Twenty Two

Barnaby invited me home with him to read his letters. It was no more than a ten-minute walk from the pub, and he passed that time badmouthing his sister-in-law, Celia, whom he believed to have driven his brother to an early grave. The best I could make out was that Barnaby’s elder brother, and thereby Celia, had inherited Hannah’s letters with the rest of their mother’s estate when she passed away in the late 1980s. Surely Barnaby had gotten some of what must have been a huge inheritance? I didn’t ask how these decisions came to be made.

Arriving, Barnaby fetched the letters directly. They were on loan from Celia; he’d borrowed them, I gathered, in anticipation of showing me. Inside a plastic Marks & Spencer’s bag, the letters were tied together with a strip of brown velour. (Celia had recalled they were re-upholstering a couch in that velour at the time Alice Munk’s “worldly possessions were dumped upon them.”)

“And this is my mother she’s talking to me about,” Barnaby marveled.

I stood with the bundle in my hands, somehow hesitant to pluck at the soft knot with Barnaby watching. I imagined both he and Celia had read the letters, on separate occasions, and returned them to their original wrapping.

“I’ll put the kettle on.” He nodded at a sofa behind me. Dutifully, I sank onto it.

There were perhaps two dozen letters, all addressed to Henri Godot (“Dear Monsieur Godot”), written in a sloping script of middling size. Occasionally, generous loops and capitals obscured letters on the lines above and below. But it was all legible, and wonderful, so much more than reading the typeset, justified passages prepared by Coles and his publisher. A distinctness, uniqueness, in the bunching and leaning and inky pools. What minute control of her pen! There were a few mistakes that went unnoticed, and some that she’d noticed and corrected. Other crossings-out and slithery additions were not corrections but rather adaptations after the fact. I could almost feel Hannah’s hand moving across the page, her eyes skimming along behind it. She had a tendency to resort to dashes and the word “meanwhile,” and she had so much to say—there were so many layers to her ideas about art—that she circled back to a subject again and again, making something fresh from it. All the while, it seemed to me, revealing more about herself than the coconut palm or the horizon line or the need to use tones of red in certain shadows. Did she know how revealing it all was? I grew very conscious—especially in the places where Hannah faltered and flailed around and threw darts at herself and others, or when she wrote from one of those black smothering holes we dig ourselves into—that she never meant for me to see her like this and would not have allowed this intimacy, most likely.

When at last I awoke to my surroundings I noticed a cold cup of liquid on the low table near me and the soft clickety-clacking of fingers on a computer keyboard.

“Professor?”

“Barnaby,” he grumbled in response. The clacking ceased after another moment and I heard a chair leg squeak against wood flooring. He entered the lounge, eyebrows raised. “Will they be useful for you, then?”

Useful for what, I thought? What was I going to do with the traces of this woman’s life? All I could sense, in that moment, was something like the opposite, a countermotion, was occurring. That Hannah was going to do something with me. That maybe she’d already started.

“They’re lovely to read,” I said. “She writes such a lot about the art she is creating. It’s quite exciting, isn’t it, how conscious she is of her process. The experimentation. The struggle.”

“Mm.”

“And I find her…” I searched for a useful word. “She’s more, like, open in these letters. They read differently.”

Barnaby scratched his chest. “You mean…these are not the same letters? As were published?”

“Oh, no!” I lunged for my briefcase and pulled out the photocopied packet I’d made of Appendix A from The Late Godot. “No, they’re not.”

“Well. I suppose that makes sense, does it?”

I flipped to Coles’ last published letter of Hannah’s, dated March 11, 1896. Then spot-checked the letters on my lap. “These are slightly later. They’re all written later, I believe, but…Why are they here?” I asked him, struck with the thought. “How did her letters to Henri Godot end up with your family?”

“Jolly right,” he said. “For God’s sake, I’d hadn’t thought of that.”

We looked through each other for a moment or two.

“Shall I order some takeaway?” he said. “There’s a nice Thai place I get sometimes.”

Barnaby allowed me to lay out the letters on his dining room table, having cleared and stacked the bills, cat treats, newspaper clippings, travel magazines and The Lepidopturus article reviews on a nearby credenza. The room smelled of cat, and I soon spotted the culprit perched on a spare dining chair in the corner, squinting at me skeptically. Never the mind the cat’s odor; I was conscious of my own. An aggravating fuzz covered my teeth and my armpits stank, quite frankly, ruined from a long day of nervous excitement. I promised myself that as soon as I’d eaten supper I’d leave the poor man alone and head for my hostel.

I skimmed back over the letters with my pen and notebook handy, interested in documenting the enclosures that were mentioned. For in almost all of the letters Hannah referred to “a sketch” or sometimes “a study.” I showed Barnaby my list.

“No Parasol Flower,” he said.

“No Murdo or Jane, either. But this could be the same still life, potentially. And there are two or three letters in which she mentions working on either a Naked House Girl or Nude House Girl.”

His eyes flicked away from mine. Good grief, I thought, surprised at what I took to be Barnaby’s prudishness. Wait until he heard my idea that the parasol flower was an enormous Georgia O’Keefe-style vagina.

“What size do you think these paintings would have been?” I wondered.

“I suppose they could have been any size,” he muttered, poking apart the blinds to peek out at the road. “She could have mailed them in tubes or between boards or some such. They sent all sorts in the post, in those days, it was really quite extraordinary.”

“And then the letters could have been attached, physically attached. Rather than the other way around. ‘Enclosure’ is a misleading word,” I said. “It could be that the art was the main thing she wanted to ship to Godot, and she was adding notes to personalize the shipments.” I had been asking myself this question already, of the letters Coles had reprinted: had Hannah written the letters as a point of context, or explanation, for the art she was sending Godot? Or was their written communication the primary purpose, and the art a happy addendum?

The letters reprinted in The Late Godot were quite short and straightforward, and now I wondered if Coles or somebody before him had excised portions. These later letters were generally longer, a good deal more rambling, and more intensely personal. I pointed out some of the differences to Barnaby; he seemed intrigued by my observations. He sat down to read the letters in my photocopy of Appendix A.

“My impression,” I told him, “is of a lonely, embattled person who is…well, joyful. Intensely joyful. Is that a contradiction?”

He looked up, pulling his reading glasses aside. “Possibly. But aren’t we all?” I could tell by the guarded look on his face that he was coming to care for Hannah, too.

As we ate, he asked me about patterns in the letters. Had I noticed any? Timing, themes, events? I don’t think my responses satisfied him, because after we’d boxed up the leftovers he hunted down a magnifying glass—a great round one, like something Sherlock Holmes would have used—and began inspecting the pages. We spent another hour or so, he and I, simply reading and rereading, studying the documents from opposite sides of his table, swapping out letters and putting them back in place, maintaining their chronological order.

“Things get worse for her,” I said, struck by a line I’d just read. “They just grow worse and worse, somehow, no matter what she tries. Is that a pattern?”

“And yet…as you say, she grows somehow fuller,” he replied. “More human, for lack of a better way to put it. However, I am still struck by your original question.”

“What was my original question?”

“How on earth these letters to Godot the artist ended up in my family’s possession.”

My eye fell on the magnifying glass, resting on a corner of the table. “You don’t think they’re reproductions?”

“And the originals went to Godot,” he said. “It was a thought. But, no, I don’t think so. Why would anyone transcribe someone else’s letters?”

“Well, to keep a copy.”

“But doesn’t that seem odd? And then of course to transcribe them, this individual would have had to have them in his or her possession for a time, at least. Which sends us back to the original question: why was someone who was not the addressee in possession of so many of her letters?”

“Someone who was not the addressee,” I repeated. “Wasn’t that someone likely to have been Eva Peterborough? The Peterboroughs are the only connection between Hannah and your family. And, of course, Hannah mentions Idlewyld and Eva throughout these letters.”

“Yes,” Barnaby said absently. He was mulling something over himself. “So the letters never reached Godot.”

I thought of what I’d read, considering this hypothesis. “I suppose not,” I agreed. “I mean, that has to be the case if these are the originals. They never reached Godot. It’s true, Barnaby, it’s absolutely true that she doesn’t make reference to receiving anything from him. She keeps asking him to write.”

He was skimming letters furiously. “She makes reference to his lectures, to things he has told her before she left—”

“To old letters, too,” I interjected. “Maybe that explains the change in tone, from the Coles’ letters to this group? She’s on her own. It’s not a true correspondence.”

“And, as you say, in increasingly difficult circumstances. Difficult circumstances change people.”

We each picked up a letter to peruse.

“But there are, what, twenty-five or twenty-six letters,” I said.

“Mmm. Over a roughly nine-month period.”

“Why did she keep writing? If Godot wasn’t replying, why did Hannah keep writing to him? Barnaby?”

He was rubbing his eyes. “I haven’t the foggiest. Hope? I suppose if we had the envelopes we could see whether they were posted or had a ‘Return to Sender’ or whatnot.”

“Good point!”

He stifled a yawn.

“I’m so sorry.” I saw that it was nearing ten o’clock. “I shouldn’t have taken up so much of your time with this!” The moment I had been mentally preparing for had arrived. I took a breath in preparation. “Look, I can take the letters with me…if you don’t mind. I’ll photocopy them in the morning and bring the originals back to you.”

He made another yawn-filled noise that seemed to signify consent, and he didn’t object as I began to stack them carefully. As I gathered up my own items I made sure to mention the second cousin Tommy and ask for his contact details. This may or may not have been the Tommy to receive the paintings, but there was no harm in asking the fellow. I added, a little glumly, “I’d be happy to be in touch with Celia directly. Then I wouldn’t have to bother you any further.”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I—I quite like the bother.”

That night I lay in my narrow bed at the hostel pretending to sleep—most of my roommates arrived in the wee hours, loudly and staggeringly drunk—while contemplating the many oddities surrounding Hannah, the Peterboroughs, her letters to Godot, my lunch with Barnaby at the White Horse. Why had he not mentioned the letters in the first place? Was it something to do with this Celia woman? Was there something Barnaby wasn’t telling me? Yet he’d been a great help, after all.

I fell asleep with Hannah’s letters tucked under my pillow, one forearm raised to protect them. They were so close I could smell the musty-sour scent of the paper.