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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
I've taken risks in my life. Some have been physical ones, but some have been bolder and required more of myself. When Englishwoman Frances McDonald sets up home in a remote South African hamlet in the shadow of the Hex River Mountains, she is regarded with suspicion by the community. Confined by a marriage of convenience, she seeks an outlet by learning the local language, teaching art, and exhibiting her paintings of the stunning veld landscape. Soon the spectre of war threatens to divide not only the country but the town itself and scupper Frances' hard-won acceptance. While her husband leaves to fight for the Allies, Frances chances to meet a former love. The bright joy of that unexpected reunion is clouded by a day that will change her life. Out of the smoke and ash of a shocking fire, she is propelled on a journey that will take her from the arid veld to the bright lights of London and beyond.
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Seitenzahl: 485
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Fire Portrait
BARBARA MUTCH
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For E, R and Z
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Contents
Prologue
This may be my last entry.
It is curious the way one’s mind turns back to the beginning.
Mother said spring came early the year I was born.
Pale daffodils burst from the ground and opened their trumpets to the rising sun, swung their faces west to miss nothing of its afternoon passage, and then drooped for the night.
You couldn’t get enough of them, even as a baby, Mother used to muse.
You’d struggle out of your father’s arms and run into their midst.
I’ve left the daffodils behind.
Now, I race to capture the diverse colours of Africa.
The orange of Namaqualand daisies, the blue-rose of dawn, the gritty ochre of desert.
The fleeting jewel of a kingfisher’s wing.
Sometimes I get it right, sometimes my colours wander across the paper like a random smear. Father 8says it’s about the soul, my teacher says it’s about technique and my husband says it’s all in the eye of the beholder anyway, and I should not agonise so much. But I do, because I am the beholder, and if my work cannot speak to me then I have failed.
How strange that I should find fame outside the area where I practised for so long.
And in a single work.
The portrait of a human face.
Chapter One
Embury St David’s, England, 1921
When I was a sober ten-year-old, I fell head first out of an oak tree and nearly died.
Nothing was ever the same again. Not me, and not the world I crashed into. I should, various relatives complained, have realised there’d been enough dying and shown more sense.
My father’s prized binoculars, slung around my neck, flipped over my head and smashed to the ground. I remember the calamitous sound of breaking glass but nothing at all from my own collision with the earth. It wasn’t my fault, I cried to my parents when I later came to, it was because I was distracted by a woodpecker on a nearby branch and failed to watch my feet as I descended.
‘Call an ambulance!’ Gerald Whittington had shouted while he loosened his daughter’s collar.
Emily Whittington knelt on the ground and mopped at the blood with her lace handkerchief and tried to clear the vicinity of lens glass. The clang-clang of the approaching ambulance brought out a crowd from the terraced houses. 10The Ferguson toddlers, attracted by the noise, had to be hauled out of the vehicle’s anticipated path by their mother; the Atkinses’ hosepipe, left running, flooded their tiny garden and ruined Mrs A’s prize phlox while the Hodgson family – mother, father, three teenagers, visiting grandparents – rushed to form a circle around the inert body. Emily Whittington appeared to be praying over her daughter, which was only to be expected of a mother, especially one who’d lost so much already.
The ambulance ground to a halt, scattering the onlookers and silencing a pair of barking dogs.
A bottle was waved beneath Frances’s nose and her eyelids began to flutter.
Why do male birds have different feathers from females? For courtship? Maybe to avoid mix-ups …
‘She’s alive!’ yelled Mr Atkins. He’d arrived on the scene after he heard the thud.
‘She’s alive!’ repeated the crowd.
Confused, lovesick birds fluttered across my brain. And something else …
A gust of wind shook the oak from where Frances had fallen. Folk exchanged glances. Frances was known to spend a lot of time up trees, more than the most adventurous neighbourhood boys. Maybe the oak had got tired of being climbed and tipped the invader out. Even Mrs Whittington had once confessed to Mrs Ferguson that she found her daughter’s behaviour … unusual. It was the Great War, replied Mrs Ferguson. And then the Spanish Flu. Nothing would ever be the same again. Even girls.
The ambulancemen lifted Frances onto a stretcher, slid her into their vehicle and lurched off. Her parents followed 11more slowly in the family motor car, bought only a year ago and the first one on the street. Gerald Whittington was a coming man. ‘Make soup,’ Mr Atkins instructed his wife before shooing the neighbours away. ‘They’ll want something warm when they get back.’
By the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital, I’d regained consciousness and it seemed I wouldn’t die from my moment of distraction. The binoculars, however, were ruined and that was the worst outcome. They were my extra eyes, the windows to a world I was sure no one else noticed. How would I see the way feathers layered along a bird’s wing and caught the light?
‘No more climbing for a while,’ said Dr Evans, the emergency doctor, after he’d examined my skull and made me watch a moving pencil without shifting my head. ‘Next time you may not be so lucky. Bed rest for five days. Lots of fluids.’ He unrolled a bandage and wound it around my head.
‘Her hands, Doctor?’ Mother looked in horror at my scratched palms. Mother was particular; the sight of abraded skin was an insult to her careful management of the household. And she wasn’t wearing a hat. Mother rarely left the house without a hat.
‘They’ll heal up soon enough. Nurse will clean them and put on dressings.’
I looked away and caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror opposite the hospital bed. Was that really me? Pale face, green eyes with a fleck of ginger, wild, titian hair scraped away from a large head bandage; a tear in my cotton blouse through which poked bruised skin.
‘Frances? Are you listening?’ Wind rattled against the 12ward windows and brought a speckle of raindrops to the glass. ‘You need to tell your parents if your headache persists in the coming days.’
‘Yes, sir, I will.’
‘What if it does, Doctor?’ This, nervously, from Mother as she plucked at my crumpled cardigan.
Mother was always well ironed, in contrast to Father’s gangly untidiness. Maybe the combination of order and disarray was the correct mix where marriage was concerned.
‘Then we’ll investigate further. But I’m confident your daughter’s injuries will heal swiftly.’
The woodpecker I’d spotted, the one that caused my fall, did he see me and wonder if I’d live? Do birds have brains that notice life and death in species other than their own?
‘When can I go home, Doctor?’
‘As soon as your cuts have been dressed. And, young lady,’ he wagged a finger, ‘no more outdoor adventures, rather take up reading or embroidery.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Father hurriedly, and shot me a warning glance. Embroidery!
‘Why,’ Mother asked later, after she’d helped me into the motor car, ‘must you climb? Why won’t you play on the ground like other girls? Like your friend Susan?’
‘Emily,’ murmured Father, putting a hand on her arm, ‘Fran’s had enough of a fright.’
He glanced at me in the rear-view mirror and closed one eye in a slow wink.
Father understood.
In a way, he was also to blame.
He’d first taken me up the oak as a child. Father said vantage points were the only way to gain a proper view of 13the world. Mother protested that climbing was an unrefined pastime for girls, but he said if Frances wanted to do so then why shouldn’t she? He’d shown me how to use the glasses to trace the winding road that led to Eastleigh, and notice how the land fell into folds as if liquid turned to solid. To match him, I’d learnt the names of the birds that played about the oak and some that didn’t, and I’d recite them until Father covered his ears: cardinal woodpeckers, raucous magpies, friendly robins, scarlet macaws from the Amazon, unmistakably …
But for Father, the view was about more than pretty scenery and a sense of proportion. It was about money. Borrowed landscape opened up a crowded island and a buyer’s pocket. ‘Look,’ he’d murmur, waving at the vista, ‘it’s ours, little one. We paid for it fair and square and it will surely appreciate with time. One day it’ll be yours.’ He must have known, even then, that I’d be an only child. And Embury, like Father, was known to be a place on the up: close enough to the cathedral cities of Salisbury and Winchester to provide business opportunities and religious solace, and also to Southampton from where the Empire was in reach for the making of a fortune. Father bought our house after the Anglo-Boer War. ‘Mark my words,’ he used to say, ‘there’ll be another set-to out there. Nothing was truly settled.’ Queen Victoria died towards the end and some said it was only her passing that encouraged the two sides to look up from battle and make reluctant peace. The fact that Father’s sister, Mary, lived at the Cape of Good Hope meant he took an interest in that part of the world.
My mind is unbound, darting from oaks to houses to distant wars …
14We crept along the road towards our home, Father driving the motor car extra slowly to avoid jarring my bandaged head. Mother did not initially share Father’s view about Embury. She would’ve preferred Winchester, even if it meant a cramped semi rather than a detached house. But Father persisted and Mother conceded. After all, she was lucky to have a husband, let alone a house. Many of her friends had only framed photographs of men in uniform and bunches of letters tied with ribbons; unsatisfactory lives eked out alongside elderly parents.
Light broke from behind the Atkinses’ curtains. Someone was watching for our return. A cat scuttled away, its eyes reflecting in Father’s headlamps as he parked. The terraced houses shifted closer, looming overhead. I felt a tremor and touched a hand to the bandage. Maybe the injury was playing with my eyes. And somewhere out there, beneath the oak, were the splinters of Father’s binoculars.
Do trees have a kind of consciousness? Do they know who climbs them? Who falls out of them?
And what kind of birds live in oak trees in Africa?
‘Mind her sore hands, Gerald,’ Mother said as Father opened my door.
Even with his helping hand around my shoulder, it took an age to reach my bedroom. Mother had wanted me to have dark curtains but I wanted voile so I could see outside at night. Father had said I could have any kind I fancied. Mother wondered how I’d manage to sleep with moonlight streaming in but eventually agreed and ordered them from France as a special treat. No one else on the street had foreign curtains.
‘I’m sorry I fell,’ I said later, when she kissed me goodnight. 15
‘I wish you’d be sensible,’ she murmured. ‘You ruined your green cardigan. And your father didn’t show it but you gave him a tremendous shock. He thought he’d lost you.’
And you, Mother?
I caught the words before they left my lips.
So often I see detachment on Mother’s face. Perhaps it was the Great War? Mother had lost her brother and nearly her husband but for a lucky avoidance of the Somme. Maybe emotion was a weakness that, like a creased blouse, should never be displayed.
Even so …
If I was the only child she’d ever have, surely she’d want to hold me closer, love me more openly?
‘It’s been a long day.’ Father appeared at Mother’s shoulder. ‘Let’s get you to sleep.’ He leant down and kissed me, his beard tickling my cheek, his watch chain glinting in the lamplight. Father might be a little untidy but he valued quality. A good watch. A tweed suit. Expensive binoculars …
‘I’m sorry, Father. About the glasses. I’ll save my pocket money—’
‘Hush.’ He put his finger to his lips before leading Mother away.
Father was never detached. He’d laugh ruefully after he’d revealed something it would’ve been better to conceal – like his opinion of the King, who was nothing like the late Victoria in terms of decorum or ending wars – and say he couldn’t lie to a child’s trusting face. He also said it was foolish to store all your assets in one place, whether it was money or influence. I didn’t understand him at the time but he said it didn’t matter as long as I remembered the words when I was older.
Risk, whatever that was, must be spread.16
I stared out of the window. It felt as if my voile curtains were being torn aside to expose the world in all its rawness. With each tug I saw more clearly, understood more sharply. Mother’s indifference might reach to the bedroom she shared with Father. I wasn’t clear how babies came about but I sensed you needed both parents to take part. That was why – not a medical reason, as I’d believed – there was no brother or sister. Mother didn’t want another child. One was enough. Or maybe, at times, too much.
Through the open window came a trilling, bubbling song.
A nightingale, I registered, as my eyes closed.
A secretive bird, not often seen. Perhaps I’d missed it in the oak.
Chapter Two
The tremor in my head disappeared but the new sharpness didn’t leave me the next day, or the next. I couldn’t work out whether this fresh awareness sprang from outside of me or from within.
Had the world changed in my moment of collision with the earth, or was it only me?
‘Is the sun too strong?’ Mother fussed with the thin curtains. ‘Are you chilly?’
Mother’s detachment now veered into constant surveillance. She wouldn’t let me draw or read in case such exertion placed too great a burden on my scrambled brain. She patrolled regularly to prevent me sneaking out of bed and falling prey to a delayed seizure.
‘It’s too soon, Frances. We must be careful.’
‘But—’
‘No buts, my dear. Remember what the doctor said.’
Mrs Atkins delivered soup and a fruit cake – I heard the door knocker – of which I was allowed to eat small portions, and Susan’s mother called to say that Sue would 18love to visit and promised not to make me laugh if doing so might hurt my head. Aunt Rosemary from Exeter offered to come up by train to child-sit. Mrs Ferguson sent over a copy of Crafts for Girls.
Mother repelled them all. In my solitude I began to speculate about Jesus. I only knew Him from Sundays, where He resided on a cross at the centre of St David’s Church, ready to forgive us for what we had done to Him, provided we sinned no more. Did He choose to cushion my fall instead of letting me die … and then cruelly decree that boredom should be my punishment? But I don’t believe He noticed my moment of distraction in the midst of all the other upheavals that vied for His attention that day. Jesus couldn’t possibly save every mouse from the fangs of a snake, or every sober child from an unfortunate slip. It was luck that spared me, not Divine Intervention. I realised these were probably heretical thoughts and should not be shared.
‘How are you feeling, Frances?’ Mother, again. ‘Have you drunk your beef tea?’
‘I hate beef tea.’
Mother was wearing a pink twinset and a navy skirt, and her hair was carefully set. I’ve never seen Mother un-set. Even in bed, she wears a hairnet to tamp down the possibility of stray curls.
‘You will drink it, Frances. You need building up. And then you must rest.’
Susan says her mother winds her hair on pins every night. Isn’t that sinful? Putting outward appearance above a holy heart? I’ve read about tribes who pierce their noses with skewers but that is for their Lord’s benefit not for their husband’s or random visitors—19
‘Frances?’
‘Yes, Mother. I’ll drink it.’
The only distraction – and I was shamefully aware that distraction had brought me to this low point – was when Father returned from work and peered lankily round my door.
‘Please, Father.’ I wriggled to the edge of the bed. ‘Take me outside! Please? A drive to the sea?’
‘Next week. For the moment,’ he fixed me with a mock stern glance, ‘we will escape via the exercise of our brains, most particularly what may be left of yours. Let me see.’ He cast his eyes upwards. ‘If one caterpillar takes half a day to eat three leaves, how many leaves will four caterpillars eat in a week?’
‘Father!’ I giggled. ‘I’m sure you don’t know yourself!’
‘I’ll read to you instead, if you like.’ He ran a skinny finger along my bookshelf. ‘Some Shakespeare. “The Taming of the Shrew”?’ He shot me a merry glance. ‘Just the ticket. And if you don’t fall out of any trees in the next fortnight, I’ll take you to Southampton to see the mail ship.’
‘Does it hurt?’ Susan inspected my head as we sat in the playground of St David’s School a week later. I’d been allowed to attend without my hat in case it restricted circulation to my brain. So there was no hiding the purple bruise which had spread across my forehead and around my eyes like a pagan adornment or the result, Father winked at me, of a barroom brawl. Phyllis Carter said I looked like a clown. Felicity Chalmers said Phyllis was a disgrace to make fun of me and Julie Eastman said her brother had once fallen out of a tree and was never the same again. Several boys laughed at me and shouted: did I think I was a monkey to be climbing like one?20
‘At least the doctor didn’t cut off your hair to see the wounds.’ Susan opened her lunchbox and poked through her sandwiches. ‘That would have been much worse.’
‘Sue! I could have died!’
Susan snorted. Her own hair was thin whereas I had enough – and of a distinctive colour – for both of us. And there it was, flowing freely while everyone else had to keep theirs unflatteringly bundled beneath school panamas. ‘Did you see stars? When you fell? Fran?’
‘I didn’t see stars but I felt strange afterwards.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘Everything was clearer.’ I hesitated. ‘I could understand things I hadn’t been able to before.’
Susan halted with her jam sandwich halfway to her mouth. ‘What things?’
But there was no time to explain because the bell rang.
‘Good morning young ladies,’ shouted Mr Cadwaller from the front of the art studio. ‘Today we’re going to study perspective. Does anyone know what it means?’
‘It’s when a road far away looks narrower,’ Phyllis Carter said smugly. ‘Or trees look smaller.’
Or, I caught my breath, when your view of the world is transformed by a blow to the head.
‘So, if we want to entice our viewer into believing the distance we’re creating,’ Cadwaller’s moustache twitched, ‘we draw objects smaller. One sheet each!’ He brandished a pile of paper.
I sharpened my pencil and held it above the paper.
The woodpecker in the oak, just before the fall.
My hand began to fly across the page. A slender head with a dominant beak emerged atop a striped breast, 21feathers ruffling slightly in the breeze, the afternoon sun falling sideways.
‘Frances,’ Mr Cadwaller murmured at my shoulder, ‘that is charming but where is the perspective?’
‘Coming, sir.’
I sketched the looming houses in the background, then roughed out a second, smaller tree with another bird poised on its trunk. The first bird seemed to be looking at the second and would not normally tolerate a rival close by, but if I made it seem too far away to be competition and yet just close enough to be clearly male …
‘My,’ Cadwaller raised his bushy eyebrows, ‘have you been practising while you’ve been at home?’
‘No, sir. I wasn’t allowed to draw. And I smashed my binoculars so now I have to look for myself.’
‘Yet perhaps that is not such a tragedy?’
Does he know?
Can he tell I’m seeing the world more clearly without magnification?
‘Binoculars are valuable, Frances, but they’re only tools. They can be replaced. A critical first glance at your subject cannot. It will never reappear.’
‘But—’ I’d always believed first impressions were flawed, lacking essential detail: the layered hues of a bird’s wing, the intricate tracery of chestnut blooms.
‘Draw what’s in front of you, as you’ve done here.’ He tapped the sketch. ‘Reflect what the eye sees.’
By the end, most girls had created roads disappearing into the distance, lined by ever-diminishing trees.
‘Quick!’ muttered Susan. ‘While Cadwaller’s not looking, draw something for me, Fran!’22
When the sketches were collected, my pair of birds was the clear winner, followed by Susan’s surprisingly good triangular kites flown by distant figures on an otherwise deserted pebble beach.
‘Are they us?’ she whispered. ‘Last summer? Before you swam out beyond the breakers?’
Father had shouted for me to come back, but the sea was flat and I could have floated all the way to the Isle of Wight, where there are gardens with plants from Africa that must be familiar to Aunt Mary.
‘Excellent work, class!’ Cadwaller shouted. ‘Look for perspective every day, young ladies!’
When I was allowed back into the garden, the sky hid beneath lowering clouds. No flowers opened their faces, no drumming woodpeckers tempted me from the oak. The only presence was a strange absence, as if the world were waiting for something to happen.
A storm? Another fall?
‘Miss is better?’ Lionel Jacobs croaked, looking up from weeding around the roses. Father said we had a duty. Mr Jacobs had lost a limb in the war. He often touched a hand against his pinned-up trouser where the leg once was. They say soldiers who lose limbs can still feel them, still sense their flesh.
‘I’m fine, sir, thank you.’ I knelt down and began to search for stray bits of Father’s binoculars in case they might stab my bare feet in the summer.
Mr Jacobs sat back on his one good heel and squinted up into the oak.
‘The tree sees everything, miss.’23
‘What do you mean?’
Jacobs talked about birds and plants as if they were his friends.
‘The tree sees the grown-ups’ sadness. Miss must be careful.’
I felt a tremor, like when I came back from the hospital and the roofs leant over me. I remember a nightingale singing as I fell asleep. And then later – the same night, the next night? – a dream woke me, gasping, in the darkness.
Mr Jacobs wasn’t talking about my fall.
Perhaps the detachment that comes over Mother’s face has nothing to do with me at all.
Chapter Three
‘One day we’ll take a trip!’ Father waved to no one in particular on the Union-Castle liner tied up to the quay in Southampton harbour. Father loved boats, even stationary ones without passengers. He loved the bustle of the docks, the aproned men swarming up gangplanks bearing boxes of unknown contents, a lighter curving through the water from an anchored barge. ‘It’s good to see such purpose, Fran. Such intent! Remember that, my dear.’
He raised his hat to a group of sailors marching by, their bell-bottom trousers flapping.
In honour of the visit, I was wearing a blue linen dress, white gloves and black patent shoes that pinched. ‘One can’t be too careful, Frances,’ Mother had warned when I asked for easier footwear. ‘The wrong accessories can betray the best of backgrounds.’
Father’s necktie broke free of his waistcoat and flapped up into his face.
‘Hold my hand,’ he said, stuffing it back. ‘We can’t have any more accidents.’25
‘Mr Whittington?’
I gazed upwards as a motor car, carefully suspended from the hook of a crane, swung slowly over the deck of the liner. ‘We’ll watch a bit longer,’ Father leant down to me, ‘then we’ll go for tea.’
‘When does she sail for the Cape, Father?’
‘Today and every Thursday. 4 p.m. on the dot.’
‘Mr Whittington?’
We turned. A young man stood before us, smiling nervously, and carrying a battered suitcase.
‘I’m Julian McDonald, sir. You knew my parents.’
Father gasped and took off his hat. ‘Would you believe it?’ He reached out to grasp the young man’s hand. ‘Julian McDonald! The last time I saw you, you were Frances’s age!’
The man offered his hand to me as well. He had fair hair and pale eyes and a strange habit of clasping and reclasping the case as if he were worried it would be snatched from him. I turned back to the ship, noting the sweep of her lavender hull, the raked angle of her red-and-black funnels, a row of dots for portholes. Mr Cadwaller was right. If I found a quiet spot and set up a folding chair and put a piece of paper on a clipboard, I could quickly sketch—
‘What brings you to Southampton, Julian? Your parents …’ Father rested a hand on his shoulder, ‘I’m so sorry. Emily and I were shocked.’
‘I’ve become a teacher,’ he said hastily. ‘I was supposed to leave today, but there’s been a delay.’
‘Come.’ Father began to head down the quay. ‘Walk with us. Where are you staying?’
‘Well, the delay was unexpected. I should find a small 26hotel.’ He looked about uncertainly. I wondered if he was short of money.
‘Nonsense!’ Father clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘You shall stay with us. I won’t hear another word. Do you have any more luggage?’ He glanced down at Julian’s meagre case.
‘That’s awfully kind. I wouldn’t want to be any trouble. I could—’
‘We have a spare room, Mr McDonald,’ I put in, feeling sorry for him. ‘It’ll be no trouble.’
And a visitor would successfully divert Mother, who was still monitoring my every move.
‘Indeed,’ Father beamed. ‘Ah, there’s a Lyon’s tea room. Let’s have a cup before we motor back.’
‘Thank you, sir. That’s very kind.’
‘Frances,’ said Father in due course, over a fat slice of Bakewell tart, ‘I have a gift for you. I want to encourage a hobby that will keep you on terra firma. As does your mother.’ He delved into his coat pocket and produced a package.
I tore open the wrapping to reveal a set of coloured drawing pencils in a decorated tin.
‘Oh, Father! Thank you!’
He winked in Mr McDonald’s direction. ‘Frances fell out of a tree recently, Julian.’
I fingered the tin and glanced out of the window, back at the ship.
‘Have you seen the other item, my dear?’
It was a book bound in leather, but not one that would teach me lessons in life like the Shakespeare Father teasingly employed. The pages were blank, lined in pale blue and 27edged with delicate gold. This was a book for me to fill with my own words.
‘Why, Father?’
But he didn’t need to answer. Father knew something inside me had changed since the fall. He was giving me a place to record whatever sprang, unbidden, into my head; thoughts that couldn’t be drawn or spoken out loud.
I reached over and kissed him.
‘A diary is a friend, Frances. You can tell it anything you like.’
It turned out that Julian McDonald’s nervousness was because of the Great War.
War and loss, in my youth, was a topic that lurked beneath every grown-up’s conversation.
‘Where is your school, Julian?’ asked Mother over dinner. She was used to Father making acquaintances on docksides or at the railway station. They could become clients, Father would say. Accountants needed a ready supply because old ones died or lost their fortunes and that was of no help. But I doubted Mr McDonald had enough money to make him a worthwhile customer.
‘In Africa, Mrs Whittington. The Hex River valley.’
‘Ah,’ said Mother, whose geography south of the equator was hazy.
‘Near the Cape, Mother. Where Aunt Mary lives. What happened to your parents, Mr McDonald?’
‘Frances!’ Mother paled and put out a hand to stop me.
‘It’s all right.’ Julian McDonald gave a faint smile. ‘My parents died of Spanish Flu at the end of the war.’
‘I’m so sorry. You didn’t catch the Flu, Mr McDonald?’28
‘That’s quite enough, Frances!’ Mother shot a despairing glance at Father. ‘Julian, please forgive Frances. She’s had a bang on the head and it’s made her a little … insensitive.’
‘I was recovering from a wound,’ Julian McDonald turned and faced me, ‘when my parents became ill. They passed away before I returned home.’
‘Well,’ said Father sombrely, leaning back in his chair, ‘your parents were fine people. Now,’ he crumpled his napkin, ‘if you will excuse us, ladies, Julian and I will take a brandy and talk about Africa.’
I glanced outside. Tomorrow, provided it was dry, I’d get up early and take my new pencils and draw the rose that was in bloom at the bottom of the garden. Maybe I’d see Mr Jacobs and ask him again why Mother and Father were sad underneath. I sensed his answer might somehow involve me but not in a way I could understand. I wasn’t at the centre of whatever it turned out to be, but rather looking on from the side. Like the dream that kept returning only to disappear before I could catch it; like smoke from a ship’s funnel slipping past my fingers.
‘I don’t know what’s come over you,’ Mother murmured as we cleared the table. ‘Ever since you fell out of that tree you’ve been in a strange mood. Perhaps,’ she looked at me more carefully, ‘perhaps we should get a second opinion. You’re not yourself.’
But I am, Mother, I’m more myself than I ever was before.
I understand more.
And I see more, I see something that I can’t quite make out—
Chapter Four
It’s taken me a while to write my first diary entry.
That’s because I was worried someone would find it and read what I’ve written and be upset.
You can never tell what will upset parents.
So I waited until my twelfth birthday, which is today, and until I found a safe hiding place.
It’s two years since I fell out of the oak and I still see life sharply. Nothing has faded.
Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe I was ready to understand more of the world anyway, and the bang on my head made it happen sooner?
Could be.
I like this new version of me.
Susan says we’re growing up and so everything in our lives will change, from our bodies – Sue is already endowed – to our minds, and that I shouldn’t fuss. And I know I’m loved even if Mother sometimes doesn’t see me at all.
I climb the oak when she’s out, and I go just as high as before.30
I want to see as far as Africa.
Father taught me to swim in the sea – he used to be a champion – and he says I’m reckless to go beyond the breakers but he understands why. I like the edge it brings.
I still don’t know what Mr Jacobs meant when he said the tree saw everything and that the grown-ups were sad. I asked him again last week but he shook his head and picked his teeth and repeated that only the Good Lord knew and I should pray. But I only pray when we’re in church and I can’t avoid it. Any spare time I have, I’m busy drawing. It takes away the tremor I sometimes still feel and lets me see what God has made, if it was Him who did so. Although, that’s not what Mr Charles Darwin says.
Father said my diary would be my friend, and that I could tell it anything.
The dream has come back to me regularly and each time I see a little more, although it’s still elusive.
There is a child in the garden. But it’s not me.
I haven’t said anything to Mother or Father yet.
The hiding place is my secret.
If I should fall out of another tree, these pages will never be found.
Chapter Five
Last night I dreamt again. Not of the unknown child in the garden but of young men going to war and never returning.
‘What were they fighting over, in the Boer War?’ I’d once asked Father when we were up the oak.
‘Gold and diamonds, of course! No one cared about the Boer republics with their backcountry Dutch until riches were found beneath their feet! Remember, Frances, money greases the wheels of power.’
‘But wasn’t that unfair, Father?’ I nudged him, but not too hard that he might fall. ‘To fight a war only because you wanted to take someone else’s riches? Isn’t that a sort of burglary?’
‘Indeed, but the world is ruled by the Great Powers, child. That’s what mostly keeps the peace. Young upstart nations can’t be allowed to get above themselves – especially as a result of lucky geology.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said to our history teacher a year after Julian McDonald’s visit, ‘why all those boys needed to die in the trenches? What did the Allies win?’32
The Great War wasn’t about gold or diamonds or upstart nations.
My classmates exchanged glances. Perhaps, I could hear them thinking, Frances did indeed lose her mind in that fall. But she’d always asked odd questions, even before she fell out of the tree.
‘The corridors of power, Frances Whittington, are not open for judgement by ourselves!’ Mrs Beatrice Andrews retorted. We called her ‘Beagle’ on account of her oversized ears and ability to discern covert snacking beneath a raised desktop. ‘Our leaders explore every avenue to avoid war until such a path becomes unavoidable. Now,’ she gave me a quelling look, ‘the Great War is not our focus until next year; let us turn our attention back to the voyages of discovery. Columbus and the New World. The sea route around Africa.’
I stared out of the window and pictured the Dutch in their wooden sailing ships, anchoring beneath the gaze of a flat-topped mountain and wondering what lay on the alien shore, just as Columbus and his men must have thought on arriving in the Americas. Might they be hit by poisonous arrows from local tribes? Would they die from eating strange fruits?
There were consequences of my question to the Beagle.
‘Your teachers say you’re very outspoken, Frances,’ Mother observed, coming into the dining room after a parent–teacher meeting and unpinning her hat.
‘Quite right, too,’ put in Father, following her to the table where I was doing my homework. ‘We’ve taught Fran to engage. Not to be afraid to ask questions. It’s part of her education.’33
‘But perhaps not so … argumentatively?’ Mother folded her gloves and placed them beside her hat.
‘I won’t say anything, any more.’ I scowled at my open textbook, Cross, Castle and Compass: Their Role in History. ‘I’ll be completely quiet.’
‘No, Frances,’ Mother sighed, ‘we don’t want you to be completely silent. But you should think before you speak. Questioning the conduct of the Great War is not appropriate for a youngster.’
For Mother, it was less about education and more about bad manners, especially in a girl. Like wearing plain shoes to Southampton instead of patent leather.
‘Art,’ said Mr Cadwaller a few weeks later, wagging a stained finger at me, ‘is a journey. It requires planning. You cannot simply trust to instinct or hope for fair weather. Eighty per cent is acquired technique, twenty per cent is talent. If you wish to progress, Frances, you must hone your technique.’
He spread out the sketches I’d brought in.
A pale pink rose, a lavender-hulled liner with a funnel in black and red, a fragile dandelion. If my pictures were no good, Mr Cadwaller would say so – unlike dear Father who said everything I drew was beautiful and showed a pleasing sense of soul.
‘I see you’re not over-detailing,’ he arched an eyebrow, ‘at the expense of the overall effect.’
‘When should I start to use paint, sir?’
‘Not just yet. This rose is well done.’
‘Mr Cadwaller,’ I felt a frisson of excitement, ‘do you think I could be an artist?’34
‘Anyone can be an artist! Anyone!’ He spread his arms wide as if to embrace the entire village, perhaps even the entire country, as if the gift were universal and simply needed to be uncovered. ‘Are you asking me whether you could make a living from it?’
‘Yes, sir.’ I hesitated and then plunged. ‘I’d like to make it my career.’
None of my friends talked of careers. They only wanted to find boys to marry. ‘What else is there?’ asked Phyllis, teasing a kiss curl over her forehead. ‘You’d be an old maid, otherwise.’
‘Frances?’
Wasn’t settling on a husband like putting all your assets into one basket, as Father had advised against?
I blushed. A truly heretical thought.
‘Are you prepared to devote yourself, Frances? To fail, and try again?’
‘I know Van Gogh went mad, sir. And Vermeer died poor. So did some of the great music composers.’
‘Now, now!’ Mr Cadwaller puffed out a breath. ‘Self-sacrifice is not required.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘You could become an educated admirer of other people’s work, like the Masters you’ve just mentioned. There’s no shame in that.’ His lips twitched. Now he was goading me. ‘You could ask your parents to take you to London to view the National Gallery.’
‘I don’t want to study art, sir, I want to make it myself.’
Are there pencil strokes that can capture the thrill of a vantage point?I asked my diary later. The risk of being up a mountain or a tree, precariously, looking down on the world? 35Father was in his study when I got home. I rapped on the door.
‘Come in!’
He looked up from his desk as I closed the door behind me.
‘Father, can I interrupt? Mr Cadwaller says I might be good enough to be an artist if I work hard!’
‘Does he now,’ Father leant back and regarded me. ‘You mean instead of an ornithologist, my dear? After all, you can list every bird in the garden by name and family.’
‘Don’t tease, Father. Could you pay for me to take private lessons?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ He winked. ‘Our shares are doing well!’
When I’d first asked where the money came from to buy our home, he’d said from the railways in America and I’d shouted ‘choof, choof!’ and it became our private joke.
I went around the desk to hug him. ‘It’s because I broke the binoculars. I learnt I could see well enough on my own to draw a picture - but I need to get better.’
He nodded and I saw his hand shake for a moment. Father didn’t like to be reminded of my fall. It brought back memories of the war across the Channel and the soldiers who fell beside him.
‘You promised to tell me one day about this man,’ I pointed to a small, framed poster tucked away on a side wall, of a man in military uniform pointing a finger at his audience. Mother disapproved, as did relatives who came at Christmas, and particularly one visitor from overseas. ‘After the internment camps, Gerald! The scorched earth! How can you bear to have him on your wall?’36
And Father had replied, ‘As a warning, dear chap. A warning.’
He stood up and took my hand and led me to the picture. ‘That is Lord Kitchener, a famous British soldier. He was the hero or the scourge of the Boer War, depending which side you were on. Ten years later, he was exhorting the same young men to follow him and sign up for the Great War.’
‘So why do you keep him here, Father?’
He hesitated.
‘As a reminder and an omen. That a person can be an enemy one moment, and an ally the next. And that powerful men must be held to account, Fran. Whether they’re Kitchener or the Kaiser.’
‘I thought the Great War started because the Archduke was shot.’
‘Yes it did, and one thing led to another. It became a matter of honouring alliances. We were obliged to uphold previous treaties and stop the Kaiser’s ambitions in Europe.’
‘Before he gathered too much power for himself?
He smiled. ‘Indeed. Talking of power, shall we tell Mother you plan to be the greatest female artist in England?’
‘Father?’ I stopped him at the door. ‘Mr Jacobs says you and Mother are sad.’
He put an arm about my shoulder. ‘Poor Jacobs also thinks plants have feelings, my dear. A sweet notion. Don’t listen to his nonsense.’
Chapter Six
The year of my fifteenth birthday was a stormy one. Winds from the Atlantic delivered gusts strong enough to bring down several branches from the oak and forced me to climb a more perilous route to my vantage point. Rainwater sluiced along our roads, filling the River Itchen with a muddy torrent that emptied itself into the Solent as a brown stain I fancied I could see in the distance. I tried to draw the bubbling streams but they were too fast, too unpredictable. Roses let you copy each delicate stage from bud to bloom but water tears past you before you can catch it.
Is love, I asked my diary after I clambered down the tree, like water? Life-giving but erratic? Too changeable to be pinned down?
I don’t want to give my love too easily in case it runs away from me.
‘How,’ I asked Mr Cadwaller, ‘do you draw something that is never still?’
‘You choose one moment, Frances, you capture it as you see it,’ he clapped his hands together, as if imprisoning the 38image between his palms, ‘and fix it upon your mind! Then draw it just so.’
I walked on Embury Common with my sketchbook and my folding stool and an umbrella, and drew whatever was fleetingly in front of me. Shifting skies, windblown daisies, flitting sparrows. ‘Rather come with us,’ Sue and Julie would urge on their way to the bus stop, skirts swinging. ‘Don’t waste an afternoon in the damp! We’re going to the pictures!’ When I hear their bus depart, I close my eyes and conjure up foreign blooms and darting birds with coloured feathers that I copy from my imagination. Mother says it’s unseemly to lust after what one can’t have. Yet nature, whether real or imagined, is surely God’s artwork? Even Mr Darwin might be prepared to agree.
‘Excellent, Frances! Such diligence to record specimens in the rough. These sketches,’ Mr Cadwaller flourished one to the class, ‘show the challenge of working outdoors. Beware, young ladies! Rain will surely fall, sparrows will surely fly away! You will rarely have the luxury of time!’
‘Now, Frances,’ said Mr Cadwaller to me privately, ‘shall we consider watercolours?’
I painted a line of cobalt blue at the top of the page and then lifted the paper vertically. Blue colour bled downwards like shards of rain. Or tears. I placed the paper flat, dipped my brush in the water and stroked it over the colour, lightening it, fading it. Too much water, though, and the effect became insipid; too little and the sky possessed a garishness that nature would never recognise. This wash of soft shades and meandering lines is the opposite of my precise flower drawings. The effect they create is like a 39dream, the blurry chase of a child in the garden.
Perhaps, one day, I’ll be able to paint what I can’t quite see.
‘Mother?’
She looked up from her knitting.
‘Did I have a brother? I see him in my dreams—’
Her face paled as readily as if I’d performed the same watercolour fade on her skin.
‘It was a long time ago. I’d prefer not to talk about it, my dear.’
‘But—’
She set aside her knitting, stood up and walked away to her bedroom. I flung down my brush, jumped up, ready to put my arms around her, but she closed the door behind her. I waited for a moment. I should have opened it, broken through her reserve. When I knocked an hour later she said she had a headache. I went outside and climbed the oak tree to the highest, most dangerous perch and looked towards the sea. Did anyone else know, apart from Mr Jacobs and our neighbours and extended family now keeping silent? Those neighbours, seeing me fall, must have feared that history might be about to repeat itself.
Mother will not allow me in, I wrote later.
She won’t allow me to comfort her in her loss.
She doesn’t realise that, in some strange way, I’ve lost someone, too.
I want to know the boy’s name, and how he died. I would like to draw him. But I could ask nothing further because Mother emerged the following morning with her face powdered and her hair immaculate and her lips closed. I could almost understand if her withdrawal were a way to 40protect herself. How much, after all, could a mother weep before her heart ran dry?
I don’t want to give away my love too easily either.
Mother and I may be more alike than I realise.
I began to paint pictures for the brother I never knew. Did he like bright colours? Roses in shades of yellow with a sweep of viridian green for their leaves; bougainvillea blossoms in indigo and rose madder. A navy swallow with a rufous throat and sleek wings made for thousands of miles of flight.
‘My,’ said Father, ‘how bold, my dear. Mr Cadwaller will surely be impressed.’
Chapter Seven
I’m not regarded as a tree-climbing monkey any more. Perhaps the outspokenness Mother tried to curb and Father likes to applaud is refreshing for boys brought up with girls who mostly giggle and agree with what they say.
Or maybe it’s because I read the papers more than my friends. I know about Aboriginal tribes in Australia and buildings in New York that are so tall they are called skyscrapers.
I don’t think the young men are interested in what I know. Or in my painting.
I like to be with them. They’re not as silly as girls, Susan excepted.
When I turned seventeen I was invited to my first formal dance by Brian Harris. Julie said he was a catch and if I ever tired of him to let her know first. Brian was a tall boy with blond hair that flopped over his forehead in an engaging way. Phyllis said he’d inherit a tidy fortune from his solicitor father who, in his spare time, bred 42horses that had won at Cheltenham.
‘Lucky you!’ chortled Sue as we pored over the invitation in the privacy of my bedroom. ‘Will you wear pink? They say it’s the colour of the season. With fringing on the hem, flapper style. A headband?’
‘White or, at most, cream,’ countered Mother over dinner. ‘Demureness for your first outing, Frances! A plain slide in your hair. You don’t want to appear worldly.’
Mother and I have said no more about my brother. Instead, she’s taken up in my new-found popularity.
‘I say,’ exclaimed Brian when he fetched me in his father’s motor car, ‘the prettiest girl in town!’
‘Only in town?’
He coloured, shot me a glance and then grinned. ‘Alright then, prettiest in the world!’
‘That’s better,’ I said, taking his arm and swinging my hips just a little, so that the tiny fringe Mother and I had compromised on could swish against my knees.
‘No speeding, young man,’ ordered Father, following us out to the motor car. He removed his watch from his waistcoat and tapped it. ‘Back by ten-thirty, please.’
The hall was decked with paper flower garlands, the band played the latest American jazz, candles flickered on the tables and I danced all evening. Mostly with Brian, occasionally with other boys who cut in. Maybe it was the flapper dress? Whatever the reason, a string of admirers soon beat a path to our door. Mother insisted I should agree to their invitations in strict rotation.
‘So you don’t favour one over another. Not yet, at least.’
Mother believed a daughter who attracted widespread attention was an asset to be carefully managed.43
‘Who do you fancy?’ whispered Susan, eyeing the crush. ‘They’re all crazy for you!’
The wooing accelerated when Brian invited me to watch the arrival of the next mail ship along with his parents. Mother advised pink-and-cream stripes, and a cloche hat. I was on parade, as were all the ladies on the quay, some waiting for a loved one’s return, others perhaps hoping to catch the eye of a foreign diamond magnate.
‘You’re fulfilling your talent, Frances,’ Mr Cadwaller said, viewing my latest work: skeletal beech trees against a winter sky. ‘Watercolours have added a new dimension.’
I stared out of the studio window. Brian Harris didn’t see me as a true partner. If I was brave enough to wait, I might find someone who did, and if money happened to come in the same package, and the young man appreciated art …
‘Frances?’
I was, I realised with a flash of guilt, making a calculation.
Mother had made it and it might suit me, too, but on my own terms.
‘If I marry well, Mr Cadwaller, I’ll have the freedom to continue with my art.’
‘How so?’
‘I’d have the means to ensure my family were well looked after – while I—’
He threw back his head and let out a giant guffaw. ‘While you headed off and travelled the world and painted it? Come, come, Frances! I admire your strategy, but that will be a stretch! And if you don’t find the paragon you’re seeking? What then?’
‘Then I shall stay single, sir. And I’ll need my art to support me.’44
‘And your father? How would he feel if he were to know your plans?’
‘I suspect he wouldn’t be surprised, sir. Disconcerted, perhaps, not surprised.’
But Father was recently too distracted to consider my burgeoning social life and was happy to leave the matter to Mother until a clear favourite emerged. I blamed Joseph Currie and Anthony Darby, who came to our house regularly, holding fat briefcases over their heads to shield themselves from the winter downpours as they ran from their motor cars to our front door.
‘Won’t you stay for drinks, gentlemen?’ Mother would say when they emerged from the study after another lengthy conference.
‘Thank you, no,’ they would reply, and make the excuse of another engagement.
Mother was told that economies would have to be made in the running of the house.
‘Just for a while,’ Father said, affecting a nonchalant air. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
I finished school top of my class and Mother proposed secretarial training if I insisted on an occupation before the leap into marriage. But rather than either of those, I joined Mr Cadwaller’s evening classes: still-life drawing, watercolours, pencil sketches. ‘Wise decision, Frances! Practise! Practise! That way lies mastery of technique!’ If I made sufficient progress, he’d promised me an introduction to the Royal Botanic Garden’s illustration section.
On the perimeter, a posse of young men vetted by Mother circled. I smiled and flirted and no one guessed my 45hesitation. Julie and Phyllis and Sue paired off with local boys and began planning summer weddings. All agreed that I, Frances, had bagged the best fellow. It was just a matter of the proposal and setting the date. Brian’s family would buy us a house in Eastleigh and I would be taken up with producing a family and supporting my husband and occasionally drawing.
What more could Frances want, they asked themselves.
As my eighteenth birthday approached, the future was as clear as the colours in my paintbox.
The only clouds in my sky were ones I chose to conjure up myself.
Chapter Eight
‘Good morning, Mr Whittington.’ The secretary looked up. ‘The partners are in the meeting room.’
‘Thank you, Miss Fisk. Will you show my daughter to the spare office? It has a good view.’
‘Of course, sir.’
I unpacked my small easel and set it up on the desk. The cathedral rose up, elbowing aside the smaller buildings around it. Brian was planning to take me up to its highest point for my birthday, chaperoned – only at a distance, hopefully – by his parents. I was certain he intended to propose and I still didn’t know how I would respond.
That first critical glance, I told myself, remembering Mr Cadwaller’s words.
I sharpened my coloured pencils.
A door further away opened and closed.
Draw what you see, Frances.
I picked up the grey pencil and began to sketch.
First the outline, the angles, then the great west façade emerging like a ship out of fog. The flying buttresses, just 47seen, the stained glass of the West Window, hinted at …
A door opened and voices swept out, talking over each other, some shouting.
‘There’s no choice! We have to liquidate!’
Tiny jewel colours for the window segments, although I couldn’t be sure without binoculars. Greyish-cream for the stone.
‘How much are you exposed?’
A light blue for the sky, arcing overhead. Filaments of cloud.
‘I warned you, gentlemen, but no one heeded me.’
‘Everything.’
‘It’s all very well for you!’
‘Surely not, Gerald—’
I glanced from the real cathedral to the copy and back again. Swiftly drawn lines, a bold cross-hatching of straight and diagonal, and the paper version had sprung to life! Yet within an hour the cloudy filaments might thicken into rain, veiling the sharp corners, smudging the bold lines—
‘Fran?’ Father peered in. His face was unusually flushed. ‘We’re going home, my dear.’
‘So soon? A little longer, please Father?’ I clipped up a fresh sheet. ‘I must do one more!’
He shook his head. ‘Another time. Gather your pencils, please.’
One of the men who may have been shouting earlier hurried by, ignoring Father as he stood in the doorway. Another came past more slowly and put a hand on Father’s shoulder.
I stared at Father but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I folded my easel and packed my pencils into their tin.48
Miss Fisk bent over her typewriter and didn’t look up as we left.
‘Read all about it,’ shouted a paperboy on the corner as we motored home in silence. ‘Big Crash!’
‘Millions lost! Read all about it!’
Cloud dived over the hills and swallowed the cathedral.
‘Splendid!’ enthused Mr Cadwaller, when I showed him my sketch. ‘Now try it with watercolours from the same vantage point – if your Father will allow you?’
‘Have you heard?’ Brian asked idly over tea, when the first whispers of collapsing shares began to circulate, ‘there’s been an issue on the New York Stock Exchange.’ He shrugged, and took my hand and kissed it while my parents were speaking to Mr Jacobs in the garden. ‘I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Our family never took a big position in American stocks. What name,’ he squeezed my fingers, ‘shall we give our new filly? She’s a beauty, and I have naming rights. I rather fancy Chestnut Delight.’
‘I think my father may have some American shares,’ I said, slowly, watching Father with Jacobs.
‘Well, I hope he’s covered against a loss. How about Fran’s Fancy?’
The word blowing from New York to London to Winchester to Embury was that no one could have seen the Crash coming. Certainly, those besuited men striding jauntily down Wall Street between the skyscrapers one morning, and then slinking home with the contents of their desks in cardboard boxes in the afternoon, hadn’t seen it coming: the ticker tape chattering madly, stock prices tumbling, fortunes dissipating like smoke in the unforgiving air. The 49newspapers with their shouted headlines were wise after the event, but there’d been no warnings in the paper that thudded into our postbox every day. And no warning from Father that such misfortune might cross an ocean.
‘How much have we lost, Father?’
Mother was at church. Would our village Jesus see the Crash as born of usury? Or simply bad luck—
‘How much, Father?’
He met my eyes reluctantly. ‘A great deal, I’m afraid.’
