Eva Oxford, 2025
The Oxford Canal is glassy and full of reflection – autumn colour, cumulus cloud, narrowboats.
All impressions. All gone in a heartbeat if the wind picked up.
Eva slows to look at one of the narrowboats.
Milly is Oxford green and clearly not a weekend hire.
There are potted plants on the roof and the foredeck is cluttered and cobwebbed.
When she peeks inside she sees a small black and white dog by a wood stove.
The stove is lit. There are books everywhere.
They line the sides and cover surfaces. She wonders who might live in such a space.
You are welcome to visit. The woman had said, when she wrote back. We are both still here.
Jericho is just fifteen minutes along the towpath from the centre of Oxford.
Eva has an urge to hurry, but then she’d be early.
As it is, she has allowed too much time.
So she strolls, like the other tourists.
She delights in swallows feeding on the wing and wonders briefly if they might be swifts or house martins; she wouldn’t know the difference.
She steps aside for cyclists and joggers and young people with backpacks full of books.
She allows herself a moment of envy for the privilege of an Oxford education.
She watches a pair of swans glide through the reflections on the surface of the canal and remembers that they mate for life.
What if one never found the other? What happens to a solitary swan?
At Walton Well Bridge she leaves the towpath and walks towards Walton Street.
Just past the cemetery, the woman wrote. Juxon Street.
Eva knocks.
An older woman answers. She is petite and bright-eyed and is wearing a silk headscarf, tied at the nape of her neck, the length of it falling over one shoulder.
It is blues and greens and ivory, and it gives her a slightly bohemian look that Eva admires.
She tried to cultivate it as a young woman but could never quite inhabit it.
‘Miss Rowntree? I’m—’
‘Of course, I’ve been keeping an eye. Call me Maude, please.’
‘Maude. Thank you so much, this means—’
‘It’s nothing, really. I’m so glad someone is interested, after all these years. I didn’t think anyone was, and she deserves the attention, used to thrive on it, you know, but that’s a whole story.’ She takes a breath, and smiles. ‘Where are my manners? Come in. Please. She’s waiting.’
The painting dominates the front room but Eva resists it. She’s come all this way to meet a ghost, she thinks, to put flesh on the bones of an impression. What if she does not recognise the woman from the German ward? What if she got her all wrong?
Instead of looking at the painting, she takes in everything around it.
Maude’s walls are covered in art, floor to ceiling, and Eva is reminded of pictures she’s seen of the Paris Salon in the 19th century.
It’s an eclectic collection that includes all the -isms, but Eva is struck by its diversity and lack of pretence.
There are a few small originals by painters she has probably heard of, but they share space with printed reproductions and pictures that probably have no provenance – the artwork of friends, Eva thinks, or strangers selling their hobby in the markets of tourist towns.
Or perhaps Maude is an artist and not ashamed to hang her own work with all these others. She asks and Maude smiles.
‘It was my dream, and I tried, but I didn’t have the talent.’
‘Though you do have an eye.’
She nods. ‘We all have an eye.’
Eva returns to her inventory. There is a watercolour, all blues and whites, that reminds her of Greece, and a pastel from Lucca, Piazza dell’Anfiteatro.
She recognises its elliptical shape and suddenly remembers a room with a tiny balcony and her desire to live there.
How had she forgotten? Why did she never go back?
There are nudes in pencil and charcoal and ink. They are of women, mostly.
She returns to the painting in the centre of it all.
If this was the Paris Salon, Eva thinks, the artist would be very happy with the placement of her work.
But it is a poor fit: too big for the small room, the carved gilt frame too elaborate.
It’s the kind of frame that would hold a Caravaggio, she thinks, though the gold is worn and the plaster chipped.
The frame is irrelevant, she reminds herself. But still, she delays.
Like a Caravaggio, there is darkness on the canvas, around the perimeter, though it does not have the depth of night or the potential of shadow.
It is dusky dark. A little drab. Like the camp at étaples, as Iso so often drew it, but without the touches of yellow and orange. Without the light, Eva thinks.
‘There she is,’ Maude says.
But still Eva resists. It’s an oil, she realises, like Iso’s paintings before the war, though that is the only thing they have in common.
It is an interior without natural light and the whole effect is dark and heavy.
When was it painted? Eva wonders, to further delay the moment.
She peers into its corners but can see no date. No signature.
‘She was very beautiful,’ Maude says.
There is a clock in the kitchen and it is ticking. Getting louder, Eva thinks. But that can’t be right.
‘Larger than life, by all accounts,’ Maude says.
It would annoy her, that ticking. It would keep her awake at night. Eva feels a hand on her arm and turns, startled and self-conscious. How long has she been standing mute?
Maude is smiling at her kindly, expectantly, and Eva worries she has been rude. She feels herself flush but the older woman is not offended. Her smile broadens and her hand strokes Eva’s upper arm in a gesture of reassurance. She nods towards the painting.
‘Is she worth the journey?’
Eva looks at the subject of the painting. The ticking of the clock fades.
All the light is in her face. All the life is in the curve of her spine and the turn of her head. Eva feels she has walked in on something and that she should turn away, but the desire to look is compelling.
‘Who is she?’
‘Her name was Tilda.’
‘Tilda,’ Eva repeats. Then, more quietly, to herself, in order to feel the woman’s name in her mouth, ‘Tilda.’ It is on the tip of her tongue and against the back of her front teeth. If I called to her, she thinks, my lips would remain parted until the sound reached her ears.
‘Is she a relative?’
‘My grandmother and her sister thought of her as kin, but she was one of those spinster aunts with no genetic link to the family,’ Maude says.
Spinster aunt, Eva thinks. She hates that term. ‘It’s very striking.’
‘She was very striking.’
‘And strange.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Eva turns from the painting to look at Maude.
‘Her head is shaved.’
Maude considers the painting and, while she does, Eva considers her.
Maude is older than she first seemed. Behind the silk scarf her hair is steel grey and spiky.
Early seventies, she guesses, from the lines on her face and the crepey texture of her neck.
But cheekbones still define her face, and she is trim.
Her faded blue jeans are a good fit. They suit the white linen shirt – untucked, the last few buttons undone, so as she stands there with her hands in her pockets, an inch or two of her bare belly is visible, pale and soft.
She is wearing Converse sneakers and Eva notes, with a little sting, that they suit this older woman in a way they would never suit her.
She wonders if Miss Rowntree is someone’s spinster aunt?
Maude is still contemplating Tilda’s shaved head. ‘I barely notice that anymore.’
‘It would have been odd, don’t you think, in her day?’
‘Tilda was never described as odd. Unconventional, yes. Independent, yes. Defiant, always.’ Maude turns from the painting to look at Eva. ‘No one ever described her as odd.’
Eva looks back at the painting and realises it’s true. The woman is defiant. Fuck you, she might be thinking. Do your worst.
‘Do you know how it came to be painted?’ she asks.
Hours later, Maude turns on a lamp and the objects on the table are illuminated.
There is a Red Cross box, letters, a journal, a sheaf of typed unbound pages tied with string, postcards of étaples and a few sketches that Eva recognises as Iso’s.
There’s a yellowed envelope with a lock of sandy hair.
It was protected between the pages of the journal.
There’s a pot of cold tea and two cups. Maude’s has a lipstick stain. Eva’s does not. Maude clears them away.
It’s dark outside. Eva has been absorbed and didn’t notice; now she’s worried she’s overstayed.
She unfurls. Puts her hands at the base of her spine and stretches.
She leans back her head and lets her eyes close.
She should go, she thinks. She wonders if Maude will let her borrow the journal, the sheaf of unbound pages. She opens her eyes.
Maude is leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen, watching. She has a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other.
‘I remember the first time I went through that box,’ Maude says.
‘I stayed up all night.’ She puts the glasses on the table, raises the bottle and her brows.
Eva nods and Maude pours. ‘I’d rather not let the journal or letters leave the house, but you’re welcome to stay and read them,’ she says.
‘I’ve made you a copy of the manuscript. Tilda wrote a lot about your artist.’
Eva picks up the title page. ‘THE GERMAN WARD,’ she reads aloud. Then she looks at the first page. Day one. Large stones lined Isolation Road.
‘I think she meant it as a memoir. It more or less reflects her journal.’
‘More or less?’
Maude laughs, easily, Eva thinks. ‘They’re essentially the same, but there are a few discrepancies.’
‘Perhaps she had a better understanding of things in hindsight,’ Eva suggests.
‘A better understanding or a preferred understanding, we’ll never know.’
‘Did she keep other journals?’