Chapter 3 Painted In
Painted In
During my last phone call with Evie, I had been so taken up with my own grief over losing Mrs Snowboots and the sudden realization that my life at Wisteria Cottage was coming to a close that I had forgotten to ask her how her current research was going for the latest in her Painted Back In series of books about the lives and work of largely forgotten female artists.
She had decided to research the mysterious woman her mother had always referred to as Aunt Milly, although in fact she was no relation at all.
As a child, Evie had for a few years received birthday and Christmas gifts from this unknown person, but it was only when she reached her teens that my grandmother had told her who she was.
Granny, Frances Madoc, had been the illegitimate child of an artist’s model, who had lived in Cornwall with Milly Vane, an artist known for her woodcut prints. Arwen Madoc, my great-grandmother, had died soon after the birth in 1920, leaving the child to be raised by Milly.
Since Milly’s elder brother, Edwin, had made himself responsible for paying my grandmother’s school fees, Frances was convinced that he was her father, but had refused to marry her mother when she fell pregnant.
Milly herself had not confirmed this – and in fact, according to my grandmother, had not wanted to talk about Frances’s mother – except to say that she had been the love of her life.
This did not appear to have stopped her installing a series of other female lovers at her Cornish home while Frances was growing up.
Frances seemed to have reacted to the shame of having been born illegitimate and the scandal of Milly’s bohemian existence by becoming as prim and proper as Milly was not. Then, as soon as she had completed her teacher training, she became estranged from her and never saw her again.
Milly, however, must have kept track of her since she had known about Evie and sent her those gifts at Christmas and birthdays. And odd, fun things they had been, Evie told me, like the silk kimono embroidered with cranes and lotus blossom, and the Moroccan leather slippers with curled-up toes …
Evie had deduced most of what she knew about Milly from the little her mother had let drop on the subject, because by the time she was old enough to try to track down Milly Vane herself, she found she had died of MS in a residential home for artists and actors several years before.
So, when I next rang the flat and Liv had finally ceased trying to persuade me to spend Christmas there with her and Evie – not an attractive prospect, since Evie didn’t really celebrate it, always referring to it as an excuse for gluttony, self-indulgence and mindless consumer spending – and passed the phone across to Evie, I asked her: ‘How are you getting on with your life of Milly Vane? Was your trip to Cornwall useful?’
‘Yes, it was, very. Milly moved to Lamorna in summer 1919 with her brother, Edwin, also an artist, although he seems to have soon headed back to London. I found some interesting leads to follow up. A lot of artists moved to that part of Cornwall around then, and there are bound to be references out there to be dug up,’ she said.
‘Milly’s woodcuts were well regarded and I hope to see some samples in private collections.
She also illustrated several books, so I’ve got Liv trying to track down copies of those. ’
‘It sounds promising,’ I said. ‘And you were hoping to contact one of Milly’s descendants too, weren’t you?’
‘I already have: a great-niece, Charlotte Vane, still living in the family home in St John’s Wood, where her grandfather, who was Milly’s elder brother, Edwin, lived.
We’ve exchanged emails and spoken on the phone a couple of times, but she’s a hospital consultant, with a husband and three children, which makes her a bit too distracted to concentrate on the matter in hand. ’
‘I can imagine, but I expect her priorities are different from yours, Evie!’ I said, wondering what this unknown woman was like, who might or might not be a distant relative, if Edwin really had been Granny’s father.
‘Of course,’ Evie continued, ‘when I explained I was the daughter of Frances Madoc, she knew exactly who I was, and that my mother had been brought up by Milly Vane. Her father had told her all about it. But she had had no idea that Evie Chase the art historian was Frances’s daughter. It was quite a surprise to her.’
Evie expected everyone to know who she was, and to be honest, most people did, although I expected the ones who had come off worst in a bruising verbal encounter wished they didn’t.
‘She’s pleased I’m writing a life of her great-aunt, because she thinks her work has been very underrated.’
‘Could she tell you any more about Milly?’
‘She did fill the picture in a little; quite literally, since she still has a lot of her work and copies of all the books she illustrated, which she will loan to me if I can’t get copies of them.’
‘Great! It sounds as if you will be able to collect a lot more factual material for this biography than some of the others.’
I knew how hard it often was to trace women artists who, once they had ceased their studies, tended to vanish from history. This was mainly, it seemed, because they were denied access to the usual means of artists to sell and promote their work, including acceptance into the Royal Academy.
‘I simply can’t think why I didn’t research Milly earlier, when my mother was still alive,’ Evie said. ‘I might have managed to winkle a little more information out of her, about Milly’s friends among the other artists, for instance.’
I barely remembered the tall, austere figure of the grandmother I had seen on just a couple of occasions in early childhood.
Just as Frances had rebelled against her own bohemian upbringing, Evie had rebelled against her strict upbringing by turning into a wild child and living a life almost as scandalous in Granny’s eyes as Milly’s had been.
I had appeared when Evie was in her late thirties, settled and successful, and although my upbringing might have been unusual, I knew Evie and Liv both loved me in their way and I had felt no need to rebel outright about anything …
unless you counted the unheralded introduction of Mrs Snowboots into the London flat.
Evie was such a strong character that I’d always found it best just to quietly and stubbornly get on with what I really wanted to do.
‘Charlotte told me more about her grandfather, Edwin Vane, who was a few years older than his sister, Milly, and became a respectable London-based artist and member of the Royal Academy,’ Evie continued.
‘But something Charlotte said in her last email was really interesting. She thinks Milly had met your great-grandmother Arwen Madoc when they were both studying at the Slade School of Art.’
‘You mean, Arwen wasn’t just an artist’s model, but an artist too?’
‘I’m going to check out the records and see if it’s true. It seems likely, because Charlotte has a couple of small oil seascapes signed by “A. Madoc”, which she thinks may have been painted by her.’
I could hear Evie restlessly drumming her fingers on some hard surface.
‘According to Charlotte, when Milly developed MS and moved into a home for artists and actors and her cottage was packed up, everything came to the London house except two boxes of Arwen Madoc’s personal belongings, which she instructed were to be sent to my mother.
But,’ she added, ‘Milly kept what she always called her “Memory Box”, full of letters and photographs.’
‘Which could be a valuable resource?’ I suggested. I was finding this all really fascinating and a welcome distraction from everything else going on in my life.
‘Of course. What’s more, Charlotte thinks it is still in the attics somewhere, only so far she hasn’t had time to go and search for it.’
I could feel Evie’s impatience over the phone and knew she would have loved to have gone and ferreted out the information herself!
I was proved right, for she now added regretfully, ‘I offered to go and search for them myself but Charlotte said she would prefer to do it.’
‘Frustrating,’ I commiserated.
‘I’ll keep chivvying her till she gets on with it,’ she said determinedly.
I was sure she would, but I thought a busy hospital consultant with three small children, the flu season upon us and Christmas popping up on the horizon would have other priorities.
‘It’s intriguing that my great-grandmother might have been an artist,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you will end up writing her life, too.’
‘It’s likely to be a short one, if so, since she died so young, but I’m certainly going to track down as much information about her as I can.
I want to see those two paintings Charlotte thought were hers, for a start, and she said if I popped round one weekday morning, the au pair would show them to me. ’
That sounded as if a somewhat harassed Charlotte had thrown her a sop to keep her off her back!
But Evie now had lots of leads to follow up, not just for Milly Vane, but also the tantalizing prospect of excavating the life and work of her own grandmother from the past, and then polishing her new-found treasure, like a jewel, until it shone in its rightful setting.
*
By the end of the first week of December a kind of seasonal delirium had usually overtaken me, but that year I was just going through the motions out of a stubborn determination to have one more Christmas at the cottage.
I adored Christmas and all the traditions. I think I was trying to make up for the austere ones of my childhood, when Liv supplied a modicum of traditional celebration by taking me, in the teeth of Evie’s objections, to see Santa at a large store, and to the pantomime.
There was also always a stocking on Christmas morning. That was something I used to do for Will every year, too, once we’d got back together after our first split. He never thought of doing the same for me.