—11—
After my phone call with Tanveer, I washed and dressed, pulling my hair under a scarf.
My growling stomach insisted on breakfast. Betty had not returned, which gave me a twinge of worry, but considering how long the bombing had gone on, who knew what things might get in her way—broken streets, debris, things I didn’t even know to consider.
If she didn’t appear midday, I’d telephone the drugstore near her sister’s flat.
Meantime, I put the kettle on, then went around opening the curtains and shades to allow the day in.
It was odd to see the ordinary September light, gloomy but oblivious to the events of the night before.
Across the way, purple-and-yellow asters bloomed in profusion in Mrs. Ball’s garden, as always.
There was no sign of Peter yet, but I worried even less about him. He had nine lives and a canny ability to get through anything.
The quest for breakfast was a bit thin—the dregs of our tea ration, which I’d save for mother, a half a loaf of bread, some jam. No meat and, of course, no eggs, though Nina had brought some hens to town from her country house, and there soon would be.
Betty managed the shopping and the ration coupons, and Mondays were her shopping day, so I’d have to make do with what I could find until tomorrow.
The potato from last night would offer a substantial base.
I picked some peas and new lettuces, then inside, I shredded carrots and potatoes and mixed them with the lettuces, sprinkling the whole with vinegar we’d made the week before from a starter Betty had thought to maintain.
With a cup of very hot water to drink, it was plenty, and filled the hole in my stomach.
My mother would need more nutrition than this, however.
She was much too thin as it was. Looking through the drawers, I found the ration books and tucked them into my handbag.
I wouldn’t be gone long, but in case Peter returned before I did, I hid the tea and the last of the sugar so I could serve it to Mother when she awakened.
Outdoors, the neighborhood looked as it always did, which was strangely unsettling.
I saw no rubble, but the sky was covered in a yellow haze, the evidence of fires still burning.
As I rounded the corner toward the fish market, I saw the queue was half the block, and my hope of getting something decent plummeted.
“Have you heard what he has?” I asked the woman in front of me.
She shook her head. “As long as it isn’t that awful dogfish from last week.”
I nodded in sympathy, but I would have taken it.
As I reached the counter nearly a half hour later, Mr. Foley asked, “Where’s Betty today?” His thick wiry brows ruffled together, like two caterpillars. “She didn’t—?”
“No, no,” I said. “She went to check on her family between sirens and hasn’t returned yet.”
“Hope she’s all right.” He passed me a white wrapped package. “I saved her this bit for dinner.”
Relief flooded through me. I didn’t care what it was—fish could give my mother some genuine sustenance. “I’m grateful. I’ll have her check in with you as soon as I hear from her.”
On the way home, I stopped in the pub to ask after Peter, but although he’d been there last night as I expected, he’d left at midnight and not returned.
“He left in the middle of the bombing?” I asked.
George shrugged, a gesture I could interpret easily enough—he’d left drunk and likely belligerent, and no one would have bothered to stop him. I couldn’t see how the noise of the bombing would have helped his shell shock, and imagined a terrified dog running mindlessly through a thunderstorm.
There was no help for it. Outside on the pavement, I stood still for a moment, struck by a shaft of sunlight on my face. It seemed so strange it should shine at all.
But weather didn’t care. It continued on in its usual way, just as the stars would shine tonight. Through everything.
At home, I settled the meager shopping, and went upstairs to my studio.
I opened the windows to create some cross drafts and set to work cataloging the paintings that remained.
The ones I’d had shipped up to Helen’s were more recent, explorations of portraiture and color that I thought were my best pieces.
She only had space for so many, and now I had to sort the rest.
I’d been painting for nearly thirty years, more if I counted the youthful work before I started art school.
The sketchbooks were stacked on shelves by the wall, not valuable but as meaningful to me as the diary of another woman.
Those pages, year after year, had captured my world a day, a drawing, a watercolor at a time.
It would grieve me to lose them. Perhaps they, too, should be boxed up and taken somewhere safe, along with the rest of the paintings.
But where? The family estate no longer belonged to us; after my brother’s untimely death, it had passed to a distant cousin, a loss I grieved still to this day, especially when I had been living at Herewich at the time and could easily have cared for it myself.
But of course a mere woman could not inherit. It had placed both my mother and me in dire straits.
Shaking off the memory, unwilling to linger on yet one more thing I could not change, I considered other possibilities for the safekeeping of the paintings.
Obviously, they could not stay here. I wondered if Nina would consider asking her brother to store them at their family estate, Clystmere Hall.
Perhaps later I could walk over to see her, make sure they’d fared all right.
I spent an hour sorting by era. There were the school pieces, when I was trying on styles and sorting out my own voice.
Nothing much would be lost if they went up in a fiery bomb.
The others fell into several eras, the work I’d done at the Slade School of Fine Art and then during the last war, both in London and, after, at Herewich.
Most were evenly divided between small domestic scenes and portraits, though I had certainly done my share of landscapes.
There was also a group from our travels to Egypt when Peter had been with the diplomatic corps in the twenties.
This was the work that had made my reputation and solidified the themes and palettes that expressed my vision most thoroughly.
They covered a spectrum of subjects, women and servants and merchants for the most part, centered in their worlds in ordinary ways.
I had few of them in my possession, only those I couldn’t bear to sell, like the portrait of my mother and the maharani, and a flower seller in the market in Egypt, her feet dirty, her smile easy as another woman bent over to tell her a secret.
Light fell on her wares, on her toes, across the crown of her head.
The painting of my mother and the maharani grew out of that time, my skill finally catching up to my vision after decades of work.
I would take them all to Clystmere if Nina was amenable.
The final group were paintings I’d been working on for the past few years.
Landscapes of India and Egypt, with a less saturated palette, flatter depth, experiments I hadn’t quite worked out.
And portraits of women, nudes in natural light, in ordinary tasks—bathing, dressing—but not young or fecund or objects of desire.
They were simply women in their bodies, ordinary, no longer particularly young, some aging or unwell, with sometimes sagging breasts and flattened buttocks or a wealth of flesh in ripples and rolls.
When I’d first learned to draw bodies, I had used my own in a full-length mirror in my bedroom.
It was deliciously scandalous to lock my door and disrobe, and use the natural light pouring in through my French doors to trace the shape of legs, hips, breasts (such as they were), my neck, my arms. I drew my body from a hundred angles, but it was a challenge to get poses correct.
I asked Gurdaya to help me, and, to my great delight and surprise, she did.
My sketchbooks are filled with her lush body, her softer hips and thighs.
She proved a great model, taking poses so I could learn how the body moved, bent, creased.
Downstairs, a door slammed.
Betty!
I clattered down the stairs to see if she was all right. Instead, it was Peter. His hair and clothing were disheveled, and he swayed unsteadily. When he raised his eyes to look at me, I recognized the haunted expression.
I met him at the foot of the stairs. No matter what he had done or how he had behaved, my pity rose when he was in this dejected, lost state. “There you are,” I said. “Are you all right? Have you eaten?”
He shook his head. “Not hungry.”
“All right.” I gently took his arm. “Let’s get you to bed then, shall we? Careful now.”
Up close, he smelled of gin and cigarettes and something acrid I couldn’t quite place. “Did you go to a shelter?”
He nodded. “Russell Square station.”
“I’m glad you were safe. We worried.”
We made it to his bedroom in a lurching, uneven walk. He fell on the bed, and I unlaced his shoes, stripped off his socks. It was an old routine, forged over the decades of his off-and-on drinking. “Come now,” I said gently. “Sit up, and let me take off your jacket.”
He obliged. I removed the coat and then unbuttoned his shirt, and took that, too, leaving him in his undershirt. “Lie down, dear,” I said.
But he clasped my hips suddenly, burying his face in my abdomen. “I am so sorry, Elsie. I’m a wreck of a man. You deserved so much better.”
I patted his upper back. This, too, was part of his pattern, the sudden wretchedness. “You did not deserve your portion, Peter. Let me get you an aspirin and some water. Things will look better when you’ve slept.”
As he fell into bed and closed his eyes, I covered him. The blackout shades kept it dark, but in the gloom, I was pierced by the look of him, his eyes sinking into hollows the color of pencil lead, weary lines of strain thinning out his cheeks.
Guilt touched me, and sorrow, and anger, all rolled together in one thread I’d carried heavily for twenty years. Once, he’d been so full of light.