Chapter Six #4
‘Yes, well done, you are right. One can imagine her taking the end of that ribbon bow and slowly pulling it undone. It is titillation. That is why this was shocking. Painters tread a fine line between art and eroticism, and Manet is reminding us here of the hypocrisy of gentlemen – and remember, almost all art is created by men for men – who want looking at naked ladies to be respectable.’
‘Because a Greek goddess must be respectable?’ Alice hazarded.
‘How could she not be? There was a lot of nudity in ancient Greek society – Greek men exercised and swam in the nude. Of course, they had the climate for it,’ he added, with an irreverent smile.
‘So depicting goddesses unclothed had no special meaning to them. They were celebrating the aesthetic beauty of the human form. By patronising Greek art, modern gentlemen can claim to be doing the same. You can have it on your drawing-room wall. You can put Lely’s Venus in your great hall where visitors will see it as soon as they enter and know you to be a person of taste and gentility.
And there may be gentlemen who do see only the abstract beauty of pure form.
But for the rest…Let me read you what émile Zola said about Olympe. Zola?’ he raised his eyebrows at her.
‘I think I’ve heard the name,’ she said doubtfully.
‘French novelist, playwright and critic.’ He picked up a book and opened it at a bookmark.
He read: ‘“When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks.”’ He closed the book, and returned his gaze to the painting.
‘She has the ordinary face of a Paris street girl, doesn’t she? ’ he said with a hint of affection.
‘I’ve never been to Paris,’ Alice said foolishly. Then, ‘I think I know what you mean.’
‘Good,’ he said briskly, and turned the sheet up to reveal another mounted print of a different painting.
‘Now, we shall consider Ingres’ Odalisque with a Slave.
An odalisque, in case you are unfamiliar with the term, is also a prostitute, so Ingres is at least being more honest in his title.
Now, given the subject’s profession, why did this painting not shock in the same way as Olympe? ’
Alice was so interested she forgot to be shy or embarrassed. Or to think for an instant of what her mother would say if she were there.
‘I hate to leave you,’ said Mr Cowling, looking at his pregnant wife with concern.
‘I shall be perfectly all right,’ Nina said. ‘I shall have friends visiting me every day.’
‘But are you comfortable here, my love? Not even in your own house.’
‘It’s a very nice house. And it’s not for long.’
Having finalised the plans for the new wing, Mr Cowling had got down to it straight away in his usual, businesslike manner.
‘Leathwaite says it can be done in three months,’ he had told Nina.
‘That will give us a bit of leeway for last-minute alterations and arranging the furniture and so on. I want it all behind us by the time the baby comes.’
When she had later relayed that to her friends, Lady Clemmie had seemed doubtful about the timetable, but Bobby had said robustly, ‘It might be impossible for the likes of you and me, Clem, but a millionaire can always get things done.’
Nina, slightly shocked, had asked him at dinner that night if he really was a millionaire, and he had looked embarrassed and said, ‘I don’t like that word, but I suppose I am. All it means, really, is that I’ve got enough to give you anything you want, to take care of you the way you deserve.’
Nina had grown accustomed to the fact that her husband was a rich man, but a millionaire?
A million was a number outside ordinary life, almost beyond comprehension.
A hundred pounds a year would be a reasonable wage for a bank clerk.
He could keep a family on it. Over a lifetime he might earn five thousand pounds or so.
How could you begin to count a million pounds, let alone spend it?
Mr Cowling had wanted Nina to move to London while the building was going on, but she had not wanted to travel in her condition, and the entertainments of London would have been wasted on her, since she didn’t like to go out in public.
She had wanted to stay at home, but the noise and dust made it impossible.
The result was this rented house in St Mary’s Road in the centre of Market Harborough, small, but quite well appointed.
And now he had to go away on business for a couple of weeks.
‘Better I’m away now and get things settled, so I can be here when the baby comes,’ he’d explained.
She had hardly waved him goodbye when Lady Clemmie, whose house was just around the corner, arrived with a bunch of flowers from her garden and a small, thin woman whom she introduced as Aggie Summers.
‘She’s staying with me, down from London, and I wanted to introduce her to you. I hope you don’t mind?’
Mrs Summers was one of the few paid organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union, working with their small Central London committee – the leading Pankhursts were still, for various reasons, largely operating from Manchester.
‘Aggie’s been working too hard and made herself ill, so I insisted she come here for a few days to convalesce,’ Clemmie said.
Nina rang for refreshments, and asked Mrs Summers politely how things were going. ‘I believe you had great hopes of the new Labour Party,’ she said. ‘Twenty-nine Members of Parliament, isn’t it? They must make a big difference.’
‘You’d think so,’ Aggie replied – she had a flat voice and a Lancashire accent – ‘but most of ’em got in through a pact with the Liberals, so they don’t want to upset them.
Christabel calls ’em Government Poodles.
And the Liberals have got such a big majority they don’t need to court suffragists for support. ’
‘They’ve a substantial reforming programme of their own that they want to get on with,’ Clemmie said. ‘They haven’t time for us.’