What You Will

When they talked about it, getting up the next morning, Gwen thought the party had been something of a success.

‘Of course it was,’ Lawrence announced. ‘Everyone there was completely remarkable. What a privilege to be in the room with such people. And oh, the pudding!’ He kissed his fingertips and tossed them in the air, then went back to scouring his teeth, toothpaste foaming from his jaws.

Gwen laughed, squeezing in at the sink. He had devoted himself to the store-bought chocolate cake.

Hyperbole often characterised Lawrence’s most serious statements. It was like a superstition with him, making fun. He feared to value anything too much in case he lost it.

‘But what do you mean by success? You want Roland to ask her out by himself?’ He shook his head.

‘You don’t think he will?’ Gwen whined a little, feeling mocked.

‘With the wound of Paul that he and I inflicted on her? It’s too much to expect him to make that up to her. Anyway, darling, you’re the one he wants. He doesn’t want her!’

She made an astonished face. ‘Come off it, Lawrence. He wants a woman who will make sacrifices for him. You remember he told us that once? I don’t make sacrifices for anyone!’

‘You make sacrifices for Will every thirty seconds.’ His voice trailed away as he went through the hall into the bedroom.

She scoffed at the mirror, spat into the sink. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

Lawrence reappeared, buttoning his shirt, grinning devilishly. He watched her reflection over her shoulder and she watched, too – watched him, watched herself. Then she blushed, more from shyness than anxiety. They both knew he had a point, but it did them no harm at all, this tiny gratification she had enjoyed, Roland’s attention. They laughed a little. It wasn’t serious. It was like being caught eating ice cream straight out of the carton with the freezer door open; she felt slightly embarrassed. Why not sit down, have a bowlful? But a chair and a bowl would formally acknowledge the appetite; a chair and a bowl would make it impossible to pretend that the ice cream wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even really being eaten. As good as being caught; so who was kidding who? It was a delicate torture, to remind them both how intimately Lawrence knew her appetites and her sensibility.

As for Roland’s admiration, Lawrence found it appropriate. It was further celebration of Gwen. Roland wasn’t anything Gwen really wanted; Lawrence was sure of that. It enchanted Lawrence to surprise his wife as she tasted something she didn’t really want; he loved the pathos of her inability to resist, and he felt a surge of strength in knowing she was his. ‘Poor Roland’ was what Lawrence really thought, but he didn’t say it aloud.

He leaned down and around to Gwen’s cheek, kissed her fondly. ‘I’m not suggesting that you should sacrifice anything for Roland.’

‘Hilary would make sacrifices, though,’ Gwen burbled. ‘That’s what she’s good at.’

But then she wondered uncomfortably, What kind of sacrifices? What kind of pleasure would Hilary have to forgo? Some deeply personal and necessary joy? Gwen remembered the sting Roland had administered with his comments about her private religion. What about mankind? she wondered. How could anybody drag her mind back from where it preferred to go? From its habitual satisfactions? In order to consider mankind? She felt angry at Roland, and she pushed the thought away.

‘Maybe Roland thinks he wants a woman who would make sacrifices. But frankly, my dear, that’s so last century.’ Lawrence paused to savour the absurd trendiness of his witticism. Then he affected a more earnest voice, ‘Don’t you think he’d lose interest in someone like that? Walk all over her, use her up, throw her out? He ought to have a wife who could challenge him, amaze him. Do we know anyone that good? That tough?’

Gwen squirmed a little, knowing whom Lawrence had in mind. He reached for her chin, tugging at it in his cupped fingers, pulling her into his control. It was possessive, somehow tender, as if he wanted only to remind her of something.

‘So, OK,’ she conceded. ‘Matchmaking’s at least as hard as painting. For me, maybe harder, since I don’t know yet how to do it.’

‘I should think,’ Lawrence agreed. He nodded, brooding, then added, ‘It’s a case of getting it exactly right once and once only. With painting, the more ways you can find, the more interest. And anyway, the paint lets you do it. But the people?’

CHAPTER 5 (#u8edd8b60-41ab-5a5e-80a3-4e0fa2296ec8)

Gwen’s studio was at the top of the house near the light. Already the autumn days seemed remorselessly short. Even if she didn’t stop for lunch at all, the light didn’t last as long as her appetite for work. She had ways of addressing this. She had systems, artifices, and she was always devising new ones.

Lately, she had one big, square canvas set on an easel directly underneath the vast skylight in the middle of the room, and another two wide, rectangular canvases facing the long window running across the back. Around the middle of the day, she usually worked on the square canvas underneath the skylight. Since it was October, the sun’s zenith barely achieved the top of sky, and, even at noon, the light slanted in at an angle. But for a little over an hour, the quality of the light remained almost steady, so that the colours, as she worked them, held their value, ever so briefly, ever so precariously, and allowed her to see what she was making: a vista of dropping emerald meadow at midsummer in broad day.

Of course the light from her city skylight was nothing like the gradual passage of limpid sun at the cottage in June. But it didn’t need to be. The meadow was a memory, a vision lodged in her mind long since. Gwen worked from what was in her mind. Catching what she could excited her for the hour or so that she tried. And she relished the time pressure because it reminded her of the transience of the scene at the moment that she had beheld it, of the urgency then of seeing it.

It wasn’t a picture of a summer day anyway. It was an experience of moisture – clumps of grass that harassed her ankles or were dazzled by the wind as separated blades, trees caressed by mild English clouds along a tamed horizon, a festival of birdsong. In full summer, the English countryside always looked to Gwen pleasant, accommodating, long in use. Like a well-pillowed drawing room in nature, it was inviting, cultivated, but without any roof. She meant the picture to convey this, and yet while she painted, her mind dipped from time to time into something wilder and more crude that she half remembered from the brilliance and unbearable energies of her childhood in America. And when her mind dipped, deep, backwards, she would think, England is not like that, England is like this, making an implicit comparison; it was as if the scene she was painting held down some other scene and covered it.

On the pair of canvases by the back window, Gwen was doing something else, equally temperate, more mysterious: a pond in the woods, cloaked in mist, at dawn. And beside it, the same pond later in the day as the mist burned off so that the pond shone among the close-growing trees like phosphorescence. She liked to work on the first of these canvases very early in the morning, when the light from the window still reached long and low into its dank grey-green washes.

She would fetch the big wooden palette which she left tilted against the wall overnight to keep dust from clinging to the wet paint, and she would prod the little turds of colour with a small brush, with a knife, and with another, bigger, once white-haired brush, feeling how the colours had ever so slightly begun to seal themselves over in their sleep, like chrysalises around caterpillars. They would spread their wings, flatten out on to the palette as she waked them. She would snatch a brush into her mouth, clamp it there with wiry lips, tasting the white spirits she had cleaned it with, select another brush and another, until several bristled from her left fist as she narrowed her eyes again at where she had left off. She had hundreds of brushes in the studio, almost as many knives, stuffed upright into jars, flowerpots, pitchers, tin cans, all sizes, all shapes, each brush looking bleached and waterlogged as if it had rolled around the bottom of the sea, been abraded by sand, by surf, drifted ashore in harsh sun.

The sable hairs of her smallest brush would nip and sway at the soft mounds of Davy’s grey, Payne’s grey, burnt umber, terre verte, cadmium green, indigo, yellow ochre, probing the caches of colour. She would poke at the palette as if at a baby’s meal, mix and blend the tiny portions in dabs, deliver them with the delicate fingertips and the anxious poise of a mother’s hand towards an upturned mouth, then wait to see the effect before she offered more. On a clear day, the shafts of light reached closer and closer to the canvas as the morning wore on, and until Gwen herself moved on to the second canvas, where the mist was rising to reveal glimpses of brown and even purple reflected in the surface of the pond and ballasting the trees, bright yellow at their tops where the mist thinned to mere wisps, lifted in threads. The pond itself looked eerily on the move, as if through time, as if emerging from the past.

While she worked on these bucolic scenes, Gwen was mesmerised by their completeness, and she would think only from time to time of Will or of Lawrence – an instantaneous drift of face before her mind’s eye, amounting to a serene recognition: They, too, exist, separately, safely. But lately, more and more continually, she thought of Hilary. Hilary didn’t seem to be a discrete, settled fact; she not only existed but also suffered. Hilary was in turmoil, in trajectory, in a state of need. She was not constant; she was changing. Gwen saw Hilary clearly – wrinkles of fretfulness striking harsh verticals through the thick, pale flesh at the top of Hilary’s long nose, between her forthright blue eyes.

One lunchtime not long after the dinner party, Gwen put down her brushes, flexed her shoulders, filled the kettle with water for coffee. The light was already hardening into the yellow-grey scowl of a smoggy London afternoon. She stared into the stained enamel sink, iridescent with wear like an old tooth, blue-black around the paint-clogged drain. She would fight it, she resolved, the premature onset of twilight. Will had piano after school and Hilary had offered to pick him up. Still time for the meadow. And what else?

She leaned back against the chipped edge of the Formica counter, the kettle roaring and spitting behind her. Around the sides of the room stood canvas upon canvas, a few with their pale wood stretchers and blank backs showing titles scrawled in black across them, others facing forward, one or two in trial frames, offering glimpses of a season, a time of day, a mood of nature. Her sketchbooks, warped and fattened with changes of atmosphere – raindrops, sun, the baking edge of the Aga at the cottage – lay here and there on the spattered workbench, the fridge, the disused cooker; one or two were propped open like tents so she could glance at them as they stood up with their wire bindings across the top. They served to remind her of what she had wanted to capture about a particular time in a particular place, like a diary of her intentions towards the paint.

A rickety panelled screen zigzagged halfway along the bed. On the floor one of Hilary’s big black suitcases lay open, her linen skirt limp over one edge, her Lycra running tights over another. Abandoned like that, the clothes seemed to Gwen poignant, vulnerable. They had pressed so near Hilary’s skin that they might have been part of Hilary herself, her chosen outline, not her assigned one. But she isn’t fully conscious of making an outline, Gwen thought. Not of how she looks or chooses to make herself look. And here they lay, her garments, with white flecks of Hilary’s sloughed-off skin invisibly clinging to them, her odour and her sweat swelling each thread of the fabric ever so slightly, making it more airy, lighter than if the clothes had been newly laundered, dried, pressed. From all the way across the room, Gwen could see how intimately the fabric portrayed Hilary’s person. Hilary who was always so unconcerned about such things. If her knickers, her bra, had lain on top of the pile of her clothes, even in a locker room, a public changing booth, she wouldn’t have noticed, wouldn’t have paused to fold them inside and conceal them, wouldn’t even have turned them right side out if they were wrong side out. Was this really a woman? How like a boy, thought Gwen, a young boy. She noticed that among the pungent smells of the studio – white spirits, oil paint, linseed, sawdust – she couldn’t, in fact, smell Hilary.

Next to the suitcase, Hilary’s black nylon briefcase leaned against the bed, the pockets all unzipped, a laptop half in, half out. Plastic sleeves holding typed sheets and photographs spilled from one side. Doro’s collection, Gwen thought, crossing the room, bending down to flip through the files, slithery in her hands.

Amphorae, kraters, statues, friezes, the likes of which she herself had once pored over with painful concentration. It gave her a start, their familiarity and their strangeness. How we both loved all this, she thought. Hilary still does; this is where she really lives, where she is at home. Is this something she should have to sacrifice? Slow-footed processionals and naked ceremonials, wars and games and crafts, kissing, killing, dancing, marrying, offering, giving thanks. There were human figures, animals, ritual fires, wreaths, gods, heroes, centaurs, satyrs, once known by name to Gwen, all poised in their long-ago occupations and obligations. Ideal bodies idealised – orderly, savage, in draperies, in helmets, in wings, in chariots, their white-ringed eyes sightless. The statues stood free and trance-like in their three dimensions, inky bronze, white marble, battered grey stone; the painted figures were silhouetted against red backgrounds, like the earth they came and went from, or, on the later vases, against black backgrounds, like the eternity of night into which, as they told, time carries everything.

Try something like this under electric light, thought Gwen. It can’t change, so the light won’t matter. It’s not as if I ever experienced any of it as a natural world to begin with.

She decided on a tall, slender, two-handled black vase with red-gold figures, and she laid the sleeve with its typed notes on the counter while she measured coffee grounds into her little cafetière, poured in the boiling water, stirred it. Then, leaving the coffee to draw on the ridged steel draining board next to the sink, she slipped the photograph from the sleeve to see the figures on the vase more closely: a wedding procession, mostly women, their hair bound with leaves, with linen, their golden earrings dangling, their gowns crisply pleated, their maidenly eyes downcast, their noses and their backs long and straight as they trod, following a man and leading a bullock, towards the longed-for state of marriage. How chaste a scene, Gwen thought, remote, inviolable.

One woman, the most maidenly, the most downcast, was carrying a vase exactly like this vase on which she was portrayed.

‘Loutrophoros,’ Gwen muttered to herself.

For there was the name of the vase shape typed across the top of Hilary’s notes. Carrier of washing water. A vase as awkwardly tall and thin as a leggy girl – easy to sweep off its foot, narrow-necked, but with a wide, inviting mouth which was shaped almost flat like a plate to catch and funnel precious liquid so that none might be spilled. Did they mean it to seem like the way into a womb? Gwen wondered. This was the vase in which they kept the sacred water to purify you for marriage, or for your funeral if you died without marrying. Undamaged, like the virginal belly it suggested. Maybe it had been unearthed from a grave, buried with a maiden still unmarried at her death, and that’s why we have it whole.

So what does that tell us about marriage for them? Gwen wondered. Right up there with death? They stayed at home with their children, they kept house, cooked and sewed. Submissive, hemmed in. Didn’t get out much to chat to Alcibiades over a kylix of wine and water, or to throw javelins at the Olympic Games. What choices did they have? Gwen wondered. She simply couldn’t imagine having no choices. They must have had ideas, sensations, plans. What did they sacrifice? They left nothing behind in words. On the other hand, neither did Socrates. We have only what the others recorded. And he was the Master of them all.

She put the photograph back into its sleeve, poured out coffee, thinking of Hilary, wondering whether this part of Doro’s collection was to be kept or sold, wondering how much Hilary minded. I might catch something before it’s dispersed, preserve it. Hilary might like that. She remembered eighteenth-century engravings by Piranesi. Earlier ones by Dürer, Goltzius. And handcoloured things in books. The self-styled Baron d’Hancarville’s illustrations of William Hamilton’s collection of antiquities. Tischbein’s. There was John Flaxman, the sculptor. Fascinated by Herculaneum, Pompeii, she thought. Lots of people were. Or much later, Beazley, the Balliol scholar, sketching vase after vase, making tracings, developing his method.

She merely fussed over the meadow, distracted by Hilary’s face, by the vase, and by the little offering she had in mind to make from it. It wasn’t long before she leaned her palette up against the wall, stuck her brushes in a jar of spirits in the sink, and began to sort through the bottom drawer of the mammoth brown chest that stood against the radiator.

She found a newish sketchbook; it was a good size, eleven by fourteen, with porous paper. She struggled with the drawer for a while, kneeling, lifting, pushing against its swollen groans. The weight was all on one side – clinking hammers, small saws, chisels, tacks. Needs rearranging, she thought, abandoned it gaping, and laid the sketch pad down flat on the workbench. Her hinged green tin box of watercolours was on top of the chest. She sharpened a pencil and stood over the photograph, calculating proportions. Then she sketched the geometry of the vase with swift strokes, thinking, To copy on to the shape of the vase a scene which contains the shape of the vase is called mise en abyme. First the potter, then the vase painter, now me. She felt the giddying pull of it, the palimpsest reaching right back through time, as if it were something she could dive into. I can lose myself in this, she thought.

She pulled up a tall stool and sat against the edge of it. As she outlined their forms and their faces, Gwen no longer wondered at all about the women on the vase. It didn’t seem to her as if the women had ever been real. She could remember that when she had been a student, her professors liked to discuss what could be found out about life in, say, fifth century BC Athens, by looking at what was depicted on a vase. Social history on the side of a ceramic object. She didn’t believe such a scene could be real. It came from inside someone’s head. The very place where people part ways with so-called reality.

What she believed was that the clay was real and that whoever had made the clay into a vase was real and that whoever had painted the decoration on the vase was also real. Otherwise it was more like decoration on an Easter egg: it was what the maker had thought of on the day – a pattern, a momentary conclusion, at best a recollection. This might look nice, the painter had thought. Pleasing his eye, pleasing his patron, pleasing his master if he was a slave. But whenever Gwen had tried to discuss this with her professors they had always explained in a remedial tone, Ah, but the Greeks weren’t like that. They weren’t interested in self-expression. They were craftsmen. And she had always wanted to insist, No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about self-expression. It’s just a practical fact about making something. It’s how it happens, if you concentrate at all. You have to abandon what you really