Keeping the World Away (7 page)

But street scenes were not what she wanted. The only reason she wanted Ida and Gwen Salmond to return was so that they could pose for her, so that she could attempt an interior with figures in it. They were obliging when they arrived, understanding her feverish impatience. The other Gwen donned a white muslin dress and Ida a flounced skirt with a pink shawl draped round her upper body, and she posed them standing together, Gwen reading a book, Ida peering at it over her shoulder. Though it was not the figures she had difficulty with – the composition was simple – but the room around them. She struggled to capture the spirit of the room but felt it slipping from her. The eye was drawn to the window in the background but tripped up on its way there by the fireplace and a picture framed on the wall above it. And the plaster rose in the ceiling. There was something not right. She needed a teacher. The teacher she wanted was Whistler, but his fees, for lessons in his Académie Carmen, were double those of other schools. What was to be done?

She borrowed money. It was against everything her father had preached – neither a borrower nor a lender be – and he would be furious if he found out. But his allowance would not pay for lessons at the Académie Carmen and so she took the money
Gwen
Salmond offered. The moment she stepped into Whistler’s presence, she was happy. He was small and neat, with curly grey hair; she noted his bright inquisitive eyes and his exquisite hands, which were rarely still. There was a passion about him which appealed to her immediately. He was different from Henry Tonks and his ideals not those of the Slade. Art, he believed, was about poetry, about bringing forth the spirit of things and expressing beauty of every sort – line, form, but most important of all, emotion. Art was about speaking from the soul.

She did not want to return to London and the Slade. Paris was right for her, she decided, it was where she must stay. So she wrote to her father, an impassioned letter, trying to make him understand the vital importance to her of Paris and Whistler and the Académie Carmen. Never had she anticipated that he would come to inspect where she was living – ‘Oh!’ she cried out as she read his letter. The others could not understand her dismay. Her father, they said, could not fail to see how happy she was and how her work had improved. But they did not know him. He was not interested in happiness, only in obedience and decorum. He would find fault even with her appearance. The girls said they would help. If she designed a new dress, they would make it up for her. So she tried to make herself look pretty and girlish, abandoning her usual dark colours and choosing a lustrous blue taffeta material and a style she copied from a painting by Manet, a dress with a full skirt and billowing sleeves and a neck with lace round it that showed some bosom.

The stare he gave her … was chilling. Disgust was in it, and horror. He told her that she looked like a prostitute. She was tempted to ask how he knew but instead snatched a cloak off a peg and swathed herself in it. ‘Is that better?’ she challenged. He turned and walked out of the apartment and she did not follow him. Watching him from the window she saw him march back to his hotel, upright, swinging his cane, not caring that he had insulted her, confident that she would have to come crawling to him for money. But she would not. She would never ask him again for money.

Rather than plead for money from her father she would readily have become what he had accused her of being. To stay in Paris it would be worth becoming a prostitute – if necessary.

*

How long had it been? On the train, she counted the months – only five, and yet they had stretched and stretched to fill her life. To be leaving Paris now was pitiful, but loans from the other Gwen, and income from modelling, was not enough. She would have to return and learn to paint by herself without expensive lessons. Ida’s company helped, but not enough. Ida was going home to Wigmore Street, but where would she herself go? She did not know. Perhaps Gus would help, not with money – he was as poor as she was – but to find a room.

In fact she found one herself, in Howland Street, round the corner from their old apartment in Fitzroy Street. A basement, dank and ugly, but which suited her mood. The steps down to it were made of iron and her boots clattered upon them unpleasantly. No light, of course. The window looked out onto a wall streaming with damp, its bricks all mossy. She did not bother to take the net curtain down, it would make no difference. She did not bother to unpack either, leaving most things in her two bags and hanging up only her best red blouse. Then she sat, bolt upright, on the bed and tried to think. How was she to return to Paris? It seemed impossible. Gus was to have an exhibition of his paintings at the Carfax Gallery and hoped to sell them, which he probably would. Could she earn money to get back to Paris, by doing the same? The idea was absurd. She had nothing to exhibit. She knew no gallery owners.

In Tenby, before she went to Paris, she had worked on a self-portrait in oils that she thought might have a future. It was, for her, quite a large canvas, twenty-four inches by fourteen, oblong in shape, and she had laboured over it, staring so fixedly into the wardrobe mirror between brushstrokes that she had felt disembodied – the woman staring arrogantly back was not she but some other demanding taskmaster of whom she was a little afraid. She had left this unfinished painting in her father’s house, and
did
not wish to go there to complete it and bring it to London. What, after all, would she do with it? Show it to Gus, see if he had any ideas? He always showed interest in her work and had already expressed dismay that in this basement she could not paint. He’d told her she must get away, into the air, into the light. He himself would go mad confined to such a dungeon.

In the spring, he took her away himself. Arriving one afternoon to find her crouched beside her grimy window sketching a stray cat which had perched on the sill, he said she must come with him to Dorset and walk among the primroses and swim in the sea and restore her spirits. The invitation to stay in a boarding house in Swanage had come from their old landlady, Mrs Everett. So she went, wishing only that one of her women friends could go with her (though not voicing this to Gus). It was, as he’d promised, a lovely, wild place and she revelled in the freedom to walk and swim and be outside all the time but the odd thing was that, though she relished the solitude and appreciated the beauty of the landscape, it did not make her want to paint. She did no work while Gus sketched madly. Instead, thoughts of people and rooms, and people
in
rooms, haunted her. It was as though the wide open skies of Dorset and the vast stretch of the sea inhibited instead of releasing her – she wanted to draw herself in, concentrate on the essence of someone or something containable. She became restless and jumpy, and Gus became irritated.

But he was kind to her. It was his friend who, back in London, let them have his house in Kensington, a whole cottage to herself. She left her basement and once in the cottage began to work again, getting Winifred to bring her self-portrait from Tenby. It was the hand she had to work on, the way it rested on her hip in that deliberate way, the hand and the belt, cinching her waist tightly. It was finished before Gus’s friend returned, and she moved again, this time to Gower Street, on her own, but not for long. Gus was going to France and asked if she would go with him, and because she could not resist the lure of France, anywhere in France, she agreed. There was another factor that lured her. Ambrose was to join them at Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne
where
they were to stay with another friend, Michel Salaman. Surely something would happen between them? Her yearning had gone on so long now and nothing had come of it.

They began well, travelling to Le Puy together, Ambrose delighted to be leaving London and telling her without embarrassment that Michel had sent him a cheque to pay for his fare. They were united in their poverty and their inability, it seemed, to earn money. But once they reached Le Puy, where Gus awaited them as well as Michel, the ease between them began to disappear. Ambrose wanted to be with Gus more than with her. They were absinthe friends, sitting in cafés listening to an alluring girl singing songs. Gwen was left alone, her arms wrapped round herself, pacing the floor until they returned. When they did, they were most often drunk, but not drunk enough not to want to go on drinking. Ambrose drank even more than Gus did, and then fell asleep and stayed asleep until the middle of the next day. Then, he’d seem a little ashamed, and go off with her picking flowers, though hardly talking. Instead, she talked. She overcame her reticence and she told him of all the feeling that raged inside her and for which she could find no outlet. ‘I am born to love,’ she said, and watched him closely. He turned away.

Her tears were wearying. They exhausted her and yet she could not stem them. ‘Gwen!’ Gus said, and sighed. He never asked her what she was crying about. He knew, and could do nothing about it. There he was, with all his girlfriends and his whores, not for one moment having to control his passion. And there she was, just as passionate, driven mad with frustration. It was not only the sexual adventures she envied but the general unfettered nature of his life. She felt imprisoned and no one, least of all Ambrose, would turn the key and let her out.

*

The fog was thick and yellow, swirling round the blackened bricks of St Pancras Register Office as Gus and Ida came out, married. It was a secret marriage. Back in Wigmore Street, Ida’s unsuspecting parents had yet to be told and she both shivered and laughed at the thought. It was, Gwen reflected, how she herself
would
wish to marry, should the occasion ever arise (though there was no suggestion that it might). No pomp, no ceremony, simply a quiet pledging of themselves to each other in the eyes of the law. The eyes of the law that day of 12 January 1901, were set in the narrow face of a thin, weasly man, eyes so very small it was difficult to ascertain their colour. Ida and Gus looked all the more beautiful in contrast to him.

Ida would probably never paint again to any effect. Did it matter? Gwen could not decide. She had never felt that Ida burned with ambition, or that within her was a raging urge to express herself through art. Gus had the need, and marriage and fatherhood would not stop his art. But about herself Gwen saw difficulties. She could not say that she did not want love in her life, and intimacy with the one she loved, but that was not the same as wanting to be a wife and mother. She hoped she would be brave, and take, and give, the love without allowing herself to be bound in any way. It ought, surely, to be possible. She intended that it should be.

Ambrose was engaged. Two months after they returned from Le Puy, he had become engaged to Mary Edwards, nine years older than himself, a woman she did not know and was sure Ambrose hardly knew. It was inexplicable, cruel. Gwen gathered from Gus that Mary had declared her love to Ambrose and that he had immediately succumbed. Well, she, Gwen, had declared her love for him, had she not? And he had not succumbed. He had turned away, run away, and now she had to tell herself she was better off without him. But the hurt was there, raw and bitter inside her, and she had to work hard to conceal it. Looking at herself in mirrors, using herself more and more as a model, she had seen the sore place seeping through her flesh, staining her skin, tightening the muscles of her face. She tried not to paint this but increasingly her brush told the tale.

Thankfully, her self-portrait, begun in Tenby, had preceded the damage and did not reveal her suffering. She had completed it before the news of Ambrose’s engagement and was able to exhibit it at the New English Art Club, the first painting she had ever publicly exhibited, confident that the impression it gave was the
one
she had striven for. She had wanted to show herself as calm and collected, aware of her own strength, a little superior and extremely serious. This was to be a portrait of a woman who was no adornment of the fair sex but a member of a new generation that intended its work to be important. There was no proof in the picture that she was an artist – no paintbrushes or palette, such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun had used, or a hand on a painting beside her, as in Mary Beale’s self-portrait. The viewer did not need to know she was an artist. It was enough that her skill should be appreciated. Sometimes, she felt she was a mere shadow of a person. Her portrait reassured her that she was not.

*

She was an aunt. A boy, David, born 6 January, in Liverpool of all places, where Gus was holding a temporary post at the art school. Gus thought Liverpool ‘gorgeous’, but when Gwen arrived there to see her nephew, she could not share his opinion, not that she saw much of the city, being too occupied with the baby, who truly
was
gorgeous. He was said to look like her, a nonsense of course. She studied him for hours, stripping off his coverings and examining him in minute detail. Was he not a work of art? She marvelled at his structure, the perfection of his limbs and the contours of his skull. Through her mind went all the paintings of babies she had seen and not one of them, not even by Michelangelo or Raphael, had captured this. It was a shame to cover him up at all, but she did, and took him out in his big black pram to get the air. She walked miles, pushing forcefully, stopping now and again to rest in doorways, squatting down on the steps and rocking the pram when the baby whimpered.

Ida looked beautiful nursing him. Gus drew and drew her, lightning quick sketches, but Gwen merely looked, noting the swell of the breasts lessening as the baby sucked, and the way his nose was flattened against them. She stored the images in her head and thought one day she might make use of them, but not now. Now, she was finishing another and much better self-portrait and it had drained her. She needed this break, it gave her time to stand back and gain some objectivity before she returned to
work
. It was strange, she could not help thinking, that seeing Ida’s child made her own work more important, not less so. She did not look at their baby and pine for one of her own, nor did the baby make her work seem irrelevant. On the contrary, he made it seem vital. She herself was not going to create a baby. All her creative talents had to go into her painting, all her feelings and emotions, all her ideas and plans, all her hopes and fears, all the turmoil within her, everything that was precious.