The Very Picture of You (10 page)

I tried to disguise my curiosity. ‘It’s certainly very fine.’ I handed Iris her stick then looked at the painting again. ‘So is it an… heirloom?’

She hesitated. ‘I bought it in an antique shop in 1960, for ten shillings and sixpence.’

I turned to her. ‘So you just… liked it.’

Iris was still gazing at it. ‘Oh it was much more than “liked”…’ She paused. ‘I was drawn to it –
guided
to it, I sometimes think.’

I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t say any more. ‘Well,’ I said after a moment, ‘it’s easy to understand why you fell in love with it. It’s beautifully composed and has so much – I was going to say charm – but what I really mean is
feeling
.’

Iris nodded. ‘There’s a lot of feeling there. Yes.’

‘The woman on the bench must be the girls’ nanny.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She seems absorbed in her knitting, but she’s actually looking at the artist, covertly, which gives it a kind of edge. It looks as though it’s from the early 1930s. I wonder where it was painted…’

‘In St James’s Park, near the lake.’

I studied the silvery-grey water shining in the background. ‘Well, it’s lovely. It must lift your spirits, just looking at it.’

‘On the contrary,’ Iris murmured. ‘It makes me feel sad.’ She lowered herself on to the bed. ‘But now I’ll change, so if you could give me a few moments…’

‘Of course.’

I went back to the sitting room. As I tied on my apron I wondered why the painting would have that effect on Iris. Of course we all see different things in works of art; yet the scene was, objectively, a happy one, so why should it make her sad?

While I was preparing my palette, my phone rang. I quickly answered.

‘He’s
called
me,’ Polly declared excitedly.

‘Who has?’

‘Jason – from the Toilet Duck shoot; he’s
just
called and asked me to have lunch with him on Saturday.’

‘Great,’ I whispered. ‘But I can’t chat, Pol – I’m in a sitting.’

‘Ooh, sorry – I’ll leave you to it.’

As I pressed the ‘end call’ button I looked at the envelope icon; I was tempted to open the e-mail from my website, but then I heard Iris’s footsteps.

‘So…’ She was standing in the doorway. The suit fitted her perfectly and brought out the intense blue of
her eyes; she’d applied some powder and a touch of pink lipstick.

‘You look beautiful, Iris.’ I put my phone back in my bag.

She smiled. ‘Thank you. So now we can start.’

Iris sat on the sofa, smoothed down her skirt then turned towards me. As I looked at her, I felt the frisson I always feel when I begin a new portrait. We were silent for a while, the brush scraping softly across the canvas as I began to block in the main shapes with an ochre wash.

After a couple of minutes Iris shifted her position.

‘Are you comfortable?’ I asked her, concerned.

‘I
am
– though I confess I feel a little self-conscious.’

‘That’s normal,’ I assured her. ‘A portrait sitting’s quite a strange experience – for both parties – because there’s this sudden relationship. I mean, we’ve only just met, but here I am, openly gawping at you: it’s a pretty unnatural first encounter.’

Iris smiled. ‘I’m sure I’ll soon get used to your… scrutiny. But wouldn’t you rather be painting someone young?’

‘No. I prefer painting older people. It’s much more interesting. I love seeing a whole life etched on to a face, with all that experience, and insight.’

‘And regret?’ Iris suggested quietly.

‘Yes… that’s usually there too. It would be strange if it wasn’t.’

‘So… do your sitters ever get upset?’

My brush stopped. ‘They do – especially the older ones, because as they sit there they’re looking back on their lives. Sometimes people cry.’ I thought of Mike and
wondered again what could have happened to make him so unhappy.

‘Well, I promise
not
to cry,’ Iris said.

I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter if you do. I’m going to paint
you
, Iris, in all your humanity, as you
are
– or as I see you, at least.’

‘You have to be perceptive then, to do what you do.’

‘That’s true.’ I exhaled. ‘And I couldn’t even
try
to do this if I didn’t believe that I was. Portrait painters need to be able to detect things about the sitter – to try to work out who that person
is
.’

We continued in silence for a few moments.

‘And do you ever paint yourself?’

My brush stopped in mid-stroke. ‘No.’

Surprise flickered across Iris’s features. ‘I thought portrait artists usually did do self-portraits.’

You’re Ella Graham now…

‘Well… I don’t – at least not for years now.’

And that’s all there is to it…

‘But… I’d love to hear more about your time abroad, Iris. You must have met some remarkable people.’

‘I did,’ she said warmly. ‘Well, they weren’t just people, they were
personalities
. Let me see… Whose names can I drop?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘We met Tito,’ she began. ‘And Indira Gandhi – I have a photo of Sophia, aged five, sitting on her lap. I also met Nasser – the year before Suez; I danced with him at an embassy ball. In Chile we met Salvador Allende: Ralph and I liked him enormously and were outraged at what the Americans did to help overthrow him, though we could never say so openly. Discretion is a frustrating, if necessary, aspect of diplomatic life.’

‘What was your favourite posting?’

Iris smiled. ‘Iran. We were there in the mid-1970s – it was paradisally beautiful and I have wonderful memories of our time there.’

‘But presumably your daughters went to boarding school?’

She nodded. ‘In Dorset. They weren’t able to join us for every holiday, so that was hard. Their guardian was very good, but we hated being separated from our two girls.’

There was another silence, broken only by the dull rumble of traffic in Kensington Church Street.

‘Iris… I hope you don’t mind my asking you – but the painting in your bedroom…’

She shifted slightly. ‘Yes?’

‘You said it made you feel sad. I can’t help wondering why – as it’s such a happy scene.’

Iris didn’t at first reply, and for a few moments I wondered whether she
wasn’t
, in fact, slightly deaf; and I was considering whether to ask her again when she exhaled, painfully. ‘That picture makes me feel sad because there is a sad story attached to it – one I learned a few years after I’d bought it.’ She heaved another deep sigh. ‘Perhaps I’ll tell you…’

I felt crass suddenly. ‘You don’t have to, Iris – I didn’t mean to pry: I was just surprised by your remark, that’s all.’

‘That’s perfectly understandable. It
is,
on the surface, a happy scene. Two little girls playing in a park…’ She paused, then looked at me intently. ‘I
will
tell you the story, Ella – because you’re an artist and I believe you’ll understand.’ Understand what, I wondered. What
could the sad story behind the painting be? It now occurred to me, with an anxious pang, that the girls might not have survived the war – or perhaps something awful had happened to the nanny. Now I wasn’t sure that I
wanted
to hear the story, but Iris was beginning.

‘I bought the painting in May 1960,’ she said. ‘We were in Yugoslavia then – our first posting; but I’d come home with Sophia, who was then three, to have my second child, Mary. There were good hospitals in Belgrade, but I decided to have the baby in London so that my mother could help me. Also, she was widowed by then and I wanted to take the opportunity to spend some time with her; so I went to stay with her for three months.’

I studied Iris, and drew in the curve of her right cheek.

‘My mother’s house was in Bayswater. She’d spent most of her married life in Mayfair but, as I say, my stepfather lost everything after the war.’ I wondered about Iris’s own father. ‘The week before the baby was due I took Sophia out in her pushchair. We had an ice cream in Whiteleys then walked slowly up Westbourne Grove: and I was just passing a small antique shop when I glanced in the window and saw that painting. I remember stopping dead and staring at it: I was completely taken with it – as you have been today. Sophia turned round and squawked at me to go on, so I did. But I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind. So, a few minutes later I turned back and pushed on the door.

‘The man who owned the shop told me that the painting had come in the week before. It had been brought in with some other things by a woman who’d
found it in her late brother’s attic – she’d been clearing his house. She wasn’t sure who it was by, as it was unsigned, but on the back of the canvas was the year it was painted, 1934. I couldn’t really afford it, but I bought it, and as I carried it back I remember feeling what I can only describe as a kind of
relief.

‘I showed it to my mother and she looked at it closely, but said nothing. I felt hurt by her lack of enthusiasm, but assumed that it was because she felt I’d been extravagant. I volunteered that it
was
a lot of money, but added that I’d fallen in love with it and simply “had to have it”. Then I hung it in my room.

‘The following week Mary was born, and I stayed with my mother for another two months. She was very helpful, but seemed sad, despite the birth of the new baby; I assumed it was because she knew I’d soon be going back to Yugoslavia with her grandchildren and that it would be a long time before she saw us again.’

‘Did you have any siblings?’

‘Yes – an older sister, Agnes, who lived in Kent. Anyway, before I went back to Belgrade I put the painting in storage, along with all the other things that Ralph and I had stored.’

‘Could you lift your head a little, Iris? I’m just marking out your brow.’ I squinted at her. ‘That’s better. So… what happened then?’

Iris folded her hands in her lap. ‘In 1963 we returned to London for a two-year stint before our next foreign posting. We were glad to be back, the only sadness being that my mother had died a few months before. I think she knew that she might not see me again, because her later letters to me had been full of sorrow – she said
that she hadn’t been a good mother in some critical ways; she said she had so much to regret. I simply thought that the distance between us had made her feel vulnerable; so I wrote back saying that she’d been a very loving and caring mother, which, in most ways, she had been…’

Iris brushed a speck off her skirt. ‘Anyway… Ralph and I had returned to our house in Clapham – it had been let while we were away. I remember the day our things came out of storage and Sophia and Mary, who were then six and three, delightedly helping us unpack the crates. For them it was a bit like Christmas. Eventually we came to the china and glass, then to the few pictures we possessed and there, wrapped in some old pages of the
Daily Express
, was my painting. I was
so
glad to see it again…’

Iris paused for a moment then continued.

‘This was the first time Ralph had seen it, although I’d talked to him about it. As he looked at it he said that it was clearly very good and added that he’d ask our neighbour, Hugh, who worked at Sotheby’s, to take a look at it. So a few days later Hugh came round, and he said that the reason it was unsigned was because it was probably a model for a larger painting. He was almost sure that it was by Guy Lennox, who had been a successful portraitist in the twenties and thirties. Ralph asked Hugh about its possible value and I remember feeling alarmed because I knew that I could never part with it – especially as I was now mother to two little girls myself. And this made me feel that
that
was what had first drawn me to the picture; when I was pregnant I was
sure
that I was going to have another daughter
– and I did. Anyway, I was very relieved to hear Hugh say that the picture wouldn’t be worth a huge amount, because Lennox was simply a good figurative artist, painting portraits to commission. And I was about to put the girls to bed when he added that his uncle had known Lennox well; he remembered him saying that Lennox had had a sad life.

‘Really?’

‘Hugh said that he could find out more about him, if I was interested – which I was. So he showed his uncle the painting on a visit to him in Hampshire not long afterwards. When Hugh brought the painting back a month later, he confirmed that it
was
by Guy Lennox, whose life story he now knew. He told us that he was born in 1900, had fought in the First World War, but had been badly gassed at Passchendaele and was sent back. While recuperating, he’d taught himself to paint, and after the war he went to the Camberwell School of Art – which is where he met Hugh’s uncle. He then decided to specialise in portraits and so in 1922 he went to study portraiture at the Heatherly School of Fine Art in Chelsea. I’m sure you know it.’

‘Yes – very well; I used to teach at Heatherly’s.’

‘While he was there, Guy fell desperately in love with one of the models – a beautiful girl named Edith Roche. His parents tried to discourage the relationship but in 1924 Guy and Edith were married at the Chelsea Town Hall. In 1927 they had a baby girl, followed fifteen months later by another. By this time Guy was becoming successful, fashionable even. He was much in demand, painting anyone who was “anyone” – literary and political figures, and members of the aristocracy. He became
a Royal Academician, and was able to buy a house in Glebe Place with its own studio. His life seemed gilded – until the day he was commissioned to paint a man called Peter Loden…’ Iris fell silent.

‘So… who was Peter Loden?’ I asked after a few moments.

Iris blinked, as if surfacing from some dream. ‘He was an oil trader,’ she replied. ‘He was very rich – he’d laid the first pipeline to Romania. He had a huge house just off Park Lane; it was like something out of the
Forsyte Saga
,’ she added absently.

‘How old was he?’

‘Thirty-eight – still a bachelor – and quite a ladies’ man. In May 1929 he won a Conservative seat in the general election and, to celebrate, he asked Guy Lennox to paint his portrait. He liked the painting so much that he decided to hold an official unveiling for it. So in the September of that year he held a lavish party, to which he invited
le tout monde
. He also invited Lennox – and his wife: and when Peter Loden met Edith…’