All the Perverse Angels Page 2

  “On the Butterflies and Moths of the Balkan Regions by Edward F. Cousins. London. Nineteen hundred and three,” I read aloud.

  “Fascinating. Are you familiar with his work?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She grinned. “Well, I usually prefer my Lepidoptera from more northern territories, but… What can you tell me about the author?”

  “Edward F. Cousins,” I began, “was a distant relative of the Earl of Garthorp-Mundum and came to the title in later life, through the unfortunate deaths of many family members in Africa, in a terrible giraffe-based incident at a wedding.”

  Emily laughed.

  “Oh,” she said, “I knew about that, of course. It was the money from the inheritance which allowed him to pursue his hobbies.”

  “Which were?”

  “Well, apart from being a voracious collector of even the most dangerous butterflies…”

  “Yes?”

  “Apart from that…” She paused. I think she must have realized that she was happy. “Apart from that, he used to record animal noises on wax cylinders and play them at parties. Oh, and he juggled goldfish on Sundays.”

  “He sounds like a dreadful man.”

  “Yes, I think I agree. Put down the book, Anna. We shan’t have any part of his ill-gained legacy.”

  I put the book back in its pile and gave a little nod to the lady seated behind the table. She did not look up from her hardback, and seemed lost in historical romantic fiction, but, as we moved away, she said, almost inaudibly, “Goldfish? It was puppies.”

  We giggled our way around the rest of the hall. The offerings were the usual: cricketing stories, railway ephemera, collections of ghostly tales, a leather-and-gilt Burckhardt on the Renaissance, an India-paper Gombrich on art. As we left, Emily held my hand, cautiously at first, as though it might be too timid to be touched, but then with a practised familiarity. We stopped by the car and kissed. Emily had left the circle, joined me alone on the floor, across the lane, by the railings.

  “Shall we talk about it?” I asked.

  “Which it? It him? It me? It us?”

  I shrugged. “Any. All. I know we tried before I… before, but maybe now?”

  “You need to rest. It’s getting late. I’ll make dinner.”

  We drove home listening to the radio. A cold spell, said the weatherman. I thought of snowmen in the garden, years ago, before Tabitha and the railings, long before Emily. I had blonde hair that made my eyes shine pale blue. I would play and grow tired. At night my parents turned off the bedside lamp once I was sleeping. Sometimes I’d wake up in the dark, and call, and my mother would come and tell me to be brave. Or Dad would come and switch on the light and tell me I was already brave enough. I was always good enough when he was around, but he was not around, and Emily said that I needed to rest my blue eyes, so we were not talking in the car.

  I fell asleep with the light on, again, that night. It was still on when I awoke the next day.

  The note on the table said, “Gone to church. Food in cupboards and fridge. E.” Whilst she ate of the body which was given for her I satisfied myself with cornflakes and milk. I took her to see The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise once, at the Musée d’Orsay. Vincent van Gogh arrived in the village, Auvers, just outside Paris, in late May, 1890. He had two more months. In those two months he painted a new canvas each day. Maybe he thought painting would chase away the inevitability of his death. Or he always knew how long he had, and counted down the blank canvases remaining to be filled.

  It was sunny outside. The lagoon had gone and I headed to the little village polder, down the lane, towards the church. Singing, faint and subdued, came from within, drifting over the graveyard, a hairbreadth above the headstones. I stopped. The tune had an ordinariness which robbed it of identity, reduced it to a primal, religious incantation.

  The lychgate was old, its dark wood textured by years of brushed-on preservative, its foundations dressed with lichen. It was wide enough to contain a bench, pressed up against one side of the woodwork and seemingly held in place by cobwebs and trapped leaves. I sat, listening. The hymn rose, fell, faded in and out.

  Van Gogh’s church is all curves in a miraculous balance. His church buckles and looms, but never seems precarious. In places it resolves into the straight lines of buttress and tower window, providing subtle anchors for the building. My church was everywhere perpendicular, or, at least, that’s how I saw it. The fault might have been with my eyes, or Vincent’s.

  The hymn came to an end. I stood and walked on, to the heart of the village. All was golden, weathered sandstone. Later it would be busy, with tourists turning off the main road, chuntering down the sloping street, filling the parking spaces, peering from behind guidebooks, eating ice cream, scolding children. But in the glow of the morning light it was mine. It was an unwanted present, something thoughtful and considered, for which I ought to have been grateful, to have expressed my gratitude, but for which I held no real love.

  At the bottom of the hill the road levelled before a humpbacked bridge carried it over a narrow stream. I wandered down and paused, looking into the waters below. The stream, which could be no more than a rill in summer, was swollen with recent rains, flowing swiftly, keeping the village safe. A winter leaf, brown and dejected, came down the stream towards me and on, under the bridge wall. I used to play Pooh-sticks as a child. The race was fun: the drop, the cross, the wait for the reappearance of the swimmers, the my-stick your-stick tension. But it was the eddies which really built the excitement: the Starry Night swirls that had the potential to catch and submerge. Sometimes you could see them, waiting, but sometimes they lurked beneath the bridge, like trolls, plotting to grasp anything which passed. I stepped across and waited for the leaf to show itself. Blue-green. Venice, receiving cargoes of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Blue-green. Venice, bringing ultramarine to Europe. Brown.

  The worshippers were leaving as I walked back up the lane. By the door of the church a cassock and alb hid a small vicar, who shook hands with his parishioners as they departed. Emily was already at the lychgate.

  “It was a nice service,” she said. “You should try it sometime.”

  “I think I’m cursed to die outside the faith and unshriven.”

  “Well, anytime you want. What have you been doing?”

  I told her as we walked the short distance back to the cottage. We sat in the front room with cups of tea, watching the religious stragglers go by at the end of the garden.

  “That’s Mabel Tamerlane,” I said, pointing at an old woman in a faded blue coat. “She left the village when she was young to seek adventure.”

  Emily took a sip of tea. “Did she find it?”

  “Oh, yes. Her life is full of tales of derring-do, illicit liaisons, and intrigue. There was a certain summer in Samarkand which would shock you. But she came back here, in the end, about twenty years ago, and now lives with memories and wonders if she should ever have left in the first place.”

  “And how do you know all this?”

  “There are two names carved in the gate of the church. Mabel and Arthur. I’m inquisitive, as you know, and happened to run into the village historian whilst playing my solo game of Pooh-sticks. So, I asked him about Mabel. He’s a strange fellow.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Everyone does. Some say he lost that leg in a bar fight, but the truth is that it got caught in the rigging of a whaling bark, in the treacherous waters around Nantucket. These days he drinks, to forget.”

  “You win,” I said, and raised my cup in a toast to the victor.

  Emily met my cup with hers in a porcelain clink.

  We talked about plans for the day until we came to the conclusion that it was a day with no need for plans. She would potter around the cottage, maybe go for a walk, prepare some papers for the following day. I thought I might go to the bookshop, the one with the cheap books. First, though, I needed to rest. I slunk upstairs and lay on my
bed, staring at the ceiling.

  Van Gogh wrote about The Bedroom at Arles, about his painting, or the room itself, in the Yellow House. Perhaps they were the same thing, with the angles, and the walls falling in from above, and the two closed doors. His letter to his brother, Theo, described all the colours, the ones he applied with no shade or shadow: butter-yellows, lemon light-greens, scarlets, lilacs. Time has worked on the pigments. The lilacs have faded to blues, the floor has darkened. There is a patch of his ceiling, in a far corner, the same colour as the walls. My ceiling had cracks in the whitewash, running along the paths taken by the timbers above, or bisecting the space between them. Either way, the inflexible plaster had lost the battle. Still, it had done better than the Yellow House, damaged by bombs during the Second World War, demolished without reprieve.

  I wanted to open more doors, to go into the hallway outside my room and see what lay beyond. Vincent had a guest room through one of his doors, ready for his friend, Paul Gauguin. The other led to stairs. In the cottage I had my own choices, and I wanted to turn left to the thin, plank door and open it and go up so that my stairs led only down. There were mysteries up there above me, mysteries that bent beams and cracked plaster, and walls which fell in, and I wanted to see them myself, to see them faded and darkened.

  Sunday was Vincent, and pills, and sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday, 14th October, 1887

  Today I have missed Father greatly. What a curious admission: I had always thought that the first days of college would fill me with nothing but excitement, and that any homesickness from which I might suffer would linger in the shadows until the solitude of night. It is undeniable that the house is dispiritingly plain and indistinguishable from the other buildings in the vicinity—red brick and sandstone quoins are seemingly prescribed by good taste in North Oxford—but it is also too small for one to feel truly alone. Perhaps I miss Father because I know he would have enjoyed tonight’s reception: he would have made the perfect chaperon.

  At the start of the evening we girls crowded together in one corner of the room, finding safety in numbers. Yet, whilst we giggled like schoolgirls—a less than charitable observer would be correct in claiming that we are little more than such—Lady Diana Fitzpatrick entered the room, escorted by a certain reverend professor of divinity, whom I understand to be a friend of the family. Unwilling to have our juvenile natures exposed by this contrast, the rest of us began to circulate in a more appropriate fashion, much to the evident approval of Miss Callow and the other ladies for whom the running of the college has become such a calling.

  How shall I describe Lady Diana? She is, in general, unassuming, which description runs somewhat contrary to her arrival this evening. On our first meeting, yesterday, at a small gathering of the students, both old and new—and even then numbering only sixteen in total—she introduced herself as “Miss Fitzpatrick, but my friends call me Diana.” I am only aware of her title because one of the other girls, whose name I now forget, delighted in sharing it with all who remained within earshot after Lady Diana’s departure, as if her society knowledge were likely to increase her own social standing.

  Lady Diana is undoubtedly beautiful. Her hair is blonde, but not of that garish hue which might suggest its achievement through the application of some form of oxide or acid; rather, it is the colour of pale honey, and the perfect match for her blue eyes. She appears young, but possesses that quality which I have seen in others of an aristocratic pedigree, that her youth does not disguise a mature beauty, but complements it perfectly. In truth, I find myself somehow lessened in her presence, as though the standards of those around me are adjusted to accommodate her comeliness and deportment, depreciating the value of any charms which I myself might presume to possess. I should have imagined that this would engender feelings of resentment or jealousy, yet I find myself approving of her, as though it is only appropriate that she exist just as she does. Although our social circles have little in common—conceivably only our attendance at college—I have hopes that I shall enjoy her company over the coming months.

  Tonight’s reception was described by Miss Callow as a chance to show her new girls to Oxford, to which she added—with a touch of venom I thought—“Or at least to those who are progressive enough to accept our presence.” She was accompanied by her assistant, Mrs. Taylor, who, in the circumstances of such a small and new college, seems to be a general factotum in matters administrative. I find Mrs. Taylor to be a somewhat fussy woman: is that the price one pays in order to be valued in an academic environment, when one is not oneself defined by academic achievement or position? Certainly, she has shown nothing but a good-natured desire to be truly helpful to the girls since the day of our arrival, and one cannot find fault with that.

  I, like so many of the girls, spent the start of the evening in our corner. This was as much the fault of those who failed to introduce themselves, and those who ought to have effected introductions, as it was the fault of our playing the ingénue role. Lady Diana’s arrival created an atmosphere of more relaxed, though always formal, geniality, and introductions began in earnest. The men fell into two categories: those who were fellows of some college or other and thus untrammelled by duties of affection—though more through righteousness than statute, it seems—and those who were in the company of their wives. In the whole evening I met only one man who broke that rule, or so I thought. He was introduced to me by Miss Callow herself and, had I been less occupied with portraying the epitome of etiquette, and less distracted by the laughter of Lady Diana sounding from the far side of the room, I should have supposed immediately that this Matthew Taylor was the husband of our own Mrs. Taylor. I was, however, both occupied and distracted, and found myself, at least for an exciting and enticing first few minutes, talking to what I presumed to be the only “single” man at the affair.

  Mr. Taylor is tall, four or five inches taller than am I, and I myself am often described as “willowy” by Mother. He was dressed smartly and entirely in keeping with the occasion, and yet somehow the cut of his cloth, or the looseness of his tie—which exposed just the slightest twinkle of collar stud—gave him what I can only describe as a poetic air. I should not want to give the impression that he is a louche individual: he had none of the extravagance which one is likely to associate with the Romantics. Yet there is, indeed, something romantic about the man. His eyelids droop—no, “droop” is too strong a word, and suggests a slow-wittedness in his character which is most certainly not the case—his eyelids hover above grey-green eyes, as though he is only recently awakened and taking in the start of the day, anew. I found myself quite disarmed and momentarily lost all concern for correctness. Indeed, so pleased was I to be conversing with one who confessed himself to be “an artist of little importance” that I poured forth a torrent of opinions on literature, leaving few pauses in which the poor man might say anything more. I spoke of Warber! It was perhaps a godsend that our Mrs. Taylor approached when she did. As she stepped closer with a low “Mr. Taylor?” it dawned upon me that this must be the man’s wife, and the light-hearted “Aha! Hello!” with which he greeted her was all that was necessary to confirm my unremarkable, and much delayed, deduction.

  There can be few people who have not experienced that intense burning sensation which accompanies a redness of the cheeks sufficient to guide the ancient ships at Alexandria. Now, as I grew suddenly voiceless before Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, I felt just such a fire. Mrs. Taylor, doubtless curious at the silence which befell our small group, bore a quizzical expression and I began to think, desperately, what one ought to say in such a conversational lull. I was saved by Mr. Taylor—thank heavens!—who turned to his wife and explained that we had been talking about my literary interests. My relief was short-lived: I became certain that Mr. Taylor intended to share with Mrs. Taylor all the details of those interests, a certainty exacerbated by the impropriety of those subjects on which I had expounded mere moments ago. Mrs. Taylor would hear of Warber, and of
his book, and the thought of that was so unbearable that I even considered the pretence of a swoon to create a distraction. Ah! but I should have placed more faith in her husband, for he delivered a précis which gave me an air of erudition with no sense of impropriety whatsoever: I was the daughter of a publisher and, as such, in possession of a natural curiosity for the history of our country’s literature. Mrs. Taylor had, then, nothing but a kind smile for me, and yet she did not follow with any kind words but asked my forgiveness as she needed to take her husband away from my company. Mr. Taylor thanked me for a most pleasant discussion, and turned to his wife without another word. I watched as she took his arm and walked with him—or led him, I believe—over to Miss Callow where clearly, since they left a few minutes later, they must have made their farewells.

  “You will see them again through the window to your left,” said a voice beside me, and I gave a little start. Lady Diana spoke with a cadence shaped from the same honey as her hair. I looked at her, feigning a lack of understanding of her comment. She cocked her head to one side, as if she were daring me to deny my interest in the Taylors, but placed her hand on my shoulder before I could utter a word in my own defence. She introduced herself, and I thought that she had forgotten my being at the college’s small introductory soirée only yesterday. I was about to say something to that effect when we were joined by her chaperon, the reverend professor, who expressed slight distress that his evening’s charge was causing him to follow her around the room.

  “We must find time to talk soon,” she said to me, with a tilt of the head, and then she moved off. I watched as she made her way over to a gentleman who stood by the very window she had indicated. The reverend professor, as ever, found himself governed by her decisions as to the path of her circulation, but she waited a respectable distance from this new gentleman, and it became evident that she knew the reverend would never allow himself to fail in his duties. So it was that he hurried past her and effected the necessary introduction, helpless to do otherwise. It was then that I came to understand that Lady Diana was perfectly aware of the formalities and that, in introducing herself to me directly, without the intercession of her chaperon, she had announced a perfect recollection of our previous meeting.