Transit(28)

I asked her what she took photographs of.

Food, she said.

The phone rang in the next-door room and I told her to excuse me while I went to answer it. It was my older son and I asked him where he was. Dad’s, he said, sounding surprised. What’s happening there? he said. I said I was in the middle of teaching a student. Oh, he said. There was a silence. I could hear a rustling sound and the sound of him breathing into the receiver. When are we coming back? he said. I said I wasn’t sure: the builder thought it might be possible in a couple of weeks. There’s nobody here, he said. It feels weird. I’m sorry, I said. Why can’t we just be normal? he said. Why does everything have to be so weird? I said I didn’t know why. I was doing my best, I said. That’s what adults always say, he said. I asked him how his day at school had been. Okay, he said. I heard Jane clear her throat in the next-door room. I said I was sorry but I had to go. Okay, he said.

When I went back to the sitting room I was struck by the sight of Jane’s jewel-coloured clothing amid the white landscape of dust sheets. She had remained very still, her knees together and her head erect, her pale fingers evenly splayed around the teacup. I found myself wondering who exactly she was: there was a sense of drama about her that seemed to invite only two responses – either to become absorbed or to walk away. Yet the prospect of absorption seemed somehow arduous: I recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others. I asked her how old she was.

Thirty-nine, she said, with a defiant little lifting of her head on her long neck.

I asked her what it was about this painter – Marsden Hartley – that so interested her.

She looked me in the eyes. Hers were surprisingly small: they were lashless and unfeminine – the only unfeminine thing about her appearance – and the colour of silt.

He’s me, she said.

I asked her what she meant.

I’m him, she said, then added, slightly impatiently: we’re the same. I know it sounds a bit strange, she went on, but there’s actually no reason why people can’t be repeated.

I said that if she was talking about identification, she was right – it was common enough to see oneself in others, particularly if those others existed at one remove from us, as for instance characters in a book do.

She gave a single, frustrated shake of her head.

That’s not what I mean, she said.

When she had said earlier that she wasn’t interested in his paintings what she was trying to say was that she wasn’t interested in them objectively, as art. They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see. It was seeing them that had enabled her to recognise that those thoughts were her own. In the gallery, the curators of the exhibition had mounted various critical commentaries and biographical notes on the walls. She had begun to read them as she passed from one room to the next, and initially had been disappointed to realise that her life and Marsden Hartley’s in fact had nothing in common at all. His mother had died when he was small; hers was still alive and well in Tunbridge Wells. His father, when he was eight or nine, had remarried and simply abandoned the boy, moving with his new wife to a different part of the country and leaving him to be brought up by relatives. When he grew up, it was to become a gay man who only ever succeeded in consummating his sexuality a handful of times in his life; Jane, female as well as thoroughly heterosexual, had slept with more men than she would care to count, even if she could have remembered them all. For most of his adult life he lived in virtual poverty, spending long periods in France and Germany and only returning to America when he had run out of money; she was a middle-class Englishwoman with a small but steady income who, though she liked travel, would never consider living abroad. Most of all he had associated with many of the luminaries of his time – famous painters and writers and musicians – and this was something Jane found it almost painful to consider, for one of her greatest complaints, if she were honest, about her own life was the lack of interesting people in it. Her longing to belong to the kind of world Marsden Hartley had frequented was such that she felt held in a perpetual, frustrated state of readiness, of alertness, as though she feared she might blink and find that she had missed that world passing right by her. Unhappy as Marsden Hartley’s existence had been, it had, unlike hers, contained those kinds of consolations and opportunities.

Also, Jane said, he’s dead.

We sat in silence for a while. Jane held her teacup as though it had nothing to do with her, while the liquid cooled inside. She had returned to the paintings, she went on, to their strange, slightly lurid colours and mounded shapes, to their interiority and yet the simple childlike honesty of their forms, while she tried to process this sense of combined familiarity and dissonance. Many of the paintings were of the sea, which deepened her confusion even more: she had never lived near the sea nor been particularly compelled by the maritime landscape. Then, finally, she came across a small oil painting that showed a boat in a storm. It was painted in a naive style – the boat was like a child’s toy boat and the waves were the curlicue kind of waves a child would paint, and the storm was an enormous white blobby shape overhead. She read the commentary beside the painting, which told the story of Marsden Hartley’s yearly visits to Nova Scotia, where he lived for the summer weeks with a local fishing family in their cottage, and where – in this family’s company – he had found the only real happiness and sense of belonging he had ever known. The sons of the family, as well as numerous male cousins, accepted and befriended him, he a wan, neurasthenic, troubled artist and they strapping good-looking rural men of liberal passions: in that wild remote spot, their home was as warm and physical as an animal’s den, the very opposite of Gertrude Stein’s sofa in Paris – where Marsden Hartley had on occasion found himself sitting – and there was some suggestion that this warm animal playfulness had even extended itself into Marsden Hartley’s sexual loneliness (they were as likely, he once recalled, to have joyfully had intercourse with a woman, or a horse) and alleviated it. During one of those summer visits, while Marsden Hartley remained painting for the day at the cottage, the brothers sailed to Halifax, along with one of their cousins, to offload their catch and all three were drowned in a ferocious storm.