It was well known that G’s early years in the city had been wild. As time went by her circumstances had become more conventional, which everyone except her seemed to regard as a natural progression. Great success had come to her, and with it a husband and child, and money that needed to be converted into material things. Her wild years were safely behind her: it was apparently only she who had thought that things could go on as they were. But instead the wildness had become historic, and was now a certified source of allusion in her work, as foreign landscapes and exotic paraphernalia were in the works of the masters.
She lived with the husband and child and the child’s nanny in a large house in a fashionable neighbourhood, and they also owned a place in the countryside not far from country places owned by people they knew. An architect had designed the country place for them, and it sometimes felt as though they were inhabiting his notion of how they should spend their time. There was a kitchen the size of a ballroom with a battalion of gleaming implements, and there was of course no ballroom, only an enormous white room with white sofas, like a polar landscape in which to entertain their friends.
There was a studio he had designed for her adjacent to the house, facing not the valley that plunged down in great leaping mist-wreathed swathes of green, but the manicured garden, where it was expected that their child would play. He had installed tall windows all along this side of the studio, so that she would be able to see what the child was doing at every moment.
There were framed photographs on the walls of both houses, amidst pieces from their art collection and works by G herself. The photographer was G’s husband. He had the images printed on thick white paper and framed at an exclusive place in the city. He described himself, in company, as an amateur. Most of the photographs were of their daughter. Everyone commented on what a beautiful child she was and the photographs confirmed this, while at the same time releasing her beauty out into the world like something too defenceless to survive there.
The child never smiled in these photographs: nobody had told her to. She simply looked at the lens, her cherub’s lips slightly parted, her round long-lashed eyes unwavering. Her composure was striking: it was easy to forget that what she was seeing was her father looking at her.
Other people had photographs of their children blowing out birthday candles or playing football, but G’s husband never photographed their daughter doing such things. It might have been that he wasn’t interested in her on these occasions. The photographs required an act of participation that was also a form of submission: her distraction was not permitted. Over time G noticed something changing in the photographs of her daughter, because as the child came to realise she was being observed her submission became more visible.
G’s studio in the city was situated in a dirty and dangerous neighbourhood, and she had so far fought off every pressure to move to more impressive premises. She herself did not fully know why this was. She was often frightened and uncomfortable in her studio. Far less successful artists had giant spaces in central locations where they received journalists and collectors. G thought that perhaps it was to demonstrate her disdain for these artists that she travelled across the city every day to her run-down quarters, and enjoyed the inconvenience suffered by those forced to seek her out.
The studio in the city was the theatre of her wild years, when she used to sleep there on a mattress on the ground, surrounded by her easels and her materials. She was 22 years old and had run away from her parents and her own country. At some point her passport had disappeared into the studio’s extraordinary disorder, never to be found again. She would call her parents from a vile-smelling callbox on the corner. She had told them she was studying in the city, but she was not a good liar. She kept forgetting the lie, and they would grow angered and disturbed by her incoherence. She would always remember how their disapproval made its way across hundreds of miles of land and sea and came into her 22-year-old ear down the filthy cord of that phone on the corner of her street.
The way her parents had combined authority with neglect had made it impossible for her to free herself from them. Since childhood her attempts to appease their authority had contorted her whole being, but she had transformed their neglect into something she herself was barely able to grasp, a violent power that remained unknowable even as it surged out of her, waking her up early in the morning and directing her mechanically to her easel.
Her parents were disturbed by her painting and threatened by its candour and so she became more candid still, as though the problem arose from the fact that she had not yet given a sufficiently thorough explanation of herself. Over time a line, or was it a wall, had begun to divide her work from herself. But back in the wild years that line did not yet exist. She was one riotous disorderly kingdom, bankrupt, continually menaced, but not yet invaded.
She had worked in a bar and barely managed to feed and wash herself. No one had ever taught her how to treat herself with care. The other people who lived like that were all boys. She never met a girl who didn’t wash her hair and put on clean clothes and remove her make-up before getting into bed. Some of the boys she slept with found her disgusting, as her parents had. She found that when she had sex she could be free for a while from her hatred of her body, but she had to overcome her fear of disgust first.
She painted frenziedly but with no clear goal, until one day a boy who was hanging around her studio mentioned that his parents owned an art gallery. She didn’t really know what an art gallery was, though afterward no one ever believed this to be true. The galleries she knew about were public museums, where she spent her time studying certain paintings and then trying to surmount their influence in her studio. It had never occurred to her that what she was doing bore any concrete relationship to these paintings. Yet some weeks later she went to the boy’s parents’ gallery with a portfolio of her work. Her memory of this period was both keen and opaque, dazzlingly strange, the magnificent intrusion into her private world like footprints in virgin snow. Later she saw it as simply another example of the way her painting functioned autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there. It had never failed to sustain itself.
She stayed with the boy’s parents’ gallery for three years, and began to make enough money to give up the job in the bar. She went to openings at other galleries and met other artists. Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness. It entailed judgement, not of her person but of her actions. She felt gaudy and exposed, and when she looked back on this time now she was swept by a terrible grief, for it was in that provisional, perilous and occasionally thrilling period while she thrashed the work out of her body that she understood she had been unloved.
At an opening she met the owner of a small new gallery, who asked to visit her studio the next day. He was a funny little man, ugly and sweet-natured, and something mongrel about him legitimised her own ugliness, so that in his presence she felt seen as though in a strong and neutral north light. In the years that followed they made fame for one another, for he had the gift of turning her persona inside out so that suddenly she made sense.
These days her gallerist was a slim, cold, effective character with a handsome chiselled face and impeccably ironed clothes. When she had discovered his age — he was 10 years younger than her — she had felt a quiet dismay. She had grown used to her own precocity, which had always guaranteed that she was younger than everyone else around her. He had small children, and they talked about parenthood, sitting in her studio in the country house where her daughter and her daughter’s nanny could often be seen through the windows. His stories about his children were thoughtful and amusing — he was a very clever man, after all — but she noticed that they always ended well, with no ragged edge of doubt or failure around them. His spotless clothes and his unhurried manner suggested another plane on which parenthood was a reasonable, well-planned and enjoyable event.
In the garden her daughter and the nanny always looked as though they were waiting for something, like an audience waiting for the play to start. In a way it was a triumph of civilisation, that she and the gallerist could sit in the calm, coherent light of her studio and discuss their children, without either of them having to do anything about them. The conversation moved easily on to her work and to whatever new and prestigious opportunity he had secured for her. A bolt of terror would sometimes fly through her heart then, as he delicately steered her back to the business at hand, and she felt the desire to rush out of the studio door into the garden and pick up her daughter and run with her, run out of the gates as fast as she could and away up the road.
In need of escape, we sometimes went to Mann’s farm, where a cottage was rented out in the grounds of the property. The cottage was at the top of a steep valley that plunged down to the sea. The valley was covered with green scrub and thorn bushes and olive trees, and far at the bottom a plain of reed beds undulated beside a glittering inlet. The few paths were meandering and indirect and rarely led to what could be seen most obviously ahead. They travelled off aimlessly or secretively elsewhere. Behind the hillside rose the mountain, with its jagged white head flung madly into the sky. Its white-and-silver surfaces stood bare and unassailable, the colossal shape not sloping but cuboid, composed of innumerable facets that flashed from its sides in the sun. There was something diabolical and machine-like in these glinting rectilinear faces.
At the entrance to Mann’s property were a pair of large wrought-iron gates, dilapidated now, that had been fabricated in a pattern of arcane geometric shapes and symbols framing the letters of his name. A rough track led to the house, through dusty fields strewn with rusting machinery and piles of wood and evidence of projects started then abandoned.
The farmhouse was a stone structure with no obvious entrance, for it was clad in an incomprehensible patchwork of wooden lean-tos and additions, all splintered and faded by the sun. The first time we went there, not knowing how to announce ourselves, we stood and waited outside in the farmyard, where a slim black dog came to greet us. Presently the dog trotted inside, through a small door that stood ajar at the side of the building. Shortly afterward Mann’s wife came out, and we were to learn that the dog would always go to find her if she was needed. She showed us to the cottage, which was some way from the farmhouse across the dusty fields, facing out over the valley.
The cottage was functional and plain, and its furnishings old and outdated, but it was orderly and homelike, and this evidence of good house-keeping seemed to stand in opposition to the spirit of chaos that presided elsewhere on the farm. Mann’s wife was small and sturdy, with a braid of chestnut hair and small eyes whose fierce blue pupils looked out keenly and in some puzzlement from her bronzed face, as though she had been misled and was now determined to see the truth of what was in front of her.
There was a man called Johann living in one of the caravans in the clearing, and sometimes we stopped to talk to him. He was a schoolteacher from Germany, a friend of Mann’s wife, and he told us that every year he came to the farm for a few months to help her with the livestock and with producing the oil and wine. He said that at one time the farm had been a mythical place, where people could come and join Mann’s community and receive the basic necessities for living in return for labour. Mann had stumbled by chance on the valley, which had remained more or less untouched by the modern era, and had bought the land and the farm for next to nothing. His idea had been to create a society that was entirely self-sufficient. He had decided to try to stop time here, because it was the most beautiful place he had ever seen.
It was like a beautiful innocent girl, Johann said drily, who he wanted to stay a virgin forever.
He told us that Mann had fought for years to keep development out of the valley, and had become so deeply enmeshed in local politics that over time the farm had fallen into decay. He’s spent so much time with corrupt officials, Johann said with some disgust, that he’s turned the same colour as them. The difference is that Mann doesn’t understand money, he said, but he needs it just like everyone else does. He’s tied himself up in so many complicated deals that they can never be unravelled. This farm has a bad case of woodworm, he said significantly. It’s been hollowed out just as men always hollow things out. The only money it makes is what she can get from the cottage.
At the farmhouse the small side door stood ajar, and when we knocked and received no response we simply pushed it open and went in. We entered a large, high-ceilinged room in a state of astonishing disorder, where books and papers were stacked into precarious towers on every surface and rusted or broken equipment lay everywhere, along with tattered clothes, old shoes, empty bottles and armchairs disgorging their stuffing. On a large desk in the middle stood what appeared to be a giant radio, in a tangle of wires and antennae. The sound of women’s voices could be heard somewhere nearby and we followed it, passing along a low passageway that led into a large, old-fashioned kitchen.
Mann’s wife stood by the window, with a young girl and a tiny old woman dressed in black with a black scarf on her head. The three of them looked up when we entered and immediately fell silent. Mann’s wife introduced the young girl as her daughter, while the old woman went and busied herself at the sink, where a basket of vegetables stood. The kitchen was as clean and orderly as the other room had been dusty and chaotic. Our provisions were packed into a basket and Mann’s wife accompanied us back through the house to the door.
This is my husband’s room, she said when we came to the high-ceilinged space with its bedlam of disorder and filth. I’m not allowed to interfere with anything here, she said, her eyes assuming their puzzled expression. He made that himself, she added, pointing to the radio. He talks on it to people all over the world. He speaks five languages, she said, and he likes to keep them up. It’s obviously very impressive, she said, but I admit that sometimes I ask myself what use five languages are on a farm.
She told us about a route to get to the sea by foot, and the next day we walked down there. The path descended steeply across a barren hillside that bulged out over the water like a giant’s forehead, and a feeling arose that we were to have often in that place, that we were being watched. It was not a human or animal scrutiny that we felt upon us. Rather, it was the land itself that seemed to possess some ambiguous spirit of observation. Rearing overhead was the mountain, at once crystalline and obscure in the last light, and it did feel as though this ghostly gathering of information was directed there, to the increase of its mute and basking form. In the blind monomaniacal eyes of that mountain, to be human was a pitiable, if not an incomprehensible fate.
Shame had always stood behind G, colossal and constrained, like water behind a dam. In the early days her studio in the city was a place of shamelessness where she could forget this silent presence behind her, but one day — whether out of curiosity or impatience — she decided to acknowledge it. She began a series of paintings in which her sense of shame was permitted to guide the evolution of the image. G thought of these vaguely as autobiographical paintings. There was a running impulse somewhere in her work, as though she were constantly fleeing or pursuing or proving something, as though she was always climbing mountains, and it was this feeling of exertion, or compulsion, that she suddenly wanted no more of. The word she found for it was shame. This word made her stop and look around herself.
G decided that shame emanated from the body and was not the same as regret or embarrassment. She wanted to speak, to tell. This telling seemed to relate to childhood and so she made some childhood paintings. They were rather horrible, pornographic and gleeful, but she felt something moving volcanically underneath them, as though the whole surface were about to crack open and erupt.
She painted a portrait of a woman, using photographs. The photographs were from a magazine she had found that dated from the era of her childhood. They showed the woman in numerous poses on a leopard-skin rug. They were outdated and lush, glamour shots, mildly pornographic. She remembered seeing such things at the time and the particular kind of alarm they had caused her. Her girlhood, which she still held like an unopened letter, had recoiled from them as though from news of a conspiracy, not just among these docile, compliant women but between them and the image-maker. Why had no one intervened in this horror taking place between the photographer and the woman on the leopard-skin rug? G hated photographers, those cowardly voyeurs. And she hated this woman in the photograph, whom she feared and blamed in equal measure.
She painted several portraits of this woman, and came to feel that she had murdered and replaced the photographer, and perhaps even atoned for him. Eventually she stopped being angry with the woman too, and decided to love her. She lavished attention on her, which made her feel better, and when she realised that the woman in the photographs would actually be quite old by now she began carefully to break her down and return her to colour and light and non-being.
G kept to this diffuse mode of perception, using it to describe the history of her sexual encounters and finding that she was free of shame, that her sexual memory could become a pagan kind of pastoral, an orgiastic panorama full of heavenly colours. Her technical competence, rather than exhausting itself with feats of representation or satire, put itself at the service of internal self-description, and the accuracy she was able to achieve through the discipline of candour was remarkable.
The ugly, sweet-natured gallerist watched these developments with serene satisfaction, and she never told him that she had expected him to drop her when he saw the new work, because the idea of it making sense to anyone other than herself had been unimaginable. One day he said that he thought it was time G had a show, and he began to spread word of her recent activities in the shambling, diffident way he had that focused, ambitious people found so irresistible.
It was at this time that G met her husband. Someone — a critic — had asked G at a party whether she was in a strong relationship and said that he hoped that she was, because the degree of attention she was about to receive might be somewhat destabilising for a young woman. G remembered thinking that what she in fact wanted was to be destabilised, but this warning must have alerted her in some deeper way, because by her second or third encounter with her husband she was ready to come out, like the cornered suspect in a film, with her hands up.
He was a lawyer, a friend of somebody who had brought him along to the opening of her show, and he had wandered around for a long time not talking to anyone and looking at the paintings. His self-containment and solitude had caught her eye, but it was his disapproval that seduced her. She recognised in his disapproval the mark of authority. While claiming to know nothing about art, which at a stroke seemed both to diminish her achievements and to increase his air of importance, he gave G to understand that there was something morally repellent in her work that she was perhaps unaware of. The show was an extraordinary critical success, but for him this was merely proof that people were mindlessly feasting on her self-exposure. G had got out of the habit of recognising authority and so she gave it a joyous welcome. The sound of his disapproval was that of something long-lost but familiar.
Later it was he who wished to put the wild years into a historical context, especially once he had seen how profitable they were, but at the beginning his disgust encompassed not only her work but her self, or rather treated them as the same thing. Like a dog slinking back to a cruel master, she came at the call of his disgust, much as she had gone diligently to the callbox on the corner.
A time of great restructuring and reorganisation followed. G moved into this man’s apartment and adapted to his way of living, which was much more bourgeois than her own. It was the life, or so she thought, of an adult. When he was at work she would go from room to room in the sunlight, touching his things. She was jealous of his former girlfriend, who was more beautiful than G and who she feared he still loved. Each time they spent an evening with people she knew, he would produce afterward a detailed indictment of their characters and conduct, and she discovered that she no longer liked them as much as she once had. She became more solitary and less friendly, and lost her feeling of camaraderie with artists of her own age.
Slowly G found herself withdrawing from her gallerist: their relationship acquired a new distance and formality. Her husband was in the habit of making pointed observations about the gallerist’s treatment of her, and of highlighting the ways in which other artists were more respected and recognised than she. The days when he claimed to know nothing about art were far behind him. He had mastered her life as he would have a legal brief. For the first time G found herself misreading situations and even sometimes coming into conflict with people. She felt embattled and exposed.
Yet her paintings were making money and her reputation was in rapid ascent. She forgot that the reasons for this lay in the work she had done before she met her husband, and attributed her new-found security to him. Her work became sombre and more formally beautiful. She painted a number of big oils that showed a seamless, almost featureless surface, quietly undulating like the surface of the sea. G had never before considered having a child, but now she considered it.
She got through pregnancy awkwardly and with embarrassment. The people in her world also seemed embarrassed — what was this rude biological bulk she was imposing on them and on their sensibilities? Her loyalty wavered as a dreadful truth, the truth of her female caste, came slowly and inexorably into view, with its smouldering fires of injustice and servitude. She was toying, she saw, with inferiority, and she regarded the clean-cut bodies of men in terror, hating them while wanting to retain kinship with them.
The baby was a girl, a result G immediately viewed as a failure. She had wanted and expected her body to produce the prestige of masculinity. But this girl very quickly brought light to G, a light like the dawn of the world, fresh and clear and revelatory. Everything outside this light was sickening and corrupt, but within its circle was a secret. G and the baby shared this secret. The only problem was the baby’s body, which had to be continually cared for by G and taken with her everywhere. She often wished they could share a body, as they had when she was pregnant. But then again, by being born the girl had returned G to herself. It was this return, with its increase in the form of the girl, that was revelatory.
G wanted to run away with her, but the problem of the baby’s body and who it belonged to prevented her. She identified the baby with everything that was true about herself and with the secret they shared. Her power of sight was doubled, now that the baby’s perspective was added to it: she started to see good and evil in what had up until now been the pressing disorder of reality. She started to see her husband more clearly, without the illusion of love. One night they argued horribly, frighteningly, and she took the baby and went to sleep in another room. This was the first time she had fulfilled her urge to run away with the baby, and as she lay beside her in the darkness, lacerated, she felt bathed in a feeling of comfort and peace such as she had never known. A few minutes later the door opened and she saw her husband’s silhouette in the frame. He looked at the two of them lying there, and then he advanced briskly into the room, picked up the baby, and took her away, closing the door firmly behind him.
There was nothing for G to do but return to her studio and work. She hired a nanny to look after the baby. The nanny was her drudge, her alter ego, her shame. G worked strongly, filled with competence and rage. Often when she returned from work her husband was already there, with the nanny and their daughter.
The nanny adored the husband: it was apparently miraculous to see a man caring for his own child. The three of them were usually in the kitchen, which somehow had become the venue for the demonstration of their life, like a theatre where they enacted their roles. There was always a moment, as she came in, when they fell silent and their three faces would look up. More and more, as time passed, her daughter’s face seemed to look at her across some unbreachable distance, as at something she no longer knew but remembered.
The days passed slowly and indistinguishably at Mann’s farm, as though they were the same day examined from different angles, like the sparkling facets of a diamond. The sky was pink at dawn and the great mop-like shapes of the many-armed cacti lay slumbering in the garden in the new light. Slowly the sun awakened the empty valley, pushing back the curtain of shadow from its forested slopes and its reed beds and its vegetation like tangled hair. The ochre wound of the quarry glittered when the sun touched it, and the sound of birdsong and of the cattle rustling in the dry olive groves began to infiltrate the waiting silence.
Passing the farmhouse on our way to the cottage one afternoon, we saw a man standing in the yard. He was very tall and emaciated, with long wild white hair and a long and filthy white beard. He wore no shoes and his clothes were little more than dirty rags. He looked at us with a confused half-grin, as though uncertain of who and where he was. Just then Mann’s wife came out of the farmhouse, with the dog at her heels. She said something to the man, an expression of impatience on her face, and he turned away from her imperiously, lifting his head as though listening to a sound in the distance.
This is Mann, she said. This is my husband.
It was a day of brutal heat. The valley below lay stunned, pulsing in the throbbing air. The cows stood with drooping heads beneath the olive trees. Mann’s wife asked us whether it was too hot in the cottage, and offered to bring us an electric fan.
They shouldn’t come here if they need to be cool, Mann said unexpectedly, in a high, clear, cultivated voice that was entirely incongruous with his wild appearance.
Mann’s wife gave a derisive laugh. It’s too late, she said. They’re already here.
He raised his hand, as though to silence her. In that case, he said, they should do as the animals do and stay still in the shade.
Mann’s wife looked at him with open contempt. Not everyone wants to live like an animal, she said.
Mann turned his head slowly toward her, as though finally deciding to acknowledge her. There was something studied in this vagueness that suggested a formulated response to challenges to his authority.
Not everyone subscribes to bourgeois values as you do, he said.
Her face flushed a dark red and her eyes flashed. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a clean and comfortable home, she said. Especially if there are children.
Mann jerked back his head with impatience. Oh, children! he said sardonically. How many times have I heard them used as an excuse for abandoning principles?
The dog started to whine and Mann’s wife laid her hand on its head. Children have natural principles, she said hotly, and Mann parted his thin lips in a gasping laugh.
In that case, he said, they’re the only beings who do.
Later that afternoon Mann’s wife brought us the electric fan. The black dog leaped nimbly over the gate and trotted into the garden, and Mann’s wife followed slowly after it. She was damp with sweat, and she sat with us for a while in the shade to cool down before her walk back to the house.
This is an ugly heat, she said, and it comes more and more.
She apologised for her accent, which she knew she retained in spite of having lived here for longer than she’d lived in Germany. I don’t know why my accent sticks to me, she said. Like the dog sticks to me. She’s Mann’s dog, she said, but she doesn’t seem to know it.
My daughter has the same accent, she said, and she’s been to Germany only a few times in her life. She was very ill as a child, and my family couldn’t believe that I didn’t take her back there for treatment. For them a child’s illness is a sign that it’s time for you to stop running away and to go back to their reality. They think that a place like this isn’t actually real, that people aren’t born here, that they don’t feel things and believe in their lives like people in Germany do. It’s ironic, she said, because people here live much longer than they do there. People here live long lives, but their rapport with death has always seemed to me more intimate.
She began to talk about a tradition on the island — or perhaps, she said, it was just a myth — of a community figure who could be called upon to assist with death, rather as a midwife assists with birth. In fact it was often the same person who did both. The assistance, in the case of death, was somewhat shocking: if a person decided it was time for them to die, this midwife would undertake the job in the swiftest and most efficient way possible. A single hammer blow to the head while the person was sleeping was the customary method. According to the myth, she said, the sign for this midwife of death to take action was when a person discreetly left their door ajar at night. It’s hard not to think of the possibilities for error, she said, but I tend to think that this woman — and it is always a woman, apparently — is subtle enough to know when the message is for her.
G made friends with a woman painter her own age. She was not friends with many women. The painter said to her, me and you are the old guard, referring not just to their age but to their medium of paint, and G wanted to get away from her as fast as she could. The painter talked about her own body as though it had no secrets, and G realised that shame had stealthily taken her again in its grip.
G made a series of big erotic pictures in which she believed her own bitterness and constraint to be concealed. She appeared to be revelling in the freedom of the male body while in fact experiencing a horrible sensation of transference that almost amounted to hatred. She wondered if men had hated the nudes they painted in the same way. She stayed far away from reality, working from photographs. The paintings felt cynical to her, mendacious, but cynicism and mendacity were very popular, if her gallerist’s response was anything to go by. She felt more inclined these days to believe what other people said about her work. In its autonomy it had opened up a more radical distance from her consciousness, where huge and increasingly nameless shapes drifted with a hulking, unbroachable violence.
She lived obediently in the bare routines of family life. When she met her male peers at parties or openings she saw them as free and herself as enchained. Even if they had families themselves she elaborated her story of their freedom. They were unscheduled, unhurried — they inhabited one glittering moment after another. She felt as if she was living in simultaneous realities, like the clocks in airports that showed the time in different cities across the world.
The woman painter didn’t go to these parties — she said she preferred to stay at home. She lived with her son in a warm, untidy house where people were always coming and going. She often painted random, unframed sections of this interior, as though she were an object blamelessly looking at other objects. These paintings reminded G of how her life used to feel and no longer did. They were curiously shocking, if only because they did not engage in the moral barter of representation. They made her own work seem exploitative and wilful. The painter was G’s only female rival in success, yet there did not seem to be an actual rivalry between them. On the contrary, the painter treated her as an ally. She assumed a loyalty and kinship with G that G was not certain she herself felt.
In the painter’s studio, which was attached to her house and where her son ran in and out, G sometimes felt a suffocating sense of exile from everything that she valued. She felt stifled by the painter’s femininity, her warmth and lack of aggression. The painter was as unhurried and unscheduled as a man, but in a different way. G wanted her to hurry, to flee from her own contentment and disorder, as though her lack of urgency was unwittingly condemning her to quicksands of female irrelevance.
The painter came to a dinner party at G’s house. Dressed up, she seemed sensuous and beautiful. She looked at the lavish, sterile space. She looked at the photographs of G’s daughter that hung everywhere. She wore an expression of interest tinged with amusement. G’s husband treated her with the extreme courtesy that was the sign of his loathing. She stayed until long after midnight, drank wine and smoked several cigarettes, and when G’s husband asked pointedly whether he could open the windows she looked at him with beautiful wide eyes and said, I don’t care what you do.
The painter visited G’s studio in the city not long afterward. She took in the studio’s filth and disorder and cleared a space for herself on one of the two available chairs. She gazed speculatively at the canvas on G’s easel. What are you doing? she said.
G felt a larger interrogation behind this question, though the painter probably didn’t mean it that way. People rarely interrogated or questioned her. Only her husband seemed to understand how willing she was to be interrogated and her actions condemned. The paintings in the studio were illicit attempts at communication behind the backs of the authority figures that had dogged her life. G’s husband no longer questioned her moral worth, in her art at least. He was entirely immersed in the money she made, and reserved his disapproval for her domestic persona. The fact that he took no notice of the ugly erotic paintings was the proof, G saw, of their weakness.
The painter, only half-joking, asked G whether she was living a double life, and G remembered the evening of the dinner party, when she had suddenly felt her conventionality on humiliating display. G wanted to protest that she hadn’t chosen what the painter saw, but the fact was that she had. She had chosen it, had sometimes even forced it to be. What she wanted was for someone to ask her why she had, to see through her as her husband did but from the other side of the mirror. The painter asked her where her daughter was in the paintings. G felt a lurching motion beneath her at this question, as though she were on a suddenly listing boat. The inescapability of her life shrank in an instant to this small and unstable boat. Obviously, the painter said, before G could say it herself, I wouldn’t ask that question to a man.
Around this time G’s husband received the news that his father was dying, on the other side of the country. His mother asked him to come and help her but he refused to go. He explained to his mother that he couldn’t simply abandon his responsibilities in that way: she would have to manage on her own. G listened to her husband talking on the phone to his mother. She could hear her weeping while he upbraided her — he often upbraided G in precisely this way. He sounded reasonable and extremely important, but the woman’s tinny cries down the receiver supplied a new dimension of horror to G’s ears. Then the mother had a stroke and had to be taken to hospital, and so there was no choice but for G’s husband to go — with the greatest reluctance — to his father.
The father took a long time to die and for that uncurtailable interval G was free from her husband’s control. She went to the country house with her daughter and her daughter’s nanny, and spent her days in the virgin light and liberty of death. She did not go to her studio. The three of them sat together on a bench in the garden, talking. The nanny was a good talker. She told stories about her upbringing and her family, of which she was the ninth and last child. The sagas of the other eight, observed from this vantage point at the bottom, constituted the riveting plotlines of these stories. There were also stories of the nanny’s life in service, which were sufficiently indiscreet to be very amusing. G heard herself laughing, there on the bench in the garden.
In the morning she went into the kitchen and made pancakes. She made them carefully and neatly, as though from memory, despite the fact that she had no real memories of that kind. Her daughter and the nanny ate them eagerly and without question. They sat there like birds with open beaks and she gave them more. It was natural, she saw, for her to do such things. When she went into her studio in the garden, it appeared to her as the abandoned scene of her preoccupations. She left the door open, as the door of a house stands open at a death.
G’s daughter started to come in and out of the studio. G tidied up, or worked superficially on mostly finished canvases, not daring to concentrate. It occurred to G that there might exist a second G, a G who did not work.
One afternoon in the studio G’s daughter looked up from her book and asked her why there needed to be men. Why can’t there just be mothers and children? she said. This bold and horrifying question immediately struck G as a trick. It was as though the walls were waiting for her answer. The answer seemed to be that there needed to be men because G thought men were superior. The idea of a world filled with mothers and children repelled her. It would be a world that lacked the crystalline force of judgement. If men were dispensable, then so was her desire for superiority. She identified mothers and children with mediocrity. How could that be, when she herself was a mother? Men are great, she answered. She justified this answer as encouraging a balanced attitude. But the question pierced her repeatedly in the days that followed.
G began to draw her daughter, childlike drawings that the girl herself could easily have bettered. She didn’t look at her daughter while she drew: the drawings came from her hand. The hand was full of clumsiness and simplicity but it seemed to awaken to the sense of its task. Because G didn’t look at her, the girl didn’t know she was being observed. It was an interior act of pure attention. The observation was not an enquiry but a confirmation, like the chiming of a bell. Unlike in her earlier drawings of childhood, she had no desire at all for obscenity.
It was when she looked at the photographs of her daughter that hung everywhere in the house that she recognised obscenity. Her husband had a knack for eliciting a certain expression from the child, whose innocence was tainted in the same instant as it was recorded. This little act of violation was his pride, and he repeated it over and over. She saw that he mistook it for genius. One afternoon, her heart hammering in her chest, she took all the photographs down.
The nanny appeared satisfied with the direction G was taking, much as her old gallerist used to be when G embarked on a new phase of work. She deferred to G ceremoniously, a smile of contentment on her lips at every evidence of the proper order of things being restored. She too seemed to find it natural that the waters would flow forth from the dam that habitually held them in check. No one identified this ruptured dam as a catastrophe, but when G’s husband returned it was immediately evident to them all that a disaster had occurred. He took in the scene of his displacement, the denuded walls, the atmosphere of female laxity, and straight away set to work rebuilding his authority. G heard his voice everywhere, loudly giving commands and administering judgement. The nanny coolly crossed back over to the other side and resumed her customary position as his subordinate.
G felt the broken fences in herself, where her hatred had surged out and got free. Her husband saw that G had admitted to herself that she hated him. One afternoon she heard him calling for their daughter in the garden. The child was sitting on the studio couch while G sketched beside her in a chair. At the sound of his voice outside, their eyes met in silence. He called and called, with increasing anger. Finally they heard his footsteps come close and he appeared in the doorway of the studio.
He was arrested for a moment by the sight of the child on the couch. His eyes moved to G in her chair, then with brisk fury he advanced across the room. G watched her daughter flinch as he approached. He took her by the arm and pulled her forcibly to her feet and led her squirming outside, shutting the door behind him.
In the spring we went back to Mann’s farm. There was no one at home when we called at the farmhouse. The black dog, Lola, was roaming restlessly in the courtyard in front of the closed front door. She followed us up to the cottage, where Johann was working in the adjacent field. When he saw us he put down his spade and came to talk to us, stroking the dog’s fine silky head. He told us that Mann’s wife was in Germany but was expected back at any time. He said that her mother was dying.
The valley was greener and more radiant in springtime, and beside Johann’s caravan the vegetables were sending out their shoots in neat rows. There were wildflowers all along the path to the sea and little songbirds sped joyously over the precipice and dived down toward the water.
Sometimes we saw Mann, in the farmyard or the fields around the house, but he seemed neither to see nor to remember us. Often he would fold his elongated figure into a tiny, extraordinarily rusted car and speed away down the track. He’s going to meet his cronies in the town, Johann said, watching the vanishing car disgustedly.
One afternoon, as we were returning to the farm, we were overtaken by a dusty yellow bus that stopped outside Mann’s gates. The doors opened and Mann’s daughter stepped down onto the road. She was wearing a school uniform and carried a satchel on her shoulders. She greeted us politely and we followed her through the gates, where she turned not down the track toward the farmhouse but in the other direction, along a path that led in twists and turns up the hillside. A caravan that had once been in the olive grove now stood precariously up there, in a clearing facing the valley. There was a washing line with clothes neatly pegged to it and an awning over the door with a table and chairs beneath.
In the evening Johann came to bring us some early vegetables from his garden, and he told us that Mann’s wife had moved with her daughter and the housekeeper into the caravan. She should have got further away, he said, looking doubtfully up at it, but there was nowhere else for her to go.
He described the ordeal of moving the caravan, which had to be dragged up the hill. They used the cattle to pull it up there, with the help of some young men from the village. I thought we would all be killed, he said. One of the ropes broke and it nearly fell on top of us. I still don’t know how we did it, he said. She got a huge strength from somewhere. I think it was her hatred.
Things had been bad between them for a long time, he told us, but the crisis came when Mann’s wife found out that Mann had been selling parcels of the farm behind her back. He’s been doing it for years, Johann said. But it wasn’t the deception that disgusted her. It was the idea that after all he only cared about the valley in the context of his own life. Despite everything, he said, she still saw him as the defender of this place, and now it turned out that it didn’t matter to him what happened to it, as long as he wasn’t there to see it.
Two days later Mann’s wife returned, and we met her one afternoon at the gates to the farm. A strong wind had sprung up on the island, which at night moaned and pressed around the eaves of the cottage, and we had thought of her and her daughter in the caravan, exposed on the clearing on the hill.
She told us that she had gone back to Germany because her mother was about to die, and that it had not gone as she had expected. At first she had sat at her mother’s bedside full of confusion, thinking about the absence of any love between them. Sometimes she would open her eyes and look at me, she said, and I thought that she was finally going to say the words I have always wanted to hear. But she just closed her eyes again, as if I was not the person she was hoping to see.
On the morning of the second day, she said, there was a ring on the doorbell and I opened it and a young girl was standing there with a big backpack on her back. She was very small, with long black hair, and she said she had walked all the way from the station because she hadn’t wanted to put us to the trouble of collecting her. I had no idea who she was, Mann’s wife said, but she told me it had been arranged for her to come and look after my mother in her last hours. She would be with her every moment, she assured me. I was free to leave.
Mann’s wife stood facing into the wind, with her legs planted and her arms crossed, the expression of bewilderment on her face as she looked out through the gates toward the road.
This morning the girl called me, she said, and told me that it was over. It had taken longer than she had expected because my mother had put up a very strong resistance. She said that she didn’t know where my mother got her strength from, Mann’s wife said, and I find I can’t get that phrase out of my head. I wonder about that girl, she said, who I suppose is going now with her backpack to another house. I never imagined that such a person existed.
She turned and looked up the hill toward the caravan, where her daughter stood in the doorway waiting for her. She waved, and the girl waved back. Mann’s wife smiled.
The wind will stop tomorrow, she said. The weather is going to be nice.
The police came to G’s house. They rang the doorbell, like travelling salesmen. They wanted to speak to her husband. Some photographs of G’s daughter had been passed to them by the printer.
It was all a mistake, of course — it was just a silly confusion. G’s husband was at his most inarguably charming and authoritative. G watched the policemen move from suspicion to receptiveness to acquiescence. They listened to his explanation, which was that he had been dissatisfied with the quality of some prints that came back from the printer, and had raised the issue with him. Call me old-fashioned, he said with winning self-deprecation, but I still use a film camera. I just can’t get the hang of the digital ones, he said, and I actually think the quality of light might be better doing it the old way. The policemen were listening earnestly. The printer was a temperamental character, her husband continued, and he had obviously decided to get his own back, because as they could see these were simply normal family photographs. My wife is an artist, he said, putting his arm around G. So it’s me who takes the family snaps. I obviously don’t have her talent, he smiled.
After the policemen left, her husband, white with fear and anger, descended into a vicious rage that lasted for several days. Once, G asked him a question while he was holding a coffee mug and he threw the mug at her. It hit her hard on her shoulder. You stupid woman, he said. Another time, when their daughter didn’t want to wear her coat to school, he manhandled her into the coat so roughly that she cried.
G began to think about running away from him. The problem, as always, was her daughter’s body. She wished, again, that they could share a body. Instead her body was shared between G and her husband. Her husband knew about her thoughts. He became quite calm and practical. He told her that she was free to leave, but that the house and the child would remain with him. He explained to her the reasons in law why this was so. He told her the amount of money she would be liable for. But if that’s what you want, he said sadly, I won’t stand in your way.
G went to her studio in the city. She stayed there all day without painting or moving. She sat in its disorder as the day grew dark outside the windows. She didn’t turn on the lights.
Extracted from the forthcoming novel “Parade” (Faber & Faber) ©2024, Rachel Cusk. All rights reserved
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