Keeping the World Away Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Gwen

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Charlotte

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Stella

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Lucasta

  Ailsa

  Gillian

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over … This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches.

  It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving for Paris where she becomes Rodin’s lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room … Then there’s Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa and finally young Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting.

  Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women’s lives, about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife.

  About the Author

  Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many successful novels – including Lady’s Maid, Have the Men had Enough?, The Memory Box, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, and most recently Is There Anything You Want? – as well as best-selling memoirs, and biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Daphne du Maurier. She is married to the writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lives in London and the Lake District.

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Fiction

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  The Battle for Christabel

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  The Memory Box

  Diary of an Ordinary Woman

  Is There Anything You Want?

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Editor)

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer: The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart

  William Makepeace Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman

  Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1838–1939

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Desserts & Captain’s Thin: A Family & Their Times 1831–1931

  Precious Lives

  Good Wives: Mary, Fanny, Jennie & Me 1845–2001

  FOR MY DAUGHTER-IN-LAW ROSA MAGGIORA

  ‘Rules to Keep the World away: Do not listen to people (more than is necessary); Do not look at people (ditto); Have as little intercourse with people as possible; When you come into contact with people, talk as little as possible …’

  3 March 1912, Gwen John Papers, National Library of Wales

  ‘As to being happy, you know, don’t you, that when a picture is done, whatever it is, it might as well not be as far as the artist is concerned – and in all the time he has taken to do it, it has only given him a few seconds pleasure … People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.’

  [?] March 1902, Gwen John to Michael Salaman

  Prologue

  THE COACH, CAUGHT in the heavy traffic along the embankment, barely moved. Plenty of time to look out of the window, plenty of time to daydream. Gillian could see Westminster Bridge coming up, but it didn’t seem touched by any of the majesty that Wordsworth saw there, according to the sonnet they’d been reading in class the day before. Big Ben was satisfyingly impressive, though. She enjoyed the chance, as the coach crawled along, really to look at these landmarks, and at the same time she was trying to frame what she saw, to separate the images and make pictures of them in her mind.

  Nobody else in the coach appeared to be looking at anything. They were having a party, the other girls laughing and shouting, and two of them dancing in the aisle, in spite of Miss Leach’s order to sit down and behave. Everyone was excited about being in London, and the art exhibition they were going to seemed just an excuse. Plans to sneak off to Oxford Street during the lunch break were well under way – Miss Leach was easily fooled. Gillian felt sorry for the poor woman. She was a good teacher but otherwise hopeless, with her straggly hair and nervous twitches and desperate desire to be liked. All the way here she’d been bleating for silence, her thin face tight with apprehension, flushed with indignation that no one showed her the slightest respect.

  Eventually, the coach stopped outside the Tate Gallery and a spontaneous cheer went up. Miss Leach stood up and clapped her hands, shouting for them all to be quiet. Immediately, the girls at the back clapped back and stamped their feet, but then, sensing their teacher near to tears – they were not cruel girls, just high-spirited today – they calmed down. Miss Leach told them to get off quickly, because the coach had to go off to park, and not to forget to take all their belongings with them. Gillian was first off the coach. She waited while the others tumbled out, with their jackets and backpacks and carrier bags and the bottles of mineral water everyone had to have at the moment. Her own friends weren’t among this group – they didn’t do A-level art – so she felt a little apart. It made her sympathetic to Miss Leach, who was leading the way up the steps and through the doors into the gallery, where she stood in the lobby, her finger to her lips, looking ridiculous and being ignored. The giggling and chatting created such a hubbub that Gillian could tell their teacher would never impose order, so she decided to act herself. Standing with her back to Miss Leach, she put her fingers in her mouth and gave a sharp, short whistle. There was suddenly a shocked silence, and then a burst of laughter, and when Gillian turned to her teacher and said, ‘Shall we go, Miss Leach?’ everyone fell into line, perfectly obedient.

  In the exhibition itself, the girls’ behaviour was exemplary. A little whispering among themselves, but that was all. They moved from painting to painting in groups of three and four, dutifully consulting the notes Miss Leach had given them as they went. Gillian had read them on the bus. She found, looking at the paintings, that they seemed irrelevant. Did she need to know where the artist was born, or trained? All that mattered now, surely, were the paintings themselves and what she could see in them. The artist’s intention didn’t matter, did it? If a painting didn’t speak for itself, what use was it? She was convinced that art should be looked at in a pure way, uninfluenced by any knowledge either of the artist or the circumstances in which it had been painted.

  But then, in front of one painting in particular, she began to have her doubts. She stared and stared at it, becoming more and more puzzled, and also, in an odd way, disturbed. Something was there which she couldn’t quite grasp. The effort to understand made her feel agitated, and she found herself biting her lip so hard it began to hurt. She lingered so long that Miss Leach came to see why she was not in the second room yet, an
d she moved on hurriedly, afraid she would be asked to explain. She took care, after that, not to separate herself. They spent over an hour at the exhibition and then the coach picked them up and took them to Hyde Park for their picnic lunch. Gillian wandered off, to sit on a bench in front of the Serpentine, in peace. She felt light-headed, the painting which had intrigued her flashing over and over before her eyes until she felt dizzy. After she’d finished eating her sandwiches, she opened her notebook, and sat with pencil hovering over the blank page. A new thought had occurred to her, but she wrote nothing. Her mind was full of simple but unanswerable questions.

  Miss Leach was approaching, a silly, hesitant smile on her face. Hastily, Gillian closed the notebook, and braced herself. She knew she was one of Miss Leach’s favourites. She knew, too, that she ought to be grateful to her – at the last parents’ meeting the teacher had defended her right to study art when her father said it was a waste of her abilities and that she ought instead to go to university. But Miss Leach was creepy, it took an effort to be polite and friendly. She couldn’t stop the woman from sitting down beside her, though. ‘Well, Gillian,’ she said, ‘wasn’t it wonderful, to see all those paintings brought together, almost a lifetime’s work?’ Gillian nodded. ‘And what did you think of them, dear? I know you’ll tell me in due course, in your essay, but in general, what was your impression? I’m curious.’

  Gillian surprised herself. She realised what had been bothering her. ‘I thought about their lives,’ she said, looking down at the water to avoid seeing her teacher’s face. ‘Whose life?’ Miss Leach said. ‘His, or hers?’ ‘Neither,’ Gillian said, beginning to feel embarrassed. ‘I meant their lives, the lives of the actual paintings, especially one of hers. I was wondering where it had been, who had owned it, who had looked at it. And other things – I mean, what effect did it have on the people who have looked at it? What has it meant to them, how have they looked at it, did they feel the same as I did, did they see what I saw, and …’ Her voice tailed off.

  Miss Leach was silent for several moments and then, in a voice quite unlike her usual plaintive tone, said that where paintings had been since they left an artist’s hand was of no consequence whatsoever. A painting took its chance. It was as simple as that.

  But Gillian thought that somehow it was of consequence.

  GWEN

  I

  THE WIND PUSHED and forced them along, great savage gusts of it, stinging their ears, penetrating their scarves, whipping their uncovered hair into fierce tangles, slicing through their coats and chilling their small bodies so completely they were crying and gasping for breath before ever they reached the steps. Gwen fell. She tried to take the steps two at a time but the wind unbalanced her and she tripped, clutching in vain at the iron handrail. Thornton hauled her up, half dragging her to the door where Winifred, lifted up there by Gus, already cowered. Gus had set her down, and stood with his back to the door, his eyes closed, his arms spread wide to welcome the wind, and a smile on his face.

  All four of them, gathered together at last, hammered on the big solid door, thumping it with their fists, rattling the letter-box and yelling to be let in. The door swung violently back, the weight of the wood for once unequal to the powerful thrust of the gale force wind. Closing it, as soon as they were safely inside the hall, took their combined strength. Eluned had not stayed to help. The children collapsed on the tiled floor, pulling at their outdoor garments, removing their boots, which were still thickly caked with mud and under no circumstances to be worn in the rest of the house. Winifred lined the boots up, taking pleasure in the task. On stockinged feet, they pattered down the stairs into the kitchen, eager for the hot milk awaiting them. Thornton and Gus drank greedily, and even Winifred sipped hers quickly. Gwen held her mug tightly, wanting its outer warmth on her hands, but not its contents. One mouthful was enough. The rest she would give to the cat, taking care that Eluned (who would report this to her father) did not see.

  Slowly, mug carried carefully, she left the others and went back up the stairs to the hall, and then up the next flight and into her room, where Mudge awaited her, expecting the milk. She emptied her mug into his dish, and he lapped the milk up without looking at her. Closing the door, and sitting on the floor with her back to it, she watched him. He was said to be an ugly cat, the runt of the last litter, but she saw in the dull grey of his coat and the white-lined sharpness of his ears something unusual that stirred her. He was her cat, unloved by others and all the more precious because of it. But he did not like to be fondled or petted. They communicated through staring, at a distance, into each other’s eyes, and by listening for each other’s slightest movement. They did this now, when he’d finished the milk. There were sounds outside the room, of feet approaching. Gwen braced herself. It was Winifred’s room too, but if she pushed back hard enough against the door, Winifred would not, three years younger than she was, be able to open it. She would run complaining to their mother, and Gwen would gain more time.

  But the footsteps ran past the door, heavy and hurried. Not Winifred’s, then, but Gus’s. She was safe a while yet. She smiled at Mudge, who turned disdainfully and jumped onto the window seat. She did not join him. Here, on the floor, against the door, the room looked different. The window loomed above the window seat, seeming twice the size she knew it to be. Interested, she followed the shape of it with her eye, measuring it for length and breadth. She wished there were no curtains framing it. The curtains were of dark red plush, thick and heavy, hanging from a brass rail all the way to the floor. She hated them, detested too the cushions covered with the same material on the window seat. Underneath there was wood which she loved to touch, the raised grain of it satisfying to her fingers. She was sitting on wood now. There was a patterned carpet on the floor but it left surrounds of wood on each side. These floorboards, stained dark, were full of splinters but she liked the feel of them and never chose to sit on the carpet. Its swirls of colour and its cloying woolly thickness offended her. So did the wardrobe, gigantic from where she was sitting, seeing herself reflected in its oval mirror. It dwarfed everything in the room. At night-time, waking from dreams, it sometimes seemed to her that its mahogany sides ran with blood.

  I am here, but not here, she thought, staring at herself. There is my head, and my hair, untidy as a rag doll’s, and there is my body in its green dress, limp and still, and there are my legs, sticking rudely out. It is me, but not me. And this room is not mine, it has nothing to do with me. I do not inhabit it. It is just a place in which I have been put. I can rise out of it whenever I want. So she rose, first just a little way, enough to hover over the head she had just left, and then higher, until she broke through the ceiling and was in Gus’s room, and then higher still and saw their house below, its roof gleaming in the rain. Then she came back down, satisfied. For the moment. Mudge turned and looked at her. He knew what she had been doing.

  Reluctantly, she got up and went over to the window seat, where he allowed her to join him. It still poured with rain, the wind still howled. It was a mad March storm, sweeping in from the sea. They should not have been out in it. Their father, when he came home, and was told by Eluned about their escapade, would be angry. No one was to cause trouble in the house. Trouble, of any sort, upset their mother, and she must not be upset, ever. Mother’s legs hurt, and so did her neck, and her back. She moaned when she moved, and bit her lip. She had stopped drawing and painting and playing the piano, and now she had to have her meat cut up for her because her fingers had no strength. Gwen stared at them at mealtimes. Her mother’s fingers appeared bent and there were strange lumps on the knuckles. She had tried to draw them but they did not look right. Gus had tried too, and was more successful, but he had hidden his drawing, not wanting their mother to see. He showed her instead a drawing of her face, sweet and smiling when she was at rest on the chaise longue. Hands were hard to do and attaching them to arms harder still.

  Her mother was upstairs, in bed, though it was only thre
e in the afternoon. Winifred would have crept up to be with her. She would have crawled under the eiderdown and snuggled up close, and Mother would be cuddling her and stroking her hair and kissing it. Whenever Gwen went into her mother’s bedroom, she stood at the end of the bed, silent and anxious. ‘Come to me!’ her mother would say, and hold out her arms, but though Gwen obediently moved from the foot to the side of the bed, she could not do what Winifred did. She perched on top of the covers, and her mother put her arm round her waist and squeezed her. It felt awkward, and soon she was released. Inside, there would be a swelling of something she feared, a rising pressure of panic which made her hurry out of the room before something happened which she would be unable to control. She did not know what she would do. She might scream or cry or shake so hard that she would frighten her mother. So she left the room.

  It was always a relief. The bedroom stifled her and she disliked it even more than she disliked her own. It was so packed with furniture, so overcrowded, and there was a smell which made her feel peculiar, a mixture of the scent her mother used, stephanotis, and the embrocation she rubbed into her limbs. The window was rarely opened, the room rarely aired. She had tried to draw this bedroom but the paper was not large enough to fit in more than half. She had drawn the window, liking the way it sloped inwards, and the view through it of the slate rooftops, but could not work out how to draw the bed and the chest of drawers and the linen box and the dressing table and the wardrobe and the nursing chair – it was too much, it made her dizzy. Her mother had looked at it and smiled and said the wallpaper was well done and the carving on the bedposts excellently rendered. She had said Gwen was ambitious but must learn to walk before she ran, and she had set her to colour in outlines of children playing on the beach, which she had drawn herself, for Gwen and Gus.

  Her mother’s paintings hung in the drawing room. They were admired by all who saw them for the first time. ‘Oh, how pretty!’ people said, especially of ‘Oranges and Lemons’, a picture of children playing that game. Gwen could see this was true. Her mother drew figures well. The colours were vivid. There was life in the painting and yet it did not stay in her head. She had stood staring at it for a long time when no one else was in the room and then turned her back and all that was in her mind’s eye was a vague impression of dresses and arms. Something was missing but she did not know what it was. She had asked Gus. He had said he did not know what she meant. She knew that he did but that either he could not say or he did not want to tell her.