An extract from Sheila

PART ONE

May 2015

I was sitting beside Dad’s hospital bed, on an uncomfortable office chair with casters. The bed stood like a throne in the centre of his former studio at Ivy Cottage, with the headrest raised to maximum height. Afternoon light streamed in from the garden, filtered through foliage at the five windows set into the thick stone walls; a fire smouldered in the grate, under the marble mantelpiece. If you have the misfortune to be bed-ridden, there could be no lovelier setting in which to pass your time. 

Propped on pillows, Dad was gazing at a painting which hung on the wall beside the door. At 93 he still had a strong, angular bone structure, accentuated by the Afghan wool hat he wore to help retain his fragile body heat. The painting was of a copper mug containing shocking-pink dahlias, positioned in the centre of an old pine table. A shaft of light fell across the uneven boards, giving them a rust-coloured tinge. 

‘Isn’t it ravishing?’ Dad murmured, his voice aquiver. 

Taken aback, I glanced from the bumpy line of his Roman nose to the painting. I wasn’t used to hearing Dad say nice things about my mother’s work. ‘Yes,’ I replied. I preferred her portraits to her still life work, but I wasn’t going to argue with an unexpected compliment. Less than three months had elapsed since her death and it surprised me that some of Mum’s work had already found its way onto Dad’s wall.  That must be down to my sister Anna. Had Dad asked for the painting, or had she simply brought it over and hung it up? 

‘Sheila was such a great painter,’ he went on. ‘Don’t you think so?’ He threw me one of his challenging glances, although the fire in his eyes was cooler than the furnace I remembered from his younger days, which stirred both love and fear in those around him. The look meant something like ‘Disagree with me if you dare, but you’ll need a damn good reason!’

I returned his gaze, wondering what had prompted this sudden re-appraisal of Mum’s talent and skill. ‘Of course she was,’ I replied. Anna and I had spent the past fortnight going through a hundred of her paintings, one by one. In addition to the work we knew, we’d found paintings we’d never seen before: landscapes, portraits of strangers and self portraits made at art school in the late 1940s, from which a younger version of the woman we’d loved gazed at the viewer with a look of raw uncertainty. Mum’s height and good looks were no surprise: her beauty had lasted well into her eighties. We knew she’d worked as a fashion model to pay her art school fees: we’d seen the photos of her in chic dresses with shoulder pads and pinched waist, hair permed, skin pale, lips red. But the vulnerability apparent in the early self portraits was something new. I’d always thought her rough times had begun later, after she met and married Dad.

Dad’s gaze had returned to the dahlias. ‘Look at the way she’s got the light falling across the brass mug, onto the table!’ He lifted his gnarled white fingers from the blanket which covered his chest and interlaced them with characteristic force. His muscles were wasting as he lay in bed and his clayworker’s hands were shrinking, but the gesture was an old, familiar one. He let out a sigh. ‘She was a much greater artist than I ever was.’

Astonished, I wondered if I’d heard him right. Acknowledgement of Mum’s worth as an artist was something Dad had never managed, much as he’d rarely acknowledged her worth as a human being. I’d heard him admit that she’d been a good mother, but that was a realm where he hadn’t sought to compete. ‘Is that really what you think?’ I said at last.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied, without hesitation. ‘She was a fine painter, a very, very fine painter’.

I reeled for days after that conversation. I felt triumphant that at last Dad had recognised Mum’s ability, but at the same time I was outraged that he’d waited till after her death to do so. His admiration would have meant a lot to Mum, and he must have known it. I wanted to phone her up and tell her what he’d said; I wanted to sit beside her on her old white sofa, with a cup of tea apiece, and recount how the conversation had come about. I would have so loved to see the look on her face. 

For lengthy tranches of my adult life, I’d felt unsafe in Dad’s presence and chosen not to see him, whereas Mum and I had always been close. It was only because I missed her that I was visiting him now: he was one of very few people still alive who’d known her well enough that we could have a meaningful conversation about her. That was partly due to the fact that, after she left London, Mum had lived an increasingly reclusive life; but also because, by the time she died, aged 95, most of her close friends had already departed. 

Even now I didn’t find it easy to sit with Dad: being in his presence triggered feelings and memories I’d rather shut out.

Throughout my childhood, Dad had prioritized his creative life over everything else: wife, children, money, home. Even before they separated, Mum’s life had been that of a lone parent: Dad was so preoccupied with his career as a sculptor that everything else had fallen to her.  Perhaps if she hadn’t been an artist, too, it would have seemed less unfair. And perhaps if he’d made money from his work and treated Mum with love and respect, I’d have felt more forgiving. But Dad’s work didn’t sell and his affairs made her life hell. We lived precariously in the shadow of Mum’s grief, dressed in cast-offs from Dad’s affluent Oxford friends, driving around in a Hillman van that was barely road-worthy and eating more than our share of potatoes. 

Pleased though I was with Dad’s admission that Mum had been a better artist than him, I told myself that his judgment of her didn’t make any difference to mine. I knew she’d been a fine painter. I’d been with her all along, watching her struggle to get her work shown. I’d sat with her at the kitchen table when I was as young as seven, watching her submit work to group exhibitions: The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Contemporary Portrait Society, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition… Occasionally a painting was accepted, but most of the time the response was a rejection slip and a curt note asking her to collect her work.  Every time it happened, I witnessed how the experience knocked her confidence. She could have done with another adult to tell her to keep going, to suggest that the selection panel were biased towards men, or artists they knew personally – or simply blind; but all she had was me, her mother and a small group of friends.

About two years before her death, when Mum was already thin and frail, we sat down together and went through an album of photos of her portraits. I’d not looked at her work in years and the quality of some of it astonished me. These were brave, honest paintings, in which you felt she’d looked deeply into the face of the sitter. The result was unsentimental, often unsmiling. She had a knack of depicting the tension between a person’s inner world and their outer persona. And the quality of the paint itself was rich, oily and generous, so that gazing at a portrait was like eating a delicious meal.

As I looked through the album, it dawned on me that even I had failed to give Mum’s work the appreciation it was due. Perhaps, unwittingly, I’d absorbed the indifference of the art establishment, which even in the nineteen sixties and seventies had little time for women painters. Probably, although I hated to admit it, I’d been influenced by Dad’s lack of interest in what Mum did. 

The next time we met I suggested that, one day in the future, after she was gone, I might write about her life as a painter. Mum stared at me with a look of suppressed pleasure, even as she asked me how I’d ever find the time. ‘Don’t burden yourself, T,’ she murmured. ‘You’ve got enough to do without taking that on.’

She was right, of course: I was a lone mum, a part time lawyer and a writer. But the idea took hold in me. Over the next few weeks, I engineered some long conversations about her experiences at school and art college, and made detailed notes. It might be years before I had the time to use them, but I knew I’d kick myself if I hadn’t asked the questions while I had the chance.

Mum died in 2015. In the months that followed, I was too upset to write more than small fragments about her. Three years went by until, in the autumn of 2018, I felt the time was right. My son had just left home for a gap year adventure, leaving me bereft but with the time and space I needed to embark on a new project. Dad was ninety six by now, still in his own home, attended by a posse of devoted live-in carers. I’d recently cut my legal work to a bare two days a week, which meant less money but plenty of time. It was late September and the leaves on the trees in the woods near my home were curling up like aged, arthritic hands and turning gold. The days were sunny but the nights were cold. On my first free morning, I lit the woodburner in my writing shed at the bottom of the garden, propped one of Mum’s larger paintings on the desk and stood back to study it.

Chapter One                 Self Portrait in Browns

The work I was looking at was a near life size figure painting which Mum had never shown to us when she was alive. Here was a young woman – head, shoulders and torso to the hips – standing tall and upright against a drab, green-brown wall. Much of her form was in shadow; the small amount of light entering the penumbra lit only the right side of her hair, face and neck. The dark wall behind the figure, the shadow on the left side of the face and a shapeless man’s shirt over an even darker skirt combined to give the painting a sombre feel. 

The likeness to Mum was unmistakable.  Here were her high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, amber eyes, small nose and pretty mouth – coloured with a lavish quantity of dark red lipstick. 

I examined the painting closely, sensing it had a lot to tell me. Mum stood very straight against the wall, her shoulders squared, head pulled back, staring out at the world. Her gaze was confident, almost to the point of defiance, but the deadpan look in her eyes disturbed me. 

She cast her gaze towards the viewer and her eyes almost met mine. But at the last moment, she threw up a wall, so that for all the boldness of her stance, her impressive height and remarkable beauty, it was apparent that the inner woman was far away, remote, unwilling to reveal herself. Initially I read her expression as one of disillusion, bordering on disgust with life; but as I looked more closely, I glimpsed profound sorrow; and a sorrow that must be kept under wraps, hence the straight back and square shoulders. 

Sheila must have made this portrait in the aftermath of World War II. The year was perhaps 1947, when she was 27 years old – very much younger than the mother I loved, who was 37 when I was born. But despite her unfamiliar youthfulness, I knew I was looking at the big, strong person I’d depended on for so many years. I chided her silently for the way she’d painted her neck, making it too wide and muscly. The shoulders were also an inch too broad, and reminded me of her bizarre conviction that her real life shoulders were square and ‘mannish’. Sheila was six foot tall, but her shoulders were shapely and in proportion to the rest of her. The breadth they appeared to have in the painting was due in part to the voluminous shirt, with its stiff collar open at the neck and its loose sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Why did she dress like that to paint herself, I wondered? To keep the oil paint off her real clothes, which were underneath? Although, from the way it draped and folded, the beige fabric of the shirt could be silk. I liked the way she’d caught the pale tones where the light fell on the collar and the dark shadows where her arms rested against the sides of her body. And she hadn’t tried to hide the fact that under that shapeless shirt she had a large, womanly bosom. As a small child my moments of deepest comfort were when she wrapped her long arms around me and I nestled my head against her.

Now my eyes returned to the face; and for the second time I was struck by the sadness in Sheila’s guarded gaze. What produced that, I asked myself, in 1947?  Several years would pass before she met my father; and she’d always described her childhood as happy. What had happened, by her mid-twenties, to cause her so much pain?

My thoughts drifted to the hot day in July 1981 which Mum and I spent in Sparta in Greece. After decades of financial stricture, when travel had been out of the question, Mum had inherited some money and taken me and my sister on a fortnight’s holiday. We flew to Athens, accompanied by Mum’s friend Veronica, and stayed in a rented apartment on the coast, near Nafplion. I was 24 and had just done my finals.

 On the day we went to Sparta, Mum and I got up early and tiptoed out, leaving Anna and Veronica to sleep. On the first bus we found seats, but when we changed to a second, it was crowded with middle aged Greeks with bags of shopping and we had to stand, clinging to an overhead rail. At nine in the morning the silver was already touching twenty six degrees. Sweat ran down between my shoulder blades as I stood in my shorts, braced against the rail, watching Mum closely for signs of heat fatigue. 

When the driver tackled a series of sharp bends at the entrance to a village, our hips lurched against the shoulders of the seated passengers. Given what I saw as Mum’s venerable age of 61, I thought somebody should offer her a seat; but she looked ten years younger than she was, and nobody did. Her cheeks were turning pink and beads of perspiration appeared on her forehead; for all that, I’d never seen her looking better than she did today. With her height, fine cheekbones and dark hair, she was something of a goddess. 

She was wearing a full-length sundress she’d made for the holiday from a length of patterned cotton. It was little more than a sack and my sister and I, both competent dressmakers, had winced when we first saw it laid out on her bed. We were mildly appalled at the way she’d used a length of red ribbon to gather the sack at one end and suspend it from her shoulders; but when she put it on, we had to admit that the fabric’s miniature orange and red flowers looked good against her swiftly bronzing neck and shoulders. We could see Mum was pleased with her handiwork and we loved her too much to do other than congratulate her, exchanging knowing glances as we did so. 

For several years now, Mum had studied modern Greek at evening classes and read her way through the ancient Greek playwrights in translation. Her excitement at being in the Peleponnese, with her daughters, her friend and enough money to wander where she chose, was a pleasure to witness; especially for me, who’d seen her struggling with poverty, intellectual frustration and social isolation for much of my life. She loved the sun; she loved the snatches of conversation she was exchanging hourly with friendly strangers; and the ancient sites fascinated her.

After a particularly sharp bend, Mum struggled to right herself and I reached out my hand to steady her. Through the window I glimpsed a dazzling white light which bounced off the walls of the village houses, turning the surface of the road to silver. 

‘I’m fine,’ she replied, tightening her grip on the overhead rail and fanning herself with the bus timetable. ‘We’ll be there soon. How about you?’

That was typical: if anyone expressed concern for her, she would immediately turn it back on them.

‘I’m fine too,’ I lied. If I didn’t drink some water soon I was likely to pass out; but I wasn’t going to tell her. 

‘There’s not a huge amount to see in Sparta,’ Mum remarked a moment later. ‘Much of the ancient city was destroyed…’ 

‘Good,’ I replied. ‘It’s too hot for a gigantic site.’ We’d been to Epidavros a few days earlier, with my sister. After a couple of hours exploring the amphitheatre I’d felt desperate to get back to Nafplion and plunge into the sea. My offer to accompany Mum to Sparta today had been motivated less by a desire to see more ruins, than by  a wish to have her to myself for a few hours.

Now I watched as her gaze wandered to the face of an old man seated on the far side of the bus. Her glances were subtle, not long enough for him to feel intruded upon; but I knew what she was doing. As far as I could tell, the man was alone; he sat with heavily veined hands neatly folded over the top of a wooden staff, which rested on the floor between his feet. The prominent, ball-like shape of his skull was visible through his fine, translucent skin. Thick white eyebrows contrasted with the mottled browns, pinks and blues of his forehead. He had a large, weathered nose; pale, watery eyes and sagging cheeks. A look of doubt played about his mouth, as if he felt vulnerable riding on a bus towards a city. 

Mum looked away and caught my eye. A moment later, very slowly, she delivered one of her subtle but insistent winks. There was no need for words. I, too, would have liked to draw the old man.