Page 122 of A Thousand Painted Hours

And there, in a cream-colored envelope, thin, with a light sketch of a desert landscape, was a letter from Garvey Martin, Taos, New Mexico, postmarked March 3, 1930.

Some four years after he supposedly died.

I flipped it over, lifted the flap, and unfolded the paper within. One page in a clean, readable script.Dearest Violet, he wrote—

Such fury filled me that I could not even see. Dropping the letter in the box, I left it on the floor and looked for a long moment at my mother, who appeared to have fallen asleep.

How could she have lied to me for so long? And what made her do such a desperate thing?

I wanted to scream at her, fling all the letters over her body, but I also wanted to fall against her hand and wail. What a terrible sacrifice, to leave a man and a world she loved to “protect” me!

And for what? For what?

Whirling, I stomped upstairs to my studio. The nudes I’d abandoned at the start of the bombing reclined against the wall, and I grabbed one, tied on an apron and began to paint, transmuting anger into art, my fear into life.

I am alive, I told myself. With every brushstroke,I am alive. I am alive, I am alive.Tears of fury and release ran down my cheeks. I painted a furious goddess, a demented Demeter.

I have seen the world. I am a witness to it, beautiful and terrible.

I am alive.

I am going to stay alive.

November 9, 1940

London

[In Urdu]

Dear Tanveer,

Tonight, I painted for hours and hours. There were bombs early, but they haven’t returned, and I left Mother sleeping. I have not been back down to check on her, and I know I should go, but I am incandescently angry with her, and I don’t even know if I should be. She is most desperately ill; two days ago her physician said simply that we can only keep her comfortable now. He has left morphine for the pain, which makesher sleep, and when she wakes, she hardly knows who she is or when she is. She rarely knows who I am—one day I am your mother, another my father, another some invisible confessor who knows all her secrets.

Tonight, she matter-of-factly told me that her husband in America did not die. She left him, and she did it to manipulate me to come back to England from India.

I write that and my hands shake all over again. I am so furious with her. I am heartbroken for her and for myself, and for you, for us, for everything that—

Oh, it doesn’t matter. You know.

And yet, I also grieve that my mother, my beloved, beloved mother, is fading. I grieve that I may never have an actual conversation with her again. How can I be angry and grieving and love her so deeply and feel so appalled at actions that have caused me—both of us—genuine harm, all at once?

I did not return to England because of her manipulations. I would not have. So why am I so very furious with her? And how do I make peace before she dies?

I feel quite lonely. I miss Betty’s competent cheer. I am mostly alone with my mother, who is no longer really here, and she is too ill to move to Nina’s as I’d hoped to do.

Enough of my sniveling.

One small beauty is the silver comb I found in the rubble when I went to visit Betty. I’ve enclosed a drawing. It’s quite beautiful, and I polished it to wear, thinking of the woman who lost it. Perhaps one day I’ll be in the market and she will see it and say, “Thatis the comb I lost in a raid. My grandmother gave it to me!” And I will happily, in peacetime, return it to her.

Fanciful, but one never knows.

Love,

Elsie

A Mature and Respectful Friendship

1926