Page 21 of A Thousand Painted Hours

But of course a mere woman could not inherit. It had placed both my mother and me in dire straits.

Shaking off the memory, unwilling to linger on yet one more thing I could not change, I considered other possibilities for the safekeeping of the paintings. Obviously, they could not stayhere. I wondered if Ninawould consider asking her brother to store them at their family estate, Clystmere Hall. Perhaps later I could walk over to see her, make sure they’d fared all right.

I spent an hour sorting by era. There were the school pieces, when I was trying on styles and sorting out my own voice. Nothing much would be lost if they went up in a fiery bomb. The others fell into several eras, the work I’d done at the Slade School of Fine Art and then during the last war, both in London and, after, at Herewich. Most were evenly divided between small domestic scenes and portraits, though I had certainly done my share of landscapes.

There was also a group from our travels to Egypt when Peter had been with the diplomatic corps in the twenties. This was the work that had made my reputation and solidified the themes and palettes that expressed my vision most thoroughly. They covered a spectrum of subjects, women and servants and merchants for the most part, centered in their worlds in ordinary ways. I had few of them in my possession, only those I couldn’t bear to sell, like the portrait of my mother and the maharani, and a flower seller in the market in Egypt, her feet dirty, her smile easy as another woman bent over to tell her a secret. Light fell on her wares, on her toes, across the crown of her head. The painting of my mother and the maharani grew out of that time, my skill finally catching up to my vision after decades of work.

I would take them all to Clystmere if Nina was amenable.

The final group were paintings I’d been working on for the past few years. Landscapes of India and Egypt, with a less saturated palette, flatter depth, experiments I hadn’t quite worked out. And portraits of women, nudes in natural light, in ordinary tasks—bathing, dressing—but not young or fecund or objects of desire. They were simply women in their bodies, ordinary, no longer particularly young, some aging or unwell, with sometimes sagging breasts and flattened buttocks or a wealth of flesh in ripples and rolls.

When I’d first learned to draw bodies, I had used my own in a full-length mirror in my bedroom. It was deliciously scandalous to lockmy door and disrobe, and use the natural light pouring in through my French doors to trace the shape of legs, hips, breasts (such as they were), my neck, my arms. I drew my body from a hundred angles, but it was a challenge to get poses correct. I asked Gurdaya to help me, and, to my great delight and surprise, she did. My sketchbooks are filled with her lush body, her softer hips and thighs. She proved a great model, taking poses so I could learn how the body moved, bent, creased.

Downstairs, a door slammed.

Betty!

I clattered down the stairs to see if she was all right. Instead, it was Peter. His hair and clothing were disheveled, and he swayed unsteadily. When he raised his eyes to look at me, I recognized the haunted expression.

I met him at the foot of the stairs. No matter what he had done or how he had behaved, my pity rose when he was in this dejected, lost state. “There you are,” I said. “Are you all right? Have you eaten?”

He shook his head. “Not hungry.”

“All right.” I gently took his arm. “Let’s get you to bed then, shall we? Careful now.”

Up close, he smelled of gin and cigarettes and something acrid I couldn’t quite place. “Did you go to a shelter?”

He nodded. “Russell Square station.”

“I’m glad you were safe. We worried.”

We made it to his bedroom in a lurching, uneven walk. He fell on the bed, and I unlaced his shoes, stripped off his socks. It was an old routine, forged over the decades of his off-and-on drinking. “Come now,” I said gently. “Sit up, and let me take off your jacket.”

He obliged. I removed the coat and then unbuttoned his shirt, and took that, too, leaving him in his undershirt. “Lie down, dear,” I said.

But he clasped my hips suddenly, burying his face in my abdomen. “I am so sorry, Elsie. I’m a wreck of a man. You deserved so much better.”

I patted his upper back. This, too, was part of his pattern, the sudden wretchedness. “You did not deserve your portion, Peter. Let me get you an aspirin and some water. Things will look better when you’ve slept.”

As he fell into bed and closed his eyes, I covered him. The blackout shades kept it dark, but in the gloom, I was pierced by the look of him, his eyes sinking into hollows the color of pencil lead, weary lines of strain thinning out his cheeks.

Guilt touched me, and sorrow, and anger, all rolled together in one thread I’d carried heavily for twenty years. Once, he’d been so full of light.

A Late Summer Party

1912

England

—12—

When we arrived in England, I found out I had cousins. So many cousins! Everyone wanted to meet the family of the new earl, so all through that first year we were invited to garden parties and dinner parties and balls and weekends at one country house or another. It was a bewildering and exotic whirl, and if the rituals seemed odd to me, I was delighted by the new wardrobe which my brother insisted was de rigueur. I found myself draped in whisper-thin silks and elegantly beaded bodices, wearing shoes with T-straps and little kitten heels. The ensembles made me feel beautiful.

Which was lucky, as the manners and customs here seemed impenetrable. The local girls had all known each other from the time they were children and didn’t allow room for me to settle in. Mostly I didn’t mind their cuts and sharp snickers, and found them thoroughly awful, but I’d been used to the closeness of friends I’d enjoyed in Nainital, and the lack made me lonely.

At a garden party at a manor house, a particularly horrid knot of girls had trapped me into a silly little revelation of something I couldn’t know. When I realized the trick, I flushed with fury and my temper rose so dangerously that I stormed away into the shade beneath an enormous spreading oak. There, I let myself weep in my fury, wishing I could just go home. “I hate this place!” I cried aloud.

“Oh, dear,” said a young woman. I hadn’t seen her sitting on a bench on the path. “Is it so terrible?”