She has placed me on a table and draped a sheet around my body. Charles came with us, but after a quarter of an hour he flew out again. Not enough action. And nothing to eat.
“Yes. That’s good now. I’m sorry, darling, I really do appreciate your posing for me. I know it’s hot.” She takes a step back, squeezes her eyes half-shut.
The tear in the wallpaper becomes a person, an animal, a patch.
“Ladies.” His voice.
“Paul!” Margaret says. “What are you doing here?”
“Your uncle asked me to come and fetch you. Hallo, Gwen. You’re looking quite, um, extraordinary.”
“I’m not allowed to move,” I reply. “Talking counts as moving.”
Paul says they’re going sailing and we have to come along.
“Art First,” Margaret says. “I need a little longer. When are you setting off?”
Has he come here because of me? I keep still, watch how they’re talking to each other. He clearly isn’t seeing me any more, yet now he’s looking at the painting and then for an instant, probingly, at me.
“We set off in fifteen minutes,” he answers.
“Then you must leave at once,” Margaret tells him. She straightens her checked skirt.
He looks at me again before he leaves the room, as if there’s something in me to be discovered. I can sense the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet, my skin in places that are otherwise silent.
Margaret lays a few more brushstrokes, but the visit has distracted her, it seems. “We should go really, don’t you think?”
“I don’t particularly want to go sailing.”
“Well, I believe I’m ready.” With the little finger of her right hand she wipes away some of the paint. I sit up. My feet have gone to sleep. I pull my dress on again, over my head.
“What do you think?” She turns the painting towards me.
I see a kind of goddess, or someone from another era, someone who has my face but is more beautiful, someone with a longer and more elegant body. There’s a Crow in the corner of the painting, sitting on a pillar.
“You’ve invented that bosom,” I say. I understand now why Paul was looking at me like that.
She smiles. “Your spitting image, right?”
“What will you do with it?”
“Oh, exhibit it, of course. Perhaps here, at the end of the season. It’s perfect here.” She leaves the room ahead of me, letting the canvas stay where it is. From a distance I can see that she has painted a window behind me, looking out on the sea.
“Lennie! Margie!” My father waves at us from the front of the boat.
I take his outstretched hand and step onto the deck. I walk to the stern, wood on water. I tug the fabric of my dress forward, then let it fall back against my skin. And again. Coolness.
Dudley is smoking, his long limbs stretched out on the bench. He rolls his eyes as I get closer: “Kingsley didn’t want to join us. Playing tennis.” Kingsley has played tennis every day this summer. Not once has he gone bird-watching with me.
Margaret shifts Dudley aside and sits down next to him. “Wonderful! Sailing in this weather.” She stretches out her long legs and closes her eyes against the sun.
“Good to see you, ladies. And now we’re just waiting for Paul and Dimitri.” Mother is wearing her large tinted sunglasses and the dress everyone says makes her look so young. A sister to her daughters, not their mother. “Cook has made sandwiches for us,” she says.
I walk to the boat rail, towards the hills in the distance.
“Ship ahoy!” Paul is standing on the quayside, bathed in light. Dimitri appears behind him. He’s a poet too and one of Paul’s friends. He sports a little moustache, twisted up at the ends with brilliantine. He is the son of Mr McWest, and McWest is a millionaire who spends the summer on his estate just outside Aberdovey. He’s had his eye on Olive for a while now, but in her opinion he’s a mere ne’er-do-well. “We’ve brought apples. And guitars!”
They dash down the stone steps and leap from the jetty onto the boat. My father pushes the boat off with an exaggerated flourish. We sail towards the hills, past banks of silt, near the castellated folly on the rock with the pine trees. The flag in front of the building is drooping. I go and sit on the foredeck with Father. When we were here last week we saw Peewits.
“When can we go to Ynys-hir again?” Father and I have gone bird-watching together these past few summers, on day trips to the salt marshes further up the coast.
“Darling, you’re too old for that now. It’s high time you started to behave like a young lady,” my mother says, pulling my skirt straight.
“I didn’t ask you,” I say, shaking her hand off, shifting away from her.
“Hallo, Gwen.” Dimitri sits down beside me and gives me a hand damp with perspiration. “Beautiful performance last week.” He laughs a little. He has a high-pitched giggle with which he often ends his sentences. His milk-white legs are going to turn bright red in an instant.
“Thank you.”
The rocks change from grey to white, yellowish on top.
“Paul said you were modelling. For Margaret. Are you an artist too?” His eyes blink against the light. His nervousness makes me nervous.
“I think I’ll go and sit under the awning. I’m about to get sunburned.” I stand up. “And no. I’m not an artist. No time for that lark.”
“All right. So, now I know.” He giggles again.
My father is talking to Paul, claps him on the shoulder. Dudley hangs over the rail, touching the water with his fingertips. Olive is reading. My mother is looking for a glass in the picnic basket. My eyes meet Margaret’s. The water swishes.
“Who’d like some lunch?” Mother is handing out the packed sandwiches.
Dimitri sits down beside Margaret. She starts to sketch him. He finds a pen and a notebook, shouts that he’s going to write a poem about her, that she’s a woman like a poem.
The bread is warm and soft, soggy, and the pieces of cucumber slide onto the napkin. I fish them up and wolf them down. I sense that Paul is looking at me.
“Delicious,” my father says. “Delicious bread. I needed that.” He pats his belly, which has greatly increased in size since he stopped work.
My mother gives him a disapproving look.
Paul comes and sits beside me. “How are your birds?” He tells me about a composer who works Blackbird song into his music.
“Olive, you must have a sandwich too.” My mother tries to push it into Olive’s hands, but my sister keeps them tightly closed.
“No, Mama. I’m dieting.”
Mother isn’t eating either. “Do you think it’s time for a toast?” she asks.
Papa nods. “It’s always time for a toast.” He nods again. “And it’s certainly the right time now.”
Everyone stands up. Margaret and Dimitri put their things down and stand next to Dudley.
My father declaims his piece about the Trojan War and then says, “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” everyone replies, and then Dudley pushes Margaret over the boat rail, immediately leaping in after her. Dimitri and Paul shed their garments and dive in too.
“I think perhaps they shouldn’t swim here,” my father says, as he heaves the boat to. “The currents are treacherous.”
My mother nods her head in agreement, because he has made a pronouncement. I very much doubt she could repeat what he said.
The tall grass tickles my legs. I walk on till I can no longer hear the others, squat behind a rhododendron bush and pull down my cotton knickers. I relieve myself, letting the stream flow between my feet. Too fiercely, it splashes against my calves. I hear something and swiftly pull up my knickers. Perhaps it was a rabbit in the distance, or a squirrel, perhaps only the wind rattling the twigs. I wipe my left calf against the calf of my right leg. The last drops have evaporated before I’ve even taken four steps.