Though I often thought about what I had witnessed, I didn’t begin to understand what had gone on against the outbuilding wall that Christmas night until much later, and even then I had no way of knowing how culpable Gloria had been. What had Mark been trying to do to her? To me, at the time, Gloria had seemed to be resisting, struggling, but when I discovered the act of sex for myself not so very much later, I found it could often be misleading that way; one often seemed to be struggling and resisting, especially during the wildest moments. Looking back now, I’d call it attempted rape, but memory, over time, has a way of altering its content.
So I did the best I could to put the whole episode out of my mind. I certainly agreed that Gloria was right not to involve Matthew. That would only have started a fight and upset everyone. His going away soon would have made it worse, too; he would be worried enough to leave her behind as it was.
Sometimes, though, at night in bed as I listened to the bombers drone over Rowan Woods, I would remember the scene, with Gloria’s bare white thighs above the stocking-tops, and those strange muffled sounds she was making that seemed lost somewhere between pain and acquiescence, and I would feel a strange fluttering excitement inside me, as if I were on the verge of some great discovery that never quite came.
On the fifteenth of January, 1942, Sergeant Matthew Shackleton shipped out. He didn’t know where he was headed, but we all assumed he would be going to North Africa to fight with the Eighth Army.
Imagine our surprise when Gloria got a letter from Matthew in Cape Town, South Africa, three weeks later. Of course, they could hardly sail through the Mediterranean, but even so, Cape Town seemed a long way around to go to North Africa. Then we got another letter from Colombo, in Ceylon, then Calcutta, India. What a fool I was! I could have kicked myself for not guessing earlier. They didn’t need bridges and roads in the desert, of course, but they needed them in the jungles of the Far East.
The drive to Leeds took less time than Annie had expected. She parked north of the city center and walked down New Briggate to The Headrow. The place was busy, pavements jammed with shoppers, all wearing thin, loose clothing to alleviate the blistering heat, which seemed even more oppressive in the city than it did out Harkside way. A juggler performed for children in Dortmund Square. The sun dazzled Annie, reflecting on shop windows, making it hard to see what was inside. Annie put on her sunglasses and set off through the crowds toward Cookridge Street. A little research after her chat with Ray had revealed that Leeds City Art Gallery had in its collection several works by Michael Stanhope, and Annie wanted to see them.
Once inside, she picked up a guidebook at the reception area. The Stanhopes were on the second floor. Four of them. She started up the broad stone staircase.
Annie had never liked art galleries, with their rarefied atmosphere, uniformed custodians and stifling aura of hush. No doubt this dislike was largely due to her father’s influence. Though he loved the great artists, he despised the barren way their works were put on display. He thought great art ought to be exhibited on a constant rotation in pubs, offices, trattorias, cafés, churches and bingo parlors.
He approved of the Henry Moores standing out in open weather on the Yorkshire Moors; he also approved of David Hockney’s faxes, photo collages and opera-set designs. Annie had grown up in an atmosphere of irreverence toward the established art world, with its stuffy galleries, plummy accents and inflated prices. Because of this, she always felt self-conscious in galleries, as if she were an interloper. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she always thought the guards were watching her, from one room to the next, just waiting for her to reach out and touch something and set off all the alarms.
When she found the Stanhopes, she was at first disappointed. Two of them were rather dull landscapes, not of Hobb’s End, but other Dales scenes. The third, a little more interesting, showed a distant view of Hobb’s End in its hollow, smoke drifting from chimneys, the bright vermilions and purples of sunset splashed across the sky. A fine effect, but it told Annie nothing she didn’t know.
The fourth painting, though, was a revelation.
Titled Reclining Nude, according to the catalog, the painting reminded Annie of Goya’s Naked Maja, which she had seen with Ray when it came briefly to the National Gallery in 1990. No matter what his opinions about galleries were, Ray certainly never missed the opportunity to view a great work.
The woman reclined on a bed in much the same pose as Goya’s original, propped on a pillow, hands behind her head, looking directly at the painter with some sort of highly charged erotic challenge in her expression, bedsheets ruffled beneath her. Also, like the Maja’s, her round breasts were widely spaced and her legs bent a little, awkwardly placed as her lower half twisted slightly toward the viewer. Her waist was thin, her hips in perfect proportion, and a little triangle of hair showed between her clasped legs, connected to the navel by a barely perceptible line of fair down.
There were differences, though. Stanhope’s model had golden-blonde hair rather than black, her nose was shorter, her large eyes a striking blue, her lips fuller and redder. Even so, the resemblance was too close to be accident, especially the frank eroticism of her expression and the hint of pleasures recently enjoyed, conveyed by the rumpled sheets. Stanhope had obviously been strongly affected by Goya’s original, and when he had encountered the same sort of sensual power in a model, he had remembered this and painted it.
But there was more to Stanhope’s vision. As Annie remembered, the background of the Naked Maja was dark and impenetrable; it seemed as if the bed were floating in space, the only important thing in the universe.
Stanhope hadn’t given his model a realistic background either, but if you looked very closely, you could see images of tanks, airplanes, armies on the march, explosions and swastikas. In other words, he had painted the war into the background. It was subtle; the images didn’t jump right out at you and dominate the work, but they were there, and when you looked closely, you couldn’t ignore them: eroticism and weapons of mass destruction. Make of it what you would.
Annie glanced at the note on the wall beside the painting, then she stepped back with a gasp that made one of the custodians look up from his newspaper.
“Everything all right, miss?” he called out.
Annie put her hand over her heart. “What? Yes. Oh, yes. Sorry.”
He eyed her suspiciously and went back to his paper.
Annie looked again. It wasn’t mentioned in the catalog, but there it was, plain as day, below Reclining Nude. A subtitle: Gloria, Autumn 1944.
SEVEN
On Monday morning, Banks looked again at the postcard reproduction of Reclining Nude: Gloria, Autumn 1944 that lay on his desk. It was an uncanny and disconcerting experience to see an artist’s impression of the flesh that had probably once clothed the filth-covered bones they found last week, and to feel aroused by looking at it. Banks felt an exciting flush of adolescent guilt, the same as he had on looking at his first pictures of naked women in Swank or Mayfair.
Annie had picked up several copies of the postcard at the art gallery and, thrilled by her discovery, phoned him late on Saturday afternoon. They met for dinner at Cockett’s Hotel, in Hawes, with every intention of going their separate ways later, both having agreed that they shouldn’t rush things, that they needed their time alone. After the second bottle of wine, though, instead of leaving, they took a room and woke to Sunday-morning church bells. After a leisurely breakfast, they left, agreeing to restrict their trysts to weekends.