A Proper Education for Girls (2 page)

“Do we really need a photographer?” she said. “Surely there have been enough people here as it is?” Alice surveyed her four great aunts and her grandmother, whose faces were ranged in baleful desiccation round the dinner table.

Aunt Lambert nodded her agreement. “Indeed. This is simply another of your schemes, Edwin. A waste of time and money, just like all the others.”

“And why get Alice involved?” said Aunt Statham. “She has enough to do without teaching you how to use your own artifacts.”

“Ladies, please,” whispered Old Mrs. Talbot.

“Come, Edwin, my dear,” said Aunt Pendleton gently. “You know Alice has very little recreational time, once she has recorded and researched and filed and goodness only knows what else she gets up to on your behalf—”

“I don't mind tending to the Collection,” said Alice hastily, fearing Aunt Pendleton was about to extol the virtues of more fitting womanly pastimes, such as needlepoint or visiting the poor. “And I've already experimented a little with Father's camera. The results are not unpleasant.”

“Oh yes,” said Aunt Rushton-Bell. “You have made some beautiful pictures, my dear. You are quite the photographer yourself. Indeed, perhaps we don't need this photographer fellow at all. Alice herself could photograph the Collection, if that's what is required?”

Alice looked at her father. It would save money, certainly, though she did not relish spending the next six months photographing the March of Progress. Perhaps it would be better if the photographer came after all.

But it had been many years since Mr. Talbot had listened to an opinion voiced by his female relations, and his aunts' words fluttered past him, like moths into the darkness. Instead, he heard only
that Alice had acquired some practical familiarity with one of his items.

“My dear, your loyalty to the Collection and the knowledge that underpins it is commendable. You know I regard you as my curator? Ah, such a calling! I tell you, Alice, your youth may be over, but oh!, the glories of the mind that accompany a lifetime devoted to tending the finest examples of man's skill and ingenuity. Surplus women are seldom granted such opportunities.”

Alice felt her face turn red.

Mr. Talbot dabbed at his eye with a napkin. “Just make sure the fellow doesn't break anything. My good friend Cattermole recommends him, so he must be a trustworthy fellow, but one can never be too careful.” He glared at the pale faces of his aunts, unnerved for a moment by this sepulchral jury, and turned again to Alice. “I'm sure I can rely on you to do your duty?” He did not appear to expect an answer but turned to gaze greedily at his most recent acquisition, a life-sized electroplated statue depicting Truth overcoming Prejudice. Truth was naked, apart from a strategically draped sheet that seemed to have all but slipped from her hips as she raised her hands in alarm. She had the appearance of having just emerged from a hot bath, her face registering surprise and disgust that she had trodden on the slippery coils of the serpent of Prejudice that someone had carelessly left on the floor.

“And what, may I ask, do we know of this photographer?” persisted Aunt Lambert.

“The fellow has a university degree in … something or other. Medicine, I think. Worked at St. Thomas's with Cattermole for a while, taking photographs of diseased body parts and tumors and such like.”

“And his name, pray?”

“Blake.” Mr. Talbot prised himself out of his chair to run an admiring hand over Truth's electroplated thigh. He stole a glance at his fingertips, as though checking for dust, but appeared to be satisfied with their cleanliness.

“And when is he coming, this Mr. Blake?” said Alice.

“A week from Monday.” He narrowed his eyes. “You seem very interested in him.”

“I merely ask in order to prepare his rooms.”

“Humph.” Mr. Talbot gave his daughter a close stare, as if to ascertain whether she had changed at all since his glance had last rested upon her. He observed her large ears, her heavy eyebrows and low hairline.
What did young men look for in a woman these days?
he pondered, his hand resting for a moment on Truth's burnished rump.
Was it a slender neck? Soulful eyes? Graceful hands?
In his own youth it had been shoulders—soft, white, sloping shoulders. He glanced at the corresponding parts of his daughter's figure. Her shoulders were square. Her neck unremarkable. Her eyes too curious (her gaze almost hostile, he noticed with some disquiet). As for her hands—they were large square hands, hands not unlike his own, other than the fact that his had wiry black hairs sprouting from their backs and hers appeared to be curiously stained with brown blotches. No, he concluded with some relief, Alice was as ugly as ever. It was Lilian who had been beautiful. “Not
that you'll
catch his eye,” he muttered to himself, though it was loud enough for the entire table to hear. “I'll have no worries on that score.”

I
T WAS CUSTOMARY FOR THE WOMEN OF THE
T
ALBOT
household to retreat to the conservatory after dinner. This they did every evening of the year, seeing no need to restrict their use of the place to the spring and summer months. Now, in the darkness of a March evening, lamps within the greenery created small spheres of light like gleaming bubbles of air in a dark fish tank. But it was a tropical fish tank, as beneath wrought-iron grids in the floor, hot-water pipes burbled and throbbed like the intestines of some huge organism. It was a place free from the overbearing presence of Mr. Talbot, as the conservatory—in particular the tropical conservatory—was the one room in the great house where he was least likely to be found. Secretly, Alice suspected that her father felt uncomfortable with the soft, vulnerable greenness of botany, preferring instead the hard, virile facts elicited when man harnessed nature for his own ends. She also suspected that the heat in the hothouse made him sweat uncomfortably, and the humid atmosphere caused his beard to frizz, which he hated. It was for this reason that she kept the heating turned up as high as the plants could tolerate. She also knew that the real reason her father had lost all interest in his botanical collection was because of Lilian. For Lilian, the conservatory and the exquisite beauty of the plants it housed had been a Garden of Eden.

Unlike Mr. Talbot, his elderly aunts and his aged mother found the heavy warmth of the hothouse comforting. Over time, they had
colonized this man-made jungle with the trappings of a civilized parlor, so that among the foliage there lurked numerous armchairs, sofas, and footstools. There was also a surprising number of tables—side tables, card tables, writing desks, a rosewood dining table, even a sideboard. It was like finding a drawing room in the middle of a rain forest.

Now, Mr. Talbot's female relatives settled down into their customary chairs and settees and busied themselves with their usual pastimes; Aunt Lambert took up a book, Aunt Rushton-Bell shuffled a pack of playing cards, Aunt Pendleton untangled a skein of jasmine from the leg of her writing table and rescued her inkwell from the clutches of a nameless creeper. Old Mrs. Talbot closed her eyes, exhausted by the trek through the foliage. Aunt Statham rummaged about beneath a huge dining table. Its surface was littered with jars of water and turpentine, some sprouting brushes, some silted with a spectrum of pigments.

“What are you doing, Aunt?” said Alice.

“Something I should have done a long time ago,” replied Aunt Statham. She lowered herself onto a sofa scarred with bursting welts of horsehair and liberally smeared with red paint. It teetered with canvasses, stretched flat onto wooden frames or rolled up into tubes. “I have decided to retire from painting. The light in here is impossible. The plants have grown so huge that I can hardly see what I'm doing. And my eyesight is going, of course.”

“I can prune everything back,” said Alice.

“It's my fingers too. They're so stiff, you know. And they shake a little too much these days. I can hardly hold the brush steady.”

“You never could, dear,” murmured Aunt Lambert.

“Besides,” continued Aunt Statham, ignoring the interruption, “my paintings are everywhere. DaVinci has made his bed out of a canvas—he couldn't get to his basket anymore.” She pointed to the large orange tomcat coiled on a sagging painting situated above a hot-water pipe. “Would you move him, my dear, and stack that picture with the others? I'm going to get Sluce to take the whole lot up to the attic.”

The cat opened acid yellow eyes and glared at Alice's approaching hands. She raised it gingerly as though it were a hotcake, and placed it, still curled in a ball, onto a stool.

To her surprise, the cat had been sleeping on her sister's face.

“I'd forgotten you'd painted Lilian,” she said, dusting the portrait free of hairs. “You must have done this just before she left.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Statham. “I never finished it. She's supposed to be holding an orchid—you know how she loved them—but I couldn't get the hands right. Or the orchid. It was Lilian who could paint flowers. You know that. Of course, she didn't paint anything else, so it's not surprising she was good at it. She did some beautiful pieces. What a pity your father put them all on the fire.”

“I have one or two hidden away,” said Alice.

“Quite right. Just don't let your father know, or he'll have them off you in a trice! It's unfortunate that you don't paint yourself, my dear, or I could have bequeathed my materials, and my paintings, to you. But then, not everyone is gifted with the artistic genius. You have the right idea. Accept your limitations and try photography instead. There's no skill required to do that, is there?”

“A little.”

“But there's no drawing involved,” insisted Aunt Statham. “It's all simply chemical reactions and so forth. You've said so yourself many times.”

“I suppose I have,” said Alice. She was not really listening. She held up the painting of Lilian, turning it this way and that in the feeble lamplight. Aunt Lambert was right. It was not very good, but Aunt Statham had managed to capture Lilian's half-amused smile, and had given her a knowing look, though this might have been the result of the canvas stretching beneath the weight of the cat. Alice found it unsettling.

“Photography's not quite that straightforward, Aunt,” she said absently. “There's the light. And the exposure time. It's very easy to get it wrong, you know.”

“But the camera simply copies what is directly before you,” insisted Aunt Statham. “It's not art, is it? Art involves skill and time,
patience and insight. Passion, even.
You
simply point your camera box at the subject and your chemicals do the work. Where's the skill in that? A camera may capture the image in all its detail, but it can't capture the spirit of the subject.”

“The camera will render painting obsolete, Mrs. Statham,” declared Aunt Lambert briskly as she dealt the cards for whist. “Particularly portraits. But then, we're all obsolete in the end. Are you in, dear? You can pair up with Mrs. Pendleton. Or Mrs. Rushton-Bell.”

“Obsolete? Surely not!” cried Aunt Statham. “Why, a photograph simply shows us as we are—tired, gap toothed, old, and dull. There is no flamboyance in photographs. No mystery. No fervor or feeling. Oh no, we will always need portraits and painting. How else will we hide the drab reality of our appearance from posterity?” Aunt Statham unrolled a canvas that had already been removed from its frame and gazed fondly at its subject—a ferocious-looking young man with the high neckerchief and extravagant sideburns of fifty years earlier. “Ah, the young Mr. Reynolds,” she sighed. “Such
passion.”
She began a dreamy recitation of all the artists she had once known—including he whose portrait she was now holding. There were many of them, it seemed, and all had marveled at her beauty and vitality, this last being a quality they felt unable to capture with anything other than the most vivid of media. Oils it had been, every time. “Certainly a mere photograph would have been useless,” she added, eyeing Aunt Lambert. “And will the photographers of today be as charming as the artists they supplant?”

“We'll soon find out,” said Alice. “Mr. Blake will be with us by next week.”

But Aunt Statham had not been looking for an answer to her question. She was lost in a whirling past that no one but she remembered. Ah, how the young men had danced and leaped around her! Alice found herself wondering how Mr. Blake could possibly hope to match the enthusiasm of these bohemian admirers.

“Ah well.” Aunt Statham sighed. “They were all penniless, of course. And then I met my husband. He was not artistically inclined
in any way. A clergyman. Like Lilian's husband, but not quite so meanly proportioned. Still, he was a dull fellow compared to the other young men of my acquaintance. Dull but reliable. But that was all a long time ago now. Perhaps this photographer fellow will make a nice husband for you, my dear?”

“Alice doesn't need a husband,” snapped Aunt Lambert. “And Lilian didn't need one either. That was her father's idea. He should have left her alone. And sending her off to India too, as if being the wife of that dreadful fellow was not punishment enough.”