A couple came over to greet the Mylins, who rose. Elsie glanced at Digby’s hands. He extended his right hand, flexed the fingers, and she smiled sheepishly, caught in the act. She studied it carefully, reconciling it with what she remembered. She nodded in approval and then looked steadily at him. He couldn’t look away, didn’t need to. Seventeen years Elsie’s senior, at that moment he felt they were equals. He was an expert on violent, tragic loss; now she had joined his ranks. He knew a simple truth: there was never anything healing one could say. One could only be. The best friends in such times were those who had no agenda other than to be present, to offer themselves, as Franz and Lena had done for him. Digby tendered himself silently.
After a while he spoke. “A few years ago, I saw your paintings at the art exhibition in Madras. I should have written to say how splendid they were.” He happened to visit Madras while the exhibits were still up. Elsie’s work had all been sold, but on the day of his visit he learned that one buyer had withdrawn and so Digby acquired the painting. It was a portrait of an overweight woman in her fifties or sixties, seated, empress-like, in a chair, wearing traditional Malayali Christian garb of white chatta and mundu, her large gold crucifix on a chain sitting atop her delicate kavani. Her hair was pulled back into a bun so severely that it appeared to lift up the tip of her nose. The viewer saw something discordant and pretentious about her pose, a disingenuousness in her smile and in her eyes. The power of the painting came from the model’s unawareness that the canvas gave her away.
“I met my painting again in your living room just now,” Elsie said, smiling. He waited, but there wasn’t more.
“What’s it like to see your work long after you let it go?”
A fleeting trace of pleasure crossed her face, an emotion that hadn’t found purchase for a while. She considered her response. “It was like . . . running into myself in the wild.” She laughed, a hollow sound. “Does that make any sense?” He nodded. Their voices were low. “After I got over the surprise, I was pleased with it. Usually, I want to fix things. But I was satisfied . . . I also knew that the artist was no longer the same person. If I did it again, it might be quite different.”
She looked down at her hands, which were quite still in her lap.
Digby said, “Art is never finished. Only abandoned.” She looked up surprised. “So said Leonardo da Vinci,” he added. “Or maybe Michelangelo. Or maybe I made that up.”
Her laugh was delightful to hear, like a solemn child tricked into revealing her playful side. Digby laughed too. When one lived alone, the loudest laughter went unwitnessed and therefore was no better than silence.
Elsie was, he thought, without blemishes on the outside. Flawless. Her scars, her burns, and her contractures were all on the inside, invisible . . . unless one gazed into her eyes: then it was like looking into a still pond and gradually making out the sunken car with its trapped occupants at the bottom. You’re not alone, he wanted to say. Elsie met his gaze and didn’t look away.
CHAPTER 82
The Work of Art
1950, Gwendolyn Gardens
That night his bungalow was alive, with four of them populating it, the rooms all lit up, and the red block-print Jaipur tablecloth like a blazing campfire around which they gathered. They lingered around the table once dinner was cleared, the conversation and laughter and drinks flowing. Elsie stayed silent but seemed soothed by their voices.
The next morning, Elsie didn’t appear for breakfast. Lena and Franz left for the opening session. Digby stayed back. When she emerged at eleven, she drank tea, declining the eggs and sausages. “You went to a lot of trouble,” she said apologetically. She had washed and loosely braided her hair, and she wore a light-green sari. The shadows under her eyes suggested the night had been difficult. Perhaps all her nights were so.
“No trouble at all.” He noticed her studying the crudely shaped buns in the skillet. “That’s bannock. Franz ate enough to shingle a roof, but he left you a few. It’s an old Scottish recipe, just flour, water, and butter. Cromwell and I lived on it when we camped nearby, while we tore down Müller’s old house. It had too many ghosts. I’d make bannock in a skillet over the campfire. Here, just try a wee piece,” he said, topping it with butter and marmalade. She put it in her mouth and nodded approvingly.
“I like the big windows all around,” she said. “Great light.” He was enormously pleased by her approval. She took a second helping and put honey on it. He wanted to say that the honey was from his estate, but he didn’t want to break the spell. “Shouldn’t you be going to the meeting?” she said softly, in her low-pitched, distinctive voice.
“I won’t be missed. I don’t sit on committees like Franz and Lena.”
“Gwendolyn Gardens?” she said, while chewing. “The name of your estate—”
“My mother,” he said simply. For an instant, his mother was in the room, looking on approvingly. Elsie nodded. Digby was thinking of the portrait they drew together. His maw. Another time perhaps he might tell her.
“Elsie, I thought . . .” He hadn’t thought at all; he was making it up, a surgeon with gauze over a probing finger, looking for a tissue plane. “Might you please take a walk with me?”
He led her into the west estate, through a corridor between high grasses where after the rains two species of butterfly, the Malabar raven and the Malabar rose, came to visit—but never together. His conceit was to think of them as his, as his creations. In answer to his silent plea, a Malabar rose flew before them, the vivid red of its slender body underscoring its coal-black wings. Digby stopped in his tracks and Elsie ran into him, her softness meeting his bony back. The Malabar rose was sleek, streamlined, with dark swallowtails on the wings that to Digby were like the engine cowlings of a plane. She drew closer to look.
A line of tea-pluckers, chattering away, came toward them, and the butterfly took flight. The women turned bashful and silent. Digby thought an earthy and vital life force rose off them like steam as they threaded past. Elsie seemed to drink them in. They hid their smiles with their loose, trailing headcloths, and politeness kept their eyes down. Digby, hands together, murmured, “Vanakkam,” since his workers were Tamilians from across the state line. Elsie’s hands rose too. The women responded eagerly, in bright voices, cloths falling away to reveal shy smiles as they slipped by, now stealing glances at Digby’s beautiful guest. Elsie watched them as they disappeared into the sun.
“The light up here . . . is so special,” she said. “As a child I thought it was because we were closer to heaven. I called it angel light.”
They cut uphill, following an old elephant trail. The bungalow was at five thousand feet, and they’d climbed five hundred more. His breath was short. Should he have warned Elsie? He didn’t turn to see how she was doing. Let her be. That had been Cromwell’s remedy for Digby when he’d landed with his burns at the Mylins’ guest cottage at AllSuch. To silently lead. To let nature do all the talking.
They were panting when at last they came to the outcrop of white rock pushing out like a hand giving its blessing to the valley below. It stood out from the brown rocks. The tribals called it the Chair of the Goddess. On its tabletop, petitioners had broken coconuts, left flowers, and smeared sandalwood paste. Digby handed Elsie his flask and she took eager gulps, her face shiny with effort, not taking her eyes away from the breathtaking view.
Whenever Digby stood here, he imagined he was perched on the goddess’s belly and sighting down past her thighs to the verdant, widening valley between her knees that turned to dusty plains at her distant ankles. He hoped Elsie felt it worth the climb.
Before he could warn her (and who but a child would need warning?), she strode out to the table’s edge, pausing there like a diver on the high board. Step back! He bit off the words, terrified that he might startle her. In all the years he’d come here he’d never dreamed of getting that close to the edge.