Page 21 of The Christmas Invitation
She gestured to a long row of books nearby, which alternated between large hardbacks and shorter paperbacks, like a strange fossil spine … a spine of spines, in fact.
‘Stone Deadwas my first. Bit dated, but then, so am I.’
‘I think I’d like to start with that one,’ I said, finding the paperback and feeling strangely guilty about the hole it left on the shelf, though it was hardly akin to removing the keystone of the universe and watching the sky fall in.
Going by the array of computer monitors and equipment on the U-shaped desk, I wouldn’t have said Clara was old-fashioned inanyway.
‘Can you get the internet OK here?’ I enquired. ‘I haven’t tried yet.’ In fact, I didn’t think I’d turned on either my phone or iPad since my arrival, but then, I had had other things on my mind.
‘Oh, yes, broadband. You have to be very unlucky these days to be beyond its reach. Just as well we have it, too, because I’m constantly emailing colleagues. And I’ve just got a new version of a very clever program to play with,’ she added enthusiastically, propelling her sturdy wheeled office chair over to the middle monitor without rising from it and quickly bringing up a screen that showed several small fragments of incised clay tablets.
‘Cuneiform, Hittite,’ she explained. ‘The pieces appear to be from the same clay tablet, but the images have been obtained from several different sources. Finds in the past were so often divided up and sold on to collectors and museums, not always with their provenance. But luckily I have a photographic memory for where I’ve spotted finds that might be part of the same inscription and with this program, you can bring them together to see if they really do fit.’
She demonstrated, moving the fragments about and turning them round. It was quite fascinating, like a jigsaw puzzle without the box, so you weren’t sure that all the pieces belonged together, or quite how it would turn out.
‘Of course, it’s not as good as actually playing with a tray of pieces,’ she said regretfully. ‘You just don’t have that same feel for what should go where, even if they are too broken to fit neatly any more.’
‘I didn’t even know you could do that on a computer,’ I said. ‘But then, I just can’t seem to get interested much in the internet, or phones, or anything else my friends seem to find so riveting. Perhaps being brought up in the commune, with only a landline phone and the radio had something to do with it. I can’t even get that interested in the TV most of the time, unless it’s documentaries. I prefer to read my fiction and see the pictures in my head.’
‘I understand what you mean. In my opinion, the internet is a good tool, but a poor master. And sadly, it does seem to have mastered and enslaved an entire generation – when they aren’t binge-watching whole inane TV series.’
She had that spot-on, I thought.
‘Don’t you feel the need to tweet about the day-to-day minutiae of your life every five minutes?’ she asked with a smile. ‘My niece, Zelda, does that.’
‘No, I’d rather just live my life rather than record it. And the same for photos. I want to look at things directly, not through a lens. I do take pictures of my sitters on my iPad, though, to help me with the portraits: to get the pose right each time, and to jog my memory for small details if I’m completing them in the studio.’
‘You’re a very unusual young woman,’ she remarked, and I thought, but didn’t say, that she was an extremely unusual oldone. Not thatoldseemed the right term for someone so radiantly vital, and her mind certainly wasn’t.
The light from the screen illuminated the interestingly strong bones of her face and I found myself looking at her now with the eye of a painter. She’d picked up a chunk of engraved stone that had been weighing down a heap of papers and was absently turning it over in her hands, the carnelian seal ring glowing dully as they moved. She was dressed today in a cherry-red jumper, black cord trousers and silver earrings in the form of ankhs. A long string of Egyptian turquoise paste beads hung round her neck, which contrasted wonderfully with the jumper.
Behind her was the bright patchwork of book spines on the shelves and, I now noticed, a tall wooden post carved with the brightly painted grimacing heads of various creatures. A bird squatted on top, reminding me of the fierce eagle on the stair post.
‘Is that a totem pole?’ I asked.
‘A small-scale replica of one. I commissioned it when I visited Canada a few years ago and had it shipped over. The Customs people X-rayed it for drugs before they let me collect it, because they didn’t believe that anyone would pay that much shipping for a carved post.’
‘I love it,’ I said. ‘And I want to paint you just the way you are now … that is, if you wouldn’t mind my invading your space?’
‘Not at all – invade away,’ she said amiably. ‘When I’m working, I soon forget anyone’s in the room anyway.’
I fished the iPad out of the depths of my tapestry shoulder bag, switched it on, then snapped her. She looked faintly startled.
‘I want to get that exact pose again,’ I explained.
‘You can set your easel up right where you are now and leave it there as long as you need to,’ she suggested.
‘Great, but you’ll have to tell me when I can start and how long you’ll sit for each session.’
‘You’ll need good light, so I could give you an hour or two in the mornings, say from ten? Will that do? Not today, obviously – it’s too late – and I want to show you round and let you settle in first.’
‘That would be perfect, and perhaps when you’re not using the room I could come in and work on the background a little, too.’
‘There we are, then, all settled,’ she said, turning off the computers and getting up. ‘Come along – time for the sixpenny tour.’
By daylight the drawing room looked even bigger than it had the previous evening, and now the mustard velvet drapes were flung back from a square bay window recess, which had padded seats up each side, to reveal an impressive view.
‘You can just see Underhill to the right. It’s that squat, rambling house there, below the Starstone hill.’
