Page 27 of The Christmas Invitation
The strong features didn’t really suit a small boy, but I knew he’d grow into them and turn into a handsome young man.I don’t usually want to paint children – their faces are generally so unformed – but Teddy would make a good subject.
It was just a pity I wouldn’t have the time.
Teddy returned and, barely stopping to wash down a scone with diluted blackcurrant juice, fetched a painting book, planting himself firmly on one of the sofas next to me. (There were three sofas and this time I’d chosen the one that didn’t try to eat me.)
‘I bet you haven’t seen one of these before, Meg,’ he said. ‘It’s a magic painting book!’
‘You’re quite right. I don’t think I’ve ever come across amagicone.’
He turned the pages, revealing old-fashioned pictures of ladies in crinolines, horses pulling ploughs and women in bonnets, feeding hens. The black outlines had been washily filled in with a limited palette of slightly mottled colours.
‘I’ve done half of them already.’ He turned a page to a fresh one, featuring a thatched cottage fronted by a border of flowers. ‘You don’t need any paint, you just use water and then the colours appear – like magic.’
‘I’m not sure you can get those painting books any more,’ said Tottie. ‘I remember them from when I was a girl, but Sybil found a few unused ones in the old nursery at Underhill, when she was having a big clear-out after her father died, and she gave them to Teddy.’
‘It looks like fun,’ I said.
‘It is,’ agreed Teddy, ‘but you have to stay inside the lines and not use too much water on your brush, or the colours run into each other. I’ll show you.’
‘Not on the sofa, darling,’ said Clara. ‘Put the book on the end of the coffee table.’
She pushed the tray containing the teapot up a bit to make room.
Den, who’d been silently sitting on one of the Egyptian leather poufs, consuming scones at a rate of knots, said he’d fetch a mug of water, if someone else would take charge of stopping Lass, who was lurking greedily beneath the table, from stealing the eatables. Soon Teddy was demonstrating the technique of producing colour from thin air. Or thin water.
He allowed me to paint one of the tall hollyhocks and it was strangely satisfying when it suddenly blossomed into a grainy yellow. It made me remember the time, many years ago, when the postmistress in the nearest village to the Farm had given me a small painting-by-numbers set of a swan on a river. I’d dutifully filled in each section with the numbered colours and then, stepping back, seen how surprisingly they blended together into a whole. I’d realized then that nothing in nature was one colour, but made up of many different shades, some of them quite unexpected. It had been exciting … and the oily smell of the little pots of paint a part of it.
Presently, Henry came in to have his teacup replenished and sat down next to Clara, who looked questioningly at him.
‘Sometimes the words flow, other times they trickle, and occasionally you have to squeeze them out of the tube,’ he said.
‘Henry’s writing a book of linked poems about Starstone and the Great Flood, pulling in several of the ancient stories of other great floods, including the biblical one,’ Clara told me. ‘It’s sort of autobiographical. And I’m writing my actual memoirs, non-poetic and just for fun, really.’
‘They both sound fascinating,’ I said, though I wondered how Clara found the time to fit any more projects into her busy life.
I was already starting to become familiar with the very assorted inhabitants of the Red House and could well understand how they had compacted into the informal, workable, extended family unit it now was. It was much the way the core members of River’s commune had settled down and taken their permanent places in the structure, while the summer helpers – transient yurt visitors and those who used the campsite – came and went like colourful flotsam on the tide.
I expect that was why I was so quickly feeling at home here, and had it not been for Lex’s dark presence hovering just off-stage and due to take a more central role over Christmas, I might just have found myself sucked in and settled there indefinitely …
As if on cue, Clara said, ‘Lex always starts his Christmas stay with us from the day of the Solstice, and it will be so nice for him to have an old friend here this year, Meg.’
‘I’m hardly that,’ I said quickly. ‘And in any case, since the portraits should be well forward by then, even if not quite finished, I’ll be able to leave at the same time as River. I’ve realized how much I’d miss the Yule celebrations at the Farm.’
Henry looked deeply disappointed. ‘Oh, please don’t run away before Christmas! It would be so much fun to introduce you to all the traditions.’
‘Of course you’ll stay,’ Clara decreed. ‘I know you’re simply being polite, because you think you’d be intruding on a family party, but that isn’t so at all.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Tottie. ‘The more, the merrier!’
‘Iwant you to stay, too,’ Teddy said with flattering enthusiasm, looking up from the painting book.
‘It’s very kind of you, but I’m not just being polite,’ I said. I knew I would have stayed in a flash, if it hadn’t been for Lex.
‘Well, there’s plenty of time for you to change your mind later, if you want to,’ said Henry kindly.
‘True,’ agreed Clara. ‘And I’m certain that by the twenty-first, you’ll be so happily settled here and painting away in your studio that you won’t want to leave us.’
I decided there was no point in saying any more just then: Clara probably wouldn’t believe I was really leaving until she saw me driving off!
