Page 57 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“The entire body of work, Elsie,” she said in a churlish tone that had been cropping up every now and then. “I do not know how to make it more plain.”

“What do you hope to find, Mother? Perhaps you can just tell me.”

She looked out the window. “I would know what you carried in your heart, Elsie. I would reconcile the choices you have made for my sake.” The rest was unspokenbefore I die.

I picked up a kitten and held it to my neck, allowing the rattling purr to pour into my ear, soothing the sudden emotion that rolled through me. Could I reveal myself so fully to her?

Slowly, I nodded.

“I would do it now,” she said. “When I feel well.”

I rose, settling the kitten on the chair. “Then we shall do it now.”

I helped her up the stairs. So many we had to pause four times. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be better for me to bring them down to you?”

“No,” she said with some irritability.

“All right.” We finished the trek, and I settled her on the overstuffed wing chair I kept in the corner. She was sweating and out of breath, her lips faintly blue. I flung back the blackout curtains, and I opened the windows slightly to allow some airflow. “Are you too cool?”

She shook her head, but I could see she was exhausted by the trek. “Mother, I can easily bring the paintings down so you needn’t—”

“I’m here,” she said, again with an edge of peevishness. So unlike her. Was it merely illness? The effort of trying to keep up a good show?

“All right, then. Where would you like to begin?”

“I haven’t seen many of the paintings you did in India when you went back.”

A stirring disturbance. “Mostly I left them there, of course.”

Her clear eyes rested on my face. “Sketchbooks, then.”

“Sketchbooks are quite personal,” I said, remembering things those books might hold, intimate and revealing things. “I would prefer to leave those on their shelves.”

“Oh, come now, Elsie.” The thing about my mother people had always discounted was the fact that she had a will of iron. What she set her sights upon, she achieved.

In this, however, I would not allow it. “Let me see if there are any paintings left in the closet.”

“While you’re looking, choose a sketchbook at random and let me leaf through it.”

I’d had several out, remembering the days at Slade, and the juicy summer of 1914, before war was declared and tore it all down. I grabbed one, gave it a cursory glance to be sure there was nothing too shocking in it, and dived into the closet.

It was a large space, fitted with vertical dividers that held paintings of many sizes. I liked a big canvas, so there were a lot of those. I knew I didn’t have many from India, for I really had left them all there, but I remembered a handful of studies I’d made in preparation for the portraits of Tanveer and Channan, and when he was born, Kirandeep in her arms. I searched for them, flipping and tugging out many in the same size I remembered doing.

Instead, I found a group of student paintings, experiments I’d engaged in when I was trying so hard to understand what was mine and what belonged to things outside of me.

Smiling, I took a stack of them out to show my mother, remembering the spring of studying artists in all the museums of London, Rocky at my side.

A Trip to the Museum

Spring 1914

London

—32—

Tanveer’s letter about Orientalism in my work weighed on me. In the cold of a February afternoon, I went to the studio where I had been assigned a small but agreeable area beneath a north-facing window. My easel was set up with a painting in progress, a rather desultory portrait of a female model, which I hadn’t liked from the beginning and liked less each day. I glared at it, hands beneath my armpits.

The studio was a shared space, but few other artists were about today, discouraged perhaps by the wet weather or a head cold that had been making its way through our ranks. A woman I knew very little painted a still life of flowers across the room, and even from this distance, I could see that she had developed her own language of art. In her brushstrokes, her shapes, the palette she employed, a soft garden-like tone on tone of purples and blues, lilacs in a blue vase. Sunlight streamed through a window, a single plum dropped by the vase, and a pair of gardening gloves suggested a person just out of scene.