At the Edge of Summer

It was cold for November as I hurried along Hutcheson Street, so cold the heels of my boots slid on the cobbles. Already it was getting dark, but that was Scotland for you. Never giving you enough day to do what you needed to do, at least in the winter anyway.

As I sped around the corner onto Trongate, the ice proved too much and I went down. My good pair of stockings ruined. And a tear along the side seam of my blue skirt to boot. It was one of two I’d bought new since arriving in Glasgow, the sorts of solid, serviceable affairs that Scottish women seemed to wear. Within the Mackintosh Building, I could wear my loose striped skirts, my red vests, my bright head scarves, the way I did in Africa. Among the art students, style was a matter of personal taste. But I kept my serviceable skirts and my green coat for venturing out into the city.

I stood and brushed dust and shards of ice from my skirt. It really was silly, all this rushing. In the end I’d return to an empty flat and a supper by myself. Likely toast and lukewarm tea again. The flat was always cold, but wrapped in layers of shawls, I’d trace pictures in the frost on my window. Nanny Proud always told me that a cold window could freeze away tears. All of these years, and I still believed her.

But it was in vain, all the rushing. Robert Miller’s was shut tight. I leaned against the shop window, shielded my eyes, and peered in, but it was already dark inside. Surely I wasn’t that late. Mockingly, the clock on the Tron church tolled out the hour. I was.

“Zut!” I hammered my fists against the window. “Not again!” Of course, the window didn’t answer, and so I turned and slumped against it.

“Please, miss, you’ve been injured,” someone said softly. I looked up to see a roughly dressed man with a walking stick politely averting his gaze from my legs. A spot of blood had soaked through the bottom of my skirt, darkening the hem.

Turning from the man, I flicked up the hem far enough to see a scrape on my calf. “Oh for goodness’ sake! Torn and spotted?” I pulled a folded handkerchief from my sleeve and pressed it against the wound.

“Do you need assistance?”

The poor man couldn’t even look directly at my leg without turning red. Little help he’d be. “I’m quite well, thank you.” I glared at the darkened window. “I would be better, however, if the shop stayed open long enough for me to buy cadmium yellow. One cannot paint France without it.”

He looked up at that. “You paint?”

“I’m a student, you see, at the art school.” I tucked the edges of the handkerchief in the hole left in my stocking and drew myself up.

“If you don’t mind me saying, you look too young for such study.”

Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. I was hardly young compared to the beribboned girls in my classes. “Too young? Or too female?”

“Oh, not at all! Rather, I sometimes think lasses may have surer fingers for art.” His accent was thickly northern, words curling in the air. “They’re not afraid to let their imaginations spill from their fingertips.” Rather wistfully he said, “My sister was an artist. I always thought she had the clearest eyes of anyone.”

I’d been hearing “was” more often these days. “I’m so sorry,” I said quickly.

He blinked at my automatic response, then shook his head. “She’s not…she’s still alive. We just…haven’t spoken in some time.”

I regarded this man, standing there in front of Robert Miller’s. He wore a fir-green sweater, like a fisherman, beneath a homespun jacket. Though he stood straight and still, he leaned on a carved dark walking stick. Nothing spotted with paint or streaked with clay. No reason for him to be standing here in front of an art supply store.

“Sir, are you an artist?”

He smiled then, either at the “sir” or the question. He didn’t look much older than me, except for in the eyes. “Sometimes I come to look through the windows of the shop and wish I was. But, no.” He tapped the walking stick. “Though I do carve.”

I bent to it. What I’d thought were merely gnarls and whorls were the scales of a serpent, twining around the shaft of the stick until his chin rested on the top. The beast gazed out at Trongate with wooden eyes almost benevolent. “Oh, but it’s beautiful!” I exclaimed. “I have a friend who would like that very much.”

Had, I should remember to say. Had a friend. If you’d had no word of someone for years, could you use the present tense?

“Thank you,” he said, bashful, startled.

“You are an artist.” I nodded down to the walking stick. “You just have to convince the rest of the world.” It was what Luc always said to me. “Trust yourself.”

The next day when I stepped out of the school building on Renfrew Street, clay still under my fingernails from a day smoothing the neck of a bust over and over until my fingers ached, my new friend with the walking stick waited.

“Why hello!” I said and rubbed my eyes. “Fancy meeting you again so soon.”

“I was waiting,” he said, and held out a small tube of brilliant cadmium yellow. “Thank you.”

I took the tube, turned it over in my hands. Cadmium yellow was not inexpensive. “For what? We only exchanged a handful of words.”

“You said to trust myself. You were right. I’ve enrolled in the School of Art.”

“So suddenly?”

“Evening classes. I can start next week.”

“Are you always so impulsive?”

“Not usually,” he said softly. “But war can do that.” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Life moves on when a man walks away from it. I suppose I’m only trying to stay a step ahead.”

His eyes grew red and damp. Though I was tired, I touched his arm. “Oh, not here,” I said. “Please, come inside.”

I took him into the sculpture studio, cluttered with tables and boxes and canvas-draped figures. He walked slowly, stiffly. The walking stick wasn’t an affectation. Inside, I pulled two scarred chairs together, facing one another.

His name was MacDonald, like half of the people at the School of Art. Finlay MacDonald. Tucked away off the street, he quietly cried in that way men do, with red eyes, lots of swallowing, but no tears. He talked, in that northern accent that sounded like bens and lochs, like rolling mists, like the sea. He’d left home; they didn’t want him there. They didn’t want him in the army either, at least not anymore. And so he was here, in Glasgow, without any clear idea of what to do, but knowing that he loved walking the streets, seeing the solid buildings, the windows full of art. He felt at home here. We sat face-to-face, knees nearly touching, me hiding accidental yawns. He had such a gentle face, looking so desperate and heartsore that I finally stopped his tale of woe the only way I could think of. I kissed him.

It was nothing like that tentative summertime kiss under the poplar tree on the road to Mille Mots. In the sculpture studio, warm and smelling like dry clay, Finlay put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me like a rainstorm.

Suddenly everything—the way I’d left my only family behind when I set off for Glasgow, the way I’d been so achingly lonely since coming, the way I knew I shouldn’t worry about Luc but I did, Christ help me I did. Everything washed over me like a wave and I knew I wasn’t the only one drowning.

In that frantic, sudden kiss I felt a year older. I felt a year beyond Mother, Father, Grandfather, Luc, all of the little things that held me tethered to the past. Finlay tasted sweet, like berries unexpected in wintertime. He leaned towards me. I reached forward and put my hands on his knees.

But he stopped and pulled back. Looking down, he tugged at the fabric stretched across his knees. “You shouldn’t,” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. Then, “I forgot.”

I brought a knuckle up to my lips. “You forgot what?” My eyes slid to his left hand, but he didn’t wear a ring.

“I shouldn’t have done that. I’m too broken down for you.”

I thought of a lonely girl clutching a sketchbook on the beach of Lagos and hiding tears in the rain of Seville. I’d spent so many years missing people—my parents, Luc, now my grandfather. I thought of that girl, who dreamt of letters left on breakfast tables. I thought of a woman who dreamt of letters left on fields of battle. “I understand.”

He drew in a breath and took my hand. “See.” He moved it to his leg, below the knee. Through the fabric I felt wood and metal joints.

I nodded. “See,” I said, and moved his hand to the hollow of my chest. “I understand broken.”

Something had to change, I knew it. I couldn’t be alone the way I’d tried to be, pretending such self-sufficiency, pretending that there was a prosthetic for my heart. Finlay’s hand uncurled against my chest.

I went with him that night, to the rough room he rented, bare and impersonal apart from a pencil drawing of a Highland cottage tacked above the bed.

“It’s okay,” he whispered once, mostly to himself, and then pulled me close and didn’t speak again. We didn’t have to open our eyes, we didn’t have to give excuses or explanations, we just had to be there. We fumbled nervously, until he lay back on the bed with me on top, until my hands at his waistband found instead the leather strap holding on his prosthesis. He stopped and pushed me away.

“It’s fine. You can leave.” He rolled away. “I shouldn’t have expected…”

I rested a hand on his back. My lips still tingled. “You didn’t.” And he didn’t. He didn’t ask me up to his room. Neither did he stop me when I followed him up.

But he said, “I can’t help but think of tomorrow.” Beneath my fingers, his back tensed. “You called me ‘impulsive,’ but nothing done on impulse is without consequences.”

Consequences.

My hand fell away.

Consequences, like the ones Mother and Madame fell with. One chose her child over her art, the other, art over her child. If I learned anything from them—from the years abandoned by my mother and from the summer watching her friend stagnate behind a desk—it was that a woman couldn’t have both family and passion.

“I wasn’t thinking.” I pushed my skirt down over my knees.

“Tomorrow you will. You’ll wake up then and you’ll wish that you were never here with me tonight.”

I realized then that he wasn’t talking about the same consequences. I worried that one night could change my fate; he worried that one night wasn’t enough to change his.

I reached across and took his hand. “Sometimes tonight is more important than all the tomorrows that come after. It lets us face the morning.”

He turned back, his eyes black pools. “Stay?”

Half undressed, we lay in the dark and talked as the shadows lengthened. How his girl turned away from him and towards his brother. How his sister just turned away. Impulsive moments that had changed his course. I told him I knew. I’d lost my mother to her restless dreams, I’d lost my father to his heartbreak, and, now, I’d lost Luc, the only person who truly knew me. And, though I knew that life was full of loss, the little girl in me couldn’t help but feel left behind.

When the moonlight came through the window, across my bare legs, across his unbuttoned shirt, he sighed. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. It isn’t right, is it, for me to take advantage of you and your kindness. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” I rested my head on his chest. “Sometimes we just don’t want to feel alone.”

He exhaled and my hair stirred. “I never used to feel so alone.” He shifted on the bed and I could hear the fabric of his trousers catch on the prosthesis. “But then your best pal dies, and then what?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “And if you don’t know whether he’s dead, is that worse? Or have you saved yourself knowing?”

“Oh, lass.” He drew a hand through my hair. “I don’t know which the blessing is.”

“That’s why I draw.” I caught his hand. “It’s me reaching out to the world. Behind all of this—the lies, the loss, the loves lost along the way—there’s still beauty. Color, lines, perfect shapes. When I draw, it’s me telling them I understand.”

“You told me you paint France.”

“The most beautiful place in the world.”

And, as we fell asleep, he sighed, and said, “Not anymore.”

—

That one desperate, fumbling night was our introduction, and the days after were the belated getting to know each other. He let me draw him with his trouser legs pushed up, over his wooden leg lashed to the smooth stump, and somehow that felt more intimate than any lovemaking could.

Of course, wrote Grandfather, when I told him of my new friend. He recognizes what art means to you. He sees how you light up with it. Those who love us don’t ask us to mask our true selves.

Finlay became my anchor, the one mooring me to real life. At the School of Art, all was imagination. A woman wasn’t just a woman under our brushes; she was a queen, a goddess, a sylph. Of course we learned the basic techniques, those shapes and lines that always made me think of shadows beneath the old chestnut tree, but, after our first years, we were meant to aspire to more. Everyone innovated. They took those lines and curved them, shaded them, twisted them, until they were anything but basic.

In class, I’d use a bold brush. I could take the still lifes, the models, the ordinary things before us, and turn them into a fairy tale. After all, wasn’t that how I lived my life? Bright skirts and scarves hiding a core of plain, ordinary loneliness. With slashes and strokes, with words on a page, I’d paint the world beneath the skin of a dream.

But, outside of class, with only Finlay, me, and my pencil, I could draw the world as it really was. Finlay, after hearing that his limb had shrunk further and that he’d need a new prosthesis. Sitting on the bed, head in his cupped hands, exhausted. His trousers rolled up over his knee. The leg all wood rubbed shiny, screws, hinges, leather straps. I didn’t leave anything out, not the weary hunch of his shoulders, the fingernails bitten down to nothing. In the dusty sunlight, he slumped, defeated.

Then furious, the prosthesis thrown across the room, scattered on the ground in pieces. His eyes flashed, angry at having to start over again, angry at having to relearn those wobbly steps, at having to go back to being a man stared at.

Then remorse, as he crouched on the floor, dust streaking the trouser knee of his good leg. He felt around, gathered up every last screw and splinter of wood. He sat, his stump splayed out, piecing that wooden leg back together. No matter how much it had betrayed him, he still needed it.

I drew all of that—the weariness, the frustration, the desperation—without any of the artifice or gilt I saw in class. I drew Finlay as he was, finding more beauty in that curve in his stump, in the stark strength on his face, than in a thousand queens.

“Clare, you are an artist,” he said, echoing me that first day. “You just have to convince the rest of the world.”

“You can’t throw my own words back at me like that,” I teased, but he wasn’t having any of it.

“With your pencil, you reveal me. And, in those drawings, you reveal yourself. This is what you were born to do, Clare.”

“My Something Important,” I whispered. Luc said that, the day we stood in the hallway of Mille Mots, tiptoed on the edge of our future. Two words that made me feel more than hopeful; they made me feel invincible.

I went with Finlay to Renfrewshire to be fitted for his new leg. Sitting in the recreation hall of the Princess Louise Hospital, I realized Finlay had it easier than most. Other soldiers, missing too much to be useful, waited, too. Some without a leg, some without two, some without an arm along with the rest. Not all had their prostheses yet. I watched those soldiers slouched in wheelchairs, propped with crutches against gaming tables, or leaning back against the walls, eyes closed, quiet resignation on their faces, and I memorized it all. On the train back to Glasgow, I let myself sketch.

I sketched a lanky soldier, still straight and proud in his uniform despite the folded trouser leg. I sketched a young man in an overlarge suit, his feet tapping out a One-Step, half the beats done with a stockinged foot, the other half with a wooden sole. I sketched a soldier, head bent, stub of an arm curled protectively around a small boy. Not all in the recreation hall were soldiers. I sketched a nurse, a refugee from Belgium, quietly knitting with three leather fingers.

Your Something Important. All of those soldiers, who’d given so much of themselves on the battlefield that they’d left a piece behind, they’d been out there doing good. Their work was more important than mine. Just a pencil, a few lines of charcoal…how could that compare?

One soldier at Princess Louise had lost a nose. It had been replaced by a clumsy rubber prosthesis, thickly painted. It filled the space, but not much more. What he’d lost, he could never fully recover. Me drawing them, it wasn’t enough. To keep those sketches in my book and pity. I needed to share them, to show the world that the dead are not the only ones to be mourned.

Finlay, he understood. “When you picked up that pencil, you gave me dignity on the page.” He stilled my sketching hands as the train rumbled into Queen Street Station. “Clare, other people should see this. You should send these out.”

So I did. With the last of my coal money for the week, I bought heavy sheets of paper and, wrapped in two scarves and an extra sweater against the cold, I copied over my sketches. I packed them carefully between sheets of cardboard and brought them to Fairbridge when I went to visit for Christmas.

Grandfather straightened his glasses on his nose and spread them all out on the empty dining table, scrutinizing until my nerves flickered like electric lights. When he finally slipped off the glasses, his eyes were wet.

“You have something your mother and grandmother never had.” He straightened up the pages. “The courage to capture the world as you really see it.” He packaged them up and sent them to Charles Rennie Mackintosh in London.

Clare, you’re in the right place now, Mr. Mackintosh wrote. Will you exhibit?

Are they good enough? I asked. My works were far from what the others at the school were producing. They weren’t the sorts of things one hung alongside the bold colors and allegories. All in pencil and soft lines, they faded.

They’re haunting, wrenching, honest, he replied. I’m reminded of Käthe Kollwitz. Those poor unfortunates in the pictures, they are the ones from whom society looks away. You look straight at them and their souls.

I was unused to praise. Who wants haunting, wrenching, and honest in the middle of a war?

Those who know it.

But I didn’t. I didn’t know any of it beyond what I saw in the corridors of the hospital. Those soldiers brought a memory of the trenches home with them, to carry around always.

Clare, I know a gallery, in Paris. The owner is an old friend. May I send one to him?

I thought and, with a hesitant pen, wrote, Yes.

The first one we sent, it sold right away. “A soldier, recently returned from the Front,” said Monsieur Santi, the gallery owner. The next two sold just as quickly. “You have an admirer,” he said, and asked me to send more.

Checks came to me in Glasgow, checks I held in disbelieving fists, then tucked away in the bottom of my washstand drawer. Share them with the world, Finlay had said. I hadn’t expected compensation for that.

I wrote to my grandfather at Fairbridge. I’ve done it. Like Grandmother, I’m an artist now.

When a letter came for me, it wasn’t from Perthshire. This envelope came from Paris. The stationery bore the insignia of the American Red Cross.

Studio for Portrait Masks

70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

Paris

January 1918

Dear Miss Ross,

My name is Anna Coleman Ladd and, under the auspices of the American Red Cross, I am attempting to set up a studio in Paris modeled after Lieutenant Francis Derwent Wood’s Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. I am not sure if you’ve read about Lt. Wood’s work with mutilated English soldiers, though you may have heard of his department, popularly called the “Tin Noses Shop.” Like yourself, Lt. Wood is an artist, and he has lectured at the Glasgow School of Art, so you may be familiar with him. He has pioneered a new and quite astonishing technique of casting thin metal masks that are light, comfortable, and quite lifelike. Not medicine, but rather art.

These masks can cover the whole face, depending on the degree of injury, or can cover only part of the face. Glass eyes can be added with durable lashes made of thin strips of painted metal. For masks that cover one’s mouth, an opening can be left for a cigarette. These masks are seamless. It is quite an impressive feat, to make masks delicate and thinner than a lady’s visiting card, yet conveying so much humanity in those few ounces of metal.

I have learned his technique and, with the Red Cross, am setting up a studio here in Paris to help French soldiers in similar circumstances (called here mutilés). I’ve made some adjustments to the process—enamel paint offers more lifelike tones of color—but follow Lt. Wood’s general method in sketching, casting, sculpting, hammering, and finally electroplating the copper mask.

I have been looking for artists who pay great attention to life detail and who have the compassion to work amongst disfigured soldiers. I have seen your pencil drawings in La Galerie Porte d’Or and, Miss Ross, I believe you have both qualities.

I will be in London next Tuesday. Would you do me the honor of meeting with me? I would like to speak to you more about the opportunity to assist me in my work. Helping these soldiers is such a small thing for us to do, but for them, it is anything but small.

Sincerely, etc.

These days it was hard to feel like art mattered. When men were giving themselves, giving their youth, giving their life, when women were waiting and praying, I was painting. I was sculpting and drawing and creating, as though there wasn’t a war, as though my creation could counter all of that destruction. None of what I was doing signified outside of the art school. Anna Coleman Ladd was doing something that did.

I remembered the soldier I used to see waiting in the hospital, self-conscious with his ill-fitting rubber nose. If he’d had the chance to instead wear a work of art, would it change things for him? Would his world seem a fraction less dim?

“You’re meant to do this, Clare,” Finlay said. “You’re more than an artist. You’re a warrior.”

“You’re the one who’s been to battle,” I pointed out.

“And you’re the one who’s saved me.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Now, go. Go bring another man back to himself.”