Autumn Laing Read Online Free PDF Page B

leading somewhere or other, a girl sometimes with a straw hat and ribbon going somewhere or other, a workman in a field with a horse, the sound of birdsong and maybe a butterfly or two. His was the reassurance of a kindly nature for the drawing rooms of the well-to-do city folk and great country families who were his patrons. He might have been making sturdy chairs for the ease of their minds and their backs. A reliable craftsman, they were pleased to revere him and to acclaim his genius in the works he made for them. Occasional portraits, too, of children or their fathers (when honours were bestowed), commissioned by the wives, were competently produced when required. He was a Melbourne man. Solid, reliable, of good Scottish stock. Sydney did not know him. Although almost never hung thesedays, a work or two of his can still be found in the inventory of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.
    He wore a dove-grey fedora with a wide black silk band and a grey three-piece suit with a plain bow tie. His moustache was large and brown and prickly. He looked like a painting of himself. A tonal head and shoulders of him, the brim of his fedora shading his eyes, hung in the parlour of the Brighton house, done by the controversial Max Manner—who did call himself an artist—and tendered in lieu of rent when Mr Manner brought his family home from France, stony broke and with nowhere to live, bolstered nevertheless by the assurance of his own genius. All that before the steady years of Manner’s prosperity and influence. Comfort and opulence in the grand house in Kew, where his two daughters, lissom Elise and chubby Simone, lived on in genteel poverty long after the great man himself had gone over to the other side. As the years went on without him the house grew seedy, green around the brows from leaking guttering and failed damp courses, the garden splendidly overgrown, the two devoted spinsters insisting on the grandeur of their father’s achievement to their last days together on this wonderful earth. Simone, the younger of them, played the role of maid to the elder’s haughty chatelaine; Elise receiving her visitors seated in the parlour, veiled in layers of pink and apricot chiffon, her lips bright red (a little askew), her purpled eyes challenging her visitor to exercise the fine manners and graces of an earlier time. Their father’s early poverty was never referred to.
    Each of the three large mirrors in the parlour was mounted on castors, concealed with tasselled strands like the feathered feet of Chinese hens, the mirrors’ shoulders draped suggestivelywith red or green brocades, their great wide eyes angled to reflect depths and elaborations of space and light. Manner’s works on the walls, or resting back on easels, were set amid the hues and tones of their own origins by his daughters. The great man’s reflected pictures, Edith recalled, had seemed to exist beyond her reach in a space of pure imagining, a world in which reversed reality held up for contemplation a mysterious order. As one entered the room, to glimpse in a mirror as if through a doorway, the mothlike figure of Elise fingering one of John Field’s elemental nocturnes at the keyboard of the great piano, the enormous black lid like the wing of Satan cloaked above her, was not to be in the presence of something real but something imaginary. It was to have no presence oneself, but to be the witness of another’s dream. As a child Edith had been struck with wonder by the achievement of this visual elaboration at the house in Kew; the endless play, not on words but on light and shade, scenes within scenes, corners and suggestions, tonal variations receding forever deeper, the centre and substance elusive, the eye drawn on in search of a point of rest. Dizzying. She had believed then that the Manner sisters were in possession of an arcane truth about the world and art that she would never come to possess herself. And in a way she still believed it. And