Faustine Read Online Free PDF Page A

green-felt-lined from this side, into the other portion of the house.
    Of course … I begin to see … the shrine that lies before me is guarded by this man and wife; they’re caretakers of the place, and with instructions to let any passing visitor come in and look around. This house is open to the public, in the way that houses of special interest were in England in the eighteenth century; to knock was to be admitted and given hospitality.
     *
    Mr Neidpath – he’s an ugly man, toad-faced, with a cast in his eye that must have given me the impression, at first sight, that he was looking at me sinisterly, that he’d seen me somewhere before and had the utmost suspicions of me – steps behind me into the long, wide room. The door swings shut with a muffled thud, and then is pushed once more to admit Mrs Neidpath, whose shiny, dyed curls poke round the door first, to be followed by her unsmiling face. Thenthe door sighs back into the wall again, and I turn to try and thank them, for I see, I have seen at first glance, that the Neidpaths have a deep pride in Woodford Manor and its contents. And I want to tell them that I’m not a casual tripper, a sixties enthusiast who will press a note into their hands when I leave, eyes starry with excitement from having been transported into the past. I came here for a specific reason, I want to say. I was searching for my grandmother, Muriel Twyman, and there is no way whatsoever that she could be here.
    There’s something about the place, though, that makes speech unacceptable. It’s as if – and I remember that strange stillness in the forecourt of Salisbury station – the house lies enchanted, like a house in a fairy-tale, with its occupants waiting to be woken by a visitor, long-hoped-for or dreaded; and I know, of course, that the visitor can’t be myself. So I walk as softly as I can on a grey pile carpet that reminds me suddenly of a visit to a grand hotel in Sydney with Maureen, the time we all went on an outing and looked at the completed Opera House. And I pause before the monuments – all to the most famous woman of her time – the pictures and silkscreen prints and lithographs and bronzes, the screens of photomontage. I walk past a bank of hydrangeas, the false pink of their petals as dead as everything else in this great, deep room with mullioned windows that look out at the back on terraces and lawns sloping down to the river. I stand by a wall of mirrors with signed studio portraits tucked in at the edges, as a teenage girl might stick snaps in her looking-glass at home; as a star’s dressing-room might look, preserved for ever after a stunningly successful first night. And everywhere the signature is the same: looped and bold, with an underlying flourish that looks as if it has been takenfrom a parchment manuscript of an ancient deed. The signature of Lisa Crane.
     *
    ‘Don’t ask me,’ Maureen Fisher used to say, when I was at the stage of collecting autographs and pinning up posters in my room of the dead stars that were just beginning to exercise their morbid power over a world no longer able to make sense of past or present. ‘Don’t ask me what people see in Lisa Crane or any of the rest of them. And take those drawing-pins out of my fresh paint!’
    Yet it wasn’t really hard to see what Lisa Crane had had; and while some would remain faithful to the memory of Marilyn Monroe, or even pin up Jean Harlow and Mae West in their adolescent dens, Lisa Crane had held me – and many others – partly for the reason that she had never been a star. A face as the ultimate symbol, a symbol of the meaninglessness and uniqueness of beauty, and of the potential for the endless duplication of that image, until the beauty was reduced to meaning nothing at all.
    Something like that, anyway. The age of the throwaway, of the excitement of anonymity and the destruction of the bourgeois pomposity of signed art – those were the notions going around, though I was too