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.
