Ali Smith - Autumn

who’s Daniel?

Daniel? Elisabeth said.

Daniel, Tom said again.

Do you mean Mr Gluck? she said.

I’ve no idea, Tom said. Who’s Mr Gluck?

Old neighbour of my mother’s, Elisabeth said. He lived next door when I was a kid. I haven’t seen him for years. Literally years. Ages. Why? Has something happened? Did my mother phone? Has something happened to Daniel?

You said his name in your sleep, Tom said.

Did I? When? Elisabeth said.

Last night. It’s not the first time. You quite often say it in your sleep, Tom said.

Elisabeth was fourteen. She and Daniel were walking where the canal met the countryside, where the path peels away and goes off up through to the woods on the curve of the hill. It was suddenly freezing though it was only quite early in autumn. The rain was coming, she could see it when they got to the top of the hill, it was moving across the landscape like someone was shading in the sky with a pencil.

Daniel was out of breath. He didn’t usually get this out of breath.

I don’t like it when the summer goes and the autumn comes, she said.

Daniel took her by the shoulders and turned her round. He didn’t say anything. But all across the landscape down behind them it was still sunlit blue and green.

She looked up at him showing her how the summer was still there.

Nobody spoke like Daniel.

Nobody didn’t speak like Daniel.

It was the end of a winter;this one was the winter of 2002–3. Elisabeth was eighteen. It was February. She had gone down to London to march in the protest. Not In Her Name. All across the country people had done the same thing and millions more people had all across the world.

On the Monday after, she wandered through the city; strange to be walking streets where life was going on as normal, traffic and people going their usual backwards and forwards along streets that had had no traffic, had felt like they’d belonged to the two million people from their feet on the pavement all the way up to sky because of something to do with truth, when she’d walked the exact same route only the day before yesterday.

That was the Monday she unearthed an old red hardback catalogue in an art shop on Charing Cross Road. It was cheap, £3. It was in the reduced books bin.

It was of an exhibition a few years ago. Pauline Boty, 1960s Pop Art painter.

Pauline who?

A female British Pop Art painter?

Really?

This was interesting to Elisabeth, who’d been studying art history as one of her subjects at college and had been having an argument with her tutor, who’d told her that categorically there had never been such a thing as a female British Pop artist, not one of any worth, which is why there were none recorded as more than footnotes in British Pop Art history.

The artist had made collages, paintings, stained glass work and stage sets. She had had quite a life story. She’d not just been a painter, she’d also done theatre and TV work as an actress, had chaperoned Bob Dylan round London before anyone’d heard of Bob Dylan, had been on the radio telling listeners what it was like to be a young woman in the world right then and had nearly been cast in a film in a role that Julie Christie got instead.

She’d had everything ahead of her in swinging London, and then she’d died, at the age of twenty eight, of cancer. She’d gone to the doctor because she was pregnant and they’d spotted the cancer. She’d refused an abortion, which meant she couldn’t have radiotherapy; it would hurt the child. She’d given birth and she’d died four months after.

Malignant thymoma is what it said in the list of things under the word Chronology at the back of the catalogue.

It was a sad story, and nothing like the paintings, which were so witty and joyous and full of unexpected colour and juxtapositions that Elisabeth, flicking through the catalogue, realized that she was smiling. The painter’s last painting had been of a huge and beautiful female arse, nothing else, framed by a jovial proscenium arch like it was filling the whole stage of a theatre. Underneath, in bright red, was a word in huge and rambunctious looking capitals.

BUM.

Elisabeth laughed out loud.

What a way to go.

The artist’s paintings were full of images of people of the time, Elvis, Marilyn, people from politics. There was a photograph of a now-missing painting with the famous image of the woman who caused the Scandal scandal, whose sitting nude and backwards on a designer chair had had something to do with politics at the time.

Then Elisabeth held the catalogue open at a page with a particular painting on it.

It was called Untitled (Sunflower Woman) c.1963.

It was of a woman on a bright blue background. Her body was a collage of painted images. A man with a machine gun pointing at the person looking at the picture formed her chest. A factory formed her arm and shoulder.

A sunflower filled her torso.

An exploding airship made her crotch.

An owl.

Mountains.

Coloured zigzags.

At the back of the book was a black and white reproduction of a collage. It had a large hand holding a small hand, which was holding the large hand back.

Down at the bottom of the picture there were two ships in a sea and a small boat filled with people.

Elisabeth went to the British Library periodicals room and sat at a table with Vogue, September 1964. FEATURES 9 Spotlight 92 Paola, paragon of princesses 110 Living doll: Pauline Boty interviewed by Nell Dunn 120 Girls in their married bliss, by Edna O’Brien . Alongside adverts for the bright red Young Jaeger look-again coat, the Goya Golden Girl Beauty Puff and the bandeau bra and pantie girdle cut like briefs to leave you feeling free all over, was: Pauline Boty, blonde, brilliant, 26. She has been married for a year and her husband is inordinately proud of her achievements, boasts that she makes a lot of money painting and acting. She has found by experience that she is in a world where female emancipation is a password and not a fact — she is beautiful, therefore she should not be clever .

The full-page photo, by David Bailey, was a large close-up of Boty’s face with a tiny doll’s face, the other way up, just behind her.

P.B. I find that I have a fantasy image. It’s that I really like making other people happy, which is probably egotistical, because they think ‘What a lovely girl’, you know. But it’s also that I don’t want people to touch me. I don’t mean physically particularly, though it’s that as well. So I always like to feel that I’m sort of floating by and just occasionally being there, seeing them. I’m very inclined to play a role that someone sets for me, particularly when I first meet people. One of the reasons I married Clive was because he really did accept me as a human being, a person with a mind.

N.D. Men think of you just as a pretty girl you mean?

P.B. No. They just find it embarrassing when you start talking. Lots of women are intellectually more clever than lots of men. But it’s difficult for men to accept the idea.

N.D. If you start talking about ideas they just think you’re putting it on?

P.B. Not that you’re putting it on. They just find it slightly embarrassing that you’re not doing the right thing.

Elisabeth photocopied the pages in the magazine. She took the Pauline Boty exhibition catalogue to college and put it on her tutor’s desk.

Oh, right. Boty, the tutor said.

He shook his head.

Tragic story, he said.

Then he said, they’re pretty dismissible. Poor paintings. Not very good. She was quite Julie Christie. Very striking girl. There’s a film of her, Ken Russell, and she’s a bit eccentric in it if I remember rightly, dresses in a top hat, miming along to Shirley Temple, I mean attractive and so on, but pretty execrable.