Ali Smith - Autumn

Where can I find that film? Elisabeth said.

I’ve absolutely no idea, the tutor said. She was gorgeous. But not a painter of anything more than minor interest. She stole everything of any note in her work from Warhol and Blake.

What about the way she uses images as images? Elisabeth said.

Oh God, everybody and his dog was doing that then, the tutor said.

What about everybody and her dog? Elisabeth said.

I’m sorry? the tutor said.

What about this? Elisabeth said.

She opened the catalogue at a page with two paintings reproduced side by side.

One was of a painting of images of ancient and modern men. Above, there was a blue sky with a US airforce plane in it. Below, there was a smudged colour depiction of the shooting of Kennedy in the car in Dallas, between black and white images of Lenin and Einstein. Above the head of the dying president were a matador, a deep red rose, some smiling men in suits, a couple of the Beatles.

The other picture was of a fleshy strip of images superimposed over a blue/green English landscape vista, complete with a little Palladian structure. Inside the superimposed strip were several images of part-naked women in lush and coquettish porn magazine poses. But at the centre of these coy poses was something unadulterated, pure and blatant, a woman’s naked body full-frontal, cut off at the head and the knees.

The tutor shook his head.

I’m not seeing anything new here, he said.

He cleared his throat.

There are lots and lots of highly sexualized images throughout Pop Art, he said.

What about the titles? Elisabeth said.

(The titles of the paintings were It’s a Man’s World I and It’s a Man’s World II.)

The tutor had gone a ruddy red colour at the face.

Is there, was there, anything else like this being painted by a woman at the time? Elisabeth said.

The tutor shut the catalogue. He cleared his throat again.

Why should we imagine that gender matters here? the tutor said.

That’s actually my question too, Elisabeth said. In fact, I came to see you today to change my dissertation title. I’d like to work on the representation of representation in Pauline Boty’s work.

You can’t, the tutor said.

Why can’t I? Elisabeth said.

There’s not nearly enough material available on Pauline Boty, the tutor said.

I think there is, Elisabeth said.

There’s next to no critical material, he said.

That’s one of the reasons I think it’d be a particularly good thing to do, Elisabeth said.

I’m your dissertation supervisor, the tutor said, and I’m telling you, there isn’t, and it isn’t. You’re going off down a rarefied cul-de-sac here. Do I make myself clear?

Then I’d like to apply to be moved to a new supervisor, Elisabeth said. Do I do that with you, or do I go to the Admin office?

A year on from then, Elisabeth went home for the Easter holidays. It was when her mother was thinking of moving, maybe to the coast. Elisabeth listened to the options and looked at the house details her mother had been sent by estate agents in Norfolk and Suffolk.

After the right amount of time talking about houses had passed, Elisabeth asked after Daniel.

Won’t have any help in the house, her mother said. Won’t have meals on wheels. Won’t let anyone make him a cup of anything or do his washing or change his old bed. The house smells pretty strong, but if anyone goes round there offering anything, offering to help out, he makes you sit down, then makes you a cup of tea himself, won’t hear of anyone even doing that for him. Ninety if he’s a day. He’s not up to it. I had to fish a dead beetle out of the last cup of tea he made me.

I’ll just nip round and see him, Elisabeth said.

Oh, hello, Daniel said. Come in. What you reading?

Elisabeth waited for him to make her the cup of tea. Then she got the exhibition catalogue she’d found in London out of her bag and put it on the table.

When I was small, Mr Gluck, she said, I don’t know if you remember, but when we went on walks you sometimes described paintings to me, and the thing is, I think I’ve finally managed to see some of them.

Daniel put his glasses on. He opened the catalogue. He flushed, then he went pale.

Oh yes, he said.

He leafed through the pages. His face lit up. He nodded. He shook his head.

Aren’t they fine? he said.

I think they’re really brilliant, Elisabeth said. Really outstanding. Also really thematically and technically interesting.

Daniel turned a picture towards her, blue and red abstracts, blacks and golds and pinks in circles and curves.

I remember this one very clearly, he said.

I wondered, Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. Because of our conversations, and you knowing them so well, the pictures. I mean they’ve been missing for decades. They’ve just been rediscovered, really. And no one in the art world knows about them, except, from what I can gather, from people who knew her in person. I went and asked about her at the gallery where they showed these pictures, like seven or eight years back, and I met this woman who knew someone who used to know Boty a bit, and she told me that the woman she knows still sometimes just finds herself in floods of tears, even nearly forty years later, whenever she remembers her friend. So, I was wondering. It struck me. That maybe you knew Boty too.

Well well, he said. Look at that.

He was still looking at the blue abstract called Gershwin.

I never knew till now she called it that, he said.

And when you look at the photos of her, Elisabeth said. And she was so incredibly beautiful. And what happened to her in her life is so sad, and then the sad things that happened after her own sad death, to her husband, and then to her daughter, just tragedy after tragedy, so unbearably sad that –

Daniel put one hand up to tell her to stop, then the other, both hands up and flat.

Silence.

He went back to the book on the table between them. He turned the page to the one with the woman made of flames, and the bright yellow abstract opposite it, reds, pinks, blues and whites.

Look at that, he said.

He nodded.

They truly are something, he said.

He turned all the pages, one after the other. Then he shut the book and put it back on the table. He looked up at Elisabeth.

There have been very many men and women in my life whom I hoped might, whom I wanted to, love me, he said. But I only, myself, ever, loved, in that way, just once. And it wasn’t a person I fell in love with. No, not a person at all.

He tapped the cover of the book.

It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren’t yours let you see where you are, who you are.

Elisabeth nodded as if she understood.

Not a person.

Yes, and the 60s zeitgeist, she said, is –

Daniel, his hand up, stopped her again.

We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

But a coldness was shifting all through her body, wiping her into a clarity much like a soapy window by a window cleaner from top to base with a rubber blade.

He nodded, more to the room than to Elisabeth.

It’s the only responsibility memory has, he said. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They’re foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

Elisabeth will have looked like she was listening, but inside her head there was the high-pitched hiss, the blood going round inside her making itself heard above any and every other thing.

Not a person.

Daniel does not —

Daniel has never —