Authors: Emma Darwin
A Secret Alchemy (3 page)
I’m familiar enough with publishers to know that her thinking is almost certainly wishful. And those research inquiries don’t sound enough to fill her days. How does she fill them? Once, she had three projects running most of the time: one in the clean light of early morning; research and reading in the bright, dull light of noon; and another as the sun slanted, picking out the grain and curve of every stone and blade of grass. I can’t see any sign of such things now. Is being the family historian, as she calls it, the only life left to her?
There are prints on the walls. I can see four that were published as headings to a nicely produced anthology of poems about the seasons. A few years ago I found a copy secondhand in a Sydney bookshop, and gave it to Adam for some small anniversary. “Autumn” is the best, I think now; the foreground is a dried leaf, exquisitely curled, with every vein and rib as exactly and gloriously necessary as the arches of a Gothic window. But though the studio isn’t especially tidy, there’s no sign of fresh ink on the stained central table or any cutting tools or knives or fragments of wood or lino that would suggest work in progress. I wonder how much work she’s getting these days. Most of my childhood drawing and story-writing was on the back of her declared failures. When I was little at the Chantry, and everyone was busy, I used to crawl under her workbench in the studio, and find the tiny scraps lying on the floor, as secret as treasure. The wood ones were impossibly pale and fragile, no more than grains of gold and silver still magically clinging together, while the curls of lino were thicker and browner, reticulated like little caterpillars, still faintly smelling of warm linseed. I’d look up and see Izzy’s legs in their darned stockings and lace-up shoes hitched around the stool’s legs,
and hear her heavy breathing. She never minded my being there, unless things were going wrong. Then she’d suddenly tell me to go, not unkindly, but without leaving any room for argument, and I’d crawl out and stand up, picking more debris from where it had stuck into my bare knees, and comforting myself with a hope that there’d be a new cake for tea or that Uncle Gareth would help me with my history homework.
“Red or white?” asks Izzy, again.
“Oh, red, please.”
She heads for the kitchen. “Shan’t be a moment.” I see a copy of
At the Sign of the Sun and Moon
on the shelf.
The roundel again on the title page, and a quotation I know by heart because it appears, set small, in every book the Press has ever issued: “As the
Edda
tells it, in the land of the giants lived a man named Mundilfoeri and he had two children: his daughter Sol was the sun, and his son Mani the moon.”
I riffle through the pages.
In 1936 Kay Pryor graduated from the Slade, and decided that the development of his painting would be best served by moving to Paris. He had never been as deeply concerned with the day-to-day work of the Solmani Press as his younger brother, Gareth, and his departure made little difference to the running of it. But, as William wrote in a letter to Beatrice Webb,
With Kay gone, the house is quieter, but we realise how much his work as a painter has kept all us craftsmen up to the aesthetic mark: as he used to say, in the dramatic manner of the young, he had no allegiance to anything but art. Gareth in particular misses him; he
has looked up to him since they were boys, and it is always he, when some question of design comes up, who says, “What would Kay think? He’d know the answer.” But Kay’s leaving does ease one private fear of my own. Ever since the day, all those years ago, when Maud and I first saw the Chantry chapel among what were then orchards and fields, and knew that we must make it the soul of our house and workshop, the soul even of our family itself, I’ve feared that one day Kay and Gareth—so different in temperament—might not be able to agree over the running of the Press. Elaine is married to Robert Butler—had you heard?—and if she has a son the problem might yet be compounded, or indeed resolved. Who knows? But for now, at least, I may take pleasure in news of Kay’s successes abroad and Gareth’s passion for the Press at home, and know that no rivalry troubles our family.
Having, as he said in a letter to his mother, “[g]ot what there was to be got,” from Paris, in 1938 Kay moved to New York. There he joined circles that included such up-and-coming painters as Ben Shahn and Charles Demuth, and in such works as “Battery Park, Nightfall” (1938, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and “The Dock at East Egg” (1939, Private Collection) he was quickly recognised as having brought a uniquely English sensibility to a circle otherwise much concerned with industrialism and its aesthetics. At the outbreak of war William took on the full burden of running the Press again so that Gareth could volunteer for the Royal Engineers; he was taken prisoner at Tobruk and repatriated in 1945. On
a visit to London in 1941 Kay received his call-up papers and joined the 8th Royal Fusiliers; he was wounded at Coriano during the Italian campaign, and the war ended before he recovered. He returned to New York, where in 1946 his mistress Lucie Lefevre, an artist’s model whom he had known before the war, gave birth to a daughter, Una Maud Pryor. In the following year Kay and Lucie were killed in California when their car ran off the Coastal Highway at the Bixby Gorge, and baby Una came to the Chantry, to be brought up with Elaine and Robert’s children, Isode and Lionel.
It’s beautiful letterpress: Plantin, pressed richly into fine paper by one of William’s most gifted heirs, sitting well in the hand, the jacket heavy matte paper with a roundel of Izzy’s engraving of the Solmani Press sign, which hung above the workshop, festooned with ivy. The roundel is blocked in gold on the boards too. It’s Izzy’s history, the official version, the story of record; I notice she even refers to herself in the third person. It’s my history, and not my history.
She finished the story with the death of our grandfather, and when it was published I read it quickly, always with only one eye while eating breakfast or on a bus or somewhere else distracting. Then I put it away, and since then I’ve only opened my copy—first edition, personally inscribed “To dear Una will all love from Izzy”—when there was nowhere else I could check a necessary reference.
I put the book back and move around the room. Here’s the big group portrait:
The Solmani Press, Silver Jubilee, 1936
, the brass plate says, shiny and faintly green around the edges with polishing. Grandpapa—William Pryor—standing beside Grandmama in
the basket chair. And their three children: my father, Kay, on his right with a palette was a quicker, darker, wirier version of Uncle Gareth, the portrait tells me. I wouldn’t know. Uncle Gareth himself in the doorway to the workshop, with the current apprentices to one side of it—very little younger than him, but somehow so clearly not sons of the house—and Aunt Elaine slightly separate, with an apron and a trugful of carrots.
Izzy returns.
“Don’t they look proper to us, these days, all wearing suits and ties?” I say.
“It was usually shirtsleeves and aprons in the workshop. This was a formal portrait. I don’t know why he insisted on Mummy wearing an apron. It makes her look as if she wasn’t part of the Press. I’ve left it to the San Diego collection in my will. It’s a particularly nice portrait of Uncle Gareth, I think.” It’s true, though he’s younger than I ever knew him, standing with one long-fingered hand on the frame of the doorway, and that look on his face that I never thought about then, but now I read as kind, amused, and always welcoming.
“Tell me how Uncle Gareth is. I’m going down to Eltham tomorrow.”
“Come into the kitchen while I deal with the food,” says Izzy. The kitchen’s narrow and dark, as they always are in these mansion flats that were built for a world with servants, and the view is of drainpipes and blind bathroom windows. “Well, he is seventy-eight, so I suppose it’s only to be expected. But you’ll notice a big difference.”
I pick up the handful of cutlery that Izzy’s put on the table and lay it out. “He was spry enough at Aunt Elaine’s funeral.”
“I know. It’s since then, I think. I suspect he doesn’t eat properly, with Mummy not doing the cooking, and I live in terror of hearing that he’s hurt himself on one of the big presses. Imagine if the motor on the Vandercook was going.” After a career of studying printing presses, I can imagine only too well. “He’s living in the workshop, did you know? And very short of money. He’s had to let out the whole of the Chantry house. That’s why it’s got to go, sad though it is. It’s impossible for him to cope with. It’s full of students and fly-by-night types. Goodness knows what they get up to. I don’t think he ever gets around to going upstairs and seeing. Lionel’s begged him time and again to get a management company to deal with it, the way you have in Narrow Street. References and proper tenancies and everything. But he just says that the Chantry always
has
been a haven for people who don’t fit elsewhere, and he’s not going to change it now.”
“Well, that’s true enough. Was there ever a time when there wasn’t some defecting Hungarian painter in one of the attics? Remember Theo Besnyö? Or one of Aunt Elaine’s friends running away from a bad marriage. Or me, even.”
“But you were family,” says Izzy, bending to get supper out of the oven. “Sorry, hope you don’t mind it’s only shepherd’s pie. I remember Mummy lying in bed with flu and explaining it to me, when Uncle Gareth went to America to fetch you home. She said it would be like having a little sister of my own. I remember she was worried that Uncle Gareth wouldn’t be able to manage; she felt terribly guilty that she’d been too ill to go. “Babies are hard work,” she said, “even once they’re walking. I’ll need your help.” And then you arrived. Funny little thing, you were—what were you? Fourteen months or so? I think I thought you’d be like Lionel, always
shouting and running about, only you were so solemn and quiet, holding on to Uncle Gareth with one hand and Smokey Bear with the other. You’d only just learned to walk. Mummy thought of you as her third child till the day she died.”
It’s true, she did. With Aunt Elaine it didn’t matter that I had no parents of my own, that no one had been able to find out much about my mother, that my parents hadn’t been married. There was Aunt Elaine’s husband, Uncle Robert, but for all practical purposes she and Uncle Gareth were my parents. They were my parents just as Izzy’s my sister and Lionel’s my brother. “I know,” I say, and I don’t have to say any more because Izzy understands, and gives my hand a squeeze before starting to dish the shepherd’s pie out of its carton. But perhaps the old ache kindles something else old in my memory, because I add suddenly, “And then there was Mark.”
“There was, wasn’t there? He must have been one of the longest-standing ones. I wonder what happened to him.”
“I suppose we’ll never know now.”
“Funny he never got back in touch. For a reference, if nothing else.”
“Maybe he wasn’t going for skilled jobs,” I say casually. “He was very practical all around. Then he’d only need ordinary references from whatever his last job was.”
“A fully trained fine printer, taught by William and Gareth Pryor, being a caretaker or something? Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. I never did…” Perhaps it’s because my grief for Adam never sleeps that such an old bewilderment can still make my throat ache. “It’s sad to think of the Chantry going out of the family at last, after all the times when Uncle Gareth managed to rescue it.”
“I know. But he ought to be retiring, not coping with tenants. He’s not going to be able to go on with the Press for much longer either. And what
matters
will be safe at San Diego: the archive, the proof prints, all the rest of it. And the history in the book. There’s so much interest in the fine presses of the past.”
“The Solmani Press isn’t in the past.”
“Well, technically, no.” She spoons peas into a dish. “You would have got in touch, if you’d needed to know anything about it for your own work, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. Though it isn’t really my period, twentieth-century fine presses. I’m more about early-modern European printing. Gutenberg’s heirs, the rise of individual piety in the late medieval period. Presses and typography, of course, but reception history as well.”
“What history?”
“Horrible word, I know, but interesting subject. What people actually bought, how the industry worked. Readers as well as writers and printers, if you like.”
“So what are you working on now?” Izzy sits down. “Do help yourself to peas. Only frozen, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I’ve only just started thinking about it. But I want to spread out from pure bibliography. I want to write about people…It’s still very easy in bibliography to forget that books are something real people buy and read and lend and lose, and they’re not always the fine books, the grand ones, the innovative ones. I want to make a different kind of shape out of books, the shape of people’s lives. All those colophons and presses, all that paper and iron and ink, I’ve had enough. I want to know someone—really know them—by their books. I…Well, I’ve decided to write about Anthony and Elizabeth Woodville, but in terms of their books.”
“Who? Oh—yes—hang on…Wars of the Roses? Didn’t she marry someone?”
“Yes. They were brother and sister. Elizabeth was married to Edward IV. She was married to Sir John Grey before, though, and had two sons. He was killed in battle, and she married Edward. And Anthony was the first writer that Caxton printed in England.” The shepherd’s pie is very hot; I have to drink some water before I can go on. “It’s about what books they owned—what Anthony wrote—and what they might have read, and what that tells us about them. And what it tells us about their world, their cultural background, about how the book trade worked.”
“You’ll be on home ground in Eltham tomorrow, at the Chantry, with the Palace up the road. Do you remember how we used to bike past and see army officers sometimes, and wonder if they were spies? Even though we knew it was only really a staff college?”
“I’d forgotten that…” I can almost smell the hot asphalt. “There’s been good research on her books, but nothing on his. And no one’s pulled it all together into a narrative. Elizabeth had two more sons by Edward, and Anthony brought up the older one, Prince Edward, the way they all used to, having their children brought up by someone else.” She tops up my wineglass. “When Edward IV died, his younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, seized the throne and put the two boys in the Tower. And he imprisoned Anthony in Yorkshire. Anthony didn’t have any sons himself, and his things were scattered. It’s a struggle to find enough material to put flesh on the bones…Did you say that Eltham Palace was being restored?”
