Still Life

by Sarah Winman

He removed a couple of floor tiles to reveal the dark maw of a cubbyhole, a hidden pantry that, for a year, had sustained life. He pulled out a bottle of wine, a candle and a nub of cheese. What a feast, said Ulysses, and he reached around and retrieved a tin of ham from his pack and placed it on the table. That’s when Arturo began to cry. It’s only ham, said Ulysses. And for two hours the wine was poured, the cheese cut, and the two men talked. Of what? Who knows? Of love, of war, of the past. And

This is what you men do to us women, thought Peg. You make us hate us. For your absence. For your lies. For your violence.

She mesmerized because that was the Peggy spell. She had class. She may have stolen it, but she had it.

And she told you so when she sang, because she sang for her life, and for yours too, because the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.

The woman sang in Italian and her voice took him back to a painting and another country and another version of himself. Col came out of the snug into the bar ridiculing the woman’s voice. He was full of impersonations that evening, and he pitched his voice high and tremulous. It’s what Col did when he didn’t understand something—he made it ridiculous and brought it down to an acceptable level;

She laughed and punched him, and he ditched the spade and grabbed hold of her. Peg, he said, I bloody missed you, and you start giving me grief—I know, I know, she said—I got back when loads didn’t—I know, I know, she said—and stuff helped me, he said. And I learned things and I met people and I’m proud of what I got to know—I know, I know, she said—and he started to dance with her, and she laughed more, and he’d forgotten that it was the best thing in the world to make her laugh. They stopped their dance and caught their breath. Peg looked warmer; she had color in her cheeks.

Those who’d cheered him on months before soon succumbed to derision. Human nature, right?

the responsibility of privilege must always be to raise others up.

We learned the hard way. That there must always be a moral argument against the march of Fascism.

phylum. A phylum Pori— Stop fucking saying the word phylum! That’s the lowest form of life, said Cress. A sponge.

There are moments in life so monumental and still that the memory can never be retrieved without a catch to the throat or an interruption to the beat of the heart. Can never be retrieved without the rumbling disquiet of how close that moment came to not having happened at all.

Cress said, We’re embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we’ll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn’t let our inability to know what’s what diminish us. Because it’ll try. We have to remain curious and open. Two words for you: ley lines. Ley lines? Straight lines of electromagnetic energy crisscrossing the Earth at special sites, drawing men and women—and ideas—to their mysterious pulse. We were drawn here, Temps. No two ways about it. As many have been before. That Baedeker book? You know what it said? Go on.

Formed four point six billion years ago. And here are we. With a combined age of seventy-seven. How young we are! And the Earth spins at a thousand miles an hour and turns on its axis once every twenty-four. This is what we’re governed by, Alys. Space, time and motion. Hours, days, seasons. Our lives segmented into a series of moments. You see over there, that faint patch of light? That’s the Andromeda Nebula. When we look at it, we’re looking back nine hundred thousand years into the past.

“To the tooth,” said Cress. Al dente. Means “firm to the bite.” Al dente.

Lost soul but incredibly kind. Last-to-the-lifeboats kind of man. I like him a lot. I could imagine him veering away from art and studying medicine.

Her body had changed little over the years except for the band of padding around her middle, an accumulation of the six o’clock cocktail, a ritual as accurate at keeping time as Big Ben.

She lay down with blackbird song and wood pigeon call and bees in clover. She thought all of existence in this bucolic trance was a poem. Timeless, resolute, universal. The image would be repeated over the decades: women seeking solace, a safe place, bodies unclothed and held by nature. All the women she’d ever cared about had come with her here at some time or another. Not Livia, of course: that beautiful flyaway puffball, who’d deposited the seeds of first love across her life.

Pinocchio is a poor provincial Tuscan boy and he was forced to cast off the clothes of his identity in order to wear the same white gloves as Mickey Mouse. White gloves, Dotty. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who notices these things.

But context is everything—and the long, heavy hand of religion was everywhere. This statue, more than anything, represents the artistic freedom of the Renaissance.

Some activities are exalted, others dismissed as lowly or humble or trivial, she thought. So who is it who decides? Privilege and male gaze, ultimately.

Life of the spirit versus that of the physical, she wrote. Sacred versus the profane. The educated versus the not. A world where the outer and inner are in constant opposition.

The world of the domestic kitchen is a female world (she underlined this). It is a world of routine, of body and of bodily function. A world of blood and carcass and guts and servitude. Men may enter but they do not work there and yet work is all that women do there. Occasionally in such paintings, male items may appear on the table—pipes, watches, maps—often

often in the most ludicrous composition and yet, they succeed in what they intend to do—revoke the feminine space. Male trium...

She’s somewhere up there—and he pointed to the black hills—cradling a broken heart, attempting to understand the complexity of human emotion. Why it’s left her diminished when not long ago she felt like a conqueror. And here am I thinking what words can give the experience value. How to explain to her that the improbability of love, which she feels will last forever, will one day shine its light again. What words of consolation can be offered? What words of reassurance can I give her that a life lived without the object of her love is still worthwhile and hers for the taking?

We had our moment and moments pass. Learn to seize them, Alys.

Oh no no, I totally disagree, said Evelyn. If women’s lives are not documented, then how on earth can we say we have the full picture? We have framed the narrative.

stay put, my sweet, and thrive.

He was a sixties man through and through, and peace and love pulsed through his pulmonic and aortic valves. And he smiled wide now that his teeth were fixed.

Good-bye authoritarianism, hello civil rights. A new ideology was taking hold and the young left no stone unturned: family, Church, Communism, Fascism. You name it, they challenged it. Divorce and abortion were back on the agenda and the Catholic right balked.

A blue marbled sphere, amplified by the lunar horizon, precious and beautiful and vulnerable, floating in the eternal darkness we all shall face. That’s how Evelyn described it whilst gazing at the cover of Cressy’s Life magazine. Cress thought Evelyn had something of the poets about her, but didn’t everyone that year, Cress? Loss and love. The only ingredients required.

mother’s, too. No education, no money, only men. A cycle of repetition so ridiculous that it needed only organ music and a scattering of plastic horses to be that predictable fairground ride. Her beauty had been her currency. Always had been. No one talked about when the bank ran dry as it inevitably would. All those books she never read. All those museums she’d rubbished as brain-box boring. Cressy said it took effort to turn a page. Takes patience and care, Peg. Takes a leap of grace to say I don’t know.

Sex, though, was what she was good at. She could turn a twenty-year-old boy into a man, and a middle-aged man into a twice-a-night. Mother was a drinker who couldn’t stop. Mother had boyfriends who couldn’t stop. Thought her dad was Bill but found out too late it was George. That was a hard one to live down. The street found her out by the canal, stony-eyed with a mouth full of bluster and a fag between her lips that she’d cadged from a decent bargeman. Take me away, she’d asked him. When you’re old enough, he’d said. See? Decent. Men who wait.

Eddie always looked at her as if the future was ripe. Ted looked at her as if the fruit had fallen.

We will find your soul, Peg, and bring it back to you.

“How beautiful is sunset, when the glow / Of heaven descends upon a land like thee, / Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!”

Evelyn said, He’s not a beggar, Mr. Lugg. What is he then, Miss Skinner? Evelyn turned back toward the cyclist and smiled. He’s alive.

Baroque! he said, tutting loudly. The art of bad taste.

Now—the pomegranate, Miss Skinner, is the symbol of . . . ? Eternal life? Resurrection? Correct. It is also the fruit of many legends. And Miss Everly looked about and lowered her voice. She said, Greek mythology says that the pomegranate grew out of the blood from Acdestis’s wounded . . . Evelyn leaned in closer. From his wounded what, Miss Everly? Miss Everly looked about her again and said, Penis, Miss Skinner.

Like Saul falling from his horse and becoming Paul. It changed me.

“Cherish the body, and the soul will follow.”

We remember the rigid corset, said the Brown sisters. When we stopped wearing them, our spines had no strength and we toppled over.

Is it wrong to admire beauty when it is the subject of such horror? The Sabine woman?

Smiling, I would say. Because he understands the response. This statue was seen by everyone, Miss Skinner. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker and the grand dukes of Tuscany. Maybe it would have been less shocking, more acceptable, had it been placed in a museum. But it was commissioned for a civic square. This man knew what he was doing. A sculpture

fixed viewpoint so we can walk around it, be part of the horror, part of the action, part of the dance. He knows the great dilemma he is presenting, Miss Skinner. He’s showing us what’s in us.

He said, The Church doesn’t have a language for the variations of our humanness. We need to look at Freud for that. Psychoanalysis is the way forward, Miss Skinner. Have you read The Interpretation of Dreams?

Today a cigarette and tomorrow the vote! she said. How very daring of you, said Mr. Collins.

That sweet delectable saint preached work without money and embrace poverty. Work without pleasure and embrace chastity. Work according to instruction and embrace obedience.

The choice for the educated woman was clear and stark. Marriage and no creative expression.

Or convent and creative expression.

So, women entered the convent in order ...