Westwood

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Authors: Stella Gibbons
Tags: Literary, Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, Contemporary Fiction
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there isn’t any happiness.’
    ‘What would you do, Mum, if Dad was to get jealous of you?’
    ‘Laugh,’ said Mrs Wilson briefly.
    Mother and daughter, arm-in-arm in the starlight, laughed delightedly at the mere thought.
    ‘No, but it’s ever so sad,’ said Mrs Wilson, sobering. ‘It makes me feel quite bad to see them; I don’t think I shall go there much.’
    ‘It gets me down too. Never mind, we’ll have Margaret round to our place and find her a specially nice boy. Oh, there’s Dad.’
    As they approached the house a dim figure could be discerned in the porch, making shooing movements towards a smaller and motionless form.
    ‘He’s putting Geoffrey out,’ said Hilda. (Geoffrey was the cat, named after the rear-gunner who had given her to Hilda as a kitten three years ago.)
    ‘Hullo, Dad! Gorgeous night!’
    Mr Wilson, abandoning the attempt to get Geoffrey to move on, glanced up at the brilliant stars and observed that he thought it would freeze before morning.
    Margaret walked quickly homewards, absently noticing the beauty of the night while her excited thoughts played about the idea of going over to Hampstead on the following afternoon, and trying to recall everything she had ever heard or read about Alexander Niland. She had seen a reproduction in colour of his best-known picture: a soldier and a woman lying embraced in long grass full of clover, under a dark tree whose branches hung down against the evening sky. The popular press had called its greys and greens and purples daring, while praising it. She herself had thought it beautiful, but it had shocked her. She had felt while looking at it as if she were spying on the kisses of those closely embraced figures, and it had made her remember every pair of twilit lovers she had ever seen.
    This feeling was not peculiar to Margaret. The common denominator was felt in all Niland’s paintings, and it was this, apart from their beauty and his genius, which gave them their popularity. For they were popular. Thousands of reproductions of them had found their way into homes all over England and America, and the strange, simple juxtaposition of their colours, unexpected yet immediately felt to be inevitable, had helped thousands of ordinary people to look at ordinary yet beautiful objects with refreshed eyes.
    Somerset Maugham has written of ‘the animal serenity of great writers.’ Niland possessed the visual serenity of the greatest painters. His work was untormented, and charged with his pleasure in the world he saw about him, and while there was no deliberate rejection of pain and ugliness in it, both were transmuted as they passed from his vision to his canvas. His paintings were not old-fashioned in the slighting sense of the words, but they resembled those of the painters of three or four hundred years ago, in that they were created in an age full of horrors and violence, yet breathed a calm loveliness which was timeless. In those medieval paintings the best of earth and the vision of the celestial were blended; on Niland’s canvases, his feeling for life penetrated the countenances and limbs of his happy mothers, his sleeping children and laughing girls, and made them glow. To an indifferent public, long confronted by a surfeit of guitars and swollen legs depicted either singly or in determined conjunction, the result was as refreshing as it was surprising.
    He had no political views, and therefore in certain circles his name was mud.
    The possibility of going to his house and perhaps catching a glimpse of him greatly excitedMargaret, and she thought far more about that than about her first day at the new school on Monday. She planned what she would wear, and what she would say if he himself should open the front door (for Lamb Cottage did not sound like the name of a large house with many servants) and even prepared a little speech that was humble or casual or provocative as her mood varied. The Anna Bonner School for Girls seemed a dull place

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