Uarda : a Romance of Ancient Egypt — Volume 02 by Georg Ebers (ink book reader txt) 📕

has the soft roundedness of childhood but whose body is moving into gangly adolescence – peels off from the group and comes towards us.

‘Fergus,’ Eve says. ‘Good lad. This is Freda. You’ll look after her, won’t you? Introduce her to the gang and show her around. Then bring her back to the studio.’ She turns to Freda. ‘I hear you’re a bit of an artist, Freda,’ she says.

Freda goes scarlet and looks accusingly at me. I hold up my hands, protesting innocence.

‘It’s all right,’ Eve says. ‘Your granny hasn’t put your school report on Facebook. Mrs Wade, your art teacher, is my daughter – Georgia. She says you need encouraging.’

And then before Freda can say anything, she waves them away and leads me off towards the cabins. For a moment there she was herself again, and I am reminded how good she was with the pupils at William Roper, how she gave the shy ones refuge in the art room, how she nudged the awkward ones into line with her combination of cheerful bossiness and resolute good humour. I so want to believe that it is still there, somewhere, behind the lined and weary face.

She unlocks one of the cabins, removing a Back in 15 minutes notice hanging from the door, and we go inside to a room that actually catches me by the throat, so that I have to produce a fake coughing fit to cover my confusion. I always loved Eve’s house; it bounced at you, brimming with too much of everything. Sketches and watercolours elbowed each other on the walls, every chair and sofa had at least three cushions, vivid in colour, bold in design; curtains draped luxuriantly, plants flowered abundantly, and on every surface pieces of pottery and glass glowed and shimmered. This room I am standing in now is like a monochrome version of that abundance. Abundant it is, and crammed with beautiful things, but the colour is gone. Drained as if in a permanent twilight I think at first, but then, as my eyes adjust from the sunlight outside, I see that the colours are there. They are muted, not drained; they are, in fact, the colours of the landscape that has produced them. They are the misty greys and blues, the sludgy greens and ochres of the lake and the moorland; they are the colours we came through on our taxi ride as the cloud lifted and the bleary sun came through. Eve is watching me intently and I turn to smile and praise, but she waves a dismissive hand around her work.

‘Tourist fodder,’ she says. ‘They like to take home their little bit of tasteful tat. I’ll make us a cup of tea. Come through when you’ve had enough.’

She disappears through a curtain at the back and I do the rounds of the room. I don’t know much – as far as the visual arts go, I’m a but I know what I like woman – but I really don’t think this is tat. The witty portrait sketches and the landscapes with their subtle washes of colour seem to me to be lovely, and there are blue and grey patchwork cushions with tiny beads that I would buy instantly if it weren’t too complicated to buy something from Eve. ‘Tasteful’, Eve said, as if it was a dirty word, and I suppose you can see how tourists will take these things back to fit nicely into their cool urban homes, to place a single cushion on a sleek sofa or hang a landscape on a Farrow and Ball grey wall. Does tasteful make them worthless in Eve’s eyes? Would she really like still to be producing the cushions with mirror sequins on them that she used to sell at the indoor market, where we bought our kaftans in the 1980s? I would like to ask her but I don’t dare.

I put my head through the curtain. I imagined that I would find a little kitchen here, but this is actually the real studio. There is a kettle and a few pottery mugs, but the room is set up for painting or sketching. Here, I think, is where she does her portraits. I look at the easel and the sitter’s chair and have a flash of memory. When I was about eight, an artist who was a patient of my mother’s offered to paint my portrait. My mother had seen her mother through a long and difficult final illness, I think, and this was a sort of thank you present. My mother wasn’t sure about it – she distrusted anything that smacked of vanity – but I was already a literary child and this was the kind of thing that happened in books. I was fascinated by the whole business and had no trouble sitting still (when she wasn’t actually painting my face, I was allowed to have a book in my lap). The best part was our breaks, when my painter would heat up milk on a primus stove to make us cocoa. I liked the cocoa but even more I liked the romance of the attic studio and the primus stove. The finished result, I am sorry to say, was disappointing. I had hoped that she would magic me into a beauty, but though she was kind to my freckles I emerged simply as a beady-eyed little girl with a rather pointy chin. I have kept it, though; it hangs watchfully in a corner of my bedroom and judges me.

‘We can take this outside,’ Eve says, and picks up a tray with pottery mugs on it and a pair of cupcakes with rather violently pink icing. Eve catches me looking at them. ‘Fergus made them,’ she says. ‘His hand slipped, I think.’

We sit down on slightly wobbly wooden chairs at a small, round table just outside the cabin door. There is a nippy little breeze coming off the lake and I am glad that I pulled a sweater out of my