Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [68]
“Do you live in Burford?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, I do now,” she said. She told me she had retired five years earlier to Burford—where she’d grown up—after spending her working life in London. “The thing I love about living in Burford,” she said, “is that you can walk through the town and always meet someone you know.”
“And someone you don’t know,” I replied. “Like me.”
She laughed. “Well, now that we know one another, would you like me to walk you up the High Street and help you find that lemon curd?”
“I’d love it,” I said.
For the next hour or so, I walked through the village with Letty Thompson as my guide. Up the High Street we went, then on to Sheep Street and Priory Lane, circling back to the High Street. And as we walked we talked. Although Letty gave no hint of being bored with village life, I could tell she was eager to meet new people.
Letty told me about her life in London as a young single woman—“spinster” is the word she used—and later, as an older single woman. She told me about the dressmaker’s shop where she had designed and sewn dresses for well-to-do ladies after giving up her hope of becoming an artist. She’d taken up painting again, she told me, since retiring to Burford.
“Watercolors,” she said. “Landscapes and animals, mostly. I rather fancy painting the birds hereabout.”
“In other words, you might be described as Burford’s answer to Audubon.”
“Yes, one could say that. Although perhaps just a bit more accomplished than your Audubon,” she said wryly. I laughed, silently admiring the quickness of her wit. It was one of the things I most admired about the Brits, their sly but sharp humor.
Suddenly Letty stopped walking. She turned to face me. “Would you like to see some most interesting paintings?” she asked. “They’re in a little gallery just near here. Quite captivating if you like the look of primitive art.” The artist’s name was Joan Gillchrest, Letty told me. “She’s seventy-five and lives in Cornwall, in a small fishing town called Mousehole. She’s painted a long while. And with some success, too.”
We turned off the main street onto Bear Court, a narrow, cobblestoned lane, then stopped before a small shop with the sign WREN GALLERY. Peering into the window, our heads close together, I caught the scent of Letty’s perfume. It was fresh and light and smelled like orange blossoms floating on top of a sea breeze. It suited her, I thought.
“Let’s go in, shall we?” Letty said, leading the way.
The paintings were wonderful. Charming and sophisticated, they were like something out of a child’s book: tiny bold blocks of color painted without perspective onto the flat canvas. It was as though Brueghel and Grandma Moses had collaborated to bring to life the village of Mousehole. Tiny painted villagers marched by, leading their dogs along a frozen canal. Women wearing hats and mufflers stopped to talk by a seawall, gesturing as they exchanged the news of the day. Men in long dark coats and caps stood at the canal’s edge, where boats were trapped like fish frozen in the icy waters.
As we stood there in the Wren Gallery, we saw spring come to the village, too: flowers bloomed, cats stretched in the sun, and crabbers sailed in bright red boats straight from the bathtubs of my childhood. Like Alice in Wonderland, I had fallen into a strange, captivating country: Mousehole. Even the name held the promise of remarkable adventures.
What made it more exciting, though, was that Letty Thompson had fallen with me into this Wonderland. Together we raced from painting to painting, pointing out a black dog here, a skating figure there, the slumped posture of a sausage-shaped dog on a leash, the tilt of a head in conversation, the single stroke of a brush that summed up a cloud or a wave.
Neither of us wanted the other