My neighbour tells me Dante Rossetti used to come here, for the light she says, knowing I’ll understand, just think of him and Elizabeth Siddal walking through the woods, up to the waterfall. And then she fills me in on the changed landscape of the town, the majority of the woodland, now park, the waterfall less of a roar now, tamed and channelled so as to avoid presenting more flood risks in a town already often besieged by water. She tells me too of Aleister Crowley, taking me past his old haunts one night but this morning, it’s Rossetti I think of as I crouch at the trunk of a oak tree, surely one Rossetti would’ve walked past, and there’s a squirrel there today, on its hind legs, an acorn clutched between two paws, these late autumn colours so close to his palette.
I am convinced I know this exact squirrel. Most of the squirrels here are jittery, not in need of human interaction and most people in the park are walking their dogs, making the squirrels wiser, warier. This squirrel though, is so often found at the base of this tree that the children have called it friendly squirrel, occasionally stupid squirrel when a dog comes hurtling towards it.
A rare day of blue sky, sleeves pulled over my fingers, could not find my gloves when I left earlier to get a coffee. I eye the squirrel, it eyes me. I barely dare to move, knowing it will scarper. I like the thick fur lining its belly, making its legs look larger than they are. For as long as it stays still, it merges with the leaves scattering the ground. Think I will need to rake them soon, the Japanese maple in the front garden has nearly shed them all, the grass more leaves than anything else.
From nowhere, a dog bolts towards the squirrel. I am sure the squirrel’s eyes widen as it darts up the trunk, away from this daft mutt barking and begging at the bottom. Think of Rossetti, of how divided the children were when I took them to the exhibition at the Tate Britain, Avery, keen to get upstairs to Bacon, doing his best to get round it as quickly as possible, whereas Estella lingered, thinking Elisabeth Siddal beautiful, asking what happened to her. And the more intense the colours of the painting, the more insistent the gaze of the model, the more she leant forward, scouring the surface of the painting, as if looking for kinship maybe, this child with her own insistent, unforgiving gaze. Not six hours born when she turned it on me, on the first day of spring, winter seeing itself out with a snowstorm that howled all night around the sharp corners of the hospital. I paced with her in my arms, her small head tucked under my chin until somewhere around the middle of the night, she looked up at me, fixing her eyes on me in a way I’d never been looked at before or since. I’ve never felt so lacking. Everything since, an attempt to make up.
She is disappointed Millais’s Ophelia is not here, so I take her up to the room it’s in, she stands looking at it for a long time. Avery, impatient, tucks my sleeve, refuses to sketch in the book an assistant gave him. We turn to leave the room, pass Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. I have to stop, nothing will ever get me past the light in that painting, think of the little girls in it, sent out night after night as Sargent tried to capture the fading sunset. I say tried, when he did capture it, in the way no reproduction can ever has. For weeks after, Estella lies in the bath, her hair spread out behind her, when I ask if she’s being Ophelia, she insists that no, she is Elizabeth Siddal. As if this kid is cut out to be anyone’s muse, but I leave her to her delusions.
I want to walk up to the old waterfall, but I also want coffee and have work waiting, in the way it always does. I leave the squirrel up the tree and the dog barking and the waterfall calling and turn sharply towards the cafe, to coffee, to home.