a seventy seventh story...'cow with a parasol'

Eric was the sum of his misfortune.

The sad equation was written into his face.

He had been waiting around for his wife to die for six years.

Only now she was gone did he understand how much of her there had been in him.

And how many of his friends were, in fact, hers.

Nevertheless, Eric had a daughter.

Eric’s daughter was an actress.

She would visit him from the city once a month.

When she came she would find the house, the family home, in a state of neglect, and her father dressed in the threadbare remnants of his flagging spirit.

‘Come on, Daddy’, she would cajole him, ‘you have to clean up after yourself’. ‘You have to make more of an effort’.

‘I know’, Eric would sigh.  And then there would often follow a lament for his departed wife.

‘But you’re still alive, Daddy’, his daughter would say.

And Eric would nod, even though, in truth, he knew he was more than half-dead.

Seeing Eric’s mordant expression, his daughter, out of a mixture of pity and sympathy, would ask for him to go and stay with her in the city.

Eric always resisted with what resistance there was left in him.

The city was full of life.

Indeed, the shock might have killed Eric when all really he desired was to be whisked away in his sleep – to his wife, wherever she was.

~

Before his wife became ill, Eric was a successful art-dealer.

He had loved art almost as much as he loved his wife, or so he used to imagine.

And yet even his passion for his one time favourite, Chagall, had dimmed.

Although he would still sit in the living room where ‘Cow With A Parasol’ hung above the mantelpiece, these days he looked at the painting less with admiration, more with growing despair.

In the top left hand corner of the painting was the white-veiled spectre of his late wife, embracing a young man.

The young man, of course, had once been Eric.

What troubled Eric most about ‘Cow With A Parasol’, now his wife was dead, was the fact it had come to appear in the painting that where the eyes of Eric, the young man, were fixed firmly on his bride, the eyes of Eric’s wife gazed distractedly into the living room.

When his wife was alive, and they would sit together in the living room on the leather recliner after dinner, and drink wine, Eric had never noticed this.

Nor the expression on his wife’s face in the painting – was it sadness? Or worse, indifference? Barely concealed disgust?! 

At any rate there was something disconcerting in her appearance.

~

Like Eric, Chagall, the man who painted ‘Cow With A Parasol’, lost his wife before he was lost to her.

When the Nazis invaded France, Chagall’s wife, Bella, died from a swift and fatal viral infection during their traumatic escape into exile.

Chagall, who movingly described Bella as his ‘soul’ and ‘inspirer’, was naturally devastated.

And yet for Chagall, Bella would live on for him in his paintings, paintings - including ‘Cow With A Parasol’ – that in their spinneys of vibrant colour and rich pastel shades helped Chagall reconcile his spirit and express his loss fruitfully.

Unlike Chagall, Eric’s association and love of art was coloured by money.

It had bought him happiness while his wife was alive, indeed he had been glad of it; but now she was gone, he realised it all added up to nothing.

Lo, there grew in Eric a desperate and wanton feeling he had mistaken greed and lust for something altogether more luminous and sacred.

And when he looked at ‘Cow With A Parasol’, with the dispassionate glut of knowledge he had of it’s creator, learned as wrote when an art-dealer, and the miserable expression on the countenance of his wife, it was akin to looking through a window into his perhaps vacant soul.

~

Incidentally, Eric had once met Chagall at an art fair in New York after the war.  He remembered with a mixture of fondness and sorrow, how his wife had so charmed the famous painter with her wit, when he had been tongue tied in the presence of someone he had learned was a genius.

Since his wife had died, this half-buried memory had found a new and rather more malignant form in ‘Cow With A Parasol’, only seeking to reinforce Eric’s feeling that without his wife his existence was worthless.

Then one evening after a particularly difficult day, at least half of which Eric had spent in his dressing gown, nursing a scotch, slumped in the living room on the leather recliner, gazing at the painting, an idea miraculously swum to the surface of his befuddled consciousness.

He sat bolt upright; suddenly resolute for the first time in a long while.

Action was needed.

The painting had to be go! 

Could he even bring himself to destroy it?

~

After Eric had paced up and down the living room for a few moments, letting the idea breathe a little and develop more of a life of it’s own from where he would be able to have a better perspective on it, it became clear to him the best solution was  to persuade his daughter to take the painting back to the city with her, following her next visit.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, Eric thought, to persuade his daughter.  After all, having an original Chagall in her London home would surely appeal to the exhibitionist inside her.  Moreover, actresses liked to entertain and be the talk of town.

And so it proved easy.

Two days later his daughter came to visit, and again in part out of pity and sympathy, in a greater part out of a vainglorious wish to be the aforementioned talk of town, she quickly acquiesced to Eric’s wish.

‘You seem more cheery, today, Daddy’ she remarked, and Eric for once agreed.  He did feel better.

Moving the painting to his daughter’s house meant he wouldn’t have to part forever with the memory of his beloved wife, not to mention a jolly expensive work of art, but instead, that the psychological torment ‘Cow With A Parasol’ had recently been inflicting on him would be alleviated.

The painting, he thought, might take on new meaning at his daughter’s house, where, on visiting her (perhaps the city wasn’t so bad after all these days), Eric mused he might joyfully rediscover it, or at least, be able to derive satisfaction from the painting the way he used to.

Therefore, after tea, and before his daughter was due back in the city, together they went into the drawing room, and stood for a while, on Eric’s request, to take in ‘Cow With A Parasol’ for one last time hanging on the mantelpiece in its place of the last thirty years.

‘Any regrets, say now!’ said his daughter.

‘It’s coming to stay with me otherwise’.

Eric looked into the beautiful green eyes of his daughter, and to his surprise felt a sense of calm descend.

‘No dear’, he said, ‘none at all’.

And without further ado, he moved across the hearth to lift the painting from the wall.

But as he did so, a folded up piece of paper, stained yellow with age, fell from behind the canvas.

His daughter moved passed him to pick it up, while Eric carefully leaned the painting against the adjacent wall.

Then he turned around.

His daughter had unfolded the piece of paper and was looking at it with mouth open, a confused and pained expression forming on her brow.

‘What is it, dear?’, Eric asked.  ‘What does it say?’

Eric’s daughter put her hand to her mouth, and took a step back.

‘It’s a love letter’, she said in a low voice … ‘between Mummy and..

..Marc Chagall’.