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Every Picture Tells …
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101 Every Picture Tells … Romaine Hill Waking, Herold lay flat on the bed, his head on Lizzie’s favourite silky mohair cushion. Out across the bay the Hottentots Holland mountains were etched clear against the dawn sky, red, tinged with gold, while the Helderberg, set at its particular angle, seemed to be moving slightly forward, seawards. ‘Issit nie pragtig nie, H.G.?’ she would have exclaimed. ‘Kyk maar net. Just like a painting, but so much more majestic.’ ‘Damn woman,’ he muttered. ‘Damn dog. Damn them all,’ and he rolled over and buried his face, but the mohair tickled him and the frame of his specs dug into his cheeks on either side of his nose and Shep, the German Shepherd, licked his ear and whimpered, ran to the door and then back to the bed. Jumping up, he pawed Herold in the back, whimpering again. He, too, was waiting for Lizzie. Rolling over and raising his voice, Herold said, ‘Down, Boy, down now,’ all the while patting the creature’s head and rubbing his chest bone to soothe him. The both of them were suffering. He adjusted the cushion under his head and lay looking at the bare frame, hooked still over the jagged-edged nail, where the painting had hung so triumphantly, complete at last. His latest sign to Elisabeth that she alone was his all. He had set her in stone, his beloved, painting her within a niche, with a small raised frame marking off the edge of the large, rectangular format. She herself rose from within the frame, fully flesh-and-blood, with her rising breasts, her shell-like nipples, her rounded belly and her long limbs reaching down from below the delectable triangle of russet hair to her long well-formed feet. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she stood at the water’s edge. Her exquisite flesh tones contrasted beautifully with the grey blue surround, while the greens and browns of the natural landscape were set against the rocks, as she stepped out from the shore and into the water lapping at her feet. 102 Lying there on their bed, he began to moan with the dog, as he gazed at this damaged portrait, now lying on the floor. How Herold had loved those days of sketching that were a prelude to this work that now lay ripped asunder and abandoned. He and Elisabeth had never felt more intimately bonded than in those months, as she sat or lay on the bed, sometimes reading, sometimes just standing there dreaming as she was wont, often, and with such enviable ease. Then, a fine thread would snap: ‘I’m cold, H.G., she would say. Bloody cold. This is inhuman. And I’m hungry. Don’t you artists ever feel anything? Put on the kettle and pass me your Aran. H.G., can’t you hear me?’ ‘Come on, Lizzie, just ten more minutes, please, I’m nearly there,’ he would plead. ‘Then I’ll cook up something delicious, while you lie in the bath to warm up. I just need to finish the curve of your shoulder.’ He knew that here, at last, was his true muse, the woman whom he could paint forever, live with forever. And the whole work was so very nearly resolved. Then, overnight, she was gone. Her canvas bag packed, the blue Volksie revved outside in the street, sailing off down Main Road from Kalk Bay, winding along the sea front toward Muizenberg to take Baden Powell Drive to Stellenbosch and then onto the highway, over the great passes and up through the Karoo, to Colesburg, to be with her dying mother. He had tried to work on alone, to stay motivated, directed. Not to long for her so deeply that his painting faltered again and fell into nothingness. And the painting had held him. The spell of her rising from the canvas had kept him there, at it, for all of three weeks. He could draw his love, paint his love and lately she had taught him to speak his love, face to face, a thing he had never dared to do. But long distance he could not, neither on the phone, nor by mail – email didn’t even come into it: ‘Who’d clutch a mouse,’ he’d been heard to say to his friend Giles, owner of the Kalk Bay Gallery, ‘when you can hold a woman or a paintbrush in your hand?’ Lizzie phoned from Colesburg once only...