Still Life with Woman and Chateau

Still Life with Woman and Chateau

There were sixty-five rooms in the house and Sarah Almant had a relationship with each of them. When her husband, the great moralist writer Arthur Almant died two decades before, she did not for a moment consider giving up the house; it was as much a part of her personal legacy and creative life as the magnificent alliance she'd shared with her husband for more than forty years. Besides, he was buried near the main house, and she could never conceive of a circumstance that would make it right to move him.

She thought about Arthur every day at precisely the same time, early morning, before breakfast in the garden with her daughter, Stella, who was now in her fifties and lived down the road. Stella was a painter, like her mother and they spent much of their time together talking about art, movements, schools, ancient and modern methods. Seasonally, they gave classes for the residents of the nearby town.

I met Sarah Almant through a friend of a friend – the brother of a woman I'd known for some years in London. A dinner party was being held at the Almant's house, a four-hundred-year-old chateau in the Sussex countryside. I'd been invited by the brother, who knew that I was broadly interested in literature and particularly in some of the later works of Arthur Almant.

Years earlier, when Almant was commanding vast royalty advances and was the subject of often ridiculous and intrusive speculation on British and American “chat shows,” I had written to his attorney asking for an interview. I'd never heard back from the attorney, and I hadn't pressed the issue; Almant had a reputation for being averse to interviews and I was working at the time for a small New York literary quarterly that hardly carried enough cache to impress a titan like Arthur Almant.

On the day of the visit, I fretted about a number of things: what to wear, what to say, how to present myself? Should I conceal that I was a follower of her husband's work and of her own remarkable still life paintings and landscapes? I was honored to be invited to the house, of course, in the presence of such history and accomplishment. Perhaps because I'd spent half a lifetime writing fiction I had trouble seeing Mrs. Almant in anything other than abstractions. I hoped when we met I would be able to react to her as a real person. Certainly, her brilliant landscapes, luxuriant with morning air and mysterious forests suggested a spirit of grace and humanity.

I had so many questions to ask her but I certainly had no wish to make her uncomfortable. To prepare for the dinner, I watched a series of video interviews she'd given with the BBC. Through a period of twenty or so years, she had seemed not to age at all – her soft features had remained velveteen with the years, her flowing gray hair remained heavy and lustrous, her skin as bright and lambent as it had been.

Arthur Almant, who had written thirteen acclaimed novels in a salmagundi of genres, was known to spend almost every hour of his day working at an ordinary oak writing desk, one he had used for most of his adult life. It was said he wrote forty or more drafts of every short story and novel, and when asked by acquaintances about this disposition toward what appeared to be a manic perfectionism he would ask, “Does anyone know what they're doing?” His schedule was to wake early, eat breakfast in the enormous central kitchen with a collection of excited dogs and cats, then retire to his office to work, uninterrupted until late dinner.

Almant's reclusive reputation had been erroneously assigned to him by people who could not understand his simple preference for work over social intercourse. And because he was seldom seen about in town or in nearby London, his cloistered reputation was considered ridiculous. In fact, he and Sarah regularly met with a formidable group of intellectual and artistic friends and colleagues who would travel up from the city for dinner or for all night tournaments of chess, a game that had become Almant's fascination when he was a teenager.

After watching one of the interviews, I considered the possibility that Arthur and Sarah might have engaged in epic chess matches that lasted into the British night but it was an image I couldn't quite summon. She seemed too restless for games. I thought of chess in black and white; Arthur Almant was black and white, too, straightforward, considered, definite, no room for error. Sarah seemed more available, more shimmering, vibrant, an artist in color.

The more I watched her interviews the more I realized that the great works of Arthur Almant, novels that would be discussed for centuries in universities and cafes, would never have been written if he had been a man of the world, a cosmopolitan who spent his time in noisy bistros and public places, meeting his readers, conducting lectures, offering advice and opinions to struggling artists. More obviously, these novels would never have been written if he hadn't had the good fortune to marry his wife. She stood for every bolt of his work; it was her presence on the other side of his office door that informed the letters of his books.

In one of the interviews, she was asked if she thought she had influenced her husband's work. She replied, “anyone who is married for so long to one person is bound to be an influence, I suppose.”

I was excited to meet her, excited to enter the house – the factory – where so much great art had been made over the many years of their partnership. But I was more intimidated now that I had done my research. Sarah seemed grounded, a thoughtful, generous artist who was willing, after all, to host me, a perfect stranger. But the grade of her work as a visual artist made me uncomfortable and somewhat intimidated. She was the spine that held the house together. I didn't want to do anything that might raise unpleasant memories or come off as fawning or sycophantic. I simply wanted to be a grateful guest.

“So nice to see you,” Sarah said to my friend Jack as he walked with his girlfriend, Sara, into the great room on the appointed day.

Jack threw his arms around her and they embraced as if they shared some secret no one else in the room would ever know.

The other visitors arrived, and we were all escorted to the enormous kitchen, a room so large that there was space in an alcove for a dining table set for twelve. As they took their seats and waited for introductions, I wondered who these people were, what they had done to deserve to be there. Sarah sat at the head of the table, observing each of us.

Here, I will need to pause. I cannot go into details of our dinner conversation because a lot of things were said that were intended only for those in the room. The meal was wonderful, four luxurious courses prepared by an outside chef who had occasionally cooked for the Almants but hadn't been back to the house for many years. The chef personally served our meal, from the charmingly egalitarian bubble and squeak to the marvelous salmon in puff pastry. After all that time, Sarah seemed to still have a warm feeling for him. I suppose he was part of her reserve of artful memories.

After dinner, some of the guests went to pay their respects at Arthur's grave site, nearby. I stayed behind with the couple who had brought me along and we all gathered around Sarah, who told us stories of her life in the house, before and after the death of her husband. When my friends left the room for a few moments to walk in the gardens behind the house, Sarah pulled her chair closer and told me an interesting thing about her reaction to Arthur's death in the immediate hours after the discovery of his body.

“I was awake for the whole thing,” she said, “not numb or out of it, as one would expect. I did a strange thing the morning he died. While we waited for people to come to take care of things for us, I walked through every room in the house. One after another, room after room. I didn't linger in any one place for too long, just moved on to the next, and to the next, until I'd been to every room – every room that Arthur and I had spent time in. I found that restorative. I suppose I needed to assure myself that with Arthur gone, the places he'd lived and worked in were still exactly as they'd always been.”

The rest of the dinner party returned to the kitchen, and we all said our goodbyes, thanked Sarah for a wonderful evening and headed out to our cars for the short ride back to London.

A few months later, quite unexpectedly, I received a note from Sarah Almant, thanking me for coming to dinner and for our conversation. I wondered if all the guests had received similar notes, but I preferred to believe that something had moved her to write to me alone.

At the end of the letter, Mrs. Almant wrote: “There was something else I forgot to mention about that morning after Arthur's death. When I got back to the house, I had a very strong urge to paint – no particular idea in mind, just anything. While a general chaos took over the house, everyone moving here and there to take care of things, I went out to the studio. I felt myself almost in a dream, as if everything around me was happening somewhere else. I sat at the easel and put the brush to a blank canvas. I chose a small one because I liked the confines of a smaller space. I thought about what I would paint and then the idea occurred quickly: a front-view portrait of Arthur, a memory for myself of how I recalled him in these last moments. I started to trace the outline of his face, but I found that I was unable to. What was going on outside the walls of the studio had overcome me. I could not address the emptiness of that canvas. I composed myself, gathered my thoughts as well as I could, and my sanity. In a few minutes the subject of the painting became clear to me.

I changed brushes, took a thicker, shorter brush and used a gray-tone color I infrequently used in landscapes or portraits. I began to trace the outline of something completely different: the house, the exterior, seen from the back gardens and beyond that, the forest. I became lost in time; I painted very quickly, which is something I don't really do; it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes. When I leaned back in my chair, I saw the house as I'd never seen it, simply because I had never painted it before. It had never occurred to me. Now I felt the need to preserve it, and I suppose to preserve myself. I felt a willingness to go on. For the moment I was found in time.”