A Secret Alchemy Read Online Free Page B

leaving does ease one private fear of my own. Ever since the day, all those years ago, when Maud and I first saw the Chantry chapel among what were then orchards and fields, and knew that we must make it the soul of our house and workshop, the soul even of our family itself, I’ve feared that one day Kay and Gareth—so different in temperament—might not be able to agree over the running of the Press. Elaine is married to Robert Butler—had you heard?—and if she has a son the problem might yet be compounded, or indeed resolved. Who knows? But for now, at least, I may take pleasure in news of Kay’s successes abroad and Gareth’s passion for the Press at home, and know that no rivalry troubles our family.
    Having, as he said in a letter to his mother, “[g]ot what there was to be got,” from Paris, in 1938 Kay moved to New York. There he joined circles that included such up-and-coming painters as Ben Shahn and Charles Demuth, and in such works as “Battery Park, Nightfall” (1938, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and “The Dock at East Egg” (1939, Private Collection) he was quickly recognised as having brought a uniquely English sensibility to a circle otherwise much concerned with industrialism and its aesthetics. At the outbreak of war William took on the full burden of running the Press again so that Gareth could volunteer for the Royal Engineers; he was taken prisoner at Tobruk and repatriated in 1945. Ona visit to London in 1941 Kay received his call-up papers and joined the 8th Royal Fusiliers; he was wounded at Coriano during the Italian campaign, and the war ended before he recovered. He returned to New York, where in 1946 his mistress Lucie Lefevre, an artist’s model whom he had known before the war, gave birth to a daughter, Una Maud Pryor. In the following year Kay and Lucie were killed in California when their car ran off the Coastal Highway at the Bixby Gorge, and baby Una came to the Chantry, to be brought up with Elaine and Robert’s children, Isode and Lionel.
    It’s beautiful letterpress: Plantin, pressed richly into fine paper by one of William’s most gifted heirs, sitting well in the hand, the jacket heavy matte paper with a roundel of Izzy’s engraving of the Solmani Press sign, which hung above the workshop, festooned with ivy. The roundel is blocked in gold on the boards too. It’s Izzy’s history, the official version, the story of record; I notice she even refers to herself in the third person. It’s my history, and not my history.
    She finished the story with the death of our grandfather, and when it was published I read it quickly, always with only one eye while eating breakfast or on a bus or somewhere else distracting. Then I put it away, and since then I’ve only opened my copy—first edition, personally inscribed “To dear Una will all love from Izzy”—when there was nowhere else I could check a necessary reference.
    I put the book back and move around the room. Here’s the big group portrait: The Solmani Press, Silver Jubilee, 1936 , the brass plate says, shiny and faintly green around the edges with polishing. Grandpapa—William Pryor—standing beside Grandmama inthe basket chair. And their three children: my father, Kay, on his right with a palette was a quicker, darker, wirier version of Uncle Gareth, the portrait tells me. I wouldn’t know. Uncle Gareth himself in the doorway to the workshop, with the current apprentices to one side of it—very little younger than him, but somehow so clearly not sons of the house—and Aunt Elaine slightly separate, with an apron and a trugful of carrots.
    Izzy returns.
    “Don’t they look proper to us, these days, all wearing suits and ties?” I say.
    “It was usually shirtsleeves and aprons in the workshop. This was a formal portrait. I don’t know why he insisted on Mummy wearing an apron. It makes her look as if she wasn’t part of the Press. I’ve left it to the San Diego collection in my will. It’s a