At the Edge of Summer

Tangier, Morocco

21 June 1922

Dear Grandfather,

We’ve found the old monastery, where you once stayed. Grandmother was right: the stones sing. The building, though, is maybe not as quiet as you might have known it. Now it houses a school for colonial children. It rings with laughter and French. It’s the perfect setting to capture life on canvas.

One of Grandmother’s paintings hangs here. Did you know? In the room where Luc teaches, in the old refectory, is a self-portrait. She’s swathed in white from head to toe, but her eyes peering from the cloth, they are familiar. Even though Grandmother returned to Scotland, she left a piece of herself in Morocco.

She’s wrapped all in white, but her hands are bare, and they cradle her belly. When she painted it, she must have known. Known that soon the pair of you wouldn’t be alone. Known that she might have to give up all of the heady days of painting her way across Africa. Known that things would change more for her than for you. Maybe it was all those thoughts that brought her back to Fairbridge. Maybe it was less fear and more a fierce resolve.

I’m not the only artist who came to Tangier in search of memories. The old gardener said that a dozen or so years ago a lady artist with hair as red as mine came seeking refuge. Of course it wasn’t a monastery anymore—it was already a school—but the headmaster gave her a bed in exchange for work. She told him she’d been home, only to find her husband dead and her little girl gone. She had nobody left to ask for forgiveness. She was also dying of consumption. He couldn’t turn her away, so he set her to restoring a crumbling mural in the old chapel.

But the restoration wasn’t the only thing that she did for the chapel. She designed a new altar, and the gardener built it under her direction. You should see it, with legs twining from the ground like rose vines. It looks as though it’s springing, living, from the chapel floor. Grandfather, they said she died here in the old monastery, that artist with her regrets and her red hair. But she left something beautiful behind. You would be proud.

There’s a new painting hanging now in the old refectory, one that hangs above the rows of curly-headed girls, swinging their legs and doggedly sketching apricots for young Maître Crépet. It’s another self-portrait of a woman swathed in robes. She, too, is cradling her stomach for the secret inside. But only with one hand. In the other she holds a wet paintbrush. The woman won’t stop for the baby in her stomach. No. But she also won’t leave her baby behind. She’ll put the paintbrush in her child’s hand and, together, they’ll paint the world.

Love,

Patricia Clare