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Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd - Christopher Arthur

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104 pages

English

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These stories move about, taking some existential liberties, and include the occasional dark episode, while at the same time, they are laced with humour and the occasional lightness of touch, though they tend not to be politically correct! Above all, they set out to entertain. Living and working in Durham, their author likes to think of himself as working in the tradition of Hugh Walpole, who wrote his famous stories in the same neck of the woods.

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Short story

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528941419
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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O phelia and O ther S tories
Christopher Arthur
Austin Macauley Publishers
2021-05-28
Ophelia and Other Stories About the Author Copyright Information © Acknowledgement Ophelia Pebbly and Narrow-Shouldered Oberon Leach A Snowflake in Summer A Battered Visage Granny’s Little Secret A Special Operation Reflections of a Life An Arachnophile The Reunion All in C Health and Safety
About the Author
I studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University, back in the ’60s, before doing fieldwork in Cyrenaica, when I traced the main water supply of ancient Ptolemais from its source to the city’s cisterns. I followed this up as a member of a field survey of sites in Fezzan and later I worked as a site supervisor for several seasons on a Byzantine excavation in Istanbul. I have also travelled in Central America, Peru, Turkey, North and East Africa, Iran, Eastern and Central Europe, Malaysia, Italy, France, Russia and Ukraine. In the course of a career, largely spent teaching, I have also written and produced a considerable number of plays.
My published works to date are the following:
Footnotes , The New Millennium Press 1994 (Travel pieces)
The Tulip Garden and Other Stories, Stamford House Publishing (2003)
Cappadocian Moon and Other Stories , Melrose Books (2007)
The Novgorod Master and Other Stories , Pearl Press (2010)
A Tale of Two Russians (a novel), Dynasty Press (2013)
What’s in a Name? (a novel), Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd. (2017)
Copyright Information ©
Christopher Arthur (2021)
The right of Christopher Arthur to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528939683 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528941419 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2021)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgement
My warm thanks to Mervyn Burleigh whose critical appraisal as the stories emerged has been invaluable.
Ophelia
Quentin Swan, ever since his student days in art school, had been something of a loner, especially with the metropolitan elite among whom he dwelt and of which he, strictly speaking, was a member. His father had been a Harley Street physician, and young Quentin had been educated in one of the capital’s leading public schools. But he had dropped out of his university course to enrol, instead, in art school to pursue what he felt was his true vocation in life, as a painter.
But a painter with a difference. He defied all the current trends, absorbing himself, instead, in the works of the Dutch masters of the 16 th and 17 th centuries, which he followed up with a detailed study of some of the nineteenth-century painters of Northern Europe, as well, which inevitably lead him to the Pre-Raphaelites whose exacting technique he admired and set about emulating.
After passing art school, he acquired a small studio in Dulwich, with the help of his family, close to where he had been a boy at school, and hopefully set out to earn his daily bread, painting portraits. It was not an unrealistic decision as his exhaustive style lent itself to that genre better than to any other. So, it wasn’t long before the name Quentin Swan started to reach out across the metropolis and beyond.
But while his work was appreciated in certain moneyed circles, it did not alter his personal predilections or rather his reclusive lifestyle. In fact, his aloofness, if anything, seemed to boost his market. However, it was only when he was alone and the larger world was locked out that he felt he could be true to himself. It boiled down to a sort of communion, mystical, in its way, with those kindred spirits with whom he felt connected.
A pair of painters gripped his imagination in particular, partly for their truthfulness to nature, but most of all, perhaps, for the subject matter of two of their paintings, each one being of a female figure plucked from literature and depicted in dire straits. They had, of course, been endlessly reproduced and most books dealing with nineteenth-century British art, especially, were obliged to include them. Quentin had first come across them, as a boy of ten, in a children’s encyclopaedia, while a few years later at school he had been introduced to the literary sources which had inspired their creation.
Did this experience have an influence on the direction his artistic predilections would later take? In his middle years at public school, he had the good fortune to fall into the hands of an inspiring English teacher, a certain Edwin Milner, who was no dumber down and believed in a bit of good old-fashioned academic rigour. He insisted on his pupils getting to grips with the most challenging texts and, at sixteen, Quentin, and others in his class were even composing their own Middle English verse in the manner of Geoffrey Chaucer. Shakespeare was tackled, over and above the requirements of public examinations, and Milner’s class was led down the byways to some of his lesser-known plays. Nineteenth-century English literature too: the great classics, the works of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray and poets such as Macaulay and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Milner was a man of a conservative disposition, not one for modernist dissonance and a stern advocate of clarity of expression. Of the twentieth-century English writers, the one he most admired was George Orwell, all of which melded readily with Quentin’s own emergent temperament, so he was soon being singled out for encouragement.
It was curiously retro, as Quentin had little or no time for current teenage tastes, preferring to immerse himself in an idealised past, and, along with it, a kind of perfectionism, a truth to nature. He might even, in the jargon of his own time, have been dismissed as an anorak or a nerd. But there was nothing nerdish about Quentin, though he was inclined to be somewhat retro in his appearance, for instance, he liked to do up his collar and to wear a droopy bow tie, yet at the same time, he was easy-going and willing to pool his interests with others. Verbal clarity seemed to go together with the visual kind that he strove to render in his painting. There were hours of methodical and meticulous study spent in the capital’s galleries, studiously copying the works of great Dutch and nineteenth-century masters. And then back again to his studio, where he endeavoured to instil the skill and visionary intensity of what he had observed into his own work.
But along with this, there was his reading. He lapped up everything he could lay his hands on about the Pre-Raphaelites, their lives as well as their work and sharing, wherever possible, in the tangled web of their relationships, while giving himself little time for any of his own, their acting as a kind of surrogate. He was intrigued, for instance, how they carried their loves over into their work. And he felt this most strongly in the case of two painters in particular: John Everett Millais and the rather later figure, John William Waterhouse. Two of their works gripped him more powerfully than any of the others, a fascination was probably born when, as a schoolboy, he had spent much of his time browsing in that children’s encyclopaedia and following on, the influence of his inspiring teacher, Edwin Milner.
The works that grabbed his attention was Millais’ ‘Death of Ophelia’ and Waterhouse’s ‘The Lady of Shallot’ . He was familiar with ‘Hamlet,’ of course, from his days under Mr Milner and his attention had been drawn to ‘The Lady of Shalott’ after he had read Alfred Lord Tennyson’s haunting poem, which bore that title. Both were about women in dire straits; Ophelia’s was worst, for she had just drowned herself and her body was floating on the surface of a stream, which was vibrant with blooms in the Millais rendering, while the Lady of Shalott was making her final desperate flight in a boat from her imprisonment.
But why had these two works become so embedded in Quentin’s imagination, apart from the obvious poignancy of their subject matter and the quality of their execution? His own relationships with the opposite sex had so far been fleeting, possibly wistful, even, and romantically inclined as far as they had been allowed to go, while he had remained firmly unattached. No woman shared his life, apart from these two tragic figures, rendered so movingly by the brushes two of England’s most accomplished nineteenth-century painters.
He had made his own copies of each, which he hung on his studio walls, and based other works on them, sometimes placing them in a modern setting, which echoed nevertheless the original plight of their subjects, as he read it.
It was the drowned Ophelia that he addressed first. The sheer beauty of the dead girl, rendered so movingly, which somehow still endowed her with a living quality that put the morbidity of decay and decomposition off-limits. It was a convincing rendering of a dead girl all right, but one still charged with life, which drew Quentin to consider the relationship the artist might have enjoyed with the subject of his painting.
The treatment of the freshly deceased girl, the deranged heroine of S