I slept with coal under my pillow. Virginia told me that women used to do that in the 17th century—it supposedly gave you dreams of who was to be your husband. She knows strange things, my sister. The things she fails to know are also perplexing, like how to scrub a blue porcelain plate clean without cracking the edges. 

            My neck was stiff when I woke and I was, unsurprisingly, still confused about my husband. My dreams had consisted of miles of sand dunes, nothing more, nothing less, no more clarity on the whole husband situation. The orange-ness of my room greeted me as my eyes peeled open, its brightness giving me the courage to fend off my sheets and swing my feet over and out onto the cold wooden boards. I stumbled towards the kitchen looking like a young giraffe, as we all do, during those first few steps of the day. I stumbled gently, if such a thing is possible, careful not to wake Clive, who now lay snoring under half pulled-back blankets.

            I padded out the door and into the hall, still in my nightdress, to Duncan’s flat at 22 Fitzroy Street. The past year of him only being a stairway away had been dreamy. Our close corridors made the affair less laborious and far more justified. I slipped through his door, crossed the living room, and floated to his bedside. I perched on the bed and combed my fingers through his hair, suddenly thinking, at the moment, of Clive’s shiny bald scalp—Clive would eventually find out about us but pretend to be completely approving, albeit secretive, of my triangular love life. Duncan’s dark lashes fluttered and eyes peeled open, greeted by the silky blue of my nightdress. “My morning Bell,” he hummed with a sleepy grin.

            After tip-toeing back up the stairs to my flat, I made myself coffee, as I always do, out of contempt for the years I believed it was only proper for me to sip tea. I slurped it down and instantly felt its bitterness turn to adrenaline. I didn’t like the taste of it as much as I loved the aroma. I woke up Quentin and Julian and prepared them breakfast and packed school lunches as they shuffled about their room. At times, being a mother felt like being a spoon—a vehicle that delivered small children their food. I was indifferent to the task but infatuated with them both. Quentin would go on to become a historian, a rather endless profession if you think of it, and write successfully about my sister. Julian would die as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War—I would be utterly devastated and live another 24 years. Angelica would be born in three years’ time, at the tail end of the war that was supposed to end all wars. She would be hit by a car as a child and live into the 21st century; only at age 17 would I disclose to her her real father.

            Once the children were off and Clive had retreated to his studio on the opposite end of Gordon Square, I was alone in the flat. What to do today? I could shop, but I found the picking of clothes rather tedious and stressful. I could never quite find the right fitting blouse of the perfect shade of blue, which is why I preferred to paint my ideal wardrobe instead. I initiated dressmaking at the Omega, only convincing the others to include it on the itinerary after playing out the scene of how enthused and satisfied their wives would be. Moreover, many windows on Oxford Street were still smashed and boarded from the suffragette raid—I needn’t any person think I either approved or disapproved of women spending time on spending money.

            I decided on a walk. I bounded out onto the square and looped the cobblestoned streets, glimpsing into the eyes of strangers in the hopes of finding an inspirational subject. I think I was secretly looking for people like me—girls with brass hips and a drifting yet well-ordered sense about them. It’s embarrassing to admit how many people I’ve failed to truly see, or perhaps have even actively ignored, over the years.

            Everyone looked tense—the bouts of attempted bomb raids over the past year had put them on edge. British villages had been hit and people died, and I refused to look at the newspapers. What was I to do with those images? What came out of hating the Germans, other than emotional fuel to pour into social gatherings? My anxiety had neutralized, had become part of my functioning being; it would take my son’s death to disrupt my neutrality towards worldly affairs.

            I zig-zagged towards Charlotte Street, catching whiffs of overripe fruit from the opened doors of pubs. As the war intensified over the coming years, these taverns would transform into dark caves of escape, a place where you forget that the ceiling above you is no less impenetrable than any other. I took the sharp left turn onto Goodge Street and felt the stabbing pains of two births as I passed by the red brick edifice of Middlesex Hospital. I would nearly die there in forty years after fainting at a dinner party—a moment that would have been utterly embarrassing had I still cared at that point about the impressions I made.

            I pause on Great Portland Street in front of Pagani’s: the Italian restaurant housing London’s best carbonara, and the façade to the Omega Workshop. I had enthusiastically co-directed this artist space in my twenties—Duncan had been the other ‘co-’. Spearheading Omega was by far my proudest achievement. At the workshop’s opening event, I was so riveted that I dashed up to the founder, Roger Fry, and proposed to him that we head to Fitzroy Square after dinner and get drunk and dance and kiss. He never saw me the same after that. I think suggesting acts of sexuality took me down a few racks in his dull metal brain—I was not unlike the other women after all. “Silly girl,” he must have thought, “It has been acknowledged for over a century, since Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, that women should not have to rely on their sexual allure to survive.”

            Now, when I see Roger’s paintings of porcelain women, a piece of me shudders. Roger, Clive, and even Duncan, think that their gentle brush strokes pay honor to their enshrined models—that hanging a woman high up on the wall where you have to strain your neck to see her, her frame nearly scraping the crowning, makes her untouchable. But what if I want to be touched? Want to be grappled with, dealt with, confronted? I can take it.

            Also on Great Portland Street is a dilapidated town house, rumored to have once been a covert brothel back when the age of consent was twelve.

            As I approached the green of Regent’s Park, I questioned whether one could truly wander down known, familiar streets. Perhaps it was possible on a day when your perspective felt joyously renewed, but at that moment, I wasn’t in the mood to feign enthusiasm for my little neighborhood. At times I loved the familiarity of the maze, sure, but it becomes exhausting when each building and bench pulls pre-packaged memories to the front of the mind. Nevertheless, I did feel light on my feet when I was left on my own, a sense of glee upon remembrance that this wandering would never have been deemed safe in the 17th century, back when the roads were littered with coal dust and feces.

            I drew to the nearest bench to continue my gazing, and to hike up my skirt ever-so-slightly to allow my sticky skin to breath. At last, I saw her: slick dark hair, curved-down lips, an inconsistent gait. Holding shopping bags in one hand and her hat in the other. Her clothes that brilliant and unusual color right between red and orange. As I got up to follow her, to catch a closer glimpse, a shadow enveloped me like a cool breeze. As one does when suddenly overcome by an unknown change in light, I looked up.

            A massive hot air balloon, no, a plane, had burst through the clouds. I had never seen anything nearing its grandness. I watched it until it had shrunken away, the air around it settling just as quickly as it had been disrupted. A gaping, silent awe consumed what is now called Fitzrovia. Screams followed, as to be expected when stalks of furious smoke suddenly bloom in the horizon. Suddenly, I remembered what I had seen before. I snapped my head back down and scanned the streets for her, but she was gone.

            I would later find out that these airships were called Zeppelins. By Christmas, there would be a total 20 raids that year: 37 tons of bombs, 181 deaths and 455 injured. Virginia had always said, “On or about 1910, human character changed.” From my perspective as an artist, this thought made me tired. Would I have to redo all the portraits I had made prior to that date?

            My sister was always offering me profound, albeit confusing, ideas that stirred my mind. “When are you going to properly record your thoughts for others to have?” I asked her once. “When I finally build up the courage to give them away.” The week before the bomb, after a particularly riveting London Group meeting, I caught her in Fitzroy Square with pen and ink. She would go on to become much, much more renowned than me, her words to be quoted most frequently in schools and at dinner parties.

            But, of course, I didn’t know any of that yet. I only knew every corner of Fitzroy Tavern, the roughness of Duncan’s feet under the sheets, how to mix the ideal shade of terracotta. My mind was stuffed with all that lay behind, which is why I rarely anticipated past the next hour and slept with coal under my pillow. My reservoir of experiences was my excuse for staying motionless.

            After losing sight of both the woman and the balloon, I retreated, raced, sprinted, back home, up the stairs, and painted the most mundane portraits of myself that I would ever create. I would draw myself but in a way that is infinite and indefinite. What are we if not the corners of our lives that we find most comforting? They would be all bright orange, all objects, all gleaming.