Abstractions
While I was a student, I lived in a pale grey cottage in Thorndon on a lane so narrow that if I was reading in my chair by the window, passersby could look over my shoulder and see that I had To the Lighthouse on my knee and that I was circling colours with my pencil: bright violet, staring white, soft deep green, mother-of-pearl. I was writing an essay about Woolf’s character Lily Briscoe, and the Post-Impressionist abstract she is working on in the first part of the novel.
When I looked out my window, lozenges of afterglow seemed to float diagonally across the lane towards the two-storied pink villa with twin gables which sat next to the cream house with a long narrow garden and reddish-brown outhouse. A lime-green bungalow squatted incongruously beside my cottage which must once have been like the mean little dwelling in which Katherine Mansfield placed a man killed by a traction engine on the day of a garden party.
Katherine Mansfield knew Virginia Woolf. I can imagine them meeting in an art gallery; Virginia smoking a cheroot, Katherine wearing her red, brick red frock and both of them ignoring shabby little Lily Briscoe. Ignoring Lily, her mouth an astonished ‘oh’ in front of Vanessa Bell’s Abstract Painting with its chrome yellow ground, floating squares and rectangles edged by faint lines made from the weave of the canvas. Lily would have gone home thinking about mass and weight and the importance of space, might have depicted my lane as a bright pink square floating to the right above rectangles of cream, lime green, and pale grey and with a dark grey triangle at the bottom left.
Perhaps that dark grey triangle could represent a woman weeping by the grate after her husband had been carried home from work, dead. But you could also see that it was necessary to balance all that floating brightness with shadow.
Margaret Moores lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland where she and her husband own an Indie bookshop. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Massey University, and her poetry and flash fiction have been published in journals and anthologies in Aotearoa New Zealand and in Australia.