season was over she visited Norea and asked for beets to make a deep red. She wouldn’t stop painting red and blue pictures.
Well, said Meggie Dob to the child, you’ve found your two ardours.
What does that mean?
I mean red for fire and blue for love—it all comes back to that.
But I want different colours.
That winter Meggie bought colour for the girl and soon she covered every surface of her mother’s small house on stilts with her flat pictures. She recast the sights of Millstone Nether: skating parties and summer bonfires and trenching potatoes and men dragging nets off boats. She gave each drawing a strange title and painted the words into her borders. On her picture of a man being blown off a ship she wove into the border Happy-Go-Lucky and on a scene of a bawn filled with goats she wrote Purple Cow Lost.
If there were ever a conflict between instinct and consciousness in her choices of what to paint and how, instinct won out. Her dogs flew and her winter trees were laden with fruit. There were fish in the clouds and babies under the sea. She couldn’t say why. Once, when asked why she drew a two-faced head, she said, I didn’t have two pieces of paper.
Though Madeleine was not pretty, Meggie always said to her, Your eyes are lit with a full moon’s light; that’s beauty enough for anyone. She kept finding paints and paper for her foundling daughter and gave her empty tins for her brushes and set up a table by the window of their tiny house and let her fill her lonely girlhood with those eerily bright flat pictures.
It was a young island where art and life went hand in hand. Women wove mats for their floors with the things ready at hand, men carved a bit of an idea into a branch for a walking stick. On the island it was thought that life could not be beautiful without art, nor art flourish without life, and so, whenever there was extra time or material around, something prettying was made. But Madeleine didn’t decorate tools or make mats or carved sticks. Her art ran the risk of looking at life in her own way. She moved without thought outside of tradition. She kept her work at home, only occasionally giving a small picture away, or tucking one in with a jug of goat cheese for someone sick or an old person who didn’t get out.
Meggie died of a fever the same harsh spring that Donal decided to leave Millstone Nether. Madeleine painted a picture of the cemetery where she last saw her mother’s pine box, and though it had been a drear day of thick fog and cold rain her picture was coloured in the bright yellows and greens of late spring. Along the side of the grave was a row of red tulips and over the unmarked mound of freshly turned earth a hardy crabapple tree showered pink blossoms over the earth. There were no mourners or minister, only a little woman wearing bright brocade boots sitting on a branch at the top of the tree. Madeleine called it My Mother’s Funeral and tacked it up beside the picture she made of her brother playing double bass with two fishermen fiddlers at the wake in their kitchen after the pine box disappeared into the ground.
Donal persuaded Colin to travel with him across the sea. They worked as ship’s hands and after many months, when they managed to get into land-locked places, they discovered they could make a living in the soot and filth and crowds of old cities by playing their instruments on rough cobblestone corners. Their jigs and airs and sea skin and great muscled arms made a sight and a sound in those places where men no longer used their bodies to make a living.
Resourceful and plucky, the two Millstone Nether boys traded on the novelty of their music and worked their way deeper into a Europe where court life and church life had forged a music too intricate for invention after hard days at sea. They took up with music students whose languages they didn’t speak but who liked their dancey tunes and their quaint bowing. They traded music for music.
Colin spent fleeting nights in warehouses and small theatres where young musicians experimented with any sound they could record for dancers who moved their bodies in angular ways. He soaked in an idea of the world in which bhavas