Look at Alice’s hair. That’s a lot of hair for one head. Biologically speaking I didn’t inherit mine from Alice so I can’t blame her for it, but I wonder if she considered hers, as I came to view mine, equally blessing and curse. Her lustrous dark-brown tresses are arranged in some kind of complicated braiding, wound around her head with what looks like a network of pins. Did she construct that elegant bird’s nest herself, or was it her mother’s work? Of course I’m wondering if she had excess hair in places where she didn’t want it, and whether she accepted it as God’s will or devised home-made remedies to counteract a fuzzy upper lip.
When I turned fifteen I was yet to have a period, but seemingly overnight the Black Forest had marched all over my lily-white legs, making camp on the tops of my pale feet and even, the horror, my big toes. Coarse dark hair had crept along my upper thighs and over my abdomen, far north of where I’d always assumed the tree line would end. Long black strays had even appeared around my nipples like scouts from an advance party, which I yanked off with my hardworking tweezers. Monitoring the enemy was a covert operation requiring constant vigilance.
I was hirsute.
Hairy.
Hideous.
The models who reclined and cavorted in the glossy pages of Dolly magazine, which I consulted like a map of foreign territory, looked tanned and happy. Their teeth were straight. Their legs were smooth. There was no sign of hair around their bikini bottoms. Surreptitious surveillance of my classmates’ limbs indicated that no one else had hair anywhere they didn’t want it. In bed each night I prayed that if God would only turn back the advancing tide then I would definitely believe. In a recent class, Deborah Best had explained inflation, trade deficits and the Gross Domestic Product as easily as if she had already completed a four-year degree. My grasp of economics was less than solid, but a Gross Domestic Product was exactly how I thought of myself.
Aside from being a hairy horror, I had freckles on my face and arms, and braces on my teeth. I clearly grasped the meagre value of these assets in terms of how the law of supply and demand applied to a boy’s interest in a girl.
The care Alice took to prepare for the portrait indicates a young woman very conscious of her body, even if she does not yet know what pleasures and betrayals it is capable of. The composition is so formal and contrived that it carries a slightly desperate whiff, as though the photographer, if not the subject herself, is determined to shape the future observer’s impression of her. She is, if not a reader, then someone who wishes to be thought a reader. Or at least a reader of the King James Bible, the book she would have been most familiar with, seeing that there weren’t many at home and Partick didn’t get a public library until 1935.
It’s an uncanny experience to gaze at Alice like this. In her unblemished face I recognise the old woman, though in photographs of an elderly Alice her teenage self is nowhere to be found. Perhaps a portrait will always be a kind of Rorschach test of the viewer’s preconceptions, influenced by one’s relationship to the subject. I wonder what Alice made of this portrait. Did it feel truthful to her, or a fiction composed for the eyes of others?
That Alice feels distant to me isn’t so much a matter of time, though the photograph is now more than a century old. We’ve all had the experience of coming across photographs of strangers out of the past, thrust before your nose as you browse in the wooden boxes of a second-hand stall or antiques shop. In Alice’s case I like to imagine she is holding herself back, pressing her real self like a cut flower behind the photographer’s glass. By now she has been a soprano in the Dowanhill Church choir for three years. Once a week she takes a piano lesson with a Mrs Ramsay of 16 India Street, Partick. She would have paid for those lessons herself, most likely from her job in a haberdashery a few doors down Dumbarton Road, and perhaps she found the job in order to pay for the lessons.
I can only imagine how peaceful Mrs Ramsay’s home must have been for Alice: an oasis compared to the formless symphony of knives and forks and cups and plates she practised in. That a woman could earn her living through the love of music would have been difficult for Alice to believe. Until she encountered Mrs Ramsay, Alice would have associated women’s work with her mother’s domestic rituals and with the mindless keeping of the haberdashery.
Did Alice consider herself lucky to have been born a woman? She never had to do the kind of physical labour that caused her father’s bone-tiredness at the end of every day. Around the dinner table she must have noticed her brothers watching their father as they got older: seeing him, a mountain of a man, physically diminished by his job, recognising his lack of choice about how he earned the money that fed and housed them, and gradually understanding that their lives were likely to be variations on his theme.
The ambitious young woman in the portrait longs to be taken seriously. By now, though she is an increasingly visible figure in the musical life of her parish, I suspect that Alice nevertheless feels constrained by the yoke of her domestic responsibilities and a growing guilt. She must sense the gulf that is opening
