Alison was brought up in Dorset, met her husband very young and married. But she is alone, lost, useless. During the summer, she meets Patrick Kerr, a renowned London painter who tells her that she can paint, that it is possible to learn, and that he loves her. And she’s going to jump into his arms, into the streets of London, into life again. Things will be harder than she thought, but she will become a true artist, she will be able to have an interesting life, she will flourish on her own, free. The story seems so real that I went looking for the names of the artists mentioned in the book. Even if they don’t exist, they are portraits that show how a middle-class woman survived in a world that wasn’t supposed to be hers. A beautiful story.
“Patrick Kerr wanted a woman who did not exist. A woman without conflict or thought, who didn’t worry about paying bills or cooking meals. He wanted someone who didn’t worry about birth control, someone who never got the flu. He wanted a woman who would never need anything from him, yet also who could be utterly reliant on him. He wanted to mould someone in his own image, but for that image to also remain the perfect image of femininity. When he met me, he wanted me because I was young and ready to be devoted; later he wanted me because I knew all his rules, and I adhered to them absolutely. When, finally, he didn’t want me at all, it was because I had found my own corner of the world and refused to let it assimilate into his.”
