Outside the Brighton Museum
She grew up in Cornwall, was just a girl when the painter Harold Harvey was at the end of his career. He was an old man then, living with his old wife and an old dog with whom she tried unsuccesfully to make friends. She moved away, went to nursing school, took a job, met a nice man from Brighton and got married. They had kids, she kept her job for thirty-one years, retired, got a dog of her own and made friends with him. She never thought about the old painter until she saw the article in the newspaper.
Forty-seven years she and her husband lived in Brighton and never visited the museum. Never thought about it, though it was just down the road. Never thought about it until she saw the article, which mentioned some paintings by Harold Harvey. She convinced her husband to go with her.
She stopped in front of Blackberry Gatherers, dated 1921, showing a woman holding a baby on her shoulder, the coast and sea in the distance. The woman in the painting, she thinks, could be…is…her mother. The baby, her older sister. She feels odd, outside herself, and tells her husband she’d like to sit a while.
He finds a bench outside. They sit. He is afraid she might cry and for the first time in forty-seven years he doesn’t know why.
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