Mr & Mrs A Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar Poetry)

Gainsborough’s much-discussed double portrait of the elaborately dressed Robert and Frances Andrews in a rural landscape is one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery. Part of its appeal is that the Andrews are so easy to enjoy disliking, especially Robert. Lesley Burt joins in this sport with as much gusto as Robert may have shown using the gun in the painting to shoot birds. In the cartoon version by Bestie on the cover of Burt’s pamphlet, with the caption THERE WAS NO RIGHT TO ROAM IN GAINSBOROUGH’S DAY, he has just employed his weapon to kill a more plainly dressed trespasser, face down in the field. The vivid pool of blood beside him is the only colour in an otherwise monochrome drawing. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’, wrote Yeats, and by that definition there is a good deal of rhetoric in Burt’s sequence of 18 variations; but there is poetry too, in the playful inventiveness with which she imagines the staid couple, led by Frances, stepping out of the frame into various other times and places. 

As a victim of a (yes, of course) patriarchal society, Frances is treated with sympathy and credited with curiosity, intelligence and enterprise, though she too manifests the hauteur and callousness of her class, commanding the usherette where to seat her in a cinema showing High Society, or faced with the poverty of a busker in New Orleans playing Mood Indigo especially for her. Before reaching these vignettes we find the couple in a modern gym, where Mr A tucks his fowling piece under his arm and increases the speed and incline on his treadmill while he watches BBC Breakfast on a muted screen. Meanwhile, Mrs A, in an expression which might have surprised her, ‘hinges at the waist for a dead lift’ before adding weights, and another woman with butterflies tattooed the length of her back executes sit-ups. In the midst of all this Mrs A says, in the idiom of her own day, ‘tomorrow let us walk in fields, perhaps to visit poor Mama, alone now, at Ballingdon.’ It’s this juxtaposition of two worlds, the spark which crosses between them, which gives electric life to the best – and that’s the majority – of these short pieces. 

One of the diversions in reading this bijou chapbookette – small but perfectly formed, diminutive enough to fit into the daintiest reticule of the most refined lady – is spotting the other unnamed paintings the couple walk into, including (spoiler alert, but it won’t really spoil it) Constable’s Hay Wain, painted not far from the Andrews’ extensive land holdings depicted in their portrait, and more surprisingly, Hockney’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. Though playfulness is the dominant mode, there is something else, when to reach the Clarks’ flat in Notting Hill they take the tube: ‘Such a strenuous ride from Bulmer! Mr A comments, taking his wife’s elbow to descend the escalator. Oh dear, she replies, we must travel by dungeon.’ I know how she feels. A touch of a Martian sending a postcard home here.

Laughter lowers our defences, and allows more serious thoughts to assail us. The Andrews are of their time, but how far are they perennial in their vices (mainly his) and their sorrows (mainly hers)? In Delhi Mrs A complains of the smell of turmeric but admires the painted elephants, while Mr A ‘checks Twitter-feed and replies: I see we have taken Pondicherry from the French.’ We are reminded that the parochial arrogance of Mr A at home had a backdrop of imperial expropriation. And what updates is a similarly complacent Mr A checking for somewhere today? 

The sequence ends on a plangent note; the actual, historical Mrs A, lonely, writing to her mother and with child yet again, regrets that she has, unlike her fantasy counterpart, spent her adult life confined in more than one sense, though she has yearned since childhood for the freedom to travel and see the world. This touch of sober realism contrasts with the lightness of tone in what has gone before, but also makes a fitting conclusion. This little book is bigger than it looks. 

John Freeman 1^st August 2023