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Sometimes, I thought it might be a relief to find out that was the case. Maybe it would explain why, when Hugh had begun to grate on me so, my mind had immediately gone to his death.
Now, I know that nature versus nurture is a subject that fascinates people these days, but I was a rich woman from North Carolina in the 1960s. Our kind didn’t exactly stay current on the latest psychological research.
So I only had my own thoughts to consult, and those thoughts were growing increasingly loud when I met Andrew Miller.
He was already fairly well known as a painter then, popular for his relaxed, natural portraits of various aristocrats, and when Hamish mentioned he was coming tostay, I was curious to meet him. I’d never met an artist before, and yes, I was already thinking it might be nice to have him paint my picture.
Andrew arrived on a Saturday, harried because the train had been late, which meant the car sent to pick him up had had to wait, and by the time they made their way up to Hamish’s, a torrential downpour had started.
When he and the driver entered, Andrew had mud up to his knees, a hole in his jacket pocket, and his dark hair, streaked with gray even though he was only in his midthirties, was plastered unflatteringly to his face.
What a shabby-looking fellow,I thought,but that’s artists for you.
When he introduced himself to me, his hand was cold, and I remember thinking that he had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen, and not much past that.
As you can see, a very different first impression than the one I had of Duke, the man Ithoughtwas the love of my life.
I had no idea this tragic, sodden person in front of me was the real thing.
Darling, you’ll have to forgive me, but I have to get through this part quickly or I won’t be able to get through it at all.
I tumbled into love with Duke, a violent upheaval that left me breathless, dizzy in its wake.
It was nothing like that with Andrew. I sat next to him at dinner, and he joined me on my morning walks, and we talked about everything and nothing. I told him about North Carolina, and he talked about growing up in Yorkshire and the life he now led in London, surrounded by other artistic types. He mentioned a wife from years ago, when he was barely twenty, how she had gotten tired of the starving artist’s life and left him, going back to her family in Glasgow, and oh, darling,how casual I thought I sounded when I asked if there was any woman in his life now.
How relieved I was when he said no.
He offered to paint my portrait, and I said I’d like that.
We talked as he painted, and one afternoon, sitting in the chilly library of Hamish’s castle, me perched on that chair in my Dior gown, Andrew studying his canvas, his brush moving so quickly, flecks of green paint dotting his shirtfront, I said, “It must be hard painting my mouth when I’m chatting away like this.”
Andrew didn’t speak for a moment, focused on the canvas. And then: “I could paint your mouth from memory alone.”
He looked up at me with those sad dark eyes, and I felt as though there were an audibleclickwhen our gazes met. “From my dreams.”
What else could I do after that but marry him?
-R
Andrew Miller is the first to admit that he never saw himself “ending up in the wilds of America, married to an heiress. It’s like something out of a novel, isn’t it?”
He says those words with a slight twinkle in his eye as we walk around the grounds of his wife’s family home, the magnificent Ashby House in Tavistock, North Carolina. There is no shortage of natural beauty to be found here, from the pines, oak, and chestnut trees that surround the home to the mist-shrouded views down to the valley floor, and Miller muses that if he were a landscape painter rather than a portraitist, he would never lack for inspiration.
“It changes all the time,” he tells me, gesturing at our surroundings. “The light’s always shifting, the colors changing. It’s fascinating.”
I mention his wife, then, Ruby McTavish, and he gives me that same twinkly look as he says, “Oh, she’s fascinating, too.”
That is one word for it.
Miller is her third husband, her first having been killed in a robbery in Paris on their honeymoon, the second falling victim to an electrical accident here on the grounds of Ashby House.
She and Miller were introduced by Sir Hamish Ogilvy in 1969, and married the next year in a small ceremony in Miller’s native Yorkshire. When it came time to decide where to settle as a married couple, Miller says there was no question of living anywhere else but here, in the house Ruby’s grandfather built, high above the townhisfather founded, Tavistock.
“I worried I might become bored up here,” Miller tells me. “Or lazy. A fatted calf and all that, drowning in excess. But here we are, six years later, and I don’t feel as though I’m seconds away from the slaughterhouse.If anything, this place has been good for me and my work. New faces, new people.”
Miller is endlessly interested in people. Who they are, what they think,whythey think it. Several times in this interview, I feel he’s asking me more questions about myself than I am about him, and he admits that his wife teases him about his insatiable curiosity all the time.
In Tavistock, Ruby McTavish is talked about the way some ancient people must have discussed deities— a distant figure, mysterious and unknowable, but benevolent, a magnanimous provider, and when I mention this to Miller, he laughs.
