It was in many ways a very unlikely marriage, for a person near-blind or going blind to marry someone whose whole world was a visual world and who was so creative in that visual world. But somehow what his creations came out of – a sort of a living or understanding of poetry – was something that always bound us and still binds us together. But at that time when I recognised Charles as potentially a very great painter and a great creator, I relinquished my strong intentions of being a writer and although I went on writing diaries and sometimes poems and more and more I became a very prolific letter-writer as I gathered more and more interesting people as friends and we became more and more separated by distance, my writing changed course, as in fact my life had changed course to become devoted to Charles’ optimal putting forward of himself as a painter.
You know, when we married I said, ‘Well if you’re going to be a painter, you’re going to paint, you’re not going to go out and get a job doing something or another,’ so he stayed home and painted. And by this time my eyesight had failed almost altogether and I was on a blind pension, so we had that as a basis to live on. And the only thing I could really do was to work as an artist’s model, as a nude model, which in fact I quite enjoyed because I was picking up a lot of information about painting. It’s quite an elegant job in its way, being a model, because one can decide one’s own poses and it’s a very private occupation. One can have one’s own thoughts and one has the satisfaction of knowing one’s doing a job well.
