by Pat Barker
Somewhere in the lower regions Albert stirred. She was half inclined to let him come to the surface, give Payne a right good bollocking, bloody little pipsqueak. God, just look at him, objectionable little man. “Seedy”—that was the word. Seedy. She honestly did believe he could be the Devil, because he wasn’t fixed. Whenever you looked at him, he seemed to be a different shape and size. She felt herself start to sink, a sure sign Albert was on his way. She didn’t really know where she went when Albert was here, except sometimes it looked a bit like her bedroom at home. At night, when she was huddled up in the narrow bed, with the sheets over her head, she’d hear footsteps on the stairs and see the knob begin to turn, and then, as he came in, a tall, thin shadow would climb the wall behind the bed, and she’d hear a voice whispering: It’s all right, don’t cry. He loved her. He always said he did.
But tonight, letting herself sink didn’t seem to work. The thing in the chair, whoever he was—whatever—wouldn’t let go. She forced herself to go on looking at him. Neat mustache, reddish-brown with a few white hairs, nicotine-stained fingertips twirling his trilby, round and round, round and round, stains on the sweatband, shiny patches on his knees where the cloth had worn thin—oh, yes, he was down on his luck, this one, in spite of his airs and graces.
I see through you, she thought. And immediately, as in a dream, found she could do exactly that. He was still there, very much there, but reduced to an outline, like a child’s drawing. Where the solid mass of his face and body had been there was now only a string of rising bubbles, like you get in a pond when something’s rotting underneath. She couldn’t put her finger on the change, because she could still see him, only now there was a sense that his apparent solidity was a delusion, and the reality was this constant flux. And he was getting smaller; his feet no longer quite reached the floor. He was child-sized now, and still shrinking fast, but somehow this didn’t reduce the force of his presence. If anything it increased it. The more he shrank, the more he was reduced to his essence, the more powerful he became.
She wanted to cry out, call for help, but there was no help, not against this, because he was liquid. He could change shape endlessly, fit himself into anything, flow through every crack in every barrier. And flow he does, drenching her in slime.
Look away. She looks instead at her left arm, which is lying on top of the coverlet, but it doesn’t seem to belong to her anymore. She focuses on her hand, tries to wiggle the fingers, but they won’t move. It’s too heavy, too stiff, she can’t do anything with it. She feels a spurt of hostility towards it. Is it even hers? It doesn’t feel like hers. Is it his hand? Her whole body feels cold along that side and so heavy, so leaden, the bed must surely soon start to tilt. She won’t look at the chair. Her right eye can’t see anything anyway, but she closes the one eye that still obeys her. Spit drools from the corner of her mouth, she can’t wipe it away; she tries to wipe it away with her other hand. The sheets are briefly warm, then cold, oh God she’s wet the bed again, she won’t half get wrong for that. But she keeps her eye closed, she won’t look at the chair. She won’t look at the chair.
Voices now, in the ward behind the screens, feet come flapping; a light shines in her eye. Stroke, she hears, stroke, but makes no sense of it. Nobody’s stroked her, not for a long, long time. Oh, six strokes of the cane, yes, she remembers that, remembers running out of school the second the bell rang, along the beach and up the hill to the castle, its towers black against the sky as the sun sinks down behind it. Running across the courtyard, now, stones hard under her feet, flecks of foam drifting like blossom across the grass, her head, her ears, even the marrow in her bones filled with the roaring of the sea. Queen Margaret’s tower behind her, she stands on the edge of the cliff. Close, so close she’s blinded by the spray and the sea boiling and churning in the Egyncleugh beneath her feet. Oh, and it’s nothing now to step forward, to take another step, and then another, to walk on air, and see, in the last moment before the water closes over her head, high above her on the cliff, Dunstanburgh’s broken crown.
TWENTY-THREE
ELINOR’S DIARY
14 October 1940
I think. The trouble with my life at the moment is that every day’s the same so I end up losing track and forgetting what day it is.
I haven’t kept a diary for years and I’m in two minds about it now. I suppose, because I associate it with adolescence, all that endless self-absorption which I’m vain enough to think I’ve grown out of, though I’ve no doubt there’d be plenty of people to disagree with me. My entire family, for a start.
So why now? Because I’m lonely. No Paul. No Rachel either—the farmhouse is empty. Rachel’s gone to stay with Gabriella, who’s had her baby now—a little girl—and Tim’s staying at his club, an easy walking distance from the War Office. Rachel’s given me a key and told me to take anything I need from the kitchen garden—after all, as she says, it’ll only go to waste—she’s even told me to raid her wardrobe, though since she’s expanded over the years and I’ve contracted, I can’t think that’s going to be much use. Still, I’ll give it a go. One thing about all that sewing I used to do, I’m quite good at altering clothes.
I found this notebook—completely blank—sitting in the bottom-right-hand drawer of Mother’s desk, and I find myself wondering why she bought it, what she intended it for, because it’s not at all the kind of thing she’d buy. There are scrapbooks in the kitchen with recipes cut out of magazines and pasted in. They’re thick, those books, and they smell of paste, and her thumb- and fingerprints are all over them. Looking through them, I can spot her favorite recipes because those pages are more daubed and crusted than the rest. I can remember the tastes too. Oh, and the ingredients…They’re like little messages from another world. But this notebook? No, I’ve no idea what it was for—and evidently she didn’t know either, since it was never used. Another mystery, and not one I’m likely to solve now.
I keep tripping over her presence. Everything here is hers, hers, not mine. The dressing table in the back bedroom…She used to look into that mirror every evening when she was getting ready for dinner. When I was a child, I used to sit on her bed in our old house and watch, though I knew my presence irritated her. Lots of hair-brushing, dabs of scent, the merest dusting of face powder—it was all a great mystery to me, what grown-up ladies did, and I felt I could never be part of it. (Oh, and how right I was!)
The sofa. I sit here in the evenings staring at the fire (lit for company, not warmth—it’s still very mild) and if I close my eyes I can actually feel my legs, skinny, little-girl legs, sticking straight out over the edge. It’s like one of those trick photographs where a child appears giant-sized because the proportions of the room are abnormal—or rather the reverse, since here I feel dwarfed by giant furniture, though really it’s the same size it always was. Only I don’t belong with it anymore.
I wonder what Paul’s doing. Whether he’s on duty. I wonder who he’s with. I wonder if Rachel has these thoughts about Tim—well, yes, of course she does, though in her case I’m pretty sure she’s right to be suspicious. I wonder if she minds.
Every time Paul visits, he brings me something, something he’s retrieved from the house. He says the house is stable, that there’s no risk, though I’m not sure I believe him. If it was stable we’d be allowed back in. I wish these little parcels didn’t feel so much like peace offerings. Last Friday, he brought two big portfolios of drawings, which had somehow survived, wedged in between the kitchen dresser and the wall, though I haven’t had the heart to look at them yet. Can’t open the portfolios. Can’t paint. Can’t do anything.
I’m a pinprick, a speck, a bee floating and drowning on a pool of black water, surrounded by ever-expanding, concentric rings of silence. I rub my wings together, or do whatever it is bees do that makes a noise, but there’s no buzzing. And no echo either, no sound comes back.
15 October 1940
Today I walked as far as the river. It came on to rain, a sudden
downpour. I stood and watched raindrops pocking the surface, rings, bubbles, little spurts of water leaping up. And I thought of Paul’s mother putting bricks in her pockets and wading in and tried to imagine her last moments, bubbles of water escaping from slackened lips, hair swaying to and fro in the currents, like weeds. And an iron band around the chest, the involuntary struggle for breath—and then, nothing. We have to hope: nothing.
Back at the cottage, I took my wet slacks off in front of the fire and my skin was all gray and purple, goosepimply, and I thought why wouldn’t he prefer firm, young flesh? Isn’t that what all men prefer, when you get right down to it?
I miss my house. It’s like grief for a person—an actual physical craving—and yes, I know it’s only bricks and mortar and it shouldn’t matter when every day—or rather every night—so many more important things are being lost. Lives, for God’s sake. And yet I can’t talk myself out of it. There’s a particular place—was a particular place—at the bottom of the basement stairs. You turn left and there’s a small window looking out onto the back garden and it has a cupboard underneath. I used to keep a jug of flowers there. We bought the jug in Deià, very cheap, but beautiful, and the flowers came from the garden in summer, in winter it was twigs and leaves, hemlock, I used to get it from the riverbank here, catkins…Nothing cost more than a few pennies, but in that particular place, at particular times of day—late afternoon when the sun struck the window at a slight angle and shone through the leaves, delineating every vein on every leaf, it was perfection.
One of the things you notice about getting older is that every loss picks the scab off previous losses. The house is gone, so I miss Toby more. Mad, but true. I feel him all the time now—and I hope that doesn’t mean I’m about to join him, because I’m not ready to die just yet.
I think about Violet and her cyanide capsule. She actually offered to get me one, but I said no. I don’t want to go to bed at noon.
16 October 1940
Yesterday I got into such a state of gloom and despondency that in the end I just ran out of patience with myself. So I made myself sit down and open the two portfolios Paul brought back last week.
A lot of drawings from last year and the year before, looking rather dated I thought, but then nothing’s quite so dated as the recent past. A few shelter drawings, one or two of them quite promising—I might work on those, I suppose. There’s one of children queuing outside Warren Street tube station that I rather like, though one of the boys at the front looks exactly like Kenny. I didn’t mean it to, but there he is—the resemblance is unmistakable.
I want to go back to London. I don’t know what stops me, except I feel I need to get Paul’s agreement—consult him at least. I even went up into the loft this morning and got a suitcase down. It’d take me literally minutes to pack. These days I’m like a snail: I carry my house on my back. And though most of the time I feel dreadful, just now and then I get a glimpse of something else, a frisson of something…Lightness. Freedom, I suppose.
But I haven’t put anything into the suitcase yet, and I don’t know what’s holding me back. Partly it’s fear: going back into that nightly horror, but that’s an impersonal fear, shared by everybody. No, I think what I’m really afraid of is being alone, just me, no longer half of a couple. A cold draft blowing down my side where Paul used to be. I don’t feel it so much here, because I’m surrounded by all these relics of my childhood, the before-Paul time. But I know in London I’d feel it badly.
Almost enough to keep me here, but I think not quite.
17 October 1940
Another bright, sunny, gritty day, no wind. Water on the marshes steel blue, reflecting light back at the sky, the reeds a vicious yellow-green, the sort of color you feel can’t possibly occur in nature, but there it is, you’re looking at it.
I came back home to a rare event—a letter, readdressed from the house, of course—just before we left we added our new, separate, addresses to the noticeboard at the end of the street. People don’t write to each other much these days, we’ve all shrunk into our little colonies, the people we see every day, but this was an official letter. And as soon as I saw the Ministry of Information stamp I guessed who it was from. One quick scan of the page, there was his signature: Kenneth Clark, chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee. Would I…? Could I…? With a view to discussing, etc….Oh, I would, I could. I will, I can. Though I’m going to have to be quick about it, because the interview’s tomorrow morning, the letter having been delayed by the change of address.
If I get a commission—actually, I don’t think there’s much “if” about it, but let’s be cautious—if I get a commission, it’ll be on a painting-by-painting basis. Men—Paul, for example—are salaried; women aren’t. And I’ve got a pretty good idea of what he’ll want me to do—rosy-cheeked children, safely evacuated from the bombed cities, merrily playing on ye olde village greene. There’s a big drive on to get children back into the country, an awful lot of them have gone home. Though we didn’t know it at the time, Kenny was one of thousands. Oh, and land-girls, that’ll be the other thing. Come to think of it, probably mainly land-girls—something about girls’ bums in breeches appeals to the male visual imagination as almost nothing else can—as long as the girl’s young and pretty and the bum not so gigantic it fills the whole canvas.
Still, I don’t mind, as long as I can do the things I really want to do as well. It’ll give me access to materials, and that’s no small thing, these days, because they’re getting awfully expensive, and scarce. And of course I’ve lost a lot of mine. Then there’s the license—I’ll be able to go (almost) anywhere and draw (almost) anything. Status, recognition…I’d love to be able to say they don’t matter, but they do. Hear Kit Neville on the subject!
The interview’s at ten, so by half past I ought to know one way or the other.
Then what? Go to see Paul, I suppose. It’ll feel odd seeing him again in London. I can’t tell him I’m coming—there’s no telephone in the studio—I’ll just have to hope I catch him in.
TWENTY-FOUR
Two or three days later (I could probably work out the date if I really tried but I’ve been awake all night and I can’t bloody well be bothered)
I caught him all right.
But I’m not going to plunge straight into that, because there’s Kenneth Clark and the War Artists Advisory Committee and, arguably, that’s now more important than Paul.
I know Clark vaguely, as I suppose everybody on the art scene does. He came to the door of his office to greet me, looking taller and broader-shouldered than he actually is—it’s amazing what a first-rate tailor can achieve—and shook hands with me very warmly, I think without seeing me at all. Women of my age are invisible to Clark, but, given his tastes, I’ve probably been invisible for the last twenty-five years at least—so there’s no point getting upset about it now!
He started by saying the War Artists Advisory Committee was determined to recruit the largest, most varied, most representative array of talent possible, and as part of this endeavor they were commissioning some of the most distinguished women artists. It was, he said, particularly important that the visual record of the war should include work that conveys the uniquely feminine vision that only women artists can supply. Etc. I’ve no idea if he really thinks there’s a “uniquely feminine vision,” or whether he just thought that would go down well. Rather to my surprise, I found myself arguing against the idea. I said I didn’t believe women were necessarily more compassionate than men…He just sat there looking cool and amused, and when I’d finished pointed out that my best-known paintings are, nevertheless, of women and children. True, of course. Of the three paintings I’ve got in the Tate, one’s a mother feeding her baby on the night-ferry crossing to Belgium, another’s of convent schoolgirls in a park, and the other’s one of a series of winter landscapes I painted after Toby’s death. (Not the best one either!) And then he started explaining that women were paid on a commission-by-commission
basis, unlike men, who get a salary. (Part of the “uniquely feminine vision” perhaps: we don’t need to be paid.)
And then we moved on to suitable subjects. Children, but only in safe areas well away from the raids; land-girls, bums not specified; women in the forces, though obviously not in any aggressive capacity, definitely no guns; factories, etc.
All very much as I expected, and of course I said yes. So—looking forward to a long and productive relationship, etc.—we shook hands again and off I went. I felt an enormous sense of relief getting out of that building; I can quite see why Kit hates it.
Though I must say, standing there on the pavement, I felt better than I’ve felt since the house was destroyed. Solider. That awful snail-without-a-shell feeling had gone. I was moving back to London, I was absolutely determined on that, but I also felt I owed it to Paul—and myself—to have one last go at persuading him to rent somewhere big enough for both of us. Not a house, necessarily. A flat would do.
So I set off to walk to his studio. And this is the difficult bit. I’d only just turned the corner when I saw him on the pavement in a dressing gown, accompanied by a girl, a stocky, little figure with long dark hair and short legs. She was standing on tiptoe, reaching up to kiss him. She was so short it was almost like a child reaching up to kiss her father, but there was nothing fatherly about the kiss. His arms were round her, he was laughing, pretending to ward her off, she was tugging at his sleeve, trying to persuade him to go back into the house. He kept shaking his head, pretending to be reluctant, but then, with a shrug of mock defeat, he let himself be led back inside—and the door closed behind them.