‘How do you mean?’
She felt foolish at having let out a direct and simple question. ‘Are you a painter? Or a writer?’
‘I work at a car park. An odd job until I find out what I want to do. How about you?’
‘I live with my husband.’
‘Is he here?’ No, and he drew her through the crowd again, pleased because she had thought he might be a painter or writer. Well, he could be, but wasn’t, not even a writer of letters because his separation from Pat was as final as if lightning had flashed between the ingrowing tree roots of them, split the sphere of the earth in two and set them spinning in different galaxies, finished forever, at distances that not even words could span.
Albert was answering questions against the wall, hating it, as if cornered by people whose belongings he’d filched, and who wanted to know, earnestly and sympathetically, why he’d done so foolish a thing – before they sent him to prison. Frank barged between: ‘Meet Myra, an old friend of mine.’
Albert was glad to, red from champagne, eyes smarting and half closed as if he hadn’t seen daylight for weeks. Myra was surprised at the open sensibility of his face, had expected something crude and northern after the write-ups. He was forty-two years old according to the catalogue, yet looked little more than a man of thirty who had already suffered the fires of life’s iniquity and emerged with a broader, deeper comprehension of the fact that there was worse to come. She hoped his paintings mirrored such a face, fragmented it to the same depth and caught the enigma of his lips and eyes.
‘I’m tired of meeting strangers,’ he said, dismissing his court. ‘I don’t get on too well with them, especially this sort. If I’m to believe ’em, I’ve already sold the whole show out.’
‘Too bad for me,’ Myra said, ‘though I don’t think I could afford the pieces here, anyway.’
‘Don’t let that worry you,’ he smiled. ‘I was only joking. I probably haven’t sold a thing. But I’ve got a few good pictures stowed away at my place in Lincolnshire, that you will be able to afford, so get my address from Frank. You can always come up and pick one or two. I’ll be only too glad to diddle old Greensleaves out of his whack.’ Greensleaves may have heard this, Albert fearlessly nodding in his direction: ‘I’ve told a lot of people that, and given them my address. I don’t care who knows it, even if I am drunk. I’d tear this place apart if I thought it wasn’t insured.’
‘It wouldn’t take much doing,’ Frank cautioned, ‘but there’s no point in it.’
Myra was amused at his empty, touching arrogance. Yet it could explode. A troupe of Didikois called at the village last summer and one of the men whose eyes burned to the same pitch-emptiness as Albert’s had been the ringleader to break up the pub after being refused a drink. ‘I hate my pictures on these walls,’ he said, unable to swing his arm towards any of them. ‘The bastards have no right to put ’em up like that.’
‘It’ll help you to live,’ Frank said sternly, ‘and paint.’
‘You think it will?’ Albert cried savagely. ‘I painted when I had nothing, don’t forget. When I see a picture of mine on the wall, and look at it properly, I feel full of bullet holes, my guts showing, all of me stark naked, hanging there for everybody to poke their fingers at.’ He took three drinks from a passing tray, handed one to Myra and Frank without a break in his talk. ‘They don’t know what to do. What few lights they’ve got go out when they look at one of my pictures. Ah! Don’t think I’m saying they’re good pictures. That’s not the point. But I go cold when I see somebody looking at them, their eyes skimming over the outside top skin. They can’t get through that little bit of surface and fly underneath. I never thought it would be like this. I’ll be months getting over it.’
‘You’re drunk,’ Frank said. ‘It shouldn’t upset you like that. Come out for a breath of air.’ A beautiful, thin, middle-aged woman smiled before phrasing a question. Her dress was superb, rich, simple, subtle perfume penetrating even the cigarette smells and heat of people. A dull silver bracelet hung from her wrist, matched the neck-brooch. The dark, piled hair showed a pale, faintly lined forehead. She had a splendidly intelligent face, grey exposed eyes, a softly curving nose with slightly spread nostrils, and lips whose real shape could not be made out because of artfully applied lipstick.
‘Not yet,’ Albert answered, his eyes clearing. ‘Somebody wants to ask me a question.’
‘You’re Mr Handley,’ she said, pointing her folder.
‘I think so. At the moment. I’m not always sure.’
‘I’ve been looking at your paintings. They’re absolutely wonderful. Quite original. A fine depth. How long have you been painting?’
‘Ages,’ he said, swaying.
‘Ages?’
‘Ages. Kiss me.’
‘Hmmm?’ Startled eyes. ‘I’m Lady Ritmeester.’
‘Kiss me again.’
‘I haven’t kissed you at all yet.’
‘Albert’ – Frank took his arm, firmly. ‘Let’s get him to a taxi, Myra.’
‘My husband is here tonight,’ Lady Ritmeester said, disturbed though not angry.
‘You’ve looked at my paintings,’ Albert went on, with a sad, lunatic persistence. ‘That’s like having been to bed with me. Go on, kiss me. We’re in a crowd. Nobody’ll see.’
She laughed. ‘You are a strange man.’
‘I’m a man, I suppose that makes me strange.’
She beamed. ‘Witty, too.’
‘Come on, Albert, let’s get you back to the old Metropole.’
‘I’m sure many other women would oblige you,’ she said.
‘But it’s you I want.’ He shook Frank’s hand away and took her fingers. ‘Lady Ritmeester?’
‘Yes?’
‘If I haven’t got you, I haven’t got anything.’
‘How charming!’
He fell back into Frank’s arms, eyes bloodshot, limbs twitching quickly again into cohesion and strength.
‘A really charming person!’ exclaimed Lady Ritmeester.
With Myra’s help they walked him to a larger space near the door. An overcoat flashed by the cloakroom. Frank recognized him first. Two months had not blunted his eyes, though Keith’s face was less sharp, a little grosser, smooth and more satisfied now that he’d been robbed of his suffering. His confident stance of lighting a cigarette had more imitation in its movement than unique feeling, and Frank recalled his face at the cottage aged by marks of agony in spite of himself. But now, he had lost even that. Something had happened. His wife had come back. He had got what he wanted, and had gone soft over it.
He called: ‘What happened to Albert?’
‘He drank too much. He’s had a few hard days.’ He noticed Keith looking at Myra. Who was she? Myra the darkish and married woman who’d come to the gallery on her own, wears glasses which give an attractive softening effect to her eyes. A smart dress showed the figure well: Frank liked to see tits on a woman, not too small, not too big, just so that they moved a bit when she walked.
Outside, photographers were waiting, cars drifting in with more and more people. Other traffic was being thrown towards Oxford Street. What shadow remained was filled with press cameramen fighting for position, to record this one-in-a-hundred shot of some stupefied-drunk painter celebrating what looked like an enormous piece of financial luck. Their readers would want to know all about that.
It was as if they’d walked into the focus of an electric storm, each flash freezing forever the limp form of Albert, held from the pavement, it seemed, by the startled angrily-set faces of Frank and Myra.
15
With Albert safely in bed at the Metropole they walked back along the Strand. When Frank left the gallery he’d felt savage and mysogynistic, but his mood softened because the night was clear, a fresh breeze lapping up from the river. It had rained, and lights were mellow and far-spreading, traffic quieter. Myra felt free of her normal life, walking with someone she didn’t know, the house forgotten in its dark ow
l-fold forty miles away. Champagne had relaxed her. Frank asked where she lived, whether she had any children, if she had a job. He wanted talk, but realized he was spoiling her mood, so they skirted Trafalgar Square in silence. The fountains were two great stationary flowers of light and colour, stamens of smoke trying to rise above the highest reach of spray, like Lady Ritmeester’s orgiastic wig tinted against the sky. Reflected light turned them blue, pink, gunmetal blue, snow blue, grey, flown across by odd pigeons left among people still sauntering around. A camera flashed near one of the lions: someone stood between its paws. A policeman dragged him down. ‘I fed pigeons here the other day,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t want to eat. One of them was so fat that when it tried to walk away it fell over. I made a grab for it, meaning to tuck it under my coat, but it just managed to flutter up onto a lion’s head. It was safe up there.’
A midnight train would soon draw Myra and her dreams out of Paddington, clattering its wheels back into the darkness. But not yet. Spring was felt more vividly and sweetly in the block-middle of the city than in the fields around her home. The air with which she would later embalm the deep mood of this rare evening was almost warm. It detached her from George and the house, made her feel closer to this young man by her side, as if he were responsible for it.
‘Take my arm,’ he said. Lulled by the noise of their own footsteps they walked towards Soho. ‘We’ll have something to eat. I know a Greek place, down in a cellar, used to be an old tube station. I sometimes go there after work, sit and read. It’s more cheerful than my crumby room in Camden Town.’
An old deadbeat of Soho asked them for money and Frank dropped him a shilling. Smells from Wimpy bars chafed his hunger, yet he savoured it, in no hurry to eat. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
She tugged his arm: ‘Let’s walk. I live in the country, and like streets. I don’t come often to Town.’
‘If you don’t like it, why do you live there?’
‘I’m married to someone who does like it. We can’t all choose what we want to do.’
‘We can. If we don’t it gets chosen for us. We end up doing what we want to do.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Yes.’ Frank was sure of it, dead sure of all he said, because he was empty and without thought, desire or aim. He was walking with a woman, enjoying himself because of this, going off for a meal with the glittering impression of the party gnawed at by vague thoughts of work in the morning. You could do exactly what your heart and soul wanted to do, if you had the courage and endurance to face the lifelessness it left in you. Emptiness was the terrible weapon fate bashed you with, but somehow you walked and worked through it, forgetting if you could the mechanics of those decisions that had landed you in the middle of a colourless psychic battlefield.
She liked his calm, quiet way of talking, and the comforting unimportant silences when he said nothing. At home with George such silences were only proof that they had little more to say to each other, a mutual reproach since both had never allowed the common areas of love to ignite and flare. Present silence was nothing to do with love, since they had only just drifted together for a few hours, though real love could come out of it. It gave her peace and rest, a sense of adventure without obligation, of easy loneliness that was only possible with a stranger. Everyone sensed the change of air and temperature, the renewed oxygen of night, and it was difficult to walk arm in arm along the pavement.
They went downstairs, sat at a rough wooden table without taking their coats off. The waiter brought two plates of rice, rained with a lava of exotic-chaotic meat sauce, a bottle of Cypriot wine, and chunks of saltless bread. It was a meal for the ravenous and she’d never felt so hungry, nor so unconnected with people and the world around – yet grateful for their continued presence, which she thought hardly deserved because she was doing so little in return. Smells of the meal and tobacco smoke in the tunnel-shaped cellar, the rough grapeyard taste of the wine, and this man called Frank busily eating in front of her, stopping now and again to rain salt on his food, had a sharp intimacy as if her senses had come back after years of nullity. It was no use searching for the cause. There’d be plenty of time for that when it had gone. The fact that it would go saddened her, as if a dagger were pressing into her side to end this good feeling in a matter of seconds. Tears were scalding her eyes, then cool on her cheeks. His hand went out to her wrist. ‘What’s the matter?’
Her happiness was so real she wasn’t even ashamed of her tears. ‘Nothing.’
‘Whatever it is don’t think about it. It’ll go away then. If it won’t go away though, tell me what it is.’
She smiled. ‘It was nothing, truly’ – surprised that at her age, after an era buried in a country-and-domestic life with a normally loving husband she should be sentimental enough to think that an hour of happiness could go on forever. Still, maybe that hope, even if sentimental, was part of that happiness. She couldn’t finish her meal.
They walked up Tottenham Court Road, plenty of time before her train left. Cinemas were spreading people over pedestrian crossings, lining them up for buses. ‘I could spend years in London,’ he said, ‘and not get tired of it. I’ve lived most of my life in the Midlands.’
‘I thought you had. You still have the accent. I was brought up in London – Hampstead.’
‘You’ve got no accent at all.’
‘I know. It’s nondescript.’
‘It sounds good to me. I like clear speech.’
‘Do you have any friends in London?’
‘Only Albert. He’ll be back in Lincolnshire soon.’
‘How did you come to meet him?’
‘Lived in the same village. I was having an affair with a woman up there, until it blew up in my face.’
‘What happened?’
He couldn’t say that he’d left her so that she wouldn’t be parted from her son, and that such an act of self-sacrifice was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. ‘She loved her son,’ he said, ‘more than she loved me. We decided we’d had enough’ – and having said that, he put an arm around her as they walked. ‘You know the way it goes? Maybe you don’t if you’re still living with your husband. Do you have many friends where you live?’
‘Not really. I’ve been ten years in the village, but that’s not enough.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘My old friends are scattered all over the place. My best friend is a girl who lives in Majorca. She’s married to an American writer. We write about every three months. She’s happy enough, as far as anybody can tell with someone who’s married.’
‘Why should anybody be happy when they’re married?’ he said. ‘That’s a load o’ rammel. Even living together, it’s not realistic to expect happiness. I used to think it was necessary, even possible, but as soon as two people start thinking about happiness then they’re finished. If only one of them thinks about it, it blows up even quicker.’
‘You wouldn’t want them to think at all, then?’
‘It’s not that. But people are chewed up by a dog-rat inside them called passion. Cannibals eat each other, which is bad, but it’s even worse to eat yourself. Don’t think I haven’t done it, or don’t still. This passion is the wrong side of the moon. It poisons the liver. Everything is geared to making you eat yourself – the way this society works. Look around, talk to anybody about their job or life, switch on the wireless or telly, and it says: “Eat yourself. Go on, eat yourself – crunch-crunch.” I feel it in here all right. My blood circles round and round, day after day, year after year, and where does it get you in the end? There ought to be some way of snapping out of this feeling except by cyanide or a knife in your back. It’s time we discovered how to break it.’
‘I suppose you want a war?’
‘I used to wonder. Civil war, maybe. But even that’s a bit too traditional, out of date. We need something new.’
‘A new religion?’ she smiled.
‘That’s all bitten out of me. You can’t
go back, not even to look for a fresh direction. You’ve got to start from where your feet are planted. So don’t mock me about religion.’
‘I’m not mocking you. Show me how to break out of all this.’
‘Maybe I will, but I can’t tell you how. When you see the moon in a pond, like the three loons of Gotham, it’s easier to reach it by sputnik than pull it in with a net, or swim out to it and freeze your fingers. As soon as you have patience you begin to go places. The only thing is, it takes longer. A year ago I didn’t even know this. I’d give a lot to know what I’ll know next year.’
‘I’d give a lot to know where I’ll be next year,’ she said.
‘You sound sad about it.’
‘That’s because I think I’ll be in the same place as I am now.’
‘You might as well put your head in the gas-oven if you think that.’
‘That’s a helpful suggestion.’
‘It isn’t easy to help anybody in that way.’
‘Not if you can’t help yourself. I don’t need help, in any case.’
‘We all need it. We’ve got to make it out of ourselves, out of each other, but in a new sort of way.’ While living with Nancy and the kids he felt encircled by a high brick wall dozens of feet thick. This wall had gone down in a cloud of smoke, but another had formed, of equal height and thickness, though a little further out which anyway left him with more room in which to move, enough to haul out the answers she wanted. If he’d loved her it might have been impossible. ‘People can act,’ he said. ‘They can do things. I came to London – which isn’t much of an act, I admit, but things happen to me.’
‘It’s dull, living in the country,’ she said, afraid of burning herself on the heat of his words. ‘I suppose if you have children and lots of family nearby you don’t notice it.’
‘Don’t you want any kids?’
‘My husband does, but so far I haven’t been able to have any.’
The Death of William Posters: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 1) Page 18