I Could Love You

by William Nicholson

  ‘Please help me,’ he calls after her.

  An unpremeditated cry, all he means is that he wants to have the use of her face, perhaps to paint her; but it sounds in the morning chill like a cry from the heart. And perhaps it is.

  She stops and turns. A teenage girl in jeans and hoodie, her trainers caked in mud. She looks at him, unsure what he wants. Maybe he’s a crazy old paedophile.

  ‘I’m an artist,’ he says. ‘I paint pictures.’

  Still she says nothing. Artists can be rapists too.

  ‘I paint pictures of people.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. Giving nothing away.

  ‘Do you live near here?’

  She nods her head towards the track. ‘In the village.’

  ‘I moved in here last month. I don’t know anybody.’

  She nods, and takes a step nearer to her side of the wall. She gestures at the cottage.

  ‘Did you buy it?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, no. Only renting. Just for a couple of months.’

  That seems to please her.

  ‘That’s okay, then.’

  ‘Do you want to see my paintings?’ he says.

  She stares at him, suspicious again. Once that kind of offer might have held danger, or promise.

  ‘I’m eighty-two years old,’ he says. ‘I have severe osteoarthritis. I can’t see a thing without my glasses. I get out of breath if I climb stairs. You’re perfectly safe.’

  A slow smile.

  ‘Okay,’ she says.

  She comes in to the garden, closing the gate behind her. At first she stands in the barn doorway, reluctant to enter. He goes ahead of her.

  ‘See. My paintings.’

  He offers the canvases for her inspection. She looks in silence, solemn as a critic. Her attention lingers longest over the portrait of Nell in Normandy.

  ‘You’re good,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I am good. I’m very good. Or I was once.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’

  Fair question. Would a successful artist choose to live out his old age in a hovel under the Downs? Or even a failed artist?

  ‘It gives me all I want. Which isn’t much.’

  He wants to paint her. The impulse which left him years ago has returned, like the final flicker of a dying fire.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he says.

  ‘Carrie.’

  ‘My name is Anthony Armitage.’

  She goes on looking at his portraits.

  ‘You paint people that really look like people,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I do. Sorry.’

  ‘Why sorry?’

  ‘That’s supposed to be the job of photography nowadays. Artists who paint people who look like people are called historicists.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It means we’re stuck in the past.’

  She frowns, trying to understand.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘They’re all wankers.’

  She blushes, then smiles. Such an awkward child, but beneath the clumsy surface there is an angry grace. The artist in him has awoken and is issuing the old dictatorial commands.

  ‘I’d like to paint you,’ he says.

  ‘Really?’ She’s surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you have a beautiful face.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Now she’s astonished, but also pleased. Such a simple line, but it never fails. And he never says it unless it’s true. That’s how artists change the world. They see the beauty that is overlooked by the fashion of the day. Then others come to their shows and see in their turn, and so the truth of beauty is preserved. Except they don’t come, and the truth is lost.

  ‘Would you let me?’ he says.

  He wants to start now, at once, before the impulse leaves him.

  She agrees, without further discussion. Some simple decision takes place within her, and she delivers herself into his hands. He feels a surge of gratitude.

  He sits her down in the front room of the cottage where the cool light from the window falls across her cheek, and sets up a hurried easel. She can’t stay too long, she says, her parents will worry. No more than half an hour. Her brother won’t worry, he wouldn’t know if she was dead or alive. She knows some people would be happier if she was dead, but who cares about them? Really who cares about people anyway? All they think about is themselves. You have to be able to cope with being alone, because that’s how you are in the end. You can have one million friends on Facebook but it’s all just a joke because not one of them would lift a finger for you if you needed them.

  He lets her talk on, his hand moving rapidly, making an initial sketch in charcoal.

  ‘I’m not really beautiful, you know,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, you are.’ He studies her with the impersonal precision of a surgeon. ‘You have a clear high brow. Strong cheekbones. Your eyes are intensely expressive. Your mouth has a curve that echoes your brow. And you should never cover that neck of yours. Your neck is perfect.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. She’s gone pink.

  ‘A remarkable face.’

  ‘But I’m not – I mean, really I’m not – I’m not anything.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he says, his charcoal flying. ‘You’re a pure form.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She stays for an hour, long enough for the initial sketch to be laid down. She promises she’ll return. As she leaves she says, without looking at him, ‘Do you smash crockery?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  He goes and retrieves the newspaper from the bin, and shows her the article about the work of Joe Nola. She looks at the picture of the recreated breakfast table. The coffee mugs. The cereal bowls.

  ‘That’s art?’

  ‘So they tell us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘No, I mean why did you smash the crockery?’

  ‘I was angry. You have to do something.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you do.’

  16

  Meg arrives for the rehearsal at the church hall. John Cartwright is there, trying to light the portable gas heater. The hall is bitterly cold. Four other members of the choir are there, still in their coats and gloves. Fanny Waller is jumping up and down as if on an invisible pogo stick to keep warm. Gill Cartwright appears from the kitchenette at the back to say she has a kettle on for tea. The Richardsons arrive, four members of the same family, all very alike, even the husband and wife, with their grey faces and sad eyes. Ben Costa, their tenor soloist, gets out his music and starts to do vocal exercises. A car pulls up right outside the church hall with its stereo system playing urban rap at top volume. Peter Tindall catches Meg’s eye and pulls a face at the racket. Meg smiles. Encouraged, Peter Tindall crosses the hall to her side, following a curving path as if to show he has only reached her by accident.

  ‘I don’t call that music,’ he says. ‘Abba, now, I can take. Did you hear that Putin is an Abba fan?’

  Meg has not taken off her brown quilted winter coat, even though she knows it makes her look middle-aged. That and her woolly hat pulled down over her ears. Peter Tindall is unmarried, middle-aged, lonely; the kind of person she would once have avoided, too near to his own condition to endure the timid overtures. But her secret liaison has changed everything.

  ‘I love Abba,’ she says. ‘I love “Mamma Mia”.’

  The gas fire blazes to life at last and they all gather round its arc of heat. The tea appears, in big white mugs. John Cartwright opens the piano and runs his fingers over the keys.

  ‘Dear God,’ he exclaims. ‘Don’t listen, George Frederick. Stop your ears with clay.’

  They are here to rehearse Handel’s oratorio Alexander’s Feast for a performance on New Year’s Day. Meg has a good singing voice and she loves to sing. As a recent recruit to the choir she is part of the chorus, but John Cartwright has already noted her ability, and says he’ll give her a solo part in
the next production.

  The choir is twenty-two strong, but this Saturday morning they are four short. This is their first time rehearsing in the church hall and it seems some choir members have got lost. John Cartwright, annoyed, says he’ll wait ten minutes but no more.

  ‘Everyone else has managed to come on time. Why can’t they?’

  Meg has always belonged to choirs, wherever she has lived. Joined with others in song she has felt, for as long as the music lasts, part of the world. People say amateur choirs are excellent meeting places for lonely hearts, but that has never been Meg’s motive. She has always been lonely, but not a lonely heart. That implies one who is looking for romance. Meg is in another place entirely, a place that is somehow not in the world. She passes through the world without being a part of it, like the deer that sometimes run out across the road as she’s driving to work. The deer live among the housing estates and golf courses, there’s not much woodland left, their lives and the lives of people intersect all the time, and yet they might as well be on different planets. Meg too feels as if that other race, the bright and the powerful, only ever sees her as a flicker in their headlights. But when she sings, her voice harmonizing with other voices, she comes in from the cold and knows the sweetness of fellowship.

  The tea is hot and strong and revivifying. The cry goes up for biscuits. Gill Cartwright has biscuits, she holds up a packet of Hobnobs, but they are for the break, not now. Choirs have to be firmly handled, like schoolchildren. Both Cartwrights are teachers.

  So the rehearsal begins at last.

  ‘Happy, happy, happy pair,’ sings the chorus. ‘None but the brave deserves the fair.’

  In usual Handel style these few words are repeated over and over so that they are drained of all sense and become notes of sound, their voices instruments as innocent as violins. Meg sings merrily, filled with the peculiar bonhomie ascribed to the angels at the Nativity, ‘goodwill to all men’. Her secret affair has transformed her perception of the world. Strange that so illicit a liaison, carried out in conscious furtiveness, should make her feel like a latter-day Virgin Mary welcomed by angelic hosts. But so it is. She glows with secret knowledge. This same dowdy figure in a shapeless brown windcheater poses for her lover in sexy lingerie. This new version of herself is present, almost as if she wears the skimpy bra and panties beneath her sober business suit, as she goes about her unremarkable day; and the world, sensing the secret, gives her the privileges of membership she has never had.

  Happy, happy, happy pair

  None but the brave deserves the fair.

  It’s a quarter to twelve by the time she gets back to her flat, and the plumber is coming at twelve. There’s a message on her answerphone from Tom saying don’t call him, he’ll call again. He didn’t need to say that. She never calls him. This is how their affair has defined itself from the beginning: he is the one who desires, she is the object of his desire. His is the call, hers the response.

  Just time to clean the bathroom, which is ridiculous, because the plumber won’t care, and it’s not as if it’s dirty. But she can’t help herself. So few people come into her flat, she wants it to be at its best. Also the bathroom will then smell as if it’s been cleaned, which is almost more important.

  She pulls on yellow rubber gloves and squirts cream cleaner over bath and surrounding tiles, and runs the tap. Then passing the bath brush from white enamel to running water and back, she scrubs the surfaces clean. The lights in the bathroom are bright and there’s satisfaction in the gleam of the perfect surfaces as the water runs away. Meg never used to be a tidy person. It really only began when she had a place of her own. But now she likes it all, the wiping and sweeping and hoovering.

  The phone rings. She picks it up still wearing rubber gloves. It’s Tom.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she says. Their phone conversations are always about arrangements, nothing more. But this time his voice is different.

  ‘I’ve got a problem,’ he says.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Belinda knows.’

  ‘How?’

  The question comes out instinctively, like a hand reaching up to avert a blow. What does it matter how?

  ‘One of the girls who works for me. People pick this sort of thing up.’

  This sort of thing.

  She’s standing in the doorway between the bathroom and the living room. The central heating is full on. She feels cold.

  ‘It’s all pretty nightmarish, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  The words are inadequate, but it’s hard to know what to say. They have a language of intimacy with their bodies, but not with words. He has taught her to say ‘Fuck me.’ Not what to say when his wife finds out about their affair.

  ‘I’ve told her it’s over,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She doesn’t know as she speaks if she’s agreeing that it’s over, or just that this is what he’s told her. She feels numb.

  ‘It’s not what I want,’ he says. ‘But I have no choice.’

  ‘So what does that mean for us?’

  She’s being stupid, but she’s not following this. What has happened? What does it mean?

  ‘I can’t come to you any more, Meg. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  She sees nothing. She understands nothing. He seems to be saying their affair is over, but that’s impossible.

  ‘We knew it couldn’t go on for ever. I just thought we’d get a bit more time than this.’

  Meg makes an immense effort of will. She drags herself out of the fog of passivity that holds her in its grip.

  ‘We have to talk.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ he says.

  ‘Come over. Any time. You can find an excuse.’

  ‘That’s just it. I can’t.’

  ‘But I have to see you. At least once more. This can’t be it.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he says. ‘Things are bad here. I’ve promised Belinda it’s over. I had to. You do see that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘We both knew this day would come. I’ve never pretended with you, have I?’

  ‘No. You’ve never pretended.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Meg. I suppose I should never have started it. But I’m not sorry I did. You’ve been so wonderful. I’ll never forget you.’

  Meg can’t answer. Her neck and face are flushing and she feels herself choking up. Abruptly she presses the End Call button on her phone. She wants to cut off their conversation before it’s ended. That way it hasn’t ended. That way he’ll have to call again.

  She peels off the yellow rubber gloves.

  She switches off the phone and the answering machine. So long as she’s not in contact with him it’s not over. Tomorrow, maybe.

  She sits down in one of her white armchairs. Only now does she realize she’s shaking, heaving, palpitating. Her body is beyond her control. The shaking turns into sobbing. She feels tears on her cheeks. She starts to cry aloud. The cry becomes a wail, a howl. She’s keening like a bereaved peasant, rocking back and forth in the armchair, making this sound like the world is ending.

  No no no no no no no no—

  The doorbell rings.

  Oh fuck! The plumber.

  The word fuck belongs to him. As she thinks it she feels a stab of pure pain.

  She jumps up, hurries to the bathroom, splashes water on her face, dabs at her eyes. She looks like hell. Only a plumber for God’s sake.

  When she opens the flat door he’s standing there with his shoes in one hand and his tool bag in the other.

  ‘Don’t like to mess up your carpets,’ he says.

  She hadn’t really noticed him before. What she sees now is a big man with a bearded face. He speaks quietly. He gets in one proper look at her, and she knows in that look that he sees she’s been crying. After that he keeps his eyes down, waiting to be told which way to go.

  ‘It’s good of you to come,’ she s
ays. ‘It’s the shower. In here.’

  He follows her to the bathroom and stands looking round, working out the flow of the system. He tries the shower, sees for himself that only a trickle comes out.

  ‘Looks like the pump,’ he says.

  He opens up his tool bag.

  ‘Okay if I turn off the water for a couple of minutes?’

  Meg goes back into the living room and sits down again. She feels weak. She thinks: I should offer to make him a cup of tea or something. But the effort is too great. All she wants to do is creep away into a hole and hide.

  The mocking phrases of Handel’s music echo through her brain.

  Happy, happy, happy pair …

  She closes her eyes. When she opens them he’s standing before her, and tears are streaming down her cheeks.

  No point in pretending now.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I had a bit of bad news. Just before you came.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ he says.

  She can tell at once from the tone of his voice that although he has just used the word pity he doesn’t pity her. He respects her unhappiness. He regards it as a normal part of life. All this she hears in his soft voice.

  Then he says, ‘My granddad always told me, however hard it gets, it’s worse in Russia.’

  She can’t help smiling at that.

  ‘Russia? Why?’

  ‘He’d got it in his head that everyone in Russia starved and froze to death. So if you weren’t starving and freezing you could count yourself lucky.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose he’s right.’

  ‘I don’t know that he is right. At least with starving and freezing after a bit you die and it’s over.’

  ‘Yes.’

  What an odd conversation to be having with the plumber.

  ‘Anyway. It’s the pump is the problem. I’ve taken the details. I can pick up a new one on Monday, it’s a standard model.’

  ‘Look, would you like a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘No, no. You’ve got enough to deal with. I’ll be off. I’ll call you when I’ve got a price on the pump, quote for the whole job. Shouldn’t be too much.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She feels confused. There’s more, isn’t there?