When they entered the cobbled alley outside, she started to laugh. ‘My saviour,’ she said. ‘You have saved me from a carpet beater!’
They walked down some steps into the main section of the Fair, picking their way carefully through the slippery patches of oyster juice which lingered in the hollows of the stones. Meredith at once became high-spirited in the noise and tumult of the market itself; he stood between two piles of hats and, taking one hat in each hand, began to juggle with them. But this gaiety clearly annoyed Mary, and she walked ahead of him towards a selection of old gloves heaped upon a stall. She seemed to be inspecting them in some detail because her head was bent across them but, when he caught up with her again, he could see that she was crying. There was a wooden box of rusty keys next to the gloves and, in his astonishment, Meredith picked up one of them and began to rattle it as he spoke. ‘What is the matter?’
She was still looking at the gloves, turning them over and over with her right hand. ‘Nothing is the matter. What could be the matter?’
A small child appeared from beneath the stall, an old blue choker tied loosely around his neck. ‘Lovely gloves, Miss. Lovely delicate gloves for a lovely lady. No blemishes at all.’
Mary smiled at him and turned away, her husband following close behind; she walked down a side-alley where several rows of old calico dresses were hanging, some of them with a faint lustre of their former glory, others faded and their flounces stale or withered. To Meredith’s alarm, they resembled lines of hanged women swaying slightly in the breeze. She walked behind one row, momentarily out of sight, and he parted the dresses in order to talk to her: the rough material brushed across his face, and for a moment he could sense the odour of rotting cologne. ‘Something must be the matter. Tell me.’ She moved down the aisle between the dresses, and Meredith followed her on the other side, watching her feet. Tell me!’
She reappeared at the end of the row, and took his arm as if to comfort him. ‘I want to go away for a while.’ They walked quickly out of the alley, both of them afraid of each other for the first time.
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
He sounded almost fierce with her, and she withdrew her arm from his. ‘I want to go away from you. Can you understand that?’
He stopped, fighting for breath. He thought he was going to vomit here, among the common people. ‘I thought you were happy.’
‘Happy? No. I’ve never been happy.’ Without seeing anything except her own resolution to leave him, much stronger now that she had at last given it expression, she was staring at a pile of old trousers. They were heaped upon a plank and an old man, sitting behind them, saw her intense glance and raised his little finger as if to catch her attention. She was startled by the movement, blushed, and walked on. Meredith was still by her side, trying to keep up with her rapid pace. That’s not true,’ he said. ‘We’ve always been happy.’ She said nothing and, accepting her silence as acknowledgment of the truth of this, he went on, more quietly, ‘So why are you crying?’
‘I’m crying for you, George.’
‘What was that?’ He pulled her beneath an old shop-front, out of the glare of the day. He did not want to see her face too distinctly, not yet.
‘I have to leave you.’
He stepped away from her, and entered the doorway of the shop. ‘What’s his name?’ She seemed to shake her head. ‘What’s his name? What’s his name?’ He made it sound like a comic patter from the Cremorne Gardens, but then he turned round and blundered into the shop. He knew one name but he could not say it in her presence; he had some fear that, if he spoke it out loud, the bearer of it would suddenly appear in front of them. ‘Look at those paintings,’ he said, although his back was turned to her, ‘lying discarded there.’ He was pointing into a corner when Mary followed him into the shop, towards a number of old or dirty canvases which were propped against a wooden trunk. He walked over and picked up one of them. It was of a middle-aged man, without a wig, sitting beside a candle; his right hand rested lightly upon some books, the titles of which were indistinct. This face is familiar, Mrs Meredith,’ he said. ‘Is it a poet, I wonder?’ With trembling hands he held it up against the light which streamed in from the open doorway, and for a moment Mary saw Meredith’s own face depicted there lined and furrowed in a desolate middle age. ‘What do you think, Mrs Meredith, is he the original or merely a model?’ He put down the painting, and wiped his fingers on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘I suppose only the painter will know.’
‘It is too close in here,’ she said and walked out of the shop.
‘Shall I see you later?’ he called out after her, sullenly. But he did not want to follow her. He did not want to walk out into the light, and he turned to the owner of the shop who had been watching them intently from behind a small oak counter. Take care of that picture, my friend.’ Meredith said. ‘It is a valuable piece of work.’
‘Do you know the artist, sir?’
‘Oh yes, I know the artist. I know the artist very well.’
‘No, I don’t wish to see it.’ But then she added in a quieter tone, not wanting to offend him, ‘Not yet. Will you show it to me later?’ She did not care to see her husband lying dead, now that she had left him, even though his death was only an image upon a canvas. But Wallis was so delighted by her unexpected arrival that nothing she said really seemed to matter.
When he opened the door, Mary had been standing in the street with her back to him. ‘Agnes’s chalet has been rebuilt, I see.’ Then she turned around suddenly, and the astonishment was so visible upon his face that she had laughed out loud. ‘I told you I would come, you know.’
‘Yes. Of course.’ Then he added, without really knowing what he was saying, ‘I always knew that you would come.’
They stood on the threshold together, neither one moving, until Mary looked past him into the house. ‘May I?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m sorry.’
He did not want to stand too close to her, not yet, and so when she entered the hallway she took off her cloak herself and handed it to him with a smile. But he could not remember what he was supposed to do with it, and he was still holding it as he led her up to the studio. She was the first to speak. ‘The painting goes on display soon?’
‘At the Hogarth Gallery.’
‘He will like that. He often talked of it.’
Wallis said nothing: the Merediths’ separation was well known to the younger artists, but was she aware that he knew of it? ‘Some tea?’ he said at last. And without waiting for her answer he got up and filled the tea-kettle from a standing tap in the corner of the studio. He needed this opportunity to collect his thoughts. ‘I am a primitive here, you see, Mrs Meredith.’ He blushed; he had not meant to call her this. ‘I mean ’
‘What is it?’ She was still smiling.
‘What?’
‘What is the tea?’
‘Oh.’ He was relieved. ‘Only Souchong, I’m afraid.’ For some reason they were now both laughing.
‘I thought Souchong was a style of painting, Mr Wallis.’ She used his name very deliberately.
‘No, you are thinking of Marikomo.’
‘Really, I wasn’t thinking of anything.’ They sat in silence until the whistle of the tea-kettle brought him swiftly to his feet, and his hands were still shaking when he carried it over to her. She sipped it, and grimaced. ‘Are you sure it is not a painting?’
He sipped his. I’m sorry.’ He poured the rest of the tea into a small wooden bowl. ‘I can taste the mastic, too. I must have been using the cups for varnish.’
She put down her own cup. ‘I’m ready now.’ He stared at her. ‘I’m ready to see the painting.’
But he was no longer so eager to show it to her: not because he was anxious about her reactions to the picture itself, but rather because he feared her response to the sight of her husband lying upon the bed. ‘I’ll bring it down here,’ he replied, very carefully. ‘I have put it in my own room.’
‘No. No, take me to it. I want to see it just as it is now. No formal introduction.’ She was clearly as nervous as he was.
He led her upstairs to his study. The curtains were drawn, to protect the newly-varnished canvas from the daylight. ‘Let me part these,’ he said, hurrying towards them. ‘You will be able to see it more clearly.’
‘May I see it in shadow first? I am a little afraid of it now.’ Wallis took her into a far corner, where the painting was propped upon an ebony night-table; in the shadows, its violent colours seemed all the more fierce, the whiteness of the flesh the more luminous. The soul of Chatterton had not yet left it.
‘Don’t be frightened of it,’ Wallis was saying. ‘After all, this painting helped us ’ He hesitated, not certain how to go on. But she was not looking at the canvas; she was looking at him. There was a small nervous movement in his left eye-lid. She wanted to put out her hand to soothe it, to touch his face. And now, across ‘Chatterton’, this is what she did.
12
ANDREW FLINT had arrived early at the Finsbury Park Crematorium. The service for Charles Wychwood was to be held in the West Chapel, a plain red-brick building which reminded Flint of a municipal baths; but its doors were still locked. Someone might still be burning inside, and it was with a certain relief that he turned away and walked beneath an arch into some gardens which, with their freshly mown lawns and carefully laid-out flower beds, promised to soothe him. Then he saw the sign beside some rhododendron bushes: ‘Disposal Area Three. Please Keep Off the Grass.’ Charles’s death had been so unexpected that it still seemed to Flint to be a sort of practical joke if he suddenly appeared from behind one of these bushes, laughing, he would not have been in the least surprised. In fact, he expected it. And he waited on the gravel path between the chapel and its lawns.
A sudden movement caught his eye and, when he looked more closely, he saw a woman kneeling beside a flower-bed, apparently plunging her hands into the damp, cold soil. When she straightened up, awkwardly wiping her hands against her black dress, Flint realised that it was Harriet Scrope. She saw him at the same moment and called out, ‘Don’t let me touch you! My hands are unclean!’ When he came up to her he saw that she was holding a geranium by its roots. ‘I just wanted a cutting,’ she said, and popped it into her handbag.
Flint smiled and nodded, as if this were the most natural thing lo do in the grounds of a crematorium. ‘Flos resurgens, I suppose? What lovely gerania.’
‘They should be, dear. They spring from the ashes of the dead.’
‘Ah yes.’ Flint sighed. ‘Suspiria de profundis.’
They walked down the gravel path in silence until Harriet said, ‘This reminds me of the scene from Villette.’
‘Does it?’ Flint was very cautious, never having read that particular novel.
‘You know, when Lucy Snowe walks around the gravel path in search of the ghostly nun.’
‘How apt.’ He hastily moved on to another subject, and pointed at the closed and shuttered West Chapel. ‘A forbidding edifice, n’est-ce pas? Almost Babylonian.’
‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been. I never got beyond Brighton.’
‘Ah, but there you have the lachrymose Royal Pavilion.’ He stopped, and picked up a piece of gravel. ‘This is my first ’ He hesitated, searching for the delicate word.
‘Cremation.’ Harriet took evident satisfaction in uttering it for him. ‘I’m always coming here,’ she added, with equal satisfaction. ‘It used to be cocktail parties, and now it’s funerals. Still the same people, of course.’ She took the piece of gravel from him, and threw it down upon the path. ‘I know every inch of this place.’
‘Sunt lacrimae rerum, don’t you think? Mentem mortalia tangunt?’
‘Does that mean, they’re dropping like flies?’ She adopted a solemn voice for this phrase. ‘Well, they are.’
‘Exeunt omnes ’ he began to say.
‘In vino veritas.’
She was clearly parodying him, but he did not mind; in fact he welcomed it. He positively invited it. ‘Dies irae,’ he added.
She knew only a few select Latin tags, and had to think for a moment. ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’ They both laughed and progressed arm-in-arm down the gravel path, passing a young woman who was carrying a small black book. ‘Whenever I see anyone reading a Bible,’ Harriet said, ‘I always assume they must be slightly mad. Don’t you? Oh look, here’s another one.’ A clergyman walked across them and she smiled graciously towards him.
‘What a charming morning,’ Flint said, rather loudly. ‘Quite rosy-fingered, if not precisely dawn.’
There were three puffs of white smoke from a chimney at the back of the West Chapel, and Harriet took this as some kind of signal. ‘Someone’s up and away,’ she said, rubbing her hands gleefully, ‘but we had better go back now. The others may be coming.’
‘Yes, I hear an English sound.’ There was a noise of car-tyres crackling across gravel and, just as Flint and Harriet walked back into the courtyard of the Chapel, Vivien and Edward were stepping out of a black car.
Flint, embarrassed, hung back while Harriet put out her arms and went over to Vivien. ‘I know,’ she murmured, with tears starting in her eyes, ‘yes, yes, I know. I’ve been there.’ Where, precisely, she had been she did not say.
Vivien embraced her. ‘You both came. You’re both here!’ She said this so gratefully that Flint pitied her and he noticed how frail she seemed when he, too, embraced her. Edward would not move from his mother’s side, and clung to her dress as she stood with them. ‘You were his true friends,’ she told them, looking from one to the other. Flint blushed.
‘Here’s Philip,’ he said quickly; and indeed Philip was getting out of a second car, together with three others. Edward left his mother and ran towards him; Philip lifted him up in his arms, and kissed him. Why is it, Flint thought, that I am the only one who does not know how to behave?
And slowly, with subdued voices, they proceeded into the West Chapel Vivien and Edward leading the way, with Harriet following close behind. Flint sat down in a back pew, and watched as the other mourners entered. And how many would bother to attend my funeral? The idea of extinction itself did not alarm him, for this he simply could not imagine, but the thought of all the work he would have to leave unfinished was intolerable. It seemed to him to be a kind of humiliation. And yet what did it matter? All activity must cease and, in any case, was it not all just a motiveless revolution of the wheel? We turn the wheel simply in order to turn it, to hear it turning and to break the silence which would otherwise destroy us. At the back of the West Chapel Flint experienced a kind of nausea.
The service was beginning and, as a priest entered from a side door, Flint for the first time noticed the pine coffin half-covered by flowers: it was resting on a ramp, also festooned with flowers, just in front of two small wooden doors. ‘You all knew Charles well…’ The priest had started his sermon, and at once Flint’s attention wandered towards Harriet who was sitting behind Charles’s family in the second pew; she seemed to be weeping, and she was kissing something which dangled from her neck. At first Flint thought that it was a pearl necklace, but then he saw that it was a large crucifix suspended on a thick silver chain. She must have kept it in her handbag, next to the uprooted geranium, until she thought the time had come to display it.
The priest had shifted his stance and was now looking over the heads of the congregation. ‘Charles was a poet, as you all know, and he was, from what I have been told by his family gathered together here today, a very fine one. It may seem to you a tragedy that he has died before he could fully explore those gifts, but we must thank God for those gifts themselves and quote with the great poet Wordsworth, Thou marvellous young man, With your sleepless soul never perishing in pride. and declare that God’s will has been done, even though we do not yet have the skill to discern it. O God, through Whose mercy the souls of the faithful find rest…’
The stupid idiot has got the words of the poe
m wrong, Harriet thought, but then she settled down to enjoy the rest of the familiar ceremony. She closed her eyes and tried to visualise all the pulleys and trap-doors beneath her feet, like Don Giovanni descending into hell… a sudden burst of sound, from the tape of an organ playing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, woke her from her pleasant slumber; and for a moment she thought she was back in the sex-cinema where she had last heard the music. But then the small wooden doors opened and the coffin slid through them, leaving only the flowers behind.
‘Ave atque vale,’ Flint murmured.
The music ceased and the priest with a quick, nervous smile took Vivien and Edward with him through the side door. Harriet was watching Edward: their eyes met briefly, before the door was closed behind him, and she was reminded of his silent presence in the hospital when Vivien had shown her the X-ray picture of Charles’s tumour. She had looked at the bulbous grey shape lodged in his brain, and it seemed to her to have the lineaments of a human face.
The mourners came out under the cloudy sky and stood in small groups, uncertain what to do next. Then an elderly couple started ushering the others towards some flowers which had been laid upon the flagstones beside the chapel: Flint presumed that these were Charles’s parents, and he was surprised how drab they seemed. They were ordinary even in their grief. Then he heard Charles’s mother say, The cars are booked, ain’t they?’
‘Don’t worry yourself. It’s all been accounted for.’
Harriet, who had been the last to leave the chapel, was now hastening to join the others; she was fumbling in her handbag and for a moment Flint believed that she was about to fling the stolen geranium, roots and all, upon the pile of more conventional floral tributes. But she took out a handkerchief and put it to her eyes. Then she saw Flint, and came over to him quickly. ‘I’m not really crying, dear,’ she whispered. ‘It’s rheum. Rheum at the top.’ With an appropriately mournful expression she was steadily examining Charles’s parents, and then whispered to him again, ‘Isn’t it amazing how many poets are born common?’ Flint had an overwhelming desire to laugh and he put his sleeve over his mouth for a few seconds, as if he were wiping it. But when he looked around he saw the strained and stricken faces of Charles’s relatives, as they started moving back to the cars; he lowered his arm.
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