Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Mend it, see? All better soon.’ Maria saw. The distress vanished and the brow cleared. She held one hand in her apron pocket, hidden, pointed with the other to the row of neat paints on a chair. Thomas, bringer of gifts, had brought indoors vast quantities of oil paint. New, tubed paint, a wide range of primary colours, useless. Maria picked up a tube, looked with perplexity, squeezed it, grinned, pointed to the madonna. Then she took off the cap of the tube, still puzzled. No answers, no paint.

  ‘You have to pierce the top,’ Elisabeth said, amused.

  Maria seized a brush, used the sharp wooden end to pierce the thin aluminium seal of the paint. She did the same with six others, quickly, with the delight of a child playing. Let her play. The paints were of little use for Elisabeth’s purposes and they would keep. They were the product of Thomas’s compulsive shopping, like other, not always well-chosen gifts. A new blue smock, since he seemed to like her in blue and Maria seemed to approve, soaps, knick-knacks, all impersonal gifts which were met with the same grave politeness with which they were presented. Let Maria play, but Maria had finished. The hand hidden inside the apron drew forth other paintings, a flush of small religious pictures. Elisabeth looked at them with respect. Saw one depiction of a woman with a white chemise and startlingly blue cloak, with beams of light arrowing down from her hands and head and a vivid green serpent toiling in the roses at her feet. The thought crossed Elisabeth’s mind, along with her suppressed laughter, that sweet, kindly Maria had similar adornments in mind for their very own madonna, but she did not wish to offend. Maria snatched her treasures away, without offence, but only as if thinking of something else. She proffered instead the rosary from round her neck. Elisabeth accepted it, crossed herself as she had seen others do, and hung the beads on a peg of the easel. Maria nodded with equally grave approval.

  Thomas had come from the other end of the corridor, a mile of carpet from that door to this and, with his arrival, the apartment which had seemed as large as it was tastefully palatial became merely a selection of cells designed to kill noise with the padding of its splendour. The two of them, Thomas and Maria, were both rehearsed in silence, like an order of obedient nuns. Thomas beneath a small chandelier wore the look of a patient gaoler – without the obviousness of clanking keys, but still a gaoler. For both of them. The sensation of that, Elisabeth’s smothered panic tinged with disgust for her own foolish imaginings, faded as soon as he smiled. Maria dutifully disappeared with the humble silence of her arrival. We are both afraid of him, Elisabeth thought: both, quietly, unnecessarily afraid.

  ‘You summonsed,’ he said, mild and deferential. ‘What next?’

  ‘Look,’ Elisabeth said. ‘Look …’ She wiped the vulnerable neck in the painting again, so the single pearl showed, damaged but clear, illuminated by wetness. ‘Why would anyone alter it?’

  Thomas chuckled. ‘You tell me,’ he suggested.

  ‘Vanity,’ she said. ‘All is vanity. I imagine this picture being hung in the house of a new rich manufacturer, two generations after it was made.’ Her voice was gathering nervous speed. ‘He might have acquired this picture because of some passing resemblance to a daughter, perhaps, wanted to pretend to others that he had family portraits, a lineage? So he buys his daughter a vulgar necklace and has the same piece painted in round the neck of this portrait. Lo and behold, he has created an ancestor and made the necklace into an heirloom. Families often alter portraits, to suit their own image of themselves.’

  She looked at him, watched him watching the slender neck of the madonna as the shine of the cleaning spirit faded and with it the brief depth the fluid had given to the detail. Yes, it was often done, this alteration of portraits to accord with the status of a new generation: there had been no surprise in the discovery, which she had made before, always with the same amazement at the vanity and insecurity that people could invest in the art they placed on their own walls.

  He shrugged, the wide smile belying the indifference of the gesture. His glasses, she noticed, were reflective, the kind of spectacles behind which a person hides in order to watch. She had never, in a fortnight of this distant proximity, seen him full face with naked eyes. Vanity, all is vanity. She wanted to ask what she dared not ask, unable in this cocoon to confront what she had come to understand was an indomitable will, even now when he was magnificently cheerful. A gaoler with his dog: she had not questioned, but she knew it so.

  ‘I cannot imagine what foolish owner ordered the adding of the sapphires,’ he said. ‘But I am convinced that their removal is cause for celebration. Lunch, I think. I mean, out to lunch. Other people do this every day, why not ourselves.’

  ‘But I’d be wasting the light. You’re paying me not to waste light.’ She did not know why she hesitated when the invitation filled her with such sublime relief she wanted to slump, suddenly dispelling as it did all those multiform suspicions which had been incubating into another state of fear, pushed back, but still fusing into a block, quite different from the fear of intrusion and the fear of footsteps, a fear which grew like a shadow as light faded. He laid a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I am not paying you to ruin your eyes. And,’ he added, removing his hand, still smiling the smile which she had come to see as being faintly relentless, ‘I know you’ve begun to imagine yourself a prisoner here, so I must show you otherwise. Mustn’t I? A privilege for me. Lunch, a walk? Maybe you could show me what inspires you? That kind of thing. Come.’

  He was turning away as he spoke, that deferential manner of his implying in all its humility his utter conviction of her acceptance. Elisabeth was silent, glad for his movement, his certainty of her compliance and the diplomacy which took away the obligation to reply. He had formulated exactly what she had been thinking ever since Butler had barred her exit, something which Thomas would have dismissed as misguided affection, if he had not, somehow, with the same blocking tactic he used now, prevented mention of it. In all their conversations, he used her own reserve, her shyness, and harnessed it to his advantage, so that even that desire of hers to go home was somehow not mentioned. She knew she was being ridiculous, but there was a kind of security here which she had eagerly embraced on first acquaintance, and, unable to examine the fear that it might have been false, she had held her tongue and her fears, closed her eyes to everything inside her skull, and, when she opened them, all she could see was colour. The olive-skinned woman, the clothes over the chair in the second picture, the third picture which lay in the corner. To leave them would feel like treachery.

  Now, he was opening the door, telling her in his guarded and formal way that she was, of course, free to come and go exactly as she wished, if she only chose to ask. All the rest, the illusion of being held so politely as a captive, had been pure imagination.

  So they went. ‘No fuss,’ said Thomas, ‘if you please.’ There was no chance for fuss. The decision made, movement followed, and she only remembered a vague need to make up her face when they were halfway downstairs. Thomas ignored the lift, she copied him. They were high above the world here: she had forgotten how many stairs or the outside aspect, or anything but what there was within. Inside the turret of her private world the exterior had become a memory. Red brick and brilliant windows so clean they did nothing but reflect; a block maintained to the highest standard. Cream balconies, a plaster shield appliquéd on the wall, nothing of interest to Middle Eastern tenants who occupied most of the other floors. In that moment, the noise of the outside world delighted her. Once they were beyond the vast front door, she looked up to the height from where they had come.

  ‘Is that us?’ she said, pointing to the eastern wing of the top floor, where one room stood out above the quiet street.

  ‘That’s us,’ said Thomas, tersely.

  ‘Don’t the windows look small from here?’

  ‘Do they? I never noticed.’

  ‘Where does Maria live?’

  ‘Oh, in the basement. She likes the dark.’

  Thomas had a pec
uliar walk, a movement from the hip on the right side, swinging the leg stiffly but efficiently. The right hand, carried limply, seemed to monitor the movement of the leg, the stillness of the arm a contrast to the rest. It looked a trifle precarious, permanently unstable, but she sensed he was a man who would despise the stigma of any kind of crutch. There were sticks and umbrellas concealed in the cupboard in the hall, she remembered, vaguely: perhaps he had needed them once. Seeing Thomas in the sunlight, she was aware of how little she knew of him, apart from that one article of history they never discussed, she maintaining their veneer of ignorance in case she was wrong. Better not to speak than be wrong. We are both damaged goods, Elisabeth thought, but we have learned to contain the rot. And he is not keeping me prisoner. He is taking me out. Like the dog on the leash, she thought, and crushed the thought in the making.

  In the street, she wanted to turn cartwheels, a childish trick she had mastered once, like running and skipping and, sometimes, shouting. In her own flat, she would cartwheel down the corridor without witnesses, a silly exercise of freedom for the occasional and always solitary state of mild drunkenness. Elisabeth wanted to run now, across the grubby square in front of the cathedral, then across St James’s Park where Thomas led with his fast, unbusinesslike swing, but she walked alongside him instead.

  ‘Wouldn’t you find it easier if you carried a stick?’ she suggested, tentatively, remembering what she had glimpsed inside the cupboard when he had handed out her coat as if the fetching of it were his task and his task alone. Thomas stopped, breathing hard.

  ‘Oh, I don’t carry a stick. Not for at least a year. A sign of weakness. I might look it, but I’m not an old man yet.’ Then he swung on, so fast she lengthened her own stride to keep up. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened to you. Since …’

  ‘To me? Since when, birth? Oh, nothing at all.’ He stopped and faced her, the loose arm swinging in front of him. ‘I suppose you mean this.’ He pointed at the right arm with the left. ‘Only a stroke, as I told you. I’m informed it happens to the best of men.’

  Suddenly he looked grey and exhausted, the dark glasses providing the only focus of colour to the whole of him, Thomas the neutral man, always dressed in dun-coloured clothes as if for camouflage. They were parallel to a bench by the path he had been covering with such clumsy speed. She guided him to it, noticing as she held his left arm that beneath the cloth of his shirtsleeve the muscles were as hard as metal. She did not touch others easily: did not flinch from contact but did not volunteer it, either, for reasons which could include embarrassment or fear of rejection as well as an abhorrence of unnecessary gestures. Touch must have meaning; if not, it became no more than a kind of patting given to a pet, with no other purpose than an awkward comforting. The latter applied in her touching of Thomas: otherwise, the texture of the skin on his wrist, the slight sweat which often shone round his nose and forehead, repelled her. When she had first shaken his hand, she had done so firmly but had relinquished it with relief. Thomas’s skin was permanently damp. Looking at him now, sitting with his head forward over his short, plump knees, she did not wish to sit closer although detesting herself for that sharp revulsion which she hoped was not apparent. He folded his arms across his chest, placing one inside the other, a defensive gesture. She wondered, fleetingly, if he had always been such a plain man, the kind of man who was always the wrong side of the line, pallid, short in stature and thin in hair apart from the shadow which always lurked around his chin however recently shaven. She realized with a shock that one of the many reasons she had felt so safe with him from the outset was because he was so quietly, defiantly and definitely unattractive, despite the grooming and the constant smell of aftershave, which signalled him as squeaky clean but faintly silly. As he had stumbled slightly against her in the second before, her hand on his arm had also nudged into that barrel chest which she had, without dwelling on the thought, previously imagined to be flabby, but it too was hard, the consistency of bone rather than flesh. Perhaps Thomas’s body had always been misjudged through the assumption that what was essentially ugly must also be sweet and softly safe, immune from the aggression and desires given to more attractive men. For the time, the loneliness of the ugly, his personal isolation as he sat there so controlled but so weak, pierced her with desperate pity.

  ‘Are you all right? Look, just rest a bit and then we’ll go home.’

  ‘Go home?’ he said. ‘Home? Did you say home?’

  Thomas sat upright, still with arms folded, looking straight ahead. Then he reached for her hand. For one desperate moment she thought he would raise it in that useless right paw either to kiss or to clutch, but he patted her knuckle instead in a gesture bereft of intimacy.

  ‘Don’t pity me,’ he said neutrally. ‘Whatever you do, don’t do that. And of course we don’t go home. You’ve only just got out. Look at those people over there. How very strange.’

  He pointed towards six or seven primary-school girls, being bullied into a group to walk through the trees. They were resisting organization, a small school outing on the kind of nature walk Elisabeth remembered in far less structured settings. A parcel of girls, sent out to find specimens of earthly life in the interests of their education, one of them standing on the edge, mutinous and indifferent, clutching a bunch of fallen horse-chestnut leaves, while the other gloved hand held an ice cream, confused as to which burden to preserve first. Elisabeth noticed how the extended finger of Thomas shook as it pointed. When the stray but perfect child turned and watched his gaze, laughing for no reason, the pity which Elisabeth had tried to distance swayed back, sharp and protective, spiked into life by the look of intense hatred on his face. This time she wanted to touch him out of guilt for her own reluctance. He stood before she could make the gesture.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go. I do beg your pardon for that little display of weakness. All I need is food.’

  If I do not move, Thomas thought to himself, she will see these ludicrous tears trapped behind these ludicrous glasses. She will know how exhausted I get if I attempt to walk faster than her without a stick. She will see too much. For the moment she pities me so much, she will come back with me, all by myself. She will come home, of her own free will, and I shall always be able to say, I did not make her. She called it home and she came home, to me.

  As the afternoon progressed, Francis became more aimless. He was doing little more than following his own tracks in circles: he was hungry but not hungry, irritable because of an indifference to a basic need which was never ignored in his carefully controlled days. Francis did not like to lose control. So far he had travelled from Portobello Road to Camden Passage, drifted through arcades of stalls and shops, remarkably unspellbound. From west London to north and back to somewhere in between, without ever being able to make up his mind about buying a single thing. Not even a new pair of socks, never mind a painting. He was ashamed of himself for the waste of time, even more ashamed when without too much genuine desire for the company, he sought out Annie’s stall at the back of Church Street. He wanted, but did not want to see Annie. He knew her only slightly and she attracted and repelled in equal measure: there was always a little needle of conflict. Francis told himself he needed to talk about Elisabeth, which was true, but what he needed as much was company.

  By four o’clock in the afternoon most of Annie’s customers had gone. There was a youth lying on the floor, and a thin woman with peroxide hair sitting on a chair and smoking a blue cigarette, fellow dealers, or Annie’s version of friends. He neither knew nor cared which, but somehow their indifference to his presence not only made him feel de trop, but also brought upon him the desire to make an impact.

  ‘Look what the cat brought in,’ said Annie by way of greeting. ‘Thought you might drop by some time today unless you thought we weren’t good enough for you. Slumming it, are we?’ She was a little resentful of his preoccupation when last seen, turned to her audience. ‘One of the posher friends,’ she explained.
‘Cultured, you know.’

  Francis did not like to be ignored, which felt to him like being despised; he invariably set out to charm strangers until he overcame their indifference. The desire to entertain was part of his calling, he supposed, but it might have been the other way round. In any event, the languid youth stirred himself into a man called Ralph who dealt in porcelain; the woman into someone called Jean who dealt in art deco. Business was bad: they had gathered round Annie because Annie liked company. Being bored meant they were highly responsive to Francis, but even if they were an appreciative audience, he could not think why he was fool enough to tell them about the young burglar boy who had stolen paintings, then ripped the canvases to pieces. He turned it into another funny story, appropriate for the company, but as he did so, he knew he should not, because the boy client had been no more than a child and no one had heard that strange cri de coeur which had haunted Francis ever since. Then the silly tale of his post-midnight scare with his own broken picture. But they were only interested in the boy.

  ‘Three years! Is that all? Little fucker should have got life.’ This from the porcelain man.

  ‘I’d have him flogged. Dipped in acid first, little sod.’ This from Jean, suddenly animated, looking like a whip.

  ‘Why?’ queried Annie. It had been a long afternoon: she was prepared to act devil’s advocate. ‘Why? OK, so he pinched the stuff and got fed up with it, but three years? It’s not as though the pictures couldn’t be repaired sooner than that, was it? Worse things can be done to a painting then taking a knife to it, I can tell you. Did the judge know that, Francis?’

  ‘I doubt it, any more than the boy.’

  ‘Well, you should have told him. Then you should have got the paintings off whoever and taken them round to our Lizzie. She’d have fixed them and then your burglar would have got less.’ She was teasing him, patronizing him in her own domain. The languid man stirred, without much conviction.