Where Nothing Sleeps
Page 43
‘If we’re going to paint people coming out of tombs we might just as well stay at home instead of dragging all this paraphernalia for miles,’ Hope said heavily. ‘I thought we were going to have a day’s sketching in the country.’
‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Robert hurriedly. ‘I only meant that we could turn our sketches into something more elaborate afterwards, if we felt like it.’ He did not want to begin an argument so early in the day.
They trudged down the road in the direction of the church. The sun began to shine. The straps on his paint-box and easel cut into Robert’s shoulders.
‘Perhaps the villagers think we look like Van Gogh and Gauguin going out for a day’s work in the fields near Arles,’ Robert suggested as they passed down the main street.
‘In spite of the popularisation, not to say vulgarisation, of their legend by many books and the Medici Society’s prints, I still think it very unlikely that the villagers have ever heard of those two gentlemen,’ said Hope with too much solemnity. He was pleased with his sentence.
‘This is awful,’ groaned Robert.
‘What is awful?’
‘Our conversation,’ said Robert. ‘So empty and stupid. Let’s talk about sex.’
So they talked about sex until this subject also seemed to become empty and stupid; then Hope repeated the curious story which a doctor friend had told him. It seems that the doctor had come to hear of a lonely young person who was in the habit of asking tramps and other needy people to come to his house, where he promised that they should have food and clothing. When he had them in his room, he gave them all they needed, including money, if only they would tie him securely to the foot of his bed.
This the tramps usually did, however bewildered they may have felt. Were they not being rewarded for it handsomely? But when the youth began to chant, ‘Now, O master, I am powerless, and in thy hands. Do with me what thou wilt. I am thy slave!’, the tramps usually became extremely perturbed and left in a hurry, abandoning the poor youth still strapped to the bed with dressing-gown cords and handkerchiefs.
At last the landlady had come in on one of these occasions, and, finding the youth trussed up and not understanding it at all, she had consulted the doctor.
‘But it’s perfectly easy to understand,’ said Robert. ‘When I was at school and horribly unhappy and lonely, I used to go down to the end of the field and chain myself up to the old horse-roller; then I’d pretend to be a slave dragging stones to build the Pyramids. You have to symbolise and dramatise your unhappiness in some way, then it almost gives you pleasure. I can also remember how frustrated I felt when a boisterous, rather likeable prefect let me off my first beating. I had so keyed myself up for the awful event that the reprieve came as a jarring anticlimax. I felt washed-out, grey, humiliated, nondescript, when I had expected to feel thoroughly sore and full of burning indignation. You see, the ending was wrong, inartistic, a flop; and this poor person, left to his own devices all day, must have felt the longing for guidance, direction, which he dramatised into the extreme form of wanting someone to ill treat him and use him as a slave.’
‘Oh, let’s stop all this amateur psychology!’ yelled Hope at the end of this long speech. ‘The amusing thing about the story is the gorgeously ornate prayer—“Now, O master, I am powerless” etc., don’t you think? That’s what I love.’
By now they had reached the churchyard; they began slowly to walk round the church, looking at it from all angles. Robert tried not to walk over any graves. He always felt constrained in a churchyard, as if every step might land him on a forbidden oblong. A nurse must have told him once never to tread on a grave and the prohibition still lived with him strongly.
They decided, at last, to pitch their easels on a gravel patch which led to the small chancel-door.
‘This pinkish gravel will be nice with green grass, won’t it?’ said Robert.
Hope merely grunted. He was busy wriggling out fat worms of paint.
‘Oh, they’re lovely, aren’t they! It’s a pity to spoil them by messing them about on a board,’ Robert exclaimed, as he watched the paints emerging from the tubes.
‘Speak for yourself,’ was the obvious answer which Hope made.
They worked in silence for a little. Robert concentrated on the texture of the walls, exaggerating the pattern of the stones and stressing the too ambitious Gothic-revival tracery which replaced the original in the windows. Hope’s picture was far more atmospheric and, of course, more accomplished generally.
They both gazed at the other’s picture and said, with mental reservations, ‘Oh, yours is much better.’
‘Mine might have been done by an old lady who wanted, in her youth, to be the English Berthe Morisot,’ Hope added to this, and Robert capped it by saying ‘And mine’s like a McKnight Kauffer poster—all black lines and over-accentuated design.’
Their modesty lasted as long as neither criticised the work of the other. When criticism was offered, modesty flew out of the churchyard, and sly little pats of mud were flung by both sides with careful aim.
‘Oh, let’s stop it,’ said Robert wearily. ‘Let’s agree that they’re both frightful. I can’t paint from nature and you oughtn’t to.’
Hope decided to ignore this last shot. He spread out his mackintosh so that they could both sit on the ground and eat their picnic.
‘Don’t get any grease on my coat, will you?’ he said anxiously. ‘If you do it will absolutely spoil this rubber material.’
‘Is it sacrilegious to eat in the churchyard?’ Robert asked.
‘Do you want me to say “yes” so that you’ll be able to feel wicked?’ Hope suggested.
Before Robert could answer they were interrupted by a very handsome red setter which had slunk up silently and was now nosing their sandwiches and raising its head to give delicate sniffs. It held one paw off the ground in a graceful curve.
‘Where on earth has this monster sprung from?’ asked Hope in mock alarm, snatching the sandwiches away and putting them under his coat. The timid dog started back at his abruptness, and a young woman’s voice called out gaily and rather insolently, ‘I’m the mistress of the monster—Spangle, come here at once.’
Both turned to watch her as she walked up from the lych-gate. She had auburn hair, was a little plump, and her mouth was a special red.
‘I suppose neither of you would like to adopt the monster,’ she said with complete assurance. ‘You see, I’ve just got a new baby, and although I really infinitely prefer Spangle to the baby, yet I feel I shall have to get rid of her because she might split the baby’s head open one day. She jumps about so when she’s excited.’
Robert and Hope looked at each other, then hurriedly turned their eyes away, fearing that they had revealed too much to the woman.
‘We live in London,’ said Robert, ‘and I’m afraid neither of us could keep a dog.’ As he spoke he looked into the woman and thought, ‘I wonder why she has to say she likes the dog better than the baby. I suppose she wants us to think she’s hard and smart and dashing—isn’t it quaint and old-fashioned?’
The woman had taken no notice of his explanation; she was now bending over their paintings with a profound expression.
‘Effective things!’ she said. ‘But I think I’m inclined to see a little more mauve in the shadows myself.’
She left them and entered the church. Spangle followed her in and was not ejected. Later they saw the woman throw the dead flowers from the altar on to the rubbish heap and go to draw some water from the tap at the foot of the tower.
‘Don’t you know who she is?’ asked Hope.
‘No, I’ve never seen her before.’
‘I thought that in country places everyone knew everybody else.’
‘Did you?’
They started to pack their things up.
About the Author
Denton Welch (1915–1948) wrote three novels and many short stories, journals, and poems. Born in Shanghai to an American mother and an E
nglish father, he was raised in England, and his principal ambition was to be a painter until a bicycling accident left him partially paralyzed at the age of twenty. After that, he began to write a series of autobiographical works. He died at thirty-three of complications resulting from his injuries.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All work by Denton Welch copyright © The University of Texas, reproduced here by kind permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, and David Higham Associates, agents of the Welch estate.
Cover design by Barbara Brown
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0292-9
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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