by Rosie Alison
But the next day, for no perceptible reason, Elizabeth’s habitual melancholy began to seep through, and she retreated inwards. Thomas found her distant and unresponsive at breakfast. Perhaps it was the dining room, with its inadequate light fixtures, or perhaps it was the weather, for the sun was closed out by dull clouds now. Thomas did what he could to engage her, smiling at her brightly, his old familiar smile.
They set out with their guide books to explore the famous city, Elizabeth pushing Thomas through the maze of piazzas and hidden streets. But they had not reckoned on the uneven paving stones, which soon began to jar Thomas’s spine. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was quickly exhausted by pushing the wheelchair through the rutted streets.
Elizabeth grew irritable and Thomas dejected. venice was beautiful, no doubt, but they found themselves too soon estranged from its beauty. In the Basilicaof San Marco, the mosaics were dun and lifeless, because no shaft of sunlight kindled their glitter. So it was with all the sights. They visited the Accademiagallery, and Thomas viewed Bellini’s paintings with acold, dead eye: his heart had closed up against so much perfection.
When they came out of the gallery, it started to rain heavily. The water fell down in sheets, sluicing down broken walls and running in dirty streams along the gutters. Thomas sat helplessly in his chair as Elizabeth wheeled him back to their room, his knees soaking, her back strained.
The next morning, Thomas woke up with a streaming cold and felt breathless. With his lungs weakened by polio, he was wary of catching pneumoniaand stayed indoors. He lay in the dark, airless hotel room and listened to the rain falling on the canal outside.
Elizabeth went for awalk on her own. She sipped coffee in Piazza San Marco, and watched romantic couples. Pigeons focked and few away in waves. By the time she returned to the hotel, self-pity had infected her every nerve, and she did not even try to be cheerful.
Her disappointed face at least spurred Thomas to attempt a recovery, and he roused himself to go out the following morning. The colours of the buildings, which had been so charming in sunlight, now looked mouldy and dreary in an overcast sky. There was a stench from the canals, and the thickening air stuck in their throats. They ate their lunch in silence, and a wave of gloom came over them both as Elizabeth wheeled Thomas back to their hotel.
More rainstorms were forecast, so after one final desultory day they left for home, three days early.
Their marriage had reached an impasse. Thereafter they hoped without hope, and their hidden crack of estrangement began to widen. When Thomas heard the sound of Elizabeth’s step, his heart did not rise. When she saw his handsome face, she was unmoved. There were occasional false dawns of intimacy, moments when they almost reached each other, usually after an evening of wine, feeling each other in the darkness of their bedroom. But each was imagining somebody else, some other life.
Divorce, however, was still not discussed. How could Elizabeth leave her crippled husband, the Ashton heir? Thomas hinted that she was welcome to her freedom by mentioning the liaisons of other London women with as much approbation as was decent. But they both still hoped for a child who might redeem their unhappiness.
Outside, the sound of the bouncing ball stopped abruptly, and Thomas realized that the girl had run off. The sudden silence prompted his return to the words before him, and he tried to switch his mind back to Aeneas’s wanderings.
Blown far off course, we wander in the dark,
Where day and night converge, till even
Our pilot Palinurus must confess
Our way is lost in all this wilderness of water…
20
When Elizabeth returned on tuesday, Thomas was careful not to trespass on her privacy.
“How was London?”
“Dark, and empty. But no sign of an air raid yet. Just everyone waiting indoors for the worst to happen.”
“And the house?”
“As ever. Well, not quite. The park is being dug up, and the railings have been removed. In fact the entire city looks oddly dismantled—”
“I think I’d rather not see it.”
“I went to the gallery too. Not much life there at the moment.”
She slipped in this last remark casually, as if to forestall any questioning. Peter Norton’s modern art gallery was where she had worked and made her friends before the war.
“It’s very nice to have you back here, darling,” he said, and he meant it.
“Yes,” she said with feeling, and touched the back of his hand. She seemed remarkably cheerful, and refreshed.
The next morning she rose early, and watched all the evacuees having breakfast in the dining room. As they fled past her into their assembly, she felt an unexpected calm settling on her. There was a brightness in their faces, as if this place suited them, and she was suddenly proud to have brought them all here, to have given them a home. at last she had been able to do something right.
She met the head gardener that morning, and found him buoyant: for too many years he had watched in quiet despair while his vegetables rotted away uneaten.
“Eighty-six children is good. I can feed more,” he told her.
There was plenty to be glad about, she decided, as she went through the staff rotas.
Such as her trips to London.
* * *
Her double life had begun three years ago, when she had been too much alone in their regent’s Park house, unoccupied and childless. Something in her had snapped.
Her transgression had begun in her mind only, as she sat in their London drawing room one day, wondering what to do with herself. Their housekeeper had placed acyclamen on the rosewood table, and Elizabeth felt herself mesmerized by its tranquil poise.
Cars hummed by on the street outside. Sunshine exposed the dust in the air as she sat on her sofa, barely moving, her gaze held by the cyclamen’s intense stillness. Even the serenity of aplant could rebuke her now, she realized, with Astart.
She pushed herself to her feet and walked round the room, suddenly impatient, past mirrors, atelephone, papers on her desk. Perhaps she should just pack her bags and leave Thomas – sail off and nurse the poor in India, or find some other heroic new life.
She wondered whether the telephone would ring. Whether ayoung man would call her, out of the blue – somebody who desired her but had been too afraid to tell her so.
What was it that she was hiding from herself – what was it that she wanted? Was it aperson, or ahope, or – arapture?
She sat down again on the sofaand reached up to feel the curve of her breasts.
There must be someone, somewhere, who would want to touch her. She wanted to stand in an embrace with Aman, and lay her head on his shoulder. She wanted to be held close, with arms wrapped around her.
Thomas could never be enough for her any more. He had rejected her, and so she was repelled by him. By his perfect face, by his coldness, by his distance. Resentment was silting her heart. She could walk naked through their bedroom and still he would not look up. His inadequacy had frozen him.
Barely spoken then, even in her mind, was the whisper of her empty womb. She was so stricken with afear of barrenness that she could scarcely bear to acknowledge it. Every month, she kept up a faith that perhaps achild would come to relieve the years ahead. But always she felt the sharp ache, the pang, the subtle inward wrench which preceded her menstrual fow. Then the blood oozed forth, washing away her hope.
afew days later, Thomas found her crying in their bedroom, after the arrival of her latest period. He sought out her face, her eyes.
“We could find our own child to love,” he said softly, “we could adopt achild.”
Her whole body ached for a baby; how could he understand that? She could not look at him.
“I couldn’t love a child that has not grown in me.”
“you might come to love the child, especially if it was with you from birth—”
“I could not love somebody else’s child.”
“you don’t know
that,” he spoke as tenderly as he could. She was crumpling, her face staring downwards.
“I need to feel my own child kicking inside—”
He reached out very tentatively and, for once, she let him hold her. In his mind he said to her, Find another man, have another man’s child. for her, for him, for both of them, he just wanted her to have achild. Please, have your child.
that night, she allowed the blood to fow over the sheets, and in the morning their bed was accusingly smeared with stiff red stains. The sheets were thrown away, but their mattress still carried the buried signs of her empty womb.
Yet Elizabeth had sensed Thomas’s unspoken pleathat night. Thereafter, every time she met Aman she felt free to check his eyes – looking for the blue gaze of the Ashtons.
Not long afterwards, she fell under the unexpected spell of arevolutionary new art show in London. The International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington galleries was Asurprise sensation in the spring of 1936. Salvador Dalí appeared in publicity photographs wearing adiving bell, and it was this iconoclastic image which intrigued the public.
Clifford Norton’s wife Peter had loaned some of the paintings, and she insisted on guiding Elizabeth around the works of Dalí, Miró, Max ernst and Paul Nash. Dream landscapes by twilight, human bodies in strange metamorphoses, subconscious images of desire and memory. The pictures were provocatively frank in their nakedness.
Elizabeth had come to the show reluctantly, and was surprised by the way it affected her. She walked around the exhibition again by herself, and these surrealist images spoke to her at once, with their erotic secrets and carnal glimpses. The paintings broke her open in some primal way.
So much of the work was by men, and she saw in their paintings the direct gaze of male desire. Their fascination with the female body, and the irrational joys offered by female fesh. She emerged from the show stirred by illicit impulses.
In her longing to reach out, she turned to Norton’s indefatigable wife Peter, who had always been an emancipated woman with acareer. She dared to talk to her about the eroticism of the surrealists.
“Why not come and join me at my new gallery?” suggested Peter, encouraged by Elizabeth’s appreciation. So many of Peter’s artist friends had fed from Hitler’s Germany, and she was determined to show their work in London, where very little modern art was exhibited. So she had opened the London Gallery in Cork Street – “The first avant-garde gallery in Britain,” as she proudly described it. The art critic roland Penrose had just joined her as adirector. She asked Elizabeth to help her run the exhibitions.
Every morning for two years, Elizabeth walked down from regent’s Park to Peter’s Mayfair gallery, her clothes crisp and chic. She spent her days attending to visitors and buyers, and felt herself in delicious counterpoint to the shambolic artists who arrived with new pictures, or came to gaze at the exhibitions there. There was abrittle immaculacy about her, with her cigarettes in along ivory holder and her tailored suits – and yet, improbably unconventional painters firted with her. She went with Peter to pubs where they mixed with surrealist poets and French modernists. Peter, in the innocence of her enthusiasm, rode through all her encounters with aguileless brio. But in Elizabeth there were more forbidden cravings.
It amused her to think of Thomas in his decorous office guarding the Empire with pen and paper while she smoked in pubs with unknown young men who cared only for their own risqué self-expression.
She began to enjoy her own incongruity. Mrs Ashton in Mayfair, groomed and genteel, but slumming now in these pubs. She swayed as she walked, knowing that her skin was glowing and her hair abundant.
What did she want? to be desired and pursued. To challenge her fate.
Something must happen.
In the evenings, after the gallery had closed, she began to haunt the pubs of Soho. Furtively at first, keeping herself apart, but gradually daring to engage with men who wanted to experiment with women.
In the French pub, Aman brought her awhisky which she did not like but sipped anyway.
“My name is Luc,” he said, and the crowd pushed them close together. It was hard to see the whole of him: he came to her in glimpses – face, forearm, fexed knee.
He was apainter, young, dark, badly shaven. His fingers were stained with nicotine, his shoes worn and tatty. He fixed his large bold eyes on Elizabeth as he told her, in broken english, about his escape from Belgium into the refreshing amorality of London. The pub was throbbing with smokers and drinkers, all gesticulating wildly in the cramped, noisy space. Luc was absurdly youthful – but attractive, too.
“Here I can paint what I see in my head, because it is clear to me. In Brussels all I had was boredom – and anger – and my mother’s black dresses. And lace. There is too much lace in Belgium.”
Elizabeth drew on her ivory cigarette holder and laughed, and felt the thrill of being with someone so young and cocky, who had no knowledge that she was Elizabeth Ashton, of Ashton Park. She locked eyes with him. His eyes were blue: could pass for Ashton eyes.
Later, she found herself in Asoho backstreet, mounting the stairs behind Luc’s stocky thighs. In his narrow room stood an iron bedstead with grey sheets. By the light of a bare bulb they took off their clothes, Elizabeth’s nipples erect, her womb crying out for achild. She let him grapple her like an animal, his legs robust and his thick erection protruding from crinkly black hair. In arapture of procreation she rolled on Luc’s unmade bed and cried out as she felt his hot rush inside her. Then she lay back to halt the ooze down her thighs, and luxuriated in the thought of her child forming within.
But still no child came. at the end of the month her womb washed itself out with blood, as usual.
In the months that followed, there was roberto, and Julius, and Stefan, and Billy, and even adiscreet guards officer, henry, who had always pursued her when she was a debutante. But generally she preferred encounters with strangers in unknown rooms, where afterwards she could look out and see an unfamiliar piece of London sky. Sometimes at night, sometimes during an extended lunch break. Peter Norton never asked where she had been when she reappeared, immaculate as ever, in the late afternoon.
Yet in her bedroom at home, the misery of infertility still persisted. Thomas continued to fear that the fault lay with him, that his polio had made him sterile. But Elizabeth began to realize now that it was probably she who was truly barren.
Was it a punishment, she wondered, for her faithlessness, for her secret abandonment of her disabled husband? Was she cursed? She lived month by month. Her hope was erratic. Her happiness depended on the time of the month.
Thomas had learnt not to watch her moods too closely, but was relieved when she returned from London in such high spirits. He could not know that her buoyancy was founded on the hope, however slight, that her latest tryst in Soho might yet prove successful.
21
Annanoticed anew arrival at Ashton. a Pole, or so Mrs Robson told them. adark-haired, heavy-browed man called Pawel, who sometimes sat at the Ashtons’ lunch table. He did not say very much. Annaheard from Miss Weir that he had fought the Nazis before escaping from Poland, “but he’ll be up and about and teaching you soon, once the yorkshire air revives him.”
The children whispered about him with awe. A man who had fought the Nazis! In England there was only the Phoney War, and nothing dramatic ever seemed to happen.
The Ashtons did not meet Pawel Bielinski properly until he joined them for dinner on his first weekend at the house. Chance had brought him to Ashton Park. In the aftermath of Poland’s disastrous defeat, he had been rescued by Peter Norton from one of the Polish reflugee camps in romania. And on their return to London, Peter had sent him to Ashton to recuperate.
“He’s an artist,” she told Elizabeth on the telephone, “so he can teach art.”
The young man whom Thomas saw across his dinner table was thin, distant and numbed. He was clearly exhausted too, for he had hardly emerged from his room since his arrival. H
is hollow-eyed absence reminded Thomas of those wounded veterans he had watched with his sister, when their house was a hospital in the great War.
He wondered if Pawel had taken life on the front, but it was too early to ask him what had happened out there. He steered their conversation towards more neutral territory.
“Don’t be too daunted by these wet days,” he said to Pawel, “it always rains here in November, but December is often surprisingly dry.”
“Oh darling, it rained all Christmas last year—” countered Elizabeth.
“Usually it’s dry for Christmas here.”
“In Warsaw, the snow is thick by now,” Pawel contributed.
He spoke reasonable english, but appeared happier when silent.
Elizabeth did not yet make much effort to engage with their new guest, but she did watch him discreetly. Noting his erect posture and broad, careful hands. And his dark eyes. He reminded her of those supple, unshaven artists who had thronged the London gallery before the war. But she feigned indifference.
Neither Thomas nor Elizabeth made much impression on Pawel that first night. For the moment, he was relieved if he could simply answer the questions of this grand english couple who had so unexpectedly given him anew home.
When the coffee arrived, Thomas asked him gently about his friendship with the Nortons.
“Peter has spoken of you with such warmth. How did you meet her?”
“She came to my exhibition in Warsaw last year, and bought some of my paintings. How lucky I was that she came,” he said with his first smile, and then tentatively began to volunteer pieces of his past to them. How he had grown up in A small town, Sulejów, but had always dreamt of moving to Warsaw, aproper city throbbing with artists and musicians.
“And did you always paint?” asked Elizabeth, intrigued by anyone with avocation.
“I was lucky enough to get into the art school in Warsaw,” he said with Ashrug.
As he gave this bald account of himself, he could barely recognize the person he was describing, shorn of emotional detail. He did not bother to tell them that his widowed mother had longed for him to be a doctor instead, nor that it had been no easy feat for a Jew to be accepted into a good art school.