The Very Thought of You

by Rosie Alison

  “By 1938, I had painted enough canvases to put on A small exhibition. Lady Norton came to the gallery – she had recently arrived at the British embassy.”

  She was distinctive, so he had noticed her at once – her quicksilver face, her faintly dishevelled short hair and awkward long limbs. She had praised the quick light of his paintings, which was just what he wanted to hear. His metaphoric scenes reminded her of Paul Nash, she said. All those defant landscapes and mountains of the mind.

  “She bought three pictures, on the spot,” Pawel said, smiling faintly. “Sometimes I dined with the Nortons at the embassy, and afterwards I was lucky enough to see her art collection: paintings by Paul Klee, Leger, Kandinsky. that was an education. She is afree spirit—”

  “And always an enthusiast,” added Thomas.

  “yes,” said Pawel emphatically.

  “How did she help you escape?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I was with a troop in eastern Poland when the news came through that the russians had invaded. Soviet soldiers arrived to round us up, but it was chaotic and many of us slipped away, crossing the river into romania, where we were put into reflugee camps. It was there that Lady Norton found me.”

  He had heard that there was to be A shipment of aid arriving from Britain, razor blades, soap, cigarettes, medical supplies, food. He went to wait for the lorries. He could hardly believe it when the door of the ford lorry opened and down stepped afamiliar figure – angular, bracing.

  “Lady Norton!” he called out.

  He saw that it took her a moment to recognize him, then joy fashed across her face.

  “We must get you out of here,” she said, embracing him. “Oome and help me unload, and you can return home with me.”

  After her own escape from Poland, she had raised flunds in London for the Polish reflugee camps, and then volunteered to drive out the provisions herself.

  They visited three more camps, with Pawel acting as her assistant. Then he accompanied her in the lorry back to Italy where, after much string-pulling and waving of arms on her part, a British consul stamped a visafor him.

  They drove back through Asubdued France, closing down for war. Pawel slept much of the way, and Peter did not pester him with too many questions about recent events. As soon as they reached London, she brought him home to Chelseato recover, hatching a plan for him to join the evacuees’ school at Ashton.

  “you’ll need plenty of time here to recuperate, so please – take your time before you start to teach,” said Elizabeth, turning to him.

  “Thank you – thank you for everything,” said Pawel, rising from his chair. Bidding goodnight to his hosts, he was struck in passing by awary, searching quality in Mrs Ashton’s face.

  He returned to his room, relieved to be released from company. He had not touched alcohol for several months, and the wine from dinner was still slipping through his veins as he undressed. He turned off the bedside lamp and lay down in the darkness, hoping for a dreamless sleep as he closed his eyes.

  22

  It was aweek before Pawel surfaced for long enough to explore Ashton Park. Until then, it had appeared to him as Aseries of distanced impressions, as if through thickened glass.

  He began to watch the children playing in the grounds. Pretty children, with smiling faces and crooked teeth, thin and fair, different in looks to the children in Poland. He met the other teachers and matrons too, though it was some time before any of them entered his thoughts.

  But he did feel some curiosity about the Ashtons’ marriage. And soon, this curiosity had crystallized into pity for the wife. Thomas Ashton was a handsome man, it was true, but he seemed a desiccated character – formal, correct and closed. Elizabeth Ashton, on the other hand, was sensuous: she swayed a little as she walked, and her every gesture suggested a caged need. Had she married him as a cripple, or as an able-bodied man?

  The other teachers seemed either not to know or not to want to talk about the Ashtons. In the end it was Joan, a housemaid who had been at the house for years, who recounted the story of Thomas’s illness. Pawel was moved by their ill luck and could not help but wonder about their life together.

  Could Thomas still make love to his wife?

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, had felt Pawel’s heat from his first day. The young Pole was oblivious to niceties of class and she felt that he had looked at her right from the start as awoman, without deference. She divined immediately that he was Aman who was drawn to women. Might it be her he came to?

  She delayed her attentions to him out of pride, but soon she could not resist being charming to him. Since he was aprotégé of the Nortons, and aforeigner, she was able to forgo that english reserve which kept her at aremove from the other teachers. And Pawel was their guest. He was soon established as Elizabeth’s particular favourite, the teacher she talked to at lunch.

  Thomas’s instincts were more wary. From the start, he sensed that Pawel was a man without ties, made reckless by his unformed fluture. He had passed through war and emerged disconnected, and might pursue any sensation right to its conclusion, just to feel alive. Thomas found himself wondering how to avert any emotional collisions. He was reluctant ever to block his wife’s needs. But he knew she was a woman in adelicate balance, and he did not want to see her hurt.

  He was surprised to feel aprickle of jealousy, too. He noted that they did not yet look at each other’s eyes – in his presence, at least. But he could feel the desire running from Elizabeth like an electrical current.

  Above all, Thomas was determined to remain calm and give off no hint of his intuitions. He continued to engage the young man in conversation, using the German he had learnt during his years in Berlin. Pawel was more comfortable in that language. It gave the two men a bond which was denied to Elizabeth.

  “How long would you like to stay with us, do you think?”

  “Until the Polish forces have regrouped here – but that will take some months. I am grateful for the place you have given me here.”

  “The children will enjoy having aproper artist to teach them. Do you have all the things you need?”

  “Mrs Ashton has been very kind about finding everything.”

  Indeed she had. She had taken Pawel off to york herself, to Ashop which had adwindling stock of paper, paints and brushes. There, she had impressed Pawel with an extravagant purchase of art materials before taking him out to lunch.

  She had chosen a restaurant where she could sit opposite him, to be sure that they had to look at each other. As they talked, she studied his face, adecisive face, with dark eyes and brows. He was unfinching in his gaze, challenging almost.

  “Will you be able to settle in England?”

  “If any place in europe is to remain free, it will be England.”

  “that hardly answers my question.”

  “I have not met many people yet, but I like the landscape. Grey-green.”

  Their conversation lurked far below the words they spoke. Pawel kept his distance, still unsure of his hold on this new life. But he was intrigued by Elizabeth: their firtation was something defnite upon which to hang his thoughts.

  He liked the crisp containment of her body inside her clothes. There was apromise of hidden fullness beneath her blouse, he was curious to unbutton it, and see her face as he did so. He sensed that she would drop her cool stare and look grateful and vulnerable.

  Their tentative intimacy moved cautiously. Both were bound by a thread of unspoken assurance that they might be lovers soon. But it was Amatter of how to let their attraction thrive within the boundaries of Elizabeth’s life – because Pawel found himself unexpectedly respectful of Thomas. He began to be unnerved by the older man’s gentle courtesy, and his sympathy for Pawel’s recent ordeals. After dinner one night, they drank Madeiratogether in the library.

  “Is it Asuccess for you, the evacuee school here?”

  “Very much so. The house is so much more alive now, and I have never seen my wife so happy.”

  “Was i
t her idea, to make ahome for these children?”

  “yes, all hers. Elizabeth has agreat deal of… vitality.”

  Thomas wheeled himself over to close agap in the curtains, then offered the young man more Madeira.

  “Are you… alone, or do you have family to worry about in Poland?”

  The question lit a fare in Pawel’s mind; he saw the fre at Sulejów, which he had reached too late. The memory was indelible – that lurid scarlet glow fooding the night sky, and his sickening certainty that Sulejów was in fames as he walked over the felds to find his mother. He ran to her house, but the entire street was gutted, Aseries of craters and shells. Had even his mother’s soul survived?

  “No. No family. They are gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Thomas in alow voice, not wanting to press him.

  Unexpectedly, Pawel turned to him.

  “I was in a troop on the border with Czechoslovakia. Our division was splintered by the invasion, and we had to make our own way eastwards. We passed through my home town, but there had been Amassacre. Sulejów was packed with Jews, and Nazi Stukas had dive-bombed the town. The wooden houses lit up like matches. When people tried to run to the woods, the planes swooped low and razed them. My family amongst them.”

  Thomas hesitated.

  “There’s nothing I can say which will help, but I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  For Amoment, the two men looked at each other.

  “You will have to be careful not to close yourself off, Pawel. It is easy to do. But you shouldn’t rush into any new attachments either. you must take care of yourself.”

  Pawel was shaken by Thomas’s words, knowing that they were spoken unselfishly.

  He took up his advice and resisted Elizabeth’s next summons into town on some spurious mission. He watched her carefully, but held himself back because, just as Thomas had warned, he was wary of breaking himself open to any new feeling yet. And he could see her haste, her wish to throw herself towards him, every time she met his glance.

  Instead he spent many hours watching the evacuees in the gardens; he had forgotten how contentedly children could play together. Boys threw balls against the outside walls for hours on end, while in the Marble Hall there was always the toc-toc-toc of badminton shuttlecocks outside lessons.

  He began to work out his own teaching style, starting with sketches of trees in all seasons. He showed the children how to draw branches sprouting out of atree trunk. Then they coloured them in with an autumn cascade of falling leaves, or the blossom of spring, or the full green glory of the summer. Even the bare branches of winter had their grace. Practically every child produced pictures of Asort, and Pawel mounted an art-room exhibition called Ashton Park Trees.

  Ashton was thriving with life now, as Elizabeth organized the school with surprising effciency. The Nortons came up for a weekend, and both were startled to see the house so transformed by children. They were relieved to find Elizabeth apparently sober and content, and delighted by Thomas’s new role as a teacher.

  The Nortons were there too briefy to pick up any nuance of Pawel’s role in Elizabeth’s rejuvenation. But Peter did rekindle her protégé’s self-belief with her lavish compliments about his talent, which had all but leaked away through so many disruptions. He began to paint for himself once again, which somehow made him feel more able to meet with Elizabeth on equal terms.

  Hope had begun to take root in him once more. He was growing fond of the children, and his natural happiness was welling up again. In afew months, he would rejoin the war effort – but for now, he would enjoy his work here with these evacuees.

  Yet he also wanted to find someone to love.

  There was atree in the woods with a great swinging branch, and one crisp february afternoon Pawel was bouncing the branch up and down for apair of robust boys. Elizabeth was out walking and joined them. Pawel felt her pleasure in seeing him entertain the boys, who soon ran off chasing each other.

  “Can I give you aride?” offered Pawel with mock gallantry as she stepped towards the tree. Playfully, she sat down and he eased the branch to and fro, but then he surprised her by rocking it much harder, with apirate’s glint of menace.

  “Enough,” she said, laughing, and he stopped.

  There was apause. Neither knew what to say.

  “You enjoy the children, don’t you Pawel?”

  “Of course.”

  “They like you, I can see that.”

  “A place like this needs children,” he said automatically.

  The pain on her face sliced through him.

  “I mean – with this war on, there could hardly be abetter place for them to be.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m glad that we have the evacuees here,” she went on, recovering her composure, “because Thomas and I can’t have children of our own.”

  Pawel did not know how to answer this remark, so he took it as lightly as he could, and continued to swing the branch, very gently now.

  “What good fortune that children have found their way here anyway.”

  “Yes,” she replied, stepping away from the branch.

  As they walked back to the house, no more was said. She averted her eyes as they parted on the stone steps.

  Pawel felt shaken as he left her: the intimacy of her revelation had touched him to the quick. He went away surmising that Thomas must be impotent. He continued to walk round the lawns, thinking of Elizabeth and her wounded eyes, wondering if the discomfort between them could ever be cured by an embrace.

  * * *

  Elizabeth walked indoors, back to her bedroom, to be alone. Her conversation with Pawel had rattled her, and she had to unpick exactly what had thrown her so much. She worried that the mention of her childlessness had been too intimate. But more, there was afurther anxiety that she had cheated. “Thomas and I can’t have children of our own,” she had said, knowing what Pawel would assume. While she knew by now from her failed Soho trysts that the problem lay with her.

  It was something she tried to keep private, but she was still locked inside her own personal ordeal: her inconsolable longing for a child. Whenever she went for awalk, she could feel the shape of her womb inside her – its readiness and emptiness. She could even sense her ovaries ripening – and yet she was blighted with infertility. This desert inside was something she could not yet accept.

  She longed for that ficker of life within, that inward spark which could reconnect her to the world outside. Just alight kick inside, and all could be well. She felt her barrenness acutely, as if it was severing her from anything that was alive and fourishing. Flowers and fruit, or any metaphors of female beauty, blossoming, blooming, budding to ripeness – all these were lost to her. All she could see were withering roses and leafess trees. Astone-dead world.

  She picked up abatch of letters from her desk and decided to post them in the village. She put on her coat against the winter chill, and set off alone, past the sodden leaves still festering in piles on the drive. Everything reminded her of her wasted womb. Leaves in apuddle. Or old conker shells crushed on the road by passing cars. Even just bad weather.

  By the time she returned home through the park lawns, there was aband of evacuees playing there. In the last of the afternoon light, they appeared to her like angels from another world, entirely outside her reach. It seemed to her that there was no such thing as an ugly child: they were all blessed with clear faces and clear spirits. She stood there as if trapped inside her own prison, cut off, watching three small girls play chase through the box hedges of the herb garden. Their bright faces. Their fresh limbs and pure skin. Their guileless smiles, and the sure way they reached out their hands to each other.

  More than anything, she longed to hold achild’s hand in hers. But her own child, who would look up into her face and say, “I love you, Mummy.”

  She sensed by now that this was unlikely to happen; yet the longing for it still would not let her go.

  None of this could she,
would she let anyone know, least of all Pawel, and so she had implied to him that her childlessness was Thomas’s fault; more, that she had made awilling sacrifce by staying in a barren marriage.

  She did not feel comfortable with her falsehood. But she wanted to present herself to Pawel as awoman without problems.

  23

  At Ashton Park, Pawel read the newspapers assiduously every day, to improve his english. Week by week, he followed the war’s dismal progress as the Germans blasted their way through europe, forcing thousands of British troops to fee from Dunkirk. Soon after, hitler was photographed in gleeful pose by the Arc de triomphe.

  But Ashton remained serenely detached from the war. Pawel continued to teach his art classes in this placid english country house. For the younger children, he drew farmyards with pigs and chickens and ablack cat sitting by aweather vane. It was apeaceful place, this crayon farmyard, Asmall quiet world untouched by war or hate. He liked rescuing the children into these pictures.

  One morning Elizabeth visited one of his lessons. She watched Pawel’s concentration, and the way he held his torso straight even as he drew his pencil over the paper for the children. He looked up.

  “I came to see your class,” she said, as casually as she could. Pawel smiled. He was glad she had come.

  “Will you look at our pictures?”

  He showed her round the tables, praising the children’s work. One girl had coloured every brick of her farm in adifferent shade. Together they admired the harmony of the colours.

  Elizabeth’s face glowed with pleasure, as it always did in Pawel’s presence. All her previous lovers had been strangers, and that was the way she had wanted it, but this attraction was something new and different. Pawel had lived in her home for some time now, she worked with him and ate with him. He even had the respect of her husband.