by Annie Bullen
‘Curious, aren’t they? There was quite a fashion for them a while back and I thought I would keep these. Smoking room material I suppose, keeping all the solid Victorian family men happy.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Angela, standing very close in the confined space to Clem, found herself slightly embarrassed. She did not want him to know that she found them anything more than amusing, but she was disturbed by several of the paintings, especially one of a lush plumpish lady, naked from the waist down, sprawled on her tummy on a chaise-longue. Her knowing-looking maid was beckoning to an eager gentleman and there was no doubt what was in any of their minds.
‘Do you sell many of these?’
‘Oh, only if a collector wants them. That goes for all sorts of work. Regular buyers suddenly develop a taste for a particular period or type of painting and of course it makes sense to keep them happy. Makes life more interesting too. I thought you might be amused. Kattie loves them – she likes that one.’ He pointed to a demure maiden lying back, again on a chaise-longue, frothy skirt and petticoats hoisted up in abandon, playing with her pet dog in a way that made Angela blush and giggle like a schoolgirl.
‘Sex was much more exciting when it wasn’t acknowledged.’ Clem grinned. ‘Especially naughty sex.’
‘Much more dangerous though. Imagine the agonies gone through by the Victorians. Wedding nights must have been a torment for thousands of women.’
‘Not only women. But that’s still the case. There’s them wot likes it and them wot doesn’t, I reckon. What about you?’
‘Me – what do you mean?’
‘Sex.’
‘Oh. That.’ Angela became flustered. She thought of Toby and then she thought of Billy and felt apologetic.
Clem sensed her discomfort.
‘You’re a very good painter,’ he said, not inconsequentially.
‘Oh dear,’ she thought, ‘he thinks I’m repressed and compensating,’ but Clem was already on to another tack.
‘Dorelia came to talk to me today with a plan which I almost dismissed out of hand as ridiculous. But, on reflection, I think it might be a good idea. The only reservation I have is you.’
‘You mean the Paris idea? Well, you know …’
‘No, don’t be self-effacing. I do mean the Paris plan. The reservation I have is not concerning your ability to carry out any venture of that nature, but whether you really would want to do so. Dorelia can be, let’s say, carried away by her own enthusiasm, and I wondered if you really had thought it through or if you had been railroaded by my daughter.’ Clem smiled at her, and Angela felt ashamed for her easy acquiescence with Dorelia.
‘Oh, I see. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t given it too much thought. Dorelia said, I think, that ventures had to start somewhere. When she asked me about it I said I could see nothing wrong with the idea in principle. I haven’t had a chance to think what is right with it. In fact I don’t think I know enough about what could be proposed to say either yes or no. I think I said to her that she had better speak to you first. My own plans are, well, I believe “fluid” is the word one should use.’
‘Ah. As you know she has talked to me. She probably told you that I have been toying for some time with the idea of opening a gallery in France. On the face of it neither of you has the necessary experience to cope with something like that, but if Dorelia wants to join the business it may well be a good starting point for her. With your knowledge of the language and painting and some other sort of commercial help, it may just work. The only thing is’ (here Clem screwed his eyes up so that he looked like an anxious bloodhound) ‘I can’t quite see the pair of you in combination. And I would have to understand that any sort of a commitment you made was a genuine one, otherwise the move would make you very unhappy. But you’re not very happy now. Are you? What about Billy?’
‘I have no intention of moving back to live with Billy.’
‘Have you told him that?’
‘No. Not yet. Well, I just haven’t got round to it.’
‘You mean you’ve been putting off thinking about it.’
‘I’ve been putting off a lot of things. It’s been too easy in a way for me to escape here, with you and Kattie being so kind.’ Angela felt herself on the verge of tears. She turned her back on Clem and the shameless girls on their chaises-longues.
‘Understand me Angela. I am in no way trying to force you to make up your mind about anything. You’re welcome here for as long as you want to stay. We realize that you have a tremendous amount to sort out. Have you started any new work yet?’
Angela shook her head. ‘No. Well, yes. I mean I have done some drawing. The hills at the top of the village. Where the ancient Britons were, Kattie says. But of course I must find a place of my own, earn some money. It’s hard to know where to start, though.’
‘You’ll work something out, given time. All I’m saying now is don’t dismiss the Paris idea out of hand and I won’t either. But it is equally important that you don’t jump at it for want of anything better. Anything that is properly your own.’
Angela, feeling herself dismissed, moved towards the door, but Clem put out a hand to stop her.
‘Let’s get the others in here now with some coffee. And I’m sorry for teasing you.’
‘Teasing me? What about?’
‘Sex.’
Lying in bed that night, virgin-still, Angela grimaced to herself in the blackness. The room was very dark, with just a pale square of light showing the outline of the windows behind the drawn curtains. A faint smell of oil paint was still evident. She had opened some tubes that evening before undressing for bed. Squeezing and mixing colours just for the feel of it, a great weariness had washed over her, forcing her to leave the worms of paint to dry on her palette.
The thick smell of the paint twisted through her senses into her brain, forcing a memory response, here in this room with its unseen sloping ceiling and shadowed window.
‘I love you,’ she would say to Toby, over and over, as they lay in bed in her studio flat, that smell of paint overlaying all their love-making. She could not think of too much else to say, so she would repeat the words, weaving a cage around them. He lay still and thoughtful, rarely responding except to say ‘I know you do.’ The love to her was something that needed to be taken out and examined, kept bright by words and gestures. But he knew it as a solid fact, like the compass in his pocket that was reliable in the matter of true north, or the many-bladed knife which could always be used to open bottles or to trim toe-nails. Toby tested his possessions and, if they worked, he held them with utter faith. She would watch others respond warmly to him and marvel that he had so much of himself to share. She would fear becoming jealous, wanting more of him for herself.
Sometimes, after she had resigned herself to life with Billy in the white house in Les Meaunes, she felt happy. If there was nothing you treasured too much, there could be no heartbreak or loss to face. The sun shone reliably, sometimes she painted well. There were olives and cheese and wine in the market, while from time to time the new English magazines came into the general stores in the town. What sort of uncomfortable messy life might have been in store with Toby? Lonely days and nights as he explored some jungle or icy waste, gradual slipping away of the first clean innocence of love. Other women, perhaps. Other men for her? Grown-up boredom and the racking sadness of the wasting of something that had come like a sudden gift? As it was, it slipped, frozen, away before the first row, before betrayal or the knowledge that your own dividing line between good and evil was not the same as that held by the person you loved.
But then the worm inside her wriggled, stirring the dust of the dry and sandy waste that was her marriage to Billy.
There was one young man, a thin blond boy from Australia who, like many others, took the opportunity to paint in the famous light of the South when he came to the area. Angela had met him in the town, in the stuffy shop that sold crayons and pencils, magazines, tubes of paint and pads of drawing paper in an exp
ensive jumble. He was trying to buy watercolour paper, dithering over the limited choice. Angela, not having lived in the town for long, was delighted to hear English spoken, but, shy of the direct approach, also used English instead of her stumbling French, as she spoke to the shopkeeper. She waited impatiently, listening to the angry buzzing of a bluebottle trying hopelessly to make its way through the polythene-covered window, but there was no response from the thin young man so, driven for company, however fleeting, other than Billy’s, Angela boldly asked him what he was painting.
She placed her own purchases, two tubes of oil paint, a box of pastels and some spirit, on the counter as she spoke, feeling that the authority of what she had bought gave her the right to challenge him. Later she realized that he had probably thought she was the local equivalent of the night school regular, getting ready for her Thursday evening Life class. But he accepted her query casually and told her that he was planning to draw some curious rock formations, partly because he had become attracted to their strange shapes and wanted, as a keen amateur, to keep his eye in, but partly because the rocks needed to be recorded in some way by the engineering team to which he belonged. He nodded politely at her as he finished speaking, picked up the small coins that made up his change and turned to leave the shop. He did not enquire about her activities.
Angela watched him, dressed in linen slacks and a cotton shirt, walk off down the formal tree-lined street. She wanted to yell, ‘Don’t desert me – I’m alone here,’ but instead she listened as the owner of the shop, recognizing her as a fairly regular customer, told her about some new pencils that would be in stock in the next few days and she nodded as if her whole attention were on his conversation.
The thought that she might have been mistaken for the lonely woman, trying to while away time with her sketchbook, occurred to her as she stowed away her paper package of paints in the saddlebag of her bicycle which was pushed against an oleander bush. Suddenly the seriousness with which she had imbued the whole encounter struck her as ridiculous, and she smiled to herself. She had started to work fairly soon after she and Billy arrived in France and her painting had become increasingly important to her as the one area which could nearly always separate her from her husband. She forgot all about the young Australian as she started to pedal home.
Two hours later she found him, talking to Billy in the Shakespeare bar. She had ridden home, along the canal tow-path out of town, dismounting to wheel her machine over the two thick black planks that served as a bridge. The same Puritan streak that was beginning to recoil in distaste at some of Billy’s less than private habits tutted, as it always did, at the danger posed by the so-called bridge. ‘It wouldn’t be allowed in England,’ she thought self-righteously, shuddering as usual at the unguarded drop to the still dark water below. ‘Ah well, what can you do?’ was her next, more general reaction as she stepped out of danger onto the warm path (and anyway, she’d never heard of an accident here, come to think of it). Guilty relief when she found that Billy was not at home was soon dispelled by his scribbled note.
‘Gone for a snort – meet me at the Bard, one-ish,’ it read.
It was maybe an indication of the rocky path her marriage was taking that her resentment at this note was based not only on the bald summons but also on his use of the words ‘snort’ and ‘bard’. She also realized that he must have taken his car into town, when he had insisted that morning that he had far too much work to do to drive her to the shops. Angela, who based her assumption that she was one of those people who would never be able to drive on Billy’s say-so, did not mind the bike journey but did resent the thoughtlessness. However, things were not yet so bad that she could ignore the note, so she turned round to pedal back into Les Meaunes.
When she walked into the English bar there she found Billy in conversation with the young man, whose name she learnt was Fraser. It was apparent from the volume of Billy’s diatribe (against the weather, the French in general and those Frenchmen in particular who drove Renault cars) that he had already taken several beers. Both men were leaning against the bar but it was Billy who was doing all the talking. Angela paused in the doorway. Unobserved by either she watched them covertly, contrasting the insecure attitude adopted by her husband with the casual ease shown by the young man with him. Billy’s face had, even in those days, settled into lines of disappointment and discontent. His moustache stretched the length of his upper lip, exaggerating the sneer with which he habitually dismissed anything outside his own small sphere. In the act of gesturing for another beer he half turned and caught sight of his wife. His sneer deepened into one of recognition.
‘Ah, there you are. Come and meet Fraser. Fraser, this is my arty little wife, Angela.’ He managed to make the word arty sound pornographic.
‘But we’ve met,’ said the blond man. ‘We’re both artists in our way,’ and he gave Angela a look of such complicity that she feared Billy would react. Billy’s expression changed from one of superiority to one of suspicion and dislike. But he managed to keep his tone jovial.
‘Been socializing behind my back, eh, Angie?’ he fired at her. She managed a sickly grin. Billy, whose right leg had been hooked over the polished brass footrail of the bar, leered back and swung round abruptly, so that the metal lower leg clanged loudly against it. He staggered, pulled himself upright and, with a tight dignity, announced that he was off to Les Hommes.
The look of disbelief on Fraser’s face made Angela want to laugh. She hadn’t a drink, or even a bag to hold on to, so she put out a hand to the bar. She looked up and caught Fraser’s eye. He was holding his features in a strange constipated expression that Angela understood to register the fact that he was nonplussed.
‘He’s got a tin leg. And you – you are married to him?’ He managed to make the pronoun sound like the word ‘that’. Angela felt herself flattered but at the same time a need to defend her husband (possibly because her taste was being held to scrutiny) asserted itself.
‘A tin leg does not necessarily indicate a defect of the character,’ she said primly.
‘Oh yeah?’ he said nastily. Angela, who felt Fraser definitely gained the upper hand in that short conversation, heard a commotion at the other end of the bar caused by Billy stumbling as he emerged from the lavatory. As she winced, Fraser said softly, ‘Meet me here again – tonight?’
‘Not tonight – I can’t.’ But before she could say anything more, Billy had rejoined them.
That night, in her marriage bed, she pushed Billy away as he fumbled for her. For the first time with no excuse apart from what she could not yet see was the entirely reasonable one, that she did not want her body invaded now, she rolled over and pretended to be too sleepy. Billy, whose temper had been mounting steadily since a battered Renault driven by a local farmer, had scraped a bright gash that morning along the side of his little automatic Citroen, grabbed hold of her shoulder and shook it roughly – far more roughly than mere waking-up warranted. But Angela, not equal to asserting herself more strongly, grunted sleepily and tightened herself up to occupy as small a part of the double bed as possible. Billy muttered and fidgeted for what seemed like hours. Angela, who felt like doing so on account of a burning sensation which seemed to cover her whole body and which she later, with guilty amazement, recognized as lust at the prospect of attention from the young Australian, lay as still as she could.
The following morning, Madame Houbon whisking around the kitchen, Billy safely in his study, she piled her painting gear into the basket of her bicycle and pushed it down the path between the tubs of scented geraniums. She had washed her hair and pinned it up into a knot. Unconsciously deceiving her husband before her instincts had any basis for reality, she wore her prettiest and most flattering underwear. She hesitated at the end of the pathway, at the point where it was necessary to mount the bike and turn, either left for the town or right for the countryside where she would normally go to paint. She turned to look back and saw Billy, standing rigidly to attention, framed i
n the window of his study. She raised a hand, a defiant gesture which hardened to resentment as he made no acknowledgement. Fortified by his hostility Angela deliberately pedalled left towards the town, instead of taking the right-hand path to placate him.
She found Fraser, as she thought she would, in the Shakespeare bar at lunchtime. She parked her bike nearby, confident that no one in Les Meaunes would want to steal either the machine itself or the contents of the basket. The couple of hours she spent walking about before venturing into the bar had passed in uncomfortable but nonetheless exciting anticipation of what she thought she was about to do. She and Billy had acknowledged their first wedding anniversary and were anticipating their second fairly soon. The prospect failed to arouse any tenderness in Angela. At this stage she was not inclined to blame herself for her mistake in so thoughtlessly and weakly marrying a man who aroused in her only feelings of an intolerant fastidiousness that she had not known she possessed. Irrationally she blamed Toby, or Toby’s shade, for deserting her, for leaving her at the mercy of the wolves in this way.
That was how she managed to justify the jaunty entry into the bar, the complicit smile at Fraser, singling him out from a small group of men, his engineering colleagues, gathered round a marble-topped table. Later that afternoon, boldly peeling off her clothes in his comfortable hotel bedroom, that was how she justified giving herself, as she had before with Toby. Lying beside Fraser, his body pale and smooth, almost hairless, she found herself able to swear at Toby’s ghost.
‘Sod you,’ she flung at his memory, sailing away from her in the concrete boat. ‘Sod you,’ as Fraser, starved of female company, entered her for the third time.
Billy, used in the past to betrayal and always expecting it, never taxed his wife with sexual unfaithfulness. He now included her in his attitude to the world in general, which was one of mistrust and bitterness. As his expectation of ultimate betrayal appeared to be justified, he seemed to find a certain grim satisfaction in his ever-increasing anti-social behaviour.