The Man Who Understood Women

by Rosemary Friedman

  He handed it back.

  ‘It’s good. Very good. I wish I could draw.’ There was nothing he knew how to do except to run his business.

  ‘Anyone can draw,’ she said, ‘but first they have to learn to see.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ she was packing her papers into an old canvas satchel and fastening her tin of broken charcoal sticks with an elastic band, ‘you’ve got to look with more than your eyes. You have to put your heart into it.’

  He waited for her to go on. She was very young but self-assured.

  ‘When I was drawing you,’ she said, ‘I saw more than a man with grey hair, an expensive overcoat, a pearl tiepin, and handmade, recently polished shoes. I saw a man with a look in his eyes as if he was lost – didn’t know where to go. I saw money in the bank, an elegant wife in an elegant home. I saw a pure silk dressing gown with a monogram, a dressing room, Mediterranean cruises …’

  ‘Stop,’ Hubert said. ‘It’s uncanny.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s merely a matter of training oneself. I tried to put all that I saw into my picture.’

  ‘And was that all you saw? ‘Hubert said. ‘The shoes, the dressing gown …?’

  ‘I looked for happiness,’ she said carefully. ‘But it wasn’t there.’

  ‘You should have come a week ago,’ Hubert said, and sighed, then pulled himself together. ‘So you really think,’ he asked, interested, ‘that if I learned to see, really see, I too could learn to draw, to paint perhaps?’ It crossed his mind that here might be something he could do if they really wouldn’t let him go back to the business.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘How do I start?’

  ‘Turn round,’ she said, ‘and look at me.’

  Hubert turned sideways on the bench and looked at the girl. He had a granddaughter of her age. She came closer and, raising her chin, looked into his face.

  ‘Tell me what you see.’

  Hubert was embarrassed. She was pretty. One of the prettiest girls he had seen. He waved his arms vaguely.

  ‘Hair,’ he said. ‘Hair. And eyes. Long eyelashes.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll start with that. Describe in your own words my hair, my eyes, my lashes. Tell me what they look like to you.’

  Hubert looked at her amber hair, soft and gleaming, drawn back from her face.

  ‘Moonlight,’ he said.

  ‘That’s good. And the eyes?’

  It wasn’t difficult. He remembered them growing in the garden beneath the trees when he had been a boy.

  ‘Violets,’ he said firmly.

  They smiled at him. She closed her eyes and the unbelievably long black lashes lay straight against her smooth cream cheeks.

  ‘Park railings!’ he said.

  She opened her eyes and laughed. ‘You’re wonderful.’ Hubert laughed too. He was enjoying himself.

  ‘If you keep on at this rate,’ she said, ‘you’ll very soon be able to take one long look at me and say to yourself: ‘Eighteen, art school, bedsitter in Bayswater, engaged to be married.’ She waved the tiny stone on her left hand. ‘Lively disposition, flat broke.’ She looked at him, not smiling now. There was something very sweet about her face.

  ‘Why are you unhappy?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I retired from business yesterday and I’ve nothing to do. I’m not used to it.’

  ‘Are you rich?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Not a care in the world,’ she said incredulously, ‘and plenty of money. Good-looking, too.’

  He smiled at her youth. ‘What would you do? In my position.’

  She took a deep breath and stared with her violet eyes towards the lake where a white swan glided silently by.

  ‘I’d go to Rome,’ she said, almost reverently, ‘and I’d look at the achievements of men who lived and died for their art. I’d stand in the Borghese Gallery before Pauline and her golden apple and stroke her gown to see if it was really marble; and I’d look upwards at the ceiling to which Michelangelo gave years of his life, working under the most trying conditions, regardless of himself, to leave something of his greatness to posterity. I’d look at all the wonder and the splendour and the majesty of art, which knew nothing of pleasing society but was an expression of the very soul of man. And I would probably cry.’

  Hubert watched the violet eyes – gazing at the lake but, seeing the Sistine Chapel, fill with tears – and reached for his handkerchief. It wasn’t necessary because just then she smiled, and he almost looked for the rainbow.

  ‘And when I wasn’t doing that,’ she said, ‘I’d ride on the buses with the natives, breathing in the garlic, pushing back when I was pushed. I’d eat tagliatelle in the trattorias, where the menu would be written in ink on a piece of cardboard, and see moonlight silhouette the Colosseum; I’d put on my best dress and watch the smart women meet their lovers in the Via Veneto and at night dream by the fountain in the Barberini.’

  Hubert thought of the countless holidays he and Muriel had taken: the luxury cruises with the deluxe cabins on A deck; the best hotels in Monte Carlo, Paris, New York, where the maîtres d’hôtel knew how Muriel liked her steak (two-thirds cooked) and that he always had two boiled eggs for breakfast. Pushing on the buses, the girl had said, the menu written in ink; it might be interesting but …

  ‘I don’t think my wife …’ he began doubtfully.

  ‘Of course, you don’t have to rough it,’ she said. ‘It isn’t necessary, and you’re too old …’

  Hubert winced.

  ‘… But I bet you’ve never even looked when you’ve travelled around. Not really looked. Have you? Take Paris,’ she said. ‘I’ve been there once.’

  Hubert thought of Paris. All he could call to mind was the inside of Maxim’s and the suite they always had at their hotel.

  ‘Have you ever wanted to paint the children on a Sunday morning in the Parc Monceau? Listened to the roadsweeper’s brush against the cobbles as he swept the water from the early morning gutters? Felt the sadness of the Rive Gauche or watched the sunlight in the Champs Elysées sprinkle the tops of the cars with diamonds?’

  He couldn’t in all honesty say he had, but he was suddenly excited. The girl made him feel that he hadn’t perhaps done everything, seen everything. She made him feel, in fact, as if he, Hubert Wilson, widely travelled, rich in worldly goods, was a small child standing naked before an undiscovered world.

  The church clock struck one sombre note. He waited for the others. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘It can’t be one o’clock!’

  The girl laughed. ‘It is.’

  ‘Come and have lunch,’ Hubert said, wondering for a moment what Muriel would think, then not caring. ‘I’ll take you to the Ritz.’

  She laughed. Her teeth were white, he thought, then checked himself. Not white. Like … well, like pearls; small, even pearls.

  She showed him her hand, black from the charcoal and shook her ponytail. ‘You’re awfully sweet, but I’m sure they wouldn’t welcome me at the Ritz.’

  He was determined not to let her go.

  They had lunch at a coffee bar where it was he, in his too well-cut overcoat and his pearl tiepin, and not the girl with her trousers and her suede jacket, who looked out of place. She taught him to see that the bearded man in the corner was waiting for his girlfriend because every time the door opened his eyes grew wide, expectant, then disappointed, sad again, and that the waitress snapped at them because in all probability her feet hurt. Hubert had never, ever, considered such matters.

  In the afternoon they wandered round London. She laughed because he wasn’t used to strolling in the streets and got cross when people bumped into him. She showed him a woodcut in a shop window, a patch of sunlight on a street corner, a Titian in the National Gallery. He bought her an ice-cream cornet and, because she insisted, ate one furtively himself.

  Before he realised it, it was five o’clock. She had to meet her fiancé and he had to go ho
me. She gave him her address, which he asked for and, lifting her face to his, thanked him for her lunch and tea.

  He dropped a kiss on the smooth forehead, then watched her disappear in her flat-heeled shoes, straight-backed, into the tube station.

  Hubert went home.

  The next day he got out of bed with the same sense of urgency as he had had before his retirement. Feeling like a naughty schoolboy, and as young, he kissed Muriel goodbye. He stopped at a stationer’s where he bought pencils and a drawing block, then took a bus for the park.

  ‘Lovely mornin’!’ the conductor said, taking his threepenny piece.

  ‘Lovely,’ Hubert said confidently, and smiled. He even hummed a little tune.

  In the park he drew a small child with eyes like black diamonds, a nannie with a hatchet face, and a boat. When he turned to the dahlias and noticed for the first time that they were royal scarlet or tender blushing apricot, he wished he had paints.

  At lunchtime he thought about the Ritz, his club, the office. He had lunch in a coffee bar.

  On the way back to the park he stopped at a flower shop.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ the lady in the floral overall asked. She had a nervous tic. He wondered what was worrying her.

  ‘Some flowers for a young lady.’ He looked round the shop, the tall roses, carnations, orchids. None of them seemed right. Then he saw them in a corner, just as he had remembered them as a boy. They were the exact colour of her eyes beneath the hair that was moonlight.

  ‘I’ll have those,’ he said, pointing, ‘and I want them sent right away.’

  ‘Violets, sir?’ the woman said.

  He understood that they would hardly cover the cost of transport to the bedsitter in Bayswater. He ordered two dozen of the best roses to be sent to Muriel. Red, to contrast with their French-grey walls. He wrote out two cards, paid the bill and went back to the park.

  By the time the light began to fail, the nannies had taken their babies home to bed and the scarlet dahlias were turned almost to black, his sketchbook was full. The drawings were atrocious, barely recognisable, in fact, but Hubert was happy. He had seen a child’s ribbon fly as she bowled a hoop, two lovers kiss, a young tree bent by the wind. He hoped that tomorrow it wouldn’t rain.

  In the drawing room at home the drinks were ready on the silver tray. He had just poured one for himself when Muriel came in. He looked at her, puzzled, then thought that perhaps it was because of his newly opened eyes. He saw for the first time that her hair was like silver smoke, her skin delicate as the petals of a pale rose, and her eyes the same blue, he could almost swear, as the summer sky.

  But perhaps she was different. She was looking at him strangely.

  She came towards him.

  ‘Hubert,’ she said, and her voice was softer, gentler, ‘you sent me violets!’

  He followed her eyes towards the mantelpiece. There, in a tiny vase, against the French-grey walls, were the violets he had sent the girl. Taking his drink with him he went over. She had propped the card behind them. He picked it up. ‘For your kindness, sweetness and patience,’ he read.

  ‘You don’t know how happy you’ve made me,’ Muriel said. ‘All the years that you’ve been sending me flowers, or rather your secretary has. The roses, the orchids, whatever was out of season, regardless of cost … or thought. These are the first flowers for more years than I can remember that are really for me, from you. Thank you.’

  He looked down at his sherry.

  ‘Muriel,’ he said, ‘I was thinking of going to Rome …’

  Muriel said: ‘Oh! We’ve missed the spring collections and we’re too early for the autumn!’

  ‘For what we’re going to see it’s certainly not too early and I hope it’s not too late,’ he said.

  Muriel bent her head and smelled the violets. ‘I’ll do anything you like,’ she said. ‘You know, Hubert, you’ve made me feel like a young girl.’

  Mea Culpa

  1960

  I should have been at a board meeting, but I was standing in the graveyard, the wind like a pain round the neck and ankles, staring at the fresh mound. There was only one other mourner. Two quick and row after row of dead. Another day there might have been children, but it was too cold. The swing park was empty.

  Heatherington was already there when I arrived. We hadn’t spoken. I didn’t think he’d recognise me. The twenty years had turned what I could see of his hair beneath the black Homburg grey, and made him appear shorter and wider – unless it was his heavy coat – than I had remembered. They had changed me from a boy into a man.

  He was still looking at the brown, unrevealing earth.

  He said, ‘Hello, Dawson,’ and I, surprised back into the disciplines of youth, replied, ‘Hello, sir.’

  ‘Just the two of us,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem much. Not after a lifetime. What brought you here?’

  ‘I read the announcement in The Times.’

  ‘I mean why?’

  ‘He saved my life.’

  ‘Old Partridge! What was it, drowning? Partridge couldn’t swim. Death on the road? He could hardly see an inch in front of him.’

  ‘Not from death,’ I said. ‘Deformity. I was thirteen at the time.’

  The brief business at the grave being over, we fell into step and walked away from the brown hump beneath which lay old Partridge, and circled the cemetery, the leaves snatching angrily at our shoes. As we walked I told Heatherington my story, about old Partridge and the ink.

  ‘It was soon after you became Head,’ I said. ‘About a year, I suppose, because that was the time it took to get the new floor in the library. We all subscribed, if you remember, boys, old boys, parents, masters, everyone. We’d all loved Mr Potter and when he retired we were glad to do something practical so that the school would remember him.

  ‘The new floor for the library was decided upon. By the time it was ready we’d got used to you, as Headmaster, and almost forgotten Mr Potter, so perhaps it was just as well about the floor. Every one of us was proud of it and small boys are not very house-proud. Each time we went into the library we’d walk gently, trying to make ourselves lighter, as it were, our black lace-ups seeming clumsy on that pale gold surface. It was parquet, a great smooth expanse of it replacing the uneven stained boards we had always tramped upon unheedingly. We talked about it, gloated over it. For a few weeks it gave us something to write home about. Then there were other things to think of: maths and history and, terribly important, cricket. It was the summer we were to play Lakeside. Our heads were crammed with these and other small-boy thoughts and gradually we forgot about the new floor in the library. We grew accustomed to walking on it. Perhaps it did still give us a tiny surge of pleasure just to see it as we opened the glass swing-door, but after that it was as though it had always been there. Except for the Rule. That reminded us. You had made it up, signed it, and attached it to the door. “No ink may be taken into the library under any circumstances.” I can still see the signature: “VS Heatherington”. It took up the width of the page and the sight of it struck terror into us all.

  ‘On the evening that it happened I hadn’t been thinking. I really hadn’t. We were rehearsing a play to be presented on Speech Day. I had two lines to say at the end of the last act. They wouldn’t be wanting me yet, they said, so I thought I might as well get on with my prep. There was no one about in the school wing. Only those who had stayed behind for the play. The others had gone over for tea. It was terribly quiet.

  ‘I took my books into the library and spread everything out on one of the round tables – physics, I think it was – and settled down to work. I remember a last ray of sun low down in the long window picking out a white rhomboid on the floor. It was as I went back to the physics from noticing the sun that I spotted the bottle of ink. I had set it neatly on the table with my books and my ruler and things. You see I hadn’t intended coming into the library. It was because of the rehearsal and they didn’t want me yet. It was silly to hang around doing n
othing. I did weigh it up for a moment in my mind. I knew it wasn’t allowed but there was no one else in the library and I had no intention of opening the bottle. My pen was full. What harm could it do?

  ‘I suppose I had been at the physics for about half an hour, because the sun had disappeared and the floor gone back to unlit amber, when I thought I’d better hurry, they must be getting near the last act, and started to clear my possessions.

  I don’t know what I tripped over. Perhaps the leg of the table. Possibly the chair. I didn’t fall, but everything went flying out of my arms. My books, pencils, ruler, compasses, protractor, everything that had been in my satchel. I couldn’t say exactly what was there. All I was aware of was the sea of deep, permanent blue spreading over the floor. Our floor.

  ‘It was as though I were dying. I had the sensation that my heart had stopped beating from pure fright. I would never have dreamed there could be so much ink in one small bottle. I had some blotting paper but it was soon blue and saturated. I used my handkerchief, some pages from my rough-book. My hands screamed out murderer. On the way to the cloakroom to wash them I met nobody. I managed to take a towel from the roller, squeeze it under the tap, run with it to the library and clean up, what still remained on the surface of the ink. I hid the towel, the handkerchief and the pages from my rough-book in the boiler room. Through the open doors of the Hall I heard Johnson Minor announce that they were about to start Act Three. I went back to the scene of the crime.

  ‘The ink had seeped in, stained and roughened the shiny surface. On our golden carpet was a hideous and unsightly patch. I, out of nine hundred possible small boys, had been the one to do it. I blamed God for allowing it to be me.

  ‘They would have to do without their Third Courtier. I told them I had a headache and they sent me to Matron. It was the spring, she said, and gave me an aspirin. All night I lay with my foul deed.

  ‘Next morning, solemnly, at Assembly, you told the whole school what had happened. There was a stirring of horror. They loved their floor. Not only was it a crime, you said, but one to which no one had had the decency to confess. Would the boy who had committed the heinous offence report to your study before noon. It was a dastardly occurrence. There must be shame, you knew, in the breast of some coward who stood before you, damning his fellows by his reticence.