‘Boys will be boys,’ she kept on muttering to herself, her glance straying, despite her goodwill and her better judgement, to Benedict and Nola’s children who appeared to have spent the afternoon drawing out chairs for old ladies, behaving like perfectly functioning little machines who would grow into big, powerful machines, like Benedict, or would malfunction restlessly, maliciously, like Nola. Her children, at least – if a little out of hand – were natural.
‘Come on, lads. What about a scout round the hayloft?’ said Toby, sounding hearty, feeling resigned, having no greater inclination for party games than Nola but well aware of the need to distract his own four rumbustious boys from their proposed schemes of ducking one or other of their cousins in the fishpond.
‘Happy hunting,’ cried Miriam, blowing kisses to spur them on and waving her tiny, sparkling hand.
‘What a wonderful woman,’ said Edward.
‘Tally ho,’ shrieked Polly, bounding away like a greyhound off the leash, followed by a crowd of eager, awkward youths and one exceedingly optimistic old man.
‘Excuse me,’ said Nola, ‘I have a headache coming on.’
Nothing at all – although one knew he must be there – had been seen of Benedict.
‘My dear,’ called Miriam, beckoning to Claire, ‘come and keep me company. There’s no need for you to go hunting. I have your gift ready.’
And with an affectionate hand she gave Claire an antique gold and enamel locket which held the photograph of a handsome, unknown child and a lock of baby-fine, baby-blond hair which she understood, with alarm, had been Jeremy’s.
‘Wear it on Sunday, dear, at dinner, with your pretty red dress.’
She doubted if she could ever bring herself to wear it at all. The chain burned her skin as Miriam fastened it fondly but firmly around her neck, telling her – as she had feared – that the locket had been Jeremy’s birthday gift to his mother, long ago on a warm May afternoon just like this, paid for with the whole of his first schoolboy allowance, the photograph taken on a furtive trip to Leeds for which she, suspecting him of mischief, had punished him.
‘And he just stood there and took the blame for something he hadn’t done because he knew how much I loved my little surprises and he didn’t want to spoil it for me. What a good heart he had.’
‘Yes.’ Claire knew no reason to doubt his goodness. Quite simply with sorrow and guilt and a familiar sense of futility, she could not remember it.
‘And such sparkle. Such a sense of fun and folly – like me, I fear.’
She could not remember that either.
Returning to Mannheim Crescent she bolted her door, took off the locket and shut it hastily away in a drawer where, once out of her sight, it became a voice whispering to her all through the night to be let out, set free, remembered, so that her dreams were threaded once again with that terrible line of blinded men, shuffling towards the horrific, crucified presence she knew, without looking or daring to look, must be Jeremy. And even when terror jerked her awake and she lay in the heavy dark – clammy and weak with gratitude that the dream was over – she was so painfully conscious of the baby-fine hair in the drawer at her bedside that she had to get up and take it away into the other room before daring to sleep again.
Yet there were days when she succeeded in holding herself aloof from all Swanfield and Lyall intrusions, in the manner of a cat who can be seen and even touched but remains, nevertheless, quite separate. She had not yet begun to think about happiness. It was too soon for that and, in any case, she did not yet require it. She had already experienced great joy, albeit in difficult conditions, and although she had lost the source of it she did not believe that she had lost the capacity. Eventually it would revive. Already – and it did not trouble her to admit it – her sensuality was no longer stunned and dormant but stirring once more with curiosity, the sound, healthy impulses of a perfectly functioning female body which might hurry her – perhaps before her heart was ready – to take a lover.
But for the time being, and once again in cat-like fashion, physical sensations of a lesser nature contented her. After four years of personal discomfort, of cold water or contaminated water or no water at all, of cold feet, blistered hands, damp mattresses, dysentery, fleas, it was luxury enough to be warm and clean. After four years of personal danger it was a blessed relief to be safe. After four years of overcrowded huts, communal eating and bathing and breathing she was rich now in the possession of a door to lock, space in which she could move unquestioned and unobserved. After four years of belonging, by her own choice, to any man who cried out in pain, she was content now – for a little while – to drift, to evade, to rest on life’s surface until, strengthened by solitude, she might equip herself to choose a new purpose. And until then, Mannheim Crescent with its motley population of drifters, evaders, solitaries, its prevailing winds of aimlessness and disillusion, seemed her rightful home.
There were rainy mornings when she did not get up at all, mornings of sunshine and warm breezes when, wrapped in a kimono which had seen better days, its embroidered dragons fraying at their seams, its gold threads coming loose, she would go out into the little walled garden, barefoot, her hair undone, and drink her breakfast coffee on a stone seat beneath the plum tree, smoking and reading, basking in the rich, sweet idleness of making no plans, journeying only from one moment to the next, a spectacle of Bohemian disarray which would have appalled her mother. She watched the plum blossoms open their eyes; absorbed through her skin, the fragrances of damp, growing green, of bluebells and dandelions standing companionably together, of ferns uncurling themselves in the sun. She listened to the rustling of leaves and grass, the movements and voices of birds and, every now and then, the notes of a hesitant piano from two floors above where a fragile spinster taught a limited repertoire of Strauss waltzes and Beethoven’s Fur Elise.
She took long walks in the rain, not always intentionally but because rain was a feature of Faxby she well remembered, fine, almost feathery rain in the summertime, drenching, stinging downpours at other seasons, a hint of it usually hovering somewhere above the hills by which the town was entirely surrounded, a clouded hollow, its cobbled streets gleaming with damp, curls of mist falling low, most spring evenings, to blend with the stridently swirling factory smoke. And when she had walked enough she lay in her green chintz armchair, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, put on her disgraceful scarlet and gold kimono and sometimes, but only vaguely, wondered about the future.
She had been educated, expensively and traditionally, not to work but to be married, not to earn a living but to provide domestic comfort and entertainment for the man who supported her. She had been taught not to cook but rather to select a well-balanced menu, to decorate a table with flowers and mosses and napkins twisted to look like swans. She could play the piano, speak French, write a well-worded letter to cover any of the eventualities her schoolmistresses – ladies of a gentler, pre-war era – had thought likely to come her way. Until Paul’s death, she had given little, if any, serious thought to a career. She had planned only to be with him, to support him in any venture he might choose to undertake, to nurture his ambitions, which represented no great sacrifice since she had none of her own. And although she did not discount the possibility that she might marry again – in fact she rather hoped she would – she did not expect it to be soon, could no longer guarantee that it would be forever. The values of her girlhood had been swept away, she fully understood that, and, unlike Miriam and her mother, she had no inclination to cling to their wreckage. She was a ‘new woman’who, having rushed headlong to France, had acquired none of the new skills acquired by the regiment of women who had eagerly taken men’s places when conscription had emptied the country of its able-bodied men. She had never learned to type or keep accounts and was consumed by no great fires to learn. She could, of course, dress wounds, bathe eyes, administer medicines, but since she desired most urgently never to enter a hospital ward again, what now?
�
�You’re not much of a housewife are you,’ Euan Ash told her, watching her as, with complete unconcern, she swept up the broken remains of a Crown Derby saucer.
‘No. So don’t expect me to clear up your mess. I have more than enough with my own.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said, giving her his smile of impudent, decadent sweetness. ‘You’re going to be awkward. I thought as much. But don’t worry. We can get Kit Hardie to come over with his dustpan from the Crown, or send one of his minions. Not that I need much in the way of creature comforts myself, I’m sure.’
‘She had seen his flat by now, just one small, square room leading to an old – fashioned, ramshackle conservatory, the room itself virtually empty except for a narrow bed covered with a grey blanket, two kitchen chairs, a heap of cushions thrown down in a corner; the conservatory cluttered with the messy apparatus of art, a huge work-table invisible beneath its burden of sketches finished, abandoned, just begun, canvases standing face to the wall in rows like naughty children, paints, brushes, pallet knives, tins and jars of varnish and turpentine, oily rags, dirty rags, piles of shabby periodicals and books, a cracked, vaguely oriental vase at least three feet high left behind by the previous tenant and which it had not occurred to him to throw away.
‘What chaos you live in.’
‘Dear child – my natural habitat.’
Yet his shared tenancy of the kitchen caused her no alarms, making itself felt mainly in the empty whisky bottles he left on the table for her to throw away and, three or four mornings a week, the presence of a girl – scantily clad and rarely the same one twice – brewing his coffee, scrambling his eggs, washing out his shirts and socks in the shallow, stone sink.
‘He has the morals of an alley-cat,’ said Nola loudly in his hearing, having spotted one of these obliging, somewhat dishevelled young ladies scurrying off through the garden gate at eleven o’clock in the morning. And with his deadly smile, he quite affably agreed.
‘What’s wrong with the alley-cat? He makes love whenever he gets the chance because it just might be his last. So do I. What do you do with your life, Nola?’
‘She was sitting at the cheap lodging-house kitchen table, draped in her fox furs, a new double pelt this time joined by the front paws, two pointed foxes’ heads hanging down her back, two sumptuous, russet bodies falling to her waist in front, two empty russet legs dangling, a cloche hat with a feather covering her ears, several strings of amber beads, several more of gold cascading to her elegantly crossed knees. She was rouged, perfumed, expensive, a cigarette-holder with a jewelled monogram clutched in one nervous hand, a crocodile skin bag with a gold clasp in the other.
‘What do you do, Nola?’
‘Bastard,’ she said tonelessly and snapping open her bag, taking out her gloves, she got up and walked away.
‘That was unkind,’ said Claire.
‘Yes, I know. I’m not really a bastard either. Not in the eyes of the law, at any rate.’
‘We never supposed you were.’
‘What am I then, lovely Claire?’
‘Oh – a young gentleman of good family, I think, with a private income so that you can afford to dress like a gypsy and do odd jobs at the Crown without losing face – or caste. Is that what you are?’
‘More or less. A very small private income though – probably a lot less than yours, just keeping-body-and-soul-together money really.’
‘Enough to let you waste your expensive education.’
‘If you like. What else?’
‘How should I know?’
But she knew very well and incautiously she rushed on. ‘I expect your mother breeds pedigree puppies and organizes the hunt ball and everybody’s morals and wins all the prizes at the local flower show. And your father will be a clergyman – the fashionable kind who understands good claret.’
Without being aware of her danger until it was far too late she had described Paul’s parents, Paul’s background, exactly as he had once described them to her. And now, to complete her self-betrayal she realized with horror and with considerable surprise that her eyes had not only filled with tears but had let loose a whole fountain of them to pour, in embarrassing profusion, down her cheeks.
‘Oh skill’she said, flatly, distinctly, and he laughed with open, genuine delight.
‘Well done, Nurse Swanfield. Spoken like a true VAD. Well – a fellow’s supposed to have a dean handkerchief at times like these, I do know that. But I’m not sure I can manage it. Oh yes-here we are. I think it’s Kit’s but never mind.’
And he dried her eyes deftly, with good humour, apparently accustomed to women’s tears and disinclined to take them too seriously, his artist’s eye, she rather suspected, far more concerned with the physical mechanics of weeping, the exact working of the muscles and the blotching of the skin and how to portray them on canvas than with the causes of her distress.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘So am I – I can’t tell you. I rather thought I might have a chance of making love to you quite soon. But perhaps it won’t be quite soon if I remind you so much of somebody else. I suppose that is the trouble?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I also suppose – taking into account the time span and all that – not your husband.’
‘No. Not my husband.’
‘Fair enough. But it’s a pity, though. I was looking forward to you, Claire.’
‘You make love to so many women, Euan.’ He grinned, boyish suddenly rather than malicious.
‘I know. It’s just about all I do at the moment with any degree of concentration – and a certain amount of success. I wonder if it’s the nearest I can get to not killing? Just about the exact opposite, I rather think.’
‘Do you? It seems a little – indiscriminate.’
‘So is killing – the kind I’ve done, at any rate.’
‘Don’t tell me.’
‘You must know that I wouldn’t dream of it.’
She nodded and, leaning forward just a little, gave him the honest, open smile of a friend.
‘I know. But the real opposite to killing would be to get all those girls pregnant. And I’m sure you wouldn’t care to do that.’
‘Dear God –’ he said, looking startled and then very much amused. ‘I hope you realize that you may, just possibly, have put an end to my virility. Because fatherhood …!’ He shuddered. ‘No. Oh no, not that, I’d have to run, of course. Much kinder.’
‘Oh well – a convenient point of view, and not original. And, speaking of originality, is Nola right when she says your pictures are no good?’
‘Come and see.’
She went with him into the bare room, the cluttered studio, and knelt on a lumpy, hessian-covered cushion while he uncovered the canvases stacked against the wall. She had already seen his sketches of Faxby’s alleyways and the patches of littered wasteland in between where Faxby’s youth, unable to afford the comfort of a cinema or a bar parlour, met to preen themselves before one another on Saturday nights. She had seen the satirical, sometimes spitefully accurate portraits he dashed off in the tap-room of the ‘Rock and Heifer’just behind Mannheim Crescent, and sold across the bar for a shilling each. But she had avoided his real work, fearing – she suddenly realized – to see the distorted death of the trenches, to discover that the line of blinded groping soldiers which so sickeningly haunted her had somehow shuffled out of her nightmare straight onto Euan’s canvas. But instead, to her infinite relief, her intense surprise, she saw first a leaf and then the petals of a flower painted with a botanist’s exactness, a woodland world of small, wild blossoms and spiky grasses, water dimpled by rain, flat many-shaded pebbles, the life of the hedgerow, the river bank, the ploughed furrow as experienced and observed by a grasshopper, a speckled, self-important thrush, a bee lavishly exploring the universe of a foxglove, a cowslip, a cornflower.
It was the English pastoral of childhood story books, the small furry creatures, the muted colours, the mild weather, with the extra and
startling ingredient of reality, the knowledge of the human rifle levelled at the happily burrowing rabbit, the mass-produced boot crushing the primrose, the natural cycle of birth and death, necessity and renewal – which was cruel enough – disrupted by the blundering presence of man.
It was beautiful and painful. Perhaps the blind soldiers would have been easier to bear.
‘I don’t know enough to judge,’ she said quickly; and kneeling beside her, his body composed of lean, hollow curves and brittle angles, he studied the canvases, his head on one side.
‘Oh – I think “mediocre” ought to describe it. As an artist I might just make a living painting pretty pictures of not so pretty women – if I cared that much about making a living.’
They were kneeling close together and with no more than a slight inclination of his head, he kissed her, no other part of his body touching hers except a cool mouth, a swiftly darting tongue, his presence light, elusive, uncertain even at this proximity; the man who, without appearing to resist, had slipped through Nola’s possessive hands like water and who held Claire to him now not by the arousal of her sensuality but by a fragile shadow of the years they had unknowingly shared.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said easily, amiably, ‘I don’t want any kind of commitment that might expect me to look beyond tomorrow morning.’
She got up smiling, easy and amiable herself.
‘I’m not alarmed. I just don’t want any complications. And you’re complex, Euan.’
‘Lord no – not a bit of it. Just a straightforward sort of chap. I’m faithless, of course – or so I’ve been told – but I do give fair warning in advance. I can only offer what I have in me, you know, which isn’t much and doesn’t last, but if it fills the present need or the present pleasure then it’s better than nothing, I reckon. And if it happens to be alive and kicking tomorrow – then that’s a bonus – wouldn’t you think? I’m just passing through, after all. I make no secret of it.’
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