by Ellis Peters
‘That’s not fair! I never said any such thing, and you know it. Come on, now, this all started out of nothing. Let’s go home and sleep on it, and tomorrow you’ll hardly remember it – only to wonder what on earth it was all about.’
She was already sorry that she had pushed the dispute into the open, for she knew in her heart that he had slipped from under her thumb so far, and hardened so inexplicably, that if she pressed too hard now he would spin far out of her reach, and it was doubtful if she would ever get him back again. Recovering from the recklessness of despair, she drew back to more secure ground.
‘I am tired! Oh, Dennis, I hate quarrelling with you!’
He paid the bill, and took her home. She made the most of the quarter of an hour’s walk, and kept him for a few minutes saying good-night when they arrived at her gate. They heard the church clock just striking the half-hour as they halted there; it was nearly five minutes fast.
‘I’m sorry we spoiled the day between us,’ she said, arduously accepting half of a guilt which she felt to be entirely his. ‘It was all rather silly, I suppose.’ She turned to face him, and her hands slid up to take him by the shoulders. ‘Dennis – you do like me, don’t you?’
‘Of course I like you! Don’t be silly! Now don’t fret any more. Just go and sleep it off, like a good kid!’
‘Come to tea tomorrow – please!’
‘I can’t tomorrow, I’ve got to go to my sister’s to fetch something for Mum. But I’ll see you Monday evening.’
‘Promise? The usual time?’
‘Yes, I promise.’ He smiled down at her, and she wondered at the way the faint light from the cream-curtained window lit up the sudden bones of his face, making him look excited, and even younger than his twenty-two years. He reared his head, looking beyond her, back towards the town; she felt how his body was arched like a spring to be off from her, and longed to keep hold of him, but she knew her only hope was to let him go.
‘Kiss me good-night!’ she asked him, raising her lips.
He kissed her, and held her a moment, and the cold young cheek was smooth against hers, and had a fresh, frosty smell all its own. ‘Good-night, Iris! Be a good girl!’
‘Oh, Dennis, darling!’ For a moment she did truly love him. The pain it involved astonished her, but it did not matter, for she never felt it again. ‘Good-night, then – see you on Monday!’
She went quickly through the gate, and down the garden path into the shadow of the house; and there she halted, flattening herself against the wall, and waited, listening to his brisk steps as he walked back towards the town. When he thought she must be already safely inside the house, he began to run. There was something terrifying to her in the suddenness of it, and the ardour. He ran like a boy let out of school, wildly, at full speed; a man running for his life could not have sounded more in earnest.
Then she knew that she had lost him, that it was all over.
3
Suspiria was standing in a corner of the room, listening to the dissertations of a critic who bored her horribly, and to whom she could be polite only with considerable difficulty. She had avoided him for more than two hours, but now, since it was within half an hour of closing time, she felt that she could bear him. He was being complimentary, but to all the least satisfactory exhibits in the show, and she found his half-informed stupidity infinitely more depressing and irritating than the frank incomprehension of some of the improbable people who had paid a shilling to come in. A few late-comers were still appearing; there were awkward gaps in some of the bus services on Saturday nights, it was growing cold outside, and this was as cheap a way of being warm and sheltered for half an hour as any other. There were perhaps a dozen people, mostly in this category, moving desultorily from stand to stand, as she yawned gently into the bronze chrysanthemums in her green celadon jar. A few had the strained look of would-be aesthetes, most were impervious. One or two looked at things as if they really knew what to look for, and lingered where she herself would have lingered. She was curiously following the progress of one of these rare specimens when she heard the door swing again, and looked round to see who had entered in such a hurry, and so late.
She knew him at once, and yet she stared as if she had never seen him before. What was he doing here, the incongruous creature from Grover’s garage? He was not being led by some intellectually ambitious acquaintance, for he came in alone. He did not make any pretence of being at home here among her children, for he looked round him, as the door swung from his hand, with those same wild and apprehensive eyes he had worn when he brought Theo home. And he had been running! He was out of breath, his lips parted, his brown hair blown into a tangle, and a high, bright colour glowing under the tan of his cheeks. And now that she came to look more intently at him, touched by his haste to reach her creations in time, she saw that the apprehension in his eyes was more than half eagerness and excitement.
As though, she thought, watching him intently over the critic’s oblivious shoulder, he was standing on a frontier ‘– like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific, and all his men—’ Only it was Balboa, of course. If it matters! This boy was neither of them, to be truthful; more like one of the mercenaries who looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. But they needed all their courage, too; more, perhaps, not having the authentic demon to drive them. It is very dangerous to open a door upon a new world, all unprepared and without maps. The door is liable to slam behind you upon all the familiar, and leave you loose among the marvellous.
And for what? she thought, speculating wildly. What inducement could he possibly have to cross all his spiritual and cultural frontiers by coming in here? Her origins were far too mixed to leave her any neat notions about the fitting of artistic appreciation into the social compartments. A boy from a garage could as naturally warm to the beauty of form and colour as the most expensively educated ornament of the universities. But not this boy. He knew himself that he was jumping over a river in the dark. His eyes were frightened of the unknown width of it, and the danger of drowning, and awed and excited about what he might find on the other side. And what did he know about the other side? Only that she and Theo would be there.
‘Excuse me a moment!’ she said. ‘There’s somebody I know. I must go and speak to him.’
The critic looked round for a celebrity, and could not see one; and when he thought to discover one in a deceptive form by following Suspiria’s purposeful advance, all he could see was a young man in a grey gaberdine raincoat, far too young to be a lion, and without the seedy sophistication proper to even the most junior members of the Press. He was standing in front of a double pedestal on which stood an olive-green bowl, below, and a great, full-bodied jug of unglazed red stoneware above. The young man gazed at them doubtfully, even with some distrust, but without hostility. There seemed no reason for Suspiria to approach so ordinary a specimen, nor could thought suggest where or how she could have met him.
She was aware, when she came to his elbow so quietly, that he did not know she was there; and therefore she could study the changes and responses of his face with deep curiosity, and know that she was seeing, for a moment at least, the truth of what he was and what he felt. She had to make the most of the moment, for as soon as he turned and saw her watching him he would retreat behind all his defences, and begin to try and assess the effect he ought to be making on her, in defence of his deeply-resented ignorance. Now he was crystal. He was used to the lavish and exuberant ceramics of the fair-ground, or, worse, the modified, arty form of the same thing, which had the raucousness of the fair-ground without its unself-conscious gaiety. In this full, fruit-like roundness, entirely without decoration, the handle a short, sturdy bow to fit and fill the hand, he could find nothing but dullness and lack of imagination. It was so plain!
People for whom life has been enforcedly plain to poverty for generations do not choose plainness when they can choose for almost the first time. They find their
way back to it through cycles of excitement and indulgence and satiety, to discover in the best of it many other qualities besides its simplicity. There was no reason in the world why he should yet doubt his own rejection of plainness, except that the self-consciousness of the age possessed him as it possessed them all, and the fact that others could praise and choose what he instinctively rejected made him hesitate, and hedge, and look back again and again to try and adjust his vision. He suspected, fatally, that there was something here he ought to admire, and that he could not find it.
There were some playful little pieces grouped together on the next table, some painted tiles, some feather-combed slip-ware dishes in bright candy colours, and several figurines of children. Perhaps the shapes were still austere for his taste, but they were lively in decoration and colour. She saw the ready gaiety of relief in his eyes, saw them dwell longest upon the delicate marbling of the dishes, and she knew he was thinking of iced cakes in several colours, teased into the same wavy pattern. They did look almost edible; she was not fond of them, but technically they were good, and they had a right to be there to balance the more monumental pieces.
‘We call it feather-combing,’ she said. ‘It’s done with a sharpened quill, drawing one slip out into another.’
He had not expected her to be there, she could see that clearly. His astonishment and withdrawal were equally instantaneous, and he stood looking at her for a moment with lips parted, still rather breathless from running. He didn’t want to move back into himself and shut the door; he was only afraid not to. She had him at a disadvantage here, because she was within her depth, and he was out of his, and he could not afford to give away any more points. And yet he continued to look out at her, from the safety of his defences, with a wary eagerness and hope.
‘Oh, good evening! I was just looking – I wondered how it was done, it’s so delicate.’
‘They never run into one another and make a mess,’ she said, ‘just lengthen out in those fine lines after the quill. On a flat surface it isn’t difficult. I didn’t know you were interested in pottery. But perhaps you often come here?’ He was not sure that she was not laughing at him a little, but if so, it was a surprisingly gentle laugh.
‘Well – not very often.’ He had never been there before, though he had lived in Great Leddington since he was two years old. He wondered if she could tell that by looking at him, and was afraid that she could, and he moved back a step into the salving darkness of his shell. She saw that he was folding and refolding the little catalogue so tightly in his hands that he would probably never get it straightened out again. Better save him the chagrin of noticing his own nervousness, then, by telling him about everything herself, if he showed any signs of wanting to know.
She took him by the arm quite naturally, with easy authority. ‘I shouldn’t waste too much time on these little things, if I were you. Shall we go round quickly?’
She held him for only a moment, and then they were moving onward together round the long, light room; but he could still feel the hard, direct touch of her fingers, so different from Iris’s insinuating approaches. Her movements beside him filled him with a sense of excited pleasure, so exact and assured was she in every gesture. This evening she had on a dark green corduroy coat and skirt, and there were no traces of clay. She looked rather more than a hundred per cent alive, and almost handsome, with the ends of her short black hair just reaching her cheeks and lying there like the tips of feathers folded close, and her long mouth brightly painted the fierce luminous red of holly berries. Her feet were small, narrow and elegant in court shoes. Plenty of girls of his acquaintance dressed much more expensively, even more smartly, he thought, but side by side with her they would never be noticed. It was something to do with the personality, nothing that could be bought and put on. Even if you disliked her, you could never ignore her.
She said very little, supposing that unless he had questions to ask, her work could very well speak for itself. He was too acutely on the defensive still, in spite of a sort of confused warmth of happiness he found in her company, to ask many questions unless he could be sure of phrasing them in a way which would do him credit. She might guess at his total insulated ignorance, but he was not going to let her get a positive glimpse of it if he could help it. Yet his eyes were full of bewilderment and wonder. He did want to know, he wanted intensely to understand everything, but without admitting for a moment that he did not know, and did not understand. Sometimes she thought, as if she stood at a distance to look at them both: ‘Why am I bothering with him? What on earth is there in this hobbledehoy to waste my time on?’ But she remembered the leap in the dark. Somebody owed it to him to shed a little light on this strange and mapless world for him, and who was there to do it but herself?
‘That sgraffito pattern could be better. The drawing isn’t strong enough for the shape, do you see that? The design is scratched through the slip to show the colour of the body underneath. It’s a pity about that one, the shape is very nearly perfect.’
He did not know what slip was, and was not sure in what sense she used the word body, but he asked no questions. These sounded the sort of thing everyone here was supposed to know already.
About one of her vases she said positively that it was a bad shape, just as positively as she had called the previous one perfect. He could not see why the one should satisfy her, and the other displease her. It was deeply frustrating to be so completely shut out from what she seemed to consider the fundamental laws of form. He continued to listen avidly for every clue, and to ask nothing more dangerous than: ‘How do you get that blue?’
‘Almost all the blues are cobalt. That one has some manganese oxide in it, too. The greens are copper, mostly. That big jar – you saw it in Theo’s picture, too, remember? – that glaze is a celadon. There are a whole family of them. They get their greyish and bluish greens from iron oxides.’
‘You have to be a chemist, as well,’ he said, lifting a sudden shy glance to her face.
‘More like a cook really. You begin by measuring and weighing everything very strictly, and end by throwing in a pinch of this and half a pound of that by touch.’
She halted him before the most beautiful thing she had ever made, or perhaps ever would, and watched in a half-angry pessimism to see its perfection slide by him without effect. Then she forgot him, because the jar was so complete and filled her with so profound a peace. It was well-placed, fairly high and alone against a brownish-grey curtain. It was large – when she was happiest and most sure of herself she had always to make enormous things, to the limit of her reach and strength. This one stood about eighteen inches high, and its outlines flowed upward firmly and urgently from the narrow base, with all the impetus of growth, expanded into a noble and virginal round breast, and then sprang arching together into a narrower neck and thick, smooth lip like a folded petal. The glaze was a full, purplish rose in colour, so deep, lustrous and luminous that it seemed to warm the air round it; and the jar had been dipped to a depth a few inches short of the base, and left to find its own edge, so that it had flowed down lower on one side than the other, like a calm, smooth wave just gathering and thickening at the lip, a wave which had never broken but was always about to break. Beneath it the stoneware of the body had burned in the kiln to a rich brick-red, a smooth rock shore waiting passively for the breaking foam of that purple sea. On the lip and the curve of the shoulder the glaze thinned very slightly to a rosier colour, in the neck and down the flanks its lustre deepened to purple, the lowest fold of the breaking wave darkest of all.
She had forgotten him, but subconsciously she was waiting for him to think of something safe to say. She heard a small, almost stealthy sigh, and then he asked with curious, child-like meekness: ‘Can I touch it?’
She looked at him sharply, wondering if it was calculated, but at the abrupt turn of her head he had flushed deeply, and looked confused and almost panicky, as if he were casting about him to see if he had said the wrong thing. S
he smiled at him, and said quickly: ‘Yes, do!’
Encouraged but still abashed, he went forward, while she watched him curiously, to see if his hands had any real hunger, any awareness. They opened, and cupped themselves about the purple roundness just below the breast, and stretched out there against the cool glaze, deliciously braced to touch with every nerve. She felt her heart turn in her with the reversion of his delight. He knew as little about it as a virginal boy knows about the terror and ecstasy of arching his hands for the first time about a woman’s breasts, and he experienced it as shatteringly. How vulnerable the young and inexperienced are, she thought, holding her breath. How wonderful and how awful it must be to be at the beginning of all this, and to feel the lightning go through you, without knowing what it is, or what directs it, or where it is going!
He stroked the purple silken surface, his arching fingers leaving it reluctantly. She felt their pain in her own. He looked at her suddenly, and his grey eyes were wide with greed, and his mouth, always the true, tender, irresolute barometer of his youth, was quivering. ‘I don’t know anything!’ he said despairingly.
She thought: ‘He’s over the edge now, he’ll never get back. There isn’t any going back into innocence.’ And she asked herself for a moment if she really had any responsibility for him; but only for a moment, because it took no longer that that to discover that it was not a sense of duty which was drawing her towards him.
‘You could learn,’ she said, ‘if you want to.’
‘What is it? That glaze, I mean? It feels like silk – only alive.’
‘It is alive,’ she said, ‘it’s organic, it grew. It’s what we call a flambé glaze. You could call them derivative – they came from China. That’s copper, too, only used in a reducing kiln. Do you know what that is? Not an oxidising fire – a smoky-burning one.’