‘And lovely clothes they were, too,’ she said, finally, ‘and they wore well too, and I kept them because they were so nice, and Gabriel tells me that their baby looks lovely in Annunciata’s dress, though I haven’t had a chance to see her in it yet. Pale green, it was, with honeysuckle on, a kind of lawn, I think, rather a bore to iron if I remember rightly, but pretty, quite pretty enough to make it worth it; and if there is anything Phillipa will spend time on, I must admit that it’s on clothes.’
The other picture that Clara particularly liked was a posed portrait of Candida with Clelia as a two-year-old, and Gabriel as a small boy by her side. It had been taken on Clelia’s second birthday, and it had been taken by one of the very few photographers of whom Clara had ever heard, and who emerged as a friend of the family, as did, peripherally, so many other familiar names, whose faded faces, or truncated limbs, or unintentional back views adorned a large quantity of the holiday snapshots.
‘I think that must be Eliot,’ said Candida, at one point, peering hard at an infinitely receding figure in the pale brown mists at the back of one document from Paris in the thirties: and Scott Fitzgerald, front view, and arm in arm with Candida, was more confidently acclaimed. The posed portrait reminded Clara of paintings that she had seen, with little enthusiasm, in art galleries and ancient monuments, and just as the Denhams’ drawing room had reconciled her to so many other dead and empty drawing rooms, so the photograph seemed to breathe life into those tediously scrutinized oil paintings of long-aged and dead small children. Candida sat there, her back to the long window, and her hair longer than it now was, and piled upon her head: small Clelia, grave and round, in a short dark crochet-collared dress, sat solemnly upon her knee, and her arm and her mother’s arm lay side by side, their gentle flesh most softly parallel, in a lovely heap of human shape. Candida’s other arm encircled Gabriel who stood by her side frowning, and holding in one hand a wooden ship. Clara seeing it, understood entirely, as she had never understood before, why one should wish to perpetuate such things, and why generation after generation had endeavoured to fix such moments into an eternity. For love, surely, was at the source of such conventional efforts; there had been love and at every stage.
She liked the look of Gabriel. She looked, anxiously, through the more recent pages of the book, in search of his adult image, but he was rather sparsely represented; there were a couple of snapshots of him at Cambridge, looking indistinctly handsome sitting on a wall in front of King’s, but the only revealing picture was one which had been taken at the christening of Magnus’s first child. Gabriel was, in fact, holding the baby: a baby elaborately draped and swathed in the ancient lace robe of the Denhams’ own childhood christenings. Candida had herself been christened in it, she claimed, and it had been embroidered by her own grandmother. Gabriel was not looking at the camera, but at the child, and he was smiling. He looked very promising. As far as one could tell from a photograph, he looked quite alarmingly wonderful. She wondered if it were possible for him to look as wonderful as the camera promised that he might.
There were no pictures of Gabriel’s own wedding. Mrs Denham said that as they were only five years old, she had not yet got around to sticking them in, and that they lay somewhere at the bottom of a drawer.
When the album had been put away, Clara, thinking over the world that it had revealed to her, thought that perhaps it dismayed her a little, although it at the same time so strongly attracted her. It was a small rich world, a world of endless celebration and fame, and a world that was gone and past sharing. Advantages blossomed on its pages, and it seemed at moments as though love (and why not?) might be a forced plant, an unnatural flower that could not grow in thinner soil.
The Denhams led her, quite literally, into areas that she had never visited before. She knew Highgate and Hampstead from earlier days and visits to other friends, but she had never set foot in Bond Street, where Clelia’s gallery was, and where, from time to time, she visited her. She had had no cause to go there, having no money to spend. And Bond Street seemed in some way to be but a logical extension of the Highgate house, for there in the windows of the shops, in the embroidered evening bags and jewelled trinkets and silken shirts, she found faint, degraded echoes of the charm of the Denhams themselves, and she wondered uneasily if expense were not after all the key to so much charm. Bond Street tired her, as the Denham’s conversation tired her; the streets might have been paved with gold, but they made hard walking, and the sight of the price tags made her feel faint.
Clelia’s gallery exhausted her too, though in a different way. It rigorously eschewed the decorative; it was small, select, and very white, and full of a chilly pale intimacy. It specialized in bleak, expensive, fashionable, non-representational paintings: Clelia said that they were all good paintings, and Clara’s eyes and imagination ached from the effort of trying to locate their virtues. It was there that she first met Magnus, the eldest brother, who had dropped in for no other reason than to have a chat with his sister; he was, or so Clara had been told, a political economist, but he appeared nevertheless to know a considerable amount about paintings, and discussed the current exhibition with some finesse, finding causes for preference and dislike where she herself could see only indistinct austerity. She did not make much of Magnus; he was too like his father, he offered little, and spoke so quietly and modestly that it was hard to catch what he was saying. When he had gone, Clelia turned to her eagerly and asked her, as was her manner, her views, and Clara hardly knew what to reply. In the end,
‘I didn’t make much of him,’ she honestly said, and Clelia laughed, and said that he was an acquired taste, and that she should wait until she met Gabriel.
Clara spent much time in Clelia’s gallery, over the last weeks of her final term. Clelia seemed to like to have her there, as she had no work to do; there were few visitors, and few of those who came wanted to buy, and when they did want to buy Clelia had to send for Martin. So all the time that Clara was not there, Clelia spent in reading novels under the desk. Clara liked to go, because she liked Clelia, and because she found the Bond Street world compelling, irresistible, uniting as it did so much that she desired and mistrusted: they had lunch together, in different places each day, and listened to the conversations of others when they ran out of breath themselves, and Clelia always, deprecatingly, tactfully, disarmingly paid.
And over their mushrooms, risottos and escalopes and chips they vowed, after a manner, an eternal friendship, each being old enough to recognize the rare quality of their communications. When Clara left London for the summer, and returned to Northam, they wrote to each other, long, intimate, witty letters, the kind of letters that Clara fancied she had for years been casting before if not swine at least less than perfect readers; in August Clelia went to Greece for three weeks, but even from Greece she sent postcards. And when, towards the end of September, they both returned to London, Clelia from Athens, and Clara from Northam, each thought of their reunion with satisfaction, and Clara had to acknowledge to herself, and, indeed, in correspondence, deviously, to Clelia, that the thought of Clelia roused more enthusiasm in her than the thought of rejoining any of the other inhabitants of her emotional domain.
It was on her return to London that she met, for the first time, Gabriel. The very evening of her arrival Clelia rang, and after the excited exchange of news asked her to come round.
‘Come at once, come instantly,’ said Clelia, ‘I can’t wait to see you, and if you can come this evening you can see Annunciata. Do come this evening because she’s off to Oxford tomorrow.’
Clelia managed to imply that the seeing of Annunciata was the greatest treat she could offer, and Clara wondered what it must be like to have relatives that one could thus serve up, with pride, as ornamental additions to one’s own confident self.
‘I don’t know if I ought to come,’ said Clara. ‘I’m supposed to be unpacking my trunk.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Clelia. ‘Do come, please come
, you must come.’
‘All right,’ said Clara, ‘I’ll come at once.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Clelia, ‘I’ll send Gabriel round for you in his car.’
‘Oh goodness no,’ said Clara, shocked by such magnanimity on another’s behalf, ‘oh no, I’ll come on the bus, it won’t take me long.’
‘No, no,’ said Clelia, ‘I’ll send Gabriel, just a moment, I’ll go and ask him,’ and she went off before Clara could protest any further. And when the receiver was picked up, it was Gabriel that spoke.
‘Hello,’ he said, in a voice that much resembled his sister’s. ‘Hello, Clara. Do let me come and fetch you, because look, it’s raining outside. Let me fetch you. Where are you staying?’
And Clara, looking out of the window at the rain, and hearing his voice, and the risky, familiar use of her name by those unseen lips, and feeling the glass of solitude crack instantly at the faint warm enticements of sociability, said yes, all right, and gave him the address of her lodgings. She had found herself a room off the Archway, and when he heard the name of the street, he said,
‘But that’s no distance at all.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Clara, who had chosen the room for precisely such a reason.
‘I’ll be round in five minutes,’ said Gabriel.
And he was. Clara spent the five minutes by changing out of one jersey into another more or less identical one; all her clothes were the same. And during the five minutes she also considered that she would probably fall in love with Gabriel, because a summer in Northam always reduced her to a state where she was ready to fall in love with a taxi driver or the man in the restaurant car on the London train. She viewed the prospect of falling in love with Gabriel with a fatalistic pleasure; she thought that she would enjoy it. The fact that he was already married was to her merely an added enticement, for she had always fancied the idea of a complicated, illicit and disastrous love. She had up to this point spent much time gratuitously complicating various perfectly straightforward affairs with her own contemporaries, in the hope of discovering the true thick brew of real passion, but her efforts had not had much success; she had lacked the ingredients. And after her acquisition of Clelia, earlier that year, she had detached herself entirely from her one thin, current attempt at intrigue with one of her professors: an intrigue which she had fostered more for its lack of orthodoxy than for any progress that it might be expected to make.
So that when Gabriel knocked upon her door, she was positively waiting for him. And she knew as soon as she set eyes upon him that he was what she wanted. Her certainty, as she saw him, seemed to be what she had thought to be love: she stood there, looking at him, and she felt herself move slowly, inch by inch, inevitably, and then with gathering speed, as she fell (and never had the metaphor seemed real to her before), as she fell in love. He was breathtaking: she stood and gaped. He was not tall, not much taller than herself, and his skin was worn, but the shape of his head had the square, solid assurance of extreme symmetry, and although it did not seem possible that anyone so handsome should also be intelligent, it seemed equally impossible that he should not be. He looked like Clelia, there was no denying that he looked like Clelia, and he wore a woollen checked shirt and trousers that were dangerously low on his hips; watching him throughout the evening Clara found it difficult to take her eyes off the shortness of his crotch, and she had to console herself by telling herself that it was clearly intended thus to rivet her attention. She thought that she had never seen anyone so sexy off the cinema screen in her life, and very few on it, and she was amazed that he should be allowed to wander loose around the world; she had always idly assumed that there was some system, some process which selected such people, and removed them safely to some other place, where they were no longer accessible to normal human need, no longer part of the system of chance and meetings, exempt from human imperfections, reserved for their own like only. She had thought that they would live, these heroes and heroines, in some bright celluloid paradise: a paradise from which Gabriel had perhaps fallen, for she might surely never ascend? She had never seen such a person so close, so near; she had seen others, fleetingly, but a mixture of envy and desire had kept her at a distance, she had kept well away from a closer vision of the locked and pearly gates. But Gabriel stood there in front of her, smiling, accessible, full of good will, as mortal as she was mortal, or acknowledging her too as divine. She wondered, as he helped her on with her raincoat, what blessed, superior creature he might have as his wife, and why he had come to fetch her so kindly in the rain.
They did not talk much in the car. He asked her how she had spent the summer, and she said she had done nothing, what had he done, and he said he had been working. She inquired about the nature of his work, feeling that such a question, to a member of such a family, could not be impertinent, and indeed knowing already, from Clelia, something of the answer; he said that he worked for one of the largest of the independent television companies, and that he had been doing a documentary on the life of Lorca, a subject which would surely interest her, as he knew that she knew Spanish. She did not accept the offered politeness, but asked him, instead, if he enjoyed his work, and he said that he did not like it as much as he had hoped, and that he had to please too many people. She could not see that this would give him much difficulty, though she did not say so, for he had every advantage, every faculty for pleasing, he was Clelia all over again, but lacking even her faint abrasive edge. She could not see that he would arouse in others any oppositions save the oppositions of jealousy.
He aroused in her, sitting by his side in the small estate car, symptoms that she could not mistake. Her flesh stiffened at his nearness; even the skin of her face, the skin of her right cheek fronting him, grew taut from its exposure to his presence. She seemed to feel a sympathetic response, but she told herself that he too, like the rest of his family, must possess an inherited universal sympathy: for what rejections, what repulsions could he ever have received? Surely his every movement, all his life, must have been more than eagerly met: and she sat still and rigid, even a little withdrawn, drawing her legs neatly over to her own side of the car, away from his. In the long pauses in their conversation she stared out of the window at the terraced houses, at the drab shops, at the ornate bridge of the Archway itself, averting her eyes from his too-lovely profile.
When they arrived, Clelia met them in the hall, and stretched out her arms to Clara and embraced her most tenderly, as a long-lost friend, and Clara returned the embrace with equal feeling, amazed and relieved to find that feeling itself could lead quite naturally to such a gesture. She had not been reared upon embraces. She took her place in the rich, diversely lit evening of the drawing room with a sense that if she belonged anywhere it was as much here as to those long and silent evenings in front of the derided, loquacious television, and the Denham parents and Martin greeted her with flattering, particular familiarity, as though they knew her well, as though the summer had accumulated knowledge between them, instead of estranging them; Candida asked her how she had found her mother, and Martin (no longer, she somehow gathered, resident in the house) asked her whether she had been pleased with her respectably pleasing examination results, and whether or not she thought her sessions in his gallery with Clelia might not have cost her a few marks, to which she said no, that Clelia could have cost her nothing, could have brought her nothing but gain. And Mr Denham himself looked at her with recognition, shook her hand with warmth.
She was, however, somewhat taken aback by the sight of Annunciata, who looked ridiculously like Clelia, in style, in feature, and even in manner; the matter was made worse by the fact that they were wearing the same shirt, though over differently coloured trousers. She resented such similarity, and she also resented, though pleasurably, the sisters’ expansive, mutual admiration. They displayed each other, they encouraged each other; they spoke about their impending, transient, trivial separation with real regret. They put their arms around each oth
er; they laughed, in the same key, at each other’s jokes. Clara had never in her life seen such a vision of sisterly affection: in her part of the world, in her background, sisters were expected to resent and despise each other, at least until marriage and the binding production of children. Her acquaintances in Northam, she thought, would have considered such affection unnatural, and probably perverted, if not wholly insincere, and there was something in herself that could not help but suspect it: and yet at the same time it seemed to absolve a whole area of human relationship, to rescue it, wholesale, from the scruffy ragbag of the tag ends of family bitterness and domestic conflict. And such affection had, surely, its precedents, for were not sisters classically intended to love, and not to despise one another? She thought, unaccountably, of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a poem which she had learned without comprehension but with considerable interest at primary school: she had always been strangely compelled by the passionate and erotic relationship described in the poem, so remote from any of the petty hostilities that she had ever witnessed. Descriptions and displays of passion had always compelled her, but she had considered this particular manifestation to be a fabrication, a convenient lie. She began to think that literature did not lie, after all; nothing was too strange to be true.
Nevertheless, despite the interest of such a discovery, she did not like the fact of Annunciata. She resented her, she took the liberty of resenting her, on Clelia’s behalf. She did not like to think that Clelia was in any way thinned or dispersed or diluted by such a close resemblance; she wanted her to be unique.
Nor did she like the look of Gabriel’s wife. She had hoped against hope that Gabriel’s wife would be somehow, in some way, a non-contender, but Gabriel’s wife looked capable of contending with anything. She was a thin, tall small-boned girl, with a great deal of very long, thin, flat blonde hair; she looked far too thin to have had, as Clara distinctly remembered, three children. She was pretty, in a pale, neurotic way; her skin had no colour, and she wore no make-up, and her fingers were brown with nicotine. She sat, most precisely, on one end of the large settee, her long legs crossed, and her body twisted from the waist, as she leant on one arm; her angle had a brittle, deliberate elegance, a conscious threat. She smoked incessantly, tapping non-existent ash from the end of her cigarette on to the carpet as she listened; she did not say much, and she listened with an impatient, alien, critical reserve. But what alarmed Clara most of all were her clothes. She was used to the artistically bizarre, and she was tolerably used to the sight, at least, of the expensive, but she had never before been in the same room with so much accumulated fashion. Gabriel’s wife looked as though she came off the front page of Harper’s. Everything was intentional, and everything was new. Her shoes were so new that Clara had not even seen debased versions of them in the shops or magazines; nothing but sheer contemporary novelty could explain their extraordinary, unfamiliar shape. Her stockings were of a shade that Clara had never seen in stockings, a strange greyish-yellow, which she took to be the newest colour available. Her skirt was three inches shorter than anyone else’s in the room, and it was made of a curious quilted material which would have made any other woman look fat; her shirt had a strange floppy neckline, that Clara dimly remembered having seen on a poster for a film at King’s Cross underground station earlier that day. The whole ensemble was extraordinarily effective, and not a little intimidating. Clara wilted, revived a little when it occurred to her that Phillipa Denham might be or once have been a model, and therefore professionally informed, and then wilted once more when it became clear from the conversation that she had never been any such thing. She preferred the way that Clelia and Annunciata looked, she preferred the style of their house, but there was an assurance, a wealth of successful calculation in Gabriel’s wife’s appearance that frightened her. She looked au fait, she looked in touch, she looked knowledgeable; she did not look as though she would relinquish anything very easily.
Jerusalem the Golden Page 13