by John Fowles
David followed the girls upstairs, then down the corridor past his own room to a door at the east end of the house. It was another large room, there was a bed, but it had more the feel of a sitting-room; a student's room, if the art on the walls had not been original and distinguished, instead of home-made or in reproduction. The Freak went to a record-player in one corner, began to sort through a pile of records. The girl beside him said, 'Over here.'
There was a long work-table, inks, water-colours, a tilted drawing-board with a half-finished sketch pinned to it. The table was scrupulously neat, in contrast to the one in the old man's studio... very much the way David liked to have his own 'bench' at home. The Mouse reached up a portfolio and put it on the table, but kept it closed in front of her for a moment 'I'd gone completely non-representational by the end of Leeds. I got into the RCA on that. So these are going backwards really.' She gave him a shy little smile. 'What I began to feel I'd missed out.'
Technically the drawing was impressive, if rather lacking in individuality. The coolness that was pleasant in her personality became a kind of coldness on paper, something too painstaking and voulu. There was rather surprisingly a complete absence of the quick freedom of the old man's line, its firmness and vigour a comparison David did not have to make from memory, since the drawing that had been mentioned, his tossed-. off little parody of the Freak in the Lautrec style, turned up in the portfolio. Its haste showed; and the instinctive mastery of living line. David was complimentary, of course; asked the standard questions, what she was trying to do, where she felt she was getting near it. The Freak now stood at his other side. He had expected pop music; but it was Chopin, turned low, mere background.
They came to a batch ofdrawings with additional watercolour washes, not representational, but colour records that were something of the kind that David used himself. He liked them better, one or two tones, contrasts, the rather tentative workshop feel after the over-meticulous essays in pure draughtmanship. The Mouse went to a cupboard across the room and came back with four canvases.
'I have to keep them hidden from Henry. And I'm sorry if they look like bad David Williamses.'
She looked for a place to hang them, then took a pencil drawing off the wall and handed it to David. Gwen John. He belatedly realized who the sitter was: Henry, he must have been about David's present age. Sitting bolt upright, in a wooden chair, a little stagy, self-important in spite of the informality of his clothes: a fierce young modernist of the late 'twenties. The Mouse tilted an angle-lamp to light the place she had chosen. David put the ousted drawing down.
The canvases she showed bore no obvious similarity to his own work, beyond being delicately precise abstracts and on a smaller scale (like his own preferred working-size) than most such pictures in the manner. He very probably would not have noticed an influence if she hadn't mentioned it. But their quality, and this was a field where he was thoroughly at home--its problems, the viability of the solutions, was not something he had to pretend to see.
'Now I know why the College took you.'
'One day they work. The next they don't.'
'Normal. They work.'
The Freak said, 'Go on. Tell her they're bloody marvellous.'
'I can't do that. I'm too envious.'
'She's only asking five hundred each.'
'Anne, stop being a fool.'
David said, 'Let's see that last one beside the sketch.'
The sketch had been of a climbing rose against a wall; the painting was a trellis of pinks and greys and creams, a palette of dangers--which had been avoided. He would have been afraid of it himself, the inherent sentiment, the lack of accent. The ruling quarters of his own zodiac were more those of the colours of the clothes the Mouse wore: autumn and winter.
For twenty minutes or more they talked painting: his own work-methods, media, a renewed interest he had in lithography, how he 'grew' his ideas... all in a way he had done often enough when he taught, but had rather lost the habit of. Beth lived too near to him to need explanation, took all that for granted; and anyway, there had never been a similarity of stylistic purpose. He understood both critically and intuitively what this girl was trying to do. It did bear an analogy with his own development; in a more feminine, decorative kind of way--more concerned with textures and correspondences than form--she was abstracting from natural rather than artificial colour ranges. She said Henry had influenced her in one way, by claiming that colour could be drawn; she had learnt a lot by forcing herself to prove that it couldn't.
They sat down, David in an armchair, the two girls opposite on a sofa. He discovered more about them, their home backgrounds, their friendship; Henry and the present were tacitly barred for a while. Again the Freak talked most, she was funny about her hair-raisingly bigoted parents, her variously rebellious brothers and a younger sister, the hell of a childhood and adolescence in the backstreets of Acton. The Mouse was more reserved about her family. She was an only child, it seemed, her father owned and ran a small engineering works at Swindon. Her mother had 'artistic' tastes, kept an antique shop as a kind of hobby in Hungerford. They had a smashing house there, the Freak put in, Georgian. Ever so posh. David had an impression of some wealth; of parents too intelligent to be stock provincial; and that she did not want to talk about them.
There came a little silence; and just as David was searching for some not too obvious way of getting them back on to the present and future, the Freak was on her feet and standing over his chair.
'I'm going to bed, David. You mustn't. Di's a night bird.'
She blew him a kiss, she was gone. She had done it too suddenly, too blatantly, and he was caught off-balance. The girl he was left with would not look at him; she too knew it had been stage-managed.
He said, 'Are you tired?'
'Not unless you are.' There was an awkward moment. She murmured, 'Henry gets nightmares. One of us always sleeps in his room.'
He relaxed back in his chair.
'How on earth did he survive before you came?'
'His last lady-friend left him two years ago. She was Swedish. She betrayed him in some way. Money. I don't know, he never talks about her. Mathilde says money.'
'So he managed on his own for a bit?'
She took his point; and answered it with a faint smile.
'He didn't paint very much last year. He really does need help in the studio now.'
'And I gather he's going to go on getting it?' It was more a statement than a question, and she looked down.
'Anne's been talking.'
'A little. But if...
'No, it's...
She turned and put her bare feet up on the sofa, resting her back against one of its arms. She fiddled with a button on the black shirt. It was wild silk, faintly glossy; around each cuff, and the collar, a delicate edge of gold.
'How much did she say?'
'Just that she was worried.'
She was silent a long moment; then spoke in a lower voice.
'About Henry wanting to marry me?'
'Yes.'
'Did it shock you?'
He hesitated. 'A bit.'
She absorbed that.
'I haven't made up my mind.' She shrugged. 'I suppose it's just that when one's doing everything a wife would do 'Is the reverse true?'
'He needs me.'
'I didn't quite mean that.'
Again she was silent. He sensed that same struggle between wanting to talk and being afraid to that he had noticed after the blackberrying. But now she gave way.
'It's very difficult to explain, David. What's happened. Of course I can't love him physically. And I know perfectly well that at least half his love for me is sheer selfishness. Having his life run for him. But he really doesn't swallow his own myth any more. The gay old dog thing is strictly for strangers. Deep down he's just a rather lonely and frightened old man .11 don't think he'd paint any more if I left. It would kill him. Perhaps even literally.'
'Why are the alternatives marr
iage or leaving him?'
'They're not. It's just that I feel I can't walk out on him now. So what's it matter. If it makes him happier.'
Still she fiddled with the button, her head slightly bent; a faint air of a guilty child. The sophisticated little crown of hair, the bare ankles and feet. She sat with her knees cocked up.
'Anne also said you were worried about seeming to be after his money.'
'Not what people might say. What it might do to me.' She said, 'It's not as if he doesn't know what the collection's worth. The Braque's going to the Maeght when he dies. But even without that. I mean it's ludicrously out of scale. As a reward. But he does know that.'
'What might it do to you?'
She smiled wryly. 'I want to be a painter. Not a loaded widow.' She said softly, 'Get thee behind me, Coët.'
'The garret theory is out of date.'
'No struggle at all?'
'I'm not quite sure which side I'm supposed to be arguing for.'
She smiled again, without looking at him.
'I'm only twenty-three years old. It seems rather early to be sure you'll never want to live anywhere else. In any other way.'
'But you're tempted?'
She was slow to answer.
'The whole outside world. I don't even want to go into Rennes any more. All those cars. People. Things happening. My parents, I've simply got to go home soon and see them. I keep putting it off. It's absurd. As if I'm under a spell. I even dreaded your coming. I really did love your show. Yet I made up my mind I wouldn't like you. Just because you come from out there and I thought you'd upset me and... you know.'
She had left one of her own paintings on the wall behind the sofa. He knew it was not out of vanity. What last remaining doubts he had had about Anne's judgment were gone; the cool self-confidence of that first evening had been a pose, like the indifference of their first encounter. But the painting hung there as a kind of reminder of an identity between them; which grew. The silences no longer mattered.
'Your parents know what's happening?'
'Not the whole... but they're not like Anne's. I could make them understand.' She shrugged. 'It's not that. Just the thought of leaving my little forest womb. Somehow here, everything remains possible. I'm just scared of making a decision. Either way.' There was a tiny pattering sound, a moth banging against the lampshade behind the sofa. She glanced at it, then back at her lap. 'And then I wonder whether there's any connection between becoming a decent painter and... being normal.'
'You're not going to paint any better by forcing yourself to be abnormal.'
'Doing what everyone expects.'
'Surely what you ought to do is what you feel you need. And to hell with everyone.'
'I don't know how to give up. That's my trouble. I always have to stick things out to the bitter end.'
'You gave up the College.'
'It was totally against my nature. You've no idea. Trying to prove I wasn't what I am. And anyway, it was only out of the frying-pan. I'm even worse now than I was before.'
She had subsided a little, her knees still up. The one light in the room was on the floor behind her. David's eyes hardly moved now from the shadowed profile of her face. There was a deep nocturnal silence, both inside the house and out; as if they were alone in it, and in the world. He felt he had travelled much further than he expected, into the haunted and unpredicted; and yet in some strange way it seemed always immanent. It had had to come, it had had causes, too small, too manifold to have been detected in the past or to be analysed now.
'This... affaire you had ended badly?'
'Yes.'
'His fault?'
'Not really. I expected too much. He was jealous about my getting into the College.'
'Yes, Anne told me.'
There was another little silence.
He said, 'I'm not being very helpful.'
'Yes you are.'
'Platitudes.'
'No.'
And more silence, as if they were quite literally in the forest; the way hidden birds sing, spasmodically, secretly shifting position between utterances.
She said, 'Anne's got this marvellous ability to give herself. To keep hoping. One day someone nice will realize what she is. Behind all the nonsense.'
'What would happen if she left you here on your own?'
'That's something I try not to think about.'
'Why?'
Again she was slow to answer.
'I feel she's my last hold on... the real world?' She added, 'I know I'm using her. Her affection. A kind of messiness in her. The eternal student.' She smoothed a hand along the back of the sofa. 'Sometimes I wonder if I'm not bent or something.'
She had touched on what had also touched David's mind once or twice during that day. He guessed that dubbing herself the freak of the two hid a truth. The physical side of her life with Henry must be deeply against the grain of her 'innocent' self. She was in that sense much more perverse than Anne. Yet the real repression must be of a normal sexuality, a femaleness that cried out for He said gently, 'Not a hope. If I'm a judge.'
'I'm not serious. We've even discussed it. We... ' but she didn't finish.
'It seems to me that this remarkable honesty you have about yourself is a kind of danger. You know. There's something to be said for instinct.'
'I don't have much faith in my instincts.'
'Why not?'
'Being an only child. Having no comparisons to go by. You can get your own age-group so wrong. I had it with Anne in the beginning. We lived in the same house, but for months I didn't like her, I thought she was just a little tramp. Then one day I went to her room to borrow something. And she was crying her sister, some upset at home. We began to talk. She told me all about herself. And we never looked back.' She said nothing for a moment. 'The same thing happened with Tom, in reverse. I started feeling sorry for him. He was terribly insecure underneath. So one moment you're turning up your nose at a heart of gold, the next you're giving body and soul to someone who's not worth it.' She said, 'I did try. After Tom. At the College. With another first-year boy. He was nice, but... it was just bed. Feeling lonely.'
'Perhaps you expect too much.'
'Someone who can see what I am?'
'That's rather difficult. If you're hidden away'
She shook her head. 'Perhaps I don't want it to happen. I don't know any more.'
There was another silence. She stared at her skirt. He watched her present metaphorical nakedness, and thought of the previous literal one; and knew that words were swiftly becoming unnecessary; were becoming, however frank or sympathetic, not what the situation asked. The moth battered minutely again at the lampshade. There were others loosely constellated on the glass outside the window over her work-table, pale fawn specks of delicate, foolish organism yearning for the impossible. Psyches. The cruelty of glass: as transparent as air, as divisive as steel. She spoke again.
'I've got so frightened by strangers. It's ridiculous, the other day Anne and I were picked up by two law students in Rennes did she tell you?'
She looked across at him then; and he shook his head.
'I was panic-stricken that they'd find out about Coët. Want to come here. As if I was a virgin or something. A nun. It's the effort of getting to know people. All the crossed wires. Or the ones I seem to produce.'
He could have smiled then: the statement denied itself. Perhaps she sensed it.
She murmured, 'Present company excepted.'
He said softly, 'Not that rare a species.'
She nodded, once, but said nothing. She seemed almost frozen now on the sofa, hypnotized by her hands, by the need not to look at him.
'I wanted to meet you. Last November. After the show. To come and talk about my work.'
He leant forward. 'Why on earth... it would have been so easy to fix.' They had discovered that afternoon that David knew her tutor at the College.
She gave a faint smile. 'For the same reasons I wait till now to tell you?'
She added, 'And my one previous experience of inviting myself unwanted into a successful painter's life.'
He had a sudden perception of the strange hazardousness of existence; of how little, a word from her, a raised 'phone, it would have taken for such a meeting to have been. Then what, he wondered; the same chemistry, in London? He didn't know; only that the now seemed more pregnant, more isolated, and somehow more inevitable. And he guessed, he began to know her so well, why the word had not been spoken: less a shyness than a kind of pride. There had been a photograph of him in the catalogue, a mention that he was married and had children. Perhaps that as well; already a flight from potential crossed wires. One way of not experiencing them was never to use the instrument.
'Do you wish you had?'
'It's too late for wishing.'
Again neither of them spoke. Then she bent forward and touched her forehead against her knees. For a few moments he had both a fear and a wanting that she was about to cry. But with a sudden change of mood, or reaction to whatever she was thinking, she put her feet down off the couch and stood. He watched her walk to the work-table. She stared down at her portfolio a second, then looked up through the window at the night.
'I'm sorry. You didn't come here for all this.'
'I wish desperately that I could help.'
She began to tie up the portfolio. 'You have. More than you know.'
'It doesn't feel like it.'
She said nothing for a moment or two.
'What do you think I should do?'
He hesitated, then smiled. 'Find someone like me? Who isn't married? If that doesn't sound too impossibly vain.'
She tied a final bow in the tags of black ribbon.
'And Henry?'
'Not even a Rembrandt has the right to ruin someone else's life.'
'I'm not sure it isn't ruined already.'
'That's self-pity. Not the real you.'
'Cowardice.'
'Also not the real you.' He watched her staring out into the night again. 'I know he dreads losing you. He told me. Before dinner. But he's lost women all his life. I think he's more inured to it than you imagine.' He added, 'And perhaps we could do something to make it easy. At least find him help in the studio.'