by Pat Barker
He sat at the kitchen table, his bad leg stretched out in front of him, and watched her pour boiling water into the teapot.
‘How is it? Your leg.’
‘Still attached. I’m one of the lucky ones.’
‘Do you feel lucky?’
‘We-ell. No; yes, I do really.’
‘I’ll let you put the milk in, you know how you like it.’
‘Do you remember the night I proposed to you, I couldn’t kneel down?’
‘I don’t recall you trying very hard.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I did, I was very romantic. Then.’
‘Well, go on, what about it?’
‘It’s the same knee.’
‘That’s it, is it? I was expecting another proposal, at least.’
‘It’s interesting, that’s all. Wounded twice in exactly the same place.’
‘What do you think God’s trying to tell you, Paul? Leave the Church of England? Become a Methodist? They don’t kneel.’
She came and sat opposite him. With her thin arms crossed over her chest, she seemed wary, almost nervous. There was something dried up about her, old-maidish, even. A flare of hope he’d experienced upstairs, when he watched her stroke the counterpane, faded. He thought, sadly, of the house in Ypres where the brass bedstead had seemed to grow till it filled the whole room. And that night, the first night they’d ever spent together, that bed had been the whole world.
‘I kept expecting to see you in London,’ he said.
‘I don’t get up to town much these days.’
He glanced round the room. It was a farmhouse kitchen, designed to be lived in rather than set apart for cooking. A fire burnt in the small grate; there was a scent of pine cones. On a table by the door, a vase of dried hogweed cast dramatic shadows across the whitewashed wall.
‘It’s nice here, but doesn’t it get a bit lonely?’
‘Not really. And I certainly don’t miss London. You get so much more work done down here.’
‘So you are managing to work?’
‘Non-stop. How about you?’
He hesitated. ‘I’ve been commissioned as a war artist.’
‘Yes, I heard.’
He waited for her to congratulate him.
‘Pay’s good. Five pounds a week.’
‘That is good. Have you started anything yet?’
‘I’ve done a couple of landscapes. Well, you know me, what else would I paint?’
‘Corpses?’
‘Not allowed.’
‘Ah.’
‘You don’t approve.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with me.’
The conversation was sticky, punctuated by long silences, though not from any lack of things to say. They were tiptoeing round each other, each aware of the possibility of a sudden flare-up. If nothing else was left of their long, fractious love affair, a willingness to speak hurtful truths, and a fear of hearing them, remained.
‘I’m actually working at the Slade,’ Paul said. ‘I bumped into Tonks and he said I could have a room.’
‘Doesn’t five pounds a week run to a studio?’
‘Yes, but I need a lot of space. Some of the paintings are going to be quite big.’
‘How big?’
He spread his arms wide.
‘Hmm. Mind you don’t fall off the scaffold.’
He laughed, but he was nettled by her sarcasm. This was exactly the kind of prickly, competitive exchange he was used to having with Kit Neville, and one or two other of his male contemporaries. But then, Elinor had always been more like a brilliant, egotistical boy than a girl. He remembered a fancy-dress party at the Slade – the end of his first term – coming into the hall and seeing a figure dressed as Harlequin, wearing a mask. He hadn’t known, at first glance, whether it was a man or a woman. Later, when he danced with her, her body against his had felt slim and muscular, but very far from masculine. The mask, the anonymity, had excited him, especially when he realized there was a second Harlequin figure, also female. He didn’t know, to this day, which girl he’d danced with first.
With an effort, he dragged himself back to the present. He’d feel more bones than curves if he danced with her now.
‘I was so sorry to hear about Toby.’
He’d already offered his condolences twice, once by letter and once, in person, at the hospital, but he felt it needed to be said again. She nodded; her eyes were bright though he suspected she was past crying. He wondered if she’d ever really cried at all.
‘You know, at first I thought “Missing, Believed Killed” meant there was a tiny bit of hope, but Father says they don’t say that unless they’re sure. It just means there’s nothing left, nothing identifiable.’
She was looking at him, perhaps even now cherishing a small, flickering hope that he might say something different.
‘Your father’s right, I’m afraid.’
‘But surely they’d find the identity disc?’
‘Not necessarily, not if it was a direct hit.’ He groped for something to soften the brutal reality. ‘It would be very quick, no pain, he wouldn’t even have known.’
God, the platitude count was mounting. He hated visiting bereaved relatives; you always ended up saying something utterly banal. Or, worse still, telling lies.
‘Did you know Kit was one of Toby’s stretcher-bearers?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘Actually, I haven’t heard from Kit for quite a while.’
‘Nor me.’ She took a deep, unsteady breath. ‘After Toby – after we got the telegram – I wrote to Kit to ask him if he knew anything, but I didn’t get a reply. I thought it was a bit odd, really. I mean, you’d expect a letter of condolence, wouldn’t you? I mean, he knew Toby, they served together. Only for two or three months, but … Well, I suppose that’s not very long.’
‘Out there it is.’
‘But no, nothing. Not a word. I thought, he can’t have got the letter, so I wrote again.’ She shrugged. ‘Still nothing.’
‘Perhaps he just didn’t know what to say.’
A weak explanation, and not one he accepted for a moment. It was extraordinary that Neville hadn’t written. Why hadn’t he? Because he knew how Toby had died and for some reason couldn’t bring himself to trot out the usual consoling platitudes? But that didn’t excuse ignoring her letters. In fact, Paul couldn’t think of a single acceptable excuse.
‘You must have heard from Toby’s CO?’
‘A couple of sentences. Quite … I don’t know. Grudging.’
‘You could always try the Padre.’
‘Oh, he wrote too, same sort of thing. “Very gallant officer” – so on and so forth. I could’ve told them that.’
‘They mightn’t know anything.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ She wiped her hand across her eyes. ‘Do you think it’s too early for a glass of wine?’
‘I think it’s a marvellous idea.’
She fetched a bottle from the dresser. ‘Here, you open it. I get into a muddle with that corkscrew.’
He drew the cork, poured wine into two glasses and handed one to her. ‘Well,’ he said, at a loss for words. ‘Absent friends.’
They moved closer to the fire. He was glad not to have the expanse of the table between them, though she chose an armchair and left him to occupy the sofa alone. For a moment the only sound was the crackle and hiss of flames.
‘You know, you said once if Toby died you’d come back here and paint the countryside he grew up in. You said you’d want to paint what made him, not what destroyed him.’
She smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve done.’
‘Does it help?’
‘No, nothing helps.’
He waited, but she was not to be trapped into a line of conversation that might end in tears.
‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
They walked across the yard where a few white hens pecked in a desultory way at the dust. A cockerel stalked towards them, shaking his blood-red comb,
the last rays of the setting sun waking an emerald gleam in his black neck feathers.
‘I work in the barn now. I find it helps to leave the house in the morning, you know? To actually go to work.’
‘I’m just the same, I thought at first I’d hate getting up in the mornings and going to the Slade, but actually I prefer it.’
The barn was dark at first, so dark he almost stumbled, but there was a door immediately ahead. Once that was open, he saw that the interior was flooded with light: oblique, amber light at this hour of the afternoon, but the windows faced north. The morning light must be wonderful.
Facing the door was an easel, partially draped in a paint-daubed white cloth. Instinctively, he looked away; work in progress was always private. The completed canvases were stacked against a wall.
She waved him over to them. ‘Go on, have a look.’
He took his time. To be brutally honest, he’d expected nostalgia: scenes from rural life, happy children, impossibly long, golden summer days. Instead, he found himself looking at a series of winter landscapes, empty of people. Well, that was his first impression. When he looked more closely, he realized that every painting contained the shadowy figure of a man, always on the edge of the composition, facing away from the centre, as if he might be about to step outside the frame. Many of these figures were so lightly delineated they might have been no more than an accidental confluence of light and shade. He stood back, trying to pin down his response. At one level these were firmly traditional landscape paintings, but there was something unsettling about them. Uncanny. Oddly enough, he recognized the feeling. It was the paradox of the front line: an apparently empty landscape that is actually full of men. How on earth had she managed to get that?
‘They’re very good,’ he said, at last.
‘It’s not about that.’
‘No.’
He held up a canvas, one of the few she’d had framed. It showed the hill behind the house; under the trees, at the edge of the painting, was a patch of deeper shadow that might, or might not, be the head and shoulders of a man. Paul intended to say how much he admired it. Instead, he said, ‘He looks as if he’s trying to get out.’
Her eyes flared. ‘It’s interesting you should say that. I had a lot of trouble with that one. I thought I’d got it and … and then when I came down the next morning the figure had moved.’ She caught his expression. ‘Of course, I don’t mean actually moved. I must have remembered it wrong.’
‘He’s in every painting. Toby.’
‘A male figure.’ She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Oh, all right, Toby. But I’m not running away from it, you know. It’s not like you and your corpseless war.’
‘Don’t let’s argue. They are very, very good.’ Clearly, Toby had become her muse. Her talent flourished on his death, like Isabella’s pot of basil growing out of a murdered man’s brains. Elinor wasn’t flourishing, though. When he turned to look at her, he noticed again the shadows under her eyes. ‘You must be pleased.’
‘Ye-es. Only I don’t seem to know where I’m going any more.’ She pointed to the easel. ‘I’ve been trying to finish that for … Oh, I don’t know, feels like for ever.’
‘Perhaps you need a break. Why don’t you come to London?’
‘Yes, I will, I do need a break, but it can’t be next weekend, I’ve got to go to my sister’s. It would’ve been Toby’s twenty-eighth on Saturday. I can’t not be there for that.’
He took a last look round. The sunlight was almost gone and there was a distinct chill in the air.
‘Come on,’ she said, touching his arm. ‘Let’s go and eat.’
Dinner was rabbit stew with herbs and vegetables from the garden: better food than you’d easily find in London these days. At first they ate in silence. Fastidiously, he removed a slug from his cabbage and set it down carefully on the side of his plate.
‘Protein,’ she said, drily. ‘Don’t waste it.’
‘I’ll stick to the rabbit, if you don’t mind.’
After they’d finished eating, they returned to sit by the fire. She was drinking quickly, always an encouraging sign, and as she drank some colour returned to her cheeks and her cheekbones looked a little less sharp, but she was much too thin. Her breasts hardly lifted the cotton blouse, though he caught the shadows of her nipples as she leaned forward to refill his glass.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I was trying to remember the first time I saw you.’
‘It would’ve been in the Antiques Room, surely?’
‘No, I mean, really saw you. Saw you, saw you. You were running down Gower Street with the girls –’
Her lips curved. ‘Oh, the wild girls –’
‘And you must’ve got a stone in your shoe or something because you suddenly stopped and took it off, and you had these black stockings on, and there was a great big hole in the heel and all this pink skin peeping out. I thought it was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen.’
She burst out laughing. ‘Paul, that is pathetic.’
‘No, it’s not –’
‘You were drawing naked women every day.’
‘Nudity’s not all that interesting. Your heel – that was the thing.’
Self-consciously, she tucked her feet under the chair. She sipped her wine, not looking at him, but she was aware of him now, and, more importantly, she was aware of herself, of her nipples rubbing against the rough cotton of her blouse, of the tops of her thighs pressed moistly together under the thick woollen skirt. Feeling his gaze on her, she put a hand up to the nape of her neck.
‘You’re growing it again.’
‘Not really, I just can’t be bothered to get it cut.’
He began deliberately to talk about the past. The weekend war broke out they’d all been together in this house: Elinor, Toby, Kit and himself. Blazing hot, he remembered it, and as the dusty, late-summer days passed, the news from London had become grimmer.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘I looked out of the window and you and Dad were on the terrace talking about it.’
‘Oh, and Toby’s friend was staying too – what was his name?’
‘Andrew? He was killed in 1915. It changed Toby, there was always a kind of sadness about him after that.’
‘They were revising, weren’t they? And the rest of us all went off to see a church. The Doom. And on the way back Kit fell off his bike. Do you remember?’
‘Yes – he asked me to marry him.’
‘Then?’
‘Lying on the ground like a wounded hero.’
‘I didn’t know that. The slithy tove.’
‘Did you ever see him out there?’
‘Once, in Ypres. That was back in – oh, I don’t know. December, ’14? He was incredibly drunk, and we spent the entire evening talking about you.’
‘Hmm, did you? I’m glad I wasn’t a fly on that wall.’
‘All very flattering.’ Though it hadn’t been. Our Lady of Triangles, Neville had called her, and he certainly hadn’t meant it as a compliment. Well, no triangles now: just a strange, solitary woman obsessively painting her dead brother. ‘This is good,’ he said, taking another sip of the wine.
She’d eaten well, and the food seemed to have lightened her mood. She sat more easily, smiled more naturally. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he thought she might have run a comb through her hair.
After coffee, they spent a few minutes walking in the garden. A full moon threw their linked shadows across the lawn, but the temperature was falling rapidly and he was glad when she suggested they should go back inside. In the doorway, he paused, looking at the room they were about to enter: shadows flickering on the walls, pools of golden light around the lamps, two wine glasses side by side on the table. Whatever else happened tonight, he would remember this.
And what was going to happen was agonizingly difficult to predict. They took their glasses through to the drawing room. She sat at the piano, he joined her there, their hips and thighs almost, but not quite, touching. He cou
ld hardly play at all and she was by no means the accomplished young lady her mother had no doubt wished to produce, but together they managed to cobble together a medley of music-hall favourites, improvised, talked, laughed, sang, drank, before finally sinking into two armchairs. Suddenly, neither of them could think of anything to say. In the silence, he heard the clock ticking towards midnight.
He reached out and took her hand, feeling her finger bones crunch as he tightened his grip. ‘How long have you been here on your own?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve lost track. Mother’s staying with Rachel.’
‘How is she?’
‘Not good. To begin with she just seemed … dazed. Lay on the sofa all day, didn’t get dressed … They all thought I ought to stay and look after her, but …’ She shook her head. ‘We’d have killed each other in a week.’
That hardness in her. It was growing, he thought.
‘Anyway, she’s happier there. She’s got the grandchildren. Children help because they don’t understand, they live in the present. Animals too. He’s been wonderful.’ She nodded at Hobbes, who raised his head, then lowered it again with a groan, keeping his bloodshot eyes fixed on her. ‘Never says the wrong thing because he never says anything.’
‘Doesn’t it help to talk?’
‘Well, you know. You must’ve lost people …?’
‘It’s not the same out there.’
She was waiting for him to go on, and that was new. For the first time ever she’d asked him a question about the war.
‘Chap out there – Barnes, he was called, Titus Barnes. God knows why his parents thought they had the right to inflict that on him. Anyway, he got hit in the head, one side blown off. It was a couple of days before we could get to see him. And of course we all sat round and listened to him snore, it was pretty grim, we knew he wouldn’t live – the puzzle was why he was still alive – and we’d all liked him. But then we had to go, and by the time we’d gone a hundred yards we were laughing and joking as if nothing had happened.’ He looked at her averted face. ‘Sorry, I know it sounds harsh, but there’s not a lot of point grieving when you know you’re going to be next.’
He couldn’t tell what she thought. She was looking down at the dregs of wine in her glass, swishing them from side to side. ‘Can I get you another?’