by Ann Bridge
Perhaps aware of her scrutiny, the young man presently raised his head again. His glance fell on the sketchbook in her lap. ‘May I look?’ he said – and stretching out his hand, took it from her knee. Slipping off the elastic band, he began to turn the pages.
He only turned three or four, and as he did so a curious change came over his expression. He turned back to the beginning, and went through the same ones a second time. Then he looked up at her with a sort of incredulous surprise. ‘Is this your book?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course – whose should it be?’ she answered, her face suddenly charming with amusement.
‘But these are very good,’ he said, in slow astonished tones.
Grace laughed out. ‘Why shouldn’t they be good?’ she asked. For some reason his astonishment was not in the least offensive.
‘Because – that stone at Torcello; you couldn’t draw that at all,’ he said.
‘I know – I’m no good at that complicated mathematical stuff,’ she said. ‘But I can draw places and people all right.’
‘But these are really good – they’re like a professional’s,’ he said.
‘Why shouldn’t I be a professional!’ said Grace, still laughing.
The young man said nothing – he turned back to the sketchbook, and now went all through it, slowly and carefully. Presently – ‘Who did you work with?’ he asked.
‘At the Slade; part of the time with Tonks – and now and then in Paris with Moru.’
‘I thought perhaps Tonks,’ he said. ‘I don’t know Moru’s work so well; so much of it is in private hands. Do you show in London?’
‘No, hardly at all – in Paris mostly,’ said Grace. She was beginning to get a little nervous; the boy knew rather too much. It was tiresome enough that he should know her as Lady Kilmichael – if he tumbled to the fact that she was also Grace Stanway he might really begin to talk, or rather write, and her whereabouts be given away. It was stupid of her to have let him see the sketchbook at all. She stretched out her hand for it, in her turn; he gave it up, and she closed it.
‘It’s odd I shouldn’t have seen any of your things, all the same,’ he said. ‘I generally nose round a bit among the modern stuff, and I’ve been in Paris once or twice lately. Where do you show there?’
‘Oh, here and there – wherever I can get in,’ said Lady Kilmichael, hurriedly and untruthfully. Really today was being a terrible day for lies and concealments.
‘Kilmichael – Kilmichael,’ said the young man, frowning and looking out to sea. ‘No, I can’t remember a single thing.’
Grace felt guilty – she minded lying about her painting more than about her plans. Partly out of genuine interest, partly to deflect him from the subject, so strewn with difficulties, of her own work, she said hurriedly, ‘You seem very much interested in painting – why are you not going to be a painter?’
‘Because I’ve got to be an architect,’ he said shortly. Grace realised that she had said the wrong thing, and made some futile and amiable remark about that being very interesting too.
‘It isn’t to me – I hate the idea,’ said the boy, his face more deeply discontented than ever.
‘But you are interested in architecture,’ said Grace, trying, after the manner of the middle-aged, to look on the bright side, and to make youth look on it too. Youth in this case, however, fairly scowled at her.
‘I’m interested in architectural types and development, but not in sanitary fittings,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’ he added, in a cold bitter tone.
‘Of course – certainly,’ said Grace, a little stiffly. He really was very offhand. But pity always triumphed in Lady Kilmichael over her – never very robust – sense of what was due to her, and the sight of the boy’s unhappy resentful face touched her almost at once. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added simply.
This slight episode produced a check to their intercourse, which was only terminated by the boy’s asking her to come and have tea with him in the deck lounge – so obvious an act of reparation that Lady Kilmichael accepted at once. The tea was rather oddly interrupted by the sight of the great Roman amphitheatre at Pola, more or less peering in at them through the glazed windows of the lounge. Young Humphries, finding that they had twenty minutes at Pola, dragged Lady Kilmichael off to see it. But they missed the way, had to scale a wall and drop six feet down into the amphitheatre, and then nearly missed the steamer. For while they stood in the empty grassy space, enclosed by the huge outer shell of the building, rising four storeys high, which is all that is left today, some chance remark of Nicholas’s drew down on him the attention of the black-haired stranger whom they had seen at lunch; and in a moment the two were deep in an archaeological discussion, which Lady Kilmichael tried in vain to break up. The first siren sounded as they left the amphitheatre, and they had to run like beaglers down the interminable quay, Lady Kilmichael, who in her – or rather Nicholas’s – hurry had left her bag on board, reflecting as she ran how excessively disagreeable it would be to be left in Pola (as seemed extremely probable) without her hat, luggage, money, tickets or passport. The other passengers, pleased spectators of the race, clustered above at the rail as the three of them went up the gangway, just when it was on the point of being raised; Lady Kilmichael was uncomfortably conscious of being hatless, breathless, flushed, and dishevelled as to hair. She was quite unaware of how becoming and indeed rejuvenating an effect this had on her appearance. The lively officer, however, standing at the head of the gangway, was clearly aware of it; he eyed her with amused admiration as she came up. ‘La donna e mobile!’ he said, and laughed, showing his handsome teeth. As for young Humphries, like the German mopping his streaming face, he grinned at her with a sort of triumphant proprietary amusement which reminded her sharply of the way Teddy and Nigel always grinned at her when they had managed to ruffle her hair or somehow upset her composure.
‘You can run!’ he said – and then, as at Torcello, he made his favourite comment: ‘What a happy day!’
SIX
It was rather a day, whether happy or not, Lady Kilmichael reflected, as she lay in a bath of hot salt water before dinner; it seemed more like a fortnight than twelve hours since the morning, so varied were the things that had happened. Her unexpected meeting with Lucia Roseneath; telling lies; Walter’s letter, and her struggle and decision not to return; more lies to the boy about her painting; his vexation on the subject of his career – finally the ludicrous Pola escapade. It was not at all like a day at home! And it was odd, having thought and felt so intensely about Walter and Linnet all the morning, to have had time to think so little – indeed really not at all – about them all the afternoon. Was this – to forget about her family – a part of the freedom she was vaguely seeking? She was not sure – what was certain was that it had been a very long day, and that with another 6.30 A.M. start tomorrow, she should go to bed extremely early.
But Lady Kilmichael’s day was not yet over, however retrospectively she might think of it, nor did she go to bed in the least early. It was perhaps natural, after they had shared in that race along the quay at Pola, that the man in spectacles should come up to her when she appeared in the deck lounge before dinner, square his heels, bow, and ask her to do him the honour of taking an aperitif with him. Lady Kilmichael accepted this piece of casual board-ship civility, and they sat drinking white ‘Cora’ vermouth; while they talked she studied his face, and wished again that she could draw it. It was a thoroughly Rembrandt face – furrowed, rugged, intellectual with a touch of mysticism, like so many of Rembrandt’s sitters, fine unmistakeable lines of impatience, even of harshness, round the mouth, a surprising hint of benevolence about the eyes – a face full of contrasts which were not yet denials, for they were unified by the curious but most definite impression of goodness which it gave. He was undoubtedly, from his accent, either a German or an Austrian; and belonging, she judged, to one of the more liberal professions.
He began by asking whether he
r exertions had fatigued her unduly, and next enquired where she was going. (Everyone, Lady Kilmichael noted, seemed to want to know where she was going – it was a universal question.) Spalato, she told him. He immediately became authoritative. There were certain things there which she must see. (She noticed with amusement that he instantly assumed in her a violent interest in the monuments of past ages – a natural assumption, perhaps, in view of her recent efforts to see the amphitheatre, which he had witnessed.) ‘For one thing, gnädige Frau, you must see the Museum. Everyone sees the Diokletianische Palast, and that is well – it is unique. But the Museum you must see also, and few people even know that it exists.’ He went on to explain how it owed its excellence entirely to the energy and devotion of one man, the old Abbé B—, who had spent a lifetime acquiring treasures, raising funds, getting a building erected, collecting an adequate staff. The account caught Grace’s imagination – she was thrilled to learn that the old man was still there, working away. ‘Yes, go and see him, gnädige Frau; it will give him pleasure.’
The black-haired man – she and young Humphries, over their belated and interrupted tea, had decided that he was a professor, and referred to him as such – displayed so much learning that she was about to ask him whether the basilica at Torcello was the original building or not when he startled her by saying – ‘Your son is very intelligent and well-instructed about architecture.’
‘He isn’t my son,’ she said, amused and a little defensive.
‘Oh, pardon! But you travel together?’
‘No, not really – only this little bit. He’s a nephew of a very old friend of mine,’ she added, glad for once that day to be able to furnish an explanation which was perfectly true.
She repeated the Professor’s remark to young Humphries at dinner; she felt that he wanted bucking up, encouragement, from whatever source. The maternal instinct, never far below the surface in Grace Kilmichael, had begun to raise its head again; this young man wanted helping somehow – she wished she could help him; when he grinned at her and talked like the boys, she caught herself feeling – most oddly – almost as if he were one of her own children.
When dinner was over, she said she thought she would go to bed.
‘Oh, you can’t now – you’d get the most appalling indigestion!’ said the young man. ‘Come on deck,’ he urged. She fetched her white coat, and they went up. It was nearly dark; a fresh wind whipped the black glossy surface of the water into broken planes – one or two stars already showed, but out to sea a low line of orange still bordered the western horizon. ‘There’s no Venice against it tonight,’ said the boy, with his conductor’s gesture at the dying sunset.
‘No. I like it better without, I think,’ said Grace.
‘Do you? Why?’
‘It’s freer,’ she said. She had only meant the sense of unobstructed space, of openness, but he took it up otherwise.
‘Do you want freedom?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I suppose so, from some things,’ she answered thoughtfully. It was odd that he should ask her that question just then.
‘Care, perhaps?’ he said, and she could hear the smile with which he said it.
‘No, not care yet,’ she said, smiling too, ‘it’s too soon for that.’
‘I should have thought you were rather free, by now,’ he said, in a different tone. ‘At least people can’t interfere with you at every turn.’
Oh, can’t they? Grace thought – aloud she only said: ‘People can always interfere with one at every turn – that’s not a thing you ever get away from.’
The boy made no answer, and they stood in silence for some time, leaning side by side on the rail, watching the dark water. His mind, Grace felt sure, was on his own troubles, though his speech had skirted round them; his silence held some other impulse too, but she was not sure what. Encouraged by the turn their talk had taken, she gave way to a compassionate impulse of her own – to try and release his sense of grievance somehow. Choosing her words rather carefully this time, she said – ‘I am sorry I vexed you this afternoon by what I said about your work – I’m afraid I was very stupid about it.’
He turned his head towards her. ‘You know the funny thing was, I had been trying to make up my mind to talk to you about it,’ he said. ‘Even before I knew that you painted. But when you began, somehow I couldn’t. Are you ever like that?’
‘I don’t know – I daresay,’ said Grace. (So that was why he had kept on looking at her in that considering way.) ‘Do you want to talk about it now?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, ‘if you’ll let me, that is, after this afternoon.’
‘Of course – I want to know very much. I’ve been wondering about it ever since that night in Venice,’ she said, anxious to make it clear that her interest was sincere.
He did not begin at once, however. He stood staring at the west, which had now faded to an astonishing silvery green; the light from the windows of the saloon shone from behind on his yellow head – his face was in shadow. At last – ‘It’s all one of those silly muddles, not having known what one wanted to do soon enough. But how can one know when one’s frightfully young? If I’d got in first with the painting idea I daresay I might have got away with it. As it was, my sister beat me.’ He paused. ‘I’d better tell you about us; my mother always says I’m so incredibly muddled in my speech! There’s only me and my sister – she’s a year older than me, and good-looking, and clever – she’s really rather a flyer. I should like you to meet her.’
Grace said that she should like to meet her very much.
‘Well, there is always this question of what one is to do,’ he pursued. ‘You might think that was more or less one’s own affair! However! Well, thank God the Army was ruled out, because I have a funny tummy. That’s why I’m starting anything so late – at Oxford it rather knocked me out for a year. And that gave Celia her chance, incidentally. But the really unlucky thing was that when I was a very small boy I was rather good at drawing buildings – churches and ruins and all that; and I thought it was the buildings I liked and not the drawing. So the legend grew up – Little Nicky wanted to be an architect. And when I found out that I didn’t, do you think I could change the legend? Why is it,’ he burst out, ‘that people will go on holding you down to your old ideas when they’re as dead as mutton? Do all parents do it? Even my mother, who really is rather good in most ways, can’t get that out of her head. ‘But dearest boy, you used to want to be an architect!’ She must have said that two hundred times! I know I used – but I don’t now!’
Grace wondered wildly for a moment whether Nigel had really stopped caring about archaeology long since, and whether Teddy now violently resented the recognised prospect of his going into business. However, for the moment that wasn’t the point. ‘How did you find out that you wanted to paint?’ she asked, in her soft voice.
‘I got keener and keener about it all the time I was at Oxford,’ he said – ‘I got into the way of doing a good bit of sketching in the vacs, and I put in some time at the Ruskin School, in the terms.’
‘That’s very sound. Well, then what happened?’ Grace asked. ‘Well, when my tummy began to play me up, I had an operation, and went abroad to get over it – to various places in the Midi, Vence amongst others. And there I fell in with a painting lot, and rather got down to it. I actually worked for six months with Zarini. It was then I decided that I wanted to go in for it, definitely. But by that time Little Sister had made up her mind that she was going to be a painter, and had made a start at the Slade. And the parent struck absolutely at two painters in the family.’
It was rather gloomy for the General, Lady Kilmichael reflected. But she said nothing.
‘That’s the sort of irrational idea that people get hold of, and simply clasp,’ he went on. ‘Why not let ten children be artists, if they’re good artists? But the maddening thing in this case is that Celia really isn’t any good at it, and never will be. She’s quite incapable of drawing. It’s jus
t a stunt. She’d had three seasons and was at a loose end, and wanted something to take up. It was a poor choice,’ he said impartially, ‘because it’s just about the one thing she’s not clever at.’
Lady Kilmichael here risked asking an obvious but rather offensive question. ‘Are you sure that you would be – are – any good at it; painting, I mean?’
‘Zarini thought so,’ he said. ‘He was quite firm about it. Of course he’s youngish still, but he’s pretty well recognised. You know him, I expect.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘But you know his work?’
‘Hardly at all – but that doesn’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘I’m not really in with painters much. I just paint. It’s rather a side issue with me,’ she explained, anxious to account for her ignorance of Zarini. She had just heard M. Breuil, or Moru, or someone, mention him as a Corsican who was coming on, and might make a great noise some day; but what she did know, for all her professed ignorance of the world of artists, was how often these future great noises die away unheard.