Next to Nature, Art

by Penelope Lively

  Mary Chambers has wandered into the library, there being a few minutes yet before it is time to gather for the morning’s activities. She is anxious to identify the daisy-like flower that springs from the cracks in the paving all over the terrace and paths. It’s a daisy, isn’t it? Paula had replied, on enquiry, but Mary suspects otherwise and searches for a flower book, to set her mind at rest. The library, however, a cavernous, dusty, echoing and unwelcoming room beyond the Common Room, is a disappointment, lined with row upon row of mainly empty shelves. Toby has sold off, over the years, any book to which value had accrued by virtue of age or rarity. Now, dog-eared paperbacks slide into thirties editions of H. E. Bates, Mary Webb, Michael Arlen, Whitaker’s Almanac; a few bound copies of Punch; a Shakespeare; an incomplete Dickens; oddments of poetry; Who’s Who for 1939; the Good Food Guide for 1964. No dictionary. Certainly no flower book. She glances through the paperbacks for a novel to read in bed, but there is little that she does not already know: old Graham Greenes, Evelyn Waughs, thrillers, a few fifties Pelicans. She leafs through Clive Bell’s Civilization, a tattered copy, evidently well-read: Toby, at one time, was very taken with the idea of a leisured creative elite, so long as one was part of it, and indeed privately regrets that the ethos of today compels one to subscribe – at least out loud – to the notion of equality of creative opportunity. Mary stands for a few minutes reading, a slight frown on her face. She is interrupted though, by the sound of voices. There is, unknown to her, a further door to the library, beyond a huge leather screen at the far end, and Toby and Bob have at this moment come through this, engaged in a discussion that does not sound entirely amiable. Mary pops Civilization back on the shelf and hastily retreats.

  “Thirty per cent” says Bob.

  “Look, Bob, there are four of us. Me, Paula, Greg, you. Right? You’re pushing it a bit.”

  Bob grins.

  “O.K., I know the potting’s a big draw. But fair’s fair. We’ve always split four ways. Actually Paula’s always felt it ought to be shifted a bit more towards me since after all I provide the ambience.”

  “Some of us,” says Bob, “have done a fair bit to ginger up the bloody ambience.”

  “All right, all right – you did a marvellous job on the studio and I appreciate it. You’re a damn good carpenter – I wish I had the patience for that kind of thing myself. But thirty per cent – Christ, Bob! Look, I’ll have a talk to Paula about it.”

  “You do that, old lad.”

  “It goes without saying,” continues Toby, after the slightest of pauses, “that I tremendously value your contribution to Framleigh.”

  “Grand,” says Bob. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “There is always the possibility that I may one day be able to expand the whole Framleigh concept, in which case …” – Toby gestures, implying untold munificence – “But for the time being, as you well know, we’re working within a very restricted margin. Frankly one is overwhelmed at times with the administrative hassles.”

  “Me heart’s bleeding for you, mate” says Bob. “Think it over, anyway.” And goes.

  Potters, of course, are two a penny. On the other hand a potter who can also turn his hand to carpentry, the odd building job, bits of general maintenance, and whose bluff northern charm is a proven attraction, is perhaps another matter. Toby himself regrets the present Framleigh financial set-up, whereby the four permanent faculty split between them, as salary, whatever profit remains when the cost of running the courses is deducted from the cash they bring in. He would have preferred what he calls a more genuine co-operative system whereby there was some kind of kitty and he administered it, but somehow that idea has never appealed to the others. Paula can really be irritatingly middle-class about money and Greg was remarkably quick, Toby feels, to latch onto the fact that some kind of a share-out was in operation. If and when the Framleigh Foundation comes into being there will be an altogether different arrangement, which quite possibly will not include Bob, Greg or conceivably Paula at all.

  “Married to Toby!” says Paula. “God, what do you take me for!”

  The day being of such perfection, she has declared it would be a crime to stay stuck in the studio, and accordingly has taken her group outside into the park for some simple sketching. Corny, says Paula, but fun. Find something nice and textural, children, and draw away. Even the hackneyed old wild flower study I shan’t reject. Right – back to the drawing-board!

  Keith is trying an impression of the house from one side of the prospect, where he sits with Paula on a section of broken stone coping. Paula, from time to time, drifts off to oversee others of her charges and then returns to take up the conversation; this enormously gratifies Keith, though the drawing frankly is boring him – he had no idea a house had so many blasted angles.

  Keith shifts uncomfortably. “Well, I imagined … Jason, after all …”

  “Oh – Jason. Yes, Jason’s Toby’s of course. But the point about children is that they are, isn’t it? Not whose they are.”

  “Mmn,” says Keith noncomittally.

  “I’ve had the marriage bit,” says Paula, “absolutely and once and for all.”

  Reluctant to pursue this, Keith returns to the matter uppermost in his mind: the conflict between his own life and what he feels may be his nature. “Sometimes I feel like throwing it all up,” he says, “and doing my own thing.”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  Keith hesitates. “Well – money, security and all that stuff. It’s a question of Karen and the kids really.”

  Paula shrugs.

  “I mean, I know if I put it to Karen, of course she’d say do it. But it seems so selfish. You can’t just think of what’s right for you personally.”

  Paula, shredding a grass stem, stares at him. “You know, Keith, you’re way off target there. You’re missing the point. It’s not a question of you, it’s what you can do. Your potential.”

  “Oh, I don’t know …” Keith begins modestly, but the reference, he at once realizes with chagrin, is to abstract potential, not to his in particular. To Paula’s, in fact.

  “I mean – what if I’d taken that sort of attitude when Philip – my husband that is but not any more of course – wanted me to rot in Maidenhead as a suburban wife and mum. Dinner parties for his friends, and his parents to stay twice a year.”

  “Well, yes” says Keith. “It would have been the most terrible waste. What did Philip do?” he adds, after a moment.

  “He was a doctor. Still is, presumably. Oh, Christ, it was all just insane. I married him when I was nineteen – I mean, how could I know what I was going to turn into? So I had to duck out of it, didn’t I? If I’d stayed there I’d have become someone else, someone I’m not. There’d have been no ‘Introspective Woman’, no soft sculpture, no mirror work, no ‘Adam and Eve’.”

  “God …” says Keith, nodding. “I see what you mean.” He frowns at his drawing, which grows more unsatisfactory by the minute. “Actually,” he continues, “I wanted to ask you – I’ve been wondering about enrolling for a macramé course at the local poly. Do you think, um, do you think that would be a good idea?”

  Paula pulls a face. “Hobby stuff,” she says, “finicky.”

  Keith, chagrined, jettisons macramé. In fact, during the last year he has run through woodwork, photography and lino-cuts. Photography looked promising for a while and the developing process was satisfying, but somehow his photographs never really seemed artistic – just quite good photographs. Nothing he’d ever taken up had seemed right for him, so far. Poetry. That bloody novel. Writing was the most unsatisfactory of all; in a poem you never could hit on the right word and in a novel something had to darn well happen and the problem was what. Oh, ideas were easy enough – what the stuff was about, one’s responses and all that – it was how to get it down and anyway it all took so long. Something much more immediate is his scene, he suspects.

  He returns to the drawing, and finds that according to him the
building slumps in the middle, not surely a part of Kent’s original conception. Paula has gone; looking up, he sees her wandering down the prospect, striking a vibrant note against the bleached grass, in her long orange skirt and black top. The sun flames the windows of the house, so that it appears to be inwardly consumed by a raging inferno; the prospect rolls down into the Warwickshire fields; a gleaming aircraft with a snout like some probing insect slides up into the sky and swims across the view, roaring. And all around, on the terrace and along the woodland rides and by the cascade and the serpentine rill, people are hunched over drawing-boards, turning nature into art, trying to impose order upon chaos.

  Chapter 5

  “What are they paying, dear?” asks the novelist’s wife, rattling the car over the Framleigh cattle-grid.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing!”

  “I know, I know. I did murmur about usual arrangements and so forth but he’s evasive, this Standish chap. The trouble is, I’ve always rather wanted to see Framleigh.”

  “It could do with having its avenue re-surfaced,” says the novelist’s wife. “This isn’t doing the car any good. God, what’s that thump?”

  “A stone. I say – there’s the house. Rather nice. It’s the park that’s the great thing, of course. He did at least mention dinner.”

  “I should certainly hope so. Thirty miles, on a wet night!”

  Framleigh, revealed suddenly and with a flourish as the road twists, looks more appealing and indeed imposing at this distance than it will do in close-up. From here, the grand design of things is to be appreciated: the closing of the perspective to draw the eye towards the house, the grouping of trees, the use made of contours, the careful manipulation of nature. The novelist wonders how far Kent’s original tree planting survives. His wife, swerving to avoid a pot-hole, asks which particular spiel he is going to give them tonight. The contemporary novel? The writer’s craft? One is tempted, says the novelist, given the setting, to hold forth on the eighteenth century and the picturesque, but I daresay that might be presumptuous – presumably Standish himself is capable of doing that. I suppose in the end I’ll just do a reading and then something general.

  “He’s a painter, did you say? I haven’t heard of him. Or does he paint under some other name?”

  “I don’t think so,” says the novelist. “No, I can’t say I have either.”

  The course members are assembled in the Common Room, awaiting the something rather special arranged by Toby for tonight, Wednesday night. Several people have been mildly disappointed when this is announced as a visit by Richard Waterton, the writer; they had hoped for something a bit more dashing. Someone talking doesn’t sound all that exciting, and most of them have never even heard of him. One or two of those who have had thought he was dead anyway; Tessa, learning that he must be seventy plus, loses interest in the evening altogether and torments herself trying to summon up courage to wander nonchalantly over to the studio and see if Bob is around. Mary Chambers has read several of Waterton’s books, and explains that they are rather intellectual novels but – this, with diffidence – actually she has enjoyed them. Sue, the librarian, who has not read Waterton but has frequently shelved him, points out that he is that old-fashioned kind of writer who also produced in his time poetry and books about other books. Short stories, too, someone else remembers. Greg, who was not consulted about the invitation, says that frankly Waterton is not spaced out, as a writer, and his stuff is way back so far as literature is concerned but he sounds a nice old guy.

  Toby, as it happens, has not read Waterton either but he has seen his name from time to time in the Sunday papers. It is in this context that he has invited him. Waterton, evidently, has an interest in eighteenth century architecture. An article by him on the Adam brothers appeared recently in the Sunday Times; it was rather heavy going and Toby merely skipped through it but it struck him that Waterton might be the man to do an appreciative piece on Framleigh, the strategic appearance of which in something or other would do no harm at all in connection with his telephone conversations with the man in London. Accordingly, he looked Waterton up in Who’s Who and found that he lives in the same county.

  The car draws up outside the house. Waterton and his wife, getting out, study the façade and their faces fall a little. I didn’t realize, says Waterton, about the Victorian addition. Wow, says his wife, look at the greenery growing out of the gutters. And I say that attic window’s got wartime blackout stuff on it still, surely? The accretions of time, says Waterton, appropriately picturesque, I suppose.

  The front door being open, they enter, hesitantly. The sight of Paula’s sculptures in the marble niches of the entrance hall stops them in their tracks. At this moment Paula herself appears, and graciously welcomes. She takes in Waterton, who is a plump and stumpy figure, and his wife who is no beauty and wears a Marks and Spencer’s cotton dress, and the welcome is tinged with patronage. Gracious patronage, naturally. Come, she says, everyone’s agog, and Toby’s about somewhere – ah, here he is.

  Toby comes rapidly from the Common Room, with outstretched hand. I loved your last book, he says simply. And now come and meet people and have a drink. I thought maybe a quick look round the place before we eat and then after dinner everyone’s dying to hear you, does that sound a good arrangement?

  In the Common Room, the Watertons are temporarily quelled again by “Adam and Eve” and the fiery effect of Paula’s ethnic cushions and covers. Waterton, a number of thoughts passing through his head, goes to the window and looks out at the terrace and the prospect. He cheers up. Ah, he says, now the cascade and the serpentine rill are off to the right, are they not? I remember the plans in the Soane Museum. And the temple will be somewhere beyond those trees. Toby opens the french window and the party moves out onto the terrace. The rain has stopped and everything steams a little. Waterton, looking down, says happily, oh, how nice, that little erigeron daisy, one doesn’t often see that. Mary Chambers, close by, says with interest that she’d thought it was an erigeron but hadn’t known which. Eigeron mucronatus, says Waterton, an introduction of course, not native, it naturalizes when it likes the soil. I wonder, Standish, might we nick a root or two before we go? Me too, says Mary, I’d been going to ask; she and Waterton exchange looks of approval.

  “But it’s a weed, surely?” says Paula.

  “Even weeds,” says Waterton with a smile, “have names.”

  “Oh goodness, I can never be bothered with all that. It’s like being back at school, learning lists of things.”

  “A rose is a rose is a rose,” says Mrs Waterton. “That would be your approach?”

  Paula glances rather more sharply at Mrs Waterton; there is an edge to her tone that surely isn’t possible from someone who looks like that. Paula tosses her hair back over her shoulders and wades in her long Indian print skirt through the clutches of the erigeron. The group assembles at the edge of the lily-pond, and stares down into it.

  “You ought to get that Japanese pond-weed out,” says Mrs Waterton. “It’s smothering the water-lilies.”

  Greg points. “It’s full of bugs – look at them all.”

  Waterton peers into the pulsating waters. “Bugs? Oh, I see what you mean. Water-boatmen, snails, too. And there’s a caddis fly.”

  “You people,” says Greg kindly, “really are into terminology, aren’t you?”

  Waterton, straightening, looks at him. “Well, it’s a small way in which one can impose order on an otherwise confusing world. Children get rather keen on it, at quite an early stage, I’ve noticed. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “It’s science, basically” says Greg, “isn’t it? I find myself reacting against anything scientific. As a poet.”

  Waterton opens his mouth, but his eyes meet those of his wife, across the teeming pond, and he closes it again. After a moment he says, “We’d love to see the rest of the park, wouldn’t we, dear?”

  It is indicated to the course members, by Toby, that the conduct
ed tour of the park is a matter for the Framleigh faculty only. No need, he says, for the rest of you to get your feet soaking, and they drift back into the Common Room where one or two head for the decanter of sherry which had arrived to greet the visitors; this, though, has somehow disappeared.

  The Watertons, flanked by Toby, Paula, and Greg and followed by Nick, move down the prospect, stand for a moment to look at the view and have the temple pointed out to them, and then turn into the woodland way, where, in the distance, “Introspective Woman” glints in the orange sunlight that shines now from crevices in the rain-clouds. Waterton says that he seems to remember early prints of the park in which an Apollo stood here, and Toby explains the departure of the Apollo and goes on to remark that most people love the spatial relationships created by the present arrangement and the way it gives a jolt to the visual sense.

  Mrs Waterton remarks that that is an interesting way of putting it. She observes that Henry Moores, in an outdoor setting, do that too. Though, she adds, the effect is rather different. Paula looks again at Mrs Waterton, dumpy in her cotton dress, hugging an anorak round her shoulders; she cannot understand why such a drab little woman should make one feel somehow uncomfortable.

  They visit the cascade and the rill. Waterton is happily enthusiastic, though dismayed at the rampant decay all around. He makes sympathetic sounds in response to Toby’s account of personal struggle and self-sacrifice in the interests of a heritage; Mrs Waterton says little but appears to listen. Greg and Paula fall behind, talking. Nick trails at Toby’s elbow. When they turn off the woodland way into the path to the grotto, passing the site of the stinkhorns, he becomes nervously chatty, and is put down by Toby, who is still outlining to Waterton his schemes for the rehabilitation of the park, if only it were possible.