Next to Nature, Art

by Penelope Lively

  Out into the bright Framleigh morning, empty as yet of anyone else, both faculty and course members being as yet either at breakfast or slowly rising, recalling with degrees of surprise the curiosities of the previous evening. Jason, for whom the evening was neither here nor there and is now in any case of no further interest, wanders into the anarchic world of the woodland way, bright with sun and leaf, active from the teeming undergrowth to the tops of the swaying trees. He is without plan or purpose – this of course distinguishing him from the life by which he is surrounded, most of which is busy either eating or being eaten. He pauses to investigate a dead pigeon, an ants’ nest, a hole in a dead tree. He is bored as only a child can be bored, drifting from one distraction to another; he ploughs through time like someone walking through water. And the day is uncontrollable, as are all days, so far as he is concerned it might go on for ever, time is chaotic, unreliable, it expands and contracts like elastic, already he has lost his bearings and cannot remember if the next meal is breakfast or lunch. He ponders this problem for a moment, then abandons it to follow a speckled butterfly that is wavering around his knees. He echoes the butterfly’s apparently purposeless flight up and down Kent’s woodland ride until it arrives at the plant for which, perhaps, it had been searching. It settles, and Jason squatting, examines it. Its wings have an intricate pattern of cream spots and its body is powdered with golden fur. Jason perceives that in some way this is marvellous, but the thought does not form itself into words; he simply absorbs the butterfly, amid the humming morning.

  The course members, being mature and ordered people, unlike Jason, are quite clear about the time of day. Some of them are complaining that breakfast is twenty minutes late, and casting aspersions on the efficiency of those on kitchen duty this morning. And the tea is stewed, at that.

  The truth is that most of them are a little out of sorts this morning; their equilibrium is disturbed. Last night’s atmosphere hangs still in the Common Room, seedy as stale smoke. There is a feeling of things having in some way got out of control, of people behaving in ways they would not normally; Sue remembers giggling at that really rather nice old man, who reminded her faintly of her grandfather. Keith, in that disorienting darkness, had at one point laid his knee against Paula’s adjoining knee: what he cannot now decide, and the uncertainty is demoralizing, is whether what he took to be an answering pressure may not have been merely Paula shifting position in the stress of the discussion. Everyone has a sense of the subtle turning of the tables upon the Watertons, who had seemed initially such sane, almost reassuring, representatives of what several still think of as the ordinary world. Although of course Richard Waterton was – is – himself an artist, of a kind, which confuses the matter.

  Tessa is silent, inwardly burning with a mixture of shame, anxiety and excitement. It isn’t that she has not been to bed with anyone before, actually there have been three – well, two and a half, sort of – but this was different. She hadn’t realized people actually … The night returns, and she bends scarlet-cheeked over the cornflakes.

  Mary Chambers is thinking about Framleigh: not its physical manifestation but its capacity for … for somehow upsetting people, discomforting them, engendering conflict. And that of course stems not from the place but from its occupants though there is a curious sense in which the house and the park are a demonstration of this: the jarring apposition of the harmony and order of their conception and the muddle of today. She thinks again, with a twinge of doubt, of Toby’s “little talk” on the first night; “doing your own thing” is of course an expression one hears a lot these days. A lot of people seem to feel it is a good idea. Observing, last night, the disintegration of the Watertons, she felt uneasily that the Framleigh atmosphere included a corrosive substance – corrosive of the personality. People, here, tended to behave not quite like themselves, as though some lurking aspect of the character got, for a while, the upper hand. You could tell the Watertons weren’t really like that at all; that business after the lights went out was ridiculous.

  Toby is irritable. Waterton, clearly, hadn’t exactly been on the Framleigh wave-length; not that the power failure helped, of course, or Paula and Greg being so bloody argumentative, but the thing was a wash-out anyway. No point in bringing up the subject of an article in one of the Sundays. He does not appear for breakfast, but drinks tea in the kitchen, after a barbed exchange with Paula. Subsequently, another line of thought leads him to the gun-room, where he spends some time finding out the telephone number of the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

  There is a row – superficially genteel, but a row nevertheless – between Jean Simpson and one of the other women about the duty rota. Some people feel they are doing rather more than their fair share. In fact the real world – the world of washing-up and negotiation and expedient behaviour – is impinging more than anyone had anticipated. Curiously, no one blames this on the Framleigh people; it is felt, still, that they can hardly be expected to cope as adroitly as others with that kind of thing. They were let down by the Filipino girls.

  It is, now, Thursday morning, and one or two people remark on this, noting that it doesn’t feel like it and how nice not to be on the way to work, or already at it. In fact, the three days of the course have already produced such a sense of suspended time that what day it is seems neither here nor there, Framleigh being above or beyond such mundane tetherings. This must be the life, sighs Jean Simpson, just getting up in the morning and doing what you want to do, day in day out. She is reproved by Keith Harrap, who points out that what is done is work the same as any other. Artists work. Well yes, of course, she says, I know that, what I meant was … Her voice trails off. She gives Keith a nasty look. I didn’t mean what they’re doing isn’t serious, don’t get me wrong, just it’s …

  Nicer, thinks Mary Chambers. Oh yes, much nicer, surely? Her own day, at this time, would be a tumultuous but planned and indeed orderly process of getting people off to school and the house cleared up and herself into the car and on the road for the polytechnic where she works three days a week as part-time secretary in the administration office. She quite likes the job but it is not, of course, in the last resort, interesting. When people ask her what she does and she tells them they say oh yes, and there is a silence. Quite often. Presumably that does not happen to Paula. Or to Toby or to Bob or to Greg. This has never, in fact, bothered her much; she is as interested in her own response to others as theirs to her, though the responses tend to be private. When Mary does not like someone they usually remain unaware of the fact. She wonders, occasionally, if she is too passive a person. But passivity implies absence of feeling, and Mary has feelings all right. It is simply that she does not normally express them; she cannot remember when she last shouted at anyone, and the nearest she comes to a display of ill temper is heightened colour. “It’s good that you’re expressing yourself more,” her sister said recently, looking at her paintings; exasperation turned Mary crimson.

  No, she does not envy the Framleigh people exactly; besides, they are different from most people she knows or has known and envy is reserved for those most accessible, on the whole. She does, perhaps, envy their capacities, their artistic capacities. And yet … She thinks of Greg’s poems, which are all about Greg. And Toby’s suite of lithographs called “Personality studies” which are not of people at all but are elegantly coloured distributions of spirals and loops and coils. And Paula’s soft sculptures and chicken wire creations and her mirror things which do indeed look quite difficult to do but don’t somehow add to your vision of anything except possibly old tights or chicken wire or pieces of broken mirror.

  Keith, having put down Jean, is feeling slightly disgusted with himself. Ever since he came here he has had this tendency to be snide with people which is not the way he normally is except towards one or two colleagues who damn well ask for it. But Jean is a perfectly agreeable woman, if unoriginal. Keith telephoned his wife late last night, and knows in retrospect that he wasn’t very nice to her, eith
er, and for no good reason except that she mentioned some problem with a blocked drain. Just at the moment he doesn’t want to know about things like that. His irritation with Jean is of course because he himself had been thinking much the same thing, but in his case envy of the Framleigh life-style is mixed with uncertainties about his own. What if he did chuck it all up? What if he went home to Karen and said right, we’re off to Majorca or Cornwall or wherever, I’m getting out of the rat-race, I’m going to see if I can make out in hand-crafted furniture?

  On the terrace, awaiting Toby with his clip-board and the morning’s distribution process, the group is quiet, preoccupied along these lines, and others. Jason, emerging from one side of the prospect, sees them as unavoidable and perhaps unfortunate furnishings of the place; they interest him rather less than the more unpredictable and entertaining aspect of Framleigh – the infinitely flexible landscape, to be made into what you will, given the time and the imagination, both of which Jason has in plenty. Jason has no fixed concept of the world: nothing it produces would surprise him. People do not much surprise him, yet. The natural world is not so much surprising as a marvellous and manipulable convenience, there for his personal benefit. Like others at Framleigh, he sees everything in terms of its relation to himself, but Jason, of course, is not yet grown-up.

  The group disperses; the terrace is once more empty. Jason wanders up the prospect, climbs the broken bit of the balustrade and squats beside the lily-pond. He observes its fervent life; things that wriggle and things that crawl and others that scoot to and fro across the surface, a striving disordered soup. The Japanese pond-weed, at the moment, is winning. Jason takes a twig and chivvies a water-boatman, to see how fast he can make it go.

  Nick, in a corner of Toby’s studio, is doing some clearing-up chores; he often finds himself doing that kind of thing. Not, of course, that he minds: to be at Framleigh and with Toby under any circumstances is better than not to be at Framleigh at all. At least so he supposes, uneasily; from time to time he rather wishes he had never met Toby in which case he might perhaps have found a job by now and be, well, settled, instead of in a state of perpetual insecurity and apprehension.

  His position at Framleigh has never been defined. Sometimes he is invited to share Toby’s bed and at other times he is not. When he goes home, to the mother in Reigate with whom, theoretically, he lives, Toby never enquires when or if he is returning. When he does return Toby may be apathetic or warmly welcoming, there is no telling which.

  Of course, in fact, he is incredibly lucky to have met Toby at all, that he does realize, and it is very silly and faint-hearted to feel otherwise: all emotional experience, surely, however upsetting, is better than no emotional experience?

  He met Toby eighteen months ago in the gallery near Victoria at which Neil Burton, who taught Nick at college, had an exhibition. Nick had helped to hump pictures from the studio to the gallery and as a reward was invited to stay on for the private view and there suddenly was Toby, being awfully charming and friendly and interested and, as he left, laying a hand on Nick’s arm and saying look if you’re ever up our way drop in at Framleigh and tell me what you think of my things. Nick had been stunned when Neil Burton, grinning sardonically, had told him that Framleigh was by way of being a stately home and Toby really rather grand. Watch it, though, young Nick, he’d said.

  The first few times at Framleigh he hadn’t known much about Paula; she’d been away staying with someone in Spain. Of course there’d been “Adam and Eve” and “Introspective Woman” and the soft sculptures but he hadn’t really given them much thought – there’d been too much else to think about. And then the next time there she was, and Jason, and she scared the wits out of him. “Is it all right me being here?” he’d asked Toby. “Paula won’t mind?” And Toby had looked amusedly at him – “Why should she, Nick?” As though, Nick realized, blushing and chagrined, he were assuming a status he very evidently did not have. Thus could Toby give with one hand and take away with the other.

  Nick is helping out, insofar as he has an official status. “My assistant,” Toby occasionally describes him as, to course members. He does the things that nobody else has the time or the inclination to do, such as tidying the studios and sending off brochures to people enquiring about the courses and checking on supplies of everything from paint and paper to drums of cooking oil and cartons of detergent. It is a pity he can’t drive or he could take over the trips to the Cash and Carry from Greg. Greg he finds less alarming than Paula, but equally disconcerting; he has a knack of making you feel – well, kind of ignorant and uninteresting. Once, there was a conversation about poetry and Nick said he liked Philip Larkin and Greg roared with laughter. He patted Nick’s shoulder and said, “You go right ahead then, Nick, just carry right on.”

  Greg is supposed to have published this collection of poems, with a rather special small publisher in New York, but somehow there are never any copies at Framleigh.

  And now Nick, stacking paper and reflecting upon the previous evening, out of sorts and with a feeling that Toby is annoyed with him, thinks with a little spurt of venom that Greg was disgusting to that old man. Going on at him like that. Rude. Paula too. Of course, there wasn’t anything Toby could have done, really, but …

  Toby and Paula meet half way across the stable-yard. Toby has left his group in Nick’s charge while he goes in to make a couple of phone calls; Paula is bored and having a breath of fresh air.

  “Last night,” says Toby coldly, “was a balls-up.”

  Paula retorts that he was asking for it, bringing a couple of stuffy old things like that along.

  Toby observes that Richard Waterton is a very well known writer.

  “You’ve never read a word he’s written,” says Paula. She has the unique privilege of ten years’ intimacy with Toby and speaks, hence, with authority; Toby, knowing this, gives her a look of tempered hatred. He does not really hate Paula, being in fact incapable of extreme emotion of any kind, but just at the moment he doesn’t much care for her.

  “Neither,” he says, meeting her on her own ground, “have you.”

  “I never said I had.”

  Toby changes tack; he knows only too well how long this kind of thing can go on. “Greg overdid it. Frankly if he throws himself around like that again I may have to reconsider his position at Framleigh. It’s the sort of thing that gives us a bad name.”

  “Greg may be going back anyway,” said Paula. “Actually I may go over with him for a bit.” She has grave doubts as to the truth of any of this; the remark is a tactic rather than a statement.

  Toby also has the advantage of ten years’ experience of Paula; she might well, he knows, take off for a while but the odds are that she will be back. She always has been. Greg, on the other hand, is less predictable and as it happens Toby rather wants Greg around for a bit longer. He does actually pull his weight at Framleigh and he has done a good job over the last year or so at keeping Paula amused and therefore preoccupied. Paula when bored and hence restive is inclined to poke her nose into areas of Toby’s life which do not bear close inspection.

  “I’m merely suggesting that Greg should be more careful about chucking his opinions around when we have these sort of occasions. As it happens I very much appreciate Greg’s contribution to Framleigh; I’m simply making a small criticism about handling visitors.”

  Paula eyes him suspiciously, trying to work out the meaning of this swerve.

  Toby looks at his watch. “Christ – nearly eleven. I’ve got to make some calls.” He wipes a worried hand across his brow. “Look, has anyone checked the stores? The lot who’re doing the cooking today are in some sort of tizz about food.”

  “I suppose I’ll see to it,” says Paula, and stalks away across the cobbled yard.

  The cobbles are broken and, in some places, missing altogether and where there are gaps a carpet of camomile has spread – an unusual growth and a survivor perhaps from another age of Framleigh. Paula treads the camomile
with sunburned feet clad in thonged sandals with black tapes that wind around and around her ankles and calves. She has handsome legs. She wears today a short denim skirt and a red silk shirt with the top two buttons undone. She has handsome breasts, too.

  Once upon a time, Toby and Paula loved one another. Up to a point and in so far as either was prepared to give way to an emotion which does make great demands on egotistic natures. Over the years, love or its equivalent has shrivelled (both have found alternatives for that, in any case) and the relationship now rests on self-interest, a capacity with which Toby and Paula are both healthily endowed. They find each other convenient.

  The camomile, crushed by Paula’s passing feet, fills the yard with its scent.

  Keith Harrap, who is spending the morning in Bob’s studio, happens to look up and so sees Paula’s silk and denim back view disappear out of the yard. Since he has been thinking of Paula this causes a disconcerting twinge, as though lust had made her manifest. Not, of course, that what he is feeling is lust, precisely, though he is perfectly aware that – to put it baldly – he fancies her. No, the thing about Paula of course is not just that she is such a good-looking woman but that she is such a talented and interesting one. If she looked like the back of a bus she would still attract him (though not admittedly in quite the same way).

  Paula disappears. Keith goes back to shoving clay around, rather half-heartedly. He thinks of Karen, his wife. He transfers himself to the kitchen at Dulwich, where Karen is getting lunch for the children. He considers her, with total detachment. At least, no, not that, because the image of her brings with it unavoidable accompanying feelings of … of, well, familiarity and yes, love and knowledge and various kinds of tolerance. And a maddening twinge of concern about the blasted drain that, she is quite right, will have to be seen to.