Next to Nature, Art

by Penelope Lively

  Outside on the terrace Jason and Kevin lie on their stomachs in the erigeron and the bindweed and the herb robert, peering in. They have had a good morning’s stalking, and seen a thing or two already. One of the ladies on the course picked her nose, and someone else was saying nasty things about people. They watch the lamp fly across the room. Kevin’s eyes widen in astonishment; it is just like a play on the telly, but real, which is muddling. He says nervously, “She didn’t ought to of done that. That costs money, that does”. “Bang!” says Jason. “Bang crash! She’ll get another one I ’spect. Anyway nobody ever uses it.”

  Chapter 10

  “What?” says Karen, down there in Dulwich. “Sorry, the children are making a row …”

  Keith looks across the gun-room; his eyes meet the sepia eyes of Toby’s grandfather, who stands amid feathered carnage in nineteen twenty-five. “Cornwall. Or possibly north Wales.”

  “Oh,” says Karen. There is a pause. “Would there be schools there?”

  “Of course there’d be bloody schools,” snaps Keith. “The Welsh can read and write, can’t they?” The same thought, during the night, has occurred to him, which is why he is snapping.

  “Well,” says Karen, after a further pause, “it’s an idea, I suppose. Is it easy to sell hand-crafted furniture, I mean I’m sure you’d be able to make it beautifully, I just wondered if …”

  Keith, who has also wondered, and told himself that that is craven, snaps again. “Do you always have to calculate about everything? I thought you might be excited.”

  Down in Dulwich someone – not Karen – has started to cry. Karen sighs. “I shall have to go. Are you enjoying the week?”

  “No,” says Keith. “I mean yes of course I am.”

  It is early evening. Light floods through the stained glass window of the gun-room and lies in rainbow pools on the battered carpet. Keith, severed from Karen with a mixture of relief and angry guilt, remains for a while sitting in the armchair. He is dressed for jungle combat in fawn cotton trousers and jacket with many pockets and tabs; he is thinking about getting hold of a lathe from someone next weekend and about Paula and about never going near the bloody lab again and about Karen and about natural inclinations and the suppression thereof. He suspects that he has always suppressed his, and tends to blame his mother. He recalls an argument when he was sixteen about Art or Subsidiary Maths at which Art was dismissed as frivolous and he recalls also the series of microscopes, calculating sets and chemistry outfits given him for Christmas and birthdays; he has, on this sultry evening in the Framleigh gun-room, a feeling that his life has been programmed, and that he has never had much say in the programming. There floats, above the massive Victorian marble fireplace, like a bubble thought in a cartoon, a picture: the picture is of a sunny room in a farmhouse with views onto expansive hilly unoccupied country. The room is cluttered with the wherewithal of making things and in the middle of it Keith sits, making them; in the background a woman who is an odd but enticing mixture of Karen and Paula is … well, is just there. Contemplating this, Keith’s face takes on an expression of petulance: the expression of a small boy who considers himself deprived. It is not, in fact, at all a characteristic expression; Karen would be surprised.

  “She’s definitely on the list,” says Jean Simpson. “I looked. You two, me, and Tessa Shaw. So where is she, I’d like to know?”

  In the kitchen, the same furry apricot light is falling on a sink filled with potatoes. The potatoes require peeling.

  “I daresay we can manage,” says one of the others. “I’ll do half of the spuds and …”

  Jean Simpson retorts that that is not the point, the girl has no business sloping off and leaving other people to do the work. She observes that as it is she personally has done more than her fair share. Eventually it is decided that Jean should go and look for Tessa: the rest, infected also now with a sense of grudge, start slowly to deal with the potatoes, to open tins, to loudly clatter saucepans.

  Jean tours the house, enquiring for Tessa; she has not been seen. Someone suggests she may be over in the studios. Jean goes out onto the terrace, where Jason and Kevin lie on their stomachs beside the lily-pond, interfering with a water-snail, and thence round to the stable-yard. Toby’s studio is empty, and so is Paula’s. The door to Bob’s barn is closed; Jean glances through the window and sees that in fact Bob is there. And so is Tessa. She is sitting with Bob on the large ramshackle sofa covered with old rugs. Bob’s arm is around Tessa and as Jean watches his hand comes down over her shoulder and rummages beneath her T-shirt.

  Jean steps back from the window. She is filled with some very odd and disagreeable feelings, connected with the fact that she is old enough to be Tessa’s mother, that it is a very long time since anyone did that to her, that she has found Bob rather a nice fellow and the niceness was compounded with the peculiar frisson he gave her whenever he stood close to her to instruct her in wheel technique. The frisson, now, turns into something else: a surging resentment.

  She bangs on the door. Bob, after a moment, appears. Jean, trying to seem less breathless than she in fact is, wonders if he has seen Tessa. Bob says funny you should ask, she’s right here as it happens, come in love. He opens the door wider. Tessa scowls from the sofa. I suppose, says Jean, her voice coming out shriller than she cares for, you’ve forgotten you’re on the kitchen rota. Off you go, says Bob, duty calls. He pats Tessa lightly as she passes, and looks at Jean as he does so, amiably grinning from within the thicket of his beard; her eyes meet his, his friendly twinkling eyes, and she knows that he knows exactly how she feels, and why. It is as though, for an instant, she were naked. As though those regrettable uncontrollable processes within the head were laid bare to the public gaze. She turns and marches away across the stable-yard, followed, ten paces behind, by Tessa.

  They do not speak. Tessa is seething. Words like cow and bitch roll around in her mind; she observes with contempt Jean’s too-large behind and her boring clothes; she sticks her tongue out at Jean’s back, and feels ever so slightly better.

  Jean too seethes; she is telling herself in her own familiar matter-of-fact rational voice that the girl had to be made to pull her weight and in any case it was in her own best interests, the silly little fool, a man like that would be after one thing and one thing only … And on another level there simmers a distressing soup of emotions, some of them identifiable and others not or at least not in any terms that Jean can acknowledge.

  They arrive back at the kitchen and find that the others have just about finished what has to be done.

  Nick, earlier, heard the sound of the exploding light-bulb and, shortly after, heard the library door slam and Paula’s sandalled feet slap across the hall and up the stairs. He heard Toby go to his study and that door, too, close. For a while he made approaches to the study, determined advances to the door that, each time, ended in withdrawal. Eventually he went out and sat on the terrace.

  Where, now, he is joined by Greg, who says “Hi … Seen Paula?”

  Nick replies that he thinks she is in her room. After a moment he continues, “Greg … what you said before about that man, about his bank maybe buying Framleigh … are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” says Greg, sitting himself down on the wall. “He told me.”

  “But Toby hasn’t ever … well, wouldn’t he have said something to us?”

  Greg shrugs. He looks at Nick, with, it seems, a momentary detached interest. “You’re really hung up on Toby, aren’t you?”

  Nick blinks, goes warm around the face, and stares into the pond. The warmth is due as much to annoyance as embarrassment: he has no intention of discussing his feelings with Greg, of all people.

  “O.K. – that’s your problem. But if you were figuring on staying around Framleigh indefinitely, I’d forget it.”

  “I wasn’t,” says Nick defensively, “it’s just it seems funny that …”

  But Greg is off, now, in another direction, an older-man-to-younger d
idactic discourse, somewhat uncharacteristic. “You’re an artist, right? Now I don’t know how you see yourself developing, but believe me you’re never going to get yourself on the right track as long as you’re hung up on personal relationships. When I was your age …” – here Greg falters, perturbed by an echo of his father, for God’s sake – “… well, I had to cut loose before I could see inside my own head. There was this girl – well, that’s past history now … The point is, I couldn’t find myself artistically until I was emotionally free. See?”

  “Yes,” says Nick automatically, and then corrects himself, “I mean no. I don’t feel like that.”

  “You don’t?” says Greg, startled. Nick is seldom or never known to disagree.

  “I think I’ll be a better artist if I have satisfactory relationships with other people than if I don’t.”

  Greg shakes his head sadly. “Yeah, but what’s satisfactory?”

  “Well,” says Nick, looking not at Greg but down the prospect, at the far end of which Jason and Kevin are jumping off the ha-ha, in turn, “I s’pose a relationship in which people try to please each other and not to upset each other and are both prepared to give things up rather than not have each other.” He has never, until this moment, formulated this and the sound of it surprises him. He almost forgets Greg, thinking about this; he watches Jason and Kevin, who are now running in the long grass of the park, small leaping unworried (or so it would seem) figures.

  “Sounds like a book,” says Greg.

  Nick is silent. He is disconcerted by his own statement; it bears heavy implications about the inadequacies of his own life, so far. He tries to think with whom he has come closest to this kind of thing, and can find no one; his mother, he realizes, has always behaved thus, but it has been a somewhat one-sided affair. He sees the conduct of parents, suddenly, in a new light. But are they doing what they do out of instinct which might be called a kind of self-interest, or genuine altruism? He frowns.

  “Relating to other people,” says Greg, “is just fine. That’s what we’ve all got to do. Sure. But you’ve got to watch out for not getting sold short in the process …” – he hesitates, something about that expression makes him uneasy. It smacks of other worlds – “… Your responsibility to yourself has to come first. Right? You’ll never make it artistically until you get your priorities sorted out. Now this girl I was talking about just now, the trouble with her was she …”

  Nick stares down the prospect. He continues to think; he sees the many harmonies of what lies before him and is struck by how effectively what people say and do blights their surroundings. If, of course, the surroundings are as exceptional as Framleigh; under other circumstances the process might be reversed. Which is interesting too.

  Greg continues to talk.

  “I won,” announces Jason. “I jumped three jumps further than yours.” He rolls on his back in the long grass below the ha-ha; he screws up his eyes at the luminous incandescent clouds that stream above him. He sees dragons, a snouty face, pillows and sheep and great gleaming fish.

  Kevin considers this and replies that it is not fair: Jason, he points out, took running jumps whereas he took standing-still jumps.

  “You could of,” says Jason, “if you’d thought of it. Taken running jumps.”

  “I did think of it,” says Kevin, lying, “but I didn’t because it wasn’t fair. Let’s start again.”

  Jason, who is out of breath, declines.

  “All right,” says Kevin sulkily, “I won’t play any more.”

  “Don’t then,” says Jason. They lie, now, side by side, amid the blonde and green and purple flowering grasses and the meadowsweet. Neither stirs, since both are trying to think of a way out of this impasse without loss of face.

  Kevin, who is the most aggrieved, shoots a sideways glance at Jason. “Anyway, I’ve got a Wild West gun and you haven’t.”

  “Don’t want one,” says Jason. This is untrue; he has raised the matter, recently, with Paula, who says guns are beastly, even as toys, and he can’t have one. “I’ve got a real penknife,” he adds. This, as he knows, is a trump card, Kevin being in the same position as regards penknives.

  “Foureyes!” says Kevin violently. This is a local term of abuse.

  “Foureyes yourself!” responds Jason.

  “I know something I’m not telling you,” says Kevin.

  “Don’t care,” says Jason, “anyway I know something too.”

  Above, in the copper beech, collared doves moan; small pale moths flicker among the grass-stems.

  Jason heaves himself over onto his stomach. “We’ll start again if I have first go.”

  Kevin hesitates; relief is compounded with lingering grievance. “O.K.” he says at last.

  Paula, in her studio, with the door closed, tramps around the littered floor; she fiddles with one of the stuffed tight sculptures, makes some corrections to a drawing. The row with Toby has left her both exhilarated and tetchy. Rows, once in a while or indeed quite often, are rather in her line. Nevertheless this one, even though she had not only the last word but most of the others, was unsatisfactory: Toby is undoubtedly up to something and whatever it is does not look as though it will suit her in any way.

  If changes are going to be made, then she would prefer to be in on them, if not to have initiated them. If it is to be the end so far as she and Toby are concerned, then she wants to be the one to do the ending. Men do not leave Paula: Paula leaves them. Admittedly, they have both had other arrangements for a long time now, but so far as the world is concerned they are a couple, of a kind, and Paula has a sense of propriety, however eccentric it might seem to some. Arrangements notwithstanding, she and Toby have enjoyed team status, and it looks suspiciously as though Toby is about to let the side down in a big way.

  Toby, even when cornered, was enigmatic about his intentions; he got away, Paula realizes with chagrin. She is none the wiser. He murmured elusively about money problems and basic re-thinking of the Framleigh concept and wouldn’t let himself be trapped into a straight answer. If he is going to sell Framleigh, then Paula will have to think out her position. If she has to go, then she needs to consider where, and to whom. On the other hand, if this stuff about the Framleigh Foundation is serious, then she is going to have to see that she is firmly at the centre of an enlarged and improved Framleigh and no two ways about it.

  Paula has come to expect, over the years, special treatment. Curiously enough, it was during her first marriage that she first became aware of the deference accorded to art. Her husband, proud of her accomplishments, hung her paintings in his consulting-room and boasted to his friends, whose wives were less attractive and had uninteresting occupations in hospitals or offices. He went to great lengths to build a studio into the loft. Paula realized that she had an aura, and learned to display it to good effect. She began to feel different to other people and, eventually, left. She was trapped, she explained to her husband, she needed space and freedom and … and people like her.

  Actually, people like her have sometimes turned out awkwardly. They have been inconsiderate and unreasonable, often. Her second alliance was with a sculptor who drank a lot and got her pregnant when she hadn’t wanted to be (she had to have an abortion, which was upsetting and uncomfortable). Also, he hogged all the studio space. There were times when she almost felt she had been better off before. She left the sculptor for a villa in Ibiza, shared with several other artists. There, the sunshine and cheap food and wine were marvellous, but frictions and rivalries developed and eventually everyone ran out of money. Paula returned to London, and met Toby.

  Paula flings herself into the studio chair. She kicks, petulantly, an ethnic cushion. She thinks resentfully that Toby is a sneaky so-and-so, out for himself. Her thoughts pass to Greg and she contemplates, for a while, the idea of going to America; the only trouble about that is that Greg has never actually suggested it. She feels a gush of resentment towards him, also; he is so self-centred and he is always interrupting one
. Only yesterday she was trying to tell him about the problems she has run into with the mirror-work and he kept going on about his wretched film stuff; she works herself up into a lather of indignation, recalling this.

  The evening sunshine creeps up Paula’s bare brown leg. She looks, sprawled there in the basket-chair, like the artlessly arranged subject of a portrait: a beautiful woman at ease. One never, of course, knows what people in portraits are thinking about.

  At supper, conversation is muted. Various people do not wish to speak to one another in any case, but these have been careful to separate themselves. Nevertheless, the refectory table is not so large as to put people out of sight or earshot of those they prefer to avoid; glances are exchanged and pointed remarks are made. Tessa observes to Sue that a certain person is a bossy old cow, just like the woman who used to run her Brownie pack. Paula, sighing noisily, says to Keith that she has never in all her life had the emotional support and understanding she needs.

  Fifteen people eat corned beef hash (again) and react to one another. There are two days left, now, of the course and its members have a curious sense of detachment, comparable to being at sea on a raft with one shore out of sight and another only barely visible. All except for one person who has reached a decision about severing relations with her boyfriend, and is immersed in rehearsals of what she will say, and another who has twinges of toothache and is thus distracted from the taxing process of human interaction. Few now remember precisely their initial response to Framleigh which has been overlaid by subsequent feelings and events; the onward rush of life has as usual obliterated or distorted the emotions of last week or month or year so that all that matters are the present ones, and the present ones involve a Framleigh which has become personal. All of those round the refectory table are now affected and hence distanced from their routine lives; they have indeed been taken out of themselves. Mary Chambers alone, looking round at the faces, remembers that this was what a number of people had wished for; she thinks also of Toby’s expression of the Framleigh Ideal.