A Winter's Child (17 page)

She took long walks in the rain, not always intentionally but because rain was a feature of Faxby she well remembered, fine, almost feathery rain in the summertime, drenching, stinging downpours at other seasons, a hint of it usually hovering somewhere above the hills by which the town was entirely surrounded, a clouded hollow, its cobbled streets gleaming with damp, curls of mist falling low, most spring evenings, to blend with the stridently swirling factory smoke. And when she had walked enough she lay in her green chintz armchair, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, put on her disgraceful scarlet and gold kimono and sometimes, but only vaguely, wondered about the future.

She had been educated, expensively and traditionally, not to work but to be married, not to earn a living but to provide domestic comfort and entertainment for the man who supported her. She had been taught not to cook but rather to select a well-balanced menu, to decorate a table with flowers and mosses and napkins twisted to look like swans. She could play the piano, speak French, write a well-worded letter to cover any of the eventualities her schoolmistresses – ladies of a gentler, pre-war era – had thought likely to come her way. Until Paul's death, she had given little, if any, serious thought to a career. She had planned only to be with him, to support him in any venture
he
might choose to undertake, to nurture
his
ambitions, which represented no great sacrifice since she had none of her own. And although she did not discount the possibility that she might marry again – in fact she rather hoped she would – she did not expect it to be soon, could no longer guarantee that it would be forever. The values of her girlhood had been swept away, she fully understood that, and, unlike Miriam and her mother, she had no inclination to cling to their wreckage. She was a ‘new woman'who, having rushed headlong to France, had acquired none of the new skills acquired by the regiment of women who had eagerly taken men's places when conscription had emptied the country of its able-bodied men. She had never learned to type or keep accounts and was consumed by no great fires to learn. She could, of course, dress wounds, bathe eyes, administer medicines, but since she desired most urgently never to enter a hospital ward again, what now?

‘You're not much of a housewife are you,' Euan Ash told her, watching her as, with complete unconcern, she swept up the broken remains of a Crown Derby saucer.

‘No. So don't expect me to clear up your mess. I have more than enough with my own.'

‘Ah yes,' he said, giving her his smile of impudent, decadent sweetness. ‘You're going to be awkward. I thought as much. But don't worry. We can get Kit Hardie to come over with his dustpan from the Crown, or send one of his minions. Not that I need much in the way of creature comforts myself, I'm sure.'

‘She had seen his flat by now, just one small, square room leading to an old – fashioned, ramshackle conservatory, the room itself virtually empty except for a narrow bed covered with a grey blanket, two kitchen chairs, a heap of cushions thrown down in a corner; the conservatory cluttered with the messy apparatus of art, a huge work-table invisible beneath its burden of sketches finished, abandoned, just begun, canvases standing face to the wall in rows like naughty children, paints, brushes, pallet knives, tins and jars of varnish and turpentine, oily rags, dirty rags, piles of shabby periodicals and books, a cracked, vaguely oriental vase at least three feet high left behind by the previous tenant and which it had not occurred to him to throw away.

‘What chaos you live in.'

‘Dear child – my natural habitat.'

Yet his shared tenancy of the kitchen caused her no alarms, making itself felt mainly in the empty whisky bottles he left on the table for her to throw away and, three or four mornings a week, the presence of a girl – scantily clad and rarely the same one twice – brewing his coffee, scrambling his eggs, washing out his shirts and socks in the shallow, stone sink.

‘He has the morals of an alley-cat,' said Nola loudly in his hearing, having spotted one of these obliging, somewhat dishevelled young ladies scurrying off through the garden gate at eleven o'clock in the morning. And with his deadly smile, he quite affably agreed.

‘What's wrong with the alley-cat? He makes love whenever he gets the chance because it just might be his last. So do I. What do you do with your life, Nola?'

‘She was sitting at the cheap lodging-house kitchen table, draped in her fox furs, a new double pelt this time joined by the front paws, two pointed foxes' heads hanging down her back, two sumptuous, russet bodies falling to her waist in front, two empty russet legs dangling, a cloche hat with a feather covering her ears, several strings of amber beads, several more of gold cascading to her elegantly crossed knees. She was rouged, perfumed, expensive, a cigarette-holder with a jewelled monogram clutched in one nervous hand, a crocodile skin bag with a gold clasp in the other.

‘What
do
you do, Nola?'

‘Bastard,' she said tonelessly and snapping open her bag, taking out her gloves, she got up and walked away.

‘That was unkind,' said Claire.

‘Yes, I know. I'm not really a bastard either. Not in the eyes of the law, at any rate.'

‘We never supposed you were.'

‘What am I then, lovely Claire?'

‘Oh – a young gentleman of good family, I think, with a private income so that you can afford to dress like a gypsy and do odd jobs at the Crown without losing face – or caste. Is that what you are?'

‘More or less. A very small private income though – probably a lot less than yours, just keeping-body-and-soul-together money really.'

‘Enough to let you waste your expensive education.'

‘If you like. What else?'

‘How should I know?'

But she knew very well and incautiously she rushed on. ‘I expect your mother breeds pedigree puppies and organizes the hunt ball and everybody's morals and wins all the prizes at the local flower show. And your father will be a clergyman – the fashionable kind who understands good claret.'

Without being aware of her danger until it was far too late she had described Paul's parents, Paul's background, exactly as he had once described them to her. And now, to complete her self-betrayal she realized with horror and with considerable surprise that her eyes had not only filled with tears but had let loose a whole fountain of them to pour, in embarrassing profusion, down her cheeks.

‘Oh
skill'
she said, flatly, distinctly, and he laughed with open, genuine delight.

‘Well done, Nurse Swanfield. Spoken like a true VAD. Well – a fellow's supposed to have a dean handkerchief at times like these, I do know that. But I'm not sure I can manage it. Oh yes-here we are. I think it's Kit's but never mind.'

And he dried her eyes deftly, with good humour, apparently accustomed to women's tears and disinclined to take them too seriously, his artist's eye, she rather suspected, far more concerned with the physical mechanics of weeping, the exact working of the muscles and the blotching of the skin and how to portray them on canvas than with the causes of her distress.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘So am I – I can't tell you. I rather thought I might have a chance of making love to you quite soon. But perhaps it won't be
quite
soon if I remind you so much of somebody else. I suppose that
is
the trouble?'

‘Yes.'

‘And I also suppose – taking into account the time span and all that –
not
your husband.'

‘No. Not my husband.'

‘Fair enough. But it's a pity, though. I was looking forward to you, Claire.'

‘You make love to so many women, Euan.' He grinned, boyish suddenly rather than malicious.

‘I know. It's just about
all
I do at the moment with any degree of concentration – and a certain amount of success. I wonder if it's the nearest I can get to not killing? Just about the exact opposite, I rather think.'

‘Do you? It seems a little – indiscriminate.'

‘So is killing – the kind I've done, at any rate.'

‘Don't tell me.'

‘You must know that I wouldn't dream of it.'

She nodded and, leaning forward just a little, gave him the honest, open smile of a friend.

‘I know. But the real opposite to killing would be to get all those girls pregnant. And I'm sure you wouldn't care to do that.'

‘Dear God –' he said, looking startled and then very much amused. ‘I hope you realize that you may, just possibly, have put an end to my virility. Because fatherhood …!' He shuddered. ‘No. Oh no, not that, I'd have to run, of course. Much kinder.'

‘Oh well – a convenient point of view, and
not
original. And, speaking of originality, is Nola right when she says your pictures are no good?'

‘Come and see.'

She went with him into the bare room, the cluttered studio, and knelt on a lumpy, hessian-covered cushion while he uncovered the canvases stacked against the wall. She had already seen his sketches of Faxby's alleyways and the patches of littered wasteland in between where Faxby's youth, unable to afford the comfort of a cinema or a bar parlour, met to preen themselves before one another on Saturday nights. She had seen the satirical, sometimes spitefully accurate portraits he dashed off in the tap-room of the ‘Rock and Heifer'just behind Mannheim Crescent, and sold across the bar for a shilling each. But she had avoided his real work, fearing – she suddenly realized – to see the distorted death of the trenches, to discover that the line of blinded groping soldiers which so sickeningly haunted her had somehow shuffled out of her nightmare straight onto Euan's canvas. But instead, to her infinite relief, her intense surprise, she saw first a leaf and then the petals of a flower painted with a botanist's exactness, a woodland world of small, wild blossoms and spiky grasses, water dimpled by rain, flat many-shaded pebbles, the life of the hedgerow, the river bank, the ploughed furrow as experienced and observed by a grasshopper, a speckled, self-important thrush, a bee lavishly exploring the universe of a foxglove, a cowslip, a cornflower.

It was the English pastoral of childhood story books, the small furry creatures, the muted colours, the mild weather, with the extra and startling ingredient of reality, the knowledge of the human rifle levelled at the happily burrowing rabbit, the mass-produced boot crushing the primrose, the natural cycle of birth and death, necessity and renewal – which was cruel enough – disrupted by the blundering presence of man.

It was beautiful and painful. Perhaps the blind soldiers would have been easier to bear.

‘I don't know enough to judge,' she said quickly; and kneeling beside her, his body composed of lean, hollow curves and brittle angles, he studied the canvases, his head on one side.

‘Oh – I think “mediocre” ought to describe it. As an artist I might just make a living painting pretty pictures of not so pretty women – if I cared that much about making a living.'

They were kneeling close together and with no more than a slight inclination of his head, he kissed her, no other part of his body touching hers except a cool mouth, a swiftly darting tongue, his presence light, elusive, uncertain even at this proximity; the man who, without appearing to resist, had slipped through Nola's possessive hands like water and who held Claire to him now not by the arousal of her sensuality but by a fragile shadow of the years they had unknowingly shared.

‘Don't be alarmed,' he said easily, amiably, ‘I don't want any kind of commitment that might expect me to look beyond tomorrow morning.'

She got up smiling, easy and amiable herself.

‘I'm not alarmed. I just don't want any complications. And you're complex, Euan.'

‘Lord no – not a bit of it. Just a straightforward sort of chap. I'm faithless, of course – or so I've been told – but I do give fair warning in advance. I can only offer what I have in me, you know, which isn't much and doesn't last, but if it fills the present need or the present pleasure then it's better than nothing, I reckon. And if it happens to be alive and kicking tomorrow – then that's a bonus – wouldn't you think? I'm just passing through, after all. I make no secret of it.'

‘Where
are
you going, Euan?'

He grinned and got to his feet, tall but far too thin, too fine-drawn to offer any kind of physical menace.

‘I'm on my way to Edinburgh – didn't I mention it? – to see a friend. Although whether or not I get there will depend on many things. The weather, for instance. If we have a good summer I may find myself in Scarborough or Whitby doing pencil sketches at sixpence a time on the beach. And even if it rains I might not get beyond Carlisle. No point in rushing things. Come with me, if you like. Travelling together might be fun. Not as lovers, of course – that's far too heavy. Just friends who happen to share a bed. Friendship doesn't scare me.'

Was he going to see a girl? A wife? How long, she wondered, would it have taken Paul to return to Gwendoline, or Jeremy to her, had fate so decreed? And even should there be no wife, no unknown child, no tag-ends of half-remembered promises, how long did it really take – having learned without too much difficulty to obey the commands ‘Charge', ‘Fire', ‘Kill' – to adapt, with like obedience to the new orders of the day ‘Return to normal', ‘Settle down', ‘Be as you were', ‘Live'?

No one could tell her that.

Forever, she rather imagined. And there was nothing to do, Therefore, but make the best of it.

‘I don't travel well, Euan,' she told him, still smiling, and returning to the kitchen she rinsed out her coffee cup, put on her hat and, looking poised, slender, admirably but far from totally self-assured in her grey
foulard
dress with its white lawn collar, her white silk stockings and high-heeled grey shoes, she went over to the Crown Hotel to drink a glass of early afternoon
Chablis
with Kit Hardie and give him her answer to a proposition he had recently made her.