Casting Off (34 page)

France. France meant painting – he felt a nervous frisson at the word. He had become so used to regular money, to not experiencing that anxiety and excitement that trying to do something difficult with a fair chance of failing used always to induce. With painting you started something and anything could be there. And as he worked, the gap between what he had seen and what he could show of what he’d seen, widened inexorably, and sometimes to such a degree that the picture was abandoned. Sometimes it seemed worth struggling on, and the result would most often be neither the original vision nor the simple failure of it, but a kind of crafty compromise. Then, occasionally and without warning, he pulled something off . . . I must get back to it, he thought, wandering restlessly to his balcony window to look, as it did, on to the square.

It was a windy evening. Blossom was being tossed off the trees to join the browning petals on the ground – it had rained earlier. A small child was listlessly kicking a large rubber ball down one of the straight gravel paths. Square gardens, he thought, were an adult’s view of a nice place for children. They had the appearance of being verdant – grass, lawns, shrubs, trees and a few flowers – but they were so ordered and confined that they contained no sense of adventure, of mystery: it was hard to enjoy something if you could see all of it at once. He had a sudden yearning for those two views from the windows, for the ordered ranks of olives and apricots set in the ruddy earth, the narrow fields of sunflowers or maize, and the greater, more spectacular view from the other side of the house, the valley and the hills beyond with the distant, terraced vines below which the river lay, unseen, but whose course was marked by poplars that grew on its banks. But it was the light he thirsted for – that clear, translucent brightness that slaked the eye and, perhaps best of all, that one could take for granted, day after day. Painting landscape in England, he had quickly discovered, was a nightmare of false starts and procrastination, since the light was hardly ever the same for two days running and, moreover, could change from hour to hour during those days.

Yes, he would go back, for a short holiday to start with. And he would invite the girls to come with him.

‘It’s very kind of you, Archie, but I don’t think I will. I don’t know about Clary – at least, I sort of
do
know, but you’d better ask her yourself. She’ll be back any minute.’

She was ironing some piece of sewing and a lock of her chestnut hair had fallen over the side of her face so that he could not see it. She wore a long black cotton skirt below which her feet were bare: they looked as white as alabaster.

She had made her room astonishingly pretty: the walls were the pale blue of a robin’s egg, the paint was white and the floor was covered with yellow haircord. Her curtains were made of mattress ticking, pale grey and white stripes, and edged with a yellow woollen fringe. Over the mantelpiece she had hung a painting of Rupe’s that he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. It was flanked by two large blue and white Delft china candlesticks, rather cracked, that she had bought when she was a child, reputedly for sixpence.

‘You have made this room nice. How are Clary’s quarters getting on?’

‘She insisted on red striped paper so they’re rather cross and hot. She’s lost interest in them anyway, so I should think they’ll stay as they are.’

She finished her ironing, laid it on the divan and began folding up the board.

‘I’m sad you don’t want to come to France.’

‘Are you?’

He began to say that of course he was but she interrupted him. ‘We don’t see you for weeks, and then you turn up here, without the slightest warning – you don’t even ring up – and then you calmly suggest that I should go to France with you! As though – as though I have absolutely no feelings! Or if I have, they simply don’t count! How am I
ever
—’ The front door slammed loudly downstairs. ‘That’s Clary. You’d better go down and ask
her
.’ She picked up the ironing board and tramped out of the room with it.

He was stunned. He’d never seen her so angry, or indeed, seen her angry at all. What was all that about? he started to ask himself, but he knew, and felt ashamed of his crassness. He tore a leaf out of his pocket diary and wrote: ‘Really sorry, Poll. Please forgive’ and propped it on the mantelpiece. Then he went downstairs to find Clary.

Her door was open and she was on her knees before a chest of drawers: she had cut her hair as short as a boy’s, he noticed.

‘It’s me. May I come in?’

She turned round, and he saw that she had made other changes. Her face was covered with some sort of white make-up, her eyes were sooty with mascara and she wore a lipstick so dark that it was almost black.

‘Oh, Archie! Yes, do. Find somewhere to sit if you can. Take those clothes off that chair.’ She got to her feet and there was a splitting sound. ‘Oh, damn! That’s my skirt. It’s always doing it.’

She wore a tight black skirt, black stockings like a hospital nurse, and a man’s shirt with collar and black tie. It was not a becoming outfit, he thought. He put her pyjamas on to the unmade bed and sat on the chair.

‘The trouble is that Poll’s sewing machine only does chain-stitch, so every time I split it, the whole thing comes undone. I’ve got some trousers somewhere. Won’t be a sec.’

She disappeared through the communicating door that led to her smaller room.

While he waited for her, he reflected that he had really got rather out of touch with both girls. When they had first moved into their flat, he had come round quite often, taken them out to dinner and to films, but he realized now that, although they had gone out as a threesome and he had occasionally taken Clary by herself, he had not once spent an evening alone with Polly.

Clary returned, wearing black rather baggy trousers in which, he thought, she looked rather like a clown.

‘Are all your clothes black these days?’

‘The ones I wear. Have you seen Poll? She usually gets back before me.’

‘I have. I came to see whether you would both like to come to France with me – just for a holiday.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She doesn’t want to. I’m afraid I rather dropped a brick there. I thought – well, water under the bridge, you know.’

‘No. She wouldn’t. Have you got a cigarette?’

‘Didn’t know you’d taken to smoking.’

‘Oh, well – it helps.’ The mascara made her eyes look enormous. When he had lit it for her, she sat on the floor opposite him and pushed a large pottery ashtray between them.

‘I’m afraid she still thinks she’s in love with you. So seeing you is purely masochistic.’

‘Oh dear. What about you?’

‘
What
about me?’

‘Well – everything what. Why do you wear those funny clothes? How’s your job? How
are
you? I feel really out of touch. Oh, and how about France?’

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t come to France for the same reason.’

He stared at her in dismay. ‘Oh, God, Clary!
You
aren’t secretly in love with me.’

This made her laugh. ‘Oh, really, Archie,’ she said, in the middle of laughing. ‘What an idiotic idea! As if I would be! It’s a bit conceited of you even to
think
that, isn’t it?’

‘It was you who said you couldn’t come for the same reason.’

‘Yes. I can’t, because I’m in love – with someone else. It’s funny that shouldn’t have occurred to you.’

‘I suppose it is,’ he said. He felt dashed: of course it was. ‘Tell me about him, Clary. What does he do? How did you meet him?’

She told him. It was the man she worked for. He was called Noël and he was married.

‘Oh dear.’

‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t believe in marriage anyway. Nor does he. He only married Fenella for practical reasons. She’s a marvellous person. She quite understands about Noël and me. In fact, he needs
both
of us. He’s desperately unhappy, you see. He hates everything about the modern world. He’s the most extraordinary, intelligent, gifted person I’ve ever met in my life. He knows the most incredible amount about everything. He’s sort of trying to educate me. He has the most amazing energy – after you’ve been with him for even
two days
, you feel exhausted. That’s not just me. Fenella feels like it as well. He hardly needs any sleep, you see, and when he’s awake things are always happening. So I sort of share him with her.’

‘Doesn’t he have any other friends?’

‘Not many. He doesn’t like men much, you see. He says women are far nicer and more sensitive and intelligent.’

‘It all sounds rather serious and gloomy.’

‘Well, life
is
gloomy. Despairing, really. One just has to make the best of it.’

‘Any jokes?’ he asked – hopelessly, he was pretty sure that there wouldn’t be.

‘Noël says that wit is one thing – he’s all for wit, like Oscar Wilde, for instance. But silly jokes, he says, are just a way of covering things up. Like my family does all the time.’

‘Not all the time, Clary.’

‘I mean, a way of not facing things. Look at Uncle Edward and Aunt Villy! That’s a perfect example of the futility of marriage and not facing things.’

‘I think there might be other reasons for that.’

‘Well, sex, of course. Noël says that sex is fearfully important, but it doesn’t ever last. He says romantic people understand this. You have to be prepared for everything to go wrong. Noël’s a romantic. He says you can’t have a serious relationship with someone
and
have children and be financially dependent – all that. You have to be prepared to risk things – and suffer if you have to.’

‘Gosh!’ Everything she said so appalled him that he recognized the need for extreme caution.

‘Are you – happy with him?’

‘Not happy!’ she replied with scorn. ‘Not merely happy! I’m simply completely, utterly in love with him. It’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.’

‘Darling Clary. I’m glad you’ve told me. Do you think that as about the thirty-second best thing that could happen to you, you would have dinner with me?’

She said she would. She’d just go and tell Poll and see if she wanted to come as well. Do, he replied.

Polly wouldn’t come. He took Clary to a small Cypriot place near Piccadilly.

‘We came here on VE night, do you remember?’

‘So we did.’

‘You told me a bit about Noël then.’

‘Did I?’

All the black lipstick was gone by the time she had finished her kebab. She ate a lot and was glowing with the pleasure of having told him. With her short hair and her white face and black-rimmed eyes, she looked like a marmoset, he told her. She had beautiful eyes, he added, in case she thought likeness to a marmoset was frivolous – currently her most damning word.

‘I’ve got thinner as well,’ she said.

‘You certainly have. Thin enough, I think.’

‘I eat a lot. But Noël likes to go for tremendously long walks, and then he likes to read aloud until quite late at night. He dictates letters all the morning – he and Fenella run a literary agency and I’m being the secretary. And then we have lunch, which Fenella cooks, and we work all the afternoon. Every other weekend I go away with him . . . Sometimes I get a bit sleepy and tired. But Fen does too,’ she added defensively. ‘That’s why it’s sensible for us to share.’

‘What about your writing? How’s that going?’

‘Not awfully fast. The days I’m not working, I seem not to feel like it. And Noël has been over my book and he says a lot of it is no good so I had to start again. The trouble is that I only have the weekends I’m not with him for proper writing, and there always seems such a lot to do – you know, washing my clothes, and cleaning up the house with Poll. And if I do get going then it’s Monday again and I’m back at work. Noël finds writing frightfully difficult too. He’s told me to write in the night, but then I just get too sleepy.’

‘What does your father think about all this?’

‘Dad? I haven’t told him. Please don’t you. Poll knows, of course, but nobody else. I don’t think anyone would understand.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said cautiously. ‘I want you to be happy. Are you?’

‘Happy!’ she said with contempt. ‘That isn’t at all the point. He isn’t happy, so how can I be? He’s afraid of going mad, you see. And the only thing that keeps him from that is me. And Fenella too, of course. He
needs
me. That’s the point.’

As he was taking her home, he said casually, ‘Could I meet him? I should like to.’

‘Afraid not. He’s said he doesn’t want to meet any of my family.’

‘I’m not family, Clary, I’m your friend.’

‘It comes to the same thing. He simply doesn’t want anything about the rest of my life to come between us.’

He was silent. Nothing that he wanted to say seemed sayable.

‘I can feel you disapproving, Archie. I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t approve of these awful clothes you’re wearing. Collars and ties? I suppose he wants you to wear them.’

‘He prefers women dressed like that. So we do.’