Consequences
Authors: Penelope Lively
CONSEQUENCES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
The Photograph
Making It Up
Spiderweb
Heat Wave
Cleopatra’s Sister
City of the Mind
Passing On
Moon Tiger
Pack of Cards and Other Stories
According to Mark
Corruption
Perfect Happiness
Next to Nature, Art
Judgement Day
Treasures of Time
The Road to Lichfield
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A House Unlocked
Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived
PENELOPE LIVELY
CONSEQUENCES
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Penelope Lively, 2007
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA AVAILABLE
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0223-4
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TO JEAN
CONSEQUENCES
Contents
Part 1
THEY MET ON A BENCH
in St. James’s Park; it was the sixth of June 1935. Lorna was crying because she had had a violent argument with her mother; Matt was feeding the wildfowl in order to draw them. He sat with his sketch pad on his lap, one hand in perpetual motion, the other chucking an occasional morsel in order to keep the birds attentive. He drew; the ducks shoved one another and commented; Lorna stopped crying and watched, increasingly entranced. When eventually Matt became aware of her, he looked sideways, and was done for.
Some while later, they went to a tea shop. By now, Lorna had learned that the duck-sketching exercise was in the service of a commission to illustrate a book on estuaries and waterways. Matt was an artist, primarily a wood engraver. He learned—or rather, came to understand, since she spoke of none of this—that Lorna was a girl somehow at odds with her circumstances. They sat for several hours over a pot of tea and a plate of cakes, and then they wandered the streets, impervious to time. By the end of the day, both realized that their lives had altered course. Lorna went home to Brunswick Gardens to a further outburst of disapproval from her mother. Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.
In due course, she brought him to the house and presented him to her parents, who were initially gracious, if a touch cool. When subsequently Lorna’s father discovered that wood engraving was not a hobby but Matt’s livelihood, the condescending interest turned to
froideur.
He told Lorna that this artist chappie was a nice enough young man but it wouldn’t do to let things go any further, d’you see? Lorna replied that things already had: she and Matt were engaged. She was wearing on her finger a little Victorian ring that they had bought in the Portobello Market the previous week for ten and sixpence. Matt had pawned an easel in order to pay for it.
Gerald Bradley shouted; Lorna sat in mutinous silence. Marian Bradley came in, wrung her hands, and joined in the shouting, at a ladylike level. When the scene had run its course, Lorna got on a 73 bus to Islington, where she found that Matt had just taken the first proof print of the duck engraving. There was the swirl of ducks in the foreground, their plumage intricately textured; beyond was the sparkle of water and the patterned fall of willows, leading the eye somehow deep into the picture, so that it became three dimensional, an intricate and calculated reflection of the backdrop to their meeting; she saw that place, but saw also now this artifact that was the brilliant expression of his hand and eye. And to one side, framed by ducks, was a small distant figure seated on a bench, a girl—dark hair, white curve of a dress. “That’s you,” he said.
They were married at Finsbury Town Hall. The witnesses were Matt’s friend Lucas Talbot and Lorna’s old school friend Elaine, who was in a lather of excited anxiety and kept repeating, “I don’t know
what
your parents are going to say.” After the deed was done, the four of them had an awkward lunch at a Lyons Corner house, Elaine still twittering, and clearly not much taken with long lank Lucas, who ran a small printing press in Fulham. Then Lorna and Matt went to Brunswick Gardens to face up to the Bradleys.
In years to come, they would recount that her father had actually said, “Never darken my doors again.” This was poetic license, but the message ran along those lines. There was a short, cold exchange in the drawing room, where the two couples sat on sofas, confronting one another across a great bowl of lilies whose scent filled the room. From elsewhere in the house came the loud assertive voices of Lorna’s two older brothers, joshing one another. At one point the parlor maid knocked to ask if tea would be required. Lorna’s mother replied that it would not. There was no shouting on this occasion; Marian Bradley was aggrieved and petulant, her husband had withdrawn into a mood of disgruntled dismissal. A great gulf opened, into which the lilies sweetly fumed. Everything that might be said hung in the air, until none of them could stand it any longer, and Lorna went up to her room to gather up a suitcase of clothes, while Matt waited in the hall. Downstairs, Gerald had a stiff whiskey and Marian rang for the maid: perhaps tea wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
“What was so appalling about an artist?” Lorna would wonder, much later. “There was art on their walls. They bought pictures. Daddy had William Nicholson paint Mummy’s portrait.”
And Matt would laugh. “Exactly. Tradesmen. Not the sort of people you want marrying your daughter. Irregular habits, erratic income. He was quite right.”
Relations were resumed within a few months, of a kind. Letters and Christmas cards were exchanged. By that time, Lorna had become someone else, perhaps the person that she was always meant to be. Her mother wrote breezy little missives about social events and the boys’ sporting fixtures; for Lorna’s birthday she sent a silk purse from Harrods. Opening this at the kitchen table in Somerset, Lorna felt as through she were in receipt of goods from another planet; her previous life seemed now like a myth, somewhere she had dreamed away her early years.
Matt knew only that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.
When she was a child, Lorna did not understand that London is a huge city. Oh, it went quite a way, she realized that—she had been on the bus right from Kensington to Piccadilly Circus. And the park was immense, a great green expanse reaching from the homely familiar base of the Round Pond and Kensington Gardens to distant Park Lane. But that was the extent of it. Beyond that…. Well, she really had not much idea if there was anything beyond that, except that there were outposts to which she had been taken, like Buckingham Palace, and that other park alongside, and Trafalgar Square with the lions, and the great wide glitter of the river. It was not until much later, years later, in time of war, when the bombs were falling, that she heard of Poplar and Stepney and Lambeth and somewhere called the City of London. But by then she was far away, amid the Somerset hills, alone, a child on her knee, anxiously tuning the wireless for the six o’clock news each evening. The world was in flames, and London with it, both the London she had known and that other London of which she had been entirely ignorant. At those moments, it seemed to her that time and space compacted; she dipped back into that other place, where they knew nothing of what was to come, and felt some strange kind of compassion.
She spent her childhood in Brunswick Gardens, in a big white stucco house flanked by other big white stucco houses from which emerged each day men much like her father, wearing dark suits and bowler hats, carrying furled umbrellas, and women much like her mother, in silks and furs, and children much like herself, who trotted beside nannies pushing high shiny prams. When she was small her day revolved around the afternoon walk to the Round Pond, and drawing-room tea later with her mother, if her mother was at home. This was a timeless period from which there floated up occasional images: the jewel-green feathers of a preening duck, a golden cavern in the coals of the nursery fireplace, the treasure trove of gleaming brown conkers in long wet grass. Later, when she was older, there were morning lessons with other little girls and a governess in a neighbor’s house, and later still she went to the Academy for Young Ladies on the farther side of Kensington High Street, where she did French and piano and some history and poetry and elocution, until she was seventeen and it was felt, supposedly, that she had learned enough by now.
Her brothers, two years and four years older than she was, had long since been hived off into an exclusive male world; they had vanished into boarding schools, and had come back in long trousers, with hoarse voices, talking in code. Then they disappeared again, to Oxford, and returned occasionally to treat her with kindly patronage. She did not much like them, and felt bad about this. They were lords of creation: the Boys. Her father smiled upon them with gruff indulgence; her mother fluttered around them, proudly attentive to their needs. They brought their Oxford friends to the house, who seemed to Lorna like a set of brother-replicas—the same robust confident voices, the same jokes, the same aura of some exclusive fraternity. She was eighteen, and would shortly embark upon the extended initiation ceremony that was obligatory for girls of her class and background. She would have to spend the next couple of years going to cocktail parties and balls and weekend parties, at which she would meet more and more young men. She presumed that most of these would be like her brothers and their friends. If by the end of this period she had not signed up for marriage, she would have deeply disappointed her mother and would be seen as a failure. The whole prospect filled her with gloom.