Consequences (3 page)

Mr. Lavery was astute enough not to pay too much overt attention to Matt. Matt’s work was in a class of its own; he knew this, and Matt knew that he knew it, and to make too much of that would have done Matt no good. His tutorship of Matt became a personal matter, pursued in the privacy of the Art Room out of hours. Here, he kept Matt supplied with materials, suggested new directions, criticized and encouraged, and when Matt was seventeen Mr. Lavery began to speak of art colleges.

At first, David and Mary Faraday were dubious. They appreciated that Matt had evident talent—were proud, indeed—but the notion of formal training in this area was foreign to them. His father could not see what it would lead to, and wondered about work prospects. His mother shied violently at the notion of London.

“But why would you have to go
there?
”

“Because that’s where the best colleges are. Mr. Lavery says so. He says Liverpool or Chester wouldn’t do. Mr. Lavery says it’s the Grosvenor School of Modern Art I should aim for, in London.”

The image of London presented itself, as the family sat around the supper table. Bryony saw the King and Queen receiving her brother on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and was irritated. Matt saw an immense light-filled studio in which students stood before easels, and an elevated version of Mr. Lavery cruised among them. His mother saw streets lined with women of ill-repute, and blanched.

His father saw expense, and said so.

“Mr. Lavery says I could get a scholarship. He says he’ll write letters for me. He wants to talk it over with you.”

And thus Mr. Lavery’s cautiously floated proposal took shape, blossomed, generated much correspondence, the selection of a portfolio of Matt’s work and, eventually, a trip to London for Matt, his portfolio under his arm and many instructions from his parents and Mr. Lavery in an envelope in his pocket.

He was amazed by the place—by its size, its dirt, its streaming impervious crowds of people—but he was too fraught about the task in hand to pay more than superficial attention. He must now expose his work to people who were accustomed only to the best. To do so felt both presumptuous and exhilarating; at one moment he was unbearably diffident, at another excitingly assured. “Just be yourself,” his parents had said, won over at last by Mr. Lavery and the contemplation of Matt’s evident promise. But who was he? A schoolboy from the sticks? An aspiring artist? Both. And also a person whom he sensed but still hardly recognized—a maturing self who had conviction and opinions and boundless determination. He would get this scholarship; he would go to London, he would be an artist, come what may.

When the letter from the Grosvenor School came, and he read it out to the family, his mother sat stricken and speechless; the women of ill-repute were right there in the room now, leering. Matt’s father said, “Well done, son.” Bryony, impressed despite herself, looked at her schoolboy brother and decided that this was perhaps a person of some account. She recognized that art has a certain cachet, and realized with private chagrin that those drawings and paintings that Matt had from time to time allowed the family to see must, after all, be the real thing, or, at least, some eery accessory to the real thing. She gave Matt a kindly cuff on the shoulder, and said she hoped he wasn’t going to get all uppity now. His mother rallied, faced down those lurking women, and began to talk anxiously of clothes, equipment, and sheltered accommodation.

Matt was by nature buoyant, but he now experienced a wild exhilaration, a sense that he had not before known, soaring above the exigencies of daily life. He could hardly believe his good fortune. And yet at the same time he knew that he had been right in that kernel of self-belief he had always had, that Mr. Lavery had been right in his support, and that he could join his peers in that imagined studio, knowing that he was as good as they were, and perhaps better than some. But, beyond and above all that, he savored the knowledge that, miraculously, his life was now on course. He was licensed to do exactly that which he wanted to do, for the next three years at least. After that—well, after that would be up to him, but for the foreseeable future he could spend each and every day doing what he liked best: he could draw, he could paint, he would learn wood engraving.

All this came to pass, not as he had imagined it, partly because reality never conforms to expectations but also because he himself became a subtly different being. The London at which he had gawped in amazement on that first visit became a familiar element through which he moved with ease; he learned how to manipulate the city, how to live cheap, how to use it. And the art college itself, at first a bewildering experience of alien attitudes and assumptions, of astonishing license, of people who spoke differently, dressed differently, lived differently, became within months a natural habitat, and he a distant older relative of the boy who had arrived there, and had placed himself nervously before an easel on that first morning.

Matt grew up. He shot through several years in each of the first months, or so it seemed. He felt as though he was some hatching insect, the dragonfly bursting free. He had friends, he had a mattress on the floor of a much-occupied attic, above all he had uninhibited access to a studio and to practicing artists who encouraged and criticized. He worked in pubs and bars to pay for paints and materials—the art college supplied only a certain amount. He sold some work shown in a student exhibition. And, above all, he became an engraver.

From the moment that he first placed a block on the sandbag and made the initial tentative lines with the graver, he knew that that intuition had been right: this was his medium. He could not have said exactly why; it had to do with the complexity of the process, the way in which what you first saw and drew—that image of a real scene—must be passed from one material to another, from the sketch pad to the tracing paper to the block and thence eventually to its final form, the subtle and delicate arrangement of black and white that was the finished print. But it had to do also with the way in which the fortuitous shapes and patterns of the physical world—trees, water, sky, buildings—were transformed by hand and eye into something that reflected what you saw but had now become a creation in its own right: the engraving was a dazzling black-and-white complement to the world of color.

Wood engraving thrived right now. He pored over the work of his eminent older contemporaries—Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Edward Wadsworth, Gertrude Hermes, Blair Hughes-Stanton—and sat at the feet of his own distinguished teacher, Iain Macnab. He learned the possibilities of the form, the potential; he saw how each artist makes of it something different, something new. He thought: I can do this.

And the time was ripe. There was a demand for the work of a promising engraver. At a party after the college’s annual student show, in his last year there, Matt met Lucas Talbot, a man a few years older than himself who earned a tenuous living as a fine press publisher. The Heron Press operated from Lucas’s dilapidated Victorian house in Fulham; he invited Matt to visit, and acquaintance blossomed into friendship. Lucas was, in a sense, everything that Matt was not; he was awkward, shy, socially inept, alarmed by women. Matt had been at the hub of student activity at the college, talked easily to anyone, was sexually confident. They liked one another immensely. Lucas knew that Matt was already a fine engraver, and that he would soar. Matt admired Lucas’s ferocious dedication to the creation of handsome editions. Within weeks Lucas had commissioned Matt to work on a series that he planned on English topography.

“W-w-which do you fancy?” he asked—the stammer always surfacing at moments of diffidence or excitement, “Moors and mountains or estuaries and waterways?”

Matt hesitated, unaware that the rest of his life hung in the balance. “Um…I don’t really mind, either sounds good…Oh, let’s say estuaries and waterways.”

“Done,” said Lucas. “Would thirty guineas for the twelve prints be all right? I’m afraid I can’t manage any more.”

Matt, for whom this would be comparative riches, said that this would be fine. Between them, they began to plan the structure of the book and the subject matter of Matt’s engravings.

In the interests of which, on that June morning, he selected a bench in St. James’s Park, put his sketch pad on his knee, took some stale bread from his pocket, and thus invited the fates to smile upon him.

The cottage stood beside a lane. At the front, it looked out over the high hedge bank of its garden, across the lane and the sloping field beyond to a wooded valley that reached up into the Brendon hills. Behind, fields and copses rolled away down to the Bristol channel coastline; there was a long thin slice of pewter sea and, on a clear day, the distant shore of Wales. Square and squat, cob and thatch, dug solid into the red Somerset earth, the small building had seen out generations of farm laborers. People had been born here, died here, had heard rumors of wars, had achieved the vote, had sweated over the same patch of landscape and stared at the same sky. Now, the place stood empty, bar the mice and the black beetles and the spiders. Empty, and two pounds a month.

Matt and Lorna stepped gingerly inside. The place smelled of damp, and two centuries of wood smoke, and a faint suggestion of the dead jackdaw that had fallen down the chimney and lay on the hearth, a brittle carcass. Matt picked it up and carried it out. He threw it into the hedge and stood for a moment, noting the view of the hills. He saw the roof of a house in the valley, with smoke curling up from a chimney; he saw stooked corn in a field: he saw the distant dotted shapes of sheep. He saw pattern and structure; pictures began to form in his head.

He went back into the cottage and joined Lorna on a tour of inspection. There was one main room on the ground floor, into which the front door opened directly; an open fireplace with a blackened kitchen range, a stone sink. Another, smaller room led off this, with a window that looked out onto the long triangular garden. Shaggy grass, gooseberry bushes, apple trees, and a plot that remembered vegetable gardening, with some stumps of cabbage and a tangle of long-rotted beans.

“It’s the Marie-Celeste,” said Matt. “Where did everybody go?” There was a built-in dresser in the main room, empty but for a cracked cup, a child’s rusted tin top, a moth-eaten tea cosy.

A wooden staircase led to the upper floor. Two rooms and a landing. They stood at the window of the largest room and looked down toward the coast. A small ship perched on the silver streak of the sea. The fields were pale bleached stubble, or rich red plough; the hedges and woodland were darkest green.

Lorna said, “This is our bedroom.”

“Are you sure? This place means oil lamps, and candles, and water from the tap outside. You have never lived like that.”

“Have you?”

“Not quite.”

“Then maybe it’s time we did.”

Outside, there were two sheds. The smaller one, at the end of a short path from the back door, housed the privy. The other had a concrete floor, a window, and a long workbench all along one side.

“Aha…” said Matt.

There was a standpipe beside the door. Matt tried the tap: water gushed. “It’s from the stream, I suppose. We’ll need jugs, basins, a tin bath.”

Beside the larger shed, a lean-to sheltered the remains of a log pile. Matt picked up chunks of wood, stacked them one upon another. “And a saw, and an axe, and a wedge. The village is over a mile away, do you realize?”

“Bikes,” she said. “And one day, when you’re rich and famous, a little car.”

“It is not always going to be a sunny afternoon in September. In the winter things will be very different.”

“I didn’t know you had this pessimistic streak. What else am I going to discover today?”

He put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t want you to be under any illusion about what it may be like here, that’s all. And what will you do all the time?”

“Do?” she cried, “Do?” She flung out her hand. “When there’s all that out there? Explore. I’ve never seen the countryside except through the windows of Daddy’s car. And dig this garden. And clean up that range and learn how to cook.”

And make a home, she wanted to say, but thought it mawkish. The first home that will be the way I want it, and a million miles from Brunswick Gardens.

“We might find something in the village with running water and electricity.”

“Not for two pounds a month. Not with a view of half Somerset.”

They had arrived here by chance, luck, by a series of unconsidered movements. They had traveled, somehow, from the bench in the park to this implacable little building. Lorna thought: it has been waiting for us. Matt thought about tools, and a spade and a fork, and furniture, and, one day, a printing press.

After the wedding, they had left London. A friend of Matt’s had offered a month’s use of his rooms in Marlborough while he was away in France. There, they had learned one another. They had learned every inch of one another’s bodies; they had learned every look, every tone, every inflection of the voice; they had learned one another’s tastes, thoughts, responses. Lorna had thought that this was the first time in her life that she had known another person, known them as though they were a facet of herself. Matt thought only: so this is love.

They walked for miles in that expansive landscape. They rode country buses to Stonehenge, to Dorchester. Matt sketched and painted. Lorna discovered for the first time in her life what food costs; she scoured the town for the cheapest eggs, for cut-price broken biscuits, for herrings and haddock. The little money that they had must last for as long as possible. Matt had finished the engravings for the book on estuaries and waterways; that payment was their small capital, when that was exhausted he must get another commission, or sell some of his work that was banked now with Lucas Talbot in London. Lorna had a Post Office savings account in which she had hoarded birthday money from godparents and most of the allowance from her mother that was supposed to be spent on toiletries, gloves, fripperies. She had nearly fifty pounds, and thought that she must always have known, with some secret intuition, that she would one day need this, that it would be a lifeline. Matt refused to let her draw on it: “I am not going to become a kept man.” She laughed, and knew that the money would be there, the ultimate resource.