Consequences (6 page)

“Congratulations,” said Lucas. “I’m most impressed.”

Lorna beamed at him. “I’ll show you how. You never know when it might come in useful.”

“I’d appreciate that.” Lucas thought Lorna the most appealing and attractive girl he had ever met. It did not occur to him to envy Matt because patently a girl like Lorna was not for the likes of Lucas—she was destined for some charismatic being, for Matt indeed, and ever had been. It seemed to Lucas entirely inevitable that Lorna and Matt should have found one another, and he felt content—privileged—to have a place at the edges of this charmed alliance. He was a diffident man rather than a humble one, conscious that a gawky body, extreme myopia, and a stammer could make him off-putting. Resigned to a degree of social isolation, he compensated for this with tenacious fostering of the Heron Press—his concept, his creation. All he wanted in life was to design and produce superlative examples of the bookmaker’s craft. In the basement of the ramshackle house in Fulham he labored at the press, setting type, printing, packaging, while in the office upstairs Miss Kelly, a middle-aged lady of stern demeanor but the requisite energy and efficiency, dealt with most of the paperwork and helped out generally when the pressure was on.

Today, on the Somerset hillside, Miss Kelly and the Heron Press were relegated. He felt marvelously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day. Of his companions. One will always remember this, he thought: probably when I’m a hoary old chap in…Christ, in nineteen-eighty-something…I’ll still see today. The valley, and Matt’s blue checked shirt, and her in that pink frock. And I’ll hear their voices.

But all he said was, “Q-quite a place, this. I’m game for another mousetrap sandwich, if that’s in order.”

After Molly’s birth, Lorna lay on her side and gazed at the baby, and Molly stared back with wide-open eyes and the strange unearthly look of the newborn, as though, Lorna thought, she had arrived from some mysterious place. But when Lorna got out of bed and crept over to the chest to get a glass of water, she glanced at herself in the mirror and saw that she too had that look, she was not the person that she had been yesterday, she had changed her skin. The district nurse clattered up the stairs and scolded her for moving about. Lorna got back into bed and resumed her silent communion with this small being who was no longer a part of her but a wonderful extension. The preceding hours fell away, that timeless tunnel of pain, and she simply lay there, sore, exhausted, and heard the cadenced exchanges of wood pigeons outside and the voice of the district nurse downstairs talking to Matt. She lay still, and around her on the walls the figures of Matt’s fresco danced—in celebration, it seemed. Presently Matt came up with a cup of tea and said, “I have this feeling that she is called Molly.” He put his finger on the baby’s cheek: “Molly?” Then he went over to the window, opened it, and more bird sounds floated in, with the smell of grass after a shower, and the faraway whistle of the train. Lorna said, “Molly will do nicely.” And then she went to sleep, plunging at once into blissful unconsciousness, while Matt sat on the bed holding her hand.

By that second winter at the cottage, they were hardened, braced for the tussles with the oil stove, the icy trips to the privy, Matt’s labor of log splitting, Lorna’s daily servitude at the washing copper. In wet weather, Molly’s nappies fumed alongside the kitchen range. On one dark January day, she developed croup; this awful harsh barking noise came from her crib, and Matt in a panic cycled down to the farm to ask them to telephone for help. The district nurse came, brisk and reassuring, summing up the situation at once; she was used to very young mothers, and croupy babies were two-a-penny. She sat on the couch in the snug, Molly propped over one shoulder, and gave instructions. “You’re learning all the time, with your first,” she said kindly to Lorna. “Most girls have their mum breathing down their neck, telling them what to do.”

Lorna doubted that her mother had ever confronted a nappy, let alone croup. She said, “My mother’s rather a long way away,” and the nurse nodded tactfully, scenting some dark disorder, some unspoken drama. They were not your run-of-the-mill young couple, this pair.

She said, “I used to come here to the Turners. Four children—bit of a madhouse, it was. You’ve perked the place up no end.” Her eye fell on Matt’s frescos. “The duck paintings are nice. More to my taste than those you’ve got up in the bedroom, I have to say.”

In the interests of salvaging his reputation, Matt displayed the engraving of a local farmyard scene. “Now that I like,” said the nurse. “Never mind it being rather modern style—you can still see what’s what. You carry on with that kind of thing.” She got up, and gave Molly to Lorna. “There you are, dear. She’ll be fine. Steam inhalations if she has another bout, like I said.”

“Thank you. I feel so relieved.”

“All in the day’s work.”

They stood at the door and watched the nurse wheel her bicycle out into the lane. Matt said, “Someone like that—someone
useful
—gives me a crisis of confidence. Art is of no use to anyone.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

Molly whimpered. They went inside.

He was working steadily. The book commission from the Curwen Press had been followed by another; there was Lucas’s Shakespeare project. From time to time, he would return to the series of original engravings inspired by local places which would form the core of an exhibition one day: the old wheelhouse of the mineral line, the quarry in the woods, a churchyard. Some days he was out in the landscape with his sketch pad. Mostly he was in the shed, or at one end of the kitchen table, the block in front of him, the tools lined up alongside, while Lorna fed Molly at the other end, or prepared vegetables, or simply watched for a few minutes.

Today, he was at the last stage of an engraving of a scene nearby—a cottage with geese in the foreground, trees, a wall, a figure against the curve of the lane. Lorna could see the ghost of his drawing now on the block, lurking on the black surface that turned silver as it was tilted. There were roughly gouged areas where the ginger-brown boxwood showed—the shapes of the geese, of the cottage—and silver planes of meticulous fret and pattern. Sky was a shower of black and silver lines, the solidity of a wall was a pile of little silver brick boxes. There were tiny scraped lines of thatch, silver scribbles that were leaves, the sharp stitching of grass fronds, the curve of a tree trunk—silver/black on one side, an intricate medley of lines on the other. The light changed each time the block was shifted, from black to silver, and you saw that somehow Matt’s drawing had floated onto the wood, and out of the block shone this new transformation of that scene: it was that place, but it was now something else entirely—it was an artifact, a flight of fancy, an interpretation.

Lorna said, “Those geese hiss at me when I go past on the way to the village.”

“Of course. You’re on their territory. Take a stick with you.”

“I know how to say boo to a goose.” She came around and stood behind him. “This is going to be one of your best. How many have you done now since we came here?”

“No idea. A fortune in boxwood, that’s all I know. I should be getting back to Shakespeare—Lucas is chivvying. You may have to pose for Titania, in your nightie.”

“I saw her once, at the open air theater in Regent’s Park. About a hundred years ago, it seems. Puck came leaping out of bushes.”

Matt put down the graver in surprise. “Really? I saw that. You could stand at the back for one and six. You’d have been the toffs with deck chairs. Maybe we were there at the same time. Titania takes on a new significance.”

“Maybe we walked past each other. Not knowing.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’d have known.”

She hugged him. “I’m disturbing you.” She sat down again, picked up a letter. “My mother says they want to come and see us. In the spring. And to meet Molly.”

“Of course.” He looked across at her. “We can cope with this, can’t we?”

Matt’s parents had visited not long after Molly’s birth, with Bryony, making the ponderous journey by road from the Welsh borders in the Austin 7. They had contained their dismay at the primitive condition of the cottage with much determined comment about what a lovely spot this was, and had been rapturous over Molly—even Bryony, who was now established in her first job, and every inch the career teacher. She held the baby in a gingerly grasp, as though she might attempt to escape, and said to Matt, “Well done, you.” The three of them stayed at a local bed and breakfast; they explored the area, walked on the moor, and made long daily calls at the cottage. Lorna cooked rabbit stew, a chicken from the farm, and baked cakes. Matt’s mother took him aside to tell him that she was a lovely girl: “We thought it was all a bit hasty, at the time. We felt you’d rushed into it, both of you. Now I know her, I can understand, more.”

Lorna had felt awkward with them at first, and then, gradually, had relaxed. Removed from the requirements and expectations of her own parents’ world, she had discovered that she was now more capable than she had ever realized of being at ease with people—with any sort of person. She no longer felt herself so glaringly defined, an unwilling specimen of a particular world.

Now, she said to Matt, “We’ll manage. It won’t be like your parents, but we’ll manage.”

Matt went to London. He had finished the set of engravings for Lucas’s edition of
Lamb’s Tales;
the blocks had to be safely delivered to Fulham. It was the first time that he and Lorna had been apart in nearly two years.

“You’ll be all right?
Sure?
”

“Of course.
Go.
Enjoy it. See friends. You’ve been cooped up here long enough.”

“So have you.”

“I’ve never been less cooped. I do what I want, every day, don’t I?”

All the way to London, in the train, she was in his head. He saw her face, riding above the fields and hills, the little towns, the station platforms. Arriving at Paddington, he felt battered by the crowds, by this accelerated world. In his student days, he had found the perpetual movement of the city stimulating, challenging; now, as he made his way to Fulham, he wondered if he could ever feel like that again.

“I seem to be a country bumpkin,” he told Lucas. “Take me to some rowdy pub, so that I can find my feet.”

Over a pint, he acclimatized. Places like this had been his habitat, time was. “That’s better. I’m learning the language again.”

Lucas was distressed. He had just heard that an acquaintance of his had been badly wounded in Spain, fighting with the International Brigade. “They’d never let me loose with a gun, not with my bloody eyesight, but there must be something I could do. One should go.” He pulled himself up. “N-not you. Me.”

“Why not me?”

“Because you’ve got Lorna. And Molly. It’s different.”

“Whereas you’re expendable?”

Lucas shrugged.

“Don’t be so idiotic,” said Matt. “No one’s expendable, wife and baggage or not. But I know what you mean. Trouble is, I simply can’t imagine myself shooting people, however strongly I felt. Can you?”

“If the Fascists aren’t stopped in Spain, it’ll be France next, eventually us. Spain is the confrontation. How can one stand back?”

“You’re not answering my question. Maybe you’re lucky that your glasses let you off the hook, in the last resort.”

Lucas looked away. “All right, we’re not soldier material. True enough. But when push comes to shove…”

Matt said, “That is something we may find out in due course, if the pessimists are to be believed.”

They fell silent. Matt got up to go to the bar. “Enough of that. I’m under instructions to enjoy myself. Let’s celebrate this book. Pint?”

Some while later, slightly drunk, Lucas reverted to his mood of gloom. “All I want is to make books. That’s all I think about. You’re an artist…. We’re private people. But there’s the world snarling away, Hammond getting his leg blown off in Spain, and you can’t stay private. It’s…it’s intolerable.”

“People have had to put up with it since forever. Nobody’s exempt from history. If our turn comes…well, it was ever thus. Anyway, it may not. Hitler’s a loudmouth. I prefer to think he’ll back off, like some people are saying.”

The pub was a warm, convivial haven, full of talk, bursts of laughter, hazy with cigarette smoke. Do I miss this sort of thing? thought Matt. But right now it was Lorna he missed. He imagined her in the cottage, lighting the lamps, getting something for supper. A couple of days, and he’d be back there.

Lorna’s parents visited, in early summer, when Molly was going on for two years old. Marian Bradley picked her way cautiously over the threshold of the cottage and stared around: “Oh, my dear…” she said, after a few moments. Lorna and Matt saw her gaze drift across the open range, the dresser with its assorted crockery, the scrubbed table, the stone sink. They all moved through into the next room, which seemed at once a size smaller, overwhelmed by Gerald Bradley’s bulk and his wife’s force field of unease. Marian sat on the sagging couch, and looked around some more. “Well, it’s cozy,” she said gamely. “Quite original, painting pictures on the walls like that, I must say.” She noticed the window, and the green reach of Somerset beyond: “Lovely view, anyway.”

They accepted cups of tea, and slices of cake. Molly was displayed, and worked a certain magic. Marian took her jacket off and lit a cigarette. Gerald spoke at some length about a man he’d been at school with who lived now at Something Manor, a couple of miles away. Had Matt and Lorna come across him? They had not.

During the next couple of hours Lorna knew that she had traveled a long way since last she saw her parents. She was reborn, it seemed, and while they were not strangers—by no means—they had acquired a strangeness. She felt sad about this, but also quite accepting. Her childhood seemed to be shut away behind glass, filled with these familiar figures, her mother and father and brothers, who were now distanced—known, and yet also unreachable. Her parents sat there in the cottage, talking hectically; she felt as though they were acquaintances. She wondered if they felt the same.