The Wedding Group (22 page)

‘Well… let me think. Oh, I had an idea the other day. What about the religions of London – get some nice shots of
old Salvation Army souls, Greek Orthodox wedding, Jewish circumcision, Irish wake…’

‘Too many of them.’

‘Do another series.’

‘People would get tired of it long before the end.’

‘What about pavement artists, then?’ The ideas came at random, for it was random journalism.

‘I should guess there wouldn’t be enough of
them
.’

‘It’s an odd taste, isn’t it? Nothing for people to get their teeth into – like eating a jam-puff, gone and forgotten in two shakes. And what the subject is hardly seems to matter – you can hit on anything, and walk round it a couple of times, and ask a few questions, and blow it up and dispose of it.’

‘And photograph it in green-greens and blue-blues,’ Jack said, of his own part.

‘They love that. You make the countryside look quite inviting,’ said David, having no love for it.

‘Must be a bit laconic occasionally, a bit quirky.’

‘Do you remember this sort of journalism when we were young?’

‘Perhaps we invented it.’

‘You know damn well we didn’t.’

‘Anyhow, we’re stuck with it, and lucky to be so. I think I’ll turn in. Not working wears me out. Did you get on much today?’

‘I interviewed some chaps in Berwick Street. Nothing wonderfully funny.’

No questions were ever asked about how either had spent the evening – neither where, nor with whom.

David, in his rather cold and very cluttered room, lay awake for a long time, thinking about Cressy and Timmy, his two little children. He tried to feel virtuous that he was lying where he was, and was aggrieved that he could only feel exactly the opposite.

I shall miss you very much,’ Cressy said sadly to her cousin, Pet. ‘I can’t believe that you are all going away.’ Yet she had tried to imagine it, and had succeeded.

They were pushing Pet’s baby in his pram round the courtyard at Quayne. Midge had been contented to have Timmy to herself for the afternoon. She would let him lie on the rug before the carefully-guarded fire, and her eyes would rarely leave him. Having him under her roof so much, had made a different child of him. Her authority had given him a sense of security. Only Cressy’s timid and uncertain handling made him cry. Once, in an excess of nervousness, she had let him roll from her lap, and Midge had bounded across the room like a lioness, and snatched him up. Her ferocity had alarmed Cressy even more, and she had watched her pacing up and down with the sobbing child in her arms, making soothing noises, laying her cheek against his wet one, kissing him again and again. Every kiss was a reproof to Cressy who, quite ignored, had sat trembling in her chair, her own tears falling into the napkin spread across her knees. For the reason that
she could not bear to think of the scene, she had not described it to Pet, to whom she nowadays confided a great deal.

There was no one else about in the courtyard, but they could hear voices from the studio. Their grandfather was there, talking to two young men, of ancient Roman Catholic families and vague artistic leanings, who had been sent to stay at Quayne for a week or two, until something else for them to do had been discovered.

‘We might have married
them
,’ Cressy said.

‘Oh, they are far too grand for us.’

As they went along the mossy brick path under the studio wall, they could hear the Master booming away inside. He had got into a rhythm which seemed to make him reluctant to finish his lengthy sentences. ‘The question of what Turner is a-bout,’ they heard, going by as quickly as they could, ‘is really the question of what painting is a-bout, what art is a-bout; in fact, what life itself, and death itself, is certainly a-bout.’

Pet and Cressy looked at one another, with pursed lips, as if to stop an explosion of laughter. ‘It doesn’t mean
a
thing,’ Pet whispered. ‘He hasn’t a clue what he is talking a-bout.’

‘Does he still make a lot of money?’ Cressy asked, when they had gone out of hearing.

‘The Lord provides. There’s a big job at the moment for a great new church – designing a tapestry and mosaics. I am in them,’ Pet added, without pride. She peered into the battered old pram and rearranged the baby against his pillow.

‘Suffolk is so far away,’ Cressy complained. ‘I might never see you again.’

‘Couldn’t I sometimes come to stay with you? I should love to stay in someone else’s house.’

‘Well, I suppose you could,’ Cressy said doubtfully.

In the kitchen-garden they met Mo, who was cutting some
cabbages, and keeping an eye on the studio door, hoping to intercept the young men when they came out of it. The cabbages were curled and purple and full of raindrops, and their leaves creaked stiffly as she held them in her arms. She was not pleased to see her cousins, for she had hung out her errand as long as she could, and there was no sign of the young men. She did not know that one of them was watching from a window as she crossed the courtyard. He was standing with folded arms, trying to convey frowning attention, looking occasionally sideways down at the ground, not listening to a word about Turner. The other young man presently dared to ask a question about Picasso. It was their only hope of release, and very soon they were allowed to go off across the courtyard towards the house, where bread, they could smell, was being baked on a large scale.

Harry, left alone, was too ruffled to get on with his work. Over the years, he had come to hate Picasso, with a deep, uneasy hatred. He had always detested his work, but now he also detested the creator of it. He was envious of him for remaining, as he himself had not, a controversial figure. To have once been a controversial figure was something to look back on, and to know that he no longer was – or only to the elderly – humiliated him. Once he had scandalised; but to see religious characters in modern clothes and surrounded by everyday odds and ends no longer scandalised anyone. In the good old days, a maniac had jabbed one of his paintings with a pen-knife, and others, more conventional, had jabbed at him in letters to
The Times
: now he was mildly praised by the very generation he had wasped, and ignored by the young.

In his character he had a need to admire other men, and Turner he admired. He had Leofric Welland’s book about him in his hands, had been reading passages from it to the
young men. Now, he turned the pages slowly, but saw nothing. He put the book down and stood by the window in a dream. He could find it in his heart to worship the man, and doing so enlarged himself. Turner was the greatest English painter, and was safely dead, did not encroach or suggest comparisons. But at the end, he had petered out, not grown and gone ahead like Picasso – grown and gone ahead
monstrously
, Harry considered; in old age he had shown recklessness and a complete lack of humility. It was annoying how his name, once mentioned, could not be put out of Harry’s mind. He tried to think, instead, of his own future – of the move into Suffolk and a new life there. They had come, over the years, to lie in a rut, in the sheltered vapours of Quayne; but soon there would be new homes to create, a new generation to influence, new chapters for Leofric’s biography; and perhaps, too – who could tell? – his great retrospective exhibition at the Tate.

Cressy, he thought, seeing her from the window, would miss this great spiritual and physical upheaval. In her ignorance of the world and refusal to be taught, her childish rebelliousness, she had simply got out of one rut and into another.

He crossed the studio to his unfinished painting of ‘The Raising of Lazarus’, and willed the sense of his own greatness to return to him, was practically sure that it had returned to him; and he pointed out to himself, as he might have done to a ring of admiring students, the organisation of the whole, the slanting, fore-shortened figures, and the richness of all the day-to-day textures that he loved so much – herring-boned tweeds and lumpy knitting-stitches, and basket-work and braided hair. Lazarus was in striped pyjamas, for he particularly liked painting striped pyjamas. He tried to concentrate on the picture, on his intentions for it as a whole, and for the as yet unpainted areas; but other, extraneous thoughts came into his
mind instead – the words ‘Sir Harry Bretton’, for instance. That he was
not
– and it would have sounded so well – was a grievance of long-standing. There was also the recurring discomfort of undue homage paid to Francis Bacon – a gathering menace. And the new annoyance of those two young men, with their lack of enthusiasm for his works.

He turned away from the easel, slung his shepherd’s cloak over his shoulders, and went out and locked the studio door – the only door which ever was locked at Quayne. The courtyard was empty. Cressy and Pet had gone inside.

He was glad to find Rachel alone in their sitting-room. She knew at once that he was out-of-humour, but she went on with her sewing, and waited as calmly as she could. He came to the fire and held out his hands to warm them. Between stitches, she gave little glances at the hands, as if they might offer a hint of his mood, which his face would have done more directly if she had dared to look at it. He turned the hands over and over as if he were lathering them. They were so familiar to her – square, short-fingered, rather grubby. They told her nothing.

‘Rachel,’ he said at last, looking down at her bent head, ‘where are my old letters to you? I feel like sitting here by the fire and reading them to you.’

She was prompt with her look of pleased anticipation, and put aside her sewing and got up at once.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Pet had said comfortingly to Cressy, as they went towards Rose’s cottage for tea. There was a slight stress on her first word. ‘You’ve got the baby, and a husband, and a mother-in-law. Two more people than I have. I shall never have
those
two.’

‘Midge seems to lose patience with me nowadays, and David hardly ever comes home during the week,’ Cressy said in a
piteous tone. It was as if she had lost confidence. She had acquired it, and lost it. ‘But don’t tell Mother about that,’ she added.

‘Mrs Brindle, I’m afraid, already has.’

‘I suppose she would have,’ Cressy said sadly, disappointed in her old ally. ‘And what will
she
do when you’ve gone?’

‘Mrs Brindle is always in demand. She might even be persuaded to remain.’

Quayne was to become a private school for problem children, and Cressy could easily imagine that Mrs Brindle would find there an alluring opportunity: and her being there would be a great enrichment to the village.

Pet lifted her good little baby from the pram and they went indoors. Father Daughtry and Joe were sitting by the fire, and Rose came in from the kitchen, carrying the teapot. ‘And where is Timmy?’ she asked, looking at the other child.

‘I left him with Midge. I hate pushing the pram up the hill.’

‘I should have liked to have seen my grandson,’ Rose said stiffly.

The room looked barer than ever, for Joe had already packed his books, as if he had given up all thought at present of getting his own book out of them.

‘Two miles and a half to the nearest pub,’ he was saying. ‘What sort of a place is that going to be?’

‘I’ve known it worse in Connemara,’ said Father Daughtry, as if this were a reason for their cheering up.

They sat round the table and, as Rose poured out the tea, she asked, ‘What time will David get home this evening?’ She was obliged to look at what she was doing, and not at Cressy.

Cressy put on a candid, but casual expression and said lightly, ‘Not at all tonight. Not until Friday. He’s doing a thing on London riverside pubs.’

‘An interesting subject,’ Father Daughtry said, feeling that
he could warm to it, wishing that he could have joined in its exploration. ‘I can well remember The Prospect of Whitby before it became the rage. There was another at Hammersmith I was fond of. And The City Barge. The dear old City Barge.’ He was sure that he could have written the article himself, and from memory. ‘To lush at Freeman’s Quay. Let’s have the derivation, now, Joe.’

Rose, ignoring him, sat – having passed the tea-cups – with her hands clasped in her lap. She wore a look of anxiety, which was so usual with her, however, that nobody but Cressy noticed it.

‘It must be lonely for you,’ she said, in a disapproving, not commiserating voice. She felt that the marriage, which was not really a marriage, was doomed; and Cressy, reading her thoughts, said cheerfully, ‘Lots of husbands are away during the week.’

Pet, for her own sake, changed the subject. ‘I wonder what it will be like in Suffolk,’ she said, for she had not seen her new home. Rose, who had, described it as remote, but open country, very flat. ‘You would not have to push the pram up any hill
there
,’ she said to Cressy. ‘Or
not
push it up,’ she added confusedly.

Midge had spent a peaceful afternoon with Timmy. She had taken him for a little outing in the pram, and he had slept. Now she was playing with him on a rug before the fire, holding up a spoon for him to grasp, watching him, entranced. When he put out his left hand, she made him try again with his right hand. She had a suspicion that he was naturally left-handed, and determined to put this right from the beginning. Soon he became fretful, turning his head impatiently, ignoring the spoon, and hooking his hands and fingers in distracted movements, scuffling his legs on the rug
like a rabbit. His face darkened, and he began to cry. It was not time for his bottle so she picked him up and walked round the room, showing him things to appease him – flowers, and photographs, his face in a mirror – and talked to him brightly and soothingly. She took up a fan from a table and fanned him and for a second or two he stared in amazement, his eyelids fluttering; then he became petulant again. She laid down the fan and resumed her pacing. She stopped before the Wedgwood wedding group, and lifted him close to it, telling him a story about it, and he stopped crying, and took in a long breath, like an out-going sigh. ‘Pretty,’ she cooed to him. ‘So pretty.’ Suddenly, he put out an uncertain hand, lurched forward, and knocked the ornament from the shelf. ‘Oh, God!’ she cried in a different voice, and he began to scream. ‘No, no!’ she said softly against his cheek. ‘Not to worry, my darling. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter a little, tiny bit.’ She moved away from the scene of the disaster; but nothing would console him now. She gave up trying, and went to warm his bottle.