Unexploded (13 page)

She assured herself she had only to run to Magdalene Street, ask Tillie if she’d have Philip for dinner, pass her the parcel of liver as a small offering, and thank her sincerely. She could leave a note for Philip on the kitchen table, which he’d find upon his return from Orson’s.

She had no illusions. She would find herself out of her depth. She tried to keep up with the new literature, but she read these days largely to convince herself that she still had a private life. In reality, she managed only a few pages at a time. Her concentration was
hit-and-miss, and she assumed that the curiosity she’d long prided herself on was, after all, only the slim pretension of youth; a
jeu d’esprit
; the ‘precociousness’ that her parents had, at best, tolerated.

After all, when it came to it, when life had finally released her ‘fin-ished’ from the school in Auteuil, when there had been at last a glimpse of freedom, where had her curiosity been? She’d fallen in love with the first man who’d touched her.

As for her cleverness, it was, she suspected, a sham. Good play-acting. A talent for references. A show of sophistication that Geoffrey had been obliged to applaud over the years in order that she might feel different, better, more discerning, than him; better, too, than the women at the WI with their uncomplicated love for the novels of John Galsworthy. Her problem hadn’t been, as she’d always told herself, the denial of the university education she’d once craved; the enforced spell at Auteuil instead of entrance into Newnham. Her problem was a quiet sense of superiority that had never been earned or tested; a superiority that had masked her failure to live in all but the most conventional of ways while quietly disdaining convention.

Only at Auteuil had she risked anything. That year, at the age of seventeen, she discovered the knack of truancy and had often travelled the four miles into Paris on the decorous Ligne d’Auteuil.

Initially, her mission had simply been to find a bookshop or library that stocked English novels, for she was homesick and longed for good company, real or fictional. Lost more often than not, she discovered instead backstreet galleries and an art that was nothing like the masterpieces the girls at the school studied in their History of Art. At first, she’d thought modern art ugly and base. On its canvases, reality elongated, multiplied and bent. Where was its purity?

But little by little, she learned how to see all over again. The pure needed the impure. Truth was bigger than the laws of perspective.
It wasn’t fixed. It couldn’t be had off the peg. Truth had to be imagined.

At La Galerie B. Weill on rue Victor Massé, the owner, Fräulein Berthe Weill, told Evelyn that, some twenty years before, she had used her dowry to pay for the gallery even though her family had promptly disowned her for it. Her hair was combed back very tightly on her scalp and her spectacles were severe on the bridge of her nose, yet her eyes were bright and her gaze direct. Whatever she saw, she
saw
. Her gallery, she said, waving a tiny hand, had been the unrivalled ‘Place aux Jeunes’ when her artists
were
still
jeune
and unknown: Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Modigliani, Vlaminck, Valadon …

Evelyn nodded. She did not admit, in her schoolgirl French, that she knew none of those names; that her studies in the History of Art would end that term on nineteenth-century society portraiture.

It was on rue d’Astorg that she first saw work by Picasso and was charmed by another gallery owner, another German art dealer in Paris. Herr Kahnweiler flattered her with cups of Earl Grey tea, spontaneous lectures on the paintings that hung on his walls, and invitations to gallery soirées she could never attend. At his encouragement, she even dared present herself on rue de Grenelle at the new Bureau of Surrealist Inquiries where she was interviewed about her dreams in the night and her chance encounters of that day. She mentioned a handsome young ticket collector on the Ligne d’Auteuil who’d asked her to speak to him in English although he couldn’t understand a word. He had just wanted to hear it. He’d listened very carefully to words that meant nothing to him. Then, ‘You are someone different in English,’ he’d said.

‘No, I am someone different in
French
!’

But he’d smiled and shaken his head.

Her adventures in Paris lasted for less than a year. In the end, the Headmistress threatened to have her sent back to England ‘unfin-ished’ and in shame. Did she want to forego the Season? Did she want to spend her life as the daughter of the house, looking after her parents as they grew old?

She gave up the pleasures of the Ligne d’Auteuil. She never saw Fräulein Weill or Herr Kahnweiler again. She fell in with convention and made her peace with the extravagant absurdities of etiquette. Until her row with Geoffrey on the Pavilion balcony, she had never so much as demurred publicly with anyone’s views, let alone her husband’s, all of which meant – she glanced at the clock on the wall again – that she was infinitely less entitled to attend a WEA lecture than the bank clerk or bricklayer who risked the contempt of his family or workmates or friends to do so. What risk, she asked herself, what actual risk, had she ever taken?

In
The Years
, North seemed to think her thoughts before she could. ‘We’re all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what? Of criticism; of laughter; of people who think differently …’ It was as if she were receiving his words direct from another place and time. ‘ “That’s what separates us; fear …” ’

Even in the day’s heat, the wide, polished corridors of the Technical College seemed as cool, as forbidding, as a glacial crevasse. Her footsteps rang out as she walked, shoulders back, head high, as if the building itself observed her. In fact, she had no idea where she was going. She’d taken a wrong turn and had lost count of how many flights of stairs she’d climbed. Somewhere a pipe groaned. A horned creature in a plaster coat of arms bared its teeth. She peered through a window slot, anticipating the lean backs of young men bent over machines, but found only shadowy rows of draughtsmen’s desks.
She must have misheard the porter at Reception. Up ahead, a single door was open – light seeped over the threshold – but when she reached it, she discovered only a collection of drills and vices, their cables trailing across the floor. The clock on the wall read six minutes past five.

She ran to the end of the corridor, pushed on a door and raced down the staircase like an errant schoolgirl. Her hair started to unroll, arcs of damp spread beneath her arms, and as she descended, she became aware of someone else ascending the flight of steps.

The top of a head, a sunburned scalp through thinning grey hair, came into view in the gaps between the steps. It seemed impossible: Mr Hatchett. Like her, he was in a hurry.

At the entrance to the fourth floor, they each stopped short. ‘I believe it’s this way,’ he said, his face determinedly neutral.

They walked the long corridor in a silence that was broken only by the staccato of their footsteps. She wished she’d worn a hat; she longed now for its brim, for its cover. After several long minutes, he stopped abruptly at a set of double doors, squinted through the slot, and held the door open.

The lecture theatre must have seated at least a hundred. Rows of brilliantined heads gleamed in descending tiers, amphitheatre style, to the front where, unbelievably, the author herself sat in a straight-backed chair in front of a vast chart of the Periodic Table. Together, she and Mrs Woolf were two of no more than four or five women in the room.

Evelyn stared from the entry door high above. Mrs Woolf ’s face was just visible beneath a wide-brimmed blue felt hat, a hat to which someone had attached a wide white chin-loop of dressmaker’s elastic. She wore a red-and-blue plaid blouse with a large bow at the neck, a silver corduroy fitted jacket, and a long navy skirt with white
stockings and broad, Roman-style beach sandals. Her feet were crossed at the ankles, there was a sheaf of foolscap on her lap, and she inclined her head slightly as she listened, smiling quizzically at the man who introduced her from the lectern.

The porter Evelyn had first met at Reception explained to her in a loud whisper that if she and her companion wished to be seated together, he was afraid he couldn’t oblige. There were no two seats together. Only three or four single seats remained. What would they like to do?

She and Mr Hatchett nearly leaped apart at the question. She glanced at him for the first time, as if to agree which of them was obliged to clarify? He, the male, or she, the person of higher social rank? And in that singular moment, they each felt, briefly, naked.

Mr Hatchett cracked his fingers. Evelyn shook her head in a single, embarrassed syllable as if to say,
No, I am unaccompanied
. She imagined the porter asking to see proof of her WEA membership, or informing her loudly that he would need to check her Identity Card, which she of course had not bothered to bring. She hadn’t even remembered to bring her gas mask, unlike Mr Hatchett, whose canister was slung dutifully over his shoulder. But the porter merely nodded and indicated with a finger a seat in the first row on the central aisle. She dashed down the side steps, face burning, and dropped into the heavy wooden chair.

She couldn’t have explained why she then felt obliged to turn to locate Mr Hatchett several rows back. He too had taken his seat and now sat, folding his butcher’s apron on his lap. He must have felt her gaze upon him, his nerves no doubt sharpened by the tension of their meeting, for he looked up at that moment and his grey, lidless eyes met hers.

She forced the corners of her mouth into a weak smile, a guilty
smile – why, after all, had she turned to stare? – but she knew it didn’t convince. She saw him stiffen. His Adam’s apple rose in the wattle of his thin, shaved throat, and it was he who had the good grace to look away first.

As Mrs Woolf stood to speak, she removed her hat, and, for a moment, appeared unsure whether to rest it in the lap of her host – who had taken the only chair – or on the only other available surface, the floor. Noting the gloom of her host’s face, she opted for the floor, but as she bent, she didn’t see the handkerchief, a large gentleman’s handkerchief, fall from her jacket pocket to the floor.

In the hush of the room, Mrs Woolf looped her spectacles over her ears and began to arrange her papers, as if unaware of the audience that waited patiently, deferentially even. All the while, they used the opportunity to observe unobserved this woman who already seemed to them less a literary spectacle than a person they had collectively dreamed.

Her silver hair matched, elegantly if accidentally, the silver cord of her jacket. The plaid bow at her neck was, at once, both spinsterish and lavish. Her eyes had the oversized, sunken but animated quality of the consumptive, while the fingers of her left hand, Evelyn noted from her vantage point in the front row, were, without exception, ink-stained. Even her lips were faintly marked with blue, as if she’d been pressing her fingers to her mouth, deep in thought as she scribbled on the train from Lewes to Brighton.

Her voice, as it first emerged, was unexpectedly deep; perhaps any threat of female shrillness had been ‘elocuted’ out of her long ago. ‘My title today is “The Leaning Tower”. I must confess that it is, at present, but a miscellany of half-formed thoughts on the modern novel. Perhaps with your help I shall develop it into something more
sensible.’ Evelyn unfastened her clutch and reached for a pen and paper. Mrs Woolf seemed as modest, as unassuming, as she was grand, and her words had their own rolling music.

‘Books,’ she began, ‘descend from books as families descend from families. They resemble their parents, as human children resemble their parents; yet they differ as children differ, and revolt as children revolt. Perhaps it will be easier to understand living writers as we take a quick look at some of their forebears.’ She looked up, almost solicitously, from her foolscap as if to assure herself that her audience was not averse to the proposal.

‘In 1815 England was at war, as England is now. And it is natural to ask, how did their war – the Napoleonic War – affect the writers of the day? The answer, if you’ll allow it, is a strange one. The Napoleonic wars did not affect the great majority of those writers at all. Their vision of human life was not disturbed or changed by war. Nor were they themselves. It is easy to see why that was so. Wars were then remote; wars were carried on by soldiers and sailors, not by private people. Compare that with our state today.

‘Today we hear the gunfire in the Channel. We turn on the wire-less; we hear an airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine caught fire; he plunged into the sea; the light turned green then black. Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening.’

And Evelyn was again in her own shuttered sitting room, in her chair, as Geoffrey tuned the wireless. Wasn’t it the same in every house? The news was as irresistible as it was dreaded.

‘Do we strain Wordsworth’s famous saying about emotion recol-lected
in tranquillity when we infer that, by tranquillity, he meant that the writer needs to become unconscious before he can create? Yet think of our modern writers. During all the most impressionable years of their lives they were stung into consciousness of things changing, of things falling, of death perhaps about to come. There was no tranquillity in which they could recollect. They told the unpleasant truths, not only the flattering truths. That is why their autobiography is actually so much better than their fiction or poetry. Consider how difficult it is to tell the truth about oneself – the unpleasant truth; to admit that one is petty, vain, mean, frustrated, tortured, unfaithful and unsuccessful. The nineteenth-century writers never told that kind of truth, and that is why so much of the nineteenth-century writing is worthless.’

Evelyn’s pen hesitated. She wondered what it must be like to stand before more than a hundred readers and declare a broad swathe of nineteenth-century literature chaff. Surely Mrs Woolf was wrong in this one regard …?