Nuns and Soldiers (20 page)

To stop the wretched tears from rising she thought, the Count is coming, I shall be glad to see him. Gertrude had not forgotten Guy’s words about Peter, but she had not, during the first mourning time, reflected on them. They were words, wrapped up, stowed away in her mind. She would not marry. She must not cry. The Count was coming and she would be glad to see him. The door bell rang.

‘Oh hello Count, how nice to see you, do come in.’ Gertrude led the way through the hall and into the drawing-room. The cold sunshine of the April evening had a dim clear light, faintly gilding the calm clever Jewish ancestral faces. The room smelt of narcissus and the uneasiness of spring. Gertrude had changed her dress and combed and patted back her thick curly brown hair in honour of her visitor. Now they turned to face each other, both in a state of extreme agitation, Gertrude suddenly so, the Count as the climax of a long and agonizing expectation. The Count felt that he was face to face with the new, the possible Gertrude for the first time, and it was like meeting a strange woman, who was yet so dear, so familiar. He felt it would have been natural to take her in his arms. His pale snake-blue eyes glared down at Gertrude, his pale face was distorted into a mask of piteous intensity. His lips were wet, and he looked in his pain almost ferocious. He was visibly trembling. Gertrude felt, with the quick shock of his emotion, her own. Suddenly alone, she was confronted with a man who desired her, who loved her, and to whom she would have in some way to respond. Her heart accelerated and she put her hand to her throat.

Anne came in carrying a tray with glasses.

‘You’ve changed the room,’ said the Count. He knew this since he had helped Gertrude to move the furniture, but he needed something to say.

Anne, seeing the last seconds of the encounter, thought to herself, the Count in love, how odd, how
improper
! She had, she realized, thought of him as somehow, like herself, isolated, separated. And Gertrude is moved, yes, she is moved, she is blushing. Anne felt suddenly sad.

The Count greeted Anne and the three of them began to chat.

 

 

Tim Reede was mooching around in his studio over the garage off the Chiswick High Road. Below, as always during the day, there were sounds of voices, of engines. Smells of petrol and oil rose to Tim’s sensitive nostrils and mingled with those of turps and paint. He liked all these smells. He looked at himself in his shaving mirror, over the sink, beside the electric ring. He was wearing a blue paint-stained overall, the uniform which he had worn ever since he had dreamed of saying to himself: I too am a painter. His eyes were as blue as ever but he had a little less hair, and his newly-shaven chin, which had once, with its myriad points of brilliant red, glowed like a barley field, now looked dark, even dirty. He wiped his face with a damp towel. Someone at the Prince of Denmark (that idiot Piglet, Jimmy Roland’s friend) had said to him: You ought to worry more about Daisy. Tim had reflected on this cryptic remark. Well, perhaps it was not so cryptic. There were so many obvious worries in the Daisy area. But was Tim worrying
enough
? Sometimes he tried to worry more, but it was tempera-mentally difficult. Anyway, where would worrying get them? Daisy didn’t worry. She complained ceaselessly, but she didn’t worry. This was a part of her marvellous magnanimous strength, the strength upon which, Tim knew, he rested. He rested upon her strength, not she on his. She had a kind of deep electric energy which Tim absolutely lacked. He lived upon her energy. If people thought him irresponsible about her, they did not see that she was the strong one. Tim often let Daisy decide things, even if the decision seemed dotty, because he trusted her instincts and because if he decided anything and it went wrong she never stopped blaming him, even if she had agreed with the original idea.

Just now there were no very clear ideas. Daisy was behind with the rent. Tim could not yet face the prospect of having her with him at the garage. There would be one long row, the usual one-sided row with Tim saying nothing, but feeling bitter and sad. Once Daisy, in a rage, had thrust a rose which he had given her, long thorny stem and all, down the back of his shirt, and that sharp pricking pain all the way down his spine came back to him during those vituperative monologues. Besides, he
could
not have Daisy here. Brian the garage man vaguely knew that Tim lived in the loft and did not just use it as a studio. Daisy came to lunch there often enough, indeed she was coming today, and she had once stayed with him briefly when she let her room, but if she came permanently and started hanging her underwear out of the window or something (she was incapable of being inconspicuous) Brian might get fed up and point out that the loft was not residential accommodation. Then the ‘local authority’ would become involved (Tim hated authorities), and he would be questioned, fined, ejected, his name mentioned in the paper. All his horrors would descend on him. He would lose his last refuge.
Lanthano
, he thought, oh
lanthano
! So it was impossible to have Daisy living here, and indeed neither of them had yet suggested it, though both of them had thought of it.

Something, however, would have to be done. Tim smiled to himself as he reflected how many times it had come to that; and, well, something always
had
been done and would doubtless be done now. He had had no teaching this past term and would probably have none next term, though there was the possibility of a two days a week job in September. That was certainly a light on the horizon. Daisy refused to look for a job. She was writing her novel. Tim had nearly had a commission to illustrate a comic cookery book, only then the firm decided not to publish it after all. He had a brief temporary job looking after someone’s little art gallery, sitting at a table while a very occasional visitor dropped in to walk gloomily round the show. But the gallery, which was going bankrupt, could pay him very little and he had to find his fares to Hampstead.

The cats were going quite well. It was a matter of inventing strong attractive images. He had done several of, as it might be, Perkins sitting on a window ledge beside a vase of flowers (Tim liked painting flowers) with a landscape behind him. The flowers were Odilon Redon, the landscape Rowland Hilder, the cat (Tim hoped) Tim Reede. The result, he had to admit, was tame (not that that mattered from a commercial point of view). He was now developing a more interesting version of Perkins at his toilet, one leg raised vertically, staring impertinently at the spectator. The background was a problem, and somehow the cat’s body refused to inhabit the space (not that that mattered either from a commercial point of view). But there was also the problem of whether there
was
a commercial point of view. Tim was painting now on wood rescued from rubbish tips. (The cats were no good in water colour.) He used acrylic paint which was expensive. Moreover, his destined clients liked fussy gilt frames which made the mogs look like ‘real pictures’, but Tim could not make such frames himself, and good frames were now hard to find in junk shops. If he bought suitable frames new the finished product was no longer profitable. If he used cheap plain frames the cats looked less like pretty gifts and more like bad paintings. And then, how to market the stuff? He had quarrelled with two gift shops because they wanted a commission which left him almost no profit. Galleries were out of the question. He could not draw attention to himself by exhibiting at the studio. Jimmy Roland, who sometimes helped him, was (according to Piglet) in Paris. Tim tried sometimes to sell his wares in pubs (not the Prince, where he would have felt ashamed). He tried the Chiswick pubs from the Tabard to the Barley Mow, and also the Irish pubs in Kilburn where he put on an Irish accent which he had stowed away somewhere in his unconscious. By this method, he occasionally sold a picture by reducing the price to almost nothing, or more often was told by the publican to clear off. Tim was made utterly miserable by aggressive rudeness. He had not the temperament of a salesman. But what else to do?

Ebury Street was no more. Gertrude had gone away to the north with her friend Anne Cavidge, so she had told him in a short note replying, after an interval of time, to his laboriously written letter of condolence, and although she might by now be back in London he felt that the links with Ebury Street were broken. Had he ever really thought of those people as his ‘family’? He could think of no method of re-establishing the contact which had once seemed so natural, no pretext on which he could now reenter that house. It had all depended on Guy. He was not needed or wanted there, and no one would henceforth give him a thought. He was not
real
like they were. Would Gertrude write to ask him how he was getting on? Inconceivable. He had once (in February) rather daringly rung up the Count at his office ‘to say hello’. The Count
had
asked him how he was getting on and Tim had said fine. He then hoped the Count, whom he liked, might invite him round, but no. Probably the Count never invited anybody, and Tim had not quite had the nerve to suggest meeting the Count in a pub. The Stanley Openshaws were of course too grand, and anyway Janet disapproved of Tim. (He wished now he had taken the opportunity to make friends with William Openshaw.) He thought of ringing up Gerald Pavitt, but his number was not in the book, and Tim had accidentally discovered from a newspaper that Gerald was a world-famous physicist. This fact staggered him. He had vaguely connected Gerald with telescopes, but had never conceived that the rather shaggy nice individual with whom he had had a drink or two at the Wheatsheaf was a great man, considered for a Nobel prize. (They occasionally met by accident in Soho since Gerald, a serious eater, frequented a gourmet restaurant not far from the Prince of Denmark.) Tim felt now that he could not possibly expect Gerald to notice him any more. Balintoy was still away, and anyway Tim felt funny about Balintoy. Tim had not been invited to Moira Greenberg’s wedding. He was well and truly out of the picture. He felt sad about it.

It was April. Down below in the garage the motors hummed, eager to depart to country lanes. The sun gave a little warmth and Tim no longer wore woollen mittens for painting. The blue skylights revealed in utmost detail the grey lined pattern of the bare boards, the mattress upon which Tim slept and where he woke every morning to think: I’m free. (This meant no longer in Cardiff, a consolation which Tim would carry with him for the rest of his life.) The kitchen table was laid for lunch for two. In the angle made by the two sloping roofs and the floor were stores of wood and painting material, neatly stowed. Tim was a neat man. The two vertical end walls were whitewashed. A door painted green and blue by Tim led to outdoor steps and the lavatory below and the forecourt of the garage. There was a radio but no television, which Tim could not have afforded and which he despised anyway as a crime against the visual world. Next to the door was a wooden dresser with plates prettily arranged, and an old trunk for storing clothes. Upon the wall opposite the door he had fixed a big piece of plywood on which he pinned his favourite drawings. These were some of his real drawings, his crucifixion figures, old men feeding pigeons, young men drinking beer, painted girls waiting. These drawings too were waiting.

Tim had lived now for a long time with himself as a painter. He had been ambitious and ceased to be, he had been disappointed and ceased to be. He knew he was absolutely, and would always be, a painter. What else was he? He was Daisy’s lover, keeper, friend. That was enough for a life. He went on trying, though he never tried very hard. Any artist who is not a beginner faces the problem of enlarging into a working space the line that runs between ‘just begun’ and ‘too late’. The hard work lies in the middle, when preliminaries are done, and the end is not yet enclosing the form. This is the space which longs to collapse, which the artist’s strength must faithfully keep open. Tim was vaguely aware of this, but he was idle and lacked confidence. He was almost but not quite aware that he chose daily to remain mediocre. His efforts tended to be either ‘sketches’ or ‘spoilt’. Yet he kept on drawing and in this activity something purely good, often mislaid, tended to come back. He knew nothing, he read nothing, but he kept on looking. Tim possessed by nature a gift yearned for by sages, he was able simply to
perceive
! (He did not realize that this was exceptional, he thought everybody could do it.) This gift does not of course ensure that its owner can paint well or indeed at all. In Tim’s case it was almost a hindrance. He got so much pleasure from the external world, he thought sometimes why trouble to paint, it’s all there,
there
in front of me, unless one’s great, why bother, why not just live happily with Nature so long as one has eyes? Even Cézanne said he could not possibly create the wonderful colours that he saw.

Tim knew nothing. One of his teachers at the Slade (the one who had said he would make a great faker) had urged him to learn some mathematics, but Tim was lazy and just
knew
he would find it too hard. However, as for the swallow which flies from Africa back to the English barn where it was born, dark knowings were effective in Tim’s mind. He picked up ideas about ‘form’ from his teachers and fellow students, yet it seemed that he never learnt anything which he had not always known. He had a ‘feeling’ about plants, how their parts connected. He instinctively understood how feathers had to grow to make a wing. His body told him about gravity, about weight, what falling was, what flowing was. He had shirked what might have been a valuable class on anatomy, but when he looked at Perkins or drew Daisy lying partly clothed upon the bed he knew what went on under the skin. He knew about light without looking into learned books. He painted a colour circle when he was five. Perhaps if he could have been persuaded to study geometry he would have learned much to profit and amaze him. Yet, untaught, it was as if in another life he had glimpsed some of the working drawings of God, and in this life had almost but not quite forgotten them.