The Beautiful Visit (19 page)

I sat down on the nearest empty seat, with the suitcase beside me. It must look very strange to be sitting there with a suitcase. I pushed it under the bench and out of sight. It was a relief to
be still. I was utterly bewildered at my blunderings. That other people or circumstances should prove hostile was bitterly reasonable; but that I should be subject to such an attack from within was
beyond my horizon, and I could only feel humiliated and ashamed. If it had not been for my ridiculous and unbusinesslike rush, I should have arrived at the studio by now. Rupert would be painting
and there would be a bowl of fat summer roses with loose petals on the table. The room would be very still and golden with the evening light; there would be an unfamiliar smell of paint and another
person’s house. We would drink milk and I would provoke his admiration by the strength and simplicity of my achievement. Fantastic conceptions of how it would all be, flowed through my mind;
all impossibly good and delightful. I remembered my nervous pride in the box-room (‘I shall never come back!’), my headlong rush out of the house. Surely I had hardly given myself time
to think. Leaving one’s home was not so simple it seemed, even when one knew where to go.
Was
it number sixteen? Nobody must know of this abortive attempt. I kicked the suitcase
further under the seat. For a moment I was tormented by the thought that other people would have walked, would have found the house by asking at all three numbers. But then I could not have carried
the case. It was too heavy for me I decided, and the irony of accepting another weakness escaped me. Perhaps I would take a lighter case. Or perhaps I would pack more belongings and go in a cab. On
my way downstairs I had remembered something left out. Hardly remembered. A fleeting thought. It could not have been more than that, or surely I should have thought of the postcard.

I would go home. They would be having supper. There would be cold rice pudding in the pie-dish with blackberries painted on it. I had a peculiar rush of affection for that dish. My brothers
would read or play chess and my sister would sew as usual. I wondered whether my mother was better, whether her tears had relieved her, or left her dry and exhausted as tears did me. A sensation
which was not hunger, nor fatigue, nor loneliness, but perhaps a blend of all three overcame me. I rose slowly and reached for the case. As I walked out of the gardens, I saw an old woman sprawled
back on a seat, underneath which was a parcel wrapped in newspaper. I quickened my steps and still the suitcase did not feel heavy.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I excused my shame at the misadventure by making practical arrangements which would conceal my plan from the family. I packed a case with much more care and looked up Beechley
Street on a map. I told my mother that I was going to see a friend in Chelsea, implying that Rupert was a woman; and she acquiesced quite readily. Tom had gone back to his school, and Hubert was so
obsessed with his own impatience that he took very little notice of me. I feared my sister most, and to her I embroidered the story most cunningly with a long account of this girl’s
exhaustion from having nursed an aunt who had recently died. I said that I did not want to tell my mother all this, for fear it would distress her. The whole business was arranged with detailed
deceit, and was quite undramatic. I finally left at three o’clock, in a cab procured by Hubert, with the family gathered round the door to say good-bye.

A faint disappointment claimed me as I waved farewell and settled bade in the cab. This was not really the way to do it. But it was the way that things happened. I was conscious of disliking
being overpowered by circumstances, of romance being drained out of die adventure, leaving it as it appears now, tawdry, practical and highly probable. The only pleasant element left was one of
surprise. I had not told Rupert that I was coming. This seemed satisfactory to me, and the feeling mounted as we trotted away from Kensington.

I asked the man to put me down at the corner of the street. Somehow I did not want to appear to have arrived in a cab. I paid the driver out of the money I had been given, and walked down the
street with my case. It was warm, still and deserted, except for several cats packed between the spikes of sailings, or perched on narrow window-sills, with the most belying air of comfort.
‘Those artists of position’, somebody had once said to me.

I walked past a little row of houses followed by a large block with wide windows, studios I imagined, and next to them an uneven stretch of buildings, all colours and shapes, mostly fat and low,
with gay painted front doors immediately on to the street. Here it was at last. A pale green door with a gargoyle knocker. I put down the case and paused. Did one simply say, ‘I have come to
stay’?

Someone across the road was playing Saint-Saëns on a gramophone. Surely Rupert would understand when he saw the case. Did people often do this kind of thing? Was it generally expected
amongst friends? Was one expected to know the friend very well before doing it? Even these speculations were not very practical; but they made my own inexperience painfully clear to me and I
realized bitterly how foolish it had been to rejoice in the surprise I was about to spring. He had said, ‘Come whenever you like,’ but it was hardly the same thing as coming without
warning of any kind. However, I could not go back now. The dignity and authenticity of my departure rendered return impossible. I need not stay very long. And then what? I must have hesitated for
several minutes before I lifted the grinning creature’s head and let it fall. It fell with such violence that it rebounded, and knocked twice; and I recoiled from the noisy peremptory object.
I waited, my thoughts congealing in the silence that followed; even the music had stopped, somebody having taken off the record in the middle. Perhaps Rupert was out. Better knock again. Better
count ten first. Very slowly. Somebody had put a waltz on the gramophone now. I counted with my heart beating time as fast. Out: perhaps he was out. Perhaps he was away. What should I do? Almost in
a panic I knocked again. Faintly I heard steps. Soft shuffling steps. He must have slippers on, I thought, and my heart was light again. I heard someone fumbling with the door, then it opened, and
a girl stood there, staring at me. Her eyes were brown and beautifully set. Her hair was hanging down her back. She was dressed in a flowered wrapper, edged with innumerable ruffles, and feathered
mules on her bare feet. We must have stared at each other with equal astonishment for some seconds, a silence from which she recovered first, for she said quite pleasantly: ‘And what can I do
for you?’

She was almost the first person I had ever heard speak with a foreign accent and I was charmed into smiling.

‘Is Mr – ? Does – er – Rupert live here?’ Absurd that. But I could not remember his name. ‘Rupert Laing’ (that was it). ‘Does he live
here?’

Her eyes narrowed a little as she looked down at the case, and up my body again to my face; but she flattened herself against the narrow wall of the passage and answered that he did, down there,
indicating the passage in her voice, without turning her head. I stepped inside, starting down the passage while she shut the door and followed me. We went through a door with stained glass to its
waist and out into a little garden, a courtyard, paved, but without flowers, and through another green door, straight into a large studio, with skylights half covered by grey blinds.

‘Will you wait here?’ the girl said, moving unhurriedly to another door at the far end of the room. ‘Do sit down,’ she added with great courtesy, so that the phrase
seemed new, and the invitation a peculiar honour.

The place was in the utmost confusion. I found a chair with no back and a coffee cup on the seat. I put the cup carefully on the floor and sat down. Flame-coloured sunlight streamed down through
the strips of windows (which were also partially covered by blinds) and added to the confusion by vast livid zigzags on the rush matting and black rugs. In one corner was a bed, unmade but strewn
with brilliant shawls and scarves. A half empty glass of milk lay on the floor at the head beneath a scarlet corner of fringe, the silken ends of which were poised just above the milk. There was an
easel, and canvases were propped against the walls. Three huge orange jugs perched about the room. The paintwork was black, but the walls were a dead pale grey, which, suffused with the violent and
restricted sunlight, gave the room a conflicting quality of warmth and cold, of heat and of chill, half midday, half evening, the twilight of some tropical scene. I remembered the girl’s
black mass of coarse shining hair hanging down her back; it completed the disorder before me, and I had just time to wonder what Rupert would be like, when he entered.

He came through the door at the far end of the room, and stood in a patch of sunlight. I saw him screw up his eyes for a second, as he looked about for me. The moment before a person sees you
presents a rare and fleeting aspect of that person, which vanishes after the meeting. It was the first time I had felt it, and I saw him for the first time, tired and defensive and somehow
drained.

‘It’s I, Rupert,’ I said.

‘Yes, I see you now,’ he replied and moved a trifle uncertainly towards me. Then he was standing over me. There was a short silence, and I felt more and more that this was a strange
thing to do and less and less able to account to him for my having done it.

‘You said I could come when I liked.’

‘Yes, of course I did. Do you never warn people when you like?’

‘I’ve never done it before.’

‘Of course. You’re the person who is always doing things for the first time. Of course.’ He bent his head a little to scratch it and saw the suitcase.

‘My father’s dead.’ I said foolishly.

‘I’m sorry,’ he answered, preoccupied.

I knew he was going at any moment to ask me terrible, practical questions about that case, which pride and resentment rendered me incapable of answering. This was not at all what I had
imagined.

‘I’m not particularly sad about it,’ I said stiffly.

He began to stare at me in a penetrating manner, when the girl re-entered the room. She stood quite still at the door, but Rupert heard her and turned.

‘Get some tea,’ he said. She nodded. ‘Make some toast. Take half an hour over it. I want to talk.’

She moved a step further into the room, standing in the patch of sunlight (it had narrowed a little now, I noticed), and staring at me inquiringly.

‘Go
on
,’ he shouted.

‘You won’t go out?’

‘
No!
For the tenth time, I won’t go out.’

She nodded again and withdrew.

‘Who is she?’

‘Her name’s Maria.’

‘Does she live here?’

‘Yes. Does that surprise you?’

‘I thought she must live here,’ I answered carefully.

‘Oh! You did,’ he seemed amused, and unhelpful. ‘Now, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I just thought I would come to tea with you.’

‘Bringing your suitcase?’

‘No – I’m going somewhere else. I had to bring that.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To friends.’

‘And this was on your way?’

‘This was on my way.’

He looked at me again and then said, ‘Right. Help me collect some of these cups or we shan’t have enough for tea. Wait a minute while I fetch a tray.’

A curious feeling of relief swept over me. I did not then worry at all about the result of my lying, but relaxed now the questions had come to an end. I collected every cup, mug and glass I
could see and there were a great many of them.

‘Hey! We don’t need all those,’ he cried. I had ranged them on a papier mâché table. ‘Maria can clear them up tomorrow.’

‘Does she work for you?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘She just lives with me. I suppose it comes to much the same thing though,’ he added as though discovering something. ‘I don’t pay her, you
see. She loves me.’

‘As though you were married?’ I felt intensely curious. The idea was utterly new to me.

‘That is a very embarrassing question and one which is not usually asked.’

‘Do you love her then?’

‘Now you are being very childish and ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

Instantly I felt very impertinent and ashamed and blushed hotly. He took die tray I had filled and kicked open the door.

‘Do recover before I return. I keep forgetting how sensitive you are.’

I recovered, slowly and painfully.

Rupert returned and began unwinding the cords which rolled back the blinds so that the windows were clear, and light coloured the room evenly.

Then he said: ‘Come and sit on the bed and wait quietly for toast. You must not mind Maria. She is not at her best today, and anyway, she’ll try and resent you. She is a –
’ he hesitated, and his voice softened – ‘a childish creature. She is not very happy today, and she’s bad at that.’

‘Oh.’

‘Perhaps you are not very happy either? Am I surrounded by unfortunate women perhaps?’

I remained silent. I think I was a little afraid of him. Eventually I said:

‘Do you like being a painter?’

‘More than becoming a doctor, but otherwise not so much as I thought. Doctoring is a disillusioning business. They take years to disillusion you, because they are so scientific about it,
of course. Now painting – with painting you can produce a picture in, say, a couple of days, and within half an hour of its completion your friends will flock round it telling you they
don’t like pink, or nobody has shoulders like that. It is all over in a trice. The most extraordinary thing about painting is the way everyone who sees any picture assumes you are showing it
to them solely for the purpose of benefiting by their destructive criticism. They are positively exasperated if they do not at once give vent to some eager ignorant disapproval. After the faint
praise, of course. There is very little variety in that.’

‘What do you do with them?’

‘Take no notice of them. And that is a lonely business. You see one cannot really
afford
their taking no notice of you. It does not make for better painting. I am certain that even
the people who survived it would have painted better if they had been needed instead of endured or ignored. People are kind to lovers. All the world loves a lover, they say. It’s because they
know it won’t last. I suppose it is a tribute to the artist when people are hostile to him.’