All the Beauty of the Sun (10 page)

Paul and I walked around the memorial; we read the names; he told me that the memorial in Thorp is outside the parish church, a great white obelisk with steps leading up to it, all surrounded by a low, wrought-iron railing with a little gate, kept locked except on Sundays, when wreaths can be laid. He said, ‘I counted the names I knew; there are three. I suppose if I'd gone to school in Thorp I would have known ten or more. In Thorp Grammar there is a plaque with the names of old boys and teachers.' He laughed, looking up at the stone soldier. ‘For the few months I taught there I seem to remember I used to run past it, looking the other way.
You there, boy! No running in the corridors!'
He smiled at me. ‘I was hopeless.'

He had taught in a boys' school just after the war – not for long; he
was
hopeless, his nerves still all shot to bits. I had forgotten he was a teacher. I felt I should have remembered this.

In the graveyard, beneath the heady lilac, he took out a photograph and handed it to me without comment. There was Patrick smiling in front of a wall covered by some profusely flowering climbing plant. He wore an open-necked shirt and pale, loose trousers, bare feet in sandals, hands thrust into his pockets. I turned the photograph over; Paul had written a date, nothing more. Handing it back to him, I said, ‘He should have come with you.'

‘He won't come back to England.' He put on Patrick's deeper voice: ‘
Not after what they did to you, Paul.
'

Paul is a good mimic; even his face changed a little to resemble Patrick's, that frowning concern that would darken Pat's eyes. Paul returned the photo to its envelope, hesitating before he took out another. This time he said, ‘Bobby.'

I gazed at Paul's son; he is Paul in miniature.

‘Dad wants me to visit him. I said I wouldn't, but I'm not sure … The very idea makes my knees give.' He took the photo from me and frowned at it. ‘He doesn't look very happy, does he? And the way they've cut his hair so short … Anyway …' He put the photo in with that of Patrick and shoved the envelope back in his inside pocket. ‘Anyway, I'm not thinking of going to Thorp.' He smiled at me, ‘If I did I'd have to buy a wig, I think, and a false beard – dark glasses, what do you think?'

I thought of him in dark glasses as though he was blind, as though they'd scooped out both his eyes in the confusion of the first aid station. I thought that he would never have seen me, only heard me, and I thought how that might be better, that he might like me more than he does. We looked out over the graves and the birds sang and halting music came from inside the church, an organist practising a Protestant hymn. A young woman walked by pushing a pram, a bunch of flowers placed across her sleeping baby.

She stopped at one of the new graves and, taking a milk bottle from the pram, went to fill it with water at the standpipe. She returned and poured the water into the grave's urn before thrusting the flowers into its covering mesh. Daffodils. She had wrapped them in a page of the
News of the World
, which flapped in the breeze, taking off only to flatten against the pram wheel. Her baby began to cry, a newborn's mewling, and she straightened from the flowers and began to push the pram away without a backward glance. The newspaper tumbled after her and I stooped to pick it up, noticing her slim ankles as I did so. Her hips swung as she walked; she had a brassy style about her that had me watching her swinging hips and backside until she turned the corner of the church out of sight.

I balled the paper and tossed it away, realising I must have looked like some deranged tramp to pick up rubbish like that, smudging my hands with ink. But Paul pretended not to notice. He handed me a cigarette and we smoked in a silence that would have been companionable if the girl hadn't provoked such frustration in me.

At last I said, ‘I'll be discharged soon, I think.'

Paul glanced at me. ‘Do you feel ready?'

‘I'm not pretending to be well, if that's what you think.'

‘No, I don't think that. Where will you go?'

‘To Mary's.' I thought of my sister and her house full of children; she didn't want me but couldn't refuse. The idea of going to live with her made me want to lash out at someone. I thought of Paul, his home with Patrick, his
life
with Patrick, and I was struck with how unfair it all was. I stood up. ‘Let's go back. No good sitting here, cold and miserable. Why aren't you being better company? You shouldn't have come if you were going to be like this.'

‘Like what, Matthew?'

‘Don't sound reasonable. I can't stand it.'

We began to walk back. Half way along the lane he stopped. ‘Matthew, you could come home with me – to Tangiers.'

I was a few steps ahead of him, and I turned. ‘What would Patrick say?'

‘Welcome? You know Patrick. Come for a holiday at least. The sun works wonders.'

‘So I need to be worked on?'

He stepped towards me and grasped my shoulders. ‘You need what I have – peace and room to think –'

I pulled away from him. ‘You have Patrick.
That's
what you have. Would you share him with me too, as well as your peace and
thinking room
? That's if I wanted such a savage, ungodly relationship.'

I shocked him. We stood facing each other in the middle of a country lane, and there was no one in sight, no human sound except that of our breathing. He looked past me, and his voice was quiet even as he said, ‘We'd better get moving. I don't want to miss my train.'

‘Then walk the other way, back to the village.'

‘I've enough time to walk back with you.'

‘I don't want you to.'

‘I've left my coat at the hospital. My ticket is in the pocket.'

‘So you would walk away now if you could?'

He met my gaze. ‘I don't know.'

‘I've hurt your feelings by speaking the truth.'

He stepped around me, walking so quickly I had to run to catch up with him.

Falling into step beside him I said, ‘It
is
ungodly what you and he do. You know it. In fact, I don't know how you can bear to do such dirty, degrading things. Are you listening? Can you hear me?' I ran ahead of him, walking backwards in front of him, my voice rising. ‘You have a child! A fine little boy! How could you leave him? Why aren't you home with him now? You care nothing for anyone – nothing! You care only for yourself – your disgusting perversion. Those boys you taught at the grammar school – were you fiddling with them? That's what men like you do, isn't it? Rob boys of their innocence?'

He stopped. ‘Matthew, you're ill, that's why I won't listen to this.'

‘Your perversion is condemned in the bible! Corinthians chapter six, verse nine!'

He began walking again. He can walk very quickly, and it took a lot to keep up. I taunted him all the way to the hospital, along its drive, up the steps, through the hallway. I couldn't stop. My fist kept going to my mouth, and I bit down hard on my knuckles, but I couldn't stop. He was very pale when we reached the room where he had left his coat, a beautiful, dark wool coat. I tugged it from him, pressing it to my face, inhaling his scent. I could sense his despair, heard it in his voice as he said, ‘I have to go now, Matthew. Give me my coat, see me out, let's say goodbye properly.'

‘Properly?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're angry now and you won't come back.'

‘I will, if you want me to.'

‘You won't have time what with all that fucking you do. Don't think I don't know that you've sodomised every man in England.'

He reached out, taking his coat from me, putting it on, fastening it; his hands were shaking, there was something vulnerable about them that moved me.

‘I'll give you my gloves if you want,' I said.

‘Thank you, but I think you should keep them.'

‘Wait, I'll fetch them from my room.'

‘No, Matt.' He stepped towards me and I flinched. ‘Shall we say goodbye here?'

I nodded, my fist pressed against my teeth so that I broke the skin and tasted blood. ‘Goodbye.'

He touched my arm; I wanted him to hug me as he had when he arrived, but perhaps he was afraid to; I only felt the memory of that hug in my bones, making my longing for his embrace even stronger.

He left and I went to the window to watch him go. I thought he might look back and wave at me, but he didn't. I watched him until a nurse came and led me away; my knuckles were dripping blood, just as though we'd had a fight.

Chapter Eleven

E
DMUND SAID
, ‘I
DON'T
have to explain myself to you.'

Ann thought that she might cry, which only made her angrier. ‘You do have to explain. You do.'

‘No. Besides, I can't.' He looked towards the bookshop's door; he had turned the sign to ‘Closed' as soon as she'd walked in, drawing the bolt across and leading her through into the shadowy interior. She could hardly see him in the dim light and she wanted to take his hand and drag him to the window, to make him face her so that she would see his shiftiness, so that he would know she saw it and be ashamed. But he wouldn't allow her to lead him anywhere; she couldn't imagine that they would so much as touch each other ever again. She imagined him in bed with that man; it was all she could imagine.

‘Why?'

‘Ann, I'm sorry. I wish Day hadn't told you, but since he has, well … It's done, and I'm sorry.' Heatedly he said, ‘And anyway, it was just a bit of fun, you said so yourself.' Pushing his hand through his hair he said, ‘Look, I need to open the shop – if Barnes gets back and finds it locked up he'll give me a row.'

He went to the door, unbolted it and turned the sign around. Now that he was in the light she saw that he didn't look at all shifty, only exhausted and anxious. The bruise around his eye showed yellow against the grey pallor of his skin – Joseph had told her all about how he had punched him, how he had deserved worse, the filthy bastard. ‘Standing there bollock naked! Both of them! Jesus! Queer English bastards!'

She had wanted to tell him to be quiet – that she wanted for once to be the kind of woman men protected from knowing about such things. She wished he hadn't told her, hadn't followed Edmund to that hotel, hadn't blacked his eye because now Edmund didn't care about her, only about his own pride.

He held the door open for her. ‘I'm sorry, Ann.'

She walked to the Python Gallery, past the second-hand bookshops, the junk shops with their miscellaneous displays: an elephant's foot, a watercolour of Highland cows; past the closed pubs where the publicans would just be waking, going downstairs to the dark bar where the night-time smells of alcohol and cigarettes still hung thickly, a miasma, a fruity old ghost of a drunk, stale and obdurate. She walked past the restaurant where they had eaten after Law's exhibition; the Italian waiters had flung open the door and windows and were sweeping and swilling; a fast, foaming stream of bleach-stinking water ran into the gutter – she had to skip around it – and one of the waiters called after her, laughing his apology. ‘
Bella
!' he called, and of course she turned, couldn't help herself, saw him pinching his fingers to his mouth, splaying them out wide to set the kiss free.
Bella.
She shouldn't have looked back.

Edmund had said, ‘I think you are possibly the most exquisite creature I have ever seen.' The first words he had ever said to her, smiling, drunk, swaying.
Possibly
.
Exquisite
. She should have known that these words were all wrong. And
creature
. An organism, an animal: something that should be pinned to a board, pared down to its bones, mounted under glass; a thing to be studied, sketched, intensely looked at, intimately explored.

She walked on more quickly, her anger an accelerant. A dray passed so that she had to walk closer to the buildings; there was the sudden country smell of dung, of sweating, powerful beasts, the heavy turn of cart-wheels sending the shuddering dread of crushed bones through her. A policeman smiled and doffed his helmet, an out-of-place man who made her feel that he might think of something to detain her with and so she should walk even faster. And so she did, glancing over her shoulder at the uniformed back, the sausage-meat-like hands clutched behind him. She became breathless, her chest tightening.

She stopped by a Wren church. She was wearing the wrong shoes to walk at such a lick. She thought that if she listened hard enough she would hear her father call out, ‘Catch up, Mary-Ann, don't dawdle now!' and he would be grinning, hands on his hips; if she ran to him he would swing her up on to his shoulders. ‘There now,' he would say, ‘a grand view from up there, don't you think?'

But there was just the noise of the traffic, a bus advertising
Five Boy Chocolate.
Name five boys you've slept with – quick now: Stephen (first, back home, a fumble, a blur), Joseph, Edmund, Lawrence (last). Not five. Only four.
Only!
Only almost five, if you could count Matthew.

You couldn't count Matthew. What had happened with Matthew was nothing, nothing at all, less than that fumble with that first one – what's-his-name – Stephen. Matthew didn't count, not at all, and she shouldn't be reminded, wouldn't be reminded, by such silly things as advertisements on a bus.
Five Boys!
No, only four and not all boys. Lawrence was not a boy.

Lawrence was a man, an angry man but angry only when he'd had a drink and then he'd say, ‘
Fuck it
.
Fuck the fucking lot of them! Bloody fools!
' Only to frown at her, ‘
Sorry. Stop your ears, sweet girl
.' She didn't mind, only words, after all. And when he was sober he was sweet as a lamb and sang and told jokes, happy, mostly happy. ‘
Finish it with that boy – you know the one I mean – Edmund? He's a waster, I think.
' Turning to her from boiling a kettle for tea in his tiny, ordered kitchen, saying, ‘
I say – you do look well in my dressing gown.
'

‘
I say
.
Fuck the fucking lot of them.
' Lawrence Hawker, youngest son of a baron. ‘
No money in it, only for Charles, and then not much – not worth it if you're a gold digger.
'

The London streets were paved with gold: gold plated like that dog's backside, her father said. Her Daddy didn't try to stop her leaving but walked with her the mile or so to the Port of Belfast, saw her off on the ferry.
‘Be good, say your prayers – write to us
.' An afterthought, this writing, an untried strangeness.

She hung on to the church railings, her shoe dangling from her fingers as she rubbed the ball of her foot. Her heels were too high: she had wanted to seem taller to Edmund, more his match, and she had been striding along in these heels, so angry because of Edmund; outraged, amazed because who would have thought it of Edmund? Lawrence had thought it. Lawrence had known all along, and even Joseph had guessed as he'd watched him with that man in that restaurant: ‘
The way they eyed each other up! As if they couldn't fucking wait!
' Couldn't wait to fuck.

Pure sex, then; no how d'you do; no ‘I think you are possibly the most exquisite creature I have ever seen.' Just that eyeing up, that speculation. How did they recognise each other? By scent, by a look, a movement, a handshake, a cryptic note passed under the table, stuffed into a pocket. By their chins, their ears, the length of their tongues … Just Edmund being Edmund, perhaps that was enough, the vulnerability of Edmund, blond and bonny and bright as the sun, a May sun, elusive, a now-you-see-me-now-you-don't sun. Edmund, who didn't care at all, wasn't responsible at all, only attentive when he could be bothered. And when he bothered, oh then you would bask in his heat; you would burn, not caring; later you would regret such reckless behaviour: you should have known better.

She put on her shoe, wincing. A woman walked past her into the church carrying funeral-white lilies, laughing as the vicar came out of the church door, ‘
There you are, Reverend! I'd called at the house –
' her words becoming lost inside, the closing door wafting out the churchy smells. No incense, not here, only back home. Only parched dust smells here, cold stone and soft hymn-book smells and brass-rubbing tourists. ‘
Brass rubbings!
' Matthew's scornful laugh: ‘
God as arts and crafts!
'

Matthew. She winced again as she let go of the railings, began to walk on, to try not to think about Matthew, who had written to her this morning, had written in big bold letters:
You are a whore.
Only that. The fire in the grate had leapt around the single page, taking a little more time over the fine, thick, well-gummed envelope, as much time as it took for her heartbeat to return to normal. Tomorrow he would write again, a normal letter, no mention of her whoredom. No apology. Matthew had never apologised but he had warned her:
I have to warn you I'm not right in the head.
When he was well, he could say,
I'm not right in the head.
He could warn her. And when he was most ill he would believe that he was most well: he could call her a whore because wasn't that the sane truth and not at all a madman's judgement?

Lawrence had warned her, too. He had said, ‘And you're thinking of visiting this Major Purcell at this place he's in?' He had frowned at her over a teapot in the café on Percy Street. Lawrence, a veteran like Matthew, although Lawrence had ‘
got off scot-free
'. Almost scot-free – he had his moments. She had thought he'd be supportive: wasn't Matthew a fellow officer? But he had only poured the tea, frowning and frowning as he'd said, ‘How well do you know this man?'

She had lied, of course. ‘Not well.'

‘Then for goodness sake don't go visiting him in a mad house! Men like that aren't sick puppies to be petted. I know you mean well, but honestly, you make me fearful.' She had laughed, not wanting him to be fearful, but he had shaken his head, frowning still. ‘Seriously, my girl. Be careful.'

Be careful,
he had said, and:
there are more things in heaven and earth
: he thought she had no imagination.

You are a whore.
The deeply scored, single sheet of writing paper had almost flown up the chimney; she'd had to rush to hold it down with the poker.

She could see the gallery across the road now: smart in the daylight with its new sign and professional paint job; she had washed the plate glass smear-free, squeaky clean, placed one painting just-so in the window as Lawrence directed her from the pavement. Not one of Law's paintings. They'd all sold. Lawrence was delighted. ‘
I told you so – didn't I? Genius!
' But who was the genius? Lawrence. Not that man. Not that talentless, repellent, one-eyed
creature
.

She waited at the kerb for a taxi to pass, crossed the road and stood in front of the gallery's window. She checked her reflection, smoothing down her hair, pressing her lips together to even out her lipstick, tilting her little hat a fraction more: jaunty whore. The gallery was empty; there was no one on the other side of the plate glass to see her. Lawrence would be in the back office, on the telephone, always on the telephone; he would wave at her as she opened the office door, perhaps cover the mouthpiece with his hand, ‘
Won't be a tick.
' It wasn't just in her imagination that his face lit up when he saw her.

She would tell him she had finished it with Edmund. He would nod. ‘
Good,
' he would say, ‘
best shot of the bugger.
' No, he would be magnanimous. He wouldn't say anything. Perhaps a smile; perhaps he would allow himself a glanced-away smile. She tried the gallery's door; it was locked. No matter, she would see him later. She would go on to the pub, surprise Susie by starting her shift early. She began to slow her walk, her thoughts, her anger slipping away a little.

‘I don't know what you see in that Edmund – posh bugger.' Ann remembered how Susie had flicked her cigarette ash contemptuously as she went on, ‘Looks down his nose, talks like an arse. Maybe if he brushed himself up a bit he would look all right. But nah – wouldn't trust him, all that butter-wouldn't-melt act.'

They had been standing together behind the bar of the King's Head, waiting as Fred opened the doors to the small knot of drinkers on the pavement outside, Susie with her arms folded, scowling, belligerent – she wouldn't smile until Fred had locked the doors again, the very opposite of the barmaid Ann had imagined her to be when she'd first seen her. Not that the customers seemed to mind Susie's surliness; it was almost as though they felt they deserved her scathing looks and remarks. The King's Head was not a pub to be comfortable in, but a place of dimness and stuffy warmth, of hard, varnished-shiny surfaces and mirrors so old and mottled they could almost be flattering if any of the customers had thought to look up to catch sight of themselves. Most of the customers were old men, or young men whom the war had made prematurely old, with all the paraphernalia of age: walking sticks, mufflers and heavy coats even in summer, clothes that barely disguised wrecked bodies.

Paul Harris was wrecked with that dead glass eye of his; in the gallery Harris had caught her studying him and his hand had gone to it. At the time she had felt sorry for him. Now she only felt sorry for his father, having a son like that.

Matthew had told her about Paul Harris, how they had befriended each other and kept in touch no matter the distance between them. ‘I owe him so many favours,' Matthew had told her. ‘I would like to feel I'd helped him in some way.' And so he had written to Harris to tell him about Lawrence and his new gallery and how he should send him samples of his work.

She had met Matthew on one of her first shifts behind the bar, when she had still been afraid of Susie and her scornful tongue, afraid that she would be too inappropriately friendly with the customers or not friendly enough; ironic, now she came to remember. But Fred, Susie's husband, the man whose name was above the door, had been straight with her: ‘You'll soon get the hang of it. Nothing to it, anyway.' From the other end of the bar, she had heard Susie's bark of laughter. Fred had winked at her. ‘Don't mind my wife.' He smiled and his voice was quieter as he said, ‘Just mind me, all right?'