All the Beauty of the Sun (2 page)

She pushed away from him. ‘
Controversial
? What if we can't look?'

He sighed, feeling large and foolish and shallow – the worst of these feelings because he knew he would be able to look, to be critical or envious or dismissive – any of his usual responses – but he would
look
. He couldn't be afraid all the time, or made to feel grief whenever it was expected. He cleared his throat and felt larger and more foolish still. ‘Shall we not go?'

‘I have to go.'

‘Then we'll go together,' he said, remembering that of course she had to be there – Lawrence Hawker was expecting her. He pulled her arm through his again, patting her hand, ashamed of his cowardly resignation. ‘Best foot forward?'

She laughed as though he wasn't quite right in the head. ‘Left right, left right?'

‘Indeed.' He had patted her hand, and now this gesture seemed to him to have struck the wrong note: it was too comradely, too affectionate, he supposed, and it came to him that perhaps affection was all he felt. He had the urge to say that he didn't care to be one among others, just to hear her reaction, but such grandstanding would only be part of that act he seemed intent on performing, and in truth her reaction meant little to him – he had an idea that she was acting a part, too, and there was comfort in this idea: he couldn't hurt her, just as she couldn't hurt him.

Chapter Two

I
N THE
P
YTHON
A
RT
Gallery, Paul Harris felt for Patrick's letter in his pocket in the vain hope that his proximity to it, and by extension to Patrick, might help him overcome his nervousness. He felt that if he really concentrated he would be able to read the words by touch, all those closely packed, heavily indented words that were so surprisingly fluent.
My darling Paul, You have no idea how much I will miss you. All I can do is pray that you keep safe. I'm scared because I can't help believing that England is the most bloody rotten, most dangerous country in the world for you to be in. I should be there, with you, protecting you.

The letter had been in his suitcase, tucked beneath underwear so that he'd find it quickly. He had put it to one side, unopened for a few hours, wondering whether he should open it at all. He could imagine what Pat would write. And, when he finally tore it from its envelope, he found that he was right, and that the letter did make him feel useless and weak. The letter had actually made him shake, confirming Patrick's worst beliefs: he wasn't fit to be away from him; he was defenceless without the big man, always had been; nothing but trouble ever came from being apart from him.

In his head he had a cartoon image of himself cowering behind Patrick, peeping out as Pat shielded him from truncheon-waving policemen. He should draw this cartoon and stick it to their bedroom mirror at home – wouldn't it make them both laugh? Wouldn't it dispel some of the tension between them? He fingered the letter, feeling the raggedly torn envelope – he had been in such a hurry to open it, once he had decided to, to have confirmation that Patrick missed him. Perhaps that was why he had shook, because he was afraid he might not miss him, afraid that Pat had come to realise how weary he had become of shielding him; he might have written,
Perhaps you should stay in England – I know how much you miss it.

He hadn't missed the miserable greyness of an English spring. He had forgotten how cold May in England could be, even wearing the heavy clothes Patrick had packed for him. Wool socks, long johns, vests, the kind of clothes he had almost forgotten about wearing, clothes that took him back immediately to England even as he watched Patrick fold them into the case. In the heat of their bedroom, he couldn't imagine holding these garments against his skin, let alone putting them on. Patrick had turned to him from shoving cashmere socks into the heavy brogues he had already packed. ‘You should be doing this. I'm not your batman.'

‘If you gave me the chance …'

But that was just it: Patrick took over and steered him through his alien life. He had become his dependent. With Patrick, he didn't have to stop being the kind of man who shook.

Through the gallery's brightly lit window, Paul saw that the rain had begun to come down in earnest. Beside him Lawrence Hawker sighed heavily. ‘I hope the weather won't stop them coming.'

Paul turned to him. ‘I'm sure it won't.' At once this sounded immodest, and he smiled uneasily. So far this evening all he had felt was this unease, a horrible, twisting nervousness that had meant he couldn't eat but had only smoked even more than he normally did so that he was down to his last cigarette, one he was saving with twitchy fidgetiness. He had a strong suspicion that no one would turn up, rain or no rain
.

Paul cleared his throat. ‘Lawrence, thank you for everything – for all this.'

‘Nonsense. Hopefully we'll both make a bit of money out of this lot, eh?'

He was so business-like, this man, making him grateful that he wasn't what he had feared a gallery owner might be: unbusiness-like, fey,
queer,
he supposed. ‘If he is like us, don't fuck him,' Patrick had said.

‘Do you have any faith in me?'

‘Honestly?'

No, not honestly. He glanced at Lawrence, guessed he was about the same age as him, reasonably handsome in an unmistakably not-like-us way. He was very similar to a few of his fellow officers during the war, clipped and precise and so confident that even the youngest, greenest of them could make him feel gauche. That was how he felt now, and his paintings, hanging on the walls all around him, well lit, carefully ordered, reinforced this feeling, reinforced his nervousness, that sense that he might vomit at any moment. All of the paintings, without exception, were terrible, embarrassing: he should have burnt them all. Worse than embarrassing, they were impertinent, a slap in the face. Not for the first time that day, from the moment he had seen the paintings gathered together in this way, he felt like hiding in his hotel room until he could board the first boat back to Patrick.

Lawrence said, ‘How do you feel?'

‘Fine.' He cleared his throat again, longing for a cigarette. ‘Fine.'

‘Scotch? I'm having one. Steady the old nerves before the off, what?'

‘No, thank you.'

‘Sure?'

‘Yes – thanks anyway.'

Hawker slapped his back. ‘Don't look so bloody terrified! It'll be fine. I keep the drink in the back office. I've brandy, gin – sure I can't tempt you, old man?'

‘Sure.'

When Hawker had gone to fetch his drink, Paul went to the window and looked out on to the street. He had passed a pub on the way from his hotel, and he imagined going there now. The King's Head – he had noticed its portrait of a flamboyant Charles II hanging above the door – would be busy, the kind of pub where the appearance of a stranger wouldn't cause a sudden, surly silence. The air would be pleasantly thick with cigarette smoke; there would be a coal fire and not too dim, not too bright lamp light; there would be decent beer and a whisky chaser and cigarettes sold behind the bar. He could smoke and drink alone and untroubled and not think about Patrick or this exhibition or Hawker with his
old man
condescension. He would only think about being back in England, away from the relentless Moroccan sun. He would take time to consider if the homesickness for England he had tried to ignore for the last year had really let up now and if it had, then what was the feeling that had replaced it – this churning, restless anxiety?

He stared out of the window at the rain. He wouldn't mind so much if it kept people away; it would even be a relief. He thought about his portrait of Corporal Cooper – although no one except him knew that it was Cooper, that cheery, hapless boy who had served alongside him for two years until the summer of 1918. He had painted Cooper hunched over the task of writing a letter home, frowning in concentration as though each word was a trouble to him. He had painted Cooper because he remembered how the boy had looked up as he passed by, saying, ‘What should I write to me Mam, sir?'

A man beside Cooper had laughed. ‘Wish you were here?'

Paul remembered how he had stopped at the place in the trench where Cooper and a small group of men had hunkered down around a brazier, and how Cooper had looked up at him hopefully, as though he might know of something appropriate to write to a mother, words that wouldn't worry her or make her feel as though she was being lied to, cheerful, ordinary words that would ignore the war and remember some happy time – a Christmas or summer holiday – or look forward to such times to come. But Paul had found himself saying, ‘Do you want me to write the letter for you, Cooper?'

‘Yes, sir, if you wouldn't mind, sir.'

The others had laughed as Paul had taken the writing paper and pencil from him and sketched a cartoon of Cooper chewing a pencil, deep in thought.
The spit of him
, one of the others had called the drawing, and Cooper had grinned, bashful and delighted.

Staring out of the gallery window, Paul remembered the sweet, lousy smell of those men – his own smell at the time – how they held out their grimy, mittened hands to the brazier's warmth and how their laughter followed him along the sandbagged trench. A still, cold, cloudless afternoon in early winter and quiet, not much doing, time enough to write letters and surprise the men with his odd little talent for caricature. Walking through that trench, bowed a little to keep his head well below the sandbags, he'd had an idea of using his talent, that if he survived he would make a record of the war that included men like Cooper struggling to reply to a mother's anxious letters, and there would be no pity or sentiment, there would only be the truth.

The truth. Should that have a capital T? Cooper's portrait was hanging behind him and he couldn't bear to turn around and look at it; he had failed. Somehow, disastrously, he had failed, and the portrait of Cooper was as sentimental as anything on the lid of a chocolate box. Cooper was too pretty, his expression too wistful: sentiment had crept in, despite his best efforts; he should try for a living illustrating greeting cards or advertisements for soap because all the paintings in this series he privately thought of as
Letters Home
had this same mawkish softness.

Only his portrait of Patrick had any merit at all. Patrick, on their bed at home, naked but for a sheet strategically draped at his groin – Pat had insisted on this modesty. Patrick, gazing back at him frankly and not uncritically. Paul was pleased at least by how he had managed to capture this tension between them, as if Patrick was about to say that he could always leave if he was so unhappy:
Go back to England, Paul, see how you get on without me.

Lawrence Hawker came back, sipping at a large glass of Scotch. Raising the glass, he nodded towards a group of people approaching the gallery's door. ‘Here they come. Looks as though we're on.' He grinned at him. ‘All right?'

Yes, he was all right: he was home; Hawker had liked his work enough to show it and there were people coming through the door to see it. The rain was letting up and the evening sky was turning pink and gold as the sun set. He would buck up, behave; there would be no more maudlin self-pity. Besides, a handsome boy was coming through the door, catching his eye and smiling at him politely before turning his attention back to the girl he was with. Tall, blond, powerfully built, he would be the evening's interest; having someone to look at, however discreetly, always helped an evening along. He heard the boy laugh the confident, privileged laugh of a well-off, well-mannered Englishman, and he smiled to himself. He was home.

Chapter Three

J
OSEPH
D
AY
GROANED
. ‘A
NN
, sweetheart, tell me again what you see in that bloody English bastard?'

‘Is he a bloody bastard?'

‘Yes.' He groaned again. ‘Oh Annie … come back with me tonight.'

‘No, not tonight.'

Ahead of them, Edmund walked with Andrew in animated conversation. She heard Andrew laugh. Edmund had a knack of making others laugh: no one was immune to his charm, his easy light-heartedness, no one except Joseph, who believed that Edmund had robbed him of her. As if she didn't have any say in it, as if Edmund had come along and told him,
It's my turn, now.
In a way, that's just what he had done: he only pretended to be shambolic, pretended to follow her lead, pretended to be flattered. Actually, Edmund was what he was: an educated boy who had an unassailable belief in his own entitlement. Really, she should hate him.

Joseph grabbed her arm, stopping her. ‘Ann – I can't work without you, you know that. I'm going mad here … The thought of you and him –'

‘He's my bit of fun, that's all.'

‘Why do you have to be such a slut?' Joseph tightened his grip on her arm, pulling her to him. ‘Fun! If you want fun –'

‘Fun?' Edmund had turned back and stood in front of them. He said, ‘Perhaps I want some fun, Day.' His voice was hard; this voice of his: she realised it was why she wanted him. Then, in the easy, soft voice he used more often, Edmund said, ‘Let her go, Joseph, there's a good fellow.'

‘Piss off.'

She shook off Joseph's grasp. ‘Shall we just go to this exhibition and look at the pictures?'

‘Well, I think that's a jolly good idea, don't you, Joseph?'

Joseph glared at him. If they were to fight over her she couldn't predict who might come out on top. Joseph would cheat, she suspected; Edmund would treat it as a joke. She imagined him dusting off his jacket and smoothing back his hair, smiling even as he wiped the blood from his nose before holding out his hand for Joseph to shake. He should care about something, she thought suddenly, something more than himself.

Joseph pushed past him, breaking into an odd little jog to catch up with Andrew, who had sensibly walked on. Raising his eyebrows, Edmund smiled at her. ‘A bit of fun, eh?'

‘And aren't you relieved?'

He lit a cigarette, shaking out the match and tossing it down into the gutter. ‘I'm relieved that I'm good for something.'

‘Have I hurt your feelings?'

He laughed. ‘Terribly. Anyway, fun is fun, isn't it? Unless it's an Irish euphemism I'm not familiar with?' He held out his hand to her and she imagined it bloody from the fight so that she hesitated a moment before taking it. Such large hands he had, capable and safe. As though he sensed her hesitation, he raised his eyebrows again, smiling a little as he asked, ‘Are we friends?'

When she nodded he squeezed her hand, saying, ‘All right, let's get out of this rain.'

When they reached the gallery, Joseph and Andrew were already inside. The place was crowded, a small scrum of bodies in the doorway, waiting for a little floor space to clear before they could go in.

A man approached them. ‘Is this the Python Gallery?' He squinted up at the sign above the door. ‘Ah yes. I see that it is …'

Edmund laughed, turning to her. ‘
Python?
Bloody silly name, isn't it?'

‘Lawrence likes it.' She looked to the man who seemed as hesitant to go inside as Edmund was. ‘Have you come to see the new exhibition?'

‘Yes,' he glanced through the gallery's window, then back to her. ‘Yes,' he repeated. ‘I know the artist. Actually, he's my son.'

He's my son, George Harris thought, and I should be proud of him. I should have been here as they opened the doors, steadying his nerves – he had no doubt Paul would be nervous, although he would hide his nervousness well. Instead he had hung back in his hotel room, deciding whether he should go to the opening – if that was what they called such events – at all.

He
was
proud of him. He had always been proud of him. He remembered the day Paul joined the army; he could have wept with fear, but he was still proud. During the war, he had looked back on that pride with contempt, wondering at his own idiocy. He should have locked Paul away or else he should have taken him to one side and told him he knew his secret:
tell them you're homosexual, and they won't have you.
Oh yes, of course he should have said such a thing. Only shame had held him back. So, he would rather see his son killed than openly acknowledge what he was.

The irony was, he didn't mind about his homosexuality, not at least as he supposed some fathers would mind. He had guessed what Paul was when he was still a small child; it seemed that for most of Paul's life he had watched him too closely, looking for signs that would confirm his suspicions; he suspected that this watching had made him love Paul too carefully, wrongly, perhaps, as though Paul was never a child, only this man in the making.

As he was dying George's own father had said, ‘Paul's different, like me.'

He knew his father had thought this deathbed confession, veiled as it was, would shock him. His father believed he was blind to
differences,
just as his father had been blind to George's awareness. But George hadn't been able to bring himself to pretend surprise, or even disguise his weariness, because by then he felt he owed his father nothing; and so he had said only, ‘Yes, Dad. I know.'

Still, his father had seemed to want to make more of it, seeming to gather all his strength to search his face, to say at last, ‘I'm sorry.'

George had wondered what he was apologising for: everything, perhaps, or nothing except this awkward moment. Impotently he'd said, ‘Can't be helped.'

His father had laughed, done with the play-acting, only to struggle to catch his breath so that George had hoisted him up the bed, fussing with his pillows, earning himself a feeble slap on the wrist. He suspected that his father thought he lacked sensitivity – he suspected that all queer men thought this about normal men; it was their brand of arrogance, George thought, and Paul was just as affected by it.

The girl he had met on the street outside the gallery had been kind to him, although he had been embarrassed at the way he'd blurted out that the artist was his son, as though he was showing off. She and her amused-looking companion had introduced him to their friends and all the time the girl – Ann – looked around the room for the gallery's owner, craning her neck and standing on tip-toe in an attempt to see over the heads of the many people standing around. ‘Lawrence will know where your son is, Dr Harris, if only I can find him …'

George hadn't yet looked at the paintings, not properly; too many people crowded around each picture and the place was full of their soft, thoughtful murmurings. He heard one man say, ‘Stunning. Quite stunning. Oh yes, of course it's quite shocking, too …' The man laughed in response to something George didn't catch. ‘Yes! No, I quite agree. One wouldn't want it actually hanging on one's
drawing-room
wall.'

The girl glanced at him, smiling sympathetically – the man's voice had been loud enough for everyone to hear. He smiled back at her, awkward now because he didn't feel as though he deserved this sympathy; he barely knew how he felt that his son had, so unexpectedly, turned into the kind of man who could inspire such talk. And these people were artists; he couldn't think of a single thing to say to them that wouldn't mark him out as a philistine. The girl was dressed rather oddly, a mismatch of jumble-sale clothes – he guessed her coat was once a man's, cut down to size – a bohemian stylishness that made him feel even more uncomfortable. She was, however, very lovely, albeit with the frail kind of beauty of someone half-famished; but she was also a little flushed, a little manic, and he wondered if perhaps she was consumptive; for all this he found it hard not to keep looking at her, professional interest vying with admiration. Her companion – lover, no doubt – watched him, still with that amused public-school-boy expression on his face, as though a provincial, middle-aged doctor was something of a joke in such a setting.

But the public school boy, Edmund, surprised him by saying gently, ‘It's an awfully good turn-out. Tremendous. You must be extraordinarily proud.'

‘Yes. Of course.' Even to his own ears he sounded off-hand. More than anything he wanted to get away from them to find Paul. He had imagined that he would walk in and Paul would be right there, as if he had been expecting him. He had imagined that they would look at his paintings together, alone, and that he would say the right things about them, although he had no idea what made him think he could. He had even imagined that his son would be pleased to see him; even that he could persuade him to come home. Idiotic, really. Even so, he hadn't imagined that there would be no sign of him, and that he would be pitied by a group of strangers who glanced at each other as though they didn't quite believe he was who he said he was.

But then, rather too brightly, the girl said, ‘There's Lawrence!' She slipped past him, edging her way through the press of bodies until she reached a young man who grinned delightedly at her. George watched as this man kissed her cheeks; he heard him say, ‘Darling girl!' And then, as he peered in his direction, ‘Really? Paul never mentioned … No, I'm not sure where he's got to – circulating? God knows he should be – everyone wants to talk to him. The pictures have all been sold.'

George found himself face to face with this man, Lawrence, his hand shaken vigorously. And then Paul's voice behind him said, ‘Dad,' and he was turning around, afraid of the emotions that surged against his heart.

* * *

Edmund sat across the restaurant table from the artist himself. Beside him sat Ann, who sat beside the artist's father, a man she had taken under her wing from the moment she set eyes on him, which was like her, of course – she never could resist lame ducks. The rest of their party, Lawrence Hawker, Day, Andrew, another artist he hadn't met before, sat further down the table strewn with empty wine bottles. He hadn't drunk very much; he should have, because he felt dull and churlish, and the wine would have helped him out of this shaming mood. He wondered if he was jealous of this artist's success, but also of his talent. He probed this idea as he might a rotten tooth, testing its painfulness, and decided that no, he wasn't jealous; he hadn't liked his paintings, in fact, had loathed them. He could see that they were technically good. He could also see that they were manipulative, and was surprised that it seemed no one else agreed with him.

The artist – whom he had heard Lawrence call Paul, but who signed his pictures
Francis Law
– hadn't drunk much either, as far as Edmund had noticed. He smoked endlessly, that was where he had disappeared to during the exhibition – to buy cigarettes. He had hardly eaten and, for a man who'd had such a successful evening, he seemed only exhausted. Edmund found himself watching him, wanting to figure him out as he would want to figure out any artist who had even this type of success. He must have made his watching too obvious because Paul – or Francis, or whatever his name was – looked up at him from flicking his cigarette ash into the ashtray and smiled wryly.

‘All right,' Paul said, ‘what conclusion have you reached?'

Embarrassed at being caught out, Edmund said, ‘Sorry.'

‘It's all right. You've had a rotten evening.'

‘Have I?'

‘I would like to slash the paintings, too.'

‘They don't belong to you any more. Besides, that's just vanity.'

‘You're right. And it was a foolish, vain thing to say, although it's true. I would like to take them all back and say that it was a bad mistake and that I'm sorry.' He looked down at his cigarette, rolling it around the rim of the ashtray. ‘Christ. Listen, don't mind me. They sold, that's an end to it.' He met his gaze. ‘Did you hate them?'

Edmund thought about lying politely and then said, ‘Yes, I'm afraid I did.'

‘Why?'

‘If you want to take them back, apologise for them, then I think you know why.' He marvelled at the pompousness in his voice – as if he knew what he was talking about – remembering how he had stood for a while in front of a painting of a soldier reading a letter as next to him another soldier slept, curled up like a small child, fully dressed even down to his boots, his face troubled, as though flinching through bad dreams. A lamp gave out a noxious yellow light; the reading soldier was smiling, an unexpectedly sweet, contented smile.

Edmund had wondered if this was the worst of the pictures or the best, his mood becoming ever sourer as he looked at it: wasn't this the worst kind of sentimental rubbish? Wasn't it made even more sentimental by the horror of some of the other pictures surrounding it? But he had gone on gazing at the picture, at that smile half covered by the boy's hand as though attempting to hide a private happiness. He thought that the boy could have been his brother Neville reading a letter he himself had sent. His brother might have smiled like that, despite everything … But it was sentimental to think so, and to be manipulated in such a way … No, he loathed that painting even more than he loathed the others.

Surprised by the anger he felt, Edmund said, ‘I can't say you're not talented.'

The artist laughed. ‘Thanks. I can't say that's not a compliment. I used to paint birds. The first picture I sold I called
Sparrows at the Drinking Fountain.
I should have stuck with birds, eh?' He held out his hand across the table. ‘We weren't introduced. Paul Harris.'

‘Edmund Coulson.'

‘Are you an artist, Edmund?'