Bombs on Aunt Dainty (17 page)

“Isn’t that so, John?” asked Barbara, and added to Max, “John here thinks she’s absolutely bursting with talent.”

John Cotmore agreed that he did think Anna very promising, and Anna sat between them feeling pleased but foolish, exactly, she thought, as she had done when Mama came to talk to the teacher at the end of her first term at primary school.

Max must have felt something of the same sort, for he assumed an elderly air while phrases like “full-time art course” and “help from the Council” fell between them, and only became himself again when the pale young man asked him if flying wasn’t very dangerous and Barbara offered him some chips.

“I like your friends,” he told Anna later. “Especially that girl Barbara. And John Cotmore seems to think that you can draw.”

They were travelling down the escalator to the tube and she glowed inwardly while he considered the evening.

“Do they all know about your background?” he asked. Harry had made a glancing reference to Germany.

“Yes, well, I told John Cotmore first,” she said eagerly. “And he said it was wrong to pretend to be someone one wasn’t. He said that people who mattered would accept me anyway, so there was no need.”

“He’s quite a chap,” said Max.

“Yes, isn’t he!” cried Anna. “Isn’t he!”

Max laughed. “I take it you want me to reassure Mama about him. Don’t worry, I’ll tell her everything she wants to hear.”

They had reached the bottom of the escalator and were walking down the steps towards the platform. Anna took his arm. “Did you really like him?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Max. “Yes, I did.” Then he said, “he’s divorced or something, isn’t he?”

There were air raids again in the spring. People called them “scalded cat” raids because the planes came in low, dropped their bombs and escaped again at top speed. They were not bad raids, but tiresome. Anna had to turn out with the local firewatchers every time the air-raid warning sounded. She still had chilblains left over from the winter and it was agony cramming her feet back into her shoes after the warmth of the bed had made them itch and swell.

However, one night when she was keeping watch with Mr Cuddeford he said to her, “I hear you’re artistic.”

Anna admitted that she was, and Mr Cuddeford looked pleased and told her that his aunt had just died. At first it was unclear how this could affect Anna, but then it transpired that the aunt had been artistic too – extremely artistic, said Mr Cuddeford – and had left a lot of equipment which no one knew what to do with.

“If there’s anything there that you’d like, you’re welcome to it,” he told Anna, and so, the following weekend, Anna went to look at it.

The equipment was nearly all Victorian, for the aunt
who had lived to the age of ninety-three had acquired most of it in her girlhood. There were two easels, several palettes and a clutter of canvases, all enormously heavy and solid. Anna was intoxicated at the sight of it. John Cotmore had been encouraging her for some time to try painting in oils, and here was nearly everything she would need for it.

“I think I could use it all,” she said, “if you can spare it.”

Mr Cuddeford was only too pleased to be rid of it and even lent her a wheelbarrow in which to carry the things home.

The problem now was where to put them. Anna’s and Mama’s joint bedroom could not possibly accommodate them.

“Perhaps I could use the garage,” said Anna. This was a separate building in the garden at present filled with the old lawnmower and other paraphernalia.

“But you couldn’t drag your easel up to the house every time you wanted to paint,” said Mama. “And anyway, where would you set it up? You couldn’t use oil paints in the lounge.”

Then Frau Gruber had an idea. Above the garage was a small room where, in the maharajah’s day, the chauffeur must have slept. It was dusty and unheated but empty, and there was even a basin with a tap in one corner.

“No one ever uses this,” she said. “You could have it as a studio.”

Anna was delighted. She moved in her equipment, wiping at the dust half-heartedly, for it did not bother her,
and took a hard look round. All she needed now was some form of heating and some paints and brushes. She dealt with the heating by buying a second-hand paraffin stove, but after this her money was exhausted. It was difficult, nowadays, to save anything out of her wages, for prices had gone up and her wages hadn’t.

“Max,” she said next time she saw him, “could you lend me eight shillings and ninepence?”

“What for?” he asked, and she explained.

He pulled a ten shilling note from his pocket and handed it to her.

“A gift,” he said, “not a loan,” and when she thanked him he sighed and said, “I’ve always wanted to be a patron of the arts.”

They were sitting in the buffet at Paddington, waiting for his train to take him back to his RAF station. Nowadays he made frequent trips to London, often calling only briefly on Mama and Papa, and always seemed abstracted. She watched him nervously crumbling a bright yellow object described as a bun on his plate.

“Are you all right?” she said. “Why do you keep getting leave to come to London? Are you up to something?”

“Of course not,” he said quickly. “I come to London to see you and Sally and Prue and Clarissa and Peggy …”

He had a host of girl friends, but she did not believe that was the reason.

“All right,” he said at last, “but don’t tell anyone. I’m trying to get on ops.”

“You mean you’re going to fly on operations?”

Max nodded. “Only I’ve had half a dozen interviews so far without getting anywhere, so there seemed no point in talking about it.”

“It would be an awful risk, wouldn’t it?” said Anna.

Max shrugged his shoulders. “No worse than what I’m doing now.”

“But Max!” she cried. It seemed madness to her.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve been an instructor long enough. I’m bored, and when I’m bored I get careless. The other night—” He stopped.

“What?” said Anna.

“Well, I suppose I nearly killed myself. And my pupil.” He suddenly noticed the bun in his fingers and dropped it on the plate in disgust. “It was a stupid mistake – something to do with the navigation. I thought I was approaching Manchester…Anyway, I almost flew into a Welsh mountain.”

“What did you do?” asked Anna.

He grinned. “Turned left,” he said. “Very quickly.” Seeing her face, he added, “Don’t worry – I’ve been very careful ever since. And don’t tell Mama.”

Anna bought the brushes and paints the next day in her lunch hour. In the evening, at art school, she asked John Cotmore’s advice on how to use them. He told her how to set out the paints on her palette, how to thin them down when necessary and how to clean her brushes. By the
weekend she felt she was ready to start painting.

She had decided, since her first painting might not be very good (though one could never tell), that she would not waste her only unused canvas on it. John Cotmore had explained to her that she could paint over a used canvas and she had chosen one that was not too big. It must have been one of Mr Cuddeford’s aunt’s last efforts, she thought, for it was only half-finished. It showed a worried-looking stag peering out of a bush, and there had evidently been some intention of having a whole lot more stags leaping about in the background, but either Mr Cuddeford’s aunt had become discouraged or old age had gripped her. At any rate this part of the painting was barely sketched in.

Anna picked up a stick of charcoal and, ignoring the stag’s reproachful eye, began to map out her design. She planned to paint a group of shelterers. Since the recent air raids, many of them had returned to the tube with their bundles and blankets, and the painting was to show not only what they looked like but how they felt. It was to be very sombre and moving. She quickly sketched out the shapes of three women, two sitting and one lying on a bunk above them, so that they just filled the canvas. Then she squeezed some colours on to her palette, and then she stopped.

Were you supposed to thin the colours with turps or linseed oil? She was pretty sure John Cotmore had said turps, but suddenly felt it would be nice to talk to him before actually starting to paint. She flew up to the public
telephone, looked up his number in the book, dialled and found herself almost choked with nerves when he replied.

“Hullo?” he said. He sounded half-asleep.

“It’s Anna,” she said, and he immediately woke up.

“Well, hullo,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m just going to start to paint.” She seemed to have less than her usual amount of breath, so she added as briefly as possible, “Is it turps or linseed oil that you should use as a thinner?”

“Turps,” he said. “Linseed oil would make it sticky.”

There was a pause and then he said, “Is that all you wanted to know?”

“Yes,” she said, and then, to make the conversation last longer, “I thought you’d said turps, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Oh yes, definitely turps.”

There was another pause and then he said, “Well, nice to hear your voice.”

“And yours,” she said with infinite daring.

“Is it?” He laughed. “Well, good luck with the painting.”

After this she could think of nothing more to say and had to ring off.

She walked back through the garden and it was quite a long time before she could compose herself enough to start work.

She spent most of the day covering up the stag. It was impossible to see her composition properly as long as he
was staring out of the middle of it, and in her hurry to get rid of him she quickly painted in the main shapes as best she could. The following morning she concentrated on improving them, and it was not until the afternoon that she began to have doubts. By this time she had painted everything except the bunk, which would be tedious, but the picture still did not look right. I’ll leave it, she thought. I’ll look at it again next weekend when I’m fresh.

“How’s the painting?” John Cotmore asked her at art school the following week. It was the first time he had ever sought her out to speak to her alone.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

The following Saturday she was shocked when she saw it again. Now that the paint had dried not only did the colours look unpleasant, but the whole thing had gone flat. Also, due to some chemical process, the stag’s eye had reappeared and glowed faintly through one of the shelterers’ faces.

Well, at least I know what’s wrong with it, she thought. There’s no light on it. She painted out the stag’s eye and spent the rest of the weekend changing the colours and putting on dabs of light in various places. It was difficult because, as she gradually realised, she was not at all sure where the light would come. At the end, the painting looked different but not much better – a speckled effect rather than a flat one – and she was very depressed.

“I’m having a lot of trouble with my painting,” she told John Cotmore. “Could I show it to you sometime?”

“Of course,” he said. Then he added casually, “It’s difficult to talk properly here. Why don’t you bring it round to my house? Come and have tea on Saturday.”

She was at once thrown into confusion.

Girls didn’t go alone to men’s houses…did they? On the other hand, why not? She looked at him, carelessly perched on one of the stools in the art-room. He seemed quite unconcerned, as though he had suggested something very ordinary.

“All right,” she said with a curious sense of excitement, and he wrote down the address for her on a piece of paper. Then he added the telephone number. “In case you change your mind,” he said.

In case she changed her mind? Did that mean it wasn’t so ordinary after all? Oh, she thought, I wish we’d always stayed in one country, then Mama would have been able to tell me what people do and what they don’t do, and I’d know!

She worried about it for the rest of the week. She played with the idea of asking Mama’s advice, of ringing up at the last moment and saying no, but all the time she knew with mounting excitement that she would go, that she would not tell Mama, and while part of her mind was still inventing excuses for calling the whole thing off another had already decided what she would wear. On Saturday she told Mama, as she had always known she would, that she was meeting a girl friend from art school, and went.

John Cotmore lived in a quiet road in Hampstead. It was
the first warm day of the year and as Anna walked up slowly from the tube station she passed flowering trees, people working in their gardens and open windows everywhere. She was early and had time to make several detours before stopping outside his door. A notice above the bell said Out of Order and after a moment she used the knocker. Nothing happened and panic seized her at the thought that he might have forgotten and gone out – to be replaced by relief and a different kind of panic as the door opened and he appeared.

“Hullo,” he said. He was wearing a blue sweater which she had never seen and was holding a spoon in one hand.

“Just getting the tea ready,” he said.

She waved her painting, wrapped in brown paper, like a passport and followed him into the house.

It was bright and empty and specks of dust danced in the light of his large untidy living room.

“Sit down,” he said, and she sat in a chair with the painting beside her.

Through the door at the end of the room she could see his studio and there were stacks of drawings everywhere.

“I’m working for another exhibition,” he said. “These are some of the ones I’ve done recently.”

“Oh!” she said and stood up again to look at them.

They were mostly figures and a few landscapes in pen and wash, all drawn with his usual perceptive precision. It was embarrassing to go through them while he watched, but she really admired them and so found various suitable
things to say. There was one in particular, a wash drawing of trees and a wide expanse of sky, which had such a feeling of wetness and spring that she forgot all her careful phrases and cried instead, “It’s lovely!”

He was looking at it critically over her shoulder.

“You think I should put it in?”

“Oh yes,” she cried. “You must – it’s beautiful.”

He was standing quite close to her and for a moment she felt his hand on her arm.

“You’re very sweet,” he said. Then he said, “Must put the kettle on,” and disappeared, leaving her alone and slightly light-headed.

She could hear him clattering in the kitchen nearby – he must have found more to do than just the kettle – and after a while she began to look through another stack of drawings on the sofa. These seemed to be mostly unfinished or discarded sketches, but there was one different from the rest. It showed a man working some kind of machine. The man looked very strong and every bit of the machine, down to the tiniest screw, was carefully drawn and shaded. She was looking at it in surprise when she heard his voice behind her.

“That’s not mine,” he said. “That’s my wife’s.”

He sounded put out, and she dropped it as though it were red-hot.

“I wondered why it was so different,” she said quickly, and to her relief he smiled.

“Yes, amazing – all those nuts and bolts.” He replaced
the drawing and threw some others on top. “But a lot of precision there. She’s very keen on social significance, whereas I –” He gestured towards his own work and Anna nodded sympathetically. It must be awful for a man of his sensitivity to be tied to someone so fond of nuts and bolts.

“It’s easier since we live apart,” he said. “We each go our own way – quite a friendly arrangement.”

She did not know what to answer, and he added, “You probably don’t know about such things at your age, but people make mistakes and marriages break up. It’s no use blaming anyone.”

She nodded again, touched by his generosity.