From a Distance (21 page)

Arthur crouched to look at a hinge. He squinted up at Michael, ‘You mean you’ve promised her?’ he nodded into Michael’s silence. ‘We’ll sort something out, and she’ll be happy enough.’ He passed a frame covered in cobwebs to Michael, ‘Makes sense she’d want a studio for her work’ he said thoughtfully, ‘Her mother was some kind of artist. Done a big painting in the library in Penzance of the
White Star
wreck. Way back in 1907 I think it was. They saved almost five hundred lives that day, and my grandfather was among the lifeboat men. It’s a great painting. That Felicity’ll be right talented I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Yes, she’ll make her mark,’ said Michael, and pride stuffed his chest. Felicity, his sweetheart. A talented artist. She wasn’t just his sweetheart. He lived in her house, they were lovers. No one seemed to bother that they weren’t married, he couldn’t imagine the same state of affairs in Norfolk. Michael thought of the drawings and small paintings Felicity was working on. She had canvasses propped on chairs and watercolour paper tucked under the corner of looking-glass frames around the house. Delicate illustrations sprung to life with colour and charm.

He was eager to talk about her, ‘She’s talented, all right. She wants to make a business out of her designs, and we’ve got a couple of hours today to get started on making some benches and shelves for her.’

‘It’s not a lot of time, but we can make a start.’

By lunchtime Arthur had patched up the crumbling roof beam, made good the door and had gone off to fetch a particular saw he needed for the shelving he would work on while Michael went to meet Felicity.

Up on the hill in the late afternoon, Michael lay and dozed, while Felicity, her painting finished, made new sketches, blurring the page with dots of coloured ink. He kept still for a minute or two when he awoke, enjoying the scratch of grasses and the solid earth warm beneath him. It wasn’t sunny: hazy August heat beamed onto his skin and somewhere high above, a skylark sang. Beside him, Felicity’s pictures filled half her sketchbook, quick flurries of colour, shapes as delicate as a cloud of butterflies. He didn’t ask her what she was thinking. He rarely did, in case she asked him the same question. Today he’d intended to talk to her, but the peace of the scene, the fact that he knew the time was coming when he would have to go, the sheer pleasure of being with Felicity and knowing he loved her, all this stopped him. It could wait.

She closed the sketchbook and leaned over him. Freckles dusted the bridge of her nose and the top of her cheeks. Michael could never quite get over how beautiful she was. Whether it was something to do with Cornwall, or being an artist, he wasn’t sure, but Felicity seemed to have a connection with the land and the sea and the weather. She thrived on it. Looking down at him now, her eyes were flecked amber and green like the dappled shade of beech trees. She had her bare legs crossed under her, but she shifted, shaking her skirt, rolling forward to lean on her elbows. Her limbs were tanned reddish gold, her legs were always bare, and the cool touch of her forearm, or a glimpse of the heart-shaped mole on her thigh could make his heart leap. He brushed a crumpled leaf off her shoulder and wound a lock of her hair around his thumb. It was glossy, dark as black treacle. Michael wondered if he was experiencing the beginning of an artistic sensibility within himself.

‘I could paint you, I reckon. I’ve got an idea how I’d do it. I might draw you first.’ As soon as the words were out, he wanted to unsay them, they were so foolish. Him! A painter. Absurd.

Felicity rolled over and lay next to him. ‘Maybe you will,’ she said. ‘Anything can happen.’

Michael propped himself up to look at her. He kissed her nose, touched that she hadn’t laughed away his thought. He knew he wouldn’t really paint her, but he would always dream about it. The truth was, he didn’t want to make art, he wanted to enjoy beauty. Felicity’s beauty. This sense was new to him, but nothing he experienced with Felicity was like anything he had ever known.

‘Come on, it’s getting late. We should go home now. This sketchbook is finished, and I’ve got something I started drawing in the shop this morning I want to look at when we get home. What about you?’

Michael opened an eye, squinting through his lashes at her. She had a splash of ink shaped like a tiny butterfly on her forearm and another on her knee. Her thin dress, sprinkled with yellow flowers looked like part of the hillside.

‘You belong here, don’t you?’ He sat up, blinking. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been up here, but it had been a while.

Felicity jumped up from the grass, shaking herself. ‘There are elf kings in Cornwall, you know,’ she said, reaching to pull him up too. ‘They live in the tin mines and have castles and kingdoms but humans can’t see them. I belong with them. I’m going to put a spell on you one day, you wait and see, so you’ll never want to leave.’

Michael laughed, ‘You’ve already done that.’

Felicity didn’t hear, she was running down the hill towards town.

In the weeks that followed, Michael found that he was happier than he had ever imagined he could be. He and Arthur finished building the screen-printing table and whitewashed the studio over three intense days where electric storms alternated with sultry sunshine. The air smelled of sawdust and wet paint when it didn’t smell of damp, and any silence in that time rang with the thwack of hammers or the drum of raindrops on the roof.

When Michael swept the last of the wood shavings out of the studio, Felicity announced she was closing the bookshop for good. ‘If I don’t do it properly, I’ll never know if it could have worked. What d’you think?’ She was sitting on the new padded screen-printing table, swinging her bare legs and eating an apple. Pots of mixed dye stood in a row by the open door, and the studio danced with sunbeams and an air of anticipation.

‘It’s what I hoped.’ Michael pulled a fleck of wood shaving from her hair, and she caught his hand between hers. Her skin was warm, she vibrated with life and energy. ‘You can’t be shut up in a bookshop all your life.’

She jumped down, pulling sketches off a shelf. ‘I know what I’m going to do. It’s this.’ She waved a piece of board at him. ‘Starting with three designs in four colourways. Look, here they are, Michael, I’ve got no excuse.’

He knew he was avoiding his own life again, for another slice of time, when he answered, ‘I love them. I’ve got an idea. Let me sort out the bookshop for you while you keep this work up. I’ll get them all catalogued for you to sell.’

Felicity threw the apple core into the flowerbed outside and began to select brushes from the earthenware pots on the windowsill.

‘Maybe,’ she said dreamily, but she wasn’t really listening. Humming, she bent to sift through a wooden box full of paint tubes on the floor.

Everything was in its place. The paintbrushes were next to a pot of paint-covered palette knives, and Felicity had picked a scratchy bunch of sea lavender sprigs and plonked them in a third. She moved across the studio, picking things up, arranging them, making the space her own. She reminded him of a swallow, swooping back and forth to the eaves of the house as to build a nest. Finally she piled a collection of white stones and a sea-bleached seal skull she and Michael had found on the beach. It had smelled of fish. Michael tried to discourage her from picking it up, but Felicity pretended not to notice. It was her favourite technique, he had begun to realise, for getting her own way. Now the ivory gleam of bone in the sunlight and the blue-grey shadow of sockets and hollows sat on the shelf, scrubbed clean by a summer outside, smelling of nothing.

He liked things that didn’t smell of anything, they had no memories attached to them. The war had smelled of mud and rubble and death. Michael sometimes evoked a fragment of it in his thoughts or his nightmares, where it emerged cloying and chilly like a damp corner, generally hidden but not forgotten. Mousehole, by contrast, was breezy, and the air smelled of fish and sea and flowers, zest and hope. It smelled of safety. He loved the aroma of newly cooked bread in the mornings when, just after dawn, he passed the bakery on his way to work, his senses still suffused with the lingering intimacy of Felicity’s scent when he had kissed her goodbye in their bedroom. The pub smell in the evenings when he and Felicity bicycled to Newlyn to meet some friends was exciting, run through with sawdust and yeasty hops, the lush whiff of a woman’s perfume, a snatch of tobacco smoke in the air as a cigarette flared against the sulphurous spark of a match.

It was an easy habit, formed through the summer, and Michael liked the fact that he and Felicity fitted without effort into the group that met up in the Swordfish. A few pints of beer, a game of darts or backgammon and people to talk to. In the pub, everyone had a story. For some, it was of a past they couldn’t yet lay to rest. Paul Spencer had flown Hawker Hurricanes in the Western Desert during the war. His passion for flying blazed as strong as his art through his talk. Another painter, Kit Barker, leaned at the bar, a black eyepatch giving the air of a pirate to a man who, as a conscientious objector, had driven ambulances through Belgium during the war. Listening, discussing and tentatively putting forward his own thoughts, Michael found himself more in harmony with these people he was meeting and befriending than he had ever expected to feel again. Across the room, Felicity was at a table with Paul’s wife Sheila. Their heads together, laughing. He loved Felicity to be happy, and he smiled and raised a silent toast to her before turning to take his turn at the dartboard.

Sometimes, in a quiet moment, he wondered how long he could continue living in this way. In his heart he knew that no matter how much he talked and laughed and bear-hugged his new friends, he was not one of them, he did not belong here, and his usefulness was limited. People came and went, it was the nature of the artists’ colony, but Michael could see how they worked together, potters and sculptors exchanging equipment, collaborating with one another, writers, printmakers, painters, falling in love, setting up house, making art, creating exhibitions and bringing up children. No one had much money but, to Michael’s mind, they all had a future he didn’t share. How many studios and picture frames could he build? He was neither an artist, nor a skilled craftsman like Arthur. He was enjoying it, but it couldn’t last indefinitely. He thought of home with a jolt one evening, when a chance remark revealed that some of the St Ives artists had spent time in Norfolk one summer before the war. A connection he hadn’t anticipated, breaching the distance from home to here in an instant. He swallowed a whisky chaser after his beer, swilling the liquor to try and lose the metallic taste of guilt.

It was a Thursday evening in September. Michael had harvested a crop of asters, and decided he didn’t much care for them. The pink and purple petals seemed lurid to him, the centre of each flower an offensive egg-yolk yellow. He laughed at himself. Here he was, a soldier back from war, the epitome of stalwart masculinity, fussing around with bunches of flowers. He took the asters to Penzance station, boxed and piled for the London train. Having passed them over to the stationmaster, he walked into the pub across the road from the station in search of Arthur, who had said he would like a lift home. He found him, sleeves rolled up, a pint of Guinness in front of him, with the newspaper. Arthur had been making wooden plinths for sculptors in St Ives, and he drank his beer with the air of someone who had earned every drop of it.

‘Blast me!’ he said when he saw Michael, his top lip decorated with creamy foam, ‘Some of those women artists are hard work.’ He rolled a cigarette and lit it, drawing deeply. ‘Had to make a sodding great stage for their bronzes, and then they were all shouting about how wrong it was that there had to be steps. But if they want to get up to them, they had to have steps. One of them walks with a stick, for God’s sake, she can’t just spring up on to a stage.’ He ground his cigarette under his boot. ‘I left them arguing about it. Reckon it’ll all be forgotten next time I go back over there. S’always the same with those sculptresses.’

Michael nodded, ‘Seems that making art is a lot more complicated than I thought. Felicity doesn’t get angry, but it’s as though a curtain falls and she disappears. She forgets everything when she’s working.’

Arthur nudged him. ‘Neglected are you? Let’s head for the pub back in Mousehole and we’ll catch up with some of my buddies. We’re finalising the team for the cricket match against St Erth, d’you reckon you’d be up for playing?’

‘For sure, you can count on me,’ said Michael, flushing, happy to be included. This was what he was missing. Friendships, cricket, a life in common. It would be there at home in Norfolk, it was everywhere that families lived, children grew up and people went out into the world. And came back.

The thing about Felicity was that she didn’t talk about practicalities or plans, she wasn’t interested. She just wanted to mix dye and make patterns. She was absorbed, and he knew her well enough now to understand that she was happy whether he was there or not. Her work was what drove her. She was working until dark every night, and the designs were becoming more intricate and beautiful. Themed around the sea, she had made flowing patterns of seahorses and cockle shells, birds and fish, sometimes closely detailed, some more abstract, all dancing on paper and fabric that she hung around the studio. Michael was sure she would sell them if she wanted to. She sidestepped any conversation about the future, or even the present, if it was about their relationship. He liked it like that. She didn’t scrutinise his motives, she didn’t cross-examine him. She was, as she teased him, from another world and the lack of demands from her were helping him heal his confused and anguished memories.