Life Class (24 page)

‘Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I had no idea.’ She stared around the café as if there were help in waiters and chattering diners. ‘How old were you?’

‘Fourteen. She was in a lunatic asylum for the last two years, in and out before that.’ He made himself stop fiddling with the cloth. ‘I don’t think about it much.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. Well, a bit, I suppose, when the anniversary comes round, but it’s got all mixed up in my head anyway. I think I remember the first time they took her away, I remember seeing the van drive away with her inside it, but I know I can’t have seen that, because I was sent away from the house so I wouldn’t see.’

‘That must have been awful.’

‘The worse thing is I think part of me was relieved when she died because it meant I didn’t have to go on visiting that place.’

There was nothing she could say to comfort him. She reached across the table and folded his hands in hers.

They came out to find the whole street lit up by a magnificent full moon, which looked down on the town and seemed to deride its blue-painted street lamps. Even the shiny road surface reflected a
blurred white light back at the sky. Elinor looked up and saw how slack-bellied and stretch-marked it was, really, a mad old woman who’d decided to follow them home for reasons no sane person could guess at.

There were no people on the streets and the only sound was a mutter of guns in the distance and closer at hand the rumble of vehicles going up to the front.

‘Let’s walk a bit, shall we?’ he said.

She knew he was trying to change the mood of the evening, to effect the transformation from friends to lovers before they got back to the house. Above all to erase the memory of his mother’s suicide. She wanted to ask more but she daren’t. She felt he’d given her a key and done so very deliberately, but she’d no time to think about it. He put his arm around her shoulders, and they walked on. A misshapen blotch of darkness, they must have seemed from the outside. Part of Elinor had detached itself and was now sitting on a rooftop somewhere watching them cross the square. She seemed to see the whole town spread out below her.

‘It thinks it’s safe, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, the town thinks it’s safe. It’s really quite a smug little place.’

‘Well, it
is
safe. Safe as you can be with a war going on up the road.’

‘I like it. It doesn’t seem to care about religion or the state or anything much except itself

‘Making money.’

‘No, I mean like Dutch painting, you know? It loves its own life. This life. It doesn’t need anything outside to give it meaning. And the armies can march all over it, and it doesn’t care.’

They walked on, feeling their hips jostle as they tried to match their strides. ‘Do you miss me?’ he asked.

‘Do
you
miss
me
?’

‘Yes, but it’s different for me, because I’ve never been with you here, so there isn’t a gap. And I don’t get much time to think.’

‘No, in other words.’

‘I wouldn’t have asked you to come.’

‘Why did you?’

‘I needed you. A bit selfish, I suppose.’

‘Oh, you’re allowed a little bit. You’re doing more than most.’

She shivered and he put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

He had a key. She hadn’t been expecting that, and it made everything easier. Stumbling along the top corridor, they saw a line of orange light underneath the door, and opened it to find that a fire had been lit in the tiny grate. Flames and their shadows chased each other all over the walls.

He reached for the switch. She said, urgently, ‘
No.
’ They undressed in the circle of light, throwing their clothes into two dark heaps on the floor. He got into bed first, with a theatrical chattering of teeth, burrowing down into the cold sheets and pulling back the covers on her side. She felt unshelled, goose-pimply anything but seductive, but in bed they shuffled closer together and pulled the covers up to their faces until only their cold noses stuck out over the top. The firelight had got into his eyes.

It was different from that time in London, the last evening they spent together before he went to Belgium, when they’d come so close to making love. Then, she’d been excited by the sight of her own breasts against a man’s chest, rather than by anything Paul did. Tonight, she lost herself. She looked up once and saw him watching her. When he climaxed, he hid his face in her neck and then slid sideways on to the pillow, gripping the cloth between his teeth, snorting and pulling and tearing. In those last few seconds, he couldn’t have been aware of who he was with. Perhaps it was the shyness of their first time, which he might feel as much as she did, though he’d shown no other sign. But no, she thought, she’d discovered something about Paul that she hadn’t known before and couldn’t have found out any other way. Lovemaking for him would always be communion with a private god.

Then, almost immediately, the perception was lost. They were laughing with triumph, pushing the bedclothes back, not cold now, not cold at all, trampling the counterpane down to the foot of the bed, admiring the shadows the firelight cast on the hills and valleys of their bodies.

Then he talked for the first time about the hospital. She lay on his chest and felt the vibration his voice made, not listening; not wanting to know. One word kept recurring: Lewis this, Lewis that, Lewis the other.

‘Am I going to meet this Lewis?’

He seemed surprised. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Yes, why not?’

This is where his life was now. She remembered how he’d smiled as she talked about her life in London, the painting, the exhibitions, the Café Royal, the Slade – like somebody looking through the windows of a dolls’ house.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve gone on a bit. It’s just there’s nobody to talk to here.’

‘Lewis?’ she said, her tone now frankly ironical.

‘You don’t talk about the hospital when you come off duty.’ He lay and thought, started to say something, ended by laughing. ‘Do you know, at the end of a shift we sometimes just sit in silence?’

‘You could always paint.’

‘What, a man peeing out of the hole where his penis used to be? Oh, yes, a great demand for that.’

‘No, other things. Landscapes. The things you used to paint.’

‘No, it’s all a mess, I don’t know what to do with it. Anyway, we’d better get some sleep.’

He rolled over and kissed her, and they made love again, more gently, lingering, taking time. Only at the end did he turn his face away. Afterwards, they lay back to back, their spines touching, like a butterfly, she thought. Their spines were its body, their arms and legs its wings. She could feel his hands all over her now, even when he wasn’t touching her, as if they’d left a permanent imprint on her skin. She was thinking about this, trying to find the words to express it, but it was too much trouble to open her mouth, and an instant later she must have drifted off to sleep, because when she opened her eyes again the fire was out and grey rainy light was leaking under the skimped curtains, finding the little puddles of clothes they’d left on the floor.

She turned over and found him still asleep. He’d turned to face her so the butterfly they’d made together was already broken, before
she moved. She lay and listened to his breathing, a little whistle at the end of every breath. His arm was flung across his face – he hid himself, even in sleep – and it came to her that he didn’t love her at all. The conviction was absolute for about one moment, then began to soften with the strengthening light.

He woke abruptly, going from sleep to complete wakefulness in a second, like an animal alert for danger. Almost at once he swung himself out of bed. Perhaps he thought he was late for the hospital, though after he looked at his watch he came back and kissed her. She watched him dress, donning the unfamiliar uniform that clearly, to him, had become a second skin. Her hip joints ached, her lips felt bruised, she was blinking and dazed, her whole body felt different, and there he stood dressed for work. He’d opened the window wide and a stream of cold air came in.

‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he said, bending over for a final, abstracted kiss, and then he was gone.

There had to be a reason why she always remembered him in profile. Certainly, if she ever did try to paint him, he’d be turned away, searching for something – or somebody – but not expecting to find whatever it was. The loss had been long ago, and now only the posture, the expression, remained. What she loved most about him was the quality of detachment that prevented his ever really loving her.

She was nowhere near as unhappy as this thought should have made her feel. In fact she wasn’t unhappy at all. He’d hardly reached the end of the street when she jumped out of bed and started to get dressed, eager for the day that lay ahead.

Twenty-five

She wasn’t lonely, though she hardly spoke to a soul all day. This was what she liked: being alone in a strange city, walking by the canal, smelling dank water, dead leaves and grass, staring at people in the streets and at lunchtime pushing open the door of a little café, and finding nobody there except a woman with auburn hair who smiled at her but didn’t speak. Kit was constantly in her mind, the dread of meeting him, of having to explain, so finding this almost empty café was a relief. After lunch, she sat in the park and sketched, watching, out of the corner of her eye, a group of schoolgirls in blue uniforms, who sat on the next bench and twittered together, as unselfconscious as the birds who gathered round them in expectation of crumbs. By the time they’d gone, long blue shadows were creeping across the grass, and it was time to go home.

Back in the room, though, she felt insubstaintial, the result of eating scarcely anything and speaking to nobody all day. She put her sketches away in a folder, then settled down to draw the rooftops from her window, but it was getting too dark and soon she had to stop. She was thinking about Paul all the time, but she felt peaceful, now, not inclined to pick and tear at the relationship as she’d wanted to do when she first woke up.

Round about the time she expected Paul to arrive, she heard a quick, heavy footstep on the stairs and jumped up to greet him, but it was Madame Drouet. There was a young man downstairs, she said, with a distinctly disapproving air. Oh, Elinor said. She couldn’t think who it could be, but immediately her mind filled with the dread that Kit had some how found out where she was and had turned up like an outraged husband to demand an explanation. Apart from Kit she knew nobody here, but then she remembered Lewis. Yes. But why hadn’t Paul come with him? She ran a
brush through her hair and went downstairs, smoothing her skirt nervously as she reached the last few steps. She had no idea what to expect, certainly not this extraordinary-looking youth with hair that seemed about to take off.

‘Good evening,’ he said.

Oh dear. He sounded as shy as she felt, or worse.

‘You must be Lewis.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Paul had to go into theatre so he asked me to take you to the restaurant.’

‘All right. Wait a minute, I’ll get my hat.’

She ran all the way upstairs and all the way down again, wondering what on earth she would find to talk to him about until Paul arrived.

‘Is Lewis your first name or your second?’ she asked as they set off.

‘Second. My first name’s Richard, but nobody ever uses it. Well, except at home.’

‘But Paul is always Paul.’

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’

‘I used to use my surname at college sometimes.’

‘I’ve never heard of girls doing that.’ He glanced sideways at her, curious. ‘Why did you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it was a way of saying, Take us seriously. It’s hard, you know, for girls to be taken seriously as artists. We don’t do it so much now.’

They walked a little way in silence. ‘What’s keeping Paul?’

‘He had to go into theatre. We had a rush on. Did he tell you they’ve made him a dresser now?’

She couldn’t remember. ‘That’s special, is it?’

‘You have to be pretty good.’

She caught the note of hero-worship in his voice, the way Andrew sounded, sometimes, when he talked about Toby.

‘So what do you do exactly? If you’re a dresser?’

‘You bandage them up after they come out of theatre. Some of the wounds are … quite difficult.’

‘I’ll bet.’

He looked startled, then laughed. ‘Paul’s not pleased, because he thinks now they won’t let him drive an ambulance.’

‘Which is what he volunteered for.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you? What do you want to do?’

He was striding ahead. She had to trot to keep up with him.

‘The same, I suppose. I know it’s wrong, because you ought to be prepared to do whatever needs doing most, but no, I’ve got to admit, I’d rather drive an ambulance.’

That speech, which should have sounded priggish, but didn’t, because his enthusiasm and energy kept bursting through, confirmed her liking for him. More than liking, perhaps. Attraction. He was attractive, in spite of his freckly skin and staring hair. He didn’t look human, not entirely human. Ariel. That’s who he was. She smiled as she sat down at the café table and looked across at him. Ariel and Miranda.

She suggested a carafe of red wine while they waited. He hardly seemed to know what to do and kept looking at the door hoping salvation in the shape of Paul might suddenly appear. When the wine had been brought to the table and poured, she asked, ‘Do you think you’ll get your ambulance?’

‘I don’t know. We keep nudging them.’

We. Evidently this had become a joint project.

‘Nurses are coming out all the time now. Proper nurses, so you never know, we might be lucky. Anyway’ he raised his glass. ‘To happier times.’

He was happy now, and because of the times, not in spite of them.

‘Didn’t you ever think of enlisting?’

He flushed, perhaps suspecting her of being about to produce a white feather. Little did he know.

‘No, I’m a Friend. It wasn’t an option.’

‘A Friend?’

‘A Quaker. We oppose all wars.’

‘Because Jesus said so?’