Life Class (32 page)

It was twenty minutes before he returned to the Café. And there she was, her shining cap of hair reflected in the mirror behind her. She looked older, but not as tired as most people did at the end of this long winter. Quite the contrary, in fact. She glowed. The lights caught the gloss in her hair, the sheen of her eyelids, the full, red pouting mouth. She hadn’t seen him. He watched her for a while talking to the men on either side of her, teasing, flirting, playing one off against the other, then suddenly sitting back against the red plush seat, self-exiled, bored, thin arms folded across her chest. He walked across and kissed her. She was expecting him – they’d arranged to meet here – and yet her lips were slack with surprise.

Recovering, she said, ‘Oh, come on, Angus, move along. I want to talk to Paul.’

The seating was rearranged and he sat down beside her. Her whole body was turned towards him, screening the other men out with her shoulder, but the eyes that looked up at him were wary. The feeling of hope that had flared in him when he first saw her began to fade.

‘I haven’t seen you for quite a while,’ she said. Getting in first, he couldn’t help thinking.

‘I don’t move in the same exalted circles as you do.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Gower Street.’

‘Ah, the old stamping ground.’

‘Just across the road.’

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea? On a quiet morning you’ll be able to hear Tonks shouting, “I suppose you think you can draw?”’

He smiled. ‘I saw him this morning. I went to show him some stuff I’ve done.’

‘And … ?’

He raised his shoulders.

‘Did he like it?’

‘I don’t know about “like”. He’s going to put me in touch with some people. With a view to getting an exhibition together.’

‘Paul, that’s fantastic.’

She leaned across and kissed him. There was no doubting her sincerity.

‘Have you seen Nev’s show?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ve heard about it. Have you?’

‘It was amazing. Totally new, somehow, though obviously he’s building on what he did before. It’s as if he was born for this.’ She smiled. ‘Do you know, as I was leaving there were these two old codgers wandering about shaking their heads and I heard one of them say, “It’s not much like cricket, is it?”’

‘It’s terrifying people still think like that.’ He felt her withdraw and said quickly, ‘I’m pleased for Neville.’

‘So am I.’

A pause. She was looking round the room. ‘Are you working?’

‘Yes, I am. I thought at first I wouldn’t be able to, but once I started I couldn’t stop.

‘Landscapes?’

‘No. Well, some, but not the sort you mean. The hospital and the road.’

She put her hand on his arm. ‘Don’t let’s talk about the war, Paul.
Please
? It gets into everything.’

‘Well, yes, of course it does.’

Her expression hardened. ‘If you let it.’

‘Oh, I see. Not mentioned in Bedford Square?’

‘Sometimes. Not often. Mainly we talk about art.’

‘
Ah.’

‘Don’t let’s quarrel, Paul.’

‘I’ve no intention of quarrelling.’ He shifted restlessly in his seat. ‘Do we have to stay here?’

‘No, I’m quite happy to move on. It was just a place to meet.’

She stood up and said goodbye to the two young men.

‘Who are they?’ he asked, as they left.

‘No idea.’ She pulled a face. ‘Hangers-on.’

They hardly spoke on the journey in the cab. Under cover of the silence, a bead of tension formed and grew. He was aware of the shape of her shoulders under her coat. Remembered seeing them too, the bones standing out from the skin. Her collar bones in particular looked poised for flight. He could picture it all exactly, down to the bluish shadow between her breasts. He leaned towards her – her hair smelled of scent and smoke – and tried to kiss her, but she moved away.

Her rooms were on the top floor. Slanted, beamed ceilings, stonewashed walls, red, rust and brown rugs on the floor.

‘This is lovely’ he said.

She pulled the curtains closed before switching on the lamps. ‘Will you light the fire? I’ll put the kettle on.’

The fire was already laid. He put a match to the paper, then sat back on his heels, watching the flames lick and flicker round the sticks. The paper turned orange first, then brown. Black holes formed, glowing red at the edges, and little fluttering helpless wings that whirled away up the chimney on a shower of sparks. There. That ought to go.

While she was busy in the kitchen he wandered through into the other room and found a painting on the easel. It was a view of the hill behind her parents’ farmhouse, covered in deep snow.

‘Finished?’ he asked, hearing her come into the room behind him.

‘Nearly.’

‘Don’t do too much more to it, will you? It’s perfect as it is.’

‘You know we had snow the week before Christmas? I was at home looking after mother so in the afternoons when she was asleep I painted.’

‘How is she?’

‘Up and down. Worse since Toby left.’

The kettle whistled. She disappeared to make the cocoa. When she came back with the tray, he cleared a space on the table by the fire and said, ‘I did do one painting you’d approve of. A canal with poplars.’

‘At least you’re working.’

‘Are you really content to let it all pass you by?’

‘The war? Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think it matters very much. I don’t think it’s important.’

Silence. She looked slightly uncomfortable.

‘Of course it matters, in one way, it matters that people are dying. I just don’t think that’s what art should be about. It’s like painting a train crash. Of course it’s dreadful, but it’s not …’ She was groping for words, which had never come easily to her. ‘It’s not
you,
is it? An accident’s something that happens
to
you. It’s not you, not in the same way people you love are. Or places you love. It’s not
chosen.’

‘You think we choose the people we love?’

She shook her head.

‘Toby’s out there now, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. He left about a month ago.’

‘Is he at the front?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, suppose something happened to him? I’m sorry, but, you know, suppose he was killed, would you still say the war doesn’t fundamentally matter?’

‘Yes, then more than ever.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘The last thing I’d want to do is paint any part of what killed him. I’d go home, I’d paint the places we knew and loved when we were growing up together. I’d paint what made him, not what destroyed him.’

‘Well,’ he said, taken aback by her ferocity. ‘Let’s hope it never comes to that.’

‘I’m so frightened for him.’

‘But you still don’t want to know what’s happening?’

‘I do know, as much as he can tell me. He writes every week. What about you? Will you go back?’

‘If I can. I’ll do something.’

‘I won’t. Daddy keeps dropping hints about nursing, but I won’t
do it. That’s how it is, you see, even for a woman.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘We all have to give in to the great bully.’

They sat in silence. The firelight crept over her face and throat. She was blossoming. It hurt him to see her, though it would have hurt him far more to see her thin and pale with grief.

‘How are you really?’ she asked. ‘The truth.’

‘I don’t know. All right.’

‘Only all right?’

‘Lewis is dead.’

She bowed her head. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘I only realized how fond –’ The truth. ‘I only realized how much I loved him when it was too late.’

She looked startled. ‘I suppose men do become very attached to each other in those circumstances.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. I’d have loved him anywhere.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been converted. I shan’t be jumping on any of your new friends.’

‘I can think of one or two who’d be delighted if you did.’

He lay back in the chair, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. ‘You know in Ypres you said I didn’t love you?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

‘No. I thought it.’

‘Anyway it isn’t true. There’s not an hour goes by I don’t think about you.’ He looked directly at her. ‘I think we should get married.’

He didn’t know what he’d expected. Certainly not this cool, considering stare. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, lots of reasons.’ He was smiling now, getting ready to pretend he hadn’t been serious. ‘We could share a studio. Save rent.’

She shook her head.

‘No, listen, that’s not a bad idea.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it?’

‘You’d need somebody to take care of you while you were working.’

‘Not true.’

‘You don’t mean it. You’re at a low ebb at the moment, so you’re clutching at straws, but as soon as you felt better you’d wonder what on earth had possessed you. You don’t love me.’

‘I do, you know.’

‘As a friend.’

‘No, as a woman.’

‘No.’

Exasperated, he said, ‘You seem remarkably determined not to be loved.’

‘I don’t think you can love a woman.’ That shocked him. ‘That’s very sad, if it’s true.’

‘You don’t trust us.’

‘No, I’m not sure I do. Mind you, I don’t trust men either so I don’t know where that gets us.’ He sat thinking. ‘And I probably wouldn’t be faithful to you.’

He saw the recoil on her face. For all her contempt for the conventions she didn’t like that.

‘No, I know you wouldn’t.’

‘I suppose we could always have an open marriage.’

‘You mean you sleeping with anybody you fancy and me sitting at home pretending not to mind? No thanks.’

‘Anyway’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I can’t ask you to marry me, my knee won’t bend.’

Instantly she threw herself at his feet, gazing up at him with clasped hands and adoring eyes. ‘Darling Paul, please say you’ll be mine.’

‘I am yours.’ He was serious. ‘For ever.’ Her smile faded. ‘No, Paul.’

‘But it’s true. Why shouldn’t I say it?’

She got slowly to her feet. ‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Go on as we were?’

‘You mean go to bed.’

That was what he meant. He looked up at her and smiled.

‘You’re a disgrace.’

‘I’ve asked you to marry me. I can’t do more.’

‘No, I suppose you can’t.’

They got undressed slowly, unselfconsciously, like an old married couple, and lay side by side on the bed holding hands. It was a long time before he turned to her. Her eyes were huge in the half-darkness. For Paul, every gesture, every caress, every kiss was heavy with pain. He felt they were saying goodbye.

Afterwards she was silent for so long he thought she’d gone to sleep, but then she turned to face him. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I love you. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. Wait to see what happens, I suppose.’

‘What do you think’s going to happen?’

He shook his head. At the moment he thought they were two twigs being swept along on a fast current, now thrown together, now pulled apart. What happened next wouldn’t depend on what either of them desired. Perhaps there was wisdom just in accepting that. He started to speak only to realize she’d fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder.

Towards dawn, the pain in his leg jolted him awake. He slipped out of bed and limped across to the window. It was snowing. He’d thought it might be: something about the silence and the quality of the light. Feeling a flicker of the excitement he would have felt as a child he pressed his face to the cold pane and watched the heavy flakes tumbling towards him, grey against the white sky. He thought of Lewis in his grave under a thin covering of snow. Of the ambulance crews coming to the end of a long night. Of Sister Byrd, slipping and slithering on the duckboards as she left the Salle d’Attente and walked back to the hut where she slept alone.

The sooner he was out there again the better, he thought. He didn’t belong here.

God, it was cold. Chafing his upper arms, he went back to bed and slid between the sheets, snuggling into Elinor for warmth. After a while he stopped shivering and turned on to his back. The room was full of her quiet breathing. He looked up at the ceiling, as the light strengthened, waiting patiently for her to wake.

Acknowledgements

A number of biographies of artists who were at the Slade in the years before the First World War were useful in the preparation of this novel, providing, singly and together, a lively account of that remarkable generation:

First Friends
by Ronald Blythe
Interior Landscapes, A life of Paul Nash
by James King
Mark Gertler
by Sarah MacDougall
Isaac Rosenberg, Poet And Painter
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
C. R. W. Nevinson, The Cult of Violence
by Michael J. K. Walsh

All these artists, and many others equally distinguished, studied under Henry Tonks. In 1916, Tonks, who had been a surgeon before he became an artist, went to work with Harold Gillies, who was then pioneering the techniques of modern plastic surgery on the faces of mutilated young men. Tonks’s job was to make drawings of the patients before, during and after surgery. In addition he embarked on a series of sixty-nine portraits of facially mutilated men which are among the most moving images to have come out of any war. They were not exhibited in his lifetime, nor for many years afterwards.

Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery
by Emma Chambers pays tribute to the man and his work while raising a number of interesting and disturbing questions about the ways in which the wounds of war are represented – or, more often, hidden.

Several writers recorded their experiences of nursing wounded men.

A Diary without Dates
by Enid Bagnold
Chronicle of Youth, Great War Diary 1913–1917
by Vera Brittain, edited by Alan Bishop
The Forbidden Zone
by Mary Borden
The Backwash of War
by Ellen N. La Motte