Schooling (30 page)

Beside her, Butcher absorbed in color ratio. A moment. Gilbert stares down at her. Out of the sun she can see very well the creases carved by his mouth. Not laugh lines at all, more like frown. He looks over to Piers and Thérèse. A hesitation.

Compared to Fauvists, I mean . . . watching him . . . Cole is so much quieter.

I didn’t know you went for quiet.

I don’t think I have so much in common with wild beasts.

Ah yes . . . he smiles to Butcher as if they share a joke but Butcher mixes, oblivious . . . Thomas Cole . . . nearly spitting . . . What a visionary. What a passionate painter. Only thrilled your aspirations are aimed so high.

Rinsing her brush . . . I like him.

Do you. I prefer your earlier efforts. Since you recall that day in the Oxbow museum so well, perhaps you also recall my saying that the exact does not convey—

Truth. I remember.

Yet, this Cole fascination, newfound that it is—

I liked him that day. You convinced me it wasn’t the right opinion.

I was guiding you.

Maybe I don’t think Cole painted things exactly . . . lifting her painting to smooth the kickpleat . . . Or maybe I can’t recognize truth.

Gilbert smiles at his shoes and over at Butcher who seems only aware of mountain, grass, cliffs, birds.

I mean . . . selecting a boring brown . . . Maybe that day in Oxbow, I was a new girl, I didn’t know what I was seeing. But that’s what you always meant to teach me, right? From the beginning you said that you would teach me how to see.

You have learned that have you. Well my job is done then.

I think so.

Gilbert hesitates, he has been vacillating between going and not going these last five minutes. Clearly he is thinking of a way to separate her from Mrs. Ingle, so he can lean down and say Don’t do this Catrine so he can whisper in her hair the reminders of their times, sweet cinemas, clandestine castles. But now Butcher mumbles some damnation about a pencil sharpener, trips off toward Vicar and his naughty rocks.

I suppose you think . . . Gilbert watches Butcher’s retreat . . . That you’re bringing up your percentage with this farce. In fact you’re spiraling toward failure.

I’ve been thinking about Mr. Betts.

Gilbert takes Butcher’s place, doesn’t pull his trousers at the knees, the sit is more collapse . . . What about him?

The first week he left me alone when I couldn’t find Missoula on the map.

Did he.

You say that when you’re not listening.

Well what does that mean, Catrine, Betts left you alone? . . . Gilbert picks up her rock . . . I don’t understand you anymore. Was I supposed to leave you alone?

I don’t know.

Gilbert passes the rock from hand to hand . . . Catrine . . . he tries to give it to her, but she has not asked for it . . . I have transgressed some—Let me begin again. I want it to be the way it used to be between us. The way it was before.

Before what? Before you lied about the library and your mother?

I was protecting you. Sometimes we protect each other with white lies. I made a mistake.

Which one?

On the drive up. When we had fish and chips. I misunderstood . . . his hand on top of hers his smell has not changed, a squeeze . . . Tell me what you want . . . he puts his arm around her shoulders as if she is very small, a petulant child with a scraped knee.

You can’t protect me from yourself, Mr. Gilbert.

Help . . . Vicar, out of breath though he can not have traveled more than a few yards . . . The little girl . . . wheezing . . . Come quickly.

Gilbert drops his arm at the Interruption, and rushes away stuffing the rock into his pocket apparently forgetting it is a rock. She follows, leaving the bad Cole behind.

Piers is standing by a clump of gorse smoking at his paintbrush. Thérèse sits cross-legged on Piers’ coat, holding her head in her hands. Butcher thrums comfort, arm around the girl.

What is it? . . . Gilbert kneels on the coat, taking Thérèse’s hands away from her face . . . Mrs. Ingle, tell me what’s happened.

Vicar and I were having an all-out search for this expensive pencil sharpener we invested in not two—

Yes yes.

Suddenly I realized the girl was crying. Well I went over to her and—

It’s in my eye . . . still Thérèse does not look up.

What is . . . a gentle secret . . . What’s in your eye?

My pencil lead . . . Piers, back and agitated . . . I struck the paper with force, the pencil point rebounded. I was upset it was so ugly, my drawing—

You’re not supposed to be drawing at all . . . Gilbert pets Thérèse, soothing.

I was providing an outline.

I’ve been doing that as well, Mr. Gilbert . . . Butcher worries . . . Is it against the rules?

The child has lead in her eye, can we all keep our heads. Vicar?

Yes Mr.—

Pass me your water jug and the palette, there.

Gilbert moves swiftly quietly, cleaning the palette, filling a hollow with water, We’re going to flush your eye We’re going to flush your eye. Thérèse moans and Butcher says, After this course I should go back to nursing with all the casualties on any given day.

Standing by Piers, looking out on rocks. Way up on the next peak, a dot of white. Clump of edelweiss if they were Swiss. If they were in France, it would be a likelihood. But they are in Cornwall. So it is perhaps a colony of gulls, or covey, mutton stranded on a moutonnée.

I have blinded her, Piers says lighting a cigarette, I never expected the lead to bounce like it did. I was annoyed at my drawing, I was annoyed I was making no progress and I found the scenery, here he gestures with his cigarette, Boring. A stream of smoke dissipates into air. Behind them, the commotion of flushing and Vicar’s new accents for Thérèse’s amusement. They assess the same cliffs, she and Piers. She has no special vantage. A pause. Smoke. Piers? Mm, a draw on the cigarette. Well it seems we are looking at the same landscape, you and I, these cliffs, mountains, the blue sky and that clump of gulls or somesuch, well, this landscape you choose to call boring, the boredom of which you break your pencil point over, the boredom for which you blind a girl, I don’t find so boring at all. I take offense. I think it’s. Majestic.

A clicking like a key in a latch, back and forth. Yesterday, free day, no painting, morning after the day of cows and sheep but the morning before porridge, walking stick, the lie. Yes, it is the morning after the evening Giddy opens the bathroom door, proving to Gilbert that there can be such a thing as one bath too many. You must take Catrine to show her Penzance, Giddy, fingers drumming, The town after so much country. You must show her everything Cornwall has to offer.

On the boardwalk, before the games, the arcade and the shoes. Thin clouds, cirrus clouds suggested no rain. Two mornings after the night of the moth. His stomach persisted on this day too, the shoe day, in an on again off again fashion. But he brought her to the water, to the ocean which she hadn’t seen in a year. And they sat down next to a great steerhorn for rope, sat down the two of them below the railing designed to prevent sitting. He said, Welcome to the Atlantic the very same water as yours back home.

Staring at the ocean, Gilbert gave insight on ablutions, how Bonnard frequently painted women bathing because his wife never stopped, how she never gave him affection of any kind.

Maybe he was repulsive.

On the contrary, he was very handsome.

Maybe he wouldn’t take her swimming.

Enough. Enough.

Maybe he was mean to her.

Shall we switch the topic?

Did he expect her to cry for the last time she had ocean, reminded of Mother, Maine. She wouldn’t. They sat close together side by side after the moth but before the lie. They looked down at the brine and laughed about Vicar and old Inred, Piers’ state of German angst. They smelled the sea together and pointed out a gull or turtle which on closer inspection always became rubbish. Nothing mattered. They looked down upon their remarkably similar shoes swinging off the boardwalk together, the leather lace-ups excellent for squashing. Gilbert took her hand when he pointed to a man whose hat was blowing away. And she pulled her hand back as she drew his attention to a faraway ship. Instead of looking to where she pointed, he looked to where she replaced her hand, to her lap, then down to her squashers which is when he said, Time For New Shoes.

What, she said, she protested she nearly became angry because there was reason for it, at least in her book, but he insisted, leaping up in his short-trousered way, babbling about the sky’s appearance for rain. They rollicked down the boardwalk screaming, scattering gulls because he tried to take her hand again so she made it a game. Breathing vicarlike up the hilly little town streets past the buttery the odd shop for bonnets or lace until they found a shop displaying winklepickers and sheepskin slippers.

Here we are, Gilbert swung in, leaving her outside pointing to the skinny shoes saying, Well I’m not wearing those. The rain began gently while they were inside. The clerk switched on a light, they were the only customers. Warm in lamplight. Gilbert walked the perimeter, hum, hum, pulling out a red shoe, high heel, an odd assortment. The clerk measured her foot using a metal slide rule. When the man disappeared she said, Mr. Gilbert I can’t wear a shoe with a heel like that, I’ll tip over. They stared at each other over a disembodied foot pierced by a rod. Sunday service requires a smarter shoe surely. Then the foot came into focus whereupon she laughed, not only because of the cutoff foot, but because he sounded so serious. A smarter shoe. She laughed and laughed. Gilbert picked up a galosh, We can experiment at the very least. No harm in experimenting is there?

This one too loud, that one too small. She wavered in the pair with the heel. They came off with a suck. The clerk said, She’s got a pair. A pair of what? Oh nothing, said the clerk, nothing at all. Careful mate, Gilbert told him, She’s got a temper. Mate, like that like he was better friends with the clerk. I don’t like that pair, she said, yes yes perhaps a tad petulant though there was reason enough in her book. Really? Gilbert said, I quite like them. Folding her arms against the best mates in cahoots against the far wall, she said, I find those shoes to be the ugliest in the shop. But as she summed up the sallow clerk in his pathetic frayed elbows, she saw them. Mr. Gilbert, she pointed. Mr. Gilbert.

Mate’s name was Steve. Steve went to get them in a five, green shoes with a darker green circle embossed on the front. Timid heel, but she could still run. If she had to. Gilbert said, What’s the circle, for it looks like someone’s dropped a penny on her foot. It’s decoration, Steve said. Just for fun.

It’s just for fun, Mr. Gilbert. For fun.

You like those?

You don’t.

Not as much. I like whichever you choose. I want your happiness.

I’m happy with these.

The dropped penny shoes.

Pennies aren’t green.

Well squashed pea then . . . Gilbert reached to pay . . . Are you wearing them?

Of course she was wearing them, though first she ensured that Steve had a box for her old shoes, the ones Father bought for her. Of course she was wearing them. Coming out of the store into rain with no umbrella, they darted from doorway to shop awning on down the hill. Gilbert held her shoebox under arm, guiding her always with a hand to her back down the hill down the hill on to the boardwalk on to the arcade. Of course she was wearing them, they made her socks pink by the laundry appear intentionally pink.

Turning her foot as they went inside to wipe off the rain . . . Mr. Gilbert.

I’m buying us tokens.

Mr. Gilbert.

Which games do you like?

Over machines and whistles, sirens and the thwack of paddles, he couldn’t hear so she pulled him down to say in his ear . . . Do they really look like mushy peas?

And he laughed his fangish laugh yes your honor the ugly one that breaks her heart, Of course not and lifted her shoe as if he were a blacksmith, pronounced them the most elegant he’d ever seen and had he succeeded in the tiniest way in making her happy? Saying it all into her ear somewhat too loudly for comfort but remembering a time when the smell of him and his sweater but that was in the past and what was the point in thinking about that. The present was now or at least it was then and she said into his ear, Thank you Mr. Gilbert. For my new shoes.

A scream. She turns with Piers who throws his cigarette to the ground leaving her to stomp it. They abandon the boring scenery and run back, nearly knocking over the vicar’s metallic easel.

What is it . . . Piers hovers over Thérèse . . . Why is she screaming like that?

Gilbert glances up . . . She’ll be alright. It’s painful.

Piers picks at his lip and pulls out another cigarette.

Elsewhere if you don’t mind . . . Butcher says to him taking the palette from Thérèse and examining it. She passes it to Gilbert . . . Think we got it.

Yes . . . he pats Thérèse . . . It’s out. You’ll be fine.

Thérèse doesn’t move . . . I can still feel it.

Likely you’ve scratched your cornea . . . Butcher pulls back Thérèse’s hair . . . Like with a splinter, you think it’s still there. But we have the evidence. May I see your eye?

Hurts to open it.

Only for a moment, then you can have a nice sleep.

Thérèse opens her eyes looks straight at Catrine then turns for Butcher’s examination. Vicar’s comments on cleavers don’t emerge. Butcher looks into corners pulls at the flesh around the girl’s eye mutters a need for the torch she left in the car. I can’t see, Thérèse says. We’re fine, Butcher says. No. Everything’s blurred, please. I can’t see, Mrs. Ingle.

Close them . . . Butcher pets the coat on the ground . . . Have a little rest.

Thérèse lies down, closes her eyes. They move away.

Gilbert says to Piers, Didn’t think I had to give a lecture on safety. Seems I should have.

Vicar says to Butcher, Now I recall I left the sharpener at home. Didn’t want to risk losing it.

Butcher says to Gilbert, Don’t be too hard on the lad. Everyone’s capable of mistakes.