Spirit of Progress (21 page)

S
kinner studies Miss Carroll’s tent. Had he noticed her in the last few days? It is a question he has pondered for two or three minutes now, possibly more. He keeps an eye on Miss Carroll’s tent, and it is no longer the possibility of company or comfort that causes him to do so, but a sense of care. Even duty. And the sense of dread that is never far from it. To care for someone or something, he reasons (whether rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t matter), is to accept the anxiety for whatever may be their fate, even to feel responsible for it. And it is because Skinner cares about Miss Carroll that he feels a sense of dread when he asks himself if he has noticed her in the last few days. In short, did he care but not enough? For these are cold days, the very dead of winter, ice over the puddles and winds with the snow on them. And Miss Carroll is looking old now and the tent that she calls home (no sleep-out yet) is wearing thinner by the year.

But Skinner, too, is older, and his memory not so
reliable any more. And Miss Carroll is now such a fixed figure on the landscape of this small community that it might be possible, he speculates, to notice her and not remark upon it, and, therefore, not remember if you have, in fact, seen her in the last few days.

It is because of this uncertainty, and because Miss Carroll has always been guarded about her privacy, that he decides, for the best of intentions, not to intrude upon her. He has no doubt, he assures himself, that if he were to approach her tent or even to enter it, he would find her sitting up in bed, reading a book to while away a cold day. And, furthermore, annoyed at the interruption, however well intended. And so, with this thought, he decides to wait. He takes his care, and the dread that shadows it, and walks back towards the milking shed.

The next morning he is looking for her. Not noticing her and then forgetting that he has, but deliberately looking for her. And she’s not there. Not to be seen, at least. And that fire upon which she cooks her meals has an abandoned look. But still he waits until he is sure that the time has passed when she should have been visible — gathering firewood, coming to him for water, or, with that old string shopping bag, walking along the dirt road to the grocer’s and the butcher’s. And so, with one part of him still reassuring himself that it is an unnecessary visit and the other part convinced that it is not, the leaning figure of Skinner crosses his paddock to Miss Carroll’s tent.

At first he stands on the dirt track that will soon become a street, reluctant to enter her property, and
looks for signs of movement or sounds of activity. But seeing and hearing none, he calls out.

There is no response. The tent is still and silent.

‘Hello Miss Carroll. Are you there?’

Again, there is no response. And so he steps off the street and on to her land, walking cautiously towards her tent. As he nears it he notices that the lamp, the lamp upon which he had dwelt night after night, is on low and his heart leaps. It’s all right. She is reading. Too absorbed in her reading to hear, or too immersed in it to care. And so it is with a light, not a heavy, heart that he pulls back the flap of the tent and speaks. ‘Hello there.’

But from the moment he speaks, and from the moment he looks around, he knows there will be no response and that the dread that shadows care was not misplaced. And, for a time, he cannot move his arms or legs, he simply stands at the entrance, staring in silent comprehension.

There is, indeed, a book beside the bed, and the lamp, though low, throws out enough light for reading, but Miss Carroll’s eyes are closed. Eyes that he knows, at a glance, will no longer perform the wonder of reading. Her hands are clasping, in what he can tell is a firm grip, her rosary. And her face is uplifted as though having just looked up at the crucifix above the bed, which may very well be the last thing that her eyes rested upon, the last image that her eyes conveyed to her brain for it to name, before the eyes closed and the mind of Miss Carroll slipped away from them all.

There, before him, is the lamp and there is the
company that he sought. And because it doesn’t seem right that the lamp should continue without her, for the lamp, indeed, had only ever shone for Miss Carroll, the only comfort or companion she had ever sought, Skinner finally finds the strength to step into the tent, registering as he does the faint smell of death in the air (faint, perhaps, because the inside of the tent is as cold as the grave), and turn off the lamp. Its function in life has ceased with Miss Carroll. And although Skinner has seen death before — both his parents, who had died in quick succession in their bed (and the animals that died on the farm or were put out of their misery by a single shot) — he knows that death will always remain beyond thinking. Something for which he, at least, has no words. Words that matter, that is. Better silence. And even now, after turning off her lamp for the last time, he is thinking only in terms of facts: dead, tent, lamp off, dark.

Outside the tent, in the clean, cold winter light, it is the same bright morning that was there before he stepped into the tent. The sun is at the same point in the pale sky, the trees still stand stark against it, and even the birds are still perched on the same leafless branches. The whole business took no more than a minute, possibly two. Nothing has changed except that now the dead body of Miss Carroll, still clutching her rosary, lies no more than a few feet away. Nothing has changed but this. And as he stands, his eyes adjusting to the light, his mind adjusting to the sudden lack of Miss Carroll in the world, all hint of the affable Skinner drains from his features. The next step decides itself. For without thinking, it seems, his legs
are moving towards the new doctor’s rooms, on the main road, not so far from Miss Carroll’s tent and Skinner’s Farm, over paddocks and open fields that are already being subdivided and sold off and which will soon become unrecognisable.

And as he walks there is guilt in his steps, for he is telling himself that he should have been looking, that he has been negligent in his care, and that had he gone to Miss Carroll’s tent sooner, he may well have found her alive. She could have been taken to a hospital and a few more years could have been added to the dates that will now bracket her life. A few more years in which she may well have seen the sense in company and allowed it into her life. He has been negligent in his care. He cared, yes. But not enough. And it is this thought that shadows him as he walks on towards the new doctor’s rooms. That and the puzzle of who on earth to contact.

A
ll those years that he dreamt of being elsewhere finally brought him here, to these streets and green parks that immediately felt familiar. And, of course, he’d seen it all before in books and paintings and photographs. Only now he knew what lay beyond the frame, beyond the uniform rows of terraces and the bombed-out blocks where the most fantastic gardens had bloomed all summer. And as much as everybody tells him he should have seen London before the war, he’d rather be seeing it now. For Sam this is the most exciting of times. Here. Right now. A war won. And victory in nobody’s faces. The past blown to bits (including the London that everybody tells him he should have seen) and something new and unknown on the way that could be anything. Even that first winter when he’d arrived two years before, which everyone spoke of (in a manner that suggested to Sam that they said this of every winter) as the worst they could remember, was exciting. And the grim faces in the streets,
awash with the kind of tiredness that is beyond a good night’s sleep, the kind of tiredness that comes to stay and never leaves, even that was exciting. The grime over everything, the fogs, the whole clapped-out city. It was wonderful. Thrilling. The most wonderful time to be alive. To be at the heart of things, to attend the funeral of the old ways and to watch a new government take over the parliament and the spivs take over the streets. Couldn’t be better. Not for Sam. For this is what he calls a ‘moment’. Not an everyday moment, but an historical one. Post-war. But only just. The dust only just settled and nobody quite sure what to do with themselves. One minute all hopeful, the next still jittery and too tired for hope. One minute lost in the fog, the next stepping into the warm sunshine of this bright new world and hearing the faint, distinctive and reassuring pock of a cricket bat hitting a red leather ball into a peaceful, clear blue sky.

Sam, who is currently taking a summer stroll through Soho to his studio flat (while Tess, in winter, is reflecting upon the tolling bell of the word ‘institution’), has just come from an afternoon gathering at a well-known gallery. It had been smoky and crowded and hot, and he had bumped into someone only to realise as he did that he was standing directly opposite the broad but surprisingly not so tall figure of Ernest Hemingway, who nodded and was about to turn back to the conversation that Sam’s bump had interrupted when an influential critic, who had opened the doors of the London art world for Sam, introduced the two. A short conversation followed and they went their separate ways. For Hemingway it was
either an interruption or a distraction; for Sam it was a reminder of where he was and that such encounters are common. Or, at least, he now imagined they were. But, more than that, it felt as though his life and all the things he might do with it were just beginning, and everything else until now had been preparation. Not that Sam feels any reverence for this new world of his, far from it. He is no more in awe of this place than he is of those ideas that he at once believes in and does not believe in. They are useful. Just as the excitement of this new world of his is useful. And Sam is a jackdaw. Or is that a spiv? A spiv on a street corner eyeing the world off, from the gutter to the toffy end of town, for what it’s worth. And he had no sooner left the gathering than he thought of George. George, who, like his tutors at university, always spoke of Mr Hemingway, never simply Hemingway. And he resolved to write to George and tell him that he had shaken hands with the author of
In Our Time
. He immediately slipped into Hemingway-speak as he mentally composed the letter, which would be simple and stark, like a Cézanne, and contain words such as ‘fine’ and ‘swell’ with ironic frequency.

And it was just when he’d finished mentally composing the letter that the small circle that they’d once been reassembled around him. There and not there. Distant and near: a small circle that he was well out of, and yet, he knew, one he would never be entirely out of, even here at the centre of things. For there are centres and centres, and that little circle and the city they’d inhabited, Sam realises, was once
his
centre and he will always remember
it as that. Even if its gravitational pull would only ever hold him for so long. But as much as he’d expected his new life to be a slog, as much as he’d expected years of anonymity and struggle, nothing of the sort had happened. He had been, from the start, a young man of great expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the words of just a few influential critics, had opened doors that opened only to the few, and Sam, as everybody had always told him, was now poised for fame. Which might also explain that sudden rush of tenderness with which he now viewed that distant first circle of his youth. Yes, Sam was poised for fame. And he knew it. The fame for which he had always been destined, for Sam was always told that he looked famous, even before he was. His last exhibition had been acclaimed and everybody was already talking about his next.

He can see them all clearly, that first circle of his youth, for the clarity that comes with distance is upon him. And it is a liberating feeling. There is a spring in his step. A bounce to his walk, a dream-like buoyancy to each and every stride that takes him back to his flat, a bed-sit, which is light enough and large enough to live and work in. His mood, too, is buoyant and will stay that way throughout the day. And the week after that. And the year that follows, and the years after that which will witness the arrival of fame, marriage to an English woman (for, by then, he will have acquired distance and clarity on Tess too, who will become a memory) and the arrival of money. Enough money to buy a farm in Kent with a large house and a stable that he will convert into a studio.

And it will be then, in the mid-1950s, when he has converted the stable into a studio and while he is arranging against a wall the paintings that he brought with him in a large trunk all those years before (which had been stored at a friend’s house and never opened) that he will see it: ‘Woman and Tent’.

At first he will be pleased with what he sees, the execution, the way the colours have stayed true, and the play between the photograph and the painting. And the old woman, whom he assumes to be dead now, staring at him, striding towards him, her arm raised once more in protest, as if, for all the world, she is about to step right off the surface of the painting. But into what? And it is at this point that he will only be able to see her striding off the surface of the painting and into the stable because, he will realise with alarm, he has forgotten what lies beyond the frame of the painting. How did it go? How did it go again? There was a newspaper photograph, there was an old woman, there was a tent. But what lay beyond the frame? A farm, an old farmer, a dirt road. Yes. But what did they all look like? He will, for a short time, have no clear images of the farmer, the farm or the road. He will have acquired the distance but lost the detail. And the farmer, the farm and the dirt road could be just anyone and anywhere, in that thistle countryside that existed north of the city then. His memories of the painting, for these few minutes, will be general, not specific. In short, he will have forgotten. Then, gradually, the memories will return, and he will breathe a large sigh of relief. The images will still be there, clear and strong, and the old
woman will then be able to step off the surface of the painting and on to the very paddocks and streets that she once walked over because he will have regained the world beyond the frame. He will forget, he will remember. It will be lost and then retrieved. But it will, nonetheless, be a moment of concern and he will ask himself for the first time — could it be, could it be that the price of distance is forgetting? That one day he will forget and not remember? That one day it will be lost and not retrieved?

At the moment, though, there is a spring to Sam’s walk, buoyancy in each step that leads him to his studio, the door of which will open on to the days of fame. And the life that will come with fame, and the farm and the stable, that will all lead to the moment when he opens the trunk of paintings, like exhuming the body of his past, and finds the old woman and her tent suddenly before him. That moment when he will ask himself: could it be that the price of distance is forgetting?