Summer in February (27 page)

It was only when he was shot, an injury which took him back across the seas, that Gilbert was able to put the pieces together,
or as many pieces as fitted. Laura Knight provided the framework. She was the only one who could, and anyway she was the only
one who he could find in Lamorna that morning. Although A.J. kept his studio, not surprisingly he had moved out of his rooms
and was, Mrs Jory said, rarely seen in the district these days.

As for Harold Knight, he was very ill in Penzance Hospital. It all started before the war with a mouth infection but soon
his whole system was seriously affected. With the outbreak of hostilities and Harold’s reaffirmation of his conscientious
objection, he was put to work alone in the open fields on the coastline by Zennor, on the bleak stretch sloping down to the
place where Alfred saved the fox. In the appallingly cold conditions of the 1914-15 winter, frozen to the marrow and cut to
the quick, the ostracised Harold buckled and broke. Having explained all this, Laura put two more apple logs on the fire,
and turned the toast on the fork.

‘But that,’ she said, her face red from the heat, ‘is not what you came to hear.’

‘I’ll go to see Harold this afternoon. If I may.’

‘Oh, would you? That is kind … would you take some more pencils in for him? You remember what he’s like over his soft pencils.’

‘Of course I will, Laura, anything you like.’

‘He has very few visitors. Very few indeed. More tea?’

‘Please.’

Laura looked at the young officer, the same old Gilbert, but not quite the same.

‘It’s so very good to see you, Gilbert. How long will you be here?’

‘In England? I don’t know. For as long as it takes.’

‘No … in Lamorna, I mean.’

‘I don’t know … It depends.’

Laura smiled at him, and she knew it was time to talk, really to talk. Gilbert sat and listened. Behind her back the walls
were covered with her lively drawings of acrobats and fairgrounds.

‘I saw quite a bit of Blote that May and June: just after you left us. Quite a bit. Sometimes we painted together at my but
… or up here or on the rocks. She seemed very well, and much more sociable. I’d started to paint gypsies. Alfred suggested
that, and then Blote and I went to the circus a few times, and when Dolly came down again from London Blote tried some larger
works … Funny to think of it now. Whenever we saw a ship, your name came up, always, always your name, which was nice, a ship
on the sea meant Gilbert and many mornings she sat upstairs for Harold. It was a happy spell … I think she liked all the scurrying
and slapdash with me and the silence with Harold. Whatever … my paintings started to sell like hot cakes, so did Harold’s,
that explains the car outside, you
saw it? … and Alfred started his parties again. It all seemed to fit together … pictures selling, cars bought, Lamorna more
alive again, though it wasn’t for long, I agree. Not for long. Hard to believe that now … is that only a year ago? A
year
ago … when we were all singing:

‘Oh, Gilbert, please don’t look like that … I know. I know. Where was I? Yes, June. No. This would have been in …
July
. I played the piano, and Alfred had bought a gramophone. You’ve never seen anyone so excited with anything. There was all
the usual singing and dancing but now we had an extra entertainer, the gramophone, and Alfred insisted we played it on and
on … over and over.

‘Well … one very hot night, only a few weeks before the war, I can see her now, with a bunch of sweet peas tucked in her grey
skirt … and I was larking and dancing away like billy-ho with Alfred, and Blote came over, and at the end of the dance she
said if nobody minded she’d be off to bed, she said she had a bit of a headache. I knew she’d been off colour for a few days,
and I said no, sleep well, and see you tomorrow, come for a picnic with us if you feel up to it, and then just as she got
to the door and lifted the latch A.J. shouted:

‘“Yes, off you go to bed, you bloody whore!”

‘It was absolutely terrible, Gilbert. By a strange quirk, no one was talking at that precise second, there was no music, and
A.J. said it so loudly the whole room just … well, you can imagine it as well as I can explain it. We all looked at her. Blote
didn’t react at all, she turned and looked at him and walked slowly out … followed by their dog, which also walked slowly
… as if the dog grasped it too. Oh,
I can see it now. Excuse me … a moment, would you? Sorry. Sorry about that. So …

‘I told A.J. what I thought of him, of course, and so did the others, we all did. I told him that was the last party of his
I’d ever attend and that remains true. To this day. After a moment or two he wandered out and sat under the trees, drinking
on his own. We all drifted away … in a sour, sour mood. That changed everything …

‘More tea? No? More toast? No … Anyway … the next morning I was sitting on the front porch, just enjoying the sun in my chair.
I’d told Harold a bit about the night before, and he kindly agreed to come with me for a picnic. If he thinks I’m upset he’ll
drop whatever he’s doing, he always has done, but I like to think I was thinking of him too, that the sun and the air might
do him some good, he looked very peaky, nothing like as bad as now of course, but of course he agreed, so I’d just packed
the cheese and onion and saffron cake when I heard the shouting and I could tell it wasn’t normal shouting or horseplay, you
know the difference, don’t you, when you hear it, your spine goes. “Mrs Knight … Mrs Knight!” a young woman was bawling at
me from forty or fifty yards and I could see it was Betty from the hotel, she had run all the way up the hill, she could hardly
speak, and while I was asking her to sit down and get her breath back Harold came rushing downstairs, straight past and tried
to start the car. Unfortunately it wouldn’t start, and would you believe, it was facing the wrong way, and Betty stayed with
Harold while I ran off down the hill, and I was halfway to the hotel when Harold came roaring down, going terribly fast, and
I thought he would kill us all, which somehow he didn’t.

‘Mrs Jory was pacing outside and waved us up … and at the top of the staircase there was Alfred … completely out of control.
We were too late, I knew that, Gilbert …
I’ve seen it before and I know when it’s too late. I won’t say much more … if you don’t mind, the doctor eventually … half
an hour after us … and I tried … all that time.’

Laura stopped.

How could she tell Gilbert about the enamel bucket, the penetration of the smell, that horse’s head and … Florence’s purple
face? How could she tell Gilbert that Blote’s tongue was sticking out, sticking right out? Laura would never forget that beautiful
woman in that state … accusing her … or so it felt … sticking her tongue out at the world. Such details were not for Gilbert’s
ears, a wounded soldier and a wounded lover.

‘Harold, as you’d expect, was marvellous. He took Alfred outside, they walked round and round the field, while I stayed with
Blote. Poor Mrs Jory … she’s never really recovered, everyone knows about it, people talk, and those rooms haven’t been taken
since. You’ll stay here tonight, won’t you … I’d appreciate it if you would, I really would.’

‘Yes … thank you.’

Laura stared into the fire.

‘Harold organised the funeral, organised everything. Jory helped a good deal … he’s a good sort, isn’t he, and we all followed
behind. And then the inquest was in the paper, of course … very distressing. A few weeks later I did speak to Mrs Jory. Blote,
she said, came down for breakfast and seemed as normal as ever. She and Alfred ate together, a full breakfast, but when he
went upstairs he found her. This time she’d taken enough. To face that once is bad enough … isn’t it, Gilbert? But twice!’

‘But she prom—’ Gilbert stopped, and moved his hands to say he had nothing to say. He and Laura watched the flames.

‘Anyway … I think you should ask Harold anything
else. He spoke to A.J., comforted him for many hours … I think Harold knows a bit more than I do. He hasn’t told me, he wouldn’t.
But I sense it. In the way one does.’

‘In what way?’

‘Ask him when you see him. Oh … and the pencils are there, on the bookcase. And when I was … helping to prepare Florence …
I found this on her, and, well, I thought you should have it.’

Laura handed Gilbert his photograph.

‘How was he?’

‘On that day? Well, I presume Laura told you I took him off. He was much as you’d expect. Mostly incoherent.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Afterwards? In the following weeks? Munnings? Oh, go on much as before … painting and drinking, riding off on his own.’

Harold’s arms, stick-thin, lay outside the sheets. Looking a bit like an emaciated bishop, he sat up on his pillows with his
pince-nez on his nose and an open sketchbook on the blanket. ‘There’s one good aspect to Penzance Hospital,’ he said with
a cynical smile, ‘it’s full of interiors, and pleasantly free of fresh air.’ On the sketchbook Gilbert could see a wickedly
accurate drawing developing of the man in the next bed.

‘Laura … said you knew more than she did. About Munnings.’

‘Did she?’

Harold tapped his fingers slowly on the blanket. His mouth was reluctant.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Mind?’

‘Talking to me … about that day.’

‘I don’t mind, I just don’t care for this topic … I don’t care for it at all. Well, Gilbert, if you must know, in a nutshell,
Munnings said the marriage had never been consummated.’

‘Oh, I see …’

‘He can’t have found that easy to say, can he … least of all Munnings … least of all to me. At the time he was sitting on
the grass, near some cows. And I wondered for quite a while why he would say that to me. I’d never have spoken to the man
myself if I had not been married to Laura.’

‘Why would he? Why would he say that?’

‘Laura told you what he said … at the party the night before, did she?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know with any certainty, Gilbert, but I’d painted Florence three or four days a week for those final months. I’d
finished three portraits of her. Did you know?’

‘She always loved being painted by you.’

‘Did she? She never said that to me … I’m so glad. Thank you. And between ourselves, again, very strictly between ourselves,
I’d noticed a change, very slight at first, but if you look at someone, a woman sitting for you, as closely as I looked at
Florence, well, I don’t think much can remain hidden. Not if you study her from every angle, not a woman of her perfect figure.’

‘I see.’

‘And I don’t think she could hide it. I suppose something must have been said.’

‘By Florence?’

‘Yes.’

‘To A.J.?’

‘To Munnings, yes. Don’t you?’

Gilbert stood up, walked a few paces away, then returned to his seat. Harold moved a little in his bed.

‘I’m sorry if all this upsets you, Gilbert.’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘It does. I can see.’

‘Harold … are you saying … how shall I put it … that there was a close connection between what he told you in the field and
the words he shouted at Florence that night at the party?’

‘That is the possibility … even the probability in my mind. Even in his abject despair he was trying to explain himself. There
was, I think, an element of … self-justification there, of self-exculpation … which he might wish reported.’

Gilbert thought about this and then nodded.

‘Laura tells me Florence is buried in Sancreed.’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘Oh, you’re going? Good … I am glad. The vicar there was first-class, by the way … Give credit where it is due. First-class.
No one else in the whole area would allow it. That is true magnanimity to me, don’t you agree? Yes, just go in by the church
gate and turn right, and keep going.’

‘Is there a stone?’

‘Yes, we saw to that.’

‘Thank you, Harold.’

‘Are you going back to Laura tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good, good. Two things, would you … One, give her my love. I do miss her, you know.’

‘I will.’

‘And second … Go up into my studio, and you’ll find something wrapped up, with your name on it. Next to the clock, you can’t
miss it.’

Gilbert could see how tired Harold was.

‘I hope you get better soon, Harold.’

‘I hope
you
do, too. But let’s be thankful it’s all over for you.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Your wound … at least you’ll play no further part.’

‘No, no, I’m afraid I’ll be going back.’

Harold’s eyes sharpened.

‘You’re going back!’

‘Yes.’

‘You want more deaths, do you! More and more? Is that what you want?’

‘No … no, I don’t.’

‘Is human life so … pointless?’

‘No … no, it’s not.’

‘You’re going back to the same place?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it bad there? The fighting?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, come and see me before you go, won’t you, because I want to ask you some more questions. Now’s not the time or place.’

‘I certainly will, Harold. And thank you again. For all you did … for all you did for her.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘No, you did everything you could. And more.’

Harold took off his glasses and cleaned them on the sheet. His fingers were like twigs. He said quietly.

‘We both loved her, I think.’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘In our different ways.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m so glad she allowed me to paint her for so long.’

‘I am, too.’

‘Goodbye, Gilbert.’

Gilbert, pale from his injury, stood at the ward door, caught the eye of his artist friend, and half waved, half saluted.