The Walking Stick (6 page)

When I got back to the department Maurice Mills and three or four others gathered round in admiration of the prizes. So often, all too often, it was the other way round – people came in
with precious possessions handed down from grandparents, highly prized, convinced of their certain value; and then you had the job of disillusioning them – the heirloom was paste or imitation
or otherwise worthless. Worthless. Worthless. Like my friendship with Leigh Hartley. Utterly worthless and foredoomed. But these two little figures were exquisite, much sought after, the work of
rare, delicate craftsmen. One smoothed them, cosseted them, would hardly be able to bear to see them sold.

A fatal mistake. One mustn’t get attached, not even to Chelsea figures.

‘Have you been out with Leigh Hartley again?’ Erica asked. ‘Why don’t you invite him in? I suggested it before, you know. If he’s an artist Douglas and I would find
him interesting.’

‘Maybe, sometime.’

‘When am I going to see you again?’ he’d asked. I said: ‘Don’t you ever take no for an answer?’

‘Why don’t you ask him for drinks next Sunday?’ Erica said, fingering the rather handsome pearls she always wore. One would have hardly thought her dressed without them.
‘Arabella will be here and there are sure to be a few other young people around.’

The Chelsea figures were beautiful, but you couldn’t spend all day admiring them. Back to the old grind of cataloguing. (But it wasn’t really a grind because every piece was
different and many beautiful.)

Weak – how weak could one get? That was the precise moment to finish it, inside his car just parked near the brass plate which read J. Douglas Dainton, MRCS, LRCP, just as I reached for my
stick to get out. But I hadn’t finished it. Perhaps I hadn’t
wanted
to at that precise moment. Of course later I’d certainly wanted to, sitting in my bedroom thinking it
all over, telling myself I was a feeble fool, but by then it was too late. I’d said: ‘Oh, perhaps next week.’ ‘What day?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Make
it Monday.’ ‘I’m going out Monday.’ ‘Tuesday then.’ ‘All right, Tuesday.’

‘I don’t think he’s quite your type,’ I said to Erica.

‘My dear Deborah, when I think of some of the very advanced young men Arabella has brought home . . . Douglas and I, as you know, pride ourselves on being able to talk to the young in
their own language. It’s an attitude of mind.’

Everything, it seemed to me, was an attitude of mind. Sex included. My two sisters differed about this. Sarah had had at least six young men passionately attached to her in the last few years,
but at twenty-seven had given herself to no one. ‘When I marry,’ she had said to me once, ‘I shall marry for love and I don’t believe in being second-hand goods.’
Arabella at twenty I knew was already sleeping with someone.

And what about their middle sister? Chance is a fine thing. Who wants to sleep with a girl with a shrivelled leg? It turns you up really to think of it. Just imagine in bed, one nice leg and one
thin, cold one. Then what the hell did Leigh Hartley want?

Lot 242. Brown glazed stoneware jar. Kwang Yao. Lot 243. Meissen May flower vase, blue, mounted in ormolu.
Pâte dure.

Arabella had said: ‘I don’t in the least feel I shall be second-hand goods. That doesn’t enter into it. Sex is only like anything else. If you kiss someone you don’t have
a second-hand mouth. Aren’t we born to live?’

For what purpose had Leigh Hartley been born? There were plenty of pretty girls around, glad of a robust young man and not particular about an accent, without him picking on me. Leave me alone
in the quiet, evenly balanced, interesting life I’d found for myself.

‘I wish these patent medicine firms would leave one alone,’ said Erica, screwing up a handful of pamphlets. ‘I feel like writing to our MP about it. Do they
really
think
we’re so ignorant as to suppose that the more complicated the synthesis the more likely the cure?’

Lot 251. Persian Ewer, white ground; with pattern in Iranian copper lustre, eighteenth century.

Lot 252. Wedgwood . . .

What was the synthesis in my case, and what the cure?

John Hallows, who was the youngest director and dealt with jewellery, came in just then with a ruby ring he wanted Maurice Mills’s opinion of, and I slid off my stool to look at it too. It
had come in by registered post today from Norwich. The registered cover had been for £20 and the likely value of the ring about £600. People often did that sort of thing.

I stood talking to them, conscious that my leg was aching a bit. Odd, for it seldom did. ‘Stick your leg out,’ the physiotherapist had said. ‘Straighten it!
Push
. Just a
couple of inches toward the sling.’ One fairly sweated in those early days, trying, trying. Odd that one had absolutely no control over that piece of bone and muscle that used to be a part of
one’s personal body. It just hung there like the discarded tail of a lizard. But the trouble was it wasn’t discarded. You couldn’t leave it behind and you couldn’t do
without it. Of course I was very lucky compared to many I saw.

‘Sitting in at the sale tomorrow, Deborah?’ John Hallows said. ‘We’ve got some pretty luscious pieces coming up, apart from the Leipzig emeralds.’

John Hallows was the type of man I would have liked for a brother: good-looking, kind, sharp as a needle in his job, but very alert to other people’s feelings. We liked and respected each
other.

‘I don’t care for morals,’ Arabella had said on her eighteenth birthday. ‘Morals are what other people think you ought to do. I only care what I think myself. I’m
not going to be anybody’s easy lay, but if I want to go to bed with a man I shall do so.’

‘Darling, you may think you’re your own best judge,’ Sarah said, ‘but there’s only so much to life, only so much experience, whether it’s sex or any other
sort. And if you fritter you fritter. And as you fritter you cheapen. What do you say, Deb?’

What I had said I couldn’t remember because anyway what did it matter to me? But I was very lucky. ‘She’s been very lucky,’ Mr Adrian had said, ‘complete recovery
of her breathing and of the right leg, and muscles of the left hip are perfectly sound. Wastage will probably not develop much above the knee. She’ll be able to lead a full life.’ Odd
to hear doctors being advised by doctors. Mr Adrian was the great man on polio. He kept people with paralysed throats alive by performing tracheotomies on them and pushing a tube into their
windpipes. Then they lay there like stranded fish for the rest of their lives gulping air through artificial lungs.

That day I was almost afraid to go out to lunch in case Leigh was waiting on the corner, so I slipped out by the back entrance and ate in a dive in Lancashire Court. On the way back I went in
the front way and there was no one there. Odd then if he never turned up again. Why should he? Perhaps he’d decided to leave me to my nice little quiet life after all.

‘If you can promise to get hold of your friend,’ my mother said, ‘I’ll work off one or two other invitations at the same time. There was that fresco artist in Holly Hill,
and the two people from Chelsea – what’s their name? – Evans or Jones. They paint jointly by a new process – something like
gouache
but their own
invention.’

‘Not this weekend. I shan’t be seeing him till Tuesday.’

‘Well, that’s awkward because the following Sunday I’m on call. Why don’t you ring him?’

‘I don’t think he’s on the phone. Anyway I don’t know his number.’

‘What does he
do
all day in the East End, one wonders?’

‘Work.’

‘Work,’ Leigh had said. ‘I’m like a man whittling away at a stick. I do it because I want to but the slivers are of no flaming interest to anyone else. It drives you up
the wall. Of course I’m learning all the time, but it drives you up the wall.’

‘Is he at a school, d’you know?’ asked Erica. ‘Has he a teacher?’

‘No. He says he wants to paint the way he wants to paint.’

Erica nodded approvingly. ‘How right. One thinks of the St Ives primitives. How they would have been ruined . . .’

I said to Mr Smith-Williams: ‘If one wanted to help a young artist, how would one go about it?’

‘What sort of a young artist?’

‘Well . . . twenty-four or twenty-five, lives in the East End, has been painting quite a while. But he doesn’t seem to have had much recognition so far.’

‘That’s not unusual. Do you know his stuff?’

‘I wouldn’t like to judge it.’

‘Has he tried the West End galleries?’

‘I expect so. Some of them.’

‘Well, that would be the first step. Get an opinion from two or three of the more honest of them. See if they’ll take a few of his paintings, and if they won’t, ask them
why.’

‘Who particularly?’

‘Well, the Maud Brothers I’d go to first. They’re absolutely straight and would give you a completely unbiased opinion. After that Arthur Hays of the Cheltenham
Galleries.’

‘You wouldn’t give one yourself?’

‘Not wouldn’t but couldn’t – with anything like their authority anyway. You know Lewis Maud, don’t you?’

It was raining on the Thursday, and Leigh was waiting for me outside.

‘I can’t—’ I began.

‘I’ve come to take you home.’

There was a glint in his eye to show he knew I was going to say I couldn’t go out with him, so he’d chosen the answer that silenced me. As he tucked me in and shut the door he said
through the swivel window: ‘Well, it’s better’n waiting for a bus, isn’t it?’

We had to make a detour to get out of the one-way streets, and while we were waiting at a traffic light I had a good new look at him, trying to see him afresh. He was wearing a pink linen jacket
without lapels and fine corduroy trousers of the wrong brown, and just too tight.

He said: ‘One day next week I want you to come skating with me at Queensway.’

‘What
are
you talking about? You must be crazy.’

‘Because you’ve only got one good leg? Well, Christ, that’s three between us. It’s
plenty
. Wouldn’t you like to try?’

‘No.’

‘I reckon you could do far more than you do.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Do you ever swim?’

‘No.’

‘People in England are crackers. They’re scared of going on a beach if they’ve a varicose vein. In Italy or Spain nobody cares: cripples, old people, fat people, they all enjoy
the sun.’

We broke free of the grip of the traffic and raced four abreast up Gloucester Place.

‘As a cripple, an old person or a fat person,’ I said, ‘I enjoy the sun very much in my own way.’

‘But you’re afraid to enjoy it in ways that might make you be looked at. It’s a great mistake.’

‘It’s a great mistake,’ I said, ‘to suppose that this line is going to get you anywhere.’

‘Where I want it to get me – where I want it to get us both – is to the ice rink next Tuesday.’

I sat quiet and watched the traffic creep and clot and spurt, creep and clot and spurt.

He said at length: ‘Deborah, come off it. I’m not trying to needle you or improve you or shove you around, see. I just
like
you and I want to be your friend.’

We went up the Finchley Road and came to Swiss Cottage, juggled with the involved traffic lights and hummed up Fitzjohn’s Avenue. His car was a Triumph Spitfire. It was old and the hood
rattled. The engine seemed all right. His big square hands were stained in two places with ultramarine.

I said: ‘I know, Leigh. Or should know, I suppose. I suppose I’ve snapped at you a lot.’

‘Not as if you meant to bite.’

It had nearly stopped raining. The road here had just been relaid, and it shone like a slab of newly split coal.

‘You understand . . .’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I reckon I understand all right.’

We roared up the hill.

‘See you next week then,’ he said.

‘If you want to, but not—’

‘On ice?’

‘Not on ice.’

‘OK. You’re the boss.’

His phrases were still all wrong, but I didn’t know how to put them right. I couldn’t go on contradicting him for ever.

We came to a stop. ‘Tuesday, then?’

‘Tuesday then.’

‘Fine.’

This time he let me get out of the car without getting out himself. I wasn’t quite sure what that implied, whether it was a little victory for me or a little victory for him.

And then he turned up at the cocktail party after all. I don’t know who had been gulling me most – my mother had apparently got an invitation to him through David
Hambro, but she never breathed a word to me; and I couldn’t help but suspect when I saw the look in his eye – like a horse that means mischief – that in fact he’d had the
invitation when we last met.

Erica normally has the average woman’s approach to cocktail-party-giving – that is, she drags together a group of ill-assorted people, crowds them in a room with plenty of gin and
smoke and allows them to shout at each other at the top of their voices for two hours. But either some didn’t run up this Sunday, or she’d decided that this was to be one of her
refined, arty evenings, for the total number was ten, and seven were painters, all of them abstract except Leigh. Two were French, one an Italian who spoke no English. One, a man called Collins,
was interested in expressing pure psychiatry on canvas, which interested Douglas. Another had given up oils and was trying to advance the technique of collage by cutting holes in his hardboard
panel.

I found it all rather tense because I could see in the middle of the talk that my family was trying to size Leigh up. Erica several times edged him into a group arguing about the geometric
disciplines of form, but he wasn’t having any. He might have been an engineer among musicians. Probably most of the other artists there were too self-centred anyway to realize that he was a
painter at all.

For the most part he talked to me or flirted with Arabella, who wasn’t above that sort of thing; and once or twice when I wasn’t within hearing I saw him talking to Erica and
Douglas. I noticed him eyeing our pictures, the prints of Paul Klee and Vasili Kandinski. It occurred to me to be surprised that I cared what
he
thought.