The Walking Stick (7 page)

When they all left about nine, I ate a sandwich and made some coffee and took it in to Erica who was still in the drawing room emptying ashtrays and looking tall and flushed and wispy-haired and
exhausted. Douglas had gone out about half an hour ago to see an old patient, so there were just the two of us.

Erica said: ‘Well I did think of asking Claude Collins and your man to stay on for an omelette and wine, but somehow they didn’t seem to get on. Your man’s not articulate, is
he?’

‘Sit down and put your feet up,’ I said good-humouredly, ‘and don’t call him my man. He’s got a name and he’s articulate enough when he feels like it. But I
told you, he doesn’t fit into the usual
pattern
. You got what you deserved asking him here behind my back.’

‘My dear, you were so preoccupied – and so obstinate. We’re much concerned for your future – Douglas and I – so naturally we want to
meet
your – your
young man. And seeing them here in your own home, will help you to bring them into perspective.’

She sat down suddenly with her coffee and began to sip it. The steam misted her glasses and she took them off.

‘He left me something, by the way. A brown paper parcel. He left it by the front door. If you’re not too tired . . .’

I hastily swallowed a mouthful of brown bread and butter and chicken and lettuce, and went down to get the parcel. As soon as I saw it I knew what it was.

‘He said it was one of his paintings.’ Erica looked older and more tired than ever without the frontage of her heavy glasses. Like a book without its glossy jacket. ‘Very
civilized of him. Though I must say in conversation it was quite hard to pin him down to opinions.’

She unwrapped the painting. It was quite small, I suppose about 16X 10. Half-done, she paused to drink more coffee. The last bits of brown paper came off and we looked at a scene of London
Docks, with the heavy cranes in the foreground, and a tug bringing up a string of barges.

‘Very – civilized of him,’ said Erica staring at it fixedly and fingering her pearls.

I reached over and offered her a sandwich but she shook her head. I realized I wasn’t very hungry after all and dropped half of mine back on the plate. Erica put on her glasses and tucked
away a few spidery ends of grey hair. They sprang out again. I wondered if in thirty years my own hair would be like that.

‘Really,’ she said, taking her eyes off the picture at last, and looking round, ‘even a dozen people turn a room into a shambles. This will have to be put right before Minta
comes in the morning.’

There was the sound of a car outside. I stared at the picture.

‘She’s getting more and more temperamental,’ Erica said. ‘It always happens with these women who begin as treasures and stay with one family half their lives.’

It was Douglas back. I got up and began to empty the rest of the ashtrays.

‘They realize they have power over the family they serve, that’s the trouble, and the power corrupts them.’

He’d been drinking whisky, not gin. There was some left in his glass but it was mainly melted ice. One of the Frenchmen had drunk
crème de menthe
and soda all evening. Very
odd.

I said suddenly, with a breathless anger that didn’t quite get out: ‘I think it would be better if you considered my room possibly empty too.’

Erica finished her coffee and put some of the brown paper back round the picture. Then she propped it distastefully against the leg of a chair.

‘Whatever makes you say that?’

‘It would be so much better if I didn’t live at home. You’d have me less under your feet, feel less responsible.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to leave, Deborah, you know that. We’ve had all this out before. It would be a great mistake.’

‘Mistake on whose side?’

She didn’t answer. The glasses tittered together as I put them on the tray.

She said: ‘You know, we weren’t trying to
interfere
with your friendship with Leigh Hartley, asking him here. It seemed simply the polite thing to do. I quite thought
you’d appreciate our little gesture.’

‘Well, I didn’t and I don’t! Anyway, this house is too far out. It’s too far every morning and evening!’ I dropped a glass and it shattered. I knelt awkwardly and
began to pick up the bits and put them on the tray.

Erica said with false patience: ‘Don’t get into one of your tempers, Deborah. You’re getting excited over absolutely nothing . . . As for responsibility, of course we feel
responsible, and should wherever you lived, because love
creates
responsibility. We feel just the same for Sarah and Arabella—’

‘Not in the same way.’

‘Yes, in just the same way. But I agree, the essence of good family life is that every member of the family should feel free within it. It’s what Douglas has always said. It’s
the only psychological basis.’

I went to the window fuming, not perhaps absolutely clear in my own mind yet why I was so suddenly angry, only aware that Erica had mistaken the cause. It was not the interference that I found
intolerable but this sudden judgment of his work which had taken place, casual, Olympian, absolute. I banged the window open to clear the stale smoke. Douglas was just coming up the steps. His head
shone smooth and pale and civilized in the lamplight. I realized I had very little in common with Leigh Hartley, except that, temporarily, I was on his side.

In fact I had nothing at all in common with him; but I had never deceived myself as to that. If I was getting emotionally involved, even in the smallest and most immature way, at least it was
not without awareness of the mistake; it was against my conscious, educated judgement. One couldn’t do better than one’s best.

On the Tuesday we met again and drove to a sort of club in Wapping, where he said artists sometimes met. It was a fairly sleazy place, with a hard-eyed manageress and brassy
barmaids, and a clientele to match. For a minute or two we saw Ted Sandymount again, and he looked thoroughly at his ease here, like a fish in water. Then after he’d gone a big man called
Jack Foil came and sat down at our table. He was about fifty with a fleshy, heavy face and thick gold-rimmed glasses in which the pebbles really looked like pebbles. He wore a signet ring on either
hand and smelled of carnation. He was a promoter and antique dealer.

He and Leigh talked about the exhibition Leigh had had in Southwark. Jack Foil had helped him to put it on, and he thought they might arrange another in a few months. I thought Leigh was more
tentative than I’d known him before, anxious to agree with whatever Jack Foil said. Foil’s voice was not uneducated but it was deep and thick and pompous. From the size of the cigar he
smoked he must have promoted other more profitable ventures than art exhibitions.

I was not at all made to feel unwelcome – in fact Mr Foil went out of his way with a sort of elephantine politeness to keep me in the conversation. He seemed to look with a paternal pebble
on Leigh, and I was more or less included. When he got up, grunting and hum-humming, he did in fact say, ‘Bless you, my children,’ as his parting words; but I thought his square back
looked formidable. He would be a good man to be on the right side of.

It was an alien world. I asked Leigh if he had been born round here.

‘Good grief, no, I come from Swindon. My old dad is an inspector on British Railways. My mother was a schoolteacher, an arts mistress at Swindon High School; she didn’t do much
painting after she was married because she had three kids and then died. I went to Swindon Secondary Modern and first got a job as a clerk; but when old Aunt Nellie coughed up this money it seemed
time to cut loose.’

‘Since when,’ I said, ‘I suppose you’ve had a lot of paint and a lot of women in your life.’

He showed his teeth in a sudden grimace. ‘Yes to number one, no to number two. There’s been one woman – one other woman. You don’t latch on, dear, you’re too
conventional, you think all artists are like those lily-necked twits your mother dragged out from under some Chelsea stone last Sunday. You think all an artist does in life is hop in and out of bed
with unwashed women. It’s a big laugh. The true artist hasn’t got all that much
time
.’

‘You think of yourself as a true artist, then.’

‘Christ knows. Maybe I’m old-fashioned. But all this swank, all this cult wind they blow out. To me art is hard work and more hard work. It’s not a high-class gab
shop!’

‘And where do people like Ted Sandymount and Jack Foil fit into your artistic world?’

‘They don’t. But they’re part of the
real
world, and that counts, doesn’t it? Just as much part of the real world and the East End as the tugs and the derricks.
They’re people I knock along with. I understand them, see. They get on with the business of living and don’t wrap their notions up in fancy paper and coloured string.’

‘Unless,’ I said, ‘it happened to be black market string.’

He looked at me. ‘You’re a sharp little devil, aren’t you? And I love you for it. Tell me about your illness.’

‘What illness?’

‘Your – this polio thing. When was it?’

‘Years ago. I’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with your leg? Tell me exactly.’

‘You can see. It won’t work much from the knee down and it’s not absolutely right from the knee up.’

‘I thought that most of that was done with now – thanks to a gent called Salk.’

‘I was pre-Salk. I tell you, it’s prehistoric. I was ten at the time.’

‘Are you ever ill now?’

‘I had flu the winter before last.’

‘Don’t be silly. I mean this look on your face. It sends me. Like a – like a madonna who’s had a car accident.’

I laughed. ‘Can I quote you?’

‘Not to your other boy friends, you can’t. But it’s there, Deborah. Blessed Damozel stuff. Does it hurt to walk?’

‘No, not really. One doesn’t do it as instinctively, as forgetfully, as a normal person, that’s all.’

‘Why can’t I paint you?’

His hands were both on the table, palms downward, showing the freckle of dark hair from fingers to wrist. One as usual had a smear of paint.

‘Have you ever done portraits?’

‘Oh, yes. Not much good, but then . . . If I could paint you, it would be a real big help to me.’

‘. . . I’ll think about it.’

‘Think hard.’

A half-dozen coloured men came into the club. Their shirts were puce and vermilion and acid yellow and pea green.

He said: ‘Tell me about your job.’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘No, everything.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m interested in everything you do.’

‘You’d be bored.’

‘Try me.’

I tried him. Later we drove home, and I agreed to meet him on the following Tuesday. He said why didn’t we meet every Tuesday and Thursday. It seemed a good idea, he said, to have a
regular date. I said no, I sometimes worked late and could never be sure more than a day or two ahead. This was true, but not the whole truth. Really, I was still struggling not to get too
committed. The fish, you’ll notice, always does struggle, even when it’s firmly on the hook.

John Hallows was flying to Geneva next week to pick up an important piece of jewellery which a Viscount Vosper was going to put in our next sale. There was a rumour that Lord
Vosper also had a collection of valuable resist lustreware that he was considering selling, and some discussion took place as to whether I should go with John Hallows to see it. But in the end it
was felt that it might be better not to push the viscount into some sale he was not quite decided on.

This discussion took place on the Tuesday at 6 p.m., and as a result I was pretty late meeting Leigh. But he took my explanations patiently enough and drove me off along the Bayswater Road.

‘You hungry?’ he asked.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Well, we can eat when you like.’

We turned off and stopped outside what looked like a cinema. Somebody was just driving away, so Leigh put his car in the convenient place.

My mind still on the recent meeting at Whittington’s, I said absently: ‘The movies again?’

‘Sort of. It’s a place I go sometimes.’

As we went up the steps a commissionaire opened the glass doors for us. Leigh went to the pay desk and bought tickets. Somewhere was the sound of music. Glittery, even for a cinema, with a lot
of massed lights over the stairs. Then suddenly I knew.

‘Leigh! You fool! I told you.’

He caught my arm as I turned to go out. ‘We can
watch
, Deb. No call to do any more. Be a Sport.’

‘It isn’t a question of that.’ I hesitated, wanting to leave but not wanting to let him or anyone else see that it meant anything to me.

‘Well, let’s just go and look-see. We can always come away if it’s a drag.’

As we went down the stairs the cold greeted us. Piped organ music was encouraging some sixty or seventy-odd people of varying degrees of skill, and lack of it, round a big oblong rink. The
ceiling was dark blue dotted with stars, and there was a sort of sham Gothic castle at one end. We took seats outside the wooden barrier and watched in silence.

As so often, his action had roused conflicting feelings: anger at being tricked, a back-of-the-mind awareness that the whole thing was too trivial to be worth anger; disgust at his obtuseness,
annoyance with myself that I was still far too sensitive; a wish to throw him over and a knowledge that if I did I’d regret it.

Presently he said: ‘OK now?’

I didn’t speak. Three-quarters of the girl skaters were in flesh-coloured tights with tiny frilly skirts. They all had the most beautiful legs.

He patted my hand.

‘Leigh,’ I said, ‘we shall get on so much better if you treat me as a grown-up human being and not as a retarded adolescent who has to be coaxed and cheated into doing
things.’

He still had his hand over mine. ‘Crikey, I
like
coaxing you, Deborah. It’s nice for me and it’s good for you. Honest. What harm have I done? Tell me. Just tell me how
you’ve come to any harm through coming here!’

I sighed. ‘Sometimes we don’t talk the same language, do we? We – we need an interpreter.’ Two beginners came sliding past us, clutching nervously to the rail.