by Pat Barker
Paul was waiting just inside the arch that led out of the station on to the open muddy street. Whenever she’d tried to imagine this scene he’d always been wearing the long black coat he’d worn last winter at the Slade, but of course he was in uniform, breeches, puttees, tunic, peaked cap, with a Red Cross armband on his right arm. He was looking away from her so that she saw his face in profile, and felt, for a moment, quite detached. A response to his own stillness, his own detachment.
He looked Egyptian, she thought, and not just because of his olive skin. Something about the nose and the heavy-lidded, slanting, dark eyes. It was a face made to be seen in profile, and the straight shoulders and narrow waist reinforced the impression. Perhaps that was why, when, lying in bed at night, she tried to think of him, he was always looking away. Surely you ought to be able to remember a close friend smiling, looking straight into your eyes? But she never could, and she didn’t know whether this detachment came from him or from her.
‘Paul?’
He turned, then, and his face flashed open in a smile that made him immediately look ordinary. She started towards him, but he shook his head, holding up a card he carried with her name on it. In the story they’d concocted, he was merely somebody from the hospital sent to meet a young woman he didn’t know. She drew back, scanned the crowd, eventually allowed herself to notice him standing there, walk forward, greet him and shake him warmly by the hand.
‘There you are.’ He took her bag. ‘This way. I’ve got a cab waiting.’
He took her arm as they crossed the road, but no more than a light pressure on her elbow.
‘We could walk, but I thought with the bag … And you must be tired?’
A quick sideways glance. He seemed shy with her, but then she’d hardly looked at him, except at his profile in the station. Her mind was full of what was to come. Or not. Somehow the theoretical possibility she’d been entertaining that they would spend a few days together as friends had vanished. They’d met as lovers, though awkward, insecure, self-doubting lovers.
Since she couldn’t look at him, she felt she ought to at least raise her eyes and take in the town, but that too seemed to be beyond her. All she could see was muddy boots and swishing skirts and shopping baskets dangling from meaty arms.
Out of the corner of her eye cab wheels appeared. He opened the door and the step tilted as she got in. He gave the address to the driver and walked round to the other side, his weight balancing the vehicle as he sat down beside her. The driver clicked his tongue, lashed the bony horse, and they lurched forward. Paul had been leaning out to close his door when the cab started, and the movement threw him back heavily against the leather seat, and he slid into her. He tried to push himself away. She was afraid they were about to have a stilted conversation about her journey, but then they looked at each other – his eye whites were startling in the gloom of the cab’s interior – and they were kissing, jolted against each other, teeth jarring, losing the other’s mouth and finding it again. She was afraid to stop because then she’d have to look at him and see a stranger. At last they separated, and it was a stranger, white-faced, breathless, black-eyed, Paul as she’d never seen him. She clutched his hand with slippery fingers and they smiled at each other; a brief respite from terror.
‘I’ll have to go back to the hospital. Just for a few hours. You’ll be all right?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
Trying to calm herself, she turned and looked out of the window. They were rattling along a cobbled road, tall white houses on either side, their walls dazzling in the late-afternoon sun. Soldiers kept passing on either side. For a time the cab ran along by the side of a canal with tethered barges and tall spindly trees that had begun to strip for winter, their bright yellow leaves twirling down to lie on the brown, smooth, reflecting surface of the water. She took it all in, indelibly; she’d remember those leaves in ten, twenty, forty years’ time, though if she’d been asked fifteen minutes later to describe them she couldn’t have done so.
‘I think you’ll like the room,’ Paul said. ‘It’s a good room to paint in.’
She nodded, though painting was so obviously not what he had in mind that she wanted to laugh, and had to turn aside to hide a smile.
At last they stopped. Paul got out, helped her down and paid the driver. She found herself staring at a narrow doorway in a tall narrow house. Paul knocked and a few seconds later the door was opened by a woman in a blue apron with bare arms as muscular as a man’s and a cloud of fine dark hair lightly streaked with grey. This was Madame Drouet. She greeted Paul with obvious delight, Elinor with considerably more reserve, then led the way upstairs, her broad backside swaying massively from side to side under a dark blue skirt. A caryatid’s backside, Elinor thought – not that you ever saw such a thing – built to hold up the world.
Her room – their room? – was right at the top of the house. The doors to the other rooms stood open and seemed to be storerooms, as far as she could tell. She glimpsed a mattress propped against the wall, and a dolls’ house with two green bay trees painted on either side of the front door. Madame Drouet stopped, turned the stable latch and opened the door on to a white-painted room that was full of light. Elinor went straight to the window. Far below was a narrow back garden, but she was looking out over angled roofs and attic windows. Turning back into the room, she saw a big bed – a bed that seemed to be getting bigger by the minute – a chair with a rush seat, a marble-topped table with a blue-and-white bowl and jug, and a wardrobe with a tarnished mirror set into the door.
‘It’s lovely’ she said, in English.
Paul translated, but it wasn’t necessary. Madame Drouet’s face had already cracked into a smile. ‘I hope you will be very happy here.’
As she spoke a shaft of sunlight reached the brass knobs on the bed, and they winked, knowingly, at Elinor. She had a vague, but vivid, sense that the room was more than a room, that it contained her future. Madame Drouet was still smiling. She likes it that we’re not married, Elinor thought. She likes the idea of illicit sex on the top floor of her house, or perhaps she likes the idea of Paul having illicit sex in her house. Madame Drouet closed the door, still smiling, and, like the Cheshire Cat, seemed to leave her smile hanging in the air after the rest of her had gone.
As soon as they were alone, they kissed again, trembling and laughing, trying to recapture the impersonal passion that had gripped them in the cab, but not quite managing it.
‘I have to go, I’m afraid,’ Paul said, taking out his watch as he spoke. ‘I’m late.’
First the Cheshire Cat, now the White Rabbit, Elinor thought. She pinched the skin on her left wrist hoping the pain would restore the material world, but she continued to feel that the afternoon had become unexpectedly bizarre, and that she hardly recognized the self who was standing there.
They kissed. He went. She followed him to the end of the corridor and watched his head and shoulders descending the stairs, leaving her behind, going off about his business of which she knew nothing.
Back in the room she sat on the bed and tested it. The clanging of springs was so noisy she felt everybody in the house must hear, but that was nonsense of course. The room next door was used only for storage. She heaved her bag on to the bed and began unpacking. The wardrobe was so shallow she had to push the hangers sideways to get the door to close, but the wood smelled of something dry and sweet. Then she was at a loss. She stood at the window looking out over the roofs, as the sinking sun cast angular shadows that had not been there when she first looked out only half an hour ago. At one point she got up and fetched her sketchbook, but she couldn’t settle, couldn’t see anything. Her eye glided over surfaces, taking nothing in. Perhaps she should try to get some sleep, but then, looking down into the garden, she felt a blaze of energy. There’d be time enough to sleep when she was dead.
Quickly she poured water into the bowl, washed, ran a comb through her hair, grabbed a sketchbook and went out into the street.
Twenty-four
Elinor found a café in the main square, where she sat for an hour, lingering over her coffee and watching passers-by in the market. Three men at the next table were waiting impatiently to be served. At last Madame appeared, a tall, heavy, dark-haired woman with premature creases in her upper lip, perhaps from the cigarettes she constantly and surreptitiously smoked or perhaps from her habit of clamping notes and even coins between her teeth while she negotiated the till, a shark of a machine that seemed determined to have her fingers off.
This was a small town. In her imagination it had swollen to the size of London or Paris, a vast anonymous city where you could move from place to palce and never bump into anybody you knew. Now the town had shrunk to its real dimensions she expected to see Kit at any moment, and what would she find to say to him? How could she explain her presence here when her last letter had been full of what was happening at the Slade with not a whisper of any projected trip to Belgium? He would be hurt, and rightly so. She waited until the shadows started to lengthen. Then she walked rapidly back along the little side street she’d discovered, reaching the house just as the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup.
She lay down on the bed and, although she felt she wouldn’t be able to sleep – too much whirring round inside her head – in fact she dropped off almost at once and when she woke again it was dark. She changed into the only dress she’d brought with her and had just finished brushing her hair when somebody tapped on the door. ‘Come in,’ she called, thinking it would be Madame Drouet, but no, it was Paul, still in uniform, looking tired and excited and unsure of himself in a way that made her stomach melt.
They looked at each other, aware of the angled roofs framed by the window and the moon staring in at them. The rumpled bed looked huge and white.
Paul laughed. ‘Come on, let’s go and eat. You must be famished.’
They went into town a different way, walking side by side, not touching, though she would have liked to take his arm. Just as they entered the square, they had to pause to let a crowd of nurses and men in wheelchairs cross the road. Drained, Elinor thought, as if somebody had pulled the plug and let their lifeblood run away. One man had bandages round his ears, with two red stains on the white gauze. She’d been telling Paul about her little trip to the café in the square. He’d said, ‘That’s where I go to write letters. You were probably sitting at the same table,’ but after the wounded were wheeled past they walked on in silence till they reached the restaurant.
They ordered beef in red wine with potatoes and beans and a carafe of red wine. Paul could hardly wait to pour it out. He drank two glasses quickly, like lemonade on a hot day, caught her watching him, and said, ‘Sorry! I’m not human till I’ve had a couple of drinks.’ But then, immediately, he poured himself another. The sight of his Adam’s apple jerking as he gulped the wine down was shocking, not like the Paul she knew at all. She was afraid he was going to sit there and get drunk, but no, with the third glass the rate of drinking slowed. After the food arrived, he drank very little. He looked better too, not so white.
‘You haven’t changed at all,’ he said.
You have, she thought. There were lines around his mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him, but he’d gained weight.
‘You look a lot better.’
‘I feel better.’
‘No cough?’
‘No-o.’
She shrugged. ‘I was worried, that’s all. When they said about your mother and TB.’
‘My mother?’ For a second he looked blank. ‘No, she didn’t have TB. That’s on my father’s side.’
She tried asking him questions about his work at the hospital, but he obviously didn’t want to talk about that. Soon she was chattering on about her life in London, presenting it to him as more light-hearted, more like the life they used to share, than it really was. Trying to be honest, she mentioned Toby’s rows with her father about enlisting, which for a time had made every weekend painful, and about Catherine’s problems. There’d been riots, would you believe, in Deptford. Bricks through windows, houses set on fire, women and children joining in, not just the men, and the police watching.
‘What about your work?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I keep going. I had three paintings accepted for the New English Gallery.’
‘Three?’
‘Yes, I was surprised.’ She held up a hand to stop him refilling her glass. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Are you finding time to do any work?’
A brief smile, noting that what he did at the hospital apparently didn’t count as work. ‘A bit.’
She waited for him to go on, sensing that he both did and didn’t want to talk about this. ‘Sketches mainly. It hasn’t really been possible to paint, though of course now I’ve got the room it might be different.’
‘It’s a lovely room.’
‘Yes, I’ve been going there on my days off.’
She finished eating and pushed her plate away. ‘What do you draw?’
‘Oh, people at the hospital. Patients.’ His tone hardened. ‘That’s what I see. Though I don’t know what the point of it is. Nobody’s going to hang that sort of thing in a gallery.’
‘Why would you want them to?’
‘Because it’s there. They’re there, the people, the men. And it’s not right their suffering should just be swept out of sight.’
‘I’d have thought it was even less right to put it on the wall of a public gallery. Can’t you imagine it? People peering at other people’s suffering and saying, “Oh my dear, how perfectly dreadful” – and then moving on to the next picture. It would just be a freak show. An arty freak show.’
Silence. They’d become surprisingly intense and were wondering whether to go on with the conversation or stop now before it became too confrontational.
‘Anyway’ she said, ‘I thought you didn’t do people. Do you remember Tonks saying some of your nudes didn’t look human?’
‘That wouldn’t necessarily be a disadvantage here.’
‘You can’t use people like that.’
‘I’m not using anybody.’
Silence again, louder this time.
‘What’s your solution, then? Ignore it?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Totally The truth is, it’s been imposed on us from the outside. You would never have chosen it and probably the men in the hospital wouldn’t either. It’s unchosen, it’s passive, and I don’t think that’s a proper subject for art.’
‘So, what is?’
She lifted her head. ‘The things we choose to love.’
‘Hmm. No, I’ll think about it. I didn’t really mean us to argue, you know.’
‘It’s better than the attitude you get at home. Most people seem to think art should stop for the duration. Inherently trivial. Like buying a new hat.’
‘They should have met one of our patients. You’d have liked him. He was an apache.’
‘An Indian?’
‘Not that kind. He was a criminal. The French have special regiments for criminals to … I don’t know, pay their debt to society, I suppose. They’re supposed to be very good on the battlefield – born killers – but not so good at sticking it out between times. But the point about him was, he was covered in tattoos. Not his face and hands but literally everywhere else, every inch. And they were good. They were art. He’d used his own skin as the canvas, that’s all. Now, that man was probably born in the gutter, knocked from pillar to post… But he didn’t think art was irrelevant. Or trivial. He suffered for it.’
‘Ornamenting himself. Is it the same thing?’
‘In his case, yes, I think it was. Oh, and by the way, he didn’t need ornament. He was extraordinarily beautiful.’
Something deep inside Elinor pricked up its ears. Beautiful was not a word pre-war Paul could ever have brought himself to use about a
nother man. He was changing, in all kinds of ways, probably. They both were.
‘Right, then,’ he said, raising his hand to summon the waitress. ‘Coffee. Would you like something to go with it?’
She shook her head. He was pleating the edge of the tablecloth, smoothing it out, pleating it again. ‘My mother didn’t have TB,’ he said at last. ‘She killed herself
‘Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I had no idea.’ She stared around the café as if there were help in waiters and chattering diners. ‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen. She was in a lunatic asylum for the last two years, in and out before that.’ He made himself stop fiddling with the cloth. ‘I don’t think about it much.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. Well, a bit, I suppose, when the anniversary comes round, but it’s got all mixed up in my head anyway. I think I remember the first time they took her away, I remember seeing the van drive away with her inside it, but I know I can’t have seen that, because I was sent away from the house so I wouldn’t see.’
‘That must have been awful.’
‘The worse thing is I think part of me was relieved when she died because it meant I didn’t have to go on visiting that place.’
