Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  She felt about her attempted visit to Tregarryn much as she felt later about the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal. It was an expedition that should not have been begun in the first place, but that, having been begun, should not have been aborted.

  When she got home she wrote a letter to her identical twin.

  Dear Dilys,

  How awful it is that we see so little of each other. I’m so pleased that you’re happy in Macclesfield. It sounds such fun. I was so happy to read about your dream semi. John sounds to be a peach and as for little Tom, what a treasure he must be. I wish I wasn’t so ambitious. Oh dear, that sounds as though I regard your horizons as limited. I don’t mean it that way. I know that geographically you are limited, but your hikes on the Derbyshire moors sound very enjoyable and your half-day outing to Congleton sounded stimulating. I should love to see Macclesfield and Congleton and hope to do so next hols.

  Dilys dear, I have a dreadful secret which I have never told anyone and I can’t even tell the rest of the family, but I must tell you. I don’t know whether after we have been apart for so long you are still able to leap across the miles and share experiences with me, but there has been a man in my life too.

  She went on to tell the story of Gwyn. She cried as she wrote it. She thought she had stopped crying over it, but the humiliating day had worn down her resistance.

  Three days later, she came out of the school with Miss Langan and Miss Carter, and THERE HE WAS.

  It hadn’t been a good day. She’d waxed lyrical about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and Lily Gardner had said, ‘Is it true Tolpuddle’s on the River Piddle, Miss?’ and all the girls had giggled, and she had said, ‘How can I teach you the vast sweep of history when you have such tiny minds?’ But now the day was a good day. Lily Gardner was forgotten. THERE HE WAS.

  He was dressed entirely in purple – purple shoes, purple socks, purple trousers, purple shirt, purple jacket, purple cravat, purple cape. He waved his blackthorn stick at her, and she felt like going back to Bude and apologising to the lamppost.

  Miss Carter, who was walking out with an insurance salesman, was horrified. Miss Langan, at whom no one would ever wave a blackthorn stick, was mortified.

  ‘I see I have company,’ said Kate, knowing that nothing would ever be quite the same in the common room again.

  She didn’t want to kiss him, he didn’t deserve to be kissed, he was an irresponsible young man who trifled with a young woman’s affections, but Miss Carter and Miss Langan were watching and it would be quite nice for them to see her kissing him, and it wouldn’t be very Bohemian to bear a grudge, and that settled it, so she kissed him. He smelt of pipe tobacco and whisky.

  ‘Come and meet my friends,’ he said.

  She recognised Arturo’s friends the moment she entered ye olde tea shoppe. They were sitting at an olde table at the foot of ye olde stairs. She particularly noticed a tall woman with a heavy bust, green eyes and a scarlet gash of a mouth, who wasn’t at all pleased to see her. Then there was a small, solemn young man with receding hair, a worried frown and a very pale face, dominated by a long, severe nose. And there was a great big bear of a man who unrolled himself endlessly from a dwarfed Windsor chair and said, ‘Never been so delighted to lose a bet.’

  Kate, determined not to be abashed by these people, stared him in the face and said, ‘I dread to think what you were betting about.’

  ‘I bet Daniel there’d be nothing sexy in the whole of Penance.’

  Indignant shoppers turned to stare at this big, loud man.

  ‘You’re offending people,’ Kate said, in a low voice, ‘either because they don’t like the word “sexy” or because they thought you’d already lost your bet because they thought they were sexy.’

  The woman with the green eyes looked more sour than ever.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No,’ said Arturo.

  ‘I suppose introductions are dreadfully middle class,’ said Kate.

  The man called Daniel smiled at her, indicated to her to sit beside him, and said, ‘I’m Daniel Begelman. I’m a painter. This is Stanley Wainwright.’ He indicated the bear-like man. ‘He’s a sculptor.’

  Stanley Wainwright held his hand out across the table. Kate almost scalded her arm in the steam from a jug of hot water as she held, and survived, his iron grip, and met his hungry eyes without flinching.

  ‘And the lady is another painter, Daphne Stoneyhurst.’

  Kate looked Daphne Stoneyhurst straight in the eyes and said, ‘I’m delighted to meet you.’

  ‘Well, I’m so glad one of us is,’ said Daphne Stoneyhurst.

  ‘Daphne!’ said Arturo. ‘That’s no way to speak to the woman I’m going to marry.’

  Kate tried not to gasp, tried not to look provincial, hoped against hope that she wouldn’t blush, attempted to look as though this sort of thing was said to her every day. But she was glad she was sitting down. Her knees might have buckled if she’d been standing.

  Daphne Stoneyhurst went pale, Daniel Begelman frowned, Stanley Wainwright smiled as enigmatically as the Mona Lisa, but on a larger scale.

  ‘Don’t worry, Daphne,’ said Kate. ‘This is news to me, and I’m certainly not going to marry Arturo.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Daniel. ‘You hardly know him.’

  ‘But that isn’t why I’m not going to marry him,’ said Kate. ‘I’m not going to marry him because I know him only too well.’

  Daphne smiled maliciously, and Kate realised that Daphne was even more angry with Arturo for bringing her than she was with her for allowing herself to be brought.

  The waitress came to take Kate’s order. She walked as if she had corns. Kate plumped for toast and butter, and gave the waitress a big smile. She thought the artists were rather offhand with the waitress.

  ‘I must say it’s very stimulating to meet artists,’ she said, getting into her stride now, and absolutely refusing to be the provincial schoolmistress. ‘I’ve only met one before. He was a post-Raphaelite.’

  There was a horrified silence.

  ‘You mean a pre-Raphaelite, dear,’ said Arturo.

  ‘You haven’t seen his work,’ said Kate sweetly.

  Daniel, Stanley and Arturo laughed. Daphne didn’t.

  After tea, they walked along the promenade, beside a gently heaving, deceptively quiet, soupy, oily sea. The Atlantic was biding its time, gathering its strength for the winter. They were an odd sight, Arturo all in purple, Stanley in corduroys with no hat, Daniel in a loose smock, Daphne in a long thing more like a sack than a dress, and Kate in the sensible skirt and blouse of the history teacher. Around them, fashionable Penance swirled and stared, the men in their dark suits and coats and bowlers and top hats, the ladies in their cloche hats and long straight dresses, all the corsets and bodices blown away with the war.

  ‘Is the sea difficult to paint?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Nothing is difficult to paint,’ said Arturo, ‘and everything is difficult to paint.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kate. ‘I’m sorry I asked.’

  ‘To sculpt the sea is the challenge,’ said Stanley. ‘One day I will. In the meantime, I could gaze at its immensity, its omnipotence, its magnificence . . .’

  ‘Until we reach the nearest pub.’ Daniel said with affection what other people said with malice.

  Soon they did reach the nearest pub, and Kate realised that Daniel had spoken the truth. Suddenly the sea lost its magic for Stanley. He marched towards the pub.

  Daphne linked arms with Kate, and Kate tried, unsuccessfully, not to stiffen. She felt that there were elements of her native puritanism in her antipathy to touching Daphne, so she gave Daphne’s arm a squeeze. Daphne looked straight into her face, and smiled with everything except her eyes. ‘I have the funniest feeling, Kate, that you and I are to be great friends,’ she said.

  Kate had never been in a pub before, but that evening she went into the Cornish Arms, the Duke of Cumberland, the Go
lden Lion, the Farmers’ Arms, the Prince of Wales, the Union, the Turk’s Head and the Seven Stars. Some of the pubs were clean and some of them weren’t. Some of them were noisy, and others were even noisier. Most of them were dark, secretive places, places of shadow. She saw men playing games she had never heard of before – cribbage and shove-halfpenny and euchre. She saw loose women and loose teeth and she heard loose talk. She had never tasted beer before, and when she took her first sip she thought she would never dare to take another, but she was riding on a tide of Bohemianism, she’d been told it was an acquired taste, and she was determined to acquire it. By the time she had acquired it she was so full of liquid that she had to go on to whisky.

  They talked about art, and then about sex, and then about sex in art, and then, as they got drunker, about art in sex. The next morning, Kate could remember very little of their conversation. Now, seventy-seven years later, she could remember even less.

  But she did recall that at one stage she asked them if they were members of any artistic movement, and Arturo said, grandly, ‘I am a Randist. I am the only Randist, but, when I’m famous, there will be others.’

  She remembered Daniel attempting to talk seriously, saying that no artists could be unaware of movements in art, and that in 1922 no artist could say that he was unaffected by cubism, even if it was to react against it. ‘None of us would call ourselves cubists, but there is the knowledge of the existence of cubism in everything we paint. We can never unknow what we know.’

  She remembered Stanley saying, ‘Daphne is in crisis. She doesn’t know whether she’s a neo-vorticist or a post-vorticist or a neo-post-vorticist.’ He also spoke passionately, at one stage – in the Farmers’ Arms she thought it was – about the purity of art.

  She found herself being asked to join them, give up her job, move to Tregarryn. She felt flattered and astonished and excited. ‘We need outside blood,’ Daniel said. ‘We need an injection of common sense,’ said Stanley. Kate wasn’t too pleased by that. Was that what they saw her potential as – an injection of common sense? So, when Daphne said, petulantly, ‘I don’t know why you should think of Kate as having common sense,’ Kate smiled sweetly at her and said, ‘Thank you, Daphne. I’m glad someone appreciates me.’ Daphne tossed her head like a wilful carthorse.

  Later – in the Turk’s Head, she thought – she commented to Stanley that, since Daphne obviously resented her, there must be more than she’d thought going on between Daphne and Arturo.

  ‘Not really,’ Stanley said. ‘Daphne’s mainly lesbian.’

  Mainly lesbian! What Bohemianism! Kate felt shocked, but she also felt shocked that she didn’t feel more shocked.

  ‘Well, why does she resent me so much, then?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with sex,’ said Stanley. ‘It’s because she likes being the only woman around.’

  ‘But there’s Daniel’s wife.’

  ‘Ah. Olga. Olga isn’t really a woman in her own right. She’s an appendage of Daniel.’

  At some stage Arturo joined in the attempts to get Kate to join them. ‘Please come,’ he implored. ‘Please come and be my lover.’

  A lover! That would be a wonderful thing to be. How angry Enid and Myfanwy would be if they knew she was a lover. But of course she couldn’t be.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I have a job.’

  ‘You’re so delightfully old-fashioned, Kate,’ said Daphne. ‘It really is heart-warming to see such old-fashioned dedication to duty.’

  They discussed Picasso and Braque and Kate noticed that the more drunk Stanley grew, the more nonsense he talked, whereas the more drunk Arturo grew, the more sense he talked. Daniel drank carefully, and Daphne drank an enormous amount without it seeming to have any effect on her at all.

  In the Golden Lion they played darts with great excitement and lots of cries of ‘Mugs away’ and ‘Nice arrows, Daphne’. The artists imagined that they were cutting a great dash as people of the people, utterly unaware that all the other people in the pub, who were people of the people, were looking on them with utter scorn. Kate was aware of this, but couldn’t have cared less. These people were fun to be with.

  Kate just couldn’t get interested in the darts. She didn’t care whether she won or not. She realised that Daniel was the same. He seemed to have no competitive spirit. They stood together, a little apart from the game, watching Arturo and Stanley in fierce battle for the title of Tregarryn Darts Champion of Penance.

  ‘It would be nice if you did join us,’ said Daniel. ‘You’ll like Olga.’

  ‘Why is she not here?’

  ‘She’s sick today. She’s pregnant.’ He looked so proud and so boyish. Kate longed to hug him, but there was a reserve about him, an awkwardness about him, which made such intimacy difficult. ‘Don’t be frightened of Arturo. His . . .’

  ‘Please don’t say his bark is worse than his bite,’ said Kate. ‘You’re far too good an artist to resort to cliché.’

  ‘You know my work?’ Daniel was thrilled.

  ‘No, but I know the sort of man you are.’

  ‘Oh.’ Daniel was flattered but disappointed. He gave her hand a little squeeze and eased himself out of his embarrassment by changing the subject. ‘Look at Arturo,’ he said. ‘He’s a little dog, always lifting his leg against the lampposts of the world.’ Kate told him about kicking the lamppost in Bude. He looked at her gravely, and said, ‘Try not to be too serious about Arturo.’

  Stanley won the match, and Kate realised that Stanley would always win, Arturo would always lose, and Daniel would always watch. Three men fulfilling their allotted roles.

  Her head was swimming now. She could hardly stand. They were in . . . probably it was the Union. It seemed a bit more respectable than the other pubs, and its respectability drove Stanley to behave outrageously.

  ‘You’re all peasants,’ he shouted at the patrons. ‘You’re dead from the neck up.’

  ‘You’ll be dead from the neck down tonight,’ retorted a ship’s chandler, and everybody laughed.

  The cold night air sent them spiralling into extreme drunkenness. Kate remembered Stanley saying ‘Look at all those stars. Look how many there are. There are hundreds’, as if he was being a truly perceptive observer of the night scene.

  They couldn’t find Stanley’s car. Up and down the windswept streets they lurched. Kate fell and crashed into a lamppost. She remembered thinking that Cornish lampposts just didn’t get on with her.

  Arturo tried to support her, but when she leant against him he fell too, and she fell on top of him, and he kissed her.

  They found the car at last. What a little car it was. Kate realised later that it was a rusting old Austin Seven. She found herself lifted up, bundled into the back seat, wedged uncomfortably between Arturo’s slimness and Daphne’s big thighs.

  ‘I really mean it,’ said Stanley. ‘I’ve never seen so many stars. There were literally hundreds of them, all over the sky. How do you start this thing?’

  ‘You have to crank it, you fool,’ said Daniel.

  How they laughed!

  ‘Let me out,’ cried Kate. ‘I’ll walk home.’

  The car sprang into noisy, bone-crunching life. Stanley got back in and drove off, jerkily. Kate could hardly have been more frightened if she was being abducted to join the white slave traffic.

  She was being abducted! Stanley lurched down Market Jew Street and out towards the countryside.

  ‘Not this way!’ she shouted. ‘I live back there.’

  ‘You live with us now,’ said Stanley. ‘You live at Tregarryn.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh come on, darling,’ pleaded Arturo. ‘Away with dull care and convention. Break free of your bonds. You can do it.’

  ‘You’re coming with us,’ said Stanley. ‘Welcome to the real world, little chapel girl.’

  ‘Real?’ screamed Kate. ‘You call this real?’

  ‘Let her out, for God’s sake,’ said Daphne.

  ‘Daphne do
esn’t want me,’ said Kate. ‘I almost want to come, because of that.’

  Daphne raised her arm to hit Kate, but only succeeded in bruising it on the roof of the car.

  ‘Shit!’ she said.

  ‘Let me out,’ screamed Kate. ‘I have girls to teach.’

  Daniel shouted, ‘Stop the car!’ not loudly, but with such authority that Stanley obeyed. At the time Kate thought nothing of this, but the next day, thinking back and trying to piece together what had happened, she was astonished at the force of Daniel’s personality.

  ‘Stop this fooling,’ he said. ‘Take the girl home.’

  Nobody spoke on the way back. Daphne was sulking, Arturo was running his hand imploringly over Kate’s body, Stanley was concentrating on his driving, and Daniel and Kate were hoping that Stanley wouldn’t change his mind.

  He didn’t. He pulled up in Regent Square outside Mrs Finicky’s. That wasn’t her real name. It was Kate’s nickname for her.

  Arturo kissed Kate very gently and whispered, ‘Please come.’ Just for a moment it was very tempting, but she had no idea how sincere he was, and reason and duty prevailed.

  They all shouted ‘Good-night’, then they all went ‘Sssh!’ loudly, then they all laughed loudly, then Stanley drove off loudly with a crash of gears, and Kate was alone in the silent town. She looked up at the vast constellations of the heavens and felt very tiny indeed.

  She lurched up the drive and took so long to unlock the door that Mrs Finicky came down in her dressing-gown to see what was going on.

  ‘What time do you call this?’ demanded Mrs Finicky.

  ‘I call it Gladys,’ said Kate, ‘or possibly five past Gladys. What time do you call it, Mrs Finicky?’

  In the morning, when she crawled out of bed and looked out of her room across the graveyard to the great bulk of the Church of St Mary the Virgin – oh Lord, the last thing she needed that morning was a church to remind her of her sins, why did she always seem to be near a church? – eleven things worried Kate the Not Virgin.

  It worried her that she had a violent headache. It worried her that she felt sick. It worried her that she had a black eye. It worried her that she’d overslept. It worried her that she’d been drunk. It worried her that it didn’t worry her more than it did that she had been drunk. It worried her that she had said, ‘I call it Gladys,’ thereby making it unlikely that she would be able to persuade Mrs Finicky that she hadn’t been drunk. It worried her that she had called Mrs Finicky Mrs Finicky to her face, because it wasn’t Mrs Finicky’s fault that she was finicky, she was a war widow with a lot of love to give and no man left to give it to, so she gave it to her china dogs and shepherdesses instead. It worried her that Mrs Finicky might get in touch with her parents to warn them of her behaviour. It worried her that the car in which Arturo had been travelling had been driven across Cornwall the previous night by a very drunk sculptor, and she had no way of knowing whether they had arrived at Tregarryn safely. But above all it worried her that, after being worried that she would never be able to fall in love again, she had fallen at least half in love with an impoverished artist who called himself a Randist, drank too much, dressed entirely in purple, and sulked when he lost at darts.