Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  Daphne entered at that moment.

  ‘Daphne!’ said Kate.

  Enid rushed out on to the terrace, oblivious of the fact that it was raining hard.

  ‘Daphne!’ said Kate again.

  Daphne spread her arms wide in a gesture of helplessness. How can I resist my feelings, her gesture seemed to imply.

  ‘I only stood at the door,’ she said. ‘I left the moment she screamed.’

  ‘Were you naked?’

  ‘Well, yes. I wasn’t sure how quick on the uptake she’d be.’

  ‘Oh, Daphne!’

  Kate rushed out and put her arms round her sister. Tears streamed down their faces. So did the rain.

  ‘Well, there’s one thing,’ said Kate. ‘You think you aren’t attractive. This shows you are.’

  ‘Kate!’ said Enid. ‘Is that all you can think of? Aren’t you shocked? You’re wicked!’

  There’s gratitude, thought Kate.

  Kate and Arturo hardly spoke now, even after Timothy was born. He painted all day and all evening, she cooked the meals and watched the sea. Black, petrol, aquamarine, purple, blue, midnight blue, turquoise, green, grey, silver, pearl, white, she watched the sea in all its colours and wished that she could paint.

  Arturo sometimes drew and made sketches, but he didn’t paint from life any more, he went into the studio and locked the door and drew a blind across the window ‘so that the light is constant, and my paintings are timeless and not influenced by the moment. My art is more condensed than the real world. It’s more real than the real world can ever be. I leave the illusion that the real world is real to Daphne, with my blessing.’

  Daphne and Stanley were scornful of Arturo. They were certain that he painted the canvas the right way up, and just turned it upside down when he’d finished. He claimed that the whole point lay in the technical challenge posed by painting the scene upside down. Kate wanted to believe him. She needed to believe him. It would have been easier to believe him if he had let her in, just once, to see him painting upside down.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘I expect faith from my wife. I need faith from my wife. Without that faith, you and I are nothing.’

  Daniel and Olga came to stay for a weekend, with the children. They were off to Palestine the next week. ‘I have to be a Jew first and an artist second,’ Daniel said. ‘Without my acknowledgement of my Jewishness, my work is meaningless.’ He was evasive about his experiences in Russia.

  It was a busy weekend, with Ruth and Barbara to entertain and little Reuben to be looked after too. Kate managed just one very brief talk with Daniel, on the middle terrace.

  ‘Why didn’t Russia work, Daniel?’ she asked.

  He looked away. He was embarrassed.

  ‘We were naïve,’ he said. ‘I feel ashamed of having been so naïve. I can’t talk about it. And you, Kate, how are things with Arturo?’

  ‘I can’t talk about that,’ she said. ‘I think he must be my Russia.’

  ‘I miss you,’ he said.

  ‘I miss you.’

  He ran one finger down her arm, and went back into the house.

  Timothy was only five weeks old when Stanley left. ‘It’s been a good place for me,’ he said, ‘but it couldn’t stand still, it could only go up or down, and unfortunately it’s gone down. I’m leaving straight away, because I hate endings. I like to get them over with.’

  Daphne was more succinct. ‘Rats leave sinking ships,’ she said. ‘This is a sinking ship and I’m a rat.’

  So Kate and Arturo were left alone in the creaking house with the two small children. Arturo painted all day. They had no means of paying the rent. There was barely enough money for food, and none for anything else. Then one day Arturo opened an envelope and beamed at Kate and said, ‘I have an exhibition in St Ives. We’re saved.’

  And they were. The exhibition was a big success. His upside-down paintings went like hot cakes, or upside-down cakes, as Kate said. A London dealer saw it and advised Arturo not to sell the few paintings that were left, but to save them for a London show, at which they would fetch London prices.

  He swaggered more and more. He twirled his blackthorn stick. He hammered the single malts. He bought an Alvis 12/50 Tourer, the very model that he had borrowed. This struck Kate as symbolic of his lack of inventive powers. Sometimes he took Kate and the children for rides. More often he went alone, with his easel and paints and brushes, his stick and his flask. Kate wondered if he was seeing another woman. Certainly he took less and less notice of her.

  He did work hard, though, that was one of his virtues. Sometimes he stayed in his studio all night. He rarely kissed Kate now, almost never showed any gentleness. Occasionally he would take her, swiftly and noisily, at unexpected moments. There was no cruelty in it, but no warmth either. She didn’t like it, but felt that if she refused him there would be nothing. Once she took the children to Swansea for a week. They chugged around Swansea Bay on the Mumbles train, soon to be replaced by trams. Sometimes they caught a bus to bold, breezy, masculine Rhossili, or soft, gentle, feminine Oxwich, or the windswept cliffs of Pennard. Kate realised how much she loved Gower, its bleak moors and miniature valleys studded with gorse and old whitewashed farms, and the glorious bays never far away. How silly she had been, as a child, to be so eager to grow up. How overrated being grown up was.

  She dreaded their return to Tregarryn, but hoped against hope that Arturo would have missed her, that her absence would have rekindled at least some of his love, that she would be able to see, in this self-obsessed egotist, at least something of the amusing charmer who had laughed with her on the Penance train, and had seemed to stand for a freer, bolder, more generous life than the one she had known.

  But no, he was just the same. How acutely she missed the ordered warmth of her family life in Wales. That was where she now felt that the true generosity was. Sometimes she thought that her iconoclasm had been no more than a youthful fancy. At times she almost hated Arturo for making her think like that. She fought her hostility desperately.

  At the private view of his London collection in the small but elegant Winchester Gallery there were pictures of North Cornwall, of the children, of Kate, of Arturo, of Tregarryn, of flowers, of his dentist and of horses, and all of them were upside down, and Arturo spoke very pompously about them.

  When the overweight daughter of one of Portugal’s leading gynaecologists asked him what would happen if she bought one of his pictures and hung it the right way up, rather than upside down, he said, ‘Why, nothing, charming creature. You would still have a beautiful picture, but you would have cheated yourself enormously of its value.’

  Overhearing this exchange, a society masseur with a place in Jermyn Street said, ‘So the value of your picture lies not in its intrinsic merit but in its upside downness, does it?’

  ‘It lies in both,’ said Arturo. ‘If it lay only in the upside downness, then the picture itself would be valueless, and a valueless picture would still be valueless upside down. Since my pictures are not valueless, the value cannot therefore lie solely in their upside downness. It lies partly in the fact that they were painted upside down and partly in the fact that they are to be seen upside down, that is their unity, every work of art must have a unity. The artist, I, and the viewer, you, share a distorting vision, experience the distortion together, and are enriched.’

  ‘You are enriched. I am poorer, if I buy the picture.’

  ‘No, I am the poorer. I have only your money. You have my genius.’

  Every word that Arturo spoke embarrassed Kate and drove him further from her. She drank glass after glass of wine in the hope that it would dull her pain. Her aching legs screamed to leave the room. Her head throbbed with tension. When a very well-spoken young man with the face of an angel and incredibly curly hair smiled devastatingly upon her and asked her if Arturo really painted everything upside down, she said, ‘Of course he doesn’t. Would you? And as for his philosophy, nuts. It all began when he hung a picture upside down
when he was drunk.’

  She shouldn’t have said it, and she wished that she hadn’t even before she discovered that the gorgeous young man, whose name was Oswald Philliskirk, was an art critic. His savage attack on Arturo’s integrity in The Times did much to burst his brief bubble.

  ‘You watched me!’ Arturo said in their hotel room, after he’d read the article. He was white with anger. ‘You spied on me.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Kate. ‘I wasn’t even sure until this moment, when you didn’t deny it. You’re a fraud.’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Arturo. ‘I’ve always known it. You’ve always known it. Now the whole world knows it. You silly bloody bitch.’

  He raised his arm as if to hit her. For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. She didn’t flinch, and, maybe because she didn’t flinch, or because there was no actual violence in him, whatever his other faults, he didn’t hit her. She might have preferred it if he had. It might have eased her guilt. Guilt and shame were all she felt now. Guilt and shame at her actions. She felt nothing whatsoever for Arturo.

  He walked to the door of their hotel room, turned to look back at her, and said, ‘You are so beautiful, Kate.’ Tears streamed down his face. ‘I loved you so much,’ he said. ‘So much.’

  She looked at him in horror. She was numb. His tears didn’t move her. She felt only that she was seeing a performance, a very good performance, from a fraud who had never felt a genuine emotion in his life.

  She caught the twelve o’clock train from Paddington to Swansea, where she had left the children. They were pleased to see her. So were her family.

  On the third day of her visit, after the boys had been put to bed, she said, ‘I’ll go back tomorrow. I’ll go, but I think it’s over.’

  The next day she knew it was over. A farmer had come across Arturo in an old barn three miles from Tregarryn. He had hanged himself, and, an artistic touch, he had hanged himself upside down.

  5 Maurice

  ‘WHO’S A LUCKY lady?’

  The words seemed to come from a very long way away and barely registered on Kate’s consciousness. She was still in a state of shock after reliving the tragic end of her life with Arturo. She was remembering the shock and the guilt and the sorrow that had swept over her more than seventy years ago. She was asking herself now, in Ward 3C, the same questions that she had asked a thousand times before. Could she have saved Arturo if she’d behaved differently? Should she have behaved differently? Had the Arturo she had loved disappeared beyond recall? Could she have made him feel that he was not a fraud?

  ‘Who’s a lucky lady?’

  Luckily, the fat nurse with the eating disorder repeated the words. Her name, Kate now knew, was Janet, and her downfall was the doughnut. She had also deduced, from remarks and insinuations overheard, that Helen, the nurse with the bony hands, also suffered from an eating disorder.

  ‘We are!’ said Janet triumphantly, answering her own repeated question. ‘We’re a lucky lady. Who’s come all the way from Russia because he loves us?’

  ‘You shouldn’t call her “us”, nurse,’ said Maurice. ‘Nobody could be less plural than her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My mother is a very singular lady.’

  Dear dear Maurice. She felt his lips on her cheek and she very nearly opened her eyes and tried to smile at him. She wanted to run her long fingers over his dear, smooth-shaven face. In all probability she wouldn’t be able to, she hadn’t managed to move them yet in the limited trials she had made. In any case it would have given the show away. She would have had to start reacting to fat Janet with the eating disorder, thin Helen with the eating disorder, mad Mrs Critchley, lonely Hilda, farting Glenda, smiling Doctor Ramgobi (she assumed that he smiled, he often sounded as though he was smiling). And for what purpose? She wouldn’t be able to save Janet and Hilda from their eating disorders. She wouldn’t be able to restore Mrs Critchley’s sanity or ease Hilda’s loneliness or make Glenda less windy. She wouldn’t be able to tell Maurice that she loved him.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ Janet asked Maurice. ‘I’ve seen you on the telly.’

  ‘Very possibly,’ admitted Maurice.

  ‘Coronation Street?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Give us a clue.’

  ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Moscow.’

  ‘Oh yeah. You’re the bloke they sent to trouble spots when Kate Adie was already somewhere else.’

  He laughed. No stuffiness about him, despite his high opinion of himself.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘Say it for me now. Say it about this place.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Say, “Maurice Copson, Ward 3C, Whetstone General Hospital, BBC News.” I got that the wrong way round, didn’t I? Say it and then I can tell my mum. She thinks you’ve got ever such a lovely voice.’

  ‘Right. For your mum. “Maurice Copson, BBC News, Ward 3C, Whetstone General Hospital.”’

  ‘Lovely. Ta very much.’

  ‘No problem.’

  His hand was clasping hers. His skin was rough. Probably he kept losing his gloves in the cold Russian winter. He lost most things. She remembered shocking a nun on the three o’clock from Paddington to Swansea in 1948, when she’d asked Kate about her children. ‘My youngest son is seventeen, idealistic, utterly impractical. Last Saturday he went to a party and lost his front-door key, his wallet and his virginity.’ The nun had gone pink. They’d been passing through Maidenhead at the time. It had shut the nun up, which had been the general idea. She’d made Maurice laugh with her tale of the pink nun in Maidenhead. She’d always loved making Maurice laugh. She wondered if she’d ever make him laugh again.

  ‘Well, Ma dear,’ he said, as if he could read her thoughts, and she often felt that he did have psychic powers, ‘I don’t know whether you want to recover or not. I gather from Doctor Ramgobi that it’s by no means out of the question that you can make quite a dramatic recovery, if you still have the desire to do so. You have an amazing constitution still, and it’s very much down to you. I like that man.’

  Yes, she thought, only you have the compassion and the strength to be so honest with me. I love you so much. I wish you’d married. Old age can be so lonely, without children. My children have been a joy to me, on the whole. They say that the hair of sexy men falls out, so I’m hoping that you’ve been sexy even though you haven’t married. I suspect none of my other children have been very sexy. I can’t have had no sexy children, can I? Am I rambling?

  ‘I wish I could have come straight away,’ he said, ‘but I had a job to finish. I hope you can understand me. You always tried to get me to talk about my doings. Things are very bad in Russia now. The state’s assessment of a person’s needs is a bath towel every twenty-three years, and even that’s too ambitious a target for modern Russia to deliver. I have to report these things, Ma. The Mafia are very powerful, the communists are waiting in the wings, chaos is their breeding ground. I have to keep the pressure on our government to give Russia the help it needs. I am the conscience of the West.’

  Yes, well, I think you have begun to believe your own publicity, Maurice, she thought. The historical irony didn’t escape her, of course. The same idealism, the same love of social justice, that had made her profess to be a communist in the 1920s had made him a passionate opponent of communism in the 1990s.

  ‘Nigel rang and told me,’ he said. ‘It surprised me how emotional he was. I’d never realised how much he bottles up. Then of course Timothy rang. Floods of tears. I can’t get hold of Elizabeth, but I’ve left a message on her answer machine. She must be away. If you can understand all this. I’m probably tiring you. I’ll just sit in silence for a while.’

  But she couldn’t rest. Her mind was churning. Every reference to Russia reminded her of the name board of Leningrad railway station. The murderer had left a note saying ‘Sorry, Ma’. Only Maurice called her ‘Ma’. He couldn’t have murdered Graham. Not Maurice. Could he? He kn
ew the truth about Graham. Could he have murdered for that? Surely not? He’d known she’d loved Graham. Surely he wouldn’t have killed the man she loved, however disapproving he was?

  These thoughts exhausted her. She nodded off, and only woke up when the food trolley clanked down the corridor towards the ward.

  ‘Toad-in-the-hole, Mrs Critchley? There you go.’

  ‘Take it away!’

  ‘You ordered it.’

  ‘Take it away. I don’t want any.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I can’t afford to pay.’

  ‘You don’t have to pay, Mrs Critchley. It’s free.’

  ‘Free? How can it be free?’

  ‘Because I’m paying for it today!’ Maurice! Good old Maurice.

  ‘Oh, that’s very kind of you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘This hotel used to be the best in Buxton. People were impressed when you said you were staying at the Spa. Fillet steak. Artichoke mousse. Magret de canard. Look what we’re reduced to now. Toad-in-the-hole. How’s the little one?’

  ‘She’s doing very well,’ said Maurice without hesitation. ‘She’s put on two pounds.’

  ‘Oh, bless her. And there was me thinking it was a boy. Oh, bless her little cotton socks.’

  ‘Toad-in-the-hole, Glenda?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please. Must keep my strength up.’

  ‘There you go. Plum pie and custard?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please.’

  ‘There you go.’

  Maurice’s gnarled hand in hers. She believed that she could feel his hand a bit more than the others. Maybe her feeling was beginning to come back, or maybe it was just because it was so gnarled.

  ‘Prawn salad, Hilda?’

  ‘Oh, no, thank you. I’m allergic to prawns.’

  ‘Well, why have you ticked them, then?’

  ‘I can’t have. I’d have ticked toad-in-the-hole if there was toad-in-the-hole. I’m very partial to toad-in-the-hole. Well, never mind, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Well, I’ve a spare toad-in-the-hole, as it happens. Mr Watson in 3A is with us no more.’