Work in the house was very spasmodic. I prepared meals for Awan and myself, did our laundry and kept our quarters clean, but Kenneth did all the work in the garden and Rose looked after the rest of the house, airing rooms and lighting fires as the weather dictated. They both did their best but things did deteriorate; a smashed window in an upper room went undiscovered for weeks, a soot-fall from a sitting room chimney was left un-cleared, a leaking pipe in a room above caused a brown stain on the library ceiling, some of the plaster cornicing fell down and the topmost row of books were ruined beyond saving. I just didn’t seem able to summon up enough energy to care.
Awan chattered away as usual, played with the boys, did the reading and spelling tasks her teachers sent home and threw herself with enthusiasm into the Christmas Carol Concert, being selected, to her special joy, to sing a solo. She went out, as she always had done, at weekends to play and was often missing from early morning to dusk, which was early. I never questioned her as to where she had been or what she had been up to; she came home often dirty and ravenously hungry but perfectly safe and that was all that mattered to me. But amidst all these signs of normality I detected an underlying restraint which had never been part of her character before. She was particularly well behaved, careful about table manners (something I had always had to pick her up on, especially when she had been spending a lot of time with Rose and Kenneth’s boys) and didn’t cross or contradict me. One of the dogs had a litter of puppies and we didn’t have our usual argument about her being able to keep one, or have them all sleep with her in her bed, or be allowed to dress them up in her dolls’ clothes. At nearly six it seemed to me these were natural signs of a developing maturity but it occurred to me also they were the result of my own odd behaviour and distraction over the past year. I had not been myself. How could I expect her, in response, to be herself?
These thoughts occupied but they did not obsess me. Like my body, my mind did not seem able to concentrate on one thing. Random, contradictory and irrelevant ideas seemed to flit in and out of my brain, jostling each other and going nowhere in the same way that I might set out in the morning to clean out the hen coop, get diverted half way across the yard by a blocked gulley and end up rummaging in a lean-to for something whose purpose or necessity I had forgotten before five minutes were up. Usually I gave up even the pretence of rational thought or purposeful behaviour, and simply roamed about.
One day my meanderings brought me to the gatehouse. It was months since I had been there but the door yielded to my push and, inside, I found things fairly well ordered. A vase of rather desiccated holly leaves and sprigs of hawthorn stood on the table and there were some books which I did not remember having taken there. One of my cake tins stood on a shelf and inside I found the remnants of a seed cake I had baked some weeks past. I assumed John had brought these things when he had been painting at the gatehouse although the books were old ones of Awan’s and the foliage arrangement rather clumsy for his artistic hands. Perhaps Awan had kept him company at some point during my bleak, mourning months?
Thought of John’s work took me upstairs. As usual with him there was a chaotic mess of paints and brushes on the table under the window and a number of half-finished canvasses propped on easels around the room. Sketch books were flung onto the divan, amongst the blankets and quilts we kept there, and some pages of correspondence from what seemed to be gallery owners and agents in London. John’s writing identified these commissions as ‘shipped’ or ‘sent by carrier’ or ‘sketches awaiting approval’. There were bills and receipts also, from artists’ suppliers of various kinds, and across these John had scrawled words like ‘paid’, or ‘wrong pigment sent. Awaiting credit’. These evidences of commercial interaction gave me fresh pause for thought; further areas of John’s life about which I knew little. I felt more estranged from him than ever.
Feeling that, for once, the gatehouse would not give me the solace I needed, I had turned to go back down the stairs when a group of canvasses stacked behind a screen caught my eye. They were shrouded in a sheet and their being doubly hidden excited my curiosity. I whipped off the sheet and brought the pictures into the light.
They were a series of three portraits of a woman, painted from unusual, even unnatural, angles, with light illuminating features which would not normally form the focus of a portrait-painter’s eye. One showed simply the side of the woman’s head and the tip of her ear brightly lit by a shaft of light perhaps from a partly opened curtain, the rest of her remained in deep shadow and no facial feature provided identification. For an artist given to modernist impressions and experimental uses of colour and texture, the style here was rather naturalistic, the individual strands of the woman’s hair and the silken sheen of it so finely rendered I almost felt I could reach out and comb it. The flesh of the ear looked alive, flushed and warm with blood which flowed through tiny veins, and I could see the velvet of downy hairs which are usually invisible to the naked eye with a clarity which made me feel as though I were viewing it through a magnifying glass. The familiarity of the rendition, and the closeness of observation gave the picture an intimate quality, and there was a sense, too of voyeurism - I got the impression that the woman did not know she was being so personally observed, or, that if she did, she did not care.
The second canvas showed a woman’s arm draped along the back of a sort of chaise. It was a sorry-looking piece of furniture, from what I could make out of it, the row of rivets dull, some missing, a rip in the material showed a mess of stuffing. The colour of it was impossible to make out; greyish purple, perhaps, its nap worn smooth. The wood of the frame was scarred with scratches. Again, the angle of light left much to be conjectured in the setting and detail - this time a dull lamp or perhaps even a candle, burning low on the floor beyond the frame of the picture, threw a muted glow over everything and cast many distorted shadows. The arm was bare from the elbow, the material above a froth of lace which suggested sensuous lingerie. But something about the drape of the arm made this ironic; rather than elegantly arranged the arm was carelessly flung, the hand hanging down, the fingers empty and dispirited, and without adornment. John had painted the skin of the arm with biological exactitude; every pore and hair was visible, the network of blue veins at the wrist clear to see and even those beneath the skin of the finger-joints - more purple in hue and as fine as ink lines on paper. The hand was a capable-looking hand, a hand which could work or save or nurture. Somehow this made the indolence of the arm’s posture, the emptiness of the hands and the overall sagged hopelessness in the drooped shoulder unbearably sad.
By this time the light was fading and I had to move closer to the window to examine the third canvas, pushing aside John’s litter to set it onto the table. Ironically, this, the smallest of the three pictures, encompassed the largest scene, a disordered bed, painted from its foot, where a few casually strewn garments had been flung. The rumpled layers of the sheets and blankets and their various textures were very well done; I could see the sheen of silky eiderdown, the tufted ridges of candlewick, the nap of flannelette sheets. From this nest, a foot protruded, thrust out, its sole and the underside of the toes facing the artist, the rims of untrimmed - and rather grimy - nails just visible. In this perspective, the foreshortened heel disappeared into the ankle and shin of the woman, and then was absorbed into the tangled bedding. A curve of thigh and buttock and the hump of turned back and hunched shoulder could be made out in the contours, and, almost at the edge of the picture, a messed mop of hair spread on a pillow.
This scene I did recognise, or I thought I did, and in recognising it I recognised them all. They were pictures of me. Me in my depression, in my mourning for Cameron. How often had I been found in a room lit only by a slightly opened curtain? The arm, idle and bereft, when it should have been busy, was mine. And this bed had been my refuge; I had refused to leave it on many occasions, seeking oblivion in sleep. The hair was mine, the skin too, but, more than that, the emotional state was mine, and that m
attered more and made the pictures so much more than mere likenesses.
That John had observed me so closely, and seen, in my drooping posture and distraction, the very depths of my despair, moved me beyond words. No matter what his life had been away from me, with me, he had been mine, absorbed in me and empathetic to my mood, and for that I ought to be eternally grateful.
The next few days saw a transformation. I had a bath and washed my hair, something I had not done in many weeks. I washed bedding and curtains, and scrubbed floors, and called in repair men to restore those areas of the house which needed it. I cooked, and told Awan to invite her friends. I called in on Patricia and Ann, and attended WI meetings.
I talked to Awan, one evening, when she was bathed and ready for bed, and sat at my side reading the book she had brought from school. ‘The gatehouse,’ I said, quietly, the smell of her hair in my nostrils, ‘it’s a special place, isn’t it?’
She turned her face to me, a mixture of anxiety and relief in her eyes. ‘It’s your special place, Mummy, but, I’ve been sharing it.’
‘I know,’ I replied, hugging her warm little body to me. ‘I’m glad. Do you know I took you there when you were born?’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, and snuggled closer, pushing the school book off her lap, ‘tell me that story again.’
I thought about John almost all the time; where he might be - my feverish imagination had him cowering in the keel of a boat, lashed by gales, or hovering close to Monique’s bed administering medicine or comfort, or socialising with a gang of heel-clicking Gestapo officers, or tied and beaten in an interrogation cell. Sometimes the images were hugely romanticised - closer to fantasies; he a dark and handsome figure, courageous in the face of the enemy. At others they took on the stuff of nightmares - he was ill and broken, and needed help I was utterly unable to supply. Either way, they reignited a spark which had been dead for a while. I found I was hungry for him, for the smell and touch of the man, and I kept myself in readiness for his return; my hair nicely ordered, my underwear the best I could muster, the bed clean and turned down in preparation for our falling into it in each other’s arms. I cooked his favourite meals, as far as rationing permitted, and kept his favourite cardigan warm near the range.
Few vehicles called at Tall Chimneys these days, and my ear was constantly pricked for the sound of wheels on the gravel but the night he came home there was a lashing squall, and the sound of rain like pebbles on the kitchen window obliterated the noise of the car approaching. It was December. Awan had been long in bed and I had been working on a cardigan I was knitting her for Christmas but it had got late and I was beginning to think about retiring too, banking down the range fire and rinsing a few dishes at the sink. All at once the dog by the door stirred and gave a warning bark. Then the door at the end of the passageway flew open and a cloaked figure entered, bringing with it a howling gust of rain-sodden wind and a flurry of leaves which had accumulated on the outside step. The passageway was unlit, and the figure frightened me, dark, indeterminate and very large, it occupied the whole space and seemed to be fighting with some invisible force. The door was, with difficulty, wrestled shut, and a hand shot out to grope for the light switch. The cloak fell to the floor, revealing John, almost doubled over, soaked through, pale and coughing, a handkerchief clasped to his mouth. And next to him, emerging from the same cloak, almost seeming to be supporting him, my sister, Amelia.
Amelia was pragmatic and brisk, wasting neither time nor words on effusions of delight at meeting a long-lost sister. She helped me get John out of his wet clothes and into bed; he was in a terrible state, shivering but hot to the touch, and his cough seemed to rack his whole body. At last, when he was settled, she declared that she was ‘tired to death’ and took herself upstairs. When I caught up with her she was in Mrs Simpson’s room unpacking her valise.
‘This room isn’t prepared,’ she observed, tersely.
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but it won’t take long for me to make the bed.’
‘Where are the servants?’
‘We only have Rose, who helps me in the house, and her husband who does the outside work. The house is run on a shoe-string; I do most of the work myself.’
‘Good God.’ She crouched by the fire I had hastily lit and stared into its meagre flames while I found sheets and towels which were not too threadbare. ‘And you sleep..?’
‘Downstairs, in the housekeeper’s rooms,’ I informed her, and then, feeling it necessary to establish my claim beyond any misunderstanding, ‘where we put John.’
‘You sleep with John,’ she confirmed, ‘yes, I understand.’
‘I suppose this used to be our mother’s room?’ I said, more by way of filling the awkward silence than because I really wanted to know.
‘No,’ Amelia shook her head. ‘It was kept in perpetual readiness for our Grandmother Harris - Mother’s mother. She liked to arrive unannounced and outstay any lukewarm welcome she might have received, if I recall. We were all terrified of her.’
‘I don’t remember her at all,’ I said.
‘She was dead by the time you were born.’
‘Of course. You’re - what? Seven? Eight years older than me? You were at school by the time I was born, anyway.’
‘You and Colin were both spared her denigrating remarks and endless cataloguing of our failings.’
‘Oh?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, let’s not talk about her now. I just want a hot bath and a decent night’s sleep. Is that too much to ask, after all I’ve endured?’
I ran her a bath and took her tea and toast on a tray while she languished in it, stoking up the fire and turning down the bed on my way out. Any rush of affection I might have hoped for, any meeting of sisterly minds, totally quashed.
For the next few days she kept herself to herself, never getting dressed and coming downstairs only to forage for food in the kitchen once she had established meals would neither be served in the dining room for her, nor carried up to her on trays.
‘I have John to look after,’ I told her, after she had querulously complained about the lack of hospitality, ‘and Awan.’
John was very ill, coughing constantly, feverish and sometimes delirious. The doctor visited daily.
‘The little girl ought to stay elsewhere,’ he frowned. ‘The spores in the sputum are infectious.’
‘She can stay with my neighbour,’ I replied.
‘Surely there is room in the house?’ he questioned. ‘Just so long as she doesn’t come in here.’
I thought about the draughty corridors and comfortless rooms above us. It crossed my mind to suggest she share with Amelia, but my sister had shown scant interest in her niece. At least with Rose and Kenneth I knew Awan would be loved and cossetted even if conditions would be cramped.
‘No,’ I said, ‘she can stay next door.’
I brought John warm soup which I dribbled into his mouth spoonful by spoonful, and cool water which he sucked from the corner of a cloth, and bathed his heated body. In a moment of lucidity I asked him about Monique.
He shook his head. ‘Dead, before I even got there,’ he croaked, through parched lips.
‘Ah,’ I sighed, feeling as though a gremlin which had dogged my back for as long as I could remember had suddenly fallen away, leaving me to stand up straighter. ‘Well,’ I added, and it was the truth, ‘I am sorry. I don’t think she had a happy life.’
‘It was an unpleasant death, I gather,’ John gasped, ‘and she died alone.’
‘God defend any of us from that,’ I said.
I lay on top of the bed and cuddled into his back during the night. It wasn’t the passionate reunion I had envisaged, but I was satisfied. John was home.
After a few days’ recuperation, Amelia appeared downstairs dressed, with her hair washed, and announced she was going to town to buy clothes. ‘The ones I have are unsuitable for this rustic, bohemian existence,’ she said, pouring coffee from a pot on the stove. ‘My sequined cocktail dr
esses will be out of place here, I surmise. I don’t suppose the Vicar holds many soirees?’
‘None whatsoever,’ I confirmed. ‘But you? Even during the war, you’ve been enjoying cocktail parties?’ I was astounded by the idea of such frivolous luxury. Life in Britain had become grim and grey indeed, leached of colour or pleasure; a doleful daily grind. I cast my mind back to the last time I had really enjoyed myself and my memory slammed against its recollection of my day in Scarborough with Cameron Bentley. The idea of shimmering evening dress, cocktails, canapes, the tinkling of a piano, all seemed wildly exotic and also trivial and wasteful. Given my day’s holiday again, I would not spend it at a cocktail party.
‘Indeed. Hob-nobbing with the higher ranking Gestapo officers and members of the Party elite was my raison d’être; they let things slip, you know, when their minds are loosened by Martinis,’ she gave me an unpleasant wink. ‘I make an excellent Martini.’
Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years Page 25
