‘I am.’
‘You’re not, you’re just nodding.’
‘I am listening, and I can see exactly what you mean about the horse. Put like that, it is almost human.’
‘More human than some humans I’ve met. Have some more wine.’
He lifted the bottle.
‘No … I really mustn’t. My head is thumping quite badly.’
He filled his own glass, spilling some on to his left shoe.
‘And,’ he pointed his glass at her, ‘I’ll tell you something else.’
She knew he was waiting for her to say ‘What?’ She said nothing.
‘I’ve painted some winners in my time, but you’re the best. Blote … is … best.’
‘Apart from the cows?’
He looked round the clearing.
‘Yes, of course, apart from the cows.’
They were sitting on the grass not far from the mill. Behind them a peacock strutted. She felt so tired and giddy, and she hardly knew why she asked the next question, it just came out, in a tired and giddy way.
‘Will you be coming roller-skating next Saturday?’
‘Roller-skating? Next Saturday?’
A flicker of fear touched her. Did his blindness affect his balance? Had she offended him again?
‘Do come, please, it’ll be more fun with you.’
‘Probably won’t, it depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘A number of things. For example, who else?’
He suddenly slumped and lay full out on his back, with the bottle crooked in his elbow.
‘Well, Joey and I are.’
‘Sit here.’ He tapped the grass, next to him, looking across at her.
He saw her mouth tighten, her frown caught in an axe of sunlight.
‘I’m quite comfortable, thank you.’
He drank. She heard the gulps go down. If he had to drink surely he could do so less noisily?
‘Fine. That’s all right. Stay where you are. Fine. Do everything with Joey, do you?’
‘Whenever possible. But he goes off on his own more and more.’
‘Does he now? But, deep down, we’re a devoted brother and sister, are we?’
‘You might say so. He doesn’t know anything about me, of course, but yes, we are very devoted. Underneath.’
‘Underneath? Underneath what?’
‘I suspect you know what I mean.’
‘And another thing … How d’you know Joey knows nothing about you?’
She picked at the longer stalks of grass, then very carefully took the heads off some daisies.
‘Boys don’t know much about girls. Girls know considerably more about boys. If you listen and if you watch, as girls have to do, it’s not so very surprising, is it? Look, I can see you’re very tired so I think I’ll draw you lying there, just as you are now, and you can rest.’
‘You’re determined to get your way, aren’t you, to do only what you want?’
‘You don’t have to move at all. Stay exactly where you are. In that position.’
‘Anyway you can’t draw me now, you’ve got a headache.’
‘You paint every morning with a headache, the amount you drink you must have one at least until midday. I have one very rarely.’
‘Women!’ he mumbled.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If you insist on this, I insist on a chair.’
*
He was twisting and turning in his seat, the same seat she had been sitting in earlier. A tense hour passed. She looked him up and down. He looked left, right, at his feet, at the sky. He rubbed his chin. While he twisted and turned she did not move a muscle.
‘Bloody hell, I hate this … I haven’t even shaved.’
‘What’s so difficult about sitting for me?’
‘I don’t want to do it, it’s the last thing I want to do.’
‘I didn’t want to this morning either but then you called.’
‘You weren’t travelling all night.’
‘That’s true. But that’s not the point. You wanted to travel all night.’
‘What is the point, then?’
‘The point is … you’ve never been much good at accepting any kind of discipline.’
‘Oh all right, get on with it. I’ve been here bloody hours already.’
‘I doubt we’ve been here one.’
‘Haven’t done this since art school … must be twelve years or more.’
He settled down a little more.
‘Where was your art school?’
‘Norwich … Evening classes … after a full day’s work. Every night of the week.’
‘You paid for yourself, even then?’
‘With what I earned in the day. Who else was going to pay? For six years I was apprenticed to a printer.’
‘It’s not every day I have an opportunity to draw you … so … would you please put that coloured handkerchief in your pocket?’
‘This one? In the breast pocket?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Like that?’
‘Yes … that’s it, and if you’d look there … as if you choose to look past me … at the mill.’
He ran his hand over his face. She could hear the bristles rasp.
‘Orders, orders … Joey must have had to listen to you a fair bit in his time. I feel sorry for him. Very sorry.’
‘That’s it. Over my shoulder … with your chin up a little. More … up more …’
‘Just because you put on a smock doesn’t make you an artist!’
It was a difficult position to hold and she knew it, but that position precisely expressed his arrogance and power. And his petulance. After looking at him very steadily she resumed drawing in a careful, deliberate way. He could not see her at all.
‘And put your knees together please.’
‘My knees!’
‘No one wants to be looking … there.’
She spoke quietly, as much to herself as to him. She went on:
‘Laura Knight tells me you will be the most famous painter in England. She said that to me twice … in front of Harold, too.’
‘How is Laura? Off with Dolly, is she? Haven’t seen her for a while.’
‘Please don’t move … with your eyes to the left … yes … and knees together. And I believe her. You will be, I can tell. You will be very famous. I cannot imagine there is anyone like you.’
She said this as if she wished to establish a neutral fact. There was no particular admiration in her sentences. When next he spoke he was serious, his voice stone-cold sober.
‘Laura’s more likely to be famous than me. I make more noise, but Laura will be the famous one.’
‘But Laura is a woman.’
‘More or less.’
She laughed, then immediately wished she had not.
‘That was very rude,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t have laughed then. How’s our Harold? Still knitting away in his nightie?’
‘I call round whenever I can. Their house is lovely and cool, and it doesn’t smell of salt water. And they’re always very kind to me. And kindness is important.’
For quite a while only the leaves moved. Her pencil made its defined edge. She looked at him with searching eyes. His chair creaked. She noticed his swollen eyelids. She thought of his blindness, and blushed. No one spoke, until almost slurring with sleep, his voice said:
‘You said, about an hour ago, about Joey, that boys don’t know much about girls. Did you mean men and women too?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Whereas you know so much about men and women, do you?’
She did not answer.
‘Do you?’
She was trying to capture the way his left eyebrow went up and the sharp edge at the corner of his mouth. More than any part of his body the corners of his mouth expressed his irregular moods.
‘Whenever my father and mother entertained at home, I watched people, the way men and wome
n manoeuvred. The way they … circled each other.’
‘And men have said things? Said things to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And done things, no doubt?’ Which made the corners of his mouth go up. She waited until they went down again.
‘Or tried to. Once. Things I’d never allow.’
She saw his swollen eyelids jerk. She made some connecting lines between his eyes and mouth. She did this confidently. Each morning this week, rising early, she had been drawing herself in her bedroom – for an hour or more before Joey got up. She looked hard in the mirror, looking hard at herself as she had never done before, and the more she looked at herself, the stronger her grasp of her features became, the underlying structure, the way her hair fell; and if she moved further back from the mirror, the way her head sat on her shoulders. And further back still, her top half framed, as it were in a picture. Recently she had been taking off her nightdress. At first she looked only at her face, or looked away. Then she looked at herself in a new, open way. Use your eyes, she said to herself. Don’t look away. And what about Dolly? Does Dolly next door look at all like this? At all as I do? Don’t look away. Do all women? Or is it just me?
She looked at his collar and bow tie … and his neck, so red and brown.
‘And as for your … bow tie …’
She mused only to herself, but he picked it up.
‘The wrong colour? Is it?’
‘No, I was going to say it’s perfect for you. Most men look silly in bow ties.’
‘Does your father wear one? I’m trying to picture him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps I’ll meet him soon.’
He felt more relaxed. He eased back in the chair. He was going to ask her if her father looked silly, very tall and very thin and very silly, but he met her eyes and dropped the idea. He was annoyed at her unspoken coerciveness, and at himself for buckling under. Who the hell did this girl think she was! And why the hell was he playing second fiddle to her? To put her in her place he needed some help, and help suddenly came from a surprising source. Just when he was despairing of his next stratagem, Charlotte, his cow, walked heavily into view. Alfred said nothing. Florence could not see it. He waited until the cow was chewing the cud only ten yards or so behind her back then he stood bolt upright and said in a breezy, social voice:
‘I’m so very sorry, do let me introduce you to my favourite model.’
She turned and screamed.
‘So you’ll be coming roller-skating?’ she asked.
‘You know damn well I will.’
‘Why should I know that?’
‘Because you’re going, that’s why.’
She paused and smiled and said she was glad, very glad.
She had decided to forgive him for the cow, he had been silly, that’s all; but he had decided it was time she was further ruffled, high time he brought even more colour to those usually pale cheeks.
‘Have you heard about Gail?’
‘Gail? Is she one of your gypsies who Gilbert told me about?’
‘No, she’s not. Told you about my gypsies, did he?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anyone at all called Gail.’
‘Well there is one. And she’s quite a girl!’
‘Are you pulling my leg? Is Gail your name for the cow?’
He laughed.
‘No … Gail’s quite a girl, but she’s not a cow.
‘There was a young lady called Gail
On whose chest was the price of her tail,
While on her behind,
For the sake of the blind,
Was the same information in Braille.’
And that, coming on top of everything else, was the last straw.
At about the same time as Alfred’s limerick was bringing an end to the sitting, Gilbert was knocking on the door at Oakhill Cottages. He found no one in.
No Florence. No Laura. No Dolly.
Only Harold Knight patiently at work upstairs. Harold opened the window and leant out. His glasses nearly slipped off his beaked nose.
‘Oh, Gilbert,’ Harold said, ‘bad luck all round, I’m afraid.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Munnings is back,’ he called glumly down, then withdrew his head.
Dolly on the Rocks
Each day that week, a week of unbroken sunshine, Laura was down on the rocks with Dolly. These were the big rocks round to the right from Lamorna Cove. When the tide draws out there you’re left with the most wonderful range of natural pools, better pools than any on the West Cornwall coast, deep enough to swim in, as well as providing perfectly flat rocks to picnic on. It was, Laura said to Gilbert, as if God had put them there not only for the marine biologists but also for the Lamorna artists, huge cubes of rock, to sweeten life, to please those who had troubled to find this sheltered place with the light every artist needs.
From early each morning Laura had been painting Dolly, studying the line of her shoulders, the way the light fell on her full breasts, and the soft turn of her arms. Dolly was the most beautiful form Laura had ever seen. She sat on the rock naked and unselfconscious. Laura looked at her shoulder blades and her ribs and the shape of her back. She was a goddess, a Tanagra Greek, a daughter of the sun, and every time she looked at Dolly’s smooth form and tapering legs she was glad she was paying her rent.
Looking back, or looking out to the Lizard, it was infuriating for Laura to realise how many wasted years it had taken her to find the confidence to paint a nude even indoors, let alone out of doors, out here in the open air on the rocks by Carn Barges. What was it about the naked body? Was one more real or less real when unclothed? By the time she was twenty Laura had drawn plenty of art school statues, but sooner or later she had to work from life. (Sooner or later, as she complained to Harold, Discobulus had to throw his disc.) Well, now, here, at long last, on the rocks near Lamorna and looking out to the Lizard, she was.
‘Are you all right, Dolly?’
‘Me? Yes.’
‘Still comfortable?’
‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘You wouldn’t like another rug underneath?’
‘No, this is the life.’
Laura smiled at Dolly’s London accent, and her satisfied sighs.
‘Tell me when you’re hungry, won’t you?’
‘No, got me apples, don’t mind me.’
But Laura did mind about her models, especially Dolly.
‘Are you enjoying it down here with us? You’re not too bored?’
‘Best day’s work I ever did, coming down here.’
‘Could you move your right knee a little … outwards.’
Effortlessly Dolly did.
‘Like that?’
‘Lovely. How long can you stay?’
‘Till Christmas, if you like.’
‘No … today, I mean.’
‘Till four … I’m meeting someone at four.’
‘Oh good, I’m glad you’re making friends. Very glad.’
‘So am I.’
It wasn’t as if Laura had a priggish upbringing like Florence. (How strange it was, she thought, how very strange, to have Florence Carter-Wood, all la-di-da and top drawer, living on one side, and Dolly on the other.) As for herself, Laura had felt the pinch, she’d seen plenty of deaths, they spoke freely as a family, but for years she simply lacked the insight, she now realised, to grasp that the best subjects were always right there under your nose. Take her sister, Eva. If a sense of propriety had not interfered Laura would have painted Sis taking her bath in the round tin in front of the fire, right there in their Nottingham kitchen, her cuddly little form topped by a head of golden hair (the same gold as Dolly’s). But propriety did interfere. It often did. In Harold’s family, for example, propriety had a stranglehold, as strong a one (she was willing to bet) as it did in the Carter-Wood family. How many lives, Laura wondered, were chilled to the bone by civility, stunted and darkened prematurely by propriety? As many, she was pre
pared to believe, as there were Cornish trees bent double by the prevailing wind.
Eventually Laura did draw her first nude indoors, a male, surprisingly: Jack Price he was called, a blind young man with a fine body who modelled at the Nottingham Art School. At first she was afraid to look at him, choosing a position from which she could not see his penis. But when his hourly rest became due he would often turn round in her direction, his face tilted up, his hand stretched out and ask for ‘Laura’ to come and help him down from his model’s throne. He could, she felt, just as easily have asked Harold or one of the other life class students, but he didn’t, he always made a point of asking for ‘Laura’. And before he did step down he also asked her to mark with a piece of chalk the position of his feet so that after his rest he could resume the exact pose. With the piece of chalk in her hand, and her face quite close to his private parts, she blushed and drew the marks. It was a terrible ordeal.
Anyway, Harold (who, by way of contrast, had never shown his penis much) had raised no objection to the undressed developments with Dolly as long as he was allowed to pursue his own work at his own pace upstairs in his own studio. Harold even enjoyed the bizarre conversations he had with the Bermondsey girl. Dolly, believe it or not, did not have the least idea before she arrived in Lamorna what a cow looked like, and she thought cabbages grew on trees.
After a few nights’ proper sleep and a few long walks with Florence, Alfred was back on top form. He told everyone in The Wink about his cow and his time with the gypsies and he galloped around the area on Grey Tick, rustling up friends for his next party, and high on his list was his good friend, his very good friend, Gilbert Evans. But Gilbert was not over at Boskenna, he was up at the new building site on the cliff above the cove, so Alfred rode back across Rosemodress, keeping the ocean and the coastal path to his right, shouting out loud with the exhilaration and the joy of it all, whooping and roaring across Rosemodress, as mad as they come.
About half a mile from Cam Barges he slowed his horse. He could see two women walking along the path side by side, and walking towards him with a determined stride. There was a sense of mission in their manner, unusual in Cornwall, especially on so hot a day. If ever there was one, this was a day for a gentle stroll, a picnic on the rocks, a doze in the sun. He stopped.
Summer in February Page 15
