Felicity rolled over and lay next to him. ‘Maybe you will,’ she said. ‘Anything can happen.’
Michael propped himself up to look at her. He kissed her nose, touched that she hadn’t laughed away his thought. He knew he wouldn’t really paint her, but he would always dream about it. The truth was, he didn’t want to make art, he wanted to enjoy beauty. Felicity’s beauty. This sense was new to him, but nothing he experienced with Felicity was like anything he had ever known.
‘Come on, it’s getting late. We should go home now. This sketchbook is finished, and I’ve got something I started drawing in the shop this morning I want to look at when we get home. What about you?’
Michael opened an eye, squinting through his lashes at her. She had a splash of ink shaped like a tiny butterfly on her forearm and another on her knee. Her thin dress, sprinkled with yellow flowers looked like part of the hillside.
‘You belong here, don’t you?’ He sat up, blinking. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been up here, but it had been a while.
Felicity jumped up from the grass, shaking herself. ‘There are elf kings in Cornwall, you know,’ she said, reaching to pull him up too. ‘They live in the tin mines and have castles and kingdoms but humans can’t see them. I belong with them. I’m going to put a spell on you one day, you wait and see, so you’ll never want to leave.’
Michael laughed, ‘You’ve already done that.’
Felicity didn’t hear, she was running down the hill towards town.
In the weeks that followed, Michael found that he was happier than he had ever imagined he could be. He and Arthur finished building the screen-printing table and whitewashed the studio over three intense days where electric storms alternated with sultry sunshine. The air smelled of sawdust and wet paint when it didn’t smell of damp, and any silence in that time rang with the thwack of hammers or the drum of raindrops on the roof.
When Michael swept the last of the wood shavings out of the studio, Felicity announced she was closing the bookshop for good. ‘If I don’t do it properly, I’ll never know if it could have worked. What d’you think?’ She was sitting on the new padded screen-printing table, swinging her bare legs and eating an apple. Pots of mixed dye stood in a row by the open door, and the studio danced with sunbeams and an air of anticipation.
‘It’s what I hoped.’ Michael pulled a fleck of wood shaving from her hair, and she caught his hand between hers. Her skin was warm, she vibrated with life and energy. ‘You can’t be shut up in a bookshop all your life.’
She jumped down, pulling sketches off a shelf. ‘I know what I’m going to do. It’s this.’ She waved a piece of board at him. ‘Starting with three designs in four colourways. Look, here they are, Michael, I’ve got no excuse.’
He knew he was avoiding his own life again, for another slice of time, when he answered, ‘I love them. I’ve got an idea. Let me sort out the bookshop for you while you keep this work up. I’ll get them all catalogued for you to sell.’
Felicity threw the apple core into the flowerbed outside and began to select brushes from the earthenware pots on the windowsill.
‘Maybe,’ she said dreamily, but she wasn’t really listening. Humming, she bent to sift through a wooden box full of paint tubes on the floor.
Everything was in its place. The paintbrushes were next to a pot of paint-covered palette knives, and Felicity had picked a scratchy bunch of sea lavender sprigs and plonked them in a third. She moved across the studio, picking things up, arranging them, making the space her own. She reminded him of a swallow, swooping back and forth to the eaves of the house as to build a nest. Finally she piled a collection of white stones and a sea-bleached seal skull she and Michael had found on the beach. It had smelled of fish. Michael tried to discourage her from picking it up, but Felicity pretended not to notice. It was her favourite technique, he had begun to realise, for getting her own way. Now the ivory gleam of bone in the sunlight and the blue-grey shadow of sockets and hollows sat on the shelf, scrubbed clean by a summer outside, smelling of nothing.
He liked things that didn’t smell of anything, they had no memories attached to them. The war had smelled of mud and rubble and death. Michael sometimes evoked a fragment of it in his thoughts or his nightmares, where it emerged cloying and chilly like a damp corner, generally hidden but not forgotten. Mousehole, by contrast, was breezy, and the air smelled of fish and sea and flowers, zest and hope. It smelled of safety. He loved the aroma of newly cooked bread in the mornings when, just after dawn, he passed the bakery on his way to work, his senses still suffused with the lingering intimacy of Felicity’s scent when he had kissed her goodbye in their bedroom. The pub smell in the evenings when he and Felicity bicycled to Newlyn to meet some friends was exciting, run through with sawdust and yeasty hops, the lush whiff of a woman’s perfume, a snatch of tobacco smoke in the air as a cigarette flared against the sulphurous spark of a match.
It was an easy habit, formed through the summer, and Michael liked the fact that he and Felicity fitted without effort into the group that met up in the Swordfish. A few pints of beer, a game of darts or backgammon and people to talk to. In the pub, everyone had a story. For some, it was of a past they couldn’t yet lay to rest. Paul Spencer had flown Hawker Hurricanes in the Western Desert during the war. His passion for flying blazed as strong as his art through his talk. Another painter, Kit Barker, leaned at the bar, a black eyepatch giving the air of a pirate to a man who, as a conscientious objector, had driven ambulances through Belgium during the war. Listening, discussing and tentatively putting forward his own thoughts, Michael found himself more in harmony with these people he was meeting and befriending than he had ever expected to feel again. Across the room, Felicity was at a table with Paul’s wife Sheila. Their heads together, laughing. He loved Felicity to be happy, and he smiled and raised a silent toast to her before turning to take his turn at the dartboard.
Sometimes, in a quiet moment, he wondered how long he could continue living in this way. In his heart he knew that no matter how much he talked and laughed and bear-hugged his new friends, he was not one of them, he did not belong here, and his usefulness was limited. People came and went, it was the nature of the artists’ colony, but Michael could see how they worked together, potters and sculptors exchanging equipment, collaborating with one another, writers, printmakers, painters, falling in love, setting up house, making art, creating exhibitions and bringing up children. No one had much money but, to Michael’s mind, they all had a future he didn’t share. How many studios and picture frames could he build? He was neither an artist, nor a skilled craftsman like Arthur. He was enjoying it, but it couldn’t last indefinitely. He thought of home with a jolt one evening, when a chance remark revealed that some of the St Ives artists had spent time in Norfolk one summer before the war. A connection he hadn’t anticipated, breaching the distance from home to here in an instant. He swallowed a whisky chaser after his beer, swilling the liquor to try and lose the metallic taste of guilt.
It was a Thursday evening in September. Michael had harvested a crop of asters, and decided he didn’t much care for them. The pink and purple petals seemed lurid to him, the centre of each flower an offensive egg-yolk yellow. He laughed at himself. Here he was, a soldier back from war, the epitome of stalwart masculinity, fussing around with bunches of flowers. He took the asters to Penzance station, boxed and piled for the London train. Having passed them over to the stationmaster, he walked into the pub across the road from the station in search of Arthur, who had said he would like a lift home. He found him, sleeves rolled up, a pint of Guinness in front of him, with the newspaper. Arthur had been making wooden plinths for sculptors in St Ives, and he drank his beer with the air of someone who had earned every drop of it.
‘Blast me!’ he said when he saw Michael, his top lip decorated with creamy foam, ‘Some of those women artists are hard work.’ He rolled a cigarette and lit it, drawing deeply. ‘Had to make a sodding great stage for their bronzes,
and then they were all shouting about how wrong it was that there had to be steps. But if they want to get up to them, they had to have steps. One of them walks with a stick, for God’s sake, she can’t just spring up on to a stage.’ He ground his cigarette under his boot. ‘I left them arguing about it. Reckon it’ll all be forgotten next time I go back over there. S’always the same with those sculptresses.’
Michael nodded, ‘Seems that making art is a lot more complicated than I thought. Felicity doesn’t get angry, but it’s as though a curtain falls and she disappears. She forgets everything when she’s working.’
Arthur nudged him. ‘Neglected are you? Let’s head for the pub back in Mousehole and we’ll catch up with some of my buddies. We’re finalising the team for the cricket match against St Erth, d’you reckon you’d be up for playing?’
‘For sure, you can count on me,’ said Michael, flushing, happy to be included. This was what he was missing. Friendships, cricket, a life in common. It would be there at home in Norfolk, it was everywhere that families lived, children grew up and people went out into the world. And came back.
The thing about Felicity was that she didn’t talk about practicalities or plans, she wasn’t interested. She just wanted to mix dye and make patterns. She was absorbed, and he knew her well enough now to understand that she was happy whether he was there or not. Her work was what drove her. She was working until dark every night, and the designs were becoming more intricate and beautiful. Themed around the sea, she had made flowing patterns of seahorses and cockle shells, birds and fish, sometimes closely detailed, some more abstract, all dancing on paper and fabric that she hung around the studio. Michael was sure she would sell them if she wanted to. She sidestepped any conversation about the future, or even the present, if it was about their relationship. He liked it like that. She didn’t scrutinise his motives, she didn’t cross-examine him. She was, as she teased him, from another world and the lack of demands from her were helping him heal his confused and anguished memories.
The working day in Mousehole was over, shop windows were being shuttered as side doors opened and families spilled on to the street. Here a woman sweeping a step, there a child pulling a wooden dog ran across the cobbled street. Michael breathed a deep sigh. The salty seaweed air in his nostrils tingled with exhilaration. Arthur was sunburned, his sleeves rolled up above arms that showed the strength his legs might have had. He rolled a cigarette and passed his tin to Michael. ‘You’ll be taking Felicity to the summer barn dance on Saturday?’
Michael looked up quickly. ‘Yes, of course. Yes, we’re going to the dance. Are you?’
Arthur sighed. ‘Hmph. That’s something. Me? Got no one to take. Got no missus, have I?’ He stood up and crossed the road to the quay. The fishermen had lifted everything that was coming off their boat into a small tender and were landing alongside the harbour wall. Arthur called to the younger one of them, and reached a hand for the rope.
‘Hey, Diccon, you got much of a catch today?’
‘Nothing to make a song and dance of, that’s for sure.’ Diccon had curly black hair and a red face, even redder than usual now after a day at sea. ‘What’s the plan for Saturday? You umpiring?’
Arthur grunted affirmation, the fisherman nodded back. ‘Tide’s in the morning, so I should be back for the second half if you need me?’
‘Come on, Diccon, we’ll never be home for tea if you keep us talking,’ the older man threw rope in a coil into the hull of the boat.
Michael shivered. The sea was swallowing the orange orb of the sun, and long shadows hung like cloaks on the hills above the village. He stood up stiffly, and took the empty glasses into the bar. Arthur had gone with the fishermen, hadn’t said goodbye, just wandered down the village street. He could see him now at the far end of the harbour, talking to Diccon and his brother outside a white painted cottage where they were spreading their net across the garden wall. He waved. Arthur waved back. It was time for him to go and talk to Felicity.
She wasn’t in the house or the studio. Michael stood in the room he’d made and looked around, his hands in his pockets, relishing the white light bouncing around him, the cat curled tight like an anemone on a cushion by the stove, and a spray of buddleia arching a silver green leaf towards the mauve spearhead in a jam jar on the windowsill. There was a smell of paint, and an acrid aroma of rubber, and on the table, daubed painted marks were building up a patina of colour on the worktop so the studio already had an atmosphere of industry. From where he stood he could see Felicity in the garden, hanging flapping bits of fabric on the washing line. Strung between the walnut tree and a post Michael had slammed into the ground with a mallet, the washing was not domestic. The swooping clothes line resembled a canopy from a medieval painting, hung with celebratory flags becoming bolder and more beautiful the more Felicity pegged out the fluttering squares of madder rose and indigo cotton she had made.
She secured the last one and turned to Michael. ‘Look, these are almost finished I think. I tried a new technique today and it worked!’ She came towards him for a kiss. He noticed her hair was held up by a small spear-like paintbrush.
‘Looks ready for a couple of knights to do some jousting,’ he joked.
‘Jousting?’ Confused, Felicity spun round. Michael pulled the brush out and her hair tumbled down her back with a swish that sent a shiver through him.
He waved the brush. ‘Yeah, you know, banners, this little miniature lance, colour, music, pageantry. It’s exciting.’
‘I’m your lady fair,’ Felicity danced a few steps and curtseyed to him, then rose and snaked her arm around his neck, ‘and you’re my valiant knight,’ she whispered.
Music curled out of the studio behind him, the click of the gramophone needle like a beat in time with the floating jazz hanging in the air. Michael wanted the moment printed on to his memory like one of Felicity’s linocuts. He needed it etched and pressed and stamped safe in his mind, where it would never fade, but would shape itself to fit him wherever he was and who ever he became, close to his heart, for ever. His pulse flew. He should have told her before. The beat of adrenalin opened a throttle, the muscles in his neck knotted, and he swallowed, pressing his lips to the top of Felicity’s head, touching the soft fragrant mass of her hair.
This was nothing like the bombast of war, nothing here to haunt him, and yet this anxiety was grimly familiar, tightening inside him, stringing his nerves like banjo wires, and unleashing his blood so it fizzed and pounded through his veins. He hadn’t realised how far he had moved from this old lurching pattern of fear and anticipation. Felicity had saved him, he could never forget that, and he was about to hurt her. His throat was dry, he wished he’d drunk more in the pub with Arthur. Brandy would have done the trick.
‘What’s the matter?’ Her face was lustrous, happiness chased in the delicate lines of her smile. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Her hands were covered in ink. As usual. She leaned on him lightly, her chin on his shoulder, and rubbed her finger along the buckle of his belt. ‘Verity came up today with a pie she baked, so lucky, as I don’t know what we would have eaten otherwise, I’ve been lost in this all day.’
Michael pulled her against him, pressing his face in her neck, shuffling to be closer, her hip hard against him, her body fitting his like a glove. It was time. It wasn’t the right time, but it was time. ‘There’s something I should have told you, Felicity.’
She pulled away, arching her back to see his face, keeping close.
She smiled. ‘You look so anxious, darling, please don’t worry,’ she cupped his face in her blue-stained hands. ‘It’s funny you should say that, you know,’ she was whispering, her lips close to his ear, ‘because there’s something I should have told you too.’
Chapter 9
‘What the hell?’ Kit braked hard. He didn’t need roadkill on his conscience. A moorhen and her three chicks, black like ink blots, legs a red blur, dashed along the white line in the middle of the road before swerv
ing into the undergrowth. He watched the leaves quiver and close behind her then a movement shimmered between the trees and he noticed cricketers spread in front of a rickety pavilion, and a mown pitch. He’d always liked the thought of village cricket, but he’d never got round to joining a team. Travel, work, running in circles just to keep up with life. It didn’t matter what the excuses were, he’d always been too busy, too keen on going it alone. Ironic, considering how much of his business was about building the team spirit. Hannah, his PA, never stopped arranging trips and bonding experiences for the employees of Lighthouse Fabrics. And here he was, by chance, at a Norfolk cricket match. Was this another epiphany? Why not? He’d stop and watch the game for a bit. Where was the harm?
Parking in a hedge opening, he wandered through to the cricket ground in time to see a wicket fall. The stumps flew and a beefy batsman trundled back to the pavilion, red-faced, hair flattened to his forehead under his helmet, the fractured smile of defeat shiny beneath a film of sweat. The next man walked out on to the pitch, clapping a friendly hand on the shoulder of his teammate. They nodded as they passed one another.
Kit had always subscribed to the belief that self-sufficiency was the ideal, but life had become solitary. He pulled a toothpick from a row of them clamped like a pointed fence in a cardboard packet and bit down. The cinnamon taste spread reassuringly, and he sauntered towards a cluster of people standing near the old shed. Sorry, make that the pavilion. Until coming to Norfolk to get to grips with his lighthouse, he’d been subconsciously shedding stuff. Possessions, even people. No girlfriend. Sure, there had been the odd date, an occasional weekend, but no one serious enough to introduce to his friends. He’d thought he didn’t want that intimacy. Couldn’t be bothered with it. He had felt comfortably selfish, securing himself, after Felicity had died, in a world where he called the shots and he knew the way.
From a Distance Page 16
