The clock on the mantelpiece ticked the minutes away. He was expected at work, he had to leave. Felicity came down to wave him off, clattering plates in the sink, flinging open the back door to let the cat out, stoking the kitchen stove, the room warming up as activity rubbed out the chill of night. Michael took the winding road out of Mousehole to Newlyn and the last day on the building work there. He looked back, he could see the lamp in Felicity’s studio, high above him on the hillside, its glow flickering like the broken beam of a lighthouse.
Felicity was obsessed with her work. Michael knew that without him returning to her in the evenings, she would never tear herself away, and would forget to eat or sleep. She loved the workshop Michael had built for her at home, and she didn’t want to leave it. Michael saw it as cramped and isolated, and wanted her to show her talent to the world, by joining the other artists who were flooding into the region. After much cajoling on his part, she agreed to take a space at the newly built Newlyn Studios. Today she would make her last work at home. Her fabrics had begun to swamp the old sail shed over the months, and already orders for her printed cottons and silk were steady. Felicity needed printing tables and space.
A letter lay on the desk in their sitting room from Liberty’s of London. A journalist from Vogue had come to St Ives to interview the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and had admired the scarf she was wearing. Felicity had screamed with delight when she opened the letter, and twirled with it around the house, with Michael laughing too, though wondering why.
The buyer had seen the scarf in the article, and on the strength of that scrap of fabric, she wanted to come and see Felicity’s work. Would the fourth of January be convenient? Felicity was five months pregnant and fired with energy. She’d already sold her first designs to a department store in Bristol, after an old schoolfriend Annie Preen had put two scarves in the window of her family’s haberdashery shop in Penzance. The rose madder silk with grey seahorses dancing on sliced, abstract waves, was arresting even behind the yellowing cellophane covering the window display in Preen’s. They had been there for a morning when Christina Bishop, wife of the proprietor of the West Country’s leading department store, walked past and stopped in her tracks. She was, she later explained, intrigued by the bold colour and abstract shapes in Felicity’s work. The fabrics were sophisticated and modern, unlike anything else, and they stood out like priceless gemstones in a toy crown.
Mrs Bishop took both the scarves and left her card for Felicity.
‘She hung around me while I took the scarf off the mannequin you know,’ Annie had told Felicity. ‘It was like she thought I’d hide it or something. She said they’d be ordering more of your designs for their shops, and that we’d done well to get you. She reckons you’re commercial and classy.’ Annie made a face and giggled, but admitted she was impressed, most clothing sat around in the shop, most customers hummed and hah’ed, and changed their minds, Felicity had done well. Felicity laughed, inclined to brush it off as Mrs Bishop’s whim, but Annie was right. Three weeks later, Felicity sold ten scarves in each of her six first designs to Bishop & Steel’s in Bristol.
Michael had no experience of anything relating to the process involved in screen-printing, let alone running a fashion fabric business, and he found Felicity’s fearlessness exhilarating. Felicity sold the stock from the bookshop as a job lot to a friend of her father’s, and used the money to buy printing inks and silk. The newspapers were full of articles about the post-war art movement, and Cornwall, in particular St Ives, was at its heart. The circle of friends that Michael found himself in through Felicity included ceramicists, sculptors, glassblowers, printmakers and textile designers. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Felicity was committed to working as a commercial artist. ‘I don’t just want to make things, I want people to want them,’ she had told the Lizard Peninsula Herald when they interviewed her about closing Delaware’s bookshop to open Delaware’s Textiles.
Michael loved her determination, and her application. With the money she earned, she bought more cloth and hired an assistant, Molly, to work with her. Michael asked the local bank manager for advice. Felicity appeared to ignore him when he told her, but in fact she was shrewd. Delaware’s Textiles began to flourish. Sketches of shells, seahorses, fish and gulls, more fish, starfish, boats and nets, feathers and pebbles and the crashing waves against the rocks covered her studio. Felicity blocked colours in ink around the drawings, stuck leaves, scraps of paper or fabric, flowers, chips of pottery, stones, anything she could find to bring the palette she wanted together.
Michael thought he loved her most when he saw her in the studio, moving back and forth, lost in concentration, a pencil twisted to hold up her hair, her head on one side as she worked, turning the tones and shapes of her world into her palette. Stone and lichen, gorse yellow, rose quartz pink, bruised mauve and greys and greens as soft and changeable as the clouds and sea. The colours caught her imagination, and Michael grew used to small piles of stones, squares of fabric and swatch after swatch of vibrant silk marking Felicity’s progress around the house.
The next stage though was more practical. Each colour on the cloth took two days to fix. The garden and the studio became like a medieval apothecary’s shop, with cauldrons of dye, tins of pigment and stirring sticks steeped in colour like a rainbow of magic wands. The screen-printing tables filled the room, and Michael felt that he had stepped through time and become a medieval craftsman as he poured dye into frames and raked the colour across the silk before sliding it, like a cake heading for the oven, into a rack in the dark room. The dark room was an old potting shed Michael had adapted in an afternoon.
There was nowhere to put anything, so raw fabric, delivered in bolts, was shunted like a group of formal visitors into the drawing room and left there. Tall cylinders of silk in stands, the exotic visitors stood close together as if in secret conversation. One group, led by a stout bolster of bold cherry red, tipped over one morning, startling the cat so he ran up the curtains and knocked two pictures off the wall. Felicity conceded that it was time to move.
The Newlyn Studios, housed in a largely derelict mill whose last use had been making uniforms in the war, was perfect. Michael even managed to salvage the cloth-cutting tables. There were outbuildings she could expand further into, and there was practical help and chat and advice, both sought and unwanted, from the rest of the artists. As Michael unlocked the space the morning before her move, he knew he had just one final touch to make: his Christmas present for her. He began to draw.
Christmas Day was soft and grey. There had been snow the night before, and it lay in mauve ripples along the hedgerows and as an apron on the lawn. The sky was full, dropping erratic flurries from clouds that bulged like over-stuffed pillows tumbling off a bed. Lighting the fire in the sitting room after a walk to the church, Michel crouched, staring into the flames. It had taken easily, the coals from the evening before still glowed orange beneath a layer of ash. He and Felicity loved fires. Coal was scarce, but Michael always had a sack of wood off-cuts and handfuls of shavings from his work, and they lit a fire any time they sat down in their house. He felt a twinge of disloyalty for his parents’ home, the cold black hearth at Green Farm House. In his childhood, Christmas Day was the only time in the whole year that a fire was lit before lunchtime. He wondered what was happening there this Christmas, but the thought was too painful to sustain and he rubbed it away with a hand across his eyes.
He leaned into the crackling heat, pushing a small log into its heart. The roar in the chimney, the faint whiff of sap burning, stirred him. He could taste childhood excitement and smell the sweet exotic scent of the orange he and Johnnie always had in their stockings. An orange, some marbles and a stick of striped candy cane. Memories of childhood. Building a marble run in the seams of the eiderdown on Johnnie’s bed, blowing the whistle so it shrieked their parents awake and the heap of laughter that he and Johnnie subsided into. Michael didn’t move. The fire held him, he fancied he could see all of
time in its heart.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower.
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and Eternity in an hour.
How many times had Blake’s lines, learned dutifully at school, come back to him? How many more times in his life would they do so? What lay ahead of him? The revelation he thought he was waiting for had not come. The answers continued to elude him, as more questions formed. Was this how it would be now? Forever?
At the beginning of December, he’d read in the newspaper that families faced terrible difficulties in trying to trace relatives missing overseas. Whitehall was besieged with requests to find sons, sweethearts, husbands, soldiers who’d vanished. The backlog had hardly moved, wrote the journalist, since peace had been declared. Michael burned the paper before he finished reading it. Guilt rattled through him, left his throat dry, empty as an old can. Sadness knocked insistently at his conscience. He mourned his mother. In his mind’s eye he saw her waiting, hoping. His parents would have another Christmas of sadness and uncertainty. He was not a father yet, but for his child to disappear without a word would, he already knew be an act of unbearable cruelty to Felicity. For himself, he thought it would be no more than he deserved.
He wrote again, this time a Christmas card. ‘Mum and Dad, dearest Mum and Dad, I’m getting well. I love you, and I’m sorry not to see you for Christmas. I will see you soon again. As soon as I can. Your loving son.’
He was not ready to be traced to Cornwall, but he could no longer hide. Sorrow, suspended, like an instrument of torture, hung around the women queuing at the War Office, years of waiting drawn into set expressions of endurance. He couldn’t go back yet. It wasn’t time, although every day, in small but palpable ways, he felt the repairs to his shattered self growing, the holes in his second skin shrinking.
He dreamed of violence less frequently now. He no longer saw the broken bodies of his comrades, or heard the deafening sounds of battle in his sleep. On Christmas Eve, he dreamed about Johnnie for the first time. Johnnie had walked towards him from the sea. He wanted Michael to tell their mother and father.
‘Please tell them you saw me. Tell Mum and Dad to start again. This is how it is now. Tell them I’m at peace.’
Michael had woken with tears on his face, the sheets wound round him like a shroud.
Felicity touched his shoulder. He hadn’t heard her come in. In the shadows of the unlit room on the still morning of Christmas Day, her cheeks were flushed, her sleeves pushed up to show her smooth, pale arms, her olive skin faded by the winter light. Michael didn’t need to touch her to know she was glowing with warmth, but he wanted to.
‘Hot?’ He watched as she opened the small window.
She smiled back at him, fanning herself. ‘You call this winter, I call this baking. I’m hardly wearing anything.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Michael. ‘Sounds sexy.’
She laughed. ‘Silly. I’m pregnant not sexy.’
‘You’re pregnant and sexy,’ he insisted.
‘Come and look at Christmas on the sea,’ she beckoned him to the window, and the pearl-grey winter sea with snowflakes billowing across the bay.
Since her pregnancy, Felicity had become the most efficient self-heating system, and warmth followed her everywhere. She rarely needed a coat, which as she pointed out, was just as well. Nothing buttoned up over the bump of the baby. Michael gave her his huge fisherman’s jumper, and she wore it on top of all her clothes. It was her outer layer for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and she’d put it on again this morning to walk with Michael back to the church.
They laid black hellebores by the wooden cross for her brother Christopher. ‘And for Johnnie too,’ Felicity had squeezed his hand as they knelt beside Christopher’s memorial.
They laid white ones on her parents’ grave. ‘It’s called the Christmas Rose,’ Felicity placed them in a small blue jug, squat against the grey of the slate headstone. ‘It was my mother’s favourite winter flower. I never liked it much until I decided to draw it, and now I see the point of it.’
Michael looked at the graves, some adorned with fresh flowers for Christmas, but more were bare. He saw a robin land on a bush by the wall, its tiny weight bouncing the twig. Michael shivered, confused. He pulled Felicity up to her feet. ‘Come on, let’s go home,’ he said. ‘We need to put some breadcrumbs out for the birds,’
‘The birds now! You’ve been over taken by the Christmas spirit,’ teased Felicity. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever noticed the birds before, have you?’
Now, from the window, he watched seagulls soar on the chill December air.
Behind him, Felicity took a record out of a paper sleeve and placed it on the gramophone. ‘Listen. This is something I love. It’s by Thomas Tallis. It’s called Spem in alium.’
He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘I thought aliums were onions?’
‘They are, but not this time, listen. Shhh!’
A single silver voice began to sing. In a rush, Michael stood up from the fire, startled. Even though he knew it was a recording, it surprised him. The voice was immediate, intimate as though someone was singing there alive in the room with them. More voices. A choir soaring. The sound inside Michael’s head felt bigger than the space available. He felt he might burst. His thoughts crowded in on silver sound as it swelled. All the losses he had known were here, present with him. In this moment, he knew they would remain with him as long as he lived. Time would close the wounds, but the loss of lives, his brother, of loves and beliefs, the hopes and dreams of a generation, and ultimately his own lost self, had caused scars he would always bear.
Across the room Felicity’s red dress became a blur. The music was overwhelming, insistent in a way Michael had never experienced before. He thought he could drown in it, never come back. Felicity saw his tears before he felt them, and crossed the room to him. Her strength radiated through him, and her arms and warmth enveloped him. Michael thought that they could be one entity with the warm beating heart of the baby safe at their centre.
‘I love you, Felicity, I love you. I’ll never forget you.’ he whispered into her hair.
They sat on the sofa, no gap between them.
Felicity replaced the magnificent sorrow of the choral music with by the liquid sound of jazz saxophone, and honeyed notes flowed in and out of Michael’s thoughts, smoothing every jagged nerve. She had a blue silk pouch in her hand. ‘Here’s your Christmas present.’ She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her eyes bright with excitement. He looked at the pouch, at her, back at it again. He wished he could paint. He wanted to remember her as she was at that moment, beautiful and strong. He untied the cord, excited like a child again, he hadn’t expected this. Whatever it was. The moment felt solemn, limitless. He reached slowly into the small silk pocket without taking his eyes off Felicity, and brought out a silver watch. Heavy, but with delicate hands, a worn leather strap, the silver buckle tarnished a little and the glass on the face scratched. A watch that had been worn and loved.
The inscription on the back read: ‘CWD. Time will run back and fetch the age of gold. TWD’
‘It was Christopher’s. It’s Milton. I mean the words are. My father loved Milton. The watch was his present to Christopher on his eighteenth birthday.’ Felicity turned the watch over on her palm. ‘They brought it home when he died.’
Michael stroked her hair, ‘I can’t accept it. You mustn’t give me this. It’s not for me to take. You’ll regret it. You should keep it to protect yourself. You and the baby, I mean.’
He hated himself for bringing a shadow to hover above them, like a bird of prey biding its time.
Felicity shook her head, ‘No, I’ve thought about it. I want you to have it. You sold your watch when you came to Cornwall. This is something from Cornwall for you to have wherever you may find yourself. No matter what.’ Her conviction was like a shield, her cheeks pink. ‘It should be part of someone’s life, not
sitting in a drawer in my bedroom. Please.’
She was irresistible. He wondered if this was how every man felt who had ever loved a woman. Surely not. Michael had the sense that this was unique. He couldn’t imagine his father feeling like this about his mother, or Esther and Reg in The Ship. How did anyone ever experience love though? And then again, how did they not?
Felicity threw him a mischievous look, and held the watch to his ear. ‘Listen! It’s ticking like a heartbeat. Like the baby.’ She put his hand on the drum of her stomach, and he felt the flickering movement within. ‘The baby’s in time with it. Punctual already, like you, like a soldier. I expect he or she will be born exactly on time.’
‘Not if she, or he, is anything like you,’ teased Michael.
Felicity put her finger on his lips, and turned his face to hers. ‘I want you to have this because I want you to remember us with every passing moment.’ Her sadness was delicate and solemn as a wedding veil between them.
He read the inscription again. ‘Time will run back and fetch the age of gold.’ He cupped her face in his hands. ‘Our age of gold,’ he repeated.
He handed her a flat package, the wrapping colourful and intricately drawn.
‘Here’s yours.’ He got up and walked around the room, shy. He hadn’t known how much he wanted her to like it until it was in her hands.
From a Distance Page 21
