Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  Whatever the reasons, Sam had felt remote from his sister. Protective, yes, where other people, who might threaten her, were concerned, but not lovingly close. It didn’t aid intimacy that Lucasta was a self-contaíned child, quiet, shy, whereas he and Tom were boisterous and sociable. Often, when his friends came, Sam was embarrassed at Lucasta’s attitude to them – she wasn’t friendly, she watched them from round corners and looked blank when direct overtures were made. She wasn’t pretty, either. He and Tom had inherited their mother’s dark good looks, and were strongly built like their father, but Lucasta, up to the age of twelve or so, was thin, with a pale, waif-like face, wispy fair hair, and grey, catlike eyes that were disconcerting. They never seemed to blink. She would stare and stare, holding any returning stare until it was the other person who blinked. The truth was, that from a very early age Lucasta made people feel uncomfortable and this made her brothers nervous; they felt they had to apologise for her. But their mother took pride in her daughter’s qualities, constantly admiring her reserve, her habit of weighing everything up before committing herself. It had made Sam jealous. Once he was grown-up, it was obvious that jealousy lay at the root of his far from satisfactory relationship with his sister – a jealousy that had begun with her birth (‘At last,’ his mother had said, ‘a girl!’), continued through her delicate early childhood, when she’d been the focus of so much attention, and finally become pretty unbearable when it turned out that Lucasta had inherited the talents of both parents. Neither he nor Tom could draw or paint, they had no artistic leanings whatsoever. Sam was athletic, excelling at sport and wanting only some future where he could earn a living by his physical prowess, and Tom, who was clever and had a mechanical aptitude, wanted to be an engineer.

  When the news of his mother’s death finally reached him, Sam told no one. He couldn’t quite take it in, though the message was clear enough and had been delivered with sympathy. There was a camp cinema, and for the Christmas and New Year period it was showing All Quiet on the Western Front. He sat through it twice, repeating to himself the words ‘Sorry to have to tell you …’ over and over, out loud. Then he got drunk, and slept, and woke to hear the same refrain: ‘Sorry to have to tell you …’ He got out all Lucasta’s letters and read them, looking for the clues that were there and which he’d missed. The bombing, when it started, was a relief. Now that the Japanese were not far away, there was a sense of panic, but Sam didn’t feel it. He felt calm, half dead already. There was plenty to do. All the time he was carrying out orders he was writing to Lucasta in his head, struggling to find appropriate words. When he finally got the chance to put pencil to very dirty, torn paper all he managed to write was ‘Dear Lucasta – Devastated to hear of Mum’s death. Hang on, you’ve been great, will be home soon.’ The inadequacy of this pathetic scrawl shamed him. He hadn’t even managed to convey his grief never mind concern for his sister.

  He promised himself that after this war he would take care of Lucasta. He saw in his mind’s eye the two of them walking hand in hand on the cliff path, the fields behind them bathed in sunlight and the sea an unlikely blue. He’d support her, encourage her to paint, help her talent flourish. He would redeem his neglect. Vowing this, he felt better, until there flashed into his mind a memory of his mother once telling him he was full of promises he never kept. But this was one which, if he survived, he was determined to honour.

  *

  Lucasta took the churns of milk to the road in the cart, handling the reins of the carthorse with care. He was temperamental and resented anyone but the farmer driving him. Each plod of his gigantic hooves shattered the icy puddles along the half-mile of track. They cracked like pistol shots, scaring the rabbits dashing through the undergrowth. At the road, Lucasta got down and, tying the reins to the gatepost, lowered the tailboard. She could just about lift the churns off and put them in the right place. Turning the horse round was harder. When he wouldn’t be turned, she sat patiently, waiting. She was as good at waiting as he was. She took a cigarette out of her pocket and smoked it. Mrs Wood wouldn’t let them smoke in the farmhouse – she fined them threepence if she caught them. The tiny trail of smoke wreathed its way over the horse’s head, and he suddenly turned and began lumbering home without any encouragement.

  There might be a letter when she got back. Since their mother died, Tom had written one long letter and Sam had written twice, odd little notes, telling her nothing much but full of concern for her. He wanted to know what she’d done with all their mother’s things, had she kept everything? He said he remembered how much stuff there had been and wondered how it all fitted into the cottage they’d moved to. The answer was that it hadn’t. Ginny had collected masses of furniture, so much that every room had been jammed full. Most of it had had to go, even Ginny had realised that. She’d only kept the best bits, but this ‘best’ looked poor in the cottage. Sam would be able to visualise the cottage where she lived. It had been a feature of their childhood, the spooky place, he would recall, where the recluse lived. They’d been scared of him. If he came out of the cottage, they hid, frightened by his burned face and his limp.

  At night, when on her days off she was there alone, Lucasta would find herself wondering about the recluse, now dead. Her mother used to say he was a sad man, that he’d suffered a great deal, and then his wife left him suddenly. When the boys were gone and they’d rented the place, there hadn’t been much in it to clear out, no clues at all as to its previous owner’s life. The hut in the garden was more revealing. The estate agent said it was an unsafe structure, they should not go into it, but they had disobeyed him and nothing dramatic had happened. It was full of painting equipment, though most of the paints had dried up and were beyond rescue. Before Ginny became ill, they had begun to clean the place and she was going to use it as a studio – but she never did. She didn’t paint again. If she had the energy, on good days, she sketched pictures of her cat, or portraits of Lucasta. Lucasta herself felt no desire, during that time, to draw at all.

  It was strange the way the need to express herself in art had left her. She didn’t know if it would come back but it didn’t worry her. Sometimes, sitting in front of the fire in the cottage, Lucasta would look up at the mantelpiece where her mother’s drawings were now propped up, the best of her sketches all in a row. Ginny had been content when she did them, smiling. ‘But I never tried hard enough,’ she’d said once, though without any apparent real regret. ‘I never really put myself into anything,’ she’d added, ‘like a real artist does, like your father did, like you will.’ Lucasta protested that she wasn’t like her father and could never be obsessed, but Ginny had said, ‘You have it in you, you’ll see.’ So far, there was nothing to see, but then death and the war could conveniently be blamed.

  Ginny’s room upstairs was still untouched. Lucasta supposed that one day she would have to sort through the drawers and the cupboard and deal with the contents, but they would wait. She did air the room occasionally, though, just went in if it was a fine day and opened the window. She liked to lean out, for a glimpse of the sea, and the little harbour with boats tossing up and down. The scene etched itself into her mind and comforted her, made her feel somehow philosophical: life went on, some things didn’t change. Turning back from the window, she was always surprised by the single picture on the wall, a quiet painting of the corner of an attic room. Conrad had given it to his wife on her fortieth birthday. He’d bought it from someone, but not from the artist, who was unknown. Ginny had loved it. Till recently, Lucasta hadn’t known if she even liked it. But lately, she realised that she was looking at the painting in a new way. It seemed now to represent peace, and peace was something to be longed for. The state of mind represented in that attic was enviable, not dreary. She felt a curiosity she had never felt before. She was ready to pull back the lace curtain, put on the coat lying on the chair, take up the parasol. The drawer in the table fascinated her. She wanted to open it and find – what? Writing materials? Cutlery? It was tantalising
not to know. Her gaze wandered over the floor, which she judged newly scrubbed, the tiles still warm from the hot soapy water, and took in for the first time the shadow along the wall behind the chair. What was it? Merely a different wallpaper from the rest, or wood? She wanted to touch it.

  One day, she took the painting off the wall and studied it carefully, in daylight, outside. Her mother would have known how the subdued effect had been achieved, but she did not. Not yet. She would learn when she went to art college, when she took up her deferred place, if she did. Her life would not be on hold for ever. But something would have to change before she could learn to be the kind of artist her mother thought she could be. There was something lacking in her that true artists had to have, some kind of commitment, and passion.

  Passion was also something, she realised, she knew nothing about.

  *

  The next time she went to the cottage, there was a letter lying inside on the mat. It wasn’t addressed to her, but to a Mr Alan Stone. And it was not a circular, but an interesting-looking envelope, and from America. The stamps fascinated her as did the handwriting, firm and bold. She had no right to open it, but she knew that Stone had been the name of the recluse who had lived here, and that he was dead. There was no relative that she knew of to whom it could be forwarded, and no sender’s address on the back to which she could return it. She opened it, taking care to slit the envelope along the top edge.

  There was only one sheet of paper inside, together with a photograph. This small black-and-white snapshot showed a middle-aged woman and a young man whose age was hard to guess – he could be sixteen or twenty-six. The woman had an arm round his shoulders, and was smiling. The man stared straight ahead, his expression impossible to read. On the back of the photograph, someone had written ‘with Jack’. There was an address at the top of the letter, so it could be returned after all. The writer, who signed herself Stella, wrote that more than twenty years was too long a time to have elapsed for her now to be writing to him and that she hardly dared do so. She had never, she went on, stopped feeling guilty about the manner in which she had left him and she supposed it was guilt which had kept her from writing. She had never forgotten him, and had hoped and prayed that some happiness had eventually come his way, as it had hers. She had not returned to Tenby, but after several years’ nursing in England she had gone to America, to Ohio, and there she had met a doctor whom she’d married and they had had a son. She thought that ‘Alan’ might be interested to know that she’d taken up painting again soon after she left him, though only as a pastime. If he had forgiven her, and cared to write, she would be so pleased, but would quite understand if he did not wish to renew contact. He had been on her conscience so long and she supposed her letter was a belated attempt, however feeble, to say sorry.

  Lucasta felt disgusted. She imagined how Mr Stone would have felt if he’d been alive and received this missive. The tone of it was not truly contrite – it seemed instead to boast about the sender’s good luck, what with the doctor husband and good-looking son. How could that possibly have comforted the recluse, with his limp and his burnt face and his wretched life? And why would the abandoned man be interested in hearing that this Stella had resumed painting? Those awful daubs hanging on the cottage walls must have been hers, and the hut hers too. It gave Lucasta a peculiar satisfaction to think how badly the mysterious Stella had painted.

  She put the letter back into its envelope, wishing that she had never opened it. How sad to know that Mr Stone had once had a lover and that she had left him. She felt glad he was long dead and did not have to suffer the pain of reading such a letter. Slowly, she took it into the kitchen and found matches and burned it, letting the ashes fall into the sink. It didn’t deserve to be returned to the sender. But though she had destroyed the letter, she could not banish the impact of its contents. Hurrying back to the farm afterwards, she imagined Mr Stone all those years ago realising he had been deserted and howling with anguish. But perhaps that was too melodramatic. Perhaps he had simply settled into a bitterness that never left him, an acceptance of defeat, a fading away of any hope of joy ever again … No wonder he became a recluse. It made her shiver.

  She never wanted to be so solitary and yet feared it might be her destiny. She must not allow it to be. She must try, once the war ended, to change.

  *

  Once they were prisoners, time seemed not so much to come to a standstill as to operate entirely differently. Sam wondered how he could ever have thought an hour such a short period – suddenly, it was an eternity, and anything longer beyond imagining. They were moved from Kanchanaburi to Chungkai camp in barges, a hundred of them to a barge, each already loaded with sacks of rice, and the journey was terrifying, each minute of it filled with fear that the barges would sink. The current in the river was powerful and they were going against it. He counted to himself, one to sixty, very slowly. The trip took thirty-seven sixties, thirty-seven minutes which felt like thirty-seven hours.

  He was in Chungkai for two years. The first months were spent building huts. These were made of bamboo frames, erected in line, with a main roof-beam of bamboo covered in atap. Each hut held four hundred prisoners, from different infantry regiments, all captured when Singapore fell. They all had to get along together and learn how to survive the brutality of the Japanese guards. There were quarrels and fights, attempts to form cliques, rivalry between huts (especially over food) but eventually a kind of solidarity emerged, united as they had to be against their guards, and a routine was slowly established. ‘Leisure time’ might be a misnomer – there could be no ‘leisure’ in the sense they had previously known it – but they did have periods of time each day when they were not herded out to labour for the Japanese. They were all exhausted and weak with hunger, so energy was low, but it was astonishing how reserves of strength were found to do things like play simple games. They fashioned a football out of rags and kicked it about – the guards watched closely but didn’t interfere – and someone made a bat out of bamboo sticks strapped together to play cricket with. But it was the stronger men who indulged in such exercise – the majority couldn’t attempt to join in and occupied themselves differently and often ingeniously.

  Sam felt that he had some good luck. The hut he was allocated to was the best one. The men in it were mostly of a quiet disposition, given to card-playing (the cards made out of scraps of paper) and chess (the pieces made out of hardened dirt) and conversation. Early on, one of the officers suggested that they should give talks, on anything at all they knew something about, and the idea caught on. Then there were those who made music, with primitive pipes and whistles made out of bamboo and drums made out of tin cans. And the artists; they had neither paper nor paint. They drew on the earth floor, or on rags, and used sticks sharpened to a point and dipped in solutions made from vegetable matter. Sometimes the results were so impressive it seemed wicked that the ground had to be raked over at the end of the day. The Japanese did not object to the drawings but they wouldn’t let them remain – order had to be restored by nightfall. There was one man, a lieutenant in the Cambridgeshire Regiment, who was brilliant. When he decided to draw, a crowd quickly gathered, Sam always among it. One day he attempted a collage of the view from a nearby clifftop where they’d been on a working party. Sam had been in that party too, and had been able to see for miles over the jungle, and below them, a thousand feet or more, the river snaking along, brown and sludge-like. The artist constructed the spot miraculously, using all kinds of materials – stones, shreds of bamboo, bits from the torn soles of boots, laces, leaves – and when he’d finished, everyone clapped. Even the guards, coming to kick it over and make them rake the ground, were admiring.

  Sam watched Lieutenant Parker, and saw how much satisfaction his crude artwork gave him. It wasn’t just the doing of it, though that was striking enough, because of the way he became so obviously immersed in what he was creating, but the aftermath. Parker would seem relaxed, enjoying the men’s pleasure
in his little achievement, and altogether calmer than before. He wasn’t a strong man, he took beatings badly, and he hadn’t made friends easily, but withdrawing into his picture-making seemed to energise him. Sam longed to see what he could do with real paint and canvas, but it turned out that Parker wasn’t an artist at all. He was an architect, he said, though he’d been to art college for a while before he began training. Sam showed him Lucasta’s letters with their mother’s drawings in them. He’d had no new letters since Singapore fell but he’d managed to hide some of those that had come before.

  ‘Nice,’ Parker said, but didn’t seem very interested.

  ‘I wish I could draw,’ Sam said. ‘I envy you, you know that? To be able to do what you do. Gives a point to life.’

  Parker smiled. ‘I’m no artist,’ he said. ‘Don’t exaggerate. Art won’t get me through this, that’s for sure. Passes time, that’s all.’

  ‘Seems to do more than that,’ Sam said, and then, ‘It did more than that for my father. Nothing else mattered, really. My sister’s got his gift, not me.’