Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  Once she had moved in, Lucasta invited Charlotte there for a drink, but Charlotte said that she found it painful being in her old home and that she’d rather meet Lucasta in a café, if she didn’t mind. They had a meal at the Cresta, a Polish restaurant near the gallery, instead, and after that occasionally they met for a drink in one of the local pubs. It suited Lucasta perfectly. She never got to know her employer intimately but they were friends. She judged Charlotte to be a contented person, happy with her gallery, and deriving great satisfaction from promoting young portrait painters. She never invited Lucasta to her own flat, which she said was too small to entertain in, but Lucasta thought it was more that Charlotte wanted to keep it to herself, and she understood this completely. It was odd, with Charlotte being the outgoing, generous person she was, and with her being well-off, for her to want to keep the flat to herself, and for it to be so modest. But Lucasta liked the contradiction.

  While Sam travelled the world, Lucasta went on helping Charlotte, and in her spare time began to paint portraits. Charlotte commissioned the first, of herself, and was so pleased with the painting that she displayed it in her gallery. Other commissions followed, and slowly, over a period of ten years, Lucasta reached the stage of being able to support herself by painting full-time. When she was forty, she turned one of her rooms into a studio and, greatly daring, established a new rule: people who wanted her to paint their portrait came to her, she did not go to them. It was a rule which almost proved her undoing, because people who had the vanity to wish to have their portrait painted were not the sort of people who were willing to climb stairs to an attic flat. But she’d made the rule, and persevered, and in time it came to seem a charming eccentricity, with which sitters interested enough to engage her services were happy to comply. She made a reasonable living, and was happy in her work, and reported to Sam that her success was growing. It seemed a little conceited to say so, but if she didn’t who else would tell Sam? He knew no one in the art world who would pass the word on that his little sister was reckoned to be a promising portrait painter, a name to watch.

  Once, Sam wrote, very sweetly and shyly, offering her money. He had sailed a boat via the West Indies to New Zealand and sold it at an unexpectedly large profit. He could, he wrote, let her have £100. Such an amount would have been very handy at the time, when she was still struggling, before she moved into Charlotte’s flat, but Lucasta had declined it, with thanks. Sam’s way of life seemed as precarious as her own, and she thought he would have more use for it than she did. She was right. The next boat Sam helped to build and then sailed halfway round the world, did not fetch much money. It had been damaged in a storm, he wrote, and his costs were hardly covered. After that experience, he gave up the boat business and became a ski-instructor. How he got into this Lucasta never did find out. It was one of the periods when there was a long gap between his letters and, when one arrived, it was preoccupied with the Alpine scenery in Austria where he was working. He wrote that she should come and visit him, and she almost did, but then her cat was sick and she couldn’t leave; and Sam didn’t ask her again, clearly thinking a sick cat was just an excuse.

  Sometimes, Lucasta wondered if she suffered from agoraphobia, so extreme was her dislike of leaving her flat. She would let herself run out of basic foods – milk, coffee, bread – and then, near the closing times of shops, she would be forced to dash out and get what she needed. Again and again it happened, twenty past five on a Saturday and only ten minutes to dash to the High Street. It was ridiculous. And yet, once out, she enjoyed it and was in no hurry to return (which showed, she felt, that she was not truly agoraphobic, but just had difficulty with departures). She invariably ended up, carrying whatever vital supplies she’d gone for, wandering first up Heath Street and then onto the Heath above the Vale of Health. She’d sit looking down at the Pond, and think, for some reason, of Cornwall and wonder how on earth she had ever managed to leave it when she so hated change and moving and disruption of every sort.

  Her rooms pleased her all the time. Over the years, she had lavished such care and attention upon them, striving to have every detail how she wanted it, and she felt she had succeeded – her rooms were her. Her living room, though the furniture was antique, looked modern with its white walls and plain varnished floors and no curtains, only blinds. The blend of the old and new was what gave her most pleasure. She felt it represented something of herself, though writing to Sam she was unable to explain exactly what she meant.

  Sometimes in his letters, Sam would mention girlfriends. There was Beatrice for a while, who was replaced by Clare, whom he seemed extremely fond of, until she too vanished without explanation. Tom had married meanwhile – Sam had visited him in Australia – and was very happy, with two children, both boys. In a postscript, after that visit, Sam had commented that he couldn’t see himself marrying and asked if she was ‘tempted’. Lucasta had replied that there had been no one tempting, and left it at that. There had seemed no point in describing to Sam the kind of fleeting affairs she’d had. None of them had been in the least serious. Sam could never be her confidant. She didn’t want to bare her heart to him, or to anyone, preferring to maintain her absolute privacy. Privacy was all. It wrapped itself round her and she hugged it to herself, content to be protected by it. She sometimes felt that her rooms knew her best – if they could have talked, they would have had a great deal to tell which would have surprised listeners. The pleasure she felt, for one thing, every time she came back to her home and closed the door behind her. Something always lightened within her, and she took a while to get used to it. The silence was so soothing. She moved among her things carefully, gliding across the floors with barely a sound, her skirt giving the slightest of whispers. This contentment with her own presence was her strength. Nobody could violate it for long. Those who came to her flat hardly touched its essential calm. They came (by arrangement only), they left, mere ripples on the smooth surface of her life. She was lucky, she thought, to have her own territory and rule it so completely. The room breathed, it held her. The room had power over her, it was not inanimate.

  She thought about hanging the little painting over the mantelpiece, but the space was too big. To the right of the fireplace, in the slim space between it and the door, where the light was not strong, she found the perfect spot. It looked right there, the canvas so small but fitting into this place perfectly.

  *

  Paul Mortimer had not wanted his portrait painted at all, but it had been his wife Ailsa’s idea, her present for his fiftieth birthday, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. However, it was a nuisance to have to go to the artist’s studio in Hampstead and toil up those stairs and obey her instructions. She didn’t try to charm him or make him feel comfortable but instead was polite, just, but brusque, and didn’t offer him refreshment during all the hours he was with her. Once, when he had a dry throat and coughed, she offered him a glass of water. She was so thin herself that she looked as though she never ate or drank. He studied her because there was nothing else to look at, except the easel with her head appearing from behind it, staring at him. It was slightly unnerving and made him fidget. The chair she’d posed him on was a ladder-backed wooden chair, upright and hard, and he sat with his arms crossed, feeling the wooden bars press into him. He knew he was frowning and probably looked bad-tempered. She’d be painting him as an ogre.

  The sessions, mercifully, were not quite a full hour. She knew he was uncomfortable, of course. When she selected the damned chair she had told him just to say if he found it too uncomfortable and she’d find another, but he was too proud to admit that he found sitting bolt upright too difficult. So he was stuck with the chair, and with the pose. ‘Sit how you want,’ she’d told him, ‘but be sure you can hold whatever position you choose.’ First he’d put his hands on his knees, and then he’d folded them. First he’d had his legs slightly apart, then imagined how this would look, and brought them together, only to settle on crossing them at the ankle. H
e’d been told to wear what he liked himself in best – an invitation to vanity if ever he’d heard one, and he wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt.

  He wondered about the artist. She was not young, about forty, perhaps. He didn’t find her attractive, though he supposed some men might like her feline looks. She had good skin, pretty hair and her eyes were arresting not just because of their size and shape but their colour, more green than grey, the irises flecked with some other colour which he couldn’t quite decide on – gold? Every other woman in London was wearing a short skirt but Lucasta Jenkinson – an absurdly incongruous mixture of names – had on a long skirt, down to her ankles and tied at the waist with a bow to one side. It was made of some sort of floaty blue material and the top she was wearing matched the shade. Her figure was good, she was slim but her breasts were well rounded and were emphasised by her thin sweater. What struck him most was her extreme neatness and freshness – there was nothing of the messy artist about her. She cared about her appearance, he thought, and her clothes, took time and trouble over both. But for her own benefit, he decided. Certainly not for his.

  Was there someone else? If so, all evidence was well hidden. No one lived with her, he was pretty sure. He’d tried, at the beginning, to chat her up, since she was clearly not going to chat him up. She appeared not to hear him. Twice, he’d asked the same question, twice there was neither acknowledgement nor reply. But then he remembered she had told him, on his arrival, that if she were silent during the sitting he must forgive her, it was how she worked. But it made him uneasy to spend nearly an hour without any communication, and being stared at. He was sure his discomfort would show in the finished portrait, and he’d hate it. She wouldn’t let him see the work in progress. About that she had been very definite, and he’d accepted that it would perhaps be a kind of unwelcome interference. But he was a curious man and found containing his curiosity frustrating – he wanted a quick glance, no more. But at the end of each sitting, she stood up and thanked him and then waited until he had left the room. She didn’t even see him to the door but remained beside her easel, bidding him goodbye, and thanking him, from a distance. He longed for some distraction to take her from the room – a phone call, a parcel being delivered – but though there was one afternoon when the door-bell rang, she ignored it. ‘Feel free to answer the door,’ he said, trying to hide his eagerness, ‘I don’t mind.’ She said nothing, and then when the bell sounded even more insistently and he fidgeted with anxiety, she said, ‘Please keep still, Mr Mortimer. I never interrupt a sitting. The caller will call again,’ and he felt reprimanded.

  On his way out of the house that day, he found a parcel sitting outside the door at the bottom of her staircase. It was tucked behind a tub of geraniums on the step, safe from all except the most prying eyes, and the postman, or delivery man, had put a note through the letter-box, saying where it was and what time he’d called. Paul hesitated a moment and then picked up the parcel – quite light, quite small, though just too big to go through the letter-box – and went back up the stairs. He climbed them as quietly as he could, hoping to surprise Lucasta Jenkinson, simply to see how she would react when caught unawares. But he didn’t catch her unawares. She was waiting for him outside the front door of her flat. ‘How kind,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Hope it’s something interesting,’ he said, feeling slightly foolish, because she must have seen him coming up almost on tiptoe. ‘The stamps look interesting, anyway,’ he added, just for something to say. She smiled, said goodbye again, and went into her flat, closing the door gently. He left thinking how much he disliked aloof, remote, self-contained women who couldn’t even bring themselves to engage in pleasantries never mind any more meaningful social contact.

  There were six sittings before she said anything to him other than good morning, good afternoon, please make yourself comfortable, goodbye, thank you. By then he was playing her at her own game, entering with a nod of greeting – that trumped her good morning – and settling down quickly on the damned chair. On the seventh, and penultimate occasion, she did not at once take up her own position. Instead, she stood in front of him, quite close, and said, ‘I’m having trouble with your tie.’

  ‘My tie?’

  ‘Yes. It looks wrong. There’s something about it.’

  ‘You mean the pattern, the stripe?’

  ‘Yes. It doesn’t fit. I wonder, could you remove it?’

  ‘You mean, not wear a tie?’

  ‘Yes. Or not that one.’

  His hands felt oddly sweaty as he fumbled to take off his tie, letting it drop to the floor.

  ‘Now undo the button,’ she said. ‘Your top shirt button. Thank you. Much better,’ and she went back to her easel.

  What was she playing at? All those sittings, and she had said nothing about ties or shirt buttons. Had she only just noticed he was wearing a tie that didn’t ‘fit’? He would look absurd, a formal suit and white shirt without a tie. If he was to be protrayed in an open-necked shirt he wanted it to be a casual shirt, worn with casual trousers. He should have said so, made his objections clear, but he’d meekly obeyed. It felt better, though, not to be wearing a tie and to have the neck of his shirt open. Was she looking at his throat, or at the gap where his chest hair showed, the beginnings of it, at least a hint? Her move had almost been like a sexual advance and yet she was so unsexual, or did he mean asexual, it couldn’t have been that. The words kept repeating themselves in his head – ‘I wonder, could you remove it? … Now undo the button’ – but he was sure that there was no trace of innuendo.

  At the end of that particular hour – which felt like an eternity – she actually smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘that was much better, getting rid of the tie. It changed things.’

  ‘You should have said earlier.’

  ‘I didn’t know earlier. It just occurred to me what a tie was doing to you.’

  ‘I always wear a tie at work. I’m used to ties. They don’t do anything to me.’ He was irritated by her silly assumptions. But she didn’t defend herself, merely raised her eyebrows and looked amused and he was shocked to realise he would have liked to slap her.

  ‘One more session, I think?’ he said, calmly enough.

  She nodded. ‘Good, thank you, next Tuesday, then. Would you mind if I took a photograph before you go?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No. At the end, before we finish. It might be useful, before I deliver the portrait, to get details right, an aide-mémoire.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He left her flat in a fury.

  *

  From the beginning Lucasta had found it hard to conceal her attraction to Paul Mortimer – it had been a shock, to feel what she did the moment he walked into her studio. There had been no preparation for the physical sensations he aroused so immediately, the faint tingling in her limbs, the sudden palpitations, the heat spreading through her body. And yet he was not conventionally handsome, no chiselled features or noble brow or lustrous hair. He had about him something of Sam when he came back from the war, a toughness, a hard look, and a weariness in the lines of his face. He had great confidence, too, striding into her flat, arm outstretched, towering over her and meeting her stare with a measured one of his own. His hand, when she took it, was strong, the skin rough, and he gripped her own a little longer than necessary. It had taken all her self-possession to remain cool and polite, and she had hurried to begin the work. Once she had done so, she felt more in control, and able to explain her reaction as the result of having expected a quite different sort of man.

  He was a company director, that was all she’d known. The name of the company had meant nothing to her and she hadn’t been curious enough to ask questions. The portrait had been commissioned by his wife, though Lucasta had never met her, for his fiftieth birthday. It had all been fixed up through Charlotte, whose gallery Mrs Mortimer had been taken to by a friend, to look
at Lucasta’s work. The money was significant and Lucasta accepted the commission without first meeting the sitter or his wife, though she was surprised this had not been insisted upon. She was asked to ‘capture the essence of the man’, which somehow sounded affected, but she was not so prosperous that she could afford to let this put her off. Once Paul Mortimer came to sit, she saw that she would have no trouble catching his ‘essence’. The suit was boring and she decided quite quickly to ignore it. She’d paint him from the shoulders up, concentrating on his face. But she didn’t tell him this. On the contrary, she encouraged him to believe that his whole posture was important, right down to the way he positioned his feet, and enjoyed watching him try to make himself comfortable on the upright chair. He failed, but his discomfort translated into a determination to endure which gave him the most aggressive expression. This was what they must have meant about catching his ‘essence’ – his ‘I will not be beaten’ attitude. Every time she lifted her eyes from the canvas to study him she was overwhelmed by the power blazing out of him – he could hardly contain himself, he might at any moment spring up and shout at her. For a moment her brush trembled in her hand. She found herself clearing her throat repeatedly with the effort of composing herself.

  He’d tried to begin a conversation but, from every point of view, she could not afford to have one, and was telling the truth when she said she had to work in silence. But the deeper reason, in this case, was that she might have given too much away. He would attempt to charm her, she could tell, without being overtly charming. Over and over again, throughout the weeks, she reminded herself that she knew nothing about this man, except that he was an immensely successful company director and that he was married, with children. Her attraction to him was purely physical, chemical almost, or that was how she described it to herself – it was a matter of hormones, leaving her mind disengaged. She neither liked nor disliked him, she did not even know him, but was drawn to him in the most superficial of ways. It was always the same for her. The few affairs she had had were due to sexual attraction, and when that was satisfied there was nothing left. Sometimes she thought she ought to get to know a man properly before indulging her own frank desire for him. But it would mean a level of disturbance she could hardly tolerate. And she did not want people to ‘get to know’ her, either. Intimacy, true intimacy, involving minds and hearts and emotions, was abhorrent to her. This, she acknowledged, was so abnormal it was better not to mention it. It hurt people, and she had no wish to offend or pain anyone. It was better to pretend that she was busy, or ill – anything to get out of prolonging such encounters.