All the Beauty of the Sun

by Marion Husband

  Paul started on Patrick when he was still married; I know because Paul used to mention him sometimes in passing, when I was in that place near York, when he wasn’t talking about his wife and his baby boy. He said he had met up with a man he had served with during the war and that he was a good friend. Wasn’t I his good friend? I did ask him this, I know I did, and he said yes, of course, none better, none gooder, he said, and smiled. There is no such word as gooder, of course. It was just his joke; he thinks I need jokes and games with words and to hear about men he meets up with because they served together in the same platoon and are good friends. He wears his heart on his sleeve. I see right through him, past his bones, right through him.

  I wish I’d told him about Ann when we were sitting in that graveyard during his recent visit. I thought to when I saw that girl with her pram and her daffodils and hip-swaying walk. Telling him about Ann would have made him realise that he’s not the only one in the whole world.

  I first saw Ann behind Fred’s bar, and she was so lively and happy I thought she wouldn’t mind me. The evening Peter O’Connor dropped dead I had thought of approaching her, of saying something careless such as, ‘It’s nice to see a pretty face,’ risking Susie’s sarcasm. More likely I would have risked only her surprise because of course I would never say such a thing: it’s the kind of remark men who have had experience with women make; men who leer and flirt quite openly; the kind of remark that might lead somewhere once everyone has got over its boorishness. But then O’Connor fell dead to the floor and the atmosphere changed so completely.

  He was dead before I reached him but I said a few words anyway, for Fred’s sake. Fred’s a suspicious man; I think he believes O’Connor would be haunting his pub now if I hadn’t been there to placate his departing soul. Placate. Is that the right word? Direct, perhaps, is more accurate. In Latin I said, go in peace. Fred knew those weren’t the official words, there weren’t enough of them – I’d left out God and he knows the Latin for God, but he didn’t complain. I was very angry with Fred, I remember, although I understand now that really I was angry with O’Connor, allowing myself to believe that were it not for his inconsiderate dying I would have approached Ann that evening in a way that would have got our relationship off on the right foot. This is nonsense, of course. More likely, I wouldn’t have spoken to her for weeks; weeks spent trying to pluck up my courage.

  Sometimes I imagine her coming to visit me, and how we would go walking arm in arm along the lane; the rain would have just stopped and there’d be the smell of the damp woods hemming us in on either side, the muddy ground a little slippery underfoot so that she’d hold on to me tightly as she used to. There’d be many rabbits, as ever, hopping quite unperturbed amongst the cow parsley in the verge. Perhaps a pheasant would come clattering out across our path causing me to imagine the hunters with their guns broken over their arms, the soft-mouthed dogs trotting ahead of them, home with the day’s kill. This image is so vivid that I half expect my father to come striding towards us, a brace of grouse dangling from his fingers. He would be pleased to see me with a girl like Ann.

  I shouldn’t think about Ann because I know I can get upset about her, all my thoughts coming like a speeded-up Keystone Kop film with pratfalls and chases.

  The weather is sunny and warm and if I look out of my window, I see that there is blossom on the trees like the blossom that was on that climbing plant in the photo of Patrick.

  I wrote to Patrick and told him that I have seen Paul, and how well he looks, very well with all the attention he is receiving in London. He glows, I wrote, as he used to when he met you. He’ll take my meaning, I think. I do like Patrick very much. He doesn’t shift so much as Paul; he is not so much of a chameleon. I have written to him, he’ll take my meaning, he will come, and Paul will have to be good, for once.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘I CAN’T DO MY bottom belly button up,’ Lawrence sang. He straightened the picture, stood back, frowned, stepped forward again and straightened it again. He cocked his head to one side. ‘There. I think that will do.’ He began to sing again, knowing the words more often than not. She caught songs off him as if they were germs; his songs became stuck in her head until she had to sing them out. His/her songs had annoyed Edmund to death.

  Lawrence had a light tenor voice. Ann suspected that he had a longing to perform on stage. He would call himself Larry, a more likely name for one of those comics who sang, who carried a walking cane and wore spats and a top hat to tilt to the back of his head when he was pretending to be perplexed. I say, I say, I say, he would say. Why did the Irish girl cry herself stupid? There’s no answer to that.

  He’d held her as she’d cried, the towel he had wrapped around his waist in preparation for his bath coming loose, displaying his flaccid penis so that even through her tears she felt embarrassed for his nakedness. She smelt the Scotch on his breath as he whispered, ‘Don’t cry, sweet girl,’ tasted the alcohol when he kissed her, and she could hear the distress in his voice, feel the tension in him. Beneath her ear his heart beat too quickly and she felt sorry for what she was doing to him, that she was shortening his life by a few minutes by setting off his heart like this; couldn’t hearts beat only so fast for so long only so often before they stopped dead? She sat up, wiping her eyes with her fingers. ‘Sorry.’ She had sounded as though he had made her angry the way she spat out sorry like that. He’d reached out and stroked her back and she glanced at him, wanting to ask what he thought of her for crying, for making his heart work so hard.

  He’d said carefully, ‘You’re crying over him, aren’t you?’

  He meant Edmund and so she said no scornfully, as though he was a fool for thinking so even though her tears were partly over Edmund, only partly, and actually it was the gallant thing to think. Lawrence liked gallant, it was one of his words. He was gallant not to have guessed about the other men; he didn’t know her history was so colourful. If she told him about Joseph Day, about that first boy back in Ireland, he would be shocked. He would be even more shocked if she told him that her tears were mostly over Matthew. She imagined how he would draw away from her; he would look at her as he had sometimes looked at Edmund, as though she was contemptible, not worth his shock, arranging his face into its cold, not-one-of-us mask.

  Now he turned to her from straightening the picture on the gallery wall and said, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s straight now.’

  ‘I mean about you – up there on the wall. What do you think about you?’

  She thought that Joseph Day had made her look like someone else, a good thing to do but not the truthful thing. Joseph had seen her through the eyes of a man who was jealous and angry and hurt and he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her when she went to his room each day so that he could finish this picture, the last one he had painted of her, the last one he would ever paint of her. But finish it he did, despite his anger – because really he wasn’t angry when he was painting, he was just a concentration of energy; and when he was painting she was just a thing, better than a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit because she had blood under her skin, bones to get right, eyes to light properly, an expression to capture. Yet he had still managed to paint an expression she didn’t recognise.

  She stood beside Lawrence; he put her arm around her waist and pulled her close, his eyes on the painting as he asked, ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m not as nice as she is.’

  He laughed, holding her even more tightly as he kissed her cheek. ‘Oh, yes you are. You are very, very nice.’

  ‘Really, I’m not.’

  ‘Really?’ He turned back to her portrait. ‘I think he was being very real. He’s very good, isn’t he? Dreadful man, bloody good artist. Don’t tell him, though – well, you can tell him he’s dreadful, just not that he’s good. He’ll be insufferable.’

  ‘As insufferable as Paul Harris?’

  He frowned at her. ‘Harris is a good chap.’ His frown deepened. ‘Is he a good ch
ap? I don’t know. Probably, underneath all that … fraught. Not insufferable though. But I understand why you think he is.’

  He didn’t understand, couldn’t see past Edmund, as though Edmund still stood between them. Although Lawrence was not as jealous as Joseph had been, he still couldn’t get over his small amount of jealousy. Again, she imagined how he would react if she told him what a slut she was.

  Lawrence squeezed her to him. ‘All right, you can stop staring at yourself now, vain creature. We should get on, hang the others. I do hope it goes as well as Harris’s exhibition. All those queers do like his work, don’t they?’

  ‘Were they all …?’

  Picking up another of Joseph’s pictures from those leaning against the wall, his voice was distracted as he said, ‘Were they all …? Oh. Yes, of course.’ He laughed shortly, his eyes serious, searching Joseph’s painting of her head and naked shoulders before glancing at her. ‘My dear girl – you didn’t think normal men would buy those pictures, did you? Now, help me with this.’

  Afterwards, when they had hung all the paintings to his exacting standard, when she had helped him to stick a card with its title and catalogue number typed neatly by her beside each one, when he had walked around the gallery again just to make sure that it was right, my darling. Things must be right! they went back to his rooms and he made her scrambled eggs and sang as he buttered toast: ‘I can’t do my bottom belly button up …’ She had told him that it was a silly song, one he shouldn’t sing because people would think he was insane. He’d frowned, pretending to be perplexed so she’d imagined that tilting top hat again. ‘Silly? It’s about a young girl about to give birth to a bastard.’ He sliced the toast in two with the buttery knife. ‘Unless I’ve got that wrong and she’s eaten too much cake. What do you think?’ He looked at her. ‘Cake or bastard, silly or sad?’

  She thought how happy he was, even for him, and that this extra happiness made him look younger and more handsome than he was; actually he was a plain man, most of the time quite ordinary-looking in the way that most men were: average height and build, mousey hair receding a little, his lips a little too thin so that he sometimes tried living with a moustache until she made him shave it off. He was plain compared with Edmund with his lovely body he was so easy in, that smiling face like an angel that had just thought of a risqué joke. Lawrence was plain compared with Matthew who has so handsome. Matthew; thinking of him was as shockingly painful as biting down on your tongue, pain caused by your own greediness, your lack of attention to anything but your own greedy want.

  She looked down at the plate of scrambled eggs Lawrence had set down with a flourish in front of her. Paul Harris had made her feel guilty over Matthew and it wasn’t fair – Harris was the guilty one. Matthew was the guilty one. Wasn’t he just as much to blame for what happened? He had hardly pushed her away. Probably he had expected her to behave so badly – still a priest at heart, imagining that all women were harlots.

  Perhaps she was a harlot. Wasn’t she here, in the worst part of London, taking off her clothes for a living; serving beer for a living; hanging dirty pictures for a living, for Lawrence who said fuck, fuckity fuckity fuck just because he dropped a spoon on his kitchen floor? And she had slept with Joseph only because he had actually got on his knees and begged her to, and she had laughed, and been thrilled and touched because he had paint on his face, because he had painted her and made her look so beautiful. And it was all right; she liked Joseph.

  And then she met Edmund and when she brought Edmund to the gallery, after he had gone Lawrence had laughed and said, ‘Honestly?’ Just that: honestly? seeing something she didn’t.

  And Lawrence had said, ‘This Matthew fellow. I really do think you should keep away from him.’ But sometimes she couldn’t take Lawrence seriously because of all the songs and top-hat tipping – even though that was only in her head, even though Lawrence had been in the war and had checked men’s feet for rot and been lucky to get off scot-free, although not really scot-free because his dreams were bad and he drank and drank because of the dreams that he said were only that: dreams; roll me out of bed when I shout. Roll me over in the clover … Roll me over. Lay me down. Do it again.

  How could you take a man seriously who sang such songs and said such things as, ‘I know you’re with that boy Edmund, but I really don’t think I can go on in this world without you. You’ll see sense, eventually.’?

  She had been made to see sense. She thought of Joseph, his face alight with the filthy thing he had to tell her about Edmund. She thought of Harris in the pub’s back room, how he had apologised without saying what he was apologising for, because how could he? He was an arrogant man in expensive clothes, wearing an expression that must have cost only a little time in front of a mirror, apologising to a barmaid in the back room of a back-street pub. He had apologised but actually he was telling her that he was entitled to Edmund, that he had a more valid claim on him. She had hated Paul Harris more than anyone else in the world then; she hated him still, even if he was Matthew’s friend; because he was Matthew’s friend, making all that guilt rise inside her when what happened hadn’t been her fault. She couldn’t accept that it was her fault.

  She realised she had finished the scrambled eggs Lawrence had made for her, had hardly tasted them, and that he was watching her, a look of concern on his face. He smiled sadly as if he knew she didn’t love him. ‘Will you stay the night?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  She laughed in dismay. ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’ He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘In the meantime, shall we go to bed?’

  Chapter Twenty

  PATRICK IS HERE, IN England. He has been to see me, looking marvellous because he always does. Tall, dark, handsome Patrick, like the prince from a fairy tale – don’t ask me which. One where the prince has his heart torn out – although I don’t think that happens to princes in stories.

  My letter and he crossed, probably somewhere at sea. He was coming here anyway, couldn’t keep away, couldn’t bear to be apart. Almost as soon as Paul left he was following him. He had fully intended not to. But jealousy is a demanding child, taking your hand, dragging you along, always looking over its shoulder at you, chivvying constantly. Poor Patrick, at his wits’ end with worry; Wits’ End, this could be the name of the prince’s home, the palace he sets out from on his quest.

  We sat on the lawn in wicker chairs that Patrick carried from the Orangery where no oranges grow. He has oranges in his garden, figs and lemons too. He told me that Paul tends them, that Paul is the gardener. He said, ‘Paul misses England, the seasons, the weather, far more than I do.’ He laughed, and glanced at me from gazing at the china blue of the English sky. ‘I think we’ve all had enough of cold and wet.’

  Oh, I would so agree with that.

  I asked him what he was going to do about Paul, to Paul. Perhaps I looked too eager to know, sitting on the edge of my seat like that. I had grasped the arms of the chair so hard the basketwork pattern imprinted on my palms. He only said, ‘Perhaps they could bring us some tea? Do they do that here?’ He has visited me in hospitals where tea is served, others where it is not. He has seen the best and the worst. I told him that here tea was brought out at four o’clock, but that was too late, he had to catch his train to London. He was only on his way; I was only a stopping-off point.

  I have to think myself very lucky he came to see me at all, the state he was in over that man he is so obsessed with: Paul. I told him that Paul had visited me and about how he’d behaved. Patrick only nodded and glanced at his watch, no doubt worried about his train. I didn’t like this impatience, it’s unlike him, so I told him how promiscuous Paul is; he only nodded again, frowning this time as though I had told him I had a headache, and asked if they were treating me well here, if there was anything he could send me to make me more comfortable. I told him that I wouldn’t be here much longer and yes, of course, he n
odded again and smiled. ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘good.’ He was being insufferable, a great big insufferable butcher – how could Paul live with a butcher, anyway? It’s unseemly, preposterous. His butcher’s hands looked as though they were ingrained with blood.

  I wasn’t in hospital when I first met Patrick. I was living with my sister and Patrick alarmed her, walking up her garden path with his great big butcher’s stride. She said, ‘Matt – what have you done now?’ She thought he was some kind of plain-clothed policeman like those in the detective novels she reads – and he did certainly look like such a man with his inscrutability and quiet clothes, except he doesn’t have a policeman’s face; he has Gabriel’s face, I might add.

  I remember we sat alone in my sister’s parlour, such a cold, unnecessary room, facing each other across the empty grate. He wrung his hands, I remember that, I couldn’t take my eyes off his wringing hands as he said, ‘I know you write to Paul. I know you know about him and me. I need you to help me, Matthew – may I call you Matthew? – I need you to help me find a way of getting him out of that prison.’

  I thought about jailbreaks: dynamite and rope ladders flung over walls. I had a vision of the jails in western novels, a barred room behind the sheriff’s office in some raw, American frontier town. Or perhaps that is only the vision I have now. Of course, I knew about real, English prisons, I had visited men in prison often, and they stank of English bodies too crowded together, of too many men using too few buckets. And the prisoners inside these prisons were not sturdy, sunburnt cowboys fresh from the prairies but grey, weasel-faced men who were stooped and wary, shifty, fidgeting as they said, ‘Father, I’m an innocent man, Father.’ Those men were very much older than me – or looked it, at least – men who would pray fervently with me, as though they really were afraid of God. They made me think of all the other priests who had prayed with them so ineffectually over the years so that my faith became a little less buoyant and a little more connected to the earth. I knew about prisons, then, and about prisoners. I knew that Paul might die in such a place; I pondered this: he would be a martyr, of sorts.