At Friends’ House on Euston Road, Paul’s cousin, Grace, wrote a name next to the number 136, looked up and asked: ‘Is there really no space for one more?’
In her house on Rose Walk, Hampstead, Mrs Morningstar handed her daughter, Miriam, a pair of scissors and said: ‘From ear to ear, as usual.’
Under the high stuccoed ceilings of a living room in a leafy suburb of Berlin, Mrs Hoffnung wrote on a piece of paper: ‘Esther Morningstar, Rose Walk, London. Or: Bentham College, London’. She handed the piece of paper to her son, Max, and said: ‘In case.’
But in Hyde Park, Charlie raced past Paul, skidded to a halt just behind a hideous gilded monument and cried out: ‘I’ve got something for you!’
He tossed a cloth-wrapped package at Paul, who failed to catch it and bent awkwardly over his bike to pick it up, not wanting to look too excited, unsure whether to expect a present or a joke.
He remained unsure even after he undid the bundle. Inside was a wooden figurine, about a foot high, with limbs carved from cherrywood, held together by rusty metal joints.
‘You do know what it is, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ lied Paul.
Charlie sighed. ‘It’s an artist’s model. I bought it from the watercolour chap who lives next to Boddington. Look.’ He pointed at some dark stains on the red wood. ‘Those are genuine wine stains from Paris.’
Paul felt a spasm travel up his spine, a sensation of wanting to retract his head, arms and legs like a tortoise, roll up in a ball, and disappear.
‘And what would I do with that?’ he said casually.
‘Improve those sketches you’ve been hiding under the brown rug for the past five years,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s not that they’re all bad. The fruit bowls are good. The socks and our garden, too. All those drawings of weeds and tools. When it comes to the human form, however . . . I know they say people come in all shapes and sizes. But actually, they don’t come in that many shapes.’
Paul forced himself to look at Charlie.
‘They’ll never let me study art,’ he said feebly. ‘It’s going to be accountancy, isn’t it? And then the soap shop. I’ll be smelling of lavender all my life.’
‘The shop?’ Charlie spat in the direction of a gilded ornament. ‘That’s what I think of the shop. Now put that away, we’ve already missed the first speech.’
Charlie swung his arms and legs as he walked, in the natural assumption that everyone would step out of his way. He cleared a path through a crowd of men outside the Royal Albert Hall. Paul followed close behind, an explorer hurrying after his machete-wielding guide.
There were more men inside, thousands of them, some old and embittered by the Great War, others young and filled with the conviction that everything could be solved by Esperanto. Here and there a chap recognized Charlie and greeted him with a clenched fist, and he returned the salutes and called the young men comrades.
It was a pacifist meeting, Charlie explained, but not the sort of meek, tedious pacifism their parents embraced. No, this was a meeting of the Peace Pledge Union, a gathering of men who knew what they wanted, and what they wanted was a new world – which was what Charlie wanted, too. What Paul had to understand, he said, was that Quakerism was all very well, but it was an awfully passive way of being, wasn’t it? It was a shopkeeper’s religion really, ideal for someone who liked to stand behind a ledger and count his pennies and soap bars.
‘Some men don’t mind smelling of lavender,’ Charlie said, ‘but I prefer the smell of adventure. Tobacco, sweat, mud – that’s what men are made of.’ He raised two fists before his chest and for a moment looked ready to challenge the men around him to a fight. Then he relaxed and put his hands on Paul’s shoulders. ‘That’s what peace means. It means believing in the brotherhood of man. Workers united in sweat and mud. Now listen to what these chaps have to say.’
Paul crossed his arms and planted his feet wide apart. This, then, was what it felt like to be a man: to wear a cloth cap and stand there with his arms crossed, to nod grimly when he agreed with the speaker and push his chin into his chest when he didn’t.
‘Wasn’t the last war meant to end all wars?’ the speaker bellowed. ‘Look at us! Here we are again, rearming and readying ourselves for the next one!”
‘This one’s a trifle tedious,’ Charlie whispered in Paul’s ear.
‘No!’ Paul stared at him. ‘No, he’s incredible.’
‘Shush,’ said a chap with a black beard.
‘Warfare is as primitive as witchcraft, as primitive as cannibalism,’ cried the speaker on the stage. ‘And soon it will be as outdated!’
They cheered. It was a stirring argument, but even more stirring was the feeling of being in this mass of men, of being addressed as a man who could choose between supporting war and opposing it; whose choice would shape the future of the country. The thought came to Paul that his old pen friend, Ludwig, might be standing in a concert hall in Bad Pyrmont and listening to exactly the same sort of speech, might in fact be thinking of Paul standing in a concert hall in London. His parents had always said that killing was wrong because even one’s worst enemy carried an inner light that must not be squashed: it was a concept that had never meant much to Paul because it was too abstract, too metaphorical. It occurred to him now that war was wrong precisely because it was not metaphorical. It was not about snuffing out an inner light, or bayoneting potato sacks, or splitting cabbages: it was about learning to operate a weapon, and then going out and using that knowledge to kill his pen friend, Ludwig. It was madness that chaps who had for years exchanged dutiful letters of ‘visit us soon!’ should suddenly be enemies.
This feeling of personal insight and importance moved Paul more than any Quaker meeting ever had. When the speaker shouted: ‘Sign the peace pledge, comrades! Sign the pledge! Send me a million men like you and then any government must look out!’ Paul knew it was time to act, and it was he, ever so placid Paul, who gripped Charlie’s arm tightly enough to make him wince, and whispered, ‘Let’s sign the pledge! Let’s do it right now.’
Charlie grew suddenly hesitant. ‘Why should we? We know where we stand, don’t we?’ he muttered.
But Paul, seized by sudden fervour, pressed Charlie until he agreed, then badgered the men around him until he had procured four postcards, two to send off to the Peace Pledge Union, and a copy for each of themselves. The brothers squatted down, laid the cards on their thighs and signed beneath the statement they bore.
‘I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.’
3
A year later, Charlie found a job as a clerk for the Peace News newspaper and Paul enrolled for an accountancy degree at Bentham College in Bloomsbury.
‘There’s no shame in running a soap business,’ his father said, and patted his back. ‘There is freedom in running a soap business, genuine spiritual freedom. If you have a soap shop, you’ll never have to compromise on your beliefs. When I came out of prison during the Great War, no one would employ me. What did I do? I sold soap out of a wheelbarrow. Then out of a tiny shop in Clerkenwell. Now we’ve got a nice shop front in Highgate, suppliers in the south of France, customers as far north as Manchester. There’s freedom in shopkeeping, and I wish your brother, Charlie, would understand that.’
He left Paul at the college gates and walked back towards the bus stop, trailing a faint cloud of lavender.
*
A gravel path led from the wrought-iron gates to a vast quad planted with chestnut trees. Squirrels and magpies rustled through the fallen leaves, observed by the utilitarian stare of Jeremy Bentham cast in bronze. On the far side of the quad loomed a mock Doric portico that inhaled a choppy flow of students. Stone columns, thick and tall, guided the gaze up towards a dome, a giant cranium holding the brain of the world.
From the moment he shuffled through this entrance to the realm of reason, Paul knew he would never live up to it. Even the stone columns were more e
nlightened than he would ever be. None of his fellow accountants aspired to be shopkeepers or clerks. No, they saw themselves as guardians of mathematical beauty and balance, wrote treatises that they prefaced with quotations from Luca Pacioli, the Tuscan monk who invented double-entry bookkeeping: ‘Ubi non est ordo, ibi est confusio.’ Where there is no order, there is confusion.
The enlightened accountants forced the university to let them study statistics with the natural scientists. Everyone except Paul thought this was a wonderful privilege. Paul wished they had their own statistics course, perhaps taught by some placid shopkeeper who expected no great leaps from the minds of men. Instead, they were taught by Mrs Morningstar, a short, slender, terrifying woman scientist from the physics department. Her brilliance burned right through Paul and left him as parched and exhausted as a man in the desert. Numbers, letters, brackets converged in a dazzling beam of knowledge that blinded him for an hour and a half every Monday morning. By the end of every lecture, when the professor collected her notes and walked out, he blinked at his empty notepad, a desert traveller wondering what had happened to the oasis on the horizon.
‘Pretty clever for a woman,’ the man behind him remarked.
‘They do say she studied under the Wizard,’ another replied.
A third chap said something in Latin, and they all laughed.
‘Would anyone like to buy a copy of Peace News?’ Paul asked nervously.
No one replied.
He fled to the one place that provided a refuge: a studio in a shabby part of Bloomsbury, where an acquaintance of Charlie’s ran a drawing course.
*
On a table outside the studio, wooden models were lined up, to be borrowed and used in class. Paul clutched his own scratched and wine-stained figure in gratitude. The communal models had suffered far worse abuse: some prankster had switched around their limbs so that their arms grew out of their necks and their heads were grafted to their armpits. Paul pitied the students who would have to use them for the first part of the course, ‘The Human Form’.
He picked up one of the mutilated wooden dummies, put it down again, picked up another. He arranged them in a circle, a pyramid, made them walk in line, dance in pairs. He circled the table and looked at them from different angles, and was so absorbed in this idea for a new painting, or even a sculpture, that he almost missed his class.
He followed the eager scratching of charcoal on paper and the nutty smell of oils and turpentine into the studio, found a free paint-splattered easel by the door and clipped his sheets into place.
Only then did he notice that the students were not drawing wooden dolls.
There, on a pedestal in the middle of the room, sat a naked girl.
She was resting her elbow on one raised knee, with her torso slightly twisted, her face turned away and her sizeable breasts in full view. Two silver clips held back her black hair, and it was those two silver clips that emphasized her nakedness.
The teacher clapped his hands.
‘Two minutes for every pose now, chaps, to loosen up!’
The girl turned round and Paul saw her face. He blushed and backed away, but she stared right past him. The teacher approached his easel and, in his panic, Paul picked up a piece of charcoal and began to draw her.
Long afternoons spent drawing the wooden dummy now stood him in good stead. He held out the charcoal and squinted, measuring her head with his thumb on the stub. Miraculously, her head fitted seven times into the zigzagged length of her seated body. He began with a stick figure to get the tilt and twist right, then built her legs and torso in simple triangles and trapezes. Her breasts were somehow lost in the process.
She stood up and tilted her head back. No time to squint and measure now. With one confident stroke Paul captured her spine dipping into the small of her back and then the curve of her bottom. Another standing pose, this time with her feet together and her arms crossed behind her neck, like a human vase. Paul’s fingers flew over the paper and soon the stub was gone and he picked up another. His right hand was smudged and so was his left from dwelling a little too long on the cross-hatching where her thighs met.
Only during the final, long posture did he capture her face, though he overdid her large brown eyes and the lecturer muttered that she looked a trifle toadish. He picked up a piece of charcoal and tossed it in the palm of his broad hand. ‘The eyes, by the way, should be in the middle of the head, equidistant from chin and crown. You don’t learn that kind of stuff from a dummy, do you?’ He walked on, whistling and tossing the charcoal in his palm.
After three hours, the girl threw on a yellow silk kimono and disappeared behind a screen to get dressed.
*
Paul unclipped his drawings, rolled them up, ran out of the door, and, in a flash of inspiration, pulled the dog-eared stack of newspapers from his bag. When she came out, he was still slightly out of breath. The excitement and running emboldened him and he thrust the newspapers under her chin.
‘Peace News! Peace News!’
She drew back.
‘Peace News!’
He had not developed a strategy beyond the initial approach, and was unsure what else he could say. There had been a vague expectation she would be intrigued and quite naturally strike up a conversation, but this didn’t seem to be the case.
‘Peace News,’ he repeated once more, a little less certainly. ‘Would you like to buy a copy?’
She frowned and craned her neck to see the front page.
‘Peace News,’ she read out slowly, and suddenly the name of the paper, to which he had never given much thought, sounded daft.
‘It’s only . . .’ he caught himself. ‘I mean, it’s free. For you. Here, have one. We’re going to have a debate on the German situation at Bentham College tonight. In fact, well, I’m going to be representing the Peace Society.’ He paused. ‘There’s going to be biscuits. All proceeds to go to good causes.’
‘Good causes?’ She arched one eyebrow, looking impossibly mature and sophisticated. The paper shrunk to a shabby loud rag in her hands. But suddenly she smiled, said, ‘I’ll see you tonight, then,’ and walked away.
Paul remained by the door for a long time, clutching his stack of newspapers, wondering if he had heard right. When he finally walked back across the quad, he realized that not only had he heard right, he also had in his possession four nude drawings of this girl. The thought made him so happy that he laughed out loud.
*
The debate was held in the student union lounge, an airy room with high, arched windows that overlooked the quad with its statue of Bentham. It was furnished with a billiard table, a few sunken leather armchairs, a bookshelf stocked with leather-bound collections of humorous university anecdotes and old student magazines. Women students were not usually permitted to enter the room. They had their own small lounge at the bottom of the hallway, and their own Women’s Union Society, whose members were known as Wussites.
Paul lived in fear of the Wussites, who wrote sharp letters to the student newspaper and rarely, if ever, smiled back at him. Yet he had bravely asked for the student union to be opened to women for the night of the debate, arguing that in this time of national emergency both sexes must be addressed. He regretted the move when he saw the stern female faces in the front row: the type who could not wait to go to work in munitions factories.
The lectern provided a shield of sorts, and he began to feel more comfortable. Mistrustful of his rhetorical skills, he had asked Charlie to help him draft a speech, which he now read from the pages before him.
‘Warfare,’ he read, ‘is as primitive as witchcraft!’ He shook his fist for emphasis. ‘As primitive as cannibalism! And soon,’ he shook his fist again, ‘soon it will be as outdated!’
There were a few cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ and a few of ‘Nonsense!’. He decided against shaking his fist a third time, and instead read a few more paragraphs. This time the cries of ‘Hear, hear’ drowned out the heckles. With a note of
triumph, he read on: ‘Wasn’t the last war meant to end all wars? And now – look at us! Here we are again, rearming and readying ourselves for the next one! Well, what can I say, sign the peace pledge, chaps!’
Half the room burst into applause. Paul looked up and shouted again: ‘Sign the pledge!’ then moved to the seats at the side of the makeshift stage to make room for his opponent.
Just then, one of the girls in the second row stood up and walked towards him.
It was the nude model, now dressed in a blue cotton dress printed with yellow squares.
‘Our next speaker will be Mrs Morningstar,’ the chairman of the student union called out. ‘Tonight’s delegate from the Women’s Union.’
Paul scanned the crowd for his diabolically intelligent maths lecturer but the girl in the cotton dress climbed onto the stage and suddenly he realized that he had misheard. His opponent would not be Mrs Morningstar, but Miss Morningstar: the nude model, who was now calmly taking her place behind the lectern. Without the slightest display of nerves, she thanked the chairman, thanked Paul for his ‘interesting contribution’, thanked the audience for coming. Her brown duffel bag remained closed: she did not need notes.
The man next to Paul put his mouth close to his ear and hissed: ‘Miriam Morningstar. She’s fierce.’
‘Is she the daughter of . . .?’
‘The physics dragon? Yes.’ And it was impossible to ignore the pity in the chap’s voice.
Miriam Morningstar placed both hands on the lectern and began.
‘I always grow a little emotional when I hear a pacifist speak,’ she said with fluent confidence. ‘And before you say that it’s because I’m a woman, well, may I just point out that I saw a few men in this room pull out their handkerchiefs. And why not? After all, our friend here used some terribly stirring phrases: “Young men sent to the slaughter! Think of the weeping mothers!”’ She leaned forward and smiled at her audience. ‘It sounds heartfelt, doesn’t it? And so innocent.’ She paused. ‘But therein lies the danger. We hear the word “appeasement” every day. We hear it from innocent-looking chaps like the one right here. But what, I ask you, lies behind the rhetoric? Well, as it happens, this morning I was given a publication that paints a rather different picture.’ She opened her bag, took out the copy of Peace News and waved it over her head. ‘Has any of you ever read this rag? It gives the most interesting insight into what really goes on in those cosy pacifist clubs. Let me read you an extract from the following article, written in response to Mr Churchill’s speech on Hitler. Mr Churchill, you see, called Hitler a cornered maniac. The author of this article, a certain John Middleton Murry, politely disagrees, and offers the alternative opinion that Hitler has instead a “touch of genius”.’
Of Love and Other Wars Page 2
