Paul considered dashing out into the corridor, but his entire body seemed to be welded to his armchair.
‘So how was this “touch of genius” acquired, in Mr Murry’s opinion?’ Miriam cleared her throat and began to read in an artificial baritone: ‘“His decisive experiences were gained as a down-and-out in the lowest stratum of modern capitalist society . . . Hitler knows the depths of contemporary despair. And he has it in for the Churchills of this world. He knows them and hates them: rather than see them still in the seats of the mighty he would pull the whole world down in ruins. The world has had great destroyers before now, and has appeared to need them. Hitler knows a good many things that Mr Churchill has never dreamed of. He knows that this is, in the fullest sense of the word, a lousy world; he will de-louse it and damn the consequences!”’
She paused and took a deep breath. Then she gripped the paper with both hands, tore it apart and flung the scraps at Paul.
‘Mr Lamb, this is the most disgusting nonsense I have ever read, and I can hardly believe that you would dare to sell something like this at Bentham College, our one beacon of tolerance and liberalism in this darkening world!’
The sinking sensation stopped. Paul jumped to his feet.
‘It’s an opinion piece, Miss Morningstar. One piece! And it was low of you to quote that single piece out of all the rich content of that newspaper.’
‘Which one would you rather have me quote, then?’
Unfortunately, Paul had not yet read that particular edition of Peace News. He had not quite got round to reading the previous edition, either.
‘Well . . . there are many important advertisements in the paper, for example.’
The room burst into howls of laughter.
‘Yes,’ Miriam said drily. ‘I noticed. Vegetarian hotel in the Lake District, conscientious objectors welcome. That does balance it out somewhat, I admit.’
There was more laughter.
Paul was no longer in a debate about pacifism and politics. He sensed his very core being attacked. All he could think of was that he must somehow defend himself in a battle only one of them could win. With high-pitched desperation, he cried: ‘And the bit about de-lousing, that was . . . that was a metaphor for ridding the world of poverty and evil!’
‘Ridding the world of poverty and evil?’ Miss Morningstar let out a scornful laugh. ‘I can tell you exactly what Mr Hitler would like to rid the world of. He does want to de-louse the world, quite right, and the people he sees as lice – the people he has described as vermin – are the German Jews.’
‘Well, that is just . . . now you are just . . .’ Paul stooped, picked up one of the scraps of paper and waved it in her face. The audience sat silent and spellbound. He picked up more scraps and frantically pieced them together. ‘He doesn’t mention Jews anywhere. Those may be Mr Hitler’s views, but you cannot in all fairness ascribe them to Mr Murry, the author of this article, now can you?’
He looked up. Her calmness had given way to a tight smile.
‘Unfortunately, I have met all too many people with views like Mr Murry’s. I know that even in this country, there are enough people who would favour a spot of de-lousing.’
‘In all fairness, Miss Morningstar, this is not something for you and me to decide. In all fairness, this is something to discuss in a different event with a representative of the Jewish students’ union.’
She gave him a very curious look. Some people in the audience began to laugh again.
‘Well,’ she said, and then laughed as well, a surprisingly high and girlish laugh. ‘The thing is, Mr Lamb, I’m not sure if you realize, but I am Jewish.’
*
‘In all fairness,’ Charlie said, and chuckled. He put his arm around Paul’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, old chap. No, really, in all fairness, she is called Miriam Morningstar.’
‘And so? That’s a Jewish name, is it?’
Charlie rolled his eyes. Paul shook off his arm.
‘How would I know? I’m not sure I’ve even met a Jewish person before.’
‘You must have come to some of Grace’s fund-raising events.’
‘Which one? Self-Denial for Spain? That was for Basque persons.’
‘You’re such a troglodyte.’
‘Troglodyte yourself.’ Paul kicked a stone at the statue of Bentham.
‘The worst thing is, her mother teaches my statistics course. I’m going to fail.’
‘Because you argued with her daughter?’
‘Because I can’t count.’
They were out in the street now. Paul walked with his head bowed, his hands angrily stuffed into his pockets, and tried to understand why the mood had so suddenly swung against him. Hadn’t they all felt relieved just two months ago when the Munich Crisis had ended, when the Prime Minister had promised ‘peace for our time’? Certainly, people were learning about air-raid preparations, Bentham College had converted its vaults into bomb shelters, the chemistry department was printing leaflets about different gases the Germans might use in their attacks. But at the same time, the Peace Pledge Union was receiving sacks full of signed postcards from all over the country, and there was a march against conscription every other week. Uniforms and gas masks had been tried on and stored away again, and even the most bellicose hecklers in the student lounge, even Miss Morningstar herself, could not seriously be wishing to unpack them once more.
‘Think of this as a test,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s hard defending the sort of views we hold, and it’s going to be even harder.’ Walking past a pub, they heard the garbled sound of drunks arguing, then a glass smashing on the floor. Charlie stopped, listened, turned to Paul. ‘You do realize there’s going to be a war, don’t you? Even Father says so.’
4
Paul completed more than fifty nude drawings over the next year. Not one of them depicted Miriam. She never posed for them again, but he began to spot her at Bentham College, leaving the arts wing in a pair of paint-splattered dungarees, chatting to lecturers in the quad, and decided she must be an art student. It took him a while to realize that she was not at all angry with him, but rather seemed to see their clash as a bracing bout of wrestling she had won. She smiled at him with familiar ease, as if there was a special camaraderie in having publicly fought over politics. He stood next to her in the luncheon queue, chatted with her on the steps leading up to the portico, and eventually had to admit to himself that these meetings were not coincidences, that he waited for the bus with her even though he always took the tube, that he persuaded the art department to let him use a corner of the studio with the sole intention of watching her stretch her canvases.
In late spring 1939, Paul failed his statistics course but finally plucked up the courage to submit his masterpiece, The Homecoming, for the Bentham College summer show. The Homecoming was a thin, almost milky oil painting of a forest of ghostly, scorched trees against a grey-white sky. A group of ragged creatures dragged themselves through the forest in single file, backs bent, limbs strangely mutilated. One of them had two arms where the legs should have been. Another, a second head growing out of his armpit. They were the distorted wooden models from the Bloomsbury studio, which Paul had scooped up, set up on a windowsill and painted as if they were nightmarish soldiers returning from a battlefield of ghouls. Lagging behind was his own model, intact but for the wine stains, which he had turned into open wounds in the painting.
From his new friends in the art department he heard that there was some discussion over whether The Homecoming quite fitted the spirit of the show, or indeed of Bentham College. Some found it implied a criticism of the military, and of rearmament, that was inappropriate at this time of heightened tension. Others argued that it was precisely the point of art to provoke and unsettle. In the end the work was accepted but given a space at the very back of the exhibition hall.
Two days before the summer show, when Paul was certain no one would dare take out his painting at the last min
ute, he sneaked into the hall and wrote along the bottom of The Homecoming in red paint: ‘War will stop when men refuse to fight. What are you going to do about it?’
*
On the morning before the show, Paul passed a shop window of tiered velvet shelves covered in earrings, bracelets, watches. One item caught his eye. He stopped and examined it through the glass, shook his head and walked on.
The shopkeeper scurried after him. His trained eye had spotted the telltale look on Paul’s face: the look of a sensible man secretly wishing to be seduced.
‘I believe these are the ones you were interested in, sir?’
The cuff links winked at him from their bed of blue velvet. He would have to buy a new shirt, too, if he wanted to wear them that night. He angled the velvet box in the light. Plain silver cuff links with an inlaid graphic pattern of black jet. Rather nice, really. Very modern.
‘You have an excellent eye, sir. Superb craftsmanship but not at all flashy.’ The shopkeeper lowered his voice and switched to confidential chumminess: ‘Tell you what, I’ll give them to you for half. My boy was called up today; suppose you’ll all be out there before the year’s up. The least I can do is make you chaps look half decent.’
*
Paul’s father wore his best suit; his mother, a cream-coloured silk blouse and a dark green skirt that she had bought for the occasion. She nervously fingered the single string of pearls around her neck. Mary Pye had enlivened her grey dress with a silver brooch. Charlie turned up late, but surprised Paul by wearing a smart jacket.
The relentlessly earnest spirit of Bentham College had softened for the summer show. Lanterns swayed in the chestnut trees. A few couples danced on the lawn. Paul’s father smiled and tapped his fingers to the rhythm of the swing band, and his mother bought a raffle ticket even though it was gambling. The mildness of early summer gave the night a tender and almost Mediterranean spirit; surely no one could even think of going to war in such lovely weather. For a moment, Paul wished he had created something decorative and inoffensive to exhibit: bright lino prints, or perhaps portraits of musicians and dancers.
Under the pretence of looking for the organizers of the show, he made his way through the crowd. He found Miriam talking to some fellow Wussites. She was wearing a midnight-blue silk gown with silver webbing over the shoulders and stood with her back to him. Her hair was swept up and secured by a silver comb, and when she turned around to greet him, a few curls came loose and fell across her cheek.
The spirit of the night infected him and he held out his hand with a strange new confidence and led her towards the dancers. He spun her around, placed his hand flat on the cool silk between her shoulder blades, guided her through the steps he had practised with Charlie; and it seemed to him that no one in the whole world had ever danced this well. The band played ‘The Flat Foot Floozie with the Floy Floy’.
‘I’ve always wondered what a Floy Floy might be,’ he said, and repeated ‘Floy Floy!’ because it sounded so jolly and matched his festive mood.
‘It’s slang for venereal disease,’ said Miriam, perfectly poised in her silk gown.
He laughed. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard a girl say those words before. Then again, I’ve never danced with a nude model before.’
She stiffened under his hand.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I was there, remember? You must have seen me.’
‘No!’
She stopped and pulled away. The band struck up a new song and Paul and Miriam began to move again but could not find the lightness of their first dance. They kept looking at their feet like bad and uncertain dancers, fell out of step, had to start again.
Miriam clicked her tongue in frustration.
‘I only posed that one time,’ she said defensively.
‘Only once?’ He looked straight into her eyes. ‘You’re clearly a natural.’
For a moment he feared that he might have made things worse, that he might have offended her. But then she laughed and looked grateful to him for having popped the taut awkwardness.
They danced well after that. Another song, and another. He caught sight of his parents standing forlornly at the edge of the party, ignored them for one more song, then murmured to Miriam that he would quickly show them his painting.
She flinched. ‘You haven’t seen it yet?’
‘Not tonight. Why?’
‘Nothing . . . I assumed you’d seen it and didn’t mind.’
‘Didn’t mind what?’
Before she could reply, he left the dance floor and elbowed his way through the crowd. He ignored the curious glances, the muffled asides. His parents and Charlie joined him at the studio entrance and asked him if anything was the matter, but he continued walking past the sculptures and lino prints, right to the very back of the room.
When he reached the corner, he heard his mother let out a gasp. Someone held his arm.
The Homecoming had been ripped open by a long diagonal gash.
Next to the painting, on a column, sat Paul’s wooden model, its arms outstretched and pleading: Look what they did to me. Someone had dipped it first in glue, then in white feathers.
Adamantine Lustre
‘When light meets a diamond, a small part of it is reflected, while the remainder penetrates and passes through the transparent stone. The reflected light produces what is known as adamantine lustre.’
A Theory of Diamond-Cutting
1
Visitors often assumed delicate Mrs Morningstar to be flighty and artistic, and her sturdy daughter, Miriam, to be robust and practical. It had become a family joke that the opposite was the case.
Mrs Morningstar took an interest in the arts, certainly, the way other people were interested in the weather or the changing seasons: they were beautiful enough, and with two artists in the family, she liked to make sure she was well informed. Ultimately, however, aesthetics mattered little to Mrs Morningstar. She had no time for fashion or beauty parlours. Once a month, she had her hair cut by Miriam in a straight line from earlobe to earlobe, in what was not so much a hairstyle as a safety measure. When, during a visit to a Moore and Hepworth exhibition in a local gallery, her husband and her daughter asked her what she considered the most beautiful thing in the world, she said: the structure of benzene.
It was therefore not surprising that she spent the opening night of the summer show in her office. Down in the quad, one of her students played the saxophone and her daughter danced under lanterns that swayed in the breeze. Up at her desk, Esther Morningstar sat in the light of the Anglepoise and marked end-of-term essays from the statistics students. What a tremendously useful occupation for a trained crystallographer, she thought: teaching accountants the probability of finding the one pea in a jar of dried beans.
Footsteps crunched across the gravel under her open window. The voice of a young man drifted up, followed by a cry of protest or outrage. Another voice joined it, clearer and louder.
‘What did you expect? Everyone knows that the Bentham art department is ruled by troglodytes.’
It seemed rather fitting that this comment should seal the term. It chimed with her dissatisfaction, with her sense that a long slow slide had brought her to this desk with its Anglepoise, which nodded sleepily because one of the springs that held the head was missing.
In the top drawer of the scratched desk lay a medal cast of solid gold, a Nobel medal, and when Mrs Morningstar was in a certain mood she liked to take the medal out of the drawer and weigh it in her hand.
A remnant from another life, this habit of falling into a certain melancholy at the end of the academic year; to tally up what had been achieved, what had been missed, and in the warmth of summer mourn the losses of the past. Mrs Morningstar did not believe in judgement season, did not believe in the judge. She walked past crowded synagogues as the first caveman walked past a group of apes; she never enjoyed a bacon bagel more than on Yom Kippur. Yet there was a deep hidden part of her that ref
used to admit reason and modernity, a deep dark hollow where low voices mingled with the smell of bread, where a woman covered her eyes with her hands and recited a blessing.
The gold lay pleasantly heavy in her palm. She traced the Latin inscription with her fingers. Her Latin was dry and functional, and she would have translated the phrase literally: ‘Inventions enhance life, which is beautified through art.’
It was the Wizard who had quoted Virgil in the lab, had taught them a looser, more poetic meaning: ‘And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery.’
She placed her other hand over the medal and thought how satisfying it would be if the name engraved in the gold were her own.
2
Esther Morningstar, née Adler, had never posed naked on a plinth. Nor had she ever ripped a newspaper to shreds in a student union lounge. And yet, there had been a time when, in her own bowl-haired way, she had lived with a hot pulse, an intensity that left all those around her looking rather limp and lifeless.
She often told her daughter about her early research, about the days when she ran to the lab every morning because she could not wait to get her hands on her spectrometer. Porridge, bathroom, shoes, coat, were meaningless items on a list that must be checked off before one could begin one’s daily task of living life, the real life that was there in the shape of a crystal waiting for a young woman scientist to extract its secrets.
Of Love and Other Wars Page 3
