A Winter's Child (44 page)

But it was too soon, of course, to grow desperate. She brought out her basket of goodies and set them on his table, put a solicitous hand to his forehead to check his temperature, listened to his cough and then, in great detail, to the progress of his current masterpiece; the ritual of nourishing, healing, inspiring which she always performed. Yet something was lacking. What had altered? The man himself was just as usual, lean, self-absorbed, self-tormented. Certainly the cold, cheerless room, a bare cell, she had always thought, in which to do penance rather than make love, was no different. What was happening to the lovely havoc, the sweet uproar this man and this room together – this atmosphere of frustrated genius – had for so long wrought in her? Clutching desperately she retrieved it and held it fast as one holds a warm quilt on a winter night, only to feel it sliding away again.

It had happened before. Each time she never expected it to happen again. This time she had been quite certain. But she opened her champagne – what else could she do? – realizing that his insistence on drinking it out of tin mugs which she had once thought so significant – but of what? – now slightly annoyed her.

‘Happy New Year, darling,' For him she knew that it would be. He would continue to live here with his dust and his mouse-droppings, his deliberate cultivation of hardship, eating his cold baked beans out of their tin, never combing his hair, carefully preserving his misery because every struggling artist worth his salt had to be miserable and unkempt. Suddenly she understood that this
vie de Bohéme
was all he wanted. He had neither the desire nor the talent for success. She had been wrong again. But, since she
was
here and had nowhere else to go, she undressed him as she always did at the appropriate moment, took off her own clothes while he kept warm under the thin blanket and then held him obligingly for the moment or two it took him to discharge his, passion. He was not a good lover. She had always known that. But she had found her own pleasure in accommodating his need. She had always felt uplifted by his quivering, clumsy helplessness at such moments, perversely satisfied by his physical inadequacy, making a sacrifice of her own orgasm on the altar of his genius. Now, lying in the cold dark on his hard, far from spotless bed, she felt irritable, disappointed,
sad.

‘I have to go now, Roland.'

He did not question her, and she had reached the dank, deserted alley behind the studio, alone at two o'clock on the first morning of the New Year, before it occurred to her to wonder just where she could go. Not home to her husband, certainly, since he had accepted her tale of family obligations in Manchester with Bernard Crozier and Nanette. Where then? No Leeds hotel would admit her without luggage at this hour, not even taking into account the huge emerald on her finger and her extravagant red fox furs. And she had an idea that if she attempted to sleep in the car then the police might question her and end up escorting her home for what they would call her own good. The officious fools! Yet – just the same – what conclusion might she draw herself at the sight of a woman of her age and class wandering alone in such a place? A sudden wind arose, sorting through the debris of the festive season, the cans and bottles, the rotting peel of brussel sprouts and mandarin oranges, the gaudy, empty shells of Christmas crackers dumped in the alley, lifting an abandoned newspaper which flew mournfully out of the dark like a giant bat. For an instant, Nola, fending off the soggy newsprint and kicking it aside as it began to wrap itself around her ankles, felt utterly forlorn.

But she had no time for that and there seemed little point to it anyway. The thought of Kit Hardie and his clean, comfortable bed at the Crown came briefly into her head. But there seemed little point to that either. What mattered first of all was getting this foul little motor started.
Damnation!
Supposing she couldn't? What then? What
did
one do when a car broke down, other than call Parker to come and put it right? She was chilled to the marrow and had split two of her long pointed nails by the time she finally jerked and laboured her engine through those narrow, identical streets of industrial Leeds. She had even shed a tear of pure frustration by the time she had passed the same dingy warehouse four times, distinguishing it from the dozens of others only because the chains hanging from one landing to another to hoist up the bales of cloth had been painted an astonishing, sickly green. But having found her way to the main road and a miraculous signpost announcing Faxby, she drove on without taking any conscious decision about it to Mannheim Crescent and, pushing her way round to the back of the house through the shrubbery of tangled, dripping trees, stood for what seemed to her a very long moment knocking on Claire's garden door. She had never been so cold, rarely so miserable. She felt weak, which was unlike her, and – to which she was rather more accustomed – dispirited and low. Yet, when Claire drew aside the curtain and began hurriedly to unlock the bolts, nothing could have exceeded the flamboyant gaiety of Nola's greeting.

‘Happy New Year, Claire – shall I be the first wet foot across your threshold this year – or shall I? You
are
alone? Ah well – poor you. As it happens, so am I.'

She went inside, shaking the drops of icy water from her furs, tossing off her hat.

‘Are you all right, Nola?'

‘Not really. Are you?'

‘About the same.'

‘Let's drink to it then.'

‘All right.'

‘Happy New Year.'

It was the second year of the peace that would – who had told them that? – be everlasting, the year when the frenzied spending of gratuities and pensions, the ‘getting back to normal', ‘making up for lost time', the ‘boom'began to stop.

But waking up cold and stiff on that first dismal January morning, having spent the last few hours of the night in an armchair pushed up by the fire, Claire's first thought was of the wife of her former lover who had commandeered her bed by the simple process of falling into it, drunk and almost fully dressed, having taken off, in fact, little more than her furs and her shoes.

Yet Nola's presence troubled her, if at all, rather less than her own aching head and the stark treachery of the fire which, after all her ministrations, all the coal and wood she had lavished upon it, had gone out. The room, therefore, had acquired a temperature which threatened her survival as, with a cricket sweater – whose, she wondered? – over the heaviest flannel pyjamas Taylor & Timms had been able to supply, a blanket over that, she went through the hated winter labour of attempting to light a new fire on the ashes of the old.

‘Shouldn't you clean out the grate first?' enquired Nola from the relative warmth of the bed.

‘Yes, Nola.'

‘So that the air can get through and ignite the sticks –?'

‘Yes, Nola.'

‘And if you dump your coal like that on top of the wood you
have
got burning then – surely – won't you put it out?'

‘Yes, Nola.'

She drove a poker viciously into the grate, attempting to clear the ash – yesterday's ash and the day before's – which clogged it and, unable to face the task of sweeping it into a dustpan and carrying it, through a high wind, into the icy yard, she ran to the kitchen instead, teeth chattering, eyes watering with cold, returning with a can of paraffin with which she liberally soaked the coal and sticks.

‘You're not going to set that alight, are you?' Nola sounded alarmed.

Claire stuck a match, and, standing back a little, tossed it into the grate, retreating further still as the hearth exploded into a fierce, malodorous blaze.

‘Good God,' said Nola, putting a hand to the space between her eyes which clearly ached. ‘You live dangerously, my pet – I'll grant you that.'

‘Nola – do tell me – have you ever actually lit a fire yourself?'

‘Lord no. Don't mind me. I live in a world where fires light themselves, we both know that. But, jaded as I may be, I do retain my capacity for astonishment …'

‘Oh –?'

‘Those pyjamas, Claire!'

‘Campaign pyjamas, Nola. We had bad winters in France.'

‘Chaste winters too, one supposes – in those.'

‘I wouldn't say that. Are you getting up today, Nola? When I've got the fire going and put the coffee on I shall want to make my chaste bed – unless, of course, you would care to volunteer?'

‘No – no, I won't, thank you very much. I'll just lie here and work on my list of New Year resolutions. A New Year, a new opportunity, after all.'

‘Do I take it that sculpture is over, then?'

Nola shrugged, making the best of it, knowing that she was probably to blame.

‘Ah well – on reflection it strikes me that Roland's work is not particularly original.'

Had he ever told her it was? Or had she seized upon it – and him – and made them both up as she went along to suit her own need? Very likely. But if Roland was gone, the need, the hollow space he had filled, existed still. Covering herself with Claire's quilt she closed her eyes, realizing that her head, either from alcohol or simply from the biting cold, was truly aching.

‘I believe I have caught the Spanish influenza,' she said with a note of interest in her voice. She had never caught an infection before and at least it would pass the time while she thought of something else with which to replace Roland.

Euan Ash, whose cough had quite ruined the ballet teacher's Christmas, disturbing so many of her nights that she had finally seen no alternative but to complain, packed his kit-bag that day. A New Year, a new opportunity.

‘I'm off to Edinburgh,' he told Claire.

‘Are you really?'

‘Well, I'll just go down to the station and see what trains are running. North, at any rate.'

‘With that chest, Euan, you shouldn't travel in this weather.'

‘With that chest, old girl, I shouldn't really be alive to tell the tale. I can hardly travel without it. The thing is I can't take my canvases – too bulky, too many. Will you hang on to them for me until I send? And if I don't send then just keep them in memoriam.'

Of course she would. Of course. That was the very least – And then, suddenly thinking of something else she could do for him, she said, making her voice casual, ‘All right. Although God knows where I'll put them. Unless – Yes. There's and idea. You only pay a few shillings a week for that room of yours, so it might be worth my while to keep it on, just for the use of the kitchen. I'm not keen to share with a stranger.'

And then, at least – at need – he would have a roof to come back to, a corner to call his own which, even if she never saw him again, he would
know
was there. An alternative to whatever he might encounter on the road.

‘So your canvases can stay where they are.'

‘Right-o,' he said.

She was immeasurably and amazingly distressed to see him go. She felt, standing on the wind-raked station platform, her teeth chattering with cold and heartache, like a woman sending out some delicate knight-errant to slay a dragon. She felt, as she had felt the night she had seen Jeremy off to France, as she had felt a dozen times, waving and smiling to Paul.

‘I suppose you have enough money?'

‘Oh –
I'm
all right. There's a money-tree at the bottom of my garden. Always has been. I just have to hold out my hand.'

He held it out now and she clasped it, his fingers thin and brittle and very cold.

‘You don't want to worry about me, you know,' he said.'

‘No. You're right. I don't
want
to. Not at all.'

He smiled and slid a thin arm around her, drawing her towards a body without substance, or any aspiration, submitting with the patience of a well-mannered child as she began to tuck the woollen scarf she had given him into the collar of his shabby trench-coat.

‘I'll be all right, love. Honestly.'

‘No you won't.'

He sighed. ‘But I will. In my fashion.'

‘What's in Edinburgh, Euan?'

‘I'll tell you when I get there.'

‘If-'

‘Well – yes. But don't worry. You don't want to care about me either.'

‘Oh – now
there
you're absolutely right. Not in the very least do I want to care.'

His arm tightened and flinging both her arms around him she hugged him, possessively, protectively,
angrily,
knowing that even if she might be able to guard him from the world with that surge of fierce, female strength, she would never manage to guard him from himself.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

So – from the very core of herself – was she.

He had said goodbye to no one else, not to Kit or Nola or his associate stallholders in Faxby Market Place. He simply boarded the train, his kit-bag on his shoulder, and went away, leaving her with two dozen canvases of fragile woodland creatures peering at one another between the fine-veined stems of English wild flowers; more empty cans and empty whisky bottles than she had ever seen gathered together in one place; a huge oriental vase and, by arrangement with the agent of her landlord, Mr Crozier, a kitchen of her own.

She missed him. And, in a way, she was glad of it, one sense of loss blending with another, so that it became difficult to know how much of it was for Euan, how much for Benedict.

A New Year, a new opportunity: and the war was over now –
over
– had been over long enough to be bearable, manageable, no longer the all-embracing alibi for irresponsible or erratic behaviour which until now it had been. Unless she organized herself,
stirred
herself soon, she would run out of excuses. Unless she moved, and moved quickly, she would be – perhaps for ever – at a standstill. Paul was dead. Euan had gone. Benedict had been a dreadful mistake, a stupid mistake for which she could not forgive herself. But if she had failed to understand him, she had at least learned something about herself. He had used her as a sexual diversion and the role neither suited her nor sufficed her. She would never play it again. It was over. And she felt nothing – very little at any rate-except hostility and contempt for him now, finding his way of life distasteful, futile,
old-fashioned,
based as it was on clandestine encounters with those eternally, interchangeably ‘smart' women who took lovers in secret because they lacked the courage to stand alone. She did not think of such women as ‘smart', or clever, or daring, as they certainly saw themselves. She thought of them, quite simply, as out of date. She had nothing to say to Benedict now beyond the essentials of those ‘family Sundays'which still brought her to High Meadows. ‘Good evening, Claire. Are you well?'