Nuns and Soldiers (13 page)

The time was nine in the evening and the day was five days later than the day upon which, as narrated at the start, Manfred and the Count and Sylvia Wicks and Stanley Openshaw and Mrs Mount and Tim had gathered for Visiting Hour at Ebury Street. Since then Tim had been there, including the present evening, twice. He did not always ask Gertrude for food, it had to be done casually. He hoped she did not observe in any detail the results of his raids on her kitchen. If he took a little bit of a lot of things it would not show. Tim didn’t want to acquire the reputation of a scrounger. What he had laid out now in front of Daisy upon the beer-stained table was as follows: two slices of bread roughly smeared with butter, two pieces of cheese, one cheddar, one stilton, two tomatoes, four oatmeal biscuits, a slice of cold roast lamb and a small bit of fruitcake.

‘I don’t think it’s too bad,’ said Tim.

‘Weren’t there any cold potatoes?’

‘No.’

Tim’s mackintosh, into the capacious pockets of which he had hastily stuffed the goodies, hung on the back of his chair, dripping. It was raining outside, and a cold east wind was making the rain run rippling across the streets of north Soho, which glittered like rivers under the street lamps. The brief snow was now gone and forgotten. Daisy had been waiting for Tim for some time.

‘I think we’re getting
too
poor. OK, we wanted to be poor, we chose to be poor, but this is ridiculous. How is it that everybody else has got money and we haven’t? How is it that they can earn money and we can’t? We have talents, why can’t we sell them?’

Tim did not know the answer. Tim and Daisy had long made a joke of being penniless. They counted themselves as wanderers, misfits, flotsam and jetsam, orphans of the storm, babes in the wood, mendicant artists, destitute hedonists on a perpetual picnic. Tim had a one-day-a-week teaching job at a polytechnic in Willesden. Daisy, who used also to teach painting, was (Tim hoped temporarily) unemployed. Payment was by the hour, so there was no pay for holidays. The term was now near its end and (Tim had not yet told Daisy) he was not to be employed next term. They both, rather furtively and without telling each other, collected National Assistance. Only somehow, perhaps because they failed to fill in the forms properly, they never seemed to get as much as other people. Their rents had lately been raised (they lived separately now). They had discussed stealing but agreed that they were conditioned against it and would be terrified of the disgrace, it was nothing to do with morality. They could have lived more cheaply it they could have made up their minds to give up drink or to live together again, but they could not make either of these decisions. Spatial problems in cheap rooms had defeated them. Tim now ameliorated their plight (he had a more extensive social life than Daisy) by removing food from the houses to which he was invited (this surely was not stealing). Any sort of party was a bonus, especially a big reception where one could pocket sandwiches. He had laid in a store of nourishment at Jeremy Schultz’s bar mitzvah. (Stale sandwiches are delicious fried.) The wedding of Moses Greenberg’s niece to one of the Lebowitzim was now happily in prospect.

Tim and Daisy had been together now for a long time, and it was not easy, even for them, to define what their relation was. Earlier Tim would have married Daisy had it not been for her surprisingly ferocious hostility to the institution of marriage, which she connected with ‘homes and gardens and hoovering the wall-to-wall carpet and generally becoming dead’. She had a special resentment against idle women who married so as not to work, and lived lives of bourgeois selfishness. The ‘haves’ with their husbands and their kiddies and their houses full of bloody furniture! Worthless people full of moral complacency and contempt for others! Daisy and Tim prided themselves on being free and having no possessions. They saw themselves as having deliberately and happily missed the bus. They had been young together. Now they were not so young together. Though still childish, they acknowledged the years, years which were fleeting by for both of them. They were comrades with a special relationship. It had long been established that they suited each other, and no one else seemed to suit either of them, and they had searched long enough. They were, for each other, the only ones they couldn’t leave. They had lived, and lived still, by a light of romance, tracking each other across London and meeting in pubs and afternoon drinking clubs as they had done when they were students. These rendezvous, which took place daily, were more thrilling than dull old living together which they had tried and discarded. They envisaged life, they said, as soldiering on from one little festival to another, and for them almost anything counted as a festival. They conspired to be eternally youthful, and on that they restlessly rested.

They had both, as children, had unhappy homes, and this seemed to make them ‘like brother and sister’, two of a kind. Daisy had a French Canadian father; the family name was Barrault, but had been changed for some reason, by her eccentric father to Barrett. Her mother was a Bloomsbury lady, remotely related to Virginia Woolf, who had been a dim dilettante painter in a Euston Road style and a protégée of Duncan Grant. The marriage broke up when Daisy (an only child) was four. The mother and child stayed in London, the father returned to Canada. He had been some sort of sculptor, according to Daisy, but turned more successfully to art business. Daisy’s mother, who wanted to be ‘in society’, but was now very poor, resented Daisy who, she thought, somehow prevented her from marrying again. The mother died when Daisy was ten and she went to Canada to her father who, though fitfully affectionate, regarded the child as a confounded nuisance. In due course he took her back to England and dumped her at Roedean; while he increasingly lived in France. Holidays were spent scrappily in hotels. Daisy hated Roedean. Then noticing that she was becoming tall and handsome, her father fetched her to Paris to share a house with his latest mistress. Shortly after that he became bankrupt and returned to Montreal to drink himself to death, leaving Daisy in Neuilly-sur-Seine with a remote relation whom she knew as Tante Louise. Encouraged by some of her father’s friends, Daisy began to study art. To escape from Tante Louise she came to London and lived there as an art student. Her father, while he lived, sent her an irregular but not ungenerous allowance. She had talent, and finally reached the Slade. It was here that she met Tim, who was two years her junior. She spoke perfect French but detested France.

Tim’s history was different but equally unsatisfactory. His father, who was Irish but had always lived in England, had been a barrister and an amateur musician. Music not law was his real love and he finally gave up his law practice. He was a good pianist but never achieved excellence. He had dabbled in composition, but now devoted himself wholly to it, at first with some modest success. He was a big brilliant funny laughing red-haired man, a great success with women. He had a fine baritone voice and knew every song. He could play anything on the piano. He was a concert in himself, whether comic or serious. As a husband and father he had fewer talents. Tim’s mother was also a musician. She had played the flute in the
Jeunesse Musicale
, later in the London Symphony Orchestra. She was a Welsh girl of modest background and delicate health (she had had TB as a child) and was briefly extremely beautiful. The two got married in haste and repented at leisure, at least Tim’s mother repented. Tim’s father, who departed soon after the birth of Tim and his sister Rita, showed no sign of uneasy feelings. He went to America, and though his musical career gradually foundered he apparently did not cease to enjoy himself. He married again, then divorced. He turned up in England at intervals to see the children of whom he was, when he saw them, demonstratively fond. Neither parent attempted to give Tim or Rita any musical education. The father was absent, the mother, whose flute was heard no more, had no will to urge her unruly children to practise the art which had brought her only sad memories.

The children adored their father. In the rather dreary and impecunious life which they were living with their mother in a London suburb he was a beam of brilliant light, a being from another world, a boisterous shining god. The children laughed and shouted with pleasure when the big handsome red-headed papa made his appearance and sat down at the piano. They mourned his departures and longed for his return and lived in a dream of going to join him in some paradise of wealth and freedom (they assumed of course he was vastly rich) on the other side of the Atlantic. Their frail nervous irritable disappointed impoverished money-grabbing mother excited their aversion. Their talk was always of when they would ‘get away’. Their mother’s departure came first however. When Tim was twelve and Rita was ten the unhappy woman reverted to her TB and died, and Tim and Rita were whisked off to Cardiff where they lived in the family of their maternal uncle, among cousins who resented their presence. Tim, who dreamed of protected children in warm nurseries, was tormented by a gaggle of disorderly little girls. When Tim was fourteen Rita died of anorexia nervosa, a disease at that time very little understood. After the mother’s death the brilliant father never reappeared. He was killed fairly soon after in a motor accident.

However the god-like papa had in fact laid up one last useful little treat for his children and it was through this that Tim came in due course into contact with Ebury Street. His father had been in his London days, a friend of Rudi Openshaw, also a musical lawyer, who was one of Guy’s uncles. Cornelius Reede (for that was the father’s name) had left in his will some money in trust for his children, in the care of Rudi Openshaw and the ‘family bank’. Rudi became in effect the children’s guardian. He was a bachelor, awkward with children, and saw his wards only once when he came to Cardiff to make some financial arrangements with Tim’s uncle. These arrangements, though welcome to the uncle’s family, did not improve Tim and Rita’s lot in any way. Rita died. Rudi died; and the trust for Tim’s benefit passed to Guy’s father, and later to Guy, who became in this odd way
in loco parentis
to Tim.

Tim’s desire was and had always been to get back to London. When he was seventeen, with Guy’s father’s consent and the blessing of his uncle, aunt and cousins, he travelled to the capital to become an art student. He suspected later that the idea of his studying art had arisen not through an analysis of his talents, but because this represented an easy inexpensive way of giving him a scrappy bit of further education. What Tim never knew was that the trust money had given out some time earlier and that Tim’s quite lengthy student days were financed by Guy’s father, later by Guy, out of their own pockets. Guy never told anyone, not even Gertrude, about this. Tim’s tuition was paid for (later he obtained a government grant) and he received a modest allowance upon which he lived in a student hostel, then in digs. He began his studies in a suburban art school, after which, to his teachers’ surprise and not least to his own, he scrambled into the Slade. When he had finished his final course Guy informed him that the trust money was nearly at an end and that the allowance could continue only for another six months. After all, thought Guy, the young fellow must learn to stand on his own feet. Whether Tim ever stood there was something which Tim himself often wondered. When Tim left the Slade he was twenty-three and Guy was thirty-four.

Later on Tim began to feel differently about his mother. When he could no longer console and love her, his heart turned towards her. He dreamt about her, that he was searching for her in dark vague halls or upon endless stairs. When he was a child his father had represented freedom, his mother bondage; but how unjust it was, with the deep casual injustice of a rotten world. His father had been an egoistic irresponsible bastard. His mother had been solitary, impoverished, ill, even her children had turned against her. Of course, as she struggled unsupported with every sort of difficulty, she became tired and ill-tempered. She needed help and love, only now when there was love for her in Tim’s heart it was too late. He had come round to loving his mother and hating his father when they were both ghosts. He longed vainly to make amends. He talked to Daisy about this guilt and this pain. Daisy said, ‘Yes, our shitty parents let us down, but I suppose we have to be sorry for them. They were miserable and we’re happy, so we win in the end.’ Tim thought that his father wasn’t miserable, and that he himself was not always happy, but he did not argue. Tim had a modest view of his rights and talents, and although he sometimes felt he had been unfortunate he had to admit that his adult life so far had been devoid of catastrophes, and he was prepared to settle for the contentment of ‘the man who has no history’. He saw himself sometimes as a soldier of fortune, a raffish footloose fellow, a drinker, a wandering cadger, a happy-go-lucky figure in a shabby uniform (not of course an officer) who lived from day to day avoiding unpleasantness and procuring small fairly innocuous satisfactions. There was no ground-base of happiness in his life, but he was naturally merry. He had (and he counted it his nearest approach to virtue) a cheerful temperament. He often thought too about his sister Rita, only about her he did not talk to Daisy. (Daisy had also suffered from anorexia nervosa when she was a girl, as a protest against Roedean.) Tim and Rita had fought a lot but they had been very close, allies against the world; which would have been an
utterly different
world now had Rita lived. As it was Tim had nobody but Daisy.

When Tim had first met Daisy, when he was entering the Slade and she was leaving it, he had admired her from afar. She was, then, a striking figure. She was very thin and boyish, with short very dark hair and large dark brown eyes, a pale purecomplexioned well-shaped face and a long sensual mouth that drooped at the corners. She had a sharp pretty nose and a mole beside one nostril. The mole matched her woody-brown eyes like a droplet. She could move her scalp backwards and forwards in an amusing manner. She dressed outrageously and was regarded by persons of both sexes as a desirable object. Though rarely inclined to formulate consistent policies, she was also regarded as something of a leader. She preferred the other sex to her own, but had emotional friendships with women, especially (at the Slade) with a group of vociferous American Women’s Liberationists. Her own opinions were of the anarchistic extreme left variety, and when roused to controversy her dark brown eyes would become square with fury. She was a talented painter of whom much was expected. When, two years later, she took Tim for a lover he was extremely proud. He felt it was the beginning of a brilliant new era.