Nuns and Soldiers (15 page)

Tim’s relation with Ebury Street had, throughout recent years, remained steady without ever becoming deeper or more interesting. Tim, when he was a student, and after the demise of Rudi Openshaw, had been acquainted with Guy’s father, a rather alarming figure who lived in a large house in Swiss Cottage to which Tim went at intervals to say how well he was getting on and to receive advice about how to live more economically. Guy, the son, was at that time a shadowy figure, lately married, who occasionally passed by in the background when Tim was visiting the father’s house. On one visit Tim saw Gertrude, a younger slimmer Gertrude, all dressed up to go out to a party. When Guy’s father died, Tim came instead, at rather rarer intervals, to report himself at Ebury Street. He was never then invited to any social function, though Guy, whom Tim regarded with nervous veneration, usually gave him a glass of sherry. When he finished his studies and his allowance ended Tim assumed that now Ebury Street would know him no more. Indeed his conception of Guy at this time was hazy, and of Gertrude vaguer still. None of the others had he ever met at all. However, as a result of some mysterious decree, his status, instead of sinking into nothing was, by the change, enhanced. The vanishing of money from the relationship had somehow rendered it social, unofficial. Tim was asked to drinks, he became a regular attender at the Ebury Street ‘days’. Sometimes there were large parties. Once he took Daisy to one. It was not a success. She was impolitely silent, then left early. Tim stayed on, then had a row with her afterwards.

Daisy set herself up to detest these ‘bourgeois grandees’ who were, she professed to think, gradually swallowing Tim, digesting him into their horrible snobby world. At the same time, Daisy said, they despised him, mocked him, treated him with condescension and contempt. They were artificial unreal people, she hated them. She was of course, as Tim realized, jealous. However he did not intend to give up Ebury Street. He tried not to mention his visits there, only Daisy kept returning to the subject and needling him about his ‘snobbery’ and telling him he was being ‘drugged by the odour of affluence’. Daisy’s instinct was in a sense right. Tim was rather enchanted by the Ebury Street scene, not (he felt) by its whiff of affluence, but simply by its atmosphere of family. Tim had no family, no belongingness anywhere except with Daisy. The Ebury Street gatherings were familial, and it gave him pleasure to be a taken-for-granted junior member of that circle of family and friends. Nor indeed was he indifferent, after the dirt and chaos of Daisy’s flat and the frugal simplicity of his own, to occasional visits to a warm clean tidy house where sherry was served in handsome glasses. Altogether, and in a sense he never troubled to define, Ebury Street was for him an abode of value.

The person there with whom he got on best was the Count. (Tim knew he was not a real count.) The Count had been markedly kind to him from the start, and Tim had intuited something of the Count’s particular loneliness and alienness. He was grateful to the Count for having bought his picture (it was entitled
Three Blackbirds in a Treacle Well
). He hoped the Count might invite him to his flat, but that never happened. Balintoy was also kind to Tim and petted him, but he could not understand Balintoy, and felt uneasy with his fellow Irishman. Once or twice Gerald Pavitt had asked Tim for drinks in a pub, but Gerald was very odd and self-absorbed and Tim found him difficult to talk to. Gerald knew nothing about painting, and Tim knew nothing about the stars (or whatever it was that Gerald did, he was not sure). Stanley Openshaw, also very kind to Tim, invited him to lunch once. He was not asked again, he suspected, because Janet did not like the look of him. With Guy and Gertrude his relations had always been cordial though formal. He was a little afraid of both of them. Guy had been quite prepared to play the heavy father, especially when once, in desperation and not long ago, Tim had asked him for a loan. He had lent Tim the money and given him a lecture too. This debt was on Tim’s conscience and not repaid. He wondered if Gertrude knew about it.

Tim had greeted the news of Guy’s fatal illness first with incredulity. How could anyone as strong and real as Guy propose to disappear from the world at the age of forty-four? Then he felt a fear which pierced into his entrails. In a respectful way, he loved Guy. But he felt a deeper emotion for himself. How on earth would he manage in the world without Guy? It was not just a question of money or of drinks or even of ‘advice’ which Guy might give him. Guy had taken over a parental role in Tim’s life. There had for so long always ‘been Guy’ there, a safe stronghold, a final refuge. If ‘everything crashed’ (a vivid entirely unclear possibility which Tim constantly envisaged) Guy would somehow be there to pick up the pieces. Guy’s background presence even in some way helped Tim to manage his life with Daisy. He was able to be calmer and more rational because of that (and not just financial) ‘last resort’. There was wisdom, there was authority, there was calm truthful affection. Guy had always exacted from Tim, as he had usually managed to exact from everybody, a particular sort of directness. The mysterious urge to lie, even pointlessly, is not always understood. Tim was evasive by nature, even something of a casual habitual liar; but he had learnt early on to tell the truth to Guy. Would there now be no more truth?

There had perhaps been one case of
suppressio veri.
Tim had never told Guy about Daisy. Of course there had been no special occasion to do so. Guy did not question Tim about his ‘private life’ in general, nor had he asked about Daisy in particular, whom he had no doubt (at that unhappy party) scarcely noticed. Tim never, after the occasion of the party (now some years ago), spoke of Daisy at Ebury Street. It was clear that he could never take her there again even if she were willing to come. She had been so quietly bloody-minded, had exhibited so much ‘dumb insolence’, and he hoped that she had, in that quarter, been forgotten. Tim thought afterwards that, when he asked Guy for money, he ought to have mentioned Daisy in answer to some of Guy’s questions. But he shrank from exposing the rackety life which he had led with his dear one to the meticulous, though discreet and charitable, scrutiny of Guy Openshaw.

As Tim never looked ahead he did not explicitly say to himself, Daisy and I will be together forever, I will die in her arms or she in mine. But it was the atmosphere of their connection, although Daisy never spoke of it either. They were two of a kind. Tim drew them as birds, as foxes, as mice, as mates, as pairs of timid uniquely similar creatures escaping notice.
Lanthano.
They were Papagena and Papageno. He said this to Daisy who, although she hated opera, accepted the idea. Papageno had had to go through an ordeal to win his true mate; and like him, Tim too would be saved at last in spite of himself. As he felt how inevitable and yet how imperfect was his relation with Daisy he wondered sometimes whether the ordeal which was to perfect it was yet to come.

 

 

By this time, back in the Prince of Denmark, Tim had eaten one piece of bread, the cheddar cheese, one oatmeal biscuit, a tomato, and half the cake. Daisy had eaten one piece of bread, the Stilton cheese, three oatmeal biscuits, a tomato, the cold roast lamb, and the other half of the cake. They had also bought and divided a ham sandwich. They decided they could not afford a Scotch egg.

‘Who was there?’ Daisy meant at Ebury Street that evening. Although she despised the ‘ghastly crew’, she sometimes made Tim call them over, and took a ghoulish interest in their doings. She had even picked up Guy’s phrase
les cousins et les tantes.

‘Oh Stanley, the Count, Victor, Manfred, Mrs Mount -’

‘Not Sylvia Wicks?’

‘Yes -’

‘She was the only one I liked in that infernal
galère
. Victimized by a bloody man.’ On the occasion of the party, Daisy had elicited the tale of Sylvia’s marriage.

‘Here’s a new beer mat. Would you like it?’

‘Yes, thanks.’ Daisy collected beer mats. ‘Let’s face it, men are beasts. Well, you’re not. Thanks for the grub. Was it still raining when you came in?’

‘Yes, a little.’

‘Why there’s Jimmy Roland with that fool Piglet, pissed again.’

‘Daisy, there’s something I haven’t told you.’

‘Something bloody awful? Are you ill?’

‘No. I won’t have any teaching next term.’

‘You mean they’ve sacked you?’

‘You might put it so.’

‘Fucking hell fire. And there’s something I haven’t told you. They’ve raised my rent again. I think I’ll have another double whisky.’

Tim went to fetch it. From the bar he looked back at Daisy, smiled at her. Sometimes she wore jeans and an old jersey. Sometimes she put on outrageous feminine fancy dress. (She could not give up a childish covetous habit of buying cheap clothes.) This evening she was wearing black fish-net tights, a voluminous skirt of a deeply saturated blue Indian cotton drawn in to her narrow waist, and an ill-fitting yellowish décolleté lace blouse, bought at an old clothes shop. A necklace of glass beads closely encircled her thin neck. Her dark streaky hair was sleeked away behind her ears, revealing the form of her narrow bony head. She had put on today a red mouth and red cheeks, and had encircled her large long eyes with dark blue. (Some days she wore no make-up.) A shaggy old woollen cardigan which she wore underneath her overcoat lay across her knees. Her skirt was well hitched up. There was something exotic, handsome, violent, raffish about her which touched his heart. And she was, for all her panache, so absolutely vulnerable. She smiled back at Tim.

Tim was wearing narrow grey tweed trousers, old but good (he never wore jeans) and a loose turquoise-coloured woollen jersey over an apple green shirt. He had fortunately, from better days, a supply of decent sensible clothes; woollen vests cost the earth now. He enjoyed mating colours and would often dye his garments with meticulous care.

‘Thanks, Blue Eyes, you are good to me. What the hell are we going to do about money, fuck it? Cash is real, cash is earnest. We’ll be reduced to drinking the left-overs in the pubs, like bloody Frog Catholics living on the Eucharist.’

‘I wish you’d paint,’ said Tim, ‘I wish you’d
really
paint.’ He said this at intervals just to keep the idea in her head.

‘Fuck it, darling, I can’t paint. I mean I won’t paint. I know you think women can’t paint because they have no sexual fantasies -’

‘I don’t,’ said Tim.

‘What’s it to do with money anyway if I paint. I’m a writer. I’m writing my novel. You’d better do some more of those mogs. Everyone in this stupid little country has a picture of a cat and wants to buy another.’

‘I’m drawing Perkins, I’ll do another set, but they fetch precious little.’ Tim knew that it would be spiritually impossible for Daisy to paint sentimental pictures of cats, and although this was a pity in a way, he treasured the fact as evidence of her tough invincible superiority to himself.

‘God, if we could only get out of bloody London, I’m stir-crazy, I’m so tired of this Christ-awful old familiar scene, I’d like to get drunk somewhere else for a change.’

‘Yeah.’ This too was something which was regularly said.

‘It would be great not to have to worry about money
all
the time.’

‘I’ll have to get another job, any job, and you must drink less, can’t you just bloody try?’

‘No, I just bloody can’t. I gave up smoking to please you and that’s it as far as abnegation is concerned. And don’t pretend you’re going to get a job washing up or something, you know you can’t stand it, it ended in tears last time.’

That was true enough. ‘Maybe we can manage on National Assistance. ’

‘Not with my rent we can’t. And the drink, all right, but the drink is a fact of life. You drink too after all, and just imagine doing without it. I’m sorry I’m not a millionaire like your grand friends at Ebury Street. I bet everybody in this pub is on social security, and I bet they all squeeze more than we do out of the bloody Welfare State.’

‘We’re lazy, that’s our trouble,’ said Tim. Sometimes he thought this was a profound truth.

‘We’re hopeless,’ said Daisy. ‘I can’t think how we stand each other. At least, I can’t think how you stand me. You ought to find yourself a girl, there are plenty around the pubs who’d fancy you even if your hair
is
falling out.’

‘It isn’t falling out. And I’ve got a girl.’

‘Yes, you’ve got yer old Daisy. We’ve been a long time in the love-me and leave-me game and here we still are. We’re OK.’

‘We’re OK.’

‘Except we’re a bit stuck for what we shall eat and what we shall drink and what we shall put on. Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, if only we could get out of London I could finish my novel. But meanwhile you’d better get on with the moggies. If only one of us could make a rich marriage and then support the other.’

‘If you married a millionaire I could be the butler.’

‘You’d be boozing in the pantry. And I’d be with you.’

‘We’re servants’ hall types.’

‘Speak for yourself, I’m not! Your wealthy friends put on airs but they’re just
nouveaux riches.
My mother was really upper class.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can’t you borrow money from any of that lot, what else are they for
les cousins et les tantes
? Can’t you get something more out of Guy before he kicks the bucket? Do you think he’ll leave you anything in his will?’

‘No. And no. I can’t ask Guy for money now, it’s too late.’

‘What bugs me is the way you revere them, and they’re all so fat.’

‘They aren’t.’

‘And they treat you like a lackey.’

‘Oh stow it -’

‘The trouble is you’ve kept up appearances, we both have. You ought to look as poor as you are. But no, off you trot in your best suit. Nobody has the faintest idea how poor we are. I expect they think we’ve “got money of our own”, that wonderful phrase! Jesus bloody Christ. What about Gertrude?’