Nuns and Soldiers (24 page)

Taking possession of the house had been an adventurous experience which appealed to Tim’s sense of ‘loot’, a mixture of fear and weird burglarious triumph. He enjoyed the space, the quiet attentive pleasantly furnished rooms, all his now. He felt profoundly safe in the house, as he had felt in childhood when his father was staying with his mother. He slept, relaxed, lying on his back, always a good sign. It had been a bit eerie at the start, inserting the key which Gertrude had given him in far-off London, opening the door, and coming in to that significant silent interior. He could understand why Gertrude did not want to come there, to see the books lying on the table, a
Times
of last year, papers and a pen upon Guy’s desk. There was also, for the benefit no doubt of tenants, a set of instructions in Guy’s fine pedantic hand. The heating for the bathrooms turned on in the airing cupboard. Rubbish should be taken to the village tip,
never
burnt. In case of mistral put garden chairs away promptly. You are advised to read the note in the First Aid Box about what to do if someone is bitten by a viper. Crockery broken should be (reasonably) replaced.
Please
do not remove books or maps. Mindful of his charge, Tim had at once checked as far as he could the condition of the house. He was relieved to find that the water and electricity were in working order. The roof appeared to be sound, but had yet to be tested by rain. A pane of glass in the study room was cracked. A little vine-covered loggia upon the terrace just outside the archway room had partially collapsed, but Tim had managed to mend that already with some stout poles which he had found in the garage.

Tim had crossed France by train, then come by bus to the village which was seven kilometres from the house. From the village he walked, after purchasing bread and wine. His first concern on entering had been to inspect the larder. This store-house exceeded his wildest dreams. Tin upon tin stretched away into endless recesses, jars of apricots, figs, plums, peaches marshalled themselves upon the upper shelves, immense jars of olive oil lurked in corners, wine bottles glistened in racks, virgin whiskies in cardboard boxes. Tim thought, I can live the whole summer off this, after all, Gertrude said I could eat anything I liked, and I can save the money she’s given me in advance for my salary! The desert island life! I knew it would suit me down to the ground. I’m a solitary chap by nature, I’ve just never had a chance to be really alone. The garage revealed two bicycles, one male, one female, both in working order. Tim (it was now the fourth day on his desert island) had biked twice to the village for bread and milk, fruit, vegetables and the local wine (he felt he ought not to drink the serious stuff in the racks). He had already made friends Frenchlessly with the shop keepers. He had, in his solitude, a new and invigorating feeling of independence. He was entirely alone for the first time in years.

His solitude was not, however, going to last. Daisy was coming. Tim looked forward to her arrival, looked forward to showing her all the things and places he had made his own. (He felt he had lived here for months already.) Yet also he felt a bit sad. Daisy’s restlessness would alter his perceptions; and he would have liked to be
really
alone in Gertrude’s house, it would in a way have made him more honest. Of course he had not breathed a word about Daisy to Gertrude. Not that, he imagined Gertrude would have minded, said ‘in that case, no or anything. He was not quite sure why, but it was somehow clear that he could
not
ask Gertrude if he could take his girlfriend along. It was an aesthetic matter really. He could never have explained Daisy. (He felt herein protective about her.) There would have been an embarrassment, a wrong impression, and somehow Gertrude’s vast imaginative act of kindness would have been insulted and spoiled. Yet was he not insulting and spoiling it now by deceiving her? As often in his life, Tim felt he was in a slightly shady position which had become unobtrusively inevitable. Of course it was not very important. Gertrude need never know, and if later she did find out that a woman had been there, Tim could say that Daisy was travelling in France and had dropped in for a day or two. What made Tim sadder really than his little deception was the fact that now he did just intensely want to be, in this paradise, alone.

Gertrude had indeed been immensely kind. Before even he left her on the evening when he had broached the matter of being ‘short of money’ she had given him a sizeable cheque, payment in advance for some of his caretaking work and for some hypothetical pictures. Overcome, confused, Tim had offered to deliver, should she wish it, his entire present
oeuvre
to the flat in Ebury Street. Gertrude had laughingly agreed to accept ‘a little drawing’ as a gift. Long and earnestly, back at the garage, did Tim ponder upon what to give her. Looking at his work in the light of this question made him see, for a piercing moment, how bad most of it was. Cats were out of the question. Some of the crucifixion drawings had charm but were, he had to admit, slight. At last he uncovered one of his earlier works, a pastel sketch for a never-completed Leda and the Swan, a pretty piece that certainly looked like something, though without the title (which Tim did not append) it would have been difficult to say what. This he mounted and framed and wrapped and carried to Ebury Street, rather cravenly hoping that he would not have to have another interview with Gertrude, the last one having been so perfect. Fortunately she was out, and he handed the drawing over at the door into the keeping of cold censorious Anne Cavidge.

He had hastened at once of course to tell Daisy, had taken the Victoria Line to Warren Street and run all the way from there to the Prince of Denmark where Daisy was waiting to hear what had happened. Daisy had behaved exactly as he expected, saying ‘fuck bloody France’, ‘bugger bloody Frogs’, and declaring that she would never set foot on Gertrude’s property, but falling in with the plan all the same and even becoming childishly excited about it. Already on the following day she was combing through her wardrobe wondering what clothes she would take with her. Tim told his usual lie about having let his studio to the niece of the garage man who wanted to spend a time in London. Daisy forgot her objections to letting her flat and immediately remembered a holidaying American girl who might be just the person to take it on for the summer. The girl however was away for a week and Daisy had remained behind to await her return and make the letting arrangements. Tim had cleaned Daisy’s flatlet from end to end and made it look much more attractive and presentable. Then he had left for France. There was still a space of four days before Daisy’s earliest arrival. Yes, he knew that once she had arrived he would enjoy her company. But now, looking upon the blue-grey shimmer of the rock walls he felt how much better and happier he would have been if he had really planned to be here alone. He had decided to leave the problem of the broken window until Daisy arrived with her perfect French. There was plenty of time, and the French word for ‘window pane’ eluded him, even, hang it, the word for ‘glass’.

Out of a cloudless sky a sunflower sun blazed down upon an earth still cool from night. The shadows etched the rocks into silently changing forms. A vast silence possessed the little valley. Swallow-tail butterflies visited the white-pink oleander. Upon the low wall of the terrace panting lizards with spider feet lifted up their reptilian heads. From their nest beside the fig tree an army of ants crossed the flag stones in two close columns, one coming, one going. Tim breathed. Behind him the glass doors of the sitting-room stood open. Hairy centipedes, equally at home inside and outside the house, scuttled then paused, brown smudges upon warm grey stone or cool plastered wall. Huge dark moths, escorted by mosquitoes, flittered into the darkness of the house. (Only the upper windows had mosquito netting.) Behind an open shutter a green toad sat thinking.

Tim had had his breakfast, consisting of fresh crusty village bread, pallid creamy village butter, and Keiller’s orange marmalade from the larder, accompanied by milky coffee. He had prepared a picnic lunch consisting of bread and butter, some paté from a tin, cheese, a yellow apple and a bottle of wine. The goodies were in a basket, the painting gear in his rucksack. After reflection, he had brought with him to France only water colour, gouache, and wax crayon. He breathed, he looked. He picked up his things and set off, crossed the flowery ‘lawn’ and the olive grove, traversed the streamlet on a wooden bridge set in a density of willows and green canes, passed through the middle of the aligned poplars, went steeply up through the vineyard, and made for the rocks. Tim had not at first gone far afield, there was so much to enjoy near the house. He had drawn the fig tree, the spear-leaved willows, the old tortured glaring olive trees with their sweet veils of silver foliage. The poplars defeated him. Many an impressionist could have rendered those straight smooth densely textured stems, those high clouds of flickering communicating leaves; but Tim could not. Dutifully, he had at once attempted to draw the house, but this too was curiously hard. The interest of the house lay in the squareness of the upper windows, the odd way the tower grew out of the roof, the live faintly powdery colour of the well-cut rectangular grey stones, the shallow tilt and faded look of the tiles. In Tim’s sketches the house looked quaint and dreadfully English. He was in any case by now becoming obsessed by the rocks.

A little path which he was following hopped here and there among the vertical strivings of the rocks, mysteriously keeping its identity. Already the house was out of sight. The sun was hot on Tim’s neck and a pleasant runnel of perspiration drew its light touch down his brow and crept onto his cheek. He was climbing. Down in the valley the cicadas were singing, but the rocks had their own silence disturbed only by his breath and the occasional scrape of his shoe. A distant bird chucked. But it was a sadly bird-less land. The only wild things he had seen were some very early morning rabbits playing among the olives. What he had taken to be animal bones turned out to be pieces of stripped wood bleached white, very smooth and shapely. He had already collected some of these. Close to, the rocks were whitish grey, close-grained and extremely hard, covered with tiny black spots. They were ridgy with small undulations as if convenient to the hand. They rose out of each other in pillared segments, each tilted and recessed a little from the one below, so that there was an effect of steps, and up these steps, following intermittent lodgements of grass and earth, the path continued; and it
was
a path, a trodden way of pilgrimage although the landscape through which Tim moved was one of the emptiest he had ever seen. Despite the olive groves and apricot orchards and vineyards down below, there was absolutely no sign of human beings. The few houses he had seen, all closer to the village, turned out to be derelict, or else shuttered up like little fortresses, their owners far away in Paris or London. The village was populous enough, but outside it the population ceased. Once, upon the road, when he saw a man in the distance, his heart had fluttered with fear. Up among the rocks there was nobody, and yet there was a path.

Tim’s objective was an amazing place which he had discovered the previous day, just as he was about to set off for home. Twilight sent him homeward promptly. He was frightened of that empty rock-lorded land at night, and indeed during the day too. He had been drawing an ash tree that hung over a small chasm. Then he had been attempting to draw a rock formation. As has been mentioned, the visual arts had been Tim’s university, but his studies therein had been eclectic and eccentric. When quite young he had been immensely pleased and impressed by some drawings of rocks by Ruskin. He had thought that if he could ever draw one tenth (hundredth) as well as Ruskin he would be content with his life (he still thought this). Having (on the previous afternoon) found the grey spotty rocks curiously undrawable, he gave up, returned to the path, and began to climb higher, hoping to reach the crest, which seemed so near, and to look down (which he had not yet done) into another valley, another country. He was searching in fact for somewhere to swim. Tim loved swimming, it had been one of the few joys of his time in Wales, but in recent years it had almost entirely passed out of his life. The streamlet near the house was too small to swim in, but it boded other water, and Tim had climbed towards the crest hoping therefrom to see, perhaps below him, a tree-shaded river, green pools. He did not reach the crest; the rocks he saw as the summit revealed beyond them another summit, and then another. But he found something else. The path had made one of its intermittent stops at a narrow square-cut rocky cleft, rather like a door. Tim hesitated, then decided that his way led through the cleft. Holding the two sides of the rock, he had to lever himself up onto a step-like platform within the ‘doorway’, and then to descend two or three smaller rock steps on the other side. Occupied with scrambling, he did not look about him until he had descended onto a level place beyond, where there was an unexpected stretch of grass. Then he looked up and saw
it.

It
was a rock, a rock face, and indeed in some unspecifiable way
like
a face, which some fifty or so yards away down an enclosed glade rose before him. Uneven rocky walls rising on either side shut out the declining sunlight and the place was dim. At the far end there was a sort of cliff, something quite unlike the endless tilted ridgy progressions of the open rocks. Part way up this cliff, and in the uncertain light seeming almost to hang separated from it, was a conspicuous paler area which looked like marble. The stone here was smoother, as if polished, nearly circular, and pitted with shadowy marks. It glowed a little like an occluded mirror. The cliff above it was darker in colour, scored with vertical straight lines, very faint like pencil lines. The relation of the parts was unclear. Sometimes it looked as if the lower paler part was itself a face, or a head wearing a crown. Sometimes the whole large formation looked like an indecipherable awful countenance. At the top, how high Tim could not reckon, there was a dark irregular mark, probably a large crack containing vegetation. From somewhere above that, long strands of creeper were hanging down. Most amazing however to Tim’s startled gaze as he advanced across the grass was something which had been invisible at first. At the base of the cliff below the ‘marble’ where the rock was recessed a little, there was a large circular pool of very clear water. The gleaming pool was so round, its rock edges so smooth, that Tim could scarcely believe it to be a work of nature. He looked upon it with awe. Then all of a sudden he was aware of the absolute silence, the absolute solitude, the darkening air. He turned and fled, scrambling through the door-like cleft and scuttling away down the winding path between the rocks, across the vineyard, through the poplars, over the murky bridge, between the twisted olive trees, up the meadowy lawn, over the terrace and into the house, where he turned on all the lights and closed and bolted the doors.