Nuns and Soldiers (44 page)

 

 

‘When you leave the studio where will you store your pictures? We could have them here -’

‘No need, I can leave them at Jimmy Roland’s place.’

‘Isn’t he the chap you share the studio with?’

‘Yes, but he’s got another place.’

Tim was painting at Ebury Street now. The studio was still ‘dangerous’, a moody Daisy might come there one day, though this was unlikely. He imagined Daisy breaking in and slashing his canvases. It was an exciting scene, but out of character. He did not actually want to part with the studio just yet. Moving the stuff would be a lot of trouble, and the reference to Jimmy Roland was an instinctive fiction. He decided to let the matter drift for a while.

Tim and Gertrude were sitting over a long lunch in the dining-room at Ebury Street. Guy had been a fast eater. Tim was a slow eater. Although they were both working, the festival atmosphere still prevailed. On some mornings Gertrude taught English to her Asian women. She had only just started to teach these women when Guy fell ill, and she felt she was still a beginner. Her pupils, often patently intelligent, come of a resourceful and clever race, were diffident and timid. They would not come (with or without their husbands) to the flat and had not yet invited Gertrude to their homes. Lessons took place in a school-room atmosphere at the community centre. The language barrier was paralysing. A little Urdu or Hindi would have helped, but Gertrude was no linguist. She took her pupils singly, and confronting those dark handsome thoughtful anxious women, dressed in the most beautiful clothes in the world, she sometimes felt that she herself was being transported far away. Sometimes, speechless, she reached across the table for a frail brown hand, and pupil and teacher communicated, almost with strange pleasant tears or else with helpless laughter. She tried to describe all this to Tim, but without meeting the women he could not understand.

Meanwhile in the mornings Tim worked at painting. He liked to be alone then, with the safety of Gertrude in his mind, but alone. That was necessary. He had taken over Anne’s room as a studio, the light was good, and had transported there by taxi the larger and more picturesque elements of his craft together with some of his more presentable pictures. He had also brought a supply of his rubbish-tip wood for painting on, though he scarcely needed this since Gertrude had bought him a number of fine new expensive canvases: or he had bought them with Gertrude’s money, or with his own money since their worldly goods were now mutually endowed. This would take a bit of getting used to, and he maintained his thrifty habits. He had not yet touched any of these beautiful white rectangles even with his thought. He had fiddled with some of the sketches made in France (not the drawings of the Great Face, those he left alone). He did two unsuccessful water colours of flowers at Gertrude’s request; and on some days when she went out teaching, he went to the park and drew trees. They travelled a little way together on the Underground, they liked that. Tim had to admit that he could not yet really settle down to his work.

The afternoons were various. Sometimes Gertrude went back to her community centre to make arrangements or to attend meetings, and Tim returned to his new studio. He also liked cleaning and tidying and mending things. The excellent char, Mrs Parfitt, still came twice a week but Tim discovered plenty of tasks himself. Sometimes after lunch he and Gertrude would go shopping together for food and household goods. Like a young ménage, they enjoyed buying mops and brushes and cake tins and tea towels and other items which were usually unnecessary as the flat was well equipped. They encouraged each other to buy clothes, but their expenditure was tacitly modest. Occasionally they invited people for evening drinks. More often they went out for London walks ending in pubs. They frequented the Ebury Arms. They had not yet invited anyone to dinner, their evenings together were too precious.

Gertrude and Tim constantly commented to each other on how amazingly well they got along. Both of them had, though without imagining in detail, expected disagreements, blockages, periods of non-communication. But these painful episodes did not occur. There were all sorts of little unforeseen concessions which they had to make to each other, but love and good sense enabled them to make them promptly. A vast scheme of small quick adjustments was no doubt taking effect the whole time. They looked at each other with a kind of wide-eyed benevolent generosity which took in each other’s deepest failings with a quick ‘Oh!’ followed by the ingenious accommodations of married love. Gertrude came to realize how far her life had depended upon Guy’s absolute efficiency, his reliability, his meticulous omniscience, his rational grasp upon the world, his effortless power over builders, plumbers, waiters, taxmen, motor cars, people on telephones, people in offices, people in shops. When she mentioned her income tax problems to Tim he said smilingly that he knew nothing about tax, he had never paid any. Tim was meticulously tidy and could clean and cook and wash clothes, but he lacked the concept of paying bills, or even keeping them. He could not write a business letter or conduct an impersonal telephone conversation. She was also shocked at the way he seemed to be able to live without reading.

Tim on the other hand was amazed at how little Gertrude knew about painting and how little visual sense she possessed. She did not seem to know much about any art except literature. She professed to enjoy music but (rather to Tim’s relief) did not suggest concert-going. Thus each of them felt, in a new way, a little superior to the other, while quickly transforming the superiority into a kind of protective tenderness. Gertrude saw that Tim was inefficient, inaccurate, even lazy. Tim realized that Gertrude was (unlike Guy) not a polymath, and, in spite of her swim in the crystal pool, not a goddess. But each continued to find the other utterly charming and quite sufficiently clever. Tim found in his wife the absolute security for which he had always craved. He perceived her virtue and rested upon it. She had rescued him from his demons and renewed his innocence.

Gertrude did gasp to herself sometimes to think that she had perfectly loved Guy, and now perfectly loved Tim, although the two men were so totally different. Sometimes she thought how
can
I be happy with someone so unlike Guy? She underwent in holy secrecy the pains and shocks of her mourning which continued their due ritual unaware of Tim. She had altered the flat as much as she could, but could not avoid seeing Tim’s shaving tackle in the bathroom where Guy’s had been; and there were many many ‘frames’ of her life where she still instinctively expected Guy and found Tim. She shed strange secret tears. She was even able in her inmost heart to grasp the idea that Tim was morally inferior to Guy. But her lively versatile love managed its new economy with self-regarding wisdom, and she found Tim not only adorable but very amusing. She often gazed at him, when he was intent on doing something (drawing, shaving, looking out of the window) and thought to herself: this absurd funny strange enchanting animal is
my
animal! She was aware of him as younger and of herself as travelling to join him in the land of his youth. She knew that she knew of death and he did not.

‘When we get a new flat you’ll have a better studio.’ They talked of finding a new place, but although both of them wanted to neither felt it was urgent. It was as if they did not yet want any new project, even this one, to disturb the magical continuity of their days. Life was still a honeymoon. They had not gone away after the wedding. Simply being together was their holiday. ‘You say the light’s good in Anne’s room. But it isn’t big enough.’

Tim wished Gertrude would stop calling it ‘Anne’s room’. It was his studio now. Sometimes he still wondered how much, in the amalgam, he was marrying for security, for his art, so as to be able to spoil expensive canvases with experiments. Was there a grain of that in it all? He trusted his love enough to know that it didn’t matter.

‘The room is fine,’ said Tim.

‘Anne wants us to go for a drink at her new flat.’

‘Oh of course she’s in. Where is it, I forget?’

‘Camden. She says it’s cheap.’

‘When does she want us to go?’

‘Six o’clock tomorrow.’

‘We were going to do the Battersea walk to the Old Swan.’

‘We can do that next day, there are lots of days.’

‘May it be so! I keep thinking you’ll die or I’ll die.’

‘We’ll try not to. You know, I meant to tell you something-I feel I must tell you everything like in transference.’

‘What? Not anything awful?’

‘No, no, just odd. You know when - when we were just back from France and we got into that funny state -’

‘You did!’

‘Well, someone sent an anonymous letter to the Count saying we were having an affair.’

‘Oh God,’ said Tim. He flushed scarlet. ‘Who?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What did the Count say, what did he think -?’

‘I haven’t discussed it with the Count,’ said Gertrude. She was blushing too.

‘But how did you know?’

‘The Count told Anne. Anne then asked me.’

‘Asked if we were having an affair?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you told her we were?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ -’

‘But she didn’t tell me then about the letter, she pretended she’d guessed.’

‘Then she told you later?’

‘She told me when I saw her yesterday. I meant to tell you but I simply forgot - which shows how little it worried me!’

‘It worries me,’ said Tim. ‘Did she show you the letter, was it typed?’

‘I don’t know, I didn’t see it.’

‘Has she told the Count she’d told you?’

‘I didn’t ask, it all just came up as I was leaving.’

‘But
who
could have written him a letter?’

‘I simply can’t imagine. Could Manfred have guessed? Surely not. Anyway Manfred would
never
write an anonymous letter. You didn’t ever tell anyone, well of course you didn’t, or sort of let anyone perhaps guess?’

‘No.’ Could Daisy write an anonymous letter, Tim wondered. If so she was capable of a degree of vindictiveness which he would never have expected. Could she threaten his love, his happiness?

Jesus Christ came to Anne Cavidge in a vision. The visitation began in a dream, but then gained a very undreamlike reality. And, later, Anne remembered it as one remembers real events, not as one remembers dreams.

The dream part opened in a beautiful garden, a rose garden with the roses in flower and the sun shining. It was not a place that Anne knew. The garden was upon a slight slope and above where Anne was standing, upon a higher level, there was a stone balustrade with a criss-cross diamond pattern. Some way beyond this there was a large stone-built eighteenth-century house. Anne began to walk slowly up the slope in the direction of the house. She felt lazy and happy. She mounted some stone steps to the level of the balustrade. Here the ground was flat and a close-clipped lawn stretched away towards a gravelled terrace which surrounded the house. To her right, a large copper beech tree threw its shadow upon the grass. To her left, where she did not look, she was aware of a tennis court enclosed by wires, and beyond it some flowering bushes and a wall with a door in it, perhaps surrounding a walled garden. There were two eighteenth-century-style statues upon pedestals, one at either end of the terrace.

As Anne walked on across the lawn she became aware of something very strange. The two statues, which represented angels, appeared to be gaudily painted. Then she realized that the statues were alive, they really
were
angels, very tall angels with splendid huge golden-feathered wings and wearing elaborate and brilliantly coloured silk robes. When Anne saw the tall angels she began to feel frightened. She wanted to run away, but she knew that she must continue to advance, and she went on across the grass, but more slowly and cautiously as if she were stalking some rare and interesting birds; and the angels did behave as if they were wild birds, for, being aware of Anne’s approach, they quite quietly came down from their pedestals and began to walk away along the gravel of the terrace, past the windows, in the direction of the corner of the façade. When she saw them moving away, Anne was filled with a terrible anguish, as if the most wonderful things she had ever possessed were being taken from her. She did not run, but she hastened now towards the terrace and mounted the step which separated it from the lawn. By now the angels, walking with dignity, had reached the corner of the house and were about to round it. Anne called after them, ‘Tell me, is there a God?’ One of the angels, turning back to her rather casually, said ‘Yes.’ Then the two great bird-like figures vanished round the corner. Anne now ran after them along the terrace and reached the corner where she could see another similar terrace stretching along the side of the house. The scene was empty. The two angels had disappeared. Filled with a kind of elated sadness Anne began to walk slowly on. When she was about halfway along the terrace whence the angels had vanished she heard a sound behind her. She could distinctly hear the crunch of footsteps upon the gravel. She
knew
that the person following her was Jesus Christ. She did not turn, but fell straight forward onto her face in a dead faint.