Pigeon Feathers (5 page)

“Our
still
life, love. Haven’t you seen Melissa’s pears? Really, if I had to look at those brown spots all day I think I’d go sick.”

The lad, in his gray apron and muddy boots, gently pushed a paper bag against her arm. “Tenpence, miss. Five for the onions and four for the head and the bag’s a penny.”

“Here,” Leonard said hoarsely, and the action of handing over the money was so husbandly he blushed.

Robin asked, “Are the onions attractive?”

“Oh yes,” the boy said in a level uncomprehending tone that defended him against any intention she might have, including that of “having him on.”

“Did you give us attractive onions?” she repeated. “I mean, we’re not going to eat them.”

“Oh yes. They’re good-looking, miss.”

The boy’s referring to the cabbage simply as “the head” haunted Leonard, and he started as if at a ghost when, emerging with Robin into the narrow street, the head of a passerby looked vividly familiar; it was the handsomely sculpted head alone, for otherwise Jack Fredericks had quite blended in. He was dressed completely in leather and wool, and even the
haircut framing his amazed gape of recognition had the heavy British form. Eerie reunions are common among Americans abroad, but Leonard had never before been hailed from this far in the past. It offended him to have his privacy, built during so many painful weeks of loneliness, unceremoniously crashed; yet he was pleased to be discovered with a companion so handsome. “Jack, this is Miss Robin Cox; Robin, Jack Fredericks. Jack is from my home town, Wheeling.”

“Wheeling, in what state?” the girl asked.

“West Virginia.” Jack smiled. “It’s rather like your Black Country.”

“More green than black,” Leonard said.

Jack guffawed. “Good old literal Len,” he told Robin. His small moist eyes sought in vain to join hers in a joke over their mutual friend. He and Leonard had never been on a “Len” basis. Had they been on the streets of Wheeling, neither one would have stopped walking.

“What are you doing here?” Leonard asked him.

“Reading ec at Jesus; but you’re the one who baffles me. You’re
not
at the university surely?”

“Sort of. We’re both at the Constable School of Art. It’s affiliated.”

“I’ve never
heard
of it!” Jack laughed out loud, for which Leonard was grateful, since Robin further stiffened.

She said, “It’s in a wing of the Ash. It’s a very serious place.”

“Is it
really?
Well, I must come over sometime and see this remarkable institution. I’m rather interested in painting right now.”

Leonard said, feeling safe, “Sure. Come on over. Any time. We have to get back now and make a still life out of these onions.”

“Well, aren’t you full of tricks? You know,” Jack said to the
girl, “Len was a year older than I in public school and I’m used to looking up at him.”

To this preposterous lie Robin coolly replied with another: “Oh, at Connie we all look up to him.”

The Constable School could not afford to waste its precious space on still lifes, and imposed upon the museum’s good nature by setting them up in the Well, a kind of basement with a skylight. Here hard-to-classify casts were stashed. Here a great naturalistic boar reclined on his narrow tufted bottom, the Dying Gaul sunned himself in the soft light sifting from above like dust, Winged Victory hoisted her battered feathers; and a tall hermaphrodite, mutilated by Byzantine piety, posed behind a row of brutal Roman portrait busts. The walls were a strange gay blue; even more strangely gay were the five or six students, foreshortened into chipper, quick shapes, chirping around tables of brilliant fruit. As he followed his friend’s blond hair down the reverberating iron of the spiral stairs, Leonard felt he had at last arrived at the radiant heart of the school.

Nowhere in the museum was there as much light as in the Well. Their intimacy in the grocer’s shop seemed clarified and enhanced here, and pointed by artistic purpose. With minute care they arranged the elements upon a yellow cloth. Robin’s white hands fussed imperiously with the cabbage, tearing off leaf after leaf until she had reduced it to a roundness she imagined would be simple to draw. After lunch they began to mark with charcoal their newly bought canvases, which smelled of glue and fresh wood. To have her, some distance from his side, echoing his task, and to know that her eyes concentrated into the same set of shapes, which after a little concentration took on an unnatural intensity, like fruit
in Paradise, curiously enlarged his sense of his physical size; he seemed to tower above the flagstones, and his voice, in responding to her erratic exclamations and complaints, resonated in the bright Well. The other students on still life also worked solemnly, and in the afternoon there were few of them. The sounds of museum traffic drifted down from a comparatively dark and cluttered world.

Jack Fredericks paid his visit the very next day. He thumped down the stairs in his little scholar’s gown and stared at the still life over Robin’s shoulder and asked, “Why are you going to grind onions in a mortar?”

“We’re not,” she replied in the haughty voice Leonard had first heard.

Jack sauntered over to the hermaphrodite and said, “Good Lord. What happened to
him?
”

Leonard made no earnest effort to put him at his ease. Embarrassed and hence stubborn, Jack lay down on the shallow ledge designed to set off the exhibits, in a place just behind the table supporting the still life, and smiled up quizzically at the faces of the painters. He meant to look debonair, but in the lambent atmosphere he looked ponderous, with all that leather and wool. The impression of mass was so intense Leonard feared he might move and break one of the casts. Leonard had not noticed on the street how big his fellow West Virginian had grown. The weight was mostly in flesh—broad beefy hands folded on his vest, corpulent legs uneasily crossed on the cold stone floor.

Seabright made no pretense of not being startled at finding him there. “What, uh, what are you doing?”

“I guess I’m auditing.”

The telltale “guess” put the Puss’s back up higher. “We don’t generally set aside space for spectators.”

“Oh, I’ve been very unobtrusive, sir. We haven’t been saying a word to each other.”

“Be that as it may, you’re right in these people’s vision. If you didn’t come down here to look at the statues, I’m really afraid there’s nothing here for you.”

“Oh. Well. Certainly.” Jack, grimacing with the effort, raised his body to his feet. “I didn’t know there were all these regulations.”

Leonard did not strenuously follow up this victory. His courtship of Robin continued as subtly as before, though twice he did dare ask her to the movies. The second time, she accepted. The delicately tinted Japanese love tale, so queerly stained with murders, seemed to offer a mutually foreign ground where they might meet as equals, but the strict rules of the girls’ house where she stayed, requiring them to scamper directly into a jammed bus, made the whole outing, in the end, seem awkward and foolish. He much preferred the days, full of light and time, when their proximity had the grace of the accidental and before their eyes a constant topic of intercourse was poised. He even wondered if through their one date he hadn’t lost some dignity in her eyes. The tone of her talk to him in the Well was respectful; the more so since his painting was coming excellently. Something in those spherical shapes and mild colors spoke to him. Seabright was plainly flattered by his progress. “Mmm,” he would purr, “delicious tones on the shadow side here. But I believe you’re shading a bit too much towards red. It’s really a very distinct violet, you know. If I could have your palette a moment … And a clean brush?” Lesson by lesson, Leonard was drawn into Seabright’s world, a tender, subdued world founded on violet, and where violet—pronounced “vaalet”—at the faintest touch of a shadow, at the slightest hesitation of red or blue, rose to the
surface, shyly vibrant. Robin’s bluntly polychrome vision caused him to complain, “Really, Miss Cox, I wish you had got the drawing correct before you began filling in the spaces.” When Puss had gone back up the spiral stair, Robin would transfer his vexation to Leonard as “Honestly, Len, I can’t see all this rotten purple. You’d think my onions were grapes, to see what he’s done to them. Tell me, should I scrape his paint right off?”

Leonard walked around to her easel and suggested, “Why don’t you try keying in the rest of it around them?”

“Key it in? Key it in!” She seemed to relish the shrill syllables.

“Sure. Make your cabbage kind of greeny-purple, and the yellow cloth browny-purple, and for the mortar, well, try pure turps.”

“No,” she pouted. “It’s not a joke. You’re just being a disgusting silly American. You think I’m stupid at paints.”

Each day he sank deeper into a fatherly role; he welcomed any secure relationship with her, yet wondered if he wasn’t being, perhaps, neutralized. Except on technical matters, she never sought his advice until the day near the end of term when, conceding him in this sense a great stride forward, she asked, “How well do you know your friend Jack Fredericks?”

“Not well at all. I wouldn’t call him my friend. He was a year younger in high school, and we weren’t really in the same social class either.”

“The social classes in America—are they very strong?”

“Well—the divisions aren’t as great as here, but there’re more of them.”

“And he comes from a good class?”

“Fair.” He thought reticence was his best tactic, but when
she joined him in silence he was compelled to prod. “What makes you ask?”

“Now, Leonard. You mustn’t breathe a word; if you do, I’ll absolutely shrivel. You see, he’s asked me to model for him.”

“
Model
for him? He can’t paint.”

“Yes he can. He’s shown me some of his things and they’re rather good.”

“How does he mean ‘model’? Model in what condition?”

“Yes. In the nude.” High color burned evenly in her face; she dabbed at the canvas.

“That’s ridiculous. He doesn’t paint at all.”

“But he
does
, Leonard. He’s taken it up very seriously. I’ve
seen
his things.”

“What do they look like?”

“Oh, rather abstract.”

“I bet.”

“
All
you Americans paint in the abstract.”

“I don’t.” He didn’t feel this was much of a point to score.

“He says I have a lovely body—”

“Well,
I
could have told you
that
.” But he hadn’t.

“—and
swears
, absolutely, there would be nothing to it. He’s even offered a model’s fee.”

“Well, I never heard of such an embarrassing, awful scheme.”

“Really, Leonard, it’s embarrassing only when you talk of it. I
know
he’s perfectly serious as a painter.”

Leonard added a fleck of black to a mixture on his palette and sighed. “Well, Robin. You do whatever you want. It’s your life.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t
dream
of
do
ing it. Mummy and Daddy would
die
.”

His relief was overwhelmed by a sudden fierce sense of
being wronged. He said, “Don’t let
them
stand in your way. Why, this may be the start of a whole career for you.”

“I mean, I never con
sid
ered it. I was just interested in your opinion of the man.”

“My opinion is, he’s a
horrible
man. He’s a silly spoiled snob and about to get hog fat and I don’t see what attracts you in him. Terrible person. Terrible.”

“Well, as you say, you don’t know him very well.”

Leonard and the other unmarried veteran went to Europe during the Michaelmas vacation. On the Channel boat, his thoughts, free for the first time from the bustle of departure, returned to Robin, and the certainty of her turning Fredericks down warmed him on the cold, briny deck. In Paris the idea that she even toyed with such a proposition excited him; it suggested an area of willingness, of loneliness, that Leonard could feasibly invade. In Frankfurt he wondered if actually she would turn his fellow-countryman down—she was staying around the university during vacation, Leonard knew—and by Hamburg he was certain that she had not; she had succumbed. He grew accustomed to this conviction as he and his companion (who was devoting himself to a survey of all the beers of Europe) slowly circled back through the Lowlands. By the time he disembarked at Dover he was quite indifferent to her nakedness.

The school had grown chillier in four weeks. In the Well, the arrangements of fruit had decayed; in case some of the students continued to work during the vacation, the things had not been disturbed. Their own still life was least affected by time. The onions were as immutable as the statues; but the cabbage, peeled by Robin to its solid pale heart, had relaxed in wilting, and its outer leaves, gray and almost transparent,
rested on the yellow cloth. His painting, still standing in its easel, preserved the original appearance of the cabbage, but the pigments had dulled, sinking into the canvas; their hardness made the painting seem finished, though there were several uncovered corners and numerous contrasts his fresh eye saw the need of adjusting. He loaded his palette and touched paint to the canvas reluctantly. The Well was so empty on this Monday morning of resumption, he wondered if he had made a mistake, misreading the schedule or taking it too seriously. At the far end, the wispy English boy, who had established himself as the teachers’ pet, noisily dismantled groups, crashing vegetable elements into a paper sack.

After eleven o’clock, Robin appeared on the balcony of the spiral stair. She overlooked the Well with her serene Britannia stance—her bosom a brave chest, her hips and legs a firm foundation—and then descended in a flurry. “Leonard. Where have you
been?
”

“I told you, I was going to Europe with Max. We went as far east as Hamburg, and came back through Holland and Belgium.”

“You went to
Germany?
Whatever for?”

“Well, I am German, eventually.”

Her attention went sideways. “I say, the cabbage has taken it hard, hasn’t it?” She lifted her own painting off the easel. “Are you still going at it? Puss has put me back in antique.”