Strange Music (33 page)

Laughing, they all ran to join him and he helped them over.

‘What then? What then?'

‘Well, you can imagine – I ran for my life. I crashed through brambles, tearing my clothes. Isabella was furious but I forgave her. I got stung on those nettles, Siri, which is how I know they can sting—'

‘You said summer. They're green in summer.'

He sighed. ‘Then you have my permission to wander among them on your way back from school. Then we'll see whether I'm right or not.'

‘The girl!' The other children shouted. ‘The Young Girl by Rosy Primrose!'

‘Yes! How did you know that! You're right, though. When I was almost home again I met a young girl standing between the pheasant run and Rosy Primrose.'

‘Was she pretty?'

‘Yes, Jasmine, she was devastatingly pretty. “My oh my!” she cried out to me. “You are in a sweat! And you look as if you've seen a ghost.” So I stopped and just stood there, panting for breath, and glad – oh, so glad – to meet another human being after that terrible sight down in Gideon's Coppice. “I don't know what I've just seen down there,” I told her. “But I hope I'll never see the like of it again – that I can tell you.” “Yes,” she said. “Please –
do
tell me.” So I described what had just happened as best I could, and when I'd finished, the young girl said, “D'you mean she did
this
?” And she, too, raised her hand to her brow and then she slowly lowered it, down, down, down, over her entire face. And when her hand was here, she had two bright, sparkling eyes; but when it reached here,
the eyes were gone
! And when her hand was here, she had a slender, very pleasing little retroussé nose; but when it reached here,
the nose was gone
! And when her hand was here, she had a pretty little rosebud mouth that any man would want to kiss; but when it reached here,
her mouth had vanished
!
Her whole face was as smooth . . . and as plain . . . and as white . . . as the side of an egg!'

They all ran off screaming and laughing into the playground – except Calley, who took her father's hand and tried to drag him to the village shop. And Siri, who came back out of the playground and said, ‘That wasn't true, was it? It didn't happen.'

He looked her in the eyes a moment and then said, ‘Some things happen out here, Siri – in the world of trees and grass and stones and birds' nests and things. And some things happen inside here among the double-breasted back chats.' He tapped his forehead. ‘And if you can work out the difference and tell it to me when you come back from school this evening . . . well, what would you like by way of reward?'

The little girl drew breath to answer, as if it were the easiest question in the world, but then a cunning look crept into her eyes and she said, ‘I can tell you that, too, when I come home from school.'

‘That little madam!' Eric said to Calley as they set off for the village shop. ‘She is going to be a handful.'

‘I know the difference,' Calley said.

‘Tell me then.'

‘Things in your head are more fun.'

‘That's not bad. We'll see if she gets it, too. Can you remember why Peter Rabbit doesn't like lettuce?'

‘Because it's sop-or-ific.'

‘Very good! What does soporific mean?'

‘Yawny and sleepy.'

‘Wonderful. And Isabella works on
Vogue
– what does vogue mean?'

‘Fashion.'

‘And what is fashion?'

‘It's what people do when they haven't got any ideas of their own.'

‘Better and better! It pays to increase your word power, you know. You keep on like this and when you grow up you'll be the editor of
Reader's Digest
!'

At the village shop he asked for twenty Capstan Full Strength but Calley shouted, ‘Gaulloises! Gaulloises!' and pointed to where the packets stood on the shelf.

‘You've been talking to Isabella,' Eric accused.

‘Two packets,' Calley said.

‘You
have
been talking to Isabella!'

Going back across the fields she counted the number of birds she saw flying – forty-seven; and that way she forgot that her legs were getting a bit tired. In the coppice Eric suggested they should stop and look hard at the first bird they saw sitting still, either in a tree or on the ground. ‘And then, when we get home, you can look for it in
The Observer's Book of British Birds
and then you can do your own drawing of it.'

The one she picked was a goldfinch but he didn't name it for her, so that she'd have to search for it by its appearance.

When they arrived back indoors she ran up the short flight of stairs shouting, ‘Isabella! Isabella! When I grow up I'm going to be editor of
Reader's Digest
!'

Isabella looked at her husband with a sort of amused weariness.

He shrugged. ‘
Calme-toi, chérie
– it's just a phase she's going through. Don't you remember when that was all
you
wanted in life and
Vogue
just seemed impossibly distant? She'll grow out of it.'

Wednesday, 4 June 1952

For half an hour Felix accompanied Reg Butler, the external adjudicator, on a tour of the sculpture diploma exhibits at the Slade. ‘So that's about it, Reg,' he said when the tour was complete. ‘I'll leave you to make your mind up. I'll be looking at the painting exhibits if you want me again. Up on the first floor.'

In the still-life room and spilling out into the corridor, an eclectic mix of classical plaster casts, from a scaled-down
Laocöon
to a half-sized
David
by Michelangelo, was scattered among spiky palmettos and improbable rubber plants. The sight, though by now familiar, still amazed him. These things belonged to a vanished world in which students had to prove they could draw and paint
properly
before embarking on more experimental work. There was even an Augustus John life study hanging on one of the walls to underline the point; there was nothing of the later John about the figure; it might have been painted by a French classicist – an Ingres or a David. Today, in passing, he noticed that the Venus de Milo was back on her plinth, after a meticulous repair that left no trace of the anatomically accurate hole one of the students had drilled in her plaster.

He found Bill Coldstream and Claude Rogers wandering around the diploma-painting exhibition.

‘What d'you think?' Coldstream asked as he joined them.

Felix answered with a mirthless chuckle. ‘I wish I were Wildenstein.'

‘Why?' they both asked.

‘I was following him round Helen Lessore's gallery in Bruton Street the other day – the Lefevre. She's got a Bratby exhibition on there at the moment. He looked at each picture in complete silence, with Helen, all anxiety, at his side, and then he reached the doorway to her little office and opened it and said, “No.” And then he ushered her inside and followed her and shut the door behind them. But just as he shut it I heard him say, “And I'll tell you why.” For myself, I thought Bratby's work was pretty powerful but I'll never know what Wildenstein disliked about it.'

‘Probably the prices,' Rogers said, with some feeling, for he exhibited at the Lefevre, too.

‘So you just want to say no?' Coldstream asked, waving a hand at the paintings generally. ‘But you don't want to say why?'

Felix shrugged awkwardly. ‘I find it all just a bit unadventurous, Bill. Remember Chris Riley-Potter – got his diploma in 'forty-nine?'

‘Adventurous, all right,' Coldstream said, with feeling.

‘There's nothing dangerous like that here, this year. It's the same with the sculpture. There's more adventurous stuff being done in the first year than we can see in any of the diploma work.'

Coldstream nodded. ‘Rogers and I were just discussing that. It's because most of these students are on ex-service grants. They're older, they went through the war, they're married, a lot of them, and some have children, too. They weren't demobbed until 'forty-eight, so they're in a hurry to catch up. When they leave here this summer, they're not going to live on half-nothing in some garret in Whitechapel or Montmartre. They want to go straight into teaching . . . or curating—'

‘Or one of the auction houses,' Rogers added. ‘It's sad, but they were fighting a war when they should have been letting off the visual fireworks.'

‘I can see all that,' Felix said. He wanted to add that, even so, they weren't exactly compelled to paint in that drab, post-Sickert-and-a-long-way-post-Post-Impressionist style known as ‘Euston Road.' But, as Coldstream was one of the founders of that school and Rogers, to a lesser extent, had been a practitioner, all he said was, ‘One can't withhold the diploma, really, because they're all pretty competent and professional-looking, and workmanlike, but one can say that if they were reaching for Bonnard, they didn't even make it as far as Vuillard.'

‘If you want “adventure,”' Rogers replied, ‘Ruskin Spear tells me there's a student at the Royal College who's dripping paint on his bicycle tyres and cycling up and down a strip of primed canvas. He then cuts it into squares and stretches them on frames, which he hangs in random order with titles like
bicycle ride one
,
bicycle ride two
,
bicycle ride three
. . . That's the sort of thing we'll be judging for diplomas
here
next year.'

As Felix left the Slade, treading a careful path over the lawns, between and over the collapsed, sun-drenched bodies of a dozen or more students, he was almost tripped by one who suddenly rose to a sitting position as he was about to step over her. Debbie something.

‘Oh, Mister Breit,' she said, shielding her eyes against the glare of the sky.

A pretty little girl – a natural for casting as an upper-class English rose, except for the brilliant red hair. She would look even more natural in a twinset and pearls, with a Doris Day haircut, rather than the denim slacks, the fisherman's smock, and the tangled ponytail that actually adorned her.

‘Debbie . . . ah . . .'

‘Kennedy,' she said. ‘You know Chris Riley-Potter, don't you?'

‘Quite well. Why?'

She glanced about her, at all her somnolent companions. ‘Can I talk with you a bit? I don't want to hold you up but I could walk with you . . . if you're going to walk, that is.'

He reached out to haul her to her feet. ‘By all means. I'm going sketching in Regent's Park. Bring your own sketchbook along if you wish.'

‘No.' She dusted herself off. ‘I just want to . . . it won't take long.'

It was a pleasure to watch someone move with such lithe and easy grace, without those little twinges of discomfort that attended almost every move he made these days.
Anno domini
according to Dr Wallace. At forty? The outlook was bleak, then. He hoped she admired the controlled strength with which he had raised her.

‘What about Chris?' he asked as they tipped a farewell finger to the porter at the gate.

‘How well d'you know him?' she countered as they headed off north, up Gower Street.

‘We both live in the same community out near Hertford – a big house divided into flats. I've been there five years. He's been there two. Why?'

‘He's living with a girl, I suppose? Jenny?'

He sighed. ‘D'you think it's fair to ask me that?'

When she didn't reply he turned toward her and saw a tear, just starting down her cheek. ‘Oh, dear,' he said. ‘I should warn you I'm not very good at this sort of thing.'

She sniffed glutinously and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her smock. He offered her his handkerchief, which she then half-filled.

‘Listen,' he said. ‘This street is hardly the place. I've an idea. I have a flat just across the Euston Road in Robert Street. A
pied-à-terre
. We could go there and make a cup of tea and you could tell me all about it.'

The change in her was astonishing. She grinned at him broadly, punched the tear off her cheek with a bare-knuckle jab, linked arms with him, and dragged him up the street past Lewis's bookshop toward the Euston Road. ‘That would be the best thing possible,' she said. ‘But would you have beer rather than tea? I mean I don't mind tea but . . . you know . . .'

‘We have beer,' he assured her.

‘We?'

‘My wife and I.' For some reason he added, ‘She won't be there,' and for some reason her
joie de vivre
did not return until he said it.

But Angela was there. The sound of his key in the lock and the sudden inrush of street noises brought her into the hallway.

‘Felix!' she cried. ‘Oh! And Miss . . .?'

‘Debbie Kennedy. She's a fourth year. My wife, Angela.'

They shook hands, eyeing each other guardedly as Felix added, ‘Actually, she wants to discuss something to do with Chris. You might be better at it than me. I've already told her I'm not very good at this sort of thing.' He turned to the girl. ‘Would you mind?'

‘This sort of thing . . .' Angela quoted, her eyes flickering rapidly from one to the other; she still held Debbie's hand in a light grip.

‘I think I'm going to have Chris's baby,' Debbie blurted out, looking wildly at each of them in rapid turns before flinging her arms around them both and hugging them into a knot of three, in which she buried her face and howled.

Over her heaving back Angela shot a look at Felix that might have said,
And you thought you could handle this?
Or it might have said,
I'm still only half persuaded that everything's kosher here
. Or it might have said . . . But why pursue it? The air was heavy with the reek of emotionally costly sequels.

‘I'll make a pot of tea,' Felix muttered, wriggling into a disengagement.