The Walking Stick (11 page)

Douglas said: ‘It rather depends who does the fussing. One mustn’t interfere with the age-old struggle to be free. Be careful how you get your car out, Erica. I drove mine in rather
carelessly last night.’

It was on this note that I left home.

That evening, Sarah being on hospital duty, I persuaded Virginia to go with me to the cinema. We went to the last house, and were not home until eleven-thirty. The telephone didn’t ring
that night.

Wednesday I went back to work. The difficulty of course with a place like Whittington’s is that it’s not like a big office or a bank or an insurance company, which no one may enter
unless he has legitimate business. People wander in and out of the showrooms all day inspecting the stuff on show and, although technically they have no business downstairs where the assembling and
cataloguing of the goods takes place, no one really questions the occasional intruder, and I thought all day that Leigh would suddenly appear, squeezing his way among the furniture and the stacked
pictures.

I didn’t go out for lunch, and in the evening I slipped out of the back entrance into Bruton Lane.

Philip Bartholomew came to dinner at the flat, a thin young man about Sarah’s height, with a desperately pale complexion as if his skin never saw the sun. Virginia was very excited about
her holidays which began next day, and we had a jolly evening. Or they had anyway.

Halfway through dinner the telephone rang, and Sarah came back from the bedroom to say: ‘It’s for you, Deb.’

I picked up the telephone without an idea in my head what I was going to say.

‘Hullo.’

‘Hullo, Deborah. I’ve caught up with you at last.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘That man Hartley. Who you had an appointment with last night.’

‘Oh, Leigh. Oh, yes, sorry; I had a bit of a throat.’

‘Are you better?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘We’ll meet tomorrow as usual, then?’

‘No, I can’t tomorrow. Virginia Fisher, Sarah’s flat mate, is going abroad for her holiday and I’ve promised Sarah to help her rearrange things.’

‘Oh . . . I’ll call for you Saturday morning, then, as usual.’

‘No, I can’t this Saturday.’

‘Hey, hey, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I just can’t make it.’

‘Oh, but we were in full flight on the painting. Too long a delay might spoil things.’

‘Sorry.’

A pause. I could picture his knitted frown, heavy lids down, lips drawn.

‘Is it because of what happened last Saturday?’

‘D’you mean? . . . Oh, no.’

‘Of course you know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I know. And it isn’t.’

‘I reckon maybe it is. Look Deborah, it was the sort of thing could have happened to anyone. I love you. D’you latch on to just what that means? What happened was because of that.
Anyway there was nothing wrong. Don’t be afraid of it.’

I bit the skin on one finger. ‘I’m not afraid.’

‘Then when will you meet me?’

‘Not for a while.’

‘Crikey, I just don’t get this! I can’t believe you don’t feel something for me, being the way you were on Saturday. It doesn’t make sense. So why try to strangle
something, now that it’s just come alive? Why run away?’

‘I’m not running away! I just think I’d like a break.’

‘Give me a chance to finish this portrait. Another couple of sittings will do it. I swear to God I’ll not touch you again.’

‘That isn’t the
reason
, I keep telling you! But I just want a break!’

‘Darling, what’s the matter? If you—’

‘Goodbye, Leigh.’ I slammed down the receiver and sat there with trembling fingers, angry and more miserable than I’d ever been in my life.

I couldn’t face them for a bit. I couldn’t go back and go on with my dinner. So I went into the bathroom and sat on the pink-towelling-covered lavatory seat and said, stop, stop,
stop
. It’s not important; it’ll all be the same in a hundred years, in five years, in one year. I shall look back and think, what a
fool
I was to get upset about such a
trivial thing and such a trivial man.

So presently I stopped and blew my nose about a dozen times and took a few deep breaths and tried to put it all away from me. Proportion, that’s the most important word in life. If you can
see things in proportion half your troubles are not troubles at all.

The ‘spare’ bedroom in the flat in Ennismore Gardens was so tiny as only just to admit a single bed and a cupboard which did for a wardrobe. At night the walls were
so close that I had to fight the old battles with claustrophobia. So when Virginia left, I moved in with Sarah.

I told Sarah that Leigh had become too persistent and I wanted to choke him off, so she must help. Sarah said: ‘Anything you say, duckie.’

I saw nothing at all of him that week.

On the Monday John Hallows had to go back to Geneva, and Maurice Mills left with him, so I was in charge of the department. This meant my working late both on the Monday and on the Tuesday. By
Tuesday evening I didn’t feel much like queuing for a bus and then walking, so I took a cab back to Ennismore Gardens.

It was a light, warm and dusty evening, when there didn’t seem much sap left in anything and the leaves of the trees made thin scratching noises in the breeze. The declining sun was
flooding the eastern side of the square. Two dogs dodged aimlessly among the rows of parked cars, playing hide and seek with each other.

As I got to the door and put in my key I heard Leigh’s step behind me.

He said: ‘I thought you must come in sooner or later.’

I stood there, feeling the ridges on the cane of my stick. ‘Have you been waiting? Sorry.’

‘Sarah went out half an hour ago. Can I come in?’

‘I’m tired. I’d rather be alone.’

Reflection of the sun in his eyes as he looked up at me.

‘What’s wrong, Deborah? Why’ve you thrown me over?’

‘I don’t think there was all that much between us, was there?’

‘I reckon so!’

‘Well, perhaps we can talk about it some time.’ I moved to turn the key.

‘No!’ He put his arm across the door. ‘I must know. It’s only
fair
to tell me what’s wrong, to say something, to explain.’

I stood there feeling pretty sick.

‘Let me alone.’

‘No. Come out to supper with me.’

‘Just give it up, Leigh.’

‘No.’

I leaned against the side of the door farthest from him. ‘Go back to your wife.’

He stared at me and took a breath. ‘So
that’s
it.’

‘Not altogether.’

‘So that’s it! My God, I might have guessed it was that.’

‘Not quite in the way you probably think I mean it.’

‘Who told you?’

‘As if that mattered. It’s true, I suppose?’

‘Oh, it’s true. But I haven’t so much as
seen
her for over a year.’

‘Isn’t it time you did?’

‘No. It’s washed up. Done with.’

I said exhaustedly: ‘Leigh. In a minute I’m going in – and if you don’t let me I shall call a taxi and drive to Hampstead. But before I go I want – want to make it
clear about this – about us.’ I swallowed and tried to get my thoughts in line. ‘I – I don’t know what the rules are of this game. Perhaps there aren’t any. That
would be nothing new. But I have to have
some
rules to go by – it so happens – rightly or wrongly I can’t do without them – and if they aren’t there I slide
gracefully out. That’s what I’m trying to do now if you’d only let me!’

‘But surely—’

‘Wait. If I could finish, and then . . . Leigh, if I fell in love with somebody –
if
I did – and he was a married man, it would matter, but it wouldn’t matter all
that much. There’s divorce – or in certain circumstances no divorce – whatever the situation was, it couldn’t be the
deciding
thing. One could only judge –
could only go on how it looked. But . . . but if I fell in love with a married man and he didn’t
tell
me he was married,
that
would be the deciding thing because that would mean
he was cheating from the first step. If – if there’s anything in life at all, one of the fundamentals, surely, is that you don’t cheat people you care about. Or, if you
do
cheat them, then you can’t care about them in the way I mean.’

His face was set in a sullen narrow frown, almost pouting. After a minute he took his arm from the door.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘it isn’t just quite so dead easy as all that. It isn’t step one, step two like some Goddamned ballet dance. Sometimes you’re so blind
scared of scaring off the person you’re in love with – especially when she’s
difficult
and
touchy
and
independent
, and can’t bear to be
pitied
,
and liable to fly off at the slightest thing and doesn’t care for you much at the start
anyway
– sometimes then you’re so blind frozen scared of frightening her off that
you don’t dare tell her a single thing she won’t like or you may lose her in a flash – snap and she’s scarpered. Just that! Just that, Deborah.’

As he was speaking we both saw Sarah coming round the square with Philip Bartholomew, and when he’d finished there were about a dozen seconds before they came up with us. Those seconds
passed in silence.

Then all was talk. They hadn’t yet had supper and it was waiting inside – cold meats and things – so we could go right up. Sarah obviously thought of inviting Leigh to join us,
but she glanced doubtfully at me.

‘Then I’d best be pushing off,’ said Leigh. ‘Nice to have seen you, Philip. And you, Sarah. See you again sometime. Bye, Deborah.’

And hunching his shoulders as if it were raining he turned and went off toward his little red car on the other side of the square.

Wimbledon and Henley came and went. It rained in Ascot week. My father and mother left on their separate holidays on the fourth Sunday after Trinity. London was full of foreign
visitors. The season began to look tired and dusty. Whittington’s always closed for the month of August, except for a skeleton staff for receiving goods for future auctions – and
auctions did not begin again until the middle of September.

I was left in harmony and peace, just as before and just as I wanted to be again: a quiet ordered life; no firm hands touching and grasping my body in strange ways, no questing lips, no
heavy-lidded, anxiously admiring eyes.

Peace.

Time on my hands.

Sarah’s friendship with Philip Bartholomew grew. Since she was so tactful about Leigh, no questions for her; but it looked like the real thing. I came to like his seriousness: it
wasn’t a dull moral attitude but seemed to spring from a fundamental belief in the value of human beings. Unusual these days. And it didn’t at all stop him from being lighthearted or
jolly.

Arabella’s affair with Bruce Spring was going through as many vicissitudes as a barometer in the monsoon season. It was fascinating to see. Maybe I’d have been better that way
instead of sitting on my feelings like a repressed Victorian.

One day in the showrooms of Whittington’s, a voice said: ‘Miss Dainton.’

Jack Foil. The stout, elderly man whom I’d met with Leigh at that club in Wapping.

‘It is Miss Dainton, isn’t it? Do you work here, then?’

We talked for a minute or two. Very friendly and polite. Behind their thick lenses, his eyes wobbled like lightly poached eggs. He was here, he said, looking at some Oriental rugs. He wanted two
for his dining room. His wife had a fancy for them. And there was a Sung baluster vase catalogued that he was interested in professionally. Did I know where that was?

Yes, I knew where it was, and led him to it, while he told me that his antique shop was in Brompton Road and invited me to call in any time I was passing. Was I interested in indoor plants? It
was his hobby.

We stood and looked at the baluster vase and he puffed out his thick lips and he asked me why it was so called, and I said its real name was Mei-ping, which referred to the shape of the mouth.
But of course, I said, he must know all this, being a dealer.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This isn’t really my line. Furniture and silver mostly. Is this genuine, this vase? I mean is it a genuine Sung?’

‘No.’

‘No? Oh, I see the catalogue only claims . . . But how does one know?’

‘If you lift it up you’ll see something has been ground out of the base. It was a reign mark, probably. The reign in which it was really made. It wasn’t
intended
as a
forgery, only as a copy.’

‘It’s really Chinese, then?’

‘Oh, yes. Probably Yung Cheng. And quite valuable.’

‘How clever you are. Have you worked here long?’

‘About seven years. But porcelain and antique pottery are my subjects. I don’t know much about rugs, I’m afraid.’

He took out a heavy cream silk handkerchief and wiped the outside corners of his eyes with it. It smelled of carnation.

He said: ‘To be frank, Miss Dainton, I don’t think I should have been so sure of recognizing you this morning if I hadn’t been looking at your portrait the other day. I
haven’t a good memory for faces in the ordinary way.’

‘Oh,’ I said, colour coming somewhere. ‘You mean Leigh Hartley’s painting.’

‘Yes, it’s splendid, isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t actually seen it.’

‘You haven’t . . .’ He put the handkerchief away, and his signet rings flashed in the light. ‘Oh, hasn’t he let you see it yet? Well at your next sitting,
maybe.’

I folded my notebook over. ‘I think I must be getting on. I was looking—’

‘Of course. Don’t let me detain you, Miss Dainton. Working hours, etc. But I must tell you, I’m very struck with that portrait. It’s much the best thing Leigh has ever
done. If you don’t want it yourself when it’s finished, I’ve offered him a hundred guineas for it. Not to resell, but for myself.’

‘For that?’ I half-laughed in surprise and embarrassment. ‘
Really
. He’ll be pleased, I expect.’

‘Yes, he is. He’s still groping his way in art, you know. It’s hard for a young man who’s not an absolute genius to develop a distinct and personal style. Young artists
often spend years doing what other people have done better before. This, this portrait he’s done of you, is the first sign I’ve seen in him of an important development.’