Consequences Read online

  CONSEQUENCES

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  The Photograph

  Making It Up

  Spiderweb

  Heat Wave

  Cleopatra’s Sister

  City of the Mind

  Passing On

  Moon Tiger

  Pack of Cards and Other Stories

  According to Mark

  Corruption

  Perfect Happiness

  Next to Nature, Art

  Judgement Day

  Treasures of Time

  The Road to Lichfield

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  A House Unlocked

  Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  PENELOPE LIVELY

  CONSEQUENCES

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Penelope Lively, 2007

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA AVAILABLE

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0223-4

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  TO JEAN

  CONSEQUENCES

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 1

  THEY MET ON A BENCH in St. James’s Park; it was the sixth of June 1935. Lorna was crying because she had had a violent argument with her mother; Matt was feeding the wildfowl in order to draw them. He sat with his sketch pad on his lap, one hand in perpetual motion, the other chucking an occasional morsel in order to keep the birds attentive. He drew; the ducks shoved one another and commented; Lorna stopped crying and watched, increasingly entranced. When eventually Matt became aware of her, he looked sideways, and was done for.

  Some while later, they went to a tea shop. By now, Lorna had learned that the duck-sketching exercise was in the service of a commission to illustrate a book on estuaries and waterways. Matt was an artist, primarily a wood engraver. He learned—or rather, came to understand, since she spoke of none of this—that Lorna was a girl somehow at odds with her circumstances. They sat for several hours over a pot of tea and a plate of cakes, and then they wandered the streets, impervious to time. By the end of the day, both realized that their lives had altered course. Lorna went home to Brunswick Gardens to a further outburst of disapproval from her mother. Matt knew only that he must see her again, and forever.

  In due course, she brought him to the house and presented him to her parents, who were initially gracious, if a touch cool. When subsequently Lorna’s father discovered that wood engraving was not a hobby but Matt’s livelihood, the condescending interest turned to froideur. He told Lorna that this artist chappie was a nice enough young man but it wouldn’t do to let things go any further, d’you see? Lorna replied that things already had: she and Matt were engaged. She was wearing on her finger a little Victorian ring that they had bought in the Portobello Market the previous week for ten and sixpence. Matt had pawned an easel in order to pay for it.

  Gerald Bradley shouted; Lorna sat in mutinous silence. Marian Bradley came in, wrung her hands, and joined in the shouting, at a ladylike level. When the scene had run its course, Lorna got on a 73 bus to Islington, where she found that Matt had just taken the first proof print of the duck engraving. There was the swirl of ducks in the foreground, their plumage intricately textured; beyond was the sparkle of water and the patterned fall of willows, leading the eye somehow deep into the picture, so that it became three dimensional, an intricate and calculated reflection of the backdrop to their meeting; she saw that place, but saw also now this artifact that was the brilliant expression of his hand and eye. And to one side, framed by ducks, was a small distant figure seated on a bench, a girl—dark hair, white curve of a dress. “That’s you,” he said.

  They were married at Finsbury Town Hall. The witnesses were Matt’s friend Lucas Talbot and Lorna’s old school friend Elaine, who was in a lather of excited anxiety and kept repeating, “I don’t know what your parents are going to say.” After the deed was done, the four of them had an awkward lunch at a Lyons Corner house, Elaine still twittering, and clearly not much taken with long lank Lucas, who ran a small printing press in Fulham. Then Lorna and Matt went to Brunswick Gardens to face up to the Bradleys.

  In years to come, they would recount that her father had actually said, “Never darken my doors again.” This was poetic license, but the message ran along those lines. There was a short, cold exchange in the drawing room, where the two couples sat on sofas, confronting one another across a great bowl of lilies whose scent filled the room. From elsewhere in the house came the loud assertive voices of Lorna’s two older brothers, joshing one another. At one point the parlor maid knocked to ask if tea would be required. Lorna’s mother replied that it would not. There was no shouting on this occasion; Marian Bradley was aggrieved and petulant, her husband had withdrawn into a mood of disgruntled dismissal. A great gulf opened, into which the lilies sweetly fumed. Everything that might be said hung in the air, until none of them could stand it any longer, and Lorna went up to her room to gather up a suitcase of clothes, while Matt waited in the hall. Downstairs, Gerald had a stiff whiskey and Marian rang for the maid: perhaps tea wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

  “What was so appalling about an artist?” Lorna would wonder, much later. “There was art on their walls. They bought pictures. Daddy had William Nicholson paint Mummy’s portrait.”

  And Matt would laugh. “Exactly. Tradesmen. Not the sort of people you want marrying your daughter. Irregular habits, erratic income. He was quite right.”

  Relations were resumed within a few months, of a kind. Letters and Christmas cards were exchanged. By that time, Lorna had become someone else, perhaps the person that she was always meant to be. Her mother wrote breezy little missives abo
ut social events and the boys’ sporting fixtures; for Lorna’s birthday she sent a silk purse from Harrods. Opening this at the kitchen table in Somerset, Lorna felt as through she were in receipt of goods from another planet; her previous life seemed now like a myth, somewhere she had dreamed away her early years.

  Matt knew only that he was entirely happy, wholly in love, and that years of this rolled ahead, waiting for him.

  When she was a child, Lorna did not understand that London is a huge city. Oh, it went quite a way, she realized that—she had been on the bus right from Kensington to Piccadilly Circus. And the park was immense, a great green expanse reaching from the homely familiar base of the Round Pond and Kensington Gardens to distant Park Lane. But that was the extent of it. Beyond that…. Well, she really had not much idea if there was anything beyond that, except that there were outposts to which she had been taken, like Buckingham Palace, and that other park alongside, and Trafalgar Square with the lions, and the great wide glitter of the river. It was not until much later, years later, in time of war, when the bombs were falling, that she heard of Poplar and Stepney and Lambeth and somewhere called the City of London. But by then she was far away, amid the Somerset hills, alone, a child on her knee, anxiously tuning the wireless for the six o’clock news each evening. The world was in flames, and London with it, both the London she had known and that other London of which she had been entirely ignorant. At those moments, it seemed to her that time and space compacted; she dipped back into that other place, where they knew nothing of what was to come, and felt some strange kind of compassion.

  She spent her childhood in Brunswick Gardens, in a big white stucco house flanked by other big white stucco houses from which emerged each day men much like her father, wearing dark suits and bowler hats, carrying furled umbrellas, and women much like her mother, in silks and furs, and children much like herself, who trotted beside nannies pushing high shiny prams. When she was small her day revolved around the afternoon walk to the Round Pond, and drawing-room tea later with her mother, if her mother was at home. This was a timeless period from which there floated up occasional images: the jewel-green feathers of a preening duck, a golden cavern in the coals of the nursery fireplace, the treasure trove of gleaming brown conkers in long wet grass. Later, when she was older, there were morning lessons with other little girls and a governess in a neighbor’s house, and later still she went to the Academy for Young Ladies on the farther side of Kensington High Street, where she did French and piano and some history and poetry and elocution, until she was seventeen and it was felt, supposedly, that she had learned enough by now.

  Her brothers, two years and four years older than she was, had long since been hived off into an exclusive male world; they had vanished into boarding schools, and had come back in long trousers, with hoarse voices, talking in code. Then they disappeared again, to Oxford, and returned occasionally to treat her with kindly patronage. She did not much like them, and felt bad about this. They were lords of creation: the Boys. Her father smiled upon them with gruff indulgence; her mother fluttered around them, proudly attentive to their needs. They brought their Oxford friends to the house, who seemed to Lorna like a set of brother-replicas—the same robust confident voices, the same jokes, the same aura of some exclusive fraternity. She was eighteen, and would shortly embark upon the extended initiation ceremony that was obligatory for girls of her class and background. She would have to spend the next couple of years going to cocktail parties and balls and weekend parties, at which she would meet more and more young men. She presumed that most of these would be like her brothers and their friends. If by the end of this period she had not signed up for marriage, she would have deeply disappointed her mother and would be seen as a failure. The whole prospect filled her with gloom.

  She knew that she was not like other girls of her kind. She got on well enough with them, she had friends, but she could not share their compliance with the expected routines of shopping excursions, dress fittings, social visits alongside mothers. She did not know what it was that she wanted, only that it should not be this. From time to time she had caught glimpses of alien interesting worlds. She came across paintings, furnishings, clothes that were exotically different from those favored by her parents and their circle; she became aware of people who lived quite differently, who turned their backs on the mandatory life structure centered upon a good income and a handsome house, who lived in a hand-to-mouth kind of way, like poor people did, in lodgings or cottages and houseboats, who did not have jobs, who painted or wrote books. Such folk were the butt of jokes in the copies of Punch that lay on the drawing-room table at Brunswick Gardens—sandal-wearing vegetarians in smocks—but Lorna did not find Punch particularly funny. She was more interested in this proof that there was another way of living, out there in the grown-up world, a way that did not require shopping in Knightsbridge, and dressmakers, and enrollment in the lineup as wife material. She thought it quite possible that she might want to get married, one day, but she flinched at the idea of a life spent with one of her brothers’ friends.

  She heard of girls who went to university, and raised this with her parents, who were aghast. Her mother told her that no man liked a bluestocking; her father said the varsity wasn’t appropriate for a girl, but she could do a domestic science course if she so wished.

  She had been quite good at drawing when she was at the Academy for Young Ladies. She made a bid for art college, and was laughed out of court. Her mother said she would be mixing with the most unsuitable types; her father didn’t say anything, merely raised his eyebrows.

  She went underground. She joined Kensington Public Library, and began to read—serendipitously, eclectically. She read novels and poetry and travel books and thus escaped—briefly—from the Brunswick Gardens regime, in which she was soon caught up as a fully fledged junior adult. She must now help her mother to arrange flowers, she must do local errands, she must walk the dog. In the afternoons she must shop with her mother, or pay visits, or go to the Hurlingham Club and play a game of tennis with old school friends. In the evenings—well, in the evenings there began now the considered process of her display in the marketplace. In the evenings she must wear a pretty frock—smile, dance, be pleasing.

  In the books that she read nobody did this kind of thing. She recognized in Jane Austen a mirror world, of a sort, but elsewhere she found conduct and assumptions that were a revelation. She read Ann Veronica and The Constant Nymph, with gathering interest. She read about love, and became increasingly convinced that it was not to be found in drawing rooms and at country house parties. But love, in a sense, was neither here nor there. She was not in any desperate hurry for love; more, she wanted confirmation that the system into which she had been born was not necessarily inevitable, that there were alternatives and that they were fine, they were neither laughable as proposed by those Punch cartoons nor disreputable as implied by her mother’s bland rejection of all practices that did not conform with her own. Her mother—and everyone that her mother knew—operated according to a set of rigid requirements, which dictated how you should dress, down to the precise width of a lapel and set of a hat, which told you how to furnish your home, how to behave in specific social circumstances, how to speak, breathe, live. Those who failed to conform were seen, quite simply, as misfits: they were not one of us.

  In her surreptitious, underground explorations, Lorna began to find not just proposals of an alternative world but also of an alternative self. She discovered unsuspected tastes and enthusiasms. She bought bright posters from art galleries which she stuck up in her bedroom: Matisse, Dufy, Klee. She saved up her allowance and achieved some clothes of her own choice—lighter, brighter, different—and wore them when she dared, in defiance of her mother’s cries of outrage: “But it’s such a horrid color, darling. You look like a gypsy. Go and put on the new tussore silk.”

  She and her mother clashed more and more. Lorna was branded difficult. She heard the word through half-closed
doors, her mother in complaint to her father: “She is being so wretchedly difficult these days.”

  Lorna looked at the rest of the family and thought that she was like a changeling in fairy stories. Her brothers were tall, fair, rawboned. She was small, dark, and neat. She sat at her dressing table and stared at her triangular face, framed in a short dark bob, and could find nothing of her father’s large florid countenance, but there was a little fold of skin at the corner of her eye that was a betrayal—he too had that. And her nose was her mother’s—narrow, slightly uptilted. I am theirs all right, she thought, there was not some unfortunate mistake in that expensive nursing home where I was born. But something got left out when I was assembled—whatever it is that makes you comfortable with what you have been given.

  She knew that she was privileged. She had only to look about her. As a child, she had taken for granted all that visible evidence that there were two kinds of people in England—those who had and those who had not. Or rather, gradations of having, from those like her parents and their friends, who had everything, through others who had perhaps an adequate sufficiency, to those who apparently had nothing much at all, who drove the rag and bone cart, hawked matches, begged on street corners, smelled not very nice, and should be given a wide berth. She grew up with instinctive awareness of social status, attuned like everyone else to nuances of speech and behavior, with an eye that could place a person at once by the clothes they wore, by what they were doing. You did not think much about it, you simply knew. Unconsidered, the world just seemed conveniently defined, with different categories of existence, rather like the big nursery jigsaw puzzle, with its horses and cows and sheep and pigs and hens and geese.

  But a time came when other responses crept in. Embarrassment; sympathy; curiosity. She saw herself through the eyes of others, and did not much care for what she saw. She looked at the rotted teeth and rickety legs of the old woman who begged at the tube station, and winced.