Next to Nature, Art Read online

  Penelope Lively

  Next to Nature, Art

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  NEXT TO NATURE, ART

  Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She is married to Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield; and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger in 1987. Her most recent novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind and Cleopatra’s Sister. Many of her books, including Going Back, which first appeared as a children’s book, and Oleander, Jacaranda, an autobiographical memoir of her childhood days in Egypt, are published by Penguin.

  Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

  TITLES BY PENELOPE LIVELY IN PENGUIN

  FICTION

  Going Back

  The Road to Lichfield

  Treasures of Time

  Judgement Day

  Next to Nature, Art

  Perfect Happiness

  Corruption and Other Stories

  According to Mark

  Pack of Cards: Stories 1978-1986

  Moon Tiger

  Passing On

  City of the Mind

  Cleopatra’s Sister

  Heat Wave

  Beyond the Blue Mountains

  Spiderweb

  The Photograph

  Making It Up

  Consequences

  Family Album

  How It All Began

  NON-FICTION

  The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History

  Oleander Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  A House Unlocked

  To David and Mary Alice

  Chapter 1

  Landscape with figures. The landscape is the contrived and ordered landscape of around 1740: a terrace dropping down to a prospect which itself is discreetly separated by a ha-ha from the view it contemplates. Trees line the prospect. The view is a wide cup of rural England: bleached fields (for this is mid-summer) and dark drooping trees and criss-crossing hedges, with – if you search carefully – a strategically placed temple in the far distance. But something is wrong. The prospect is a hayfield, the ha-ha smothered in brambles, the terrace shaggy with weeds, the parterre to the side of it blurred almost to invisibility. And, where the eye should be drawn to the cleft in the horizon there is now a road, so that the glint of cars interrupts and distracts. Every half hour or so an aircraft blasts diagonally across, taking off from the American air-base half a mile away.

  The figures are a woman and a small boy, upon the terrace, backs to the landscape, facing the house which is the point of it all.

  Paula sits on the terrace wall. She is in her late thirties and has tawny hair – much tawny hair – and a remarkable face and long legs. The legs, at this moment, are covered to the ankle by a skirt of material that pretends to be patchwork. Above that she wears a purple T-shirt. She is making a chain of the daisy-like flowers that spring from cracks in the paving and fissures in the wall. From time to time she looks up at the house, a building of elegance and symmetry in perfect accord with its setting, and, like that, in a sad state of decline – the stucco shabby, a disagreeable extension of about 1880 slapped on at one end.

  Jason is peeing into the lily-pond. He pees in a wide delicate arc, playing the jet from one lily-pad to another. Jason’s hair too is fair and he has the face of a small boy in an advertisement: engaging and healthy and unknowing, the archetypal child. An aircraft crashes past.

  “That’s a fighter. How do people pee in aeroplanes?”

  “They have loos,” says Paula. “You’d better pack that in. Here’s Toby.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s bad for the bloody fish, or the frogs or whatever.”

  “But I wanted to,” says Jason.

  “Grown-ups,” says Paula, “don’t do that.”

  “Why can’t grown-ups do what they want?”

  Paula yawns. “They can. At least they sort of can. That’s just not the kind of thing they want to do.”

  “What do they want to do?”

  “Different things,” says Paula crisply. She completes her daisy-chain, hangs it around her neck, and waves to two men who are coming out through the french windows of the house onto the terrace.

  Jason also looks towards the men. “Nick came out of Toby’s room this morning with just his pants on. He hadn’t got any pyjamas.”

  Paula adjusts her daisy-chain. “Did he now? Well, well. Fancy.”

  “Is he too poor to have any pyjamas?”

  “Frankly, I wouldn’t know.”

  The men arrive, now, at the lily-pond. Toby Standish, owner of Framleigh Hall, and Nick Watson, unemployed graduate of Camberwell School of Art; the one fortyish and slightly balding and the other twenty-two, short, dark and uncertain of manner.

  Toby says, “That damn butcher hasn’t delivered yet. They’re going spare in the kitchen.”

  “Have you phoned?”

  “Yes, Paula, I have phoned. He says his van’s on the blink.”

  “Who’s taking the minibus to the station?”

  Toby sits down on the wall. “I really have no idea who is taking the blasted minibus to the station.” Thin, to the point of concavity, he wears faded jeans and a coloured shirt (he always wears jeans and a coloured shirt), sleeves rolled up and front buttons partly undone, showing his navel and the inward curve of his stomach. He wipes a hand across his forehead, giving an impression of exhaustion held at bay by a fund of nervous energy.

  Nick says, to Paula “I think Toby’s getting one of his heads. Do you think we should …”

  “I am not,” says Toby, “getting one of my heads. I merely am concerned about providing a meal for sixteen people in three hours’ time.”

  Paula stretches. “Greg will take the minibus to the station and pick up the meat on the way. No problem. I s’pose I’d better check the rooms.” She sighs, rises, and wades with sandalled feet through the terrace greenery. She pauses a moment by Nick. “Very choice you are in your stripy cheesecloth today, ducky. Incidentally I could do with a hand in the studio in a minute. I want to move the new piece before the onslaught, and Greg’ll be gone to the station. I don’t know where the hell Bob is, by the way, he pushed off somewhere this morning.”

  “Yes, of course, Paula. Would you like me to …” But she has already gone, approaching now the open french windows of what was once the drawing room and looking, with her long skirt and piled thick hair, like some vaguely distorted manifestation of the house’s past.

  There is a silence. Bees, birds, the distant rumble of a combine harvester. “Toby,” says Nick. “There’s a thing I’ve been wondering. I’ve been thinking perhaps …”
>
  Toby, now, also rises. “Another time, love, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to see to something.” And he too goes away towards the house.

  Jason has lain there all the while upon his back. He looks up and sees them through the tangle of daisy and herb robert and periwinkle and rampant bindweed: enormous, like gods walking. They have loud irrelevant voices and legs that go up and up and end in round quacking faces. Paula’s face and Toby’s face and Nick’s face. He makes the sky into a sea, in which people stand on their heads with their feet sticking up. He looks down into this sea and makes fish swim about the heads, goldfish darting through Paula’s floating hair, minnows nosing at Toby’s forehead.

  Framleigh Creative Study Centre, once Framleigh Hall, is nine miles from the market town and railway station towards which Greg, in the Framleigh minibus, is now driving. The village of Framleigh crouches at the gate of the park: pub (the Standish Arms), Mace Superstore, hardware store, greengrocer, school, church, nucleus of old cottages and farmhouses, the whole embraced by a girdle of council housing and bungalows for the retired.

  Greg whips through the lanes, driving with one arm on the window ledge. He is a twenty-nine year old poet, American, five years resident in England, eighteen months attached to Framleigh. His brief there is to provide support of various kinds for Paula and inject into the courses that verbal element which has hitherto been lacking and which Toby feels they ought to have. Music, they ought to take in, too; they had a bloke who was doing marvellous things with electronic sound at one point, but he had a flaming row with Paula and went, so that area of expression is neglected at the moment.

  For this is nineteen seventy-four, a time when creativity is rated high. And Toby, who shares with his Standish forebears a certain ability to snatch straws from the wind (an eighteenth century Standish curried favour with Fox, and received useful patronage, a nineteenth century one made a packet in the railway boom), has seen the handy combination of his own artistic status and ownership of a large and handsome if run-down ancestral home. Since the environment is also held in high esteem just now he set out initially to bring in that too, Framleigh being surrounded by it, so to speak. But the Framleigh Centre for Field Studies, started at the same time, foundered with the defection of the old school friend and botanist who was meant to be running it but did not, in the end, see eye to eye with Toby over various things. So the Study courses ignore the environment these days (unless you count painting and sculpting it) except for the Nature Trail through the park on which Toby takes course members.

  Toby himself is known best as a lithographer and graphic artist. His allegorical studies, in which figures wander through odd mythical landscapes, and his more abstract swirling prints, called Nature Suites, have been seen in a couple of West End galleries. Quite a few of the people who come on the courses have vaguely heard his name.

  This weekend’s course is due in ten minutes. Or rather, nine of its members will by then have gathered at the station, getting off various trains from various directions, and will be expecting to be met, as promised in the brochure. The other two are arriving by car and will find the place themselves, coming upon the open but rusty wrought-iron gates opposite the council houses and pausing as they turn in to stare with respect at the park: the avenue of elms (many of them skeletal, victims of the beetle), the plantings of beech and oak, the cows drowsing in the shade. The cows, of course, are not Toby’s: they belong to Lamniscaat Farms Ltd., a Dutch company.

  Greg stops off to collect the meat, and also a bottle of scotch with which he proposes to sustain himself through the week: the Study Courses are quite tough going for the Framleigh faculty, as Toby likes to call himself, Paula, Greg and Bob. This is a private bottle, for distribution probably only to Paula and conceivably any course member who takes his fancy. Greg then puts his foot down, as time is running short, and arrives in the station yard just as the group outside is coalescing and turning its collective eye, a trifle anxiously, towards the approach road. As the minibus (neatly lettered on one side “Framleigh Creative Study Centre”) draws up, they relax.

  Six women and three men. The times being what they are, it is not possible to determine occupation, let alone class, by people’s dress. The women wear jeans, or long skirts of an Indian cotton in bright colours that, a few years back, would have been regarded as more suitable for bedspreads. They have long hair, for the most part, and look as though they have cultural or artistic connections – work in art galleries, perhaps, or small publishing houses, or in interior decoration. In fact they are a dentist’s receptionist, a librarian, two teachers and two married women whose occupation is precisely that. The men are clad as though for a safari or a bout of guerrilla warfare, though this slightly aggressive look is tempered by a good deal of hair around head and face, suggesting aesthetic leanings. They are a university lecturer, a research chemist, and a television cameraman. One of them, and three of the women, are here for emotional reasons, in flight from unsatisfactory personal circumstances by way of spouses, lovers, parents or children.

  They are all agreeably impressed by Greg: his silky brown side-burns and his air of ease, his New England voice and his anxious concern for their comfort since in fact this number of people is one too many for the minibus to seat satisfactorily. They pile in, somewhat on top of one another, and ride in a state of interested expectation through the somnolent Warwickshire landscape. A girl called Sue, a librarian from Coventry, sits immediately behind Greg. The sun-tanned back of his neck gives her a slight frisson – he is the one who is a poet, she realizes after a quick peek at the brochure, and she hasn’t ever come across a poet before. Keith Harrap, the research chemist, stares out at the fields and trees and villages, composing into pictures that as quickly dissolve, and wishes he’d brought his camera. He lives in Dulwich and doesn’t often get into the country. Still, it is to do some painting that he is here; photography hasn’t worked out anyway. He has noted the preponderance of women on the course; cursory chat at the station has not revealed them as all that promising, either. The girls are quite attractive, but that seems to be all. Keith looks for rather more than enticing appearance from a woman: he loves his wife, Karen, but feels that she has atrophied of late. Of course that may be his fault (or the children’s). And his own creativity is, well, undirected. Evening classes in this and that will no longer do. His potential, he knows, is as yet unrealized; the Framleigh course just might help him to see where he ought to be heading.

  They turn into the Framleigh drive a couple of minutes before an old mini driven by a woman called Mary Chambers, who follows them between the elms and into a weedy gravelled circle in front of the house. She sits for a moment in her car as the others disembark, looking at the balustraded steps to the front door, at the top of which stand a man and a woman, who beam in welcome, and a small boy who sits folded with his chin upon his knees and stares.

  Toby and Paula, like the gracious host and hostess of a bygone day, stand on the top step and watch the approach of the minibus.

  “Just so long as Greg’s got that fucking meat,” says Toby.

  “He will have. Calm down. You’ll give yourself a migraine.” Paula smooths her billowing skirt, and waves. She wears, around her neck, a chain of wilting daisies.

  Toby, too, waves. “And one thing, love, you might mention that I don’t care for this amplifier he’s playing about with. He was making one hell of a racket yesterday.”

  “It’s part of his film sequence,” says Paula. “He’s experimenting with sound levels.”

  “Tell him,” snaps Toby.

  Paula says with dignity that maybe she’ll mention it. She adds, in passing, that Nick never showed up to help her to move the new piece and she thinks she’s pulled a muscle in her back.

  The course members are now clambering out of the minibus and Toby and Paula descend the steps to greet and welcome.

  Two hours later, the visitors have been allocated their rooms, have unpacked their bags and learned their
way about the place. They have met Paula, Toby, Greg, Nick and the fifth member of the Framleigh group, Bob, and discovered the studios and the Common Room and the refectory, wandered out onto the terrace and along the prospect and back along the overgrown paths of the old kitchen garden. They have been impressed, bemused or affronted by the place according to age, inclination and experience. None of them remains unmoved, since Framleigh is, in its way, unique.

  Designed by William Kent, the house itself is not perhaps outstanding. There are other early eighteenth century country houses of equal or greater grace and elegance. But the park has always been considered a masterpiece, transcended only by Rousham and Stowe, the perfect manifestation of the picturesque: Hogarthian lines of beauty, sham ruins, cascade, grotto, the lot. Twenty-five acres in which the disordered was cunningly turned into a contrivance, in which the physical world was made an artistic product, in which nature became art.

  All that, though, was a long time ago, and since then much has happened including the misfortune of several generations of inept Standishes. Toby’s father failed to take advantage of either the glad hand of the National Trust or the opportunities offered by mass tourism; Framleigh has gone to seed. What the course members see, as they wander about the place, is a lamentable ruin of what was, overlaid by the tastes of subsequent generations: by Victorian brick, by Edwardian insensitivity and above all by weeds.

  During the war the house was taken over by a preparatory school, evacuated from a more hazardous part of the country. The old servants’ pantries and the corridor from the kitchen to the dining room are filled to this day with tiers of lockers and a forest of pegs, the faded names stencilled on flaking green paint: J. P. R. Mather, D. Loxton-Smith, Upper IVb Games Kit. In the field beyond the ha-ha, where at one end goal-posts stand at a drunken angle, the long grass seems infested yet with the ghostly forms of small boys, purple-kneed on winter afternoons, swarming over one another in the mud.