Consequences Page 4

  He did not make love to Lorna until they were married. During their first times together in his garret room after their meeting, he had to force himself away from her at moments when he thought he could bear it no longer. He would go and sit on the single wooden chair while she sat on the bed. He set about painting her, to keep himself six feet away from her, and occupied, while still able to look at her constantly. That portrait hung now in the snug at the cottage.

  They ate the chicken for supper that night, with some cider from The Valiant Soldier in the village; it was a feast. A late autumn gale was buffeting the cottage, but it was warm within, with the fire built up and the heat from the range; the room was full of flickering shadows made by the hurricane lamps. Lorna nibbled the flesh off the wishbone and held it out across the table. They hooked fingers around it and pulled; when it broke she held the larger piece.

  “I don’t know what to wish for. I seem to have got everything I want.”

  “We could do with an Austen 7. Or a couple of brand new Raleighs, if we’re going to be more modest. Who is it that grants the wishes, anyway?”

  “God?”

  “No, no. Someone pagan and primitive. We’d probably stand more chance there.”

  They had agreed their disbelief, early on. Where I grew up, Matt told her, God was a pillar of society—the ultimate pillar of society. He was the squirearchy, and the Chief Constable, and my headmaster, all rolled into one. He was the final authority and you crossed him at your peril, but at the same time he allowed the world to carry on as it does. I thought: if that’s his line, then no thanks.

  Lorna had considered her own religious experience in this light and saw that—yes, the Church as she had known it was a backdrop to Brunswick Gardens’ requirements and practices: weddings and christening parties for which you must be correctly dressed, to the last button and stocking seam, Christmas carol services and her father pushing a crackly note into the collection bag. Did she believe in God—a god? Had she ever done so? Well, no.

  “You shouldn’t wish for things, anyway,” she said. “You wish for abstracts. That you’ll be nicer, or cleverer, or better at something. Or that something will or won’t happen. Maybe I should wish Hitler would drop dead.”

  “I doubt if half a chicken bone is going to sort Hitler out.”

  “Then I wish this baby will be healthy…”

  “…wealthy and wise?”

  “We’ll leave out wealthy. Wise might be quite a good idea.”

  “Unlike her parents.” He grinned.

  “Her?”

  “I have a hunch.”

  Lorna could not imagine this baby. The world is full of babies, but she had never much noticed them. In nine months’ time—no, less—there would be a baby that was of immediate personal relevance. Her baby; their baby. And she could not grasp the fact, she could not conjure up any baby. Her body was in a state of disorder: no monthly bleeding, swollen and tender nipples, she began to feel nausea. It was as though she had been taken over by an alien force, and was now headed in some unimaginable direction, programmed to bring this about, come what may.

  And she was perfectly content. So be it. They had not meant this to happen, not just yet, but no matter. Already, her condition was coming to seem just another facet of this new life. She thought: a year ago I would never have dreamed that there could be Matt, that we could be here, like this, that I would feel as I do, that I could have become a new person. And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

  He said, “You’re not to come upstairs today. At all. I’m working in the bedroom.”

  She stared. “Why in the bedroom?”

  Matt grinned. “You’ll see.”

  He was there from morning till dusk. She heard the boards creak as he moved around. In the middle of the day he came down and ate bread and cheese at the kitchen table, hurriedly, looking abstracted.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Wait. Patience.”

  When the light was draining, outside, he called her. “Now you can come.”

  The room. Their bedroom. It was peopled, populous; it was full of color, and life, and action. The walls were dancing, figures spun across them, holding hands, man and woman, naked, vibrant, joyous. They whirled from corner to corner, arms outstretched to one another—this pair, that pair, these, those, the same all around the room, dipping down, flinging up toward the roof, a continuous sinuous wave of movement.

  Lorna put her hand to her mouth. “Is it us?” She saw the curves of breasts, of buttocks, graceful heads that had no features. Man and woman. Woman and man.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s lovely. I think it’s us. But…” She gazed around the room.

  “But what?”

  “What would the farm people say?”

  “They’re not going to see them, are they? And if we leave I’ll put a coat of distemper over it all.”

  He walked over to the bed. “Come here.”

  They undressed, face-to-face, both smiling, on the edge of laughter. The window was open; beyond, the wind in the oak tree, and tumultuous birds.

  Lorna said, “I’m cold.”

  He pulled her down onto him. “You won’t be. Just you wait.”

  They walked up the hill, the three of them—Matt, Lorna, and Lucas—and sat in a field that overlooked the Luxborough valley. Matt had brought a picnic in the rucksack—cheese sandwiches, apples, cider. It was Easter time, and unseasonably warm. The men were in shirtsleeves, Lorna had bare legs and wore a cotton smock that she had made herself, which billowed above her pregnancy. They lay on a grassy ridge, with piled cumulus clouds above and munching sheep all around.

  “Down in there,” said Matt, pointing into the dark woodland that lined the valley, “is something called the Druid’s Grave—except that it is not. A Bronze Age burial site, in fact. And up over to the left, where you can’t see, are the old mine workings—the wheelhouse and so forth. I’ll take you there. You can use Lorna’s bike.”

  They knew this landscape intimately now, had walked every lane, track, and field within range of the cottage, had cycled miles until Lorna’s condition made this more difficult. And now the winter was packed away and the sun was out and the place had sprung into growth—the trees in leaf, cliffs of primroses at the sides of the deep lanes.

  “Yes, please,” said Lucas. He was in a state of rich content. He was with the two people he liked better than anyone, pitched into their bright company from the exacting daily routine of the Heron Press—playing hooky in order to see how Matt’s work was getting on, and to bring the good news that three of his prints had sold, placed in an exhibition by Lucas. He had arrived at Washford station with the welcome cash in hand, to be met by Matt and Lorna for the two-mile walk up to the cottage. From the moment he got onto the branch line train at Taunton, he had felt as though transported from one element to another, relishing the emphatic divide between city and country. London dissolved behind him as the country train made its way across fields and between steep hills, a shadow trail of the engine smoke traveling alongside. It stopped frequently, at stations with alluring names: Norton Fitzwarren, Bishops Lydeard, Crowcombe, Stogumber. School-children got off, and women with shopping baskets. When they reached Washford, he was almost the only passenger—and there were Matt and Lorna on the little platform, waving.

  It was good to have Lucas at the cottage, thought Matt, good to be out here in the sunshine, indeed everything was good at this moment. Three prints sold, and he had a book commission from the Curwen Press, and Lucas was talking about a new project—an edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, with engravings by Matt. Months of work. And money coming in; not princely sums, but enough to keep them going.

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nbsp; He stared up into a sculptural pile of cumulus, gleaming white against a hard blue sky, and saw a Wedgwood design, or puffy cherubim on a ceiling frieze. The mind is cluttered with images, he thought—everything we see refers us to something else. Perhaps only children see with absolute purity of vision; they see things for what they are and nothing else. The rest of us see signals from elsewhere, and always have done, ever since people began to think. First they see gods and ghosts and symbols and portents. And then they are battered with the images of everywhere and every time and all that they see is invaded from elsewhere. Eighteenth-century potteries float in the twentieth-century spring sky; cherubim are trumpeting Handel high above Somerset.

  We don’t see plain anymore, he thought. I am an artist, and I don’t see plain. I see what it has been suggested that I see. I look at a tree and I see it as Dürer saw trees, as Samuel Palmer did, as Cézanne did. Who has ever seen plain?

  Lorna felt the baby move. A flutter; a curious little local independence within your belly. It had only just begun to do this, and the sensation fascinated her. She sat cross-legged, watching blue butterflies on clover heads; the men lay on either side, hands locked behind their heads. Lucas appeared to be asleep. Matt, she saw, had gone into one of those thoughtful trances from which he would surface with a surge of energy.

  Her own head was full of seeds: lurking mind-pictures of the different flower and vegetable seeds that she had been sowing these last couple of weeks—seeds that were like fluff, or grains of sand, or tiny balls, or fine brown dust. She saw the potatoes that she had laid out yester day, each one with its potent sprigs of growth. She sat there feeling the sun on her skin, seeing the mist of green over the woodland down below, the sharp little blades of new grass under her feet—everything growing, rushing into life. And me, she thought, I’m adding to it—we are, Matt and I. Clever us. Except that it isn’t really clever at all, it just happens, and we’re only doing what is always done, seeing to it that things go on, that someone will come after us, that there is a future.

  Matt jumped to his feet. “I’m ravenous. Time for the grub.” He delved into the rucksack. “Wake up, Lucas. Here—the village shop’s best mousetrap, and the pick of last year’s apple harvest.”

  Lucas opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep. Just relishing happenstance. That I happened to get chatting to Matt that evening at the Grosvenor. That you two happened upon each other.” He took a bite of sandwich. “Very decent mousetrap, if I may say so. You know, you’ve stepped out of a game of Consequences: you two. Matt met Lorna—on a bench in St. James’s Park. He said to her: ‘Let me rescue you from your ivory tower.’ She said to him: ‘There’s a ladder in the basement, and my parents are out this evening’—The World said: ‘They’ll never get away with it’—and the consequence was…. Well, we shall have to wait till August to find out what the consequence was.”

  Lorna laughed. She turned to Matt. “What did you really say? Oh, I know—the ducks. You told me what the ducks were called.”

  And that afternoon floats into this one, conjured up in their two heads, the London park superimposed upon the Somerset hills. Matt sees her white dress, the little green bag she carried that lay beside her on the bench; he sees again for the first time the shape of her mouth, the set of her nose, her eyes. Lorna sees his hand moving to and fro across his sketch pad; she sees the glint of the sun on his hair, she sees his lips pursed in concentration. Each hears the other’s voice. They hear, too, the sharp cries of waterfowl, they see the dark green water of the lake that is ribbed and dimpled with light; each cruising bird trails a silvery V-shaped wake.

  He turns his head; he notices her.

  She smiles, uncertain.

  So does he.

  Both look away, disconcerted, and focus upon the throng of birds around them.

  “There are so many different kinds,” Lorna says.

  “That is a tufted duck,” says Matt, pointing with his pencil. “And that’s a pochard. Those fellows are graylag geese. A shelduck there. Mallard, of course. You probably know all that.”

  “No,” she says. “None of them. Except the mallard.” There are mallard on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens; she has grown up with mallard. “What’s the big brown one?”

  “Ruddy shelduck. And here comes a pelican. I don’t really want him—he’ll bully the others out of the way.”

  She becomes bolder. “May I look?”

  He turns the sketch pad toward her. “This is just a preliminary. Note taking, as it were.”

  She says, “It’s lovely. Duck portraits.” She gazes, fascinated. She looks at him, and he at her; both return to the ducks, after rather longer.

  He tells her about wood engraving. He tells her about the Grosvenor School of Art, where he was a student under Iain Macnab. She has never heard of Iain Macnab, but she nods wisely. She tells him that she likes Matisse and Braque, that she goes to the Bond Street galleries sometimes but not all that often because…well, because it’s a bit difficult. She does not tell him very much because she feels that this young man would have little time for the life that she must lead.

  Later, in days to come, she would do so. When she came to realize that he wanted her for herself, and that it was neither here nor there to him whence she came.

  “He made me feel reasonable,” she told Lucas. “He made me feel as though how I wanted to be was perfectly normal. Nobody had ever done that before.”

  “What she means,” said Matt. “Is that I had no objection to milk poured straight from the bottle and I didn’t tell her what to wear. The poor girl just needed a spot of license.”

  “That room of his in Islington seemed like paradise,” said Lorna.

  “Ah, that room. The original garret—starving artists, for the use of.”

  “He had painted the walls different colors. The bookshelves were made out of planks and upturned flower pots. The table was an old rabbit hutch. I ate fish and chips for the first time.”

  “Such deprivation,” said Matt. “You poor love. It doesn’t bear thinking of. Never mind, you’ve made up for it since. The cottage is fish and chips on a grand scale. Or rather, bread and dripping and rabbit stew. Do you know, Lucas, she can skin a rabbit?”

  “Congratulations,” said Lucas. “I’m most impressed.”

  Lorna beamed at him. “I’ll show you how. You never know when it might come in useful.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” Lucas thought Lorna the most appealing and attractive girl he had ever met. It did not occur to him to envy Matt because patently a girl like Lorna was not for the likes of Lucas—she was destined for some charismatic being, for Matt indeed, and ever had been. It seemed to Lucas entirely inevitable that Lorna and Matt should have found one another, and he felt content—privileged—to have a place at the edges of this charmed alliance. He was a diffident man rather than a humble one, conscious that a gawky body, extreme myopia, and a stammer could make him off-putting. Resigned to a degree of social isolation, he compensated for this with tenacious fostering of the Heron Press—his concept, his creation. All he wanted in life was to design and produce superlative examples of the bookmaker’s craft. In the basement of the ramshackle house in Fulham he labored at the press, setting type, printing, packaging, while in the office upstairs Miss Kelly, a middle-aged lady of stern demeanor but the requisite energy and efficiency, dealt with most of the paperwork and helped out generally when the pressure was on.

  Today, on the Somerset hillside, Miss Kelly and the Heron Press were relegated. He felt marvelously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day. Of his companions. One will always remember this, he thought: probably when I’m a hoary old chap in…Christ, in nineteen-eighty-something…I’ll still see today. The valley, and Matt’s blue checked shirt, and her in that pink frock. And I’ll hear their voices.

  But all he said was, “Q-quite a place, this. I’m game for another mousetrap sandwich, if that’s in order.”

  After Molly’s birth, Lorna lay
on her side and gazed at the baby, and Molly stared back with wide-open eyes and the strange unearthly look of the newborn, as though, Lorna thought, she had arrived from some mysterious place. But when Lorna got out of bed and crept over to the chest to get a glass of water, she glanced at herself in the mirror and saw that she too had that look, she was not the person that she had been yesterday, she had changed her skin. The district nurse clattered up the stairs and scolded her for moving about. Lorna got back into bed and resumed her silent communion with this small being who was no longer a part of her but a wonderful extension. The preceding hours fell away, that timeless tunnel of pain, and she simply lay there, sore, exhausted, and heard the cadenced exchanges of wood pigeons outside and the voice of the district nurse downstairs talking to Matt. She lay still, and around her on the walls the figures of Matt’s fresco danced—in celebration, it seemed. Presently Matt came up with a cup of tea and said, “I have this feeling that she is called Molly.” He put his finger on the baby’s cheek: “Molly?” Then he went over to the window, opened it, and more bird sounds floated in, with the smell of grass after a shower, and the faraway whistle of the train. Lorna said, “Molly will do nicely.” And then she went to sleep, plunging at once into blissful unconsciousness, while Matt sat on the bed holding her hand.

  By that second winter at the cottage, they were hardened, braced for the tussles with the oil stove, the icy trips to the privy, Matt’s labor of log splitting, Lorna’s daily servitude at the washing copper. In wet weather, Molly’s nappies fumed alongside the kitchen range. On one dark January day, she developed croup; this awful harsh barking noise came from her crib, and Matt in a panic cycled down to the farm to ask them to telephone for help. The district nurse came, brisk and reassuring, summing up the situation at once; she was used to very young mothers, and croupy babies were two-a-penny. She sat on the couch in the snug, Molly propped over one shoulder, and gave instructions. “You’re learning all the time, with your first,” she said kindly to Lorna. “Most girls have their mum breathing down their neck, telling them what to do.”