Consequences Read online

  Lorna hugged him.

  She was bemused by the opening view: all those strangers, chatting in groups, cruising the room, scrutinizing the engravings. People came up and told her how proud of Matt she must be. She overheard snatches of comment: “…really a remarkable style, quite individual, extraordinary sense of volume,” “…look at that use of white,” “…his silvery grays are most effective.” Red stickers appeared all over the place. Matt was wanted everywhere; she watched him across the room, and glowed with pleasure. She was wearing a dress from Brunswick Gardens days, blue chiffon, that had lain in the chest at the cottage for three years. She disliked resurrecting it, but had nothing else suitable for the occasion. Each time she caught sight of herself, reflected in a mirrored door, she was startled, as though at a glimpse of the past itself: but that’s not me, that person is gone.

  They stayed several days at Lucas’s house. Lorna took Molly to see her parents, determinedly. Her brother and his wife now had a baby, a boy. “We’re all so thrilled,” said Marian Bradley. “Daddy is pleased as punch. What he wanted, of course.”

  They went to art exhibitions, Matt met up with old friends. Lorna said, “Shouldn’t you have more of this? Maybe we should leave the cottage.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, then. Me neither.”

  Molly ceased to be a baby and became a child. She ran about; she spoke. Matt looked at her and saw this amazing fusion of Lorna and himself, who was also someone entirely unique and unpredictable. Lorna thought that she could no longer conceive of a time when Molly had not been there; oh, she could remember a world without Molly, but it was also an impossibility, an anachronism. Molly was so emphatically present, so undisputedly there—how could she ever not have been? She ran in and out of the cottage; she brought small offerings from the garden—a twig, a berry; she pointed—“Bird!”; she listened—“Train!” Her discovery of the physical world became a rediscovery for Matt and Lorna; they too gazed at spider webs, at the tapestry of a butterfly wing, at the red spires of lords and ladies in the hedgerow. Matt, seeing suddenly with Molly’s intimate close-up attention, began a new series of engravings in which small things became intimate structures, studies in form and pattern: shells, leaves, the firework display of dried cow parsley heads.

  Mrs. Mason in the village shop said, “I don’t care to look at the papers anymore, myself. All this war talk. It just depresses me. Sure you want The Times, dear? I just stick to the Western Gazette these days. Local news is good enough for me. Sugar, flour, bread, marg., tea, a quarter pound of bacon—is that all? My brother’s joined the ARP in Williton. Trust him—he always did enjoy bossing people about. I told him: you’re going to be really disappointed if it all comes to nothing, aren’t you? No swanning around in a fancy helmet. Well, we’ll see. Personally, I don’t want to think about it.”

  Lucas wrote: “Matt’s star remains in the ascendant. Three of the exhibition engravings sold out the entire edition; high demand for the rest. I am the complacent middleman, stashing away the shekels. How do I remit to you? Check? Or are you still keeping money in an old sock? There has been a run on Lamb’s Tales, too—much packaging and posting. It has been a question of all hands to the mill, Miss Kelly and I shoulder to shoulder. I am wondering about an Arabian Nights. Does that attract you, Matt? Or are you committing further infidelities with the Curwen lot—or, heaven forbid, Golden Cockerel? Now that you are the man of the hour, I must become a humble supplicant. Well, think about it. Or, if the oriental theme doesn’t inspire you, what about Gilbert White of Selborne? Or The Compleat Angler? More appropriate, perhaps, given your back-to-nature way of life.

  “Have gas masks reached deepest Somerset? I received mine without enthusiasm. Pictures in the paper of responsible citizens filling sandbags for the protection of key points, with much jollity. It is all surreal, is it not?

  “How does your garden grow? And Molly? Lorna, I have not yet skinned a rabbit, but I have my eye on the deer in Richmond Park, if the worst happens.”

  “Now that this wretched war scare is over, we are off to Menton for a fortnight,” wrote Marian Bradley. “Heaven. The Med should still be warm enough for swimming, and Daddy will get some golf. Roddy and Sally join us there, leaving little Peter with Nanny.”

  Whenever a parcel arrived from Lawrence’s in London, with fresh blocks, Molly was allowed the brown-paper wrapping as drawing material. Lorna would cut the sheets up into small pieces, and the little girl would sit at the kitchen table, the tip of her tongue stuck out in concentration, and scribble with her crayons. She was being Matt, Lorna knew, and her creations must be treated with respect, given cardboard frames, placed in a cardboard portfolio and tied with tape.

  That fourth winter in the cottage, they were veterans—not impervious to cold and damp, but resourceful. Lorna had the measure of recalcitrant oil lamps and the sullen kitchen range; Matt kept the log pile stacked high from the wood dumped periodically at their gate by the farmer. They were established local figures now, in a sparsely occupied landscape where everyone was known to everyone else within a radius of several miles, where information traveled as though on the wind, where every chance encounter required a ritual exchange. Matt, out sketching, would be greeted and sized up by farm laborers, by boys out rabbiting, by landowners, by postmen, by the driver of the milk lorry.

  “I am the local oddity,” he said to Lorna. “Fiddling away while others work. Grasshopper and the ants. Sitting around drawing things is pure self-indulgence—that’s the view, though people are too polite to say so.”

  “How do they think you earn a living?”

  “I’m a man of substance, presumably.”

  “But living here, like this?” She laughed.

  Time was, she had not thought much about how people earn a living. At Brunswick Gardens, you did not talk about money—that was vulgar. Patently, money underpinned the life that was lived in that house; her father’s departure every morning to the place known vaguely as The Office had some eerie connection with money, but that was not a matter for discussion. Occasionally, others were referred to as “not well off,” in lowered tones, as though perhaps they suffered from some chronic ailment.

  Nowadays, she knew all about money. She knew the price of everything in the village shop, she knew how to budget, calculate, scrimp, save. She was a connoisseur of jumble sales and thrift stalls. She enjoyed the triumphant discovery of a pair of old curtains that could be cut up and made into a skirt for herself, a dress for Molly. Money had become interesting: a challenge. In these parts, people talked much about money; vulgarity was not an issue. They talked about the price of hay, of rents and rates, of wages and leaseholds. The local paper was full of fatstock prices over which Lorna pored in fascination, and could then see the populated fields as money on the hoof. This fractured vision became intriguing—a flock of sheep as part and parcel of the landscape, its living expression, white shapes against the green slope of a hillside, but also a sober statement of rural economy—someone’s income, someone else’s meal.

  The farmer’s wife had given her an old chicken coop and some pullets which, in the fullness of time, began to lay. Now, they had a few eggs. There was a daily hunt in the hedge, which the hens preferred as a nest site. They had their own vegetables, too, in season. Lorna found all of this intensely satisfying.

  “Before, I had never in my life done anything useful,” she told Matt. “Now there is a point to everything.”

  “Spring at last,” wrote Lucas. “I suppose you have primroses and lambs and all that. Here, we have our urban version, but it’s hard to feel uplifted, isn’t it, with all the papers all gloom and doom. I heard Herr Hitler on the wireless, last September, ranting. A beastly sound—it keeps coming back to me now. And we thought we were spared. Oh, well—one feels oddly resigned, this time around. On a happier note, sales of Lamb’s Tales continue on their steady way. And I hear the gallery is just about sold out o
f engravings now. I saw the Curwen Press book, and I have to admit—through gritted teeth—that it is pretty nice. I was much taken with the new Spiderweb print, Matt. Marvellous. One of a series, you say—nature studies. Basis of a new exhibition, maybe, in a year or two? If the world holds still.”

  “If there’s a war,” Matt said. “I shall have to go.”

  “I know.”

  “You couldn’t stay here alone.”

  “I could,” she said. “If I have to. And I’m not alone. There’s Molly.”

  “Your parents…or mine.”

  “No. Don’t talk about it. Not till we have to. If we have to.”

  On Molly’s third birthday, they cycled down to the coast, the little girl in the pillion seat that Matt had made. On the beach, she pottered among the rock pools while they sat and watched. She came to them with small trophies—a ribbon of seaweed, a brightly banded pebble. She was intent, serious, busy—bustling to and fro, wearing cotton knickers and a sunbonnet.

  “I want to know what she will be like when she’s twenty,” said Matt. “I want a sudden quick glimpse into the future.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be appalling to know the future. You couldn’t live, knowing the future.”

  “I don’t want the entire narrative. Just a few interesting snapshots. Molly in some other incarnation. What will she be? What will she do?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we? We’ll be watching.”

  “Middle-aged fogies,” said Matt. “Making noises of disapproval, just like our own parents.”

  “Only if she wants to live in Kensington, and play bridge. Which she won’t.”

  “Perhaps that will be her form of rebellion. Each generation kicks out at the one before. Artists always do that. It’s obligatory.”

  “Do you?”

  “Engravers are a law unto themselves. We all think we’re innovators. Doing it differently.”

  The tide was out. The sea seemed to be retreating to the distant coast of Wales, leaving a great expanse of glittering Bristol Channel muddy sand, fingered by long slicks of water. Behind them, the cliffs were veined with pink and gray; rock falls had brought down chunks of the alabaster. Matt picked up a large pink piece. “This is going to be a Henry Moore maquette—one of those earth mother figures.”

  Lorna had brought a cake, and three candles. They found a flat rock at the foot of the cliff, and she set out the birthday tea. The candles guttered in the breeze, and had to be relit before at last Molly blew them out. Then she became intent once more upon beachcombing, while Matt and Lorna sat looking out at the far-off sea, at the white glimmer of the Welsh coast, at a skittering dog, at a row of gulls lining the rock pools. There were scarves of cirrus cloud against a clear blue sky; the late afternoon sun was warm on their faces.

  “Actually,” said Lorna, “I am not remotely interested in the future at this moment. I want to stay here, like this, as we are, forever. I want it to be now, always.”

  Molly comes staggering over the pebbles toward them, holding a shell. “More cake?” she inquires. “Blow the candles again?”

  Marjorie Sanders, from Roadwater, leaned her bike against the wall of the cottage, and stepped inside. “Thank you, Lorna—cup of tea would be nice, after the hill. In fact, I’m not me today, I’m the billeting officer. Ever so important, I am. Power of life and death. If I say so, you get an East End mother and four children. In your case, I doubt it. Now, you’ve got just the two rooms up and this—is that right? And you’ve not got running water or electric? I’m going to be putting you on the reserve list. We know how many billets we’ve got to find, for Williton rural district, and we won’t need to scrape the barrel, far as I can see. I’m not being rude, you’ve made this place a nice home, but you’d be hard put to it to squeeze any extra in. So I’ll just tick you off, and be on my way, when that kettle’s boiled. Heaven knows how they’re going to settle in, when they come. If they come. I mean, town people are different, aren’t they?”

  “It’s going to happen, isn’t it?” said Lorna. “The war.”

  “I suppose so.”

  They were in the shed. Matt was taking the first print from a newly engraved block. He eased the back of a spoon to and fro over the paper, back and forth, across and across, picked the paper off and there was the proof print: an intimate scrutiny of dandelion clocks, which made them into something startling, unique.

  He stared at the print: “It makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing, fossicking away.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t wonder. You wouldn’t have, before. It’s just that everything’s gone wrong. Look—I found the first ripe blackberries.”

  When it came, it came in the form of tea urns, the train, and crying children. They cycled down to Roadwater, alerted to the need for helpers at the village hall, leaving Molly with the farmer’s wife. Eight hundred women and children from London were anticipated at Washford, who would have been waiting, and traveling, for many hours, all of whom must be allocated billets before nightfall. Matt joined those helping to escort and identify the evacuees; Lorna was put onto the distribution of tea and sandwiches. First, there was the bustle of expectation, instructions, queries, the assembling of trestle tables, chairs—an almost festive atmosphere. Then suddenly they were here, and the place was full, lines of people spilling out into the road, ranks of drab, tired women clutching babies, toddlers. The hall became hot, smoky, ripe with the smell of sweat, and children. Lorna gave tea to a richly pregnant girl, and found her a chair. The voices all around were those of strangers, alien, not the soft Somerset voices to which she had grown accustomed; these people came from a London that she never knew existed. “I’m a Londoner too,” she said, trying to make contact, and the women stared at her with skepticism. There were so many of them, and the rumor was that there would be more trainloads tomorrow and Monday. Suddenly, the cruel black print of newspapers, from which you shied away, was turned into an awful reality, in which the certainties of the world that you knew were swept aside; it was like being plunged into the irrationalities of dream, of nightmare. This bemused mass of women and children, who should not be here, who did not want to be here. What was it that was expected? What annihilation? What Armageddon?

  There were many blackberries that year, wortleberries up on the hill, mushrooms, hazelnuts. The hedges glowed with hips and haws. The sunshine reached far into October, the leaves turned, the first frosts came, and an autumn gale or two. The oak tree beside the cottage rattled acorns onto the roof and shed a small branch.

  Everything had happened, but also nothing. London was not burning; nor Liverpool, nor Birmingham, nor Manchester. Things went on as they had before, except that they were different. You must obey remote, draconian regulations: comply with the blackout requirements, stick sheets of cardboard over the cottage windows, eat what you were told to eat, go to Williton to register for a ration book. People grumbled and complied, laughed and negotiated. In a trickle, then a stream, the London women got on the trains and went back; they were homesick, they couldn’t be doing with the food, the quiet, this foreign land.

  You stood at the gate and watched for the postman, holding Molly’s hand. What did he have in his bag today? He had taken on a new significance, and he knew it—now he was half apologetic, half portentous. “Just a letter for you—nothing for him. Young Ted Moult had his papers, though. They’re taking the boys first. They always do that, don’t they? Your husband’ll be in the clear for a while. Maybe they won’t want him at all, the way things are going.”

  When the winter arrived, it bit sharp. On New Year’s day the frost was deep into the ground, the ploughlands ice hard, the trees stiffly white. The tap had to be unwrapped from a cocoon of sacking each morning before they could get water. The privy was a test of endurance. It was February when at last the thaw came, and then the spring was one of tranquil beauty; days as warm as summer, everything rushing into growth, birds nesting in March.


  At first, this time seemed simply like an extension of life before, though infected by all the dictates of the day—the restrictions, the regulations. Matt bought a wireless; it crouched on the kitchen dresser, an alien presence that became insistent each night, as they turned on the nine o’clock news and that clipped voice filled the room. And Matt himself began to change; he was often silent, he found it hard to work, his state of unrest was grimly apparent. When March came, he offered himself to the farmer, and helped out with lambing and other jobs. “I have to be up and about,” he told Lorna. “If I sit here, working, I feel…pent up.” Many of the local young men were now gone, those not in reserved occupations, and Lorna knew what was in his mind, though they did not talk of it—that he would volunteer before his call-up papers came.

  When at last Germany moved, and the wireless talked every night of Norway, she knew that it was only a matter of time. In the event, his papers came on the day that German forces invaded Belgium, and she realized when she saw him holding the brown envelope that he was relieved.

  He said, “Well, this is it. I’m to go for a soldier.”

  “Right away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh…”

  “We knew.” He put his arms around her. “It’ll be all right. It’s you I’m worried for. It’ll be hard here. I think you should…”

  “No,” she said. “I’m staying. If it’s too hard—well, I’ll think of something.”

  It was high spring. The hedges and woods were full of warblers; there were creamy rivers of may blossom. That night, he made love to her with a kind of desperate passion.