A Table of Green Fields (3 page)

—These modernists. Ah, yes.

—And Wyndham Lewis paints a world that has neither air nor light.

—Do you know Lewis?

—I've met him. I dropped over his garden wall one evening. He was drawing in a back room. I introduced myself. It gave him quite a start. A childish trick on my part, but it amused him immensely. He fancies eccentricity.

He mentioned Eric Kennington, Rothenstein, Lamb. At one point Tuke gave him a very hard stare.

When Willy and I undressed, horsing around, as was our way, Ross paced as he talked with Tuke, holding his left wrist and wrenching it, as if he were screwing it off and on. He talked about Mantegna's bathing soldiers, which we had a print of in the studio, and a bathing place called Parson's Pleasure at Ox
ford. He was like a professor with a subject. One thing reminded him of another, and he thought out loud about it.

—Oh yes, well, Eakins in America. No one can get near him, Tuke said.

—Things return, Ross said. Here in the autumn of time you are recovering a spring which we have forgotten in our culture, a spring we know about in Greece and in the late Middle Ages.

Did Tuke know a man named Huizinga? A Dutchman. —Meredith, Tuke said, has a lovely scene of boys bathing, in 
Feverel.

It was Leo, stretching between poses, who asked Ross why, if he was as educated as he sounded, he wasn't an officer. 

—Cowardice, probably, Ross said.

—Leo didn't mean that in an untoward way, did you, Leo?

—Lord, no.

The sea had taken on a wonderful green brightness, a shuffling of silver, and the sky was glorious in its blue. Willy had swum out, dog-paddling. Tuke had removed his scarf. I was beginning to ponder what this visit of the little soldier Ross was all about. Tuke seemed to know things about him that we didn't, and to be keeping a secret. A confidence, perhaps I should say.

Willy did a devil dance on the sand, to get warm.

—We've often turned fair blue with cold for Mr. Tuke, he said.

In many of the pictures where we all appear to be toasty brown in fine sunlight we were actually freezing our ballocks off.

—Will you pose, Aircraftsman Ross? Tuke said abruptly. I covet your profile.

—I wonder, Ross said with a smile that was also a frown.

—We're a kind of
comitatus
here, Tuke said. Friends, all. The vicar, who likes to visit at tea, usually when the boys are still half undressed, has his doubts about the propriety of it all.

—Eats his doubts in muffins, Leo said, and drowns 'em in tea. 

—He reads Housman, and Whitman.

—But brought back the Edward Carpenter we lent him without 
a word to say about it.

I liked the mischief in Ross's eyes as he listened to all this. —We are hypocritical dogs, we English.

—Decent, Leo said, patting his tranklements.

—A naked English lad is as decent as a calf, Willy said. Though the best painting I've posed for is fully clothed with Mary Baskins in the apple orchard.

—For which, Tuke said, I hope to be remembered, if at all, that and
August Blue.

—It is insufferably egotistical, Ross said, unbuttoning his tunic, to assume that one cannot possibly be understood by another, or for that matter by people at large, but there is that residuum of privacy at our center which we do despair of exposing to the world's mercy.

Tuke thought that over carefully, very interested, you could tell by the cock of his head.

—True, he said. We aren't quite ready to admit that we are all alike, all human. And in our sameness we are wonderfully different.

His tunic open on an Aertex vest, Ross sat to unwind his leggings and to pull off his glossy hobnailed boots.

—I'm wondering, he said, what I've come here to find. I'm forever, I think, looking for one thing or another. When I first saw your painting, Tuke, I recognized a fellow spirit, and life is not so long that we can afford to put off meeting one's kin.

He shed his trousers, which had a complexity of buttons and flaps. Naked as Willy, Leo, and I, he seemed little more than a boy with a shock of hair and shy blue eyes. There was something wrong with his balls, as if they hadn't come down properly, or were stunted.

—Sit on the sand, Tuke said. I can do a crayon study fairly quickly.

—The sun feels good.

—Have you been drawn by any of these artists you've talked about?

—John. He did me in pencil. Kennington, pastel.

—Would it be a liberty, Leo said, as I had wanted to say, to pry into how a private in the RAF is so up on painters, sitting for them and all?

—There goes Leo again, Tuke said, drawing the thinnest possible line between good manners and intelligent curiosity.

—Oh, I don't mind, Ross grinned. The answer, Leo my fine fellow, is that I'm not Aircraftsman Ross 352087. The Brough is real, and the 352087 is real, and the uniform is real enough for the RAF. For the rest, I was born an impostor.

—Look straight ahead, and slightly up, Tuke said. I do hope the vicar doesn't turn up. He's well up on things, if you see what I mean.

—I don't, I said without thinking.

Tuke and Ross exchanged smiles.

—He would most probably recognize Private Ross.

—You're playing a teasing game with us, I said. Vicar, of all people! He didn't know Lord Gower when he was here with Frank or that French writer with the square face.

—Ross is different, Tuke said.

—Oh, I'm not afraid of the vicar, Ross said. I've got being an impostor down to an art. I've posed for a painter who didn't recognize me in the street the next day. The trick is to feel that you're nobody, and act accordingly.

—You've got to tell us, Leo said. You've gone too far not to. 

—But, said Ross, there's really nothing to tell. I could tell you that my name is Chapman, which happens to be true, and you're none the wiser, are you? Things in this world are like that. A bloke whose name you know as Ross turns out to be named Chapman. It's worth Fanny Fuck All, as we say in barracks. Georgie Fouracre is Georgie Fouracre. You know who you are. You will beget strapping boys like yourself, and sit by your own fireside, you and your good wife.

—Mary Baskins, Leo said, more fool her.

—You lost your hopes with her by belching in church. Sounded like a bullfrog, and Vicar lost his place in Deuteronomy.

—But Vicar would recognize Chapman here, from the papers, 
from the pictures, from knowing him?

—I've said quite enough, Tuke said. I've got the profile. What about a bathe, what say?

Tuke was out of his clothes in the shake of a lamb's tail. Ross swam well, effortlessly. It was Willy who said later that he did everything with style, as if there was the one right way of doing a thing.

We had no towels, and were sitting and drying in the sun when there were steps down the path, and here was Vicar, shouting jovially, using a wholly unnecessary brolly as a cane, fanning himself with a cream panama.

—Oh! I say.

—You've seen us mother-naked before, Vicar, Leo said, giving Willy's ribs an elbow.

—Oh, I say! Of course, of course. A painter of lads must have lads to paint. If I'm intruding, I shall beat a prudent retreat, what what?

—Not at all, Tuke said. As a matter of fact, I have been making a watercolor study of a visitor, who came on that motorbike, and whom I'd like you to meet.

—I noticed the motorbike, yes. The etiquette of meeting a gentleman in a state of nature is an interesting one which our nannies rather passed over lightly.

Ross rose with an easy dignity and shook Vicar's hand. 

—The Reverend Button Milford, Tuke said. Aircraftsman Ross. He has sat for John and is kind enough to like my work.

—Ever so pleased, I'm sure, said Vicar. Don't get dressed on my account. A classical education gives one a taste for the, ah, pastoral, don't you know.

Vicar dithered about, causing Leo to search the horizon for, as may be, a ship. And then asked:

—Were you, Ross, in this late, and one hopes last, terrible war? But of course you weren't: you're too young.

—I was indeed in the war, Ross said. And it is not the last.

A little girl, hustled into her pram by an officious nurse, discovered halfway home from the park that her doll Belinda had been left behind. The nurse had finished her gossip with the nurse who minced with one hand on her hip, and had had a good look at the grenadiers in creaking boots who strolled in the park to eye and give smiling nods to the nurses. She had posted a letter and sniffed at various people. Lizaveta had tried to talk to a little boy who spoke only a soft gibberish, had kissed and been kissed by a large dog, and had helped another little girl fill her shoes with sand.

And Belinda had been left behind. They went back and looked for her in all the places they had been. The nurse was in a state. Lizaveta howled. Her father and mother were at a loss to comfort her, as this was the first tragedy of her life and she was indulging all its possibilities. Her grief was the more terrible in that they had a guest to tea, Herr Doktor Kafka of the Assicurazioni Generali, Prague office.

—Dear Lizaveta! Herr Kafka said. You are so very unhappy that I am going to tell you something that was going to be a surprise. Belinda did not have time to tell you herself. While you were not looking, she met a little boy her own age, perhaps a doll, perhaps a little boy, I couldn't quite tell, who invited her to go with him around the world. But he was leaving immediately. There was no time to dally. She had to make up her mind then and there. Such things happen. Dolls, you know, are born in department stores, and have a more advanced knowledge than those of us who are brought to houses by storks. We have such a limited knowledge of things. Belinda 
did, in her haste, ask me to tell you that she would write, daily, and that she would have told you of her sudden plans if she had been able to find you in time.

Lizaveta stared.

But the very next day there was a postcard for her in the mail. She had never had a postcard before. On its picture side was London Bridge, and on the other lots of writing which her mother read to her, and her father, again, when he came home for dinner.

***

Dear Lizaveta: We came to London by balloon. Oh, how exciting it is to float over mountains, rivers, and cities with my friend Rudolf, who had packed a lunch of cherries and jam. The English are very strange. Their clothes cover all of them, even their heads, where the buttons go right up into their hats, with button holes, so to speak, to look out of, and a kind of sleeve for their very large noses. They all carry umbrellas, as it rains constantly, and long poles to poke their way through the fog. They live on muffins and tea. I have seen the King in a carriage drawn by forty horses, stepping with precision to a drum. More later. Your loving doll, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: We came to Scotland by train. It went through a tunnel all the way from London to Edinburgh, so dark that all the passengers were issued lanterns to read
The Times
by. The Scots all wear kilts, and dance to the bagpipe, and eat porridge which they cook in kettles the size of our bathtub. Rudolf and I have had a picnic in a meadow full of sheep. There are bandits everywhere. Most of the people in Edinburgh are lawyers, and their families live in apartments around the courtrooms. More later. Your loving friend, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: From Scotland we have traveled by steam packet to the Faeroe Islands, in the North Sea. The people here 
are all fisherfolk and belong to a religion called The Plymouth Brothers, so that when they aren't out in boats hauling in nets full of herring, they are in church singing hymns. The whole island rings with music. Not a single tree grows here, and the houses have rocks on their roofs, to keep the wind from blowing them away. When we said we were from Prague, they had never heard of it, and asked if it were on the moon. Can you imagine! This card will be slow getting there, as the mail boat comes but once a month. Your loving companion, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: Here we are in Copenhagen, staying with a nice gentleman named Hans Christian Andersen. He lives next door to another nice gentleman named Soren Kierkegaard. They take Rudolf and me to a park that's wholly for children and dolls, called Tivoli. You can see what it looks like by turning over this card. Every afternoon at 4 little boys dressed in red (and they are all blond and have big blue eyes) march through Tivoli, and around and around it, beating drums and playing fifes. The harbor is the home of several mermaids. They are very shy and you have to be very patient and stand still a long time to see them. The Danes are melancholy and drink lots of coffee and read only serious books. I saw a book in a shop with the title
How To Be Sure As To What Is And What Isn't.
And 
The Doll's Guide To Existentialism; If This, Then What?
and 
You Are More Miserable Than You Think You Are.
In haste, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: The church bells here in St. Petersburg ring all day and all night long. Rudolf fears that our hearing will be affected. It snows all year round. There's a samovar in every streetcar. They read serious books here, too. Their favorite author is Count Tolstoy, who is one of his own peasants (they say this distresses his wife), and who eats only beets, though he adds an onion at Passover. We can't read a word of the shop signs. Some of the letters are backwards. The men have bushy 
beards and look like bears. The women keep their hands in muffs. Your shivering friend, Belinda.

***

Dear Lizaveta: We have crossed Siberia in a sled over the snow, and now we are on Sakhalin Island, staying with a very nice and gentle man whose name is Anton Chekhov. He lives in Moscow, but is here writing a book about this strange northern place where the mosquitoes are the size of parrots and all the people are in jail for disobeying their parents and taking things that didn't belong to them. The Russians are very strict. Mr. Chekhov pointed out to us a man who is serving a thousand years for not saying
Gesundheit
when the Czar sneezed in his hearing. It is all very sad. Mr. Chekhov is going to do something about it all, he says. He has a cat name of Pussinka who is anxious to return to Moscow and doesn't like Sakhalin Island at all, at all. Your loving friend, Belinda.