Consequences (7 page)

Her father talked about the boys. Roddy had finished at Sandhurst, with flying colors. Martin was in chambers with a leading barrister: “One of the very top men, I understand.” And Roddy was engaged to someone called Sally.

“Such a sweet girl,” said Marian. “One of the Nesbits. You went to dancing class with them, Lorna.”

Matt was quiet, courteous, attentive. He listened, with apparent interest, as the names of friends and relatives he did not know were paraded by the Bradleys. From time to time Marian would remember his ignorance and offer some quick benign enlightenment. Later, Matt realized that they had never once asked him a personal question, that in fact they knew little or nothing of his own background.

“I suppose we should meet his people,” Marian had said, with stiff resignation. This was on the last occasion that Lorna had seen her alone, a few days after she and Matt were married, when she returned for the last time to Brunswick Gardens to collect the rest of her things.

“I don’t think there’s really any point,” Lorna had replied.

She could not imagine the conjunction of those two sets of parents. She had visited Matt’s family soon after they were married; the Faradays had been surprised but welcoming. In her mind’s eye, she saw her mother and father receiving the Faradays in the Brunswick Gardens drawing room, and shuddered.

The small room in the cottage began to feel more and more constricted, as the visit progressed. Lorna suggested a stroll along the lane. Her father looked relieved, and rose with alacrity. Outside, they moved in a cohort between the hedge banks, Marian quickstepping on high heels, Matt with Molly astride his hip. Lorna pointed out wildflowers, and recited names. “I never knew anything about all this,” she said. “Now I can’t stop hunting for things I haven’t yet found. I’ve got a book.”

Marian peered at toadflax, bush vetch, red campion. “So pretty…” She was a townsperson to the hilt; the country, to her, was a pleasing backdrop seen from a train or through car windows. Family holidays had been spent at Biarritz or Torquay or some southern French resort.

Gerald had been on shooting parties and could put up a passable show of rural interest. He wondered which hunt operated in these parts. Matt and Lorna did not know. Gerald talked knowledgeably about pheasant drives. “Do you shoot at all?” he asked Matt.

Matt laughed. It was the first spontaneous and assertive sound that had come from him that afternoon, and the Bradleys both looked startled. They were gathered in a gateway at that moment, contemplating the sweep of landscape before them—the fields tipping down to the distant gray sea, which reached away to the coastline of Wales, with the darker smears of Steepholm and Flatholm perched on the horizon.

“I’m afraid I can’t imagine myself with a gun in my hand,” said Matt.

Gerald appeared perplexed. “Really? Oh, well…”

“You know, it’s beginning to feel a tiny bit chilly,” said Marian. “Perhaps we should go back.” A thought struck her. “And we haven’t seen any of Matt’s drawings.”

They returned to the cottage. “You needn’t, you know,” Lorna said to Matt, quietly, as they went in. “We can make an excuse.”

He shrugged, and squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry—it’s all right.”

Marian clapped her hands. “Do let’s see, Matt.”

He brought out some recent work from the series of engravings inspired by local scenes, and spread the prints on the kitchen table.

“Awfully good,” said Gerald. He seemed genuinely surprised.

Marian inspected, with little exclamations. “
So
clever…the way you’ve done the roof of that barn.”

“I can’t be doing with this abstract stuff you see around nowadays,” said Gerald. “You steer clear of that, Matt.”

Marian took his arm. She looked at him, eager. “Darling, I’ve had a thought. I want us to buy one!” She turned to Matt. “
May
we?”

“Good idea,” said Gerald.

Matt smiled. “Which one would you like? But it’s a present. My pleasure.”

“Oh, but how sweet of you. Really, you shouldn’t…I can’t decide…” Marian’s hand hovered. “This one, I think. I can just see it in the small spare bedroom by the window.” She had chosen the study of the farmyard by the lane, with the geese.

I don’t want that in the spare room at Brunswick Gardens, thought Lorna. Like an extra bit of wallpaper. None of this has any place there—here, where I live now, and the way we live, and Matt’s work. None of it has anything to do with Brunswick Gardens or that world. Molly began to grumble; Lorna gave her a rusk and stood by, trying to look pleased while the engraving was packaged and her mother gave more little cries of satisfaction.

And then began the process of departure, oiled by the sense of relief all round. Much was made of Molly: “I’m going to send some little smocks from Woollands,” said Marian. Gerald busied himself with the car, checking oil and water. He pecked Lorna on both cheeks, shook Matt by the hand. Marian embraced Lorna: “You must bring Molly to see us in London.” They got into the car; Marian settled a rug over her knees. As the car turned into the lane her hand fluttered at the window. In spirit, she would now be back at Brunswick Gardens, Lorna knew, a task completed, an awkward day now shelved. She wondered if her mother still loved her, or if her dereliction had effectively stemmed what mothers are supposed to feel. “You have been an utter disappointment,” Marian had said, during that last disastrous confrontation. Lorna thought that nothing that Molly did could ever change what she felt about her, nothing.

She said to Matt, “You didn’t have to give them the engraving. You should have let them pay for it.”

“Even penniless artists are entitled to the occasional lavish gesture. I enjoyed it. Momentary sense of power.”

“I love you.”

“God knows why.”

The sun had come out; light chased across the hills. A buzzard floated straight ahead, high above. They stood at the garden gate and watched. “Look,” Lorna said to Molly. “Look up there.” The baby stared at her, and broke into a seraphic smile. There was a smell of crushed grass, and wood smoke.

From somewhere, there came a rumble. It rose to a low roar, died away; like distant thunder, like gunfire. Lorna found herself shuddering. “What on earth was that?”

“They must be blasting, in the quarry.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “Could there be a cup of tea, do you think?”

They went inside, restored to privacy, to intimacy.

Matt was acquiring a reputation—some capricious process whereby his name traveled, and left ripples in the arcane world of those concerned with wood engraving: the galleries, the presses, the collectors. Lucas had placed the rest of the prints left with him in exhibitions, and all were sold. He began to talk of a one-man show, up in London. Finish your Somerset series, he urged, this could be a big thing, this could put you in the front rank. Evangelical fervor smoked up from his letters—that eager commitment to Matt’s talent. Matt wrote back, teasing Lucas for being an entrepreneur, but was secretly touched, and worked harder than ever, putting in long hours, day after day.

And thus, in due course, Lorna found herself on the train to London, heading for Lucas’s house, and the opening view of the exhibition. Matt had gone ahead with the engravings, to supervize framing and hanging. When she arrived at Paddington, with Molly in the pushchair, he was there to meet her—exuberant, excited by the effect of the exhibition: “The room is perfect—white walls, bare floor. It sets them off. I still can’t quite believe it. When we’d finished the hang, I just looked, and thought: crikey, did I really do all that?”

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.