Home Schooling (24 page)

The thing was, artists had to experience every thing that life had to offer. That was what Désirée began to say. Why should this or
that way of life be considered superior? Maybe she needed to consider that point of view, for a change. The true artist was able to make use of everything, including love, marriage, even children. She certainly didn't want to be an old maid living in a boarding house and going around with dried paint under her fingernails and one of those beret things stuck on her head, did she?

When Désirée married Tom, Alex was her bridesmaid. And exactly a year later she was godmother to Désirée's infant daughter, Loren Alexandra. On the day of her baptism, the baby lay stiff as a china doll in Alex's arms. Then she took a gulp of air and began to shriek. She cried all the way home from the church, and for a good part of every day and night in the weeks that followed. Alex walked up and down with her; she patted her back and tried singing to her.

Désirée couldn't cope. She cried more helplessly than the baby. “Babies do cry a lot, at first,” Alex said. “But they get over it.”

“No, they don't,” Désirée said. “They just go from one thing to another. I think she's coming down with a cold now. I don't know what to do with her. She doesn't even like me.” Désirée used to throw herself down on the floor in the living room after Alex had finally got Loren to sleep. She would say that she couldn't survive. “I'm so tired,” she said. “This isn't natural. I must be sick. I must be dying. I'm so tired I wouldn't care if I died.”

“Don't say that,” Tom said, trying to pull her up from the floor. “That's a terrible thing to say.”

Leave her alone, Alex wanted to say. Leave her alone; she'll get fed up with herself. Instead, she offered to stay and see to the baby during the night, and Désirée said, Oh would you Alex, are you sure you don't mind? I truly don't mind, Alex had said. I truly don't.

Alex was good with babies, even babies as ornery — Tom's word — as her godchild. Alex had always been able to get by on very little sleep. She enjoyed helping out where she was needed. That was what she told herself. She tried very hard not to covet what
Désirée had. The truth was, when Alex had first seen Loren, only an hour or so after the birth, her heart had become molten. Tears had sprung to her eyes. She had lightly, reverently, brushed her fingers across the baby's head, along the side of her face. In the shape of her eyes, the dimple in her chin, the fine brown hair, she was a small replica of Tom. She had to force herself to hand the baby back to Désirée. “Be careful, don't drop her,” she had actually said. What was happening to her? She wanted this baby and she wanted Tom and she wanted Tom's house — a white house with green shutters at every window — and she wanted the view of Puget Sound, and the smell of the sea and the soft grey fog manifesting itself all at once in place of the clear sky. She wanted to be a nurseryman's wife. Yes, let her be honest: she wanted all this, and at the same time she felt horribly ashamed and impatient and angry with herself. She kept thinking, But what shall I do?

Soon after they'd arrived at Grove's End, Désirée enrolled Loren in a Montessori kindergarten in the village and then sent her off every morning with Alex. The teacher was Mrs. Clara Fradkin. The children called her “Mama Clara” and happily followed her around the schoolroom like ducklings. Loren, who even at the age of four still cried easily and often, as if this was, for her, the most natural form of expression, cried when it was time to go home.

“This is the exact opposite of what usually happens,” Mrs. Fradkin said severely, removing Loren's hands from her skirt. “Usually the child wants to go home to its mother. This is a very unusual situation. Do you have good rapport with Loren?” she asked of Alex, who explained once again that she was not the child's mother, she was only a friend, a close friend.

“I'm an aunt, really. I'm Aunt Alex, aren't I, Loren?” she said. “I am her godmother,” she said.

Loren buried her face in the folds of Mrs. Fradkin's substantial skirts. Mrs. Fradkin wore black cloth slippers and print dresses under
voluminous aprons and her plentiful grey hair was twisted in thick braids around her head.

“Perhaps the mother should come for Loren, then,” she said to Alex.

Alex agreed. She thought Loren would like very much to have her mother come to the school. She imagined Désirée would be delighted to have a closer look at this schoolroom, with its long wood tables and its easels and paint pots and flowers in jam jars and its scarred wood floor. Surely, if Désirée could see Mrs. Fradkin as Alex saw her, she would immediately reach for her paintbrushes. She would have Mrs. Fradkin sit with her feet in a bucket of steamy water. Or knitting, with a fluffy cat asleep on her lap. She would have her sit in the cold blue light from a window reading an antique leather-bound book. The furrows in Mrs. Fradkin's intelligent, sensible face would be accentuated. The mole beside her upper lip would be pre-eminent. Alex, seeing this painting in her mind, became quite excited. She wanted to pick up a brush and begin work on it herself.

“Loren's mother would come for Loren if she could, but she is very busy,” Alex explained, trying to grasp Loren's hot, damp hand in hers and discretely disentangle her from the teacher. “She's at Grove's End,” she reminded Mrs. Fradkin, but Mrs. Fradkin, unim-pressed, merely said, “I think the mother should at least on some occasions call for the child. It is the child that matters, after all.”

“Mrs. Fradkin does not approve of you,” Alex later told Désirée.

“The club is always looking for new members,” Désirée said. “Let her join. It's not exclusive, believe me.” She was sitting on her bed, drinking a glass of red wine. She had a letter from Tom in her hand and she waved the sheets of paper at Alex. “He wants us to come home,” she said. “Well, he wants me and Loren to come home, I don't suppose even Tom would presume to make the same demands of you. He misses me. He's offering to take me on a holiday if I come home now, this minute. Mexico, Jamaica. He says he
thinks I'd probably enjoy painting or sketching in the Caribbean, from what he's heard of it.” She let the letter slide from her hand to the floor.

“I would love to go to Jamaica,” she said. “Some day. I just don't like it that he puts conditions on everything. If I come home now, he says. If I'm a good girl.” She picked up the wine bottle from her night table and refilled her glass. “Want some?” she said. Alex shook her head. Désirée said: “Robin is taking me to Pembrokeshire, to see the town where he used to live. Where he had a house. Or his parents had a house. I think it was before the war. I meant to ask, would you mind looking after Loren while I'm gone?”

“No, I wouldn't mind,” said Alex, not meeting Désirée's eyes.

“We could take her along, but she'd be bored. So this would be a better arrangement, wouldn't it?”

“Oh, yes,” Alex said. “I suppose it would.”

“I know what you're thinking,” Désirée said, lifting the wine glass in the air and studying its contents. “I know what Alex is thinking. You're thinking I'm a married woman and I shouldn't be going to Pembrokeshire with Robin Pritchard or any other man. Aren't you?”

“No, I'm not. Oh, Désirée, I don't know,” said Alex. “It's up to you, isn't it? You know what you're doing. I don't mind, I'm happy to look after Loren.”

“Well, then. You're a good friend, Alex. But I don't want you to judge me. I don't want you to think badly of me, either.” She got off the bed. She went to the window. “I want some happiness out of life
now.
Not always later, later. Not that I wasn't happy before. I was. I think I was. But this is different, isn't it? This is unexpected and precious to me.” She moved away from the window and put her wine glass down on the night table. “Do you know who I saw outside just now? Robin. He's walking up the lane. In two seconds he's going to come in the front door. There. What did I tell you?” She smiled at Alex, a sunny smile, full of complicity, as if they were
girls again, students cutting classes, preparing for another adventure on the road in Désirée's red mg.

On the kitchen wall at Grove's End there was a copy of a painting by Henri Matisse:
The Joy of Life.
It was a scene of nude figures lying around in what seemed to Alex a post-apocalyptic garden. Was that what Désirée meant? Alex's first impression was that the figures had, in a sense, all turned their faces to the wall. They had finished with being actively in life; now they were preoccupied with what they could learn through their senses, through the tips of their fingers, or by gazing for timeless moments at the closed lids of their eyes. In her opinion, at least to begin with, the painting was immoral, or did she mean amoral? She tried to explain this to Désirée, who laughed and said, “Oh, Alex, you are a strange one, aren't you?”

Désirée took the print down from the wall and wiped a cobweb from the backing. She propped it up closer to the window and studied it avidly.

“Well, I don't care for it,” Alex said. “I don't think I like the colours. They're harsh.”

“You know, it's not about life,” Désirée said. “It's not really about the joy of ordinary life. It's about the joy of art, I think. It's about the sheer joy that can be attained through art. Through the simplicity of art. Which is, oh, I don't know, seeing with perfectly innocent eyes. Does that make sense?”

Look how delicate the figures were, how insubstantial, she said. Above them the great massed dream-shapes of the trees, and the clouds, and the sea.

“It's decadent, though,” Alex said. “How can you see decadence through innocent eyes? It's strained, in a way, that whole scene. As if the artist is reaching for something he can't quite grasp.”

“Well, maybe that's what painting is all about,” Désirée said. “Maybe that's where the joy comes in. Working at something so hard you almost die of it.” She smiled, as if Alex couldn't be expected
to understand or to share in this vision. Sometimes it seemed to Alex that everyone at Grove's End gave her the same look. She made them all feel superior, she supposed. She didn't care. She knew she wasn't an artist, or a poet. She was only there to look after Loren while Désirée painted. There had been trouble about this at first. Felix Curtis had told Désirée he was very sorry, but, no, there wasn't room for a friend and certainly not for a child. He said this in a letter, before they left America. I can't come without my daughter, Désirée had written back. She said she had no choice but to withdraw her application. Felix Curtis had replied immediately, by telephone. He had said he would make room for Désirée's daughter and for Alex. He would sleep in the garage, if necessary. On the floor in the garage, where he'd catch his death of cold, no doubt, but for her he would take that chance. When she finished talking to him, Désirée had said to Alex, “I think he's mad.”

When they arrived at Grove's End, Felix Curtis had presented Loren with the Welsh doll, in its apron and tall black hat. Why, how sweet of him, Alex had thought, in surprise. He was older than she'd expected. He was slight, with narrow shoulders and a thin neck and odd, almost unnaturally large, flat, glistening eyes. He kept a tin of toffees especially for Loren on the mantelpiece. “Would you like a sweetie?” he would say. “Only one, that's a good girl. You don't want to spoil your tea.”

In the evenings at Grove's End, everyone gathered around Felix Curtis. They would wait (there were generally three or four writers or painters staying there at a time), seemingly mildly amused at their own eagerness, for Felix Curtis to say something tantalizing or provocative. And he, obviously relishing the moment, would lean back with his pipe clamped between his teeth and his dog curled at his feet. (There was a watercolour of Felix Curtis, done by Désirée, in this exact pose: firelight flickering across his face, his eyes darker than ever, more lustrous, a cartoonishly ardent group crouched at
his feet, and in the recesses of the room shelves of books, paintings askew on the rough plaster walls.)

Not long after Robin arrived at Grove's End, he told Alex and Désirée that he firmly believed Felix Curtis was a reincarnation of Madog ap Maredudd, manifesting all over again that mighty warrior's special fondness and regard for poets. “Madog and Felix. They are one and the same entity, in my opinion,” he said. Désirée said she didn't know about Madog ap Whatever-his-name-was, but she certainly felt that Felix Curtis was an extraordinary person. Her salvation. She worshipped him. He was like a religious figure to her, she said, a priest or a saint. Once, he had casually informed her that he was actually given to visions of angels and demons, which appeared at his window by starlight and made their claim on his spirit, in spite of the fact that he was not religious in any orthodox sense. It was something in his brain that caused this, he had said: a bit of loose wiring.

“Now, let me put this question,” Felix Curtis was saying. “Can we afford art? What are we doing, when we indulge ourselves with our personal, narrow
artistic
interpretations of history, of nature, of humanity?” And what, he wondered, did art specifically have to do with memory? With the psychology of memory? With the “persistence of vision,” if he could use that term? Those impressions the eye recorded for one-tenth of a second and then relinquished: how would they be remembered, if they were not immortalized by the artist? He winked at Alex: Now there was a question, he said to her. And here was another: How did the artist deal with the strictures of bourgeois life, which as everyone knew hampered more promising careers than did any other factor?

Hah, Alex thought. She had just finished washing up a sink full of dirty dishes that had been ignored by everyone else. What about the strictures of Bohemian life? she wanted to ask. But Désirée agreed with Felix.