Keeping the World Away (24 page)

She’d given herself a year to see if she could make even a slender living out of painting, a year as a reward for getting through the war. Alan had encouraged her. He had his pension, he could support them, and he had bought this cottage, right away from it all, out of money left to him by his parents. But in that first year after the war was over, she had made no money and spent a good deal. The hut had cost money, humble though it was, and so had all the materials she needed: the easel and paints, and canvases and paper. Alan had said not to worry, she shouldn’t expect success in a year. So a second year went by, in which she sold two paintings. She’d thought it might be the beginning of some modest success but it hadn’t proved to be so. Alan said it didn’t matter, but it mattered to her. Not the success itself but the encouragement it would have provided. She needed it: she had so little confidence, untrained as she was.

She heard him coming along the track leading from the road. He was whistling. She went to the door and opened it, and stood in the darkness waiting, hearing his whistling, hearing his feet crunch the stones beneath them. There was a hint of rain in the wind, soft gusts blowing into her face, and far off at sea the sound of a ship’s horn. He stopped a few feet away from her and stared. She glanced behind her, to see what he might be looking at, and then felt his arms round her. ‘Your hair,’ he whispered, ‘it looked on fire … with the light, behind.’ His coat smelled of smoke and she had a sudden image of all the crowds he’d passed through during his day, their smells absorbed by the jacket he wore. ‘Take your coat off,’ she said, and helped him. It dropped to the floor and he would not let her pick it up. First, he had to embrace
and
kiss her, hugging her to him fiercely. All she did was yield, but it was enough. ‘So?’ she said, when at last they were sitting down. ‘Good news, yes?’

‘Good news,’ he said, and repeated what they’d said at Moorfields. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he finished. ‘And look, I’ve brought you a present, to celebrate.’

She was surprised by the brown paper package. And then she felt bewildered. ‘What is it?’ she asked, stupidly. ‘A painting. I thought you might like it, or if you don’t, you could use the frame for one of your own.’ Slowly, she took the wrapping off, and stared. It was so unusual, so odd of Alan to have been attracted to such a quiet picture. ‘Well?’ he asked. She went on staring, holding the painting first at arm’s length and then closer. She asked him where he had got it, and listened carefully while he related his story, adding to it his theories about where the little painting had come from. ‘The frame is expensive,’ he said. ‘Whoever framed it didn’t paint it, I bet.’ ‘The frame is wrong,’ she said, ‘all wrong,’ and she began to turn it over to remove it. Once the canvas was in her hands, she felt relieved – it was like taking off an ornate dress and finding a simple petticoat underneath, so pure in its cotton simplicity and lack of adornment. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Alan was happy. This was such a rare event that it confused her. She knew how to comfort him when he was sad or in pain, she even knew how to lift his spirits a little when he was depressed, as he often was, but Alan happy was such a rare occurrence it was hard to adapt to. She suddenly saw him as he must have been before the war – carefree, eager, optimistic. Even the burn did not look so ugly, with his smile pushing it to one side and his suddenly bright eyes catching attention instead. He seemed no longer a damaged man and she no longer felt like his nurse. He wouldn’t let her make him something to eat but insisted on going into the kitchen and banging about making them both scrambled eggs and toast. The toast was burned and the eggs over-scrambled, but they were presented with a flourish and eaten with relish. Then he opened a precious bottle of malt whisky and they drank some of it in front of the fire.

How, she wondered, as she often did, had Alan and she ever come together?

*

The sun streamed through the windows of her hut, lighting up every dancing speck of dust as Stella swept the floor. She stopped to admire the swirling patterns in the air. The door was open while she cleaned and she could see the white horses riding on the sea. She was not going to try to paint today. Later she would walk with Alan, if he decided his leg was up to it. Her water-colour of the day before, her still life, was propped up on a chair. She was going to frame it herself, in a narrow, plain wooden frame, and then take it down to the pottery, to Conrad Jenkinson, who might sell it for her. He sold his own pots there and let other people display their artistic efforts at no charge. (It was he who had sold Stella’s two paintings last year.) Conrad knew real artists, he was a friend of Dod Proctor, and would not have let her show her paintings in his place if they had been embarrassingly bad (or so Stella told herself).

There was nothing hanging on the hut’s walls, which were not much thicker than plywood and shook alarmingly in any strong wind, but at one end Alan had built a broad shelf, right across, and here she displayed her work when it was finished until she decided whether it was worth taking to Conrad. She had four awaiting judgement, as well as the latest still life. Cleaning the shelf first, she put Alan’s present up with the other paintings, and stepped back. She felt herself blushing, a slow heat spreading through her, and put her hands up to her face, unable to understand what was causing her discomfort. Slowly, her eyes went from left to right and back again, and each time she stopped at Alan’s offering. Something was there, she could sense it. Something that made her own work instantly brash. Worse than that – shallow, empty, flat. There was no meaning in what she had done, no feeling. In despair, she rushed forward and laid her pictures face down and then retreated again to look at the unknown artist’s work. To her relief, it did not look so powerful – it was the contrast with her own that had made it so dominant.

She longed to dash off and show it to Conrad, but there was Alan to think about. The day was dedicated to him, and he would be up by now. Quickly, she finished the floor and closed the door on the newly clean and tidy hut. Leaving it, she always felt reluctant, whether she had been working well or not. It was her place. Alan never came in unless invited, and then he seemed uncomfortable. Strange, she thought, how a room, and in this case just a makeshift room, could take on an atmosphere. There was little in it that was purely personal except for her paintings, no belongings or furnishings that reflected her own personality, and yet the hut felt like hers. It
was
her.

She said this to Alan as they set off on the jagged cliff path. ‘How can a hut be me?’ she wondered aloud.

‘It isn’t,’ he said, ‘you just like to think it is. Rooms aren’t people. Anyone could walk into your hut and make it their own.’

‘Then why do I feel it is me?’

‘You’re a romantic, you like the idea of it.’ He stopped to pick up a stone and hurl it down to the sea. There was no splash that they could hear.

‘Well then, why do I like the idea of it? What does it say about me that I want to believe the inside of a wooden hut is me?’

‘You want something inanimate to belong to you. It’s the thrill of ownership.’

‘You’re not serious!’

‘No, I’m not. You are. I’m humouring you, can’t you tell?’ He was laughing, but she felt annoyed.

‘Don’t humour me, then. I don’t like it. I’m trying to understand myself, and you’re mocking me.’

‘Oh, Stella, really.’

‘I am. I want to sort myself out.’

‘What on earth is there to sort? You’re thirty years old, beautiful, healthy, loved by me, an artist …’

‘But am I an artist?’

‘So you don’t question the rest?’

‘I can’t question being thirty and healthy and to say I’m beautiful is too silly.’

‘You
are
beautiful, and loved. How can you ignore those facts?’

‘I’m only beautiful to you.’

‘Isn’t that all that matters?’

‘Alan, don’t. You keep teasing me, don’t.’

‘I’m not teasing you. Look at me.’ He stopped again, and turned her to face him, and held her face between his hands and stared into her eyes. ‘You-are-beautiful,’ he said, slowly, ‘and-I-love-you. There. Is that teasing?’

She broke away, and walked ahead. The path dipped alarmingly, running very near the edge. They would have had to go in single file for this bit anyway. She could hear Alan behind her, not able to move so rapidly, and on the steep section ahead coming out of the dip he would be slower still. It was stupid and ungrateful to feel upset, she knew that. Alan would never let her try to trace why she always felt disorientated and anxious about where she was and what was going to happen. He just said it was normal, that everyone who’d gone through the war, as he and she had, felt the same – unsettled, suspicious. But she felt it was something to do with her life before the war. She had never felt safe since she’d left Tenby. Alan wouldn’t let her explore that. He hated her to dwell on her life before she was with him – it was as though he were jealous of it. She’d wanted to take him to Tenby, to show him her childhood haunts, but he refused to go with her, and would not come and meet her mother who still lived in Victoria Street. The past, her past, was to be a closed book, because he wanted to blot out his own past, the war and what it had done to him. She wanted to talk about Emlyn, too, but Alan couldn’t even bear the sound of his name. She wanted to confess her shameful envy of Emlyn, of how she was consumed with jealousy, burning and horrible, when he went off to London, to paint. It was only twelve years ago but it seemed like a century. Emlyn’s talent was so obvious that she’d known hers was not in the same league, but still, she hoped and longed for the same opportunity. They had had one year together in London, when she’d followed him and was nursing at St Bart’s, the year before the war started, and then it was all over. Alan knew she was a
widow
, but he preferred to ignore the fact of her marriage entirely. In the same way, he rejected her own curiosity about his life before the war. She knew there had been someone else, but that was all. ‘It is a New Year,’ Alan had said at midnight on 31st December, ‘and a new decade. Here’s to the future. The past is not worth remembering.’ But she wanted to remember it. Sometimes she wondered if her urge to paint was an act of remembrance, of Emlyn, of trying to hang on, however pathetically, to what he had been.

At the top of the incline, she sat down and waited, facing out to sea. It stretched, now sullen and grey, to the horizon, meeting a sky furiously busy with scudding clouds pushing across it. The early morning sun had almost gone, only flashes of it appearing hurriedly from behind clouds which grew bigger and darker every minute. The wind was coming from the west and would bring rain soon. They should go back. Alan would never manage to get round the headland. But he was stubborn. If she said that the path was proving too difficult and that they were going to get caught in the rain, he would insist on continuing. Turning back had to be his decision, and she would have to be cunning and help him make it.

She remembered seeing him for the first time in Netley’s Royal Victoria Hospital. She should not have been in the main building at all – her place was in the Welsh hospital, a large hut in the grounds holding 200 beds – but she had been sent over to ask for some extra pillows. She was lost, totally confused by the crowded, enormously wide and long corridors, not knowing which way she should go. The light was poor – all the lights were covered in brown paper shades – and she could hardly get past the iron bedsteads now in the corridors as well as the wards. She’d come to a halt, wondering whom she could ask for directions, and something had made her look up. There was a landing above, and a man standing on it, poised to come down the stairs. He was on crutches, and as she watched she guessed what would happen. When the man fell she was already halfway up the staircase and reached him in time to stop his falling the full length. She bent
over
him, soothing him, telling him to lie still and she would get help. He didn’t speak, but out of the corner of his right eye tears leaked onto the horrific burn covering his cheek. It had no dressing, and she could see it was as healed as it ever would be. Pity was what she felt. It was what all the nurses felt, all the time, pity, exhausting pity, the sort that drained them. Some of the soldiers hated it. Sympathy, concern, interest, yes – but not pity. It diminished them, made them feel less like men. But after the pity, when Alan had been carried back to the ward and she had gone to check he was recovered from his fall, pity was followed by admiration. He brushed aside her solicitous enquiries. ‘My own stupid fault,’ he said. That had been the beginning.

She made a point of smiling at him as he reached her so that he would not think she was offended by his dismissal of her wish to talk about herself. But still he asked if he was forgiven now, as he dropped down beside her.

‘Bloody leg,’ he sighed.

‘It does well,’ she said, patting the leg lightly on the knee, ‘when you think what the poor old limb has been through.’

‘Don’t tell me that at least I’ve got a leg to moan about.’

‘I wasn’t going to, I wouldn’t be so crass.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t, nurse.’

‘Look at those clouds.’

‘Rain.’

‘Will we shelter, or go on?’

‘Or go back?’

‘If you like. We won’t get so wet then.’

‘Go slowly, though. I’m not ready yet.’

She waited with him, reclining on her side, chewing a piece of grass and looking at him, but he didn’t return her gaze. He was looking out to sea, his chest rising and falling as he recovered his breath. ‘You are tying yourself to an invalid,’ her mother had said, though she had never met him. ‘It’s one thing working as a nurse, it’s another having to take your work home with you.’ She wasn’t nursing any more anyway. She’d given it up, the moment the war ended, and her mother was scandalised. ‘All that training,
all
that good you could do.’ But Stella hadn’t been able to throw off the knowledge she had. She was watching Alan now as a nurse, calculating what he was suffering, wondering if there was something she could do about it. When he began to get up, she helped him, and he said again, ‘Thank you, nurse.’