Keeping the World Away (33 page)

‘Anyway, it wasn’t hers. I wouldn’t have let you have it, even if it had been. It’s too precious.’

‘You’re welcome to it.’ He didn’t like the way she’d said that. ‘How about a cat drawing? There were loads of those.’

He left the next morning with a small black-and-white charcoal drawing of Turpin, the cat they’d had when he was about seven. It fitted easily into the inside pocket of his jacket, it was so small. He liked feeling it there, next to his heart, and kept patting it as he and Lucasta walked to the station. Just as the train was about to come in – they could hear it approaching – Lucasta said, ‘I’m glad you came. Thanks.’ He was so ridiculously pleased, and managed at last to kiss her and hug her as he’d been wanting to ever since he’d seen her. Her body in his arms felt both fragile and soft. It touched him, made him almost tearful, and he had difficulty keeping his composure. She did not resist his embrace but she did not respond either, except for placing her arms tentatively round his back and allowing herself to be held. It was he who stepped back, releasing her. He wanted to say something but, yet again, the right words would not come. He squeezed her hands as he let her go, then picked up his bag and got on the train. ‘Keep in touch,’ he said, through the open window of the carriage door, his voice sounding strangely hoarse. ‘I’ll send an address as soon as I have one, I’ll write, I will!’ He made a point of continuing to wave until she was no longer even a speck in the distance.

*

The relief Lucasta felt when once more she was alone in the cottage was a physical thing, like a headache lifting, a pain disappearing. It
scared
her even though she was glad of the sensation. What was to become of her if she could not bear the company of others? And Sam was not ‘others’. He was her brother, who cared about her and, in his own way, loved her.

She picked up her portrait of him and scrutinised it carefully. Had she caught something of him? Perhaps she had, after all. It had felt exciting, somehow, at last, to have tried. It was always a strange feeling, the charcoal in her hand having a life of its own as it had swept over the paper guided, it seemed, not by that hand, or her eyes but some other force. It wasn’t something she could tell anyone. Too fanciful, too pretentious. But it was true. She hadn’t lost the power.

*

Sam wrote short, stilted letters, but he wrote often. The letters didn’t arrive regularly every second week or even every month, but their very irregularity could be depended upon. Sometimes the gap would be long, as long as six weeks, and then there would be two letters within days. They came from all over the world, mostly blue airmails. Lucasta could tell that the airmail sheet suited Sam and understood why – one whole side and then the turnover flap, and he was done. It was a space he could manage, it wasn’t intimidating. He filled these blue airmails with information. That, to her brother, was obviously the point of a letter – to give the receiver information. He didn’t write about thoughts and feelings, fears and hopes, but about where he had been, where he was going, what he had seen and done. They were travelogues and didn’t develop their relationship in any way, but Lucasta loved the airmails and was touched that Sam sent them. She saved them all.

Her own letters were not like Sam’s. She found them difficult to write, and worried that they might overwhelm Sam in their detail. She tried to follow the pattern of her brother’s letters, writing back immediately, and once she was in London, she had plenty to tell him: about art college, and what her timetable was like and what she was learning, and about the other students. Because of the war, most of them were quite a lot older than she
was
but she liked this: she got on better with older people. They were more serious, less like the average giddy students she had feared. And there was a lot to tell him about London and how she had come to love it, to her own great surprise. What she liked was the very thing she had thought she would hate – its vastness, its complexity. She found it liberating not to be known, to be anonymous in the crowds, where no one looked at her, no one noticed her. Remembering her terror on VE Day, she was embarrassed.

But then, once her education was finished, the letters became easier to write. At first, she rented a bedsitter in the Vale of Health, in Hampstead, which gave her something to tell Sam, and at the same time she got a job in an art gallery.

The owner was a woman, of about sixty (Lucasta thought), called Charlotte Falconer, who had lived in Hampstead all her life. Her gallery was a corridor of a room, at the top of Heath Street, almost at Whitestone Pond. Someone told Lucasta that Miss Falconer was wealthy and belonged to a well-connected family who had owned a large house, somewhere off East Heath Road, now turned into flats. She herself didn’t live there but in a tiny flat above her gallery, a very modest space consisting of two rooms and a bathroom. She had apparently inherited her father’s art collection, sold some of it, and founded her gallery on the proceeds. She was reputed also to have a private income and had become a patron of young artists. Her speciality was portraits, which was how Lucasta had come to enter the gallery, having seen, through the glass door, portraits hanging on the walls.

Charlotte – she wouldn’t hear of being addressed as Miss Falconer – seemed to fill her little gallery, not because she was tall and broad-shouldered, which she was, but through the size of her personality. She had an energy about her, even when sitting still, which made Lucasta feel weak. At first, when Lucasta started working for her, Charlotte’s inquisitive nature proved a strain. ‘I’m prying,’ Charlotte said, as her direct questions about Lucasta’s past went unanswered. ‘I shouldn’t, I’m sorry. Don’t take any notice – I can’t help wanting to know
everything
about people.’ She said
this
so frankly and cheerfully that one really could not take offence, and as Lucasta confessed in a letter to Sam she felt ashamed of her reluctance to satisfy Charlotte’s harmless curiosity. She was not, she realised, devoid of curiosity herself when it came to wondering about her employer. Sometimes, she was surprised and impressed by Charlotte’s knowledge. Charlotte didn’t lecture Lucasta exactly but there was something of the teacher about her – had she trained, perhaps? – and her lessons were more informative and enjoyable than those Lucasta had been given at college.

It was Charlotte’s idea, when Lucasta had worked there for a year, that she should rent the top flat in her old home. The rent she quoted was, Lucasta knew, far below the market value but Charlotte said it was more important to her to have tenants she liked and trusted than to make a lot of money. She took Lucasta to see the flat. ‘These had been the maids’ rooms, and the attics, when it was our family house,’ she said. ‘I always liked them. I have a thing for attics, something about the simplicity of them, the way they pare life down.’ But there was not much of an attic feeling left about this converted top floor, now that the ceiling levels had been altered and some walls knocked through. Lucasta accepted Charlotte’s offer, of course, writing to tell Sam how lucky she felt to have found such a flat. She mentioned in this letter how the normally ebullient Charlotte had seemed unlike herself when she was showing her the flat – quiet, pensive, even a little sad.

Once she had moved in, Lucasta invited Charlotte there for a drink, but Charlotte said that she found it painful being in her old home and that she’d rather meet Lucasta in a café, if she didn’t mind. They had a meal at the Cresta, a Polish restaurant near the gallery, instead, and after that occasionally they met for a drink in one of the local pubs. It suited Lucasta perfectly. She never got to know her employer intimately but they were friends. She judged Charlotte to be a contented person, happy with her gallery, and deriving great satisfaction from promoting young portrait painters. She never invited Lucasta to her own flat, which she said was too small to entertain in, but Lucasta thought it was
more
that Charlotte wanted to keep it to herself, and she understood this completely. It was odd, with Charlotte being the outgoing, generous person she was, and with her being well-off, for her to want to keep the flat to herself, and for it to be so modest. But Lucasta liked the contradiction.

While Sam travelled the world, Lucasta went on helping Charlotte, and in her spare time began to paint portraits. Charlotte commissioned the first, of herself, and was so pleased with the painting that she displayed it in her gallery. Other commissions followed, and slowly, over a period of ten years, Lucasta reached the stage of being able to support herself by painting full-time. When she was forty, she turned one of her rooms into a studio and, greatly daring, established a new rule: people who wanted her to paint their portrait came to her, she did not go to them. It was a rule which almost proved her undoing, because people who had the vanity to wish to have their portrait painted were not the sort of people who were willing to climb stairs to an attic flat. But she’d made the rule, and persevered, and in time it came to seem a charming eccentricity, with which sitters interested enough to engage her services were happy to comply. She made a reasonable living, and was happy in her work, and reported to Sam that her success was growing. It seemed a little conceited to say so, but if she didn’t who else would tell Sam? He knew no one in the art world who would pass the word on that his little sister was reckoned to be a promising portrait painter, a name to watch.

Once, Sam wrote, very sweetly and shyly, offering her money. He had sailed a boat via the West Indies to New Zealand and sold it at an unexpectedly large profit. He could, he wrote, let her have £100. Such an amount would have been very handy at the time, when she was still struggling, before she moved into Charlotte’s flat, but Lucasta had declined it, with thanks. Sam’s way of life seemed as precarious as her own, and she thought he would have more use for it than she did. She was right. The next boat Sam helped to build and then sailed halfway round the world, did not fetch much money. It had been damaged in a storm, he
wrote
, and his costs were hardly covered. After that experience, he gave up the boat business and became a ski-instructor. How he got into this Lucasta never did find out. It was one of the periods when there was a long gap between his letters and, when one arrived, it was preoccupied with the Alpine scenery in Austria where he was working. He wrote that she should come and visit him, and she almost did, but then her cat was sick and she couldn’t leave; and Sam didn’t ask her again, clearly thinking a sick cat was just an excuse.

Sometimes, Lucasta wondered if she suffered from agoraphobia, so extreme was her dislike of leaving her flat. She would let herself run out of basic foods – milk, coffee, bread – and then, near the closing times of shops, she would be forced to dash out and get what she needed. Again and again it happened, twenty past five on a Saturday and only ten minutes to dash to the High Street. It was ridiculous. And yet, once out, she enjoyed it and was in no hurry to return (which showed, she felt, that she was not truly agoraphobic, but just had difficulty with departures). She invariably ended up, carrying whatever vital supplies she’d gone for, wandering first up Heath Street and then onto the Heath above the Vale of Health. She’d sit looking down at the Pond, and think, for some reason, of Cornwall and wonder how on earth she had ever managed to leave it when she so hated change and moving and disruption of every sort.

Her rooms pleased her all the time. Over the years, she had lavished such care and attention upon them, striving to have every detail how she wanted it, and she felt she had succeeded – her rooms
were
her. Her living room, though the furniture was antique, looked modern with its white walls and plain varnished floors and no curtains, only blinds. The blend of the old and new was what gave her most pleasure. She felt it represented something of herself, though writing to Sam she was unable to explain exactly what she meant.

Sometimes in his letters, Sam would mention girlfriends. There was Beatrice for a while, who was replaced by Clare, whom he seemed extremely fond of, until she too vanished
without
explanation. Tom had married meanwhile – Sam had visited him in Australia – and was very happy, with two children, both boys. In a postscript, after that visit, Sam had commented that he couldn’t see himself marrying and asked if she was ‘tempted’. Lucasta had replied that there had been no one tempting, and left it at that. There had seemed no point in describing to Sam the kind of fleeting affairs she’d had. None of them had been in the least serious. Sam could never be her confidant. She didn’t want to bare her heart to him, or to anyone, preferring to maintain her absolute privacy. Privacy was all. It wrapped itself round her and she hugged it to herself, content to be protected by it. She sometimes felt that her rooms knew her best – if they could have talked, they would have had a great deal to tell which would have surprised listeners. The pleasure she felt, for one thing, every time she came back to her home and closed the door behind her. Something always lightened within her, and she took a while to get used to it. The silence was so soothing. She moved among her things carefully, gliding across the floors with barely a sound, her skirt giving the slightest of whispers. This contentment with her own presence was her strength. Nobody could violate it for long. Those who came to her flat hardly touched its essential calm. They came (by arrangement only), they left, mere ripples on the smooth surface of her life. She was lucky, she thought, to have her own territory and rule it so completely. The room breathed, it held her. The room had power over her, it was not inanimate.

She thought about hanging the little painting over the mantelpiece, but the space was too big. To the right of the fireplace, in the slim space between it and the door, where the light was not strong, she found the perfect spot. It looked right there, the canvas so small but fitting into this place perfectly.

*

Paul Mortimer had not wanted his portrait painted at all, but it had been his wife Ailsa’s idea, her present for his fiftieth birthday, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. However, it was a nuisance to have to go to the artist’s studio in Hampstead and toil up those
stairs
and obey her instructions. She didn’t try to charm him or make him feel comfortable but instead was polite, just, but brusque, and didn’t offer him refreshment during all the hours he was with her. Once, when he had a dry throat and coughed, she offered him a glass of water. She was so thin herself that she looked as though she never ate or drank. He studied her because there was nothing else to look at, except the easel with her head appearing from behind it, staring at him. It was slightly unnerving and made him fidget. The chair she’d posed him on was a ladder-backed wooden chair, upright and hard, and he sat with his arms crossed, feeling the wooden bars press into him. He knew he was frowning and probably looked bad-tempered. She’d be painting him as an ogre.