Schooling (24 page)

You wonder what it was like here during the war, quoth the Barrister. Whether anything was different.

Actually I was wondering whether I would be obliged to suffer more brandies or whether with Miranda present to accompany her father to brandyland, I might be granted a reprieve of the gin and tonic variety.

I should imagine not as much as we’d think, Miranda said.

I had no idea what they were discussing. I had my head in the menu. How long since I had tasted Yorkshire pudding a dish which, with my timing difficulties, I could never venture to cook. Monstead made a nice Yorkshire pudd. Chewy in the center. There were not many superior dishes from the school cooks but it behooved you to notice when they did something well and you had to hand it to them on the Yorkshire pudding. I made my contribution to the conversation on this topic.

There was a quiet.

Teddy, Miranda said. We’re speaking of politics.

Politics. I could see I was to be unfavorably compared to Brickman. Ah yes, I responded, But food is always political isn’t it?

The waiter penguined up before I was forced to further expound on this theory. And the Barrister, being kinder than his daughter, ordered us all Sunday lunch.

Before the first round arrived, I had successfully avoided brandy, ordering instead a very political gin and tonic, although now I think perhaps that was a lady’s drink. No matter, I planned to impress both Miranda and her father. The B knew me well enough from the working hours we spent together. Yet I felt hardly knew me at all. At the office I was surly (seventeen), my mind cloudy. No amount of tea could awaken me from the sludgery of forms.

So I seized the chance. When the penguin came, I aimed toward conviviality, raising my drink and toasting. I couldn’t find much the three of us had in common but finally, my arm beginning to shake from holding the glass straight out, it came to me. To politics, I said. And good old Brickman, hoping I wouldn’t choke on the gin or the lie.

Mine was not a mind content with Yorkshire pudding. I deliberated on Miranda, our history together. I had, on the first occasion, suffered a paralytic fit, and on the second, given her pause as to the question of my mental health. Add to that the portrait of an ignoramus I was halfway through painting.

Rifle through, old man. Rifle through. What would Mortimer say. There were refined topics for conversation, I was familiar enough with Shakespeare for God’s sake. They weren’t to know I read him on the toilet. Mr. Mortimer had a genius for bringing people out. Opening up the conversation, getting a man to tell what he might not bring up himself for fear of appearing a swellhead. I missed the old man. The gin was making its way to a sentimental bit. Blazing a trail to where the scratchy music sounded glorious, the fox hunt was romantic. The beginning of alcohol was always the best. A few more and I’d have drunk too much or not enough. Difficult to gauge. Good times at school, times you remember only while having a gin and tonic surrounded by horsy sausages. You never knew it at the time. No no. At the time you felt you were in a cage. Misunderstood. Preyed upon. But you were connected, three hundred like you, though at the time they seemed so different. At the time it was miserable. I wouldn’t go back. Not I at sixty reliving dorm raids at nine as if fifty years had been insignificant in comparison. Get a hold of yourself those who say school days were the best days. Pathetic. But Mr. Mortimer and the four of us. Once Stokes was gone. Lawn roller, the copse, it was only one evening out of eight years. 2 2 2 Darvish, God rest him. Treat and Hawthorne. Working at their father’s banks by now. It was all laid out for them. In the trajectory from table to mouth I toasted the four of us. Five including Mortimer. He would find another group. There was nothing special about us. Of course he was going to make you feel special. But he was like the others, glad to see the back of you. Remember him laughing so he convulsed. Over one of your stories, too. How was he going to find that in a new group. We were unique. Treat copping an American accent for the redhead at Corby. Until she knew he wasn’t enlisted. Selling his coat on the bypass because he couldn’t get back before chapel.

The gin and tonic was sweet and effervescent. A warm evening in June. A girl content with her own mind. All most attractive. I was sitting but the gin made me feel qualified for standing. It wouldn’t do to be reduced every time to nerves and paralysis. No no boy that won’t do at all. I must bear up. For a start, I was not some innocent. There was drunken seduction in my past. Who initiated it was unimportant. I had woken to a woman’s hair in my mouth, her back curved into my belly. Yes it’s true for a while I couldn’t remember her name. And perhaps I did follow her home for reasons that transpired to be other than what they were, but we do the best with the information we’re given at the time. Miranda, well she wouldn’t be getting just any seventeen-year-old. I knew my way around.

The food.

I looked where she pointed. On the table, a polished shank of meat. Yes.

And is that for all three of us, I asked about the Yorkshire pudding. I had by now spent some time in my head, but Yorkshire pudding had its own significance. Perhaps I should have excused my drifting attention. There are hierarchies, they change as you age but they’re there all the same.

You
are
hungry.

I was in a state is what I was. Miranda pudding Miranda pudding.

Watty tilted a bowl of peas, scooping with a wide flat spoon. He’s a growing boy.

I could have eaten the plate it came on. But I was careful not to chew too enthusiastically. At one point I affected a sort of sidechew. I saw a sausage across the room doing it. Talking, even drinking, with the nonchewing side of his mouth. Economical. But I was not accomplished enough for that.

Miranda asked was I to be a barrister like her father.

He could be an actor, Prospero said. The old man wanted me to join the local dramatics group doing All’s Well.

Not I.

Go to the auditions. For the merchants. As an Englishman, we need participation.

I didn’t say I’m not English, I don’t have to prove myself a part of anything, so audition yourself you old sausage. I didn’t say I don’t need to be up on stage for Shakespeare when I have him in the toilet. I said, I won’t wear stockings. I get easily chilled. If they make me wear them, I’ll end up in bed for three weeks. It happened the last time I went out improperly dressed. It’s something to consider. You haven’t suffered our spring months. They’ll kill a man.

Shakespeare isn’t always done in stockings. Miranda slivered her beef. You’d expect her to take the old man’s side.

I can’t act.

I don’t know if it was because she had taken a liking to my new way of chewing or the prospect of seeing me in stockings, but Miranda invited me to a Shakespeare in Cardiff two nights following. So I could get a feel for the acting and words.

Didn’t say what I’d rather get a feel for, said alright.

We left Watty dribbling happily by the fire. If the cribbage biddies found him in their spot they’d have something to say about it.

On the Algernon’s veranda yes veranda she pulled up my hand to protect the wind from her cigarette.

Miranda on the Veranda, I said.

Father doesn’t like me to smoke.

I like to see a woman smoke. My mother smoked. Then I had an attack of coughing. I was always putting my foot in it like that.

Makes your clothes reek. She puffed at the cigarette. You’d make my father very happy by doing this drama. It’s important for him to feel a part of things.

I told her I didn’t know why the Barrister loved Wales. I said it seemed stupid to love things you knew nothing about.

Well he had a friend, she said.

Was he a singing rugby playing coal miner, I inquired.

No.

I needed to calm down. You didn’t want to get me started. I had an American mother, for God’s sake. And how was I to know Watty’s friend was shot down over Germany? There were always those stories of lives being saved. Watty was one of them, by this Welsh friend. It was too much for me, with the Yorkshire and all. I sat down on a potted plant which I mistook for a bench.

You’re a funny boy, she said through her smoke.

Did she mean humorous or insane. Her expression indicated she was enjoying whichever it was.

Oh Miranda, said I.

You’ll help my father then? Between her slender fingers, the cigarette was helpless. And I was caught. Her hair in the moonlight, what torture it is to describe when you have no range of language. I understood Hamey then, the hunger that has a boy put a bird in his mouth. Miranda, I said as I stood, for the planter was cold. If you told me you’d have me in tights I would find some tonight.

She blew out some smoke, a little through her nose. I’m not sure what you mean by that.

And I said it I said it without thinking without considering the consequences I went with the collaboration of my mouth, teeth and tongue, the syllables they wanted to make I heard myself say as I’d been asking myself these three days, only now aloud I said Miranda, Would ya marry me?

And it was seventeen more before I asked again. I found her sitting in the corner at a dance with diamonds in her hair, the American Girl. Well they were only paste, I saw it when I took her in my arms for a waltz and later, on a balcony, when I told her she was the woman I planned to marry.

For when you’re seventeen, it’s forgivable not to know your own mind, to confuse Shakespeare with desire, to end up wearing tights to gain a lady’s love. Then to spend three weeks laid up in bed with a fever which no amount of contrition makes right.

How can you know it.

She wore them in her hair again on our first outing. A man came up to her while I was on the toilet. Well, I said on my return, If you don’t mind, this woman is being entertained.

Well, the man said to make fun of my voice. Well, he said to her,
Whooo
’s this then? The American Girl wouldn’t answer. So the man turned to me, What’s your name?

My name, I said taking the girl by the arm, My name is for my friends, and leading her out towards the lights of Trafalgar through traffic and into the park, I confessed I had stolen the line from Lawrence of Arabia, I told her I had no money and might never have money, I would go to America if that was what she wanted but I couldn’t leave her not her nor here not in London for she made me laugh, she read books and kissed me and had such a neck.

12

Owen paces the stage tapping a pencil against his forearm. Down on one knee, Percival is proposing to Brickie who has wire wings fixed to his back.

Find Basileia . . . Percy turns to Owen . . . We’ll go with the wedding dance one more time.

From a tree, Simon watches her take a seat in the audience.

You’re not dancing? . . . a voice in her ear, Betts . . . I’m surprised . . . he sits down, closing his notebook . . . I took you for a dramatic type.

Can’t sing.

I wager you have quite a voice. I’d like to hear it having read your sides. A Welsh father, biddies at their cribbage. Very humorous. I suspect you almost enjoy writing. What will discourage you from trespassing in the future, may I ask? Nevermind, I was entertained. Perhaps stories will be your forté, Evans. To write, one only needs a pen. Of course, by pen I mean enclosure.

Onstage, Brickie takes the hand of a reluctant girl Liz Estrada or somesuch he leads her through two columns of second-years. The girls sing . . . Phonéya is that far country—

A fair imagination you have, Evans.

From the stage . . . They plough the fields there with their tongues and sow and reap as well.

And you’ll settle here yet. You have friends? Your own age I mean.

Sophie Marsden.

Owen strides across the stage . . . Hold on a minute.

The girls stop singing. Owen tells Brickie something which makes him laugh. The boy has a nice laugh, give him that.

Wharton reminds me of an old Oxbow friend . . . Betts stamps his foot . . . Pins and needles this is not how I would direct this scene. Tree should be farther downstage. And someone explain why those girls are dressed in every color of the rainbow. Still, who’s interested in my opinion.

Where’s your friend now?

Mahesh? . . . Betts chews on his pencap . . . Everywhere you turn. Grinning down from advertisements, on television. Changed his name to act in films. The chicanery of moving images, hardly a career for a grown man.

Maybe it’s not an audience he needs, but company.

Company of actors?

The girls sing again . . . They plough the fields there with their tongues—

Just company.

Betts coughs, holding up his notebook to shield the spray. Onstage, marrying the girl in golden furbelows, Brickie trips. Betts jots a note.

NOTE

I saw you, he says as they hunker through another field perspiring up the pastoral meadow path the chit of random birds and a thickness in the air as last night’s rain bakes mud. Doctor’s bag bucking her side, thewy, she insisted on carrying it. I saw you. Gilbert stops, easels against one shoulder. The sun aglint off his unwashed hair. Peaks and divots. Holding open a gate. From the balcony. You were down below, cozy in the audience with Mr. Betts. What were you two cronies discussing?

Doctor’s bag scrapes her knee as she passes through the gate. Perhaps the English master was praising your vocabulary . . . Gilbert latches it behind them . . . Whatever it was, you were certainly intrigued.

Mr. Betts said I had a fair imagination. He said I’d settle here yet.

Gilbert snorts . . . How thoughtful.

Once Betts told me I might not be so bad at the English language . . . she stops to take off her sweater.

Distractedly, Gilbert catches her shirt as it inches past her navel . . . And who asked his opinion?

She pulls her arms from the sleeves, balls up the sweater. Gilbert still has her by the shirttail.

Mr. Gilbert.

Sorry . . . he lets go.

Kneeling to shove her sweater into the doctor’s bag, she looks up at him. Profiled against the muddy background, he has the nose of an explorer, the worry of a new world.

They continue on.

Mr. Gilbert, did you know that the word allude and the word ludicrous both come from
lud
, the Latin word for play?

Is that right, well what thrilling lessons are to be found in English, hum? But today’s lesson is in painting not etymology, not vocabulary, which I leave to your friend and mine Sir Patrick Betts.

Gilbert stops on a rise too slight to name Hill. A proposed landscape. All I see is mudscape, she calls. From the shade of a lone tree. All I see is brown, Mr. Gilbert, so he will look up from unlegging an easel. But Gilbert continues to unleg, saying, Monochromatic. Shades of the same color. Etymologically speaking, since you love language so, from the Greek
mono
meaning single,
chroma
meaning color. Well it seems dull to me, she says. Insipid. A hand at his eyebrow to find her against the light. Insipid, Punchinello? Insipid? Walking to her. For her. Her very own.

They met by the rearing horse, he came for her in the Fiat, window scrolled to half-mast. They drove with wind buffeting inside the car. An anomaly, a day like this in April, do you know what anomaly means? His cuffed elbow on the door frame where the window wasn’t, poking out easily as if it has been summer their entire history instead of today being a Deviation From the Norm, a day it might reach twenty. That being a celsius account.

Insipid, you say? But he smiles as he walks toward her.

In London, eighty degrees sent the English into bewildered fannings of newspapers. Damp missionaries stranded on the Bloomsbury veldt. Undone by heat. How well Gilbert handles an upswing in degrees remains to be seen. Shirt rolled to an easy forearm boded well. But careful examination revealed many errors. Points lost for black socks.

Drab, you think? . . . he reaches her . . . Will you stay under that tree? Ignore the landscape I’ve taken such pains to provide? . . . Gilbert takes the bag from her . . . Come on, you can take heart from your great love, Thomas Cole and his Drab River School.

She never said she loved Cole. Or had she. Perhaps she had. He arranges the paints, fanning out the tubes. Who does she love. A question that.

At Christmas I saw a landscape I liked . . . taking the paintbrush Gilbert holds out to her . . . A postcard. They were having a picnic, men with pipes, a lady in a necklace.

Picnic? You mean
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
? That ’s . . . a dry cough . . . Not what I would call a landscape. Certainly information to keep from Mr. Betts. He’ll fear a restaging of it on the hockey pitch.

They snicker together because they are both anti-Betts because shrubs and greenery doth not a landscape make. Not when there’s nudity involved.

A swell of wind shimmies the new leaves. A thin line of yellow to her paper, snaggling it for a leaf. What about this Dido, does the teacher love her still. A query to which old Gilbert hems, hums and improvises an artful analogy. Different sorts of loves. The foreground and background of ardor, Manet’s peaches versus his leaves. Platonic, romantic, the fuzzy line between. Does she understand. Well not really, but why did the teacher move his love from a peach in the foreground to a leaf in the back. Well, he says shyly these questions are highly irregular, but I found that my wife was herself after all, not the person I fashioned to love.

Oh. And silently they paint together in their brown landscape quiet together. Side by side in their worlds considering who they love sharply in a foreground sort of way and who are the blurry ones, the victims of perspective.

In the center of the canvas she has the beginning of a trunk, from the bottom up this time instead of the usual top down, so she has learned one thing. Although, it strikes her now that the most important features should appear slyly to one side.

My tree’s smack in the middle and very bad to boot.

Gilbert’s head jerks up . . . To boot? You sound so English saying that.

He is tricking her.

What’s the matter?

I don’t want to sound like you.

But I’ve been making a concerted effort not to sound so affected.

No, the snooty voice is funny. In fact, I give you eighty-two percent for it.

Has there been another panel? Where was I when that convened . . . Gilbert flicks something from his paper . . . Had I known, I would have trotted out some superior puns.

Puns aren’t funny.

Good to know. Still, eighty-two percent is not ninety-one. Though you have the challenge of not falling.

I won’t fall.

Gilbert acts glum, mutters
hubris
and
youth
so much
promise
so little
compromise
. She laughs at his show, the poor moron left in shadows. Wait, you’re laughing, he says, That’s worth an eighty-four, eighty-three at the very least which only makes her laugh harder. Eighty-five, eighty-six, he continues. Stop, she sobers, taking her landscape off the easel, I’m the judge.

Gilbert watches her set the painting on a patch of dry mud. She steps back to let him see.

My, my . . . he evaluates . . . Wild tree. And yellow. You’re a secret Fauvist, a—

Faux vista?

Fauvist. From the French, meaning wild beast. Meaning emotional exuberance, vivid color, unconventional form over the more traditional civilized lines.

Then Gilbert sets down the paintbrush he’s been using to describe the air because in trying to reposition her easel she’s getting ludicrously tangled in its legs. Hold on, Hercules, he says walking over. Yes he does own too short trousers, bad socks and a limited hairwashing routine but Gilbert also owns strong hands that trick flesheating chemicals hands which are at present moving her easel to the north, precisioning new watercolor paper carefully, tacking sheet to easel. Her hands would leave the paper furling and smudged. Upper right bottom left like hospital corners the sheet of paper a bedsheet. White shirt. Laundry smell with an unwashed Wednesday souring—

You smell nice, Mr. Gilbert.

He looks down at her, sweeps her paper with the side of his hand, then moves away, back to his own easel. Dropping down next to the doctor’s bag to find a better brush.

Didn’t mean to say it aloud. Dipping her brush in the water cup. A wrong thing to say. Wet brush aloft, surveying the uneasy land, uncivilized, a wild beast, she will choose caesious, orpiment, grege. Consider. Consider the words first. Gilbert never goes quiet. Has never simply left her to the stutter of birds. If this were a play he would stride over, he would do something dramatic or exit. Drama doesn’t bear silence. Or is that exactly what it bears. Silence to feel what are the actors feeling. In a play, they would have better background than this. Hillocks on their way to rocky mountains, edelweiss, a tricky brook. And there would be other characters. Stock hardy types found in all trustworthy British dramas. Morally upright in an unselfconscious way, not secretive or So You Might Think, undemanding and useful. The plot would not involve painting which when it comes right down to it is dull as mud to watch. No, the plot would expose a secret or two, held out to a thrilling conclusion, inevitable but at the same time surprising. A revelation concerning the hero. A transformation involving the villain. Instead, they are lodged in mud and Gilbert will not act as rehearsed.

Suddenly he’s here holding a clean palette. Quietly . . . For you.

She turns to say—but he flinches, a stab in his eyes. A fleeting look, something. Fear? He gives her the plastic disc. She would have preferred a wooden palette with a hole for the thumb. Shoulders hunched, Gilbert walks back through the stubble to his own easel.

Silence. They paint.

Memlinc.

She looks up.

Gilbert, absorbed, painting, a surmising nose scratch . . . Memlinc was a Flemish painter. From the Flanders school which is a region we now recognize as Belgium. You remember. France’s attempt to control the cloth-producing towns of Flanders led to the Hundred Years war.

French flags festooned the list’s border. Allons-nous en Provence! announced the jovial title. The details were admirable. Apparently the weather in Southern France can be unpredictable. Who knew that hovercrafts usually depart on time? It seemed a meeting of participants would be held one night next week. This meticulous information, for the organizers had done their jobs scrupulously, was followed by a list of participants. Brickman, Craven, Curran and there it was. Or rather, wasn’t. A surprising omission between Eggles and Finch.

Gilbert glances up . . . We won’t have any fun in France without you.

Valor, Bucket, Foretold. Armed with Araigny’s vocabulary, they will only have words like Grief but will really know Grief if they ever need a Toilet. On the other hand, she knows the word for sandwich. And more than one type.

Now, van der Neer, well, I attempted homage once . . . Gilbert’s shirttail’s out, fingers grasping waist, he dabs paint idly as if waiting for a bus . . . You’ve seen the results in Howlands. You said your mother liked dark paintings, didn’t you?

She rinses her brush. A cloud moves back,
tada
, the sun. Catrine?

She squeegees out excess water.

It gets boring, you know.

What does?

The constant deflection.

The chemistry teacher walks briskly downstage. Hold on, the follow spot can’t keep up. He sets down his folding stool and takes the girl’s hands. All very deliberately. Silence. His rolled-up sleeves, the greasy hair, paint on his fingertips like a child. A long moment. They stare at each other. The audience grows restless, shuffles programs. Above, a caw of bird spills down, away.

I asked you a question about your mother.

The sun catches his scar, his nose becomes a blade.

Don’t ignore me.

Mr. Betts says Never Capitulate.

Patrick Betts, need I remind you, IS NOT HERE. And what the hell does that mean? Surely Mr. Betts did not intend . . . Gilbert sighs, there’s no other word for it . . . Well who knows what he intended . . . taking her hands to his forehead, Gilbert cools himself after his exertion to make her tell, then drops them. It’s not good, he murmurs and returns to his easel.

Propped before her, a yellow effort, incomplete, the underbelly of a rock. Fabrication, because the exact is never true. She chooses violet. Gilbert grumpily clanks his brush against the water bottle.

Violet grass violet tree . . . My mother wouldn’t have liked the Fauvists.

Don’t talk about her to appease me . . . still grumpy.