The Sandcastle (26 page)

that
into
this.
He marvelled again that she had not gone away altogether. She was dressed today
in a dress which he had not seen before, a clinging dress of light grey wool,
which made her look taller. As she talked, he watched her bright thrown-back
boy’s face, and the extreme roundness of her breasts, displayed now by the
close-fitting wool. He noticed that she was wearing high-heeled shoes, instead
of the canvas slippers which she usually wore down at St Bride’s. He noticed he
handbag and a long black-polished heel tapping rhythmically. He coveted her,
and his need for her was suddenly so extreme that he had to turn away.
He wondered for the hundredth time what it was that he wanted from her. It was
not just to be the owner of that small and exotic being. He wanted to be the
new person that she made of him, the free and creative and joyful and loving
person that she had conjured up, striking this miraculous thing out of his
dullness. He recalled Bledyard’s words: you think of nothing else but your own
satisfaction. All right, if two people can satisfy each other, and make each
other new, why not? After all, he thought, I can be guided by this. Let me only
make clear what I gain, and what I destroy. With relief he felt his mood
shifting. The cloud of nightmare which had hung over his head while he was
waiting at Waterloo was lifted. In a world without a redeemer only clarity was
the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing,
and then he would decide.
Rain had finished with the connoisseurs. They said good-day, and all departed
together. She turned to Mor. ‘You haven’t been looking!’
‘I
have
,’ said Mor, smiling. ‘Now you show me the pictures.’
They began to walk round. Mor was not used to looking at pictures, and these
ones startled him. They were very various. Some were meticulous and decorative,
like the portrait of Demoyte, others very much more impressionistic, with the
paint plastered heavily upon the canvas. After making one or two wrong guesses,
Mor gave up pretending to know which were Rain’s and which were her father’s.
There seemed to be no way of deciding on grounds of style.
‘How do the experts know?’ he asked Rain.
‘My father’s pictures are better!’ she replied.
The pictures all showed a great intensity, even violence, of colour, and a bold
harsh disposition of forms. Everything was very large and seemed to have more
colours and more surfaces than nature possessed. Compared to these works, the
portrait of Demoyte seemed more harmonious and sombre.
When Mor said this, Rain said, ‘I am only just beginning to develop my own style.
My father was such a powerful painter, and such a strong personality, I was
practically made in his image. It will be a long time before I know what I have
in myself.’
Mor thought, even at this moment she knows that there is a future. He wished
that she could communicate this sense of futurity to him. He said, ‘Is there a
picture of your father here?’
‘Several,’ said Rain. She stopped him in front of a portrait.
Mor saw at first the jagged mountains and valleys of the paint, and then he saw
a thin-faced man, looking suspiciously sideways towards the spectator, his face
turning the other way, a thin wig-like crop of straight black hair, grey at the
temples, big rather moist eyes with many wrinkles about them, and a slightly
pursed thoughtful mouth.
‘Did you paint that?’ asked Mor.
‘No, my father did,’ said Rain, ‘a little while before he died. It’s a very
good painting. See the authority of that head. Mr Bledyard would not have
criticized
that
.’
Mor felt unable to make any judgement on the painting. He had a dream-like
sensation of being translated into Rain’s world, as if she had laid him under a
spell in order to show him the past. How objective she is, all the same, he
thought. They moved on.
There was a portrait of a young girl with long black plaits, leaning over the
keyboard of a piano. Out of a haze of colour her presence emerged with great
vividness, bathed in the light and atmosphere of a southern room.
‘Who is that?’ said Mor, although he already knew.
‘Me,’ said Rain.
‘Did your father paint it?’
‘No, I did.’
‘But you were a child then!’ said Mor.
‘Not so young as I look,’ said Rain. ‘I was nineteen. It’s not very good, I’m
afraid.’
To Mor it looked marvellous. ‘And you had long hair!’ he said. ‘When did you
cut it?’
‘After — In Paris, when I was studying there.’
They moved on quickly to the next picture. Rain’s father stood in a doorway,
leaning against the jamb of the door. He was dressed in a loose-fitting white
suit, and his face was in shadow. Beyond him through the door could be seen a
dazzling expanse of sea.
‘I painted that too,’ said Rain. ‘That’s a more recent one, not quite so awful.
That’s through the door of our house.’
‘Your house!’ said Mor. He must have supposed that Rain and her father lived in
a house - but somehow his imagination had never tried to provide him with any
details of how she must have lived in the past, before he knew her.
‘Here’s our house again,’ she said. ‘You see more of it here.’
Mor saw the façade of a white villa, powdery with sun and scored with blue
shadows, with pinkish patches on the walls where the plaster was falling off,
and decrepit grey shutters disposed in various positions. A ragged cypress tree
partly obscured one of the windows.
‘Where is the sea?’ said Mor.
‘Here,’ she said, indicating a point beyond the foreground of the picture.
‘Which was your room?’ said Mor.
‘You can’t see it here,’ she said. ‘That was my father’s room. Mine looked out
at the back. You can see the window here.’ She pointed to another picture. It
was evening, and the back of the house was glowing in a soft diffused light. A
wilderness of flowering shrubs, with grotesque shapes and violent purple
shadows, crawled right up to the wall.
‘There’s no path!’ said Mor.
‘No, you have to push your way through.’
‘And the view from the window?’ said Mor.
‘Here,’ she said. It was mid-afternoon, and line behind line a drowsy
landscape, crumbling with dryness, receded into mountain slopes spotted with
vines and mauve distances of dry vegetation and rock.
Who — ‘ he began.
‘I painted this one,’ she said. ‘The other ones are by my father. He never
tired of painting the house.’
‘Who has the house now?’ asked Mor.
She looked surprised. ‘I have it,’ she said.
They moved from picture to picture. Almost all were either pictures of the
house, or of the landscape near it, or self-portraits, or portraits of each
other, by the father and daughter. There were two or three pictures of Paris,
and about five portraits of other people. Mor looked with bewilderment and a
kind of deeply pleasurable distress upon this vivid southern world, where the
sun scattered the sea at noon-day with jagged and dazzling patches of light, or
drew it upward limpidly light blue into the sky at morning, where the white
house with the patchy plaster walls was stunned and dry at noon, or shimmering
with life in the granulous air of the evening, as it looked one way into the
sea, and the other way across the dusty flowers and into the mountains. He
looked, and he could smell the southern air. And here at last in the room that
he had come to recognize as the drawing-room sat a black-haired girl in a
flowered summer dress. It was midday, but the shutters were drawn against the
sun. The room was full of the very bright and clear but shadowed light of a southern
interior. The girl had tossed back her very short hair and turned towards the
spectator with a smile, one hand poised upon a small table, the other touching
her cheek. The picture had something of the fresh primness of a Victorian
photo. This was a Rain whom Mor recognized, the Rain of today.
‘One of my father’s last pictures,’ said Rain.
Mor was moved. How he must have treasured her. In this sudden movement of
sympathy towards her father it occurred to him for the first time that his
general attitude to this person was one of hostility.
‘Who possesses that picture?’ Mor asked.
‘The Honourable Mrs Leamington Stephens,’ said Rain.
Mor frowned. What right had the Honourable Mrs Leamington Stephens to possess
such a picture of Rain? ‘I want it!’ he said.
‘I will paint one for you, dearest,’ said Rain. ‘I will paint many, many. I
will paint pictures of you. I will paint you over and over again.’
Mor saw the years ahead. The room was full of pictures of himself and Rain.
Himself reading upon the terrace at evening, working in the drawing-room in the
noon light, walking in the wilderness between the dusty leaves of the bushes
where there was no path. Rain, slowly losing her boyish looks, the tense and
precious simplicity of her childhood changing into the serenity of middle age,
and so picture behind picture away into the farthest future. Rain with her
brush in her hand, looking through a thousand canvases towards the end of life.
He said nothing. Rain was looking up at him. He met her eyes without smiling,
yearning for her to decide his fate.
‘Is there no picture here of your mother?’ Mor said at last.
‘No,’ said Rain. ‘My father hardly ever painted her.’
They moved a pace or two and Mor wondered to himself how much that missing face
would have told him. He wanted to ask a question, but Rain interrupted.
‘This is rather a curiosity,’ she said, pointing to a large canvas which hung
at the end of the room. Here both the faces appeared. Rain’s father sat behind
a table which was strewn with books and papers, facing the spectator. Upon the
left side of the table, propped up upon it, was a large gilt mirror, in which
could be seen the reflection of Rain and of the canvas which she was painting,
whereon the same picture appeared again, severely foreshortened. Rain’s father
was wearing an open-necked shirt. His close-cropped dark hair fell in a silky
fringe along his brow, his narrow brooding face looked intently upward towards
his daughter, and one hand rested upon the frame of the mirror wherein was seen
the reflection of her face, equally intently looking down on him. The heads
were close together and the resemblance between them was marked and touching.
‘That’s extraordinary!’ said Mor.
‘Not very successful, I’m afraid,’ said Rain. ‘I must try again sometime with
you.’ She spoke in the most ordinary tone, her attention still upon the
picture.
Mor thought: she has decided.
She
has decided. He began to want to get
away from the pictures. Without words they turned and went slowly down the
stairs. As his heels bit into the thick carpet Mor felt the pain of the
transition, back to the cold rainy autumnal afternoon and the roaring traffic
outside the door. Here all was the same as before, chilly, noisy, ugly, without
space, without leisure, without peace. He looked sideways at Rain as they came
out of the door. No, she was not quite the same; a new light fell upon her from
the pictures, she was strengthened and made radiant by her past. All the
different faces that he had seen, from the young girl with the plaits to the
posed beauty in the flowering dress dwelt in her face now, giving it suddenly a
new authority and a new age. He thought too how much at this moment she
resembled her father, except that what in him appeared as a sort of
self-contained moroseness appeared in her as a pedantic and dignified serenity,
which combined with her rounded head and fresh face of a child was absurd and
affecting. Mor was overcome with emotion.
It was raining steadily. Mor had no overcoat. Rain had a small umbrella
swinging over her arm. She handed it to him in silence and he opened it above
them both. Arm in arm they made their way back to Bond Street.
‘Tea at Fortnum and Mason,’ Rain decreed.
Tea at Fortnum and Mason! Mor was suddenly filled with a deep and driving joy
which furrowed through his body with such force that he did not at first know
that it was indeed joy that shook him so. She had decided. He had decided too.
He could do no other. ‘Rain — ’ he said.
She looked up, squeezing his arm, bright-eyed and confident. ‘I know, she said.
The rain began to fall faster. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Mor. ‘I’m not
sure that I could really live outside England, not all the time, not even most
of the time.’
‘Dear Mor, then we’ll live in England!’ said Rain.
She clutched his arm more tightly. The rain began to pelt down with spitting
violence. They started to run as quickly as they could in the direction of
Fortnum’s.

Chapter
Sixteen
IT was the following day. That evening Bledyard was to give his famous art
lecture, and Rain had been persuaded by Mr Everard that she really must be
present — especially as the lecture, on this occasion, was to be on the topical
subject of portrait painting. Mor usually cut Bledyard’s lecture, but this
time, as Rain was coming, of course he would come too. Since he had finally and
definitely made up his mind, the world had been completely altered. A
tremendous energy, which had previously consumed itself in perpetuating his
indecision and conjuring up all kinds of catastrophic fantasy, was transformed
into the purest joy. Mor now felt an intense benevolence towards his
colleagues, including Bledyard, and he found himself positively looking forward
to the lecture as if it were to be the most enormous treat. He would be sitting
in the same room as Rain, and as Bledyard talked he could think about her, and
see again the extraordinary and moving images of the previous day which still
hovered for him about her head, like a cloud of angels surrounding the madonna.
Mor had had a bad hour during the afternoon when he had drafted a very frank
letter to Nan. Even this task had been lightened, however, by the extreme
relief which he felt at finally knowing what the truth was and being able to
tell it. When he had completed the draft he roughly sketched a letter to Tim
Burke explaining briefly that after all he would not be able to stand as a
Labour candidate. Concerning this, Mor felt another quite separate and deep
regret. But he gave himself the same answer. He had won a great prize. He was
willing to pay for it. When he had done, there was no time left to copy the
drafts, so he put them away in a drawer. They would go on the morrow.
The one matter to which he had not yet let his thoughts fully turn was the
matter of the children. When he felt him self inclined to think about them he
told himself: whichever way I move, something must be destroyed - and the
destruction may well be less than I fear. After all, the children are nearly
grown-up now. We cannot lose each other altogether. But so far as he could he
prevented himself from considering the children. He had made up his mind, and
there was no point in indulging in painful self-laceration which had no longer
any relevance to the making of a decision. He had suggested in the draft letter
to Nan that nothing be said to Donald or Felicity until after Donald’s exam. He
had considered the possibility of delaying his letter to Nan until after this
date - but his anxiety to tell her what he had decided was too intense. He
felt, still, that his achievement was precarious and must be fixed and
established at once. Towards Nan he felt no more of his former anger, only a
dull feeling of hostility, mixed with pity and regret. He knew that she would
be very surprised. She would hardly be able to imagine that he would turn
against her decisively at last. At the thought of her surprise he felt a very
slight satisfaction which faded into a sense of shame. Then pity began to take
possession of his mind — and as soon as he was able to he brought the full
focus of his attention back towards Rain.
Bledyard’s lecture took place after supper and was to be given, as usual, in
the Gymnasium, which was easier to black out than the hall. In fact, it would
be dark soon after the lecture started, but it was worth blocking out the twilight
for the sake of the first few slides. It was to be hoped that the epidiascope
would not go wrong again, and that the number of slides inserted upside down
would be kept to a minimum. Somehow these things always seemed to happen at
Bledyard’s lecture, when their tendency to bring about total chaos was
especially strong. The most trivial incident, which on any other occasion would
pass unnoticed by the School, on this one was a cue for hysterics. The School
came to Bledyard’s lecture as to a festival or orgy, in the highest of spirits
and ready to be set off by anything. The atmosphere was infectious. Mor found
himself caught by it and looking forward in a crazy way to the enlivening of
proceedings by all kinds of absurdities.
He met Mr Everard crossing the playground. His face wore an anxious expression.
‘I hope you’re coming this time, Bill?’ he said.
‘Most certainly!’ said Mor. He felt like embracing Evvy. He wondered if he was
looking as wild as he felt.
‘It’s rather a relief that you’ll be there,’ said Evvy, shaking his head. ‘I
only hope things won’t get out of hand.’
The School was already trooping into the Gym. The dark curtains had been drawn,
and the lights were on inside. Outside, the evening was warm and the air was
penetrated with smells, conjured up by the recent rain, which lay in heavy
layers, earth and leaves and flowers. A pleasant hazy twilight enveloped the
school, softening the bleakness of the red brick and turning the neo-Gothic
into Gothic. Opposite to the Gym the tower soared up magnificently into the
curling rings of evening mist and darkness, and here and there a few lighted
windows made by their gold the surrounding air more dusk. One by one the lights
went out. It was customary for everyone at St Bride’s to attend Bledyard’s
lecture.
A violent and increasing din of high-pitched voices and clattering chairs
issued from the Gymnasium. Already the slightly hysterical note was to be
heard. Then someone clapped his hands and some voice, probably Hensman’s, said,
‘Stop that noise, you’ll bring the roof down! If you all talk in your ordinary
voices you’ll all hear each other perfectly well.’ An instant later the din was
renewed, louder than before. Mor reflected that he probably ought to be inside
supporting Hensman. It was on the latter that the task of working the
epidiascope had now devolved. Usually this task was performed by Mr Baseford —
but in his absence popular vote had given it to Hensman. Mor reflected that
Hensman could hardly do it worse than Baseford, and was likely to do it better,
since he was totally imperturbable and impervious to any kind of ragging. Mor
was rather glad that he had not himself been detailed for this tiresome, and on
this occasion rather nerve-rending, duty. Still leaving Hensman to control the
increasingly rowdy scene within, he stood looking towards the far end of the
playground. He hoped to see Rain arriving, and if possible to sit near her,
even next to her.
It was growing darker. A stream of juniors went by, carrying additional chairs.
They sped past in a mad race for the Gymnasium door. Three of them, reaching
the door simultaneously, locked themselves together into a thick yelling tangle
of small boys and upturned furniture in the doorway. A struggle developed,
someone pretended to have been knocked out. Mor took a few steps towards the
scene. The barricade of chairs and squirming bodies dissolved instantly and the
children vanished into the Gym, to dispute with their friends for the best
places. As Mor turned round again he saw Rain coming across the playground
escorted by Mr and Mrs Prewett. It seemed to Mor as if she glowed in the
twilight and came towards him carried by a gentle but infinitely powerful wind.
Even the Prewett’s, who were walking on each side of her, had caught some of
the radiance from her triumphal course. How exceedingly nice the Prewetts are!
Mor thought. They were both smiling at him. Rain’s face he could hardly see. As
he stepped forward, Evvy suddenly appeared out of the evening air and
intercepted Rain. He had been lurking in the doorway of the Library building,
shirking the scene in the Gym. He took charge of Rain and began to escort her
towards the door. Mor followed with Mr and Mrs Prewett.
As he entered, Mor blinked at the bright light within, and at the noise which had
now settled to a sort of continuous high-pitched rumbling scream, not unlike a
jet engine. He saw Evvy’s back ahead of him, and then his profile. Evvy was
visibly shaken by the scene. The small boys in the very front, once it had
become clear that some people would have to sit on the floor, had taken it into
their heads to lay several rows of chairs on their sides, and by this method to
seat three boys on each chair, one sitting on the back, one on the seat, and
one on the legs. Round each of the prostrated chairs a small squabble was going
on as the occupants attempted to reach a suitable equilibrium. Beyond this riot
area the older boys were massed, eager, chattering, wildly animated, right to
the back of the hall, some standing up, some kneeling on their chairs, some
sitting astride talking to people behind them. Already the rows were so crooked
in some places that it was impossible to discern whether there was a row at
all. The chairs were placed higgledy-piggledy in a great clattering undulating
sea.
Evvy, who seemed to be, no doubt because of the presence of Rain, more than
usually paralysed, picked his way without a word between the juniors down a
ragged aisle which had been left clear in the middle, at the far end of which
stood the epidiascope. Mor followed closely, nipping in in front of the
Prewett’s, determined if possible to sit next to Rain. He felt at that moment
as light-hearted as a Fifth-Former. As he passed through the shrieking barrage
of juniors he said in a penetrating voice, ‘Put those chairs upright!’ He hoped
this would not offend Evvy. But in fact when it came to it nothing ever
offended Evvy, dear old Evvy. And to permit this sort of anarchy right from the
start was really asking for trouble. The juniors scrambled to right the chairs,
and further battles then developed between the different trios as to who should
be the single occupant of each. Mor left them to it, passing on close behind
Rain and the Head.
In front of the epidiascope, on either side of the aisle, there were a number
of chairs which had been kept free by Hensman. Several masters had already
settled themselves in this region of comparative safety. With a sigh of relief
Evvy ushered Rain in and flopped down beside her. Mor was able quickly to
instal himself on her other side, and the Prewetts sat next to him. He looked
round to see who was behind him and to see if he could locate Donald in the
throng, but his son was not to be seen.
Bledyard had already arrived. He was usually in fact the first man in the Gym
on the evening of his lecture. He stood now in the open space in front of the
junior boys, leaning upon the long rod which he was to use to draw attention to
features of the various pictures and to tap the ground for the next slide.
Behind him a great white sheet had been suspended on the wall of the Gym. He
leaned there, looking into the pullulating crowd of boys, his face twisted into
a sort of bland and pensive expression, as if he were rehearsing what he was
about to say and finding it extremely interesting. Bledyard never needed to
speak from notes. When once set off, on any subject on which he chose to hold
forth, he could continue indefinitely in his stumbling but unhurried manner,
with sustained coherence and even elegance. Bledyard was in his way a good speaker
and could have impressed almost any audience but an audience of school-boys.
It was customary for lecturers, if they belonged to the school and were not
outsiders, to begin their lectures without introduction once the Headmaster had
arrived. Bledyard therefore watched to see Mr Everard seated, and then rapped
sharply upon the ground with his rod. He looked completely unruffled and
reminded Mor suddenly of a representation of a pilgrim, leaning on his staff,
patient and full of hope. Bledyard must surely know what he was in for. But he
seemed each year to be, on the occasion of his lecture, full simply of the
subject in hand, and he accepted the storms that so often broke over him
without surprise but also without interest. On one occasion when Demoyte had
had to stop the lecture in the middle because the School had become totally
hysterical, Bledyard would have been quite willing to continue, although not a
single word would have been audible. He stood now, head slightly bowed, as the
hubbub gradually died down and was reduced to a low mirthful murmur. He had
pushed his long limp strands of dark hair back behind each ear, revealing a
large area of very pale cheek, which now grew concave, sucked thoughtfully into
his mouth. The lights went out.
The murmur from the School increased in the sudden darkness and then died down.
Audaciously Mor thrust out his hand and found Rain’s hand near by. He squeezed
it violently. She returned the pressure and then gently disengaged hers. Mor
tried to catch it again. It eluded him, and alighted like a bird upon his
wrist, to give an admonitory pat and then vanish, to be locked away, chaperoned
by her other hand, on the far side of her knee.
The juniors were already giggling in anticipation. Bledyard said, ‘Quict
please, boys.’ A sort of silence fell at last.
The epidiascope came into action, casting a white square of light on to the
screen. By this illumination Mor turned to look at Rain’s profile. She was
looking sternly forward. He realized that, if he was not careful, she would
very shortly burst out laughing. He hurriedly transferred his attention
elsewhere, concentrated on remaining reasonably solemn himself.
Bledyard had started talking. He began, The human face has been described as
the most interesting surface in the world.‘ An explosion of laughter, quickly
muffled, came from the younger boys. ’By a mathematician a mathematician,‘ said
Bledyard. He did not find the word easy. A silent shudder of mirth went
backward through the room. ’Now shall we ask ourselves ourselves the question,‘
Bledyard went on, ’why we are always interested in faces, and why when we meet
our friends we look we look at their faces and not at their knees or elbows?
The answer is simple. Thoughts and emotions are more often expressed by movements
of the face than by movements of the knee or elbow.‘
A guffaw, which the School had been holding in with difficulty until the end of
this period, broke out explosively. Mor glanced sideways again and saw that
Rain was hiding her face in her handkerchief. Her chair trembled slightly.
Beyond her Mor caught a glimpse of Evvy, wide-eyed and serious above his
dog-collar. He began to feel that he could not hold out much longer. He started
to search for his own handkerchief.