The Walking Stick (12 page)

It was one of those times in life when because everything moves as usual, nothing seems to move at all.

On 21 July, which was a Friday, I felt I just couldn’t go back to the flat and spend the whole weekend there, so I went on my own to the Academy Cinema to see a reissue of the Bergman film
Wild Strawberries
. I got a seat at the side away from everyone else and watched the remaining few minutes of the secondary film. As the big
Fin
showed up larger and larger through the
last sunset someone walked along the row and sat next to me.

The lights came up slowly. People stirred and yawned and looked about. A girl came up the aisle selling icecreams and soft drinks, and a little cluster formed around her. The dull discomfort in
the middle of my body, which had been with me so long, turned and twisted into life.

He said: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. Honest I couldn’t.’

I moved my stick to the other side of the seat, out of his way. I was wearing my old office dress, the grey linen one with the wide green belt.

‘Have you seen the main film?’

‘No.’

‘Nor have I. Mind if I stay here?’

‘As you please.’

‘I’ve only been here about ten minutes. How long’ve you been here?’

‘About the same.’

‘As soon as my eyes got used to the dark I looked around and there you were!’

It didn’t seem likely. Probably he’d followed me from the office. I stared at the advertisements trying to empty mind of thought and heart of feeling. Blood and nerves obey. Be cold,
detached, secure, an iron tower in a wind, not a frail surface-rooted tree.

Brown suede boots crossed themselves beside me. Dark brown small check trousers, a cinnamon shirt with white collar and a green knitted tie. No jacket. Probably he was frowning at me; if I
looked up he’d be staring at me with those contorted lines over nose and brow.

‘It’s been hell not seeing you,’ he said.

More people coming in now for the beginning of the big film. Two sat down behind us, began to rustle chocolate paper. Hell? But why? There are other women. Dozens and dozens all able-bodied,
glad of a strong vigorous young man. Then what? He wants me. That’s it. And no one else’ll do. For some reason. And I?

He said: ‘Been to the ice rink since?’

‘No.’

‘I went a couple of times, hoping you might be tempted or perhaps go with someone else.’

The advertisements were over. Music played. More people, filing in, settling.

‘You living with your sister all the time now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t your father and mother mind?’

‘They’re both away.’

‘When do you have your holidays?’

‘Week after next.’

The lights began to go down.

He leaned over. ‘Look, Deborah, you think I did you dirt not telling you about Lorne. I
did
. But it was for fear of losing you. I told you that, tried to explain. Didn’t I
explain that to you? Every time it came up and I was going to say something, I just looked at you and thought, if I tell her she’ll walk out.’

‘Perhaps I would have.’

‘Well, then.’

The curtains were sliding back as the taped music died and was superseded by the soundtrack of the film.

He sensed he had a good arguing point. ‘What
should
I have done? Tell me. How could I have done it?’

I sighed: ‘I don’t know. It’s difficult to answer when you—’

‘There you are, you see. Look, Deborah, when this is over—’

‘Ssh. Ssh!’ said someone behind us.

‘Let’s go,’ he whispered, making a move.

‘No. I want to see the film.’

‘I’ll talk all through it.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

He subsided, but I didn’t know if he’d stay quiet for long. He put his hand on my arm. Though I made no response, I didn’t take it away.

So we sat through that strange sombre classic. At first I couldn’t follow it for thinking of the choice I’d to make when it was over; but when I did follow it it seemed as if it was
my own life. Infinite pathos of lost youth, joys of childhood fading into the past, sound of dead voices, echo of laughter; these seemed to fill and flood my memory. The tension of my half-broken
love affair heightened every light and shadow so that I was caught up in it and became a part of the tale. I felt the loss of an emotionally rich life that hadn’t ever really been mine. In
the end I shed no tears, but there were tears in my heart.

When it was over we moved together slowly towards the exit, going with the crowd. I didn’t know what effect if any the film had had on him. Fragments of the conversation of others drifted
around.

Outside he said: ‘Coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Drive you home?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Ennismore Gardens?’

‘Yes.’

Little red car. Same smell of petrol and leather and paint. Same rattles. The wind blew back on to my hair. London was warm and traffic fairly light. We could have raced down Park Lane, but he
kept to a moderate speed.

Seeing a film like that gives a new look to your own life. When you’ve been concentrating on the eternal verities, temporary misunderstandings look pretty trivial. It seemed to me just
then that childhood, maturity, marriage, old age and death were each no more than the turning of a page; and soon it’s all gone, and nothing’s left but the sad wind sighing in an empty
garden. Just how big did my own doubts loom in this context? They made no louder sound than a pin drop in a great hall.

After the car stopped we sat in silence for a while.

I would have loved to talk to him about the film, to tell him what I felt, to say that tragedy of this quality had a liberating effect on tired and twisted emotions. One wanted to
proclaim
that there was some justification to life, that there was
some
purpose to it more dedicated than the blind reactions of an amoeba, that all one could do was reject and throw
out the trivial, the petty, the cheap, the vulgar, the shoddy, the sham. And say, I am a human being, and as such am greater than the sum of my parts. I live. I breathe. I am. Let the pages be
turned . . .

But he didn’t speak and I didn’t speak, because I was afraid he wouldn’t understand.

The sky had a whiteness that comes only from the moon; it encroached even on the cinnamon glow of London.

‘Do me a favour, Deborah?’

‘What?’

‘However you feel about me, give me a chance to finish the painting. You don’t need to get any more fenced in. But I’m stuck, and it’s hell to be stuck. One more sitting
might do. Two at the most.’

‘All right.’

He took a breath. ‘Thanks.’

I opened the door, anxious to be gone now.

‘When? Can I come for you tomorrow morning?’

‘If you want.’

‘I want.’

I opened the door, got my stick and went in. After shutting the front door behind me I stood back to it for a minute or two, waiting for his engine to restart. I couldn’t forget the
strange dream in the film of the coffin and the dreamer seeing his own face as a dead man.

At last I went into the living room. Sarah called from the kitchen.

‘Good film?’

‘Great, thanks.’

‘Coffee? I’m just making some.’

‘Lovely.’

After a minute or two more I went to the mirror and pushed my hair back more or less in place. I ought to wash it tonight. Sarah was still in the kitchen. I went to the window and parted the
curtain an inch. He was still sitting there in his car smoking a cigarette.

While I was sitting on the Saturday morning, he said: ‘I’d like to tell you about Lorne.’

‘Oh . . . It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me. I want you to know about it.’

‘She was five feet four and dark, with blue eyes.’

He painted steadily for a minute, refusing to be put off. ‘And twenty years old. She’d come from Cork and had got a temporary job as a receptionist to a coloured dentist in Jamaica
Road. I had a toothache and went along to the first brass plate I could find. She let me in.’

I stirred.

‘Don’t move. It’s just great as it is . . .’ He picked up a tube of paint and squeezed some on to his palette. He dabbed it with a brush and began to mix. ‘She was
horribly lonely, see? She couldn’t bear London. She knew nobody out of all the millions. They’d no friendliness, she said . . . I suppose it attracted me, her being like that . . . She
was pretty in a way. I was her only real friend in London, she said. One day we decided to get married.’

A cloud moved over the sun and he looked up, scowling, as if someone were standing in his light. He said: ‘Living together’s different from loving together, isn’t it. We never
somehow made it. I’ve always heard of the Irish – haven’t you – as being happy, easygoing, careless, untidy, willing to live in a mess. Just like me in fact. She
wasn’t like that. She was all for neatness, carefulness, looking after details. And she always worried. If I’m painting I like to stop when I want to stop, not when the potatoes are
ready. And when I stop I like to drop things where I can pick ’em up next day. She was forever struggling to make me live as she thought I ought to live, quiet and orderly, see, and it just
didn’t work.’

‘You don’t like order?’

‘I don’t like someone who
worries
about it. But Lorne never settled here in this studio, she never settled in this district. She thought it was ugly and everything about
London was big and hard and cold and grey. She made no other friends. And the break-up was partly my fault. In those days I expected people would like what I painted and want to buy it – some
of it at least. I wasn’t – geared down to failure, as you might say, and that made me pretty short tempered. She was nearest to me, living here, and got what there was. She didn’t
like it. I don’t blame her for
that
.’

‘Generous of you.’

He smiled. ‘Well, I wanted you to know it wasn’t some grotty Bohemian affair, it was a genuine marriage that genuinely went wrong, the same as it can in your swank Hampstead circles.
We haven’t divorced, because she’s a Catholic, but she left me eighteen months ago and I haven’t even seen her for twelve.’

‘Why don’t you try again?’

‘I don’t want to. No more would she.’

When we’d finished that morning he said: ‘One more sitting’ll do it. Like to see it now?’

I slid off the chair and limped to the easel. One isn’t ever much of a judge of one’s own portrait, and I couldn’t decide whether the girl with the coppery brown hair and the
dark eyes and the fair complexion was like me or not. I thought I looked as if I were listening to something. Somehow he’d made me look a bit more lush, a bit more sexy than I really was, as
if he was maybe reading into me what he wanted to see there.

I said: ‘Did you mean it, what you said just now? About being geared down to failure?’

‘What?’ His eyes were suddenly a very clear grey as he blinked toward the river. ‘Oh, that. Yes. Nasty medicine, but better to swallow.’

‘D’you think being reconciled to failure at twenty-five is a good thing?’

‘It’s better than living among the ostriches . . . But of course I’m making a big drama of it. I don’t really think my stuff’s hopeless, otherwise I wouldn’t
push on. I mean failure in a money sense.’

‘Hasn’t Jack Foil offered you a hundred guineas for this?’

‘Who told you?’

‘He did. He came into Whittington’s a couple of weeks ago.’

The morning was cool, and I’d brought a light linen coat with me. I went to pick this up.

He said: ‘Can’t we lunch somewhere before I take you home?’

‘Leigh . . . I know lots of the people who run the galleries in the West End.’

He was putting his brushes in their jars of turpentine. ‘Can we lunch?’

‘Yes. I ought to be back by three, as Virginia is coming home.’

‘I’m afraid of going to these West End sharks. They’re interested in nobody but the latest French discovery or some gimmicky bloke who frames his pictures with old lavatory
seats.’

‘Not these. Of course they run with public taste – they have to if they’re going to live. But I’m sure they’d be absolutely honest with you.’

He put out his bottom lip doubtfully.

‘How long is it since you tried any gallery in the West End?’ I asked.

‘About eighteen months.’

‘Well, haven’t you improved, moved on since then? Just this portrait seems an advance to me. Jack Foil thinks the same.’

‘I know.’ He wiped his hands on a much stained cloth. ‘All right, if you think so. And thanks for the interest. That’s the one certain good thing that can come out of
it.’

Through Smith-Williams I was able to make an appointment with Lewis Maud, the older of the two brothers, for Friday at three, and another with Arthur Hays of the Cheltenham
Galleries at 4:30.

The Maud Gallery was at the smarter end of Grosvenor Street, but its windows were old-fashioned, and they’d done nothing to liven up the inside with modern furnishings. All the same its
turnover was probably as big as any in London. Lewis Maud was a third-generation English Jew of about fifty and was the sort of man you’d never notice in a group. Quiet-spoken, badly dressed
and casual, he had no pretensions and no side. Everything about him was strictly workmanlike, and he’d no room for theories and schools. For this reason I thought he would appeal to Leigh; at
least they could talk the same language, whatever was said in it.

Leigh had brought four paintings. I felt apprehensive about the whole thing now it was on me, but hopeful and excited as well. I introduced them and they talked amiably enough, and Lewis Maud
pointed out one or two new names among the pictures on his walls. We trailed about the gallery, Leigh making a few assenting grunts and I trying to comment intelligently. There was no one else in
the place, but after a few minutes Maud led us into his office at the back, in which there was nothing much but a desk and an easel, and said: ‘Well, I think we have to see these paintings of
yours, Mr Hartley. If you’d be obliging enough to put them on that easel one by one, I’ll sit here. The light’s good. Sometimes in the winter it’s dark in here . .
.’