Lorna doubted that her mother had ever confronted a nappy, let alone croup. She said, “My mother’s rather a long way away,” and the nurse nodded tactfully, scenting some dark disorder, some unspoken drama. They were not your run-of-the-mill young couple, this pair.
She said, “I used to come here to the Turners. Four children—bit of a madhouse, it was. You’ve perked the place up no end.” Her eye fell on Matt’s frescos. “The duck paintings are nice. More to my taste than those you’ve got up in the bedroom, I have to say.”
In the interests of salvaging his reputation, Matt displayed the engraving of a local farmyard scene. “Now that I like,” said the nurse. “Never mind it being rather modern style—you can still see what’s what. You carry on with that kind of thing.” She got up, and gave Molly to Lorna. “There you are, dear. She’ll be fine. Steam inhalations if she has another bout, like I said.”
“Thank you. I feel so relieved.”
“All in the day’s work.”
They stood at the door and watched the nurse wheel her bicycle out into the lane. Matt said, “Someone like that—someone useful—gives me a crisis of confidence. Art is of no use to anyone.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
Molly whimpered. They went inside.
He was working steadily. The book commission from the Curwen Press had been followed by another; there was Lucas’s Shakespeare project. From time to time, he would return to the series of original engravings inspired by local places which would form the core of an exhibition one day: the old wheelhouse of the mineral line, the quarry in the woods, a churchyard. Some days he was out in the landscape with his sketch pad. Mostly he was in the shed, or at one end of the kitchen table, the block in front of him, the tools lined up alongside, while Lorna fed Molly at the other end, or prepared vegetables, or simply watched for a few minutes.
Today, he was at the last stage of an engraving of a scene nearby—a cottage with geese in the foreground, trees, a wall, a figure against the curve of the lane. Lorna could see the ghost of his drawing now on the block, lurking on the black surface that turned silver as it was tilted. There were roughly gouged areas where the ginger-brown boxwood showed—the shapes of the geese, of the cottage—and silver planes of meticulous fret and pattern. Sky was a shower of black and silver lines, the solidity of a wall was a pile of little silver brick boxes. There were tiny scraped lines of thatch, silver scribbles that were leaves, the sharp stitching of grass fronds, the curve of a tree trunk—silver/black on one side, an intricate medley of lines on the other. The light changed each time the block was shifted, from black to silver, and you saw that somehow Matt’s drawing had floated onto the wood, and out of the block shone this new transformation of that scene: it was that place, but it was now something else entirely—it was an artifact, a flight of fancy, an interpretation.
Lorna said, “Those geese hiss at me when I go past on the way to the village.”
“Of course. You’re on their territory. Take a stick with you.”
“I know how to say boo to a goose.” She came around and stood behind him. “This is going to be one of your best. How many have you done now since we came here?”
“No idea. A fortune in boxwood, that’s all I know. I should be getting back to Shakespeare—Lucas is chivvying. You may have to pose for Titania, in your nightie.”
“I saw her once, at the open air theater in Regent’s Park. About a hundred years ago, it seems. Puck came leaping out of bushes.”
Matt put down the graver in surprise. “Really? I saw that. You could stand at the back for one and six. You’d have been the toffs with deck chairs. Maybe we were there at the same time. Titania takes on a new significance.”
“Maybe we walked past each other. Not knowing.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’d have known.”
She hugged him. “I’m disturbing you.” She sat down again, picked up a letter. “My mother says they want to come and see us. In the spring. And to meet Molly.”
“Of course.” He looked across at her. “We can cope with this, can’t we?”
Matt’s parents had visited not long after Molly’s birth, with Bryony, making the ponderous journey by road from the Welsh borders in the Austin 7. They had contained their dismay at the primitive condition of the cottage with much determined comment about what a lovely spot this was, and had been rapturous over Molly—even Bryony, who was now established in her first job, and every inch the career teacher. She held the baby in a gingerly grasp, as though she might attempt to escape, and said to Matt, “Well done, you.” The three of them stayed at a local bed and breakfast; they explored the area, walked on the moor, and made long daily calls at the cottage. Lorna cooked rabbit stew, a chicken from the farm, and baked cakes. Matt’s mother took him aside to tell him that she was a lovely girl: “We thought it was all a bit hasty, at the time. We felt you’d rushed into it, both of you. Now I know her, I can understand, more.”
Lorna had felt awkward with them at first, and then, gradually, had relaxed. Removed from the requirements and expectations of her own parents’ world, she had discovered that she was now more capable than she had ever realized of being at ease with people—with any sort of person. She no longer felt herself so glaringly defined, an unwilling specimen of a particular world.
Now, she said to Matt, “We’ll manage. It won’t be like your parents, but we’ll manage.”
Matt went to London. He had finished the set of engravings for Lucas’s edition of Lamb’s Tales; the blocks had to be safely delivered to Fulham. It was the first time that he and Lorna had been apart in nearly two years.
“You’ll be all right? Sure?”
“Of course. Go. Enjoy it. See friends. You’ve been cooped up here long enough.”
“So have you.”
“I’ve never been less cooped. I do what I want, every day, don’t I?”
All the way to London, in the train, she was in his head. He saw her face, riding above the fields and hills, the little towns, the station platforms. Arriving at Paddington, he felt battered by the crowds, by this accelerated world. In his student days, he had found the perpetual movement of the city stimulating, challenging; now, as he made his way to Fulham, he wondered if he could ever feel like that again.
“I seem to be a country bumpkin,” he told Lucas. “Take me to some rowdy pub, so that I can find my feet.”
Over a pint, he acclimatized. Places like this had been his habitat, time was. “That’s better. I’m learning the language again.”
Lucas was distressed. He had just heard that an acquaintance of his had been badly wounded in Spain, fighting with the International Brigade. “They’d never let me loose with a gun, not with my bloody eyesight, but there must be something I could do. One should go.” He pulled himself up. “N-not you. Me.”
“Why not me?”
“Because you’ve got Lorna. And Molly. It’s different.”
“Whereas you’re expendable?”
Lucas shrugged.
“Don’t be so idiotic,” said Matt. “No one’s expendable, wife and baggage or not. But I know what you mean. Trouble is, I simply can’t imagine myself shooting people, however strongly I felt. Can you?”
“If the Fascists aren’t stopped in Spain, it’ll be France next, eventually us. Spain is the confrontation. How can one stand back?”
“You’re not answering my question. Maybe you’re lucky that your glasses let you off the hook, in the last resort.”
Lucas looked away. “All right, we’re not soldier material. True enough. But when push comes to shove…”
Matt said, “That is something we may find out in due course, if the pessimists are to be believed.”
They fell silent. Matt got up to go to the bar. “Enough of that. I’m under instructions to enjoy myself. Let’s celebrate this book. Pint?”
Some while later, slightly drunk, Lucas reverted to his mood of gloom. “All I want is to make books. That’s all I thin
k about. You’re an artist…. We’re private people. But there’s the world snarling away, Hammond getting his leg blown off in Spain, and you can’t stay private. It’s…it’s intolerable.”
“People have had to put up with it since forever. Nobody’s exempt from history. If our turn comes…well, it was ever thus. Anyway, it may not. Hitler’s a loudmouth. I prefer to think he’ll back off, like some people are saying.”
The pub was a warm, convivial haven, full of talk, bursts of laughter, hazy with cigarette smoke. Do I miss this sort of thing? thought Matt. But right now it was Lorna he missed. He imagined her in the cottage, lighting the lamps, getting something for supper. A couple of days, and he’d be back there.
Lorna’s parents visited, in early summer, when Molly was going on for two years old. Marian Bradley picked her way cautiously over the threshold of the cottage and stared around: “Oh, my dear…” she said, after a few moments. Lorna and Matt saw her gaze drift across the open range, the dresser with its assorted crockery, the scrubbed table, the stone sink. They all moved through into the next room, which seemed at once a size smaller, overwhelmed by Gerald Bradley’s bulk and his wife’s force field of unease. Marian sat on the sagging couch, and looked around some more. “Well, it’s cozy,” she said gamely. “Quite original, painting pictures on the walls like that, I must say.” She noticed the window, and the green reach of Somerset beyond: “Lovely view, anyway.”
They accepted cups of tea, and slices of cake. Molly was displayed, and worked a certain magic. Marian took her jacket off and lit a cigarette. Gerald spoke at some length about a man he’d been at school with who lived now at Something Manor, a couple of miles away. Had Matt and Lorna come across him? They had not.
During the next couple of hours Lorna knew that she had traveled a long way since last she saw her parents. She was reborn, it seemed, and while they were not strangers—by no means—they had acquired a strangeness. She felt sad about this, but also quite accepting. Her childhood seemed to be shut away behind glass, filled with these familiar figures, her mother and father and brothers, who were now distanced—known, and yet also unreachable. Her parents sat there in the cottage, talking hectically; she felt as though they were acquaintances. She wondered if they felt the same.
Her father talked about the boys. Roddy had finished at Sandhurst, with flying colors. Martin was in chambers with a leading barrister: “One of the very top men, I understand.” And Roddy was engaged to someone called Sally.
“Such a sweet girl,” said Marian. “One of the Nesbits. You went to dancing class with them, Lorna.”
Matt was quiet, courteous, attentive. He listened, with apparent interest, as the names of friends and relatives he did not know were paraded by the Bradleys. From time to time Marian would remember his ignorance and offer some quick benign enlightenment. Later, Matt realized that they had never once asked him a personal question, that in fact they knew little or nothing of his own background.
“I suppose we should meet his people,” Marian had said, with stiff resignation. This was on the last occasion that Lorna had seen her alone, a few days after she and Matt were married, when she returned for the last time to Brunswick Gardens to collect the rest of her things.
“I don’t think there’s really any point,” Lorna had replied.
She could not imagine the conjunction of those two sets of parents. She had visited Matt’s family soon after they were married; the Faradays had been surprised but welcoming. In her mind’s eye, she saw her mother and father receiving the Faradays in the Brunswick Gardens drawing room, and shuddered.
The small room in the cottage began to feel more and more constricted, as the visit progressed. Lorna suggested a stroll along the lane. Her father looked relieved, and rose with alacrity. Outside, they moved in a cohort between the hedge banks, Marian quickstepping on high heels, Matt with Molly astride his hip. Lorna pointed out wildflowers, and recited names. “I never knew anything about all this,” she said. “Now I can’t stop hunting for things I haven’t yet found. I’ve got a book.”
Marian peered at toadflax, bush vetch, red campion. “So pretty…” She was a townsperson to the hilt; the country, to her, was a pleasing backdrop seen from a train or through car windows. Family holidays had been spent at Biarritz or Torquay or some southern French resort.
Gerald had been on shooting parties and could put up a passable show of rural interest. He wondered which hunt operated in these parts. Matt and Lorna did not know. Gerald talked knowledgeably about pheasant drives. “Do you shoot at all?” he asked Matt.
Matt laughed. It was the first spontaneous and assertive sound that had come from him that afternoon, and the Bradleys both looked startled. They were gathered in a gateway at that moment, contemplating the sweep of landscape before them—the fields tipping down to the distant gray sea, which reached away to the coastline of Wales, with the darker smears of Steepholm and Flatholm perched on the horizon.
“I’m afraid I can’t imagine myself with a gun in my hand,” said Matt.
Gerald appeared perplexed. “Really? Oh, well…”
“You know, it’s beginning to feel a tiny bit chilly,” said Marian. “Perhaps we should go back.” A thought struck her. “And we haven’t seen any of Matt’s drawings.”
They returned to the cottage. “You needn’t, you know,” Lorna said to Matt, quietly, as they went in. “We can make an excuse.”
He shrugged, and squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry—it’s all right.”
Marian clapped her hands. “Do let’s see, Matt.”
He brought out some recent work from the series of engravings inspired by local scenes, and spread the prints on the kitchen table.
“Awfully good,” said Gerald. He seemed genuinely surprised.
Marian inspected, with little exclamations. “So clever…the way you’ve done the roof of that barn.”
“I can’t be doing with this abstract stuff you see around nowadays,” said Gerald. “You steer clear of that, Matt.”
Marian took his arm. She looked at him, eager. “Darling, I’ve had a thought. I want us to buy one!” She turned to Matt. “May we?”
“Good idea,” said Gerald.
Matt smiled. “Which one would you like? But it’s a present. My pleasure.”
“Oh, but how sweet of you. Really, you shouldn’t…I can’t decide…” Marian’s hand hovered. “This one, I think. I can just see it in the small spare bedroom by the window.” She had chosen the study of the farmyard by the lane, with the geese.
I don’t want that in the spare room at Brunswick Gardens, thought Lorna. Like an extra bit of wallpaper. None of this has any place there—here, where I live now, and the way we live, and Matt’s work. None of it has anything to do with Brunswick Gardens or that world. Molly began to grumble; Lorna gave her a rusk and stood by, trying to look pleased while the engraving was packaged and her mother gave more little cries of satisfaction.
And then began the process of departure, oiled by the sense of relief all round. Much was made of Molly: “I’m going to send some little smocks from Woollands,” said Marian. Gerald busied himself with the car, checking oil and water. He pecked Lorna on both cheeks, shook Matt by the hand. Marian embraced Lorna: “You must bring Molly to see us in London.” They got into the car; Marian settled a rug over her knees. As the car turned into the lane her hand fluttered at the window. In spirit, she would now be back at Brunswick Gardens, Lorna knew, a task completed, an awkward day now shelved. She wondered if her mother still loved her, or if her dereliction had effectively stemmed what mothers are supposed to feel. “You have been an utter disappointment,” Marian had said, during that last disastrous confrontation. Lorna thought that nothing that Molly did could ever change what she felt about her, nothing.
She said to Matt, “You didn’t have to give them the engraving. You should have let them pay for it.”
“Even penniless artists are entitled to the occasional lavish gesture. I enjoyed it. Mom
entary sense of power.”
“I love you.”
“God knows why.”
The sun had come out; light chased across the hills. A buzzard floated straight ahead, high above. They stood at the garden gate and watched. “Look,” Lorna said to Molly. “Look up there.” The baby stared at her, and broke into a seraphic smile. There was a smell of crushed grass, and wood smoke.
From somewhere, there came a rumble. It rose to a low roar, died away; like distant thunder, like gunfire. Lorna found herself shuddering. “What on earth was that?”
“They must be blasting, in the quarry.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “Could there be a cup of tea, do you think?”
They went inside, restored to privacy, to intimacy.
Matt was acquiring a reputation—some capricious process whereby his name traveled, and left ripples in the arcane world of those concerned with wood engraving: the galleries, the presses, the collectors. Lucas had placed the rest of the prints left with him in exhibitions, and all were sold. He began to talk of a one-man show, up in London. Finish your Somerset series, he urged, this could be a big thing, this could put you in the front rank. Evangelical fervor smoked up from his letters—that eager commitment to Matt’s talent. Matt wrote back, teasing Lucas for being an entrepreneur, but was secretly touched, and worked harder than ever, putting in long hours, day after day.
And thus, in due course, Lorna found herself on the train to London, heading for Lucas’s house, and the opening view of the exhibition. Matt had gone ahead with the engravings, to supervize framing and hanging. When she arrived at Paddington, with Molly in the pushchair, he was there to meet her—exuberant, excited by the effect of the exhibition: “The room is perfect—white walls, bare floor. It sets them off. I still can’t quite believe it. When we’d finished the hang, I just looked, and thought: crikey, did I really do all that?”