The Walking Stick

  ‘Let’s drive into Cadiz and buy a pair.’

  ‘It’s miles. Let’s wait for a wet day.’

  ‘The sea’s rough and the tide’s out now. It’d take us a couple of hours each way at the most.’

  ‘I’ll come for the drive.’

  ‘You’ll come for a pair of shoes.’

  On the way there I said: ‘Leigh, we’ve been away five days and you haven’t let me pay for anything so far. That’s ridiculous.’

  He fiddled with his sunglasses. ‘It’s the principle of the thing.’

  ‘I thought you claimed not to have principles.’

  ‘I’ve my own set, made to measure, see. I’d never mind pinching someone’s tiara or travelling by air on a forged ticket – but I don’t take a girl on a holiday and expect it to be a Dutch treat.’

  ‘It’s as much my pleasure as it is yours.’

  He glanced quickly at me. ‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Deborah.’

  ‘I must have said nicer things than that.’

  ‘Yes, but when we’ve been making love. Anyone says nice things then. This is coolly, in the light of day, like.’

  We travelled over the long empty road, broken only by the occasional clump of pines, the distant white-walled farm, the advertisement hoarding for brandy or sherry.

  ‘You’ve never told me,’ I said, ‘how much money you have to live on; how much your aunt’s legacy brings you in.’

  ‘Oh, I’m spending capital. I told you that when we first met.’

  ‘It’s not a very good idea, is it? How long will it last?’

  ‘Not long. When it’s gone it’s gone.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I’ll work at something else. Maybe before it’s gone. I’ve not much encouragement to go on wasting paint.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  He shrugged. ‘Haven’t thought yet.’

  We reached the causeway to Cadiz about eleven and got to the town in time to do some shopping before everything closed for the afternoon. We found a square in the centre of the town and a place to park the car, presided over by the usual Spanish cripple, this one in a wheelchair. A fellow feeling, a sympathetic twinge.

  We wandered down the narrow slits of streets and soon found a shoe shop. The shoes were cheap and of good style and quality, and, gripping my arm, Leigh pushed his way in through the bead curtains. I bought two pairs of shoes. My feet weren’t all that much different in size, and I didn’t try too hard, as I was convinced I’d not be able to wear them. But just as we were leaving the shop I pointed to a pair of high-heeled crimson kid with a bow in front and said: ‘Aren’t those lovely!’ And he said: ‘Buy them.’ And I said: ‘That’s impossible.’ And he said: ‘Just for the fun. You can wear ’em in bed.’ And I laughed and said: ‘I’ve never owned a high-heeled pair of shoes in all my life.’ And he said: ‘Now’s the time to begin,’ and we turned back.

  After lunch we drove to the beach and Leigh bathed, but I wouldn’t because the beach was crowded and there were a few English and Germans about. Later we went back for tea in the town, and I said: ‘Leigh, there was a good man’s shop on the other side from the shoe shop. Let me buy you something. There was a sweater and one or two other things.’

  His eyelids drooped. ‘That’s because you don’t think much of the clothes I wear, isn’t it?’

  We went back to the narrow street which now in the slanting afternoon sunlight was thronged with black-coated people; and there we bought two sweaters, a pair of beach trousers, shorts, a smart jacket in fine blue wool.

  We drove home, watching the sun sink itself into a raft of cloud floating over the sea. The old ramparts of Cadiz were black against the vanilla sky.

  As we came through San Fernando, Leigh said: ‘I reckon you’re taking me in hand, aren’t you?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, these clothes. Quieter. A bit less juke box.’

  ‘Don’t you like them – ’

  ‘Yes, sure. They’re OK.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘And this business of stopping me combing my hair. That’s another thing. Not done.’

  ‘Well, your hair looks a lot better without it.’

  He brooded for a few minutes. ‘You’ll never make a silk purse out of me, you know.’

  ‘I’m not trying. I like you as you are.’

  ‘With amendments.’

  ‘Very little ones. Do you mind?’

  ‘No, not really. Not so that it matters.’

  We drove on a long way. I could still see he was thinking of it.

  ‘Deborah, I sometimes wonder.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whether this flop in my painting – whether in a way it’s had its pay off—’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, it’s altered us, hasn’t it? Our relationship, as you might say.’

  ‘Well, yes I—’

  ‘You see, I wonder . . . I was always the one in charge, wasn’t I, telling you to snap out of it, do new things with your leg, rise above it. But now, since then, in a way I’m crippled – in my chosen job. That failure meant a lot to me – more even than you imagine. Well . . . now we’re on equal terms. D’you think you’d ever have come away with me if that hadn’t happened?’

  ‘I didn’t come away with you out of pity, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, but I think it had some effect on you, didn’t it? Like feeling you were helping me instead of just being helped . . .’

  ‘Leigh,’ I said, ‘I swore when I came on this holiday not to think, not to ask myself questions, not try to sort anything out, but just to enjoy myself, to be. So I have. So I’ve done that. Well . . . I don’t want you to start!’

  Neither of us spoke after that. A real sense of contentment, just driving back knowing we’d eat dinner in the little restaurant of the motel, waited on by the white-coated Moroccan boy from Ceuta, drinking a bottle of wine while the candles guttered, and then going across to our chalet to make love.

  By now we’d come to know each other with a physical intimacy that I still found not quite believable. Most times I completely forgot my deformity in his forgetting of it. For the first time my thin leg in nakedness of the whole body seemed natural, as natural as the good-shaped one, as natural as the curling brown hairs about his navel, as his strong broad loins. And I’m pretty fastidious over many things; small things easily offend. But there was nothing in him to offend; he had a sense of judgement, a lack of coarseness that many better educated men couldn’t have equalled.

  But in thought we were still infinitely apart; our minds didn’t interlock in the least, they moved in the same ambience but separately, making contact as they could.

  One day we were talking about Whittington’s, and I told him of an Italian who had come in and asked them to offer for sale three Tiepolo sketches which in fact it turned out later he had stolen in Rome. While they were examining these he had contrived to steal six small English water-colours which were on view at the time and which he took back to Rome and put up for auction there. Only someone’s quick eye and the last-minute intervention of Interpol had prevented the double swindle.

  Leigh was disgusted, not because the Italian had tried to cheat us but because he had done it so badly.

  ‘Lord help us! How could he hope to get away with it?’

  ‘He nearly did. He’d twice done it successfully in France.’

  Leigh brooded a minute. ‘I suppose you do get things stolen from the auction rooms?’

  ‘Very, very little. A pretty careful watch is kept on the small things, like jewellery.’

  We were lying on the beach, but partly under the shade of the beach umbrellas we’d bought, because we were both brown in places and sore in places. It’s always difficult to get a consistent tan. He put his hand on my back, where the costume ended, and moved his fingers along my spine.

  ‘I really think I’d rob a bank to be able to do this for
ever.’

  ‘You’d tire of it.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Not if we could be like this for ever.’

  He laughed. ‘You see . . . God, I’m flattered.’

  I put my face against his shoulder, smelling the warm skin. ‘Don’t be.’

  The sun stole an inch more of our shade.

  ‘From here,’ I said, ‘Tarifa looks like a medieval Moorish town. The other morning I got up early when you were still asleep, and it looked as if it were floating in the sea.’

  ‘I wonder how often it’s been raided and pillaged and burned,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s what I was cut out for, to be a pirate, not a painter, to take what I want and damn the consequences.’

  ‘You sound very lawless this afternoon, robbing banks and walking planks.’

  ‘Or getting other people to walk ’em. It’s always the successful pirate you think of in your dreams, isn’t it – yes, the successful bank robber – even the successful painter. Never the one who comes unstuck.’

  ‘You’ve not so much as sketched since you came. Don’t these new surroundings make you feel—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said roughly. ‘They make me feel.’

  ‘So?’

  He kneeled up in the sand and sat back on his haunches. Bent double, his legs looked immensely strong. ‘This is the best time I’ve ever had in my life, Deborah.’

  ‘And for me.’

  ‘So although I’m happy as hell, there’s the old canker gnawing underneath.’

  ‘If your—’

  ‘Sometimes in the middle of all this happiness with you I feel I could tear the world in strips. Why the hell should I be given an urge and no talent to satisfy it! If I’m talking about robbing banks and turning pirate, that’s why! I wish I could! By Christ, I wish I could!’

  We were silent for a bit. Presently his hands unclenched and he slid down into a sitting position again and put his arm round my waist. Very quietly then he added: ‘I wish I could.’

  After I was ill the muscles of my foot and lower leg had been so paralysed that my foot had flopped about like the foot of a broken doll. When at length it was decided that no more recovery could be expected, I had two operations (arthrodesis, they called it), one to fuse the bone of the ankle, and one the bones of the foot. This meant taking away the cartilages in the joints so that the bones could then fuse together solid. Following it, of course, there could never be any spring in the foot again, or any movement not initiated by the muscles higher up the leg; but it did give me something solid to walk on, and I’d managed pretty well with the stick and the irons and the built-up shoe. And later without the irons.

  For a few winters I’d suffered hideously with chilblains and my leg had swollen and gone puffy and blue; but now I had injections each autumn, carbolic injected into the lumbar spine, which wasn’t pleasant but it worked miracles.

  In ordinary shoes, without the support and the extra inch provided by the built-up shoe I thought I should wag from side to side in that horrible way you see some people doing; but I found, as I’d found on the beach, that somehow I was able to take the weight on the ball of my foot without the heel quite touching the ground. It was odd to do this, because I’d never actually tried it before, but one soon got into the way, and by throwing my weight a little more forward I didn’t seem to need the stick so much. At first I only tried it a couple of hours a day.

  So ten days went by. Our skin had reddened and flaked and browned, and now it could only darken with every new day’s sun. Leigh had now run out of money and I was at last able to use some of my travellers cheques.

  In all our talk no mention was ever made of Lorne. This I take some credit for. It’s not always easy to love a man and be made love to all through such a fortnight, knowing of his still existent marriage to a dark-haired blue-eyed Irish girl, five feet four inches in height, with a lovely brogue, and not once to drop her name into the easy conversation of dinner or the taut talk of love.

  Although by now I was so much in love with him – sexually in chains – that I would have married him any time, anywhere, given the chance; yet, intellectually, I didn’t know if I wanted to be so tied. Certainly, I didn’t want to have given myself on any conditions. I had come to Spain because I wanted to come, with my eyes open, with absolute freedom of choice. That there should be any obligation to him as a result of it was unthinkable.

  In spite of his superficial self-confidence there was no offending self-confidence in his attitude to me. He never took me for granted, was often hesitant and groping toward an understanding of what I felt or did.

  And one thing I loved him for was that sexually he had little to teach: we learned what we learned together. For some obscure reason this seemed to convince me more than anything of the lasting quality of his love.

  We flew home on 24 August.

  It was odd how slightly more difficult it all became once we returned to England. One’s affair became brother and sister to all the other affairs going on in dusty Fulham flats, with ravioli cooked on gas rings, and rust on baths where taps dripped, and worn-down heels and black sweaters freckled with dandruff. On the twenty-sixth I went to Hampstead. Leigh had wanted to come with me, but in this I was emphatic, not even would I go in his car.

  Back almost to childhood, for I had been born here; back at least to maidenhood, intellectual and aesthetic maidenhood, long nights of reading about life instead of living it. Let myself in. Both there. Friday a good night. Erica as usual had just had her hair done. Thinner she looked. More feminine. New blouse.

  ‘Deborah, how nice! We’ve just finished dinner. Have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. How are you both?’

  ‘Very well. Your father picked up a virus in Corfu, but he’s better now. Let’s go into the drawing room. Are you staying tonight?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘You’re very brown. Wasn’t it far too hot?’

  ‘No. Not by the sea.’

  ‘I don’t know how you could go to that country,’ Douglas said, ‘where there’s still so much oppression.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘And poverty.’

  ‘A lot of them looked quite happy to me.’

  ‘That of course is the tourist’s view.’ We went into the drawing room. ‘A glass of port to say welcome home?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re walking without your stick?’ Erica said.

  ‘Only partly. I left it at the door.’

  ‘But you used to use it everywhere.’

  ‘I think I can manage better than I used to.’

  We sat down. Douglas came over with the port.

  ‘I don’t think we should forget,’ Erica said, ‘what Mr Adrian warned us of.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He said you mustn’t overtax the muscles of that leg, the few that still function. He said you could only develop them to a certain degree, and if you tried them beyond that point they’d be likely to let you down.’

  ‘I’ll risk it.’

  Douglas said: ‘No one has ever fully assessed the mind–body correlation. Remarkable things are happening every day for which there’s no medical explanation.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s all that remarkable,’ I said curtly. ‘I’m only trying a new way of walking. I just got into the way of it while I was bathing.’

  ‘You bathed?’ said Douglas. ‘Better still. In Spain I suppose it’s different.’

  ‘There are a lot of cripples, yes,’ I agreed. ‘But in fact we were bathing on an empty beach.’

  ‘My dear,’ said Erica, ‘I’m sure Douglas didn’t mean that at all—’

  ‘I meant,’ my father said, looking at me with his frank blue eyes, ‘nothing more than to be pleased you were going in the sea. If I put it badly, I’m sorry.’

  We sipped our port, and Douglas talked of a protest he was organizing against the police. Five youths had beaten up and robbed a milkman on his round, and the story was that when they were arreste
d they themselves had been badly handled at the police station. Douglas had written to The Times and The Guardian and was getting up a petition to present to the local MP.

  Through all this Leigh was never mentioned. It seemed he was to be one of the very few unmentionable subjects in this house. With half a chance Erica would have rationalized. A barrow boy who painted. The unforgivable thing was that his paintings were old-fashioned.

  I stayed till ten-thirty. Then Erica said: ‘When do you think of coming back?’

  ‘I haven’t quite decided.’

  ‘Are you at Sarah’s?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘Sarah’s coming here on Sunday with Philip. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘With Leigh?’

  There was silence as she pushed up her glasses.

  ‘If he would like it.’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’

  ‘The trouble with sex,’ said Douglas, ‘is that it complicates life instead of – as it should – simplifying it. The essence of physical sex is that it should release tension. But in the act human beings nearly always build up within themselves bigger tensions than they break down. Hence Arabella, no doubt.’

  It was the first time I knew he knew about her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I tried to find a sort of middle course for the time being by going back to live at Ennismore Gardens. I made the excuse that it was difficult to get to and from Grafton Street each day from Rotherhithe, but in fact it was easier from there than from Hampstead.

  He argued long, but I felt I had to live separately from him for a while, just to get my bearings. One night he told me he’d been to the labour exchange, and a week later he took a job as a bus conductor.

  I said: ‘D’you need money that badly?’

  ‘Well, soon will.’

  ‘Have you any time to paint at all?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  I blamed myself for taking him to the galleries. Before that he had had doubts enough, but they had been doubts of success not certainty of failure. I felt I had helped to destroy him.

  During this time we were making love, and there was no abatement of our need. But living separately was constantly raising problems, of meeting, of leaving, of spending the night. I always made a point of going back to Sarah’s flat afterward. And the fact that we were both now working regular hours didn’t help.