The Walking Stick

  Lot 242. Brown glazed stoneware jar. Kwang Yao. Lot 243. Meissen May flower vase, blue, mounted in ormolu. Pâte dure.

  Arabella had said: ‘I don’t in the least feel I shall be second-hand goods. That doesn’t enter into it. Sex is only like anything else. If you kiss someone you don’t have a second-hand mouth. Aren’t we born to live?’

  For what purpose had Leigh Hartley been born? There were plenty of pretty girls around, glad of a robust young man and not particular about an accent, without him picking on me. Leave me alone in the quiet, evenly balanced, interesting life I’d found for myself.

  ‘I wish these patent medicine firms would leave one alone,’ said Erica, screwing up a handful of pamphlets. ‘I feel like writing to our MP about it. Do they really think we’re so ignorant as to suppose that the more complicated the synthesis the more likely the cure?’

  Lot 251. Persian Ewer, white ground; with pattern in Iranian copper lustre, eighteenth century.

  Lot 252. Wedgwood . . .

  What was the synthesis in my case, and what the cure?

  John Hallows, who was the youngest director and dealt with jewellery, came in just then with a ruby ring he wanted Maurice Mills’s opinion of, and I slid off my stool to look at it too. It had come in by registered post today from Norwich. The registered cover had been for £20 and the likely value of the ring about £600. People often did that sort of thing.

  I stood talking to them, conscious that my leg was aching a bit. Odd, for it seldom did. ‘Stick your leg out,’ the physiotherapist had said. ‘Straighten it! Push. Just a couple of inches toward the sling.’ One fairly sweated in those early days, trying, trying. Odd that one had absolutely no control over that piece of bone and muscle that used to be a part of one’s personal body. It just hung there like the discarded tail of a lizard. But the trouble was it wasn’t discarded. You couldn’t leave it behind and you couldn’t do without it. Of course I was very lucky compared to many I saw.

  ‘Sitting in at the sale tomorrow, Deborah?’ John Hallows said. ‘We’ve got some pretty luscious pieces coming up, apart from the Leipzig emeralds.’

  John Hallows was the type of man I would have liked for a brother: good-looking, kind, sharp as a needle in his job, but very alert to other people’s feelings. We liked and respected each other.

  ‘I don’t care for morals,’ Arabella had said on her eighteenth birthday. ‘Morals are what other people think you ought to do. I only care what I think myself. I’m not going to be anybody’s easy lay, but if I want to go to bed with a man I shall do so.’

  ‘Darling, you may think you’re your own best judge,’ Sarah said, ‘but there’s only so much to life, only so much experience, whether it’s sex or any other sort. And if you fritter you fritter. And as you fritter you cheapen. What do you say, Deb?’

  What I had said I couldn’t remember because anyway what did it matter to me? But I was very lucky. ‘She’s been very lucky,’ Mr Adrian had said, ‘complete recovery of her breathing and of the right leg, and muscles of the left hip are perfectly sound. Wastage will probably not develop much above the knee. She’ll be able to lead a full life.’ Odd to hear doctors being advised by doctors. Mr Adrian was the great man on polio. He kept people with paralysed throats alive by performing tracheotomies on them and pushing a tube into their windpipes. Then they lay there like stranded fish for the rest of their lives gulping air through artificial lungs.

  That day I was almost afraid to go out to lunch in case Leigh was waiting on the corner, so I slipped out by the back entrance and ate in a dive in Lancashire Court. On the way back I went in the front way and there was no one there. Odd then if he never turned up again. Why should he? Perhaps he’d decided to leave me to my nice little quiet life after all.

  ‘If you can promise to get hold of your friend,’ my mother said, ‘I’ll work off one or two other invitations at the same time. There was that fresco artist in Holly Hill, and the two people from Chelsea – what’s their name? – Evans or Jones. They paint jointly by a new process – something like gouache but their own invention.’

  ‘Not this weekend. I shan’t be seeing him till Tuesday.’

  ‘Well, that’s awkward because the following Sunday I’m on call. Why don’t you ring him?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s on the phone. Anyway I don’t know his number.’

  ‘What does he do all day in the East End, one wonders?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘Work,’ Leigh had said. ‘I’m like a man whittling away at a stick. I do it because I want to but the slivers are of no flaming interest to anyone else. It drives you up the wall. Of course I’m learning all the time, but it drives you up the wall.’

  ‘Is he at a school, d’you know?’ asked Erica. ‘Has he a teacher?’

  ‘No. He says he wants to paint the way he wants to paint.’

  Erica nodded approvingly. ‘How right. One thinks of the St Ives primitives. How they would have been ruined . . .’

  I said to Mr Smith-Williams: ‘If one wanted to help a young artist, how would one go about it?’

  ‘What sort of a young artist?’

  ‘Well . . . twenty-four or twenty-five, lives in the East End, has been painting quite a while. But he doesn’t seem to have had much recognition so far.’

  ‘That’s not unusual. Do you know his stuff?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to judge it.’

  ‘Has he tried the West End galleries?’

  ‘I expect so. Some of them.’

  ‘Well, that would be the first step. Get an opinion from two or three of the more honest of them. See if they’ll take a few of his paintings, and if they won’t, ask them why.’

  ‘Who particularly?’

  ‘Well, the Maud Brothers I’d go to first. They’re absolutely straight and would give you a completely unbiased opinion. After that Arthur Hays of the Cheltenham Galleries.’

  ‘You wouldn’t give one yourself?’

  ‘Not wouldn’t but couldn’t – with anything like their authority anyway. You know Lewis Maud, don’t you?’

  It was raining on the Thursday, and Leigh was waiting for me outside.

  ‘I can’t—’ I began.

  ‘I’ve come to take you home.’

  There was a glint in his eye to show he knew I was going to say I couldn’t go out with him, so he’d chosen the answer that silenced me. As he tucked me in and shut the door he said through the swivel window: ‘Well, it’s better’n waiting for a bus, isn’t it?’

  We had to make a detour to get out of the one-way streets, and while we were waiting at a traffic light I had a good new look at him, trying to see him afresh. He was wearing a pink linen jacket without lapels and fine corduroy trousers of the wrong brown, and just too tight.

  He said: ‘One day next week I want you to come skating with me at Queensway.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You must be crazy.’

  ‘Because you’ve only got one good leg? Well, Christ, that’s three between us. It’s plenty. Wouldn’t you like to try?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I reckon you could do far more than you do.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Do you ever swim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People in England are crackers. They’re scared of going on a beach if they’ve a varicose vein. In Italy or Spain nobody cares: cripples, old people, fat people, they all enjoy the sun.’

  We broke free of the grip of the traffic and raced four abreast up Gloucester Place.

  ‘As a cripple, an old person or a fat person,’ I said, ‘I enjoy the sun very much in my own way.’

  ‘But you’re afraid to enjoy it in ways that might make you be looked at. It’s a great mistake.’

  ‘It’s a great mistake,’ I said, ‘to suppose that this line is going to get you anywhere.’

  ‘Where I want it to get me – where I want it to get us both – is to the ice rink next Tuesday.’

  I sat quiet and watched the traffi
c creep and clot and spurt, creep and clot and spurt.

  He said at length: ‘Deborah, come off it. I’m not trying to needle you or improve you or shove you around, see. I just like you and I want to be your friend.’

  We went up the Finchley Road and came to Swiss Cottage, juggled with the involved traffic lights and hummed up Fitzjohn’s Avenue. His car was a Triumph Spitfire. It was old and the hood rattled. The engine seemed all right. His big square hands were stained in two places with ultramarine.

  I said: ‘I know, Leigh. Or should know, I suppose. I suppose I’ve snapped at you a lot.’

  ‘Not as if you meant to bite.’

  It had nearly stopped raining. The road here had just been relaid, and it shone like a slab of newly split coal.

  ‘You understand . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I reckon I understand all right.’

  We roared up the hill.

  ‘See you next week then,’ he said.

  ‘If you want to, but not—’

  ‘On ice?’

  ‘Not on ice.’

  ‘OK. You’re the boss.’

  His phrases were still all wrong, but I didn’t know how to put them right. I couldn’t go on contradicting him for ever.

  We came to a stop. ‘Tuesday, then?’

  ‘Tuesday then.’

  ‘Fine.’

  This time he let me get out of the car without getting out himself. I wasn’t quite sure what that implied, whether it was a little victory for me or a little victory for him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  And then he turned up at the cocktail party after all. I don’t know who had been gulling me most – my mother had apparently got an invitation to him through David Hambro, but she never breathed a word to me; and I couldn’t help but suspect when I saw the look in his eye – like a horse that means mischief – that in fact he’d had the invitation when we last met.

  Erica normally has the average woman’s approach to cocktail-party-giving – that is, she drags together a group of ill-assorted people, crowds them in a room with plenty of gin and smoke and allows them to shout at each other at the top of their voices for two hours. But either some didn’t run up this Sunday, or she’d decided that this was to be one of her refined, arty evenings, for the total number was ten, and seven were painters, all of them abstract except Leigh. Two were French, one an Italian who spoke no English. One, a man called Collins, was interested in expressing pure psychiatry on canvas, which interested Douglas. Another had given up oils and was trying to advance the technique of collage by cutting holes in his hardboard panel.

  I found it all rather tense because I could see in the middle of the talk that my family was trying to size Leigh up. Erica several times edged him into a group arguing about the geometric disciplines of form, but he wasn’t having any. He might have been an engineer among musicians. Probably most of the other artists there were too self-centred anyway to realize that he was a painter at all.

  For the most part he talked to me or flirted with Arabella, who wasn’t above that sort of thing; and once or twice when I wasn’t within hearing I saw him talking to Erica and Douglas. I noticed him eyeing our pictures, the prints of Paul Klee and Vasili Kandinski. It occurred to me to be surprised that I cared what he thought.

  When they all left about nine, I ate a sandwich and made some coffee and took it in to Erica who was still in the drawing room emptying ashtrays and looking tall and flushed and wispy-haired and exhausted. Douglas had gone out about half an hour ago to see an old patient, so there were just the two of us.

  Erica said: ‘Well I did think of asking Claude Collins and your man to stay on for an omelette and wine, but somehow they didn’t seem to get on. Your man’s not articulate, is he?’

  ‘Sit down and put your feet up,’ I said good-humouredly, ‘and don’t call him my man. He’s got a name and he’s articulate enough when he feels like it. But I told you, he doesn’t fit into the usual pattern. You got what you deserved asking him here behind my back.’

  ‘My dear, you were so preoccupied – and so obstinate. We’re much concerned for your future – Douglas and I – so naturally we want to meet your – your young man. And seeing them here in your own home, will help you to bring them into perspective.’

  She sat down suddenly with her coffee and began to sip it. The steam misted her glasses and she took them off.

  ‘He left me something, by the way. A brown paper parcel. He left it by the front door. If you’re not too tired . . .’

  I hastily swallowed a mouthful of brown bread and butter and chicken and lettuce, and went down to get the parcel. As soon as I saw it I knew what it was.

  ‘He said it was one of his paintings.’ Erica looked older and more tired than ever without the frontage of her heavy glasses. Like a book without its glossy jacket. ‘Very civilized of him. Though I must say in conversation it was quite hard to pin him down to opinions.’

  She unwrapped the painting. It was quite small, I suppose about 16X 10. Half-done, she paused to drink more coffee. The last bits of brown paper came off and we looked at a scene of London Docks, with the heavy cranes in the foreground, and a tug bringing up a string of barges.

  ‘Very – civilized of him,’ said Erica staring at it fixedly and fingering her pearls.

  I reached over and offered her a sandwich but she shook her head. I realized I wasn’t very hungry after all and dropped half of mine back on the plate. Erica put on her glasses and tucked away a few spidery ends of grey hair. They sprang out again. I wondered if in thirty years my own hair would be like that.

  ‘Really,’ she said, taking her eyes off the picture at last, and looking round, ‘even a dozen people turn a room into a shambles. This will have to be put right before Minta comes in the morning.’

  There was the sound of a car outside. I stared at the picture.

  ‘She’s getting more and more temperamental,’ Erica said. ‘It always happens with these women who begin as treasures and stay with one family half their lives.’

  It was Douglas back. I got up and began to empty the rest of the ashtrays.

  ‘They realize they have power over the family they serve, that’s the trouble, and the power corrupts them.’

  He’d been drinking whisky, not gin. There was some left in his glass but it was mainly melted ice. One of the Frenchmen had drunk crème de menthe and soda all evening. Very odd.

  I said suddenly, with a breathless anger that didn’t quite get out: ‘I think it would be better if you considered my room possibly empty too.’

  Erica finished her coffee and put some of the brown paper back round the picture. Then she propped it distastefully against the leg of a chair.

  ‘Whatever makes you say that?’

  ‘It would be so much better if I didn’t live at home. You’d have me less under your feet, feel less responsible.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to leave, Deborah, you know that. We’ve had all this out before. It would be a great mistake.’

  ‘Mistake on whose side?’

  She didn’t answer. The glasses tittered together as I put them on the tray.

  She said: ‘You know, we weren’t trying to interfere with your friendship with Leigh Hartley, asking him here. It seemed simply the polite thing to do. I quite thought you’d appreciate our little gesture.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t and I don’t! Anyway, this house is too far out. It’s too far every morning and evening!’ I dropped a glass and it shattered. I knelt awkwardly and began to pick up the bits and put them on the tray.

  Erica said with false patience: ‘Don’t get into one of your tempers, Deborah. You’re getting excited over absolutely nothing . . . As for responsibility, of course we feel responsible, and should wherever you lived, because love creates responsibility. We feel just the same for Sarah and Arabella—’

  ‘Not in the same way.’

  ‘Yes, in just the same way. But I agree, the essence of good family life is that every member of the fam
ily should feel free within it. It’s what Douglas has always said. It’s the only psychological basis.’

  I went to the window fuming, not perhaps absolutely clear in my own mind yet why I was so suddenly angry, only aware that Erica had mistaken the cause. It was not the interference that I found intolerable but this sudden judgment of his work which had taken place, casual, Olympian, absolute. I banged the window open to clear the stale smoke. Douglas was just coming up the steps. His head shone smooth and pale and civilized in the lamplight. I realized I had very little in common with Leigh Hartley, except that, temporarily, I was on his side.

  In fact I had nothing at all in common with him; but I had never deceived myself as to that. If I was getting emotionally involved, even in the smallest and most immature way, at least it was not without awareness of the mistake; it was against my conscious, educated judgement. One couldn’t do better than one’s best.

  On the Tuesday we met again and drove to a sort of club in Wapping, where he said artists sometimes met. It was a fairly sleazy place, with a hard-eyed manageress and brassy barmaids, and a clientele to match. For a minute or two we saw Ted Sandymount again, and he looked thoroughly at his ease here, like a fish in water. Then after he’d gone a big man called Jack Foil came and sat down at our table. He was about fifty with a fleshy, heavy face and thick gold-rimmed glasses in which the pebbles really looked like pebbles. He wore a signet ring on either hand and smelled of carnation. He was a promoter and antique dealer.

  He and Leigh talked about the exhibition Leigh had had in Southwark. Jack Foil had helped him to put it on, and he thought they might arrange another in a few months. I thought Leigh was more tentative than I’d known him before, anxious to agree with whatever Jack Foil said. Foil’s voice was not uneducated but it was deep and thick and pompous. From the size of the cigar he smoked he must have promoted other more profitable ventures than art exhibitions.

  I was not at all made to feel unwelcome – in fact Mr Foil went out of his way with a sort of elephantine politeness to keep me in the conversation. He seemed to look with a paternal pebble on Leigh, and I was more or less included. When he got up, grunting and hum-humming, he did in fact say, ‘Bless you, my children,’ as his parting words; but I thought his square back looked formidable. He would be a good man to be on the right side of.