‘You see,’ said Laura, ‘it was a good idea of mine.’
She had such fond memories of the farmhouse from their few cold days in January. How could it not be heaven in July? Here was the peace and solitude Nick needed to complete his work; and for her, there was the mass of reading to get through before the start of her second year. If there was to be a second year. Nick still talked of New York in the autumn.
‘Let’s see what happens with your blot book,’ said Laura.
Anything could happen, she reasoned. His treatise could lead to a job offer in England; or if need be she could go to New York with him.
Nick’s new subject was an eighteenth-century watercolour painter called Alexander Cozens, who had come up with a method for drawing what he called ‘automatic landscapes’. Cozens’s approach was ahead of its time, and broke away from all contemporary systems of perception.
‘We all see what we’re predisposed to see,’ Nick explained to Laura. ‘We see according to conventions. There’s no such thing as an innocent gaze. So how can we ever see anything new?’
This love of change secretly disturbed Laura. She did not long to see the world in a new way. In the letters she wrote to her friends she declared herself to be perfectly happy, because being with Nick was all she wanted in life. Still after nine months together her love for him possessed her almost to the exclusion of all other thought. She could not imagine any way in which their love could be more perfect. And yet she was often tortured with baseless anxiety.
When Nick went out to walk alone, as he did sometimes, saying that he needed solitude to form his ideas, she became immobile until he returned. She felt his physical absence like an ache. She took care not to tell him of her weakness, being sure in herself that it was a weakness. But since any change could only be for the worse, she could not share his excitement over new modes of perception.
Alexander Cozens’s innovation involved ink blots. The idea was to force the eye into creating original work by splashing ink at random on paper. You then stared at the blots until you began to see rocks, trees, houses. Out of this scatter of elements you then created an entirely new imagined scene – an ‘automatic landscape’.
‘Every time you’re starting again from nothing.’ Nick found in the new method a prescription for life. ‘Wipe the slate clean. Know nothing. Start afresh.’
‘But what if you’re happy with what you’ve got already?’
‘That’s stasis. That’s stupor. You might as well die.’
Laura knew that Nick was right because he was cleverer than her, but it felt wrong. It felt like an idea you might propose in an argument, not a principle by which to live your life.
‘They all tried it,’ Nick told her. ‘Gainsborough, Constable, Joseph Wright of Derby. It was quite a craze for a while.’
In his treatise he was linking the blot method with twentieth-century abstract painting, in particular Jackson Pollock and his drip method. Some art was closed and some was open. Open art had no single meaning, and imposed no single response. Perhaps it even stilled the gazing mind’s lust for meaning altogether, and so opened a window onto what truly is. So ran Nick’s multiplying thoughts.
Every other day Laura drove Nick’s Vauxhall Viva to the Co-op in Hereford to stock up on supplies. When she made these trips, Nick roamed the hills alone. On her return she called out to see if he was in the house ahead of her. If he was not she turned on the radio and played music to fill the void.
The early evenings were the best time, better even than the nights. The farmhouse was set in a hollow, with only limited views from its deep windows, so they had dragged two armchairs out of the back parlour and up the grassy slope to the edge of a small wood. Here beneath the shade of an oak they sat and watched the sun descend over the hummocky hills and drank vermouth and talked in a drifting inconsequential sort of way. The chairs were side by side, close enough to reach out and touch each other. The evenings were warm. No one else ever passed down the long unmade track that led to their hidden valley.
Sometimes Nick sang, as he had done at the riverside picnic. He knew all the songs from the popular musicals, which seemed so unlike him, and made Laura love him even more. There he sat, his long legs stretched out before him, crooning ‘Shall We Dance?’ from The King and I while the sheep drifted over the far hillside.
One day they went to the cinema in Hereford and saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. On the way back Laura told Nick that her parents had rented a house in Provence for the whole of August, and they were invited too.
‘After all,’ she said, ‘it’s not as if we’ve got any other plans for the summer.’
Nick didn’t say much either way in response, but she had learned that was how he worked. Often he would come up with a rejoinder to something she’d said days later, as if there’d been no interval at all.
‘Diana will be there, with this new boyfriend of hers. And a couple of old friends of my parents. It’s near a village called Aups.’
Then one evening they didn’t sit under the oak tree. Nick said he needed to think, and he went out for a walk alone. He was gone for half an hour or so, not long, but for Laura it was an eternity. This was not his usual time for a walk.
When he came back she was in the kitchen at the sink, scrubbing potatoes. The spring water had chilled her hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Sorry? What for?’
There was a pause. Then he said,
‘This isn’t working.’
She took her hands slowly out of the sink and dried them on the tea towel.
‘What do you mean? What’s not working?’
‘Us.’
‘What are you talking about, Nick?’
‘I need some time on my own.’
‘You have time on your own. As much as you want.’
‘I mean, just me.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Nick. Just me? You’ve always been just me.’
‘Well, except there’s you.’
‘How am I a problem?’
‘Not a problem. I just need my own space.’
‘What about me? What am I supposed to do?’
‘That’s up to you.’
They stood there in the kitchen, unable to move, as evening turned to night. She couldn’t even bear to light a candle. She wanted to hide in the gathering darkness. Dread was rolling over her, wave upon wave, like an ocean. What he was telling her was unthinkable, impossible, and so long expected.
‘It’s not that I’ve stopped loving you,’ he said. ‘I still love you. But I need to be on my own now.’
‘You still love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why don’t you want to be with me?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t explain. I’ve been feeling cramped. I can’t go on like this.’
‘Cramped? I’ve cramped you? How? When have I ever stopped you doing whatever you want?’
‘You haven’t.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. You say you love me, but you don’t want to be with me. It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘No, I suppose it doesn’t.’
He spoke in a low voice, his eyes cast down. Laura felt utterly helpless. A madness was overwhelming her, and she didn’t know where it had come from or why.
‘If you love someone you want to be with them. That’s what loving is.’
‘I do love you,’ he said. ‘But I want to be free.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know. That’s for you to decide.’
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘Laura, I can only tell you what’s happening to me. I can’t tell you what to do.’
‘But you want to live on your own. That’s what you’re saying.’
‘Yes.’
‘So one of us has to go.’
‘I’ll do whatever you want.’
‘I want to stay with you. I want to go where you go. You know that.’
br />
She was crying. She must have been crying for some time.
‘Even so,’ he said.
There was no appeal. He was quietly implacable.
‘It’s my fault, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not your fault. You’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘So why have you stopped loving me?’
‘I haven’t stopped loving you. I just need to be on my own now.’
‘Because I’m cramping you.’
How could she tell him he couldn’t leave her? How could she say to him, Without you I have no life? This cramping of which he complained was her love itself. He had stopped loving her because she loved him too much. This was the only sense she could make of it all.
‘If I promise to love you less will you stay?’
He almost smiled at that. But it made no difference. The decision had been made on that solitary walk. The more she demanded reasons the quieter he grew, and none of it made any difference.
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘I haven’t really thought.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And leave me here alone?’
‘No, not that, obviously.’
‘So what? Am I supposed to go?’
‘That’s up to you.’
She felt she was going mad. He kept saying he wasn’t telling her what to do, but this silent decision of his had boxed her in. He was telling her what to do, but not in words.
‘If you don’t want me here then I have to go, don’t I?’
‘I still love you, Laura. This isn’t because of anything to do with you. It’s just how I am.’
‘So I’ll go, then. I’ll go first thing in the morning.’
She hoped by turning the parting into a reality that he would come to his senses and ask her to stay.
‘You’d better drive me into Hereford. Then you can clear up the house before you leave.’
‘If that’s what you want,’ he said.
She hit him.
‘It’s not what I want! It’s what you want!’
She hit him and hit him, there in the darkening kitchen, as the stream trickled ceaselessly down the sink. Of course the blows led to embraces. She clung to him, weeping, unable to believe the horror into which they were falling, falling even as he held her in his arms.
They went to bed at last. She clung to him in bed, refusing to believe that anything had changed. They made love as they had done almost every single night since they had been together, and she felt as close to him as ever. Then they slept.
On waking she saw the bright daylight glowing in the flimsy curtains, and rose to go quietly to the bathroom. He slept on, as he always did. In the bathroom she remembered. A wave of giddiness made her reach out for the bathroom wall.
She dressed, went down to the kitchen, put the coffee pot on the flame of the little kerosene stove. When he came down, wearing pyjama bottoms and no top, she gave him his coffee. He drank it and then said,
‘When do you want to go?’
30
Friday, last day of the school week. Alice trotting off so bravely to her classroom, smiling for me to show I don’t have to worry, but I do. I’ve not forgotten what it’s like, God knows school can be torture, I want to tell her it’s not the whole world, only one tiny corner of the world, but it’s not true. It’s the whole world all right. And these laughing running children in their bright blue blazers designed to convey an image of order and privilege are wild animals just as we were, forming packs, asserting dominance, demanding submission. Why must it be like that?
Oh my baby how have I failed you? No one in all of history has ever loved their child as much as I love you. I love your funny long face and your skinny legs. I love to feel you close to me, holding on to me, not because you can’t bear to be parted from me, you run off smiling, but because we just belong together, you and me. I never want to let you go, want to be with you always, I’d come to all your lessons with you if I could, sit by your side and pass notes when the teacher’s not looking, but I know I have to let you go. Only why must there be so much unhappiness?
‘Ah. Hello there.’
There he is, the one I have to talk to, and blushing because he wept in front of me. He’s not sure what to call me, he knows I’m an unmarried mother, the unmarried mother. In the upper economic zone there are many single mothers but all comfortably divorced.
‘Mr Strachan. I was hoping to catch you.’
‘Is everything all right with your mother?’
‘Yes, she’s fine, thanks. No, actually, she isn’t. Her dog was killed. It’s all a bit of a tragedy, in fact.’
All Mummy can think about is that bloody little dog, you’d think she could have picked up a phone, but I knew nothing till the teacher called. A child surely has a higher claim on the attention than a dog, especially a dead dog.
‘How did it happen?’
‘We don’t really know. She found him dead in a field.’
Poor old Mummy, I mustn’t be too hard on her, that little dog was her child, more than me really. At least he didn’t go off and produce a bastard, though he might have done, no I think he’d been neutered.
‘But you were wonderful with Alice. I haven’t had a chance to thank you properly.’
‘It was good to get to know her a little.’
‘Well, whatever you said to her she’s totally in love with you now.’
I wonder what his name is, I can’t go on calling him Mr Strachan, he has to be younger than me, only a boy really. He has a sweet face, hard to think of him as a teacher. The truth is even we parents can’t help relating to teachers as power figures, we become children again, stand up tall, don’t shuffle your feet, Elizabeth, what’s that you’ve got in your mouth.
‘When you have time maybe we could have a talk about how she’s getting on.’ He’s using that bad-news voice that doctors put on. ‘I’m a little better informed than I was a day ago.’
That’s because I made him cry. At any rate he cried. Who knew that teachers cried?
We’re all unhappy.
But this I need to know.
‘Now. Let’s talk now.’
Ding-ding-ding! The bell for assembly.
‘I can’t now. But if you’re picking Alice up at the end of the day.’
‘Yes, I am. My mother’s not up to it yet, I’m afraid.’
You can say that again. Like a bloody zombie. Poor Mummy. Oh God here comes the swarm. Alice could show up again any minute, lost and faceless in the stream of clones. Every one of whom carries a mother’s heart in her heartless hands.
‘I’ll look out for you, then. It’s Alan, by the way.’
That’s perceptive. In the midst of the mounting chaos to notice that I’m finding the naming awkward. But then so is he.
‘I’m Liz.’
Funny little smile as he goes. What’s he doing being a teacher in a nancy little Sussex prep school? What am I doing sending my daughter here? Same thing we’re all doing, trying to buy a little safety, a little advantage. No reason to suppose she’d be any happier anywhere else, she’s the quiet kind, too tall for her age, not yet started her periods, oh my sweetheart you have all that to come, the bother and the anxiety and the shame, still so much shame. ‘Nothing shocks us any more,’ they said to Lenny Bruce, ‘you can tell jokes about anything, there are no more taboos.’ And he said, ‘Sanitary towels.’
There she is with her class, hasn’t seen me, slip away, she won’t want to see me. Once you tear yourself away from your mum you harden like a scar over a wound, you scar every single morning, you have to. Sometimes I wonder how it would have been different if Daddy hadn’t left us but he did and to tell the truth Mummy never smiled again. Is it worse for me or for Alice who’s never really had a daddy to start with?
Some of them holding hands not all and not Alice. Into the day’s battle she goes head high and dread in her heart, a gallant soldier who doesn’t know why the
re has to be a war, and Jesus nor do I. It gets better darling as you grow older, better but not that fucking good.
31
Jack passes Toby Clore a note in history saying ‘Dogman latest!’ and when it’s break he just strolls off down to the tennis courts and knows Toby is following. He feels sure and strong because he has a secret and for a very short time remaining he is the one with something to give and Toby the one who wants it. This is so unaccustomed a feeling that Jack almost decides to keep his secret, except that knowing Toby he could go cold in one second and disband the Dogman Fan Club. So Jack will tell him, but in telling him he seeks to win a privileged position in Toby’s circle. He wants it to be a secret for the two of them. Not Richard Adderley, not Angus Critchell. It’s to be his special bond with Toby.
So Toby comes after him, not fast, not as if he really cares, like it’s something to do in a boring break, and he’s got Richard and Angus with him.
‘Just Toby,’ says Jack. ‘It’s about the Dogman.’
‘Why?’ says Angus. ‘We’re all in the club.’
‘This is serious, Angus. I shouldn’t really tell anybody.’
‘So? Why tell Toby?’
Oh how sweet their hunger. And it’s all true. It’s serious.
‘Trickle away, people,’ says Toby in his lazy voice. How does he come up with these words? They’re simply perfect, like he’s being polite to small children. Angus and Richard hate it so Jack tries his hardest not to smile.
They don’t go far away. They hang about between the trees scuffing pine cones and looking round every two seconds to see if they can come back.
‘So what’s the news, Jacko?’ says Toby, leaning against the wire netting of the tennis court, reaching out his hands wide on either side and holding the wire mesh as if he’s practising to be crucified.
‘I was watching out for the Dogman,’ says Jack, whispering. He’s thought a lot about how to tell his secret. He doesn’t want it to be over too soon.