All the Beauty of the Sun (16 page)

She turned onto her side, away from him, and saw her suitcase there on the floor, packed and ready. She gazed at it, unpacked and repacked it in her head, making sure that everything was there. She knew she wouldn't sleep, or she would sleep restlessly and wake up each hour until it was time to get up, to dress, to wake Bobby from his bed in the room next to theirs, to meet the taxi on the road outside; she wouldn't wake Daniel, wouldn't disturb him. She would dress in the half-light leaking through the curtains and close the bedroom door quietly behind her.

Chapter Eighteen

P
AUL HAS BEEN A
lot on my mind lately, since he visited me. I've been thinking how changed he was, how much happier; his suntan suited him, he looked fitter and healthier than I think I have ever seen him; more
virile
. Virile is from the Latin
virilis
meaning
man.
So Paul is at last manly, in an elegant, off-the-cuff way, although I overheard one of the nurses make some sniggering remark about him after he had gone; but that particular nurse is an uncouth fellow and I didn't pay any attention. Although this place is very much more civilized than some of the other hospitals that have detained me, the nurses and orderlies are all cut from the same rough cloth as nurses and orderlies everywhere. I don't trust them and they don't trust me. One of them asked me rather slyly how I knew Paul, saying how it seemed that I thought very highly of him. I ignored the man, of course; he won't get a rise out of me.

I wonder if I do think highly of Paul. That nurse made it sound as if I've put him on a pedestal, so high that I can't see his faults, and also that I am naïve to admire such a man, that only someone as uniquely inexperienced as me
could
admire him. I think the staff believes that I haven't truly escaped my adolescence, despite the war, despite everything – despite even my friendship with Paul – a brush with whom would surely initiate anyone into the ways of adulthood.

I am thirty-five. Not old, not young, a nowhere age. During the war, at my lowest and most afraid, I'd hoped to achieve these milestones by now: marriage, children, a career – perhaps in a bank, safe behind a counter as a big clock kept me rigidly in check. When I was a little boy my father wanted me to be a priest because it was what my mother wanted more than anything in this world. Her only son, her youngest child, a priest:
Father Matthew Purcell.
I was not a devout child, but rather ordinary and grubby as any boy, always out with my father, stalking across the moors for miles and miles, the two of us quiet together, the very best of companions. If I'd told him I would rather be like him, follow only in his footsteps, he would've been disappointed only for my mother's sake.

I would have been a gamekeeper, like him, had it not been that Christ came to me when I was fifteen, an experience of such astonishing clarity that I couldn't speak for days. Nothing else mattered, only Christ and our mutual love. Christ could make me weep with joy or pity; he made me quicker, sharper, brighter than I would ever have been without him. I was his, heart, body and mind. I was spilling over with love for Christ, and the energy I had then seems miraculous to me now, such energy as though I could shoot all the birds from the sky and bring each one back to life again by blowing on its feathers.

Occasionally I would wonder if perhaps I loved Christ too much, that I should be more tied to the earth than this energetic love would allow me to be. In the seminary I tried to keep much of this energy to myself but still the others looked at me as though I intended to show them up, like a miner who digs too deeply, too quickly as his workmates chip away slowly, taking care not to give so much away.

Paul asked me once if I missed the priesthood. I should have told him that I miss Christ, but I was afraid that I would seem odd to him –
odder
. I do so want him to think of me as any other man.

After his visit I was taken to my room and left there to contemplate my foolish behaviour. My room is a space just big enough for a bed and a chest of drawers. There is a high, arched window with a deep stone sill, the glass divided into leaded diamond-shaped panes that make a tiring pattern on the wooden floor when the sun shines. The walls are painted white and although we are allowed to put up pictures, I haven't. When I described this room to Paul in a letter, he sent me a painting of the sparrows that visit his courtyard in Tangiers; I wrapped it in newspaper and stored it under my bed.

Today I was thinking about Paul so much I took the painting out. I can't think why I hid it away for so long. The little birds around the fountain are so lively one almost expects them to fly off the canvas; he has captured the way the sunlight sparkles on the fountain's spray very well, I think, although of course I am no judge of art. In the bottom right-hand corner he has signed the painting
Francis Law
. I know Paul Harris as Paul Harris, and I do wish he wouldn't change about so as if he is trying to lose his past and all his old friends. Paul Harris and I have been friends for a long time now, since July 1st, 1919, my birthday. Perhaps Paul didn't paint this picture of the sparrows hopping around the fountain; really I don't think he's capable of such fineness. Perhaps he is a liar, pretending that this Law's work is his own.

July 1st, 1919, was the third anniversary of the 1st Battle of the Somme. ‘Were you there, Paul?' I once asked him, and he said no, that he had been gassed and was recovering by the sea in England. ‘Piece of luck,' he said, and his smile was ironic. ‘And you, Matthew, were you there?' and his voice was ironic too, and I said yes, I was. Piece of bad luck. We talked that little bit about that little bit of the war only because it happened to coincide with my birthday and the day we met. We never discussed the war otherwise. What was there to say?

We used to talk about his wife sometimes, when he'd visit me at a place I was in near York, a place not as nice as this one: I remember I slept in a ward with nine other men. Five beds down each side, high-up windows with belt-and-braces bars. I wasn't as well then as I am now, so when Paul visited he did the talking – he used to talk about his wife, and I listened.

She sounded like a silly little piece to me, from what he said. Her name was Whittaker, before Paul married her. I remember because that was the name of one of the priests who taught me at the seminary. Paul has a son called Bobby. Paul showed me his picture. He showed me a picture of a little boy who'd had all his lovely curly hair shorn off; at least I imagine he once had lovely curls. I imagine the locks of dark hair falling to the floor around him as he cries. I imagine how he cannot be comforted, not for a little while. Not for a little while at least.

Paul would say that his wife was very sweet.
Very sweet
! I remember in York I could hardly bear to listen to him talking about her, hardly asked two words about her the whole time he was going on. I did ask something – and it's excusable because I was very poorly then – I asked if he liked to fuck her. He only looked down at his cigarette and didn't answer. Maybe he didn't hear me. Sometimes I think I've said things aloud when actually the words are only in my head – and the other way round: vice versa, which is Latin for the position being reversed and nothing to do with vice.

Another time, another visit, I asked him if he had finished with buggering men now that he was married. I think I did ask. I certainly wondered to myself about it, even if I might not have actually got the question out because it's a bit of a mouthful. Mind your own business, Matthew, after all. He was teaching at a school in Thorp then, and I was in that institution near York, and he used to take the train to see me on a Sunday and he didn't look virile as he looked the other day; he looked ill and unhappy and I didn't believe him when he said his wife was very sweet. And when he told me that his baby was born and he was a boy I thought that it was very, very wrong of him to have a baby like that because it didn't seem fair to me. And it's no good him being nice to me, being ironic and funny and bringing me toffees because he likes them. He's not really a good person, he's a
wrong
person, I think, but all the same he gets everything he wants and always has.

He got Patrick. He showed me a picture of Patrick, too, the other day. Before the little boy's photo, Patrick's, Patrick in front of a wall. The wall was covered in some climber: it didn't look as though he was going to be shot or anything – the wall was too pretty for that and he was smiling, anyway, that smile he has for Paul which makes me think he doesn't know Paul as I do because the smile is straightforward love and no doubt about it.

Paul started on Patrick when he was still married; I know because Paul used to mention him sometimes in passing, when I was in that place near York, when he wasn't talking about his wife and his baby boy. He said he had met up with a man he had served with during the war and that he was a good friend. Wasn't I his good friend? I did ask him this, I know I did, and he said yes, of course, none better, none
gooder
, he said, and smiled. There is no such word as gooder, of course. It was just his joke; he thinks I need jokes and games with words and to hear about men he meets up with because they served together in the same platoon and are
good friends
. He wears his heart on his sleeve. I see right through him, past his bones, right through him.

I wish I'd told him about Ann when we were sitting in that graveyard during his recent visit. I thought to when I saw that girl with her pram and her daffodils and hip-swaying walk. Telling him about Ann would have made him realise that he's not the only one in the whole world.

I first saw Ann behind Fred's bar, and she was so lively and happy I thought she wouldn't mind me. The evening Peter O'Connor dropped dead I had thought of approaching her, of saying something careless such as, ‘It's nice to see a pretty face,' risking Susie's sarcasm. More likely I would have risked only her surprise because of course I would never say such a thing: it's the kind of remark men who have had experience with women make; men who leer and flirt quite openly; the kind of remark that might lead somewhere once everyone has got over its boorishness. But then O'Connor fell dead to the floor and the atmosphere changed so completely.

He was dead before I reached him but I said a few words anyway, for Fred's sake. Fred's a suspicious man; I think he believes O'Connor would be haunting his pub now if I hadn't been there to placate his departing soul. Placate. Is that the right word? Direct, perhaps, is more accurate. In Latin I said,
go in peace.
Fred knew those weren't the official words, there weren't enough of them – I'd left out God and he knows the Latin for God, but he didn't complain. I was very angry with Fred, I remember, although I understand now that really I was angry with O'Connor, allowing myself to believe that were it not for his inconsiderate dying I would have approached Ann that evening in a way that would have got our relationship off on the right foot. This is nonsense, of course. More likely, I wouldn't have spoken to her for weeks; weeks spent trying to pluck up my courage.

Sometimes I imagine her coming to visit me, and how we would go walking arm in arm along the lane; the rain would have just stopped and there'd be the smell of the damp woods hemming us in on either side, the muddy ground a little slippery underfoot so that she'd hold on to me tightly as she used to. There'd be many rabbits, as ever, hopping quite unperturbed amongst the cow parsley in the verge. Perhaps a pheasant would come clattering out across our path causing me to imagine the hunters with their guns broken over their arms, the soft-mouthed dogs trotting ahead of them, home with the day's kill. This image is so vivid that I half expect my father to come striding towards us, a brace of grouse dangling from his fingers. He would be pleased to see me with a girl like Ann.

I shouldn't think about Ann because I know I can get upset about her, all my thoughts coming like a speeded-up Keystone Kop film with pratfalls and chases.

The weather is sunny and warm and if I look out of my window, I see that there is blossom on the trees like the blossom that was on that climbing plant in the photo of Patrick.

I wrote to Patrick and told him that I have seen Paul, and how well he looks, very well with all the attention he is receiving in London
. He glows
, I wrote,
as he used to when he met you
. He'll take my meaning, I think. I do like Patrick very much. He doesn't
shift
so much as Paul; he is not so much of a chameleon. I have written to him, he'll take my meaning, he will come, and Paul will have to be good, for once.

Chapter Nineteen

‘
I
CAN'T DO MY
bottom belly button up,'
Lawrence sang. He straightened the picture, stood back, frowned, stepped forward again and straightened it again. He cocked his head to one side. ‘There. I think that will do.' He began to sing again, knowing the words more often than not. She caught songs off him as if they were germs; his songs became stuck in her head until she had to sing them out. His/her songs had annoyed Edmund to death.

Lawrence had a light tenor voice. Ann suspected that he had a longing to perform on stage. He would call himself
Larry,
a more likely name for one of those comics who sang, who carried a walking cane and wore spats and a top hat to tilt to the back of his head when he was pretending to be perplexed.
I say, I say, I say,
he would say.
Why did the Irish girl cry herself stupid?
There's no answer to that.

He'd held her as she'd cried, the towel he had wrapped around his waist in preparation for his bath coming loose, displaying his flaccid penis so that even through her tears she felt embarrassed for his nakedness. She smelt the Scotch on his breath as he whispered, ‘Don't cry, sweet girl,' tasted the alcohol when he kissed her, and she could hear the distress in his voice, feel the tension in him. Beneath her ear his heart beat too quickly and she felt sorry for what she was doing to him, that she was shortening his life by a few minutes by setting off his heart like this; couldn't hearts beat only so fast for so long only so often before they stopped dead? She sat up, wiping her eyes with her fingers. ‘Sorry.' She had sounded as though he had made her angry the way she spat out sorry like that. He'd reached out and stroked her back and she glanced at him, wanting to ask what he thought of her for crying, for making his heart work so hard.

He'd said carefully, ‘You're crying over him, aren't you?'

He meant Edmund and so she said no scornfully, as though he was a fool for thinking so even though her tears were partly over Edmund, only partly, and actually it was the gallant thing to think. Lawrence liked
gallant
, it was one of his words. He was gallant not to have guessed about the other men; he didn't know her history was so colourful. If she told him about Joseph Day, about that first boy back in Ireland, he would be shocked. He would be even more shocked if she told him that her tears were mostly over Matthew. She imagined how he would draw away from her; he would look at her as he had sometimes looked at Edmund, as though she was contemptible, not worth his shock, arranging his face into its cold,
not-one-of-us
mask.

Now he turned to her from straightening the picture on the gallery wall and said, ‘What do you think?'

‘It's straight now.'

‘I mean about you – up there on the wall. What do you think about you?'

She thought that Joseph Day had made her look like someone else, a good thing to do but not the truthful thing. Joseph had seen her through the eyes of a man who was jealous and angry and hurt and he couldn't bring himself to talk to her when she went to his room each day so that he could finish this picture, the last one he had painted of her, the last one he would ever paint of her. But finish it he did, despite his anger – because really he wasn't angry when he was painting, he was just a concentration of energy; and when he was painting she was just a thing, better than a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit because she had blood under her skin, bones to get right, eyes to light properly, an expression to capture. Yet he had still managed to paint an expression she didn't recognise.

She stood beside Lawrence; he put her arm around her waist and pulled her close, his eyes on the painting as he asked, ‘Well?'

‘I'm not as nice as she is.'

He laughed, holding her even more tightly as he kissed her cheek. ‘Oh, yes you are. You are very, very nice.'

‘Really, I'm not.'

‘Really?' He turned back to her portrait. ‘I think he was being very
real.
He's very good, isn't he? Dreadful man, bloody good artist. Don't tell him, though – well, you can tell him he's dreadful, just not that he's good. He'll be insufferable.'

‘As insufferable as Paul Harris?'

He frowned at her. ‘Harris is a good chap.' His frown deepened. ‘Is he a good chap? I don't know. Probably, underneath all that … fraught. Not insufferable though. But I understand why you think he is.'

He didn't understand, couldn't see past Edmund, as though Edmund still stood between them. Although Lawrence was not as jealous as Joseph had been, he still couldn't get over his small amount of jealousy. Again, she imagined how he would react if she told him what a slut she was.

Lawrence squeezed her to him. ‘All right, you can stop staring at yourself now, vain creature. We should get on, hang the others. I do hope it goes as well as Harris's exhibition. All those queers do like his work, don't they?'

‘Were they
all …
?'

Picking up another of Joseph's pictures from those leaning against the wall, his voice was distracted as he said, ‘Were they all …? Oh. Yes, of course.' He laughed shortly, his eyes serious, searching Joseph's painting of her head and naked shoulders before glancing at her. ‘My dear girl – you didn't think normal men would buy those pictures, did you? Now, help me with this.'

Afterwards, when they had hung all the paintings to his exacting standard, when she had helped him to stick a card with its title and catalogue number typed neatly by her beside each one, when he had walked around the gallery again just to make sure
that it was right
,
my darling. Things must be right!
they went back to his rooms and he made her scrambled eggs and sang as he buttered toast: ‘
I can't do my bottom belly button up …
' She had told him that it was a silly song, one he shouldn't sing because people would think he was insane. He'd frowned, pretending to be perplexed so she'd imagined that tilting top hat again. ‘Silly? It's about a young girl about to give birth to a bastard.' He sliced the toast in two with the buttery knife. ‘Unless I've got that wrong and she's eaten too much cake. What do you think?' He looked at her. ‘Cake or bastard, silly or sad?'

She thought how happy he was, even for him, and that this extra happiness made him look younger and more handsome than he was; actually he was a plain man, most of the time quite ordinary-looking in the way that most men were: average height and build, mousey hair receding a little, his lips a little too thin so that he sometimes tried living with a moustache until she made him shave it off. He was plain compared with Edmund with his lovely body he was so easy in, that smiling face like an angel that had just thought of a risqué joke. Lawrence was plain compared with Matthew who has so handsome. Matthew; thinking of him was as shockingly painful as biting down on your tongue, pain caused by your own greediness, your lack of attention to anything but your own greedy want.

She looked down at the plate of scrambled eggs Lawrence had set down with a flourish in front of her. Paul Harris had made her feel guilty over Matthew and it wasn't fair – Harris was the guilty one.
Matthew
was the guilty one. Wasn't he just as much to blame for what happened? He had hardly pushed her away. Probably he had expected her to behave so badly – still a priest at heart, imagining that all women were harlots.

Perhaps she was a harlot. Wasn't she here, in the worst part of London, taking off her clothes for a living; serving beer for a living; hanging dirty pictures for a living, for Lawrence who said
fuck, fuckity fuckity fuck
just because he dropped a spoon on his kitchen floor? And she had slept with Joseph only because he had actually got on his knees and begged her to, and she had laughed, and been thrilled and touched because he had paint on his face, because he had painted her and made her look so beautiful. And it was all right; she liked Joseph.

And then she met Edmund and when she brought Edmund to the gallery, after he had gone Lawrence had laughed and said, ‘Honestly?' Just that:
honestly?
seeing something she didn't.

And Lawrence had said, ‘This Matthew fellow. I really do think you should keep away from him.' But sometimes she couldn't take Lawrence seriously because of all the songs and top-hat tipping – even though that was only in her head, even though Lawrence had been in the war and had checked men's feet for rot and been lucky to get off scot-free, although not really scot-free because his dreams were bad and he drank and drank because of the dreams that he said were only that: dreams;
roll me out of bed when I shout. Roll me over in the clover … Roll me over. Lay me down. Do it again.

How could you take a man seriously who sang such songs and said such things as, ‘I know you're with that boy Edmund, but I really don't think I can go on in this world without you. You'll see sense, eventually.'?

She had been made to see sense. She thought of Joseph, his face alight with the filthy thing he had to tell her about Edmund. She thought of Harris in the pub's back room, how he had apologised without saying what he was apologising for, because how could he? He was an arrogant man in expensive clothes, wearing an expression that must have cost only a little time in front of a mirror, apologising to a barmaid in the back room of a back-street pub. He had apologised but actually he was telling her that he was entitled to Edmund, that he had a more valid claim on him. She had hated Paul Harris more than anyone else in the world then; she hated him still, even if he was Matthew's friend;
because
he was Matthew's friend, making all that guilt rise inside her when what happened hadn't been her fault. She couldn't accept that it was her fault.

She realised she had finished the scrambled eggs Lawrence had made for her, had hardly tasted them, and that he was watching her, a look of concern on his face. He smiled sadly as if he knew she didn't love him. ‘Will you stay the night?'

She nodded.

‘Will you marry me?'

She laughed in dismay. ‘I should, shouldn't I?'

‘Yes.' He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘In the meantime, shall we go to bed?'