Nuns and Soldiers (61 page)

The next events formed, later, a sort of pattern in his mind. They all seemed to contribute something to the outcome, and without all of them, perhaps, nothing of what did happen would have happened. At the time, however, it was all a jumble. It was partly the leaves. Tim had always liked leaves, knew indeed quite a lot about trees, and had never ceased to draw and paint them. This autumn promised to provide an exceptionally good leaf season. London had been hot and sunny, then had become cold and windy. Frost was forecast. Then the weather partially recovered. Whatever the chemistry of hot and cold exactly was, it was beginning to produce, still in September, a superb collection of early autumn leaves. These little works of art lay about in gardens, stuck to damp pavements, or were collected into little treasure-stove piles by leisurely men in squares and parks. Sometimes they hovered in the air like butterflies in front of Tim’s dreamily outstretched hand. He collected them, at first picking up so many that he had to crush them by stuffing them into his pockets. He could not resist these masterpieces which were lying about free of charge: handsome plane leaves, green and brown or the purest yellow, maple leaves which turned tawny and vivid green or sometimes radiant red, and were often covered with the most elegant spots, curvy oak leaves, palest ochre and gold, beech leaves, brownest of absolute browns, and the more exotic joys of rhus cotinus, orange and blazing red with blotchy veins and streaks of the palest green, dark crimson of many-pointed liquidambar, and huge limp pallid flags of catalpa. Tim soon stopped pocketing these marvels, but carried with him in a large bag a portfolio with many sheets of blotting paper, into which, with increasing discrimination, he carefully put the leafy donations. At home, he pressed them, treated them discreetly with a glyceriny varnish, and then, inspired, began to make them into collages in the Victorian manner. For this purpose, and to show off the larger leaves, he used the parks as his wild countryside and collected bramble sprays and wild rose and old man’s beard. He made his collections early in the morning when no one was about, when the low white mist hung over the steamy surface of the Serpentine. He watched the fishing heron. Once he met a fox.

When he had made a number of collages he framed them in simple black frames, with plastic instead of glass, and showed them to the Irishman in the Barley Mow. The Irishman, called Pat Cameron, a sentimental soul, pronounced them the darlingest things and voted to buy the lot to sell in his shop. Tim made a cannier bargain this time, then ran home to make some more. He also painted several larger and more ambitious cat pictures from the drawings of Perkins which he had in stock. The next thing was that Pat Cameron asked him to come and help decorate his church for harvest festival. Tim agreed, assuming that Pat was a Catholic, and expecting to be ushered into some dark vaulted place full of saints and candles. Not so, Pat was a Protestant, a member of a very exclusive sect who met in a bright corrugated iron shed in Richmond, where there was no cross or altar, only a blue and white banner saying
Jesus pardons, Jesus saves.
Here the faithful had brought a lot of apples and pumpkins, and loaves of bread and a remarkable number of powerful roses, but had little idea of how to arrange these offerings. Tim took charge. He introduced quantities of Virginia creeper and yellow-fruited ivy and drooping hawthorn berries and red fans of cotoneaster, and produced in the end such a sumptuous series of tableaux that some of the faithful thought it positively Romish. Several people wanted Tim to stay to be pardoned and saved, but he gratefully declined.

During this ‘time of the leaves’, as he later thought of it, Tim was in a strange mixed-up unstable frame of mind. Often he felt weary and empty, and that was not bad. Sometimes he felt practical and busy, and that was not bad either. He was glad to have, for the moment, a sort of job, and to be able to sell something to somebody. He had enjoyed
Jesus pardons, Jesus saves
, but that was over now. He was curiously lonely, but he did not mind that, he felt that he had always been lonely. His parents, Daisy, had, and not accidentally, made him into a solitary man. He felt that he was reverting to a form of life that was natural to him. It was his proper destiny to be sad and disappointed and alone. Daisy had prevented him from making friends, while at the same time preventing him from having any proper relation with her. Perhaps he had, and not accidentally, performed a similar service for Daisy. He stayed at home a lot. He rearranged the studio and cleaned the skylights and scrubbed the dresser and even the floor. He washed his summer clothes and put them away. He went through all his paintings and drawings and destroyed some and sorted the rest into groups and wrapped them in cellophane and stored them neatly in the angles of the room. He ate frugally and ‘like a cat’ as Daisy had said. He went to pubs, new pubs, and made some casual acquaintances (no girls). He went to the White Hart at Barnes and the London Apprentice at Isleworth and the Orange Tree at Richmond. He became rather fond of Pat Cameron, who regarded Tim with a gratifying kind of awe because he was ‘a real artist’.

And throughout this period he was at the same time, in the deeper part of his mind, very miserable indeed. He scarcely for a moment ceased thinking about Daisy and Gertrude. Every evening he imagined Daisy sitting in the Prince of Denmark, wearing her blue eye make-up, with Perkins on her knee. He thought that she had probably returned to her flat in Shepherd’s Bush. He pictured her there, lying in bed till noon with no one to pick her clothes up off the floor. Or else he wondered whether she had actually left London, as she said she would. Perhaps she was already living with someone else. Her mysterious friends were, Tim conjectured, probably women. He really knew very little about Daisy. As he thought these various thoughts, he watched himself, watched for signs of frenzy and desperate need, desires, doubts, indecisions, intentions and hopes. There were none. There was a steady mourning and a bitter grief as for one dead. But there was no real wish to turn the clock back. Instead there was, together with sorrow, a melancholy sense of solitude and freedom. He awoke every day to a blank quiet relief that he had laid down the burden of Daisy forever, and done it cleanly and decently and honourably and with her consent. He recalled her words, her voice, begging him, for her sake, never to repent of their parting or try to undo it. He treasured his admiration for her and could think wistfully of her many qualities and sadly of the duration and the failure of their life together.

His thoughts about Gertrude were darker and more agonizingly and tightly knotted and more deeply and awfully frightening. He did and did not want to think about Gertrude, he often tried not to, dodging the terrible thoughts like blows. He dreaded the letter that he would one day receive from Moses Greenberg. He had sent Moses his address on a postcard. Remorse and guilt remained with him, lived in him, grew in him he sometimes felt, increasing without rational proportion. And he could not stop himself from thinking about Gertrude sometimes in a live way which had constantly to be prevented from becoming mindlessly hopeful, as if he momentarily
forgot
all that had so irrevocably happened. He noticed, almost in passing, how he had always
got on
with Gertrude, and never with Daisy. He did his best with himself in his new life, at least he sometimes noticed himself trying to be sensible. He was able to be busy, with his old rather useless impecunious practicality. He cooked and tidied. He did not go mad. He produced no ‘real art’ but he made some little pleasing oddments. He had a tiny job until November. He could
see
the autumn leaves, though he was still afraid to go back to the National Gallery. But underneath it all the old dark stream went swirling on and when he woke in the night he remembered his last conversation with Gertrude and ran through it over and over and over again. It will pass, he thought, it will all pass, it must pass. I am
alone
and I am now hurting no one, and that is the
essential thing.
Oh if only Moses Greenberg would write that letter and the last grisly necessities could be done with.

 

 

A letter did come one morning, but it was not from Moses. Tim, who usually received only bills through the post, looked at the envelope with surprise, shock. He had been unable to cure himself of an idea, which he constantly suppressed, that Gertrude might one day write to him. This was not Gertrude’s writing. It was an unfamiliar educated hand. He quickly opened it. It ran as follows.

Tim received this letter on the morning of Tuesday, his teaching day at the art school. He put it in his pocket and went to teach as usual. The next day he went to France.

Tim’s inconvenient popularity had caused him to be recognized on the bus before he even arrived at the village. Now he had been unable to avoid being hustled into the café to
prendre un verre
and be effusively welcomed by the
patron
and his wife. Several people were anxious to give him information, most of which he was unable to understand. He gathered that there had been a wicked mistral last week. But now all was quiet. The evening sun shone with benign calm upon the warm stones of the square and the motionless leaves of the pollarded plane trees in the little street.

When Tim had gone to his teaching on the day before he had been determined to ignore the baneful letter. He read it again during his short lunch hour and then tore it up. He felt that it must be untrue, and that in any case he ought to think it untrue. It was a bad letter because it disturbed, and if he was not careful could destroy something that was good, his ability to function in a fairly ordinary way. He did not want to be mad again, he did not want to suffer horribly again. He wanted to preserve the rational self-regard which would help him to survive, ultimately to recover. He tried to crush down savagely in his heart what was so terribly rising there. He said to himself, you are alone, you are in luck, you have at last made conditions for peace in your life. You may not be happy, but at least you can quietly hide.
Lanthano.
Do not go where you will simply be slaughtered, more terribly, a second time. Consider how, in all these horrors, you have got off more easily than you might have done. He did not trust Mrs Mount’s judgement, he regarded her as a gossipy busybody, though it was true that she had been very kind to him and Gertrude, and he could not work out any motive she might have for lying now. Perhaps she actually did wish him well, perhaps she actually
liked
him, some people did. But could she be right? She admitted it was a conjecture. Her letter was probably a whim, born of an idle, though possibly well-intentioned, desire to meddle. The risk was too great. How
could
he approach Gertrude again? A failure now would really drive him mad.

But in the afternoon, during the drawing class, as he brooded wretchedly upon these things, he knew that he was done for. The image of the house and of Gertrude alone in it was honey-sweet. He had to go where that sweetness was even if he died of it. He had at least to go and look, and let the gods decide. He did not, he told himself, yet really intend to see Gertrude. He only intended to go to France. After all, Gertrude might not be there at all. But he had to go to that place to which every path and every thought now led. His precious solitude, his simple life, was now completely ruined. It had not lasted long. Perhaps really it had been a fiction, an illusion. It was spoilt by Mrs Mount’s careless whim, and by the demons in his mind which had simply been waiting for a cue; and really, many chance events might have provided that cue. Moses Greenberg’s letter might have done it. Why did he for a second imagine he had ‘escaped’? Perhaps the real torment was only starting. He could not now inhibit or deny the desires and cravings which twisted so deep, the mindless hopes, the sweet hopes which were worst of all. He had achieved nothing. Well, he had achieved one thing. He knew that if he were still living with Daisy he would not have decided to go to France.

Sick with urgent terror he excused himself from the café. Absolute fear in the form of sexual desire made him almost faint. He went into the hotel next door to avoid his well-wishers. He left his mac and his jacket and his small bag, and vaguely indicating that he would return, left by the back door and set off walking along the road towards Les Grands Saules.