The Best Thing for You (21 page)

May 10, 1915

Dear Mr. Newbery,

It is now my extremely unpleasant duty to write to you about the events of yesterday evening, events which it appears shall precipitate our departure from Walberswick. I feel it is my obligation to inform you first, as it was your great kindness and hospitality that brought us to Suffolk, and until this last day or so had been such a refuge for us from our troubles at home. I would not like to think of you hearing of these events from some other source.

As you know, Margaret and I had intended to stay on at the Millside house instead of returning to Glasgow. We found much that was congenial here – the house, the beach studio, our friendships with other visiting artists, and the easy acceptance (we thought) of the local people – and so much to avoid at home – a grim, provincial city, a lack of commissions, even an outright hostility to my own work especially that wounded me deeply, as you know. If Glasgow found us bizarre, queer, decadent, and long past fashion, well then, we thought, Walberswick was for us, so be it. We were so pleased to accept your invitation to share the house at Millside last summer, and (I confess it now) enormously relieved when, returning to Glasgow yourselves,
you so kindly permitted us to stay on for the winter. Glasgow does feel less and less like home.

I am writing to you now from a jail cell in the Walberswick police station, where I am being kept overnight, like a rowdy. The charge, I fear, is in fact far more serious, though the absurdity of it would make one laugh, were one able to watch from the distance of the stars. They have been kind enough to provide me with a little chair and table, at any rate, and have permitted me to write letters to pass the time. Sleep is out of the question.

Last night, as is our custom, Margaret and I took a stroll around the village. Returning to Millside at around half past seven, we were stopped by a soldier with a bayonet fixed at the gate, and informed that military police were searching our rooms. Finding some letters with German and Austrian postmarks – from a Viennese architect inviting me to work with him in that city, a possible commission from Berlin, a German publisher interested in a book of watercolours, and so on – they accused me of being a German spy and took me into custody. One of the constables who knows me from the Anchor let slip that my habit of walking at night and my “strange” Highland accent raised suspicions with some of the locals, and thus was I “tipped off” to the authorities.

My work has always been more accepted on the Continent than at home; indeed, were it not for the present war, I dare say I would have more work in Germany than a man could comfortably handle in a lifetime. Yet my contacts and connections with that country have always been of an artistic nature, and anyone who knows me knows there never lived a stauncher Scottish patriot. On top of all the indignities I have suffered these past few years, this disgrace truly is more than I can bear. I am resolved to take my case to the House of Lords just as soon as I am able, to clear my good name.

Meanwhile, I am told I will be forbidden to live in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, or anywhere along the coast, near main roads, or railway lines. I cannot now see us returning to Glasgow, or rather I can see our reception there all too clearly, and have no appetite for it at all. That leaves London.

I hope what I have written here will not cause you to doubt for a moment our gratitude for all your many kindnesses and your hospitality. Margaret and I have no regrets about coming to Walberswick; I only wish we were leaving under happier circumstances. Please accept, too, my apologies for any future embarrassment you may suffer in the village as a result of my having been a guest in your house at the time of these unfortunate events.

May 10, 1915

My dear Margaret,

I am compelled to write to you, though I imagine you will never read this, or if you do, it will be with me at your elbow reading over your dear shoulder, apologizing for the anger, the haste, the untidiness, the bitterness of this screed. I imagine a warm fire in the grate, the tea on its tray, and our bags packed and waiting, in the downstairs hall, for the morning train. We must leave, we will leave, we will start again in London, that is if you think that you can work there; for I have said before and I say again that I have talent, but you have genius, and it is your work, above all, that matters.

Your face, my dearest, when the soldier met us at the gate last night (only last night! it seems years ago now), when he put his hand on my arm and we realized he would not let it go; your face
when I stumbled and had to ask him to slow down on account of my limp: eyes like jewels and hair like embers. No, my dear, don’t be afraid. Remember we had just spoken of the garden, and the warmth of the nights now, and of our watercolours? Remember we had just decided to look for forget-me-nots to paint in the morning, and how you thought you had seen a cluster near Mrs. Thomson’s house? The soldier thought I had been too long at the Anchor, but you know my dear that was not true, not last night at any rate. They have all seen “Old Mac” about the village often enough to know my gait. That soldier was young and himself intoxicated, I think, with his own uniform and important business, there at our garden gate. He reminded me of the students at the College now, so young and proud and pleased to dismiss their elders like flies from the feast table, to show them their own irrelevance.

Now you will say I am moaning, and you are right, it does not suit a grown man. But, Margaret, have we not suffered a little, we two? Have we not seen our work ignored, where once we were respected; have we not gone from comfort and success to this exile’s life, forced to be grateful for what crumbs of work still come our way? And you, my dear, have you not suffered even further in putting up with my melancholies and my nocturnal ramblings always ending at one of two places, places you know all too well though you have never set foot inside either? Ah, Margaret, let us moan a little, just this once, and get it off our chests.

When I was a young man I lived a kind of double life, a day-life at the architectural firm and a night-life at the art college, and my greatest dream was to reconcile the two, the straight line and the curved, the leaf and the bloom. Now it seems I am cast in that role again: puttering old flower painter in a deerstalker muttering over his pint, and German spy, as swift and stealthy
and deadly by night as I am lame and harmless by day. There’s a frightful flower from an unlikely seed, wouldn’t you agree?

One cannot of course control how one is seen by others. One can never in fact hope to control the totality of anything; I think that has been one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I never desired to be an architect, or a painter, or a designer of fabrics or furnishings, but rather some grand embodiment of all these, creating houses whole with a new way of living already complete inside them. Perhaps I am not so very far off the level, as far as the Germans are concerned, now that I see the words written, for the Germans are a people who admire discipline and control, and can be as inflexible in their way as is a certain Scot in his. No, don’t chide me, I am not all straight in my head tonight and am mixing ideas like colours on a palette, though my hand is clumsy and everything comes out a muddy kind of grey. They have me in a cell, Margaret, a room of such unremitting dreariness I think even you and I together could not salvage it. I spent some moments trying, if you can believe it, the first minute after they showed me in, my mind not yet caught up to my eye, which raced ahead as is its custom – a frieze rail perhaps, a wheat-coloured rug, a simple square light fixture in one corner, one of your large gesso panels above the cot – but our old accustomed lightness ill suits this gloomy place, and when I caught myself playing with pale colours and spring-like visions I reproved myself sternly, as a schoolmaster might reprove a dreamy pupil, and set about in full consciousness to give the place, in the mind’s eye, its due – dark wood panelling, a sombre bare floor, and minimum of ornamentation. None of our old curves and ovals, but something harder and more geometric, balanced, spare, slashing through any pretence of prettiness. A new style, one we shall forge together, for your own eye has ever complemented and perfected my own.

And forge it we shall, because here is news, dear Margaret, news that in its prematurity I had been keeping from you. Amongst those letters on my desk that have caused us such grief tonight was one from a new client, a German businessman, an admirer of the Mackintosh style (his words) who covets (and offers a small fortune for) a trinket with which to woo a young lady. Very well! But the gentleman further lets drop he is heir to a prominent Berlin department store, and that when the store passes into his stewardship he would be honoured to consult us on the refurbishment of the premises, and perhaps on two or three as-yet unbuilt stores, if the German economy should one day prove favourable to an expansion into the suburbs. Of course I have not met the young gentleman, but his letter impressed me, with its mixed modesty and enthusiasm, and I intuit that we would understand one another completely, and he would not seek to dominate or impress upon me his own ideas. Money, he says explicitly, is no object.

As for the trinket, well Margaret it is a metronome. It seems the young lady in question is an amateur musician, a pianist, and the gentleman from Berlin writes feelingly of how the object will mark the time between their visits together, and make that time more bearable by emphasizing its “finity.” (His English, have I mentioned, is delightful: very elegant and startled by more rules – each absolutely logical in itself – than have ever, I think, yoked the language before.) Apparently the lady is not unwilling, though the father is dead set against the marriage. It is a matter of religious difference, which is certainly an impediment though not, I think, in these modern times, so great a one as it once was. He is a romantic, I suspect, in that high, hopeless German vein, and I do not like him the less for it. I understand the innards are very like a clockwork’s so the construction should be straightforward. For some reason,
when I imagine the casing, I keep seeing the Necropolis at the end of Firpark Terrace, where we lived when I was six, with its headstones and monuments and mausolea like little houses, where a small boy could play hide-and-seek for hours. I see the metronome like a little dark house, though I can hear you telling me I am wrong, for love is light and beautiful, not a queer, dark, boxed ticking. It was not so for us, at any rate, was it, my dearest? We always knew how to be together, we matched like right and left, like the palest silk gloves.

It is the needle that fascinates me, the swing of the needle from left to right, from ill to good, from misfortune to fine redheaded luck. We are no longer young, and our own little houses will only ever be for two, yet I feel the pendulum has begun to swing back to us, and we will find a way out of this present unhappiness, to a place of love and work and calm where everything we do shall be the product of two souls so entwined that no one shall know what was yours and what mine; and we shall laugh at the confusion, as we ever have, and never care.

May 10, 1915

Dear Herr Goldberg,

Many thanks for your letter. I have never heard of a lady wooed, let alone won, with a metronome, but the challenge is one that appeals to me very much. So you remember my drawings for the
Deutsche Kunst
, for the House of an Art Lover competition. I think you must have been very young, for they were published in Germany well over a decade ago. I am not averse to attempting a design in that style, as you suggest, though I have moved
on significantly since and would prefer to put some of my more recent ideas into practice. The whites and creams and pale gem colours I favoured at that time would at any rate not suit the project you suggest. The metronome is a symbol, is it not? I was thinking, rather, blue.

The fee you propose is generous; indeed, I could design a flock of metronomes for the sum, and probably persuade them to fly, into the bargain. There remains the small matter of the present war, which I fear might delay delivery of the finished article, but let us cross that bridge when we come to it. Perhaps I shall fletch the object after all, and send it on its way to you independent of all postal systems, checks, borders, customs, stops, searches, suspicions, or prejudices of any kind.

Your letter has given me the greatest pleasure. What higher calling, after all, could art serve, than the pursuit of love? There is nothing like a lady’s hesitation to spook a man; believe me, sir, I have served in those trenches myself, and I know. Thus I wish you all happiness and Godspeed in your suit, and will do my all on this side of things to further a victory of the heart. I am,

Herr Professor Gerhard Weber met Daniel Goldberg for the first and last time in the winter of nineteen forty, when brown ice candied the puddles and street corners cut sharp as paper against the cold air. The go-between, a former university colleague who had turned to the black market in antiquarian objects when the race laws cost him his teaching position, had chosen an address in a part of town unfamiliar to Herr Professor Weber. Many of the storefronts were boarded over and scrawled
with more and less official graffiti, and on the sidewalk glass crumbs crunched beneath his shoes along with ice. The streets were virtually deserted. He passed a girl in a felt coat with a paper pinned to the lapel who averted her face when he neared, and a pair of men who pulled their hats low, pushed their hands deep in their pockets, and finally crossed the street and disappeared down a narrow alley to avoid any proximity to him. He himself was stopped by a greatcoated soldier who requested, in the charming accents of the Black Forest, his papers, returning them with a polite word or two when he saw that all was in order. The Herr Professor would not have minded chatting a moment with the soldier, who was young and seemed friendly enough and whose accent reminded him of his new wife’s, but his breast-pocketful of cash advised caution.