The Very Thought of You (29 page)

All her life, she had lived through art, but all the art she had ever known could not redeem the despair of this place. Here there was pain and anguish beyond any expression, and beyond any hope of relief.

She wiped her face and breathed deeply, and returned to the back of the lorry for the next batch of medicine. Bit by bit, she did what she could to be practical on behalf of those
who might recover. Something is better than nothing: that was all she could hold on to.

After three days she had exhausted her supplies, and the survivors had all been attended to – and the dead tidied away. So she drove her empty lorry back to the embassy at Berne, and returned to the carefully anaesthetized existence which passed for her life there.

She tried to tell her husband about what she had seen, yet she could not quite retrieve the truth of what she had felt.

Within months, she and her husband began to pick up the pieces of their pre-war routines, and she resumed her bracing enthusiasm for daily life. But every now and again, the smell of that camp would come back to her. And for a moment, she would grasp again what the place had told her – about the limitless capacity for human suffering. And the fear would seize her again that random but unspeakable pain might strike anyone at any time, and that her own blithe disposition was a mere carapace of deluded hope, no more than a defensive illusion.

Back to the Old House

1946–2006

49

Soon after the war, when the storage vaults of the British embassy in Warsaw were reopened, someone uncovered a stack of Peter Norton’s paintings which she had left behind when fleeing the Nazis in 1939. There were canvases by Kandinsky, Klee, Duchamp and Ernst, all from Peter’s prewar collection at the London Gallery.

“Let the Poles keep them for their galleries – they have lost everything else,” she insisted with her usual generosity.

She and her husband had recently packed up all their belongings yet again, after being posted to a new flashpoint, Greece, where civil war was devastating a country already ravaged by the Nazis. But by 1948, the steady flow of American dollars from the Marshall Plan was beginning to revive the economy, allowing the Nortons to enjoy their post-war life in Athens.

Peter continued to support the cause of modern art, although her enthusiasm for young artists did not always suit the more dignified trappings of diplomatic life. One Christmas, she hid two young painters – John Craxton and Lucian Freud – in the embassy garage, where they kept themselves scarce from Sir Clifford, until General Montgomery came to stay and rumbled them.

More acceptable to her husband was the major Athens exhibition of Henry Moore’s work, which she mounted with the artist in 1951, to international praise. Norton was proud, too, of how readily the Greeks treasured his wife for her indeflatigable charity work; during the civil war, she
made numerous trips up into the mountains with mules, ferrying parcels of food and clothing to camps of orphans and refugees made homeless by fighting. In recognition of her tireless initiatives to relieve poverty in outlying Greek villages, she was awarded the honorary citizenship of Athens – “a rare distinction”, as Norton told their visiting friends.

After the Nortons finally retired back to Chelsea, Peter continued to fund new and undiscovered talent, supporting the early careers of numerous painters, from Francis Bacon to yves Klein, and many others whose work was later lost along the way.

She spent much of her time in Paris too, seeking out French avant-garde artists, and it was on the Left Bank, in 1955, that she bumped into Pawel Bielinski again at a party. He had lived there since the war, he explained, and was now part of a circle of Jewish artists and writers, Avigdor Arikha and Paul Celan among them.

The following morning Peter walked up the many stairs to Pawel’s studio and there, propped against the walls, stood several paintings of a naked woman with long hair, reflected in a triptych of mirrors.

“I heard about Elizabeth’s death,” he said to her, anticipating her recognition, “but how is Thomas?”

Peter shrugged, said it was always so hard to know with Thomas – he was such a private man, always so polite. But all
appeared
to be well with him. Ashton Park was a school now, and Thomas was still teaching there.

“I think he’s probably a very good teacher,” she added, to be positive.

“He was a very patient man, I remember,” replied Pawel. Peter did not press him any further, but she did buy one of his paintings of Elizabeth. And when she returned to her house in Chelsea, she hung it in her study.

Her husband recognized the portrait at once, and it moved him, even though he had never liked Elizabeth.

“Keep it there,” he said, “to remind us of the past.” They did not mention the picture to Thomas, not knowing what his reaction would be.

The Nortons did not see Thomas very much any more – nor did any of his old friends, because he hardly ever came down to London after the war. His Regent’s Park house had been half destroyed in the Blitz, so he had sold it to a developer in 1946, unable to face its renovation himself.

As Thomas grew older, he only really felt comfortable in Yorkshire, and so he settled there permanently – continuing to teach at Ashton Park, where a girls’ boarding school was established soon after the war.

Every September, he would watch as a new group of eightyear-old children arrived in the Marble Hall with their freckles and pigtails and school trunks – before emerging four years later as reflective girls who would tilt their heads to one side and frown slightly before answering a question.

There were always so many children passing through his life now, each year a fresh generation to be moved by – but Thomas did still sometimes pause and wonder what had become of those first children he had known, those who had been evacuated to his house during the war. Too many of them had vanished from his mind, like footprints in the sand.

50

London, 1957

Anna sands entered an anonymous hotel lobby in Holborn. A brash chandelier cast an unnerving fare onto muted
green walls, and she was half-aware of the reflected glare of a polished floor, with shimmers of light unsettling her balance.

Her partner was thirty years her senior, ageing, balding, with a thickening waist and a grizzled beard. Three weeks earlier they had met at the Frankfurt Book fair, where both of them were guests at a raucous party in a baroque hotel bar. There was a crush of publishers with cigarettes and wine glasses, and when a mutual colleague introduced them, she had to repeat her name twice in all the noise. He was the sales director of one of the bigger publishing houses – self-confident, determinedly low-brow – while she was a junior editor at a literary imprint.

At first, she only talked to him out of politeness, and hardly listened to his questions. He was overripe, his body going to seed, a heavy man who liked to drink and smoke. She was a firesh-looking twenty-six-year-old, with a girlish face but a woman’s body.

She was about to move off when he insisted on buying her a drink. As he handed her the glass, she saw a flash of tenderness in his eyes, and he called her “
my dear
”. That was always the giveaway – their connection was made.

Ten days later he rang her office and asked her out to lunch, at an Italian restaurant near the British Museum. They sat at a corner table and played with their food while talking about Graham Greene’s novels and his understanding of odd love.

He had been married for twenty-five years, she for three. She felt herself growing wet as he studied her face. When he reached out to hold her hand, she was afraid to raise her eyes to his in case they welled up.

He had already chosen the hotel, within walking distance of their lunch. It was raining and the pavements were slick
– people walked with their coat collars up and their heads down. They shared his umbrella and he steered the way.

There was discomfort for her as they checked in, and the neat brunette receptionist was careful not to meet her glance. Anna wanted to say,
I am a decent educated woman with a husband at home.
But she did not want to leave either. He was more at ease with the procedure.

They reached their room and closed the door behind them.

For the first time they were alone together. It was a moment they had both hankered after, ever since she had accepted his lunch invitation.

He took off his jacket and smiled at her in a way that was ribald and wry, but tender too, and vulnerable. Their eyes locked into each other as they reached forwards to kiss. Then he held her tightly wrapped in his arms.

She undid his tie, then his shirt, and saw the grizzled hair on his chest. She rested her head against him and felt his pleasure at this yielding.

The uncovering of her breasts was a moment of excitement for him; she knew that she hid their size beneath her clothes. “
Look at you!
” He said, and she sank once more into his arms, feeling self-conscious for a moment, until he led her to the bed and their lovemaking began.

Later, when they dressed, neither of them knew if there would be a second time. As they parted, he looked into her eyes with sentimental kindness, and told her she was lovely.

She had no umbrella, and her hair was dishevelled with rain by the time she reached her office. It was late, too late, and she invented a spurious meeting with an agent to satisfy a curious colleague. She could not concentrate on any of the manuscripts before her.

After work, riding home on the underground to her husband, Anna sat down on an empty seat and tried to stop herself shaking. What was this transgressive streak in her, she asked herself. She was scared, and close to the edge, and could not flathom why she felt this need for intimacy with men old enough to be her father.

She loved her husband Jamie, who was dark-haired and attractive, and successful in every way – in his spontaneity, in his friendships, in his creative life as a radio producer. His boyish vitality spilled over into every moment of his day: whether he was running for a bus or charming a receptionist, there was always a bounce, a smile, a dash about him which captivated anyone he ever met.

For two years now, they had been trying for a child without success. The doctor had told them there was nothing wrong with either of them – that they must be patient and relax, and a child would come.

But Anna feared it was all her fault. In the intimacy of their bedroom, she could feel her husband’s desire and yet her own body would not respond with an answering release. She could not understand why, nor did they discuss it.

Yet that night, as her lithe young husband made love to her, she did come for him – but only by closing her eyes to think of the ageing sales director with his crumpled face and grizzled body, and his sentimental eyes.

“I love you, my darling,” Jamie said afterwards, as they lay together. He stroked her inner thigh, a place he loved to rest his hand.

“I love you too,” she said. And the word
love
unleashed a shudder of confused guilt right through to her womb.

51

London, 1964

Children had arrived in the end for Anna. She was a mother now, with Ason and daughter. Every Friday to Monday, she would stay at home in Bayswater, playing with her children, hanging their washed nappies on a rack over the bath, and taking them for walks in Hyde Park. But midweek she would still set off to her old publishing house in the West End.

On those days, she would emerge from Oxford Circus station and make her way through Soho knowing that she was lucky and blessed – or so it would appear to anyone watching her as she swung along the streets in her skirt and boots and coloured raincoat. Here she was, a young woman in her prime of life, with children at home and a husband at the BBC, setting off to work with a face which could engage anyone she passed on the pavement.

Just before 9.30 she would arrive at the Georgian building which housed her publishing firm, a literary imprint founded by a Viennese émigré. It was her job to find firesh voices which might uncover new emotions for the reading public. Every Wednesday the company held an editorial meeting in which they would discuss the latest submissions.

But in the last few weeks, something strange had been happening to Anna: she could no longer read. Her in-tray was spilling over with unread manuscripts as she struggled with her mental block. All week she had been staring at the same piles of paper, and secretly crying. She went for walks to disguise the tears, then returned to the stack of unread novels, facing once more her word-blindness.

It seemed as if the link between words and their meanings had somehow been severed, until all she could see was neat
rows of black marks. Just ink – just the shape of ink. She sat at her desk, quietly stringing paperclips together, not knowing how to stop this unravelling. Soon every part of her life was infected.

“You’re not listening,” said her daughter, as Anna crouched on the stairs at home and stared at the wall, not hearing her questions. Instead of playing with her children, she just sat still and watched them. Their washing piled up.

When Jamie returned home, she would cook supper like an automaton. Sitting down to eat with her husband, his voice came to her as if from an ill-tuned radio.

Every day, she continued to brush her teeth, and lay out the breakfast things, and walk the children to nursery. She put money in the machine to buy her Tube ticket and heard the clunk of the coins falling down the chute. She followed safe routines which might keep her on a steady track, but secretly she was gone, off and away into a silent place with no gravity, where all you did was float and look.

She began to see things in trance-like, subaqueous colours. The world came to her as a flicker of disconnected details, raindrops on a car roof, chewing gum on the pavement, a stray white hair on a man’s navy coat, her own hands chapped and red in the cold weather. Sometimes the world seemed to be breaking up before her, scattering into bits, a rainstorm of fragments which would not fit together.