The Walking Stick Page 2

  He pretended not to notice and nodded and slipped in.

  Actually I didn’t help much because it’s always hard for me to get up and down in a hurry, and anyway the kitchen would hardly take more than three. So after passing a few things I grabbed a plate and a glass of wine, and a couple of people made room for me sitting between them on a bed.

  There was a biggish round table which was normally in the living room, and that took seven. Three or four more sat around the low dressing table, and the others sat on or between the two beds or stood or squatted on the floor. Leigh Hartley was at the dressing table and spent most of the meal talking to a stout dark girl whose name I never knew; but every now and then I could tell his head was turned and once I glanced up briefly and met his look.

  We ate for about an hour. It was Spanish Chablis, with vichyssoise, followed by jambon à la crème. Virginia fancied herself with her foreign menus. But actually it was very good. The man next to me was a doctor and the man on the opposite bed was a doctor and they were discussing the opening of a new psychiatric ward. The man next to me said: ‘What I’d really like is a selection: about fifteen schizos, five paranoids and a dozen manic depressives to begin. That’s about the right proportion. It doesn’t do to get out of balance right at the start.’ He sounded as if he was ordering plants for his herbaceous border.

  ‘Well maybe we can fix that,’ said the second man. ‘I’ll talk to Villars-Smith in the morning.’

  The man on the other side of me had just come back from a skiing holiday in Norway, and if supper had gone on another hour he might just have been able to get the whole thing out of his system. I sat there listening and saying yes and no and watching his red young self-important face swelling up like a frog as the room got hotter: a perfect subject for a coronary at forty-eight; but he’d still got twenty years ahead of him of swelling and shouting and accidentally spitting out bits of food. One couldn’t help but speculate what he would be like as a husband. Some poor girl . . .

  Supper finished about eleven, and everyone was very jolly and talkative. I went into the kitchen, but after a bit Sarah pulled me out. ‘I’ve told you before, Deborah, you are an ape. We pay to have this cleared up. Come and talk.’

  So I went in and somebody found me a chair, and in about five minutes Leigh Hartley had edged over to sit on the arm of the settee nearby.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Remember me?’

  ‘Not very well.’

  ‘I’m that fresh guy who insulted you by admiring your hair.’

  I didn’t reply, and after waiting he said: ‘I suppose the old cold shoulder is the easiest way of keeping wolves like me at bay.’

  I met his eyes. They were grey, absolutely clear grey, with whites nearly as bright as his teeth. ‘I haven’t any trouble usually. After the first howl or so, they don’t come after me.’

  He continued to look. ‘Because you’re lame, you mean?’

  Most people weren’t quite tactless enough to spell it out. But all I said was, ‘It could be,’ and turned to speak to David Hambro, who was squatting on a cushion nearby. I carefully didn’t turn back for quite a time, and knew he was sitting there more or less isolated, because the girl on the settee was chatting to Arabella. I tried to think of a way I could get up and leave without speaking to him again, but presently he got up himself and crossed the room. It was funny how angry one could still become, because it probably hadn’t been intended as offensive. You shouldn’t victimize a man for speaking the truth . . .

  He came back carrying two glasses. ‘You were nearly empty so I’ve brought you a refill,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m fine with what I’ve got.’

  ‘Well, let me exchange a new one for the old. It tastes better out of a clean glass.’

  I smiled at him. ‘No, really, I don’t slobber. This is perfect, thanks.’

  He sat down on the arm of the settee. ‘OK, I’ll drink them both.’

  That ended diplomatic relations for quite a while. About midnight one or two couples began to dance, and David Hambro asked Arabella. Hartley slipped down onto the cushion and hugging his knees looked up at me.

  He said: ‘You’re quite right, you don’t slobber. I’ve been watching.’ He went on: ‘I’m not really a wolf, you know. Haven’t the time.’

  I smiled again, but thoughtfully.

  He said: ‘Well, stone the crows, but you’re really beautiful. Maybe it is a bore to you, but think of the kick it gives other people.’

  The disc ran out at last, and couples stopped dancing, and Sarah went to turn the thing over. It was long-playing and I could see I was stuck for another twenty minutes.

  ‘Why haven’t you the time?’ I asked. ‘You should make it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but sarcasm is almost always lost on me.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered.’

  ‘I paint.’ He bit it off with his teeth, like someone biting the end of a cigar.

  ‘Oh, I see, that explains the yellow.’

  ‘What yellow?’

  ‘You said something about Naples yellow before supper.’

  ‘Well, yes. Well, it explains me, see. I’m the uncouth type. Haven’t had time to pick up the graces of society.’

  I looked at his hands: they were broad and stubby; he might more probably have been an engineer or a carpenter. His clothes were odd too, quite good but overstyled. A few people were going now; two of them came across to say good night to me. My stick got in the way, and one of them stumbled over it. The music was late-night music, dreamy, beat stuff suitable for amorous couples and a crowded floor. I wished I hadn’t come. I wished so much that Sarah wouldn’t ask me. She did it always out of a loving goodness of heart and trying to draw me into the circle of her friends, and always it was a failure.

  ‘What do you paint?’

  ‘Pictures. You know. With a brush. Oil on canvas. Or hardboard when I’m short of cash. Or canvas paper when I’m broke. It’s a simple question of economics.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Well, you aren’t . . . I shouldn’t think so anyway.’

  ‘Are you a good painter?’

  ‘No.’ He stopped looking at me and looked through me. ‘I’m a good draftsman. But that isn’t enough.’

  That was original anyway. Or maybe it was just a new line. ‘You’re modest.’

  ‘No – clearsighted.’

  ‘In that case, why do you still go on with it?’

  I thought he was staring at my bad leg, and moved it for him to see better.

  He said: ‘Why do you go on breathing?’

  ‘Do you sell your paintings?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Do you work at something else, then?’

  ‘No. I’ve a bit of lolly from an aunt. She married an ironmonger in Dulwich and I was her only blighted nephew. It just about keeps me above the Chinese famine level.’ He gulped his other glass of wine. ‘Can I take you home?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m spending the night here.’

  ‘You don’t live with Sarah – not normally, I mean?’

  ‘No, with my parents in Hampstead.’

  His face set into fixed angular planes. ‘Will you come out some evening with me?’

  ‘. . . I actually don’t go out much. I get home latish most evenings.’

  ‘A Sunday then.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Good, that’s settled. I’ll ring you. Or what about next Sunday?’

  ‘No, I’m booked.’

  ‘OK. I’ll ring you.’ He looked round. ‘I don’t know anything about you yet. Odd, isn’t it? But you’re beautiful – or nearly beautiful. Been watching you. With some expressions and in some lights it’s like catching light on water. Quicker here and gone than a rainbow.’ He brooded. ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘What’s unfair?’

  ‘Beauty. It does things to you. Doesn’t it?’

  So did ugliness. But when he rang I could be out.

&nb
sp; He said: ‘There’s no Goddamn fairness in art. What you feel is absolutely no guide to what you can express. We can all be Rembrandts, Rouaults, Picassos in what we feel and what we get fun out of and that sort of thing, but not one in a bloody million can express it.’

  Most people were going. Release was not far off.

  He said: ‘What do you do? You’ve got a different face from your sisters. You musical?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’ve got long faces really. Modern faces. Yours isn’t. It’s oval – a good bet for old man Rossetti. It’s nineteenth century. Very out of date.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No. It’s got something. It’s sensitive, and gentle. Of course, I can see you aren’t a bit gentle really, but that’s not what I mean. You look romantic, even though underneath you may be—’

  I didn’t learn then just what else Leigh Hartley thought I might be underneath, because Sarah came across and interrupted us, bringing with her a girl neither of us had yet met. I waited until the conversation got going and then slid away into the kitchen and saw no more of him that night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I work for Whittington’s, the auctioneers. This might seem a bit of a comedown in a professional family like ours, if it hadn’t been Whittington’s.

  When I left school the one thing I was certain I wasn’t going into was medicine, so my mother sent me off to France where she had a married cousin. I stayed there, outside Avignon, and read for university entrance but never got far as I’m not really the academic type. Being laid up so long has fostered the reading habit without giving it discipline, so that I can always read and study and pick up quickly what I am interested in, but what I’m not interested in simply slides away and my memory of it is as blank as a cinematograph reel that hasn’t been exposed to the light.

  My half uncle is an archaeologist and writes popular books on Pompeii and Arles and Perpignan for the French public. I read these and they touched off a fuse, so that I went back to the scholarly works from which he’d got most of his facts, and then I couldn’t read enough about it.

  So later I had gone to Whittington’s. It was a time when employment by any of the big three was just becoming fashionable. Even Debs applied for jobs in Whittington’s or Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and when I put my name down I was at the foot of a long list. But it wasn’t long before I got a second interview, and with it, at nineteen, a job as a receptionist clerk. There were, you see, certain things in my favour. Already I knew quite a lot about early art. And Mr Hallows, who first engaged me, must have reasoned that it was unlikely I should get married. In a world where woman-wastage must reach about 90 per cent, this virtue isn’t to be sneezed at.

  So after two years I was put in the antiquities department, and then later transferred to the porcelain which was much larger and really covered most of the things I was interested in. A year later I became a cataloguer, and now I was Mr Mills’s right hand and usually went with him if there was a china or porcelain collection to be itemized out of town. On smaller jobs I often went alone.

  Whittington’s is the smallest of the big three, but in some ways the most select. It is just the oldest, by a matter of five years, and its links with English aristocracy are secured by long custom. All the same it was slower than the other two to discover that even tradition must give way to progress, and in the postwar period – when I was still a child at school – it nearly ran on the rocks. Then a new generation of directors grew up and shook it out of its dying sleep and put it on its feet again.

  He rang me on the following Wednesday about nine in the evening.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you free this coming Sunday? I’m a member of the Seven Arts Club and we have a film show every Sunday evening. It’d be interesting this week—’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m already booked up.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sounded really disappointed. ‘Pity.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks all the same.’

  He sensed I was going to ring off and said quickly: ‘That’s a pity because it’s the Picasso film – it’s an old one, made ten years or more ago, but I’ve never seen it. The old boy in action. People who’ve seen it rave about it.’

  ‘Oh . . . Yes, I have heard of it.’

  ‘Not that the Seven Arts Club is often much to write home about. I sometimes reckon it’s more an excuse to watch blue films than anything else. But every now and then they turn up something real good.’

  ‘Like this.’

  ‘Yes, like this. We wouldn’t need to get there till nine. What hopes?’

  ‘No hopes . . . Sorry again. I must ring off now, as I left a kettle on.’

  ‘OK . . . Deborah?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When is your next free Sunday?’

  Damn the man. ‘Well . . . I’m not absolutely sure. Perhaps next month.’

  ‘As long as that? Anyway, I’ll ring again.’

  ‘Yes, all right. Goodbye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  In the drawing room my mother had just finished playing the piano. It was an ascetic, sterile room, with two small Hamadan rugs on the polished oak block floor. The charcoal leather settee was without cushions. The Bluthner six-foot grand in black veneer had an Anglepoise lamp on it. That was all there was in the room except for three framed reproductions of paintings by abstract artists, two small pieces of modern sculpture, and three chairs. Douglas, my father, always said that if one’s intellect was worthwhile, that furnished any room adequately. People cluttered their rooms, he said, as they cluttered their minds. (Yet, of his three daughters, I collected porcelain and Sarah collected old silver. Arabella so far only collected young men.)

  Erica wore an expensive but seventh-winter grey barathea suit. ‘Was it for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not one of the girls? Because I wanted to ask Sarah—’

  ‘No, it was somebody I met at Sarah’s party.’

  ‘They were inviting you out?’

  ‘No. They wanted an address.’

  Up in my bedroom I had a moment’s regret. The Picasso film was one I hadn’t seen, and God help me, it couldn’t have hurt to go out one night with a man. And I could surely handle Leigh Hartley, in the very unlikely event of his needing to be handled. (A few men had been interested in me in my life, but very few. In most cases the sight of a withered leg put them right off, and in others I think they felt I was delicate and they’d be taking advantage of an invalid.)

  I stared at the slightly damaged Italian majolica dish I’d picked up in a shop in Brighton. A gorgeously rich ruby lustre and the central picture was of God turning Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden; it had probably been painted by one of the Grues of Castelli. The plain answer to my question was that men really weren’t for me. Any more, perhaps, than they should have been for Eve.

  Leigh Hartley in his obtuseness clearly hadn’t come to appreciate all this, for he rang me the following Monday evening and told me that because of its great success the members had managed to get the Picasso film for a further evening. Could I come next Sunday at nine?

  I said: ‘You’ve seen it once. You don’t want to see it again,’ and then cursed gently under my breath while he reassured me he was going a second time in any case. When you’ve not said no at the very beginning it’s harder halfway through. Of course I should have said: ‘For God’s sake go away and stop bothering me!’ But last week’s thoughts were still in the back of my mind; and, after all, the poor fellow didn’t mean any harm. His rather humorous blunderings were better than the glassy-eyed self-adulation so many young men have.

  So I found myself weakly agreeing to meet him at the Hampstead tube at 8:30. He would have come to the house, but I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving under the speculative eyes of my parents. I never really knew how they felt about this sort of thing.

  This Sunday evening was the first Sunday in May, and when I got to the tube he was waiting standing beside a very small red sports car. I got across
the road without him noticing, and came up behind him. His face lit up when he saw me. He was younger than I remembered, probably years younger than I was; crikey, he must still find me attractive, I thought; odd, is he a ‘case?’ but generous and warm; give him his due; pity about his bad voice – just flat rather than accented, and thin in timbre; a sort of cockney voice without the accent; it didn’t go with his physique, which was husky and strong. Artist barrow boy? And those clothes.

  ‘Can you fit in here? Let me take your stick. That bogey across the way has been looking pretty nasty, I reckon one shouldn’t park here. Mind your coat – this door has to be slammed. Good. Hold your breath and we’ll see if it starts.’

  The show was in a little cinema in Wardour Street, and had just begun when we got there with a short film about sculpture in Japan. When it was done we ran straight into the Picasso. I’d never studied painting as such; but inevitably as pictures and furniture were the two biggest sections of Whittington’s, one came to know a certain amount about them.

  When the lights went up we had drinks at the bar there, but it was crowded and noisy. So he said, let’s go round the corner and have coffee in peace. This we did, and sat in a café and talked in quite a friendly way for a while.

  Then he said: ‘You didn’t want to come out with me tonight, did you?’

  I picked at a flake of skin on the edge of my finger. ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘You reckon I’m a Smart Alec, who won’t take “not particularly” for an answer.’ He was smiling, but one really got the impression he cared what I said next.

  ‘It isn’t quite that. Maybe I’m a bit abrupt – a bit rude. Or seem so. It isn’t that I intend to be.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to know it.’

  I said carefully: ‘Of course I enjoyed the film, and of course I wanted to see it. It was fun . . . I get a great deal of fun out of life, but it isn’t always quite the same fun. I mean the same as other people’s.’

  I paused. He said: ‘Well, go on.’

  ‘There’s not much more to say, is there?’

  ‘D’you mean because you’re lame?’