The Very Thought of You (16 page)

Every morning for two years, Elizabeth walked down from regent’s Park to Peter’s Mayfair gallery, her clothes crisp and chic. She spent her days attending to visitors and buyers, and felt herself in delicious counterpoint to the shambolic artists who arrived with new pictures, or came to gaze at the exhibitions there. There was abrittle immaculacy about her, with her cigarettes in along ivory holder and her tailored suits – and yet, improbably unconventional painters firted with her. She went with Peter to pubs where they mixed with surrealist poets and French modernists. Peter, in the innocence of her enthusiasm, rode through all her encounters with aguileless brio. But in Elizabeth there were more forbidden cravings.

It amused her to think of Thomas in his decorous office guarding the Empire with pen and paper while she smoked in pubs with unknown young men who cared only for their own risqué self-expression.

She began to enjoy her own incongruity. Mrs Ashton in Mayfair, groomed and genteel, but slumming now in these pubs. She swayed as she walked, knowing that her skin was glowing and her hair abundant.

What did she want? to be desired and pursued. To challenge her fate.

Something must happen.

In the evenings, after the gallery had closed, she began to haunt the pubs of Soho. Furtively at first, keeping herself apart, but gradually daring to engage with men who wanted to experiment with women.

In the French pub, Aman brought her awhisky which she did not like but sipped anyway.

“My name is Luc,” he said, and the crowd pushed them close together. It was hard to see the whole of him: he came to her in glimpses – face, forearm, fexed knee.

He was apainter, young, dark, badly shaven. His fingers were stained with nicotine, his shoes worn and tatty. He fixed his large bold eyes on Elizabeth as he told her, in broken english, about his escape from Belgium into the refreshing amorality of London. The pub was throbbing with smokers and drinkers, all gesticulating wildly in the cramped, noisy space. Luc was absurdly youthful – but attractive, too.

“Here I can paint what I see in my head, because it is clear to me. In Brussels all I had was boredom – and anger – and my mother’s black dresses. And lace. There is too much lace in Belgium.”

Elizabeth drew on her ivory cigarette holder and laughed, and felt the thrill of being with someone so young and cocky, who had no knowledge that she was Elizabeth Ashton, of Ashton Park. She locked eyes with him. His eyes were blue: could pass for Ashton eyes.

Later, she found herself in Asoho backstreet, mounting the stairs behind Luc’s stocky thighs. In his narrow room stood an iron bedstead with grey sheets. By the light of a bare bulb they took off their clothes, Elizabeth’s nipples erect, her womb crying out for achild. She let him grapple her like an animal, his legs robust and his thick erection protruding from crinkly black hair. In arapture of procreation she rolled on Luc’s unmade bed and cried out as she felt his hot rush inside her. Then she lay back to halt the ooze down her thighs, and luxuriated in the thought of her child forming within.

But still no child came. at the end of the month her womb washed itself out with blood, as usual.

In the months that followed, there was roberto, and Julius, and Stefan, and Billy, and even adiscreet guards officer, henry, who had always pursued her when she was a debutante. But generally she preferred encounters with strangers in unknown rooms, where afterwards she could look out and see an unfamiliar piece of London sky. Sometimes at night, sometimes during an extended lunch break. Peter Norton never asked where she had been when she reappeared, immaculate as ever, in the late afternoon.

Yet in her bedroom at home, the misery of infertility still persisted. Thomas continued to fear that the fault lay with him, that his polio had made him sterile. But Elizabeth began to realize now that it was probably she who was truly barren.

Was it a punishment, she wondered, for her faithlessness, for her secret abandonment of her disabled husband? Was she cursed? She lived month by month. Her hope was erratic. Her happiness depended on the time of the month.

Thomas had learnt not to watch her moods too closely, but was relieved when she returned from London in such high spirits. He could not know that her buoyancy was founded
on the hope, however slight, that her latest tryst in Soho might yet prove successful.

21

Annanoticed anew arrival at Ashton. a Pole, or so Mrs Robson told them. adark-haired, heavy-browed man called Pawel, who sometimes sat at the Ashtons’ lunch table. He did not say very much. Annaheard from Miss Weir that he had fought the Nazis before escaping from Poland, “but he’ll be up and about and teaching you soon, once the yorkshire air revives him.”

The children whispered about him with awe. A man who had fought the Nazis! In England there was only the Phoney War, and nothing dramatic ever seemed to happen.

The Ashtons did not meet Pawel Bielinski properly until he joined them for dinner on his first weekend at the house. Chance had brought him to Ashton Park. In the aftermath of Poland’s disastrous defeat, he had been rescued by Peter Norton from one of the Polish reflugee camps in romania. And on their return to London, Peter had sent him to Ashton to recuperate.

“He’s an artist,” she told Elizabeth on the telephone, “so he can teach art.”

The young man whom Thomas saw across his dinner table was thin, distant and numbed. He was clearly exhausted too, for he had hardly emerged from his room since his arrival. His hollow-eyed absence reminded Thomas of those wounded veterans he had watched with his sister, when their house was a hospital in the great War.

He wondered if Pawel had taken life on the front, but it was too early to ask him what had happened out there. He steered their conversation towards more neutral territory.

“Don’t be too daunted by these wet days,” he said to Pawel, “it always rains here in November, but December is often surprisingly dry.”

“Oh darling, it rained all Christmas last year—” countered Elizabeth.

“
Usually
it’s dry for Christmas here.”

“In Warsaw, the snow is thick by now,” Pawel contributed.

He spoke reasonable english, but appeared happier when silent.

Elizabeth did not yet make much effort to engage with their new guest, but she did watch him discreetly. Noting his erect posture and broad, careful hands. And his dark eyes. He reminded her of those supple, unshaven artists who had thronged the London gallery before the war. But she feigned indifference.

Neither Thomas nor Elizabeth made much impression on Pawel that first night. For the moment, he was relieved if he could simply answer the questions of this grand english couple who had so unexpectedly given him anew home.

When the coffee arrived, Thomas asked him gently about his friendship with the Nortons.

“Peter has spoken of you with such warmth. How did you meet her?”

“She came to my exhibition in Warsaw last year, and bought some of my paintings. How lucky I was that she came,” he said with his first smile, and then tentatively began to volunteer pieces of his past to them. How he had grown up in A small town, Sulejów, but had always dreamt of moving to Warsaw, aproper city throbbing with artists and musicians.

“And did you always paint?” asked Elizabeth, intrigued by anyone with avocation.

“I was lucky enough to get into the art school in Warsaw,” he said with Ashrug.

As he gave this bald account of himself, he could barely recognize the person he was describing, shorn of emotional detail. He did not bother to tell them that his widowed mother had longed for him to be a doctor instead, nor that it had been no easy feat for a Jew to be accepted into a good art school.

“By 1938, I had painted enough canvases to put on A small exhibition. Lady Norton came to the gallery – she had recently arrived at the British embassy.”

She was distinctive, so he had noticed her at once – her quicksilver face, her faintly dishevelled short hair and awkward long limbs. She had praised the quick light of his paintings, which was just what he wanted to hear. His metaphoric scenes reminded her of Paul Nash, she said. All those defant landscapes and mountains of the mind.

“She bought three pictures, on the spot,” Pawel said, smiling faintly. “Sometimes I dined with the Nortons at the embassy, and afterwards I was lucky enough to see her art collection: paintings by Paul Klee, Leger, Kandinsky. that was an education. She is afree spirit—”

“And always an enthusiast,” added Thomas.

“yes,” said Pawel emphatically.

“How did she help you escape?” Elizabeth asked.

“I was with a troop in eastern Poland when the news came through that the russians had invaded. Soviet soldiers arrived to round us up, but it was chaotic and many of us slipped away, crossing the river into romania, where we were put into reflugee camps. It was there that Lady Norton found me.”

He had heard that there was to be A shipment of aid arriving from Britain, razor blades, soap, cigarettes, medical supplies, food. He went to wait for the lorries. He could hardly believe it when the door of the ford lorry opened and down stepped afamiliar figure – angular, bracing.

“
Lady Norton!
” he called out.

He saw that it took her a moment to recognize him, then joy fashed across her face.

“We must get you out of here,” she said, embracing him. “Oome and help me unload, and you can return home with me.”

After her own escape from Poland, she had raised flunds in London for the Polish reflugee camps, and then volunteered to drive out the provisions herself.

They visited three more camps, with Pawel acting as her assistant. Then he accompanied her in the lorry back to Italy where, after much string-pulling and waving of arms on her part, a British consul stamped a visafor him.

They drove back through Asubdued France, closing down for war. Pawel slept much of the way, and Peter did not pester him with too many questions about recent events. As soon as they reached London, she brought him home to Chelseato recover, hatching a plan for him to join the evacuees’ school at Ashton.

“you’ll need plenty of time here to recuperate, so please – take your time before you start to teach,” said Elizabeth, turning to him.

“Thank you – thank you for everything,” said Pawel, rising from his chair. Bidding goodnight to his hosts, he was struck in passing by awary, searching quality in Mrs Ashton’s face.

He returned to his room, relieved to be released from company. He had not touched alcohol for several months, and the wine from dinner was still slipping through his veins as he undressed. He turned off the bedside lamp and lay down in the darkness, hoping for a dreamless sleep as he closed his eyes.

22

It was aweek before Pawel surfaced for long enough to explore Ashton Park. Until then, it had appeared to him as Aseries of distanced impressions, as if through thickened glass.

He began to watch the children playing in the grounds. Pretty children, with smiling faces and crooked teeth, thin and fair, different in looks to the children in Poland. He met the other teachers and matrons too, though it was some time before any of them entered his thoughts.

But he did feel some curiosity about the Ashtons’ marriage. And soon, this curiosity had crystallized into pity for the wife. Thomas Ashton was a handsome man, it was true, but he seemed a desiccated character – formal, correct and closed. Elizabeth Ashton, on the other hand, was sensuous: she swayed a little as she walked, and her every gesture suggested a caged need. Had she married him as a cripple, or as an able-bodied man?

The other teachers seemed either not to know or not to want to talk about the Ashtons. In the end it was Joan, a housemaid who had been at the house for years, who recounted the story of Thomas’s illness. Pawel was moved by their ill luck and could not help but wonder about their life together.

Could Thomas still make love to his wife?

Elizabeth, meanwhile, had felt Pawel’s heat from his first day. The young Pole was oblivious to niceties of class and she felt that he had looked at her right from the start as awoman, without deference. She divined immediately that he was Aman who was drawn to women. Might it be her he came to?

She delayed her attentions to him out of pride, but soon she could not resist being charming to him. Since he was
aprotégé of the Nortons, and aforeigner, she was able to forgo that english reserve which kept her at aremove from the other teachers. And Pawel was their guest. He was soon established as Elizabeth’s particular favourite, the teacher she talked to at lunch.

Thomas’s instincts were more wary. From the start, he sensed that Pawel was a man without ties, made reckless by his unformed fluture. He had passed through war and emerged disconnected, and might pursue any sensation right to its conclusion, just to feel alive. Thomas found himself wondering how to avert any emotional collisions. He was reluctant ever to block his wife’s needs. But he knew she was a woman in adelicate balance, and he did not want to see her hurt.

He was surprised to feel aprickle of jealousy, too. He noted that they did not yet look at each other’s eyes – in his presence, at least. But he could feel the desire running from Elizabeth like an electrical current.

Above all, Thomas was determined to remain calm and give off no hint of his intuitions. He continued to engage the young man in conversation, using the German he had learnt during his years in Berlin. Pawel was more comfortable in that language. It gave the two men a bond which was denied to Elizabeth.

“How long would you like to stay with us, do you think?”

“Until the Polish forces have regrouped here – but that will take some months. I am grateful for the place you have given me here.”

“The children will enjoy having aproper artist to teach them. Do you have all the things you need?”

“Mrs Ashton has been very kind about finding everything.”

Indeed she had. She had taken Pawel off to york herself, to Ashop which had adwindling stock of paper, paints and
brushes. There, she had impressed Pawel with an extravagant purchase of art materials before taking him out to lunch.