Consequences (2 page)

She knew that she was not like other girls of her kind. She got on well enough with them, she had friends, but she could not share their compliance with the expected routines of shopping excursions, dress fittings, social visits alongside mothers. She did not know what it was that she wanted, only that it should not be this. From time to time she had caught glimpses of alien interesting worlds. She came across paintings, furnishings, clothes that were exotically different from those favored by her parents and their circle; she became aware of people who lived quite differently, who turned their backs on the mandatory life structure centered upon a good income and a handsome house, who lived in a hand-to-mouth kind of way, like poor people did, in lodgings or cottages and houseboats, who did not have jobs, who painted or wrote books. Such folk were the butt of jokes in the copies of
Punch
that lay on the drawing-room table at Brunswick Gardens—sandal-wearing vegetarians in smocks—but Lorna did not find
Punch
particularly funny. She was more interested in this proof that there was another way of living, out there in the grown-up world, a way that did not require shopping in Knightsbridge, and dressmakers, and enrollment in the lineup as wife material. She thought it quite possible that she might want to get married, one day, but she flinched at the idea of a life spent with one of her brothers’ friends.

She heard of girls who went to university, and raised this with her parents, who were aghast. Her mother told her that no man liked a bluestocking; her father said the varsity wasn’t appropriate for a girl, but she could do a domestic science course if she so wished.

She had been quite good at drawing when she was at the Academy for Young Ladies. She made a bid for art college, and was laughed out of court. Her mother said she would be mixing with the most unsuitable types; her father didn’t say anything, merely raised his eyebrows.

She went underground. She joined Kensington Public Library, and began to read—serendipitously, eclectically. She read novels and poetry and travel books and thus escaped—briefly—from the Brunswick Gardens regime, in which she was soon caught up as a fully fledged junior adult. She must now help her mother to arrange flowers, she must do local errands, she must walk the dog. In the afternoons she must shop with her mother, or pay visits, or go to the Hurlingham Club and play a game of tennis with old school friends. In the evenings—well, in the evenings there began now the considered process of her display in the marketplace. In the evenings she must wear a pretty frock—smile, dance, be pleasing.

In the books that she read nobody did this kind of thing. She recognized in Jane Austen a mirror world, of a sort, but elsewhere she found conduct and assumptions that were a revelation. She read
Ann Veronica
and
The Constant Nymph,
with gathering interest. She read about love, and became increasingly convinced that it was not to be found in drawing rooms and at country house parties. But love, in a sense, was neither here nor there. She was not in any desperate hurry for love; more, she wanted confirmation that the system into which she had been born was not necessarily inevitable, that there were alternatives and that they were fine, they were neither laughable as proposed by those
Punch
cartoons nor disreputable as implied by her mother’s bland rejection of all practices that did not conform with her own. Her mother—and everyone that her mother knew—operated according to a set of rigid requirements, which dictated how you should dress, down to the precise width of a lapel and set of a hat, which told you how to furnish your home, how to behave in specific social circumstances, how to speak, breathe, live. Those who failed to conform were seen, quite simply, as misfits: they were not one of us.

In her surreptitious, underground explorations, Lorna began to find not just proposals of an alternative world but also of an alternative self. She discovered unsuspected tastes and enthusiasms. She bought bright posters from art galleries which she stuck up in her bedroom: Matisse, Dufy, Klee. She saved up her allowance and achieved some clothes of her own choice—lighter, brighter, different—and wore them when she dared, in defiance of her mother’s cries of outrage: “But it’s such a horrid color, darling. You look like a gypsy. Go and put on the new tussore silk.”

She and her mother clashed more and more. Lorna was branded difficult. She heard the word through half-closed doors, her mother in complaint to her father: “She is being so wretchedly difficult these days.”

Lorna looked at the rest of the family and thought that she was like a changeling in fairy stories. Her brothers were tall, fair, rawboned. She was small, dark, and neat. She sat at her dressing table and stared at her triangular face, framed in a short dark bob, and could find nothing of her father’s large florid countenance, but there was a little fold of skin at the corner of her eye that was a betrayal—he too had that. And her nose was her mother’s—narrow, slightly uptilted. I am theirs all right, she thought, there was not some unfortunate mistake in that expensive nursing home where I was born. But something got left out when I was assembled—whatever it is that makes you comfortable with what you have been given.

She knew that she was privileged. She had only to look about her. As a child, she had taken for granted all that visible evidence that there were two kinds of people in England—those who had and those who had not. Or rather, gradations of having, from those like her parents and their friends, who had everything, through others who had perhaps an adequate sufficiency, to those who apparently had nothing much at all, who drove the rag and bone cart, hawked matches, begged on street corners, smelled not very nice, and should be given a wide berth. She grew up with instinctive awareness of social status, attuned like everyone else to nuances of speech and behavior, with an eye that could place a person at once by the clothes they wore, by what they were doing. You did not think much about it, you simply knew. Unconsidered, the world just seemed conveniently defined, with different categories of existence, rather like the big nursery jigsaw puzzle, with its horses and cows and sheep and pigs and hens and geese.

But a time came when other responses crept in. Embarrassment; sympathy; curiosity. She saw herself through the eyes of others, and did not much care for what she saw. She looked at the rotted teeth and rickety legs of the old woman who begged at the tube station, and winced.

When they drove out into the country in her father’s Rover, she eyed the street upon street of little houses in which other lives happened, of which she knew nothing, and she wondered. So she was privileged, she was among those who were to be envied. But she could not feel enviable or grateful; some part of her protested, was critical and hostile and…difficult. It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?

She began to question the most sacred assumptions. Why must some people be poor? Why do I have to wear stockings, and gloves? Why are men’s and women’s lives different? Why must I go to the Langfords’ dance tonight? Her mother sighed and shook her head. Her father folded his newspaper, stared at her, and said he hoped she wasn’t becoming a silly little socialist. Her brothers laughed and patted her on the head and went about their business.

Lorna and her mother were permanently at odds. Lorna sat sullenly in a corner throughout a debutant tea party; her mother said that she was ashamed of her, she had let everyone down. She declined a dinner invitation from a red-faced young man who had pawed her in a taxi, and who talked of nothing but horse racing; her mother observed that the young man’s father owned a thousand acres in Gloucestershire. She was silent and rebellious at dress fittings; she read a book when cousins were visiting; she went off on her own and did not tell her mother where she was going. There were heated exchanges; doors were slammed.

And thus it was that on an exquisite June morning Lorna sat weeping on a bench in St. James’s Park, with the willows cascading into the lake, and a cohort of bright-feathered ducks eddying about at her feet. She became aware that she was not alone on this seat, looked sideways, stopped crying, and the rest of her life began.

When Matt was young he did not know where London was. The word was familiar; you heard it on the wireless or in conversation, that thumping sound—London. It meant Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, and solders in red coats and crazy black hats; the King and Queen lived there; its people talked Cockney. His parents had never been to London, nor indeed had anyone he knew. The place was an irrelevance, for those living in a small market town close to the Welsh border. Matt’s father was a local government official; his interests were sternly focused and his horizons parochial. He had been born in the town and had never seen any reason to stray farther than Chester, for an annual dinner from which he returned with a sigh of relief. Matt’s mother came from a village three miles from the town, to which she had moved when she was a girl to work at the Town Hall, where David Faraday was a junior functionary. The family joke was that they had courted beside the tea urn, which accounted for Mary’s addiction to tea.

When Matt was sixteen he learned where London was. By the time he was seventeen he knew that he had to go there, not on a visit but for a long time. This knowledge sprang from several years of communion with Mr. Lavery, the art master at the grammar school, who was his mentor and friend. The words “art college” fell from Mr. Lavery’s lips when the two of them were standing before Matt’s pen and wash drawing of a landscape beyond the town, a piece of work that even Matt—a modest lad—could see was pretty good. “What is an art college?” he asked.

Mr. Lavery told him, and the seeds were sown.

A year later, he said to Mr. Lavery, “What is a wood engraving? How is it done?” He had in his hand a book that he had bought for a shilling in the secondhand bookshop on the High Street:
Erewhon
by Samuel Butler, with wood engravings by Robert Gibbings.

It was not the text that had appealed to him, but the illustrations, at which he had gazed with fascination.

Mr. Lavery explained. Matt said that he wished he could have a go himself. Mr. Lavery explained further: wood engraving is a sophisticated and highly technical form of graphic art, dependent on an expensive material—boxwood—and alas, not really appropriate for the curriculum of a school art department. He talked further about art colleges.

Bryony, Matt’s elder sister, was going to be a teacher. She, too, had achieved grammar school, the girls’ institution on the other side of town, and had excelled. She was the pride of her parents, and was spoken of approvingly among the neighbours; education was highly regarded in those parts and at that time. Bryony would go to teacher training college in Chester; her mother worried about the evils of metropolitan life but felt that Bryony had the strength of character to cope. She was a serious and rather taciturn girl; she and Matt found less and less to say to each other as they grew older, and cohabited in a kind of amiable boredom.

Art had stolen up upon Matt. It fingered him when he was quite young, he later realized, remembering an infant passion for pencils and paper, and later endeavors with sticks and stones and leaves and seeds and berries that could be turned into intricate sculptural arrangements upon the garden path. He had always wanted to make things. Not the mechanical constructions of model airplanes or meccano but things that demanded original materials, flair, and ingenuity. He had found a seam of clay in a field beyond the town and made little sculptures, which he tried to fire in his mother’s oven, to her distress. He discovered the possibilities of papier-mâché, using glue and newspaper, and created an elaborate bas-relief of Theseus and the Minotaur, inspired by the primary school’s
Book of Myths and Legends.
He requested crayons and paints for Christmas and birthday presents, and scrounged paper from rubbish bins and local shops. And then when he arrived at the grammar school there was that fertile ground of the Art Room, and the heady encouragement of Mr. Lavery. He borrowed books on art from the town library and pored over the Italian Renaissance, French classicism, Rembrandt, Turner, Constable, the Impressionists. He was long familiar with the town’s small art gallery, which held the work of several local nineteenth-century painters and not much else; now he was amazed by these revelations of exalted practice. So this was what art could do.

He became Mr. Lavery’s special project, with license to haunt the Art Room in free periods and after school. Mr. Lavery wore a corduroy jacket with leather-patched elbows, smoked Woodbines, and lived alone in a terrace cottage on the edge of town. A small exhibition of his work at the school had caused some consternation among parents, who had been anticipating a few peaceable watercolors. Mr. Lavery was into Vorticism. The parents toured the exhibition, tight-lipped, and hoped to one another that he was not teaching the boys this sort of thing.

They need not have worried. By and large, their sons were not remotely concerned with art; art periods were regarded as intervals of light relief, when you let off steam. Mr. Lavery was prepared for this; he maintained a kind of order by way of laconic wit at the boys’ expense. They recognized him as a maverick form of adult, whose opinions and behavior hinted at worlds with which they were unfamiliar, and were accordingly wary or contemptuous, depending on temperament. Either way, they did not care to provoke his ironic comments, and tempered their behavior; mostly, they just made it clear by their halfhearted application that they had better things to do than mess about with this sort of stuff.

Except for Matt. He realized early on that if he was going to persist with his unorthodox commitment he would have to learn to ride out the derision of his peers. The few boys in the school with a serious commitment to music had the same problem. The esteemed activities here were cricket, rugby, and athletics. Matt was fortunate in that he was robustly built. Those inclined to torment him as an arty-farty came to recognize someone who did not care much about what others said in any case, and who was likely to give as good as he got if it came to a dustup. In time, Matt was allowed to go his own way, somewhat solitary but not unpopular, seen simply as an eccentric, but a person to be reckoned with.