Nuns and Soldiers Page 11

  Later on Tim began to feel differently about his mother. When he could no longer console and love her, his heart turned towards her. He dreamt about her, that he was searching for her in dark vague halls or upon endless stairs. When he was a child his father had represented freedom, his mother bondage; but how unjust it was, with the deep casual injustice of a rotten world. His father had been an egoistic irresponsible bastard. His mother had been solitary, impoverished, ill, even her children had turned against her. Of course, as she struggled unsupported with every sort of difficulty, she became tired and ill-tempered. She needed help and love, only now when there was love for her in Tim’s heart it was too late. He had come round to loving his mother and hating his father when they were both ghosts. He longed vainly to make amends. He talked to Daisy about this guilt and this pain. Daisy said, ‘Yes, our shitty parents let us down, but I suppose we have to be sorry for them. They were miserable and we’re happy, so we win in the end.’ Tim thought that his father wasn’t miserable, and that he himself was not always happy, but he did not argue. Tim had a modest view of his rights and talents, and although he sometimes felt he had been unfortunate he had to admit that his adult life so far had been devoid of catastrophes, and he was prepared to settle for the contentment of ‘the man who has no history’. He saw himself sometimes as a soldier of fortune, a raffish footloose fellow, a drinker, a wandering cadger, a happy-go-lucky figure in a shabby uniform (not of course an officer) who lived from day to day avoiding unpleasantness and procuring small fairly innocuous satisfactions. There was no ground-base of happiness in his life, but he was naturally merry. He had (and he counted it his nearest approach to virtue) a cheerful temperament. He often thought too about his sister Rita, only about her he did not talk to Daisy. (Daisy had also suffered from anorexia nervosa when she was a girl, as a protest against Roedean.) Tim and Rita had fought a lot but they had been very close, allies against the world; which would have been an utterly different world now had Rita lived. As it was Tim had nobody but Daisy.

  When Tim had first met Daisy, when he was entering the Slade and she was leaving it, he had admired her from afar. She was, then, a striking figure. She was very thin and boyish, with short very dark hair and large dark brown eyes, a pale purecomplexioned well-shaped face and a long sensual mouth that drooped at the corners. She had a sharp pretty nose and a mole beside one nostril. The mole matched her woody-brown eyes like a droplet. She could move her scalp backwards and forwards in an amusing manner. She dressed outrageously and was regarded by persons of both sexes as a desirable object. Though rarely inclined to formulate consistent policies, she was also regarded as something of a leader. She preferred the other sex to her own, but had emotional friendships with women, especially (at the Slade) with a group of vociferous American Women’s Liberationists. Her own opinions were of the anarchistic extreme left variety, and when roused to controversy her dark brown eyes would become square with fury. She was a talented painter of whom much was expected. When, two years later, she took Tim for a lover he was extremely proud. He felt it was the beginning of a brilliant new era.

  Now Tim was thirty-three and Daisy was thirty-five. She was still handsome and boyish and slim, and her fine painted eyes still had what Tim called their ‘Etruscan look’, but sometimes, he had to admit, she looked almost old. Her thin face had become prematurely haggard and her close-cropped hair showed streaks of grey. Rows of fine lines seamed her upper lip. Her face had become more emphatic and expressive so that she seemed to be grimacing as she talked. She had increasingly the rather dotty smile of a Goya peasant. It was harder than it used to be for her to communicate with people. Her voice, a curious mixture of a French accent and a Canadian accent, dominated by the Bloomsburian upper-class voice of her mother, grew more strident. Her language, always lurid, grew more foul, and she laughed at Tim’s shudders. Tim was old-fashioned enough to object to the words ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ occurring constantly in the mouth of the woman he loved. Tim’s appearance had of course changed too, but, he felt, not so much. At twenty-three he had had long curly blazing red hair. He now wore his hair shorter and it had lost its curl and faded, it might even almost be called ‘ginger’. His pallid freckled face seemed unchanged however. He had a small nose which often wrinkled (he had an acute sense of smell) and his lips were ruddy. His eyes were azure, not a pale snake-blue like the Count’s but the full glowing blue of a summer sky. He could perhaps have been diagnosed as Irish by a compatriot because of a certain quirkiness about his mouth and a quick nervous vagueness about his eyes. (There is a fierce hard Irish face, and a soft gentle one, and Tim had the latter.) He was slight, shorter than Daisy. He was clean-shaven at present; when he wore a moustache he looked like a boy lieutenant in the first war.

  Tim and Daisy had stayed together for a while, parted, and come together again. Both had had other love affairs, usually unsatisfactory and in Daisy’s case very stormy. Daisy seemed to hate all her former lovers, whereas Tim was on quite good terms with the wayward Welsh girls of his past. (In this respect London had quite redeemed Cardiff.) Daisy was indeed full of hates. She hated the bourgeoisie, the capitalist state, marriage, religion, God, materialism, the establishment, anybody with money, anybody who had been to a university, all the political parties, and men, with the exception of Tim whom she said (and he was not sure if he was pleased or not) she did not count as a man. The tall noisy American women had departed to found some sort of women’s community in California, but their ideas lived on in Daisy’s turbulent bosom. Men were beasts, vile selfish egoistic bullies. ‘Look at our bloody fathers!’ Heterosexual male humans were the nastiest animals on the planet. Some of them drove themselves literally mad with egoism. Tim was occasionally depressed by her universal belittling malice, but more often he found it oddly invigorating. He recognized in her a deep generosity of spirit and a kind of innocence which disarmed her sharp opinions. Her left-wing views had gradually composed themselves into a sort of passionate anarchism. She upset Tim most by professing a sympathy with terrorism. ‘It’s just an aesthetic reaction against materialism.’ She sometimes said she would like to be a terrorist herself.

  It was never very clear what happened to Daisy’s career as a painter. She took a part-time teaching post in a well-known London art school, and produced some promising work, abstract of course, they were all abstract painters in those days. (This early work often consisted of tiny squares or tiny crosses of slightly varying colours with which she meticulously honey-combed enormous canvases.) Then suddenly she changed her style and one obsessive mood followed another. At one time she would paint nothing but piles of boxes (matchboxes, cardboard boxes, crates), at another nothing but (extremely realistic) spiders, or window frames, or burning candles. She went into a half-satirical ‘primitive’ phase, and at this time sold a modest amount of work to people who found her paintings ‘charming’. The experts had begun to shake their heads however: she was not developing, there was a moody versatile cleverness but no depth. Daisy herself now began to declare that she was not seriously interested in painting and was not properly a painter at all. She announced her discovery that she was really a writer. She gave up her teaching job and wrote a novel and to everyone’s amazement got it published. It had a little success but was not reprinted. She wrote another novel which was not published. Tim, with whom she was once again living, persuaded her to go back to art teaching. Jobs were now a good deal harder to find. She found a part-time post teaching art history, about which she knew little (but little was required). She became interested in screen-printing and textile design and thought she would set up on her own as a designer, but nothing came of this except that she left her job. She started on a third novel which was still intermittently in progress. She took another job and then lost it. Tim knew that she was, or had been, a better painter than he was. But he knew no magic by which he could persuade her to work.

  Meanwhile Tim, more modest and more cunning, had managed to keep himself afloat and ind
eed increasingly to keep Daisy afloat too. He also had failed to improve, to ‘develop’, but he kept on painting assiduously, content to be a mediocre painter and enjoy it. He had no identity, no ‘personal style’, but he did not mind. (Guy once told Tim that it did not matter, having no identity.) He became a cubist, then a surrealist, then a fauve: a futurist, a constructivist, a suprematist. He adopted expressionism, post-expressionism, abstract expressionism. (But never minimal or conceptual or pop, these he despised.) He imitated everybody he admired, everybody fairly modern that is, he could not imitate Titian and Piero. (He would have done if he had known how to start.) He painted pseudo-Klees, pseudo-Picassos, pseudo-Magrittes, pseudo-Soutines. He would have done pseudo-Cézannes, only that was beyond him. He attempted spotty interiors in the style of Vuillard, and breakfast tables in the style of Bonnard. One of his teachers had said to him, ‘Tim, I think it is your destiny to become a great faker.’ Alas Tim could not rise to this. Faking demands a patience and a knowledge of chemistry which Tim did not possess. It also demands a considerable talent as a painter. Tim did not possess this either.

  Tim would not have agreed with the Shakespearean dictum that if all the year were playing holidays to sport would be as tedious as to work. He had occasional bouts of childish misery but they did not last long. His exiguous teaching was not arduous. When he tired of painting he went to the pub. He was not an industrious painter, he was indeed rarely systematic. He was not a reader of books. What he knew about the history of his art he picked up in an instinctive and random manner. He went to the picture galleries and remembered what he liked. He also, in a spirit of hedonism, haunted the British Museum. His interest in the exhibits was purely visual, he knew nothing of their history. Unencumbered by extraneous facts he taught himself to look at Greek vases and Etruscan tombs and Roman painting, and Assyrian reliefs, and vast Egyptian statues, and tiny jade objects from China and tiny ivory objects from Japan. All sorts of things took his fancy and pleased his magpie taste: elegant Roman letters, curled-up Celtic animals, jewels, clocks, coins. These aesthetic adventures rarely influenced his painting, and it never occurred to him that he might be inspired by what he could not copy.

  He attempted to sell his paintings, but this was difficult since no one would exhibit them. Friends and acquaintances occasionally bought his work out of kindness (the prices were modest). The Count bought a painting (a pseudo-Klee), and Guy bought one and hid it. Tim, never very ambitious and now resigned, went on drawing and painting randomly, it was after all a natural function. He drew people, figures in pubs or on streets, whom he thought of as ‘spectators at a crucifixion’. A man drinking beer watching a crucifixion, a man selling newspapers watching a crucifixion, a man on a passing bus watching a crucifixion. The crucifixion scene itself, however, never materialized. His drawings could appear impressive and he once obtained a lucrative commission to produce some carefully specified pornographic pictures; but he felt disgusted with himself afterwards and never did it again. He sometimes did pretty-pretty representations of flowers or animals, of which he felt differently and mildly ashamed and which did at least sometimes sell for small sums. If he sold them through shops, the shops took a commission. He had a friend, a commercially minded painter and dealer called Jimmy Roland (whose sister Nancy was one of Tim’s old flames), who exhibited at the Hyde Park railings on Sundays, and he sometimes put some of Tim’s ‘pretty-pretties’ in with his work. Tim’s most successful line was cats. In England a drawing of a cat will always sell if it is soppy enough. Tim studied soppiness. For a while he had a three-day-a-week job teaching drawing in a polytechnic in North London. Then the teaching was reduced to one day a week. The cats were a useful stand-by, but he was getting tired of them. He went on painting ‘seriously’ but without much hope of selling anything.

  When he and Daisy joined forces for the second time, just before Daisy’s ‘literary phase’, they lived together in a pleasant flat in Hampstead. This was a brief period of expansion and domesticity. They developed a sort of social life together. They went folk dancing; Tim was a good dancer, he had been a keen Morris man as a student. They learnt to play chess and had hilarious incompetent contests which ended with Daisy pushing the board onto the floor. Tim even learnt to cook a little; Daisy despised cooking. However by the time Daisy had finished her second novel they were living in a smaller nastier flat in Kilburn and coming to the conclusion that though they would stay together they could not live together. Close proximity brought on endless tiring quarrels which Tim felt were Daisy’s fault and she said were his fault. Tim was obsessively tidy, Daisy wildly untidy, and it became necessary for him to get away so as not to live amid perpetual mess. He was appalled by her unwillingness to clean or embellish. He wearied of picking her clothes up off the floor and washing them. He needed more space in which to paint, while Daisy said his presence distracted her from writing. They both really feared proximity, lack of privacy; cohabitation was becoming altogether too exhausting.

  Tim moved out and wondered if this was the end, but it was not. Their relation was revivified, rendered suddenly more romantic and exciting. Their love-making, which Daisy had announced was becoming ‘bloody dull’, was once more impetuous and unpredictable. When they decided to go home together, to Tim’s place or Daisy’s place, it was as if they were students again, creeping up the stairs and giggling. Sometimes one would say ‘We’re bad for each other’ so that the other should say ‘No’. Or ‘We are just flitting through each other’s lives, in one door and out the other.’ Or Daisy would say to him ‘Go and find yourself a dolly bird, I’m too old,’ but she did not mean it. Really they felt that in their odd way (and they gloried in its oddity) they had settled down. Tim and Daisy loved all pubs the way some people love all dogs. The pubs were innocent places wherein they were innocent children. They returned to the Soho pubs which had been their original home, where they had spent every evening before returning to cheerless digs or hostels when they were young. This sort of urban life suited Tim, pub-crawling, wandering, looking in shop windows. He loved the charm of noisy messy changing London, pedestrian bridges and roads on stilts, the magic of Westway, of modern pubs beside noisy roundabouts. Soho in summer was his South of France.

  Daisy moved out of the Kilburn flat, which had become too expensive, and for a time had a cheap room in Gerard Street where at first she rather enjoyed being molested, but then became frightened. Tim found her a little one-room-with-kitchenette place in the dusty confines of Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush, with a shared bathroom, very cheap. She was now out of work and he had to help to support her. She had also begun to take more seriously to drink. Tim himself had been very lucky in finding a large room, a sort of loft, over a garage just off the Chiswick High Road. There was an outside lavatory with a wash basin, and he installed an electric ring for cooking and a paraffin stove for heating. Rent and rates were very low, as the room was not supposed to be a dwelling. Tim pretended he just used it as a studio. The garage man, called Brian, who saw Tim as a romantic Bohemian, winked at lights on late at night. Once, in order to save money, Daisy had let her flatlet to a tourist for a limited time and moved in with Tim. Once Tim moved in with Daisy and, in order to encourage her to let her flat, pretended he had let his. He did not really let it, however, since he feared inquiries, discovery, police, and a vast un-payable bill for arrears of rates. Tim was frightened of ‘officials’ of any kind. (This was perhaps why he never managed to get more than the most meagre amount of National Assistance.) Guy had once mentioned to him, in connection with some show of excessive anxiety on Tim’s part, an expressive Greek verb, lanthano, which meant I escape notice doing something or other. Tim decided that his motto was Lanthano.

  Tim was partly touched, partly exasperated by Daisy’s assumption that he would support her. Sometimes, in the ebb and flow of their relations, the assumption seemed natural, sometimes not. There was always the possibility that he would get a better job, that she would decide to teach again, th
at her novel would make a fortune. They soldiered on, as the years fleeted by, still saying, ‘Maybe we’d better part, give it up, we might be better off with someone else.’ To which the answer was ‘Who’d have us now?’ and off to the pub. Daisy took to keeping flagons of wine in her flat and staying in bed till noon. They never really tested their relationship on a public scene. The very modest ‘entertaining’ of the Hampstead days was no more. Their old Slade friends had mostly drifted away. They had some pub friends. Daisy had women friends whom Tim hardly ever met, more ‘Women’s Libbers’, and left-wing toughies. Tim, who had no politics, had a few odd pals such as Jimmy Roland and one or two of his art school colleagues. And then there was the mob at Ebury Street.

  Tim’s relation with Ebury Street had, throughout recent years, remained steady without ever becoming deeper or more interesting. Tim, when he was a student, and after the demise of Rudi Openshaw, had been acquainted with Guy’s father, a rather alarming figure who lived in a large house in Swiss Cottage to which Tim went at intervals to say how well he was getting on and to receive advice about how to live more economically. Guy, the son, was at that time a shadowy figure, lately married, who occasionally passed by in the background when Tim was visiting the father’s house. On one visit Tim saw Gertrude, a younger slimmer Gertrude, all dressed up to go out to a party. When Guy’s father died, Tim came instead, at rather rarer intervals, to report himself at Ebury Street. He was never then invited to any social function, though Guy, whom Tim regarded with nervous veneration, usually gave him a glass of sherry. When he finished his studies and his allowance ended Tim assumed that now Ebury Street would know him no more. Indeed his conception of Guy at this time was hazy, and of Gertrude vaguer still. None of the others had he ever met at all. However, as a result of some mysterious decree, his status, instead of sinking into nothing was, by the change, enhanced. The vanishing of money from the relationship had somehow rendered it social, unofficial. Tim was asked to drinks, he became a regular attender at the Ebury Street ‘days’. Sometimes there were large parties. Once he took Daisy to one. It was not a success. She was impolitely silent, then left early. Tim stayed on, then had a row with her afterwards.