Time Squared, page 19
Fortunately, the National Gallery proved to be a network of trenches, at least once you started seeing things in that light. Long narrow galleries, few windows, a heavy protection of ceiling and—what seemed important to Robert—working men who tipped their caps. Maybe he needed Tommies around so he could keep on being an officer. In the gallery, the guards even wore uniforms.
They strolled past the paintings, not really looking, but finally able to talk about ordinary things. Robert’s mother wanted to move out of Ackley Castle into a more comfortable house, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. His brother had been part of the aerial photography initiative over Neuve Chapelle. Got a battering from the winds, and she was right, they flew motorized kites. But for the first time, they’d mapped an enemy position, giving the old men a leg up on planning the offensive that soon followed. Modern warfare. Too bad about the old-fashioned weather, the torrential rains that were half the reason (but only half) for that particular defeat. Eleanor told Robert that the Hon. Walrus had died at Neuve Chapelle and he said he was sorry, although he didn’t sound it.
Their conversation wasn’t ordinary. Even a year ago, Eleanor would have been stunned by the death of so many boys she knew, by the number of young widows and bereft fiancées; at the sight of all the wounded lads shuffling through the streets like an army of old men. Zeppelin raids on Vauxhall Bridge, conchies beaten while handing out pamphlets, girls thrusting white feathers at men not in uniform. And Goodwood going to be a hospital, she said. Some Middleford girls were already working as VADs but her aunt wouldn’t hear of Eleanor training, not even for Goodwood hospital.
“Quite right,” Robert said.
“Please don’t say that. I’d like to have a purpose, some role. Lately I seem to be of little more use than a hat stand. And you haven’t even noticed my hat.”
Robert gave her an amused glance but kept walking. “I think it’s up here,” he said, having claimed to be looking for a painting. She thought he’d forgotten, but now he stopped in front of a Renaissance work, The Raising of Lazarus, Christ on the left lifting one flat palm to Heaven while pointing his other index finger at Lazarus, as if he were gathering electricity from the heavens to spark Lazarus back from the dead. To the right of the canvas was an incredulous-looking Lazarus removing his graveclothes as spectators gaped with shock.
“When my brother and I first saw the picture, we were little horrors. Lazarus, of course, having been dead for four days, and the two of us very well aware of the state of birds and animals dead for half that time, especially in hot weather. Yet there he is, looking ready for a bout of wrestling, and likely to win it.”
Robert half smiled, although he didn’t seem to see the painting, or was seeing it with Edward.
“Mockery being an effort to cover up fear, of course. I had nightmares after seeing it, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster coming after me, the sewn-together body parts. Since here”—knocking his knuckle against the picture frame—“the putrification of the body is made unmistakable by being so emphatically denied.
“You asked why I went into the military,” he said, still looking at the painting. “To confront one’s fears? Or find some meaning before we become dead meat? Of which, believe me, I’ve seen sufficient lately.”
Robert shrugged. “Probably a little bit of this and a little bit of that, like Mrs. Cook making her cake. But when you get over there, none of it matters. You’re there because you’re there, just as we’re here because we’re here. Is there any purpose or meaning?”
Eleanor waited for him to answer his question. When she realized he wasn’t going to, she said, “I was thinking lately about the gods retreating to Mount Olympus, but still raining down mockery. If you’re right, and mockery is meant to cover up fear, then the gods are afraid of us. Maybe they should be.”
Robert blew out his breath, seeming to agree.
“I do like your hat,” he said, tweaking its brim. Eleanor slipped her arm through his, leaning against him ever so slightly. They walked on silently, not looking at any more art than before, but afterwards finding a place for tea.
* * *
David Arden’s paintings were of No Man’s Land. Not quite the same as the religious works in the National Gallery, but this time Robert was looking at them, circling the gallery. They mostly showed the front from a distance, an indistinct and featureless moonscape of craters and slumped and slumping earth, all of it made wispy by fog or smoke. The canvases were pale, the cloudy light yellow and jaundiced, as Kate had said, something like a pea-souper. The only colour came from a few muted figures in the medium distance holding weapons and sometimes wearing red crosses. They were painted off-centre: slightly abstracted men behaving heroically.
Eleanor walked beside Robert, stopping at one canvas that showed stretcher-bearers carrying a wounded Tommy. Robert kept moving, and after a brief look, she followed him to an image of ambulances moved away from the viewer, ant-like men marching beside them. The next showed ruined houses that on closer examination were functioning as billets with clothes hung out the windows, or maybe blown out the windows, or maybe those weren’t just clothes. Here was David returning to all that in his paintings. It made her think of Odysseus visiting the underworld, the ghost of Tiresias appearing and saying, “Why, poor man, have you left the light of day and come down to visit the dead in this sad place?”
Kate had met them at the door. “Don’t ask about home. I have to get through this.” She’d leaned against Eleanor as Robert nodded and went directly to the paintings, not speaking to anyone else. The images had pulled him, she supposed. There were plenty of other people in the square gas-lit gallery. One was a solitary lurking man whom Eleanor thought must be an official from the Ministry, keeping an eye on things, but most were gathered into fluid talkative groups that broke apart and re-formed—artistic types wearing exaggerated versions of Kate’s clothes. Eleanor particularly noticed two tall women, a beautiful one they called Vanessa and an eccentric named Ottoline with hair coloured the same scarlet as the macaws in the London zoo. They intimidated Eleanor, and she didn’t know any of the others. On top of which, her aunt was late. Eleanor had soon joined Robert in looking at the paintings.
The final one halted her: a tent of wounded men in rows of beds with nurses working among them. It was as faded as the depictions of No Man’s Land and bore more than a slight resemblance to a graveyard with its rows of oblong stones. She looked at Robert, but he didn’t want to talk, and began circling the paintings again. Eleanor decided that she’d had enough and turned to look again for her aunt. She still wasn’t here, but David Arden had left the other artists to stand on his own. He was wearing his uniform, the wound patch redundant given his hook, and he was watching Robert examine his paintings with something like hunger. At that moment, Robert turned and saw him, and there was an exchange of salutes, not unironical. Each knew who the other must be, although Kate hurried over to introduce them, freeing Robert from a spell.
“Would you like one in your library, sir?” David asked.
“I’ll be back there in a couple of days,” Robert said.
“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get back myself. But they don’t seem to want me,” David replied, raising his hook. “Despite my cleverly curved bayonet.”
Eleanor could see these simple sentences were as laden with meaning as poetry, a code she didn’t have the key to. The whiff of discord was enough to draw the artists over, and soon Eleanor found herself surrounded by a discussion of art that sounded equally coded. David’s work apparently stood in contrast to an exhibition across town by a group of artists disliked by the talkative man who had arranged David’s show, Roger Fry. He was scathing in his criticism of the other artists, who called themselves the Vorticists and portrayed modern life as a machine. Good on David for rejecting the vortical blast, Fry said, taking a stand for impressionism with his fine exploration of light.
Eleanor had no idea what any of this meant. She slipped away to look at the paintings again, not seeing any other option with her aunt so late. Kate’s word jaundice jaundice jaundice beat in her head, and this time she saw the Flanders of David’s paintings as being sickened by war. Following one of the walls around a corner, she was surprised to walk into a small anteroom, and even more surprised to see three canvases with Kate’s signature, portraits rather than landscapes, two brightly slashed visions of women and a little boy.
She thought this might be work Kate had done in South Africa when David had gone there for the Illustrated London News. She’d written about painting Boer families left without a man by the last war. The boy was elfin and the women were thin, the women’s angularity not quite beautiful but striking, challenging the viewer as they stared out from the canvases. Eleanor thought about the literal sense of striking. The intensity in the women’s eyes struck a blow at viewers. Others might have seen their lives as dun and restricted, as washed-out as David’s No Man’s Land, but Kate had painted them in colours both raw and intense. Umber. Indigo. Chinese red. The muted grey-green that Eleanor loved.
“She’s better than he is, isn’t she?” a woman asked.
Turning, Eleanor saw the macaw at her elbow, the tall odd-looking woman. The tall odd-looking lady, she corrected herself, registering her more fully.
“I like them,” Eleanor said. “But I’m her friend. I don’t know what a critic would say.”
“She’s a woman. They don’t say anything.”
If they could have talked as openly as the lady seemed to wish, Eleanor would have asked about Roger Fry’s motives in getting David an exhibition. Whether he’d done it less to help David than to take a stand against the artists he disliked, the mechanical ones. But the woman’s batty imperiousness frightened Eleanor a little and she couldn’t seem to frame an intelligent question.
“So you think she ought to be satisfied exhibiting three paintings in a closet?” the lady asked, mistaking Eleanor’s silence. “Through the charity of her husband?”
“Not at all.”
“So you dislike the position of women? When we’re rather taunted with just a hint of respect these days. An atom of it, held just out of reach.”
The tall lady held her hand up with surprising grace, dangling an invisible something, as if she were holding a sprig of mistletoe. Eleanor was tall herself but the woman had long arms and loomed over her oddly, casting a scythe-like shadow in the anteroom. I’d like to be useful, Eleanor wanted to say, but didn’t want to sound naïve.
“So how does one avoid exhibiting in closets?” Eleanor asked.
“Of course, one can’t hold it against him.”
“Against whom?” Eleanor asked, not quite picking up the thread.
“Against whom are you holding something?” the woman asked. She seemed to want to play with her, even flirt, and feeling slightly panicked, Eleanor excused herself and left.
* * *
Mrs. Crosby had arrived. Back in the main gallery, Eleanor found her aunt standing with Robert.
“I seem to have got here just in time to leave,” Mrs. Crosby said. “Robert tells me we ought to get to the station. Just let me put down my guinea for one of the paintings. The townscape with laundry, I believe. If that’s laundry. Of course, once it’s our painting, we can decide for ourselves.”
“If,” Eleanor said, taking her aunt’s arm as she turned, “you don’t mind putting down something for me as well, for one of Kate’s paintings? The one of the little boy.”
A brief hiatus as they went to look at Kate’s work, crowding silently into the anteroom.
“You’ll notice my niece is loyal,” Mrs. Crosby told Robert, embarrassing Eleanor with her insistent matchmaking. “And expensive,” she added, taking out her purse.
Robert had stored his kit at Victoria Station, planning to catch the late train to Folkestone. He’d spend the night there before picking up an early morning transport across the Channel. Her aunt had kept a cab waiting outside the gallery and they set off immediately. Eleanor found herself back to monosyllables in Mrs. Crosby’s company and Robert was worse, brooding and silent. The streets were empty and coloured a strange medicinal blue by the covered street lamps as anti-aircraft guns boomed from the Heath. The weird desertion of central London meant the trip went quickly but seemed long and fraught. Eleanor was conscious of her last minutes with Robert ticking away. Her last for now, she corrected herself. At least when they arrived at Victoria, Mrs. Crosby said she would wait in the cab.
“I won’t say goodbye, Captain Denholm, but à bientôt,” her aunt said, an odd echo of something that Eleanor couldn’t quite remember, one of so many echoes lately.
Inside the station, Eleanor hurried behind Robert as he marched to collect his kit from Left Luggage. He had to elbow a path through a crowd heavy with khaki, many home leaves ending, boys heading south to cross the Channel. Afterwards, burdened with his kit, he elbowed another path to the platform. They stood together awkwardly, not as close as Eleanor would have liked. The train was already in the station and the platform milling with families and sweethearts saying goodbye. Eleanor found the other figures as faint as the soldiers in David’s paintings, not quite in focus and oddly silent despite the hubbub, which seemed to mutter above her head. She badly wanted to say something but didn’t know what. Robert didn’t seem able to speak, either. Finally Eleanor dared herself to put a hand on his chest, feeling the rough wool of his tunic on her palm.
“That painting of Kate’s,” she said, insisting on meeting his eyes. “I see the little boy as being . . . ours. The son we haven’t had, not yet. And if things go as badly as they can, the one we might never have. Because you see, I’ll always have him, to think of you, and this day with you. But I would . . . I’d like it terribly,” she said, trying not to cry, “if you’d come back.”
His arms flew around her and they kissed. Eleanor hadn’t known it was like this, but she also did. She felt nothing but his warmth as the train started up beside them: the chuff of steam, a mechanical screech, the flight of panicked pigeons from the rafters. There was a rush to board and jocular comments—“All right, me lad, leave us through”—until Robin finally pulled away. They met each other’s eyes and held them until the last minute, when he lifted his kit and jumped onto the train as it was pulling out, standing in the open door to wave goodbye. Eleanor couldn’t make herself run after him as some girls ran after their beaus, instead watching him until he, too, was a figure from one of David’s paintings: distant, half obscured by clouds of smoke and steam, disappearing, tiny, gone.
1940
Preston Hall, Kent
16
Edward Denholm was the first to telegraph his imminent arrival in Kent, having got his leave in record time after his father’s fatal heart attack. Eleanor supposed the Royal Air Force was used to coping with the sudden disappearance of its pilots, the mortality rate for air crews being what it was. And he only had to find his way down from Yorkshire, which Eleanor knew he could do fairly easily, more traffic heading up the trunk line (replacement crews) than came back down.
Eleanor’s job in the Ministry involved transportation, and she was used to deflecting questions by claiming it was too boring to talk about, and it was. But the reason she’d signed the Official Secrets Act was that anyone looking into the manifests she filed could figure out the size and location of armed forces bases that the Ministry—not to mention the entire bombed-half-to-pieces country—would rather the Nazis not find out. Edward’s base didn’t seem to be large, but she had an idea it was important. Robin’s most recent letters from a remote corner of Scotland left her pretty sure he was training as a commando, having proved himself so admirably at Dunkirk in the early days of the war. Quite primitive equipment was sent up to Scotland. They seemed to need a lot of rope.
“Education?” the man from the Ministry had asked. Charles Mortlake had been the one to give into her entreaties and set up a job interview. Eleanor had no idea how senior the man was. His name sounded made up. Norfolk. Of course, there were the dukes of Norfolk, but the family name was Howard.
“I was privately educated,” Eleanor replied. “My father was a vicar.”
Norfolk perked up. Perhaps this was the last place, the last job, where this sort of thing was not only acceptable but preferred. The decayed gentry. Her ancestral home of Goodwood had been half ruined during the last war by being used as an infectious diseases hospital. Its ruin would be completed by this one, the army having requisitioned the poor old girl again, the air healthy and the location remote enough not to distress the citizenry with the sight of the burns cases they planned to send there.
“Can you type?” Norfolk asked.
“No, but I imagine it’s not too difficult to learn. And I do learn quickly.”
“Quite right. But I presume you can spell.”
“And add. Maths skills, I suppose. I like words and numbers.”
“Crossword puzzles?” he asked, which Eleanor later understood to be a feint toward her suitability for intelligence work, code breaking, which she would probably have enjoyed and been reasonably good at. But that was as far as it went, something she half regretted. Her ideal would be an interesting job and a settled personal life. But given the over-interesting lives they were leading during the Blitz, she was happy to have a routine job busy enough to leave her with little time to think. She was a cog, but (she hoped) a useful cog.
