What You Will

‘Maybe Paul was somehow intrigued by you – authentically,’ Lawrence proposed. ‘Maybe he felt comfortable knowing nothing need happen between you. There are plenty of men like that, gay and straight.’

‘And are there plenty of women like that?’ asked Hilary, open-eyed.

‘Plenty of women?’ Lawrence echoed. ‘For whom nothing need happen?’ He felt strangely pinned down by her, targeted, and he found himself stuttering, ‘No,’ then, ‘I don’t know,’ as it came over him that he had always presumed that women were not comfortable unless something did happen. Not a wise presumption, he advised himself. Yet he felt certain that it was true for this woman: something would need to happen for Hilary to feel comfortable. Lawrence felt it distinctly.

Roland turned away just then from Hilary. Gwen felt his attention shift with a snap, like the mainsail of a boat going about in a stiff breeze. The weight of the evening fell towards her heavily, life jackets, picnic bags sliding down across the cockpit. He began to ask her about her upcoming exhibition.

‘I’ve banned my dealer from my studio,’ she announced. ‘It’s not until after Christmas, and he’s already sold a piece. Had it shipped to Aspen to some movie producer. That was sort of – withering.’ She hunched her shoulders up around her neck like a vulture, curled her fingers together in front of her face, miming avarice. ‘He arrives from New York with this big black portfolio, peers at all the canvases, scavenges little scraps of drawings lying around. There’s a lot of money on offer. The figures are going way up, which starts getting inside my head, right inside my imagination. Once I’m done with the paintings, OK, I’ll want them all out – instantly –’ She waved her hand imperiously. ‘But I work back and forth from one to another and I need them all together until they’re finished. You don’t want someone buying your flat, really, if you’re still living in it. Even though you might need the money. You want to find your new place first, where you’re going to live next.’

‘Same with books,’ Roland murmured as if to himself, chewing, ruminating, so that Gwen had to sit up close to hear him. He swallowed, bent his head towards her, spoke more clearly, his lips near the curve of her cheek. ‘I never tell a colleague, or even a student, something that I’m writing about; it’s only natural for them to try to use it before I can publish it. Anything we say aloud – it’s up for grabs, isn’t it? Anything at all. But on the other hand, we writers don’t really have to part with our books. Not like paintings. Everyone can have a copy of a book. More that the publisher worries nobody will want one.’

Gwen laughed at this. ‘My dealer’s pretty commercial,’ she confided. ‘American. You’d think I’d want big exhibitions and the high prices. But I feel a little pushed. A little packaged. Who are these clamouring millionaires? I need to paint without worrying about what sells; otherwise, I get on this roll that isn’t my own. I hit one thing that someone really goes for, and I know I could do it again, and there’s a lot of adrenalin there, and maybe even a temptation – a kind of challenge to please some supposed audience. But then, what would I really be doing? Are they hot for just whatever it is I’m producing? Or am I producing something they’re hot for?’

She whirled her fork through the air. ‘Sometimes I think I might have to run away from it, back to the country. So I don’t become part of something dreamed up by other people. But right now, the work’s OK. There’s a lot happening fast. More coming. I can’t stop. You’d have to pry my brushes out of my hands.’ She gripped the fork hard, making a fist.

Now Roland laughed, a murmur in his chest, pleasure, interest, leaning down towards her. ‘Part of art?’ he asked, as if she knew what he meant. And when she looked bemused, he went on, ‘To please the audience, to give them pleasure? Nowadays all parts of our culture are infected by a kind of marketing mentality. Even Lawrence. What do the people want? That question shapes everything – politics, education, health, transport. But can one ever be right in thinking one knows what the people want? And do the people want the right things in any case?’

Gwen poked at a nearly invisible fish bone on her plate, pushed it to the very edge, and without looking up said dreamily, almost as if she were thinking aloud, ‘When I’m out in the landscape, looking, or even just being there, I don’t think of any of that. It’s something else – something that carries you right out of yourself, out of normal experience. Like some loophole you can get through in time, where it’s slower or deeper – and actually real –’

‘That’s quite a palatable form of religion – nature worship. But quite primitive, eh? Pantheism, Wordsworth, the Druids. A sense of awe before the natural world? What about mankind, Gwen? What about civilisation? Or God, for that matter. Far more complex and intriguing.’

‘What about God? What are you saying?’ she demanded, sitting right up into the flow of his talk. ‘I’ve copped out? Picked the easiest subject matter?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Roland said, smiling a smooth, almost syrupy smile, as if he were stroking her mind to quiet it. ‘You’re a painter after all.’

This was worse. ‘So it’s painting that’s not good enough for you? What is wrong with this country, that painting isn’t anything? And you’ve had so few great painters!’

He fell silent, looking confused. Then he said, ‘Your paintings please me enormously. And I think art should please; it should be beautiful. Marketing, after all, is a lowbrow commercial name for something that has always been going on – and going on for perfectly good reasons. I like to see you think hard, that’s all. You could do anything you wanted to. You might be more thoughtfu—’ he corrected himself, ‘more analytical – if you were pushed to it.’

‘Watch your step, Henry Higgins!’ Though she joked, Gwen was hurt. I reveal something personal, she thought, and he comes at me with that arrogance. Why does everything have to be an argument or a theory supported by evidence, a proof of something true or untrue? Who the fuck does he think he is?

Roland looked at her, down at his plate, at her again. Gwen sensed that he wanted in some way to apologise. She glanced at Hilary, wondering how the evening seemed to her, safely chatting with Lawrence.

‘Of course I have my own favourites,’ Hilary was saying, eyes on the hem of her napkin which she was folding and unfolding on the tabletop. Then she leaned a little towards Lawrence’s reply.

‘You won’t ever be content if you let someone else get their hands on those. Will you?’

‘I don’t talk about it. It’s not really appropriate to have my own opinion about the collection.’ Hilary was demure and self-contained.

‘But that’s ridiculous!’ Lawrence offered friendly outrage. ‘You must have your own opinion! How can you ever have been a student of mine and not have an opinion? You must summon some nerve and tell me what it is! I’m longing to hear it!’

Hilary’s cheeks darkened with his enthusiasm.

That’s more like a conversation, Gwen thought. And it dawned on her that Roland was hardly coping with life away from Oxford. He was stuck after all in the tone of voice, in the useless style of put-downs and sparring. Roland only wants to please, she thought. Wants to be noticed and admired. But he doesn’t know how to give ground. He doesn’t believe as much as he pretends to believe in anyone else’s vitality. He just knows how to question.

Tonight he had a chance – in theory, he had a chance for love. And he blew it. Before he even got into the room. He’s the one who recommended the heartless Paul to be Hilary’s assistant. So he’s taking revenge on me as well as on Hilary. He won’t even risk considering whether or not he likes Hilary, or how he ought to talk to her; he’s just leaving her to Lawrence. He must have failed at this a hundred times, agonisingly, and he’s trying to prove to us that he doesn’t care – about women, about romance. Which shows that he’s terrified. Gwen saw it all so suddenly and so clearly.

Oh, she thought with pain, he doesn’t set out to hurt. He only needs someone to encourage him. To straighten his hair and spruce him up a little. Then he could shine. It occurred to her that, until tonight, she herself had been able to bring out what was generous and alive in Roland because she wasn’t a chance for love. She was already taken; with her, he was safe from failure, and so with her, he succeeded.

As she thought of this, she looked up at Roland with such warmth, such forgiveness, that he blushed brick red, almost purple, like a bruise, and the blush made a bond between them, a certain understanding. She could easily be the one if she cared to; he’d admitted it. It made the insides of her nostrils burn with surprise; she felt a flush of energy in her chest. She looked over at Hilary again, thinking, this should be you, Hil. And yet she felt a furtive pleasure that Hilary was still deep in conversation with Lawrence.

Gwen smiled a long easy smile at Roland. She felt gratified. She liked knowing she could be the one with him. She liked considering him as if she were single like Hilary. It was a long time since she had looked at a man with unmarried eyes.

When they talked about it, getting up the next morning, Gwen thought the party had been something of a success.

‘Of course it was,’ Lawrence announced. ‘Everyone there was completely remarkable. What a privilege to be in the room with such people. And oh, the pudding!’ He kissed his fingertips and tossed them in the air, then went back to scouring his teeth, toothpaste foaming from his jaws.

Gwen laughed, squeezing in at the sink. He had devoted himself to the store-bought chocolate cake.

Hyperbole often characterised Lawrence’s most serious statements. It was like a superstition with him, making fun. He feared to value anything too much in case he lost it.

‘But what do you mean by success? You want Roland to ask her out by himself?’ He shook his head.

‘You don’t think he will?’ Gwen whined a little, feeling mocked.

‘With the wound of Paul that he and I inflicted on her? It’s too much to expect him to make that up to her. Anyway, darling, you’re the one he wants. He doesn’t want her!’

She made an astonished face. ‘Come off it, Lawrence. He wants a woman who will make sacrifices for him. You remember he told us that once? I don’t make sacrifices for anyone!’

‘You make sacrifices for Will every thirty seconds.’ His voice trailed away as he went through the hall into the bedroom.

She scoffed at the mirror, spat into the sink. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

Lawrence reappeared, buttoning his shirt, grinning devilishly. He watched her reflection over her shoulder and she watched, too – watched him, watched herself. Then she blushed, more from shyness than anxiety. They both knew he had a point, but it did them no harm at all, this tiny gratification she had enjoyed, Roland’s attention. They laughed a little. It wasn’t serious. It was like being caught eating ice cream straight out of the carton with the freezer door open; she felt slightly embarrassed. Why not sit down, have a bowlful? But a chair and a bowl would formally acknowledge the appetite; a chair and a bowl would make it impossible to pretend that the ice cream wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even really being eaten. As good as being caught; so who was kidding who? It was a delicate torture, to remind them both how intimately Lawrence knew her appetites and her sensibility.

As for Roland’s admiration, Lawrence found it appropriate. It was further celebration of Gwen. Roland wasn’t anything Gwen really wanted; Lawrence was sure of that. It enchanted Lawrence to surprise his wife as she tasted something she didn’t really want; he loved the pathos of her inability to resist, and he felt a surge of strength in knowing she was his. ‘Poor Roland’ was what Lawrence really thought, but he didn’t say it aloud.

He leaned down and around to Gwen’s cheek, kissed her fondly. ‘I’m not suggesting that you should sacrifice anything for Roland.’

‘Hilary would make sacrifices, though,’ Gwen burbled. ‘That’s what she’s good at.’

But then she wondered uncomfortably, What kind of sacrifices? What kind of pleasure would Hilary have to forgo? Some deeply personal and necessary joy? Gwen remembered the sting Roland had administered with his comments about her private religion. What about mankind? she wondered. How could anybody drag her mind back from where it preferred to go? From its habitual satisfactions? In order to consider mankind? She felt angry at Roland, and she pushed the thought away.

‘Maybe Roland thinks he wants a woman who would make sacrifices. But frankly, my dear, that’s so last century.’ Lawrence paused to savour the absurd trendiness of his witticism. Then he affected a more earnest voice, ‘Don’t you think he’d lose interest in someone like that? Walk all over her, use her up, throw her out? He ought to have a wife who could challenge him, amaze him. Do we know anyone that good? That tough?’

Gwen squirmed a little, knowing whom Lawrence had in mind. He reached for her chin, tugging at it in his cupped fingers, pulling her into his control. It was possessive, somehow tender, as if he wanted only to remind her of something.

‘So, OK,’ she conceded. ‘Matchmaking’s at least as hard as painting. For me, maybe harder, since I don’t know yet how to do it.’

‘I should think,’ Lawrence agreed. He nodded, brooding, then added, ‘It’s a case of getting it exactly right once and once only. With painting, the more ways you can find, the more interest. And anyway, the paint lets you do it. But the people?’

CHAPTER 5

Gwen’s studio was at the top of the house near the light. Already the autumn days seemed remorselessly short. Even if she didn’t stop for lunch at all, the light didn’t last as long as her appetite for work. She had ways of addressing this. She had systems, artifices, and she was always devising new ones.

Lately, she had one big, square canvas set on an easel directly underneath the vast skylight in the middle of the room, and another two wide, rectangular canvases facing the long window running across the back. Around the middle of the day, she usually worked on the square canvas underneath the skylight. Since it was October, the sun’s zenith barely achieved the top of sky, and, even at noon, the light slanted in at an angle. But for a little over an hour, the quality of the light remained almost steady, so that the colours, as she worked them, held their value, ever so briefly, ever so precariously, and allowed her to see what she was making: a vista of dropping emerald meadow at midsummer in broad day.

Of course the light from her city skylight was nothing like the gradual passage of limpid sun at the cottage in June. But it didn’t need to be. The meadow was a memory, a vision lodged in her mind long since. Gwen worked from what was in her mind. Catching what she could excited her for the hour or so that she tried. And she relished the time pressure because it reminded her of the transience of the scene at the moment that she had beheld it, of the urgency then of seeing it.

It wasn’t a picture of a summer day anyway. It was an experience of moisture – clumps of grass that harassed her ankles or were dazzled by the wind as separated blades, trees caressed by mild English clouds along a tamed horizon, a festival of birdsong. In full summer, the English countryside always looked to Gwen pleasant, accommodating, long in use. Like a well-pillowed drawing room in nature, it was inviting, cultivated, but without any roof. She meant the picture to convey this, and yet while she painted, her mind dipped from time to time into something wilder and more crude that she half remembered from the brilliance and unbearable energies of her childhood in America. And when her mind dipped, deep, backwards, she would think, England is not like that, England is like this, making an implicit comparison; it was as if the scene she was painting held down some other scene and covered it.

On the pair of canvases by the back window, Gwen was doing something else, equally temperate, more mysterious: a pond in the woods, cloaked in mist, at dawn. And beside it, the same pond later in the day as the mist burned off so that the pond shone among the close-growing trees like phosphorescence. She liked to work on the first of these canvases very early in the morning, when the light from the window still reached long and low into its dank grey-green washes.

She would fetch the big wooden palette which she left tilted against the wall overnight to keep dust from clinging to the wet paint, and she would prod the little turds of colour with a small brush, with a knife, and with another, bigger, once white-haired brush, feeling how the colours had ever so slightly begun to seal themselves over in their sleep, like chrysalises around caterpillars. They would spread their wings, flatten out on to the palette as she waked them. She would snatch a brush into her mouth, clamp it there with wiry lips, tasting the white spirits she had cleaned it with, select another brush and another, until several bristled from her left fist as she narrowed her eyes again at where she had left off. She had hundreds of brushes in the studio, almost as many knives, stuffed upright into jars, flowerpots, pitchers, tin cans, all sizes, all shapes, each brush looking bleached and waterlogged as if it had rolled around the bottom of the sea, been abraded by sand, by surf, drifted ashore in harsh sun.

The sable hairs of her smallest brush would nip and sway at the soft mounds of Davy’s grey, Payne’s grey, burnt umber, terre verte, cadmium green, indigo, yellow ochre, probing the caches of colour. She would poke at the palette as if at a baby’s meal, mix and blend the tiny portions in dabs, deliver them with the delicate fingertips and the anxious poise of a mother’s hand towards an upturned mouth, then wait to see the effect before she offered more. On a clear day, the shafts of light reached closer and closer to the canvas as the morning wore on, and until Gwen herself moved on to the second canvas, where the mist was rising to reveal glimpses of brown and even purple reflected in the surface of the pond and ballasting the trees, bright yellow at their tops where the mist thinned to mere wisps, lifted in threads. The pond itself looked eerily on the move, as if through time, as if emerging from the past.

While she worked on these bucolic scenes, Gwen was mesmerised by their completeness, and she would think only from time to time of Will or of Lawrence – an instantaneous drift of face before her mind’s eye, amounting to a serene recognition: They, too, exist, separately, safely. But lately, more and more continually, she thought of Hilary. Hilary didn’t seem to be a discrete, settled fact; she not only existed but also suffered. Hilary was in turmoil, in trajectory, in a state of need. She was not constant; she was changing. Gwen saw Hilary clearly – wrinkles of fretfulness striking harsh verticals through the thick, pale flesh at the top of Hilary’s long nose, between her forthright blue eyes.

One lunchtime not long after the dinner party, Gwen put down her brushes, flexed her shoulders, filled the kettle with water for coffee. The light was already hardening into the yellow-grey scowl of a smoggy London afternoon. She stared into the stained enamel sink, iridescent with wear like an old tooth, blue-black around the paint-clogged drain. She would fight it, she resolved, the premature onset of twilight. Will had piano after school and Hilary had offered to pick him up. Still time for the meadow. And what else?

She leaned back against the chipped edge of the Formica counter, the kettle roaring and spitting behind her. Around the sides of the room stood canvas upon canvas, a few with their pale wood stretchers and blank backs showing titles scrawled in black across them, others facing forward, one or two in trial frames, offering glimpses of a season, a time of day, a mood of nature. Her sketchbooks, warped and fattened with changes of atmosphere – raindrops, sun, the baking edge of the Aga at the cottage – lay here and there on the spattered workbench, the fridge, the disused cooker; one or two were propped open like tents so she could glance at them as they stood up with their wire bindings across the top. They served to remind her of what she had wanted to capture about a particular time in a particular place, like a diary of her intentions towards the paint.

A rickety panelled screen zigzagged halfway along the bed. On the floor one of Hilary’s big black suitcases lay open, her linen skirt limp over one edge, her Lycra running tights over another. Abandoned like that, the clothes seemed to Gwen poignant, vulnerable. They had pressed so near Hilary’s skin that they might have been part of Hilary herself, her chosen outline, not her assigned one. But she isn’t fully conscious of making an outline, Gwen thought. Not of how she looks or chooses to make herself look. And here they lay, her garments, with white flecks of Hilary’s sloughed-off skin invisibly clinging to them, her odour and her sweat swelling each thread of the fabric ever so slightly, making it more airy, lighter than if the clothes had been newly laundered, dried, pressed. From all the way across the room, Gwen could see how intimately the fabric portrayed Hilary’s person. Hilary who was always so unconcerned about such things. If her knickers, her bra, had lain on top of the pile of her clothes, even in a locker room, a public changing booth, she wouldn’t have noticed, wouldn’t have paused to fold them inside and conceal them, wouldn’t even have turned them right side out if they were wrong side out. Was this really a woman? How like a boy, thought Gwen, a young boy. She noticed that among the pungent smells of the studio – white spirits, oil paint, linseed, sawdust – she couldn’t, in fact, smell Hilary.

Next to the suitcase, Hilary’s black nylon briefcase leaned against the bed, the pockets all unzipped, a laptop half in, half out. Plastic sleeves holding typed sheets and photographs spilled from one side. Doro’s collection, Gwen thought, crossing the room, bending down to flip through the files, slithery in her hands.

Amphorae, kraters, statues, friezes, the likes of which she herself had once pored over with painful concentration. It gave her a start, their familiarity and their strangeness. How we both loved all this, she thought. Hilary still does; this is where she really lives, where she is at home. Is this something she should have to sacrifice? Slow-footed processionals and naked ceremonials, wars and games and crafts, kissing, killing, dancing, marrying, offering, giving thanks. There were human figures, animals, ritual fires, wreaths, gods, heroes, centaurs, satyrs, once known by name to Gwen, all poised in their long-ago occupations and obligations. Ideal bodies idealised – orderly, savage, in draperies, in helmets, in wings, in chariots, their white-ringed eyes sightless. The statues stood free and trance-like in their three dimensions, inky bronze, white marble, battered grey stone; the painted figures were silhouetted against red backgrounds, like the earth they came and went from, or, on the later vases, against black backgrounds, like the eternity of night into which, as they told, time carries everything.

Try something like this under electric light, thought Gwen. It can’t change, so the light won’t matter. It’s not as if I ever experienced any of it as a natural world to begin with.

She decided on a tall, slender, two-handled black vase with red-gold figures, and she laid the sleeve with its typed notes on the counter while she measured coffee grounds into her little cafetière, poured in the boiling water, stirred it. Then, leaving the coffee to draw on the ridged steel draining board next to the sink, she slipped the photograph from the sleeve to see the figures on the vase more closely: a wedding procession, mostly women, their hair bound with leaves, with linen, their golden earrings dangling, their gowns crisply pleated, their maidenly eyes downcast, their noses and their backs long and straight as they trod, following a man and leading a bullock, towards the longed-for state of marriage. How chaste a scene, Gwen thought, remote, inviolable.