A wooden staircase led to the upper floor. Two rooms and a landing. They stood at the window of the largest room and looked down toward the coast. A small ship perched on the silver streak of the sea. The fields were pale bleached stubble, or rich red plough; the hedges and woodland were darkest green.
Lorna said, “This is our bedroom.”
“Are you sure? This place means oil lamps, and candles, and water from the tap outside. You have never lived like that.”
“Have you?”
“Not quite.”
“Then maybe it’s time we did.”
Outside, there were two sheds. The smaller one, at the end of a short path from the back door, housed the privy. The other had a concrete floor, a window, and a long workbench all along one side.
“Aha…” said Matt.
There was a standpipe beside the door. Matt tried the tap: water gushed. “It’s from the stream, I suppose. We’ll need jugs, basins, a tin bath.”
Beside the larger shed, a lean-to sheltered the remains of a log pile. Matt picked up chunks of wood, stacked them one upon another. “And a saw, and an axe, and a wedge. The village is over a mile away, do you realize?”
“Bikes,” she said. “And one day, when you’re rich and famous, a little car.”
“It is not always going to be a sunny afternoon in September. In the winter things will be very different.”
“I didn’t know you had this pessimistic streak. What else am I going to discover today?”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t want you to be under any illusion about what it may be like here, that’s all. And what will you do all the time?”
“Do?” she cried, “Do?” She flung out her hand. “When there’s all that out there? Explore. I’ve never seen the countryside except through the windows of Daddy’s car. And dig this garden. And clean up that range and learn how to cook.”
And make a home, she wanted to say, but thought it mawkish. The first home that will be the way I want it, and a million miles from Brunswick Gardens.
“We might find something in the village with running water and electricity.”
“Not for two pounds a month. Not with a view of half Somerset.”
They had arrived here by chance, luck, by a series of unconsidered movements. They had traveled, somehow, from the bench in the park to this implacable little building. Lorna thought: it has been waiting for us. Matt thought about tools, and a spade and a fork, and furniture, and, one day, a printing press.
After the wedding, they had left London. A friend of Matt’s had offered a month’s use of his rooms in Marlborough while he was away in France. There, they had learned one another. They had learned every inch of one another’s bodies; they had learned every look, every tone, every inflection of the voice; they had learned one another’s tastes, thoughts, responses. Lorna had thought that this was the first time in her life that she had known another person, known them as though they were a facet of herself. Matt thought only: so this is love.
They walked for miles in that expansive landscape. They rode country buses to Stonehenge, to Dorchester. Matt sketched and painted. Lorna discovered for the first time in her life what food costs; she scoured the town for the cheapest eggs, for cut-price broken biscuits, for herrings and haddock. The little money that they had must last for as long as possible. Matt had finished the engravings for the book on estuaries and waterways; that payment was their small capital, when that was exhausted he must get another commission, or sell some of his work that was banked now with Lucas Talbot in London. Lorna had a Post Office savings account in which she had hoarded birthday money from godparents and most of the allowance from her mother that was supposed to be spent on toiletries, gloves, fripperies. She had nearly fifty pounds, and thought that she must always have known, with some secret intuition, that she would one day need this, that it would be a lifeline. Matt refused to let her draw on it: “I am not going to become a kept man.” She laughed, and knew that the money would be there, the ultimate resource.
When the month was up and they had to leave Marlborough, they simply drifted west. It was high summer, languid August days, and the thought of London was abhorrent. Matt had given up his garret room, and they would have to look for somewhere else if they went back, and in both of their minds was the thought: why go back? Why London, anymore? They stayed a week or two near Bath, with a farmer’s wife who rented out a caravan, and moved from there to rooms above a grocer’s shop in the little Somerset town of Williton, simply because they had got off a bus there, had been struck by this rich corner of West Somerset—its hills, its deep lanes, its sudden startling vistas—and saw the TO LET notice in a window. And it was there, after a few weeks, that they had heard about the cottage, had hired bicycles, and had come upon it, tucked down beside the lane, on this afternoon of sun-struck red ploughlands fingered by the long shadows of trees.
“It won’t always be like this,” Matt repeated. “Think of rain. Snow.” But he was already wandering back to that shed with the inviting workbench. He brushed away cobwebs and opened the window. Light flooded in.
Lorna was beside him. “In summer, you’d work here. In winter, inside—by the kitchen range.”
They made their way through long grass around the garden. Matt found some raspberry canes. The hedge was covered with brambles, the blackberries ripe.
“How do you grow things?” Lorna said. “I have no idea. I shall find out.”
“We are all peasants at heart. In search of Arcadia.”
“I don’t know what that means. I just want to plant things and see them grow.”
He turned her face toward him, and kissed her. “You are the most unexpected girl. Have I ever mentioned that I love you?”
“From time to time.”
From somewhere out of sight beyond the fields, nearer to the sea, there came a distant whistle. Smoke fumed up beyond a clump of woodland. They remembered the train, the branch line to Minehead.
Lorna said, “A train seems all wrong here. Bustling through the place.”
“This is the twentieth century, and you’re not allowed to forget it.”
“When it’s the twenty-first, there won’t be trains. People will just get onto conveyor belts. I read that somewhere. I’m glad we shan’t be around.”
The train whistled again, farther away. The smoke diffused.
They went in search of the farmer who was renting out the cottage. His wife came to the door of the farmhouse in the nearby hamlet and said that he was up on the hill, checking stock. If they walked up the lane, they would probably meet him.
He was a small dark man, riding a chunky pony. He stopped, dismounted, and they stood talking while the pony clinked the bit and its skin twitched against the flies.
The deal was struck. Ten shillings a week, and he would throw in a supply of firewood. “It’s quite a run-down old place. Not much modern comforts. Sure it’s what you want?”
He was puzzled by them, they could see; their youth, their accents, which were not that of people who propose to live in decaying cottages.
They assured him that it would be fine. “My husband is an artist,” said Lorna. “He’ll be able to work there.”
The farmer was evidently unimpressed by this news, but appeared gruffly entertained, perhaps at her tone of pride. His wife would give the place a clean-out, he said. When did they want to move their things in?
They explained that they had, as yet, no things. They would need to look for some cheap furniture. Their new landlord made some suggestions about possible sources. Lorna thought of the great cargo of possessions at Brunswick Gardens, the freight of chairs and sofas and tables and mirrors and ornaments, of mahogany and rosewood and oak, of velvet and silk and chintz; the cottage would carry the opposite of that, it would travel light. She saw a scrubbed table, kitchen chairs, a bed. Maybe a couch for visitors to sleep on. Lucas must come—shy, lanky Lucas, Matt’s friend; she liked Lucas. Yes, a couch—and a jug and basi
n for their bedroom, and a little chest. Crockery for that dresser in the main room—bright, sturdy plates and cups, the antithesis of the ornate porcelain at Brunswick Gardens. Pots and pans. Rugs. She furnished the place in her head, as they stood there, Matt and the farmer now talking about local sites of interest: the slate quarry in the woods across the valley, the ruined Cistercian abbey down the lane, the old railway—the mineral line—that once carried iron ore down from the hills for shipping over to Wales. The farmer’s forebears came from Wales as miners in the last century: that dark, Celtic look was explained.
Matt thought of them going to these places, the two of them. He saw his sketchbook filling; he saw his tools lined up on the bench in that shed, a block on the sandbag waiting for him to start work. The press; a stack of paper. He felt primed with energy, as though the landscape around him—the contours of the hills, the intimacies of tree and leaf and gate—were rushing into his head and reforming into shapes and lines. He would hone his style; he would sharpen his technique. He would accumulate enough work for an exhibition; he would hunt out more book commissions. There was Lorna to look after now; he no longer had only himself to think of.
They moved into the cottage three weeks later, having spent much of their small capital, and some of Lorna’s nest egg, on essential furnishings and equipment. They had two armchairs with sagging springs, a deal table, kitchen chairs, a bed, a couch, an array of unmatching crockery, some worn floor coverings. A primus stove, a slop pail, a chamber pot. Two packing cases to double as tables and storage areas. Hurricane lamps. They felt rich. Lorna was amazed to discover in herself some proprietorial instinct. She had never cared tuppence about the trappings of her room at Brunswick Gardens; now, she cherished each of these unassuming effects. She loved the rag rugs they had found in a jumble sale, the patchwork bedcover from a flea market, the Victorian jug and basin that had cost a sinful five shillings in an antique shop. She had a chipped brown pitcher which she filled with great sprays of scarlet hips and haws from the hedgerows; she wrestled with the old range, and produced her first triumphant meals; she washed their clothes in the big copper that was in the shed and pinned them to the line. When they pushed their bikes up the hill from the village and she saw the solid little outline of the cottage ahead, she thought: home.
October sank into November, and home showed its claws. Damp stained the walls; the cold must be fought with a paraffin stove and a mountain of firewood; when the wind was the wrong way, the chimney smoked. Matt eyed her thoughtfully, on one mean gray day: “When you’ve had enough, say so.”
He was sitting at the kitchen table, the block in front of him. It was too cold now to work in the shed. The tools were laid out in a neat row to his right, the different sizes and shapes—the graver, the square graver, the spit sticker, the oilstone for sharpening. He had just finished tracing a completed drawing onto the block and was ready to engrave—always a heady moment. Soon, the farmyard along the lane would start to bloom from the boxwood, translated into an intricate creation of lines and curves, of light and dark.
Lorna was at the draining board beside the sink, cleaning a chicken. She had already plucked it; now came the tricky part. The farmer’s wife had shown her how, and she was hoping that she would remember which bits of that slippery rainbow interior she must go for. The chicken was a treat, a handsome gift from the farm, where she and Matt seemed to be regarded as slightly feckless children, to be indulged with the occasional bag of potatoes, half a dozen eggs, this fowl. At Brunswick Gardens, she had occasionally gone to the kitchen with some message from her mother and seen the cook doing just this, and had turned away fastidiously. Now, she wanted to say to Brunswick Gardens: look at me, look what I can do, look at the person I have become.
She ignored Matt; the chicken required all her attention. When she had finished, she slid it into the basin to wash it out, and put the entrails on a sheet of newspaper. The newspaper was a week old—she picked up discarded copies from the village shop—and the black print chattered of far off things: Hitler, the Rhineland, questions in Parliament. She stared down for a moment, reading, before she wrapped the entrails; it was as though for a moment there were some ugly intruder in the room. Then she rinsed her hands along with the chicken, wiped them dry, and turned to Matt.
“I was going to boil it, but if I can get the oven hot enough I think I’ll try roasting. I’ve got some dripping.”
“I wasn’t talking about the chicken.”
“I know you weren’t. I was politely ignoring you, because what you said wasn’t worth answering.”
He laughed. “So we’re bedding down here, are we?”
“It looks like it.” And she smiled at him, that sudden smile that seemed to light up a room, that had other people smiling back, willy-nilly. She had smiled thus on the bench in the park and he was lost.
“You are a total distraction,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that. Go and do something useful.”
She came around behind him and rested her cheek against his. “How long will you work?”
“Did you have something else in mind?”
Sometimes they made love when the moment seized them, when they couldn’t resist it, going upstairs to the iron bedstead whose springs squeaked and groaned, but what did it matter, there was no one to hear.
“Well, maybe…But I was thinking of the paintings. I want more.”
They had whitewashed the damp, stained walls of the cottage, top to bottom, and now in spare moments Matt was decorating some of them with frescos. In the small room that led off the kitchen he was creating a frieze of waterfowl, which commemorated their meeting. A troop of mallard, shelduck, graylag geese circled the room, just below the ceiling; in each corner, willows poured down; there was rippling stylized water. This room was grandly termed the parlor, by the farmer’s wife. There, Lorna and Matt kept the bed for visitors, which doubled as a sofa; there were packing-case tables, and a shelf for books they had picked up from the secondhand bookshop in Minehead. They called it the snug; there was no fireplace but it could be made modestly warm with the oil stove.
“I’ll do another half hour or so,” he said. “Then I’ll paint, before the light goes. You could get the ladder in, and the paints.”
She smiled. There was something about her, something heightened, charged; he could sense it, with that intimate awareness of her that he now had. He put down the graver and stared at her.
“What is it? What’s up?”
“Well…” She twisted her hands. “It’s just that—I’d better tell you. I’ve not had a visitor this month.”
She had not meant to come out with it, not just yet. And now she was blushing—because she hadn’t been able to stop herself using her mother’s coy euphemism.
“I wondered…” he said. “I’d noticed. Did you think I hadn’t? So…” And now he felt a sudden rush of euphoria. He had never thought about having a child, children were neither here nor there, but confronted with this, with her standing there with that look on her face, he knew all at once that of course he wanted a child, a child was the natural and obvious outcome. And anyway…
“Anyway, we can hardly be surprised.” He grinned at her.
“That thing…” she said. “That thing was supposed to…”
“Well, that thing evidently didn’t work.”
Lorna had never thought about happiness in her earlier life, perhaps because she had not previously been conscious of being happy. Oh, she had known the fire of well-being, of exulting in a particular moment—a spring morning, being swirled around in a dance, the exuberance of her own mind and body. But she knew now that there is another condition, of a different quality, a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity. It turned the discomforts of the cottage into an atmospheric backdrop that would always refer her now to this particular transcendence. It made chapped fingers and frozen feet not so much irrelevant as an accompanying theme song; it sidelined
the carrying of buckets from the tap; the scamper to the privy on a cold, wet morning; the scrubbing; and the tussles with the range and the oil stove. All of this was real, and sharp, and she was often cold, often tired, but everything was overlaid with this sublime content: pushing the bike up the hill after a foray to the village shop, in the knowledge that in a few moments she would see Matt; thinking about the night to come as she peeled potatoes or wrung out a shirt, that she would be lying beside him again. And again, and again.
“So there’ll be three of us,” he said. “What’s that going to be like?”
“Is a baby a person?”
“They become people.”
“It’ll be half you, and half me,” she said. “It won’t entirely feel like someone else.”
She loved his gaiety, his seriousness, his energy, his capacity for concentration; she loved the way he frowned when he was working, and the mole on his left shoulder, and the smell of him and his thick, springy brown hair. She had had no idea, none at all, that you could feel thus for another person; it was as though you acquired a sixth sense. She had loved her parents, in some quite other way, when she was a child; she still felt residual stirrings of that affection. But what she knew with Matt was a thing apart—it was like stepping into some other, brighter world.
Matt had had few dealings with women before he went to the Grosvenor, beyond the occasional flirtatious exchange with local schoolgirls back home. Plunged into the heady atmosphere of the art rooms, he had at once fallen into various liaisons, mostly transitory and superficial, but occasionally more intense. An episode with one fellow student lasted several months, and was his sexual initiation. The sex had been a revelation at first, and then became a slightly guilty indulgence because he knew that he was not in love with the girl; in due course she detected this, grew indignant, and went off with someone else. Matt settled back to passing encounters, with a certain relief, though he missed the regular sex. He had standards of his own, and thought it wrong to try to get every possibly compliant girl into bed, though most in his circle would have thought that entirely understandable behavior. They were young, they were modern young, they saw themselves as in apposition to the assumptions and attitudes of conventional society.