Pat Barker - Life Class

‘Can you see anything?’

‘No. If he was here he’s gone.’

‘It’d be him all right.’

‘I didn’t see anybody.’

She gazed around her, the moonlight glittering in the whites of her eyes. ‘Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I’m imagining things.’

But she didn’t sound convinced.

Shivering, she pulled the edges of her wrap together and went down the steps into the house, and with a last look at the wet grass and the shining rails, he turned to follow her.

Neville replied to Paul’s note of congratulation with an invitation to lunch. Just family, he’d scribbled underneath his signature. I thought we might go for a swim afterwards? Weather permitting, of course.

‘I wonder what he wants,’ Teresa said.

‘Does he have to want something?’

‘No-o.’

‘Well, I’ll know soon enough, won’t I?’

Sunday found him in the Nevilles’ dining room overlooking a balding lawn. The weather, after a few fitful weeks of mixed sunshine and rain, was now definitely getting warmer. The rhododendron leaves were limp in the midday glare.

Paul was sitting next to Mrs Neville, a thin, energetic woman who was an enthusiastic suffragist.

‘Suffra gist ,’ she insisted. ‘Not gette.’

‘No,’ Neville said. ‘But gette ’s on the way, isn’t it?’

‘Well, if the moderates don’t make progress, what do you expect? Obviously people are going to be attracted to more extreme tactics.’

‘Don’t start throwing bricks, my dear,’ Colonel Neville said. ‘You’re a terrible shot.’

Mrs Neville seemed to be fond of her family, in an abstracted kind of way, though Neville, jokingly but with an edge to his voice, claimed she never listened to a word he said.

‘Poof! What nonsense.’ She dropped a kiss on her husband’s forehead, acknowledged her son and his guest with a vague, bright smile, and swept out of the room.

‘It’s true,’ Neville said, caught between amusement and self-pity. ‘Half the time she doesn’t know I’m here.’

Paul thought he detected a lot of tension beneath the surface in this family. Neville was in awe of his father, a war correspondent who’d faced danger in every corner of the world. Throughout his life the father had gravitated towards violent conflict, and the son was desperate to measure up. No easy matter if the worst danger you face is a collapsing easel. But it made sense of Neville’s preoccupation with virility in art. Paul had read a couple of Neville’s articles now and both of them were full of the need to stamp out the effeminacy of the Oscar Wilde years. You’d think, the way Neville wrote about it, that the Wilde trials had taken place last year, not a generation ago. What a shadow it cast.

After coffee Colonel Neville retired to his study and the two young men went upstairs to Neville’s quarters: a large studio right at the top of the house. The treetops were level with his windows.

There were several completed paintings to admire, one of them very fine indeed. Many were urban, industrial landscapes. Paul was generous with his praise, though inwardly discouraged. In comparison with this his own work was immature, and he couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t particularly young for his age. His mother’s long illness and early death had forced him to grow up and take on responsibility. So this maturity of vision in a man whom he found distinctly childish in many respects bewildered him. Living at home, spoiled, self-pitying, moaning on because his mother didn’t pay him enough attention — for God’s sake! The work and the man seemed to bear no relation to each other. And the contrast was all the more painful because Neville was painting the landscape of Paul’s childhood. These paintings were the fruit of a trip up north to seek out the same smoking terraces and looming ironworks that Paul had turned his back on every Sunday, cycling off into the countryside in search of Art. He glanced sideways at Neville. One of them was mad.

‘They’re very powerful.’

‘I managed to get inside one of the works and see a furnace being tapped. God, it’s an amazing sight.’

‘You haven’t tried to paint it yet?’

‘No, I’m gearing myself up.’ He was pulling a bathing costume out of a drawer as he spoke. ‘Shall we go for a swim, then? It’s too nice to stay inside.’

Pausing on the landing to collect towels from the airing cupboard, he led the way downstairs. In the hall dust motes seethed in a shaft of sunlight. No sound anywhere, no voices, no traffic noise. Only the steady ticking of a clock.

‘It’s quiet, isn’t it?’

Paul was referring to the absence of traffic noise, but Neville chose to take it more personally.

‘Oh, it’s always like this. Do you know, sometimes I don’t talk to a living soul from one day’s end to the next? Mother’s got her blasted meetings, Father’s never here …’

‘I suppose there’s always the Café Royal.’

‘Can’t stand the place.’

He was there every night. ‘I thought you liked it.’

‘ Like it? Of course I don’t like it. It’s vile.’

They had turned out of Keats Grove now and were walking up the hill towards the Heath, the sun heavy on the backs of their necks.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ Neville said. ‘How did you get on with Tonks?’

‘All right, I think. He doesn’t seem to want to throw me out, and the fact is, I don’t want to leave. There’s too much going on.’

Neville was too short of breath to reply and they climbed the rest of the hill in silence. When they reached the bathing area, he pushed the gate open to reveal an area of sparse grass covered in lobster-pink flesh. Paul stepped inside and took a deep breath. Smells of pond water, sopping towels, damp hair. The path ahead had wet footprints dabbled all over it.

‘Reminds me of school, this,’ Neville said.

‘I’m surprised you can stand it.’ Neville looked a question.

‘Well, you don’t seem to have liked school much.’

‘Doesn’t mean I don’t remember it. Let’s face it, Tarrant, it never really leaves you, does it?’

‘Mine has.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Grammar school.’

‘Oh, well.’ He was tugging at his tie as he spoke. ‘I say, Tarrant, you’re not chippy, are you?’

‘I’m sorry?

‘Chippy. A bit, you know —’

‘Not at all. I think it had a lot of advantages.’

‘Such as?’

‘Not having to shower with your back to the wall.’

‘Oh.’

Neville looked around him uneasily, but the men stretched out on the grass might have been asleep for all the interest they showed.

‘Or perhaps you think that’s an exaggeration?’

‘Not where I was. The dormitory was a sewer.’

My God. Paul hadn’t expected either the frankness or the bitterness of Neville’s response.

‘Where do we leave our clothes?’

‘C’mon, I’ll show you.’

Neville was obviously well-known here. Several of the men lying on the grass looked up and greeted him as he walked past. Paul followed him reluctantly into a low brick building that housed the lockers. It was too soon after lunch to go swimming and he disliked padding about on other people’s wet footprints. At one point he was holding on to the wall and shaking one foot like a disgruntled cat.

A few minutes later, walking along to the end of the jetty with his locker key on a string round his neck, he began to change his mind. The pond was a sheet of silver with concentric rings of turbulence around the dark sleek heads of the swimmers. He gazed out beyond the fringe of willows and hawthorn bushes to the sunlit hills beyond, then turned and started to climb down the steps, the icy water inching up his mottled things.