Pat Barker - Life Class

Silence. They’d become surprisingly intense and were wondering whether to go on with the conversation or stop now before it became too confrontational.

‘Anyway’ she said, ‘I thought you didn’t do people. Do you remember Tonks saying some of your nudes didn’t look human?’

‘That wouldn’t necessarily be a disadvantage here.’

‘You can’t use people like that.’

‘I’m not using anybody.’

Silence again, louder this time.

‘What’s your solution, then? Ignore it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Totally The truth is, it’s been imposed on us from the outside. You would never have chosen it and probably the men in the hospital wouldn’t either. It’s unchosen, it’s passive, and I don’t think that’s a proper subject for art.’

‘So, what is?’

She lifted her head. ‘The things we choose to love.’

‘Hmm. No, I’ll think about it. I didn’t really mean us to argue, you know.’

‘It’s better than the attitude you get at home. Most people seem to think art should stop for the duration. Inherently trivial. Like buying a new hat.’

‘They should have met one of our patients. You’d have liked him. He was an apache.’

‘An Indian?’

‘Not that kind. He was a criminal. The French have special regiments for criminals to … I don’t know, pay their debt to society, I suppose. They’re supposed to be very good on the battlefield — born killers — but not so good at sticking it out between times. But the point about him was, he was covered in tattoos. Not his face and hands but literally everywhere else, every inch. And they were good. They were art. He’d used his own skin as the canvas, that’s all. Now, that man was probably born in the gutter, knocked from pillar to post… But he didn’t think art was irrelevant. Or trivial. He suffered for it.’

‘Ornamenting himself. Is it the same thing?’

‘In his case, yes, I think it was. Oh, and by the way, he didn’t need ornament. He was extraordinarily beautiful.’

Something deep inside Elinor pricked up its ears. Beautiful was not a word pre-war Paul could ever have brought himself to use about another man. He was changing, in all kinds of ways, probably. They both were.

‘Right, then,’ he said, raising his hand to summon the waitress. ‘Coffee. Would you like something to go with it?’

She shook her head. He was pleating the edge of the tablecloth, smoothing it out, pleating it again. ‘My mother didn’t have TB,’ he said at last. ‘She killed herself

‘Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I had no idea.’ She stared around the café as if there were help in waiters and chattering diners. ‘How old were you?’

‘Fourteen. She was in a lunatic asylum for the last two years, in and out before that.’ He made himself stop fiddling with the cloth. ‘I don’t think about it much.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. Well, a bit, I suppose, when the anniversary comes round, but it’s got all mixed up in my head anyway. I think I remember the first time they took her away, I remember seeing the van drive away with her inside it, but I know I can’t have seen that, because I was sent away from the house so I wouldn’t see.’

‘That must have been awful.’

‘The worse thing is I think part of me was relieved when she died because it meant I didn’t have to go on visiting that place.’

There was nothing she could say to comfort him. She reached across the table and folded his hands in hers.

They came out to find the whole street lit up by a magnificent full moon, which looked down on the town and seemed to deride its blue-painted street lamps. Even the shiny road surface reflected a blurred white light back at the sky. Elinor looked up and saw how slack-bellied and stretch-marked it was, really, a mad old woman who’d decided to follow them home for reasons no sane person could guess at.

There were no people on the streets and the only sound was a mutter of guns in the distance and closer at hand the rumble of vehicles going up to the front.

‘Let’s walk a bit, shall we?’ he said.

She knew he was trying to change the mood of the evening, to effect the transformation from friends to lovers before they got back to the house. Above all to erase the memory of his mother’s suicide. She wanted to ask more but she daren’t. She felt he’d given her a key and done so very deliberately, but she’d no time to think about it. He put his arm around her shoulders, and they walked on. A misshapen blotch of darkness, they must have seemed from the outside. Part of Elinor had detached itself and was now sitting on a rooftop somewhere watching them cross the square. She seemed to see the whole town spread out below her.

‘It thinks it’s safe, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, the town thinks it’s safe. It’s really quite a smug little place.’

‘Well, it is safe. Safe as you can be with a war going on up the road.’

‘I like it. It doesn’t seem to care about religion or the state or anything much except itself

‘Making money.’

‘No, I mean like Dutch painting, you know? It loves its own life. This life. It doesn’t need anything outside to give it meaning. And the armies can march all over it, and it doesn’t care.’

They walked on, feeling their hips jostle as they tried to match their strides. ‘Do you miss me?’ he asked.

‘Do you miss me ?’

‘Yes, but it’s different for me, because I’ve never been with you here, so there isn’t a gap. And I don’t get much time to think.’

‘No, in other words.’

‘I wouldn’t have asked you to come.’

‘Why did you?’

‘I needed you. A bit selfish, I suppose.’

‘Oh, you’re allowed a little bit. You’re doing more than most.’

She shivered and he put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

He had a key. She hadn’t been expecting that, and it made everything easier. Stumbling along the top corridor, they saw a line of orange light underneath the door, and opened it to find that a fire had been lit in the tiny grate. Flames and their shadows chased each other all over the walls.

He reached for the switch. She said, urgently, ‘ No. ’ They undressed in the circle of light, throwing their clothes into two dark heaps on the floor. He got into bed first, with a theatrical chattering of teeth, burrowing down into the cold sheets and pulling back the covers on her side. She felt unshelled, goose-pimply anything but seductive, but in bed they shuffled closer together and pulled the covers up to their faces until only their cold noses stuck out over the top. The firelight had got into his eyes.

It was different from that time in London, the last evening they spent together before he went to Belgium, when they’d come so close to making love. Then, she’d been excited by the sight of her own breasts against a man’s chest, rather than by anything Paul did. Tonight, she lost herself. She looked up once and saw him watching her. When he climaxed, he hid his face in her neck and then slid sideways on to the pillow, gripping the cloth between his teeth, snorting and pulling and tearing. In those last few seconds, he couldn’t have been aware of who he was with. Perhaps it was the shyness of their first time, which he might feel as much as she did, though he’d shown no other sign. But no, she thought, she’d discovered something about Paul that she hadn’t known before and couldn’t have found out any other way. Lovemaking for him would always be communion with a private god.

Then, almost immediately, the perception was lost. They were laughing with triumph, pushing the bedclothes back, not cold now, not cold at all, trampling the counterpane down to the foot of the bed, admiring the shadows the firelight cast on the hills and valleys of their bodies.