Pat Barker - Life Class

Lewis has just come in to get me. He sends his affectionate greetings and asks to be remembered to you. Do you know he told me the other day he’s never been afraid? He wasn’t boasting either. As you know, he’s not exactly the boasting type. I’m afraid all the time, though it doesn’t seem to make much difference to what I do. Write soon. Even your handwriting on an empty envelope might help to convince me that there’s still a girl called Elinor Brooke.

Ever your own, Paul.

Elinor to Paul

What does ‘ever your own’ mean, Paul, if you don’t believe the person you’re saying it to exists? I haven’t stopped living just because you can’t imagine me. I go on living. I move on. I don’t spend much time sitting in the window outside Tonks’s room, or anywhere else for that matter. I work, Paul. I work as I’ve never worked before. I always feel apologetic when I say that because I know your time for work is limited, and you must find it almost impossible to concentrate even when you do find time, but I can’t help that. If painting matters you have to give your life to it and that’s what I’m doing. Not quite to the exclusion of everything else, I do get out now and then, but every day’s spent working. Most of the time I don’t even remember to eat.

One of the reasons this letter’s late is that I’ve been hesitating over whether to tell you something. I saw Teresa again. She got my new address from somebody at the Slade and just turned up on the door. She looks well, asked after you, her husband was called up in the first days of the war — he was a reservist — and nobody’s heard from him for two months now so she’s beginning to think he’s dead. I couldn’t make out what she felt about it, I don’t think she knew herself. I hope this doesn’t upset you? But if I’m so unreal you can hardly picture me, Teresa must be even more so. Just another of those funny little figures at the wrong end of your telescope.

Apart from that there’s very little news. Catherine’s making me a dress. It’s a way of slipping her a few shillings without making her feel she’s accepting charity. Father has raised my allowance (just when I don’t need it). Of course he’s not supporting Toby at medical school now. Toby came home to see the baby who’s going to be called William. His father pretends to be indifferent to him but is secretly pleased, I think.

I’m sorry you had such a dreadful job to do. I don’t know much about what’s going on out there because I don’t read the newspapers any more. Like you, I find it hard to cross the desert that divides us. It feels like standing on top of a mountain sending semaphore signals across the abyss. But don’t, whatever you do, stop writing. Although I felt quite angry when I read your letter, I do very often think about you — in that long black coat you used to wear.

Write soon. This war destroys so much, don’t let it destroy us as well. Elinor.

Write soon, she said. But it became harder and harder to write at all.

Dear Miss Brooke (I reserve this formal style of address for

young ladies I haven’t heard from lately/for a long time),

Damn. He’d meant that as a joke, but on the page it sounded bitter. True, though. She didn’t write often now, and when she did her letters were full of people he hadn’t met and places he hadn’t been to. She went on living, he was buried alive. That’s how it felt. He sometimes thought he might as well be one of those poor chaps under the tarpaulin. No doubt their girls had ‘moved on’ too.

Pushing the writing pad away, he sat for a moment with his head in his hands. When he next looked up, he saw a woman watching him. He’d noticed her earlier, sitting at a table in the corner, eating croissants, edging a crumb delicately into her mouth with her ring finger as she looked out on to the street. It had long since been cleared of rubble, though there were boarded-up buildings at intervals along the terrace like black teeth in a smile. She looked up at the sky, wondering, perhaps, if they were to have more snow, and the movement revealed the creased, white fullness of her throat. He liked the slight sagging of her skin that revealed the orbits of her eyes more clearly and the downturn of inbuilt sadness at the corners of her mouth that vanished when she caught him looking at her and smiled.

He got up and asked if he could sit at her table. Did she mind? She looked round at the empty café, smiled back at him, a little doubtfully, and said, No, of course not. Of course she didn’t mind. She was wondering whether he knew what she was. He could see her wondering and deciding not to care, to take the moment for what it was. Her name was Madeleine, she said. Behind the bar, a lugubrious middle-aged waiter flicked a dirty dishcloth at the counter and looked at them with contempt, assuming the young Englishman was too naïve to know he was making a fool of himself. She aroused hostility, Paul could see that. When the waiter brought her more coffee, he set the cup down on the table so carelessly the coffee slopped into the saucer. Paul asked for another, and got it. His French was improving, though his new vocabulary, acquired while nursing badly wounded men, varied between the clinical and the obscene. Her English was good, but she wasn’t confident in using it, so they talked haltingly at first, making a joke of their difficulties, laughing a lot. She was carefree, and became more so as the minutes passed, forgetting who she was and what she did, as he, too, was forgetting who he was and what he did.

When at last she got up to go, he said, ‘Can I see you again?’

Immediately she frowned, and he was dismayed, thinking he’d misjudged the situation.

‘I’m here most mornings.’

‘I was thinking an evening, perhaps?’

‘No, I’m not free then.’

After that he made a habit of meeting her on his days off. Once, to the waiter’s undisguised amusement, he brought her flowers. They flirted, talked about Paris, Brussels, cafés, holidays, food, wine — never anything connected to the present. She mentioned a husband once, but he didn’t pursue it. And then, one evening, walking through the town after a day spent painting, he saw her going into a house beside the café, looking heavier, older, her flesh sagging like dough. As she turned the key in the lock, she glanced up and must have seen him, but she gave no sign of recognition.

It changed everything, that sight of her, though he didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he’d been under any illusion about what she did. On his next day off, he slipped down the back street but, instead of going into the café, knocked on the side door. It was opened by Madame’s husband, a drooping, tadpole-shaped man.

Paul was ushered into the parlour, a room of such stifling respectability he immediately wanted to laugh. A glass case full of artificial flowers, a picture of the Virgin — oh, for God’s sake! — a fan of red crepe paper in the empty grate. The paper was peppered with soot, the only dirt allowed in the room, which was otherwise spotless. Dust motes sifted in a shaft of sunlight. The room smelled of beeswax and Condy’s Fluid, or whatever the Belgian equivalent of Condy’s Fluid might be.

Paul sat on the pink sofa and contemplated Madame’s knick-knacks. He was already regretting his visit. Inertia, rather than sexual need, kept him pinned to the cushions. Like a big, fat, juicy insect, he thought. As they all were, the men who sat here, listening to the floorboards creak in the room above. In the café he’d always been repelled by the sight of men sneaking off to the house next door. He’d wanted no part of it. Now he didn’t know why he was here, except that it had less to do with Elinor, the coldness of her letters, than with the man in British army uniform he’d found lying under a heap of French dead. Something was needed to sluice that memory away. Drink didn’t do it. Painting didn’t do it.