Pat Barker - Life Class

‘The war? Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think it matters very much. I don’t think it’s important.’

Silence. She looked slightly uncomfortable.

‘Of course it matters, in one way, it matters that people are dying. I just don’t think that’s what art should be about. It’s like painting a train crash. Of course it’s dreadful, but it’s not …’ She was groping for words, which had never come easily to her. ‘It’s not you, is it? An accident’s something that happens to you. It’s not you, not in the same way people you love are. Or places you love. It’s not chosen.’

‘You think we choose the people we love?’

She shook her head.

‘Toby’s out there now, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. He left about a month ago.’

‘Is he at the front?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, suppose something happened to him? I’m sorry, but, you know, suppose he was killed, would you still say the war doesn’t fundamentally matter?’

‘Yes, then more than ever.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘The last thing I’d want to do is paint any part of what killed him. I’d go home, I’d paint the places we knew and loved when we were growing up together. I’d paint what made him, not what destroyed him.’

‘Well,’ he said, taken aback by her ferocity. ‘Let’s hope it never comes to that.’

‘I’m so frightened for him.’

‘But you still don’t want to know what’s happening?’

‘I do know, as much as he can tell me. He writes every week. What about you? Will you go back?’

‘If I can. I’ll do something.’

‘I won’t. Daddy keeps dropping hints about nursing, but I won’t do it. That’s how it is, you see, even for a woman.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘We all have to give in to the great bully.’

They sat in silence. The firelight crept over her face and throat. She was blossoming. It hurt him to see her, though it would have hurt him far more to see her thin and pale with grief.

‘How are you really?’ she asked. ‘The truth.’

‘I don’t know. All right.’

‘Only all right?’

‘Lewis is dead.’

She bowed her head. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘I only realized how fond —’ The truth. ‘I only realized how much I loved him when it was too late.’

She looked startled. ‘I suppose men do become very attached to each other in those circumstances.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. I’d have loved him anywhere.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been converted. I shan’t be jumping on any of your new friends.’

‘I can think of one or two who’d be delighted if you did.’

He lay back in the chair, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. ‘You know in Ypres you said I didn’t love you?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

‘No. I thought it.’

‘Anyway it isn’t true. There’s not an hour goes by I don’t think about you.’ He looked directly at her. ‘I think we should get married.’

He didn’t know what he’d expected. Certainly not this cool, considering stare. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, lots of reasons.’ He was smiling now, getting ready to pretend he hadn’t been serious. ‘We could share a studio. Save rent.’

She shook her head.

‘No, listen, that’s not a bad idea.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it?’

‘You’d need somebody to take care of you while you were working.’

‘Not true.’

‘You don’t mean it. You’re at a low ebb at the moment, so you’re clutching at straws, but as soon as you felt better you’d wonder what on earth had possessed you. You don’t love me.’

‘I do, you know.’

‘As a friend.’

‘No, as a woman.’

‘No.’

Exasperated, he said, ‘You seem remarkably determined not to be loved.’

‘I don’t think you can love a woman.’ That shocked him. ‘That’s very sad, if it’s true.’

‘You don’t trust us.’

‘No, I’m not sure I do. Mind you, I don’t trust men either so I don’t know where that gets us.’ He sat thinking. ‘And I probably wouldn’t be faithful to you.’

He saw the recoil on her face. For all her contempt for the conventions she didn’t like that.

‘No, I know you wouldn’t.’

‘I suppose we could always have an open marriage.’

‘You mean you sleeping with anybody you fancy and me sitting at home pretending not to mind? No thanks.’

‘Anyway’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I can’t ask you to marry me, my knee won’t bend.’

Instantly she threw herself at his feet, gazing up at him with clasped hands and adoring eyes. ‘Darling Paul, please say you’ll be mine.’

‘I am yours.’ He was serious. ‘For ever.’ Her smile faded. ‘No, Paul.’

‘But it’s true. Why shouldn’t I say it?’

She got slowly to her feet. ‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Go on as we were?’

‘You mean go to bed.’

That was what he meant. He looked up at her and smiled.

‘You’re a disgrace.’

‘I’ve asked you to marry me. I can’t do more.’

‘No, I suppose you can’t.’

They got undressed slowly, unselfconsciously, like an old married couple, and lay side by side on the bed holding hands. It was a long time before he turned to her. Her eyes were huge in the half-darkness. For Paul, every gesture, every caress, every kiss was heavy with pain. He felt they were saying goodbye.

Afterwards she was silent for so long he thought she’d gone to sleep, but then she turned to face him. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I love you. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. Wait to see what happens, I suppose.’

‘What do you think’s going to happen?’

He shook his head. At the moment he thought they were two twigs being swept along on a fast current, now thrown together, now pulled apart. What happened next wouldn’t depend on what either of them desired. Perhaps there was wisdom just in accepting that. He started to speak only to realize she’d fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder.

Towards dawn, the pain in his leg jolted him awake. He slipped out of bed and limped across to the window. It was snowing. He’d thought it might be: something about the silence and the quality of the light. Feeling a flicker of the excitement he would have felt as a child he pressed his face to the cold pane and watched the heavy flakes tumbling towards him, grey against the white sky. He thought of Lewis in his grave under a thin covering of snow. Of the ambulance crews coming to the end of a long night. Of Sister Byrd, slipping and slithering on the duckboards as she left the Salle d’Attente and walked back to the hut where she slept alone.

The sooner he was out there again the better, he thought. He didn’t belong here.

God, it was cold. Chafing his upper arms, he went back to bed and slid between the sheets, snuggling into Elinor for warmth. After a while he stopped shivering and turned on to his back. The room was full of her quiet breathing. He looked up at the ceiling, as the light strengthened, waiting patiently for her to wake.

A number of biographies of artists who were at the Slade in the years before the First World War were useful in the preparation of this novel, providing, singly and together, a lively account of that remarkable generation:

First Friends by Ronald Blythe

Interior Landscapes, A life of Paul Nash by James King

Mark Gertler by Sarah MacDougall

Isaac Rosenberg, Poet And Painter by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

C. R. W. Nevinson, The Cult of Violence by Michael J. K. Walsh