The Walking Stick Read Free Page B

case, why do you still go on with it?’
    I thought he was staring at my bad leg, and moved it for him to see better.
    He said: ‘Why do you go on breathing?’
    ‘Do you sell your paintings?’
    ‘One or two.’
    ‘Do you work at something else, then?’
    ‘No. I’ve a bit of lolly from an aunt. She married an ironmonger in Dulwich and I was her only blighted nephew. It just about keeps me above the Chinese famine level.’ He
gulped his other glass of wine. ‘Can I take you home?’
    ‘Thanks, but I’m spending the night here.’
    ‘You don’t live with Sarah – not normally, I mean?’
    ‘No, with my parents in Hampstead.’
    His face set into fixed angular planes. ‘Will you come out some evening with me?’
    ‘. . . I actually don’t go out much. I get home latish most evenings.’
    ‘A Sunday then.’
    ‘Well . . .’
    ‘Good, that’s settled. I’ll ring you. Or what about next Sunday?’
    ‘No, I’m booked.’
    ‘OK. I’ll ring you.’ He looked round. ‘I don’t know anything about you yet. Odd, isn’t it? But you’re beautiful – or nearly beautiful. Been
watching you. With some expressions and in some lights it’s like catching light on water. Quicker here and gone than a rainbow.’ He brooded. ‘It’s so unfair.’
    ‘What’s unfair?’
    ‘Beauty. It does things to you. Doesn’t it?’
    So did ugliness. But when he rang I could be out.
    He said: ‘There’s no Goddamn fairness in art. What you feel is absolutely no guide to what you can express. We can all be Rembrandts, Rouaults, Picassos in what we feel and what we
get fun out of and that sort of thing, but not one in a bloody million can express it.’
    Most people were going. Release was not far off.
    He said: ‘What do you do? You’ve got a different face from your sisters. You musical?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘They’ve got long faces really. Modern faces. Yours isn’t. It’s oval – a good bet for old man Rossetti. It’s nineteenth century. Very out of date.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘No. It’s got something. It’s sensitive, and gentle . Of course, I can see you aren’t a bit gentle really, but that’s not what I mean. You look romantic, even though underneath you may be—’
    I didn’t learn then just what else Leigh Hartley thought I might be underneath, because Sarah came across and interrupted us, bringing with her a girl neither of us had yet met. I waited
until the conversation got going and then slid away into the kitchen and saw no more of him that night.

CHAPTER TWO
    I work for Whittington’s, the auctioneers. This might seem a bit of a comedown in a professional family like ours, if it hadn’t been Whittington’s.
    When I left school the one thing I was certain I wasn’t going into was medicine, so my mother sent me off to France where she had a married cousin. I stayed there, outside Avignon, and
read for university entrance but never got far as I’m not really the academic type. Being laid up so long has fostered the reading habit without giving it discipline, so that I can always
read and study and pick up quickly what I am interested in, but what I’m not interested in simply slides away and my memory of it is as blank as a cinematograph reel that hasn’t
been exposed to the light.
    My half uncle is an archaeologist and writes popular books on Pompeii and Arles and Perpignan for the French public. I read these and they touched off a fuse, so that I went back to the
scholarly works from which he’d got most of his facts, and then I couldn’t read enough about it.
    So later I had gone to Whittington’s. It was a time when employment by any of the big three was just becoming fashionable. Even Debs applied for jobs in Whittington’s or
Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and when I put my name down I was at the foot of a long list. But it wasn’t long before I got a second interview, and with it, at nineteen, a job as a
receptionist clerk. There were, you see, certain things in my favour.