I was lying on my front and Clancy was stroking the backs of my legs. I couldn’t imagine myself in a wheel-chair.
“How ill is he? Seriously?”
“Pretty ill. It’s the winters. It gets cold there. The house isn’t in such wonderful condition, you know.” I realised that Clancy was speaking as if of some future home. “He nearly died last winter.”
I pictured Clancy’s uncle sitting out in the orchard with his voluptuous attendant, enjoying perhaps his last summer.
I said, “Do you think he’s happy.”
“I think he’s happier now — since my aunt died — than he’s ever been. But then he’s an invalid.”
When Clancy became exhausted with talking about Suffolk she would ask me about Gauguin. I said he was a French stock-broker who gave up his job to be a painter. He left his wife and family and went to Tahiti, where he lived with a native girl, painted his greatest pictures and died, in poverty, of syphilis.
One day Clancy was gone a long while on one of her trips to the Post Office. I was worried. I thought her parents’ spies had swooped at last. But then she returned, sweating, with the money, a carrier-bag of shopping and a lumpy brown paper parcel. “Here,” she said, kissing me and taking off her blouse, “For you.” Inside the parcel there were six assorted pots of watercolour paint and a set of three brushes.
“You ought to be a painter,” Clancy said. And after a moment’s pause, “—or a poet.”
“But you shouldn’t have bought this. We need the money.”
“It’s my money.”
“But — I don’t know how to paint. I haven’t painted since I was a kid.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’ve got the feel for it. I can see. You ought to be an artist.”
I thought of explaining to Clancy that admiring an artist or two wasn’t the same as possessing their gifts.
“But what am I going to paint on? I’ve got nothing to paint on.”
Clancy quickly gulped down a mug of water from the sink and waved her hand. “There’s all that — and all that.” She pointed to two walls of the room from which the wallpaper had either been stripped back to the bare plaster or peeled of its own accord. “You can use the draining board as a palette. If you like, you can paint me.” And she pulled off the rest of her clothes and bounced onto the bed, hair tossed back, one knee raised, one arm extended.
So I began to paint the walls of our room. I quickly forgot my initial doubts at Clancy’s whim and made up for them with gratitude. I suppose I was really flattered and touched by the idea Clancy had of me, which only corresponded to some idea I secretly nursed of myself, as an artist, producing wonders in some garret.
My painting lacked skill, and the subjects were predictable — palm trees, paradisial fruits, lagoons, native girls in flowered sarongs, all stolen from Gauguin. But I knew what I was really painting and Clancy knew what I was really painting and what it meant. Each native girl was intended to be Clancy; and each one, it was true, was slightly less crude and ungainly than its predecessor, so that one day I really hoped to capture Clancy in paint. All through the early part of June I painted the first wall, while Clancy wrote to her uncle, describing my great talents and saying how few people truly understood life. To be happy and occupied seemed easy. You found a place of your own and made love. You rented a squalid room in Bermondsey and painted Polynesian scenes on the wall. Clancy’s more extravagant fancies didn’t seem to matter. Once she wrapped her arms round my neck as I cleaned my brush: “I had a letter from Uncle today. When we go to Suffolk you’ll paint there, and write poems, won’t you? All the painters painted there.” I didn’t answer this. As for being a poet, I didn’t get beyond Sonnets and Lyrics of the English Renaissance. I was content as we were.
Then things changed. Nothing fundamental altered, but a host of minor things that had never bothered us before began to affect us. The dirt of our room and the smells of the tenement which we’d been heedless of up till then because we were preoccupied with each other, began to irritate us. This was odd because it was just at the time when I was transforming our little hole into a miniature Tahiti that we began to sense the filth around us. Before, we’d tipped all our rubbish, empty tin cans, milk cartons and vegetable peelings, into old grocery boxes till they overflowed, and we’d hardly noticed the stink or the swarms of flies. Now we bickered over whose turn it was to carry the rubbish boxes down to the dustbins at street level. We felt our lack of changes of clothes, even though we seldom wore any. Before, we used to wash clothes, because it was cheaper than the launderette, in an old two-handled zinc tub we’d found propped under the sink; and we’d washed ourselves in the same way, one of us sitting in, laughing, while the other tipped water over us. Now Clancy began to hanker after showers and proper laundering. Somehow we stopped thinking the same things together and wanting to do the same things at the same time — make love, eat, sleep, talk — which had meant that in the past there was never any need for decisions or concessions. Now the slightest things became subjects for debate. We began to get insecure about being found out and dragged back to the homes we’d left, even though we’d survived for nearly three months; and at night the noises in the tenement, the scufflings and shouts on the stairs made us nervous. Clancy would start up, clutching herself—“What’s that?! What’s that?!”—as if the police or some mad killer were about to burst in at the door.
Even the endless sunshine, which was such a blessing to us, began to feel stale and oppressive.
We were aware at least of one, unspoken reason for all this. Our money was dwindling. The figures in Clancy’s Post Office book were getting smaller and smaller and the time was coming when we’d have to get jobs. We’d both understood that this would happen sooner or later. It wasn’t so much the having to work that depressed us, but the thought that this would change us. We wanted to believe we could go out to work and still keep our desert island intact. But we knew, underneath, that work would turn us into the sort of creatures who went to work: puppets who only owned half their lives — and we’d anticipated this by stiffening already and becoming estranged from each other. Maybe this was a sort of defeatism. Clancy started looking at the job columns in newspapers. We’d existed quite happily before without newspapers. It was a sign of how different things were that I’d watch her for some time sitting with the pages spread in front of her, before asking the needless question: “What are you doing?”
“Looking for jobs. What’s it look like?”
“If anyone’s going to get a job it’ll be me,” I said, tapping a finger against my chest.
Clancy shook her head. “No,” she said, licking a finger to turn over a page, “You’ve got to perfect your painting. You mustn’t give that up, must you?”
She really meant this.
“You’re not going out to work while I piss about here,” I said, feeling I was adopting a stupid pose.
Then we had a row — Clancy accused me of betraying ideals — the upshot of which was that we both went out the next Monday looking for jobs, feeling mean and demoralised.
There was a dearth of employment, especially for school-leavers. But it was possible to find casual, menial jobs, which was all we wanted. Clancy got a job as a waitress in a pizza house near the Elephant and Castle. I went there once and bought a cup of coffee. She was dressed up in a ridiculous white outfit, with a white stiff cap with a black stripe and her hair pinned up like a nurse. On the walls of the pizza house there were murals with pseudo-Italian motifs which were worse than my pseudo-Gauguins. I looked at Clancy at the service counter and thought of her lying on the bed in the sunshine and swimming in the muddy creek in Suffolk and how she’d said: “Paint me.” It was so depressing that when she brought me my coffee we said “Hello” to each other as if we were slight acquaintances.