The footsteps, soft and slurred, were Mr. Plomer’s. He hesitated when he saw us there, me standing guard, like poor old Joseph at a bivouac on the flight to Egypt, and Polly seated, cradling the child, with the window and the wind-blown day at her back. Little Pip held out eager arms to her granddad, wanting to be lifted up. He touched her cheek distractedly. “My dear,” he said to his daughter, “I wonder if you’ve seen the little book I was showing to you last evening — the volume of poems? I want to return it to Mr. Hyland, whose property it is, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”
—
By late afternoon the rain was back with a vengeance, and I went for a walk. Yes yes, I know what I said about walks and going for them, but on this occasion outdoors was more tolerable than in. A great search had been instituted for Freddie’s missing book. To join in it, under Janey’s command, two extra housemaids were summoned. Up to this they must have been confined in some chamber deep in the lower regions of the house, for I hadn’t known of their existence until they popped up, blushing and tittering. Meg and Molly they were called, a mousy pair, with red knuckles and their hair in buns. There was much clattering of heels on stairs and a raucous calling of voices from room to room, and many a red-bound volume was carried hopefully to Mr. Plomer, but over all of them he sadly shook his head. “I can’t think what has become of it,” he kept repeating, in an increasingly agitated tone, “I really can’t.” Impatient with all this fuss, and seeing in it a reason if not an excuse to be off, I waylaid Janey in the hall and asked if there was some rain-gear I could borrow. Polly, cross with me again because I had declined to take part in the search, caught me slipping out at the front door and gave me a wounded glare. “Daddy’s in an awful sweat,” she said accusingly, “and now Mr. Hyland has taken offence and is threatening to leave because we can’t find his blasted book — and you’re going for a walk. Take Pip with you, at least.” I said I would love to take the child, of course, of course I would, except that it was raining, look, and stepping smartly out on to the glistening step I shut the door behind me and made off.
I walked down the drive, sloshing through the rain happily enough and whistling “The Rakes of Mallow.” I think escape is all I really yearn for, everything being contingent on the simple premise of being at large. Janey had found for me a splendid hat, a sort of sou’wester, with a sloping flap at the back and an elastic string to go under my chin, and an oilskin coat that reached almost to my ankles. Also she produced a pair of stout black boots; they were a perfect fit, which, I thought, could only be a signal of encouragement from the household deities whose task it is to arrange such small, happy congruences. I took a walking-stick, too, from among a bristling bundle of them in an elephant’s foot receptacle in the hall. Come, Olly, I bade myself, step forth and claim the freedom of the road.
The rain somehow negated whatever utilitarian aspect that being on a walk might have had, and so, as I went along, I was free to look about me with a lively interest. Here was a field of cabbages, each coarse and leathery leaf bestrewn with wobbling jewels of rain. The wet branches of the trees were almost black, though underneath they were of a lighter shade, a darkish grey; when the wind gusted they let fall clatters of big, random drops, and I thought of the priest at my father’s funeral and the short, thick, ornate metal thing with a perforated knob on the end of it that he dunked repeatedly in a silver bucket and scattered holy water from, over the coffin, and over the mourners, too, the ones standing most closely round. Decaying leaves squelched and squirmed under my tramping boots. I felt a cold drop trembling at the tip of my nose, I wiped it away and a minute later another one had formed. All this was curiously pleasant and cheering. At heart I am I think a simple organism, with simple desires that I keep on foolishly elaborating to the point where they get me into impossible fixes.
I was glad, in the end, that our child turned out to be a daughter. True, I had set my heart on having a boy. However, there is something at once absurd and slightly grotesque in the spectacle of a father and his son, especially when there is a marked resemblance between them. It’s as if the father had set out to make a creature in his own image, an exact scale-model of himself, but through lack of skill and general clumsiness had managed to produce, in this tottering homunculus, only a comic parody. My little girl was very bonny, oh, yes, and looked nothing like her whey-faced, freckled and spheroid papa, or not that I could see, anyway. I was particularly taken by her upper lip, which was perfectly the shape of those stylised seagulls children draw with crayons, and had in the middle of it a little bleb of flesh that was almost colourless, that was almost indeed transparent, and that delighted me, I don’t quite know why. How well I remember her face, which is a foolish claim to make, since any face, especially a child’s, is in a gradual but relentless process of change and development, so that what I carry in my memory can be only a version of her, a generalisation of her, that I have fashioned for myself, as an evanescent keepsake. There are photographs of her, of course, but photographs of children are no good. I think it’s because of the artless way in which they gaze into the lens, without that giveaway flash of vanity, defensiveness, truculence, that in an adult’s portrait reveals so much.
I never tried to paint her, in life or afterwards. All the same I seem to see a trace of her in this or that of my things — not a likeness, no no, but a certain, what shall I say, a certain echoing softness of tone, a certain tenderness of colour or form, or just the slope of a line, or even a perspective, shading off into infinity. They leave so little trace, our lost ones; a sigh on the air and they’re gone.
What did my father make of me, I wonder, what did he feel for me, the last of his children? Love? There’s that difficult word again. I’m sure he did cherish me, let’s put it no more strongly than that, but that’s not what I mean. What had he hoped for, from life, overall? Whatever it was I’m sure it can’t have been personified in me, or anyone else, for that matter. Gloria told me, long after he was dead, that one day he had turned to her without warning or cause and had said, forcefully, angrily, even, that he, too, could have been a painter, like me, had there been the means for him to be educated and trained. I was startled. If other people are a puzzle, a parent is an unfathomable mystery. I stepped over both of mine, stepped on them, rather, as if they were stones in a river, the deep and swollen river separating me from that far bank where I imagined real life was being carried on. How had he said it, I asked Gloria, what had been his tone, his look? Her only answer was one of those smiles of hers, gentle, pitying, not unfond.
By the time I got to the gates at the end of the drive the rain had stopped, which rather disappointed me. I had fancied the notion of myself braving the elements, an old sea-dog lubbered on land, in my sou’wester and seven-league boots, heedless of rain and gale. After I stopped being a painter I noticed that I had to keep verifying myself, had to keep knocking a knuckle against myself, as it were, to check that I was still a person of at least some substance, and that often, getting back only a hollow sound, I would slip into imagining another role for myself, another identity, even. Polly’s lover, for instance, was something for me to be, as was the ingrate son, the false friend, even the failed artist. The alternatives I conjured up didn’t have to be impressive, didn’t have to be good or decent, didn’t have to feed my self-esteem, so long as they seemed real, so long as they could pass for real, by which I mean authentic, I suppose. Authentic: there’s another word that always worries me. The notable thing in this strategy of setting up new selves was that the results didn’t feel much different from how things had been with me before, in the days when I was still a painter and didn’t doubt, or didn’t realise I doubted, my essential selfness. It’s a rum business, being me. But then it would be rum being anyone, I’m sure that must be so.