“I think it’s time you did something,” John Cotmore said to Anna a few weeks later at art school. “I mean something more than drawing from the model or filling up sketch books.” He was sitting on the edge of the model’s throne with Welsh William and Barbara who nodded in agreement.
“What sort of thing?”
He gestured vaguely. “Something of your own. Illustrate a book – paint a wall – anything.”
“A wall!” The idea at once appealed to her. But where would one find one?
“I did a mural in a school once,” said Barbara. “It was great fun. All you need is some oil-bound distemper and a few large brushes.”
“Not so many walls left, though,” said Welsh William.
1944 had begun, ominously, with the heaviest air raids in years.
John Cotmore waved him aside. “All the more reason for painting them,” he said.
The idea of the wall stuck in Anna’s mind and she found herself examining any large vertical surface with a view to decorating it. She thought briefly about the disused ward where the officers’ clothing had been stored, but dismissed it. It was dark and no one would ever see it – there would be no point.
There was nothing in the hotel either, but then, one day, she found just the right place. It was pouring with rain and, rather than get soaked walking to the Lyons tea-shop which was some distance away, she decided to have lunch in a café in Victoria Street. The tables were packed with steaming bodies and she ordered Russian steak (mince patriotically renamed from the Vienna steak of pre-war days) with a pleasant sense of extravagance.
While she was waiting for it to arrive she looked round and suddenly realised that the café was exactly what she had been looking for. It consisted of several rooms knocked into one and the result was an irregularly shaped space bounded by a great many walls at different angles. They were all painted pale cream and there was absolutely nothing on them except a few mirrors. Surreptitiously she counted them. Nine. Nine walls all crying out to be painted! She eyed them greedily all through the Russian steak and the eggless, sugarless trifle that followed it. I could really do something here, she thought.
She ate at the café again the following lunch time, bankrupting herself for the rest of the week, and thought about it for several more days before she summoned up enough courage to do anything about it. Finally, one evening after she had finished work she walked past it twice, peered through the windows and at last went in.
“We’re closed,” said a stocky man who was scattering knives and forks over the empty tables.
“Oh, I haven’t come for a meal,” said Anna.
“What then?”
She produced the speech she had been rehearsing for three days. “I’m a painter,” she said, “and I specialise in murals. I wondered if you’d like me to decorate your restaurant.”
Before the stocky man could answer, a voice called out from the basement.
“Albert,” it cried. “Who you talkin’ to?”
“Little girl,” Albert called back. “Wants to do some paintin’.”
“What sort o’ paintin’?” shouted the voice.
“Yeah, what sort o’ paintin’?” said Albert.
“Decorations,” said Anna as grandly as she could manage. “Pictures. On your walls.”
“Pitchers,” shouted Albert just as the owner of the voice emerged from the basement, saying, “I ‘eard.”
It was a very large woman with a pale face and small, dark eyes like a hedgehog’s, and she was carrying a trayful of glasses. She put the tray down on a table and looked from Anna to the walls and back again.
“What wouldyer paint on ‘em then?” she asked.
Anna was prepared for this.
“I thought as it’s called the Victoria restaurant,” she said, “it might be nice to have some Victorian scenes. Men in top hats, children playing with hoops – that sort of thing.”
“Bit grand, init?” said Albert.
“Dunno – might brighten it up at that,” said the large woman. “If it was done nice.” She looked at Anna. “You don’t seem like you was very old.”
Anna bypassed this neatly. “Well, of course I’d let you see sketches,” she said. “I’d do it all on paper first, so you could see what it would look like.”
“Sketches,” said the woman. “That’d be nice. Don’t you think that’d be nice, Albert?”
Albert looked doubtful and Anna wanted to kill him. He searched his mind for objections and finally came up with, “What about me mirrors? I’m not takin’ down none o’ me mirrors.”
“Young lady’d paint round ‘em, wouldn’t you, dear?” said the woman trustingly.
Anna had had no such intention.
“Well—” she said.
“He couldn’t take ‘em down,” said the woman. “I mean, Albert paid good money for them mirrors, din you, Albert? He couldn’t just waste ‘em.”
Nine walls, thought Anna. What did a few mirrors matter?
“All right,” she said and added, to save her dignity, “I’ll incorporate them in the design.”
“That’d be nice,” said the woman. “Wouldnit, Albert?”
Then they both stood looking at Anna in silence.
Was it settled? She decided to assume that it was.
“Good,” she said as carelessly as she could. “I’ll come and measure up the walls this time tomorrow.”
No one objected.
“See you then,” she said, and managed somehow to walk out of the place as though nothing special had happened.
“I’m going to decorate a restaurant!” she shouted triumphantly as soon as she saw John Cotmore, and he gave her a quantity of advice which ended with kissing her behind the paint cupboard.
It was not until she got home that she realised that she had completely forgotten to mention any payment for her work.
She spent the next three weeks making sketches. A book from the library gave her all the information she needed about Victorian dress, and she worked every weekend and often in the evenings, even giving up some of her life-classes so as to get the drawings done.
The mirrors were not nearly such a nuisance as she had expected. They were all different shapes and sizes, and she found that she could make them stand for some large object which she then surrounded with people. An upright mirror made the main body of a puppet theatre, with Punch and Judy painted at the top of it and children staring up from both sides. A long thin one, with a few reeds painted round about, suggested a lake. As she finished the design for each wall, she pinned it up in her room above the garage, and both Mama and Papa came to admire them.
At last she rolled them all up together and submitted them to her patrons, spreading them over half the tables in the café. They stared at them in silence. At last the woman said, “They’re quite nice. Don’t you think so, Albert?”
Albert looked gloomily at the drawings and at his pure cream walls.
“What’s that, then?” he said, pointing to the puppet theatre.
“That’s your mirror,” said Anna. “I’m just going to paint these things round it.”
Albert checked with the wall.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s the centre of the design,” she explained.
Albert seemed pleased. “Yeah,” he said. “It is, init?”
“I think it’s ever so nice,” said his wife, warming to it.
Albert made up his mind.
“Yeah,” he said. “All right then. You can do the place up.”
Anna had been wondering how to get round to the subject of money, but he forestalled her.
“How much was you thinkin’ of askin’?” he said, and panicked her into coming out with the first sum she could think of.
“Fifteen pounds,” she said and at once cursed herself for ruining everything with her excessive demands, but Albert remained calm.
After this Anna became frantically busy. The café closed for the weekend after lunch on Saturday, and she was there, waiting for the last customer to leave, from two o’clock onwards. Albert had provided a stepladder, and she spent the first two weekends drawing her designs all over the walls in chalk. There was no heating and spring was late, so she wore two pairs of socks and several sweaters which gradually became covered in chalk dust as she drew, climbed down to view her work from a distance and climbed back again to change it.
It was strange to spend so many hours alone, with her ideas gradually becoming visible around her, and by the end of the second Sunday she was almost giddy with it.
She had drawn in the last shape to her satisfaction and sat exhausted in the middle of the floor. The white outlines of the figures were everywhere, clustered round the puppet theatre, watching the ducks on the lake and moving round the room in a cheerful procession of parasoled ladies, gentlemen on penny-farthings and children with hoops and tops. Some appeared twice over as they were reflected in the mirrors on opposite walls, and the effect was strangely dreamlike.
It looks just as I hoped it would look, she thought, and a great joy welled up in her, but she quickly subdued it to stare at each wall severely in turn, trying to catch it out in some fault of composition or proportion.
She was so absorbed that she hardly noticed the sound of knocking until it became insistent, and she realised with a shock that there was someone at the door.
As long as it isn’t Albert who’s changed his mind, she thought, and went to open it, but it was not Albert – it was Max in his RAF uniform, radiating warmth and energy.
“Well!” he said, looking round. “You seem to have found your ambience.”
“What’s an ambience?” she asked, and he grinned.
“What you’ve found.”
She showed him round and he looked at all the walls and then at her sketches, full of enthusiasm and intelligence. But the parts he liked were not always the best and she was relieved to find that in this one thing, at least, her judgment was better than his.
“I didn’t know you were coming up,” she said at last. “Have you been home?”
He nodded. “I’ve got five days’ leave. Finished my course.”
That meant he would be posted to an operational squadron.
“Already,” she said, as lightly as possible.
“Yes,” he said, “and Mama and Papa both said ‘already’ in exactly the same always-keep-a-lamp-in-the-window voice as you. I’m only doing what thousands of others are doing.”
“Oh, I know,” said Anna.
“I’m going to live all my life in this country,” said Max. “I have to take the same risks as everyone else.”
“Everyone else,” said Anna, “does not fly on operations.”
Max was unmoved. “People like me do,” he said.
She began to tidy up, rolling up her drawings and pushing tables and chairs back into place.
“How did you find Mama and Papa?” she asked.
He did not answer at once. Then he said, “They’re not too good, are they?”
She shook her head. “Seeing them every day – one gets used to it.”
Max pulled out one of the chairs she had just tidied away and sat on it.
“What worries me,” he said, “is that I can’t think of anything that would help even if one could arrange it. I mean, money would help, of course. But I still don’t know how they’d live the rest of their lives.”
“I’ve never thought beyond the money,” said Anna.
There was a chalk mark at the side of the puppet theatre which bothered her and she wiped it off with her sleeve.
“Perhaps after the war …” she said vaguely.
“After the war,” said Max, “if there’s anything left in Germany to print books with, and if there are any people left who would want to read them, they’ll probably republish Papa’s works – in time. But he still wouldn’t want to live there.”
“No,” said Anna. It would be impossible, after all that had happened. She had a vision of Mama and Papa floating in a kind of limbo. “It’s funny,” she said. “When I was small I always used to feel so safe with them. I remember I used to think that as long as I was with them I’d never feel like a refugee. Do you remember Mama in Paris? She was marvellous.”
“Well, she still is,” said Max. “She does everything, she keeps everything going – only the strain is making her difficult to live with.” He looked round at the chalk figures promenading all over the walls. “I’m so glad about all this,” he said, “and about the whole art school thing. You belong here now, just as I do. But Mama and Papa …”
She watched him make the face, half-smiling and half-regretful, which he always made when something was difficult, and suddenly remembered the countless times they had talked like this, sharing the worries of their disrupted childhood in four different countries.
“Oh, Max!” she cried, throwing her arms about him. “For God’s sake take care of yourself!”
“There, there,” he said, patting her back – gingerly, because of the chalk on her clothes. “Nothing is going to happen to me.” And as she still clung to him, he added, “After all, if it did, Mama would never forgive me!”
It took Anna five more weekends to finish painting her murals. On Barbara’s advice, she used white distemper which she mixed with powder paints to get the colours she wanted. She stirred them up together in an ever-expanding collection of old tins and pots and it was a clammy, exhausting job – but she loved it. The murals continued to look as she had hoped, and as she finished the walls one after another and stood staring at them, covered in paint now as well as chalk dust, the same great joy welled up in her as on the day she had finished the drawings. Sometimes when she thought about them at home she imagined some frightful flaw which she had overlooked, and had to rush to the café early next day and peer through the windows to reassure herself. But they were always all right, and the customers as well as Albert and his wife seemed pleased.
Max got his posting and wrote after some time that he had now flown several operations and that nothing ever happened on them. “And we always get egg and bacon on our return,” he said, “so it’s a great improvement in every way.”
No one was sure whether to believe this, but Mama could not bear to consider any other possibility and insisted that it must be true.
Finally, in May, Anna finished her murals. Albert paid her the fifteen pounds, and since she was now richer than ever before in her life, she decided to invite first Mama and Papa and then her friends from the art school to the café for a meal. Mama and Papa were both full of admiration and Anna sat happily between them in a new sweater, peering at her work through half-closed eyes and wondering only occasionally whether some hand might not have been better drawn or whether a figure on one wall might not have looked better on another.
“But it’s so professional!” cried Mama, and Papa said, “It’s delightful!”
She got a great kick out of the astonished way they looked at her, and out of paying the bill at the end.
But it was the art school outing that really mattered. Anna had hardly been to evening classes while she was working on her murals – there had not been time – but now she was excited at the prospect of seeing John Cotmore again. He’ll have missed me, she thought. It seemed to her suddenly that the purpose of decorating the café had been solely to show it to him, and that when he had seen it and spent a whole evening with her something must change, that something extraordinary and quite unprecedented must happen between them. He’ll realise that I’m grown-up, she thought, more of an equal, and then he’ll…She was not sure herself what he would do. But there would be some sign, some way of committing himself, of showing her that from now on things between them would be quite different.
She was in a state of feverish expectancy by the time he arrived. Hiding behind the menu in a corner, she watched him stand for a moment inside the door and saw the sudden concentration in his face as he looked at her murals. He examined each wall in turn, walking slowly round and twice retracing his steps. At last he saw her and sat down beside her.
“Well,” he said, “you have grown up!”
If she’d chosen the words for him she couldn’t have done it better.
“I hoped you’d like it,” she said, and then listened in happy confusion while he praised the composition, her drawing and the subtlety of the colours.
“I expected something good,” he said, “but this is a surprise.”
She could do nothing but sit and smile and watch him as he looked at her work again, and then from her work back to her.
“So this is what you were doing,” he said, “instead of coming to art school!”
It was all happening just as she had hoped. She nodded and smiled and saw his eyes look back at her with a new seriousness…And then the others were upon them.
“It’s enchanting!” cried Harry from the door. “Don’t you think it’s enchanting, John?”
He was followed by Welsh William who settled himself beside her. “I was afraid it would be ladies in crinolines,” he said. “You know, standing about with no feet, the way they used to do on the chocolate boxes. How can I eat my food, I asked myself, when it’s been paid for by ladies in crinolines with no feet? But now –” he gestured respectfully towards the wall – “my conscience is clear.”
“By Winterhalter out of Berthe Morrisot,” said Barbara firmly, and Anna blushed with pleasure.
It seemed like the pleasantest evening she had ever spent. Even the food – dried egg omelette, Spam fritters, vegetable pie – seemed to her delicious. She basked in her friends’ praises and listened to their news – Barbara had a new job and Welsh William had sold a drawing but was soon to be called up. She ordered food and ate it and glanced surreptitiously at her murals and watched John Cotmore’s face, and all the time her excitement grew because she knew that something more was going to happen, that the best part of the evening was still to come.
At last all the food had been eaten and all the coffee had been drunk. Albert had presented her with the bill and she had paid it with a flourish, and they all stood outside the café in the early evening light.
“Well –” said John Cotmore.
Anna waited.
“Thank you for a lovely evening,” he said. “And thank you for painting such good murals.” He took her hand and suddenly turned to Harry. “I think one’s allowed to kiss a favourite student, isn’t one?” And before she had time to think he had kissed her formally on the cheek. “Congratulations,” he said. “May you paint many more murals as successful as these.”
Then he turned, called out something that could have been either “good night” or “goodbye”, and walked away in the direction of Westminster, with Harry and Barbara following.
Anna could not believe that it had happened. She stood there with the smile still on her face, her hand still ready to take his arm, and the dust of Victoria blowing about her feet.
“Went off a bit sharpish, didn’t he?” said Welsh William, and they both watched his figure rapidly diminish as it hared off down the street.
“Well,” said Welsh William at last, “coming?”
She roused herself and, still in a daze, walked with him to the tube. He talked all the way, but she did not hear a word. She could think only of John Cotmore. What on earth had happened? Why had he kissed her like that and rushed away? And was it “good night” that he had called out or “goodbye”?