The Breaking Point Read online

  ‘Madame Kaufman?’ he called. ‘Madame Kaufman? Could you find me some rags?’

  She came at once, tearing some undergarment into strips, and he snatched them from her and began to wipe the offending burnt sienna from his brush. He turned round to see her peeping at the canvas.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he shouted. ‘You must never look at an artist’s work in the first rough stages.’

  She drew back, rebuffed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and then, with hesitation, added, ‘It’s very modern, isn’t it?’

  He stared at her, and then from her to the canvas, and from the canvas to Johnnie.

  ‘Modern?’ he said. ‘Of course it’s modern.What did you think it would be? Like that?’ He pointed with his brush to the simpering Madonna over the mantelpiece. ‘I’m of my time. I see what I see. Now let me get on.’

  There was not enough room on one palette for all the blobs of colour.Thank goodness he had bought two. He began squeezing the remaining tubes on to the second palette and mixing them, and now all was riot - sunsets that had never been, and unrisen dawns.The Venetian red was not the Doge’s palace but little drops of blood that burst in the brain and did not have to be shed, and zinc white was purity, not death, and yellow ochre . . . yellow ochre was life in abundance, was renewal, was spring, was April even in some other time, some other place . . .

  It did not matter that it grew dark and he had to switch on the light. The child had fallen asleep, but he went on painting. Presently the woman came in and told him it was eight o’clock. Did he want any supper? ‘It would be no trouble, Mr Sims,’ she said.

  Suddenly Fenton realized where he was. Eight o’clock, and they always dined at a quarter to. Edna would be waiting, would be wondering what had happened to him. He laid down the palette and the brushes. There was paint on his hands, on his coat.

  ‘What on earth shall I do?’ he said in panic.

  The woman understood. She seized the turpentine and a piece of rag, and rubbed at his coat. He went with her to the kitchen, and feverishly began to scrub his hands at the sink.

  ‘In future,’ he said, ‘I must always leave by seven.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll remember to call you. You’ll be back tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said impatiently, ‘of course. Don’t touch any of my things.’

  ‘No, Mr Sims.’

  He hurried up the basement stair and out of the house, and started running along the street. As he went he began to make up the story he would tell Edna. He’d dropped in at the club, and some of the fellows there had persuaded him into playing bridge. He hadn’t liked to break up the game, and never realized the time. That would do. And it would do again tomorrow. Edna must get used to this business of him dropping into the club after the office. He could think of no better excuse with which to mask the lovely duplicity of a secret life.

  3

  It was extraordinary how the days slipped by, days that had once dragged, that had seemed interminable. It meant several changes, of course. He had to lie not only to Edna, but at the office as well. He invented a pressing business that took him away in the early part of the afternoon, new contacts, a family firm. For the time being, Fenton said, he could really only work at the office half-time. Naturally, there would have to be some financial adjustment, he quite understood that. In the meantime, if the senior partner would see his way . . . Amazing that they swallowed it. And Edna, too, about the club. Though it was not always the club. Sometimes it was extra work at another office, somewhere else in the City; and he would talk mysteriously of bringing off some big deal which was far too delicate and involved to be discussed. Edna appeared content. Her life continued as it had always done. It was only Fenton whose world had changed. Regularly now each afternoon, at around half-past three, he walked through the gate of No. 8, and glancing down at the kitchen window in the basement he could see Madame Kaufman’s face peering from behind the tangerine curtains. Then she would slip round to the back door by the strip of garden, and let him in. They had decided against the front door. It was safer to use the back. Less conspicuous.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Sims.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Madame Kaufman.’

  No nonsense about calling her Anna. She might have thought . . . she might have presumed. And the title ‘Madame’ kept the right sense of proportion between them. She was really very useful. She cleaned the studio - they always alluded to his room as the studio - and his paintbrushes, and tore up fresh strips of rag every day, and as soon as he arrived she had a cup of tea for him, not like the stew they used to brew in the office, but piping hot. And the boy . . . the boy had become quite appealing. Fenton had felt more tolerant about him as soon as he had finished the first portrait. It was as though the boy existed anew through him. He was Fenton’s creation.

  It was now midsummer, and Fenton had painted his portrait many times. The child continued to call him Da. But the boy was not the only model. He had painted the mother too. And this was more satisfying still. It gave Fenton a tremendous sense of power to put the woman upon canvas. It was not her eyes, her features, her colouring - heavens above, she had little enough colouring! - but somehow her shape: the fact that the bulk of a live person, and that person a woman, could be transmuted by him upon a blank canvas. It did not matter if what he drew and painted bore no resemblance to a woman from Austria called Anna Kaufman.That was not the point. Naturally the silly soul expected some sort of chocolate-box representation the first time she acted as his model. He had soon shut her up, though.

  ‘Do you really see me like that?’ she asked, disconsolate.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ he said.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s just that . . . you make my mouth like a big fish ready to swallow, Mr Sims.’

  ‘A fish? What utter nonsense!’ He supposed she wanted a cupid’s bow. ‘The trouble with you is that you’re never satisfied. You’re no different from any other woman.’

  He began mixing his colours angrily. She had no right to criticize his work.

  ‘It’s not kind of you to say that, Mr Sims,’ she said after a moment or two. ‘I am very satisfied with the five pounds that you give me every week.’

  ‘I was not talking about money,’ he said.

  ‘What were you talking about, then?’

  He turned back to the canvas, and put just the faintest touch of rose upon the flesh part of the arm.‘What was I talking about?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Women, wasn’t it? I really don’t know. And I’ve told you not to interrupt.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Sims.’

  That’s right, he thought. Stay put. Keep your place. If there was one thing he could not stand it was a woman who argued, a woman who was self-assertive, a woman who nagged, a woman who stood upon her rights. Because of course they were not made for that.They were intended by their Creator to be pliable, and accommodating, and gentle, and meek. The trouble was that they were so seldom like that in reality. It was only in the imagination, or glimpsed in passing or behind a window, or leaning from a balcony abroad, or from the frame of a picture, or from a canvas like the one before him now - he changed from one brush to another, he was getting quite dexterous at this - that a woman had any meaning, any reality. And then to go and tell him that he had given her a mouth like a fish . . .

  ‘When I was younger,’ he said aloud, ‘I had so much ambition.’

  ‘To be a great painter?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, no . . . not particularly that,’ he answered,‘but to become great. To be famous. To achieve something outstanding.’

  ‘There’s still time, Mr Sims,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps . . .’ The skin should not be rose, it should be olive, a warm olive. Edna’s father had been the trouble, really, with his endless criticizing of the way they lived. Fenton had never done anything right from the moment they became engaged: the old man was always carping, always finding fault. ‘Go and live abroad?’ he had exclaimed.‘Y
ou can’t make a decent living abroad. Besides, Edna wouldn’t stand it. Away from her friends and all she’s been accustomed to. Never heard of such a thing.’

  Well, he was dead, and a good thing too. He’d been a wedge between them from the start. Marcus Sims . . . Marcus Sims the painter was a very different chap. Surrealist. Modern. The old boy would turn in his grave.

  ‘It’s a quarter to seven,’ murmured the woman.

  ‘Damn . . .’ He sighed, and stepped back from the easel. ‘I resent stopping like this, now it’s so light in the evenings,’ he said. ‘I could go on for quite another hour, or more.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah! Home ties,’ he said. ‘My poor old mother would have a fit.’

  He had invented an old mother during the past weeks. Bedridden. He had promised to be home every evening at a quarter to eight. If he did not arrive in time the doctors would not answer for the consequences. He was a very good son to her.

  ‘I wish you could bring her here to live,’ said his model. ‘It’s so lonely when you’ve gone back in the evenings. Do you know, there’s a rumour this house may not be pulled down after all. If it’s true, you could take the flat on the ground floor, and your mother would be welcome.’

  ‘She’d never move now,’ said Fenton. ‘She’s over eighty. Very set in her ways.’ He smiled to himself, thinking of Edna’s face if he said to her that it would be more comfortable to sell the house they had lived in for nearly twenty years and take up lodgings in No. 8, Boulting Street. Imagine the upheaval! Imagine the Alhusons coming to Sunday supper!

  ‘Besides,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘the whole point would be gone.’

  ‘What point, Mr Sims?’

  He looked from the shape of colour on the canvas that meant so much to him to the woman who sat there, posing with her lank hair and her dumb eyes, and he tried to remember what had decided him, those months ago, to walk up the steps of the drab villa and ask for a room. Some temporary phase of irritation, surely, with poor Edna, with the windy grey day on the Embankment, with the fact of the Alhusons coming to drinks. But the workings of his mind on that vanished Sunday were forgotten, and he knew only that his life had changed from then, that this small, confined basement room was his solace, and the personalities of the woman Anna Kaufman and the child Johnnie were somehow symbolic of anonymity, of peace. All she ever did was to make him tea and clean his brushes. She was part of the background, like the cat, which purred at his approach and crouched on the windowsill, and to which he had not as yet given a single crumb.

  ‘Never mind, Madame Kaufman,’ he said. ‘One of these days we’ll hold an exhibition, and your face, and Johnnie’s, will be the talk of the town.’

  ‘This year . . . next year . . . sometime . . . never. Isn’t that what you say to cherry stones?’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got no faith,’ he told her. ‘I’ll prove it. Just wait and see.’

  She began once more the long, tedious story about the man she had fled from in Austria, and the husband who had deserted her in London - he knew it all so well by now that he could prompt her - but it did not bother him. It was part of the background, part of the blessed anonymity. Let her blab away, he said to himself, it kept her quiet, it did not matter. He could concentrate on making the orange she was sucking, doling out quarters to Johnnie on her lap, larger than life, more colourful than life, rounder, bigger, brighter.

  And as he walked home along the Embankment in the evening - because the walk was no longer suggestive of the old Sunday but was merged with the new life as well - he would throw his charcoal sketches and rough drawings into the river. They were now transfigured into paint and did not matter. With them went the used tubes of colour, pieces of rag, and brushes too clogged with oil. He threw them from Albert Bridge and watched them float for a moment, or be dragged under, or drift as bait for some ruffled, sooty gull. All his troubles went with his discarded junk. All his pain.

  4

  He had arranged with Edna to postpone their annual holiday until mid-September.This gave him time to finish the self-portrait he was working upon, which, he decided, would round up the present series.The holiday in Scotland would be pleasant. Pleasant for the first time for years, because there would be something to look forward to on returning to London.

  The brief mornings at the office hardly counted now. He scraped through the routine somehow, and never went back after lunch. His other commitments, he told his colleagues, were becoming daily more pressing: he had practically decided to break his association with the present business during the autumn.

  ‘If you hadn’t warned us,’ said the senior partner drily, ‘we should have warned you.’

  Fenton shrugged his shoulders. If they were going to be unpleasant about it, the sooner he went the better. He might even write from Scotland. Then the whole of the autumn and winter could be given up to painting. He could take a proper studio: No. 8, after all, was only a makeshift affair. But a large studio, with decent lighting and a kitchenette off it - there were some in the process of being built, only a few streets away - that might be the answer to the winter. There he could really work. Really achieve something good, and no longer feel he was only a part-time amateur.

  The self-portrait was absorbing. Madame Kaufman had found a mirror and hung it on the wall for him, so the start was easy enough. But he found he couldn’t paint his own eyes. They had to be closed, which gave him the appearance of a sleeping man. A sick man. It was rather uncanny.

  ‘So you don’t like it?’ Fenton observed to Madame Kaufman, when she came to tell him it was seven o’clock.

  She shook her head. ‘It gives me what you call the creeps,’ she said. ‘No, Mr Sims, it’s not you.’

  ‘A bit too advanced for your taste,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Avant-garde, I believe, is the right expression.’

  He himself was delighted. The self-portrait was a work of art.

  ‘Well, it will have to do for the time being,’ he said. ‘I’m off for my holiday next week.’

  ‘You are going away?’

  There was such a note of alarm in her voice that he turned to look at her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘taking my old mother up to Scotland. Why?’

  She stared at him in anguish, her whole expression changed. Anyone would think he had given her some tremendous shock.

  ‘But I have no one but you,’ she said. ‘I shall be alone.’

  ‘I’ll give you your money all right,’ he said quickly. ‘You shall have it in advance. We shall only be away three weeks.’

  She went on staring at him, and then, of all things, her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry.

  ‘I don’t know what I shall do,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where I am to go.’

  It was a bit thick. What on earth did she mean? What should she do, and where should she go? He had promised her the money. She would just go on as she always did. Seriously, if she was going to behave like this the sooner he found himself a studio the better. The last thing in the world he wanted was for Madame Kaufman to become a drag.

  ‘My dear Madame Kaufman, I’m not a permanency, you know,’ he said firmly. ‘One of these days I shall be moving. Possibly this autumn. I need room to expand. I’ll let you know in advance, naturally. But it might be worth your while to put Johnnie in a nursery school and get some sort of daily job. It would really work out better for you in the end.’

  He might have beaten her. She looked stunned, utterly crushed.

  ‘What shall I do?’ she repeated stupidly, and then, as if she still could not believe it, ‘When do you go away?’

  ‘Monday,’ he said, ‘to Scotland. We’ll be away three weeks.’ This last very forcibly, so that there was no mistake about it. The trouble was that she was a very unintelligent woman, he decided as he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. She made a good cup of tea and knew how to clean the brushes, but that was her limit. ‘You ought to take a holiday yourself,’ he told her
cheerfully. ‘Take Johnnie for a trip down the river to Southend or somewhere.’

  There was no response. Nothing but a mournful stare and a hopeless shrug.

  The next day, Friday, meant the end of his working week. He cashed a cheque that morning, so that he could give her three weeks’ money in advance. And he allowed an extra five pounds for appeasement.

  When he arrived at No. 8 Johnnie was tied up in his old place by the foot-scraper, at the top of the steps. She had not done this to the boy for some time. And when Fenton let himself in at the back door in the basement, as usual, there was no wireless going and the kitchen door was shut. He opened it and looked in. The door through to the bedroom was also shut.

  ‘Madame Kaufman . . . ?’ he called. ‘Madame Kaufman . . . ?’

  She answered after a moment, her voice muffled and weak.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’

  Another pause, and then. ‘I am not very well.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fenton. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘No.’

  Well, there it was. A try-on, of course. She never looked well, but she had not done this before.There was no attempt to prepare his tea: the tray was not even laid. He put the envelope containing the money on the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ve brought you your money,’ he called. ‘Twenty pounds altogether. Why don’t you go out and spend some of it? It’s a lovely afternoon. The air would do you good.’

  A brisk manner was the answer to her trouble. He was not going to be blackmailed into sympathy.

  He went along to the studio, whistling firmly. He found, to his shocked surprise, that everything was as he had left it the evening before. Brushes not cleaned, but lying clogged still on the messed palette. Room untouched. It really was the limit. He’d a good mind to retrieve the envelope from the kitchen table. It had been a mistake ever to have mentioned the holiday. He should have posted the money over the week-end, and enclosed a note saying he had gone to Scotland. Instead of which . . . this infuriating fit of the sulks, and neglect of her job. It was because she was a foreigner, of course. You just couldn’t trust them. They always let you down in the long run.