Work Text:
I return, unfortunately, in time for the uninspiring luncheon Mrs Ames’, my landlady’s, cook prepares. I quickly freshen up and descend once more, determined not to let the prospect of the food spoil my day, when my heart sinks. The flowers have been replaced in front of the crepe-draped photograph of my landlady’s godson, the wax bouquet put aside for a vase of fresh lilies. The young man’s mother must be lunching with us, which will mean a meal of solemn silences, followed by an afternoon of tears. It would be impolite to intrude on her grief, I think, frantically trying to construct a plausible excuse to leave the house so soon after returning to it. The unfortunate woman will wish to once again speak of her shock and terror when the telegram was delivered – I will simply have to flee, I decide. I cannot stay and face more questions about my own experiences, brief though they were. I am already sure she hates me for living while her son died; I know I would, in her place.
In the end I creep down the hallway and peep into rooms until I spy the parlour maid. Quickly requesting that she make my apologies, I am at the front door before she can get there to open it for me and I all but sprint down the road. I pass the rest of the day in somewhat guilty boredom; after a brief lunch I wander around bookshops and artists’ supply stores making purchases I don’t really need. I will wait until Schuldig is with me to buy new brushes, I think, so that he may see which are best for each task. At last I can no longer put off my return, and make my way back to the house.
I find I have come home to an icy atmosphere. My apologies and explanations of a forgotten engagement do nothing to assuage Mrs Ames’ displeasure.
"Mrs Scott was particularly looking forward to speaking with you," she says, as if correcting a naughty boy.
"I’m very sorry, Mrs Ames," I say, thinking, Thank God I escaped.
"It does her good to speak with men who fought, so that she may better understand what her poor son went through," she goes on, as if she thinks I understand any of it myself.
"I was there for only a short time," I demur, "and I was invalided out – "
"Young people are often thoughtless," she says implacably. "I know you would have found it uninteresting, but it would have been kind to have stayed."
"Yes," I say quietly. "I am sorry." Uninteresting, I think, wishing my feelings on the matter could indeed be described thus. I feel, though, shame at knowing she thinks me unkind to her friend. It is enough to keep me on my best behavior throughout dinner, and to force me into the sitting room to make conversation with Mrs Ames afterwards.
"Have you any more of your charming landscapes to show me, Mr Crawford?" she asks, and I feel my heart wither a little at the adjective.
"I've been concentrating on figure studies recently," I say. "I feel they may be my forte, rather than the landscapes."
"What a pity," she murmurs, disappointed in me once more, " they were very pretty."
The polite and strained silence that follows is broken by a knock on the front door. Mrs Ames looks at the clock on the mantel in some surprise.
"So late," she says, disapprovingly.
A few moments later the parlour maid enters, looking a little confused.
"There's someone to see you, Mr Crawford, he says he's a friend of yours, sir."
A step behind her, the caller enters. I can't quite believe the sight of Schuldig, hair brushed neatly, dressed respectably and all the wickedness in his face confined to the quick glance he gives the room's ornamentation.
"Schuldig!" I exclaim. "I – oh, ah, Mrs Ames, this is my, ah, this is Schuldig, who works with me."
"Good evening," she says in some bewilderment, as Schuldig smiles and takes her offered hand.
"It's very mild this evening, isn't it?" he says. "Now that the wind has dropped it really feels like spring has arrived."
With that, they're off in the blasted British obsession with small talk about the weather. I'm annoyed and suspicious, for it is obvious to me that this is Schuldig acting out politeness, being, it would seem, more English than the English themselves. I watch him being charming, and wait for him to do something dreadful. Surely he will explode from the frustration of keeping his usual profanities unspoken?
"It's quite a surprise to see you," I say, trying not to glare at him.
"I wasn't doing anything, in fact I was rather bored; so I thought I'd come to visit," he says airily, smiling genially about him.
Mrs Ames does not look as if she approves of boys who admit to boredom.
"Did you have far to come, Mr, ah – excuse me, I'm not sure I caught your name correctly?"
"Schuldig. No, not far. Crawford, Sergei said all Renaissance art should be set alight, did you know that? So I took the bus to Trafalgar Square so I could look at some today; I liked what I saw."
"You're a student of art history?" Mrs Ames says, looking at him a little askance.
"No, I work as an artist's model at the moment, for Crawford and some other artists. And I'm learning technique from them." His smile is sly and wide. Behave. Please, behave, I think, as if he can hear me.
"A model?" she repeats.
"Yes. I stand around, and Crawford paints me."
Mrs Ames purses her lips. "That doesn't sound like a good, steady job. Is it a disappointment to your parents?"
"Many things in this city have disappointed my family in recent years," Schuldig says, and I feel all at once that he will take the conversation into areas from which no one will be able to retreat.
"Which paintings did you particularly like?" I ask, a little too loudly.
"I wanted to see that perspective trick you talked about last week," he says, "in Holbein's Ambassadors."
I feel a happy warmth that he actually pays attention to anything I say, let alone that he has gone to find out more.
"I do like his portrait of King Henry, the one that one sees reproduced in history books," Mrs Ames says. "Don't you think it shows his power and majesty very well?"
Schuldig smiles the polite and dismissive smile of a boy faced with the stupidity of adults. "That wouldn't interest me. It's just what he had to do as a foreigner working here; keeping his employer happy so that he was able to do what he wanted."
His tone is grower sharper, word by word. I wonder if I remonstrate with him what the effect would be. I draw breath more easily as he grows more polite again, cheerfully telling me facts about Holbein's life I already know. I grow less wary until I see the slight frown on Mrs Ames' face, and my heart sinks as Schuldig continues on, an impassioned young Londoner except for - damn it, I think – the regularly interspersed German names, all of which drop into his sentences crisply, and clearly pronounced by a native speaker. The way he pronounces some of his vowels seems more and more obvious to me, and I think that surely Mrs Ames cannot but hear them as well as I. He isn't even being provocative; it simply has not occurred to him that anyone might need to mispronounce the names in his account.
"Mr Schuldig," Mrs Ames says suddenly, "your name isn't English, is it?"
"No, it isn't," he says, laughing a little.
"It might be a Jewish name, perhaps?"
He seems genuinely surprised. "No, it's a name that I – no, it's not. My family's Lutheran."
"I will leave you to speak to your friend, Mr Crawford," she says, rising.
I stand, and note that Schuldig has done likewise. He never gets up when Miss Lin rises from her seat, but then she thinks such gestures nonsensical.
"What are you doing here?" I ask when Mrs Ames has closed the door. "How did you know where I live? I never told you."
He gives me his most infuriating smile while slouching down in his seat. "I told you, I was bored and I wanted to talk about art. How can you stand this place? This room's so fucking boring."
"Shh! You haven't answered my question!" I must not, I tell myself, laugh. It will just encourage him.
He pulls out a packet of cigarettes and looks around for an ashtray. "You're always so anxious to be back home if you've said you'd be in for dinner, but you always cut it very fine so I knew you had to live in the neighbourhood."
It is the same logic I used when I searched for him the previous summer. He has been seeking me out, I think as Schuldig adds without a trace of shame,
"So one evening I just followed you."
I gape at him as he smirks. All I can think to say is, "Mrs Ames doesn't usually have gentleman visitors, she doesn't keep ashtrays and prefers it if I don't smoke in the house."
"So I should use a vase?" Schuldig says, and sighs theatrically as I take the cigarettes away. I take his matches as well, just to ensure his good behavior. Then his smile comes back as he takes out a few pages. "Look, I tried to copy that perspective trick, but it's hard. Can you do it? Sergei says I should copy Kandinsky instead, but you know how much Sergei is love with fucking geometry. What do you think?"
He's never shown me anything he's drawn before. I examine the sketches carefully, even the one with heavy black frustrated lines scribbled across it. They're not terribly good, and he has chosen far too ambitious a project, but I can see he'll improve with enough practice. The small globe he has sketched in a corner of one page is better than the main efforts.
"This is good," I say, indicating it. "I can see good control of the line, here. The rest, well, you need practice. You will improve but try easier subjects for now, so you can see your progress."
He purses his lips, then takes the pages back, looking from them to my face with a sly glance. "And here I thought I'd could at least expect some flattery from you," he says. "Shouldn't you tell me I'd be a second fucking Leonardo with your close tuition?"
"Should I?" I say, bewildered. "Why?"
"Why, indeed?" he says, but his tone is laughing, not offended. He puts his drawings away, leaning forward, his face avid. My fingers twitch, longing to hold pencil or brush. "Crawford, some of the paintings I saw today, they showed the light as if – I don't know how to describe it, but how can you paint light?"
I feel deeply touched by his interest, seeing in him my own fascination and love of art when I was a boy, and we pass time quickly and pleasantly speaking of painters and techniques. We are both surprised when the door opens once more and Mrs Ames re-enters.
"It is really rather late," she says, and I look somewhat guiltily at the clock on the mantel to see it is past 10 o'clock. "Don't you think so, Mr Schuldig?"
"Oh. Yes, I should –" Schuldig says, beginning to rise, when she continues,
"After all, even a mother of your race must worry a little about her child being she knows not where in the middle of the night."
Schuldig stares at her in silence, his eyes wide. He looks younger, I think, very much a boy. I wait for him to start yelling, for him to say something truly disgusting and terrible, then he straightens up and nods politely to me.
"Thanks for your advice, Crawford, I'll see you as we arranged. Mrs Ames, thank you for your hospitality. Good night."
"Schuldig –" I say in the hallway. "I'm sorry –"
"When we meet, are you going to finish what we were doing before or start something new?" he says, cutting across me. "I'm happy with either. I'd better go." He is gone before I can say anything else, leaving me at the front door looking at his retreat. I wonder if he really does live nearby as I shut the door and return to the sitting room. I must find a way to speak with Mrs Ames about her unkindness to him, I think. I don't want him to think he is unwelcome in my home.
She is sitting, looking through a book in her lap. I freeze as I recognize one of my sketchbooks. Others are open beside her, all open to images of Schuldig, stretching, reclining, laughing wickedly from the page, looking still and solemn. I feel a wash of anger that my privacy has been broken, that she has taken my books from my room, that she is looking at pictures of Schuldig as if they were vile, as if they are something obscene.
"Mr Crawford," she says, looking coldly at me, "I think it is time to discuss your continued presence in my house."
* * *
My studio is crowded once I have moved all my belongings in. I thought I had been living an ascetic life, but it seems that a year in London has accumulated more material acquisitions than I thought. I fold my shirts carefully and stack the collars neatly, then put them helplessly on the lone chair. The fact that the room was all but unfurnished was appealing to me when its sole use was for painting – now that I must live here its deficiencies are clear.
I spend an uncomfortable night. The settee is too short for me, and the throw is too thin to provide much warmth. Being at the top of the house gives the room excellent light for painting, but makes the trip downstairs to the convenience less than convenient. I must wait my turn for the bathroom, even though I have risen later than most others in the house, and then am faced with the knowledge that I will have to go out to find breakfast. By the time I return it is almost eleven o'clock; I am astonished that the shop-girls and clerks who live in the house can so order their lives that they are up and out to work so early without anyone else to aid them by preparing their breakfasts or making sure they have everything they need.
Schuldig rises from the step where he is sitting.
"I was about to give up."
"I'm sorry. I was having breakfast."
"New brushes?" he says nodding at the package I am carrying, and I remember I told him I needed some.
"No," I sigh. "It's just some food."
Once inside I realise there is nowhere to put my loaf of bread and pound of butter, and that the only knives I have are palette knives. Rather than fling the package across the room, I place it gently on the settee. When I turn, Schuldig is looking at my books, my suitcases, the clothing piled on the chair. I ready myself for the mockery.
"What are you working on today?" he asks, taking off his jacket, and dropping it on top of my clothes. "It's a nice day, at least I won't freeze." He chatters on about the spring weather as he strips, ignoring my silence, then pads across the room to fetch a sketchbook and pencil to press into my hands. He is so pleasant that my mood sinks even further at the thought that I am evidently so much to be pitied. He hasn't sworn at me even once.
"Schuldig," I say finally, "Aren't you wondering –"
"No," he says, "Draw me."
I sit on the settee and draw him. He is a much better model now, and can hold poses perfectly. When he takes a break and stretches I want to keep drawing, to capture it all. After an hour he is still in a good humour, still hasn't let slip a single swear word. I feel as if I will explode.
"I can't go back there," I say in a rush, before he can stop me. "She made it clear she disapproves of my associations."
He sighs, and folds his arms, tapping one foot. "You didn't like it there. Stop feeling sorry for yourself."
I nod meekly, sketching the line of his leg. His foot stills, and I look upwards to meet a gaze half-suspicious, half-alarmed.
"Which associations? She threw you out because of me?"
I shrug helplessly. I don't want to hurt his feelings or risk him running away in fury again. "She didn't like your visit to see me," I say.
"What, you weren't allowed visitors? You're fucking better off here."
It's such a relief to hear him swear that I laugh. His smile turns sour as he says,
"Tell the truth, did she have the room scoured, or maybe hold a prayer service to get rid of the filthy Fritz presence from her house?"
"Schuldig –" I start, then change what I was going to say. "It's not just that," I say, "she thought my pictures of you disgusting – she looked through my sketchbooks. And she came across sketches I had made of you with Sergei and Miss Lin, and disapproved of them also, once I had made it clear that Miss Lin is indeed Chinese and that Sergei is a Communist. She told me that if I wanted to stay I had to break off all links with you and them at once. I told her I had no intention of giving you up."
Something within him lightens. He looks down on me solemnly, the light behind him glinting on his hair, making an unlikely halo for one who is very much not angelic.
"You said that?"
I indicate my suitcases against the wall. "And meant it."
He steps forward and puts a knee on the settee, between mine, leaning down, supporting himself with a hand on the settee's sagging back.
"No," he smiles, as I shrink back in a presentiment of alarm, "this time, don't say no."
He presses his lips to mine, softly and warmly, his other hand resting on the side of my face. I am no longer holding the sketchbook as a shield against him, I find, my hands lying on his shoulders instead. To push him away, I think, feeling how his muscles move as he shifts closer. He pulls back and carefully straightens my spectacles, then looks about the room, hands on hips.
"Now that you aren't paying two rents – which was a stupid fucking thing to do in the first place – you can either buy some furniture or find somewhere bigger."
"I could," I say in such tones of wonder that it is clear even to myself that I have thought myself condemned to no more than one small, lumpy settee and one chair forever.
He shakes his head contemptuously.
"I don't know what you'd fucking do without me. Come on, start drawing again, or painting, or take me to lunch."
"Whatever you like," I say.
"My favourite words," he says in cheerful satisfaction.
I inwardly quail at the thought of what lunch is likely to cost, then realise I don't actually care. I have made the right decision; I have chosen what is needful for my art and I have, finally, I think, managed to wipe away my stupid remarks to Schuldig when he first posed for me. My low mood is washed away as if it had never been, for I know exactly what I would be doing without him, and I have no wish to go back to America, announce I have failed and meekly start working for my father as everyone predicted I would. Instead I will stay here, and find a way to translate the feel of Schuldig's smooth skin and the taste of his mouth into a painting that will set the world back on its heels.
"Whatever you like," I repeat.
"I'm going to hold you to that," he says, laughing and beautiful.