Pigeon Feathers Read Online Free PDF Page B

there was something flat and smooth behind her large eyes that repelled closeness. She seemed to be empty of the ragged, absorbent wisdom of girls at home whose war experiences stopped short at scrap drives. Across Robin’s incongruities—between her name and her body, her experiences and her innocence—was braced a determined erectness of carriage, as if she were Britannia in the cartoons; her contours contained nothing erotic but limned a necessarily female symbol of ancient militance. Robin was tall, and her figure, crossing back and forth through the shadows of the casts and the patchy light between, seemed to Leonard to stalk. She was always in and out now. In at nine-thirty, breathless; out at ten for a coffeebreak; back at eleven; lunch at eleven-thirty; back by one; at two-thirty, out for a smoke; in by three; gone by four. Since the days of their joint attack on that chaste archer the moon goddess, Robin’s work habits had grown blithe. She had moved away to another area, to analyze another figure, and he had not been bold enough to follow with his horse, though his next statue took him in her direction. So at least once an hour she appeared before his eyes, and, though the coffee breaks and long lunches forced him to deduce a lively native society, he, accustomed by the dragged-out days of Army life to patience, still thought of her as partly his. It seemed natural when, three weeks before the Michaelmas term ended, Puss—Leonard had fallen in with mocking Seabright—promoted them to still life together.
    At the greengrocer’s on Monday morning they purchased still-life ingredients. The Constable School owned a great bin of inanimate objects, from which Leonard had selected an old mortar and pestle. His idea was then to buy, to make a logical picture, some vegetables that could be ground, and to arrange them in a Chardinesque tumble. But what, really,
was
ground, except nuts? The grocer did have some Jamaican walnuts.
    “Don’t be funny, Leonard,” Robin said. “All those horrid little wrinkles, we’d be at it forever.”
    “Well, what else could you grind?”
    “We’re not going to
grind
anything; we’re going to paint it. What we want is something
smooth
.”
    “Oranges, miss?” the lad in charge offered.
    “Oh, oranges. Everyone’s doing oranges—looks like a pack of advertisements for vitamin C. What we want …” Frowning, she surveyed the produce, and Leonard’s heart, plunged in the novel intimacy of shopping with a woman, beat excitedly. “Onions,” Robin declared. “Onions are what we want.”
    “Onions, miss?”
    “Yes, three, and a cabbage.”
    “One cabbage?”
    “Here, may I pick it out?”
    “But, Robin,” Leonard said, having never before called her by name, “onions and cabbages don’t go together.”
    “Really, Leonard, you keep talking as if we’re going to
eat
them.”
    “They’re both so round.”
    “I dare say. You won’t get me doing any globby squashes. Besides, Leonard, ours won’t get rotten.”
    “Our globby squashes?”
    “Our
still
life, love. Haven’t you seen Melissa’s pears? Really, if I had to look at those brown spots all day I think I’d go sick.”
    The lad, in his gray apron and muddy boots, gently pushed a paper bag against her arm. “Tenpence, miss. Five for the onions and four for the head and the bag’s a penny.”
    “Here,” Leonard said hoarsely, and the action of handing over the money was so husbandly he blushed.
    Robin asked, “Are the onions attractive?”
    “Oh yes,” the boy said in a level uncomprehending tone that defended him against any intention she might have, including that of “having him on.”
    “Did you give us attractive onions?” she repeated. “I mean, we’re not going to eat them.”
    “Oh yes. They’re good-looking, miss.”
    The boy’s referring to the cabbage simply as “the head” haunted Leonard, and he started as if at a ghost when, emerging with Robin into the narrow street, the head