Consequences by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online

country. London dissolved behind him as the country train made its way across fields and between steep hills, a shadow trail of the engine smoke traveling alongside. It stopped frequently, at stations with alluring names: Norton Fitzwarren, Bishops Lydeard, Crowcombe, Stogumber. School-children got off, and women with shopping baskets. When they reached Washford, he was almost the only passenger—and there were Matt and Lorna on the little platform, waving.
    It was good to have Lucas at the cottage, thought Matt, good to be out here in the sunshine, indeed everything was good at this moment. Three prints sold, and he had a book commission from the Curwen Press, and Lucas was talking about a new project—an edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, with engravings by Matt. Months of work. And money coming in; not princely sums, but enough to keep them going.
    He stared up into a sculptural pile of cumulus, gleaming white against a hard blue sky, and saw a Wedgwood design, or puffy cherubim on a ceiling frieze. The mind is cluttered with images, he thought—everything we see refers us to something else. Perhaps only children see with absolute purity of vision; they see things for what they are and nothing else. The rest of us see signals from elsewhere, and always have done, ever since people began to think. First they see gods and ghosts and symbols and portents. And then they are battered with the images of everywhere and every time and all that they see is invaded from elsewhere. Eighteenth-century potteries float in the twentieth-century spring sky; cherubim are trumpeting Handel high above Somerset.
    We don’t see plain anymore, he thought. I am an artist, and I don’t see plain. I see what it has been suggested that I see. I look at a tree and I see it as Dürer saw trees, as Samuel Palmer did, as Cézanne did. Who has ever seen plain?
     
    Lorna felt the baby move. A flutter; a curious little local independence within your belly. It had only just begun to do this, and the sensation fascinated her. She sat cross-legged, watching blue butterflies on clover heads; the men lay on either side, hands locked behind their heads. Lucas appeared to be asleep. Matt, she saw, had gone into one of those thoughtful trances from which he would surface with a surge of energy.
    Her own head was full of seeds: lurking mind-pictures of the different flower and vegetable seeds that she had been sowing these last couple of weeks—seeds that were like fluff, or grains of sand, or tiny balls, or fine brown dust. She saw the potatoes that she had laid out yester day, each one with its potent sprigs of growth. She sat there feeling the sun on her skin, seeing the mist of green over the woodland down below, the sharp little blades of new grass under her feet—everything growing, rushing into life. And me, she thought, I’m adding to it—we are, Matt and I. Clever us. Except that it isn’t really clever at all, it just happens, and we’re only doing what is always done, seeing to it that things go on, that someone will come after us, that there is a future.
    Matt jumped to his feet. “I’m ravenous. Time for the grub.” He delved into the rucksack. “Wake up, Lucas. Here—the village shop’s best mousetrap, and the pick of last year’s apple harvest.”
    Lucas opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep. Just relishing happenstance. That I happened to get chatting to Matt that evening at the Grosvenor. That you two happened upon each other.” He took a bite of sandwich. “Very decent mousetrap, if I may say so. You know, you’ve stepped out of a game of Consequences: you two. Matt met Lorna—on a bench in St. James’s Park. He said to her: ‘Let me rescue you from your ivory tower.’ She said to him: ‘There’s a ladder in the basement, and my parents are out this evening’—The World said: ‘They’ll never get away with it’—and the consequence was…. Well, we shall have to wait till August to find out what the