Consequences Read Online Free Page A

much-occupied attic, above all he had uninhibited access to a studio and to practicing artists who encouraged and criticized. He worked in pubs and bars to pay for paints and materials—the art college supplied only a certain amount. He sold some work shown in a student exhibition. And, above all, he became an engraver.
    From the moment that he first placed a block on the sandbag and made the initial tentative lines with the graver, he knew that that intuition had been right: this was his medium. He could not have said exactly why; it had to do with the complexity of the process, the way in which what you first saw and drew—that image of a real scene—must be passed from one material to another, from the sketch pad to the tracing paper to the block and thence eventually to its final form, the subtle and delicate arrangement of black and white that was the finished print. But it had to do also with the way in which the fortuitous shapes and patterns of the physical world—trees, water, sky, buildings—were transformed by hand and eye into something that reflected what you saw but had now become a creation in its own right: the engraving was a dazzling black-and-white complement to the world of color.
    Wood engraving thrived right now. He pored over the work of his eminent older contemporaries—Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Edward Wadsworth, Gertrude Hermes, Blair Hughes-Stanton—and sat at the feet of his own distinguished teacher, Iain Macnab. He learned the possibilities of the form, the potential; he saw how each artist makes of it something different, something new. He thought: I can do this.
    And the time was ripe. There was a demand for the work of a promising engraver. At a party after the college’s annual student show, in his last year there, Matt met Lucas Talbot, a man a few years older than himself who earned a tenuous living as a fine press publisher. The Heron Press operated from Lucas’s dilapidated Victorian house in Fulham; he invited Matt to visit, and acquaintance blossomed into friendship. Lucas was, in a sense, everything that Matt was not; he was awkward, shy, socially inept, alarmed by women. Matt had been at the hub of student activity at the college, talked easily to anyone, was sexually confident. They liked one another immensely. Lucas knew that Matt was already a fine engraver, and that he would soar. Matt admired Lucas’s ferocious dedication to the creation of handsome editions. Within weeks Lucas had commissioned Matt to work on a series that he planned on English topography.
    “W-w-which do you fancy?” he asked—the stammer always surfacing at moments of diffidence or excitement, “Moors and mountains or estuaries and waterways?”
    Matt hesitated, unaware that the rest of his life hung in the balance. “Um…I don’t really mind, either sounds good…Oh, let’s say estuaries and waterways.”
    “Done,” said Lucas. “Would thirty guineas for the twelve prints be all right? I’m afraid I can’t manage any more.”
    Matt, for whom this would be comparative riches, said that this would be fine. Between them, they began to plan the structure of the book and the subject matter of Matt’s engravings.
    In the interests of which, on that June morning, he selected a bench in St. James’s Park, put his sketch pad on his knee, took some stale bread from his pocket, and thus invited the fates to smile upon him.
     
    The cottage stood beside a lane. At the front, it looked out over the high hedge bank of its garden, across the lane and the sloping field beyond to a wooded valley that reached up into the Brendon hills. Behind, fields and copses rolled away down to the Bristol channel coastline; there was a long thin slice of pewter sea and, on a clear day, the distant shore of Wales. Square and squat, cob and thatch, dug solid into the red Somerset earth, the small building had seen out generations of farm laborers. People had been born here, died here, had heard rumors of wars, had