Fascination (5 page)

‘Are you all right, Monsieur?’ Oliver asked softly.

The painter turned slowly round. He had a big rectangular face, its features powerfully present – the nose, the eyes, the thin, wide mouth, the absolutely white hair – yet in no way distinctive or handsome, just a strong simple oblong face, Oliver thought, but somehow oddly memorable.

‘But of course, young man,’ the painter said. ‘Many thanks for asking.’

Oliver had parked his bicycle and had climbed over the fence and approached the painter without seeing any movement in him, aware now that he wasn’t in fact dead, of course, but curious about his impressive immobility.

‘I thought,’ Oliver began, ‘because you weren’t painting that –’

‘No, I was just refreshing my memory,’ the painter said. ‘I just needed to come out here again, in case I had got something wrong.’

Oliver looked at the murky canvas, which showed, as far as he could tell, a ship washed up on a shore in the night. He looked up at the bleached, blinding sky and back at the dark, thin canvas.

‘This happened a long time ago,’ the painter said in explanation, pointing at his painting.

He began to ask Oliver polite questions: what is your name? –
Oliver Feverall – how old are you? – almost twelve – where do you live? – Château Les Pruniers, but just for the summer.

‘You speak very good French, but you have an English name,’ the painter observed. Oliver told him that his mother was French and his father was English. His mother was an actress, she had appeared in half a dozen films, perhaps he knew of her – Fabienne Farde? – the painter confessed he did not.

‘Perhaps you’ve heard of my father, he’s a famous film director, Denton Feverall?’

‘I rarely go to the cinema,’ the painter said, beginning to pack away his brushes and tubes. As far as Oliver could tell, he hadn’t added a stroke of colour to his grimy canvas, just come outside and stared at it for a couple of hours.

They walked back to the gate that led to the coast road. The painter admired Oliver’s bicycle, admired the efficacy of its folding-down stand. Oliver tried once more.

‘It was given to me by a singer, a famous singer, he’s in Deauville for the summer, at the Casino – Lucien Navarro.’

‘Lucien Navarro, Lucien Navarro…’ the painter repeated, holding his forefinger erect on his right hand as if calling for silence. Oliver waited. Then, after a while: ‘No, never heard of him.’ Oliver shrugged, wondering what kind of reclusive life this man led who had never heard of Fabienne Farde, Denton Feverall or Lucien Navarro.

They shook hands, formally, and the painter wished Oliver a good end to the afternoon and thanked him again for his solicitude. Oliver looked back as he cycled away and saw the old man striding down the road, his canvas and easel under one arm, the afternoon sun striking his silver hair, making it flame with light.

Lucien had a new car – a Lancia, whose roof came down. ‘Lucien and his Lancia,’ Oliver thought, a note of disgust colouring his reflections as he cycled off to Varengeville with his mother’s letter, ‘Lucien and his Lancia.’

Lucien had not visited for some six days and Oliver had noted
his mother’s moods steadily deteriorating. One morning she had not descended from her bedroom at all, only the maid was allowed access, bringing up all manner of curious drinks. Even Oliver’s soft knock on her door in the afternoon produced only the moaned response ‘Darling, Maman has one of her migraines’ and he did not see her at all, he calculated, for a further thirty-seven hours.

And then Lucien was coming and she was alert and agitated, changing her clothes, shifting vases of flowers about the drawing room, her perfumes more noticeably pungent, her affection for Oliver overt, falling upon him suddenly, with brusque, sore hugs and alarming cannonades of kisses and caresses. Oliver looked impassively out of the library windows as Lucien’s midnight blue Lancia crunched dustily to a halt and, for the first time, felt relieved he had to go to Varengeville and post a letter.

But in the village, standing in front of the pale yellow post box he felt a sudden flow of anger at his ritual banishment. He tore open the letter – always to his mother’s sister in Paris – and, as he knew he would, discovered three perfectly blank sheets of paper. He folded them up, deliberately, slowly, and dropped them in a litter bin by a set of traffic lights. He cycled south out of Varengeville, towards the plateau, heading for Longeuil, not wanting a
diabolo menthe
, wondering how he was going to survive the two and a half weeks of August that were left, wondering how he could go through this pretence, this silly game, each time Lucien arrived. Why didn’t she just say she wanted to be alone. He didn’t care how long they kissed each other, or whatever else they got up to. He simply wanted summer to be over, he wanted to get back to school, he wanted his father to finish filming
Daughters of Dracula
.

The painter was walking along the road with his usual light burden of easel, folding stool and long, thin canvas. Oliver slowed to a halt and they greeted each other, Oliver noticing that, although the day was hot, the painter was wearing a tweed jacket with a shirt and tie and a curious knitted waistcoat. Old men felt the cold, Oliver remembered, even on the warmest days.

‘Where are you going?’ the painter asked. He gestured at the flat, baking landscape inland. In the enormous sky a fleet of huge, burly white clouds moved slowly along, northwards, pushed by a warm southern breeze. A heavy flight of crows crossed the stubble field beside them. ‘It’s hot out there,’ the painter said.

‘I’m not going anywhere in particular,’ Oliver said, feeling unfamiliar tears sting his eyes.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘Come home with me,’ the painter said. ‘Have a cold drink.’

The painter showed Oliver into his studio: it was a large, tidy room with a Persian rug hanging on the wall. On an easel was a sizeable painting of a blue bird shape against a slate-grey sky. On tables and on the floor were rows of cleaned brushes laid on palettes, and others stuffed into ceramic pots. Small tables held neat rows of tubes of oil paint and on these tables were jars of flowers, many of them dried. Oliver was impressed.

‘You must have hundreds of brushes,’ he said. ‘Thousands.’

‘You may be right,’ said the painter, smiling, placing his small canvas on an empty easel and stepping back to contemplate it. Oliver circled round to stare at it, glancing at the picture of the bird and thinking that he, Oliver Feverall, could paint a better-looking bird than that.

The small canvas looked like a sodden field beneath winter skies, three uneven stripes of brown, green and grey, the paint thickly smeared, but quite dry.

‘I’m having real problems,’ the painter said. ‘I don’t know what to do. I did one like this before and put a plough in it, and it seemed to work.’

‘What about a man?’

‘No. I don’t want people in these pictures.’

‘What about some crows?’

‘It’s an idea.’

As they were going outside to the terrace to have their cold drinks, Oliver heard a woman’s voice call out ‘Georges? Are you back?’ The painter excused himself and went upstairs, returning a minute later.

‘It’s my wife,’ he said. ‘She thinks she’s getting flu.’

They sat outside at a metal table under a small canvas awning which provided a neat square of shade and sipped at their cold drinks, fetched for them by a plump, smiley housekeeper. Oliver was introduced as ‘Monsieur Oliver, my English friend,’ and his hand was shaken. The painter drank mineral water, Oliver an Orangina, and they both sat there silently for a while in the relentless afternoon heat, staring out at the big, solid clouds steaming towards them, northwards. Oliver thought that the painter had a sad face and noticed how the lines that ran from his nose to his face were particularly marked, casting, even in this shade, dark sickle shadows.

‘It’s an interesting idea that,’ the painter said, ‘crows.’ He turned to Oliver and continued, ‘So, when’s your birthday?’

‘Next week. Wednesday.’

‘Come by. We’ll have another drink. I’ll drink your health. No, I mean it, if you’ve nothing better to do.’

Oliver thanked him. Wednesday was usually a Lucien day – Wednesday and Friday.

They were silent again for a while, together.

‘Do you know what a “love affair” is?’ Oliver asked.

‘Yes,’ the painter said, ‘I certainly do.’

‘Do you think that if you’re married you should have a love affair with someone else?’

‘I don’t know,’ the painter said.

‘Isn’t it wrong?’

‘It depends.’ The painter sipped at his mineral water. He held up his glass as if to look at the sky through it. ‘Sometimes water is the best drink in the world, isn’t it?’

He walked Oliver to the road and watched him as he crouched to undo the padlock on the chain that Oliver had threaded through the rear wheel as an anti-theft device.

‘Do you think someone will steal your bike?’ the painter asked.

‘You can’t be too careful. In London I’ve had three bikes stolen.’

‘But this is Varengeville, not London. Still it is a splendid machine, isn’t it, wonderfully built.’

‘I wish it had drop handlebars,’ Oliver said. ‘I think it looks a bit old-fashioned.’ He kicked up the stand with his left shoe. ‘I’d better get home,’ he said, ‘my mother will be waiting.’

‘See you on Wednesday,’ the painter said.

On his birthday his mother gave Oliver a very crumpled ten-pound note and promised him a proper treat when they returned home. Oliver said he was going to see a friend in Varengeville and set off up the drive a good half hour before Lucien was due.

The housekeeper was watering some pots of geraniums by the front door as Oliver approached.

‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘They had to go back to Paris yesterday. Madame has bronchitis, we think.’

Oliver pursed his lips and pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. Damn, he thought, bloody damn. He looked about him, hands on his hips, wondering resentfully what he would do for the rest of the day – maybe he should just go to the beach.

‘He’s left a present for you,’ the housekeeper said, disappearing back into the house and re-emerging with a long, thin brown paper parcel. ‘He was very insistent you should have this.’

Oliver sat on the beach below the small cliff and took his shoes and socks off. He looked at his watch – he’d better stay here for a couple of hours at least, to allow Lucien time to leave. It was annoying that the painter had been obliged to go to Paris – he had been looking forward to the visit, it would have solved the problem of the day.

Oliver allowed himself an audible sigh and looked about him, idly. A stout, dark girl in a yellow bikini sunbathed some feet away, her small Yorkshire terrier at her side huddling under a bunched towel for shade. Further along a group of kids sat in a circle around
a transistor radio. Toddlers studiously dug in the wet sand at the gentle surf’s edge. Oliver thought about his birthday – what could he get for ten pounds?… Maybe Dad will call this evening. He’s bound to give me ten pounds too, maybe more… He mentally totalled all the potential fiscal gifts that he might receive from his assorted relatives and came up with a satisfyingly large figure. Not such a bad birthday after all, he thought, and unwrapped the painter’s present.

It was the wet fields painting, Oliver was not too surprised to discover – and just what was he supposed to do with it, he wondered? It wasn’t particularly well painted, Oliver thought, and also the painter himself had seemed dissatisfied with it. He felt a slight surge of irritation that the painter had given him a picture that even he had been unable to finish properly. What it needed was something else in it, not just fields and sky. Maybe, Oliver thought, he should paint his bike in one of the corners, have it leaning over on its stand…

The sunbathing girl in the bikini turned over suddenly and rolled on to her small dog, which gave an anguished yelp of pain and surprise. No, Oliver thought, inspired, if he painted the sky blue then the field would look like a beach. Then he could paint the girl lying on the beach with her yellow bikini and her little dog. And then the painting would at least be finished – at least it would be about something. Oliver stared at the plump girl as she fussed and petted her discomfited dog. He found himself grinning, felt the laugh brim in his throat, and quickly covered his mouth with his hand in case she should see.

[It had become his habit over the years, whenever he lunched alone, to take a small notebook with him, into which he jotted down his random thoughts and observations, preferring to disguise his solitariness by writing, rather than reading.]

No crab-cakes today, so I settled with bad grace for a pseudo-
salade niçoise
(no potatoes). This restaurant is renowned for its crab-cakes – this is why I and most of its clientèle come here – so why not supply crab-cakes on a daily basis? Just seen
Slang
– interesting thriller, because it all takes place during the course of one night. A clear
hommage
– which is to say rip-off – to Raupp’s
Death Valley
but without its textures, its love of character. Defects: sudden shifts of mood from whimsy to hardboiled; silly plot contrivances (the lap-dancing scenes, the language school);
fantastic
coincidences – always a sign of waning inspiration. Raupp does this but it sort of works with him. Finally the film is just not
true
– and as Pierre-Henri Duprez, I think, once said somewhere, you can’t hide anything from an audience. (Which is wrong, actually: look at the garbage in our cinemas that is avidly, unreflectingly, credulously consumed.)