Summer in February (4 page)

From the moment they met, Laura could not take her eyes off him. Married woman though she was, she freely admitted as much
to herself. And to others. She had never before in her life felt herself in the company of so powerful and challenging a spirit,
of so wild and unsettling a nature.

She had been down on the rocks all day with Dolly, working on a big canvas. Since coming to Cornwall her canvases had become
bigger and bigger, bolder and bolder, and Harold had very kindly left his own work, as he so often did, and walked down through
the village to the cove to help her carry the six-foot canvas, poles and general clobber back up the hill. It’s a steep pull
up from Lamorna Cove, very steep at first, as it curves round past ‘Lamorna’ Birch’s house, where the water on the other side
comes down the valley gathering speed as it runs through a narrow runnel. Going up those first few hundred yards, before it
eases a little, you need all the help you can find, and Laura knew she was lucky to have a kind, attentive husband. Sometimes,
preoccupied with his own thoughts, Harold went on ahead, keen to return to his own studio,
letting her stroll back at will, letting her smell the flowers or eat blackberries while she chatted to Gilbert Evans outside
his office.

‘Thank you, Harold,’ she would often say back in the cottage, ‘what would I do without you?’

‘Get someone else to help, no doubt.’

Harold always preferred to paint indoors. He was a slow, painstaking perfectionist, and they had worked in separate studios
ever since the day ten years ago on York station when Laura punched out their names on one of those penny slot machines: LAURA
KNIGHT, and then HAROLD KNIGHT. With a smile Harold took the tin strips from her hand as if that had decided the matter, two
separate names, two separate people. He nailed one on his studio door and one on Laura’s, though Laura’s was often unused
because her real studio was the open air.

Everyone in Lamorna noticed how different in every way the Knights were. Laura was all fast hands and full of dash, big canvases,
big effort, squeezing paint out of the tube, letting the pencil and brush speak before she could interrupt them; she felt
she could run in the playground and not get touched, she was a stormy scatterbrain, she didn’t mind, she would show everyone
her work – you could stand behind and watch, if you liked.

Not so Harold. He was as still and white as his studio wall; he kept his paintings turned away from prying eyes and woe betide
anyone who looked at them until he was good and ready. ‘Because we live together,’ he said to Laura, ‘we must not influence
each other too much.’ Yes, he was a wise old bird, and there he was going up the hill in his stiff-backed way, just ahead
of Laura, on a hot early September evening, a bonus day, a windfall day, when—

When—

By a gate halfway up the lane, just up from where Gilbert
Evans had his office, Harold could see – no, he could not yet see, but he could
hear
a very noisy crowd. For a moment he wondered if it was Gilbert and Joey Carter-Wood, but then Gilbert and Joey weren’t noisy
types and anyway this noise was very female. Peaceful though it could be, Lamorna was also quite used to its fair share of
noise. If it wasn’t stormy weather coming in off the Atlantic or the quarry blasting granite by day it was the artists blasting
away at a party by night, but by any standards this was raucous, a fusillade of laughter, a real racket.

Harold and Laura came round the bend. Standing in the centre of a circle of girls was a stranger. The girls were all laughing
and cheering. It occurred to Harold that the joker in the middle of the pack might well be a travelling performer. They did
have the occasional tramp in those parts, attracted perhaps by the easy pickings offered by a painting fraternity, and eccentrics
attracted more eccentrics, but even at a glance, this loud young man was the oddest yet.

Harold could not get past him quickly enough. Laura, however, slowed. The centre of attention had light brown hair combed
forward with deliberate style, and her first thought was that here was the spitting image of the Robbie Burns portrait she
had seen on her last visit to Edinburgh. He was a slim, animated figure; he was expressive with his hands, but in an entirely
manly fashion, and his shoulders were broad.

Could Laura take in so much at a glance? Yes she could, and more! He had slim hips, very slim hips. As for his clothes? Well,
it had to be said, his clothes were the main point of his strangeness. You would never expect to come across such a figure
in a Cornish lane: he wore a shepherd’s plaid suit with close-fitting trousers that belled out at the bottom – and he wore
it with such style as if to say ‘And
do I not look the part?’ Where on earth did this strange being come from, what was he doing here, and who were all these silly
sycophantic girls surrounding him?

They must, she guessed, be Stanhope Forbes’s pupils from Newlyn, or they might be models, or both. But some of them looked
too sharp to be painters and the others looked too horsy to be models. The first clear words Laura heard spoken among the
excitable babble was a high-pitched urging:

‘Oh, go on, Alfred, do, please!’

‘Yes, Alfred, come on!’

‘We want to know!’

This was followed by more cheering and clapping. They were all clearly agreed on what it was they wanted Alfred to do.

Harold Knight, silent and absorbed, forged ahead, but as Laura made to follow her husband up the lane, the stranger looked
at her right over the heads of all the girls, and looked at her with a shrewd scan, a look used to judging distances and assessing
dangers. More than that, there was a laughing note in his glance.

Laura did not imagine this, she made none of this up. She had a penetrating eye herself and she saw what she saw and she missed
nothing. As if to prove this, he half waved at her, almost as if he knew her and knew what she had been up to on the rocks
and knew exactly where she was going – back home with her taciturn partner. This sense that the stranger already knew her
shocked her. Were her senses that afternoon particularly heightened? She asked herself this because she could, at ten paces,
clearly smell the face-cream on the silly girls and clearly see the make-up on their lips and eyelashes.

Thirty yards or so up the road Laura stopped to rest her tired legs. Some wild roses stirred the hedgerows and the
late afternoon sun felt hotter than ever on the back of her neck. Sweating, she looked down at her arms, her forearms, and
her fingers. It was as if she had never looked at them before. They weren’t her arms. They were someone else’s arms, they
were the arms of a washerwoman. They were blistered red, badly blistered, and as for her face, she did not have to look at
her face: that, she knew only too well, would be as red as a beetroot. Even after the shortest of walks her skin took on a
strawberry hue, and the day with Dolly on the rocks, with the reflection from the ocean, had been one of unrelieved sunshine.

But why all this worry?

For years she had not given a thought to her colouring. Thank goodness she was past all that young misery, that self-consciousness,
such as the terrible anxiety she felt before they were married that, on one of his visits, Harold would suddenly bend down
on his knees and see the chamberpot in her bedroom. A visible chamberpot was bad enough but hers was delicately painted with
crimson roses and green leaves, surrounded by the immortal words ‘For a kiss you may use this’. That chamberpot, she was convinced,
would put the kibosh on her chances of marrying Harold.

Oh, the agonies she had been through! She first met Harold when she was a very young fourteen; he was a very old seventeen
and so pale and so elegant and so distinguished, and she used to suck her red cheeks in to try to look like Harold, that is,
pale and elegant and distinguished. Then her sister asked, ‘What are you pulling those faces for?’ so Laura reluctantly settled
for the round-faced girl she then was and still was now. After all, she might be raggle-taggle, might be red in the face,
might have crinkly hair, but she had talent as well.

She knew she had talent.

Then, as she stood in the Lamorna lane, she suddenly looked down at her shoes – at her boots, rather. Ah, that was it, that
was what the stranger was laughing at: her hobnailed boots.

When Laura got back to her low cottage her husband was already shut away up in his studio. To cool down she flopped into the
deep basket chair by the open door, her feet bare on the flagstones. Once cooled down, but still thinking of that cocky, tanned
face and the mocking smile, she put the kettle on the hob.

The only reference Harold made to the incident in the lane came two weeks later. He spoke without looking up from his book.

‘I’ve found out who the bookie is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The bookie with the bevy of damsels.’

‘Oh, him.’

‘He’s called Munnings. Taken that place near the mill.’

‘Is he a painter?’

‘Of sorts. Apparently. If you can believe it.’

‘I can, yes.’

‘Invited us to a party.’

‘Has he, how nice!’

‘You go.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ve got toothache.’

Poor Harold. He’d always had terrible trouble with his teeth.

‘There are so many artist chappies on my land now, Gilbert,’ Colonel Paynter said (more than once) as they walked side by
side round the estate, ‘you’ll soon be taking a roll call at sundown.’ This was one of the Colonel’s better little jokes.
Since Gilbert had arrived down in Lamorna, as the Colonel’s land agent, some new artist or other, or artist’s model, had appeared
almost every month in one cottage or studio or outhouse. Newlyn, of course, had been packed tight with them for many years,
but now it was Lamorna’s turn (as later it was to be St Ives’). The trouble was, with these artist chappies, someone was always
joining the ranks unannounced or jumping ship, so Gilbert decided there would be very little point in trying to keep track
of them all.

Tramps, gypsies, coastal walkers and artists, it was not (frankly) always easy to discriminate one from the other. One month
they were as penniless as the mice in the church or borrowing off each other; then the news went round that someone had sold
a couple of pictures in Bond Street or had an exhibition lining up in Penzance and they all somehow made ends meet – or, more
likely, they went mad on the
proceeds. So life was never dull. That was what felt so very good about being down here in that far-flung corner of England,
a place people came to punt away their previous existence, rather appropriately (Gilbert thought), as the tip of Cornwall
was like the boot at the end of a long leg.

For many years Newlyn had been the focal point. Stanhope Forbes (‘the Professor’) and his wife Elizabeth had attracted a large
number of young art students from London, indeed from all parts of England. Then Samuel John Birch (soon to be called ‘Lamorna’
Birch) settled four miles away from Newlyn in Lamorna, in his house just up from the cove – and what a view he had! Other
artists followed. One, two, three … became a trickle, then a small stream, and now (as the Colonel implied) the floodgates
were open.

‘Lots of painters,’ the Colonel said, ‘but not a decent carpenter in sight.’

That was another of his little jokes.

Apart from the locals, Gilbert Evans was just about the only one who wasn’t an artist. Down at The Wink playing skittles the
other night he heard a man grumbling away that Lamorna ‘weren’t Cornwall any more’. The trouble with comments of that nature,
quite apart from the fact that they made Gilbert feel unwelcome, was that he was not entirely sure what was meant by ‘Cornwall’.
By ‘Cornwall’ did those in The Wink mean windswept, deprived inland farms and poor fishermen risking their lives? Did they
mean people who spoke with impossible accents? Maybe they did. But was there not room enough in that strange vast county for
all of them, artists and writers and fishermen, even for the occasional army officer turned land agent?

Laura Knight put it rather well over supper. Gilbert, a regular guest up in their long low cottage, was lighting their paraffin
lamp and Laura, as usual, was talking.

‘Cornwall isn’t like anywhere else, you see, so it’s no use trying to compare it to your previous experiences. Take Nottingham,
take Yorkshire, take Holland, take Paris, they’re all so different. Isn’t that right, Harold? We’ve always found that, haven’t
we? … Harold?’

Harold went on reading, his glasses on the end of his nose.

‘Harold, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘What I just said.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, honestly.’

‘You haven’t stopped for half an hour. You’re as bad as the bookie. Why don’t you let Gilbert say something?’

Laura laughed a nervous, vulnerable laugh. Gilbert turned from the lamp to face Harold.

‘Who is the bookie?’

‘Laura’s new friend, down at the mill. Mr Modesty.’

‘Oh? Oh, Munnings, you mean?’

Laura smiled bravely and encouragingly.

‘Gilbert’s been helping him settle in, haven’t you?’

‘Not only me,’ Gilbert said. ‘The place was a shambles, it really was, so we all rallied round, the Colonel gave me a day
off … well, half a day.’

‘Jolly … good,’ Harold added slowly, after a pause.

‘He’s a tremendous painter,’ Gilbert said, ‘not that I’m any judge.’

‘Turns out a lot, the bookie, does he?’ Harold asked.

‘Stacks,’ Gilbert nodded approvingly. ‘He’s always out and about, I see him everywhere. In all weathers.’

Harold stirred with distaste but remained looking at his book, and only at his book.

‘Gilbert sees the best in people,’ Laura said, ‘don’t you, Gilbert?’

Though she often added that Gilbert should not try
quite
so hard to be decent, nor try
quite
so hard to make everyone like everyone, because marriages were marriages and life was life, wasn’t it, and some people preferred
Sennen Cove to Lamorna and some preferred Lamorna to Sennen Cove, and what could you do about
that
? She filled Gilbert’s glass to the brim.

‘So tell us what
you
think of Alfred Munnings, Gilbert. We all know what Harold thinks; when he doesn’t call him the bookie he calls him the ostler.
Don’t you, Harold?’

Harold exhaled, just loudly enough for it to rate as more than an unconsciously necessary function, slowly put down his book
on the side table, made a steeple of his fingers and looked into the grate. There was a silence, which Gilbert did not fill.

‘For example,’ Laura said, ‘do you like him?’

‘I don’t really know him yet,’ Gilbert said. ‘I wouldn’t like to say … just yet. Ask me when I know him better.’

Laura whooped and clapped her hands.

‘Marvellous! You are the soul of tact. Isn’t he, Harold?’

‘Have you been invited to his party?’ Gilbert asked. ‘On Friday?’

‘Who hasn’t?’ Harold said gloomily.

Laura stood up.

‘
Everybody
has, the whole village, Joey, Dolly. The Birches. He’s planning to have a party every week, every week, think of that, he’s
so generous, isn’t he? And let’s face it, not everyone would invite Dolly, would they? I mean you wouldn’t, Harold, would
you? … Harold?’

Lieutenant-Colonel Camborne Haweis Paynter, JP, or Curl-and-Painter as the local lads called him, owned most
of the land on the harbour side of the cove, that is west of the little stream which divides the Lamorna valley – all the
land from there right over to Boskenna and a bit beyond. On the other side, the east side of the steep valley, strewn with
huge chunks of overspilt granite, you have the quarry. The quarry side of the valley was owned by Lord St Levan. The footpath
to the east runs round from the cove past Half Tide rock, Carn Du and Kemyel Point, with the sea always in sight, to Mousehole.
Keep going and you reach Newlyn (and the painting school, where Joey Carter-Wood was a gifted, if reluctant pupil) and then
the wide promenade to Penzance.

Gilbert was responsible, then, for a sizeable area of sloping fields dotted with farms and outbuildings, sloping fields full
of flowers and vegetables, and for the rent and upkeep of all the properties. You could say he ‘ran’ the place. If a roof
was damaged in a gale, if the water failed, if there was a crisis, ‘The Captain’ was called. Gilbert liked to feel he was
‘responsible’. ‘What I am not responsible for,’ he said with a smile in The Wink, ‘is the behaviour of the artists.’

‘Why don’t you arrange a place of your own?’ Laura asked Gilbert. ‘You deserve one.’

‘Because I’m happy enough where I am. Thank you. Quite spoilt, as a matter of fact.’

Gilbert had rooms in the hotel: a bedroom – the bed narrow but well sprung – and quite a cosy little sitting-room which, with
the kind help of Mrs Paynter, he was beginning to furnish. For the time being it looked rather spartan, the sort of room a
sapper officer might settle on, with a small carpet, a chair and some curtains, a small writing desk and a small chest of
drawers. There was nothing small, though, about the views from his window.

The wide, wide sea: from the Lizard round to Land’s End.

The hotel itself was something of an enigma. First of all the name needs clearing up. Cliff House, built in 1870, was not
put up as a hotel, which explained why some of the older men in The Wink still referred to it as Cliff House. Then it became
Cliff House Temperance Hotel, then Jory’s Temperance Hotel, or Jory’s Hotel, or simply Jory’s.

The name Jory’s was, however, anything but simple. That name introduced a range of complications because Mr and Mrs Jory ran
rival establishments: Jory’s Hotel (let us settle for that), where Gilbert had his rooms on the first floor, was run on a
tightish rein and with the firmest and kindest of hands by Mrs Jory. Or, as she advertised it, ‘Mrs Jessie Jory, proprietress,
furnished apartments (bathrooms), sea view and south aspect’. Mrs Jory prided herself on providing a splendid breakfast and
supper to which Gilbert could, and frequently did, invite guests (Joey Carter-Wood and Munnings, to name but two).

A hundred yards or so lower down in the village was The Wink. This inn was run on the loosest possible rein by Mr Jory, or
‘Mr Nicholas Jory, beer retailer’. The hotel and the inn were chalk and cheese, control and indulgence, thrift and forgetfulness.
When he was returning on his bicycle from a long day at Boskenna, Gilbert could often tell his mood by sensing towards which
place his wheels were drawn.

Mr and Mrs Jory were not on speaking terms. ‘As long as she do stay up there,’ Jory said with his pendulous bottom lip in
his beer, and with his elbow on the bar, ‘and I do stay down here, it do suit. But if she do come down ’ere, I’ll be off faster
’n a fox and that’s a fact.’

Marriages, marriages, Gilbert thought.

When Jory did venture up the steep slope to the hotel in
his pony and jingle trap – he was often hired to take guests or residents in and out of Penzance for trains and shopping expeditions
– the husband and wife did not so much as look at one another. As Bess, the pony, clip-clopped off Mrs Jory would hiss, teeth
clamped, point her indelibly inked finger at his back and say, ‘And good riddance.’ For his part, once out of sight, Jory
would lift his left buttock and fart. This he could do to order.

Marriages, marriages, Gilbert thought: imagine not loving your wife, imagine not talking to her. ‘May God protect me from
such a union,’ he said in his prayers.

After being thrown out of his temporary lodgings in Newlyn for excesses which his landlady did not wish to discuss and which
he could not even remember, A.J. Munnings took the damp and deserted dwelling, a sort of studio and stable, not a stone’s
throw from the mill. He had tried to find a place in Paul and Mousehole and Trewoofe before coming by chance to Lamorna, and
as soon as he saw the mill nearby and watched the shutter being released so that the wheel could grind, as soon as he heard
there had been a mill of sorts working there since the fourteenth century, he knew he was, in a sense, ‘at home’. Bowered
in trees, near a mill. Here he would stay. Head bowed, he stood in front of the millstone wheel, a huge circle of local granite;
then raised his eyes up at the water, diverted there from the stream at the top of the valley. All this, the drowsy sound
of mill and plash, was in his family’s veins. The steady flow of water and the familiar sound of the cogs convinced Munnings
that here was the hub of the village. Here he could paint! He must have it! And within a week, with Gilbert Evans’s practical
help, it was more or less habitable. Then the parties began. By day Munnings worked outdoors till he dropped, and by night
he roistered. His horses, Grey Tick and Merrilegs, were stabled beneath his studio. When he slept (if he slept) it was upstairs,
on a mattress in his studio, or below in the hay with the horses, while Taffy, his terrier, travelled hopefully (sometimes
fearfully) between his two beds.

During the long hours of roistering his studio was blue with smoke, blue with everything, some of it belching back down the
chimney, which badly needed a good sweeping, but mostly from a variety of pipes and cigarettes. It was crammed tight with
young people (including some of the faces seen by Laura in the lane) and anyone else A.J. had just bumped into. And they all
brought candles, musical instruments, cakes, bottles and bits and pieces to make his cramped place more comfortable – cushions,
for example, went down well.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he shouted at all and sundry, ‘in you come, whoever you are!’

His weekly parties started when the sun went down and only ended, according to the watching sabbatarians, when the sin ended.
Everyone talked. Everyone drank. Most sang. Most talked art. They laughed, danced, swallowed punch, ate sausages and saw who
could wear the most colourful clothes and use the most colourful language – seeing who could, in Laura’s phrase, ‘Be the wildest
of the wild’ and ‘Something tells me,’ Munnings added, ‘it won’t be your husband Harold.’ Usually who-was-the-wildest-of-the-wild
boiled down to a straight contest between A.J. Munnings and Laura Knight, although they were amongst the oldest.

The second Munnings party Gilbert attended, and the one which changed their lives, came at the end of an awful day. From dawn
to dusk it had rained non-stop, as only Cornwall can, and to make matters worse Gilbert’s bicycle had a bad puncture at St
Buryan, so he had to push the
thing two miles in a steady downpour, encouraged only by the occasional lulls and respites. With the sky a regatta of fast
storm clouds, only for those respites to be followed by sustained horizontal sheets of grey rain coming in from the Atlantic
– well, such days left Gilbert looking forward more than ever to a party and the smack of drink.

By the time he turned down past the mill, just before nine, his socks wet, and the mill race a torrent, it was gusting a gale.
So loud, however, was the din within the smoky blue studio that no one noticed the windows rattling, the downpipe gurgling,
the roof groaning and Colonel Paynter’s responsible land agent standing there dripping on the edge of the circle of light.

Gilbert watched.