Summer in February (9 page)

A.J. saluted them at the door before taking his big-stepping horse home very slowly to Lamorna.

‘Call me a sentimental sod, but all in all,’ he said to Grey Tick, stroking his horse’s powerful neck, ‘not too bad a day,
Tick. All in all, eh?’

Before she left her London home for Lamorna, Florence Carter-Wood went into her father’s library, stretched right up on tiptoe
and took down their large, leather-bound Atlas of Great Britain. She opened it out on her knees and sat very upright – it
was a habit of hers to sit very still and very upright, a habit which immediately attracted Gilbert Evans, was noted by Harold
Knight and copied, as the days went by, by Dolly – with the landscape of England beneath her hands. She turned and stroked
each page, sliding her fingers over the western counties.

The West. The western counties felt so far away they might as well have been the Bahamas. Florence had, it is true, already
travelled a good deal, but as far back as she could remember it had always been the same journey: from London to Carlisle
and from Carlisle to London, from town to country house and back, and these journeys to the Cumbrian coast were always taken
at much the same time of the year in much the same company. Until twenty she had led, she now realised, a well-guarded life.

To her, each page of the Atlas now seemed an open road, a possibility if not a temptation. She had money, and with
Papa’s generous allowance where could she not go and what could she not do?

She stroked the map. Her fingers soon found the southwest tip of Cornwall, then traced a line down the map south from Penzance,
along Mount’s Bay, to Newlyn, and then on to Paul and Mousehole, where die road seemed to wind and twist and turn. Mouse-hole?
That sounded a strange place. It made her laugh. As for Lamorna, that did not sound English at all. La-mor-na could easily
be a beach in the Bahamas, which Mousehole could not. But it was in Lamorna, Joey said, that the most wonderful and the most
extraordinary people in the world were living.

‘Where did you say this painting school was, my dear, Mouse-hole or Newlyn?’

‘Newlyn, Mother.’

‘Oh good, that sounds so much better, much more congenial, though I fail to see why you have to travel quite so far to sketch
something.’

‘Why does she have to sketch anything at all?’ her father said, forking a kidney.

This was familiar territory for Florence. Embroidery and quilts her father could understand, that was the right kind of thing
for a woman. But daubing! Facing her father and his kidney, Florence spoke with icy control.

‘Because Mr Stanhope Forbes – oh, we have discussed this
so
often – because Mr Stanhope Forbes teaches in Newlyn and because Mr Wilks who is teaching me here at home cannot teach.’

Mother and daughter listened to Mr Carter-Wood crunch his kidney. This took some time. Mr Carter-Wood ate slowly. What Florence
could not understand was how a man who ate so much and so often could remain so thin. He wiped his mouth and spoke as he slowly
lowered his napkin.

‘Mr Wilks is considered a good enough painting master for most families. Don’t get too many fancy notions, my girl, or you’ll
soon be brought back here.’ He pushed back his chair to curtail the conversation. Even as he did so, even as the maid cleared
the plates, Florence fancied she could smell the longed-for Atlantic. Her face took on a fresh, childlike excitement, she
felt the wind on her cheeks, the excitement you feel when you come round a bend in the road and for the first time on your
journey your eye hits a sunburst on the sea or you lean over a gate and admire the view and talk freely or walk arm in arm
with brilliant and unconventional artists.

So she was not as sad as she might have been when she said goodbye to Papa (kissing his dry cheek at Paddington) and boarded
the Cornish Riviera Express, nor quite as sad as she might have been when she said goodbye to her mother in the drawing-room,
her mother in tears and holding Florence’s hands a little longer than Florence wished them to be held. Certainly Lucy, her
elder cousin who had kindly agreed to accompany her on the journey, thought she might have made rather more of an effort all
round. After all, she was leaving home for the first time.

‘Exactly,’ Florence said, as she settled into her carriage and took out her new sketchbook. And did this other England, did
the West, look as she imagined it would when she sat in the library with the Atlas in front of her? In something of a trance
she sketched these swift intrusions, glancing out of the window, looking up and down from passing landscape to the pad on
her knees, listening to the tiresomely voluble Lucy as she had to do, but the landscape went past all too quickly for her
to form impressions beyond Elizabethan gables, oaks and elms, pillared porticos, slow rivers, warm and trim red-brick towns,
calves at the edge of a pond and horses in a field
… and the further west she went (no, no, she really did not want sandwiches or scones, thank you, but you do, please), the
further west she went the England of oaks and elms and slow, wide rivers gave way to undulating moors, faster streams, plain
villages and windswept stone-walled country.

‘Have you noticed, Lucy, there are fewer people?’

‘Quite a lot got off at Plymouth.’

‘No, silly, fewer people out
there
, I mean, fewer houses, more gorse, haven’t you noticed, more slate.’

‘If you say so,’ Lucy said, spreading the damson jam on to her bread. ‘How long will it be to Penzance?’

It should have been no more than twenty minutes to Penzance but it took them two and a half hours. It was beginning to rain
quite steadily when, for no apparent reason, the express suddenly went into a convulsive shiver, then a violent series of
judders and clanks, pitchforking Florence off her seat. The train grunted and shrieked in spasms, taking a long time to slow
and grind to a halt. For a moment or two everything was very quiet, then there was the sound of running feet and loud shouts.

Dusk was falling and the rain started to come on in full strength. Through the rain men ran back up the line. Three guards
gathered at the side of the track and were later joined by a policeman in a shiny cap. Observing all this, Florence sat very
still, only her eyes moving. As she wiped the window with her handkerchief she watched the racing raindrops compete with the
condensation and with a murky reflection of herself.

Lucy exhaled. Then exhaled again, as if Florence had not heard the first exhalation, and then stomped out of the carriage
in a huff to see if she could find out what on earth was causing this dreadful delay. Florence
took the opportunity of her cousin’s absence to slip her hand into her pocket to read, yet again, the crumpled letter.

‘The human and the animal world!’ Florence smiled to herself as she folded up the longest letter she had ever received from
her loving brother and placed it in the pocket of what she hoped would prove an appropriate coat. She placed it there just
as Lucy came back into the carriage with the news that there had been an accident, but as no one would tell Lucy its exact
nature Florence herself stood up and walked, in her most composed way, through to the back of the train. As she arrived there
she looked out of the open carriage door to see a man’s trunk being placed on a brown leather stretcher. Both his legs and
one of his hands had been cut off.

That delay, with a confusion over the date which Joey later admitted was his own fault, explained why he was talking to Dolly
and Prudence at the studio party and did not meet her at Penzance station, and explained why she arrived at the most annoying
possible moment for Alfred Munnings.

Florence was now sitting in her neighbours’ cottage, at the plain wooden table set by the Knights, while Laura was telling
Florence her version of the story of Alfred and the Fox, in which Alfred was even braver than he was in Joey’s account.

Harold looked at Florence’s profile: Botticelli’s Venus, no more, no less.

Laura rattled on about Alfred Munnings, no more, no less.

Harold had, quite early in the piece, switched off the Munnings story, suspecting many and various embellishments from Laura,
and switched on his forensic stare,
as if he was measuring Florence for a frame, gathering the lines of her features in his clear mind’s eye. It was clear. Florence
was perfect for his purposes, the perfect accompaniment to his art. She was as poised and as pale as Munnings was red-nosed
and foul-mouthed (Florence stayed still, whereas Munnings threw his arms about like a windmill) and as soon as the extremely
tedious fox saga drew to its long-awaited conclusion Harold would ask her how her classes with Stanhope Forbes were progressing.

‘Oh, not as well as I had hoped, I have to say.’

‘But … quite well?’ Harold liked her understatement. It offered a blessed relief from the obligatory superlatives of the fresh-air
brigade.

‘Oh yes,
quite
well.’

‘What is … disappointing? If that is the case?’

‘Joey and his tanks and aquarium! Will you do all you can to ensure he attends the classes with me? Please. It’s a matter
of life and death. Well, it … could be.’

Harold pushed his glasses up a little on his nose.

‘I’m not sure he pays that much attention to me. He’s more likely to listen to Laura.’

‘But you can
try
. He’s here to study art, not the lowest order of animals to be found in a muddy pool.’

‘And I will try of course. But your brother lives very much – how shall I put it? – his own life down here. And I am told
a young man must have his head.’

‘Har-old!’ Laura said, with a warning emphasis.

‘And what kind of subjects do you favour?’ Harold quickly asked.

Florence looked from Harold to Laura to Harold, trying to understand the nature of the warning, then said:

‘At the moment I am simply trying to improve my drawing. That is all, and, for the moment, that is enough.’

She spoke, she invested, each ordinary word with care and precision.

‘That’s practice, that’s all,’ Laura broke into the conversation, ‘you keep at it, Florence, just hammer away at it, page
after page, sketch pad after sketch pad, believe me, I’ve got piles of them on the shelf there, look at mine for yourself
if you like, and before you can say anemone you’ll find—’

‘But
take your time
,’ Harold countered, with quiet emphasis, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose again. ‘Art is not a race, art is
not a matter of who can cover the most paper!’

Laura clapped her hands and stood up and made some tea. She knew only too well that Harold was criticising her as much as
talking to Florence, so she cut some chunks of bread and listened through the open kitchen door. Had Florence Carter-Wood
ever, in her pampered days, seen
chunks
of bread? Laura doubted it. There was, however, no doubting her husband Harold’s interest.

Come to think of it, Laura Knight thought, Florence looked exactly right for one of Harold’s interiors, with the tone and
quality of a quiet sitting-room, with a place prearranged for the picture in the quiet corner of a gallery; she even spoke
in the same finely balanced tones as Harold painted.

Laura carried in the chunks of bread, even chunkier than they need have been, and told Florence to help herself. Florence
did not. As for Harold, he did not even notice Laura’s return into the room. He was staring at Botticelli’s Venus sitting
there opposite him, anticipating his painting, absorbing her in his hands and eyes. In a sad way, Laura found it all rather
funny. He looked like a bird of prey eyeing a field mouse, an old buzzard mesmerically circling a young, unguarded prey …

No, no, stop it, Laura, stop it now.

But the staring was, in all conscience, enough to put the Carter-Wood girl off. Not that she looked at all discomfited by
his scrutiny, quite the reverse. She sat with her hands on her lap (having again refused the bread) and waited for the next
question. It was inevitable. After some preliminary clearing of Harold’s throat, followed by a very thorough cleaning of his
spectacles with a large blue handkerchief, it duly came.

‘I would like to ask you a favour, Florence, if I may …’

‘Of course.’

‘It is quite a substantial favour. I would like to paint you … if I may.’

‘Paint me?’

‘If you have the time, that is. But then you are only next door, which is a blessing.’

He closed his eyes and waited for the confirmation.

‘That might be difficult, I’m afraid. At the moment.’

Harold opened his eyes.

‘Oh, I quite understand, you are over at your class in Newlyn three days a week, and your work must come first. Of course,
of course. As you said, that is why you have joined us here.’