The Merciless Ladies (13 page)

In the end Connor himself provided the solution. He suggested that we and the Grimshawes should take the
Patience
home ourselves and that he should return at his leisure in November or December.

‘You've both got calls in London, and there's no need to hang around for me. With luck we should get a month of tolerable weather yet. The brothers Grimm are first-rate navigators and you should be home by the first week in October.'

‘All the same, she's your cutter', said Paul. ‘We can wait another fortnight. You may pick up very quickly now.'

Connor shook his head.

‘Summer weather is unreliable enough, God knows; but the chance of trouble much increases when October comes. There are really two choices:
(a)
you leave for home this week in the
Patience
, or
(b)
you book a passage at your convenience and leave
Patience
here.'

‘What then?' I said.

‘Then I'd either sell her on the spot or leave her in one of the harbours in the Canaries until next summer, when I could come out and fetch her.'

Paul looked at me and then back at the sick man.

‘Which would you do, Bill?'

‘I'd rather take the
Patience
home.'

‘So would I', said Paul.

Connor nodded. ‘That's what I hoped. Good luck. And this time you won't have someone trying to navigate the ship and forget the pains in his belly. In the meantime will you ask the Grimshawes to come and see me.'

It was still early when we left the hospital: the sun was gaining in heat every minute, but a pleasant fresh breeze blew and we had ample time to stroll back to our hotel for lunch. The nursing home was east of the town and our hotel west of it, on the cliff overlooking the harbour and the sea, so we had a walk ahead.

‘This place', said Paul, breaking a long silence, ‘ almost makes me regret not bringing a box of crayons. The colours are so rich. See the light there …'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘Didn't I what?'

‘Bring a sketch-book. You know, this holiday is the first time in my life I've seen you without some sort of a pencil in your hand.'

‘I feel I don't want to bother … I've been painting without a break for seven years.'

We strolled along, and I stared absently at a tall man walking in front of us.

‘Where did inclination end and compulsion begin?' I asked.

‘God knows. You can't partition things off in life. At first you're dead keen just to paint. Then you're dead keen to paint really well. Then you're all out to make a name. Then you're all out to maintain it. Then suddenly instead of being all out, you're all in.'

‘Career in a nutshell. But it doesn't end there.'

‘No … one breaks and rests and begins afresh. But this holiday has been such a change … Life's the size you make it, isn't it? I suppose it's at this point that the tussle with fate really begins.'

We had wandered down through the steep, twisting streets of the old town to the jetty and were now about to take the new road leading from the Pontinha, which runs across the Ribeiro Secco to the West Cliff. At that moment the back of the tall man whom we had been following for some time became familiar. There was also a tall girl limping at his side.

I muttered something to Paul and ran up alongside them. It was Sir Clement Lynn and Holly.

V

My grandmother used to say of a hot drink on a winter's night that it ‘ warmed the cockles of your heart'. In a world where overt friendship is so common and the real thing so rare the experience of meeting true friends after a long interval is similar. They were returning at last from the protracted lecture tour and had broken their journey at Madeira in order that Sir Clement could meet a German physicist who had made his home there.

I introduced Paul and we strolled along talking at a good rate. Except that his hands and face were clean, Sir Clement was little altered. In the four years since we had last met he had developed a paunch, which lay strangely under a badly knitted pullover and seemed not to belong to him; one felt that at any moment he might reach up a hand and pull out a scarf or other detachable cause. In manner he had not changed in the least from the day I first met him when I was twelve years old: scrupulously polite, vague, long-jawed, deeply intellectual, and still with some inherent irresponsibility in his dealings with ordinary men. His knighthood was a slight embarrassment to him, like an ill-fitting collar-stud.

But Holly had changed – perhaps more even than the average girl between the ages of fifteen and twenty. For at fifteen she had been mentally precocious but physically undeveloped. I felt like someone who has left England in April and comes back in the middle of June. Not that she was pretty or ever would be, but in the interval summer had come.

We talked about their tour and about our voyage; I told them our troubles; they had heard Leo was engaged to be married; was it true, did I think? As if I were likely to know more than they did. How was Mummy managing without them? Her letters told one nothing except about the dogs. A great idea, coming here in one's own yacht; it was like being a millionaire without the cost.

At their hotel we stopped, and I put in an invitation to dinner that evening before they did. We arranged to meet at seven-thirty.

Paul and I walked on to our hotel in silence.

‘So they're the rest of the Lynns', he said at last. ‘They're in a different league from the brothers, aren't they? Not that Bertie is too bad … But these two – these two are the genuine thing. Like father like daughter, eh?'

‘She's doing pretty well at Oxford', I said. ‘What time she spends there.'

Paul stared at an elderly woman with mascaraed eyelids, dressed in flowing draperies and carrying a pet dog.

‘What was he knighted for?'

‘Services to science. I think it was something to do with the wave theory of matter.'

Paul scowled at the woman to show that she offended his aesthetic sense.

He said: ‘I'm so damned ignorant of everything except a few social graces and how to paint pretty women in a pretty way – sometimes.'

‘You're miserably illogical.'

‘Oh, I suppose so.''

‘You set out to specialize. Everything else must go by the board. And now you're complaining because your education hasn't been more varied. And you set out to be a success. Nothing must stand in your way. You made that clear often enough, in all manner of ways. Well, now you've got there, all I hear is moans of discontent. You began by despising the people concerned with success, and now you've come to despise the state itself.'

He was silent for some time.

He said: ‘The first part of that isn't quite true. I'm not altogether discontented. But in a sense I've come to a dead end; because the Marnsett picture was a flash in the pan. I can break other new ground. But it won't be easy. Or I can go on repeating. I can with the
greatest
ease go on
endlessly
repeating. That's simple. Terrifyingly simple.'

We were near our hotel now and looking down on the shallow curve of the bay. The sea was a brilliant aquamarine dotted here and there with the white of small craft and the yellow and grey of a larger vessel which had just arrived off the island. The land climbed steeply behind us and towards the east it jutted out into the sea, grey-purple and grey-green.

Paul mopped his forehead. ‘And the second part isn't true either. I don't despise success. Why should I? It's given me all I have. I'm independent of fools and rogues. I enjoy comfort and good food and drink. I like having plenty of money and being my own master and mixing with other successful men just as much as I ever did. And I don't despise
them
either. I'd be a bigger fool to do that. Most of them have had to work hard to get where they are and most of them have to work hard to stay there. Most of them have a better right to the title than I have. Most of them have made the best of the brains and intelligence and artistic gifts God gave them. And I like their attitude towards life; they're tolerant and astute and disillusioned and kindly. And they don't care in the slightest whether you were born in Blenheim or Bermondsey or went to Harrow or Borstal. In fact, the second would be an added attraction. The snobs I have to pander to is another matter; but one of the really satisfying things is that I hardly need consider them now.'

He had been talking rapidly but now he stopped.

‘Go on', I said.

He looked at me. ‘Did I tell you I spent the month of July in Paris?'

‘No. I wondered at the silence.'

‘I spent the month just wandering around – looking at pictures, other people's pictures. And visiting studios, other people's studios. What I saw didn't make me any more proud of myself.'

‘You've been there before.'

‘I
lived
there – for a short time. I must have gone about with my eyes closed. I was too
young
, or something. I spent my time whoring, sitting talking with other students at corner cafés, learning a bit of French – and of course painting. Painting out of myself, and being taught now and then, but not
seeing
, not
really
learning as I should have done. Look at it this way: you're a reader, I'm not: did it never happen to you that you opened some of the great writers before you were
ready
– so you didn't take them in, the sentences didn't mean much, so you turned back to
The Magnet
and
The Boy's Friend
?'

‘I know what you mean.'

‘That's how I've been feeling these last two or three months.'

After a bit I said: ‘Perhaps it's what Henri Becker was driving at long ago.'

‘What?'

‘About serving God and Mammon.'

‘Hell, that's too much of a simplification.'

‘I wonder, Paul', I said, ‘how many of those artists you so much admired in Paris were living as comfortably as you are – or if dead were not miserably poor when they were alive.'

We turned in at the gates of the hotel.

‘Oh, I know, I know', he said, his voice suddenly lighter. ‘One gets moments of passing disillusion. No one with imagination escapes them. But don't make the mistake of thinking I'm not going to hold on to what I've got.'

I wondered if these words were addressed to me or to himself by way of reassurance.

‘I shall be getting as self-engrossed as Leo', he added. ‘And as long-winded. It's a habit that must be sharply discouraged. What time did the Lynns say? … D'you think Sir Clement would tell me something of his wave theory over dinner?'

‘Unless you want to miss your dinner I wouldn't ask him.'

VI

Holly arrived in an almost smart dinner frock which made her look more mature than ever. She had somehow become comely without losing those characteristics which I should always associate with her, the lanky youthfulness, the good grey eyes and the expressive mouth. The straggly hair seemed to have a new life and gloss about it, and light horn-rimmed spectacles had replaced the old steel goggles which had never been the right size. There was a warmth about her which the other Lynns lacked. She might not be good-looking, but she was going to be very much better looking than one would have expected five years ago.

‘I'd hardly have recognized Holly', I said to her father. ‘I might have passed her in the street.'

‘I wouldn't have given you the chance', said Holly.

‘Yes', said Sir Clement, heaping unnecessary sugar on his grapefruit. ‘I suppose she has grown.'

‘Daddy measures my change by inches', said Holly gently. ‘It's the sort of phenomenon he can understand.'

‘My dear child, I do appreciate that you were twenty years old the month before last—'

‘By the slide rule.'

‘By the natural sequence of somatic development as the term is generally understood. By the passage and measurement of man-made time.'

‘You can add a thing up different ways', I said. ‘You can put it that a butterfly is so many weeks older than the chrysalis, but that doesn't exhaust the subject.'

‘Or so many younger than the caterpillar', said Holly. ‘Have you ever painted a caterpillar, Mr Stafford?'

Paul looked surprised. ‘ No …'

Holly said: ‘Nobody ever seems to paint insects properly. They're too small to bother about.'

‘What is your special line, Mr Stafford?' Sir Clement asked.

‘Mainly portraits', said Paul, looking pleased someone didn't know.

‘Of course, you saw something of Leo when he was in London, didn't you? I remember his saying you had introduced him to some of your friends. I remember him speaking of the Hon. Mrs Holderness, was it? Or was it Montgomery?'

‘Montgomery', said Paul. He looked at Holly. ‘ I've always fancied that my masterpiece will be a full-length study of an earwig.'

‘Caterpillars are my favourites', said Holly. ‘Those big furry ones with eyebrows.'

‘You mustn't mind my daughter's views on painting', said Sir Clement. ‘I have found her with peculiar notions even on important subjects.'

This was definitely the remark of the evening.

‘Coming here from New Orleans', Holly said, ‘Daddy's cabin was very noisy and he was put off his work by a dance band and other things. We're leaving the day after tomorrow in a banana boat, so that should be quieter. I've told him he should wait until we reach England; there's plenty of time then.'

Sir Clement said: ‘It's really a question of working while things are fresh in one's mind. Notes are never the same. And besides, I am fifty-three this year, which gives me the bare expectation and no certainty of another seventeen years. No certainty at all. Seventeen years, that's, let me see, around a hundred and forty-eight thousand nine hundred and twenty hours. Roughly dividing that into half leaves a general maximum of seventy-four thousand four hundred and sixty hours for work. I hope to progress a considerable way, but there's no guarantee I shall have that length of time and certainly there's no incentive for listening to those semi-negroid discords which dance bands make.'