The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "I'll have to get Mr Pauwels in," said Paul, "our historical framemaker. The right panel has obviously been cleaned quite recently, only last week by the look of it, whereas the dentist's part is relatively filthy and more damaged than I realised when I saw it before. Of course the light was very bad . . . " He appeared both thrilled and forlorn about the work, and inspected it with extraordinary technical thoroughness. I wondered what it was he read in it inch by inch.

  "When do you think it was painted?" I asked.

  He stood up and steadied himself with a hand on my shoulder, as though momentarily dizzy. "That's a very good question." We contemplated the slightly pathetic reunion of the three canvases, which now seemed to me like long-separated friends who no longer have much to say to each other. "And one that you should be able to start answering by now," he said, giving me a tutorly shake.

  "I'm afraid I've only been looking for spelling mistakes," I said.

  "Well, there's kind of spelling mistake in this." I scanned the pictures again, knowing I wouldn't find it, and gave a shrug.

  "I suppose the seascape is quite different stylistically."

  "It is indeed. One can be pretty sure that it was painted at least ten years after the other panels, possibly as late as 1932. His sight was deteriorating steadily then, and he only painted from memory. You can see how broad the handling is, and the composition is of the simplest. I mean, I think it's a very beautiful picture, and a very moving one—his later works sometimes have that kind of force."

  "Helene was telling me about the white pictures," I said, not without a certain nervousness. I saw his twinge of weary annoyance.

  "Yes, I'm afraid that's all a lot of nonsense," he said, as though determined to be reasonable. "I refuse to show them as finished works—they're only prepared canvases in many cases. Helene, bless her, was very taken in by a young art-historian from Paris who worked here for a while and started giving them titles like 'Dans la Neige'. The fact is, Orst couldn't see. As you must have realised he was riddled with syphilis, he tried bravely to keep on painting, almost as a kind of optical experiment, while the fog closed in. If they do have any interest then it's purely medical."

  "I see. I'd no idea—that he had syphilis."

  "He could still paint, with vision, as it were, up until about '33. The other two panels can be dated much earlier, as they're both copied from known photographs. As for the syphilis, yes, of course."

  "I suppose I should have worked it out," I said uncertainly. "I don't think you mention it in the guide, do you?"

  "I've never laboured the point. I mean, it's known, obviously. I'm afraid I'm of the school that rather disapproves of publicising artists' private lives," he said, with an unhappy stiffness that was quite at odds with his normal shy cleverness.

  "I'm not sure."

  "You forget that I knew him; and—I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm lecturing you. It's simply a matter I have strong views on."

  I spread my hands to deny any wish to contradict him; though it was surprising to learn that the monkish Orst, the exquisite recluse, had been the victim of this quaint, almost romantic, sexual disease. I thought Paul could tell from my expression that I was going to want to know more.

  "It's ironic of course", he went on, "that he could never see very well anyway—at least from about Marcel's age onwards."

  "Really. Well, I've noticed the thickness of his glasses. But his work is usually so incredibly fine."

  "Oh, close up he was all right, his sight was superhuman, but anything more than a few feet away gave him increasing trouble. He was just very myopic, as so many artists of all kinds are." Paul squinted sympathetically at the pictures against the wall, and I felt as if my own short sight had been flatteringly vindicated and explained. "I remember he said to me when he was completely blind how strange it was that into his fifties he had had an eye like a microscope."

  "So what about the portraits, and the landscapes even?"

  "Oh, they were all done from photographs. Of course he gave up portraiture after about 1900 anyway. The later landscapes, all the Givrecourt pictures, were simply based on earlier pictures, with brilliantly imagined or remembered changes of light. They used to create the impression, in the galleries, that he went there year after year, but actually, no. Not after the turn of the century and all that change in his own life. Well, you can see he didn't need to. And he couldn't. The old house there was sold to finance the Villa Hermes."

  "It's strange, I was just reading his piece about Givrecourt this morning, and thinking about what lay ahead for him." I was never quite sure if Paul grasped the full extent of my innocence about his man. "So did he not travel at all?"

  "Hardly at all. He still went occasionally to London. Once or twice to northern Germany and Jutland. There was a brief trip to Italy, but he didn't like the abruptness of the southern sunsets, and never went back there. In general he followed Rembrandt's advice, that artists shouldn't travel. What is rather revealing—I can't remember if it's in what you were reading, but he tells how as a boy at Givrecourt he was set to study and copy his grandfather's collection of English watercolours, and how he was painting Suffolk scenes and the Lake District indoors before he was allowed to go and paint the forest just outside."

  "I used to think how odd it was that he photographed Jane so much, but perhaps it wasn't after all, if he needed the photos to paint from." It seemed an explanation of something I knew I had never liked about him, the work prolific but not abundant, the passion chilled and codified, almost menacing.

  "I often ponder it," said Paul, and drifted across the room as if lured by another image of her there with an orange lily beside her, and an amulet in her open palm. I was very touched, even so, by the way his subject absorbed him, and made him seem both formidable and childlike, as if each judgement were somehow referred back to their long-ago meetings and whatever had communicated itself then. "It seems to me one of the deep coincidences of art," he said, "that he should have amassed all that material with no awareness of how fate would require him to use it."

  "I was wondering if the photographs still exist."

  "Oh yes—well, a large number of them. His sister kept everything, religiously. She wasn't a scholar, by any means, but she did have a high sense of what posterity would demand of her, she wasn't like those famous obstructing widows who make scholars' lives a misery. She passed everything on to the Museum—even things that must have shocked or disturbed her."

  I noted this impassively and asked another question: "But you say the seascape wouldn't be based on a photograph or earlier picture?"

  Paul paced back. "As it happens, there are much earlier sketches for it. And it is also the subject of one of his blackest lithographs. But the forms are so simple it hardly required any model. With the woman, we have a photograph of 1899 as the terminus post quern; with the city picture we have a photograph—in an English volume on Historic Flanders published in 1911, on which it is modelled directly. There are complications, which I won't go into at the moment. For the seascape I offer a date on strong stylistic grounds—it comes from a different phase of his career, though I'm sure it won't have escaped you that it is in fact the emotional fulcrum of the whole work."

  "There's a sort of movement outwards," I hazarded. "From the interior, to the city, to the open sea. It's like a kind of. . . spiritual journey?"

  Paul didn't look especially impressed with this. "I'm not sure that's quite how it works," he said.

  Cherif was lying on the bed, smoking a joint and blowing the smoke over his nodding cock. The rackety little blow-heater gusted the air round and round in a stuffy indoor anticyclone.

  "This is all very North African, dear," I said; "but I don't actually approve of smoking in the bedroom." I was banging about, clearing the place up, powered by a few dull resentments. "Lovely in a brothel in Tangier, I'm sure, but here . . ."

  "Don't you want some?" he said.

  I had started to sort a ruck of clothes into piles before
a visit to the launderette, Cherif’s thick socks and nylon underpants and cheesecloth shirts, Luc's bits and pieces that it was a shame in a way to wash, my coloured shirts with fraying collars. I went over and took a quick crackling drag. It gave me the usual giddiness and distant aphrodisiac buzz—I'd never really seen the point. The hot air from the blower went wolfing up the back of my legs, I thought my trousers might get scorched; and he was warm too when I bent down to him and kissed him as I let out the smoke. He was a wonderful kisser and left me each morning with my lips tender and glowing, as if they'd been lipglossed. And now there was the moustache and its softly scratchy exercises.

  He pushed his hand through my hair. "I love you," he said, quietly sing-song, a routine reminder.

  "Mmm."

  "Don't go out now."

  "I've got to, I'm afraid. Actually, I think my trousers have caught fire."

  He lifted my glasses off, as if to make it impossible for me to leave, and put them on himself, saying now he would have "Edward's view of the world". I left him wincing and recoiling at the steep-down sharpness of things, and stepped into the other room, hesitant, with an outstretched hand, not noticing what I was doing. I opened the cupboard to get my leather jacket; it hung there obscurely beside Cherif’s vulgar coat, which still gave off the expensive new smell of opera cloakrooms. My life seemed to be one of understandings based on sex and misunderstandings based on love.

  Out in the street, shouldering my bulky hold-all, unshaven, whistling that trite song that was played over and over in the Cassette, the song the man had whistled on my neck the day I arrived, "See Me Tonight"—"seamy tonight" I thought each time—I came round a corner and saw Paul leaving an old house across the way. Again, the fleeting impulse to go on as if I hadn't seen him: I was too scruffy, too seamy, really. "I say," he called out.

  "Good morning, Paul."

  "You look as if you're eloping."

  "Only as far as the washerama, I'm afraid."

  "I've just been to see Pauwels about the frame. He's got to get the right gilt to match. I've given him the photograph to go on for the design."

  "Oh good." It was almost as if my approval were being sought.

  "Where is the laundry thing by the way?"

  I gestured generally towards the area of the shopping streets.

  "Isn't it rather a bore?"

  "It's not especially fascinating." Though there had been some nice working lads there last time, folding up old-fashioned winter drawers.

  "If you don't mind the walk, you could do it at our house. Lilli's always got the machine going."

  "It's sweet of you. But there's such a lot," I said, stooping and shrugging under the burden. "It's not all mine," I warned candidly.

  "And there's something I want to show you too," he said.

  We walked on in silence for a while, adjusting to being outdoors together for the first time. I felt more observant, filled with a slightly precious regard for my surroundings, as though Paul owned the place and were graciously making it available.

  "I was quite wrong the other day," he said, clearly himself unmindful of the splendour of the main square. "I'm sorry. I could see you thinking something wasn't right."

  "Was I? I'm sure there's no need to apologise."

  "There is because I was being inconsistent. You asked me about the white pictures and I got snappy about sex and said that artists' private lives didn't matter or should be kept secret and then I started testing you with questions which are actually all to do with the artist's private life."

  "I think I thought," I said carefully, "that you felt a special respect for this artist, because of having known him."

  "Well, that's perfectly true," he said, "though not exactly the point." He looked at me shrewdly. "I'm quite a reluctant curator, you know"—almost with the implication I had somewhere claimed the opposite. "I certainly never planned to end up back here, where I'd begun. As I think I told you, my original field of interest was the seventeenth century; I spent a year at the Courtauld in London, with your famous Sir Anthony Blunt! Then I came back and taught in Amsterdam, and so on and so forth, I won't bore you." He was nervous these past few days, and I often found him, despite all my sympathetic politeness, my genuine delight in being with him, at least a step ahead of me, or to the side. I caught his arm to stop him as the tram came silently across our path.

  "I'm not at all clear how the Museum came about," I admitted; "I ought to be by now."

  "Well, that is perhaps where the problem lies, the problem of my talking nonsense. The point is if you have been spending years with Van Eyck and so on, and then with Rembrandt and even Rubens, and you have your own passion for Delacroix, or Manet, or Picasso, then Edgard Orst does not seem after all to be an artist of, shall we say, world standing. Then his sister is dying and she asks me to help her set up a trust, to make a permanent museum of his works; she says it was his wish and she thinks I would be the right person to run this museum, which is to be in the family house—where she, incidentally, continued to live, unmarried, to the end. That, very briefly, is the story of how this place pulled me back. And also perhaps explains a little of why I felt the need to protect him. Now if he were a Delacroix I don't suppose I'd worry."

  It couldn't be the whole story. I said, "Nowadays people are more interested if they know, say, that an artist had syphilis."

  "And even more so, don't you think, if that artist had the image of being austerely celibate? For years the pious people here saw him as a model of devotion, the scandal of his affair with Jane was completely forgotten, they knew nothing about it, they thought of him as a kind of hermit, like St Anthony or something. And like St Anthony he had his temptations."

  In the kitchen Lilli (could I call her that?) was chopping vegetables at the table, whilst Marcel sat opposite, picking bits and being indulgently ticked off. I thought how innocent he was and how Lilli and he carried on like a parody of a mother and child. I wondered what form his passion for Sibylle took, what images enshrined it in his mind. He gave me a friendly greeting, as though I wasn't his teacher any more—an uncle, perhaps. He'd got used to having me around; it showed in his work, which was lazier but better. And as for me, I was charmed to be in their warm kitchen, stuffing my washing hurriedly into their capable machine, accepting an offer of coffee, all ready to be absorbed into these simple Saturday rhythms.

  "Will you be working on the picture?" Lilli asked.

  I hadn't planned to do anything of the kind—but if Paul wanted me to . . . It would be a few more hours away from Cherif.

  "I'm going to take Edward for a walk," he said. "There are some things I want to show him, my dear Lilli." And she smiled warily.

  We followed the curve of the streets at the town's edge. Paul had put on a dark hat, which gave him an adventurous look, almost a kind of glamour, with his mild pale dome eclipsed, and a subtle air of self-mockery too. I realised he was excited. "I don't have your splendid raven locks," he said. I strode alongside in the mood of suppressed annoyance that precedes being given a surprise.

  "That's the old Altidore house, by the way," he said, as we passed a long building with an arched entrance and tall gables of cut brick. It had the plaque of the regional water-board beside the door, and office lighting glowed inside the warped old windows; but high up there were gothic As in the brickwork. I tried not to show how immoderately interested in it I was.

  "When did they sell it?" It was a sudden troubling possibility that Luc had spent his early childhood there. But in fact his gambling grandfather had made the move to Long Street before the war. The Germans had used the house as a local headquarters, Paul said, and the fifteenth-century woodwork had been wantonly damaged before their departure. It was the first time I had heard him refer to the Occupation that must have hatched his own adolescence so darkly.

  A nice crew-cut soldier with the bulk of a body-builder came slowly striding towards us—as often happened in these empty streets I saw him some way off: there was time for
interest and self-consciousness to quicken or be mastered as you approached each other, strangers crossed with a heightened sense of promise. He was wearing camouflage gear over a roll-necked jersey, the dappled trousers tucked into socks and boots—he looked fit, supple and compact. Charmingly he wore tortoise-shell glasses.

  Paul was talking about something and I found myself laughing exaggeratedly so as to make an impression of happy indifference on the young man; at the same time the laugh was a mask behind which I looked at him all the more keenly. I wasn't listening to what Paul was saying and didn't know if he had registered my lapse of attention: he tended to busy on, caught up in the oblique runs of his own thoughts. But he looked across with a moment's surprise as the man drew level with a questioning smile and I let out a bold little "Hi!" My heart sped up for a while, I even fell a pace or two behind and glanced back at him moving away. It wasn't often you saw a soldier by himself. He was a natural buttocky type, like the young Dawn, though what cut into me was the glint of intelligence, the hint of witty sous-entendu his glasses lent his square, inexperienced face. And maybe we did make an enigmatic couple, me stubbly and leather-jacketed and fucked-looking, Paul, in his oddly vented paletot and broad-brimmed trilby, seeming perhaps a little fruity and mysterious, like one of those flamboyant but watchful dons who recruit discreetly for the intelligence services. When I caught him up again he stared at me for a second, and I thought his large pale eyes had never been more subtly comprehending. I felt he must know about Luc and everything, but simply, kindly held back from touching on a situation which he could only see as futile and perhaps improper. He wasn't a drunk or a gossip. I knew he cared about me. He must have read my smothered hints, my trembling unconcern at every mention of Luc and his ancient family. I looked away into the arched stillness under a bridge that the road rose and swung to cross. Almost a circle, arch and reflection crossed by the water's wintry line. I was working with nothing, I had nothing on Luc, nothing of him that mattered, nothing from him. It came over me with a certain desolate formal perfection and for the first time.