‘Are you a modern painter?’
I replied cautiously that my art was purely abstract.
‘You mean that if you paint a cow, it doesn’t look like a cow but the sort of thoughts one might have about a cow?’
It seemed safe to agree to this.
‘I hoped you would,’ he said. ‘Of course one is often wrong to judge by appearances, but I somehow felt you belonged to the avant-garde.’
He was a bit out of date, but I was not going to tell him so. The real avant-garde—to go by the few shows I had time to see in London—dressed like stockbrokers.
‘And can I guess what your pictures represent?’ he asked. ‘Or do you have to explain them in words?’
‘I don’t have to,’ I answered, ‘but I find it helps if I do.’
‘I wish you would tell that to my sister. She paints, too. But she won’t explain. She says it doesn’t matter. Oh, you’ll have a lot in common,’ he added. ‘She’s very lonely down here.’
His glance begged me to be polite to her. He need not have bothered. I had every intention of keeping the conversation firmly fixed on her own paintings.
His farm turned out to be a pleasant, rectangular Regency house, which looked as if it had once been the vicarage. Separated from the house by a semi-circular gravel drive was a formal lawn surrounded by flower-beds, in which his sister was bedding out geraniums. It seemed a very harmless pursuit for so advanced an intellectual.
‘I’ve brought Michael Bassoon back with me,’ my host announced—and added more feebly when it was clear the name meant nothing to her:
‘He paints.’
Veronica put him in his place, answering, ‘Oh, yes?’ with a casually offensive lift of the voice which implied that her brother might be easily impressed by sideboards and a folding easel, but that, for her, artists worthy of serious consideration were few indeed. However, she shook hands with me cordially enough, and waved away the trivialities of gardening.
She was fond of gestures which were rather larger than life. No doubt they had grown upon her in the cut and thrust of youthful argument. She was, I suppose, about forty, with an arrogantly classical face which must have tended, when she was a girl, to limit her love affairs to those prescribed by the duty of self-expression; but at her present age it was possible to feel sorry for her, and to note that her profile was magnificent.
When I had had a quick bath—or as quick as could be considering the time spent scrubbing the dirt from the bathtub after removing it from my person—I found drinks laid out in the living-room. Robert Donolow’s hospitality was excessive from the start; when his sister appeared he had already ensured that my mood should be genial. Severity was still her keynote. Veronica was all black silk—a vaguely Chinese effect—from neck to ankles. The distance between them, though agreeable, was far too long.
As I was now shining with soap and gin, she decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.
‘Michael Bassoon,’ she murmured. ‘Now, of course I’ve heard the name, but I don’t quite——’
‘One has to be dead,’ I told her, ‘before the dealers will publicize one’s name.’
She liked that, so I felt on safe ground. The trouble was that I could not be sure how London painters talked. I had to back my knowledge of Ecuadorians. Apparently there was no noticeable difference.
‘And what’s in a name?’ I went on. ‘That lovely thing, now’—I pointed to one of the remarkable splodges of colour on the walls—‘I don’t know who did it, and what does it matter? It exists in itself.’
‘What would you call it,’ she asked suspiciously.
I carried my gin across the room, and looked over it at the picture.
‘The Composer,’ I said.
After all, Latin America is rotten with painters as good as Veronica and I knew what to look for. There was an ink-potty splash of blue in the left foreground and a thing which was certainly an eye with another thing which was probably a finger. The blue exploded north-east into an effective fountain of red and yellow pyrotechnics.
Veronica looked at me with respect, and a refreshing suggestion of humility.
‘The Analyst,’ she said. ‘I painted it.’
It seemed to me that there was little in common between a Composer and an Analyst, but evidently there was enough for me to relax. So long as I was not expected to discuss technique, I could carry on as an imposing authority. I kissed her hand. Robert Donolow beamed. We had some more gin.
Dinner was simple—cold beef in quantity and an excellent local cheese. Veronica, who was now addressing me shortly as Bassoon, took over the conversation and ignored Robert. He didn’t mind a bit, and kept filling our glasses with a youngish but insidious Burgundy. He was a delightfully unselfish brother, entirely content so long as Veronica could spread her wings.
When she had left us alone with another bottle—for she held by convention to that extent—I complimented him on his care of her.
‘I say, old boy, can she really paint?’ he asked.
He was not in practice and his speech was getting thick. Evidently he seldom treated guests as he was treating me. But I was no longer suspicious of his motives.
‘Just as well as I can,’ I replied.
‘Very fond of her,’ he said, ‘but farm not the right place for her. Can’t afford to give her an allowance, you see. So got to put her up and put up with her, put, put. Am I talking too much?’
I assured him that he wasn’t.
‘Shu-shuperfluous female,’ he went on. ‘Poor Veronica. Takes it out of me a bit. I’ve got to see to the cows. You go and talk painting.’
He grabbed a vast pair of Wellingtons from a corner and tripped over himself into the night.
Veronica was in the living-room, smoking far too many cigarettes. She supplied me with coffee and brandy, and begged to see a Bassoon—a real Bassoon with which I myself was pleased. It was no good showing her the studies of ecclesiastical architecture done by my predecessor between collecting-boxes, and I flatly refused to be responsible for his other work; but fortunately I had one of my own. The amount of alcohol which her brother had poured into Veronica had, I hoped, overloaded the centres of higher criticism. In any case I felt confident—for my mood was expansive—that the work was up to our common standard of originality.
I had painted it in oils while sheltering from the rain in a barn. What I was icily trying to do was to express a remembered colour: that of an Indian-dyed magenta skirt which my mestiza nurse used to wear on holidays. I captured it—at any rate towards the outside of the patch—and set it in a lot of emerald green straight out of the tube. I carried my unique painting around in a frame with a piece of cardboard across, because it would not dry. I had not realized that if you intend to keep walking without any fixed base, you must use watercolours or draw.
Frame and all, it was only intended to divert the eyes of policemen from my face. I propped it up on the mantelpiece for Veronica’s approval. My magenta patch looked rather like a horse, so I christened the picture Ploughland. She stood back and gazed devotedly. I thought she would—especially after I had explained that I had tried to paint a childhood memory. The field—that was me. My nurse—that was the horse. And the field was green because it had been ploughed the year before.
She swept over the coffee tray with a magnificent gesture, and ignored the damage with a still finer one.
‘Bassoon,’ she exclaimed, ‘I would give anything to be able to afford that! It is the most exquisite, uninhibited infantilism I ever saw.’
‘It’s yours for a fiver,’ I said.
‘You can’t!’ she cried. ‘You can’t let it go for that!’
She was serious. I tried to give it to her. I made every possible disclaimer, short of shoving it into her arms and covering her with magenta and green. To my horror she extracted five pounds from her bag and forced th
em on me, protesting that it was robbery and that she should be ashamed of herself. She almost persuaded me that I was an unconscious genius. I can only hope that she was right. Certainly it would have been quite beyond an expert painter to produce such uninhibited infantilism.
Little sister’s face was gay with enthusiasm and worship when Robert Donolow returned sleepily from the cows. He never said—didn’t even imply—what he must have thought of her purchase. I wonder what made him give up diplomacy for farming. He looked as if he were about to give us or art in general his blessing, refrained, and staggered off to bed.
We followed shortly afterwards, Veronica talking incessantly of plans for my future. There was no opportunity for me to open my mouth. I could well imagine that, as Donolow said, she took it out of him a bit. And I could not even get away at my bedroom door, for he had placed me opposite her at the end of an interminable passage.
Having kissed her hand when it was not bedtime, I couldn’t very well avoid doing it again when it was. I hardly lingered over it more than courtesy demanded, but the delay gave Veronica an occasion for dramatics. What gesture she meant to make I do not know. It started off as Candida patronizing her poet; it became regretful—though somewhat alarmed—dismissal. And then she burst into tears. It was most awkward. All her severity had been dispelled by art and Burgundy, and there remained nothing but the classic profile. What could I do? I took the line of least resistance.
In the morning I was tormented by my Latin conscience. It is entirely different from the English conscience. I have both; so I know. A pure Englishman, finding himself in my position through little or no fault of his own, would have bothered about Veronica as Veronica. That was as nothing compared to my remorse at having seduced, if one may call it so (and my Latinity did call it so), my host’s unmarried sister. It was a breach of hospitality of which I should never have suspected myself capable.
Veronica, very wisely, had said her farewells and did not appear at breakfast. I was left to face her brother’s eyes as best I could. They were still honest and untroubled. He helped me to kidneys and bacon, while I congratulated him on the excellence of his liquor which had left us with only the merest trace of headache. He discussed the morning’s news and offered me three different sorts of marmalade. I could only think of my appetite with shame.
Did I want a lift anywhere? No, I did not. I should walk gradually westwards, I told him, into Somerset. He saw me to the door, still with his fatherly expression, helped me on with my pack, lent me a map and said good-bye. And only then, as he relinquished my hand, did he say:
‘Be a good fellow, and write to her from time to time, will you?’
The perfect manners of him! The gentle depths of immoral, iniquitous hypocrisy! The basic English desire for peace in a comfortable home! I understand them, even admire them. But I cannot conceive why he should have been so sure that I was a person who, even after the deliberate undermining of his principles and that carefully arranged contiguity of bedrooms, would have permitted himself so to outrage all proprieties.
I wandered across Somerset in the character of Michael Bassoon. As I looked poor and my approach was cordial, I managed to get a few odd jobs. I spent a couple of days hoeing turnips, and the best part of a week replacing a stableman on holiday; but my appearance was so unconventional that no employer thought of offering me a permanency. In fact, Michael Bassoon was becoming a bore. Economically he was a mere parasite. He could not hope to exploit his genius for abstract art in the country, and he was incapable—though warmly encouraged—of painting an inn sign in return for drink and lodging. There was nothing to be said for him except that he was unhesitatingly accepted for what he wasn’t.
That was important, for the newspapers, after forgetting Howard-Wolferstan among the excitements of rape, murder and a millionaire who, cautiously avoiding both, had been divorced for the eleventh time, decided on a noble outburst of British indignation.
WHAT ARE MI5 ABOUT? Even I could have told the patronizing columnist what they were about—checking up on my past and leaving to the police the routine job of finding me. WHAT DOES THE FOREIGN OFFICE KNOW? Well, they bought that. It was extraordinarily silly of them to pretend that they knew anything. Then came the LIFE OF HOWARD-WOLFERSTAN on Sunday—a romantic bit of fiction which the public were exhorted not to miss. I had been a bullfighter. I had lived by my bow and arrows among the Indians up the Marañon. My main source of income had been the export of dried heads to Russia from secret airfields in the jungle. I could spot that the correspondent in Ecuador had been pulling his editor’s leg, and I was homesick for the party at which these joyous adventures had been concocted for me.
My English career was fairly accurate. It had been so simple. School. Oxford. Cricket. And two years in London as what they called a ‘clubman’. But then came the inevitable accusation. During the war, with Christopher Conrad Emmassin, I had been successful in Penetrating the Secrets of British Intelligence.
Hell! Chris and I were much too busy trying to preserve our own secrets. When he turned up in Russia, he could, I suppose, have given them some information about political security—such as it was—in the Andean Republics; but for his new employers that would be the least of his assets. All they got out of poor Chris’s desertion was prestige—and a thoroughly overworked and unbalanced brain which never had a chance to recover its quality.
All this nonsense was accompanied by the same old photograph, touched up with different lights to give it a bit of novelty, and some poorish snaps sent over from Ecuador. One showed me in wild country and wilder dress, but did capture my normal expression. I dared not abandon my disguise, slight though it was, and if I had to keep it, bald head and all, then there was no better man to back it up than Bassoon.
Meanwhile I had obeyed Robert Donolow’s modest and touching request—it was the least I could do—and written a discreet letter to Veronica into which, I trust, she could read as much affection as she required. She replied to me at the Post Office, Yeovil, in an overmanly style, ignoring the ephemeral accidents of life and enclosing a cutting from some art monthly which she had covered with indignant exclamation marks. She said that her brother had had a casual visit from a picture-dealer named Finster who claimed to know me well and wanted to get in touch with me. As they did not then know my address, they could only tell him I was somewhere in Somerset.
This was alarming. My first impression was that the enquiry must come from the police, and I cursed my folly in playing cricket and allowing a possible identification by my individual style of off-break. On second thoughts, however, I saw that this Finster had nothing to do with the law. If police wanted to talk to Bassoon, they had only to alert local stations and Bassoon would be picked up in ten minutes. Nor could anyone have been put on my trail through cricket, since the captain of the village eleven had claimed to know Howard-Wolferstan personally. Therefore I was not he.
No, the chances were that Cecil Reyvers had reported his adventure to higher authority. He knew that I was in the west country; he knew that I intended to paint, either for fun or for cover. The immediate impulse of Reyvers’ committee or cell would be to give information to the police. But that they dared not do. They had two very awkward hurdles to get over: that Reyvers had, however unwillingly, helped a spy to escape, and that I might be taking instructions from Olympian heights far above their ken. The Olympian heights themselves would be doubtful. They had to run me to earth and find out.
The more I thought of this explanation, the more likely it seemed. I was still a member of the party—which would startle them as much as it did me—and I had been caught prowling around an atomic monastery in the dead of night. What they would want to know very badly was from whom I had my instructions. It would never occur to them that I hadn’t any. It was inconceivable that a communist should act without instructions. I began to realize that, so far as the party was concerned, I was in a very strong position indeed
.
But the risks were unlimited. Rather than meet this Mr Finster, it was wiser to destroy Michael Bassoon—to drown him or let him disappear on a railway journey. I could make him into a filthy old-fashioned tramp with a week’s beard. That, however, probably meant that I should be caught in an unfamiliar world of welfare workers, labour exchanges and police, all so anxious to reform me that one of them, sooner or later, would hit on my identity.
As I could think of no safe or reasonable alternative to Bassoon, I decided to play out the comedy with Finster. It might be a risky gamble, but no worse than standing my trial for High Treason. And at least any enjoyment there was would be mine, whereas if I were compelled to listen to learned counsel trying to persuade himself and a jury that I was innocent, all the enjoyment would be his. The more I considered the comrades, the more I liked them. They might be only too glad to smuggle me on board a ship, and if I did not care for its destination—and I probably shouldn’t—a port had far wider possibilities than the fields of Somerset and that intolerable man, Bassoon.
After reading Veronica’s letter, I strolled out of Yeovil into the pleasant meadowland to the north of the town, giving plenty of time to any interested persons who wanted to catch up with me. My movements since leaving the Donolows had never been in the least suspicious or concealed, so I reckoned that I ought to have been spotted in Yeovil. But nobody followed me on foot or bicycle. Nobody examined me from a car.
Evidently Comrade Finster, picture-dealer, had managed to lose the scent. Perhaps he was plain inefficient, or more familiar with industrial districts than the west of England. And I suppose I was not easy to find without asking too many questions, which had to be avoided.
So I returned to Yeovil, stopped at a shop that sold artists’ colours, introduced myself as Michael Bassoon and bought a tube of white. I chattered away for half an hour as if I owned the place, and left the proprietor in no doubt at all that I was on my way by Ilchester to Glastonbury, and intended to paint the countryside as it had never been painted before.
Fellow Passenger Page 7
