Summer in February

by Jonathan Smith

  Half armed though he was, that question hit Gilbert like a bullet, and for one who had been hit by a bullet this was no mere figure of speech. He almost staggered. David was such a percipient boy. Perhaps those months when he was so ill last year, those worrying months, had given him – as illnesses often do – special insights into adult devices.

  Gilbert took a pace or two towards the painting, glad the light was now fading so quickly that David could not see his face. At various times of day the painting looked so different, depending on the light, and now it took on its most sombre tones.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘she was a very great friend.’

  He could feel David’s eyes now on him. Then the boy quickly got to his feet, pulled his long socks up to his knees, turned the tops down, and said:

  ‘Did you know there are adders in the vegetable garden?’

  ‘Yes – yes, I did.’

  ‘I’m meeting the gang at the cove.’

  ‘All right, old chap.’

  ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘You won’t be late, will you, there’s a good fellow. Remember, you’re off to school tomorrow.’

  And David shot out of the room.

  A bit restless, Gilbert pottered around the house and then pottered around the garden. When Joan got back from her walk he told her a bit, in a roundabout way, about the Academy speeches, but of course the whole business with A.J. was years and years before they met, many years before Joan came to Lamorna, and given all that had happened he felt he couldn’t very well go into the details with his wife. Nor did he mention to her the conversation with David. That was a private affair, too, and Gilbert rather doubted either of them would ever allude to it again.

  As was usual, Joan went to bed before Gilbert. He sat up for a while and read The Field, a bit dreamy in his chair, slowly turning the pages, before he was distracted by a bumblebee which had worked itself into something of a state, and once he’d released him out into the night air and he was up on his pins Gilbert thought he might as well go upstairs himself.

  But he knew, even before he started to climb the staircase, that he wouldn’t sleep. He knew it long before he lowered his head on to the pillow.

  What are the best games to play, Gilbert wondered, while trying to switch off an over-active mind, when thoughts speed up and down like restless swallows over a stream? He ran through the little jobs that needed doing in the greenhouse, the seeds that needed sowing in the little meadow, the miles per gallon the Armstrong Siddeley managed, and if these mundane reflections failed he recalled the home matches Wales played in their great days, The Golden Age, before the Great War: he saw some wonderful games, once travelling back on the overnight train from Penzance, changing at Bristol. That was 1911. Or was it 1972? Whichever, Wales beat Ireland 16-0. The Arms Park! The gates were closed over an hour before the kick off. But the crowds burst through and then scaled the walls. There were deaths and terrible injuries, and Gilbert saw all the bodies laid out, so that didn’t work, that didn’t help his mind settle.

  Nothing worked. He couldn’t sleep. So he tried trying to remember the earliest they had ever picked daffodils at Boskenna, picturing daffodils with double centres, trying to remember the names of all the boys in his house at Rugby, the names of the men in his regiment, but that jumped sideways to those friends he lost in the Boer War – and that didn’t help.

  Damn you, Munnings!

  Damn you, A.J.! A.J., as was his wont, had stirred him up again. A.J., Alfred, Sir Alfred Munnings, damned Munnings, everywhere he went he stirred people up. Could nothing ever be left alone? Couldn’t even the oldest wounds be allowed to heal?

  Gilbert leant up on his elbow and slipped out of bed as quietly as he could, careful not to disturb Joan. He went into his dressing-room. There’s nothing worse than unnecessarily waking up others, dreadfully selfish, such a precious thing, sleep, especially as we get older, and, feeling older, he pulled on his big cardigan. It was late April and still a touch chilly at nights. Mind you, late April often saw Lamorna at its very best – it’s when Gilbert pulls his first potatoes, the summer birds return, the dry heath on the cliffs begins to show a little pink and

  ‘Are you all right, Gilbert?’

  ‘Yes, I’m so sorry, Joan, I’m afraid I’ve woken you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just a bit of indigestion.’

  ‘The milk of magnesia’s on the shelf in the kitchen. On the left.’

  ‘You go back to sleep, I’ll be all right.’

  His problems, that moonlit night, were far beyond milk of magnesia’s reach, but all his life he’d had something of a dicky tummy and he was quite happy for Joan to think it was no more than that. A nurse herself, she’d been wonderful to him, quite wonderful; twenty-two years younger and to some that may seem quite an age gap, but they had two splendid boys, and much though he’d miss them when they were back at school, he was a lucky chap to be so on in years and blessed with such young sons.

  He went downstairs as quietly as he could.

  Unused to his master’s midnight wanderings, Pedro leapt up from his basket, and out they went together for a breath of air, Pedro shaking himself, Gilbert pulling his cardigan a little tighter. Round to the right, and past the garages, which reminded him to check the gearbox oil in the spare Armstrong, and across the sloping meadow, until he could see the hotel, or at least its outline.

  The hotel.

  In the moonlight it was completely black, like one of those huge cardboard cut-outs David enjoyed making with scissors on the kitchen table. If you then cut out a white circle for the moon and hung it above the black card you would catch the reality and unreality of that moment. So quiet was the sea in the cove he could hear almost nothing, and that was rare.

  He shivered. He told himself to be sensible. To be practical. It was much better to look to the future, to the boys’ future, they’re such promising lads, yes, look for new buds appearing, that’s the ticket, be sensible, forget the past, that’s the only way, Gilbert, no point looking back, come on, Pedro, let’s both go back in, shall we, and get some sleep, shall we? Good dog, good dog.

  And, being sensible now, he slept.

  At seven o’clock prompt, Lilly, the maid, brought him up his cup of tea and his apple. He peeled the apple. When Lilly appeared again, with his mug of piping-hot shaving water, Gilbert got up, feeling very sensible and very practical as he shaved. But at breakfast The Times was full of Sir Alfred Munnings. There were columns and columns about the Retiring President uncorking his long-bottled emotions at the banquet. Oh, no, Munnings wasn’t going to go away that easily! Try as hard as you could to be sensible you still ended up drinking half the night away with A.J., listening to his dirty songs and, of course, his quite awful poems.

  ‘Where are you going, Ev?’ he’d shout as Gilbert tried to slip away at two in the morning. ‘Sit down next to Laura and have another drink.’

  You never could escape him, never.

  And now, with every column in the papers telling you the whole world was in a most awful, most precarious state (Berlin, the Yangtse, Israel, India, and Communist China), here was an incoherent speech about modern art becoming a sensation. Once again, A.J. took a central-stage position, insisting all eyes stayed on him.

  ’Twas always thus, Gilbert grunted to himself.

  In 1911 it used to be Munnings against Roger Fry (or Rogering Fry as Munnings preferred to put it); and now, in 1949, it was The President versus Picasso, Munnings versus Moore, Burlington House battling against Bloomsbury, with the pink coats on the left wing about to attack that conservative Chamber of Horrors, the Royal Academy, led by Sir Alfred and his blue-blooded hunters.

  Gilbert carefully folded The Times, left his kippers half eaten and went up to the boxroom at the very top of the house. He had taken the first steps up there last night but thought better of it, thinking he might in doing so disturb Lilly or the boys. He knew exactly where in the boxroom he was heading, though i
t was years since he last looked. The trunk, a dark brown one with Captain C.G. Evans boldly printed on it, he bought to go to West Africa in 1914. He knew exactly where in the trunk they were. He knew which pages he would open first.

  Trembling, he sat on top of the trunk.

  Do you realise what you have done, A.J.?

  Do you, you old scoundrel?

  Part Two

  I fear love making and painting don’t go together.

  Alice Forbes, letter to Ethel, 1886

  History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days.

  Winston Churchill, 1940

  The Stranger in the Lane

  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.

  Suddenly There Came a Knocking

  ‘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.