I am quite sure those were the exact words she spoke, odd though they look now on the page before me. Even odder, as she said them, I could see Joey scurrying past the tubs of geraniums and into the cottage behind her back, and evidently as keen as he could be not to be spotted by either of us. Florence withdrew her arm from mine, turned to face me and smiled.
‘Thank you for walking me home, Gilbert, I enjoyed it so much, and I’ll tell Joey we met.’ She raised her hand to correct herself. ‘If, that is, he returns.’
Barely two days before the races at St Buryan a letter arrived for me at the hotel. I knew the handwriting. Once again it seemed I was the chosen one.
Dear Ev,
Dear boy! What do you say to THIS? Come on, admit it now, you did not expect to hear from me so soon, did you? I may be deemed a difficult chap but here I am, pen poised, no, not with the glorious gypsies in the hop fields of Hampshire, but far away in a rather wintry Norfolk. Back home I travelled, through Essex and Ipswich, and now reside just south of Norwich. Devoted though I am to you all in Lamorna, here is home, here I lay my head. But what specifically – when so much calls me West – brought me here to the East?
Instinct, Hal, instinct: Falstaff’s instinct.
Believe me, it happened without my intervention. Suddenly I was carried away, bound upon a course, fancying myself in my Melton jacket and brown-top boots, very natty, and that course led me to a strange, unplanned reunion, yet so strange and so fortuitous it must surely have been planned. And throughout the vicissitudes of this strange reunion I have been happy to know that you are there in Cornwall, KEEPING AN EYE ON HER, as well as everyone else. Oh, you are in-dis-pensa-bull.
What a week it has been, a turbulent week! I might have guessed that Shrimp would be the cause. But, as is my wont, I am rushing headlong ahead, I have not told you about my favourite model – no, I do not mean my cow Charlotte or my paintable girl, my adorable Blote – I refer to one Shrimp.
I ran into Shrimp, fingering his glass and his half-shaven chin, in a snug little bar (where else?), with his small stack of coins placed in front of him like draughts. The very same Shrimp who stood, sat and acted as my model in earlier years until I settled (don’t laugh, I am more settled than ever) near my mill in Lamorna. Being a model, is he (you may be asking) astonishingly handsome and graceful, is he a subject fit to set before a king?
No, Ev, he is not! He is rough and tough, small and artful, a villain and a brigand. He lazes with lurchers under the caravan; he haunts with harpies, snatchers and strutters. (Now do notice the alliteration, old boy! It took some minutes of mental agility to marshal those.) He lives on the road. As far as I know he knows no home, or at least he admits to none, and there is something in me that warms to that. He is a swaggerer, a braggart, a Pistol who discharges (if he has his way) upon mine host. Shakespeare would be proud of him. If I say to you he saunters up to me, mouth insolent, wearing a sleeve waistcoat with black pearl buttons, with both his hands stuck in the front pockets of his tight black cord trousers, you may also see the sight for yourself. But what no one (not even you, Ev) can picture is the way he halters the wildest, unruliest colt, or the style with which he sits on an unbroken pony, because no man ever had a more velvet hand with animals or subdued nature so naturally.
Because you are an educated man, Gilbert, and no doubt schooled somewhere posh, AND Vice President of the St Buryan races, and because I am a half-educated artist and nowhere near half a gentleman, I ask you: is it possible to be uneducated and know too much? Let me release you from your misery. The answer is ‘Yes, may I introduce you to Shrimp?’
Shrimp is a wild man, no mistake. He has pure blue eyes, as clear and innocent as cornflowers, but red swollen eyelids which – it is no secret, eh? – suggest that this latter-day Pistol, this bareback rider, is partial to pint pots as well as hostesses. He also loves his pipes. Between puffs, leading the horses ahead, he says over his shoulder:
‘So, Toff, where you bin?’
The cheek of the fellow! ‘Toff’ indeed. Where I bin?
‘I bin getting myself hitched soon,’ I said.
He laughed, a rather insolent laugh, as if to doubt I was the marrying kind, but I let that pass. He can see I am impatient to paint, and he is very paintable; and peacock that he is, he knows that, for males are every bit as vain as females. He is at ease in his boots, he likes his look in the mirror, he delights me, he inspires me, but he is a villain. He enrages me (me, the mildest of men). He is steeped in cunning and roguery: in fact he is something of a fox—
Where was I? Yes—
On Monday, towards the end of the day, I told him to take the blue caravan and horses on ahead to The Falcon, the pub in Costessey where I planned to take my supper. He struck up as soon as he could, pausing only to look at my painting and say, ‘That bridle ain’t right.’ This made me swear. Who was this ignorant cowhand and horse-breaker to think himself a critic! But he was right enough. The bridle wasn’t right. It was very wrong. Still, it was a beautiful winter’s day, Monday, and what a sky there was (and you, I imagine, were riding Merrilegs along the cliff?), and I had at most two hours of daylight left to correct the poorly painted bridle.
As well as a perfect day I had a perfect spot: a track ran down to the river, and went on over an old cart bridge, and my eye was carried to marshland with sloping fields on either side. Between the line of poplars I could see the tall tower of a windmill. I worked in silent cold toil, transfixed, close to the silent river, and I imagined it as summer, tapestried with leaves, with scarlet fields of poppies shimmering in the distance. And to my joy I found I could paint exactly what I imagined! How fast the minutes go, Gilbert (why should I always call you ‘Ev’?), how fast they go when you are working en plein air with Bastien-Lepage presiding unseen by your side. And by the time I set off for the pub, loaded with clobber, the bridle was right.
Smacking my dry lips in anticipation of a pot I made my way back, arms aching, gouty foot hurting, fit only to drop, through a farmyard full of frightened hens but not too tired to miss a trick of dying sunlight on some lichen. At the inn gate, facing its fine front, I was met by the landlord, all crimson tinge with pebbly eyes, reddish-brown mutton chop whiskers and teeth that showed an inch of gum. And Trouble was brewing in those pebbly eyes!
Shrimp and the caravan had only just arrived. The facts were all too immediately clear, the landlord said, from the moment Shrimp was seen. He stood up, swayed, and fell headlong off the shafts. There he was lying still, and still dead drunk, with the front wheel stopped against his head. It was a miracle he had not brained himself. For a moment I wished the scoundrel had. He’s a villain, as I said, and impervious to improvement.
‘Let’s teach him a lesson!’ I said to the landlord.
So we carried him round to the back and put his head under the pump, and while I held the half-drowned little rat the landlord pumped away. Suddenly, shocked by the freezing water, the brigand came to life and fought like a cornered badger, kicking me with great force in the shins and told me if If———did that again he’d f———kill me, so we pumped some more water into his filthy mouth.
I told him I’d forgiven him and hoped he’d learnt his lesson.
That was punishment enough, you might think, to make him correct his ways. (How would the Army have proceeded?) But no! On Wednesday, only two days later would you believe, he was arrested at Aldborough Fair for using bad language and committing an assault. While I was peacefully painting a group of tinkers, a colourful crew, he picked a fight. Disorderly conduct. Arrest. I could not, though, allow my model to be so detained. He is vital to my work (and hence my prospects with Blote). I paid the inspector a fifty-shilling fine, and all this before a crowd which had gathered for an unexpectedly free theatre show.
‘He’s lucky,’ the arresting officer said, ‘to have a gentleman to pay for him.’ To accompany the payment I assured all concerned that this was a most unusual aberration.
‘Ta, Toff,’
Shrimp said, raising his hand by way of thanks when the storm had passed. The shamelessness, the ease of his self-forgiveness, made me apoplectic. How I needed some of your military control! If there was one more such incident or anything of a similar savour, I told him, that would be the end of his work with me, and that meant the end of his money, and the little villain does love money. He rubs his hands over his florins, giving them his warmth, before parting with them at an inn.
All the next afternoon he sat head down and morose, his brow as black as sin, holding the horse hard with his knees, as motionless as the wintry trees. I painted as in a dream, with only the blackbird’s song and the sound of my brush, and a winter’s sun to lighten up the loins and brighten up the coat. Three hours without a murmur Shrimp sat. How much, would you estimate, is his skill and sympathy with animals worth? Florins by the score! No horse I have ever seen stood still so long. And you could smell the pastures through the pores of the horse’s coat, the very opposite smell to bloody petrol. The long peak of Shrimp’s cap covered his insolent mouth, hid those blue eyes and swollen lids, but if I told him to ‘Brighten her up a bit’ with a touch the mare grew in stature. He is, you see, the most important piece on my chessboard.
‘Bin punished, ain’t I?’ he said afterwards, mooning about, hands in pockets, kicking the ground, or whistling silently. ‘Bin punished good an’ proper.’ This time I could see true penitence. He felt sorry for himself and what he had done and I felt sorry for him.
‘Tell you what, Toff,’ he went on, ‘this is a bloody bore. Me legs is achin’ awful.’ Bore or not, with his bout of drunkenness and bad language and assault he assuredly had now done his worst. There could be no continuance of his outrages.
What a lot of rot!
As I was sleeping last night in dreamful happiness, sleeping like a happy spinning-top after another successful day, I gradually awoke to the sound of a soft pounding, a thumping. It was a still night, a cold night, a moonlit night. What on earth could it be? Animals, of course, but what were they doing? Some cattle must have strayed on to the grass at the side of the inn. I took up my stick, the one with the heavy knob, and stepped out in my nightshirt. I listened and tiptoed away. Then, realising the sound was fainter, tiptoed back, and found the source, right under my caravan would you believe, and I bent down and there was Shrimp and there was a maid from The Falcon. I pulled him out by his feet, his backside white in the moonlight, and kept pulling. Painful, no doubt, but what a business, Ev, right under my caravan and the two of them under an eiderdown and tarpaulin. In this weather! Brass monkeys!
There was some flustering from the wench, a tall robust girl with a strong figure who started to punch me. I advised her to return to her rightful bed. For her part she was evidently no respecter of persons, for she kicked me as well with her sharp shoe.
‘Lor!’ she screamed, ‘’Tis only nature!’
‘Nature?’ I roared.
‘Mind yer own bleedin’ business,’ she hissed. ‘Who be you tellin’ us what to do!’
‘Off you go,’ I shouted at Shrimp, who was buttoning up before belting his trousers, ‘get out, you bareback rider!’
They ran off into the bushes.
After that I could not sleep. I communed with the clear night sky but in my mind’s eye, I admit, I returned under the caravan and saw Shrimp pinning a well-positioned girl. Only nature? I suppose you could say so, and in the morning I most certainly felt cold porridge.
You could argue he appears a crude little hero, this Shrimp, an ill-bred little hero, and I do think his unreliability would grate on you, Ev, every hour of the day. There is abundant evidence, in this letter alone, that he needs whipping.
Yet.
Yet he has characteristic charm, and indeed leads a charmed life, and when I contemplate how indescribably stuffy, say, Mr Carter-Wood of Carlisle and London is, I wonder will I be stuck with stuffed shirts and hemmed in by stodgy people, am I marrying into a circle in which I will be strangling yawns? And when I start to think like this I warm to my little brigand, and when I see the white hairs of the old mare on his black breeches I could sob with gratitude.
You see, I NEED HIM. The truth will out, and if that statement makes me unworthy of your friendship I am sorry, but I wish to be given no lectures on it. Too many people, I have found, have no sympathy with or fellow feeling for failure and weakness. You see, I dream of great success, I dream of fame, I dream of being a name on everyone’s lips, and Shrimp is a figure in the future I paint. But I ramble, I rant.
How are YOU, Gilbert? Busy, busy, I’ll be bound, and thinking of other people, while my mind is restless though my body is loitering in a Norfolk inn. Everywhere I see crossroads with glinting signs pointing me east, west, north and south, and I want to take them all. Difficult business, this life. Still, you are keeping your eye on everyone, I warrant, with your strict impartiality and your unobtrusive dignity.
Sometimes I wonder if people think I rather bagged Blote before – but no, another time for all that, and besides I call to mind your politeness in the face of improper suggestions, and I even wonder if I was wise to include herein my account of Shrimp’s nocturnal lechery when you have the bright, unsullied character of a saviour.
Oh yes, I must remember to ask. How is your poor bicycle? Do avoid thorns and nails, won’t you, but no … I won’t banter on. Rather, I ask you to give the enclosed to Blote and assure you that I will see you soon.
Your good and true friend,
A.J.M.
I read his long letter twice. The second time I read it I found more than half my mind was running towards the smaller, enclosed envelope. Soon I found myself opening it very carefully, something I have never done before in my life, and an act I would only admit in the absolute secrecy of these pages. I eased it open with a pumping heart and with all the skill I could manage. BY HAND he had written on the envelope, and it was with a guilty shaking hand that I read his words.
TO BLOTE
The moments fly fast when the artist at last
Has found himself the right spot
Box, canvases, easel and grub in a bag—
Not even the bottle forgot!
With the hours passing by, he works on the sky
And the faraway distance and tone:
Nobody is nigh; not a soul passes by.
He is working at peace and alone.
But our painter of tone, who sits working alone,
Is not quite at peace in his mind,
Which all unaware, goes straying elsewhere,
As thistledown floats on the wind.
His work on the spot, alas! is forgot,
As his mind strays away from the moat*
To a far different place, where it dwells on a face—
The face of adorable Blote!
A.J.M.
(Poet Laureate, Painter Laureate)
PS Essential we meet in London. Essential I take you to Suffolk. Essential I order a suit, and where else but in Southwold? Suggest you and Gilbert make the journey. Suggest it to him. I know a place in London for our Gilbert. Good hotel.
I resealed the envelope. There was no visible sign of tampering, and later that night, I placed it through her front door.
Florence was there, waiting for me.
To my mind she had never looked more lovely.
In the days before our meeting the hands on the clock walked, as it were, with boot-clogging clay. I worked hard on the estate and did extra little jobs in my rooms (new hooks on the back of my bedroom and sitting-room doors), nothing was too trivial if it passed the time, or I stared away minutes looking at the fading rug by my bed, with my fingers fidgeting and my mind racing ahead. The maid scurried out of the ironing-room and cleaned around me as if I were a statue. Would Alfred arrive back, full of his stories, on the very day before the St Buryan races? Or would she wake up unaccountably bored and scream out loud and change her mind at the last moment? I really had little idea what kind of ‘mind’ she had, so how pos
sibly could I judge? What if his love poem had gone straight to her heart, affecting her in some new way that would ruin the whole enterprise? Would she refer to Alfred’s proposal of a visit to London and, if so, how exactly was I supposed to fit in to such a joint venture? I would not be a pawn. Above all it was imperative I gave no indication whatsoever of having read the contents of his note to her. Each time I thought of that I blushed.
The day dawned, Alfred had not returned from Norfolk, and she was waiting for me.
She looked – the words will have to do – so beautiful.
Botticelli’s Florence, Botticelli’s Venus.
Furthermore, there was none of the fashionable delay which some simpering girls favour in such circumstances. Jory, jingling the harness, still smelling of beer and pickled onions, carrying in his clothes what he called a ‘whiff of The Wink’, drove me up to her cottage in the trap. I could see Florence sitting upright in the little front sitting-room. She stood up and waved gaily. She did not wait for me to knock, but rustled past me as I approached the door, with:
‘Good morning, Gilbert … Good morning, Mr Jory, thank you for being on time, I am so excited I can barely contain it.’
She smiled confidently and settled beside me. For the expedition to succeed I knew I had to be confident, courteous but confident. Women, I had noticed, do not like ditherers. Women, I had also recently suspected, do not like errand boys. In the stream I have, while fishing, missed many good fish through striking too late; in billiards, fortunately, I strike at the right time. We sat side by side. I had, by the way, hired Jory for the whole day. With me, even when he had a hangover, he was never ratty, indeed he was only too willing to help, partly I suspect to spite his wife – in a sense they vied with each other for my approval. Most men try to soothe their angry wives; Jory provoked his further. The other side of his keenness, of course, was that he greatly fancied a day at the races himself. And there he was driving us, with his large lower lip, his one-sided smile and his one wobbly tooth, grumbling happily, blinking his hangover away, telling Florence which horses he would give the time of day and which only a blind fool would follow. When it came to temptation Jory was both wild and tenacious. Florence listened attentively to him, then turned to me.
Summer in February Page 19