Summer in February

by Jonathan Smith

  ‘Gilbert, may I ask you a favour?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘It’s quite a large favour and it may not fit in with your plans.’

  ‘It’s I can help you, I will.’

  ‘Alfred has asked me to join him in London, and he is wondering if you would accompany me. If you would I would be delighted. It would make all the difference.’

  Jory seemed to choose that very moment to drive on more quickly.

  ‘London? I see.’ I paused, as if to give myself time to think this over. ‘Go with you to London? When would this be?’

  ‘As soon as possible. As soon as you will agree, oh, please do agree.’

  ‘And for … how long?’

  ‘I don’t know … a week perhaps. Perhaps less. Would you be able to get away? Wouldn’t you enjoy such a break? I’m sure you need one.’

  ‘I could ask the Colonel … It could prove difficult, there’s a lot on.’

  ‘Would it be a help if I asked him too?’

  The suggestion, she could see, rather put me on the spot, so with her hand hovering over my arm, she added:

  ‘Anyway, would you please give it some thought … think of London!’

  All the way through the narrow lanes to St Buryan she was absorbed and excited, admiring that cleanly cut hedge, pointing out the fuchsias, and did I happen to know where that path or that lane led. My eyes followed her gaze and Jory or I answered as best we could. While she spoke to Jory about the horses I examined her face. Had she done her hair differently? Had she lavished any extra care on herself, or was she natural? She was natural. I then heard her enlisting Jory to persuade me to travel to London with her.

  ‘If you won’t, sir, I will,’ he laughed, revealing his tooth, ‘if the young lady do ask me.’

  From this familiarity it was, when we arrived, a small step to marking her card. Jory put a small pencil cross next to four horses, his tips. Florence seemed to pay the most serious attention to all this.

  Over lunch, an excellent hamper, I tried to ask her about her painting from life but she would have none of it. Nor did she seem at all keen to talk of Alfred or to know the contents of his letter to me, while a question about her brother Joey plainly irritated her. But the sight of the horses, the jockeys carrying their crops and the smell of the animals meant that Alfred’s spirit loomed over us; indeed I found his raucous presences were distributed throughout the day. It was as if I kept bumping into him. I looked at Old Jory sitting there, scratching his head, eating bread and cheese and hevva cake, and I looked at Bess, his horse, with her nose in a big hessian bag full of feed, and I thought, ‘If Alfred was with us he would be painting them even as we sit talking.’

  The damned man was there even when he wasn’t!

  I said ‘loomed over us’ but it was not clear to me whether Florence was as aware of his dominating unseen presence as I was, nor if she missed him at all. Surely she had not ‘given herself away so lightly’ that she now never even thought of him? No. More likely she was so sure of him she felt no need to refer to his name.

  As soon as we had finished lunch she left, alone, to study the runners. She insisted on being unaccompanied.

  ‘Please,’ she said to me, ‘it’s so good not to be pampered and protected, and I have ample money.’

  I was on my feet to accompany her, but she was adamant. She put a restraining hand on mine.

  ‘No, thank you, Gilbert, you really are kind, but I would rather meet at the end of each race. Then I will enjoy your company all the more.’

  The next few hours of pounding horses passed in a whirl. She was like an escaped bird, her eyes full of exhilaration, tension, despair and shrieking fun. On one occasion, when her horse seemed for a while about to be overtaken, I thought truly she might go mad. She ignored Jory’s advice in every race and gambled the whole hog. Three times I saw her place substantial sums.

  ‘It is essential,’ she turned to me with absolute seriousness, ‘that the rules do not hold us.’

  There was little, too, of her promised conversation at the end of each race because she was either collecting her winnings or having her attention drawn to the next event. Excited myself by her excitement, I trailed her at a close distance, so near and yet so far. Munnings might be the lucky man but as I watched her, so animated in a way I had never seen before, I felt my life too was peppered with good things.

  A moment or two before the last race she suddenly said:

  ‘I did not think very much of his poem, did you?’

  ‘What … poem?’ I managed.

  She looked down at her race card.

  ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, what am I thinking of, the races are making me muddled.’

  She was a substantial winner. On our way home, her mood uncontrollably elated, she tried to press a considerable proportion of the money she had made into my hands. I could not possibly take it and told her so. She said it was of little consequence to her and it would give her so much pleasure to part with it. I nodded towards Jory’s back. For a while he too resisted: no woman, no lady, he said, had ever given him money and he’d been properly paid for his services by Captain Evans but, even though he had lost on every race, he arrived back at The Wink a much richer man, a man who could not believe his luck.

  ‘I’m as loaded as a bee,’ he said.

  I arrived back at the hotel feeling troubled. For, as we parted, Florence reached up to kiss me on the cheek, saying:

  ‘You will come to London, won’t you? Both Alfred and I hope you will.’

  ‘I’ll ask the Colonel if I can.’

  She moved back a little and looked at me.

  ‘And let’s go for a walk tomorrow. You choose which path, Gilbert, and tell me when we meet. There’s so much I want to talk about.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘And there’s no one else in the world, no one else I can count on, no one of your loyalty. And it was a wonderful day at the races, wonderful, and whatever happens in the future, I’ll always look back on today with pleasure.’

  As I sat, disturbed, on my bed and ran through all that had been said and done, I felt both a winner and a loser.

  How many men, I wonder, live their lives with a woman in their minds, and that woman more alive than any reality? And for how many men living in that daily anguish is the woman in their mind another man’s wife? Not that Alfred was married yet to Florence, but as good as.

  The alacrity with which Colonel Paynter acceded to my request for a few days’ leave was gratifying. Indeed he pressed on me the notion of staying up in town for the full week if I so pleased. I declined. Good though the workmen are I had no wish for standards on the estate to slip, although the Colonel added that recently I had looked tired and that he was sure I deserved a rest.

  Alfred had booked me a room at Fuller’s Hotel, near Hyde Park, and was, by way of a ‘thank you’ for escorting his fiancée, to pay my bill. Florence was to stay at her family home. As for Alfred’s precise plans, Florence was vague, beyond that he would be meeting our train at Paddington.

  Mrs Jory handed me a hamper for the journey with a disapproving pout before Jory drove me to collect Florence and be at Penzance station in time for the early train: a pleasant enough spin until some fool came tooling down the middle of the road in his Wolseley and as near as dammit had us all in the ditch. Though it was no fault of Jory’s or mine I found myself apologising as I helped Florence back into her seat. Sometimes my attempts at courtesy come out as misplaced apologies.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘it’s rather fun to feel one’s heart hammering. After all, they’re crossing the Channel by aeroplane now.’

  ‘Cars and aeroplanes!’ Jory said viciously.

  After the spill Jory raced on, scattering some chickens on a bend, and soon had us nicely settled into our carriage. There were four other occupants and one of them, a sullen individual with a red nose, seemed unaccountably disgruntled at our presence and Florence’s luggage.

  ‘You
and your wife,’ he said, ‘are not the only pebbles on the beach, you know.’

  Florence smiled at me without moving a muscle. I was so flustered by the reference to my wife that I stammered out a rather ineffectual retort along the lines that I lived in Cornwall and knew quite enough about pebbles and beaches, thank you.

  I had not been to London for nearly two years, not in fact since I very nearly agreed to go to Peru. Instead of being a fisheries officer in South America, at the last moment I had, however, decided to be a land-agent in West Cornwall; and thank God, otherwise I never would have met Florence nor had those hours close by her side on the train, even though she passed some of them reading Browning. I did not feel excluded or unwanted as her eyes were held on the page, her full lips slightly apart. Instead, I tried to imagine what kind of life she was expecting in her marriage, but when she put her marker in the book all I asked her about was the poem. She was surprised.

  ‘Have you not read The Ring and the Book?’

  I had not and told her so.

  ‘It’s a Roman murder story.’

  ‘It looks very long.’

  ‘Yes … yes, it is. But it always takes a long time to arrive at the truth, doesn’t it, and in Browning all the characters have their say. Which is as it should be.’

  ‘Is there a hero?’

  ‘There’s a heroine.’ She smiled, and looked away.

  ‘You’ll be seeing Alfred soon,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it’s exciting,’ she said to the window.

  We arrived at Paddington half an hour late and there, pacing around the platform, was Alfred in his pepper and salt covert coat. He was not in the best of form. Furious at the delay he whisked us off towards Piccadilly.

  ‘Is it so important to go this very minute?’ Florence asked his back.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You must see for yourself.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘The Summer Exhibition,’ he said snappily. ‘Where else?’

  I had almost forgotten how abrupt and forceful a fellow Alfred was. Was this the same man who so recently wrote me such full and engaging letters, letters from Hampshire and Norfolk which evinced considerable affection? Had he, not I, been in that carriage there would surely have been an almighty row even before the train left Penzance. When he is with you there seems little room to breathe. It is as if, like some chemical force, he expands to fill all the space available. Yet he showed no special pleasure in greeting Florence. I had prepared myself and stood well aside on the platform to allow the great reunion. There was none. I do not quite know how to explain it except to say that he treated us as if we were of the same sex.

  We hurriedly crossed the cobbled courtyard of Burlington House, and it was on the cobbles that he fired the first shots. The walls of the Academy were packed high with paintings, sometimes three deep, and to my amateur eye they were all splendid but he was of a different mind, and immediately talking at the top of his voice. Whenever Florence spoke to me on the train, asking me about my earlier life, her voice excluded all other listeners, the soul of privacy. With Alfred it was the opposite. Alfred addressed the world.

  ‘Good God, Blote,’ he said, ‘what would Gainsborough want to do with all these? What would Reynolds do? And as for Hogarth! The place should be blown up, boom, I’d blow it up, Ev, painted ceiling or no painted ceiling. And to think I have always dreaded rejection by this lot! By some ex-pert, some would-be conno-sieur with a piece of chalk, putting his X on the back of the rejects and his D for doubtful. D for doubt-ful!’

  I could see the other visitors looking at Munnings as if to say, ‘Who is that fellow?’

  Perhaps unaware, and certainly unperturbed, he marshalled us this way and that, pitching his voice at just the wrong level, finding an occasional word of praise here, more often a curt dismissal there. From room to irascible room we trooped, his vapourings growing more and more excitable, as he claimed to have seen better art in wayside urinals and asserted that the Royal Academy needed a breath of fresh air more than a French latrine.

  Finally, we turned a corner and with a sharp shock stood before three of his own paintings. One was of the Western hounds chasing a fox on Zennor hill. The second, The Path to the Orchard, showed a girl in a white linen hat and apron leading a pony along a path. In the foreground were clumps of white and crimson phlox. It was a happy, breathtaking picture. The third was Morning Ride. Florence was sitting there on Merrilegs.

  ‘You see why you had to come,’ he beamed. ‘You see why you’re here.’

  Florence stood, speechless and pale, before the painting.

  ‘Yes … yes I do,’ I said. ‘Well done, A.J. Very well done.’

  He hugged me hard.

  ‘And you,’ he said to Florence, ‘adorn the Royal Academy, and let the world see you!’

  We all looked at Morning Ride. Florence was right; the man was a genius.

  In bed that night, with the sounds of London traffic in my ears, I asked myself for the first time some unthinkable questions. Why should Munnings, genius or no genius, want to marry Florence? Having asked it once I asked myself it again. Of course I do realise that one answer is manifestly simple: any man in his right mind would want to marry her. But as I lay there, sleepless and unwilling to face my dreams, a second, third and fourth possibility occurred. Once I had allowed myself the first thought others raced in behind like waves, a rising tide of disturbing doubts, mounting waves crashing into Lamorna Cove.

  That he, a wild drinker and spender, wanted and needed the financial security of her family, a family who could afford to live only in certain rooms.

  That a man of his humble beginnings, a miller’s son from Suffolk who felt himself at odds with the established order, wished to align himself with a rich and accomplished woman who was not only sympathetic to art but an artist herself.

  That he was exacting a kind of revenge on a world that he suspected did not want him, much as he felt and expressed about the Royal Academy.

  That he planned to have not so much a wife as a beautiful possession, a self-effacing subject who would not rebel, one to whom he would seem a God or hero; a cheerful welcoming face who would become the mother of jolly children. Did part of his befuddled mind envisage a wife playing bridge and eating ginger biscuits, a life of lacy parasols and sculling boats and flower-trimmed hats? But no! He could not, because Florence was no such woman. And if she was not, what exactly did Florence see in him?

  My head was spinning with these analytical reflections. In the months ahead I could see Munnings behaving increasingly irrationally and Florence becoming increasingly crestfallen. I got out of my bed and paced the hot, stuffy room. I wondered what kind of night she was having at her home. I wondered where A.J. was staying.

  Surely I was not thinking that all this with A.J. and Florence was only for appearances? Was it not a love match, the simple attraction of opposites? Yes. Things would work out in the long run … I lay once again on my bed. After all it was not my affair, it was time for sleep, and I closed my eyes.

  Only for another, bigger wave to come crashing in.

  Why, no sooner than his proposal of marriage had been accepted, did he go away and go about a great deal? Stay away, in fact? And, when away, why did he write at such length only to me? Again, when we left the Royal Academy that very afternoon, why did he assume the pose of the showman, a glass too much and one glass more, and launch into his pungent stories, when there were the clearest signs of distress etched on Florence’s face?

  Of course such night thoughts as those might never darken Alfred’s door. Maybe he was simply too happy at feeling the fresh wind of success on his back, too preoccupied with the path that opened up before him to notice what he was doing? But if he continued not to attend to Florence’s needs, how long would a woman so beautiful and so gifted remain untempted? To put it another way, had she trapped herself for ever by an afternoon of pique on Penzance skating-rink? Or could she, even now, retrace her steps, and if
she could, would her steps be directed towards me?

  Dangerous thoughts.

  I tried to sleep but saw her sitting beside me in the train. I felt the warmth of her shoulder. Did the look she gave me in the carriage, and the same glance again in the Academy, did those pressures and glances encourage me to abandon self-denial and become more than a friend and observer? To become Alfred’s rival? After all, it was not unknown for engagements to be broken, even at the very last hour.

  No.

  I knew I had to silence those threatening thoughts.

  I awoke with a headache, unsure where I was, but sure that I had dreamt dreadfully. Usually I have variations of two dreams. By writing them down, who knows, perhaps I may encourage the wretched things to go away, to leave me alone. Laura Knight told me that writing them down often helps to exorcise their power. We shall see. At the moment, however hard I work to ensure an exhausted sleep, I find they come round regularly, swinging like grotesque faces on a roundabout.

  Now there is a third.

  The first dream: it is a hot day. I have killed someone. I have no recollection of doing the deed, and no reason for committing the act, but the person is dead at my feet. I feel sick but cannot be sick. There is no blood and no evidence. No one saw me do it. I bury him very carefully, taking precise bearings and marking the exact spot. I am, after all, a surveyor. I survey the land and make coded notes in my small pocket diary, in amongst the number of trout I have caught, the number of miles I have bicycled and the size of my breaks in billiards. I can remember no distinguishing feature of the landscape, no trees or undergrowth or footpaths. But I know exactly where I have put it … put him. When I return to check, to see if it is undisturbed, I can find no trace. It is as if I did not do it. But I did. I know I did.

  From this dream I always awake very distressed.

  The second dream: there is a blazing sun. I have sunburnt legs. I am in South Africa as an official war artist. I have been commissioned to record, in as much detail and in as authentic a way as possible, what I see in action. This bothers me since I am an officer and no artist at all. I am being asked to sing the leading part in an opera when I have no voice.