Seascape

by Anne Weale

Nor, it turned out, had they fulfilled Xan’s expectations of them. Because several people were late coming down, he put back the usual pro-dinner critique until afterwards.

  When the showing of their day’s work-shorter than usual—was over, to Kate’s secret surprise and the visible discomposure of some of the group, he revealed himself to be a more exacting mentor than he had seemed so far.

  ‘I’m aware that this visit to Crete is described as a painting holiday,’ he began briskly. ‘But may I remind you that you’re lucky to be here? Innumerable people would like to be in your place. There are carers, pensioners and invalids for whom the chance to come here and develop a latent talent must remain wishful thinking.’

  He paused to look round the room. ‘All human beings with the luck to have health and strength, time and money, are under an obligation to make the most of those assets. If you’ve come here to draw and paint, then every day you should have a worthwhile output ... make some small but significant advance in your knowledge and skill.

  ‘I have now seen enough of your work to know that this group includes some promising artists. What is conspicuously lacking is discipline and application. By application I mean effort and concentration. Everyone who went to the Gorge, excluding the non-painters, should have come back with at least a dozen sketches. They didn’t. Even the people with me didn’t work as hard as they should. Up to now I’ve let you off lightly and tomorrow is a free day. But after that I shall be less patient. Goodnight.’

  As he strode from the room, Kelly gave Kate a nudge. ‘I wonder what’s got into him? He’s ever so sexy when he’s annoyed, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is he? I wouldn’t know,’ Kate said dismissively.

  But inwardly she too was wondering what had prompted Xan’s strictures and how the group would react to being told they were lazy in that astringent tone.

  On all Palette trips lasting two weeks, the fifth day was always a day off for the tutor and courier. By this time, in foreign locations, Miss Walcott considered the group had had time to get their bearings and could look after themselves while she disappeared to work on paintings to exhibit.

  In recent years her output of these had diminished. It was no longer enough to merit a one-woman show at the well-known provincial gallery where she had been showing her work for many years past. But she still produced enough work to show in mixed exhibitions.

  Kate’s days off were usually spent sightseeing. In Chaniá, she had planned to spend the first free day lazing on the beach and perhaps doing some shopping.

  She was still in bed, lazily stretching, when her telephone rang.

  ‘I’m re-renting the car and going into the country today, taking a picnic lunch. Would you like to come with me?’ asked Xan.

  Without pause for thought, she said, ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

  ‘Good. The car’s being delivered at eight. We’ll have breakfast in a café on the way out of town. I’ll take care of the provisions. You need only bring your camera.’ He rang off.

  Kate jumped out of bed, performing a pirouette on her way to the window. Leaning over the wide sill, enjoying the lovely view of calm blue sea and cloudless morning sky, she asked herself why she had felt that burst of elation. Even harder to answer was why Xan should seek her company when he could have spent the day alone, free of them all. Or with Juliet.

  Then Kate remembered that, last night at dinner, Juliet had said she was going to enjoy a long lie-in. She was by nature an owl, at her best in the evening, sluggish in the morning.

  Thinking about last night, Kate decided not to mention his homily. She knew it had upset some of the group. But, as she had pointed out in response to their aggrieved comments, artists of Xan’s stature seldom agreed to accompany parties of amateurs. When they did, the cost was always far higher than price of the present trip.

  By eight-fifteen they were sitting under the vine outside a small bar, breakfasting on cheese, olives and rusks dipped in olive oil.

  Across the road two middle-aged women in aprons were engaged in animated discussion. Xan whipped out a sketch-pad and started to draw them, a smile hovering round his firm mouth as he captures on paper their short sturdy legs, brawny arms and graphic gestures.

  Intent on his drawing, he was not distracted when Kate rose from the table and moved away to take first a photograph of him and then one of his subjects.

  When he had finished, she told him what she had done and that she would like to take a close-up of the sketch.

  ‘By all means,’ he said, handing it over.

  ‘If they come out well, the three shots will make an interesting illustration for a future brochure,’ she explained, when she had taken the third one.

  ‘Don’t you think you should ask if I mind being used as an advertisement?’

  His acerbic tone made her flush. ‘I’m sorry. That didn’t occur to me. Would you mind?’

  His a reply was a succinct, ‘Yes.’ After a pause, he added, ‘I’m here as a favour to you. I’d prefer my association with Palette to be confined to this one trip.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘In that case I’ll keep the snaps for my private record of the trip.’

  She would have liked to ask what had induced him to do her a favour, but she felt this was perilous ground she might be wise to avoid, at least for the present. She confined herself to asking a safe question.

  ‘Where are we going? Anywhere special?’

  ‘Towards Léfka Óri...the White Mountains. I’ve been reading a book about Crete called Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations, published in 1632. The author describes the Plain of Chaniá, between the mountains and the sea, as the diamond spark and the honey-pot of the island. He lists all the crops that were growing three centuries ago and calls the area a battle-ground between Bacchus, the god of wine, and Ceres, the goddess of agriculture.’

  ‘Could I borrow the book when you’ve finished it?’

  ‘By all means.’ He took his eyes off the road for a moment to smile at her, his earlier displeasure forgotten.

  She resolved not to reactivate it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DURING the morning they made frequent stops for Xan to do rapid sketches of a wayside shrine, a tethered donkey patiently waiting for the return of its owner, a small barrel-vaulted church in the middle of nowhere and a group of old men playing tafli, a form of backgammon, outside a village bar.

  The land they passed through was still as fertile and carefully tended as it had been for centuries. But by noon they were in the foothills leading up to the heights of Léfka Óri. Here there were only olive groves and a large herd of browsing sheep watched over by a handsome youth with his crook resting on his shoulders and his wrists draped over the ends.

  A mile or so further on, Xan said, ‘Time to find a patch of shade and have some lunch, don’t you think?’

  A suitable spot presented itself a few hundred yards along the bumpy dirt road they were following.

  ‘I borrowed this cooler from Kyria Drakakis,’ said Xan, unloading it. He gave Kate a large loaf of crusty bread to carry to the ancient carob tree whose branches would protect them from the scorching midday sun.

  In the cooler were some cheese and vegetable pies, a ready-made tomato and onion salad in a plastic bowl, pears and small pots of yogurt for dessert, a bottle of unresinated Cretan white wine and two bottles of water.

  While they were eating the main course, spearing the pieces of tomato and onion with a couple of forks Xan had borrowed, he said, ‘I hope you haven’t been bored, sitting about while I sketch. What have you been listening to?’

  In the expectation that he would want to draw, she had brought her headset and a couple of tapes.

  ‘Khachaturian’s Spartacus,’ she said. ‘A few years ago the Adagio was used as the theme music for a TV series, The Onedin Line. I’m afraid my taste in music is not very highbrow. As to being bored... not a bit. It’s nice to have a day doing nothing but looking and listening. But I don’t think I’
d want as much time on my hands as a shepherd,’ she added reflectively. ‘I wonder what he thinks about all day?’

  ‘Perhaps he composes mantinádes,’ said Xan.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Two-line rhyming couplets. The name comes from the Venetian word for the serenades which lovers used to sing to their girls in the small hours of the morning. Kyria Drakakis tells me that not long ago virtually everyone in Crete could make up mantinádes. Meeting a friend in the street, they’d do it as casually as the British make comments about the weather.’

  ‘It makes one realise how little most of us know about other people’s cultures,’ said Kate.

  Or about other people, period, was her unspoken afterthought.

  This led her, after a pause, to say, ‘You once mentioned that being an artist was only one of the things you’d wanted to be. What were the others?’

  ‘They were even more impractical. A master at school was a rock-climbing enthusiast. He taught me and one or two others. But you can’t make a living as a climber,’ Xan said wryly

  He cut through the loaf until a thick slice was attached by a thin hinge of crust and offered it to her. When she shook her head, he tore it off himself.

  ‘Nerina would never leave me on my own at the cottage while she was away,’ he went on. ‘The teenage drug problem was starting and she was afraid I’d get hooked. Not very likely, as I didn’t smoke or spend any time at discos with the school’s ravers. The year I was fourteen she took a party to Portofino in Italy. One of the non-painting husbands was a yachtsman. He rented a boat and taught me to crew for him. For about six months after that I had dreams of sailing round the world. What did you want to do when you were fourteen?’

  ‘My young-teen ambitions were all wildly unrealistic. I daydreamed of being an opera singer, an actress, a top model. But I couldn’t sing, I had no aptitude for acting and I was never going to be tall enough for the catwalk.’

  ‘You may not be tall enough but all your other proportions are right, now that models have breasts,’ said Xan, appraising her. ‘Although I gather theirs are mainly. implants, not the real thing. It’s interesting that you let your imagination run away with you. You weren’t always as practical and sensible as you are now?’

  Was that his impression of her? Were ‘practical’ and ‘sensible’ euphemisms for ‘down-to-earth’ and ‘dull’?

  To deflect the conversation from herself, Kate asked, ‘How did you manage to live after you left school?’

  Although she had studied Miss Walcott’s albums of clippings about him, there was never any reference to his origins or his early life. Perhaps, when journalists enquired, he was adept at tossing them a red herring.

  ‘I won a prize,’ he said. ‘The age limits were eighteen to twenty-five, but it was no problem to backdate my birth certificate by two years. Now the prize attracts a lot of publicity, but it didn’t then, in its first year. In fact the backers were annoyed because it got so little coverage. At that time the Press regarded art as a minority interest. They take it more seriously now there are several million enthusiastic “Saturday painters”.’

  ‘So many that Palette ought to be booked out within weeks of the brochures being mailed,’ Kate said, frowning. ‘But apart from being hit by the recession, we also have other problems. Art holidays are proliferating. Our advertisements are being swamped by ads for painting holidays here, there and everywhere...often with poor facilities and inadequate tuition.’

  ‘For today, forget Palette’s problems,’ he told her, with a hint of impatience. ‘I want to hear more about you. When did the daydreams stop and practicality set in?’

  ‘The daydreams were only ever a secret indulgence. I always knew I was destined to join the vast army of girls working in offices. That might sound dull to you, but I felt there was a challenge in starting at an ordinary workstation and seeing where those skills might lead. It was chance rather than design that led me to an estate agent’s office. Until the bottom fell out of the property market, I was doing rather well... at least in a material sense. I’m actually happier now. This job is much more satisfying. The people I meet are nicer. Before, they were mostly upwardly mobile status-seekers.’

  Xan refilled their glasses. ‘That was a masterpiece of evasion, Kate,’ he said drily. ‘It told me almost nothing about you. I recognise the trick because I use it myself when I’m being interviewed. Providing one talks a lot, only the shrewdest inquisitors realise they’re being fed superficialities.’

  ‘What do you want? A complete CV?’ she asked lightly.

  ‘Yes. Start at the beginning. Where were you born ? Where do your parents live?’

  ‘I can’t answer either of those questions. I don’t know. I was abandoned at six weeks and brought up in an orphanage.’

  She wondered how he would react. Not many people were sufficiently interested to find out but, of those who did, the majority said they were sorry and looked embarrassed.

  Xan said, ‘Do you find it’s perceived as some kind of disability? Is that why you avoid mentioning it?’

  ‘I don’t avoid it. As soon as you asked me, I told you.’

  “Tell me more. Where were you found?’

  Later, when he had winkled most of her life history out of her, he said, ‘Whoever your parents were, they gave you some major assets. Those remarkable eyes for a start. Which reminds me, I wanted to look at them through a magnifier.’

  He sprang up and went to his pack. Having found his magnifying lens, he came back to where she was sitting and went down on one knee beside her, taking her by the chin and tilting her face up. His manner was as impersonal as that of optometrist with a patient.

  ‘Focus on the top of my right ear,’ he instructed.

  She did as she was told, trying not to blink too often. He was still holding her chin between his finger and thumb and she found herself longing for him to release it and slide his hand down her throat. She forced herself to concentrate on the upper rim of his ear and the thick dark hair growing above and behind it.

  ‘Eyes are an interesting study. I’d like to make some colour notes, but I don’t want to give you a crick in the neck. You’d better lie down.’ He moved away to unfasten a different compartment of his pack. ‘I’ve got my bathing towel in here. I’ll spread it on the ground. You can do without ants or other small bugs in your hair.’

  As she lay back, Kate wondered what anyone watching would make of this performance. She had read that although this wild terrain might appear to be deserted, often there were hidden observers-shepherds minding flocks of goats, old women gathering herbs.

  Xan set out his paintbox and water pot before stretching himself at full length on the ground beside her, propped on one elbow, the other free to examine her eye through the lens and then to paint what he saw.

  ‘Even eyes which aren’t noticeably interesting become so in close-up,’ he said.

  She looked at the tracery of olive branches above her, their leaves stirring slightly in a light current of air. When Xan leaned closer to look at her eyes again, she wondered what he would do if she slipped her arms round his neck and said, ‘Kiss me.’

  Considering his reputation, this doesn’t say much for my kissability, she thought glumly. I might as well be a log with an interesting patch of lichen on it.’

  ‘All done.’ He rinsed his brush and threw away the painting water.

  ‘May I see?’ she asked, sitting up.

  He handed over his sketch pad. Beside a small sketch of her eye, showing the shape of her eyelids and the line of her eyebrow, he had painted a diagram of the iris.

  ‘Last month,’ he said, ‘I was approached by a London publisher with a lot of painting books on his list. He wants a small book of water-colour sketches to bring out at a price which will make it an attractive Christmas present. I’ve been casting about for ideas and you’ve given me my theme.’

  ‘I have? How?’

  ‘I’m going to do a page of eyes, a page of hand
s, ears, noses, feet and so on. Some of the Cretan country people have hands as gnarled as old roots. A baby’s hand is like a starfish. Your hands and the way you use them remind me of a ballerina.’

  As he said this, he took the one which was lying in her lap and carried it to his lips. ‘Thank you for the idea,’ he said, before kissing her knuckles.

  This gesture, following his apparent indifference to their physical proximity a few moments earlier, took Kate by surprise.

  He then surprised her even more by saying, ‘I left out lips,’ and leaning closer to kiss her.

  Compared with his previous kiss, this was even lighter and more fleeting than the brush of his lips on her fingers. He followed it with other gentle kisses round the edges of her mouth, each one a little firmer until suddenly both her lips were pressed firmly under his and she was in his arms, pinioned between his hard chest and sun-baked earth.

  Was it one endless kiss, or many kisses merging with each other? Kate lost all sense of time. She had only two sensations: at first the exquisite pleasure of what his mouth was doing to hers and then, steadily growing more urgent, the longing for a more complete synthesis with the powerful body holding her a willing captive.

  It was ended by Xan, not by her. She had her arms round his neck, one hand in his thick dark hair, and his hand was unbuttoning her shirt when he stopped short and rolled away.

  She opened her eyes and saw him sit up, turning from her so that she could only see his bowed shoulders and bent head. Instinctively she knew he was wrestling with the same fiery need which had been sweeping through her and that fighting it was painful for him.

  She waited, her shirt half open, her breasts aching for his caresses, her body melting and quivering with unsatisfied desire. But her mind knew that he was right. This was not the time or the place for that lovely taking and giving which surely must be the outcome of this unfinished embrace.

  She was sitting up, fastening her shirt, when Xan straightened and said, ‘Time to move on, I think.’

  He sprang to his feet and held out a hand to pull her up. Then he busied himself with packing their picnic things.