by Lucy Foley
‘Tom, I know I can say this to you because I’m certain you won’t speak of it to anyone else.’
He shakes his head. ‘I won’t.’
‘I know.’ She pauses. ‘Do you remember that friend, Ralph, the one who came down halfway through the summer to stay with us? There was some trouble with his parents: a separation, I think.’
Tom nods. He recalls the slight, dark young man with the face that seemed that of a far older person, someone who had seen much, who knew things. Such an odd friend for Archie, he’d thought at the time. The two of them so different: Archie radiating energy and athleticism whilst Ralph was watchful and withdrawn, a classic introvert.
‘I followed them, once. I was cross with Archie, for always going off and leaving us.’ She smiles up at him. ‘Not that I wasn’t satisfied with you for company, but I didn’t like the idea that Archie thought himself too good, too old, for Winnard Cove. He and Ralph were always disappearing off on their bicycles for a whole day at a time, never asking us if we’d like to come along. There was something else, too … something I couldn’t work out.’
Tom feels a prickle of apprehension, without quite knowing why.
‘I followed them out to the paddock and saw them go into the stables. At first I thought they were going to reappear with one of the ponies, but then I realized they’d gone into the empty stall at the end, which was being kept ready for the new mare. I waited for several minutes, and when they didn’t reappear I decided they must have made themselves a hideaway there, like the one we had in the tree house.
‘It was quite exciting – it became a mission, of sorts. I knew that there was a window high up in the back, to let a bit of light in when both doors were bolted. I climbed up to it, stealthy as I could. I remember my shoe got caught in a nick in the wood and I had to wriggle it free – but managed it without a sound and was proud of myself.
‘At first I could barely make them out – only vague shapes. I rubbed the glass until it was clearer, and they were … embracing. Not in the way that friends might, but as I understood a man and woman might. And I saw them kiss: it was almost violent.
‘I was so shocked my arms forgot to hold me up, and I fell down, my leg catching a loose nail on the way. I couldn’t feel any pain but it began to bleed almost immediately – it was that thin skin over the shinbone. Blood, quite a bit of it, running down my leg and into my sock. I ran as fast as I could for the copse behind the paddock, and I thought I had done it in time. A moment later, they came out, Archie first, followed by Ralph, and I watched them from behind my tree.
‘They looked up and down the paddock for a couple of seconds and seemed to decide it must have been nothing. Archie began to walk away, back in the direction of the house, and Ralph made as though to follow him, but then he turned, suddenly, and looked straight across at the tree. Even if he couldn’t actually see me, he knew I was there.
‘When I next saw Archie, at tea, he was careful around me. I was desperate for him to tease me, as he always did. Instead he treated me like a stranger: enquiring politely about my leg … but not with the affection he normally would. He was like that, more or less, until he went away to the front.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom says.
‘Don’t be. It can’t be helped. I only wish that he could have trusted me enough to understand that he didn’t need to be careful, that I would never have told, that I would have kept his secret for him.’
Tom wakes – without remembering falling asleep – to discover that the sky is beginning to lose its light. Alice lies on her side, eyes closed. Her face is close, just beneath his own. He can see the constellation of faint freckles, a surprise against her pale skin, across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. He can study the shape of her mouth, the sharp indentation above her upper lip that gives the impression that her lips, when they are not smiling, are set in a slight pout. He sighs.
Alice returns two days later, causing a sensation once more at the gates. She wears dun riding breeches, a short tweed jacket, men’s brogues. Her hat this time is a red cloche, pulled rakishly down over her forehead.
They stream along country roads strewn with fallen leaves. The fields beyond the hedgerows are hazy and golden with that peculiarly rich early autumn sunlight. They pass men bringing in the last of the harvest who turn to gaze at them. There are engine-powered tractors now, but here the farmhands load sheaves on to a trailer harnessed to a carthorse. They stare at Tom and Alice as though they are visitors from the future.
They break for tea in a nearby village. The exhilaration of the drive has left them both hungry, and they order food: a plate of ham sandwiches, a vast golden seed cake.
‘So tell me about Oxford.’ In the muted light of the tearoom Alice’s hair appears black as ink, and she has tucked it behind her ears. The effect is charmingly austere.
‘It’s all right.’
She looks outraged. ‘Only all right? Tom, if you knew how much I envied you, you wouldn’t dare say something like that.’
‘I think you’d make a much better student than me. I always loved History at school, and it’s interesting enough, but I can’t make it mean anything. It would help if we were studying, say, recent history, rather than French revolutionaries, but the War seems to be out of bounds. More time needs to pass, perhaps, before it can be considered safe territory.’
Alice nods, and considers him. ‘So what does mean something to you?’
‘Painting.’
‘I remember that about you, you know. You had such a gift. Those maps. Even the drawings you would make in the sand … the castles you’d build on the beach. Is it what you’d really want to do?’
He laughs. ‘In an ideal world, yes.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’
‘I don’t think it’s as easy as all that. For one, I don’t know if I’m good enough. Besides, I’m meant to build a career. My parents have always expected it.’
Alice smiles and moves her fingertips across the tablecloth, so they are touching his own. He looks down, seeing how small and clean her hand appears next to his own, where flecks of paint cling stubbornly to the skin. ‘I don’t think it can be a shameful thing,’ she says, ‘to follow the thing you love.’
They fly back to Oxford along new roads. Alice accelerates and Tom feels the engine roil and thrum beneath him. His eyes stream in the wind as though he is weeping, and perhaps he is, from sheer exhilaration. He looks over at Alice. Her dark hair is whipping in a silken mass about her head: a mad, glorious dance. She turns to him, laughing. Her cheeks are brilliant with colour, and the tip of her nose is pink. He has seen this look on her face before, he realizes. He remembers a day when the two of them jumped white horses – huge waves funnelled into the cove by the wind, both of them crazed with a violent mixture of exhilaration and terror. And he recalls Alice urging him on, moving further and further out to sea until her terrified nanny screeched at her to return to shallower waters.
So this is it, Tom thinks to himself. This is what it is to be young: this is what people mean when they talk about the freedom and folly of youth, the reckless glamour of it. It is the purest sort of intoxication, this flying over rough ground so that the breath is knocked out of you, whizzing through the world with such power and grace and danger.
Tom sits labouring at a study of a nude woman. He has joined the college Art Society: a haphazard group run by a decadent postgraduate who wears rouge and suits of printed Chinese silk, a self-styled patron of culture.
Some of those about him are intent on their work, but others talk in murmurs, make lewd comments to one another, as though this isn’t an artistic endeavour but some Soho establishment. Tom feels alone and exposed. He is struggling, as perhaps many of them are, even the jokers, to project a façade of unconcern – as though this isn’t the first woman he has seen without her clothes.
Tom has not had much in the way of experience with women. He was never one of those boys at school who preferred experimenting with each oth
er to nothing at all. He has kissed two girls in total, which doesn’t count; snatched opportunities that were nothing compared to what he feels, knows, a proper kiss could be.
He glances surreptitiously at the faces around him. He is sure that he can’t be the only virgin. Truth be told, it’s quite difficult not to be. It isn’t as though the few girls of his acquaintance would be willing to besmirch themselves in any way. Besides, as Tom’s college friend Henry has pointed out on more than one occasion, ‘English women are impossible.’
Henry lives with his French mother in Paris in the holidays and has – allegedly – had plenty of success. If Tom were a Frenchman, he feels, there is no doubt that he would now be a lover of Casanovian experience and ability. He knows that some of his peers have made trips down to London, in order to meet a more willing sort of woman there. And yet this has never appealed to him, despite his awareness that matters are getting fairly desperate.
Tom knows that he should be concerned only with his craft – thinking as a painter, not as a sex-starved young man. Surely the artists that he admires most are able to gaze upon a naked model and see form alone, to empty their minds of baser concerns.
He looks at the woman prostrate before him and thinks, unwisely, of Alice. The model’s limbs are compactly voluptuous and the skin is mottled, pinkish in places where touched by the warmth of the gas heater, which makes for an excellent study in skin tone. But Alice’s – he thinks of the almost translucent skin of her neck and shoulders – would be luminous and pale. Her legs, much longer than the model’s, would reach beyond the end of the ottoman. This woman’s breasts are large, slightly pendulous, with brown, shilling-sized areolas. Alice’s, he has no doubt, would be as small and as beautifully shaped as those parts of her body he is familiar with: the gentle shell curves of her ear lobes, the charming slight retroussé of her nose.
He’d better stop.
In fact, he’d better concentrate on the task at hand. He looks at what he has so far. He can already tell it isn’t going to be perfect. The proportions are not exactly right. The limbs are exaggerated, the hands a fraction too small. All the same, it has life in it, perhaps more than he has ever managed to instil a painting with before. This could be his greatest success to date with the medium. Oils still intimidate him – he finds them heavy, unwieldy, and it is difficult to prevent the colours from muddying one another. This time, though, they seem to have yielded to him, accepted his mastery. The flesh tones are vivid, and he has managed to capture even the faint flush to the lower belly and the tops of the thighs. The hair, too, is right; the coppery mass falling across the dimpled shoulder and full breast as in life.
The face he is finding more of a struggle, and this is what he is working on now. The model’s eyes are wide and round, with irises of an uncomplicated blue. They shouldn’t be difficult to depict. As eyes go they are fairly unchallenging, devoid of any expression other than a gentle sleepiness.
Why then the trouble? The problem is that the eyes Tom has painted are not the eyes of the woman before him. Where they should be round, they are almond-shaped. And they are not blue but defiantly grey – a strange, silvery grey. The expression in them is also wrong: too animated, too bold.
They are the eyes of Alice Eversley. He has managed to paint Alice’s eyes into this other woman’s face. Despite the red hair, the ripe curves of the pink-and-white body, it is Alice who stares out at him, who drapes herself nude and languorous across his canvas.
Eventually, the painting given up for the day as a bad job, he cycles back to college. The sky is darkening to purple, and the air has a crispness to it that wasn’t there a week ago. It seems that the Indian summer might finally be coming to an end.
10
Corsica, August 1986
We broke for a late lunch shortly after three o’clock. I could see that Stafford was tired by the morning and ready to finish for the day. As he worked, he had told me of those afternoons spent in Oxford with Alice. Already, I felt that I was beginning to form a sense of the person she might have been.
The meal set out for us on the terrace was a simple affair: bread and cheese, a bottle of dusky wine. It was oddly reminiscent of the picnic that Stafford had described eating with Alice in the Oxfordshire countryside. I wonder if he noticed too. Here the cheese was a pungent Corsican variety, herby and friable, made from the milk of the island’s goats. And our bread was a loose-grained white baguette of the sort that doesn’t exist in England.
I looked at Stafford and once more experienced that strange double vision. I was certain in that instant that I could again see both Thomas Staffords before me, as in one of those Victorian composite photographs where many faces are layered to form one visage. I could see the elderly man – the famous artist who had spent the morning looking back upon his life – and I could see the young man, too, still really a boy, who had not yet made his mark in the world and was unsure whether he ever would.
When we’d finished eating, Stafford disappeared inside for his afternoon rest. I decided to go for a walk, taking my Nikon with me, though I knew I wouldn’t get any very good shots in the fierce light. At four o’clock the sun was barely weaker than at midday, and it wasn’t the most sensible idea to head off in such heat – pale-skinned and ill-adjusted to the Corsican climate as I was. But after spending the morning indoors I felt the need to explore, to re-engage with the present.
I headed further down the track that ran past the Maison du Vent. I soon discovered that as it continued the way became even less defined. Stafford’s house was apparently the last mainstay of civilization before the land took over once more.
The path was covered in dust a couple of inches thick, fine as flour and bone-white. There couldn’t have been rain for weeks. The heat pressed down upon me, but I began to enjoy its fierce embrace. On either side of me the vegetation was alive with the rapid-fire staccato of cricket song. It gave off the most tremendous aroma, this shrubbery – complex, warm, by turns sweet and savoury. This was the scent of the Corsican maquis, a native tangle of herbs, wild fig and bracken. ‘When Napoleon was in his prison on Elba,’ Stafford had told me, ‘he claimed he could smell it, carried across the water on the wind – the scent of his homeland.’
I followed the road around and away from the sea, inhaling deeply to draw the perfumed air into my lungs. I stretched my arms up above me and out to the side in windmills, feeling slightly foolish and glad of my solitude.
Gradually the bush thinned and the land opened out on either side to reveal rows of pale olives, nets spread out beneath them to catch the fallen fruit. There was an oddly temporary look to the scene, though for all I knew olives had been grown here for millennia. It was as if the island had permitted the clearing of the natural vegetation and the taming of the rocky soil, but with the proviso that it could claim back the land whenever it wanted without warning.
I heard a mewing, high above, and saw a bird of prey plummet from the blue – as true and deadly as an arrowhead. I watched, transfixed as prey, as it swooped close to the earth, claws raking the ground. As it rose, moving away from me towards the purple shadow of the mountains, I saw that some small creature wriggled in its grasp.
Corsica was a wild place, I thought. I had never been anywhere quite like it. Mum and I had always travelled to cities – Rome, Paris, Berlin – because that was where her work took her. Yet I knew she would have loved it here. She loved anything in its untamed state. At the time of her death she had still been performing, though it wasn’t technically ballet. The best thing about her success, she explained to me once, was that it had given her licence to experiment. She had begun to perform improvisations, barefoot, which proved a liberation for her point-battered feet. These dances were beautiful but raw – her movements remarkable not for their choreographed precision but for their instinctual animal grace. It was, you could say, what free jazz is to a piano recital. Some of the purists turned their backs on her then, but I believe it was at this time in her career that
she was at her happiest – and most exceptional. It was how she danced for me, when as a child I had asked her to, following her about the room on stumpy legs.
The memory became an ache in the centre of my chest, as though it had opened up some cavity there. I knew that I could not allow the pain to take over, lest it split me in two. So I took my camera from its case and flipped off the lens cap, training it upon the wheeling black arc that was the bird soaring with purpose towards the distant mountains. It would be a terrible photo, undoubtedly – the light was too harsh, and would wash all detail out. But the act of finding the shot, bringing it into focus, breathing my way through that all-important click: it was the best way of forgetting that I knew.
When I returned to the house, labouring my way up the – I counted them – eighty-five steps, Oliver was standing on the terrace with his back to me, looking out to sea. He was quite still. I was tempted to try and sneak behind him into the house, to avoid having to make any awkward pleasantries. But I would be my braver, better self, I decided.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He gave a tiny start and turned. In that unguarded moment I thought I saw something in his face that I recognized. Akin to loneliness, though altogether more complex than that. Then it vanished without trace, and I wondered if I had imagined it completely.
Now he gazed back at me, impassive as ever. ‘Does that hurt?’ he asked.
I followed the direction of his gaze – saw that the loop of skin above my T-shirt was a raw and flaming red. So too, no doubt, was my face. Now that I was aware of it, the skin felt tight and painful. I’d thought, in my foolhardy English way, that the sun cream I’d applied first thing in the morning would suffice.
‘Oh,’ I said, gazing down at the burnt skin in horrified fascination. ‘I’d better—’
He cut me off. ‘How long are you staying?’