by Joseph Hone
I stayed up at the farmhouse with Tom and his wife Margery. They gave me a tot of brandy and later a young policeman came to interview us. I told the man all that had happened, and Tom confirmed it. The policeman took our names and addresses, and Tom brought me back to my barn, where I started in on the drink; the last of some cooking brandy and a bottle of Bulgarian red, gone before Tom arrived down the lane again with a message from Sam McCartney in Dublin. My mother had died that afternoon. Would I come straight over? Tom said he’d drive me to Birmingham Airport the next morning. I could think of nothing but Katie then, anguished, the pain only beginning.
‘It must have been an accident,’ I said to Tom. ‘We’d had a row, so she drove away like fury, then skidded off the track and straight into that beech tree.’
‘I don’t know about an accident,’ Tom said. ‘The track is dead straight there, and firm. Nothing to skid on, and the beech tree is a good twenty yards off the track, the sun behind her, and the car almost new. You’d have to have had a real intention to drive into that tree.’
Maybe Tom was right. It hadn’t been an accident. It was suicide. After all, I’d seen her face, entirely conscious, scorning fate, making her own funeral pyre. That would have been very like her. Why should she kill herself just because I’d asked her for a proper life together? That was hardly a killing matter. If it was suicide there must have been some other reason. Only one thing certain – Katie was gone and all I had of her now were definitive memories.
Even when she was alive they often seemed definitive, since latterly I never knew if I was going to see her again. After weeks without seeing her – my only contact just an evening phone call now and then, when I’d try, and usually fail, to get through to her from the phone box beside the pub I went to near Chipping Norton, she would turn up out of the blue for sex in the afternoon, or sometimes for the night, and then disappear for another few weeks or longer.
I’d learned to be without her in any real sense. I lived alone and tried to bury myself in my work, painting furiously, each canvas worse then the last, and working on a nude sculpture of her in red Cornish clay.
My last good painting was of Katie, done over two years before, during our good times. I’d painted her lying naked in the foreground of the hazy, mauve-blue flax-flowered field beyond my barn, at the end of the long track, in the middle of nowhere.
I’d sold the painting for £6000, surviving for the last few years on the £4000 or so – after my dealer’s commission – that her naked body had fetched. The money was just enough for the rent, paint, canvases, smokes, drinks, food and petrol for the battered old green 1947 Bentley that I’d accepted instead of a fee for a portrait ten years before. I should have taken cash. I was running out of it even then, and I didn’t have enough to pay the rent of the flat in Primrose Hill, so that after Angela left I abandoned the flat and looked for something in the country.
I found the old barn by chance, travelling the north Cotswolds one day. I’d stopped at a pub in Chipping Norton and asked the landlord if he knew of anywhere to rent, an old barn or outhouse, as a studio. It was market day. He pointed to a sharp-faced, birdlike little man in a cloth cap sitting with a large jolly woman in the corner. ‘Ask him – Tom Phillips, local farmer. He might have something.’ He did.
I paid him only a nominal rent of £20 a month for the barn. Tom just wanted me to legally occupy the building to keep one of his scheming daughters and her husband at bay, who had started to convert the barn, assuming, wrongly, that her father was leaving her the place. His daughter had already installed an open staircase, half an upper floor and two large skylights, which made a fine north-facing studio.
I lived downstairs in the long open space, the birds high above me. Several pairs of immigrant doves came and went over the seasons and years, nesting way up in the rafters, flapping and warbling urgently in the spring, chuckling softly on dark winter days, a chorus of quiet ease, their white droppings and feathers coming to litter the floor like a strange snowfall – rafters from which I’d hung a battered chandelier, an old theatrical prop, made of gilded papier-mâché, heavily baroque, which I’d found in the local dump.
Downstairs there was a huge open fireplace at one end, flagstones and bare stone walls. A divan bed, tattered carpets, a sofa with the stuffing leaking out, some old armchairs, tables and bookshelves that I’d picked up at local sales or from the rubbish tip. There was electricity but no telephone, plumbing or water. I had to go out the back to a hand pump for that. No lavatory either. I used the ancient privy in a rackety wooden shed behind the barn.
Everything was basic in the barn. That was the thrill of the place – that it wasn’t a house, simply four bare walls and a roof, the long empty space downstairs a stage that I could make over entirely in my own images, moving the furniture about or just sitting there thinking of things, looking at the partly completed clay nude of Katie, drinking a glass or two of cheap Bulgarian red, listening to my Verdi CDs or an old Richard Tauber tape on my music centre and not worrying about the dirt. A roaring log fire in winter, cool within the great thick walls in summer. No sound but the wind in the corn, or the strange delicate swish of the breeze as it passed over the mauve-blue flax, moving across the hazy flowers in a long wave, the hand of God. Bright mornings of birdsong – crows in the beech trees, larks in the spring air. I love the place, though now and then I feel I could do with some company.
On winter Sundays I went up to the farmhouse and had elaborate teas with Tom and his wife Margery, the last of the old-fashioned farming people in the area. Great slices of breadcrumbed ham, cut from the bone, cold roast beef, horseradish sauce, Branston pickle, tomatoes and salad cream, all manoeuvred onto thick slices of fresh, crusty white bread, which Margery baked – the meal washed down with strong tea, laced with gin if you wanted it, for this was a traditional Sunday ritual of Tom’s. Sometimes as a result of these great whacks of gin in the tea, and having picked up logs in the yard and put them in the boot of the Bentley, I would take off down the lane in splendid state, singing ‘The Skye Boat Song’ loudly, the car swinging madly in and out of the ruts. Yes, a mad life lost in the wolds, and a fine madness when Katie was there.
She’d come regularly to the barn and spend nights and most weekends during the first three years of our affair, and I’d painted her time and again, summer and winter, portraits, nudes, sitting, standing, lying out on the low divan, pushed near the big fire in winter, naked in the warmth, her skin with a reddish tinge, coloured by the glowing logs.
Then things changed for her at home, and she came less and less often to the barn, then hardly at all, and didn’t care much to see me up at the stables either. I painted her only once after that, over a year ago, the nude of her lying at the edge of the flax field. After that she wouldn’t be painted, and my painting went to pot. I practically gave it up.
I took some more Châteauneuf, rolled myself a cigarette. So much for my various careers. The long struggle for good work seemed to have ended here, where it had begun thirty years before – upstairs, further upstairs, in this house. There was another, narrow stairway at the end of the landing, leading up to the attics. I got up and made towards it, climbing the steep stairs, sweating.
I’d made a studio for myself in one of these attic rooms when I was eighteen and first studying art in Dublin. I’d fitted it out in all the traditional ways as I’d seen them then: an attic with a skylight giving north light, dark drapes, a raised ‘throne’, big easel, a high stool, but I’d abandoned the place a year later after a flaming row with my mother and left for Paris.
I suppose my stuff was still up here. Nobody ever went up to these rooms. I moved along the narrow corridor, passing rooms filled with old furniture and lumber, until I reached my old studio at the end. I pushed the door open. The early-evening sun streamed through the cobwebbed skylight. The place was filthy, dust motes rising as I trod the boards. The throne was gone, but everything else was still there, including a stack of my old canvase
s in the corner.
I sat up on the high stool, right under the skylight, the sun beating down on me, the little room right under the slates an oven after the long day’s heat. I had another go at the wine, mopped my brow, and licked my salty lips.
My head started to swim.
Suddenly I was swaying, the stool tipping. I fell, sideways, smashing into the stack of old canvases against the wall, my head glancing off the stonework, stunned for a moment.
When I got my senses back my head was still swimming; my eyesight was blurred and my shoulder hurt. The room seemed almost in darkness now. I crouched up on all fours, trying to clear my head, looking at the wall where my old canvases lay scattered, some of the wooden stretchers broken. Gradually my vision cleared.
I got up and looked at the paintings. Only the stretchers of the front two or three were smashed. The other half-dozen oils at the back were all right. I picked through them. Tyro work, many of them nudes. Derivative, too influenced by Modigliani’s nudes.
Then I saw the picture.
It was at the back of the stack, unharmed. A nude woman, not a large canvas. The first thing I knew was that, though it was much in the Modigliani style, I hadn’t done it myself. The painting was far too good. The subtle colours of the woman’s face a darkish peachy tone, with touches of coral and orange that seemed to glow in the slanting beams of sunlight.
The body done in pink, light umber, lemon yellow, sitting on the edge of a divan, set against a dark maroon background, so that the lines and contours of her flesh stood out, were all the more sensuously apparent, the body vibrant, seeming to come out of the canvas at me. There was a fine symmetry in the placing of her arms, making angled parallel lines across the upper body, one hand at her crotch, the other touching the end of a blue beaded necklace. A young, dark-haired woman with a sad, almost tortured face, head cast down, eyes half-closed, as if she had just been, or knew she was about to be, abandoned by the painter.
The composition, colouring, the woman herself – with her angular set of head, long neck, oval eyes, mask-like face, breasts splayed to either side of one forearm – the whole thing was wonderful. In the style of Modigliani, or a copy. Though if the latter, I’d never seen the original in any book or gallery.
Yet there was something about it that denied all fakery. I turned the picture over. It was stretched on an old pinewood frame, backed by decaying hessian, slightly torn at the bottom. I pulled the tear and saw how at some point the canvas had been reset over too small a stretcher, so that it rolled down and round the edge of the wood, leaving part of the picture invisible. I eased up more of the hessian backing, revealing the bottom edge of the inscription, quite clearly, scrawled in black paint. ‘Amelie-Amedeo-Amore’.
Now I was almost certain this was the real thing. Amedeo Modigliani had been poet as well as painter, steeped in Italian classic literature, often quoting Dante, Petrarch, Virgil and Catullus to his friends in cafés or his models as he painted them. There was something in this simple inscription that absolutely reflected the style of the man.
I felt sober, the drink draining out of me. Yes, this must be the real thing, the finest Modigliani nude I’d ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off this sad and erotic woman. I heard the telephone ring, faintly, far away downstairs. I let it ring, gazing at the woman.
Later, when I’d brought the painting down to the drawing room, setting it on the sofa, the phone rang again.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again. It’s me, Elsa Bergen. We met earlier this afternoon.’
‘Yes, you disappeared suddenly. I was wondering where you’d got to.’
‘I’m sorry, leaving in such a hurry. I had to go back home and see my father …’ She hesitated. ‘He died. It was all rather quick. Thank God I got back in time. But before he died he asked me if I’d seen you, if you’d “explained” things to me. I said no, and he said, “You must go and see him again. He knows. He’ll tell you.” He died a few minutes later.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Yes, well, you see,’ she rushed on, ‘there must really be something – some special connection between our two families, which we couldn’t fathom, something we’ve missed. So I wanted to call, to see if we could meet again. Maybe tomorrow morning? About ten?’
‘Yes, that’s fine.’
What the hell is this all about, I wondered, after I’d put the phone down. If the matter between our families was so important why hadn’t the old man told her about it there and then, before he died?
I brought the nude over to the big window that gave straight out into the pink-tinted waters of the bay. The sun was beginning to set. The painting, reflecting some of this light, shone with a strange bronze sheen, the woman seeming more alive than ever. I left her. It had been a long day and I’d drunk too much. I put the picture on a chair, flopped down on the big sofa and fell asleep.
I woke early next morning. Bright sunlight streamed through the big windows, illuminating the nude, propped on an armchair. I dragged myself off the sofa. I felt unsteady. Was this really an original Modigliani? I wasn’t as sure now as I had been the previous evening.
I stared at her. It was an exceptionally erotic painting, even for Modigliani, and it must have been by him. Who could have faked so personal an effect of intimacy and reproach? Or invent such a simple inscription? A faker would simply have scrawled the artist’s signature, if he’d bothered even with that, as Modigliani often hadn’t.
‘Amelie-Amedeo-Amore.’
There had been a deep mutual passion here, behind the words and in the painting. I was fascinated by this woman. Who was she? – this Amelie, painted seventy or more years before in Paris, hidden, forgotten in a Dublin attic, and now reborn.
It was only then, having established to my own satisfaction at least that this was an original, that other questions struck me. How had my father, a man of no real taste in art, least of all in modern art, come to possess such a picture? Why hide it, among my own poor imitations of Modigliani’s works?
Still, one point was clear beyond dispute. The painting was mine now, since my father, on his death, had left me all the hopeless pictures in the house, along with his motor cruiser, my mother to have these for her lifetime before passing them on to me. So now, without her knowing it, she had bequeathed me the nude masterpiece as well. Splendid irony! She had denied me my inheritance in the house, leaving it to a Dublin charity, but now she had made me a millionaire several times over.
My mother hadn’t trusted me in anything. First because of my insistence on taking up the dubious career of a painter, then, latterly at least, for my conspicuous lack of success in this, and finally for what she had always seen as my irresponsible, my ‘bohemian’ way of life.
She’d never seen how there was as much of the bourgeois in me as there was of the bohemian – the first characteristic having led to my unfortunate marriage, over twenty years before, to the essentially very conformist young woman I’d met when I first lived in London: Angela, daughter of a High Court judge.
Penniless twelve hours ago, I was rich beyond the dreams of avarice now. Amelie, at present prices, must be worth millions. Yet looking at the picture again I felt I never wanted to be parted from this woman. She struck me, in her face and shapes, her crown of dark hair, the sense of understanding and intelligence, her unafraid sexuality, to be the sort of woman who could be both wife and mistress.
The phone rang. It was Dermot O’Higgins, an antiques dealer with an engaging Dublin voice. He’d read of my mother’s death in the paper and had heard from a friend in the trade that my father had collected fine Gothic-revival furniture. I might be interested in selling one or two of these pieces? They were likely to be valuable. Cash, of course. Perhaps he might come round later?
From where I stood by the telephone in the drawing room I could see out into the big hall and through the other door into the dining room – rooms with quite a bit of Gothic-revival furniture. I’d no right to sell any of it, but since I’d
been left penniless, I would, without a qualm. Besides – and I looked over at the nude again – selling some of the furniture and getting a good stack of cash for it would be a first step in never having to part with this extraordinary woman.
‘Yes, certainly,’ I told the man. ‘Come at 12.30, say? Don’t think there’s much of any great value here, but you’re welcome to look.’
An hour later Elsa arrived.
We sat on the terrace in the sun, great rose bushes blooming around us. Mrs Mullins, who’d cooked for my parents and lived in the gate lodge with her husband Billy the gardener, had brought us coffee. Washed and shaved, with some breakfast, the hangover had gone and I felt quite spruce. Elsa, however, was no longer her controlled self. There were cracks in her decorum, a barely repressed fluster, her face drawn. Her father was dead and had left her with a mystery, probably something quite unpleasant, since he wasn’t able to speak of it even on his deathbed.
I thought I saw the reason now for that look of premonitory alarm on Elsa’s face at the reception. I’m half-Irish, half-Italian – and Jewish. I tend to believe in fate and precognition.