by Francis King
‘Does he? Do you think he really does?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
Theo got off the bed, and stooped and fumbled under it to draw out a pair of slippers, trodden down at the heels, which were made of the same tartan as his dressing-gown. ‘Now you go back to the fire and keep warm, and I’ll make your cocoa.’
‘No, really, Theo; you’ll catch cold in nothing but your dressing-gown.’
‘I won’t catch cold. I’m tough.’ He tightened the dressing-gown cord about his waist and, curiously stiff and erect, made for the door. ‘ You go and talk to Götz.’
Five minutes later he returned with a tray on which were two mugs of cocoa and a saucer of crumbling petit-beurre biscuits. ‘There!’ He put the tray down on the top of the piano, and brought a mug first to me and then to Götz where he lay moody and silent, outstretched on the divan.
‘Thank you, Theo,’ he muttered.
Theo sat down beside him. ‘Poor Götz!’ he said; as he smiled at the German his face expressed nothing but tenderness and sympathy and affection. Then he looked down at Götz’s feet: ‘Gracious!’ he exclaimed. ‘ Look how wet you’ve got yourself. You must take those off at once.’ As Götz sipped the hot cocoa, Theo began to unlace his shoes and ease them off to display the soiled socks beneath.
Chapter Nine
IT is from this evening that I date the reinvigoration that started Theo on the third, and last, of the schemes by which he attempted to establish himself as something more durable than a mere ‘character’ in Athens. Slowly those periods of despondency became shorter, and less and less frequent; he was once more eager to go out, to hear news of his friends and enemies, and himself to plot for their happiness or unhappiness. Perhaps it was simply that he had got used to the idea of life without Nadia; perhaps, as he himself would have explained, he was exchanging a ‘manic’ for a ‘depressive’ phase in his life.
‘I see now that I’ve been on the wrong track. Mine is an original genius, and I must do original things. Others have designed clothes, others have been composers. But there is only one fantasiometrist in the world—in the universe. That, when I die, will be the contribution by which I shall be remembered.’
Once again all the old apparatus for publicity and promotion was brought into play. Letters were sent to the newspapers, often bearing the signatures of Theo’s friends though he himself composed them; interviews were given to a Time magazine reporter, to a poet art-critic, lecturing for the British Council, and to the young editress of a University magazine; plans were laid for hiring a gallery, borrowing two rooms in the house of a friend, transporting the whole exhibition to Rome, London or Paris, getting Picasso or the Turkish Foreign Minister or Katina Paxinou to open it. But, always recurrent, there remained a single problem: money.
Cecil was due to return, and Theo would sometimes hint that perhaps, once more, he would be willing to give his assistance. ‘But I don’t like to ask him. It doesn’t seem fair.… Not that a hundred pounds or so can really matter much to him—can it? I’m told that he’s very rich.’
‘A hundred pounds always matters—however rich one is,’ Götz said sagely.
‘And anyway he has the idea now that any project of mine is bound to end in fiasco—simply because, on the two previous occasions, circumstances all conspired against me.… Frank, can’t you think of a patron for me? Wouldn’t the British Council do something?’
‘But, Theo, fantasiometry has so very little to do with the British Way of Life.’
‘Oh, that attitude is so parochial!’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘What about your friend, Madame Landerlöst?’ I was astonished that Theo should mention her, since he had always insisted on placing on her shoulders the blame for his failure with Mabel Aaronson.
‘What about her?’
‘Their Embassy is one of the largest in Athens.’
‘But why should she——?’
‘She’s interested in art, isn’t she?’
‘Up to a point.’
‘And in Greece?’
‘Well—yes.’
‘Then there you are!’
At the time I did not take this suggestion any more seriously than the others that Theo had been throwing out during the last few days. But two mornings later, he was round early at Dino’s flat, coming into my bedroom while I was dressing, with a cardboard box under his arm. ‘I was afraid you’d be off for a lesson before I could get to you. Really, Dino should speak to that man of his—his manners are awful. I had to push past him, he didn’t want me to come in!’ He watched me for a moment as I brushed my hair before the glass, and then said, with obvious pleasure: ‘Goodness, you are going thin in front. Still—you’re the sort of person who looks far more distinguished when he’s bald.’ He put the box down on my unmade bed, and seating himself beside it, began to tug at the string. ‘I had a brain-wave,’ he said. He chuckled to himself: ‘There’s not much I don’t know about diplomacy.’ Continuing to struggle with the knot he added: ‘After this, I think we shall have Madame Landerlöst in the bag.’ He glanced up at me, as I began to thread my cuff-links. ‘Don’t you ever use those shell cuff-links I made you for Christmas?’
‘Not for everyday.’
‘Look!’ He opened the box. ‘ Sophie Landerlöst!’
I peered in; and the extraordinary thing was that Theo’s construction was recognisably Sophie.
‘The face is built up from Swedish matches,’ he began to explain. ‘The eyes are two studs from a pair of climbing boots, and the mouth is painted with some cyclamen lip-stick—I noticed that that was the shade she used. One breast has a photograph of Josephine Baker pasted on it, and the other of Sarah Bernhardt; that suggests her equivocal origins, you see. The breasts themselves are made from two tennis balls from a set of six that I bought many years ago in Paris. In Paris, you notice—most appropriate. At her feet are lying these typical Greek figures, cut from magazines and newspapers, of course: an evzone, Mr Venizelos—always so susceptible—the actor Pappas, Admiral Lappas, a man who has just passed his one hundred and twentieth birthday in Joannina, Mr Yost, the chef at the Grande Bretagne, and so on.… That, of course, means that all Greece is at her feet.’ He continued to explain, pointing to each feature in turn, until he concluded: ‘And now, dear boy, the rest is up to you.’
I drew back, astonished.
‘You must take this little gift and present it to Madame Landerlöst.’
‘Present it to Madame Landerlöst?’ I echoed.
‘Well, what’s so strange in that? You’re having drinks with her today, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then all you have to do is to hand her the box with some—some judiciously worded compliment.’
‘But what shall I say? She may be offended.’
‘Why should she be offended? She should be honoured that I have singled her out to become a subject for my art.’
‘She may not see it like that.’
‘Of course she will—if you say the right things. Naturally that depends on you. But I can rely on you, can’t I?’
I hesitated; I knew that this was one of the ‘tests’ to which, from time to time, Theo would put his friends, and I realised that if I should refuse, there was a likelihood that I should be banished, either temporarily or permanently, from his circle. ‘When the hour of need came, he failed me’: how often I had heard that sentence applied indiscriminately to friends who had put off his visits, had failed to win for him some concession from the banks or Government offices in which they worked, or all unconsciously had perpetrated some other imagined slight or insult, like forgetting his birthday, failing to recognise him in a crowded street or laughing at some remark that was intended to be serious.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it for you. But don’t hold me responsible for the consequences.’
‘Now is that likely?’ Theo asked.
It was, I knew, very likely.
Soph
ie Landerlöst had told me to ‘drop in for a drink—just ourselves, that’s all’; but as I had feared, her drawing-room was crowded. I walked towards her with extreme self-consciousness, holding Theo’s box. Everyone seemed to be staring at me, and when Sophie herself greeted me, I dithered, not sure what to do with my burden as she held her hand out to be shaken. Eventually, as there was no table, I put the box on the floor. Theo would not have approved, I knew, of the clumsiness of my entry: I might almost have been Götz.
Sophie had a daughter, a girl of nine who, when she was not helping at Sophie’s parties, seemed to spend her time sticking photographs of film-stars into an album. She spoke French, English and Greek indiscriminately, often all three at once, and took what I considered to be an unpleasantly precocious interest in all her mother’s affairs. Sophie always declared that she had brought her up to be ‘an old-fashioned child’; but apart from her habit of curtseying to adults to whom she was introduced and the pert mock-gravity of her manner, her upbringing seemed, on the contrary, to have been disastrously ‘ modern’. She had a thin, razor-sharp face around which her dark hair fell in elaborate ringlets.
As I stood exchanging a few words with Sophie, this child tiptoed towards us, gave me her usual bobbing curtsey, and then, with the pointed toe of one of the black patent-leather dancing slippers, began surreptitiously to ease the lid off Theo’s box.
‘Désirée dear! What are you doing? Leave Mr Cauldwell’s parcel alone.’
‘What’s inside it, Mr Cauldwell—please?’ Her skinny arms were locked behind her back as she swayed from side to side.
‘It’s for your mother,’ I said. ‘Be a good girl and put it on that table for me.’
Sophie had been distracted by another guest, but the child now called out: ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mr Cauldwell has a present for you.’
‘A present—for me?’
‘It’s in his box.… Can I open it for Mummy, Mr Cauldwell?’
People had begun to gather round. ‘It’s not from me,’ I said. ‘It’s from a friend of mine—Colonel Grecos.’
Désirée began to giggle: ‘Do you mean that old man that I saw putting some of our cigarettes in his pocket when we gave that party for Eisenhower?’
‘No, that was Colonel Garvas,’ Sophie corrected her. ‘Colonel Grecos is that extraordinary old thing who banged out those Greek dances for us that evening—isn’t he, Mr Cauldwell?’
I wondered how Theo would feel if he heard his performance of the Athens Concerto described in these terms, but I nodded and said: ‘Yes, you came to his house.’
‘It was great fun,’ Sophie said. She turned to the guests gathered around us: ‘We did all the dances—and this old boy is really a wonderful dancer, much better than I. We went on till two.’
‘I heard about it from Lady Aaronson,’ Mrs Tullett, the wife of a British businessman, said with a certain tartness. ‘ I gather that you really let yourself go, Sophie.’ Although she and her hostess were perpetually in each other’s houses, they rarely had a good word to say of each other. ‘Lady Aaronson told me you were stinking.’
‘I was!’
‘Do open the parcel, Mummy. Or may I open it?’ Désirée, already kneeling on the floor, began to lift the lid.
‘What is it? What on earth is it?’ the guests all asked. Everyone turned to me: ‘What is it, Mr Cauldwell?’
‘Colonel Grecos calls it ‘‘fantasiometry’’.’
‘Calls it what? What was that? What?’ different voices queried.
Mrs Tullett, who was tall and raw-boned and perpetually conscious of being less wealthy, less well-dressed and less popular than her hostess, drawled: ‘It’s this thing he does. Somebody—who was it?—was talking about it to me only the other day. It was Madame Tsaldaris, I think—or was it Tiggy Ghika. People seem to think he’s got something new.’
‘But what is it? What is it meant to be?’
‘Guess,’ I said.
‘It’s Mummy!’ Désirée cried.
‘Right, first time.’
‘It’s me!’ Sophie exclaimed with a mingling of incredulity and delight. ‘But explain it to me—I don’t understand. How clever of the child to realise!’ She put an arm round Désirée and pressed her to one of her massive thighs. ‘Do explain, Mr Cauldwell.’
I had never thought of myself in the past as being a good salesman, but now it was too easy. I talked vaguely, using the terms that Theo himself would have used, about fantasiometry, and when any statement appeared to be questioned, I had only to wait for Mrs Tullett to silence the interrupter by putting in some remark like: ‘But that’s obvious’ or ‘You’re missing the whole point of modern art’, followed by an inaccurate repetition or expansion of what I had just said.
‘But I think it’s such fun!’ Sophie cried when I had concluded my explanation. ‘Don’t you? Don’t you think it’s fun?’ She turned to her guests, and then once again, fascinated, examined the object. She turned it this way and that, touched the two tennis-ball breasts with the long crimson nail of her forefinger, and then held it up to her nose to give it a sniff. ‘It even smells of me!’ she cried.
‘I must get him to do one of me,’ the wife of a minor Greek politician said.
‘So must I,’ another woman added.
Mrs Tullett turned to me and said in a hoarse whisper: ‘Stupid hens! They’ll do anything if they think it’s the fashion. As soon as I’d bought my Tsarouchis, there were rude pictures of nude sailors in every flat in Kolonaki. It must be so discouraging for an artist like—like Colonel What’s-his-name to have to stomach that sort of enthusiasm.’
But Theo had a stomach for enthusiasm of any sort, and he was delighted to be taken up by these foolish, excitable women who could pay no higher compliment to his art than to say it was ‘such fun’. Now he was to be seen at innumerable cocktail parties and tea parties and when there was a knock at the door it was as likely to be two shrill, well-dressed Kolonaki ‘hens’ (as Mrs Tullett had called them), as two Peiraeus cocks for Cecil. Mrs Tullett herself and Sophie were vying with each other for the honour of being Theo’s patroness.
‘I don’t know what to say. Of course Madame Landerlöst is much grander, isn’t she? And if I have the exhibition at the Embassy, it’ll give it a certain stamp. But Mrs Tullett is much more of an intellectual—people take her much more seriously—and though her house hasn’t really got a single good room, if she’s willing to let me have both the drawing-room and the dining-room … What do you think, Frank?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s helpful, anyway.… I suppose you haven’t got any British Embassy writing paper?’
‘No. Why should I?’
Theo was at that moment at work on one of his ‘objects’. ‘ I’m doing Moore Crossthwaite. Next time you’re at the Embassy, do see if you can scrounge some. One of those clerks you know is sure to let you have a sheet. But it must be stiff.’
In the end, Theo decided that it would be best to hold his exhibition under Sophie’s patronage; and inevitably, when this was known, Mrs Tullett, previously so lofty in her championing of his art, now began to scatter derisive comments. ‘ Oh, it’s amusing in a dotty sort of way,’ one would hear her drawl at parties. ‘Not at all a bad joke. But poor Sophie will take such things seriously. She’s like a child in many ways … Oh, Sophie, we’re just talking about your dirty old man. You’re not seriously going to organise his exhibition for him, are you?’
‘Certainly I am.’
‘I think it’s so brave of you. Athenians have such a sharp sense of the ridiculous. Anyway, this is the silly season so, I suppose, why not?’
As the day they had fixed drew closer and closer, Theo seemed to eat and sleep less and less and work more and more. He became, as a result, nervy and irritable and his tendency to see insults where none were intended had now been aggravated into what can only be described as a definite persecution mania. From time to time even his closest friends—Götz or Cecil or myself—would fall under s
uspicion, and if two of us ever began to talk together, in front of Theo but out of his hearing, he would shout: ‘What are you whispering about? What is it? Out with it!’
The smallest mishap would start him on a train of ominous brooding. For example:
‘I wonder if I can really trust Dino?’ he mused one evening as he splashed paint on to one of his ‘objects’.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s two days since I gave him that announcement for the editor of Kathimerini and it still hasn’t appeared. They were going to have dinner together.’
‘Do you think Dino forgot it?’
‘No, I don’t think he forgot it.’
‘Well, then?’
‘There’s something not quite straight about him.’ He stared at his work, and then looked up at me: ‘He might have destroyed the announcement,’ he said.
‘But, Theo—why on earth?’
The next morning the announcement was on the front page of the newspaper.
Götz and I both realised that the sleeplessness, and the refusal to settle to a proper meal, and the unrelieved tension in which Theo was now living were bound, in the end, to have an adverse effect on his health. We used to urge him to rest, but having lain down on a couch for a few minutes, he would throw off the rug with which he had covered himself, and drag himself to his feet, mumbling, ‘ ‘‘Nox ruit, Aenea …’’ ’
‘But, Theo, do please sleep for just half an hour.’
‘I haven’t time.’ He would begin pulling odds and ends from a drawer. ‘ Besides, with all these ideas whirling about inside me, how can I sleep? I must get them out. Must, must, must,’ he would go on mumbling as he settled again to work.
Only on one occasion, when Götz had his birthday, did we succeed in dragging him out: and that was the night of the disaster.
Theo was in an excellent mood, for his exhibits, with one or two exceptions, were now all ready, stacked upon shelf upon shelf of the room which he had always called the ‘library’, although the books had long since been sold during one of his financial crises and the shelves until this moment had supported nothing but dust and some tattered copies of Punch and The Illustrated London News and Health and Efficiency. We had been together to see Sophie Landerlöst about the final arrangements for the exhibition which was to be held in less than ten days.