Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
I felt great wide-eyed questions welling up, about what it had been like; and then shamefaced doubts about what could tolerably be asked by someone who knew nothing about it, who had never known anything like it. ‘Your parents weren’t worried about your spending so much time with him?’ was all I prudishly came up with.
‘No, no. It was they who arranged for me to go.’ I thought Paul was cross with me for a moment, then saw that perhaps it was only with himself. ‘Put simply: when Orst became too infirm to stay at the Villa he had moved back to his sister’s house – now, as you know, our Museum. I’m not sure when he contracted the pox. You probably know there was a great spread of it during the war – it may have been soon after he returned from England, in 1919. I suspect the tertiary stage was very delayed, and when it came it was clearly very prolonged. Anyway, Delphine took him in: she was very tough and capable and … unsentimental. That would have been in about 1930. She looked after him with her old servant, who was married to the cook – dear old people. The paintings and most of the contents of the Villa were brought over and stored, a lot of them in this house that we’re in now, which had been left to Delphine and which stood unused for years. It was she who made the little passageway that you go through from our sitting-room to my office.’
‘Oh!’ I said, with slightly more wonder than I could account for.
‘And there he stayed, painting until he could see no more and taking a long time to die.’ This was what Helene had hinted at on our evening walk – it seemed the embodiment of something I had always felt about the old town, and found shadowed forth in many of Orst’s eerie lithographs, a sense of dying life, life hidden, haunted and winter-slow. ‘The trouble came with the new war. Edgard and Delphine’s mother had been Jewish – oh, quite assimilated, but Jewish. Obviously, they must have watched the deepening of race-hatred among the Belgian fascists with alarm; but when the Germans made their move, it was all so incredibly quick and so feebly resisted, they had to make a plan. She fled to England again, at really the last possible moment – it was almost Dunkirk. She stayed with friends until the end of ’44, in Chislehurst – they were old patrons of Edgard’s.’
‘Chislehurst!’ This trivial detail surprised me much more than the lightning progress of the German army. She could have known Aunt Tina. I remembered Orst’s love of the
legendary
sentiment in English art.
‘Of course there was no way Edgard could be rushed out of the country, so they did the simplest thing, by pretending he no longer existed – which to all intents and purposes and in most people’s minds was the case anyway. The cook and her husband stayed on and looked after him, and if asked they would say that he was either dead or in England too.’
‘He lived a kind of ghost existence, a premature ghost.’
‘Indeed so. At first, the measures weren’t quite as drastic as had been feared. I think initially the Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David – I remember those in the street; but not for long: the next thing was they weren’t allowed to leave their houses. The final stage, of course, was the order that they must go off to work elsewhere, which many thousands of them, with no freedom or civil rights, did without any great reluctance. Or they had persuaded themselves that the summons to the train-station offered them a positive chance of a better life, rather than … what it did.’ And I shared Paul’s evident reluctance to name their destination: I felt it on the pulses, hearing his bleak summary of the facts. ‘On one occasion, quite late on, the house was searched – I believe in a routine way. Orst was wheeled and bumped through the secret passage into the other house and no one suspected anything.’
And there he left it hanging. I wanted to help him on towards the story’s wretched climax, though my sense of it as an adventure had withered. I looked round and saw Lilli in the doorway.
‘Ah,’ said Paul, both relieved and confused. ‘Why don’t we go through?’
I cleared a space on my side of the desk and sat there as if about to be served a second meal. I pictured Cherif back at my room, gaping with boredom, stirred slowly into resentment and jealous fantasy. I hadn’t actually said I’d be back for lunch. Paul came in with a large old box-file and set it in front of me – I felt I’d rather jumped the gun, he still had this stage of my education to lead me through.
The file contained all that survived of the painter’s photographs of Jane Byron. They were creased and curled and compressed and when I lifted the restraining spring they rose with a ghostly tremor to the brim of the box.
I was looking at a large-faced woman wrapped and scarfed like a desert-dweller in a length of dark material, her pale, heavy features set off in half-profile by the silky cowl. Her skin was rough and pouchy, there was a pitiless quality to the photo, heightened by its metallic register, which rose out of black through obscure leaden greys to glaring blurred highlights. In the next picture her hair was down, she was gazing up from within it, in pained adoration, her long, powerful hands twisting a lily. In the next she lay on a kind of day-bed, her hair dragged backwards, eyes staring at nothing. It was the first one I recognised as the basis of a painting – the Ophelia that hung upstairs – and it gave me, across nearly a century, a quick shudder to see her acting out that particular death.
Paul stayed in the room, abruptly taking down books and putting them back, not hovering exactly, but there to watch my progress, commenting occasionally, as I picked another photo from the box, on the picture it had become. ‘That of course is “Le Collier de Médailles”,’ he said when I paused on a staring full face, chin pushed up by an elaborate heavy collar of what?, Roman medals, the impressive white slope of the bosom wrapped in a sheet – it was sexy and monumental at once. And then, at a very shadowy little study, a reverie, the eyes averted, a pale gloved arm gleaming against darkness – ‘Ah, that’s a lost picture, it disappeared in the war, it was called “La Musique” or “Palestrina” – oddly enough, I only know the painting itself from a photograph.’
Many of them were torn at the edges, or showed the little tooth-marks of pegs or rusty pin-holes. On several a white crayon had added its own emphases or drawn a detail out of darkness, like a picture touched up and sharpened in an old magazine. On one or two there were smears of paint, lemon or violet thumbprints that were disconcerting evidence of the man himself, who took care never to be seen at work. Sometimes there were splashes of that intense blue he used, which Paul said was the costly blue of a Bellini Madonna but given a further resonance – the Symbolists’
infinite azure
.
Almost at the bottom of the box was the photograph that Orst had based the famous triptych wing on, where Jane was seen at the mirror, seen
in
the mirror, hidden from us by the shimmering high-necked cope figured with lilies. The photo was brighter than the painting, but it seemed to me just as accomplished, with the sheen of the fabric disappearing into folds of shadow, and the sources of light subtly diffused. In a way I liked it more than the finished work, I liked it before it had been coloured in, while you could still see details in the background – a littered desk, a doorway with a tacked-up curtain – that Orst would blur and dissimulate into shadowy panels and dim thresholds.
Sometimes Jane smiled, was required to smile, either distantly, at some soft recollection, or close up, with a kind of lustful fixity that I registered with a shock through the momentary delay, the fluted dusk, of a veil. Paul helped me with reproductions of paintings, and I looked at them with a dwindling sense of amazement, side by side with their originals. They had the unintended effect of making the paintings seem predictable and the photographs more and more mysterious. Or perhaps they were just two different kinds of mystery, one deliberate, the artist making things vague and portentous, and the other to do with two lovers in a Brussels studio and the things they did for each other on certain mornings, the posing and play-acting given solemnity by the long exposures, the need for unblinking stillness. There was even a touch of irritation in one or two of the expressions, the mood of some protracted rehearsal, a sense that they had been at this long enough. I found myself imagining the face cracking, the hand dropping the golden bowl, a casting-off of wraps, a move to coffee and cigarettes in the next room, the intimate accommodations of an affair in a bachelor apartment.
And there was a further minor mystery, to do with famous beauties, beauty as it seemed to have been judged in the days before cinema and running water: sallow skin, broody jaws, great hanks of greasy dark hair, a greasy sheen too to collars and lapels and sweated-in satin, but no faltering of confidence in front of the camera, no suspicion that they might not appeal to the fastidious viewer a century ahead. Jane wasn’t as grim as some I had looked at bemusedly, but she was big and middle-aged close to as she might not have been in the magic of stage-lights, and was never to be in the necromancy of Orst’s art. Perhaps her skin was spoilt by corrosive paints, it was only natural that he should give her this radical, classicising face-lift; I wasn’t sure I could say so to Paul, but I liked her best as she came solid and unembarrassed before the camera, when she was only acting. I liked a sexy sense of latent power she had, a cleverness in those large eyes, so colourless they seemed faintly fiendish and barely changed between photo and painting, pupils of grey ice. I knew nothing about her, but I felt she could make her own way, she wasn’t just the silent screen of the artist’s fantasy – or at least, wasn’t meant to be, wouldn’t have been if she’d lived.
I laid the pictures carefully back in the box-file and looked up at Paul, who swept it away like an attentive waiter. ‘That was
very
…’ I said, able after a few seconds to produce only a rather special smile, which he seemed to find adjective enough.
‘I knew you’d be fascinated,’ he said quietly. ‘I think we should have a few of them in the catalogue, don’t you?’
‘But obviously.’ It had become
our
catalogue only in the past week or so, and he appeared to welcome the uninformed certainty with which I saw some matters he had fretted over for years. ‘Besides they are themselves art-works by Orst,’ I pronounced. ‘We – you might even put them all in.’
‘It’s not usual,’ he said crisply, crossing to the print-cabinet, and stooping to tug out one of the wide shallow drawers. ‘But see what you think later’ – in a teasing tone; was I drunk?
He came back with a big square folder, and handed it to me carefully. ‘A la nuit tombante’ was written on it in an old-fashioned hand – not Paul’s pretty writing, some earlier guardian, perhaps the high-minded Delphine … ‘I just want you to see this,’ he said. I opened it with a little mime of curiosity, as if it were a present.
An expanse of creamy-white, a sheet that was more like a wall, with a small square aperture at the centre – through which you looked at a dark sea and a sky that rose from a rim of light into deepening greys. The image was only four or five inches high, but intensified by a heavy black frame that gave one the impression of looking out from a high-up window in a thick-walled castle – for some reason I thought of Elsinore. At the same time I knew it was the lithograph to which Orst had returned in the simple late panel of the triptych, though there he had dispensed with the heavy masonry of the surround. It had a certain power, the lonely sea and the sky, though I felt it took enigma to the verge of emptiness.
Underneath, though, was another sheet – an earlier state, Paul said, that showed what the black margins hid, like worn old details boarded up against the salt air: the white balustrade of a balcony below, tall windows at either side folded steeply back, in the left one the letters DROME reversed, running downwards and very faint. The sky was lighter and crossed with high striations of cloud and in its depths I thought I saw (what may only have been a hesitation of the pencil) a pale speck of the folding star – well, you didn’t fold at sea, but it gave me a disconsolate shiver.
‘Presumably Hippo and not Aero,’ I said, envisaging the white cliff of sea-front hotels, it might be Eastbourne, and then seeing of course where it was, the whole thing shifting into a deeper perspective, a hotel at Ostend – ‘Cold as the wind without an end’.
‘Eh? Oh, you’re very clever.’ Paul smiled. ‘But not quite clever enough!’ I frowned and he stooped beside me; I was in his breath as he looked very closely at the picture. ‘You have to think what hotel our friend would be likely to choose for a romantic escape with his lover. And right next to the Kursaal, too, for Jane, who loved to gamble.’
‘I’ve never been to Ostend, where I assume it is, except getting off the ferry to come here.’ I was trying to think what other sorts of drome there were. A velodrome? The Belgians were keen cyclists. Or perhaps it was the beginning of the word. ‘The Dromedary Hotel?’ was my unconfident attempt.
Paul stood back. ‘No matter. It was the Hotel Andromeda. It really doesn’t matter, though it was a favourite legend of his.’
‘Did he see himself as rescuing Jane from something? I suppose her jealous husband …’
‘It’s possible. Actually, I don’t think it was the rescue side that interested him, he was much keener on the idea of the chained-up woman. He had a bronze Andromeda at the Villa – school of de Vries, a beautiful thing, but with a very long and heavy chain that hung down the pedestal in a loop.’
‘Anyway’, I said after a moment, ‘he certainly didn’t rescue her on the most important occasion.’
‘He couldn’t swim,’ said Paul abstractedly, still pondering the images he must have seen so many times, as if there were more of these secrets in them if you only knew how to look. ‘He stood at the window in the late afternoon and watched her go out till he lost sight of her. She swam right out, as she often did – she was a strong swimmer. He never saw her come back. He sat in the room and sketched the window and the view, almost as a kind of reflex: he liked to be busy with his work all the time. He made this simple empty drawing – evening was coming on – he followed the hour and darkened it into his favourite twilight. Later he went down to the beach to look for her. I’ve always had a very clear idea of the scene, the dandyish young man in his owl’s glasses, rambling back and forth on the sand in the thickening gloom, trying to make out faces, putting questions to strangers: that awful fear that makes you an idiot. At last he told the police, but it was dark by then, and there was nothing they could do; and besides, who knew which way she had gone? Perhaps further out a current would take her. They alerted the coastguards at Middelkerke and De Haan. She was quite a well-known figure, so the news travelled fast in other directions. Apparently they had registered at the hotel under false names, but Edgard forgot in the turmoil of the moment. He seems to have been briefly deranged by anxiety – he went out quite late to the Kursaal, believing that he would meet her there. Then he made a scene. He was still so young, remember, he was only thirty-four, and he thought he had lost his great love – well, he had. I must say he seems a touching figure to me – self-absorbed, of course, not particularly humorous, but slightly comic even so, and, you know, vulnerable.’