Charlotte Gray (40 page)

The woman returned with a tray on which was a bottle of spirit and three glasses. She poured one and handed it to Gregory. He thanked her warmly. As he raised the small glass to his lips, he thought of Leslie Brind taking down the glass yard from above the bar at the Rose and Crown. The fellowship of these men, foolish, drunk as they were, was not a reason to die but could be another reason to live. The liquor on his tongue freed the words and, thinking of these men, he began once more.

"You imbecile!" the woman screamed, and Gregory was stunned by her fury. Her face was so twisted by anger and indignation that it took him a moment to see that she was talking to her husband.

"Give this man a card! If you delay one moment longer I'll pack my bag and leave you."

"But, my dear, I must think about the commune."

"If you're not man enough to take responsibility for your actions in the town then God knows why you're Mayor. You're certainly not the man I married. Give me the cards."

"There aren't any here. They're at the Mairie."

"Then you will get one first thing in the morning."

"But he'll need a photograph." The Mayor's fleshy face was set about with anxiety.

Gregory had recognised the word 'photograph' and was rummaging in his pocket.

"Notes for pilots' by Wing Commander H. S. Verity DSO, DFC. He knew it by heart: " You should carry a standard escape kit, some purses of French money, a gun or two, and thermos flask of hot coffee or what you will.

Empty your pockets of anything of interest to the Hun, but carry with you some small photographs of yourself in civilian clothes. These may be attached to false identity papers. Change your linen before flying, as dirty shirts have a bad effect on wounds. The Lysander is a warm aeroplane, and I always wore a pair of shoes rather than flying boots.

If you have to walk across the Pyrenees you might as well do it in comfort." Gregory handed the Mayor two photographs.

The painting that Levade had thrust at Charlotte was the only one he still had from the best period of his work. He had kept it back when he sold the others, from some suspicion developing even at the time that the inlets in his mind had moved into a favourable but temporary conjunction that never come again. Charlotte looked at it for several minutes; by the time she had finished she was less sure what it was she had seen than when she began. There was a square in a French town, painted in a clear and representational manner; the colouring was flat, the shadows thrown by the buildings were hardedged: there was no deliquescence of form or colour as in an Impressionist painting; on the contrary, the technique was so realistic that it drew attention to itself.

But against this assertiveness there was an element of mystery: the square was deserted, a clock on the church showed twenty to four, as though this blank hour of the afternoon were significant. Two figures in a side street faced in different directions, apparently trapped by yfle melancholy misunderstanding. The picture was suffused with a sadness that was both particular and irresistibly suggestive. What gripped Charlotte was the sense of being strongly moved by a mysterious emotion, yet having the release of that feeling repeatedly closed by the ambiguity of the image. In the days after she had seen it, Charlotte thought that perhaps what made it so affecting was that Levade had given the impression of seeing through the surface of the world into the deeper reality: he had unpicked one's natural assumptions of the way things looked and reassembled them in a different way; then, as one tried to adjust to this altered, truer state, the constituents of the picture once more unravelled.

It was an entrancing feeling that Levade had evoked, but it was not reassuring; the powerful yearning, brought on by the immediate certainty that he had disclosed something profound, was frustrated by a metaphysical limitation. Perhaps there was an element of truth he had not been able to find. Perhaps he had reached a point beyond which it was not possible to go.

When she asked him why he no longer painted in this way, he sighed.

"It's simple," he said.

"It's because I no longer dream. As a young man I painted in a very traditional way. Before the war I had a studio with some other people in the rue Carpeaux. We'd see what Picasso and the others were doing, and although I thought it was important I couldn't find my own version of it, my own language. I kept on painting in the style of artists I admired, Courbet, or Degas, then later like the early Matisse. When I returned to Paris after the war everything seemed to have changed. Suddenly I found I wanted to paint quite differently, and the subjects suggested to me the way they should be treated. They seemed to come to me more or less complete in dreams. At least, I didn't puzzle over how I should treat them, I just had to record them, as they were."

Charlotte was sitting, once more at Levade's invitation, on the bed in his studio.

"And these dreams that came to you, were they of places you knew, or were they imagined?"

"Most of them are the places of my childhood. It was as though there were a landscape inside my head which I'd forgotten, and it was restored to me bit by bit each night. Perhaps it was the effect of the war in some way. I would wake up each morning and find that another small piece of myself had been rescued and returned to me, though of course, it now looked different.

In the passage of time it had become more charged. My dreams seemed to capture the full meaning - something that had not been apparent at the time."

"How long did this go on?" said Charlotte.

"For about five years. No more than that. All the good paintings I've done were in that small period. After that, something shifted, something changed. Although the process seemed to be spontaneous, I think there was also an element of will. I spent many hours at the easel there was that sort of self-discipline but apart from that I was unaware of any intellectual effort, although I suspect it was more than I realised at the time. When you're painting at that pitch of concentration, your mind is partly passive, you're in a state in which you surrender to the impulses you feel, but there's something active as well. You're making sure at the very least that the impulses stay in the right constellation. There's push and pull; even letting go is quite a conscious act. The fact that you're not aware of the active part doesn't make it any less demanding.

Many painters become worn down by their efforts Derain, for instance, in my view.

Perhaps in the end that's what happened to me. I experienced it as a loss of these spontaneous dreams, but maybe I was really just exhausted." Levade coughed and gave one of his quickly vanishing smiles.

"So now I just put paint on canvas. The skin of a waitress's arm."

"It must be frustrating."

"Of course. I think about it all the time. Painting was my life and it failed me. I was bound to wonder why. And the solitude has given me time to puzzle over it." Charlotte pushed her shoes off and sat back against the bolster, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms round them. Levade had spoken quite unguardedly, with a fluency that must have derived from having gone over the question so often in his mind.

"Have you talked to Julien about this?"

"Yes." Levade sat on a little stool he kept in front of the easel.

"It was difficult at first because I hadn't seen him since I left his mother and I thought he might not want to know me. But he's a very forgiving man. He has a remarkable temperament. In the end I told him everything. When he first came to live in Lavaurette he used to come here for dinner every night. He cooked and then we'd talk for hours.

Then I think he found a woman."

"Who was that?" Charlotte's voice was even.

"He didn't tell me her name. Some woman in the village. He never stays with them long."

"Like his father."

"I think he has some difficulties. The difference is that he would like to be faithful, so he's always disappointed by himself."

"But you didn't want to be?"

"Not until I married Julien's mother, then I did try."

"And what was it about Julien's mother, out of all the other women?"

"It was a dream. I'd known her for five years. She worked in a baker's on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. I used to see her almost every day, and her brother knew a lot of people who were friends of mine. She was older than me, not very beautiful, a rather stout bourgeoise. Her father had a number of shops, they were quite well-to-do. Then one night I had an overwhelming dream of being in love with her. I awoke in the morning and found it was true. I was sick with the feeling. When I told you the other day that I didn't use the expression of being in love I should have excluded this one instance. I took flowers to the shop, I followed her in the street. I was distraught, yet I had a sense of inner conviction that this was the woman I had to be with. The dream was not a vision or a fragment, it was the statement of a reality. I couldn't properly remember from that day on what I had felt before. I couldn't imagine what it had been like not being in love with her."

"What went wrong?"

"I suppose it was the war. Julien was born in 1913 and the next year I was mobilised. I came home on leave from time to time, but it was difficult. The life I was living at the front was impossible to reconcile with what was asked of me at home. I knew it was changing me inside. I felt it was destroying me." Levade's voice was hard and emphatic. Charlotte felt he wanted to disclose more to her of what had happened to him.

"And yet," he said, more ruminatively this time, 'it was the making in some way of my painting. I left Julien's mother in 1922 and it was then that my dreams began. But without the four years at the Front. I don't know." Charlotte looked out of the window and saw that it was dark.

"I should go and make dinner," she said.

Levade did not answer; he seemed to be lost in recollection.

"Yes," he said eventually.

"If you like. Perhaps you could bring something up here on a tray." After dinner Levade closed the shutters in his studio, handed Charlotte cigarettes, two glasses and a bottle of Armagnac "How did you find this house?" said Charlotte.

"A friend of Kahnweiler's. The picture dealer. It belonged to a family with several children but none of them wanted it or could afford it." Charlotte put some more wood on the fire, then sat down in the room's only comfortable seat, a battered, rush-seated armchair. She thought for a moment of winter nights in the Highlands. Before it was somehow taken from her, there had in her childhood been a period of perfect contentment. She must have been very young indeed, yet the experience of it was still real in her mind: a sense of secure order in which the details of domestic life, the taste of redcurrants from the cage in the garden, the sound of a bicycle bell, the smell of paraffin with which her daily chore was to fill the heaters in the hall, the first frisson of hot water as she lowered herself into the bath in a cold but steam-filled room; and the lanes along which she walked these had been of an enchantment that was complete, not tainted by comparison or loss.

And these remembered details would have amounted to nothing without love. For some short time at least. Charlotte recognised with a shock, there must have been harmony between herself and her parents.

She had forgotten this brief childish paradise.

Levade took a glass and sat in the wicker chair by the window. He began to talk about his life in Paris. Then he told Charlotte about a house he had once lived in by the sea. It was summer time. Julien, aged about twelve, was packed off by his mother on the train from Paris to be met by Levade at the local station. The village had been inhabited by fishermen and their families for centuries and had yet to acquire a proper hotel. The house to which Levade took Julien was behind a small bay with pink cliffs topped by fir trees. There were upturned boats and lobster pots, tended by the fishermen whose boots left ugly imprints on the sand; no visitors from Paris had ever been before, and they were regarded by the people of the village with puzzled indifference.

Levade's whitewashed cottage had a terrace that overlooked the sea; inside, it was bare and simple, with two bedrooms and a small garden at the back. A girl from the village came in every day to clean and make lunch from whatever fish she had bought from her grandfather's early boat on the way.

In the evening, Levade took Julien by the hand and led him across the sandy village square with a wind-battered larch, to the Pension that was housed in a squat brick building with bright blue shutters. Various friends from Paris were staying, also painters, some with small children in sailor clothes and sun-hats, some with their mistresses, and two men who dumbfounded the servant-girls by sharing a singlebedded room. All day Levade worked out of doors, sitting on the top of the cliff with an easel or walking round the headland with a sketch book.

Sometimes he would take a boat and row out of the bay, looking back at the tenacious grey village on the hillside, watching Julien's sunburnt face as his trailed fingers split the surface of the dark water.

Occasionally there would be telephone messages from Paris, uncomprehendingly relayed by the woman on the switchboard; once a telegram boy arrived on the beach; but these urgent communications seemed no more than gestures from a forgotten world.

The reality was only in the swinging glass-panelled doors of the dining room at night, the snail's line of sand from the children's canvas shoes and the cream cheeses they ate with such glee for dessert, while their parents smoked cigars or persevered with the smaller limbs of lobsters; it was in the simple faces of the waitresses and the indulgent smile of the widow who owned the Pension. As the summer wore on, the composition of the party changed and its numbers gradually diminished, but Levade felt there was no reason ever to go home.