The Merciless Ladies Read online

  In some ways Turstall had been bad for him. The war, and his return to a new, young society in London had helped to soften the combative inhibitions. The resentfulness had gone, but he was still very purposive, very self-contained, And much less uncouth. He was surrounded by portraits, one or two of which I tried to admire, but he was genuinely dismissive of them, contemptuous of his own work, not because in his view it was bad but because it ought to have been better.

  In a pub round the corner we talked for an hour. He was hoping to get to France for a while: there was some sort of an exchange system between pupils of the Grasse School and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He was working five nights a week washing dishes in a restaurant and had saved a few pounds: he hoped it would be enough. He wanted to be back for Christmas: in spite of the lure of Paris, London was the place where everything happened, the only place he really wished to be, to live, to work. He had ‘ sold’ two portraits to friends and had one or two other small successes. With an optimism rare in him, he saw himself as able to make some sort of a living in a year or two. When was I coming to Town so that we could share a flat?

  Chance, I said, was a fine thing, and I meant it with all conviction; for what he said was absolutely true: to a young man working on a provincial newspaper, or indeed to anyone interested, however peripherally, in the arts and in letters, London was the only place to be. Post-war London had, it seemed to me, everything – except the job to keep me there.

  Before I left, Paul introduced me to a dozen of his friends; young, lively, talkative, knowing about the things that ‘ mattered’, admirably emancipated. And two pretty girls who had an eye for him. One of them was called Olive Crayam. That meant nothing to me at the time. I went home terribly discontented, envious of his life, though it was clear that it was still the monthly supplement from ‘the old man’ that enabled him to exist.

  Although on that visit there were obvious signs that his work was maturing, I was absolutely dumbfounded to hear that one of his paintings was to be in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. In a single year he had made the step from total obscurity to being among those who counted. It was, of course, the portrait of M. Becker himself – now in the Columbus gallery of Fine Art, Ohio. That M. Becker had consented to sit was a sufficient guide to what he thought of his pupil.

  In those days the importance of art and literature rated much higher than they do today. Well-known authors were invited to contribute centre-page articles on current topics; their opinions were sought and their opinions were news. Similarly the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition never opened without a full two pages in the quality newspapers, devoted to illustration and comment. And Paul Stafford’s portrait (of a well-known teacher with a following), well hung, and the work of a newcomer, attracted a lot of attention. John Grey, writing in the Morning Post, went over the top about it.

  ‘There is about this work the decided accent of a young man born to paint portraits, born to draw from each sitter perhaps the one unforgettable and vital impression which is waiting to be set down. Mr Stafford has a remarkable future.’

  Others were more cautious but the over-all impression was that a new talent had arrived.

  Sir Laurence Bright, who made a fortune out of army belts during the war, wrote a rather pedestrian autobiography which, published at his own expense, soon sank from sight. But I came across a second-hand copy on a bookstall the other day, and in it he mentions his visit to Burlington House that year and his reactions to Paul’s picture. He wrote to the unknown artist, and suggested that he might commission him to paint the writer’s twin daughters. Paul was then in Paris, so replied that he would be willing to do this on his return, and a price and date were agreed without their ever having met.

  Sir Laurence goes on:

  ‘Mr Stafford arranged to be in Hertford by the 9.30 train, and sent my chauffeur to fetch him from the station. I and my daughters, too conventionally, expected to meet a youngish man, perhaps bearded, with a pale sensitive face, a velvet jacket, a glowing black bow tie. Instead a clumsy, ill-dressed youth of twenty-one was shown into the drawing-room. He might more properly have been an apprentice engineer or an omnibus driver. My first thought was that Mr Stafford was ill and had sent a servant to present his apologies. The anti-climax for Elizabeth and Pamela was profound. However, this first bad impression soon wore off. Mr Stafford had a way with him, particularly, it seemed, with young ladies.’

  Later Paul spoke ill of his first commissioned portrait, but I believe it is still in the Bright family home where he painted it. And it made him money and it was a beginning.

  Not that he was remotely out of the wood. It was still his father’s help that kept him above the level of poverty.

  However, that soon changed when he met Diana Marnsett.

  II

  The Hon. Mrs Brian Marnsett was the second daughter of Lord Crantell. She had married young – just before the war – and her husband, Colonel Marnsett, twenty years older than herself, was a rich and distinguished man. Apart from being a director of the Westminster Bank and of the White Star shipping line, he owned one of the best art collections in the country and was a notable philanthropist, having bought a number of well-known and valuable pictures for the nation. He was, however, a dull stick, and since the Crantells were still trying to recoup on the third baron’s dissolute extravagances, it was not unnaturally supposed that Diana had married her husband less for love than for money. She confirmed this view by becoming a leader of a smart set which led fashion in London and dispensed patronage to the arts.

  When I first met her, which was a year or so later, I thought her one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Born in India when her father was governor of Bengal, she had brought home with her a certain duskiness under the eyes which contrasted in a marvellous way with the extreme pallor and purity of her skin. She was tall and slender with a mass of fine ebony hair and dark, wide-set eyes that could be either soulful or imperious. Her profile was not so good, and she knew it. People could close their eyes to a suggestion of sharpness here, just as her husband must have closed his eyes to a good deal in her behaviour. She accepted admiration as her right. She had favourites but generally tended to change them quickly. She was a born hostess. When Paul first met her she was thirty.

  It’s quite difficult in this permissive age, when everybody leaps into bed with everyone else – at least, according to the media – when certainly a man and a woman can live together without benefit of clergy and no one really lifts an eyebrow to judge, to remember a state of affairs where, in spite of the emancipating effects of the bloodiest war in history, morality was only slowly shifting its values away from the rigid codes of the Victorian age. Of course there was a lot of immorality – if that is a word that can still be used – as there has been at all times – but it had to be hidden, kept quietly under cover, not flaunted or publicized. If it was so publicized it could still do a great deal of harm, to one’s social life, to one’s financial expectations, to one’s actual career.

  Paul at this time was involved with Mary Compton – one of the two girls I had met on that first visit to him in London – but to what lengths I have no means of knowing, and Mary Compton, who married shortly afterwards, clearly never had any wish to say more about it. Her attachment with Paul broke soon after he met Diana.

  Diana Marnsett’s interest in Paul was immediate. Through her husband and some of her friends she knew enough about painting to see his obvious talents; and, to a woman jaded with the attentions of smooth young gentlemen, his blunt, uncompromising maleness must have made a special appeal.

  He had not known her a month when she offered him the advice that it would pay him to have some of these rough corners ‘ rounded off’. There was an elocutionist in Hanover Square: a couple of lessons a week would make all the difference. Her husband’s tailor in Cork Street would fit him out, and he was never in a hurry for his money when someone came in with the right introduction. As for his hair, Brown of Bond Stre
et was an artist in his own way too and would wreak an interesting change.

  He did. They did. They all did. When at the beginning of the following year to my delight I was offered a job – though at no higher wages – in the London office of the then Manchester Guardian, and went to see him after the interview I was astonished, aghast at the change.

  Presumably it was Mr Brown of Bond Street who had divined the trouble with his hair. He now wore it long – or long for those days – and it had ceased to stand up like an aggressive brush at the front, but curled away from his forehead in a good glossy mane. He hadn’t adopted ‘arty clothes’, but wore well-cut, heavy tweeds with a suggestion of flair. Most surprising was his voice, from which most of the flat vowels had disappeared. No doubt Mr Shaw’s Professor Higgins would have been able to tell not only that Stafford came from Lancashire, but exactly what part. For normal people that didn’t apply. For normal people he had a new voice.

  I remember at the time being not only aghast but disappointed. For eight years our friendship had run very true, wirhout flaw. I thought highly of his talents and believed he would become famous. This pandering to snobbery lowered him. I didn’t say so but commented simply that he had taken Mrs Marnsett’s advice to heart.

  He said sharply: ‘Of course I have, because it’s the soundest I’ve ever been offered. I have a supreme contempt for people who judge by such things, but since ninety per cent of the people I shall be mixing with think that way, it’s common sense to do it. If I can’t change them I can at least change myself.’

  ‘Which means’, I said, ‘that you have a supreme contempt for ninety per cent of the people you mix with.’

  ‘Well, eighty-nine’, he said, with a gleam in his eye.

  By now gossip was linking his name with Diana Marnsett in a way that went beyond friendly advice.

  I noticed that be didn’t renew his suggestion that we should share a flat. He was somehow contriving to live a smart life – into which I perhaps would no longer easily fit – and yet was painting six and seven hours a day. The occasional commission came his way. A young woman who didn’t like him implied that Mrs Marnsett was supporting him, but I felt I knew him better than that.

  One day we had lunch together and Paul told me he had just had a brush with Henri Becker. What about? I asked in surprise.

  ‘I showed him my three entries for this year’s Academy. He doesn’t like them.’

  ‘He liked his own portrait, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But after seeing this later stuff he referred me to the Bible and its statement that you cannot serve both God and Mammon.’

  I waited, expecting more.

  ‘He says I’m talented enough to know the difference between gold and gilt. He says these paintings are too facile. That I’m not a great portraitist anyhow, that I have other fields to plough. That portraiture comes easiest to me and that, having now done little else for two years, I should drop it and concentrate on other things. He didn’t actually bring up the question of my birthright and a mess of pottage, but I was afraid any moment he might.’

  ‘Well …’ I said. ‘What’s your view on that?’

  ‘I think probably he’s right – though I don’t see it in such black and white terms.’

  ‘And what are you going to do about it?’

  Paul’s long lashes veiled the expression in his eyes. Certainly the new grooming had improved his looks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve told you long ago, Bill, where I’m going. So far I haven’t let anything stand in my way. D’you think I’m prepared to let my own talent – if that’s what it is – do so now?’

  ‘No’, I said, looking at him.

  ‘No, indeed. I’ve seen people do that sort of thing before. Casting away the substance for the shadow. What’s the good of fame after you’re dead, if you live your life in poverty, and empty-minded, half-literate snobs are able to patronize you and get the best of everything?’

  ‘The trouble is to decide which is substance and which is shadow’, I said cautiously.

  ‘Nonsense. It’s perfectly plain. When I get to the top maybe I shall be able to please myself. People are like sheep. Once you get ahead of the flock the rest of the flock will follow.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Anyway, I must earn my living. I’ve bled Father white and can’t expect more. I don’t want more. With luck I shall manage.’

  Soon after this I took a week’s holiday at Newton. Leo had been unable to follow Bertie into commerce and was still beating out his life on the piano. But, in spite of her severe words, Leo was his mother’s ewe lamb, and she had so far shaken herself out of her preoccupations with Greek, the violin and the latest vegetable seeds to take a long journey to see her brother Frederick and put Leo’s plight to him in her high-pitched fluty tones. The result was that Brother Frederick had come up to scratch and Leo was shortly coming up to London.

  Holly was away at school on this visit, but I saw a good deal of Bertie, who was still living at home and playing cricket for Berkshire. He had also developed an interest in Toc H. ‘Some sort of a secret society’, Mrs Lynn explained, a view to which she adhered in spite of all efforts to correct her.

  Chapter Three

  If you turn to the Press reviews of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of the following year you will find some diversity of opinion over Paul Stafford’s second really important picture, the portrait which was to be probably the most discussed painting of the season.

  Pride White in the Observer, summing up the show, commented:

  ‘Painted as this is by a young man only just twenty-three, Paul Stafford’s ‘‘Diana Marnsett’’ is a work which must make acritic of imagination anxious about the future. It offers, at least so far as portraiture goes, the uncanny spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career seems to have nothing more to learn.’

  Alfred Young in the Daily Telegraph did use the word ‘facile’, but on the whole the comments were favourable. As it happened, the Spectator had invited the French critic René Buerchel to review the exhibition for them, and he, after some half-hearted praise of Paul’s painting, went into a long discourse on the psychology of women who become ‘professional beauties’. He argued that Stafford had treated the portrait of Diana Marnsett in this light: he had not so much idealized Diana as depicted the idol which men saw and which women came to see in themselves.

  Paul became a name. Noel Coward – roughly the same age as Paul – wrote somewhere of living and having his being ‘in extreme poverty among wealthy friends’. This was exactly Paul’s position. Talked of, photographed, attender at first nights, guest at parties at Deauvilie and St Moritz, the money he made went on clothes and keeping up a front. He had moved to a small studio in Chelsea – not far from the Grasse School, with whose principal he was no longer on speaking terms – and there he sometimes held court, usually with Diana at his side.

  Yet he never lost touch with old friends, and whenever he could would contrive some benefit on their behalf. When Leo came to London to study at the Royal College of Music he invited him to a couple of his parties. Not that they had ever been entirely ‘simpatico’. Leo never understood Paul’s self-contained manner, his lack of any outward sign of temperament. He thought Paul dull, without spark. And Paul had little patience with Leo’s ebullient enthusiasms, his love of discussions that didn’t seem to matter. If Paul thought a thing he said so, and that was the end of it: no point in going on. Leo loved to have a case to argue, to put it one way, then another, according to the response he got, even to do an about-turn if it suited him. He chattered and assumed attitudes and was always concerned with ethics and social significance.

  So it was partly as a concession to me that Leo was invited, and very soon I wished he hadn’t been. Paul had introduced me to Diana Marnsett four months before, commenting satirically that perhaps I would divert some of La Marnsett’s attentions from
himself. There may have been by then a grain of truth in it, for Paul was becoming notoriously fickle with his women; but Diana rightly would not be diverted. Unfortunately Leo achieved the end playfully set for me.

  Leo might not be going to hit any headlines; but at a piano, which by now he could play very well, with his handsome Roman head set with its black curls, and his great muscular white body, Diana found him irresistible. There was in fact little resistance on either side. Leo fell for her instantly, and was far too self-absorbed to be respectful or subtle about it. He grasped the forbidden fruit with both hands.

  Paul was not jealous, only amused. With a greater sense of responsibility for Leo’s welfare, I was a bit anxious and eventually tackled him about it. Paul’s affair had at least been discreet. His, being Leo, naturally was less so; and Colonel Marnsett, long-suffering though he might be, could probably turn nasty if too obviously provoked. It wouldn’t be a happy beginning, I pointed out to Leo, if he were to be involved in a divorce case at the very outset of his career.

  ‘I should welcome it’, said Leo. ‘Lord, man, d’you think I like seeing her tied to that withered old bounder? If she were free I’d marry her tomorrow!’

  ‘On prospects and a family allowance?’ I suggested.

  He flung out of his chair. ‘You know damned well I can’t earn more or I would! I’ll earn presently. But she has money of her own. Yes, I’d even sponge on her rather than see her tied to him.’

  ‘What does she feel about that?’

  He looked at me with a sort of angry hauteur. ‘Good God, man, d’you think we talk about money when we’re together, when every minute’s precious?’

  ‘No’, I said. ‘Sorry. But these prosaic details may crop up if you’re not careful. I’m only trying to be helpful.’

  ‘Well, shut up and talk about something else, then.’

  Paul smiled when I discussed this conversation with him.