A Man Over Forty (12 page)

They went out, and a boreal wind took their breath away. They put up their collars, and Balintore said, ‘New York has this advantage, that anyone can find his way about in it.' They turned right, to reach Fifth Avenue, and found themselves on Lexington.

They retraced their steps, and came to a bright, enormous channel that divided with fearful precision a populous and mountainous honeycomb, man-made of steel and glass and stone. Dallying on Fifth Avenue in despite of a cold and searching wind, they admired the vast cliffs that towered in rectilinear grandeur above the pavements where passers-by were insufferably tempted by the shops' displays of improbable costumes for ladies, jewellery of fabulous price, and extraordinary facilities for sailing to every other quarter of the globe.

‘It is the most abstract of cities,' said Balintore. ‘It caters for the ideal, and its architecture is designed for two purposes: to make the common run of humanity insignificant, but to exalt the status of the express-elevator pilot. I like it immensely! It bears no relation to common needs, but creates from uncommon skill an architecture of magnificent perversity. How beautiful it is – and how ponderous an impermanence! In ten years' time it will look quite different, but still have no stability; only a much larger rental value.'

‘It is very, very cold,' said Palladis with a shiver.

‘The United States has a climate far superior to ours,' said Balintore. ‘Every American knows that.'

‘One of my ears is frost-bitten.'

‘We British have become decadent weaklings,' said Balintore. ‘We have no resistence to the extremities of weather. In July New York can be an absolute inferno of damp and sullen heat. Not as bad as Washington, of course, but too much for us. We should die of it.'

‘Are we going the right way?'

‘I think we must be. The Guggenheim Museum is opposite Central Park.'

‘But surely Central Park is in the other direction?'

‘Perhaps it is. Oh, you can't lose yourself in New York.'

Again they retraced their steps, and at the intersection of 59th Street staggered slightly as they met the gale of icy wind that swept across the barren spaces of the Park.

‘It is like a view of Lapland,' said Palladis.

Ten minutes later, at 86th Street, he stopped and looked at the concentric levels and apparent imbalance of the Museum. ‘And that,' he said, ‘is like a nest of flower-pots.'

‘Sometimes,' said Balintore, ‘you are quite offensively insular.'

‘But this is fantasy. Fantasy realized in concrete. Suitable, perhaps, for a Californian juxtaposition, but not for the Lappish tundra of Central Park in winter.'

‘It's a most ingeniously efficient design for the exhibition of pictures. Come inside, and you'll be convinced of that. But wait a moment.'

A placard on the outer wall of the Museum announced an exhibition of 40 NEW WORKS BY THE ACTION PAINTER INGO POMADOR.

‘What a nuisance,' said Balintore.

‘They usually are, these action paintings. A public nuisance – not so much painted as committed.'

‘I don't mean that. I mean that I don't, and I can't, look at pictures by Ingo Pomador.'

‘Why not?'

‘A certain delicacy – an inhibition of delicacy – prevents me. But don't ask me to explain.'

He turned and walked rapidly away. Palladis followed, and was warned by his expression not to question him: he wore taciturnity like a placard saying No Admittance. But when, after a sombre march the length of sixteen blocks – an unimpeded march, for in that area, on so bitter a morning, no native pedestrians were abroad – they came to a building, a little way retired from the Avenue, of conventional elegance, Balintore said, ‘Let us go in here and look at some of
our
pictures.'

They entered a warm mansion, and beyond a hall where fountains played in an atmosphere like that of Florida, saw many of the masterpieces assembled by the millionaire Henry
Clay Frick. Constable, Gainsborough, and Reynolds; Lawrence and Turner and Hogarth – perhaps, thought Palladis, Balintore was right in describing pictures by them as ‘ours'; but there were also Piero della Francesca and Vermeer, Rembrandt and Bellini and El Greco. ‘Do you claim them too?' he asked.

‘I've no patience with narrow nationalism. I speak as a European,' said Balintore magnificently, and stood with the air of a proprietor before Velasquez' portrait of Philip IV.

‘And in the old age of Europe,' said Palladis, ‘it's pleasant to be shown proof – proof beyond all doubt – that there's no such thing as progress except in a price-list.'

‘Change and decay, that's all,' said Balintore; and looked with gloomy satisfaction at Holbein's grim portrait of Sir Thomas More.

They spent a couple of hours in the Frick mansion, but even the Fragonards could not dispel the cloud of dark discomfort which had settled on Balintore. When they left, he looked carefully behind him – northward into the chill vacancy of Fifth Avenue – as if to make sure that no one was following them.

In the evening they went to see a play-with-music for which Palladis had managed to get tickets by paying three times the official price. It was called
Natty Bumppo!
, and for rather more than a year had been running to unfailing applause. It included a dozen songs, sung with stentorian simplicity to tunes of elemental vigour, and a
corps de ballet
of lightly clad and handsome Mohicans who danced some intricate measures with great dexterity. When the performance was over, Balintore and Palladis walked back to the Hotel Henry James and finished the bottle of Old Grand-dad that Balintore had bought the night before.

In the morning Palladis questioned him about the many friends in New York of whom he had spoken: was he not going to see them, or ask them to come and see him?

‘It would introduce complications,' said Balintore.
‘T ous nos malheurs viennent de ne pouvoir être seul.'

‘What are you frightened of now?'

‘I'm frightened of nothing! But having recovered something like peace of mind, I want to preserve it.'

‘Then why did you come to New York? It isn't usually recommended for a rest-cure.'

‘I must see Polly Newton.'

‘Why don't you?'

‘So much depends on it. Her future – her future may be in my hands, and that's a responsibility one can't take lightly. I may be wrong – I don't think I am, but one can't exclude the chance – I may be wrong when I suspect that man's – what's his name? Her employer.'

‘Evershrub.'

‘When I suspect him of taking her to London on a
voyage de noces.'

‘She might enjoy it too.'

‘Don't you remember our first sight of her? A frightened creature, all alone at the cross-roads: afraid of leaving home, afraid of the unknown. She's not the sort of girl to enjoy a vulgar romp.'

‘And a vulgar romp may not be Evershrub's intention. You've admitted that. He may, quite simply, need a good secretary. More and more people do. Among men over a certain age, or with an income above a certain level, there's an incapacity for life which only a good secretary can repair. A secretary is much more likely to be a substitute-nanny than a disguised mistress.'

‘It's possible.'

‘What else is worrying you?'

‘It's seven weeks since I saw her.'

‘And you may be disappointed?'

‘One's memory does play tricks.'

‘Then forget her. Avoid disappointment and don't make a fool of yourself by saving her from non-existent danger. That's good advice, if ever you heard it.'

‘Admirable advice,' said Balintore, ‘and only a coward would listen to it.'

He went into his own room, and shut the door hard behind him; but opened it again, a moment later, to say, ‘I've lost her telephone number.'

‘Your little book's on the table.'

Five minutes later he returned to their sitting-room to say complacently, ‘She's coming here this evening.'

‘Here?'

‘I asked her to meet me in the tavern, as they call it. The Golden Bowl Tavern.'

In The course of his disastrous interview in the television studio, Balintore had boasted that all his wives had been able to better themselves in consequence of marriage to him, and the experience they had gained by it.

He had indeed treated them generously, and though their conduct had never been faultless, he had always refused to take advantage of casual misdemeanour and insisted, in an old-fashioned way, on naming himself as the guilty party. But many people, while admitting that Louise, his second wife, had shared all the benefits accorded to the first and third, would have hesitated to say she had finally – or in her present circumstances – ‘bettered' herself.

She had been a student at the Slade School of Fine Art when he first met her; she was older than most of her fellow students, and much disheartened because an early exuberant talent was not maturing but receding. She had a lively spirit, a strident voice, and a figure of exceptional beauty. Her face had a snub, faintly negroid prettiness of a sort that would not have attracted much attention in the early years of the century, but was generally admired by her contemporaries. She said her father had been a Colonel in the Gunners – or sometimes in the Royal Armoured Corps – but now, alas, was dead; though in fact he had been a farrier-sergeant in a Lancer regiment and still lived snugly in Northamptonshire, much respected by his neighbours. It was several years since Louise had seen him. She had much on her mind, for as well as her work at the Slade, she was writing a novel.

Balintore had wooed her impetuously, and allowed himself to be divorced after four and a half years of marriage. For a
little while Louise had enjoyed the fame of being his wife, and acquired a brief notoriety of her own when a gossip-writer announced the sale of her novel to a film company for £25,000. But the novel was never finished, and all she got was £40 for an option on it; which was not renewed.

Immediately after her divorce she left London, and for a valediction was photographed at the airport. ‘I have always wanted to be a painter,' she said, ‘and now I am going to make a fresh start. I have heard of a teacher in Mexico who has been successful, on many occasions, in releasing a dormant talent, and I am going to work under him.'

Her talent resisted all conventional efforts to awaken it, but in Mexico City she met the action painter Ingo Pomador, and presently became his mistress and collaborator. She wrote to Balintore: ‘You once told me, contemptuously, that I had no temperament, but before very long you will see – yes, see! – how mistaken you were. Art has no boundaries, and Ingo and I have won possession of an aesthetic province that no one before us had dreamt of exploring. The old ways were not for me, I had to wait for Genius to direct me. But when I found my Genius, I found myself.

‘To my old friends my new name will mean nothing, but I want you to know it. Henceforth I shall be known only as
Nova
. This is Ingo's wish and mine.'

Balintore had never shown this letter to Palladis, nor told him that Louise was associated with a man called Pomador. At that time the name of Ingo Pomador meant nothing to Balintore, nothing to Palladis, and nothing to the vast majority of ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic. Only to a very few, to the foremost of the
avant-garde
, was it familiar and significant. They spoke it with reverence and prophesied his fame. Already he had done more than any other of the action painters to expose the faded insufficiencies of orthodox art, and the shallowness of mind that had characterized the so-called masters from Cimabue to Chagall. He had bicycled over furlongs of wet paint, and thrown small furry animals into pools of crimson lake and Chinese white. He had flung vegetable refuse at ochre screens, and pushed wheel-barrows across canvases splashed with Prussian blue to spill upon them loads
of mica and dried blood. With boxing-gloves soaked in cadmium red he had punched the incontestable image of his vigour on to shivered panels smeared with Naples yellow; and daubed a tight-stretched pair of
pantalons de toile
with the varnished entrails of bats, young pike, and hamsters.

In a hundred ways he had demonstrated that new revelation of mind and matter, of impact and resistance, that action painting had made possible. But except to a few of the
avant-garde
he was still unknown. He had to wait, for general acclaim, until he was expelled from Mexico and found refuge in New York.

He made no claim to have invented a new mode of painting, but merely announced, in a manifesto which became famous, his discovery that new values could be created by the willing co-operation of artist and model. Participation, he declared, was the essence of all modern activity – gone were the bad days of loneliness and individualism – and to achieve the impress of a conjoint emotion he covered the backward parts of his model with carefully selected pigments – he used, to begin with, only pastel hues – and embraced her on a prepared canvas. To the subsequent prints he gave the striking name of AUTOPORNOGRAPHS.

His early experiments were interesting, but, as he himself confessed, of no permanent value. It was not until he met the former Mrs Balintore – whom he re-christened Nova – that he achieved a synthesis of dramatic effect and aesthetic composition which no art critic in the world dared deny. But with success came, as so often happens, disaster: he was expelled from the country where he had lived happily for many years.

Fortunately for him, and for Nova, the action of the Mexican Government was immediately denounced, by all the most enlightened people in New York, as an example of hidebound, intransigent authoritarianism – as tyrannous and impermissible obscurantism – and they were received, at Idlewild, as honoured visitors for whom every comfort and facility, including a disused studio on Long Island, would immediately be provided.