Leonora (27 page)

‘Does it hurt?' Max keeps asking her, every minute.

Leonora's hand has faded and blends into the white sheets.

‘Might you have a fever? It seems to me that you look flushed.'

Leonora indicates No with her hands, then places them palms upwards, and Max kisses them. She remains impassive, she could so easily run her fingers through his white hair, she could so easily stroke his blue fish's eyes; but she doesn't. In Max's face the suffering deepens. ‘That is how I suffered in the Villa Covadonga.' She stays silent, since nothing now happening to her even comes close to anything that went on in the Villa Covadonga. She smoothes her sheet, and the sensation of well-being is new, rising from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head. How easy to sleep when you feel protected! There in the Villa Covadonga she would awaken on the edge of the abyss and with the smell of urine all around her; here the bed is white and clean as the host at Mass, or a handkerchief, or a cloud.

‘I am the Immaculate Conception, kiss my feet.'

Max kisses them.

Leonora is captivated by herself. ‘Everyone else loves me and so I love myself, utterly and madly.'

Max and she read and draw together in perfect harmony, with no need to speak to each other. The days run on over them like water. Kay Boyle swears that Max is a different man when he's with Leonora. Whenever she is absent, he seems miserable and nervous and everything irritates him. ‘He's crazy about her, ab-solu-te-ly crazy.' Kay, finding herself in the same clinic due to sinusitis problems, visits her room every morning and the two grow closer.

‘What are you finally going to do?' Kay asks. ‘Will you go back to Max?'

‘I don't know … I don't think I can do that to my husband.'

‘The Mexican?'

‘Yes. He has treated me very well.'

‘Max too.'

‘Max less so.'

‘See here, Leonora, you give the impression that you are waiting for someone to hypnotise you, you're like a medium in a trance.'

‘I don't know what to do.'

‘Are you already married? Do you already have your marriage certificate?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you really like him?'

‘Yes, he is a good person.'

‘That's not important. Do you like him as a man?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then stop carrying on as if you were waiting for a sign from on high, because what's going to hit you is a bolt of lightning.'

Kay persuades her to stay with the Mexican.

Max despises Renato. Sometimes, force of circumstances obliges them to keep each other's company, and Leonora always has a bad time of it. Renato is well aware of his rights, and she follows him upstairs. ‘Goodnight, Max, sleep well.'

‘If you live with Max,' Kay insists, ‘he will end up using you. The sole form of cohabitation Max accepts is that of servitude.'

‘You did me down!' Max blames Kay. ‘I thought you were my friend and you betrayed me.'

‘Of all people you have the least right to use the word betrayal,' Kay defends herself.

When Leonora is discharged from hospital, the group welcomes her back with open arms.

‘I don't understand how such a beautiful woman can dress so badly,' Peggy comments. ‘Surely looking a mess must be connected to her madness.'

‘Peggy, don't be cruel,' Kay intervenes angrily. ‘A month or two ago she was in an asylum, and right now she's only just come out of hospital.'

‘Perhaps you could propose to her that she writes about her adventures while she was in there.'

‘She surely will. It must have been a terrifying experience. The Mexican helped her out of it and still continues to look after her.'

‘Then it's a good thing he does take charge of her, because Max abandoned his first wife, sent the second one to the devil, and doesn't even bother to look after his only son.'

‘The Mexican gives her some stability …'

‘And she's bound to need it. To me she looks as if she's having a rough time.'

Leonora explains to Max that she has to remain at Renato's side until they depart for New York.

‘To my mind your being with him is an insult, and I would prefer not even to see you.'

Laurence Vail decides to go to the beach at Monte Estoril; the crowd follows after him.

On the first night there, Peggy comes across Max in the hotel lobby, and asks for Laurence's room number so she can go and wish him goodnight. Max gives her his own one instead. Peggy spends the night with him, and the couple resume their affair.

For the five weeks they spend on the coast, Leonora often comes over to spend the day with them. The riding club is magnificent; the horses excellent; and the ambience takes her back to her childhood. Children and adults ride all morning long. Leonora preens. If she could, she would whinny. The horse synchronises with her: she is a woman with a horse's body, or a mare with a woman's face. Her body is wreathed in waves of energy, the force of their furious gallop attracts attention. Children pause as if magnetised, their eyes fixed on the track. She is dazzling, her body lengthens, she jumps every gate, the hooves of her mount echo – they resound like bells, horseshoes bringing good luck. Nothing makes her happier than this equine flight which Max follows with his eyes like a bird of prey.

‘What are you doing with that inferior man?' Max asks, seated astride his horse.

‘What do you mean?' Leonora pulls up abruptly.

‘You know very well.'

Leonora spurs on her horse.

‘He is not an inferior man and I owe him my life.'

On another occasion at the livery yard, Max again rails against the Mexican.

‘Don't you dare speak ill of him, I refuse to let you,' and Leonora's eyes cloud over. ‘I was devastated when I lost you, but that time in the asylum opened my eyes.'

‘That kind of experience is bound to change your life, I know, but from now on we're going to live together, and paint together.'

‘And Peggy?'

‘I am not in love with Peggy.'

‘If you don't love her you should not be with her.'

‘Peggy was my only way out. Do you love your Mexican?'

Desperate at the thought of losing her, Ernst overwhelms her: ‘Peggy knows that you are the only woman I love.'

‘That means you're using her?'

‘And you are using your Mexican?'

‘My situation is different.'

‘No it is not. Peggy may get me out of Europe, but once in New York things will change completely.'

‘The war is driving us all mad. I owe my survival to someone else, and I am as yet unsure of what you and I can mean to each other.' Leonora turns on her heel.

One Sunday she turns up in Estoril with Renato. He, too, is an excellent horseman, and he entertains them all with his tales of Pancho Villa, the one and only true Mexican, the Centaur of the North, the general who dynamited the train lines together with their wagons and everything on them; and who carried off women over his shoulder – all before going so far as to invade the United States. Leonora smiles and Max, furious, attempts to unseat her, while Peggy celebrates the Mexican Revolution: ‘Yes indeed, those are real men!'

The group observes that Leduc could equally well command a battalion, lay siege to a fortress, or cross the deserts of Antar at a gallop.

In the morning, Leonora opens her bedroom door. Her wet hair hangs loose over her shoulders.

‘I want to speak with you,' Peggy tells her. ‘It's time to come clean about our situation. Let's go and have a drink.'

Seated opposite one other, the two women square up. Leonora opens her eyes so wide they flash daggers, while Peggy just turns up her nose at her.

‘Either you get back together with Max, or else you should leave him to me.'

‘He is all yours.'

‘Are you going to stay with the Mexican?'

‘That's my business.'

‘What are you going to do?'

‘For now, I won't be returning to Estoril, although I shall certainly miss the horses here.'

Leonora rises from the table and leaves Peggy with words still on the tip of her tongue.

When Peggy tells Max, he is so angry that he obliges Peggy to write to Leonora to beg her to resume her visits to Estoril.

Leonora never returns.

‘No doubt the Mexican keeps her better entertained,' Kay says, insinuatingly.

31

MADAME GUGGENHEIM

‘W
AR CHANGES THINGS
, Max!'
   ‘Don't I know it? They banged me up in three concentration camps, one after the other. If anyone knows about those changes, it has to be me.'

‘And what about me?' Leonora muses to herself. ‘Why does he never ask me about the time I spent locked up in the asylum? Why was the only thing he asked me when we were reunited how I could have lost the house and his canvases? Why does he only talk about himself and never listen to me? Even back in St. Martin d'Ardèche, the whole world revolved around him. When I painted him in his cape of feathers, as the superior bird, I felt the same shiver up my spine as I do now; when I thought he might end it with me.'

One night, Peggy hears a knocking on the door of her hotel room. She opens it to find Leonora and Max standing there.

‘Here you are, I am returning him to you,' says the Englishwoman.

There can be no doubt that, in spite of everything, Leonora has much more in common with the group that revolves in Peggy Guggenheim's orbit than with Renato Leduc. They speak the same language, walk the same streets, move in the same circles, read the same books, frequent Piccadilly and St. Giles, Hyde Park Corner and the Tate Gallery, attend Ascot. And they are all insatiable. They create the atmosphere of a gala performance, thanks to their ingenuity in criticising absent friends. Peggy Guggenheim praises Lucian Freud, and Herbert Read applies the brakes to her impulses to keep constantly buying up pictures.

In the course of her multiple acquisitions the millionairess has succeeded in acquiring a good eye. Of course she always has Herbert Read in tow to consult; yet on many occasions she makes a selection on her own, and hits the nail on the head. Kay Boyle complains that the war prevents her from writing, and gossips to Leonora that Sam Beckett was one of Peggy's lovers, too.

‘I don't know who Beckett is, but the worst part of this all is that I still haven't read this Djuna Barnes of whom you all talk so much,' Leonora apologises.

‘But you do know who Read is: he acts as a consultant to Peggy in all her purchases.'

‘Yes I know that much. He and I went for a walk along the esplanade the other day.'

Peggy offers Leonora a ticket to fly to New York with the rest of her retinue.

‘Thank you, but no. I shall travel by boat with Renato Leduc.'

‘So will you be leaving ahead of the rest of us?' Max interrupts.

‘Yes, we'll be departing on the
Exeter
.'

‘Do you think you could take some more of my rolled canvases, which I can't manage to bring on the liner with me?' Max asks, pale with anxiety.

‘Yes, I can.'

‘They make for quite a fat bundle. In it, along with the
Loplop
you painted, there is also my
Leonora in the Morning Light.
'

Max oversees the packaging, ensuring that every care is taken in rolling up the canvases, which results in their being both heavy and awkward to carry.

That night in the hotel, Leonora says to Renato: ‘Max does not love Peggy, yet he is with her.'

‘And you, who after all married me, do you actually love me?'

‘Not yet, although I may yet come to,' Leonora admits. ‘What do you make of Peggy, Renato?'

‘She's a Yank who knows how to throw her money around.'

‘And Max?'

‘I would rather not discuss that son of a bitch.'

‘What do you mean son of a bitch?'

‘You'll understand later, when we get to Mexico. In my opinion, Max is a bastard.'

Leonora keeps quiet and repeats as if she were reciting the rosary: ‘I married Renato, I am travelling from here with Renato, I am
with
Renato. If I owe anything to anyone, it's to Renato.'

At Crookhey Hall, everything was always kept under lock and key. Now she, too, guards her secret – the decision to follow Renato – deep in her heart.

At the Mexican Consulate, endless applications for departure visas are overwhelming Leduc, and he returns home in a state of daily exhaustion.

‘It's so dramatic, it looks like another Great Flood, everyone is huddling for refuge under the wing of Mexico.'

‘Don't forget to get at least one last pair of lizards onto the ark, although in your country they may well turn into crocodiles.'

Sitting in their deckchairs on the top deck of the
Exeter
, beside Renato who keeps her snug under a rug, makes her feel more at ease. The sailors all turn to stare as Leonora's hair blows in the wind. Leonora pays scant attention to the noise of the ship's machinery, or to the shortage of food.

‘Renato, there where the sea meets the horizon, I can see a castle.'

‘It's a mirage.'

‘Christ comes walking across the waters.'

‘I thought you weren't a believer?'

‘I think he must be drunk, because he's walking in zigzags.'

The dawn, the dusk, the salty air and the gulls in flight give her a sense of well-being she hasn't experienced for years.