My Brother Michael (15 page)

‘I thought you would.’

Nigel said sulkily: ‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I wouldn’t be any good at it and I should loathe it, and that would be dreadful.’

‘The final hell,’ agreed Simon cheerfully. ‘Well, we must find you a gimmick, Nigel. Make them come to mock and remain to pay. You must make your pictures out of sequins, or do all your painting under water, or get yourself into the popular press as the man who Always Paints to the Strains of Mozart.’

Nigel gave him a reluctant and slightly shame-faced grin. ‘Count Basie, more likely. All right, what shall it be?
Art trouvé
, or bits of rusty iron twisted any old way and called
Woman in Love
, or
Dog eat Dog
, or something?’

‘You could always,’ I said, ‘travel through Greece with a donkey, and then write a book, illustrated.’

Nigel turned to me at that, but with the look of someone who has hardly been listening. I wondered again if he had been drinking too much. ‘What? A donkey?’

‘Yes. There was a Dutch boy in Delphi this evening who’d just got in from Jannina. He’d been walking over the hills like Stevenson, with a donkey, and painting by the way. I gathered that he’d done a lot of sketching in the villages and more or less paid his way with them.’

‘Oh, that chap. Yes, I’ve met him. He’s here now.’

‘Of course, I forgot. Simon told me he’d come up here to sleep tonight. Did you see his work?’

‘No. He was too tired to bother. He went to bed at about nine, and I think it’d take an atom bomb to wake him.’ His look lingered on me as if he were with difficulty bringing me into focus and himself back into the conversation. He said slowly: ‘Being true to oneself … knowing that one can do a thing if only the world will give one the chance … but having to fight for it every step of the way …’ The blurred blue gaze sharpened and fixed itself on Simon. ‘Simon …’

‘Yes?’

‘You say a gimmick would be “part of the fight”, because, in the first place, it would make people stop and look? If my stuff’s not really good, no gimmick will get it anywhere beyond the first hurdle. You know that. But if it
is
good, then once people have stopped and paid attention, the
work itself is
what’ll count? That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘It could be. In your case I imagine a lot might depend on the gimmick.’ Simon smiled. ‘I have a feeling that quite a few good artists have been driven along a path they never intended in the first place as anything but an odd deviation – a wallop in the public’s eye. Naming no names, but you know who.’

Nigel didn’t smile. He seemed still hardly to be listening, but very busy following his own thoughts. He hesitated, then said suddenly: ‘Well, and that’s being true to oneself, isn’t it? And don’t you think
that
means, come what may, one should take what one wants and needs? Go straight ahead the way you know
you have to go, and the devil take the hindmost? Artists – great artists – work that way, don’t they? And doesn’t the end justify them?’ As Simon seemed to hesitate, he whipped round on me. ‘What do
you
think?’

I said: ‘I don’t know specially about great artists, but I’ve always imagined that the secret of personality (I won’t say “success”) was one-track-mindedness. Great men
do
know where they’re going, and they never turn aside. Socrates and the “beautiful and good”. Alexander and the Hellenising of the world. On a different level – if I may – Christ.’

Nigel looked at Simon. ‘Well?’ His voice was sharp, like a challenge. ‘
Well?
’

I thought: there
is
something going on here that I don’t understand. And I don’t think Simon understands it either, and it worries him.

Simon said slowly, those cool eyes vividly alive now, watching the younger man: ‘You’re partly right. The great men know where they’re going; yes, and they get there, but surely it’s a case of driving themselves without pause, rather than juggernauting over all the opposition? And I thought Polonius was a prosy old bore? You brought him in, not me. I don’t agree with him, but do him the justice of looking at the end of the quotation. “
To thine own self be true … thou canst not then be false to any man
.” If being true to oneself means ignoring the claims of other people then it simply doesn’t work, does it? No, your really great man – your Socrates – doesn’t drive along a straight path of his own cutting. He knows what the end is, yes, and he doesn’t turn aside from it, but all the way there he’s
reckoning with whatever – and whoever – else is in his way. He sees the whole thing as a pattern, and his own place in it.’

I quoted, thinking back: ‘“
I am involved in mankind
”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘What’s that?’ said Nigel.

‘A quotation from John Donne, a poet who became Dean of St Paul’s. This comes in one of his Devotions … “
No man is an island, entire of itself
.” He’s right. In the end it’s our place in the pattern that matters.’

‘Yes, but the artist?’ said Nigel almost fiercely. ‘He’s different, you know he is. He’s driven by some compulsion; if he can’t do what he knows he
has
to do with his life he might as well be dead. He’s got to break through the world’s indifference, or else break himself against it. He can’t help it. Wouldn’t he be justified in doing almost anything to fulfil himself, if his art were worth it in the end?’

‘The end justifying the means? As a working principle, never,’ said Simon. ‘Never, never, never.’

Nigel sat forward in his chair, his voice rising again with excitement: ‘Look, I don’t mean anything dreadful like – like murder or crime or something! But if there was no other way—’

I said: ‘What are you planning to do, for goodness’ sake! Steal the donkey?’

He swung round on me so sharply that I thought he was going to fall off his chair. Then he gave a sudden laugh that sounded very much to me like the edge of hysteria. ‘Me? Walk to Jannina and write a book about it? Me? Never! I’d be scared of the wolves!’

‘There aren’t any wolves,’ Simon’s voice was light, but he was watching Nigel rather closely, and I saw the shadow of trouble in his face.

‘The tortoises then!’ He grabbed the bottle again and turned back to me. ‘Have some more ouzo? No? Simon? Here, hold your glass. Did you know, Miss Camilla I’ve-forgotten-your-other-name, but there were tortoises running about on the hills here? Wild ones? Imagine meeting one of those when you were all alone and miles from anywhere.’

‘I’d run a mile,’ I said.

‘What
is
it, Nigel?’ asked Simon from the window-sill.

For a moment I wondered just what was going to happen. Nigel stopped in mid-movement, with the bottle in one hand. He was rigid. His face went redder, then white under the peeling sunburn. His ugly spatulate fingers clenched round the bottle as if he were going to throw it. His eyes looked suffused. Then they fell away from Simon’s, and he turned to set the bottle down. He said in a curiously muffled voice: ‘I’m sorry. I’m behaving badly. I was a bit high before you came in, that’s all.’

Then he turned back to me with one of his quick angular movements that were like those of an awkward small boy. ‘I don’t know what you must think of me. You must think I’m a pretty good heel, but things were getting me down a bit. I – I’m temperamental, that’s what it is. Great artists are.’ He grinned shamefacedly at me, and I smiled back.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘And all great artists have had a
horrid struggle for recognition. As long as it doesn’t come after you’re dead, it’s all the sweeter when you get it, and I’m sure you will.’

He was down on his knees, lugging a battered portfolio from under the bed. I noticed still that febrile air about him, and his hands were unsteady. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you my drawings. You can tell me if you think they’re worth anything. You can tell me.’ He was dragging a sheaf of papers out of the portfolio.

I said feebly: ‘But my opinion’s no use. I really don’t know anything about it.’

‘Here.’ He thrust a drawing into my hand. ‘That’s one of the ones Simon talks about. And this.’ He sat back on his heels on the floor, and sent Simon a look that might almost have been hatred. ‘I’ll be true to myself, Polonius. You can be bloody sure I will. Even if it means being true to nobody else. I’m not involved with mankind, as your old parson friend puts it. I’m myself. Nigel Barlow. And some day you’ll know it, you and all the rest. Do you hear?’

‘I hear,’ said Simon peaceably. ‘Let’s see what you’ve done, shall we?’

Nigel pushed a drawing towards him, and then a handful at me. ‘This. And this. And this and this and this. They may never set the Thames on fire, but given a push and a bit of luck they’re good enough to make me … Aren’t they?’

As I looked down at the drawings on my knee I was conscious of Nigel’s fixed stare. For all the wild and whirling words the vulnerable look was there again, and on that final question the over-emphatic voice had
broken into naïve and anxious query. I found myself hoping with ridiculous fervour that the drawings might be good.

They were. His touch was sure and strong, yet delicate. Each line was clean and definite and almost frighteningly effective; he had managed to suggest not only shape, but bulk and texture, by pure drawing with the minimum of fuss. Somehow the technique suggested the faded elegance of a French flower-print combined with the sharp, delicate, and yet virile impact of a Dürer drawing. Some were mere sketches, but over others he had taken greater pains. There were rapid studies of the ruined buildings – part of a broken arch with the sharp exclamatory cypresses behind it; Apollo’s columns standing very clear and clean; a delightful drawing of three pomegranates on a twig with shiny drooping leaves. There were several of olive trees, lovely twisted shapes with heads of blown silver cloud. In the plant- and flower-studies he used colour, in faint washes of an almost Chinese subtlety.

I looked up to see him watching me with that anxious-puppy stare from which all trace of belligerence had gone. ‘But, Nigel, they’re wonderful! I told you I didn’t know much about it, but I haven’t seen anything I liked as much in years!’

I got up from my chair and sat down on the bed, spreading the drawings round me, studying them. I picked one of them up; it was the drawing of a clump of cyclamen springing from a small cleft in a bare rock. The textural difference of petal, leaf and stone were beautifully indicated. Below the flowers, in the same
cleft, grew the remains of some rock-plant that I remembered to have seen everywhere in Greece; it was dead and dry-dusty, crumbling away against the rock. Above it the cyclamen’s winged flowers looked pure and delicate and strong.

Over my shoulder Simon said: ‘Nigel, that’s terrific. I haven’t seen it before.’

‘Of course you haven’t. I only did it today,’ said Nigel rudely, making a quick movement as if to snatch it back. Then he appeared to remember, as I had, that he’d told Simon he had done no work that day, for he flushed that raw red again, and sat back on his heels looking uncomfortable.

As usual, Simon took no notice. He lifted the drawing and studied it. ‘Did you mean to use colour in it? What made you change your mind?’

‘Simply that there wasn’t any water handy.’ And Nigel took the paper from him and put it back in the portfolio on the floor.

I said, rather quickly: ‘May I see the portraits?’

‘Of course. Here they are – my bread and butter drawings.’ There was a curious note in his voice, and I saw Simon glance at him sharply.

There was a whole sheaf of portraits, done in an entirely different style. This was effective in its way, the beautiful economy of his drawing telling even in the thick, dramatic, and overemphatic line. His brilliance of execution had here become a slickness, the clever blending of a few stock statements into a formula. In a way, too, the originals of the portraits might have come from stock. What Nigel had been doing was, of course,
to find ‘types’ and to set these down, but, while some of these were discernibly living people, others could have been abstractions of well-known ‘Hellenic types’ taken from statues or vase-paintings or even from the imagination. There was one fine-looking head that might have been Stephanos, but it had a formal and over-type air like an illustration to a set of Greek myths. A girl’s face, all eyes, and deep shadows thrown by a veil, could have been captioned:
Greece: the Gate to the East
. Another portrait – more familiar in type to me and so possibly more alive – was that of a young woman with the Juliette Gréco face, large lost eyes and a sulky mouth. Beneath it was the drawing of a man’s head that, again, seemed purely formal, but was oddly arresting. The head was round, set on a powerful neck, and covered with close curls that grew low on the brow, like a bull’s. The hair grew down thickly past the ears, almost to the jawline, as one sees it in the heroic vase-paintings, and these sidepieces were drawn in formally, like the hard curls on a sculptured cheek. The upper lip was short, the lips thick, and drawn tightly up at the corners in the fixed half-moon smile that shows always on the statues of the archaic gods of Greece.

I said: ‘Simon, look at that. That’s the real “archaic smile”. When you see it on crumbly old statues of Hermes and Apollo you think it’s unreal and crude. But I’ve actually seen it on men’s faces here and there in Greece.’

‘Is that new too?’ asked Simon.

‘Which? Oh, that. Yes.’ Nigel gave him a quick upward glance, hesitated, then appeared to abandon
his pretences, whatever they were. ‘I did it today.’ He took the drawing from me and studied it for a moment. ‘Perhaps you’re right; it’s too formal. I did it half from memory, and it’s gone a bit too much like a vase-painting. However.’

‘It’s the Phormis head to the life,’ said Simon.

Nigel looked up quickly. ‘Yes, so it is! That’s it. I wondered what he reminded me of. I suppose I drew it in. Still, it makes a “type” for the collection, and as Camilla says, it does exist. She’s seen that queer fixed grin here and there, and so’ve I. Interesting, I thought.’

‘What’s the Phormis head?’ I asked.

Simon said: ‘It’s a head found, as far as I remember, at Olympia, and is supposed to be that of Phormis, who was a playwright. That head is bearded, and this isn’t, but it’s got the same heavy wide cheeks and tight curls, and that typical smile.’