The Fatal Englishman (15 page)

An encounter on the boat made him believe he was being followed by members of the Guinness family or their agents. He felt so sure he was being watched that he threw his pipe and opium overboard. Although he loved Frosca, he had never been able to extirpate Meraud from his thoughts; he was frightened of her family, with whom he had been on bad terms ever since the affair had ended. There was no doubt that the affair with Meraud – although he forced himself to view it, and her, as immature – had troubled him in a way that related to his sexual identity and to his whole idea of himself. But the development of Wood’s anxieties to the point of paranoia can only be explained by the unsettling effects of the last few months. He was mentally and physically exhausted by his work, and his system had been abused by alternate indulgence in, and withdrawal from, large doses of opium.

When he arrived in Southampton he sent a telegram to his mother asking her to meet him for lunch in Salisbury the next day. He then caught a ferry to the Isle of Wight.

No one knows why he decided to go to Salisbury before London; Frosca understood that he wanted his mother’s advice about something that was troubling him. At any rate, it is possible, thanks to the inquiries made some weeks later by a private detective, to recreate Wood’s movements with a certain plodding precision.

He arrived at the Pier Hotel in Yarmouth at eleven o’clock on the morning of 20 August. He had three suitcases with him and three large packets of pictures. He said he would have lunch at the hotel if they could reassure him there was no one else around. Lunch was served to him, but he was too agitated to eat. He was out for most of the afternoon, took no dinner, and went up to his room at nine. He was heard walking about until eleven o’clock, soon after which he went to bed.

At 6.30 the following morning he appeared in the dining room and asked for a whisky and soda. He was told that the bar was not open. He said he wanted breakfast at once but the waiter told him the chef was not up. Wood paced up and down the dining room. He told the waiter he had been out all night; that although he had initially gone to bed in his room he had then left the hotel and slept on a quayside. The waiter went to hang up Wood’s coat, which he had left on a chair. Owing to the weight of it, he looked in the pockets. There he found a six-chamber revolver. Perhaps it was the same one with which he had frightened off the eagles in Greece.

Wood went upstairs and had a bath. He came down at 8.15, had breakfast and left in a hurry. The boat for Lymington was due to leave at 8.30, but fortunately for Wood it was a quarter of an hour late. He just made it. Although the Guinness family was well known in Yarmouth there was apparently no trace of them there at the time. They had a yacht, which they sometimes brought over for Cowes week, but various ‘yachting people’ interviewed by the private detective stated firmly they were not there. Wood was imagining his persecution.

That morning he took a train from Lymington to Salisbury. At about 11.30 on the morning of 21 August Wood walked into the bar of the County Hotel in Salisbury and accosted a Major Beckley, who was staying there. He said, ‘Can I have a little interview now, as I expect my mother in about half an hour.’ Beckley explained that there must be a mistake: he had never seen Wood before and had no business with him. Wood paced about the lounge until a woman’s voice was heard outside. He went out and spoke to her. She asked how he was; he replied that
he was very well, and said they would ‘settle what we will do in half an hour’.

He had lunch with Clare and Betty Wood in Salisbury. What passed between the three of them is not known. Frosca later wrote to Winifred Nicholson (presumably on the basis of what Clare Wood told her) that Wood told his mother that he was being pursued and that he had heard voices telling him to commit suicide. Afterwards Betty drove all three of them to the station, where Wood bought a ticket for Waterloo. A porter called Alfred Hibberd saw the car pull up at about 1.40 pm. Wood jumped out and the car drove off. Hibberd saw him say goodbye to Betty, but was not sure if he said goodbye to his mother, as he himself then went into the station. Hibberd was told that a passenger in the cloakroom required a porter. This turned out to be Wood. He took his luggage on to the Number Two platform for the Waterloo train. A newsboy called Leslie Smailes, employed by Smith and Sons, sold Wood a book for eight shillings and sixpence. He said Wood appeared agitated and flushed; he sat on a seat near the bookstall but seemed too distracted to be able to read. He shut the book, stood up, and walked up and down the platform. He was standing only two feet from the comer of the bookstall when the train was coming in.

At this point, according to Smailes, Wood ‘sort of ran and jumped and dived and screamed’. He jumped right in front of the engine.

The driver of the engine, Charles Davie, was on the point of pulling up in the usual way, on time, when his fireman, who was on the platform side of the engine cab, called out: ‘Whoa! A man’s jumped in front of the engine.’ Davie applied the brake fully and the train pulled up quickly.

A Mr F.L. Buttar, a medical practitioner and police surgeon, said he was telephoned by the police and asked to go to the Southern Railway Station. When he arrived he saw the body of a man on a stretcher. He had received severe injuries to his trunk and legs. He was dead. The upper part of his body and head were uninjured. Buttar believed death to have been instantaneous, caused by shock following the injuries.

Buttar, Hibberd, Smailes and Davie all gave evidence to an
inquest in Salisbury conducted the following day by the City Coroner, Mr A.M. Wilson, sitting with a jury. They were told by P.C. Berryman of the Salisbury City Police that on searching Wood’s body he had found a bloodstained envelope with the County Hotel’s stamp on the flap. Wilson read what he could of the message; he said it appeared to him ‘perfectly senseless’ and evidence of the fact that Wood was not in his normal state of mind. As far as he could decipher them, the words were: ‘Are they positive’, followed by a word that might have been ‘though’ or ‘through’. Then it continued: ‘Are they positive as to who they are. Throwing away is not a big enough proof The coroner believed the words had been written by a man ‘out of his senses’.

The jury returned a verdict that Wood died from shock following injuries sustained from his throwing himself in front of a train while of unsound mind. The coroner expressed deep sympathy for Dr Wood and his family on the loss of one he believed to have been a brilliant artist.

The last word was spoken with the controlled politeness of the English upper-middle classes into which Wood had been born. Dr Lucius Wood, veteran of the Western Front, embodiment of Huyton and good sense, rose to his feet and thanked the coroner for the sympathetic way in which he had conducted the inquest.

Christopher Wood’s life was finished.

Across Europe, in apartments and hotels, in galleries and houses, there were detonations of private grief. News reached Wood’s scattered friends at different times, awkwardly, sometimes from the wrong people. Frosca first heard when Winifred Reitlinger wrote to console her. The pathetic letters Wood’s friends exchanged conjured the terrible shock, the stricken intake of breath, the slamming doors. The scribbled lines revealed the hellish despair of Frosca Munster, Tony Gandarillas, Winifred Nicholson and others who had loved him; what remained beyond reach were the feelings of Clare Wood as she surveyed the ruin of her fallen Icarus.

One of the last letters Kit wrote to her concluded: ‘I love you so dearly and think of you as my best and dearest friend, and I shall never forget how perfectly sweet and understanding you have
been towards me, and when I think of all the sacrifices you have made for me it makes me very ashamed, and makes me think you must care for me very much. Goodbye my sweet. All my love and I’ll write as soon as I get back to Paris. Your loving Kit.’

It was appropriate that his final words should be of thanks. In the confused mesh of his motive and ambition, a desire to improve his painting, to realise his talent to the utmost, had become synonymous with his feeling of gratitude. His wish to please her led him indirectly to the strain that made him do the thing that in all imagining would hurt her most.

Clare Wood showed herself to be a woman of great resource. In the days between the death and the funeral she was so composed that friends worried for her. When Winifred Reitlinger wrote to offer her condolences, Clare Wood replied magnificently: ‘Dear Miss Reitlinger, Thank you for your letter full of kind thoughts. I feel so sorry for you to have lost such a good friend as I know Kit was… Will you give Frosca my love and tell her I am thinking of her all the time. I am glad she will soon be seeing you.’

Lucy Wertheim telephoned Clare Wood on the evening of Kit’s death. Mrs Wertheim, who was subsequently to enter a tense relationship with other parties over the possession of Wood’s work, had bought a large number of his best paintings at advantageous prices: ‘The Yellow Man’, for instance, became hers for only £30. Wood had liked her and enthusiastically supported her proposed gallery; he borrowed money from her on account during the summer of 1930 against future work. Nevertheless, it was not tactful to telephone a house that had received such news only hours before.

Clare Wood’s letter to Mrs Wertheim the following day was remarkable:

My dear Lucy,

Thank you for all your dear sympathy, of course I should love to see you but don’t feel like talking to anyone until after tomorrow. The funeral is tomorrow at three. As I said in my wire I could see you on Sunday and love to or any other time you might choose. The telephone was so bad last evening and we were so upset that Betty could hardly understand what you were saying. Thank you so much for telegraphing. You will understand dear why I can’t write more now, my heart is too full but there is one thing I want you to do and that is if you know where Kit has sent his new pictures to, were they addressed to you?

I am so sorry to trouble you about it but we think we ought to know where they are, as Kit told me yesterday they were all packed up and sent off, but where to I don’t know. Could you let me know this by return in case you cannot come to see me just now.

Very much love, dear Lucy. Ever Yours, Clare.

The lines of Clare Wood’s character – her love and ambition for Kit, her altruism and politeness – were starkly laid out.

Frosca, meanwhile, was alone in Paris when she received Winifred Reitlinger’s letter. She wrote to Winifred Nicholson (in French, though for once her terse and beautiful style fell apart):

Dear Winifred,

I beg you to write to me, speak to me of Kit. I know how much you loved him and what the loss of a man like him means. I am suffering terribly and the only consolation I have is to talk to the people he loved and who loved him like you. Teach me, tell me everything that is your idea of good, or of the hope you have in life. Perhaps that will bring me some consolation. I am appalled, I just cannot accept this injustice. I find it terrible to have to live on this earth if such atrocities are allowed to happen … Dear Winifred, tell me something, write, I can think and speak of nothing but Kit. What an angel, what a marvellous being – and how will I be able to accept life without him, how can I carry on, start again. Life will never again give me something as perfect as Kit was for me. I am very unhappy, I need help. Write to me. I embrace you with all my heart. Frosca.

Winifred and Ben Nicholson replied, but Frosca was still almost demented: ‘I cannot tell you what a state I am in. I don’t even know if I am alive … Nothing I say can explain to you the state of my heart.’

Tony Gandarillas was in Biarritz. He wrote a postcard to Winifred Nicholson: ‘Kit will always be alive between us – We must do all we can for his memory – I am so frightfully unhappy
that I can’t write yet and tell you all I want – He meant to me more than my children and all my family, a friend like Kit is very rare in this world. I didn’t deserve his friendship and great affection … Don’t leave me quite alone – I must be near Kit’s friends.’

In a letter from Madrid he wrote: ‘I also see exactly like you in most of his paintings that journey to the far horizon and the longing for which is beyond this world. He is gone and I can’t part with him. I think I could have saved him and I feel more miserable each day.’

Wood had once described Gandarillas as a ‘chittering, charming, childish and always cheerful small monkey’. He was irresponsible, but he was irresistible. It was probably with him that Wood first smoked opium, and this knowledge added to Gandarillas’s torment. Both he and Cocteau had had the money and the sense to undergo cures; if only he had stayed closer to Wood he might have seen the danger signs and financed some treatment. Gandarillas was tormented by the feeling that he might have prevented the catastrophe. He wrote to H.S. Ede. the curator of the Tate Gallery, who had become a friend of Wood’s in London: ‘It is marvellous of you to have done all that work in Minton Place. I couldn’t have done it. I think I would have died. I couldn’t have seen so many things of the past, the memories of the last ten years of my life. I can’t have any serenity over Kit’s death. I know it is wrong but I can’t help it. I feel I should have saved him.’

By the end of September, Gandarillas’s anguish was no better. He wrote to Ede: ‘You know what it means to me, his work. It is all my life as I have been waiting for the day he will become great. Whatever I do I can’t think of anything else but Kit and I feel more and more unhappy each day.’

The days of Taormina, the lobsters in bed, the terrace with the Roman mosaic; the lovely earnest Englishman out painting all morning then back for lunch beneath the trees… it was hard for Gandarillas to believe that this was the ending to which the treacherous years had all the time been leading. His anguish led him into a nervous collapse.

‘I can’t have any serenity …’ This was the agony of Wood’s
death for both Tony Gandarillas and Frosca Munster. Apart from the pain of bereavement, there was in his case the feeling of impotent frustration, the sense that he could have helped; and in her case there was a raging resentment of what she saw as a terrible injustice.