Strange Music (4 page)

Adam sat down, stunned, then stood again, realizing he had poured only half his wife's cocktail. ‘I've heard nothing of this.'

‘I thought we might ask Chris Riley-Potter. He'll get his Slade diploma this summer and will be looking for somewhere cheap. The Fergusons want to stay on until Michaelmas.'

‘But what's wrong . . . I mean . . . Good Lord – the
Fergusons
? Have they fallen out with anyone? Can't we persuade them to think again?'

Sally almost had to prise the glass from his fingers. There was a distant flash of lightning, somewhere above the clouds. Automatically she began counting the seconds.

‘They've put down the deposit,' Nicole said.

‘I think Chris would fit in very well here,' Tony added.

‘Did you know about this, Sally?' Adam asked.

‘. . . eight, nine, ten.' There was a barely perceptible rumble of thunder. ‘Two miles,' she said. ‘No, I didn't know – though it explains why Betty has been a bit mopey lately.'

‘Dormer Green's not that far off,' Tony said. ‘Surely she can come back and play whenever she wants?'

Nicole and Sally exchanged glances, each thinking what the other was thinking.

‘Gracie,' Nicole said.

‘She thinks our language and our manners are just a little too free,' Sally explained. ‘Eric says the Fergusons are working class on their way up
to
respectability and we are middle class on our way down
from
it.'

‘Well!' Adam sat down heavily. ‘It's a bit of a blow, all right.'

Nicole said, ‘I think it will be wrong if everybody in the first wave should stay. It would mean we are . . .
amorphe
.'

‘Amorphous,' Tony said. ‘Yes, we stand for something and if the Fergusons feel they can't join in wholeheartedly . . . well then, it's best to part amicably. So what about Chris Riley-Potter? He'd certainly be right with us from day one.'

Sally said she didn't know him.

‘You do,' Tony assured her. ‘He was the bloke who climbed up the copper beech at last year's midsummer party and sang . . . well, yes, Gracie Ferguson certainly wouldn't have liked
that
song!'

‘As long as he doesn't complain incessantly about the smell of onions from our kitchen,' Sally said.

One of the catering students came in and laid the table in the dining end of the room, which was large enough to serve as a sitting room, too. ‘This is a smashing place,' she said cheerily. ‘They should do this with all these big country houses. Kick Lord Salisbury out of Hatfield House and let us students move in. He could have my place. I call it a
place
– it's a rat-hole.'

‘How's the meal coming on?' Sally asked.

‘Pretty good. You must have been saving up ration points for weeks. You all going to drink wine, are you? The white and the red? Only we'll have to wash up the glasses in between – there's only six.'

‘Don't you know there's a war on?' Sally asked.

‘Yeah – it still feels like that sometimes, dunnit!' She raised her eyes to the ceiling.

There was another, slightly less remote flash of lightning; this time Sally counted to seven.

Nicole said, ‘Willard has started on designs for the Festival
pissoirs
. But it's a joke from the
RIBA
, no? And from all those left-wing people in power who he has insulted? Can't he see that?'

Sally replied, ‘I don't think an American
could
see it. Too understated.'

‘Too subtle,' Adam said.

‘No. I mean understated. Americans can be subtle, too, but in a different way.'

‘He's going about telling everyone who mentions it that they're going to be “the best goddam brick shithouses in the world.” Subtle, huh?'

‘That's not fair. Americans are
never
subtle about their own careers or achievements. You can't expect it of Willard.'

‘Any Englishman who got given that contract,' Tony put in, ‘would have gone about saying something like, “At least they knew what I'm good for –
and
they gave me the chance to show it.”
That's
subtle.'

Nicole stage-whispered to Sally, ‘If that's subtle, I can play, too.' Then, raising her voice: ‘Englishmen
are
marvellous.'

When the meal petered out in port and cigars, or Gaulloises for Sally and Nicole, Adam said, ‘Well, it's pretty obvious we didn't invite you to dinner to discuss a replacement for the Fergusons. In fact—'

‘You will think about Chris Riley-Potter?' Tony urged.

‘I said I would. But what do you think about this? The “inspiration phase” part of the Greater London Plan is over. The strategy is complete, and you and I have had a hell of a time working on it. But now it's pretty obvious – to me at any rate, and to Sally – that the implementation calls for a different kind of architect. Men like Wally Edwards, Jim Partridge, Harry Doyle. We did all that in
AMGOT
, and bloody good fun it was, too. But I don't want to go back to that. And Hull has turned down the Abercrombie-Lutyens plan. And we all agree that Plymouth is going to be abso-bloody-lutely awful—'

‘Well, you surely don't want to follow Willard?' Tony asked. ‘I know he's transforming parts of London, but—'

‘No! I'm glad you mentioned Willard and the work he's turning out because that's exactly what I don't want to do—'

‘And exactly what
I
don't want to do, either,' Sally put in. ‘Even though Willard was right – damn him – about the Greater London Plan.'

‘What?' Tony and Adam were in scandalized unison.

‘Well, he was! Commerce has beaten the bureaucrats hands down. Willard's tower blocks are the proletariat's homes for the foreseeable future. The Churchill Gardens Estate is the only bit of Abercrombie that will ever be built.'

‘Leave that aside,' Adam said impatiently. ‘Let's talk about
us
. What
we
want to do – Sally and me – is the sort of architecture we thought we were going to do when we started our studies at the Bartlett before the war: individual houses for individual clients . . . a small estate for the local council or a private builder . . . half-a-dozen houses in a landscape . . . a sensitive extension to a period house . . . that sort of thing. We'll never be millionaires but we'll never be poor, either.'

‘So we wondered if you'd like to join us,' Sally concluded. ‘Both of you.'

‘
Moi?
' Nicole exclaimed.

‘We will need an office manager – someone to look after the correspondence, keep the day-to-day accounts, answer the telephone, organize the diary, remind people of deadlines well in advance . . . a myriad things. We'd split the profits equally – four ways, and we'd need to—'

‘Two ways, surely?' Adam said.

‘Four ways,' Sally insisted. ‘And we'd need to be sure we could survive six months with very little coming in. Preferably nine months.'

‘You needn't answer now. Talk it over and let us know what you think of the idea. Or are you absolutely set against it now in principle?'

‘No!' the Palmers answered in unison.

Out in the grounds a streak of lightning struck the copper beech; the following morning they found its bark all peeled into strips and laid out around it like the spokes of a wheel.

Thursday, 27 October 1949

When Felix arrived in London, penniless, in 1947, it was Wolf Fogel, boss of the Manutius Press, who had thrown him the first lifeline – a consultancy on a series of books on modern art. It included a commission to provide a sculpture to be photographed in different ways as an introductory image to each section in each book. Felix started with an egg, only partly carved out of its marble, but in each subsequent book and section a fraction more of the egg was liberated. In its final appearance at the end of the last volume it would be smashed to bits, as if to say ‘Art is now free and mature' (though, in fact, this was Felix's way of preventing Fogel from acquiring a valuable Felix Breit sculpture for peanuts).

One day, when the final volume was in production, he called on the Manutius series editor, Peter Murdoch, dropped a portfolio on the man's desk and tweaked one of the ribbons. ‘Have a gander at this,' he said. ‘A slight change of plan.'

Murdoch tweaked the other two ribbons and opened the covers. ‘Slight?' he cried.

Felix explained: ‘It always worried me that we just smashed the egg and found that it contained nothing . . . as if the egg were some kind of climax in its own right. When we started out it was meant to symbolize the art
process
not art itself. But that's how critics and reviewers have interpreted it in the earlier volumes.'

‘But . . .
this
!' Murdoch gestured at the sketches. ‘These . . .
things
. . . what are they?'

‘Grotesques . . . chimeras . . . a Dipsas, a Manticora, a Wyvern, a Simurgh . . .'

Murdoch gave a baffled laugh. ‘Where do you dig up stuff like this?'

‘Not me, actually. A bloke who lives at the Dower House – Eric Brandon. He's persuaded me that from this generation onward all pictorial art will be pastiche . . .
can only be
pastiche.'

‘Then he's mad.'

‘Think about it. What is Sutherland doing that Bacon hasn't already done? What is Bacon doing that Sutherland hasn't done? Or Colquhoun and MacBride? What's Ruskin-Spear doing that Sickert didn't? Isn't Ben Nicholson just painting tasteful variations of Léger? And Barbara is surely just giving us a native version of Arp and Brancusi. That's the whole point. The work we've been covering in these six volumes was the last great explosion of revolutionary originality in the visual arts.'

‘And you?'

‘I'm not doing anything that Epstein didn't. Or Gill. And even they hardly pushed the boundaries beyond Rodin and Maillol.'

Murdoch scratched his head. ‘There has to be the possibility of further revolution. A genius – another Picasso – will arise. Maybe he's leaving the Royal College this summer. He'll break out of the pastiche straitjacket and show us whole new worlds to explore.'

Felix sat down and played the ace. ‘So we delay publication until then?'

‘Christ, no! We just assume it will happen because it always has happened. Raphael and Leonardo take art up to the heights of the sublime – and then along comes Caravaggio and El Greco. Ingres and Leighton push realism as far as it will go and – hey presto! Along come Cézanne and Monet.'

‘But you're making
my
point. There have now been so many reactions and revolutions that everything an artist can possibly do has been done. There's a painter – so-called – in America, born in the same year as me, 1912, and he has given up any attempt to
paint
his pictures. Instead he buys cans of liquid paint and pops a hole in the bottom and swings can after can back and forth over his canvases, which he lays on the studio floor. And he lets them dry and he sells them as “paintings!” Really they're just a record of the conspiracy between gravity and the laws of reciprocal motion. If
that's
the sort of genius you think is going to come up with the next great revolution, then I believe that my grotesques being hatched out of our shattered egg are very appropriate – no?' After a pause he added, ‘Shall we just run this past Fogel?'

Faith, Fogel's right hand (and Felix's first lover in England, before he had met and married Angela) breezed in at that moment. ‘How's it going? What d'you think, Peter?'

‘You know all about this idea?'

‘Hasn't anyone told you? I used to be Felix's bit of stuff. Now I'm just his lodger, and the drone from him and Eric Brandon – despite being muffled by two stout walls – has been lulling me to sleep for weeks.'

Murdoch hid his embarrassment well. ‘So you disagree?'

‘No! I happen to agree, but isn't that slightly beside the point?'

‘How?'

‘It'll certainly set the cat among the pigeons – accusing all the London galleries and dealers of handling nothing but pastiche . . . telling William Corvo and Grigson and Herbert Read and all the other scribblers that they're wasting their sensibilities on second-hand goods. It'll be a scandal – and I never yet heard of a book whose sales weren't helped along by a whiff of scandal.'

Murdoch's face was a study. He was at heart a lover of the arts, especially of painting and sculpture; and he was an ardent admirer of Felix, especially of the commissions the man had carried out since settling in England, for it seemed to him that Breit was at last able to work at his full potential. In just three years he had fulfilled half-a-dozen public commissions on a monumental scale and several more modestly proportioned works for private clients. So how could he claim that
everything,
including what he himself was doing, was nothing but pastiche? Or, at best, homage to some past genius?

But he didn't want to put that question directly to Felix because he suspected the man had an unpalatable answer. He was, however, a commercial publisher, too. He knew what sells well and what gets remaindered. And Faith was right. ‘I suppose we leave it to Fogel to decide, then,' he said wearily.

‘Fogel will accept whatever Felix wants,' Faith said. ‘Partly because it will create a scandal, which will be good. But mainly because' – she turned to Felix – ‘he wants you to be the overall design consultant on a new series of books he's planning with Julian Huxley and James Fisher. That's what I—'

‘How long have you known this?' Felix asked.

She grinned and levelled a finger at him. ‘You see! If you hadn't married that woman – if my head and yours still lay on the same soft pillow – you'd learn all these things a lot earlier.'