All those years that he dreamt of being elsewhere finally brought him here, to these streets and green parks that immediately felt familiar. And, of course, he’d seen it all before in books and paintings and photographs. Only now he knew what lay beyond the frame, beyond the uniform rows of terraces and the bombed-out blocks where the most fantastic gardens had bloomed all summer. And as much as everybody tells him he should have seen London before the war, he’d rather be seeing it now. For Sam this is the most exciting of times. Here. Right now. A war won. And victory in nobody’s faces. The past blown to bits (including the London that everybody tells him he should have seen) and something new and unknown on the way that could be anything. Even that first winter when he’d arrived two years before, which everyone spoke of (in a manner that suggested to Sam that they said this of every winter) as the worst they could remember, was exciting. And the grim faces in the streets, awash with the kind of tiredness that is beyond a good night’s sleep, the kind of tiredness that comes to stay and never leaves, even that was exciting. The grime over everything, the fogs, the whole clapped-out city. It was wonderful. Thrilling. The most wonderful time to be alive. To be at the heart of things, to attend the funeral of the old ways and to watch a new government take over the parliament and the spivs take over the streets. Couldn’t be better. Not for Sam. For this is what he calls a ‘moment’. Not an everyday moment, but an historical one. Post-war. But only just. The dust only just settled and nobody quite sure what to do with themselves. One minute all hopeful, the next still jittery and too tired for hope. One minute lost in the fog, the next stepping into the warm sunshine of this bright new world and hearing the faint, distinctive and reassuring pock of a cricket bat hitting a red leather ball into a peaceful, clear blue sky.
Sam, who is currently taking a summer stroll through Soho to his studio flat (while Tess, in winter, is reflecting upon the tolling bell of the word ‘institution’), has just come from an afternoon gathering at a well-known gallery. It had been smoky and crowded and hot, and he had bumped into someone only to realise as he did that he was standing directly opposite the broad but surprisingly not so tall figure of Ernest Hemingway, who nodded and was about to turn back to the conversation that Sam’s bump had interrupted when an influential critic, who had opened the doors of the London art world for Sam, introduced the two. A short conversation followed and they went their separate ways. For Hemingway it was either an interruption or a distraction; for Sam it was a reminder of where he was and that such encounters are common. Or, at least, he now imagined they were. But, more than that, it felt as though his life and all the things he might do with it were just beginning, and everything else until now had been preparation. Not that Sam feels any reverence for this new world of his, far from it. He is no more in awe of this place than he is of those ideas that he at once believes in and does not believe in. They are useful. Just as the excitement of this new world of his is useful. And Sam is a jackdaw. Or is that a spiv? A spiv on a street corner eyeing the world off, from the gutter to the toffy end of town, for what it’s worth. And he had no sooner left the gathering than he thought of George. George, who, like his tutors at university, always spoke of Mr Hemingway, never simply Hemingway. And he resolved to write to George and tell him that he had shaken hands with the author of In Our Time. He immediately slipped into Hemingway-speak as he mentally composed the letter, which would be simple and stark, like a Cézanne, and contain words such as ‘fine’ and ‘swell’ with ironic frequency.
And it was just when he’d finished mentally composing the letter that the small circle that they’d once been reassembled around him. There and not there. Distant and near: a small circle that he was well out of, and yet, he knew, one he would never be entirely out of, even here at the centre of things. For there are centres and centres, and that little circle and the city they’d inhabited, Sam realises, was once his centre and he will always remember it as that. Even if its gravitational pull would only ever hold him for so long. But as much as he’d expected his new life to be a slog, as much as he’d expected years of anonymity and struggle, nothing of the sort had happened. He had been, from the start, a young man of great expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the words of just a few influential critics, had opened doors that opened only to the few, and Sam, as everybody had always told him, was now poised for fame. Which might also explain that sudden rush of tenderness with which he now viewed that distant first circle of his youth. Yes, Sam was poised for fame. And he knew it. The fame for which he had always been destined, for Sam was always told that he looked famous, even before he was. His last exhibition had been acclaimed and everybody was already talking about his next.
He can see them all clearly, that first circle of his youth, for the clarity that comes with distance is upon him. And it is a liberating feeling. There is a spring in his step. A bounce to his walk, a dream-like buoyancy to each and every stride that takes him back to his flat, a bed-sit, which is light enough and large enough to live and work in. His mood, too, is buoyant and will stay that way throughout the day. And the week after that. And the year that follows, and the years after that which will witness the arrival of fame, marriage to an English woman (for, by then, he will have acquired distance and clarity on Tess too, who will become a memory) and the arrival of money. Enough money to buy a farm in Kent with a large house and a stable that he will convert into a studio.
And it will be then, in the mid-1950s, when he has converted the stable into a studio and while he is arranging against a wall the paintings that he brought with him in a large trunk all those years before (which had been stored at a friend’s house and never opened) that he will see it: ‘Woman and Tent’.
At first he will be pleased with what he sees, the execution, the way the colours have stayed true, and the play between the photograph and the painting. And the old woman, whom he assumes to be dead now, staring at him, striding towards him, her arm raised once more in protest, as if, for all the world, she is about to step right off the surface of the painting. But into what? And it is at this point that he will only be able to see her striding off the surface of the painting and into the stable because, he will realise with alarm, he has forgotten what lies beyond the frame of the painting. How did it go? How did it go again? There was a newspaper photograph, there was an old woman, there was a tent. But what lay beyond the frame? A farm, an old farmer, a dirt road. Yes. But what did they all look like? He will, for a short time, have no clear images of the farmer, the farm or the road. He will have acquired the distance but lost the detail. And the farmer, the farm and the dirt road could be just anyone and anywhere, in that thistle countryside that existed north of the city then. His memories of the painting, for these few minutes, will be general, not specific. In short, he will have forgotten. Then, gradually, the memories will return, and he will breathe a large sigh of relief. The images will still be there, clear and strong, and the old woman will then be able to step off the surface of the painting and on to the very paddocks and streets that she once walked over because he will have regained the world beyond the frame. He will forget, he will remember. It will be lost and then retrieved. But it will, nonetheless, be a moment of concern and he will ask himself for the first time — could it be, could it be that the price of distance is forgetting? That one day he will forget and not remember? That one day it will be lost and not retrieved?
At the moment, though, there is a spring to Sam’s walk, buoyancy in each step that leads him to his studio, the door of which will open on to the days of fame. And the life that will come with fame, and the farm and the stable, that will all lead to the moment when he opens the trunk of paintings, like exhuming the body of his past, and finds the old woman and her tent suddenly before him. That moment when he will ask himself: could it be that the price of distance is forgetting?