Almost three years have passed since he first left for New York. It seems that the name Thomas Stafford now has some currency in the art world; Alice hears it mentioned in the same breath as Hopper and Bellows. When she does, she feels a strange sense of estrangement, as though this Thomas Stafford cannot really be the one she knows.
Apparently, a couple of big collectors have taken a serious interest in his work. One of his pieces, Bowery Morning, sold to an American hotelier for an eye-watering five thousand dollars.
Stafford, people say, is one of the few English artists not caught up in aping Picasso or Matisse. Aunt Margaret’s advice about originality found its mark. Every so often Alice sees his name appear in one of the British newspapers she buys from the tabac at an eye-watering premium. She cuts out these mentions and keeps them in the drawer of her bedside table.
Her stepfather’s name also appears in the papers with increasing frequency: ‘BUF rally in Kensington: Mosley and Hexford speak’, ‘Hexford talks at the Cambridge Union’, ‘Lord and Lady Hexford entertain the Führer’. Photos, too, of her mother, frostily beautiful in a white mink tippet, stepping from Goebbels’ gleaming Mercedes-Benz. Her stepfather wearing that black shirt and those ridiculous riding breeches, addressing a crowd of admirers. These pictures Alice does not cut out.
The news from Europe is bad. Sophie De Rosier has cousins in Bohemia, and she has not heard from them for some time – since March, in fact, when German troops moved in from the Sudetenland and took control.
‘Why,’ she asks Alice, ‘is no one doing anything? The French and British governments … why are they allowing this to happen?’
Alice thinks of Archie, and of Tom’s father – poor Mr Stafford, for all those years effectively a prisoner of war – if only within his own mind. ‘I think it’s fear,’ she says. ‘They don’t want another war – people remember the first one too clearly.’
Sophie nods in understanding. She too lost a brother – her eldest. ‘But if they don’t act,’ she says, ‘then it will surely continue. It could be France or England, before too long.’
Cycling home later, Alice tries to imagine the city, balmy and almost eerily quiet on this day in high summer, invaded by a hostile force. It is impossible. She is so intent on her thoughts that she does not see the glass in the road in front of her until it is too late and the tyres have passed over it with an ominous hissing. It is a broken bottle – a drunk’s, probably, that has rolled from the pavement and smashed. She looks at the damage and curses quietly under her breath. Twin punctures, decisive ones at that – so that all of the air has completely left both tyres. She wheels her bike back to the De Rosiers’ house, and leaves it there – too tired to think about how to mend it now. For once she decides she will take the Metro instead.
As she waits for her train, a poster on the opposite platform catches her eye. It depicts a bright, abstract painting of a street scene – unknown to Alice, but something about it tugs at her, demands her attention. Someone stands in front of it, so that she can’t quite be sure what it says. She moves in agitation, trying to see. The train is coming in now: she should get on, but she has to know what it says. The carriages slow to a halt, obscuring the other side from view. People pour off and on. At last, in a grinding of gears and with a mechanical hiss the train lumbers away, rattling off into the dark tunnel. The opposite platform is revealed. The woman has disappeared, and Alice can finally see it properly. Though she has to read it more than once, to be sure.
- EXHIBITION -
Thomas Stafford: The Lights of New York
At the gallery entrance Alice hesitates, unsure of herself suddenly, of whether she has done the right thing in coming here. There is a press of people inside and a pall of cigarette smoke hangs several feet from the ceiling. She fights her way through the throng, torn between stopping and taking a look at the works hung along the walls and searching the room for his face. A couple of times she thinks she sees him and starts forward, only to be disappointed. Every so often she is stopped by someone she knows and forced to make small talk before she is able to escape. ‘Have you heard?’ someone mutters, nearby. ‘Gertrude Stein is here.’ Sure enough, there she is, in the corner of the room, surrounded by an admiring crowd. Slightly smaller and older than Alice had imagined, but at the same time magnificent, wrapped about in a jewel-coloured shawl, her hair, steel grey, cropped close to her head like Joan of Arc’s.
But where is Tom? Alice is beginning to wonder whether he hasn’t attended his own exhibition. She has done a full circuit of the two rooms now, pushing her way past the same groups of people, making a nuisance of herself. Then she sees something: the back of a head, the particular tapering of the hair at the nape of the neck that gives her pause. She had noticed before and dismissed it. On second glance, though … No, it can’t be. The shoulders are too broad, the posture too … different, the hair a shade darker than she remembers. And yet it is him, unmistakably. His head bows as someone leans in close to say something. She is diminutive and Nordic blonde, this person, and Alice is sure, even from this distance, that she is beautiful. She feels a shock of jealousy go through her, that – unreasonable though it is – she doesn’t quite know how to quash.
She cannot believe the change in him. When she remembers Tom, it is always as he was that last time she saw him: tall, but with the lankiness of youth – a stretched quality, like a spruce that had shot upwards without finding the time to put branches out. His face was still that of a boy. Now she is confronted with the fact of that near decade that has passed. Those years have done their work indeed, and the changes they have wrought fascinate her. His frame is broader and his face has coarsened, but the change suits him – his prettiness has evolved into a more masculine register of beauty. He has kept his high colouring, the almost feminine flush of his cheeks, but it is tempered now by the shadow of stubble upon his chin, the more resolute shape of brow and jaw.
He is taller than any of those who have gathered about him. One of them says something to him that causes him to raise his head and look about the room, and his gaze, suddenly, rests upon her. And stays there. Unnerved, she feels the need to acknowledge this strange moment. She raises her hand, feeling the small tremor that runs through it, and gives a tentative wave.
The blonde woman has seen her too, now and she watches Alice with the unwavering, blue-eyed regard of a Siamese cat. She is exquisite. The modern, polished beauty of a Hollywood starlet, neatly voluptuous in her close-fitting grey suit: Schiaparelli, undoubtedly. A little white hand lifts a cigarette to her lips, and another man from the group steps in quickly to light it for her, retreating with a look of absurd pleasure upon his face. She, however, only has eyes for Tom, and the other hand finds its way to rest upon his forearm. Suddenly, with a lurch, Alice knows who this woman reminds her of. Her mother.
Alice turns and heads for the exit, almost breaking into a run in her eagerness to be outside in the anonymous street, where she can merge with the crowd and slip away. A hand brushes her arm and she wheels about – thinking it might be … No – it’s … ah, a friend of the American writer. She smiles, nods, and excuses herself. She realizes, as she gains the cool air without, that she can’t remember a word of what the man said to her.
It was a mistake to come. If Tom had wanted her here, he would have written to invite her. She should have been content with his letters.
It is past nine o’clock, and Alice is thankful for the concealing twilight. She is halfway down the street when she hears her name called and a smatter of quick footsteps.
‘Alice?’
He stands before her, tall and flushed, breathing hard. ‘I knew it was you. I couldn’t get away …’ He stares, fascinated. ‘You’ve changed so much.’
‘I know. So have you.’
‘I was going to surprise you, tomorrow. We weren’t meant to meet like this.’
‘You didn’t want to tell me about the exhibition?’ Alice realizes as she says it how hurt she is by the slight.
‘I didn’t want us to meet like that, with all those people. I wanted to come and find you first.’
‘But of course I would want to be there. Tom, those pieces … they’re so different: such energy and colour. You’ve done so well.’
Tom shifts from one foot to the other. ‘Thank you, but … I don’t know. It all seems … not quite real. I keep feeling that I’ll do or say something wrong, something that gives me away as a phoney.’ He grins. ‘Shall we escape?’
‘You can’t leave your own exhibition!’
He shrugs. ‘They’ll do just as well without me in there. I’m not sure I was needed, to be honest. Most people there have better-informed opinions on my work than I do. I doubt they’ll notice.’ He takes her arm again and tucks it under his. She feels the thrill of his nearness: this person so familiar and yet so wonderfully strange.
Alice can’t help herself. ‘Your friend might. She seemed particularly interested in what you had to say.’
He looks at her in bemusement and she feels her face grow hot. She has no right to be jealous.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The woman you were talking to in there, the blonde.’
‘Grace?’
‘Is that her name? Yes, I suppose it does suit her. She’s very lovely.’
‘Grace is a friend.’
‘Ah.’ But I am your ‘friend’ too, she thinks, and look how little that says about what has been between us.
‘She’s the wife of one of my patrons: they paid for my passage here. In all honesty, I find her rather hard work, but it would not do to be rude.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Alice tries not to betray her relief. Tom gives her a quick dart of a look, a tiny smile. She feels him draw her slightly closer to him with his linked arm.
The light is fading. They walk along the quiet Boulevard des Invalides, past the long shape of a flower stall, its canvas covering snickering in the breeze. Alice points out the Lycée Victor Duruy, vast and silent – a sleeping giant. ‘Matisse teaches there.’ They peer up together at the dark windows as though they might glimpse that bearded face through one of them like an apparition.
‘Did you know,’ Tom says, ‘Matisse was supposed to be a lawyer, too.’
Alice is astonished. ‘Then thank goodness you both saw sense!’
She is only aware of how far they have wandered when the lights of the Boulevard du Montparnasse appear ahead of them. There are sounds: music, shrieks, laughter, the hum of idling engines. The night-time revelries start early in this part of town. As they turn the corner on to the thoroughfare, Tom’s eyes widen at the spectacle, and Alice feels a thrill of pride that this, her city, is able to fascinate him – one who has lived a decade in the American metropolis.
‘All right,’ she says, matter of fact. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I’d like to try a dish of oysters – I’ve never eaten them.’
‘Not even in New York?’
‘Never.’
She grins. ‘Neither have I.’
‘I thought that was all people ate in Paris. Oysters … and plenty of champagne to wash them down with, naturally.’
Alice laughs. ‘Some people, perhaps. Not me – that isn’t the sort of life I have here. My salary doesn’t stretch to many oysters.’
‘Well, we definitely have to try them. My treat. After that, I’d like us to get extremely drunk. Do you remember that party, by the lake?’
She nods.
‘I’d like to do that: drink too much and then sit together, talking until dawn. The champagne will keep us warm.’
‘All right.’
The oysters, quavering on their bed of briny ice, are a strange thing. After the first, Alice isn’t sure she wants another. Her mouth seems to taste of salt and metal.
‘They aren’t quite what I expected.’
‘No, nor I.’
‘They don’t taste of much, do they?’
‘Of the sea, I suppose.’
‘And the texture: slippery, cold. Slimy, you might say.’
‘Hm. Perhaps if we tried each one with the champagne straight afterwards? You know, sluice them down with it?’
By the time the bottle is finished, oysters are Alice’s favourite thing in the world.
‘They merely take a bit of understanding,’ she tells Tom earnestly. ‘They’re very subtle.’
When the waiter comes with their bill, Tom insists on paying for everything. ‘I told you,’ he says, batting her away, ‘I have money now.’ He says this with such incredulity, so like the Tom she remembers, that on an impulse she reaches across the table for his hand and presses it against her lips. He goes quite still and watches his fingers there, resting against her mouth. Suddenly self-conscious, Alice lets his hand drop.
He buys them absinthe in the next bar. ‘This is what everyone drinks here, surely? Besides champagne, I mean.’
‘No – in fact I’m not even sure if it’s strictly legal.’
‘How odd. Such a harmless little drink. Surely nothing tasting of sweets could be truly bad for you.’
They watch, captivated, as their waiter goes through the elaborate performance of preparing their drinks: the delicate perforated silver spoon, the steeped sugar cube, the peculiar alchemy that occurs when the water meets the jewel-coloured liquid and turns it cloudy white.
Afterwards, they dance in La Coupoule. They move with the intense concentration of people more than two-thirds drunk, and with each new piece of music they press closer together. Alice feels the strength of Tom’s supporting forearm behind her back and his breath, faintly liquorice-scented, on her cheek. After an hour or two they break for air and make for the riverbank, where they find a bench to sit upon. The water seeps below them like a flow of black treacle, reflecting, wetly, the lights from both banks.
‘I can see why you love it here,’ Tom says, his words ever so slightly slurred.
‘I don’t go dancing every night, you know.’
‘You should – you do it so well. That time I saw you by the lake. You moved like … like water. You could be a dancer.’
She laughs and swats his arm. ‘You flatterer!’
‘No, I mean it.’
He turns to look at her. His face is flushed and his eyes bright. She reaches up to feel her own hot cheeks with the backs of her hands. Then she does the same to him. She senses the pressure of his gaze intent upon her face, but she can’t quite look up at him. To do so in this moment, she feels, would be like staring directly at the sun. As if of their own accord, her fingers trace their way lower, until she is touching his lips. She has always loved the shape of them: the curve of the top lip perfect – a drawn bow – the full lower lip.
‘I’m so glad you came.’ She strains to keep her voice light, but knows it has come out rougher than she intended. The words are like an incantation for both of them. She reaches up with her hands, cups his head and draws him down towards her so their lips can meet. He is gentle, at first, but she forces him not to be, and his arms go around her and pull her almost into his lap. He is hard beneath her, and the rush of longing that she experiences in this moment is almost frightening – though not enough to make her stop.
‘I think you should come back to my room.’
‘Alice, are you sure?’ His eyes are unfocused, his breathing erratic. She can feel her own breath catching, and her heartbeat resounding through her whole body. She doesn’t answer, but pulls him up after her, looking away, embarrassed and aroused, as he shrugs off his jacket to hold it in front of himself.
It isn’t far to her apartment from here, but it takes them far longer than it should – they keep having to stop along the way. They are both bemused and thrilled by this thing that has happened to them again, and each new kiss is a reaffirmation, a further avoidance of doubt.
Alice falls back upon the bed and Tom follows her down, his mouth on her forehead – almost chaste – then the side of her neck, the hollow above her collarbone. She unbuttons her blouse for him and he sits back to stare at her. She laughs and tries to pull him down but then she realizes what he is doing, making it real for himself, fixing the details in his memory.
When they are both naked they become desperate, fumbling, urgent. Not particularly gentle, or graceful – but it is just as she would have wanted it, somehow.
In the morning, Tom manages to get the stovetop coffee pot to produce two bitter black cups that they drink in bed with the sunlight swimming across them, spilling over the discarded pile of clothes on the floor. They don’t say much to one another – deliciously tired from the night before, content with silence. Then, suddenly finding themselves ravenous after the meagre supper of the night before, they venture downstairs for breakfast, taking one of the ironwork tables outside. The air still holds the coolness of early morning, but the sky is an undisturbed Wedgwood blue – the sign of another hot day to come. Madame Fourrier emerges from the kitchen, eyeing Tom censoriously. He struggles manfully through the interrogation that follows in his schoolboy French.
Later, they find themselves retracing their steps – back to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, past the entrance to La Coupoule. In the new light, the entrance to the club appears slightly shabby and subdued, like one of its own partygoers stumbling into the sun, ruing the excesses of the night before. They sit down by the Seine again, on the same bench.
‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Tom covers her hand with his – his touch questioning, tentative, not yet quite sure of itself.
‘Where to?’
‘To Corsica.’
‘Why there?’
‘A friend of mine – a collector, actually – has lent me his place. To paint. Before I left for New York I saw an exhibition at the National, a series of works by a Victorian artist – I forget the name. Not my style, there’s too much realism, but they’ve stayed with me – the quality of the light, the wildness of the landscape … a town hewn out of a mountainside. I thought then: I want to see that place for myself, capture it, if I can. I’ve had enough of cities for the time being.’ He begins to stroke her wrist with his calloused thumb, up to her forearm, down across the sensitive skin on the back of her hand. Alice shivers. ‘Will you come?’ he presses.
She takes a deep breath and stirs her coffee with her free hand to focus her mind on his words, not on the delicious friction of his skin upon hers. ‘When do you go?
‘In the morning. I have a train ticket to Marseilles.’
Alice thinks. The De Rosier family is holidaying in Provence: they will be there for the whole of August, as is their tradition. The museum is quieter than ever in this empty season, and there is no question that Étienne, Georgette and old Monsieur Dupré will survive without her. The American writer is visiting with friends in Marrakech. Then she thinks of her conversation with Madame De Rosier the previous morning: the feeling of vague, unspecific dread that she had carried with her for the rest of the day. She is struck by the thought that she must not let this chance pass her by.
‘All right.’
He looks so astonished by this that she laughs. ‘You thought I wouldn’t say yes?’
‘Not exactly. I hadn’t quite dared hope that you would.’
The train south is an exercise in self-control. They sit with their knees touching as the carriage grows ever more crowded with passengers, rather than emptying as might be hoped. Alice tries to focus on the newspaper she bought at the kiosk in Paris but realizes that though she has looked at every page she has not read a single word.
Corsica is sun and dirt and herbs. It takes a few minutes, stepping queasily off the boat from Marseilles, for Alice to appreciate it fully, this vertebra of rock protruding from the placid green wash of the Mediterranean.
The cottage is a former peasant’s dwelling. Two rooms: an upstairs and a downstairs, not much larger than Alice’s room at Bistro Fourrier, but it is sufficient for their needs. The view of the sea, which is almost limitless, more than compensates for any lack of space.
On that first day they go immediately to the beach, picking their way along the coastal path that skirts the cliffs and then plunges down between them to sea level. The sand is hot underfoot and coarse, reflecting the midday sun with a dull mineral glimmer. There is a small patch of shade in the lee of the rocks where they choose to sit. It is only the two of them and the loud silence of the surrounding beach; the slap and swell of the water, the delicate vibration of the wind.
In the evening they have supper in a small town outside Bonifacio. The place appears utterly unchanged by the twentieth century: no motor vehicles in sight and fishermen setting out for the night-time catch, oil lamps burning to attract the creatures out of the black depths. Tom sits and sketches the scene, while Alice imagines that the furthermost lights are in fact pirate ships, off to plunder and pillage.
They eat in the only restaurant available; an unusual meal of sea urchins, surprisingly creamy and delicious, hidden among buttery strands of pasta. All eyes are upon them: the foreigners with the city clothes, but Alice is unaware of anything but the miracle of his face before her, and the secret knowledge of what further pleasures the night will bring. She feels that they are, briefly, outside time, that they have carved out a space for themselves in which they are protected from it. The past – and her lie – the present drama in Europe, the future – and all that it may bring.
The next day they hire a fishing boat with a peeling green hull that seems barely seaworthy on dry land but sits reassuringly high in the water. The flimsy awning slaps and screeches in a stiff new breeze that has rushed in over the sea without warning. The sea is a deep purple-blue now, stippled with tiny waves.
Alice relishes the respite from the heat. She sits on the wooden seat near the bow, and between her feet is their lunch basket: bread, boiled eggs and cheese, matter-of-fact Corsican red wine. She licks her top lip and finds a thin crust of salt. Tom sits opposite her, grinning into the wind. Alice explores him secretly with her eyes: she has still not had her fill of looking. The changed shape of him, the sun on his brown hair turning it to gold. He catches her looking and smiles a different sort of smile.
When they reach the place they haul the boat up the sand behind them to where it will be safe from the swell. The beach is sheltered by two arms of rock on either side and the heat immediately has them in its grip again. They discard their clothes and run into the pale shallows, where shoals of silver fish scatter and re-form.
Tom doesn’t take his eyes from her, and she feels doubly naked and doubly warmed, his gaze like a second sun. ‘Remember that day, by the lake?’ he says, with an odd urgency.
‘Of course I do.’
‘When you came out of the water … I’d never seen anything so beautiful—’
‘Tom …’ She is embarrassed by his fervency.
‘—but it pained me, too, because I knew that no matter how I tried I could never have captured you as you were, not properly.’
They return to the cottage in the evening gritty with sand: burned and buffeted by the day spent outside, deliciously tired. They roast a fish whole and watch the smoke rise up and mingle with the purple dusk. In the distance are the lights of Bonifacio, the dark headland. Gradually the light fades further into velvet blackness and the stars begin to show themselves. It is a clear sky and they appear so bright that the man-made lights of the city seem like their dull, imperfect reflection.
‘We could live here,’ Tom says. ‘One day, when we’re old.’
‘Perhaps.’ She doesn’t want to say yes, though, suddenly, she knows that she wants it desperately. To agree, she feels, might be to alert the Fates. But perhaps it could happen, she thinks. It might.
*
Overnight, with no warning, the wind grows. They lie in bed listening to it begin to gnaw about them, hearing its eerie exhalation down the chimney. After a while Tom falls asleep, but Alice lies awake in the crook of his arm, breathing in the scent of his skin that is unique to him, and so beloved to her. She does not say it aloud, but the wind unnerves her. It is the inevitability of it, perhaps, that makes her think of those other inarguable forces: fate, time. Try as she might, she cannot help but read some sort of message in it. It has discovered them in what she thought was their safe, separate place. Nothing stays still, it says: not air, not sand, not one moment stretched greedily between two lovers. Life is movement and violence.
By dawn the wind is howling in from the sea, whistling through the roof tiles, drumming against the windowpanes. It is astonishing, this violence of thin air. They say the Mistral can send you mad. It is not wise to venture out when it blows. And yet some brave souls do, hunched against the onslaught, driving themselves blindly forwards.
Alice and Tom are content to stay inside. They spend almost the whole day in bed, lost to everything but each other – the novel and yet familiar delight of each other’s bodies. Tom explores her with his hands and mouth, but it is his gaze that feels warmest of all upon her skin. At one point, almost unnerved by the intensity of his concentration upon her, she laughs. He raises his head and gives a slow smile. ‘I need to prove to myself that you’re real, that it’s not simply another dream.’
In turn she learns the changed landscape of his body: the coarse new hair upon his chest and those faint freckles along the ridge of his collarbone that seem to her like tiny particles of fallen rust. They must be new, she decides: she cannot see how she could have failed to notice something so distracting before.
His stubble leaves a pinkish rash across her breasts and the secret blue-white skin of her inner thighs and as even she watches it fade Alice wishes that it would remain like a brand. The strangest thing, but even as he moves inside her, even as she almost completely forgets herself in pleasure, the dread of impending loss follows close behind. It is irrational: he is here with her now, yet it is as though some part of her beyond thinking, a deeper sort of knowing, understands it cannot last.
They make a simple meal that they eat with their fingers, half-clothed. Alice asks Tom about New York. He tells her more about his life there, speaks of the glamorous excesses of the nightclubs and restaurants he has known, the famous names he has encountered. And he talks about that other side of the city that is rough and dirty and desperate. The streetwalkers who patrol the streets near his flat with runs in their stockings and broken heels. The Brooklyn neighbourhood he visited where he saw a family rummaging through the contents of the rubbish bins, the children climbing over the refuse like stray cats. It is, as they say, a jungle, a melting pot. Infuriating at times, and exhausting, but the energy of the place is addictive, like no other place on earth. ‘Not even Paris?’ she asks, rather jealously.
‘I haven’t spent long enough in Paris to say,’ he says prudently.
The next morning they wake to a peculiar hush. As quickly as it appeared, the wind is gone. They lie in bed and listen to the silence, their legs tangled together beneath the sheets. Tom brushes the skin of Alice’s back with his fingertips – lightly – up, down, in widening circles. She presses her face deeper into the pillow and revels in the sensation of his touch.
‘Come back with me, Alice.’
She had expected the question, and dreaded it. ‘I can’t,’ she says, knowing it to be true but wishing there were some way to soften the blow for both of them. ‘Not yet, anyway. I have a life in Paris, and there are ties I can’t break quickly. I am needed there, and I like it, Tom – I like being needed.’
‘But I need you,’ he says, almost peevishly.
She tries to smile. ‘Not like that. I mean that I am useful – I have a purpose.’
‘So when could you come?’
‘In a year, maybe.’
‘A year!’ He is appalled.
‘It’s not such a long time.’
‘But what if you have to?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If war does break out. If France is threatened.’
‘It wouldn’t make me leave.’ It is only as she says it aloud that she realizes the truth of it.
He is exasperated by this. He can’t see the logic in it.
‘You’d stay in America, if there was a war?’
She can see that this has defeated him. He shrugs. ‘No. I wouldn’t want to be so far away, but it’s—’
‘Precisely. You’d want to be at home, so that you could do your part, if it were needed. Paris is my home, Tom.’
He throws up his hands in surrender. ‘You’re infuriatingly stubborn, but part of me can’t help loving you for it.’
That word – spoken so lightly. And yes, like a powerful, yet subtle, incantation, it has worked its inevitable magic, caused everything to shift.