We turned towards the car. Perry stepped between Gloria and me and put an arm at both our backs, drawing us along with but slightly ahead of him, like a conductor at the triumphal end of a concert sweeping his soloists forwards into a storm of applause. He smelt of engine oil and expensive cologne. The wind from the estuary was ruffling everything except his hair, which, I noticed, he has started to dye; it was plastered back over his skull, tight and gleaming, like a carefully applied coat of shellac. “Damn fool air controllers tried to stop me landing here,” he said. “Now they’ll think I’ve crashed, of course, or gone into the drink.” He has a plummily refined accent with a faint Scots burr — his father was something high up in the Kirk of Canongate — and the barest trace of a Frankish lisp from his Merovingian mother. Very proud of his grand origins, is Perry.
Behind us, Orville and Wilbur were wheeling the plane effortfully towards the barn, one pushing while the other pulled.
In the car I sat in the back seat, feeling like a child being punished for naughtiness. The sunlight was gone now, and luminous veils of what was barely rain were drifting aslant the streets. As we went along, Perry, perched sideways in the front seat, turned his neat round head this way and that, taking in everything with appalled fascination, exclaiming and sighing. “Was that your name I saw over that shop?” he asked. I told him it used to be my father’s print shop, and that my studio was upstairs — my studio as was, I didn’t say. Perry turned all the way round and gave me a long look, shaking his head sadly. “You came home, Oliver,” he said. “I would never have thought it of you.” Gloria gave a soft laugh.
I encountered Perry Percival for the first time in Arles, I think, or was it Saint-Rémy? No, it was Arles. I was very young. I had come down from Paris, at the end of that summer of study, so-called, and was morosely wandering in the steps of the great ones who would never, I was gloomily convinced, invite me up to join them, sitting before their easels on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. There was a market on and the town was busy. I had been amusing myself by strolling from one crowded café to the next, swiping the tips that departing customers had left behind on the tables. It was a thing I had become adept at — talk about sleight of hand — and even the sharpest-eyed waiters missed me as I flitted among them with a muffled, tell-tale jingle. Although I was penniless, I wasn’t taking the money because I needed it; if I had, I would have tried to make it by some other means. It was at the Café de la Paix — don’t know why I’ve remembered the name — as I was pocketing a fistful of centimes, that I happened to glance up and caught, through the open doorway, deep in the brownish darkness of the interior, Perry’s sharp bright eye fixed on me. To this day I don’t know if he spotted what I was up to; if he did, he certainly never said so, and I’ve assumed he didn’t. My instinct was to run away — isn’t it always my instinct? — but instead I went into the café and approached Perry and introduced myself; when one is threatened with discovery, effrontery is the best defence, as any thief will tell you. I hadn’t a shred of a reputation yet, but Perry must have heard my name somewhere, for he claimed to be familiar with my work, which was patently a lie, though I chose to believe him. He was wearing the usual rig-out of the northerner holidaying in the south — short-sleeved cotton shirt, absurdly, indeed indecently, wide-legged khaki shorts, open-toed sandals and, bless your heart, stout woollen socks — yet still he managed to convey a lordly hauteur. You see me here mingling among tourists and other riff-raff, his manner said, but even as we speak, my man is laying out tie and tails for me in my suite at the Grand Hôtel des Bains. “Yes yes,” he drawled, “Orme, I know your things, I’ve seen them.” He invited me to sit, and ordered for us both a glass of white. To think that from this chance encounter there developed one of the most significant and — etc., etc.
I pause here to say that I never got the hang of being an exile. I don’t think anyone does, really. There’s always something smug, something complacently self-conscious, about the expat, as he likes to style himself, in his offhand way, with his baggy linen jacket and battered straw hat and his sun-bleached, sinewy wife. And yet once you go away, and stay away for any extended length of time, you never entirely return. That was my experience, at any rate. Even when I left the south and came back here, to the place I started out from and where I should have felt the strongest sense of being myself, something, some flickering yet intrinsic part of me, was lacking. It was as if I had left my shadow behind.
Is Perry a fraud? He certainly looks and sounds like one, but examine any soul closely enough and you’ll soon see the cracks. For all that he may be a bit of a crook, he has an eye. Put him in front of a picture, especially a picture in progress, and he will fix on a line or a patch of colour and shake his head and make a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “There’s the heart of the thing,” he will say, pointing, “and it’s not beating.” He is always right, I find, and many’s the bloodless canvas I stabbed with the sharp end of a brush on the strength of his strictures. Then he would shout at me for wasting all that work, saying pointedly that it wouldn’t have been the first flawed piece of mine that he, or for that matter I, had ever offered for sale. Barbs like that went in deep, and lodged fast, I can tell you. Welclass="underline" if I’m the pot, he is surely the kettle.
“How is your friend?” Gloria asked him. “I can’t remember his name. Jimmy? Johnny?”
“Jackie,” Perry said. “Jackie the Jockey. Oh, he died. Horrible business.” He rolled a mournful eye. “Don’t ask.” He mused a while. “You know all these nasty new germs are coming from outer space, don’t you?”
Gloria was smiling through the windscreen at the rain. “Who says that, Perry?” she enquired, glancing at me in the driving-mirror.
Perry shrugged, arching his eyebrows and drawing down the corners of his wide mouth, thereby taking on a momentary and startling resemblance to Queen Victoria in her failing years. “Scientists,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Doctors. All the people who know.” He sniffed. “Anyway, the germs got Jackie, wherever they came from, and he died.”
Poor Jackie, I remembered him. Young, swarth, good-looking in a ravaged sort of way. Huge eyes, always slightly feverish, and a mass of curls, shiny as black-lead, tumbling on his forehead; think of Caravaggio’s sick young Bacchus, though less fleshy. He wasn’t a jockey — I don’t know how he came by the nickname, though I suppose I might hazard a guess. He was a filcher, like me; unlike me, he stole for gain. He and Perry were together for years, the unlikeliest pair. I should say that besides a succession of catamites, of which Jackie had been the latest one that I knew of, Perry also had, and has, a wife. Penelope is her name, though she is known, improbably, as Penny. She is a large, muscular, relentless woman, and I have always been a little afraid of her. Strange thing, though: when we lost the child, it was to Perry and his mighty missus that Gloria fled for shelter and succour. I never got to the bottom of that one. She stayed with them for a month and more, doing who knows what, crying, I suppose, while I solitarily stewed in Cedar Street, reading a vast study of Cézanne and every evening drinking myself into a stupor.