“You should have seen your mother when your father married her,” he said to Francis. “An absolute stunner. There aren’t any women like that now. They’ve broken the mould.”
“If he had seen his mother when his father married her,” said Ismay, “it would have been rather a scandal, wouldn’t it?”
“Ismay, darling, don’t catch Daddy up on everything he says,” said Aunt Prudence, and a familiar wrangle was renewed.
“Well, why can’t people say what they mean, and not simply waffle?”
“You know perfectly well what I meant, but you can’t resist any opportunity to show how clever you’ve become at Oxford.”
“If you didn’t want me to become clever at Oxford, you shouldn’t have nagged me to go for that miserable, inadequate scholarship. I could have stayed at home and studied stupidity. That would have had the advantage of being cheap.”
“As I suppose you are too old to be sent from the table, Ismay, I have no recourse but to leave it myself. Francis, would you like a cigar?”
“We’ve finished anyway, and I wish you wouldn’t take refuge in Christian-martyring, Daddy. It isn’t argument.”
“I do so well remember your mother’s wedding,” said Aunt Prudence, the peacemaker. “But Francis, didn’t you have an older brother? I seem to remember a letter from Switzerland, from your father.”
“There was an older brother, also Francis, but he died.”
It was the memory of that older Francis that softened the opinions of the living Francis about Ismay and her parents. In a world that contained such secrets as the Looner, these disputes seemed trivial. What did Wordsworth call it? The still, sad music of humanity—to chasten and subdue? Something like that. The underlying, deep grief of things. One must try to understand, to overlook sharp edges. Of course he was on Ismay’s side, but certainly not as a combatant. Her parents were dull and tedious, and she was too young, too radiant and full of life, to have learned to be patient. Probably she had never had to be patient about anything. Without knowing it, Francis’s view of family life was much like that of Shakespeare; parents, unless they happened to be stars like King Lear, were minor roles, obstructive, comic, and not to be too much heeded. Only Coriolanus paid attention to his mother, and look what happened to him!
If Shakespeare was not present in his mind, the Grail legend had returned to it in full force. Once again he was on the holy ground of Cornwall, and the pedal-point of his passion for Ismay was the story of Tristan and Iseult, and another more primitive and magical tale.
A passion it certainly was. He was twenty-four years old, so he did not moon and brood like a boy, but he ached for Ismay, and longed to see her happy and pleased with life. He had the lover’s unjustified belief that love begets love. It was impossible that he should love Ismay so much without her loving him by infection. He did not think ill of himself; he did not consider himself deficient, compared with other young men. But faced with the splendour of Ismay he could only hope that she might let him serve her, devote his life to her and whatever she wanted.
Ismay knew all of this, and therefore it was perhaps surprising that she let him persuade her to spend a day with him at Tintagel. She tormented him, of course. Shouldn’t they take Isabel and Amabel, who did not get many outings; they mustn’t be selfish, must they? But it was Francis’s intention, on this occasion, to be wholly selfish.
They had a fine day for their picnic, though as it was Cornwall it was certainly not a dry day. Ismay had never been to Tintagel, and Francis held forth about its history: the castle of the Black Prince, and before that the monastic community that had gathered around the hermitage of St. Juliot, and, far back in the mists, Arthur, that mysterious fifth-century figure who might have been the last preserver of Roman order and Roman culture in a Britain overrun by savage northerners, or—even better—have been the mighty figure of Welsh legend.
“Did he live here?” said Ismay, who seemed to be yielding a little to the nature of the story and the spirit of the place.
“Born here, and strangely begotten here.”
“Why strangely?”
“His mother was a wonderfully beautiful princess, who was wife to the Duke of Cornwall. Her name was Ygraine. A very great Celtic chieftain, Uther Pendragon, saw her and desired her and could not rest until he had possessed her. So he took counsel of the magician Merlin, and Merlin surrounded this castle with a magical spell, so that when her husband was absent Uther Pendragon was able to come to her in her husband’s guise, and it was here that he begot the marvellous child who grew to be Arthur.”
“Didn’t the Duke ever find out?”
“The Duke had no luck; he was killed and cuckolded the same night, though not by the same man. Arthur was brought up by another knight, Sir Ector, and educated by Merlin.”
“Lucky lad.”
“Yes. Didn’t you ever learn any of this at school? You, a Cornish girl—a Cornish princess.”
“My school thought mythology meant Greeks.”
“Not a patch on the great Northern and Celtic stuff.”
Thus Francis began the casting of a spell that had been long working in his mind, and with such success that Ismay yielded to it, becoming tenderer and more compliant than he had ever known her, until at last on a motor rug in the embrace of what might have been part of the Black Prince’s castle, or one of the hermitages of the companions of St. Juliot, or just possibly a remnant of that castle of Duke Gorlois (who figures ignominiously in legend as cuckolds must) in which Arthur was begotten, he possessed Ismay, and it seemed to him that the world could never have been so splendid, or blessing so perfect, since the days of the great legend.
Ismay was subdued as they made their way back to the Glasson family car (itself almost a vehicle of legend) and walked somewhat uneasily.
“Anything wrong?”
“Not seriously. But there were a few stones under that rug. Frank, do you know the one—
Francis was so lost in the splendour of the afternoon that he was ready to accept this as the plain-spoken jesting of the age of legend, befitting a Celtic princess.
Francis had taken sereiously Saraceni’s advice that he should stop flirting with colour and find out what it truly was. That meant working in oils, and except for some tentative messing he had never done much with oils, and knew he must make a serious beginning. When he left Cornwall, reluctantly but aware that his fortnight could not be extended, he went to Paris, and during the summer months worked almost every day at La Grande Chaumière, an art school directed at the time by Othon Friesz. He bought the tickets that were sold by the concierge, arrived early and left late, spoiled a substantial amount of canvas, and achieved some dreadful messes of dirty colour until, in time, he was able to put into practice the few precepts Friesz threw to him, almost inaudibly and apparently with contempt.
Always paint fat on lean. Always lay in your warms over your colds. The groundwork should be done in paint well thinned with turpentine: afterward your fat colour, mixed with mastic or Venice turps. Don’t mess your paint about on the palette: fresh paint gives the best quality. Never put more of a colour over the same colour. Always paint warm on cold and after your body coat every successive coat must be thinner until you get to the top. Always fat on lean. Simplicity itself, like the few notes Mozart wrote on the back of a letter and gave to his pupil Sussmayer to explain how to compose music. But not easy to do. It was Francis’s skill in drawing that saved him from abject failure. There were plenty of students in the atelier who knew nothing of drawing, and from their easels Friesz sometimes turned with a murmured “Quelle horreur!” But Friesz did not turn up often. Having given advice, he allowed the student to struggle until he had mastered it or abandoned the contest. Friesz provided a place to work, an ambience, a name, and infrequent, good advice; it was enough.