CHAPTER XXXIII : LIFE CONTINUES. . . AND FOR SOME IT ENDS.
While Michael phoned his mother every single day and visited her often, Alice lost a friend. Well, not actually lost because their mutual love could not expire in a week or a month or even a few years. It was their nearly daily contact that was lost. Alice visited her rarely at the embassy’s residence but much more frequently they met for a coffee at a midway point such as the Harrods cafeteria or a coffee bar in Knightsbridge. Their reunions, surprisingly for such usually calm and self-possessed persons, were enthusiastic and noisy with affectionate bear hugs and kisses. Annie talked of her new eventful life of cocktail parties and diplomatic dinners which she seemed to enjoy and Annie gave restrained versions of her own relative successes in her art career. Amusingly, she, too, had the secret illusion or superstition that if she highlighted her successes too assertively, things might turn around and the surprising initial takeoff in the sales of her paintings would fade away. She teased Annie and asked her if in her social whirl she had found the English Lord that would be fucking her in the château of his domain and Annie laughed and said that Tasos, for the moment, was doing excellent work and she needed neither the Lord nor the gamekeeper of his estates like Constance Chatterley. He was passionate, full of energy and desired her with a priapism that surprised and pleased her. Who would have imagined such a reversal of erotic aptitudes? Omar fading and Tasos blooming. With me, at least, she added laughing.
They ordered their cappuccinos and though both had many and varied interests, especially Alice, their favorite subject was one, and Annie who had given her report needed to know how her darling niece was faring. So tell me, Alice, she asked, how’s your love life? Casual and occasional, Alice replied. I haven’t got a steady lad. For the moment it’s better this way. I have been too busy painting. Working as well, of course, at the hospital, which leaves little time for a man. You haven’t become a nun, have you? teased Annie. Close to it but not quite, Alice replied. There’s a lot of give and take between nurses and young doctors at the hospital and the proposals are not lacking but I am rather choosy. I pretend not to understand the offers that come my way and have the reputation of being difficult. So it is I that usually gives the hints to the ones I like and they usually bite the bait. Then it’s once or twice at their place, never in mine, and, well, until now I have not found someone I wanted permanently. Keeping it sweet and short is best. Michael on his own is enough. I keep a close watch on his studying and we have fun together. Yes? What sort of fun? Annie was interested. Innocent fun, cinema, theatre, music sometimes. Is that all? Annie said. Well, yes. He usually goes through the indispensable male macho assaults but I do not bite. Annie laughed. Why not? she asked. It feels like incest. Oh nonsense, said Annie. Not only that, Alice continued, he is younger than I am and I want to keep the upper hand until he finishes his studies. If we have an affair I shall lose my grip on him because it would surely be passionate, wild and unrestrained. Aha, commented Annie. By the way, I have done a number of studies of him, Alice said. What do you mean studies? Paintings, my dear auntie, and some very fine charcoal drawings of his face. I have done two lovely, full-sized paintings of him lying on my sofa. One dressed and one nude. You mean like Goya’s Naked Maja? Annie said laughing. Exactly, said Alice, also laughing. Michael desnudo and Michael vestido. It was so funny. Michael didn’t want to undress for the nude version. Finally, I convinced him by saying I had seen dozens of male models in the nude and after all didn’t he make love to girls naked? Or did he just take it out of his fly and thrust it into the girl? In the end I started undressing him forcefully with many laughs and giggles and when I pulled down his underpants he had an erection. He tied to kiss me but I told him this was strictly business. The paintings came out superbly and Chester loved them. Who’s Chester? Annie asked. He’s my agent, said Alice. My, my, you’re coming up in the world, Alice, Annie said. You even have an agent? All painters have agents, Annie. How else would they sell their paintings? By telepathy?
A few months earlier, Chester Basterfield had gone to 73 Fulham Road as scheduled and remained there all morning examining Alice’s work. He was impressed. I can’t believe it Eleni, such maturity in a morsel of a girl. And the technique, extraordinary. How old are you girl? Seventeen, eighteen? Twenty three Mr. Basterfield. I have been painting for over a decade. Chester, my dear, Chester. Some of these are clearly very early stuff and not worth much but your latest ones are very, very good. The two pieces with the young man dressed and nude are excellent. What amazes me is that you are not stuck to any one genre. Your portraits, your landscapes and your abstracts are equally good. Your color combinations blend beautifully except when you want to jar the eye and make a point. And, of course, art and feeling overflows. You are the equal of a violinist who at five plays Paganini solos. I am a little older than five, Alice said laughing. In painting, my dear, you are at the equivalent age of five. For while there are musical prodigies at five there has never been a great painter with a masterpiece at five or ten or even fifteen. I don’t want to overpraise you but I have to say that you have extraordinary talent, which is never static but will develop as you go along. The one prescription I can give you is paint and paint and paint. Get out of this wretched London. Go to the countryside, to Scotland and the Lochs. Go to Greece, paint the antiquities, the Parthenon, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, the temple of Aphaea in Aegina and the innumerable others, go to the islands, paint the Greek sky, the dazzling blue of which I have found nowhere else in the world, paint the sunsets after a storm, where nature far surpasses our skill in coloration and taste. And I shall be behind you, to advise you and sell your paintings.
Alice smiled. One needs money for that, she said. He stood for a moment and thought. I shall choose about twenty canvases, he said, and send the chap with the van that does my transportation and you consign them to him. I shall give you a thousand pounds on account to get you started and we will square things out as we go along. You must trust me. I am like an author’s agent. I am not a philanthropist. I shall earn money from your paintings. Alice thought for a moment. I trust you Chester and I shall send you the paintings but I don’t feel I can take money from you until my canvases start selling. Until then I shall be a junior nurse at Charing Cross earning humbly my daily bread. I think my parents would agree with that. As you please Eleni. I want to assure you that I shall do my best to get things rolling. I shall frame your work and set up a special section in the gallery with a few of them. The rest will be in the flat above the gallery which I keep as a storeroom and will show them to all interested parties. To begin with the prices I shall assign will be modest so that the sales take off. For a start, the way I work is this, I consider fifteen percent of the painting’s price goes for the materials, thirty five percent is my commission and fifty percent for you. I shall be doing a lot of work, mind you. I have contacts in New York and shall send them large professional color photographs of the paintings and I believe we shall soon develop a market there. When your name and work gets known, we shall raise the prices and thus change also the percentages. My commission will be reduced and your earnings increased. Is that all right? Do you trust me on what I just told you? Alice smiled again. Do I have a choice? she said. He smiled too. Perhaps not at the moment, Eleni, but you shall have one later on. That’s why I play a fair game. I would not want to lose you.
Two years later, money started trickling in steadily and Alice quit her nursing job. Chester was urging her to give him more material and she could not possibly cope while she was also employed at the hospital. Once her painting earnings approximated her hospital salary, she took courage and resigned. Taking his advice, she began travelling to the countryside with her stand, her bag of paints and solvents a few clothes, her paint-stained overall and located rooms for rent in small, remote villages from where she could trek to the lakes and woods and mountains to discover views and subjects for her painting. A picturesque cottage, horses feeding in a field, cows lying on the ground, placidly masticating their regurgitated grass and children playing with a ball at the local village school. Many an elderly landlady was happy to pose for her sitting under a tree or with her cat, or next to a brook, or sweeping her backyard and her bearded husband smoking his pipe with his dog at his feet. She entered pubs and asked permission to draw and everyone was happy and curious as she painted rapidly to capture the magic of the moment. She usually completed her work later in her room or on her return in Fulham. At home in Hove, too, she painted the beach, the sea on a cloudy day, their house, her mother, her father and granny Marian lying infirm in bed. In Brighton, she painted the Palace Pier and views of the city from the pier. She was finally blissfully happy. It is not work I’m doing, she told her parents, it is my favorite, my most wonderful pastime. I’m one of the lucky ones of this world. Chester was happy with Alice’s increased output. He started shipping some of her paintings to galleries in New York and the name Eleni Ioannides, the young Greek painter, was becoming a familiar name in the art circles.
The only unhappy person was Michael. He had entered the Imperial College for architecture and during his first year he had Alice as his steady companion to encourage him, to urge him on with his studies and to plan and schedule their outings to plays and films. They were just companions albeit very close and indispensable to one another. He never relinquished his attempts to become her lover but Alice believed this relationship would disrupt his studies and gently spurned his impulsive attempts to kiss her erotically even though she had become reconciled to the idea that this would happen eventually. It was her secret expectation which always came to mind whenever she saw him after a few days’ absence. They both had furtive casual affairs with third parties for they were both young and needed the relief of sex. Michael was not as compulsive a woman chaser as his father, perhaps because of Alice’s constant presence in the background. Besides, he was not as good looking as Omar was in his youth. He had inherited from Annie certain features, such as a large mouth and extra-large eyes that spoiled the perfection that was Omar’s face. When Alice began her trips to the countryside during his second year at Imperial, which lasted up to two weeks, he was often depressed. He missed her much more than he missed his mother Annie. Moreover, as Annie herself said, she was just three subway stations away and he saw her two or three times a week. He insisted that Alice call him on the phone every day and whenever he had the opportunity he clambered on a bus or a train to go meet her and spend a weekend or a few days with her. He would become her porter carrying her stand and canvases up hills or down country lanes and go out to bring her a coffee or a snack. The problem was their sleeping arrangements. It was fine if there was an extra room in the boarding house but if they had to share a room she would tell him, I’ve got my chastity belt on so don’t try anything funny. It was not easy for either of them this forbearance and abstinence from so vital a need of human nature but Alice always had a sensible argument to convince him that sex between them for the time being would be disruptive both for her art and for his studies. He was neither convinced nor appeased. I shall find myself a girlfriend, he threatened, and I shall forget about you. Go ahead, you silly boy, she told him. If you can forget me that easily, you do not deserve my friendship. Just keep in mind, your priority number one at the moment is getting your architecture degree. Apart of that get yourself half a dozen girlfriends for all I care.
And he did initiate a relationship with a colleague from the Imperial and told Alice about her. A tall, not particularly pretty but attractive and extremely intelligent Jewish girl called Janet. Alice received the news with mixed feelings. She was both miffed at his abandonment of their special relationship and relieved that Janet was a fellow student. Michael was in her blood and she cared about him and continued calling him sporadically to find out about his progress. But they stopped going out together and anyway Alice was constantly on the go with her travels and her painting. One happy result of this new attachment was that Janet and Michael studied together and she pushed him with his work even harder than Alice and he passed the second year’s important examinations at the Imperial.
At the beginning of summer, my mother-in-law, Mrs. Fremantle died in her sleep. She suffered the last few years from a debilitating blood disease and she begged us not to send her to hospital. She considered it a ridiculous additional hardship at her age. She did not see the reason for prolonging her bed-ridden state in hospital with injections, medication and blood transfusions. Diana and I respected her wish and she became progressively weaker and could no longer eat normally. We found her lifeless one morning when Diana took a cup of tea upstairs for her. Diana’s and Alice’s pain was inevitable but a little crudely I reminded them that death is man’s inescapable destination and that our turn would arrive sooner or later. For all her pain, Diana could not help laughing. How very comforting you are, George, she said. Luckily, Alice was in Fulham and arrived on the double and we buried her with many tears early in the afternoon that same day. She was a woman who loved me and whom I loved. The affection we felt for one another was palpable. She loved me because I made her daughter happy and adored her grandchild as my own, and I loved her because she accepted me without reservations as a son-in-law at a time I did not have the means to sustain a household. Diana and I were already thinking about a two-week holiday in Greece to see my mother Helen who was getting on in years as well but was in reasonably good health. However, we were reluctant to leave Mrs. Fremantle for two weeks even though Alice would have been at her side. As it turned out we opted for the trip immediately after her death and Alice decided to join us though she told us she would be travelling around out of Athens, to paint. Chester was delighted at the news. He had been urging her to do this for at least the past couple of years. Diana and I stayed in Athens with mother and I cannot pretend that our stay was very pleasant in the city’s oppressive summer heat. It was, however, necessary. Mother was past eighty five and how much longer would we have her with us? Alice plunged in a frenzy of activity and by the time we left we had a batch of her paintings to pack and ship to London and her realization that she had only scratched the surface of Greece’s unlimited painting potential. Had she not had a travel appointment with Chester who was organizing an Eleni Ioannides exhibition at a New York gallery she would have certainly stayed on in Greece.
Another busy year went by. Not so much for me and Diana, who had adapted to our routine without Mrs. Fremantle and a convenient and healthy lifestyle of frugal meals and lots of fruit and salads. We had lunch snacks at work and new-style almost readymade meals for dinner, which reduced not only the effort of elaborate cooking but also the need for the encyclopedic culinary knowledge that our dear Marian possessed. But a busy time for Alice who kept her shape by often forgetting to eat and never feeling hungry. Always on the go, she managed to survive with coffee-bar fare and Lyons cheese pasties and meat pies. Except when Chester invited her to the Chanterelle after a good sale and showed her the pub he frequented often in the past which was nearby just off Queensgate. A busy time too for Omar involved in business trips and business lunches with corresponding diets whenever he felt his girth was in danger of assuming permanent unacceptable dimensions. Busy, but never so busy as not to remember his friend and brother George. He called me often at home in the evenings and I met him on occasions when I was in London. Inevitably we reminisced about our student days and he said they were the happiest in his life together with his first few years of living together with Annie. All this frantic running around, jumping on and off planes, even with the consequent considerable wealth, left him empty. On second thoughts, he often told me with a smile, you were wise to stick to your skinny bitch. I laughed and told him it was not wisdom but the compulsion of love. A busy time for Michael, in his last year at Imperial, who was at the same time grateful but annoyed and fed up with the whip that Janet brandished to keep his face glued to his books and architectural drawings. The only happy, none too busy persons were Annie and Tasos. From cocktail to cocktail party and dinner to diplomatic dinner, they were both putting on weight. Annie was becoming voluptuous and sexy and drove Tasos wild with desire and she had no objections to Tasos putting on a little extra bulk when she heard a doctor quote statistics which confirmed that plumper men are more oversexed than normal or thin ones.
At a recent meeting in Knightsbridge after some months, Alice was surprised to see Annie looking voluptuous with heaving breasts, an expanded belly and fuller haunches. She kissed her laughing and told her not to overdo it. You look wonderful and sexy my sweet auntie but better reign in your appetite. A few kilos more and you’ll become a typical Greek matron. Yes, yes, Annie agreed. I have already started a strict diet. Alice looked at her keenly, her head leaning to one side. An idea struck her. Would you pose for me for a painting? she asked Annie. Annie was flattered. Why, yes, she said, with pleasure. It came to me suddenly this idea for a picture, Alice said. A picture of you in the nude as Eve next to a tree, and a snake coiled around a branch looking at you. Oh, you devil, stop teasing me, Annie cried. I mean it Annie, Alice protested. It will be in the seventeenth and eighteenth century styles but with the modern touch of Eve as a beautiful contemporary woman, you. I couldn’t pose in the nude, Annie objected. Nonsense Annie, are you ashamed of me? You shall make a lovely modern-day Eve with your large mouth, your lovely large eyes, your abundant silky chestnut hair and your sensuous body. Please Annie, the more I think about it the more I like the idea. Reluctantly Annie agreed to pose and went to the Fulham flat for five consecutive days until Annie finished Eve and later completed the tree and the snake. There was a suggestiveness of sexuality which should have been obviously absent in Paradise with part of the snake hanging from the branch leaning towards her like an erect penis and Eve staring back at it languorously as if suspecting that something was missing in her life. Alice called the painting Eve of Belgravia in Paradise. It was a beautiful piece of work, sensual and exciting, with lively colors giving it a modern touch and Chester was delighted. Tasos wanted to buy the painting but Alice refused. You will bury it somewhere in a room, she told him. I want people to see it. I shall donate it to a contemporary art museum if need be.
That summer Michael and Janet graduated from Imperial. Janet with first-class and Michael with second-class honors. With their graduation they separated. They no longer saw each other daily and I think they felt a mutual need for change from a relationship that was too much akin to marriage and which suffered, after two years, with the same sense of slackness and ennui that engulfs a lukewarm liaison. It was not dramatic and there were no tears but rather a sense of relief on both sides. Their need had been for study, companionship, and sex and was lacking in passion. Moreover, Janet’s wealthy old-fashioned parents were on the lookout for a nice, Jewish boy of their class to marry her to and were relieved at their separation. Alice had kept in touch with Michael and phoned him to congratulate him on his graduation and to tell him that she was leaving shortly for Greece on a painting campaign. I shall probably be away for more than two months. How exciting, Michael exclaimed. May I come with you? You cannot imagine Alice how much I need a change from these two years of compulsive studying. I shall not be a burden to you or a pest. I promise, and if I am, you can send me away. And Janet? Alice asked. We have had an amicable, mutual-consent divorce, he said laughing. Not to worry, it’s over. They left for Athens a fortnight later very lightly burdened with clothes crammed in backpacks and no painting equipment. Alice would buy all she needed from Athens. Some of the things, such as her easel, brushes and palette were already in granny’s storeroom from the previous summer. They stayed four days with my mother Helen, who though in her middle eighties, was still mobile with a walking stick and happy to do the cooking at home for her English grandchildren. A pleasant Albanian maid did her shopping and cleaned the house five days a week. Helen spoke Greek with Alice who answered in the same language with perfect grammatical syntax and a delightful Anglo accent and with broken English with Michael, who also answered in the same broken-English fashion believing she would understand what he had to say better that way. Unlike Alice, she had not seen him for many years and kept saying how much he reminded her of Annie. The mouth and those lovely big eyes are identical, she said.