Summer in February Read online

  —elected by me, that is, because he can paint a tree to look like a tree and he can paint a sky to look like a sky

  —Winston Churchill elected by the second son of a Suffolk miller—

  ‘and I know Winston is behind me, because once he said to me, “Alfred, if you met Pee-cass-O coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his something-something-something?” and I said, “Yes, Sir, I would.”’

  Well, that was it! There was uproar. Uproar, no less. Alfred felt he’d done the trick, he had really and truly loosened up the whole show. Gallery Three of Burlington House rocked. Waves of laughter rolled towards him from the back to the top tables. Down at his end Monty was cackling away.

  So that was fine. So far so good. But how was it going down with the pansies? What about the Blunts of this world, with their manicured nails and their modulated voices and their porcelain expressions? What did they make of Winston and the President lying in wait in some doorway for Pablo to come down Piccadilly in his beret so that they could jump out and kick him up the arse? Eh?

  The President was feeling in terrific form; he had never felt better.

  ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘we have all sorts of high-brows here tonight, ex-perts who think they know more about Art than the men who had to paint the pictures, even those poor devils who sit out and try to paint a landscape and fail.’

  Because that, the President maintained, was how you should paint a picture, en plein air, as Bastien-Lepage said. It was as simple and as difficult as that. You needed all your colours, your white, your turps, painting umbrella, rags, beautiful brushes, and with your hat over your eyes and your brushes in your mouth, you picked up your easel and palette and canvas and went out into the open air in all weathers, wind, rain or shine, in Norfolk or Cornwall or Hampshire, in peace or in war, you got outside and worked, that’s what he and Laura used to say to each other in Lamorna. ‘Get outside and work till you drop.’

  And what did you paint?

  Paint the real world, paint ordinary men and women, the land, the sea and the sky, not the sick world of some tortured spirit, not the surreal world of some diseased and malformed imagination. But could you imagine those critics out in the open air? Just imagine Anthony Blunt out in a field, with his eyes watering, his hands blue and with some dark storm clouds coming up. Just imagine him covered in sultry summer flies. What would he do? He’d shut up shop and be back to his boys in his Chelsea boudoir, well, bugger that lot if you’ll excuse the pun, because the President would prefer a basket-covered stone jar of ale and an oak-ribbed bar, let’s say The Red Lion, some soup, fish and pheasant, or sausage and mash and briar pipes – that was good enough for him, before the slow walk home.

  Everyone could see he was enjoying himself. Any mention of the critics always brought the best out in Alfred.

  The cri-tics.

  ‘They are so – if I may use a common expression – so fed up to the teeth in pictures, they move among pictures, they see so many pictures that their … they … their judgement becomes …’

  At this point, as luck would have it, the President saw the offending article. His sight might not be too good these days but he was sure the offending article was there, third table along at the far end, the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. The President didn’t plan it. He just said, ‘because their judgement becomes blunt, they, yes, blunt. And that reminds me, is he here tonight? Anthony Blunt, is he here tonight?’

  Oh, he’s here tonight all right and staring at his polished fingernails.

  ‘Who once stood in this room with me, when the King’s Pictures were here, and there was a Reynolds hanging there, and he said “That Reynolds isn’t as great as a Pee-cass-O”. Believe me, what an extraordinary thing for a man to say! Well, perhaps one should not mention names, but I do not care, since I am resigning at the end of the year.’

  ‘Good riddance!’ someone said.

  The President’s blood jumped. His fists clenched. Who said that? Someone had, quite clearly, uttered the words ‘Good riddance’. It wasn’t loud but he heard the words all right. His eyesight might be poor – and who could be surprised at that? – but his ears were still damned good. ‘Good riddance’, eh? He could feel his knuckles grinding away into the tablecloth. He moved the weight off his painful foot. His head started to beat, but he fought back.

  ‘I do not wish to go on with an Academy that says, “Well, there must be something in this modern art, we must give these jugglers a show.”’

  And what about that ‘woman’? Woman, my foot! Ask them about that monstrosity.

  ‘Here we are in this Academy, and you gentlemen assembled in the Octagon Room, and there was a woman cut out there in wood, and God help us if all the race of women looked like that!’

  Yes, they enjoyed that, the diners did enjoy that. And the President enjoyed listening to their laughter, waves of it, good, warm, male laughter, and they were laughing because they were all men together, and they all knew what a woman looked like, and they all knew what they wanted a woman to look like, they wanted a woman to look paintable, but … did the pansies? Did the pansies? Come on, be honest, did the critics? No! What did the modern critics fancy? They fancied Modigliani’s models and Henry Moore’s holes, Henry Moore’s modern heavyweight holes.

  ‘The sculptors today … are sinking away into a fashion of bloated, heavyweight, monstrous nudes.’

  Blots on the landscape, bloated females, bloated, blote …

  Blote—

  Oh, Alfred, why did you say that?

  His left hand started to tremble, then shake. He didn’t mean to use that word. It was a word he always avoided. He clenched the tabletop to steady his hand, but the trembling would not stop. It was so easy to be put off one’s stride, wasn’t it, even when things were going so well. Bloated. He had to blot out all bloated things. But he couldn’t. He could see her face, her pale face. It was such a silly name, the very last name you would give a beautiful, paintable, elusive girl, but it clung to her and it clung to him, like anemones to rocks.

  There was silence and cigar smoke. But you couldn’t have silence in a speech, could you? If he didn’t speak soon they would think he’d suffered a stroke. He had to keep talking. He could feel the room changing, he could sense a shiver in the subsoil, and the next thing he knew he was on to ‘Battersea’, another B, oh bloody hell, and he gabbled on, but his heart was no longer in it. He was thrown, thrown off his horse, and he heard himself saying these sentences:

  ‘You saw those … things exhibited in Battersea Park? Did you? Things put there by the London County Council. We are spending millions every year on Art Education, and yet we exhibit all these foolish drolleries to the public. And yet I have stood in that park, and I have been with the public who’ve been there, I’ve asked them questions, and they were disgusted and angered, just as they were to see this Madonna and Child in a church at Northampton.’

  Henry Moore’s monstrosity, they all knew what he meant, Moore’s monstrously modern holes.

  ‘Because … I would like to ask everybody here to travel up to Northampton to see this statue of the Madonna and Child at this church. I am speaking plainly because my horses may all be wrong, but I’m damned sure that statue isn’t right!’

  At this point there was a kerfuffle at the far end of the gallery. Three or four chairs were being pushed back. Was it a protest against the President and what he was saying or a brace of weak bladders? The President could not be sure, but it further sapped his strength.

  Stop now, Alfred, he said to himself, you’ve said enough, probably more than enough.

  ‘Well, I’m not going on too long, Sirs … I would not go on any longer because I know a greater man than I is going to follow me.’

  Mr Winston Churchill, no less. And you cannot get greater than that.

  But he didn’t sit down, because he had not yet mentioned Mr Matisse. He had to get Mr Matisse off his chest.

  ‘But I would like to say that this afterno
on I went to the Tate Gallery, the Tate, the second room on the right with white walls, which is nothing but walls, and you will see this picture by Ma-tisse. It is called Le Foret … the … forest.’

  And damn me if it didn’t happen again, and in much the same part of the room, only louder this time. More chairs moved. Mentioning Matisse had done it. This time their voices were louder. The critical geese were gobbling and honking and stretching out their long white necks.

  ‘Best thing in the Tate!’

  ‘Wonderful!’

  ‘Lovely work!’

  ‘A beautiful work of art!’

  The President glared.

  Beautiful, my backside!

  ‘I hope,’ he shouted, ‘I hope you hear these other members interrupting me … As I am President and I have the right of the chair, allow me to speak. I shall not be here next year, thank God.’

  ‘Thank God indeed,’ he heard.

  But no, no, he was not going to bite back, not this time. No, let it go, let it all go. What was it all for, art, all that toil, all that effort in the wind and rain – and we’re gone. And what did they know, what do the critics know about skies and a countryman’s soul, about the head-work and the hand-work, the steady movement of the scythe, the dance of raindrops? He was trying to explain all that the other day to … forgotten his name … that Old England was gone, that you couldn’t see the barley ears for thistledown, cottages had given way to villas, sleeved waistcoats to boiler suits, horses to tractors, fences to barbed wire, and Sargent to Salvador Dali, and what was his art, Salvador Dali’s, glutinous watches and sagging pianos, that’s all.

  The President held up his hand, like a tired conductor on his very last night on the rostrum.

  ‘In the Telegraph I was reported as having said “Let a tree look like a tree”’ because trees look like trees, don’t they, and women look like women. Or should! We all know a paintable girl when we see one, and we all know how difficult it is to choose between the demands of a paintable girl and the demands of paint.

  ‘Well,’ he pointed a thin, bent finger at the packed, silent room, ‘you go and look at that spirit of a tree … by Matisse. But hear what Robert Louis Stevenson said He spoke of the sound of “innumerable thousands and thousands of treetops and—”’

  and why-oh-why did he ever risk that difficult word again—

  ‘“innun … immuner … imminumer”’

  He couldn’t even speak now. His hands shook. He told himself to take the horse slowly home along the lanes, very slowly. Try again, Alfred, very slowly.

  ‘“in-num-er-able millions of green leaves that were abroad in the air”.’

  ‘The fellow’s tight!’

  ‘Of course he’s tight. Always is.’

  ‘Just a country bumpkin.’

  ‘Disgraceful!’

  The President looked at Winston. But the Great Warrior was looking down at his cigar, at the moist black end of his fat cigar. On his left, the President felt well-bred withdrawal; to his right, he sensed stares of admonition. He was as drained as he had ever been. It was time to sit down, long past time. Someone passed the port. It looked blue red purple, like … damsons.

  He put his hand over his eyes. Above all else he had to blot out all damsons. If he didn’t blot out damsons he could not go on.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, trying to smile but feeling his lips stuck firmly to his teeth, ‘as President, and resigning President, I thank you all for drinking the health of the Royal Academy as you have done. I thank the Archbishop of Canterbury for what he has said tonight, and I wish you all well.’

  With these words, with his head spinning, with his right hand a shambles, and with the cat well and truly among the pigeons, he sat down.

  The buzz, the reaction, the clapping, the outrage, was much the loudest it had been all evening, though no one spoke directly to the President. The Duke of Gloucester looked glazed and the Archbishop stared steadfastly at the ceiling. Still, the main thing was he’d got the horse home, hadn’t he?

  It was time to move on. It was time now for The Great Man. The President turned to the toastmaster and nodded. This time the toastmaster, who needed no second invitation, hit the gavel as hard as he could.

  He puffed out his chest and bellowed:

  ‘Your Royal Highness, Your Ex-cellencies, Your Graces … My Lords and Gentle-men, Pray Silence for Mr Winston Chur-chill.’

  Even as Winston Churchill was speaking on the air, the BBC switchboard was jammed with telephone calls. Over the next few days and weeks Sir Alfred Munnings received thousands of letters from home and abroad, sacks and sacks full of support.

  One letter was from his old friend, Dame Laura Knight:

  16, Langford Place,

  St John’s Wood,

  London

  28th April 1949

  Dear A.J.,

  Yes, you mad old thing, you did it. And now you’ve done it!

  Love,

  Laura.

  Lamorna Cove, Cornwall, 1949

  Listening to the Royal Academy speeches on his new Regentone Radiogram, Major Gilbert Evans thought he was alone. Once Winston Churchill had finished his reply, Gilbert sat for a moment in quiet thought, lost in the past, the distant past, then eased himself up out of his fireside chair and turned off the wireless.

  Munnings.

  Gilbert stood there, cigarette in hand, shaking his head.

  Life was a funny business.

  Munnings and Churchill.

  And still that same Suffolk accent. Or was it Norfolk?

  Gilbert stood there, smoking, looking out across the sea to the Lizard. Listening to the speeches, he had become so bound up with the broadcast that he did not notice his younger son, David, slipping into the room. Once Twenty Questions was finished Joan had gone off towards the cliffs for her evening walk with Pedro, their dog, leaving Gilbert still settled in his chair. As for Gilbert, he assumed Timothy and David were down at the cove. And what better last night of the Easter holidays could they wish to have? That last night of freedom was very special to a boy before he returned to boarding-school – Gilbert remembered them so well, a boy’s precious hours of freedom, though for him they were fifty years ago, or more.

  But in fact David was sitting cross-legged on the drawing-room carpet not five feet away, and sitting very still. What on earth had captivated the child? Was it Churchill’s style and delivery that transfixed him, that measured resonance, that witty balance? Gilbert hoped so. ‘It is a good thing,’ Winston said at one point in his speech, ‘that art should be above parties, though parties are not above art.’ How many people these days could turn a sentence like that? Perhaps if more of them studied Tacitus they could do so; perhaps if more of them studied Churchill’s speeches they could.

  As for A.J.’s speech … Well, Gilbert hadn’t seen Munnings for years, they had lost touch long long ago, but his forceful, angry, sincere and vehement style was unchanged. Quite frankly, A.J. was not an educated man, never had been. At the best of times he was inarticulate, and listening to him tonight on the wireless it showed. In a way it was rather embarrassing; one was somehow embarrassed for him. Yet to hear his country voice was to be grabbed again by the lapels, to be button-holed again, to see his rosy face again one inch from your nose, with drink on his breath, ‘Listen, Ev, lis-ten to me, will you,’ he would say and, of course, Gilbert would listen. With Munnings there wasn’t much choice, was there?

  Oh, yes, the man on the wireless, President or no President, was the same old controversial A.J. they all knew and loved – well, not all loved, but the same old A.J., only older. Although white-haired and famous, if not infamous, Sir Alfred Munnings still sounded like a river about to burst its banks, or – what did Harold Knight say, how did Harold put it? – rather like an agitated bookie.

  If you had been mad enough to ask Gilbert before the First World War what odds he would give on Alfred Munnings ever becoming President of the Royal Academy he would have said it was too absurd to con
template – but then, in 1945, just after we had won the Second World War, it was equally impossible to contemplate the suggestion that Winston Churchill would lose the General Election, which he duly did.

  It was a good thing for the banquet, though, that Winston had spoken next. As usual he struck just the right note. Gilbert could tell A.J. had comfortably overstepped the mark, but Winston nicely defused it all. ‘No one can doubt that the President, whom I rise to support, has some strong views.’ Gilbert admired that kind of understated, mature wit. It smoothed ruffled feathers. It put everything back into perspective.

  ‘Who was that, Daddy?’ David suddenly piped.

  ‘Winston Churchill,’ Gilbert said, ‘you must have recognised his voice.’

  ‘No, the man before.’

  ‘That was Sir Alfred Munnings.’

  Though he never could, to be honest, quite see him as ‘Sir Alfred’.

  ‘Haven’t I heard you talk about him before?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Didn’t he live in Lamorna?’

  ‘Yes, he lived in the hotel. He had rooms there.’

  ‘When, before the war?’

  ‘Before both the wars. This is thirty, no, forty years ago we are talking about. Lots of artists lived here then. Lots. Quite the place, it was.’

  Gilbert glanced up at the portrait.

  ‘Did she?’

  He was so taken aback by the boy’s question he was not sure he had heard David correctly. Rising to his feet, he said:

  ‘Sorry, old chap?’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, Daddy. Did the woman in the painting live in the hotel?’

  Gilbert flicked through the pages of the Radio Times, trying to collect himself. His young son was staring, eyes concentrated, at the painting.

  ‘Yes, she did. A number … of us did.’

  ‘You lived in the hotel as well?’

  ‘Oh yes, for quite a while. I’m sure I’ve told you all that.’

  ‘Did you know her well, Daddy?’