Free The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks

Bruton Place off Bond Street in April, though by this time he was mainly exhibiting with the Seven & Five Society, of which Ben Nicholson was chairman. The Seven & Five had begun in 1919 as a refuge from the war of competingstyles: their cautious manifesto felt that ‘there has of late been too much pioneering along too many lines in altogether too much of a hurry.’ From its non-doctrinal beginnings the society grew to give a fair reflection of the progress of English art. Under Ben Nicholson’s influence it eventually, in the 1930s, refused to show any more representational work.
    The Beaux Arts was a joint show with the Nicholsons and the potter William Stake Murray. Cocteau wrote an introduction to the catalogue in which he spoke of Wood’s innocence, comparing him to a puppy that had not yet had distemper. Just before the show opened Winifred Nicholson fell through an open trap door and broke her back; her Christian Science beliefs denied her the usual medical treatment and she herself ascribed her recovery to a miracle.
    There was little miraculous about the show. Wood’s best work was not in it; the pictures he did show left no impression even on Winifred Nicholson. For all the ‘life and death struggle’ he had put into them, the street scenes he had painted at Passy were unremarkable. Wood told his mother the show was a success, though he sold only three pictures. He sent six to the Leicester Galleries, the rest to the London Artists’ Association and reckoned that, when one took framing into account, the thing had just about paid its way. Winifred Nicholson’s verdict was terse: ‘No one noticed the exhibition.’
    From May until the end of 1927 Wood was in the Mediterranean. He told Winifred Nicholson that he could not go to England because it was the time of year that he always went to Rome with Gandarillas, ‘whom I love the best in the world’. They hadn’t managed to make it the previous year because Gandarillas had lost all his money at the casino in Monte Carlo on the way.
    Wood had by this time developed an intimate friendship with Winifred Nicholson, based on his appreciation of her abilities as a painter and the fact that she was what he called a ‘real woman’. There seemed much more to her than to Jeanne Bourgoint, of whom he had started to tire. He told Winifred Nicholson that he had ‘the misfortune to love if one can call it so a Tom Boy who is wonderfully beautiful physically but that is all and a person whodoesn’t create anything, not even a thought and who won’t be created in any form. If I had allowed myself to love her I should have been very unhappy.’
    Winifred Nicholson changed Wood’s views of women. He had thought of them previously as people who kept him hanging about but might, as in Jeanne’s case, provide sexual pleasure. His feelings for Winifred Nicholson were ardent but pure – exactly the kind of emotion she wanted to feel for him, though there was a sexual element in her fondness for Wood which, by denying, she intensified. She was not Wood’s preferred physical type, but his admiration for her, coupled with the memories of the pleasure Jeanne Bourgoint had given him, made him eager to find a woman who might combine both roles. His ideal might have been a gifted and spiritual artist, like Winifred, a loving admirer, like his mother, with a hard, boyish body like Jeanne Bourgoint.
    Meanwhile he went with his friend Tony Gandarillas to Naples, Athens and Monaco before, after a brief return to Paris for Luisa Casati’s fancy dress ball in June, they went south to Cannes in July. Gandarillas was detained at Vichy to ‘get over all his debauchery’, as Wood rather frankly put it to his mother, adding with all the confidence given by a liver still at its peak: ‘I eliminate mine by painting.’ A fortnight later, however, even Wood’s youthful constitution was feeling the strain and he took a water cure at Cannes.
    Cannes had been ‘discovered’ for the