Free The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks Page A

English by Lord Brougham and was popular with the wealthier elements of London as well as of Paris. In August 1927 the town was almost as full of Chelsea and Mayfair as of the seizième and Montparnasse. Wood liked it because it was beautiful without being obviously picturesque. The mountains opened up before him like a Chinese fan, and the air, so soft beneath the deep blue skies by day, was filled at night with the mysterious sound of tree frogs.
    Wood was able to put behind him the memory of his fruitless spring in Paris. Such passages of unrewarded labour were necessary, he convinced himself, to a painter’s development. He believed that in Cannes he might do some work of real substance, provided he could escape from the rackety claims of ‘society’.
    When the major development that Wood was expecting finally arrived, it was not in his painting. He fell suddenly in love. Everything was emotionally propitious; in fact, from the new interest in women he had developed since knowing Winifred Nicholson it might almost have been inevitable. The woman in question, however, raised as many questions as she answered: she was called Meraud Guinness, and he had met her at Lord Alington’s and at a party given by Augustus John in Dorset.
    Meraud (pronounced ‘Merod’, though she preferred to be called by her second name, Michael, given in honour of her godfather, the Russian Grand Duke) was the daughter of Benjamin and Bridget Guinness. Even by the standards of the family they were rich, with houses in London, Pittsburgh and New York as well as in Cannes. Meraud was a painter and had studied at the Slade, then with the sculptor Archipenko in Paris, before attaching herself to the Surrealist Francis Picabia. She insisted that she was a serious artist some of whose subjects happened to come from the beau monde; critics viewed her as an ex-debutante who dabbled in painting.
    She had large, heavy-lidded eyes, a short nose and a fleshy mouth. A portrait of her by Alvaro Guevara in 1929 minimised the breadth of her jaw and width of her lips, but showed her candid, gamine sexuality, at once more feminine and less pretty than Jeanne Bourgoint. According to her mentor Picabia, she had ‘eyes full of sighs’. Kit Wood spoke of her with childish glee: ‘I see her pretty often, she has a lovely sailing boat.’
    He was so wrapped up in her that for ten days he even forgot to write to his mother. When he did so he was full of apologies for his neglect, reassuring her, in a way that was certain to alarm, that she was still his greatest love. ‘Don’t forget,’ he concluded, ‘your old friend of the war days.’ The reference to his illness showed how seriously Wood was taking the affair with Meraud: he invoked this intimate and painful passage in his life only when something of comparable significance was happening to him.
    The romance began in mid-August and within a month was being widely savoured by the gossip-hungry population of Cannes. Speculation focused on the likely reaction of Meraud’s parents. Wood had no illusions about his desirability; he thoughtMeraud’s parents were snobs who ‘would like her to marry a duke’.
    One night he was woken from a troubled sleep in his hotel room by the sound of laughter outside. He stumbled to the door in his pyjamas to find Prince George, the Duke of Kent. Awash with champagne, the Duke’s party had come to see the young painter whose love life was the talk of Cannes. Wood was not at his best and made a note to send round his apologies the next day.
    At this delicate moment Tony Gandarillas left for Nice, where he was to have an operation on his haemorrhoids. His parting advice to Wood was that he should marry or elope. Wood valued his old friend’s approval because Gandarillas had made no secret of his dislike of Jeanne Bourgoint. It was an awkward time to be alone, however, with his opium, his painting and his uncontrolled feelings for Meraud.
    Meanwhile, Bridget Guinness,