Free The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks Page B

Meraud’s mother, moved into action. She told Meraud she could not throw herself away on Kit Wood but must wait for someone suitable. It was not just her daughter’s happiness for which she was concerned but her own social ambitions. Although she was a generous patron of the arts there were limits: Kit Wood, after all, was penniless, he smoked opium; and, with the exception of a liaison with a decadent tomboy mannequin, his tastes had been homosexual. To the mother of a nice young girl in 1927 these objections counted for something.
    In separate conversations with Wood himself, Bridget Guinness pointed out that her husband would not consent to the marriage. As a mother she disliked the gossip that had been attached to her daughter’s name and now expected Wood to see a good deal less of Meraud. She presented Wood with a choice: either he could elope with Meraud, in which case she would be disinherited; or he could finish the romance with dignity and in his own time. But if he had come to the Guinnesses looking for a way to finance his opium and his painting he had chosen the wrong family.
    It made Wood reconsider. What exactly was he after? The model of the Nicholsons – that of two painters working devotedly side by side – exerted a powerful attraction. Could he picturehimself and Meraud as such a couple? Her paintings leant heavily on the example of her mentor Picabia, who had been an important figure in successive movements from Post-Impressionism, through Cubism, Dada and, by 1927, Surrealism. The trouble was that where Picabia’s work was authenticated by proven talent and experience, Meraud’s paintings had some of the more dubious trappings of Surrealism – shock tactics, bits of string – without the proof that she could even really draw. Wood had no interest in Surrealism and felt particularly suspicious of it since ‘his’ commission from Diaghilev had gone to Miró and Max Ernst; and where Winifred’s homeliness and spirituality offered a good anchor for an artist husband, Meraud was headstrong, dangerous and twenty-two. Wood doubted whether she was really what he called ‘enough of an artist’ for him; he wondered whether her principal motive in marriage was not merely to escape from her snobbish family.
    But he was in love with her. The relationship was of the enclosed, self-regarding kind that makes parents uneasy: they are convinced on one hand that such feelings in their children are comically short-lived, but wistful on the other that they themselves can no longer aspire to such passion. Wood told his mother: ‘I worship the very ground she treads on, and am proud to be capable of so great a love.’ Even the worrying narcissism of young love was there.
    Bridget Guinness’s campaign to ‘save’ her daughter was successful. Meraud told Kit she would have to see less of him because ‘people’ were talking. It would be different if they were engaged, but since her father was in America that was impossible. Wood thought that if she really loved him none of this would matter, but he was convinced by her submission to her mother that Meraud was ‘a baby at heart’.
    He left Cannes and took himself to Aries, a sacred place for him because of its association with Van Gogh. He wrote letters of bitter despair to Winifred Nicholson. The anguish of his thwarted love for Meraud was intensified by a suspicion that she was not, au fond , the right woman to share the artistic life he planned. On hopeful days he ignored this suspicion; on days when he wanted to get on with his work, he exaggerated it. ByOctober he had persuaded himself that Meraud was too ‘girly’ and empty-headed for him. ‘I must say,’ he wrote, ‘that French women once they care for you nothing can drag them off; English women by contrast, ‘are decidedly undeveloped sexually and mentally.’ His experience of Jeanne and Meraud scarcely entitled him to such grand generalisations, and he knew it. He was temporising. He did then