The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online Page B

what it was all about. He told his mother that ‘I hope to goodness there is not’ a revolution; but having escaped the massacre of Smyrna he felt no particular need to take any precautions against mobs in the seizième. He returned to the easel.
    Cocteau arranged for him to go to classes with Andre Lhote, who was regarded as the best teacher of composition in Paris. He also took him to a doctor who diagnosed acute anaemia and put him on a further course of iron and arsenic injections. Cocteau told Wood he had more talent for painting than anyone he had ever met.
    It was almost enough to turn a young man’s head; though there is no evidence that it did. One of the ways in which Cocteau kept himself youthful was by taking young lovers, and Wood’s handsome naïveté was exactly what appealed to his taste. Atabout this time, however, while Wood’s regard for Cocteau’s achievements in no way diminished, he formed the opinion that he was a ‘most jealous and selfish person’. If some sexual incident took place it made no impact on either man, or on their relationship, in which Cocteau for all his selfishness continued to encourage, and Wood to learn.
    In February 1925 Wood saw his old friend Drian, who, to his hilarious disgust, had taken to painting people’s ceilings with a picture of the owner, his house and a map of the surrounding countryside. Wood meanwhile invited his mother to come and stay in his studio in the rue des Saints Peres, where he still officially lived. She came in March, and the visit passed off in perfect harmony. It was what Wood most wanted: to paint all day long with his mother in the background and his father several hundred miles away. When Clare Wood returned to Huyton Kit wrote to her as though they were adulterous lovers, waiting for the day when the impediment to their happiness would be removed. He did not say how he expected this to happen, but quoted his favourite proverb: ‘Tout s’arrange dans la vie.’
    At the same time Cocteau was persuaded to take an opium cure at the Thermes Urbains, a clinic in the rue Chateaubriand. His disappearance from Wood’s life and studio ended a tense period in which Wood’s loyalty to Gandarillas had been tested. That it passed off without major incident was largely due to Gandarillas’s decision to let Wood’s hero-worship run its course.
    Shortly afterwards Wood and Gandarillas set off for their customary spring break. Gandarillas had been anxious to escape a visit to Paris by the president of Chile, accompanied by Mrs Gandarillas. They went first to Marseille, where, like many others, Wood painted boats in the harbour; then they moved to the Bristol and Majestic hotel at Monte Carlo where Picasso had taken a floor to accommodate his wife, their baby and several servants. Also at the hotel were the principals of the Russian Ballet. Wood felt flatteringly at one with what he called a ‘big family of artists.’ Picasso said he would like to see his paintings, but Wood had nothing of sufficient interest with him. Picasso gave him a sketchbook but no dedicatory sketch; he was notoriously mean about giving drawings to his friends andpreferred to throw away the ones that did not please him. Only Mme Errazuriz was regularly given his work.
    From Monaco Wood and Gandarillas moved on to Rome, where Wood returned to the Villa d’Este with Lord Berners (‘a musician and an intelligent man’) and saw the Sistine Chapel. Gandarillas had a fever, which prevented him from going out, and Wood sat with him. After lunch the shutters were closed against the heat of the afternoon, but Wood was unable to join the general siesta. They were building an extension to the hotel and there was the sound of hammers, pulleys and shovels; behind that was the noise of unsilenced car exhausts, to say nothing of motor horns and the regular Roman background of churches tolling the hour while women shouted to each other across the narrow streets.
    Wood did some drawings in