October 2010
After coffee and rich chocolate desserts, Sam brushed aside all my offers to pay and asked me whether I would care to join him for a nightcap back at his apartment. It was still early, not much past ten, and a very pleasant evening for strolling the boulevards of Paris, so I said I would be happy to do so.
We walked up the narrow Rue Delambre, past the closed poissonerie , where you could still catch a whiff of the day’s deliveries on the wet pavement. Sam wore a panama hat and carried a stick with a lion’s-head handle, which he used more as a prop than as a necessary aid to walking. He walked slowly, but with a straight back, and without any noticeable shortness of breath. We waited for the lights to change at the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, by the dark cemetery.
‘This may sound like an odd question,’ I said, ‘but was anything bothering Grace when you last saw her? Did she seem upset, worried, unusually depressed, anything on her mind?’
‘Not when I last saw her,’ said Sam. ‘But you have to remember, that was three weeks before her husband’s death, and our relationship wasn’t like that. We lived in our own world, a fantasy world, if you like. Grace didn’t tell me about her domestic problems, if she had any. Most of the time I didn’t really know what she was thinking. She loved art, music, books, and that’s what we talked about when we weren’t making love. We cared nothing for money and the material world. For Grace, I think, our relationship was an escape, time out of time. She would have tired of me before long, I’m certain. There was a restlessness to her nature. I couldn’t fathom her, didn’t know what she was searching for.’
‘Was she religious?’
‘I wouldn’t say so. Certainly not in the ordinary way. She said she’d lost her faith, though she never amplified on why, but I think it was something she still struggled with. I think she was a deeply spiritual person. You know, with some people, you think they can go either way, become complete atheists or Catholic converts. Grace liked Graham Greene. He was one of her favourite novelists. That tells you something about her, I think.’
‘Greene was a Catholic convert.’
‘Yes, but it always seemed a bit of a struggle for him. Grace went to church for the sake of appearances. Most people of her social standing did attend back then. But she probably thought more about God than many who professed to be believers. The only thing that made church bearable for her was the music. She sang in the choir and played organ from time to time. She loved Bach and Handel. I mean, I’m an atheist, but it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Michelangelo or Giotto.’
‘Did she never talk about her problems or her feelings about her husband?’
‘Oh, she told me about the separate rooms. But that was because I got jealous and started telling her how I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else touching her, making love to her, especially him. She rushed to assure me that nobody did, not even her husband. And she mentioned her little day-to-day problems now and then, but she never overburdened me with them. They weren’t part of our relationship. I wasn’t there to comfort her over Randolph’s scraped knee or his getting into trouble at school, that sort of thing. She was quiet sometimes, distracted, even moody, but mostly, as I said, we inhabited a kind of idealised, romantic world. Other people didn’t exist for us – until one burst into our haven with a vengeance. It was a very fragile, rarefied sort of affair. No, she didn’t say anything else about how her husband treated her. I only inferred his coldness and cruelty from certain moods she had and things she alluded to.’
‘If you loved each other so much and didn’t care about money, why didn’t Grace just divorce Ernest and the two of you run away together? Surely people did that, even back in the fifties?’
‘Oh, yes, of course they did. Sometimes. But it was more difficult and had far more stigma attached. Ernest Fox wouldn’t have allowed it, for a start. I couldn’t imagine a man like him accusing his wife of adultery and being branded a cuckold in public. People like him swept these things under the carpet, came to some sort of arrangement, carried on with their private cruelties and presented a civilised veneer to the world. He’s the kind of man who would have dragged her back home if she dared to desert him, just to prove his power.’
‘From what I can gather, though, Grace had always been a bit of a rebel, headstrong, a bit unconventional, wasn’t she? She rode a motorbike, for one thing. That must have been unusual back then?’
Sam regarded me with a sad smile. ‘The Vincent. Yes. It was a bit of an affectation, really. She learned to ride during the war and found she quite enjoyed it. But that hardly meant she was the kind of woman who’d just abandon her husband and child, not to mention the status and comforts of her life. She wasn’t that much of a rebel. Oh, we might have done it eventually, run away, had the relationship lasted, but we didn’t, and then it was too late. If anyone overheard us saying anything, it would have been indulging in fantasies about running away together. But whatever we felt in each other’s company, perhaps we both knew, when we were apart, that it wasn’t going to happen. That we didn’t have the courage, or whatever it took. Sometimes dreamers are only dreamers. And there was the child, don’t forget. She wouldn’t have abandoned Randolph to Ernest, and we could hardly have taken him with us. There was no room for a child in our fantasy world. God knows, Ernest didn’t particularly like the boy, but if we had taken Randolph, he would have hunted us to the ends of the earth to get back his rightful heir.’
The lights changed and we crossed to the Rue de la Gaite and carried on towards the Rue Froidevaux, off which Sam’s narrow street ran. There were plenty of people sitting out at the cafes and bistros, and passing one place, I actually caught a whiff of Gauloises, which took me back to school days. We used to buy all kinds of exotic cigarettes in a little tobacconist on Boar Lane, in Leeds city centre – Sobranie Cocktails, which came in different pastel colours and had gold filters, Sobranie Black Russians, with the long black tube, the oval Passing Cloud, Pall Mall and Peter Stuyvesant from America, along with Camel, which we believed were made of genuine camel dung, and from France, Disque Bleu, those yellow Gitanes, and Gauloises. Most of them tasted awful and made us cough, but we persisted, thinking ourselves sophisticated.
‘How did you meet?’ I asked, as we approached the tenement building.
Sam flashed me a smile. ‘At a local artists’ exhibition in the indoor market in summer. It was 19 July, I remember, the day the Olympics started in Helsinki. There’d been all that fuss about the Russians coming back in.’
‘And Grace?’
‘She was just browsing around the exhibits. I thought she looked stunning. If you’d only seen her…’ He shook his head. ‘“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”. Age just didn’t come into it. It was a warm day, and she was wearing a yellow summer frock and a wide-brimmed hat with a matching band and a feather in it. You might think it odd, but one of the first things I noticed was her feet. She was wearing light, high-heeled Italian sandals, and you didn’t see them very often in Richmond. Very elegant ankles, she had, and a fine arch.’
‘The artist’s eye?’ I remarked.
He shot me a wicked grin. ‘Exactly.’ The twinkle was still in his eye, all these years later. ‘She also carried a fan with an oriental design, which she used to swish the humid air about now and then. A bit affected, but attractive, nonetheless. Anyway, we got talking about one of the paintings she was thinking of buying for her sewing room, a rather anaemic watercolour of Easby Abbey, I thought, and I was trying to steer her towards buying one of mine. I needed the money. In the end, she realised what I was up to and laughed.’
‘Did she buy it?’
‘Yes. We went for a cup of tea in the market square, all perfectly innocent, you understand. Like I said before, I used to fiddle about with cars and mechanical stuff a lot back then, too, made a bit of money at it. She said she had a Vincent she was having a bit of a problem with, and I said I’d have a look at it. I asked if I could sketch her portrait in return. She knew quite a lot about art, music and poetry. She was a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, whom I thought represented a sort of overblown eroticism. We disagreed, argued, but it didn’t matter. That’s how it all started. I was smitten from the beginning.’
‘And Grace?’
‘I rather like to believe I amused her. You have to remember, we were both very shy. This sort of thing was new to both of us.’
‘She told you that?’
‘That she hadn’t had any other lovers since her marriage? Yes. I was very jealous. I’m sure I questioned her relentlessly. She did tell me that an officer kissed her once, during the war, but that was all.’
‘So why then? Why you?’
Sam paused and stared into space. ‘God only knows. She was bored, unhappy. She’d been living a lie for too long.’ He shrugged.
‘The painting she bought?’ I asked. ‘Do you remember what it was?’
