We had entered an inflamed landscape. Half a mile away the angular cornices of the summer house jutted into the vivid air as if distorted by some faulty junction of time and space. Behind it, like an exhausted volcano, a broad- topped mesa rose into the glazed air, its shoulders lifting the thermal currents high off the heated lake.
Envying Nolan and little Manuel these tremendous up-draughts, more powerful than any we had known at Coral D, I drove towards the villa. Then the haze cleared along the beach and I saw the clouds.
A hundred feet above the roof of the mesa, they hung like the twisted pillows of a sleepless giant. Columns of turbulent air moved within the clouds, boiling upwards to the anvil heads like liquid in a cauldron. These were not the placid, fair-weather cumulus of Coral D, but storm-nimbus, unstable masses of overheated air that could catch an aircraft and lift it a thousand feet in a few seconds. Here and there the clouds were rimmed with dark bands, their towers crossed by valleys and ravines. They moved across the villa, concealed from the lakeside heat by the haze overhead, then dissolved in a series of violent shifts in the disordered air.
As I entered the drive behind a truck filled with son et
Beatrice Lafferty stepped across the cables. “Major Parker there are the clouds we promised you.”
I looked up again at the dark billows hanging like shrouds above the
white villa. “Clouds, Beatrice? Those are tigers, tigers with wings. We’re manicurists of the air, not dragon- tamers.”
“Don’t worry, a manicure is exactly what you’re expected to carry out.” With an arch glance, she added: “Your men do understand that there’s to be only one subject?”
“Miss Chanel herself? Of course.” I took her arm as we walked towards the balcony overlooking the lake. “You know, I think you enjoy these snide asides. Let the rich choose their materials-marble, bronze, plasma or cloud. Why not? Portraiture has always been a neglected art.”
“My God, not here.” She waited until a steward passed with a tray of table-cloths. “Carving one’s portrait in the sky out of the sun and air-some people might say that smacked of vanity, or even worse sins.”
“You’re very mysterious. Such as?”
She played games with her eyes. “I’ll tell you in a month’s time when my contract expires. Now, when are your men coming?”
“They’re here.” I pointed to the sky over the lake. The three gliders hung in the overheated air, clumps of cloud-cotton drifting past them to dissolve in the haze. They were following a sand-yacht that approached the quay, its tyres throwing up the cerise dust. Behind the helmsman sat Leonora Chanel in a trouser suit of yellow alligator skin, her white hair hidden inside a black raffia toque.
As the helmsman moored the craft. Van Eyck and Petit Manuel put on an impromptu performance, shaping the fragments of cloud-cotton a hundred feet above the lake. First Van Eyck carved an orchid, ‘then a heart and a pair of lips, while Manuel fashioned the head of a parakeet, two identical mice and the letters “L.C.” As they dived and plunged around her, their wings sometimes touching the lake, Leonora stood on the quay, politely waving at each of these brief confections.
When they landed beside the quay, Leonora waited for Nolan to take one of the clouds, but he was sailing up and down the lake in front of her like a weary bird. Watching this strange chatelaine of Lagoon West, I noticed that she had slipped off into some private reverie, her gaze fixed on Nolan and oblivious of the people around her. Memories, caravels without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burnt-out eyes.
Later that evening Beatrice Lafferty led me into the villa through the library window. There, as Leonora greeted her guests on the terrace, wearing a topless dress of sapphires and organdy, her breasts covered only by their contour jewellery, I saw the portrait that filled the villa. I counted more than twenty, from the formal society portraits in the drawing rooms, one by the President of the Royal Academy, another by Annigoni, to the bizarre psychological studies in the bar and dining room by Dali and Francis Bacon. Everywhere we moved, in the alcoves between the marble semi-columns, in gilt miniatures on the mantle shelves, even in the ascending mural that followed the staircase, we saw the same beautiful, self-regarding face. This colossal narcissism seemed to have become her last refuge, the only retreat for her fugitive self in its flight from the world.
Then, in the studio on the roof, we came across a large easel portrait that had just been varnished. The artist had produced a deliberate travesty of the sentimental and powder-blue tints of a fashionable society painter, but beneath this gloss he had visualized Leonora as a dead Medea. The stretched skin below her right cheek, the sharp forehead and slipped mouth gave her the numbed and luminous appearance of a corpse.
My eyes moved to the signature. “Nolan! My God, were you here when he painted this?”
“It was finished before I came-two months ago. She refused to have it framed.”
“No wonder.” I went over to the window and looked down at ‘the bedrooms hidden behind their awnings. “Nolan was
“But why should Leonora ask him back? They must have-”
“To paint her portrait again. I know Leonora Chanel better than you do, Beatrice. This time, though, the size of the sky.”
We left the library and walked past the cocktails and canapés to where Leonora was welcoming her guests. Nolan stood beside her, wearing a suit of white suede. Now and then he looked down at her as if playing with the possibilities this self-obsessed woman gave to his macabre humour. Leonora clutched at his elbow. With the diamonds fixed around her eyes she reminded me of some archaic priestess. Beneath the contour jewellery her breasts lay like eager snakes.
Van Eyck introduced himself with an exaggerated bow. Behind him came Petit Manuel, his twisted head ducking nervously among the tuxedos.
Leonora’s mouth shut in a rictus of distaste. She glanced at the white plaster on my foot. “Nolan, you fill your world with cripples. Your little dwarf-will he fly too?”
Petit Manuel looked at her with eyes like crushed flowers.
The performance began an hour later. The dark-rimmed clouds were lit by the sun setting behind the mesa, the air crossed by wraiths of cirrus like the gilded frames of the immense paintings to come. Van Eyck’s glider rose in a spiral towards the face of the first cloud, stalling and climbing again as the turbulent updraughts threw him across the air.
As the cheekbones began to appear, as smooth and lifeless as carved foam, applause rang out from the guests seated on the terrace. Five minutes later, when Van Eyck’s glider swooped down onto the lake, I could see that he had excelled himself. Lit by the searchlights, and with the overture to Tristan sounding from the loudspeaker on the slopes of the mesa, as if inflating this huge bauble, the portrait of Leonora moved overhead, a faint rain falling from it. By luck the cloud remained stable until it passed the shoreline, and then broke up in the evening air as if ripped from the sky by an irritated hand.
Petit Manuel began his ascent, sailing in on a dark-edged cloud like an urchin accosting a bad-tempered matron. He soared to and fro, as if unsure how to shape this unpredictable column of vapour, then began to carve it into the approximate contours of a woman’s head. He seemed more nervous than I had ever seen him. As he finished a second round of applause broke out, soon followed by laughter and ironic cheers.
The cloud, sculptured into a flattering likeness of Leonora, had begun to tilt, rotating in the disturbed air. The jaw lengthened, the glazed smile became that of an idiot. Within a minute the gigantic head of Leonora Chanel hung upside down above us.
Discreetly I ordered the searchlights switched off, and the audience’s attention turned to Nolan’s black-winged glider as it climbed towards the next cloud. Shards of dissolving tissue fell from the darkening air, the spray concealing whatever ambiguous creation Nolan was carving. To my surprise, the portrait that emerged was wholly lifelike. There was a burst of applause, a few bars of Tannhauser, and the search-lights lit up the elegant head. Standing among her guests, Leonora raised her glass to Nolan’s glider.
Puzzled by Nolan’s generosity, I looked more closely at the gleaming face, and then realised what he had done. The portrait, with cruel irony, was all too lifelike. The downward turn of Leonora’s mouth, the chin held up to smooth her neck, the fall of flesh below her right cheek-all these were carried on the face of the cloud as they had been in his painting in the studio.
