Conversations With Mr. Prain (16 page)

I waited for him to say more, but he sat back as if he had finished. “Oh well,” I said, trying to be strong. “It was very good of you to—”

“No, not at all. It fitted in perfectly with what I had intended to discuss with you. Everything has fallen into place.”

I froze a little. There was too much to absorb all of a sudden, and I was too raw. I was being turned this way and that. I could not find the heart to challenge what he meant.

“Of course,” he said. “There was the possibility that you would have produced something that was pre-eminently publishable, but that was a long shot.” He was continuing despite my obvious apathy. Having set him up for explanations, he was now rolling through them whether I was ready or not. “But I want something from you that has nothing to do with all this.”

I believe I managed a perplexed expression. He leant forward again, with his elbows on his knees, directing his gaze in an intimidating manner. He paused. He was waiting for me to ask what he meant. My expression must have been enough.

“As I said, I want to offer you a deal,” he said.

“A deal,” I repeated.

“As I read through your work, and while I have been speaking with you today, I have been trying to discover how important it might be to you to have a stretch of time set aside for your writing. I wanted to know whether writing was a hobby you did for extra money and interest, or whether it was something you felt bound to do, despite the obstacles, and had considered rationally. Reading your material has convinced me you have the necessary skills to produce something well worth my publishing in time, if that is what you want. Talking with you, I realise you do take your writing very seriously. You have the intelligence, the talent and the commitment. There may be a market for your work in the future. You haven’t worked hard enough yet to produce something polished and unique, and sellable, but you may well do. And I hate to see talent wasted as much as anyone.”

This prompted me to react. “A stretch of time? Are you offering—?” I did not dare say what. I broke off.

“Exactly,” he said, very calm. “A stipend.”

He stood up, walked over to the fireplace, and leant against the mantelpiece, below the looming portrait of his
mother. The unsolved mysteries of the afternoon returned out of a foggy haze into sharper relief. What had this to do with Monique and her sculptures? This must form part of the solution. The trapped fly buzzed past me and, fortuitously, out of the door.

“A kind of conceptual stipend,” he continued. “A contract. I want something from you and I can give you something in return that I think you will want. There are no strings attached.” He said these last words emphatically.

No strings? And yet I felt caught in them, bound to the chair, pulled and twisted with thick cords.

“First of all,” he continued, “I want to explain my position. I may have stalled earlier, and been guilty of hiding the truth from you, and in a way you are justified in being upset with me for the way I have … arranged things. But I felt I had to proceed very slowly, in case you assumed … in case you supposed I was behaving improperly. I don’t want to stand accused of suggesting anything improper. You may think that what I am about to say is a little strange, but so be it. I am not trying to … to use you.” He cleared his throat, looked at me thoughtfully, and then continued, “I wanted you to come to the house, to see the photograph, to see the sculpture, and to meet Monique. Perhaps, since you have met her now, I should explain about Monique first.”

“All right,” I said.

“Well, it’s quite simple really. Monique has duties here. She does occasional cooking. She deals with the gardener and the various other employees. I needed someone to
supervise the house and grounds since I’m mostly in London and time does not permit me to live in these genial surroundings.” There was a shade of a smile when he mentioned time. “Monique is a sort of personal assistant. If I am here and need a letter posted, she’ll do it. She’ll drive into Banbury for something. She does a number of different things.”

“Like playing chess?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Quite. We share that interest.”

And what else did she do?

“So, in short,” he continued, “she has a definite role here, a valuable role.” A pause. “I get a return from my investment.”

“Investment?”

“Yes. In marble.”

“You pay?”

“I pay for all her expenses, and for all her materials. As I believe I mentioned, the British public are not the greatest consumers of sculpture. A few years ago, after Mother died, I was in the position where I needed someone to live here and look after things, but I had great difficulty in attracting suitable candidates for the job. It seemed impossible to find anyone who would not use the house as a dance-hall, or steal. I wanted someone who could manage the place, someone trustworthy. Then, when I was in Paris for a week on business, I happened to be invited to the opening of an exhibition by three promising French sculptors, one of whom was Monique Martin. I met her there. She expressed an interest in coming to Britain.
Her work until then was in plaster and sandstone, but she confessed how much she would love to work in marble, if and when she had the money, or a commission. There was something marvellously down to earth and solid about Monique, most unlike an artist, I suppose. When I returned to London, it struck me I could kill two birds with one stone, if you’ll pardon the pun. I managed to find her again, and invited her to look after Walton Hall in return for a modest wage, and all material paid for, even if it was marble. In return, too, I have the satisfaction of being a patron of the arts.”

“But good marble must cost a fortune. You’ve been incredibly generous,” I said, in some disbelief.

“I have great confidence in her. She’s already received promising commissions. I believe in patronage, actually. I consider it a responsibility of those like myself to be patrons of the arts. I have already provided stipends for students and various fellowship funds, but this is more direct, and personal. However, this arrangement will soon draw to a close. She wants to return to France next year. She’s homesick. A shame, really, as it has been working terribly well,” he said, smiling a little sadly. “Monique is very good at administering this estate. The only difficulty is with the gardener. He accuses her of all sorts of things.” He looked at me askance. He did not know what the gardener had told me. I guessed he may have said much more than he did. It was not just that she apparently stole his nuts and bolts. “But you know, there’s always been a certain hostility towards the French on the part of some Englishmen.”

“Why did you not tell me this before?” I asked. Already, I knew what he would offer me, and yet I feared him making such an offer. What did I possess that was so valuable? What was this something for which he would strike a deal? He would be my patron and I would be his—what? I knew and yet I did not know. I sensed and yet I censored out the possibility.

“Because it’s a secret.”

“Is no one to know about your sponsorship?”

“No. No one else is to know about it.” He aimed a gaze that I could not return. I observed instead my fingers, silver rings, short fingernails. “Of course, I can only ask you not to say anything. I have trusted you with what was a complete secret between Monique and myself. I could not tell you before. Moreover, had I done so, your expectations of me may have been too high.” I was still looking at my fingers, but I heard him move from the fireplace towards the sofa again and sit down. “You may have spoken purely to impress me. I wanted you to be yourself regarding your work and your ideas about literature. I had to somehow determine … whether you could be trusted.”

“Why should my expectations of what you might offer me be high when, as far as I see it, I have very little to offer you in return?” I said, testing. “I don’t see that you need another employee here, at least not until Monique leaves.” I swallowed and made myself look at him. He seemed uncomfortable, diffident, and almost apologetic.

He did not answer at once. I decided to fill the short pause by prompting him to explain, though he was in little
need of that. He was about to do so. Even still, I felt my questions might ease discomfort, mine more than his. “What you’ve said doesn’t explain why I had to note Monique’s sculptural expertise.”

“Because …” I had the feeling that had he been a smoker he would have lit a cigarette at this moment. I suspected that once he had been a smoker, for he seemed as if he wished someone would offer him one. He drank martini instead. “… if I had simply told you about how good her sculptures were, you may not have believed me. You may have suspected that there was no sculptor and that I was deluding you. I wanted you to be impressed by her work without knowing the sculptor was Monique, at first. I wanted the satisfaction of knowing that you believed in her work as
art
. Just that. Had I said right at the outset that she created
Perseus and Medusa
you may have given me a polite, rather than an honest response. I needed to know that you were genuinely impressed. Had you remained unimpressed by its artistic value, I would have had to reconsider. I wanted to be certain you believed this sculpture was great art so that you would not think of my offer as … I was not at all certain I would …”

“You would?”

“I would make you the offer.” He was almost there.

“Oh please tell me what it is.”

Now we both stared at each other. By that time, I had guessed what he wanted, in general terms, at least. Looking back on the afternoon, I think perhaps I had an inkling of this from the moment I saw
Perseus and Medusa,
even from the moment he showed me the photograph. At any rate, it did not come as a complete surprise.

But I had to listen to the details. They interested me intensely. I was intrigued by how he would ask, and what reasons, if any, he would furnish.

“I told you that the photograph I purchased, the one of you taken by Denis Johns, was special to me. It was important that I knew for sure whether you were or were not the model, for my own peace of mind, but it would not have mattered in the long run, had it been someone else. The fact that the resemblance was so strong effected … the same spell.”

A spell? He was bewitched. He had to see me.

“It mattered mainly in that if you were the same woman, then you might not be averse to the idea of posing again. I mean, it isn’t something that very many women would do, is it?”

I put on a non-committal expression and half-shrugged. “You want me to pose naked for a sculpture?”

He seemed relieved that I had said these words. “If you do that, then you will have my patronage. I want you to be the model for a sculpture in the Classical style. Monique has agreed, for me, that she will work in marble, and omit any of her usual embellishments. She can make a copy for herself, however, and do what she wants.”

“Right,” I said, flatly. “Do you realise that you could have asked me that outright in the Market any time you came to visit, and I would have been quite happy to consider it?”

“But don’t you see, Stella? What if I really had happened to say in some conversation with you, ‘Oh, by the way, have you ever done nude modelling?’ What would you have thought?”

I smiled. “If I had never done any, I might have thought you were a nasty, lecherous creep. But since I have, I would have presumed you had recognised me from one of my depictions. There are a number of photographs and paintings of me hanging in people’s homes, and one or two in galleries. When you’ve worked as a life-model you don’t get offended if sensible people suggest further work. I wouldn’t have been as offended as I felt upstairs. The way you showed me the photo then was—”

“But I didn’t want to risk anything else. I wanted to be discreet,” he insisted. “And supposing I had said to you out of the blue, ‘Look, would you mind doing some nude modelling at my house for a sculptor friend of mine?’ Isn’t it much better that you saw Monique’s work, and it impressed you artistically, before I asked if you would like to model for her? I know you are an artist: writers like you are. This is an artistic arrangement. It is not for prurience.”

I smiled again. He knew I was an artist. “Perhaps I would have thought you were a sleazebag trying to seduce me, had you been more direct, but quite frankly the way the day has progressed here has hardly spared me from the thought. You are on shaky ground.” I looked down pitifully at my folders. “No strings, you say, or no strings that are formally part of any deal?”

“No strings at all,” he said, looking a little strained. “If you wanted, we need never meet again after today.”

A part of me was relieved to have this option presented with such apparent sincerity. To my dismay and bafflement, another part of me reacted with disappointment.

“Perhaps you think I’m … I don’t know … downright peculiar,” he said, “but I would very much like this sculpture. And in return, I offer you the freedom of my estate, to live in, to write in, for as long as it takes Monique to complete her work.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering about my double-sided reaction to the possibility of not seeing him ever again.

“I was going to suggest it, in Camden, you know. I went to visit you having in my mind a plan to ask you here to see Monique’s work, and, if you were impressed by it, to offer you a sum of money in return for a series of … sittings. But I was afraid that money would not be a good enough incentive to you, especially if you had not done any modelling before. Being the kind of person you are, you seemed almost careless about money. I knew you were committed to environmentalist ideals, and you might not have wanted to embroil yourself with someone like me, or take the trouble to come out to Banbury every few days. I wasn’t sure how committed you were to your lifestyle.” I raised my eyebrows. A good defence against the misery of being relatively poor is to pretend that money is not a great concern. “I felt you may require an enormous amount of money to agree, or else you would refuse
outright, not necessarily on the basis of any inhibitions, but on the basis of certain principles.” Principles, I thought, perhaps. But he understood me little on this score. “I wished there was some other incentive apart from money.”