The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (19 page)

She walked slowly over to Victor and kissed him on the mouth. I saw that they were almost exactly the same height. Then we were introduced. Having shaken my hand Carmen took no further interest in me, but she paid great attention to Paul, who was equally enthralled. This mutual fascination, I think, had little to do with mere sexual allure; but they were both acutely conscious of the curious, dispassionate intimacy of their forthcoming relationship as artist and model. I do not remember what was said during these opening gambits; I only remember Victor’s behaviour. From the time when Carmen had entered the room and went over to kiss her husband on the lips I do not think there was a moment when some part of him was not touching her. He did not paw her; his contact was light but it was constant. And yet they barely looked, let alone smiled at one another. Once I saw him touch her hand; instinctively, her fingers curled round his and squeezed them, but that was the extent of her response. My inexperienced, adolescent mind registered these details greedily but had no means of analysing them.

Before lunch Victor took us into the lounge, a large, lavishly furnished room which looked as if it had never been used. Above a Carrara marble fireplace of Rococo design—elegant in itself, but quite unsuited to the room’s low-ceilinged mock Tudor proportions—Victor indicated a large area of wall covered in nothing but sea-green watered silk wallpaper.

‘That’s where I want Carmen to be,’ he said.

‘Her portrait, you mean?’ asked Paul with seeming innocence. I glanced at Carmen who started a choking fit. Victor slapped her back quite smartly and looked at us all severely. He was acute enough to recognise that there was a joke at his expense, but he could not unbend enough to share it. The three of us could have been his children. Happily his butler José entered at that moment to announce lunch.

Over the meal it was decided that when Victor and Carmen were up in London—they had a service flat in Dolphin Square—she would come to Paul’s studio to be painted for a couple of hours each day. It was agreed that half Paul’s fee was to be paid at once, half on the painting’s satisfactory completion and delivery. It was all very tidy and businesslike, and I believe I had a hand in its smooth negotiation. I can only recall one snatch of conversation which came after a pause towards the end of the meal. Suddenly Victor, who had Carmen seated on his immediate right, grasped one of her smooth white arms and said:

‘My wife is a very beautiful woman, you know.’ When he said this Victor looked straight at Paul, as if issuing a challenge.

I looked at Carmen to see how she had taken his remark, but her expression was quite inscrutable. I saw neither pleasure nor irritation, nor embarrassment on her face, and yet she must have felt something. That amount of concealment in one so young was impressive, perhaps even a little frightening.

‘How did you two meet?’ asked Paul.

‘She was a model,’ said Victor, as if this explained everything.

‘A fashion model,’ added Carmen. I had been trying to guess her origins from her accent, but could get nowhere, especially as she talked so little. She spoke in the socially neutral tones of what is called ‘received pronunciation’, acquired perhaps at a modelling school. At any rate, after that little exchange, no further information on Carmen’s life before Victor was made available. As we drove back to London after lunch, Paul was unusually taciturn and thoughtful.

**

During the following week Paul started on the portrait. I did not see or speak to him for a fortnight, until, quite unexpectedly, he invited me out to dinner at a restaurant with his girlfriend, Christine. When he was in funds Paul, who had an innately generous nature, liked to indulge his passion for sensual enjoyment with friends, and would refuse all offers to share the expense. We met at Paul’s flat and walked to the restaurant. It was the first time that I had been with Paul and Christine outside their home where Christine kept herself in the background.

They had been together for some years when I knew them and had been, as they put it, ‘childhood sweethearts’ before that. Christine was a quiet, intelligent beauty who showed no signs of being overawed by Paul’s personality.

During dinner Paul was the principal conversationalist. In particular he talked with enthusiasm about the sexual revolution and about the ‘open relationship’ he enjoyed with Christine who listened to him impassively.

‘We believe that we have the right to explore the limits of sensual experience with others, but we remain totally faithful in terms of our commitment to each other as lifetime partners. That’s something sacred to us. We believe that freedom and fidelity are compatible. I’m happy if Christine experiments with other relationships, and she’s happy if I do, because we both know that there is something between us that can’t be broken, that’s just . . . eternal. You agree with that, don’t you, Christine?’

‘Yes. Right. No, I’m very happy with that,’ said Christine, firmly but without enthusiasm.

Paul was in an exuberant mood, but more restless than I had ever seen him before. He ate and drank prodigiously, but without the alcohol seeming to have any effect. I asked him about the portrait but he brushed my enquiries aside with the words: ‘Wait and see.’

One afternoon about a fortnight later Paul summoned me over to his flat with the simple words: ‘It’s finished.’ When I arrived there was in the middle of his sitting room a five foot by four canvas on an easel draped rather dramatically in a black silk sheet.

‘Apart from Christine, you’re the first to see this,’ said Paul. Without any flourish, but hesitantly, I thought, for him, he slowly removed the sheet. It slid down the canvas and lay shimmering on the floor like a dark pool. I saw the portrait of Carmen Lyons for the first time.

‘My God!’ I said involuntarily. Usually I had better control over my reactions, but this defeated me. Paul, whose mixture of arrogance and vulnerability was uncommonly explosive, even for an artist, looked dismayed.

‘But don’t you think it’s a great picture?’

‘Of course! It’s incredible.’

‘So? What’s wrong?’

I was going to find it difficult to explain without offending him. Rather feebly, I said: ‘But do you think they’ll like it?’

‘That’s funny,’ said Paul. ‘It’s exactly what Christine said.’

Against a deep black background Carmen in a short, tight black dress was seated in a plum coloured wing chair, her legs, shoeless as when we had first met her, crossed seductively. The left hand rested on an arm of the chair, her right arm curled upwards around one of the wings. She faced forward directly at the viewer with an intense, menacing stare. You could not define that look as one of malevolence exactly because malevolence is a human feeling and this look was not quite human. I have seen similar looks on predatory animals. It was unfathomably dark and dangerous.

When I had collected my thoughts I asked Paul if he didn’t think that the picture was a little ‘overpowering’. Paul did not appear to understand.

‘No. That’s just how I saw her, that’s all.’

‘Is she really like that?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’ said Paul who was being unusually obtuse, I thought. On an instinct I asked him if he had had an affair with her.

‘Yes. Briefly,’ he said. ‘Just a physical thing. I wasn’t that interested to be honest. Funny thing. She wanted it a lot, but she didn’t seem to enjoy it. It was all a bit of a grind.’ I could not tell if this coldness and casualness was a pose or not, but it upset me. I did not stay long after that and we parted less than warmly.

I should add one more thing about the picture. Paul had included the Persian Blue cat in the portrait though it was little more than a slip of furry tail around Carmen’s ankles and a glitter of two eyes under the chair. It was an effective piece of trickery, if slightly unsettling. It was as if this secret presence, once noticed, made it a different picture altogether: no longer a portrait, but a picture about a girl and her cat.

The trouble that followed the presentation of the portrait to Victor fell mostly on the head of my poor father who, characteristically, shouldered the blame without reproaching either Paul or myself. Victor hated the picture. My father who tried to take a detached interest in Victor’s reaction attempted to make him explain himself. Did he think it was badly painted? No. Victor had to concede that it was ‘quite well done’. Then what was wrong? Was it a bad likeness? At this Victor hesitated because he was discerning enough to understand that from a purely physical point of view it was an extremely good likeness, but. . . . But what? The most coherent answer that Victor could give to my father’s probings was that the picture was ‘not right’ and not what he had wanted. The upshot of it was that Victor refused to pay the second half of his fee for the picture, and even demanded the return of his first instalment.

A week or so of argument and negotiation followed. Paul was desperate and distressed, but chiefly, I think, because he had already spent the money he had been given and had incurred debts on the expectation of the second tranche.

Eventually it was decided, to nobody’s satisfaction, that Paul was to keep his commission fee, but that the painting was to be returned to him without any further payment. I was appointed to drive to Gerrard’s Cross in my father’s estate car and fetch back the offending item. My father, unsurprisingly, wanted nothing more to do with the whole wretched business. It was not a job I relished, but, like my father, I felt in some way responsible.

I arrived at Victor’s house at exactly the hour agreed and rang the bell. After a minute or so it was answered not by José, but Carmen. She wore no shoes as usual and seemed paler than when I had last seen her. I said I had come for the picture and she laughed. It was a perfectly pleasant-sounding laugh, but it disturbed me because it made no sense.

She said: ‘He’s in his study. Top of the stairs, first door on the right.’

‘Can’t I just take the picture?’ I asked.

‘The picture’s up there with him,’ she said. She made a disdainful little pushing gesture with her hands, as if shooing me up to see him. As I mounted the stairs I was conscious of her standing at the bottom of the staircase and watching me.

I had to knock twice on the study door before I heard an indistinct human sound which I took to be a summons to enter. It was a large room lined with shelves full of impressive leather bound volumes which I suspected that Victor had bought by the yard, just as he had bought his Old Masters. Victor was seated with his back to me in a high-backed leather swivel chair. All I could see of him was his right hand which cradled a monstrous balloon glass half full of brandy. I could tell, however, what he was looking at. Facing both of us was the portrait on its easel, a third living presence in the room.

I coughed and announced that I had come to take the picture. The chair swivelled round rapidly and revealed Victor sitting there naked, his face contorted with fury.

‘How dare you come in without knocking!’ he shouted.

I said I had knocked. In my embarrassment I chose to stare past him at the only object worth looking at in the room, the picture. Since I had last seen it Paul had altered it slightly so that the Persian cat was a little more in evidence. Not simply two eyes, but a whole head was peering out very close to her legs from under the chair. Keeping my eyes on the painting I told Victor that I had come, as arranged, to take it back.

‘Well, you can’t have it!’ he said aggressively and swivelled his chair back to look at the picture. Spared now the embarrassment of talking to a naked man, I recovered my courage and told him that I was not going to leave without either the picture or a cheque for the remainder of Paul’s fee. There was a silence. I coughed again, just to remind Victor that I was still there.

‘What do you think of it?’ asked Victor.

Choosing my words carefully I said that I thought it was very powerful.

‘Yes, yes!’ he said. ‘But is it
her
?’

I said I didn’t know.

‘I think it is,’ he said. ‘I think it is her.’ I saw his left arm stretch out and point directly at the canvas. ‘I think THAT . . . IS . . . HER!’

After a pause I said in what I hoped was a firm voice that if he was keeping the picture I would need a cheque from him now. With a sudden convulsive movement Victor bounded out of the chair, went over to a desk by the window, pulled a cheque book out of a drawer, wrote the cheque, blotted it and held it out to me with a trembling hand. My mind, overwhelmed by what had gone before, took in the absurd scene with detachment. He is handed a cheque by a naked man in a book-lined room, I thought to myself, as if composing a scenario for a film in my head.

He said: ‘If that really
is
her, I’ll have to keep it, won’t I?’ I nodded my agreement with this strange statement and left the room. When I reached the top of the stairs I paused for breath. On looking down I saw Carmen at the bottom of the stairs looking up at me with those great dark eyes of hers. She was not standing but crouching in an odd position, a little like an athlete, poised for a sprint. She rose from this position slowly and seemingly without embarrassment.

‘He’s keeping the picture,’ I said and for the second time that afternoon she laughed.

**

Paul was delighted with the cheque, but did not seem to be particularly interested in the story of my adventures with Carmen and Victor in Gerrard’s Cross. It was only when I mentioned the alteration he had made to the painting with regard to the cat that he became animated. ‘No!’ he said. ‘You must be mistaken. I absolutely did not alter it by a brushstroke after I showed it to you.’ This was odd, but I did not press the point, sensing that Paul would be irritated. When I told my father about it all he simply commented in his characteristically enigmatic way that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’.

A year passed and I was at Bond Street Station one evening when I noticed the headlines on the late edition of the
Evening Standard
. They read: TYCOON FOUND DEAD and there was a photograph of Victor Lyons. His death would have made a headline in any case, but its bizarre circumstances had propelled it onto the front page. He had been found dead, having blown out his brains with a shotgun while seated in front of the portrait of his wife Carmen.