3
The light was just beginning to go as I walked through the street market to Byrd’s place. The building was grey and peeling, but so were all the others in the street. So, in fact, were almost all the others in Paris. I pressed the latch. Inside the dark entrance a twenty-five-watt bulb threw a glimmer of light across several dozen tiny hutches with mail slots. Some of the hutches were marked with grimy business cards, others had names scrawled across them in ball-point writing. Down the hall there were thick ropes of wiring connected to twenty or more wooden boxes. Tracing a wiring fault would have proved a remarkable problem. Through a door at the far end there was a courtyard. It was cobbled, grey and shiny with water that dripped from somewhere overhead. It was a desolate yard of a type that I had always associated with the British prison system. The concierge was standing in the courtyard as though daring me to complain about it. If mutiny came, then that courtyard would be its starting place. At the top of a narrow creaking staircase was Byrd’s studio. It was chaos. Not the sort of chaos that results from an explosion, but the kind that takes years to achieve. Spend five years hiding things, losing things and propping broken things up, then give it two years for the dust to settle thickly and you’ve got Byrd’s studio. The only really clean thing was the gigantic window through which a sunset warmed the whole place with rosy light. There were books everywhere, and bowls of hardened plaster, buckets of dirty water, easels carrying large half-completed canvases. On the battered sofa were the two posh English Sunday papers still pristine and unread. A huge enamel-topped table that Byrd used as a palette was sticky with patches of colour, and across one wall was a fifteen-foot-high hardboard construction upon which Byrd was painting a mural. I walked straight in – the door was always open.
‘You’re dead,’ called Byrd loudly. He was high on a ladder working on a figure near the top of the fifteen-foot-high painting.
‘I keep forgetting I’m dead,’ said the model. She was nude and stretched awkwardly across a box.
‘Just keep your right foot still,’ Byrd called to her. ‘You can move your arms.’
The nude girl stretched her arms with a grateful moan of pleasure.
‘Is that okay?’ she asked.
‘You’ve moved the knee a little, it’s tricky … Oh well, perhaps we’ll call that a day.’ He stopped painting. ‘Get dressed, Annie.’ She was a tall girl of about twenty-five. Dark, good-looking, but not beautiful. ‘Can I have a shower?’ she asked.
‘The water’s not too warm, I’m afraid,’ said Byrd, ‘but try it, it may have improved.’
The girl pulled a threadbare man’s dressing-gown around her shoulders and slid her feet into a pair of silk slippers. Byrd climbed very slowly down from the ladder on which he was perched. There was a smell of linseed oil and turpentine. He rubbed at the handful of brushes with a rag. The large painting was nearly completed. It was difficult to put a name to the style; perhaps Kokoschka or Soutine came nearest to it but this was more polished, though less alive, than either. Byrd tapped the scaffolding against which the ladder was propped.
‘I built that. Not bad, eh? Couldn’t get one like it anywhere in Paris, not anywhere. Are you a do-it-yourself man?’
‘I’m a let-someone-else-do-it man.’
‘Really,’ said Byrd and nodded gravely. ‘Eight o’clock already, is it?’
‘Nearly half past,’ I said.
‘I need a pipe of tobacco.’ He threw the brushes into a floral-patterned chamber-pot in which stood another hundred. ‘Sherry?’ He untied the strings that prevented his trouser bottoms smudging the huge painting, and looked back towards the mural, hardly able to drag himself away from it. ‘The light started to go an hour back. I’ll have to repaint that section tomorrow.’ He took the glass from an oil lamp, lit the wick carefully and adjusted the flame. ‘A fine light these oil lamps give. A fine silky light.’ He poured two glasses of dry sherry, removed a huge Shetland sweater and eased himself into a battered chair. In the neck of his check-patterned shirt he arranged a silk scarf, then began to sift through his tobacco pouch as though he’d lost something in there.
It was hard to guess Byrd’s age except that he was in the middle fifties. He had plenty of hair and it was showing no sign of grey. His skin was fair and so tight across his face that you could see the muscles that ran from cheekbone to jaw. His ears were tiny and set high, his eyes were bright, active and black, and he stared at you when he spoke to prove how earnest he was. Had I not known that he was a regular naval officer until taking up painting eight years ago I might have guessed him to be a mechanic who had bought his own garage. When he had carefully primed his pipe he lit it with slow care. It wasn’t until then that he spoke again.
‘Go to England at all?’
‘Not often,’ I said.
‘Nor me. I need more baccy; next time you go you might bear that in mind.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘This brand,’ he held a packet for me to see. ‘Don’t seem to have it here in France. Only stuff I like.’
He had a stiff, quarter-deck manner that kept his elbows at his waist and his chin in his neck. He used words like ‘roadster’ that revealed how long it was since he had lived in England.
‘I’m going to ask you to leave early tonight,’ he said. ‘Heavy day tomorrow.’ He called to the model, ‘Early start tomorrow, Annie.’
‘Very well,’ she called back.
‘We’ll call dinner off if you like.’ I offered.
‘No need to do that. Looking forward to it to tell the truth.’ Byrd scratched the side of his nose.
‘Do you know Monsieur Datt?’ I asked. ‘He lunches at the Petit Légionnaire. Big-built man with white hair.’
‘No,’ he said. He sniffed. He knew every nuance of the sniff. This one was light in weight and almost inaudible. I dropped the subject of the man from the Avenue Foch.
Byrd had asked another painter to join us for dinner. He arrived about nine thirty. Jean-Paul Pascal was a handsome muscular young man with a narrow pelvis who easily adapted himself to the cowboy look that the French admire. His tall rangy figure contrasted sharply with the stocky blunt rigidity of Byrd. His skin was tanned, his teeth perfect. He was expensively dressed in a light-blue suit and a tie with designs embroidered on it. He removed his dark glasses and put them in his pocket.
‘An English friend of Monsieur Byrd,’ Jean-Paul repeated as he took my hand and shook it. ‘Enchanted.’ His handshake was gentle and diffident as though he was ashamed to look so much like a film star.
‘Jean-Paul speaks no English,’ said Byrd.
‘It is too complicated,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘I speak a little but I do not understand what you say in reply.’
‘Precisely,’ said Byrd. ‘That’s the whole idea of English. Foreigners can communicate information to us but Englishmen can still talk together without an outsider being able to comprehend.’ His face was stern, then he smiled primly. ‘Jean-Paul’s a good fellow just the same: a painter.’ He turned to him. ‘Busy day, Jean?’
‘Busy, but I didn’t get much done.’
‘Must keep at at, my boy. You’ll never be a great painter unless you learn to apply yourself.’
‘Oh but one must find oneself. Proceed at one’s own speed,’ said Jean-Paul.
‘Your speed is too slow,’ Byrd pronounced, and handed Jean-Paul a glass of sherry without having asked him what he wanted. Jean turned to me, anxious to explain his apparent laziness. ‘It is difficult to begin a painting – it’s a statement – once the mark is made one has to relate all later brush-strokes to it.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Byrd. ‘Simplest thing in the world to begin, tricky though pleasurable