saw with a shiver that I had killed him off already, perhaps too high a price for either of us to pay. I went upstairs in search of Jane, standing aside at the first turning for the couple who had come in before me, and overhearing their firm Cheshire distaste for what they had walked all this way to see; I warmed to them and despaired of them at the same moment; then past the door of Paul Echevin’s office, which was slightly open in approved Orstian style, his voice heard on the phone, trying to wind up a conversation.
And there Jane was. She wasn’t entirely alone: other figures and various beasts paced and waited in the starry twilight, the jewelled Hades that she inhabited. But she was always the one on whom the drama turned or the mood centred. In a big triptych, hinged like an altarpiece, you saw only her ringed left hand scooping a train of crumpled satin, like a bride entering a carriage, but you knew it was her. In other pictures, cropped in similar startling ways, you were given only the firm-jawed lower half of her face and the hair spread out, or gathered round her like a shroud. A conversation-piece, where half a dozen women lazed on a terrace with tea and sewing and cigarettes while sunset waned through trees and spires beyond, turned out to be all Jane – full face, once smiling, once pensive, both profiles, a chicly bustled rear view, stretching, hands pressed to the small of the back, and a tender
profil perdu
, which spoke of intimacy and oblivion; in the mannered vastness of the flat gold frame, the words ‘Léal Souvenir’ were inscribed in red.
Just by repetition the face began to emanate a kind of power, though this was nothing to do with character or expression. Jane Byron might have been a versatile actress but all the roles Orst cast her in were enigmatic or monumental – the seer, the sufferer, the sphinx. Even the domestic scenes, depicted with photographic refinement, had an air of suspended animation, and seemed reports from a world of dreams. The face itself was a mask, heavy, almost matronly at times, and while I didn’t warm to it in itself I was oddly excited by its pale proliferation. Though the pictures showed no concern at all with men (the occasional epicene boy was always in the end a Hebe or a bosomless girl-child) there was none the less something perverse about them which did almost as well. It was the sense of a passion that had taken the fateful turn into fixation, exploited by its own compelling mechanism long after its subject was gone.
It was quite a surprise after all this to find a group of pupils from St Narcissus on the upper floor, junior boys cross-legged in their capes and gaiters forming a semi-circle around the art master, a dynamic broad man built like a prop forward. I loitered on the further side of the room, looking with an adult eye at a row of tiny, almost invisible silverpoint drawings, but curious as a boy about the others and what they were being told. The master was explaining a set of landscapes: I heard how Orst had returned every year to the hamlet in the Ardennes where his childhood summers had been spent, and how he liked to escape from the studio and paint out in the forests and on the heathy uplands; how, in particular, he returned to a lonely woodland pond, which he had painted twenty or thirty times in different lights and at different seasons. I learned more about St Narcissus, too, than I had gleaned from the chants and odd emphatic phrases of lectures that crossed the back garden; I recognised the methodical presentation, the excessively clear light thrown on obscure subjects, the mixture of free speculation and arbitrary learning that make up a good old-fashioned education; I saw the reasonable self-satisfaction of the master and the concentration of the boys who were not afraid to speak their minds when questioned, and not broken by a reproof. And I thought of Luc out on this same lesson two or three years back, attentive but independent,
And there Jane was. She wasn’t entirely alone: other figures and various beasts paced and waited in the starry twilight, the jewelled Hades that she inhabited. But she was always the one on whom the drama turned or the mood centred. In a big triptych, hinged like an altarpiece, you saw only her ringed left hand scooping a train of crumpled satin, like a bride entering a carriage, but you knew it was her. In other pictures, cropped in similar startling ways, you were given only the firm-jawed lower half of her face and the hair spread out, or gathered round her like a shroud. A conversation-piece, where half a dozen women lazed on a terrace with tea and sewing and cigarettes while sunset waned through trees and spires beyond, turned out to be all Jane – full face, once smiling, once pensive, both profiles, a chicly bustled rear view, stretching, hands pressed to the small of the back, and a tender
profil perdu
, which spoke of intimacy and oblivion; in the mannered vastness of the flat gold frame, the words ‘Léal Souvenir’ were inscribed in red.
Just by repetition the face began to emanate a kind of power, though this was nothing to do with character or expression. Jane Byron might have been a versatile actress but all the roles Orst cast her in were enigmatic or monumental – the seer, the sufferer, the sphinx. Even the domestic scenes, depicted with photographic refinement, had an air of suspended animation, and seemed reports from a world of dreams. The face itself was a mask, heavy, almost matronly at times, and while I didn’t warm to it in itself I was oddly excited by its pale proliferation. Though the pictures showed no concern at all with men (the occasional epicene boy was always in the end a Hebe or a bosomless girl-child) there was none the less something perverse about them which did almost as well. It was the sense of a passion that had taken the fateful turn into fixation, exploited by its own compelling mechanism long after its subject was gone.
It was quite a surprise after all this to find a group of pupils from St Narcissus on the upper floor, junior boys cross-legged in their capes and gaiters forming a semi-circle around the art master, a dynamic broad man built like a prop forward. I loitered on the further side of the room, looking with an adult eye at a row of tiny, almost invisible silverpoint drawings, but curious as a boy about the others and what they were being told. The master was explaining a set of landscapes: I heard how Orst had returned every year to the hamlet in the Ardennes where his childhood summers had been spent, and how he liked to escape from the studio and paint out in the forests and on the heathy uplands; how, in particular, he returned to a lonely woodland pond, which he had painted twenty or thirty times in different lights and at different seasons. I learned more about St Narcissus, too, than I had gleaned from the chants and odd emphatic phrases of lectures that crossed the back garden; I recognised the methodical presentation, the excessively clear light thrown on obscure subjects, the mixture of free speculation and arbitrary learning that make up a good old-fashioned education; I saw the reasonable self-satisfaction of the master and the concentration of the boys who were not afraid to speak their minds when questioned, and not broken by a reproof. And I thought of Luc out on this same lesson two or three years back, attentive but independent,
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