A Distant Call
Paris 1936. As the shadows of war lengthen across Europe, an artist’s integrity is put on the line, and a marriage is tested to its breaking point. When a desperate plea from family pulls them into the heart of the Spanish Civil War, they must decide where their loyalties lie: to their art, to their country, or to each other. The powerful conclusion to the trilogy: The Eatons, which began with Wayward Daughter and Exiles in Paris.
1936
one Derek
Derek stood staring at the blank canvas. He put his hand to it, testing its tension. He turned it sideways. Selecting a large brush, he dipped it into the aqueous blue on his palette and drew it across the top of the block. Soon the practice of daily painting swept him along. It was to be a Seine scene, the islets beloved of the Impressionists, aglow in the soft morning light. It was subtle, subdued and very Parisian.
Minutes later he had turned it upside down in disgust. He was dabbling, prettifying. He had done a hundred such river scenes. He breathed deep, stood back, put his hand to the canvas again, making his fingertips sticky. A hundred churned out for Sam Goldman. An easy way to earn money, keep Mo in the silk stockings she’d grown used to. His stomach tightened, inducing a sensation of nausea. He stood further back. The composition was not bad, the background, mid-ground balanced, the foreground distinct, with enough diagonals to create interest. A punt was daubed in, a man in a boater…
He grimaced. It was all too pat. People were easy enough to please. Mostly they followed the crowd, going where others had dared before them, claiming it as their own. The abdominal tightness grew. This would not do. He had to leave the studio.
He took to the streets.
It was misty. He noted the muffled shapes dissolving and reappearing in the half-light of the dismal February morning. It reminded him of Victorian cemeteries at dawn, with gravestones ivy-grown and leaning all over the place. It reminded him of mist over fields on the trips he made to his sister’s place in the Cotswolds. He loved to lose himself in the vagueness of it, his collar up to shield from dampness, a cap rammed over his eyebrows. He became a student again, out to hunt the fleeting image. Leaving home, he had not intended this roaming around. But an old restlessness had taken hold of him, dragging him along.
As he crossed the Seine on Rue des Deux Ponts he glanced up at the bulk of Notre Dame as it swam in and out of view. Its bulk was a ship ploughing through a sea fret. Bastion to mediaeval Europe, to Abelard and Heloise, the edifice defied gravity and time: it remained an icon to the faith of the past, spirit etched in stone.
He sniffed.
A horse snorted on the bank, its hooves clip-clipping in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. The animal sound was reassuring, but through the haze seemed far away, fading into the hum of traffic. Samuel had become a friend, but as a businessman he was as shrewd as they come. Derek had just completed a series of street scenes: Les Halles, people emerging from L’Opéra, evening boulevards where people strolled and took aperitifs when it was warm enough, otherwise huffing and puffing around the chestnut-roasting street braziers. Samuel said the New Yorkers loved the images of the City of Light. Loved the romanticism of the artist’s life, its harking back to a more poetic era. Derek’s pictures reminded them of the dancers of Degas, the crowded bars and parks of Auguste Renoir. Cubism they were not so keen on. They wanted, at least those who could afford it, a little let-up from the grind of a struggling economy. The ease and speed with which Derek could produce these paintings made it simple to find regular buyers.
But how long could he keep it up for?
Little did they know how much Paris had changed and would continue to change. Or perhaps they knew full well but insisted on manufacturing a past to suit their whim. For him Paris had lost some, though not all, of its gaiety. Shadows of the glorious Twenties lingered on in some of the cafes but tarnished like a Music Hall singer plastering on paint to hide wrinkles. The edginess of political cabaret was creeping in. Some acts could not help but reflect what was occurring on the other side of the Rhine. The habitual haunts of intellectuals in the Latin quarter had been enlivened by an influx of German artists and writers, many of them Jewish, when Adolf Hitler grabbed power in 1933. Though it was a legally constituted government, everyone knew it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The stories coming out of Germany alarmed: not just the Jewish Boycott or the burning down of the Reichstag; it was more the unrelenting squeeze of the population towards uniformity, a growing intolerance of anything which questioned the onwards and upwards of National Socialism. Germany’s loss was France’s gain. The Jews and ideological refugees added gravitas and urgency to the flagging city. They brought with them a love of earnest debate and a thorough-going knowledge of Hegel and Marx.
In France, things were not so bright. The Great Depression in America had bitten deep here, too. Governments came and went, teetering on the brink of extinction even before they’d had half a chance to declare their programme. Workers were clamouring for a forty-hour week, a minimum wage. Leon Blum and the Popular Front promised them it was possible, desirable, even. But putting it into practice was something else. Derek saw a lot of poverty around him. Sadly, that had not changed. He saw less of the Russians he’d befriended years before. They had gone their own ways, melding into the background, earning commissions, patrons, and getting by as best they could.
He found a corner café where he could perch and observe his fellow man unnoticed. He ordered coffee and whatever pastries they had, and unfolded his pad. That night he would go to watch Mo perform; she said she was bringing new material. He’d left her sleeping. She slept long and deeply these days: tiredness from the pregnancy, he supposed. He wondered how much longer she would be able to keep up the regime of singing five days out of seven, with rehearsals and other run-throughs often thrown in at the last minute.
Two men were huddled by a lamppost, heads bent together as if in conspiracy, faces obscured by smoke from their cigarettes. He drew out a stick of charcoal from his pocket and scraped the page, capturing the broad lines of their leaning bodies, their heads almost one creature. He smudged the page. The legs were too long, the angle of incline too acute. He drew again alongside with a pencil, using the side of it to gain a lighter, indistinct impression. The men broke apart, laughed. One patted the other on the back. They departed, wisps from their cloud of smoke disappearing into the thick air. Derek watched the effect.
A waiter with a moustache and grubby shirtfront appeared with coffee and placed it in front of him. Derek nodded acknowledgement and noticed the man’s hair needed cutting. It curled, unbecomingly, over his collar. Lighting his first cigarette of the day Derek watched the man wander back to the kitchen. He had a slight limp, he noticed, and wondered whether he was one of the war-wounded. Many had ended up as waiters; that is, if they still had sound limbs. There was no way the man could be an immigrant. Most immigrants would give their eye-teeth to land a job in a café. Most counted themselves lucky if they sweated in bistro back kitchens as plongeurs.
He swilled the espresso and knocked it back in one. Though it might be counted as time wasting, he loved this aimless café-sitting and speculation about people around him. Later that morning he was due to meet Samuel. In his head he had already gone over the meeting. He wanted to tell him: enough of the nostalgia of Paris for New Yorkers; he was working up to something grander, bolder, more revolutionary. So far, he had not yet been able to bring himself to say it. Each time he was about to, he visualised Mo on the chaise longue in their apartment, stretched out in her silken peignoir; he recalled her sheer delight when the doctor confirmed the pregnancy. Now they had the means to start the family they had promised themselves, now they had the maturity to be capable parents. He pictured their former cramped rooms with the rickety balcony and surly landlord, mice in the skirting and leaks in the roof. They had been happy enough there, a fair start in Paris. But they had moved on.
What she made from her gigs in La Scheherazade could never cover their current costs, so his desire for integrity as an artist edged into the shadowland of the near future, the just-round-the-corner possibility. He ordered another coffee. Felt the caffeine rush.
There was always the Klimt, of course. Mo had inherited a small Gustav Klimt painting from her father, who had lived and worked as a musician in Vienna. They had agreed to hang on to it. She wanted that connection with the late Sandor Olmak: musician, Hungarian Jew, mystery man. And Derek was not inclined to argue with her about it, far less to insist she sell it for the sake of his career. He stirred the coffee, sipped it, enjoying the acrid taste. The sun was beginning to break through: dispersing the morning moisture. A man in a trilby approached him for a light. Derek obliged. He looked somehow familiar. Was he one of the artists at La Ruche?
‘Derek Eaton isn’t it?’ said the other in English with a hint of a German accent. ‘I’ve been watching you. When I saw you sketching, I was sure I was right.’
Derek nodded, turned back to his pad.
‘My name is Hermann Gieselman. You will not have heard of me. I come from Vienna.’ The man had lifted his hat to reveal a tuft of sandy hair, thinning on top. He bowed his head slightly. He had a thin face with a strong jaw. He reminded Derek of a fairground worker.
‘May I sit here?’
Rattled at the intrusion, Derek nevertheless motioned for him to sit down. The man held out his hand and Derek shook it. Gieselman looked over his shoulder.
‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Derek and pushed his pad to one side, sensing the man was not about to go away.
‘A glass of house red,’ answered the other without hesitation, then added. ‘May I see your sketchbook?’
Derek gave a quick laugh. ‘Nothing worth seeing, I’m afraid.’
‘I am always interested in what other artists are getting up to. Part of our trade I guess.’
‘So, you’re an artist then?’
Gieselman shrugged, took a gulp of the red wine which had just arrived.
‘And you’re from Vienna, you say? There’s been a lot of change there in recent years.’
‘You could say.’
‘How long ago did you leave?’
Gieselman sighed. ‘A few years ago.’ He sipped his wine. ‘It’s not what it was. Before the war, I mean. Before everything broke up. The Social Democrats got in and tried to change things. Built apartments, widened streets, put in lighting and all that. But well, a city is more than buildings, isn’t it?’
All the time he was talking Derek was beginning to wonder just what the man wanted, he caught a whiff of desperation in him.
‘May I?’ Gieselman had seized hold of the sketch book and was leafing through it.
‘It’s nothing much. Preliminary scrawls.’ Derek suppressed the urge to wrest back the book. The keen eye of the other seemed to be seeing things of which Derek was unaware. ‘I was just out and about. I like this strange light. It hides and reveals things all at once.’ He looked around. ‘Now it’s gone. Just common daylight.’
Hermann Gieselman continued studying Derek’s marks. ‘It all begins with drawing.’
‘So they say.’ Derek paused. ‘Your studio is in La Ruche, I take it?’
Gieselman shrugged as if it were of no consequence.
‘You’re lucky to get in there,’ said Derek. ‘I couldn’t when I first arrived. It’s good to be around others doing …’
‘Other crazies you mean?’
Derek laughed. ‘It sometimes feels like that. What sort of stuff do you do?’
Gieselman stretched out his legs and sipped his wine. ‘My father was a Secessionist. On the periphery, but he knew Gustav Klimt and was heavily influenced by him.’
‘Is that so?’ Derek leaned forward, interest aroused. ‘What about you? Are you in the same mould?’
‘Things have moved on, haven’t they? That was a long time ago, culturally speaking. I like to defy categorisation. But that’s just vanity. An art critic would put me somewhere. Just to make me safe.’
‘Your face is familiar,’ said Derek. ‘But I can’t recall seeing your work. You exhibit, do you?’
‘Only when I’m short of cash.’
Derek leaned back, studied the heavy jaw and tight mouth of the other, trying to decide if there was something unhinged about him.
‘I don’t give a fig what anybody thinks about what I do,’ said Gieselman.
‘Is that so?’
‘What good artist was ever recognised in his own lifetime?’ There was a defensive smugness about the man, which was beginning to grate. Derek suspected he was nothing more than a freeloader. ‘One of the other artists mentioned you had a special interest in Viennese painters, especially Klimt,’ the man added and looked across with sudden sharpness.
‘Who was that then?’ Very few people knew that he and Mo were in possession of a Klimt painting.
‘I’m like a journalist,’ said Gieselman glibly. ‘I never reveal sources.’
There was no good reason to be secretive about the Klimt Attersee picture. It was currently in storage, for safe keeping. They had had it up on the wall of their apartment until Samuel warned them that word would get out. Klimt’s paintings were rising in value. It might prove just too much of a temptation for some hungry artist or enterprising cat burglar. They had a concierge and lived on the second floor, but they were often away at weekends. Theirs was a quiet street and an athletic burglar could shin up via the balconies and break in without too much effort. Better to be on the safe side.
‘My wife’s father was from Vienna. He was a musician. But he left a long time ago. She’s been there a couple of times.’ He paused. ‘You chose to leave, I take it?’
‘I wasn’t driven out at gunpoint if that’s what you mean. I left when the atmosphere no longer pleased me.’
Hermann had emptied his glass and was looking over his shoulder to attract the attention of the waiter. Derek was intrigued by the man, wondered what he was not saying. It was no surprise that he would pitch up in Paris; after all, the city attracted all sorts. But there was a guardedness about Gieselman that led Derek to believe that the man had stories to tell.
‘Would you like another?’ He gestured towards the empty glass.
‘I wouldn’t say no.’ It was early in the day to be knocking back vin ordinaire, especially without food. The man watched the waiter weaving among the tables and waved the glass in the air. ‘Encore, encore,’ he said louder than he should have, drawing stares.
‘I’d like to see your work,’ said Derek slowly. ‘I hear there were huge shortages in Vienna after the war. No coal, little meat, copper, lead being stolen. Hunger. People getting desperate. To live through all that – must have been – hard after being the hub of a great empire.’
‘Du hast keine Ahnung.’ Gieselman was suddenly far away. ‘Yes, you are right. You can’t imagine. I was just a child. My father killed in the war. My mother moved out to the Salzkammergut. She had a sister there, married to a farmer. At least we got to eat.’
The waiter brought a carafe of wine and another glass. Derek ordered bread and pâté. Gieselman tore into the bread when it arrived. ‘I find I’m accepted here,’ he said quietly. ‘A chance to get on with my work.’
‘Are there a few of you from Vienna in La Ruche? I’ve been busy one way or another. Not socialised much. And we make trips to and from London. My wife’s family runs a public house. Time just flies by…’ He found himself saying more than he intended, unnerved by the desperation he sensed lurking in Gieselman.
‘There are a few of us. Not many at La Ruche, but in the area.’
‘I’d like to see your work. Call round to your studio…’
Gieselman frowned. ‘I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m working. Better I come to you. I know where your studio is.’ He tore off another chunk of bread and smeared it with pâté.
‘Of course.’ Derek looked around, suppressing irritation at the man’s evasiveness. ‘It’s clearing up. I’d better get on. A lot of things to sort out today.’
Gieselman stared at him. ‘You were one of the original ones, they said. One who stuck to his own ideas. But you’ve grown cautious. They say you got tamed. Can’t face your own darkness. An apartment in Rue du Bac. An American agent. Exhibitions here there and everywhere. Making a name for yourself…’
Derek stared at Gieselman whose tongue, loosened with wine, was spouting without constraint. He could only stare. Who was this man? How had he materialised this misty February day to mirror his failings.
‘You seem very interested in what I might or might not be doing,’ he said coolly.
Gieselman shrugged. ‘No offense. But I had you down as one of the – I’m not looking for a leader or mentor, but I noticed your work before. Now I don’t feel pulled in the same way.’
Gieselman got up and as suddenly as he had appeared, moved away. The restlessness that had been dogging Derek for weeks sharpened into clarity. It was time for change.