Pascali's Island

Mister Bowles has lost the world too, by courses which I can only guess at. He has lost, or perhaps he never had, essential familiarity with things, ease, custom. So of course he simulates, but badly, and this gives him a strange sort of dignity, power even, he imposes himself. Like a critical visitor. Or like a god, a minor god. A god would not, after all, move at ease among the inhabitants and artefacts of this world. He would be characterised by just this kind of hampered grace.

Lydia came back with the wine, in tall glasses. I sipped mine, still absorbed in my pure perception of Mister Bowles. He was standing with Lydia now. She was showing him the painting on the easel. They were close together, and had obviously ceased to be aware of me. I went through into the living-room, where I had earlier noticed some grapes in a bowl on the sideboard. A handful of these I took to the window, and I stood there eating, looking out.

From here I could look inland, over the double row of acacia trees lining the avenue, to the white climbing houses of the town and the summits of Maron and Amphissa. Leros beyond, far off, but glowing clear in the morning light. The town, the whole island, was present to my mind, held in the protracted pang of its existence. For a few moments, standing there, my heart expanded with happiness. The cold wine, the sweet grapes, the indifferent beauty of the world, my recent apercue about Mister Bowles, all combined to reconcile me. My clammy fears receded. I felt tenderness for those two standing together in the next room. More than tenderness. Love, Excellency. Love for them severally and together. And for all the people on the island, whatever the race or creed. As I finished the grapes there were tears in my eyes. I found a small piece of halva on the sideboard and paused briefly at the door to eat it, before returning to the studio.

'You have captured,' I heard Mister Bowles saying gravely, 'the very essence of the landscape there.'

They were still standing before Lydia 's painting. I approached and looked closely at it again: white houses on the lower hillside, the Byzantine dome of Aghios Giorgos, cloaked shepherds, goats; the whole bathed in calmly radiant light.

'Yes, by Jove, you have caught it,' Mister Bowles said, and it was true. Lydia had secured the landscape as effectively as if in some invisible noose. Or net. As always she had been faithful to the form and substance of things. As always she had failed to register what for me is the essence: the effects of a light so clear that it verges on the hallucinatory, cancelling those very perspectives that Lydia works so hard to achieve; the constant, half-surprised, half-acquiescent stirring of landscape and people into myth.

'I must confess,' Mister Bowles said, 'that I like paintings that grapple squarely with reality. Not try to dodge it, you know.'

Lydia did not reply at once. She is not, after all, accustomed to talking about painting in terms of a wrestling match or a scrummage on the rugby field. Again I have the feeling that the Englishman's words belie him in some way. Is he simply a moralist, or does this praise of robust realism mask a sensibility he feels to be discreditable, unmanly?

'Well,' Lydia said, 'I believe myself that art should stay close to nature. That is the source of everything. These people in Paris now, Matisse and the Fauves, you know, they are causing quite a stir at the moment, but it is only a succès de scandale, it will fizzle out.'

'I am not familiar with them,' Mister Bowles said.

'Colour for colour's sake,' Lydia said. 'You can't found a movement on that.'

Mister Bowles nodded. His face expressed disapproval of these undisciplined Parisians. 'Balance,' he said. 'Self-control. I have always understood these things to be fundamental. They are the classical virtues.'

'Of course,' Lydia said, 'mere imitation is not… You must try to seize the essential nature of things, but the way is through attention to what is there, what is out there.' She made a gesture towards the window.

Have you noticed, Excellency? Capture. Catch. Grapple. Seize. It is astonishing. Neither of them can talk about art for two minutes without using some such word. Odd, in extolling the classical virtues of balance and moderation, and opposing the exuberance of the colourists, odd that they should themselves use such frankly violent terms, words denoting assault and ravishment. I deal in reality myself, Excellency. Reality and illusion, their intimate blending. I have not attempted to disguise from Your Excellency that my reports have not been entirely factual. But my effects are patiently and lovingly contrived – not imposed. To talk about truth as something that can be marched up to and arrested seems solemnly mad to me. Like one of your gendarmes trying to take Proteus into custody. You are left with something in your hands but not what you wanted. Lydia grasps her subjects too firmly, nothing has freedom, there is no potential for movement or change. The spectator also is immobilised.

The violent apprehension of reality… We were still standing in front of the painting. Light flooded over us and over the room, evenly, impartially. Light filled my mind, drained, filled. The painting before me, a tract of land, an area of the mind, experience 'seized' for ever, no possibility of change; Mister Bowles, immobilised at last in this room of disturbing multiplicity, himself another objet trouvé; myself transfixed among unreadable signs and portents; and Lydia, Circe with the wand of her will, capturing our essences, stilling us for ever in these arbitrary shapes. Homeric shadows touched my mind. As before I felt the need to break out, assert autonomy of movement, speech. I said, 'You do not heighten reality by idealising it, Lydia, if that is what you mean. And I suspect it is. It is idealisation that does violence, not experiment, because it consumes its subject. It is dangerous in all departments. In love, in art, in politics. Conscious distortion is better.'

'You mean telling lies,' Mister Bowles said instantly. The man is a pure Manichean. He sees everything in terms of moral opposites. Every conversation with him leads to head-on confrontations between darkness and light, good and evil.

Telling lies?' I said. 'No.' Though half-smiling still, I felt myself becoming angry. 'How have you arrived at this confident knowledge of what is lies and what is truth? I envy it.'

'Kandinsky says colour will express everything,' Lydia said. 'How do we know what colours are expressing?'

'Exactly,' Mister Bowles said. 'I mean to say, we know what a hay-wain is, don't we?'

'I think Expressionism is dangerous,' Lydia said. 'I think it is a retrograde step. It simply encourages the irrational.'

It was now that feeling betrayed me into indiscretion. I freely admit it, Excellency. The fact is that in all this talk of respect for reality, I began to smell again the swamp steam of your Empire, began to feel again that horror of immobility. 'Not so dangerous,' I said, 'as trying to petrify things, even if you do it out of love. Not so violent as the means we use to contain the irrational, as you call it. Your paintings are violent, Lydia.'

As soon as I had said this, I regretted it. I could see from Lydia 's face that she was hurt – the severity of its repose once broken, her face has no guard against feeling. Besides this, I was weakening, faltering. My poor burst of fervour was over.

'That is absolute poppycock,' Mister Bowles said. 'Anyone with half an eye -'

Fortunately, at this point there was a brisk double-knock on the living-room door. Lydia left us and returned a moment later with Doctor Hogan. He had an arm over her shoulder. 'Hello, Basil my boy,' he said, in his breezy way. 'How's the old stomachi?'

'Fine,' I said. 'As an organ that is, not as an object of view.' Some months ago I had persistent stomach pains, quite disabling. I thought at first they were due to dietary deficiencies consequent upon my poverty, but they turned out to be neurasthenic, the result of long hours of creative tension at my table here. The doctor provided me with a sedative syrup and I have been quite free of the pains since then.