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point in the conversation, in fact just before he planted his lips on her forehead, she had put her hand on his for several seconds, and that was it. It was as simple as that. I knew it had more to do with the loud, slutty aspect of the woman, and the fact that she painted as he wanted to paint, but I also realized that no matter how tarty her clothes, no matter if they reeked of cheap scent, when Vera Savage was aroused, which was often, for she contrived arousal with alcohol, she seemed to possess a life-force to which men were irresistibly attracted. Jack was no exception, in fact he responded with immediate enthusiasm to her vitality, in particular to her louche talk and her expressive, tactile behaviour.
    We talked soberly, the three of us, in the pub that day. She was wearing the same old cocktail dress from the night before, but she had scrubbed off her makeup and looked much younger, almost girlish in fact, her skin so pale you could have traced the faint blue veins beneath. Also, the Glasgow accent was much less broad, clearly she modulated it to suit the occasion. We talked about painting and I was astonished to discover, in the clarity of daylight, and herself at ease, and not in front of an audience, that she was without dogma, she was without conviction of any sort at all. We spent an hour together, and as I remember it now Jack bombarded her with questions which to her ears must have sounded laughably naÏve, for he held to his ideas with no little intensity, believing with all the ardour of his youth that art had to be cleansed of the corrupting influences of the past, though quite what those influences were I cannot now recall. But to all his impassioned certainties she responded with mild shrugs and worried frowns, and discovered exceptions to every broad, sweeping law he proposed, and seemed uncomfortable with anything that smacked of theory or abstraction. Finally she apologized—I’m awful sorry, Jack—and laid a hand on his arm and said she supposed she was a practical sort of an artist, and if a thing worked, it worked—she supposed he must think her very stupid—?
    That stopped him in his tracks. That shut him down all right. That with his flood of talk he should elicit from Vera Savage an apology for her own stupidity—in that moment I think he jettisoned every idea he had about painting and started again with a clean slate, for he was young enough then that such a shift was possible. Personally I considered it not unikely that she
was
very stupid, but at least we now understood why, in her lecture the evening before, she had resisted generalization, and had worked her way back to certain painters, Kandinsky in particular, and what she had learned from each of them.
    This was as far as we got that day. Almost as an afterthought, as she rose from the table, she said she was going to a party later, would we like to come? Yes, we would; and I scribbled the address on the back of a beer mat.
    We had fetched up in a small house in a shabby street in Camden Town. We had found Vera in a smoky kitchen surrounded by a group of men, and the serious thoughtful woman of the morning was gone. This was Vera out on the town, with her face painted, and more than a few drinks in her, and she was telling them loudly that it was all over with Europe, that the war had done for Europe, that the future of art was not in Paris—certainly not in London—no, it was in
New York.
The men groaned and sneered, but all the same it was an impressive spectacle: there she stood, or swayed, rather, a fake-leopardskin coat draped about her shoulders and a glass in her hand, shouting that she was sick of the English and their hypocrite ways, at least with Americans you knew where you stood, and some wag, a poet called Julian, I think, said that if she knew where she stood how come she fell down so much? There was loud laughter at this, hoots of it. I was exhilarated by the whole scene and thought Jack would be too, but oddly he