The Fatal Englishman Read Online Free PDF Page A

wooden seats in the opera house uncomfortable because they had grown so thin), Leipzig and Nuremburg, then known only as the birthplace of Dürer.
    At the end of November Wood met his mother for a few days in London and introduced her to Tony Gandarillas. Clare Wood was a good-looking woman who appeared at least ten years younger than she was; nevertheless she was a provincial doctor’s wife whose chief concerns, as she expressed them, were curtain fabrics and the shortage of domestic help. Gandarillas was one of the most worldly men in Europe. The meeting, however, lubricated by his charm and their common dedication to her son, was a great success. It was followed by a further cordial exchange of letters.
    In London Wood also saw Augustus John, whom he continued to admire, believing him to be ‘very refined and a gentleman to his finger tips’. Back in Paris he effectively moved in with Gandarillas in the Avenue Montaigne, though there was some pretence that he lived in a small hotel nearby. They had been through the wonders of Taormina and the trials of Smyrna together; whatever might happen to their sexual feelings, they were now bound close in affection and friendship. On 28December they went to the evening service at the classical church of Saint Sulpice, the ‘cathedral’ of the aristocratic Faubourg St Germain. It had been a tumultuous year.
    In the new year, 1923, the contrast between Wood’s work and his social life became more marked. By day he attended classes or toiled in his studio, worrying about the price of paint and canvas. At night he moved with such people as Luisa, the Marchesa di Casati. She owned the Palais Rose in Neuilly, formerly the property of the exquisite Robert de Montesquiou, who had served as Proust’s model for the Baron de Charlus. Her dining room was hung with black velvet, and at one end was a plate-glass partition behind which a boa-constrictor was fed with live animals during dinner. She also owned an eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, which was later sold to Peggy Guggenheim. It was here that she gave a ball at which Nijinsky danced with Isadora Duncan – supremely to her satisfaction: ‘It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer’s billiard table.’
    Luisa Casati had red hair and red eyes, which she concealed behind a veil. She was the friend of another fantastic character, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian poet-aviator who had taken the Adriatic port of Fiume by force and turned it into an independent republic. By this time, however, D’Annunzio was on the way to becoming a kind of proto-Fascist. Wood knew nothing of Fiume, which became Rijeka, part of Serbia, and cared less. He liked his new friends more than the old ones and that was all that mattered to him.
    He had also understood something that escaped puritanical critics of the Parisian social circus. Many of the most colourful figures of the beau monde had good taste and the money with which to back it. Gandarillas’s aunt, Eugenia Errazuriz, for instance, was a figure almost as exotic as Luisa Casati, but the two people she had chosen to finance in their struggling days were Picasso and Stravinsky, for whom she had bought a piano. Mme Errazuriz’s decorative taste was for simplicity – scrubbed tiles, whitewash – and was said by Cecil Beaton to have defined ‘the whole aesthetic of modern interior decoration’. Paris was notsusceptible to easy distinctions between the vulgar and the valuable because the two were often co-existent.
    In February Gandarillas’s wife paid a visit to Paris and he chose that moment to absent himself. The doctors who had been treating Wood for the after-effects of malaria recommended a change of climate, so the two headed south. In Rome they visited Luisa Casati in her marble house whose upstairs gallery contained more than 100 portraits of her by contemporary painters, including Picasso, Boldini and Augustus John. Wood was overcome