The Merciless Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page B

way. D’you think I’m prepared to let my own talent – if that’s what it is – do so now?’
    â€˜No’, I said, looking at him.
    â€˜No, indeed. I’ve seen people do that sort of thing before. Casting away the substance for the shadow. What’s the good of fame after you’re dead, if you live your life in poverty, and empty-minded, half-literate snobs are able to patronize you and get the best of everything?’
    â€˜The trouble is to decide which is substance and which is shadow’, I said cautiously.
    â€˜Nonsense. It’s perfectly plain. When I get to the top maybe I shall be able to please myself. People are like sheep. Once you get ahead of the flock the rest of the flock will follow.’
    â€˜I hope you’re right.’
    â€˜Anyway, I must earn my living. I’ve bled Father white and can’t expect more. I don’t want more. With luck I shall manage.’
    Soon after this I took a week’s holiday at Newton. Leo had been unable to follow Bertie into commerce and was still beating out his life on the piano. But, in spite of her severe words, Leo was his mother’s ewe lamb, and she had so far shaken herself out of her preoccupations with Greek, the violin and the latest vegetable seeds to take a long journey to see her brother Frederick and put Leo’s plight to him in her high-pitched fluty tones. The result was that Brother Frederick had come up to scratch and Leo was shortly coming up to London.
    Holly was away at school on this visit, but I saw a good deal of Bertie, who was still living at home and playing cricket for Berkshire. He had also developed an interest in Toc H. ‘Some sort of a secret society’, Mrs Lynn explained, a view to which she adhered in spite of all efforts to correct her.

Chapter Three
    If you turn to the Press reviews of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of the following year you will find some diversity of opinion over Paul Stafford’s second really important picture, the portrait which was to be probably the most discussed painting of the season.
    Pride White in the Observer , summing up the show, commented:
    â€˜Painted as this is by a young man only just twenty-three, Paul Stafford’s ‘‘Diana Marnsett’’ is a work which must make acritic of imagination anxious about the future. It offers, at least so far as portraiture goes, the uncanny spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career seems to have nothing more to learn.’
    Alfred Young in the Daily Telegraph did use the word ‘facile’, but on the whole the comments were favourable. As it happened, the Spectator had invited the French critic René Buerchel to review the exhibition for them, and he, after some half-hearted praise of Paul’s painting, went into a long discourse on the psychology of women who become ‘professional beauties’. He argued that Stafford had treated the portrait of Diana Marnsett in this light: he had not so much idealized Diana as depicted the idol which men saw and which women came to see in themselves.
    Paul became a name. Noel Coward – roughly the same age as Paul – wrote somewhere of living and having his being ‘in extreme poverty among wealthy friends’. This was exactly Paul’s position. Talked of, photographed, attender at first nights, guest at parties at Deauvilie and St Moritz, the money he made went on clothes and keeping up a front. He had moved to a small studio in Chelsea – not far from the Grasse School, with whose principal he was no longer on speaking terms – and there he sometimes held court, usually with Diana at his side.
    Yet he never lost touch with old friends, and whenever he could would contrive some benefit on their behalf. When Leo came to London to study at the Royal College of Music he invited him to a couple of his parties. Not that they had ever been entirely ‘simpatico’. Leo