I looked up again at the dark billows hanging like shrouds above the white villa. ‘Clouds, Beatrice? Those are tigers, tigers with wings. We’re manicurists of the air, not dragon-tamers.’
‘Don’t worry, a manicure is exactly what you’re expected to carry out.’ With an arch glance, she added: ‘Your men do understand that there’s to be only one subject?’
‘Miss Chanel herself? Of course.’ I took her arm as we walked towards the balcony overlooking the lake. ‘You know, I think you enjoy these snide asides. Let the rich choose their materials — marble, bronze, plasma or cloud. Why not? Portraiture has always been a neglected art.’
‘My God, not here.’ She waited until a steward passed with a tray of tablecloths. ‘Carving one’s portrait in the sky out of the sun and air some people might say that smacked of vanity, or even worse sins.’
‘You’re very mysterious. Such as?’
She played games with her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you in a month’s time when my contract expires. Now, when are your men coming?’
‘They’re here.’ I pointed to the sky over the lake. The three gliders hung in the overheated air, clumps of cloud-cotton drifting past them to dissolve in the haze. They were following a sand-yacht that approached the quay, its tyres throwing up the cerise dust. Behind the helmsman sat Leonora Chanel in a trouser suit of yellow alligator skin, her white hair hidden inside a black raffia toque.
As the helmsman moored the craft Van Eyck and Petit Manuel put on an impromptu performance, shaping the fragments of cloud-cotton a hundred feet above the lake. First Van Eyck carved an orchid, then a heart and a pair of lips, while Manuel fashioned the head of a parakeet, two identical mice and the letters ‘L. C.’ As they dived and plunged around her, their wings sometimes touching the lake, Leonora stood on the quay, politely waving at each of these brief confections.
When they landed beside the quay, Leonora waited for Nolan to take one of the clouds, but he was sailing up and down the lake in front of her like a weary bird. Watching this strange chatelaine of Lagoon West, I noticed that she had slipped off into some private reverie, her gaze fixed on Nolan and oblivious of the people around her. Memories, caravels without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burnt-out eyes.
Later that evening Beatrice Lafferty led me into the villa through the library window. There, as Leonora greeted her guests on the terrace, wearing a topless dress of sapphires and organdy, her breasts covered only by their contour jewellery. I saw the portraits that filled the villa. I counted more than twenty, from the formal society portraits in the drawing rooms, one by the President of the Royal Academy, another by Annigoni, to the bizarre psychological studies in the bar and dining room by Dali and Francis Bacon. Everywhere we moved, in the alcoves between the marble semi-columns, in gilt miniatures on the mantelshelves, even in the ascending mural that followed the staircase, we saw the same beautiful self-regarding face. This colossal narcissism seemed to have become her last refuge, the only retreat for her fugitive self in its flight from the world.
Then, in the studio on the roof, we came across a large easel portrait that had just been varnished. The artist had produced a deliberate travesty of the sentimental and powder-blue tints of a fashionable society painter, but beneath this gloss he had visualized Leonora as a dead Medea. The stretched skin below her right cheek, the sharp forehead and slipped mouth gave her the numbed and luminous appearance of a corpse.
My eyes moved to the signature. ‘Nolan! My God, were you here when he painted this?’
‘It was finished before I came — two months ago. She refused to have it framed.’
‘No wonder.’ I went over to the window and looked down at the bedrooms hidden behind their awnings. ‘Nolan was here. The old studio near Coral D was his.’
‘But why should Leonora ask him back? They must have—’
‘To paint her portrait again. I know Leonora Chanel better than you do, Beatrice. This time, though, the size of the sky.’
We left the library and walked past the cocktails and canapes to where Leonora was welcoming her guests. Nolan stood beside her, wearing a suit of white suede. Now and then he looked down at her as if playing with the possibilities this self-obsessed woman gave to his macabre humour. Leonora clutched at his elbow. With the diamonds fixed around her eyes she reminded me of some archaic priestess. Beneath the contour jewellery her breasts lay like eager snakes.
Van Eyck introduced himself with an exaggerated bow. Behind him came Petit Manuel, his twisted head ducking nervously among the tuxedos.
Leonora’s mouth shut in a rictus of distaste. She glanced at the white plaster on my foot. ‘Nolan, you fill your world with cripples. Your little dwarf — will he fly too?’
Petit Manuel looked at her with eyes like crushed flowers.
