The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks

what he always did when he was confused: first he wrote sentimentally to his mother, then he went to join Tony Gandarillas.
    This meant going to Marseille, where Gandarillas was looking after Rene Crevel, an old hand from the Hotel Welcome, who was suffering from tuberculosis. He had been on the point of leaving for Egypt, but had been too ill to travel and had almost died in the hotel. Wood and Gandarillas spent an anxious ten days while Crevel’s condition gradually improved. In intervals from nursing, Wood painted in Marseille. He did some landscapes, some flower paintings and two self-portraits. He wanted to work at his waterfront hotel, but it was too busy. He vowed to return one day because he liked the traffic of the port: ‘All the bustle of this great place makes one want to do some very ugly pictures,’ he told Winifred Nicholson. ‘I see everything ugly here. The women with hideous faces and bodies, enormous legs and fat arms, holding pig-like babies, the men who slouch round are the worst dregs … I only like ugly things now, as what I thought beautiful before, it does not last… I shall never many anything but a hideous wife if ever I do this foolish thing. I have forgotten almost about my lovely lady of Cannes this summer.’
    As Crevel’s health improved, Gandarillas and Wood took him up to the village of Vence in the hills behind Nice, where the air was reputed to be good for the lungs. Wood’s instinctive reaction when in trouble – to go and find Gandarillas – paid dividends in an unexpected way: in his painting. He was pleased with Vence. He painted pictures in dark colours, experimenting with shades of black. His mood of petulant post-Meraud gloom may have been a facile starting point for this new darker colouring, but he developed it into a subtle and important way of giving depth and doubt to his mature paintings.
    Wood stayed with Crevel until December when he went backto join Gandarillas in Paris. Gandarillas had been diagnosed as having consumption and had experienced a minor haemorrhage in Vence. Wood was upset by the news but thought it would give him the chance to show his devotion by nursing Gandarillas in some remote mountain sanatorium. But the illness, whether TB or not, neither developed nor prevented Gandarillas from resuming his old ways, beginning with a New Year’s Eve party in Berlin.
    At Christmas Wood wrote to his mother: ‘Daddy talks of my not sticking to my arrangements. I never make any on purpose but I don’t think he need worry about my place in the world, I think that will be all right.’ The ambitious optimism recalled Keats’s more well-founded claim, made at an even younger age: ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.’ Wood resembled Keats in many ways: in the desire to live a life of sensation rather than of thought, the almost reckless devotion to work, the spasmodic development that came swiftly from the ruins of temporary failure, and in the boyish eagerness that felt weighed down by admiration of past achievement but quickened by its appreciation of the modem.
    As far as his ‘arrangements’ were concerned, Dr Wood’s captious view was vindicated in the most spectacular way a few days later when Kit announced that he and Meraud Guinness were about to elope.
    Meraud arrived in Paris in preparation for leaving the country and marrying abroad, since no ceremony could take place in France without her parents’ consent. There was one small piece of grit in this plan: Meraud had left her passport behind. Wood was not upset by such a minor administrative detail. He was happy and exhilarated beyond anything he could recall. The long months of separation, thinking that she didn’t care; the dull weeks nursing Rene Crevel and painting with a black palette … all could be forgotten now, because it was Meraud that he loved, and had done all along, ever since he had first seen her almost four years ago. Meraud’s father was furious, but