Engineman - Eric Brown [210]
This was my first stay at Sapphire Oasis, and I was still somewhat out of my depth. I feared being seen as an artist of little originality, who had gained admittance to the exclusive colony through the patronage of the celebrated Primitivist, Ralph Standish. I did not want to be known as an imitator - though admittedly my early work did show his influence - a novice riding on the coat-tails of genius.
I sat next to the white-haired, leonine figure of Standish, one of the last of the old romantics. As if to dissociate himself totally from the Modernists, he affected the aspect of a Bohemian artist of old. He wore a shirt splashed with oils, though he rarely worked in that medium, and the beret by which he was known.
Seated across from him was Perry Bartholomew.
The Modernist - he struck me more as a businessman than an artist - was suave in an impeccably cut grey suit. He lounged in his seat and twirled the stem of his wine glass. He seemed always to wear an expression of rather superior amusement, as if he found everything that everyone said fallacious but not worth his effort to correct.
I had lost interest in the conversation - two critics were airing their views on the forthcoming contest. I turned my attention to the spectacular oval, perhaps a kilometre in length, formed by the illuminated domes. I was wondering whether I might slip away unnoticed, before Ralph and Bartholomew began their inevitable sniping, when for the first time that night the latter spoke up.
He cleared his throat, and this seemed to be taken by all present as a signal for silence. "In my experience," Bartholomew said, "contests and competitions to ascertain the merit of works of art can never be successful. Great art cannot be judged by consensus. Are you submitting anything, Standish?"
Ralph looked up, surprised that Bartholomew was addressing him. He suppressed a belch and stared into his tumbler of whisky. "I can't. I'm ineligible. I'm on the contest's organising committee."
"Ah..." Bartholomew said. "So you are responsible?" His eyes twinkled.
Ralph appeared irritated. "The Sapphire Oasis Summer Contest is a long-standing event, Perry. I see nothing wrong in friendly competition. The publicity will help everyone. Anyway, if you're so against the idea, why have you submitted a piece?"
The crowd around the table, swelled now by a party that had drifted up from the lawns below, watched the two men with the hushed anticipation of spectators at a duel.
"Why not?" Bartholomew asked. "Although I disagree in principle with the idea of the contest, I see no reason why I should not benefit by winning it."
Ralph laughed. "Your optimism amazes me, sir."
Bartholomew inclined his head in gracious acknowledgement.
The resident physician, a man called Roberts, asked the artist if he would be willing to discuss his latest creation.
"By all means," Bartholomew said. "It is perhaps my finest accomplishment, and has also the distinction of being totally original in form." Just when he was becoming interesting, if pompous, he damned himself by continuing, "It should make me millions - which might just satisfy the demands of my wife."
There was a round of polite laughter.
Ralph exchanged a glance with me and shook his head, despairing.
Perry Bartholomew's separation from his wife, also an artist of international repute, had made big news a couple of years ago. Their ten year marriage had been a constant feature in the gossip columns, fraught as it was with acrimony and recriminations before the final split. He had, it was reported, taken it badly - even an arch-cynic like Bartholomew had a heart which could be hurt - unless it was his ego that had suffered. For a year he had lived as a recluse, emerging only when he moved to the Oasis for an extended period of work.
Tonight Bartholomew looked far from well. He was a handsome man in his early fifties, with a tanned face and dark hair greying fashionably