MORNING SERIAL

IF I had ever thought Francis had given up painting, I had been wrong. He had left Britain, left St Martin’s, concerned about his finances. I remember he had said to me that his retirement could be in jeopardy, but that he was determined to see out life as a victor. Too many of his contemporaries had sparked in the midpoint and fizzled out to destitution by the end, and he refused to go the same way. What brought him to Cyprus? The Mediterranean retirement was always his romantic vision of his final years, painting his latephase masterpieces overlooking a glass-blue cove. It seems it had not been far from the truth.

The studio was not simply a workspace, it was Francis Benthem’s home. The building was two storeys, a circular tower with several balconies looking out to east and west – over the man-made wood, and back over toward the house. The tower was really one room, the ground floor studio with a mezzanine that housed Francis’s bed and shower facilities. At the doorway I knew it was immediately Francis’s place – his fingerprints were everywhere, in the form of shredded newspapers, paintsmeared jam jars spouting threadbare brushes, slashed canvases, the tools for canvasmounting, and pinboards decking the walls covered in cuttings from Cypriot and English newspapers. This was how Francis had always worked, how he had always nested. It was as if he was still there. I could smell his smell.

Afterwards it occurred to me that Prostakov had given me a moment to come to terms with the atmosphere of the room – it wasn’t so much that I felt emotional, which I did, but rather that these were long-distant sentiments, long-forgotten details of a past friendship that had become, in my mind, broad and dense. Francis used to say that a painting offers an electronic impulse of a vision, and that is what he had become to me, a story that would jolt me from afar.

“So, everything in here is belonging to Francis,” Porstakov said. “And he says in his will that seeing as he has no children and his wife died many years ago that he wanted you to have claim.”

> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Part hi anwww. part hi an books. com

CONTINUES TOMORROW