Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Then came the morning painting lesson. We were amateurs but keen, and the lessons were made for us. Susannah Fiennes is all sensibility delivered in a voice of sense; she sees the world with a precise but passionate eye. Her one-woman show at the National Portrait Gallery in London was praised for both its expressive accuracy and its austere poignancy. Looking herself like a Gainsborough—her face a perfect English pink, her clothes fluttering in the wind, a large straw hat held on with a frayed white satin ribbon—she would teach us the vocabulary of primary colors and their opposites, of suffused and diluted tones, of rich washes and negative space. “Saturated color is freedom from gray,” she would say as she set us up with our palettes and watercolor paper. Her voice would lift as she directed us toward all the forms and tones that are hidden along the coast of Lycia (an ancient region in southwest Turkey) and in its monuments. She could be forceful.

“Did Charles ask you for advice when you were painting together?” one of us asked Susannah, who has, at royal invitation, accompanied the Prince of Wales to paint during his state visits.

“No,” she said, “but he got some anyway.”

Sometimes she read aloud from a book about color theory, or from Cézanne’s letters. She would instruct, “Painting must analyze the natural world and still be subjective.” All of us, under her tutelage, learned to see anew. “Look at the beauty of that shape,” she’d say, “where the sky is between those two peaks.” She once exclaimed, “Look at that! It’s not really a nose at all; it’s the most remarkable broken triangle of light!”—which rather alarmed the bashful cook, who until then had been sure it was a nose: his rather comely one.

Then we would go ashore to see some historic place or pull into a bay to swim in water so transparent you could scarcely tell it from the light (but it was a bit more alizarin, Susannah would explain). We breathed in sharply when diving from the height of the deck because we were always overwhelmed at first by the deepness of that sea; but then suddenly we would find that it was not overwhelming at all, and we would swim past one another or tread water holding hands or splash up onto some deserted beach or bit of rock or play at being sea monsters. One of the women had a pink bikini that she had bought in Saint-Tropez, and though the rest of us had nothing of the kind, we all felt equal in the common, salty, clear element. You could swim once around the boat, or you could swim a mile to an inviting rock. It was delicious: so sweet and so cold.

We were usually damp when we sat down to lunch. We noted the color contrasts of the salad and drank the local wine; sometimes the women put flowers in their hair, and we told one another our best stories, our intimacy quick and authentic. Perhaps this can happen only when you are in Lycia and the weather is fine, the youngest of you is only twenty-four and the eldest over eighty, each of the mahogany-paneled cabins has its own shower and bathroom, the boat is eighty-five feet long and has blue sail covers, and a red Turkish flag the size of a carpet flies at the stern. It is most likely to happen when the cost of going hasn’t been high, and two classicists and a painter are with you at all times. It happens when you have all taken off your watches and do not put them on again for eight days. It happens when most of you have read too much Evelyn Waugh, have pondered but never fully understood both Aeschylus and Matisse, and can identify immediately most episodes of Absolutely Fabulous.

“Listen! What is that? I think it’s the bird we were talking about yesterday, that rare Anatolian eagle,” said someone.

We were all silent for a moment.

“That’s Venetia’s alarm clock,” someone else said.

And so it was, that time, but overhead birds were flying and crying as though they, too, thought the simple fact of this day and this light warranted celebration.