The Last Crossing

CHARLES GAUNT
I let myself into the house, stand looking up the stairs, turn, go into the study, pour a whisky and soda. Today’s mail is waiting, envelopes on a salver. My man, Harding, has laid a fire, but I don’t trouble to light it. I leave my ulster on, stand sipping from the tumbler with a gloved hand, staring at the day’s letters.

I know what they are. Invitations. Invitations for a weekend in the country. Invitations to dine. More invitations than I am accustomed to receiving. Now people court me. Queer old Charlie Gaunt has become a minor, middle-aged bachelor celebrity. Even Richards and Merton, long-time acquaintances with whom I dined tonight in the Athenaeum, did not allow my new eminence to pass unremarked. For years, I was never anyone’s first choice as a portrait painter, never admitted as a full member of the Royal Academy, only very lately handed the privilege of sporting the initials
A.R.A.
after my name. Merely an
Associate
. Tardy laurels finally pressed upon an indifferent brow.

The highest praise ever bestowed by my fellow artists was to say I ought to have been a history painter, my rendering of marble in oil paint was as exquisite as Alma-Tadema’s. Cosgrave, with a picture dealer’s disdain for the truth, once described me to a dewlapped matron as a “court painter.” By that he meant I had doodled up a portrait of a demented claimant to the throne of Spain (of which there are legion), a sallow-complexioned fellow who sat in my studio morosely munching walnuts and strewing the floor with their shells. I cannot
recall his name, only that he wore a wig, but never the same wig twice. This led to an indistinct element to the portrayal of His Catholic Majesty’s coiffure which mightily displeased him.

But now, the mountain comes to Mohammed. Artistic success won in an unexpected quarter. The dry old stick Charlie Gaunt publishes a volume of verse. Love poems, no less. For months, much of London society has been mildly engrossed in tea-time speculation about the identity of the lady of whom I wrote. A small assist to sales. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the
Times
was laudatory and the
Edinburgh Review
kind in a niggling, parsimonious Scottish way.

Yesterday, I ran into Machar, the Glasgow refugee, outside Piccadilly Station. He was arch, and I was short with him.

“We hadn’t guessed, Gaunt,” he cooed. “I mean the book – that’s a side of you we hadn’t suspected.”

I challenged him. “You’ve read it, have you?”

“Haven’t had time to read it yet. But I bought it.”

He was lying. If he had it at all, it was borrowed from a lending library. “Well,” I said, brandishing my stick to hail a passing cab, “then you don’t know what you’re talking about, do you, Machar?” I showed him my coattails, spun off without another word.

One of the envelopes on the tray attracts my eye, addressed by an unfamiliar hand and bearing a Canadian stamp. Inside, I discover a newspaper clipping already a month old.

My eyes skim the remainder of the obituary, settle on the last paragraph.

The indestructible Potts dead. The news excites a pang of melancholy despite the fact that I have not laid eyes on him for a quarter-century. Yes, faithful and true he certainly was. And now, apparently famous too, after a fashion. Jerry Potts, how unlikely a candidate for renown.

Wondering who could have sent me such a notice, I peek into the envelope and dislodge a small piece of notepaper, a few words scrawled on it in pencil.
There is something you must know. I can only tell it to you in person. I beg you to come soon. Signed, Custis Straw
.

The shock of the name turns me to the window. In the square below, street lamps are shedding an eerie jade light which trembles in the weft of the fog.

It seems I am asked to perform at another’s bidding, just as I did more than two decades ago when my father set my feet on the
Pasha
, 1,790 tons of iron steamship breaching the Irish Sea, bound for New York.

Twilight, the ship trailing scarves of mist, the air wet on my face. Standing at the stern, damp railing gripped in my gloves, sniffing the
fishy salt of the ocean, gazing back to the blurred lights of the river traffic plying the mouth of the Mersey.

The land slowly vanishing from sight, retiring at ten knots per hour, as the screw boiled water and I stood, one hand clamped to my top hat to hold it in place, and peered down. Alone. The other passengers had gone to dress for dinner. The propeller frothed the water, beat it white, the ship’s wake a metalled road pointing back to England. The breeze freshened, the skirts of my frock coat fluttered. Sailors cried out, preparing to raise auxiliary sail. Chop clapped the sides of the vessel, pale veins of turbulence in the dark granite sea. A first glimpse of stars, their salmon-pink coronas.

Deferential footsteps behind me, a smiling steward had come to announce dinner was served. I shook my head, “Thank you, I shall not dine tonight.” The puzzled steward’s face. Thirty guineas passage, meals, wine included, and the gentleman does not wish to dine tonight?

Not when I preferred to gaze upon what I was leaving, to recall those figures in the Ford Madox Brown painting,
The Last of England
. A young couple in the stern of a boat, holding hands, faces sombre, the white cliffs of Dover sentimental in the distance, the ties of the woman’s bonnet whipping in the wind. A lady flying from England just as Simon, my twin brother, had fled it.