The Last Crossing (31 page)

So how to account for the circumstances I found Lucy in the other night? The perplexing scene she enacted with the stick, her behaviour verging on hysterical frenzy. Even when she recognized who I was, the fashion in which she gave herself to me created disquiet in my mind, as excessive emotion always has.

When I questioned her later, tried to draw her out about what had led to the inner storm which shattered her strong exterior, I recognized the look which stole over her face. There was something in it of Simon’s expression the night I came upon him and the Reverend Witherspoon in the drawing room. Something guarded and hostile, as if I were being refused admission to a reality I had not earned.

Of course, in Simon’s case I deserved his distrust after the unfortunate incident with Iris. I had truly thought I was doing him a favour when I gave the servants a half-day off, slipped Iris into his room to await his arrival, and took myself off. An antidote to Dr. Milton, one might say.

But when I returned later that afternoon, Iris was gone and Simon in a terrible state, white with fury, unwilling to accept any excuse or apology from me.

“I have sat here waiting for you to return, Charles,” he said, “thinking how I can impress on you the heartless, dreadful thing you did to that girl.”

“I’ll thank you to use my friend’s name,” I shot back. “It is Iris. She is a kind, affectionate girl with a warm heart and she would have done you a lot of good if you had let her. I only hope you were not so rude as to pray over her.”

Simon crossed the room to a table from which he retrieved a book. He marched back to me rigid with anger. “I have marked a relevant passage. Perhaps it will show you the error of your ways,” he said.

Naturally, I expected it would be some high-minded bosh, but when I turned it over I saw it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Confessions
. My surprise could not have been greater if he had handed me a copy of
The New Lady’s Tickler
.

“What are you doing with this?”

“Read, please!” he said vehemently.

Skimming those few pages, I found nothing which touched upon my particular transgression. What Simon had marked was a description of an attempt by a sodomite to seduce the young Rousseau. I closed the book. With some asperity I said, “I fail to understand the point you wish to make.”

“Rousseau observes that the man’s advances upon him allowed him to see men as women must. The brutality of their lust. Put yourself in that girl’s place. Think of what you subjected her to.”

“Apparently neither of us subjected her to anything. You saw to that. You make too much of this,” I said. “And I am very much surprised by your taste in immoral French literature. I offer you a jolly, healthy girl and you prefer this.”

“At least Rousseau’s honesty saves him from true immorality.”

“So I am dishonest?”

Simon hesitated.

“Say it. Be what you advocate. Play Rousseau, Simon.”

“You are dishonest to yourself when you scratch no deeper than the surface of things.”

It was a piercing betrayal. In that instant I noticed his hand was resting on one of the sketches I had left lying on the desk. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, I saw he regretted them, but that only drove home even more forcibly that his opinion was genuine.

“Thank you,” I said.

He flushed to the roots of his hair. “I beg your forgiveness, Charles.”

“And I yours,” I returned. But this was a falsehood. I hid my anger because to reveal it would have exposed the depth of my humiliation. If Simon, the naif, said such things, what was being said behind my back by the gossips of the art world? The little confidence I had stored up crumbled with the lightest of touches, my brother’s white hand laid on a drawing. Suddenly, what I had taken such pride in – that in all of England there might not be more that two or three draftsmen better than I – became a paltry achievement. I saw that the true artist required more than an exquisite touch.

“Let us go to bed,” Simon coaxed. “Hard words forgotten and forgiven.”

I offered a conterfeit smile. “In a bit,” I told him. “I am not sleepy yet.”

Simon left. It was past midnight. I turned off the gas lamps and stared into the unsteady blue flames of the fire. A story Gambart, the picture dealer and infamous rumour monger, had related about Charles Collins burned as hotly in my mind as the coals on the grate. Like me, Collins was an artist of care and patience. A great future was predicted for him. For weeks, he worked out of doors in all weathers to capture a quaint, tumble-down shed, holes gaping in its roof, planks missing from its walls, light streaming through the tottering wreck. But when Collins finally finished rendering the shed after much painstaking labour, he was at a loss as how to proceed. The shed was always intended to be a background, but for what, he could not say. For the rest of his short life, he debated what he might place in the foreground and dismissed all ideas. An old shed was all he had, ever would have. “Poor fellow never painted again,” Gambart confided to me. “And here’s a romantic touch. Collins died with the unfinished canvas lying on his bed.”

The fire went cold and still I sat, smarting. Why had my brother encouraged and applauded me if this was his true opinion of me? Was Collins’s story mine? Was I all background, an empty foreground? Industrious as an ant, and just as artful? At five in the morning I got up and went to my studio, lit the gas lamps. There was my answer. Piles of sketches, studies, and not one painting finished. Like Collins. Heaps of paper and canvas through which I feverishly sifted. Here a hand, here a torso, here a leg, here a head. The offal of a crude autopsy.

At dawn I carried the body parts into the garden. It began to rain as I set fire to them. I stood there hat in hand, watching the flames fizzle in the downpour. No more successful in destroying the wretched things than I had been in making them.

I walked into the streets of London, into the fitful coming and going of rain. If the downpour became intolerable I crept into a public house or a shop and waited for it to decrease. The rest of the time I
tramped without direction or purpose, adrift in crowds hurrying to escape the wet and the cold, hastening to win the warmth of their own cozy parlours. London in February, winter darkness, my feet counting greasy flagstones as I stumbled down a very English Via Dolorosa, thoughts as cluttered and grey as the dismal streets.

A little after eight o’clock, having taken not so much as a morsel of food all day, I found myself faint and weary outside the British Museum, drops of rain pattering lightly on my hat like a madman’s babble, feet soaked. The museum shut and locked as if its custodians had known of my coming, had expressly barred the doors to me and me alone.

I recalled more of Gambart’s gossip. Behind those locked doors the doting mother of the young painter John Everett Millais had done the research for his historical paintings. Had pressed his copies of Hogarth on President Shee of the Royal Academy, launching his career. At ten, the prodigy was accepted into the Royal Academy; a few years later, he was presented the Gold Medal in the Antique School, such a small boy that the members had passed him hand over hand and plunked him down on the dais to roars of approbation. The hope of English art they had called him then, and what had become of him? The painter of “Sermons.” Not fit to wipe Turner’s and Constable’s brushes, but rich. Because he could draw, do an admirable likeness.

I knew by heart the envious tittle-tattle circulating about Millais, the man who made twenty-five-thousand pounds a year, rode to hounds, fished salmon, hunted deer on a grand estate in Scotland. Every inch a gentleman. If I could not whole-heartedly admire his paintings, his personal style appealed to me. I have always loathed Bohemianism, the buffoonery, the insufferable pretence, blouses besmirched with paint, grown men in silly hats.

I made a decision that night, hands gripping the cold bars of the museum gates. If I was already a sham, better to be a sham like Millais and have the world at my feet. I was a prodigious drawer. At ten, I could reproduce Durer almost as well as Millais did Hogarth. Henceforth likenesses for the wealthy and eminent would be my trade. There is always a demand for portraits. I might not be a graduate of
the academy, but I possessed other qualities. I was presentable, the son of a man with a fortune and a country house; if I chose to be, I was adept at agreeable conversation. I must go about, make myself known in the right circles.

And this I did. To the men I had known at Oxford I announced that the hermit had renounced the hermitage. I joined a club, accepted invitations to dine. If the overly polite inquired after my twin, I explained he was of an evangelical temper, did not drink wine or dance. Hostesses were apt to declare this admirable but privately judge him unsuitable for the sort of parties they gave. One William Wilberforce in society had been enough.

So I withdrew myself from Simon. Our conspiracy against the larger world was finished, no more colloquies over tea and buns. I was always out, cultivating patrons and artists of whom society approved. Of course, Millais and Leighton, the gods of English painting’s Olympus, were not to be approached by the likes of me, but there were other lesser beings whom I might gather to my cause. I frequented the home of a shrill bluestocking who drew sullen poets and fashionable painters around her commodious skirts. At one of her afternoons I made the acquaintance of Pemberton Stall, portraitist of choice for the Men of the North, cotton manufacturers, iron mongers, ship builders with plenty of loose coin and a willingness to expend it to have their faces preserved for posterity.

How often I had heard Gambart say no one could polish an apple like Pemberton Stall, an artist who could erase the squint of a rich man’s wife, add cream and damask rose to the bad complexion of a much beloved daughter. That day, I polished Pemberton Stall’s apple, showed myself well acquainted with his work. In a short conversation I learned his favourite adjective, “charming,” and applied it to a portrait of his I had recently seen hanging in a gallery. My reward was an invitation to visit the studio he kept in his home in St. John’s Wood and, “Peruse some rather nice little pictures I have recently done.”

Two days later, I was ushered into Pemberton Stall’s sanctum sanctorum by his wife, Elizabeth, a woman possessing an imperious
carriage, a thrilling, husky voice, and round white arms. We spent the afternoon drinking tea while the painter skipped about his studio, feverishly putting up canvases and taking them down, basking in our unstinting applause. I envied the magic Mr. Stall worked on people of every sort, attracting both the attention of this majestic woman as well as the favour of the blunt manufacturers of the north, men who made a fetish of plainspokenness, practicality, and bluff heartiness. His conversation was whimsical, fey, poetical. Tiny and smelling of French scent, he was amusingly erratic. The very antithesis of his patrons and even of his wife, who was statuesque, cool, contained.

After Elizabeth and I became lovers, she never revealed how Pemberton had won her, but she did explain how he enchanted the dour industrialists. “You see,” she said to me one afternoon as we lolled about in her bed, “these men like to think they have hired an artist. Not too much of an artist, of course, but someone just a trifle out of the ordinary and beyond their humdrum experience. Someone who will provide them with anecdotes to entertain their friends, but won’t take artistic temperament to an excess. A chap a bit exotic, but not so exotic he does not know his place.” Cocking her head and smiling roguishly, she said, “Pemby fits the bill very nicely, don’t you think?”

I did, and in time came to see how he fit Elizabeth’s bill so nicely too. Despite her cool demeanour, Elizabeth was a driving woman who would have inevitably come into conflict with a more conventional husband determined to play paterfamilias. She relished her position as the dragon who guarded the precious treasure, Pemberton Stall. Theirs was a partnership of equals, he plying the brush and seducing clients, Elizabeth negotiating commissions, bringing pressure to bear when payment lagged, arranging and overseeing the dinners and parties which were Pemby’s forum, glittering occasions when he sprinkled the company with his witticisms and whimsical lectures on Art. This was a select group. No one of whom Elizabeth Stall disapproved gained admittance to the house in St. John’s Wood, even if Pemby protested. She approved highly of me.

Our affair lasted two years, and during the course of it she advanced my career tremendously. No disloyalty to her husband was involved in this, adultery was a minor thing compared to failing to forward his position in the world of art. But work which Pemby disdained, or was too busy to execute, was carefully steered my way. What a surprise to realize that by the second year of our liaison, I was earning two hundred and fifty pounds per annum by my brush. Not a mint certainly, but a noble supplement to my allowance from Father. Of course, it was in Elizabeth’s interest to do all she could for me since so much of what I earned was spent on her. Both of us knew how we stood with one another, that ours was a contract based on mutual satisfaction.

How Elizabeth adored the opera, the ballet. Pemby adored them too, but he never seemed available on the evenings she wished to go. She loved good wine, good dinners, and fashionable restaurants. So did Pemby, but he preferred some sycophant to pay for them. Little gifts, flowers, perfume, chocolates, amused her, but on special occasions, she expected jewellery. Pemby, apparently, was forgetful of special occasions. It was my lot to remember them.

Elizabeth found time spent alone unendurable. I must squire her about, or dance attendance at her home in St. John’s Wood, play cards with her, read to her. All her friends paid lip service to the fiction that I was a talented young man whom she was assisting to make his way in the world. When surrounded by ladies, Elizabeth talked a good deal about the beauties of platonic friendship.

From the beginning, jaunty Pemberton Stall never once gave the slightest hint that he suspected matters were other than they should be between me and his wife. It took months to realize that in fact he was aiding and abetting his wife’s infidelity. One Sunday afternoon, I laid aside the novel which I had been reading aloud to Elizabeth and asked how it was her husband could overlook our affair. Laughing, she kissed me and exclaimed, “Charles, you silly goose! You have not plumbed the reason for Pemby’s tact!” Feeling foolish that I had been so blind, I left it at that.