The Portrait (8 page)

I am not joking. I cannot even claim that it was on impulse, or something that I truly regretted. I stole the money from my mother. Her life savings, all she had for her old age after my father died. You notice I do not say borrowed, or took. I am not trying to hide anything. Stole. It was my only chance, my only hope of survival. It was her or me. When I decided I had to go to Paris, I made the long journey home, went to the little package she kept hidden under the bed, and took it all. She knew it was me, of course, but never said a word. It was her punishment for having brought me into the world. She knew it, and so did I; I was an agent of chastisement only. I think I did tell myself that I would give it all back, with interest, when my career prospered. But I never returned a single penny. She died before I had anything to give back, but I am not sure I would ever have done so. I didn’t want to. She had to live out the rest of her life knowing she had a worthless, greedy, cruel son, and her pride and dignity meant she could not even tell anyone. It made it certain I could not go back there, ever. The guilt was like the walls of a fortress, forever keeping me out of Scotland, barring my way back to where I came from. And when she died, I did go back. But not to her funeral. She was buried alone, and I don’t even know where. She was a wicked woman, harsh and punishing, who used her own sufferings as a weapon against her child and her husband. She deserved no pity, and got none from me.

Now, to work. I have finished sketching, had enough experimenting with your fine features. I tried all sorts of angles and poses in my head, and have settled on the one that was in my mind from the very beginning. The characteristic one you have of sitting in a chair with one shoulder slightly forward, and your head fractionally turned towards it. It gives you a sense of being about to move all the time, of energy. Quite undeserved, I think, as you are one of the laziest people I have ever known. Your energy is not physical at all; it is a fine case of the body reflecting the mind, creating an illusion which has nothing to do with the pills for the heart, weak arms and your tendency to puff and wheeze your way up stairs. It is an example of the superiority of the will over reality; I could beat the hell out of you, pick you up and carry you halfway across the island even against your will. Most people could; but I suspect the idea has never crossed anyone’s mind since you were at school—where I imagine you were bullied, as children do not appreciate the power of the intellect. A further problem to be solved, of course—for the painting must convey the intellect through the physical—how to communicate the strength of one and the weakness of the other at the same time?

I’m not asking your advice; merely posing the question. It would be a fatal error to ask any sitter how they wished to be portrayed. People cannot tell the truth about themselves, for they do not know it. What do you think the balance should be between painter and subject, in any case? I know your answer without even asking, really. The subject is merely the means by which the painter expresses himself. The painter is merely the means through which the critic’s ideas take form. It is a route that runs to perdition, you know; it will cut the artist off from everything but his own ego, sooner or later, and he will have an eye for nothing but what the
Morning Chronicle
says of him.

Enough of this. You are looking weary, and it gives you a faintly undignified expression. I cannot stand it. I keep seeing that rather bony bottom of yours sliding uncomfortably across my chair, and the vision is beginning to hinder my work. So I suppose I had better continue with my confession and tell you when I duped you. I could see by the look on your face when you came in that you wanted to know. Indeed, I had a fond, and slightly malevolent, pleasure in thinking about you going to sleep last night, tossing and turning in your uncomfortable, flea-ridden bed, wondering which of the tens of thousands of pictures you have viewed in your life showed you up to be a fool. Not a great one, certainly, but a small one; that, for you, is the worst of all, is it not? The idea that someone out there is laughing at you. And how many other people have been told? Is it common knowledge? Did you go into parties and hear someone snigger, all those years ago? Is that what they were laughing at?

Relax, I do not have that much malevolence in me; you should know that by now. I am not above a practical joke, I can be cruel, but am only rarely mean. Only on special occasions. My lips were sealed; it was a private pleasure, and all the more enjoyable for that. Besides, the whole business was unimportant in comparison to the result of it.

Shall I give you a hint? No; don’t try to guess, it will only make it worse if you panic and decide that genuine master-works were by my hand. It was a Gauguin. That painting which occupied a small place in your smoking room before you sold it to that American woman. I felt like telling you then, because you got a respectable sum for it and I felt I should have had a share. It’s not as if I sold it as a Gauguin, after all. My conscience is clear. In a museum now? Good heavens, how gratifying! I must write to them before I die, or better still, I will leave a note in my papers so that if someone ever writes a biography of me, the information will come out then.

I painted it for purely innocent reasons, I assure you, and had no intention of selling it to anyone. But do you remember when news of this man first came to us? How some shrugged and dismissed him, while you became convinced that he was the greatest thing since—the last greatest thing? I was intrigued, and went along to that dealer who had some of his pictures. I studied them hard, you know; sketched them, examined them meticulously, tried to figure them out. And got nowhere; baffled completely. So I decided to paint one, to see if that could give me any insight.

It did me no good. Whatever merit he possesses does not lie in his skill; he is not a skilled painter, speaking from a technical viewpoint, and I already found my simplicity in the East End; I saw no need to rush to the other side of the world for it. Besides, they seemed rather fraudulent to me, and I felt rather sorry for those poor native women splodged onto his canvas. They were just puppets, nothing more; no individuality or existence of their own. He was using them, not looking at them. He travelled right across the world and still could see only himself. At least colonialists provide sewage and a railway line to those they exploit. He took and gave nothing in return whatsoever. Nonetheless, a Gauguin I painted, and rather a good one, it seems, as it fooled not only you but everyone else as well.

I was going to paint over it when I’d finished, but Anderson came to visit. This was shortly after he had abandoned painting and gone into art dealing. “Get between the painter and his public, my boy.” That was his business, and he proceeded to squeeze his svelte little body into just that position; taking more, giving less. The recipe for brilliance as a dealer. You, I recall, were properly sneering at his decision, and were highly critical of the consummation of his marriage to Mammon, although I never really saw that there was so great a difference between him and you.

You hurt him, you know; and very badly. Under that don’t-give-a-damn façade there beat the heart of a sensitive soul. He really wanted to be a painter—far more than you could ever understand. He had set his heart on it when he was eight, so he once told me. Can you imagine his anguish, poor man? To have everything necessary except true ability? His eye was exceptional, his taste exquisite, his sense of colour remarkable, his feeling for proportion and structure was near perfect. Technically he was highly accomplished. He worked hard. But try as he might, he couldn’t put it all together, couldn’t harness those skills into a harmonious whole. So, rather than be a bad painter, permanently disappointing himself, he became a dealer instead.

You were the one who forced him to give up, you know. That winter when he took a studio near the Tottenham Court Road and went underground, living like a hermit, doing nothing but work all the daylight hours God sent. By day he painted, the rest of the time he sketched and drew. He became obsessed; I could see it on his face on the rare occasions I bumped into him. The darkness of too little sleep, the slightly hunched air of one trying to defy the world but knowing he is taking a gamble that might well not come off. A man trying to ignore what he already knows in his heart.

He was painting for his life, working away to try and tip over that edge into—what? Not competence or expertise; he had those already. He wanted to be good, and he thought he was getting there. He persuaded himself this burst of work was inspiration, that finally he had let loose whatever it was that proved so difficult.

Eventually he finished. About a dozen paintings, one of which he planned to submit to the next New English exhibition. But he was living in his mind, and knew that sooner or later these works would have to be shown to others. So he invited us to a small dinner. Just you and me; the people he trusted. You must remember it! I know you do; you’d be lying to deny it. I recall every second. It was one of the most distressing evenings of my life.

His tension, his agitation were terrible. I could understand why he was nervous of you; you had already established yourself as the great arbiter of the modern and the worthy, and if he was frightened of me it was only by association. I have never been a severe critic of others. He did his best to be hospitable, dropping things on the floor, spilling wine on the table; I could hardly bear it. Poor man! I thought he was prolonging the social niceties because of gaucheness; but I was wrong. Miserable as it was, he wanted it to last as long as possible. I think that in his heart he knew already they were the last few moments when he would be able to think of himself as a painter.

Eventually the moment came. “Oh yes, I have been working. Quite a lot, in fact. Pleased with my efforts. Think they’ll be more than good enough.” The staccato phrases, delivered with a fake drawl of self-confidence, only showed how on edge he was. “Want to see them? Oh, very well then, if you must . . .”

Then it began. One by one, the pictures brought out; one by one, put on the easel; one by one, a grunt or sniff from you, and the silence of increasing despondency from me. Surely you remember them? They weren’t that bad. They really weren’t. They were competent, even charming. But mechanical and lifeless—frozen people, dead landscapes, pointless interiors with no shape or form. How could he not see? How could he not do better?

And when he had finished, you started. Picture by picture. Perhaps you began in the spirit of constructive criticism, I don’t know. But as you worked your way through each canvas, the joy of the hunt came upon you. The pitilessness of it was terrible. Every fault, every weakness you spotted and pointed out; each painting was dismantled, colour by colour, line by line, form by form. Nothing escaped you: it was a tour de force, a brilliant piece of sustained, improvised destruction. And throughout it all, poor Anderson had to sit there, politely, respectfully, not able to show on his face how you were torturing him as you ground his dreams to dust. He hoped, no doubt, that you would clap your hands and acclaim each one as a masterpiece. At the very least, he hoped for dishonesty on your part; polite praise and a promise to put in a word with some hanging committee, to find a place on their walls for one picture, to give him a chance.

But dishonesty was not in your character—not then, at any rate. That would have been a betrayal of something more important than friendship, of mere human relations. Anderson was no good. That was all that concerned you. It was his job to face up to it. Your job to make him do so. You were cruel in the name of art, vicious in its protection. You left him a hollow man, for you took away his dreams and showed him what he really was. The critic as mirror: unflattering, harsh, but bitterly truthful.

I could not have done it. I would have taken the polite, dishonest, reassuring route. It would have led to the same place eventually, no doubt. Nor could I disagree with what you said; as ever, you were right, each fault was real, and you did not exaggerate. You were judicious in your devastation, calm in your violence.

But still, I did catch that flicker in your eye, something of the sort that I had seen once before. A hidden pleasure, a satisfaction. Power controls the artist. You were laying claim to that power, flexing your muscles. You decided who was or was not to be counted in the ranks. And you expelled Anderson.

I know; you didn’t realise how badly you hurt him, but why you look so concerned now I don’t understand. It wouldn’t have made any difference. Besides, you never asked, and Anderson was expert at hiding his sadness. What are schools for, after all? And he had been to a good one which had taught him how to present the right face to the world. So, to you, who did not trouble to look below the surface, he was more interested in money than painting. Nonsense. He longed to starve in a garret, poor man. Desired nothing better than to be shunned by the public, scorned by the galleries. If only he could please himself, he would have been more than happy. But he could not please himself, and you explained why not.

Were I meaner than I am, I could make much of this in my portrait, you know. Is not a critic someone who is meant to see below the surface? Can you be a judge of art but know nothing of the people who produce it? If you cannot understand your fellow man, can you understand what he produces? Is this your weakness, that no matter how skillful your judgements, you never see the humanity which must lie underneath it? Or might I take the other view and think that perhaps you did see, and in your comments you were deliberately turning the knife in the wound, adding ridicule to the sense of failure he already felt in abundance?

Either way, you made a quiet enemy that evening. So when he came to visit me and saw my Gauguin, the thought occurred to him. A little joke, we told ourselves, but both of us knew it was more than that. We were going to expose you. You had just come out with that article on the primitive folk of the South Seas, where you praised the clarity of vision that could not be achieved in England. And so on, and so on. Magisterial, informed, influential, nonsense. There was always a side of you which could tip slightly into windbaggery, and this was one of those occasions. So next time you visited Anderson’s gallery, he got his assistant to whisper that you should go into his office, and look at the picture leaning against the wall.