That Summer: A Novel (14 page)

“The gallery
is
on my way from work,” chimed in Natalie.

“That’s that sorted,” said Nicholas. He gave Julia an oblique look. “I’ll ring you by Monday and let you know what I’ve discovered. What’s your number?”

It was only after he’d gone that Julia realized that none of them had asked the real question: what in the hell was a Pre-Raphaelite painting—imitation or original—doing hidden in the back of her wardrobe?

London, 1849

As if through a fall of water, Imogen heard the whisper of skirts, the chatter of voices, the clatter of heels on the marble floor as the exhibition goers moved on their varied courses around her. Her hands felt damp in her kid-leather gloves.

There she was, on the wall, for the world to see.

No, not her. A model. A model with long, red hair. Painfully, Imogen forced herself to step back, to look at the painting critically, trying not to feel as though she’d just been stripped bare in the middle of the Academy.

So what if it was her sewing box, her Book of Hours? They were just objects, nothing to do with her. Anyone else looking at the painting would see only a scattering of items, part of a scene, a scene from a poem, depicting something very long ago and far away. No one would think to ask to whom the individual items might belong. They were simply props, like the pasteboard crown in a Shakespeare play.

She should, Imogen told herself firmly, admire the technical skill of the work. The colors were rich and glowing, making the composition stand out among the duller shades of the paintings hung above and beside it like a robin in a field of wrens. The window, in particular, shone as though light were streaming through the glass. It had the same pure, clear tones as the best sort of medieval-manuscript miniatures.

And her deepest, darkest feelings staring out at her from a stranger’s face.

“Mrs. Grantham!”

The sound of her own name started her out of her reverie. She turned, surprised, and her exhibition catalog fell, splayed open on the floor.

Mr. Rossetti gallantly scooped it up for her before it could be trampled. His disordered curls had been brushed for the occasion, but his cheeks still had the proper air of artistic pallor.

“I see you’re admiring Thorne’s work,” he said as Imogen received the catalog from him with a murmur of thanks.

“Mr. Rossetti.” Imogen forced herself to sociability. “Where is your work?”

Rossetti shrugged with feigned nonchalance. “Not here, I’m afraid. I exhibited at the Free Exhibition in Hyde Park this year instead. I didn’t want to risk my
Girlhood of Mary Virgin
being hung all the way up by the ceiling with the cobwebs! As you can see, Thorne got one of the good spots.”

“Yes,” murmured Imogen. “Yes, he did.” On the line, they called it. Hung conveniently at eye level for all to see.

Rossetti said easily, “But I’m sure you’ll be wanting to see Thorne to congratulate him.”

“No, really, there is no need—” began Imogen.

“There is every need,” said Rossetti. “Honest admiration is good for the artist’s battered soul. Particularly once the critics have been at one. There he is, with Millais. Thorne!”

Rossetti raised a hand to the other man, who was standing a little bit away, in a group that included another man, with a high forehead and fair, tousled hair, and the ubiquitous John Ruskin. Seeing them, Thorne murmured something to the others and started in their direction.

Imogen adjusted her sweat-sticky gloves and pasted a polite smile on her face.

“Mr. Thorne.” Her greeting was all that was politely condescending. “I have just been admiring your work.”

“Admiring” wasn’t at all the word she would have preferred to use.

“Mrs. Grantham.” His deep voice with its regional accent sounded particularly out of place against all the high-pitched chatter around them, something from a different, more rough-and-tumble sort of world, for all that his words were everything that was correct. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

“You seem to have taken much from your visit to us,” Imogen said, trying to keep her voice light.

Thorne’s brows rose at the acid note in her voice. “Your husband was kind enough to allow us to sketch anything that caught our interest. I was given to understand it would not be an intrusion.”

Of course, Arthur would say that, thought Imogen bitterly. It wasn’t his soul being bared on canvas.

Her sewing box, that was. Not her soul. Mariana in her moated grange was nothing to do with her.

“I am surprised by your choice of subject,” she said, her voice just a little too loud. “Don’t you find Mariana a rather dull character?”

“You’ve read the poem, then?”

Read it and chafed at it. She had despised weak, whiny Mariana—and despised herself even more for the sense of kinship that came to her through those lyrical, despairing words. Perhaps that was why the poem had annoyed her so much, annoyed her enough that she had flung the slim volume aside and sought solace in her garden, in the honest work of digging and planting and tearing out weeds. She knew how it felt to be caught in a cage, waiting, constantly waiting.

And for what? She had learned long ago that there were no such things as knights in shining armor. And if such a being did come to bear one away, it was inevitably to one’s doom, or so the stories would have it.

“The mirror crack’d from side to side.… Singing in her song she died.”

But that was another poem, also by Mr. Tennyson, beautiful and disturbing and with a heroine just as ill-fated.

“Mr. Tennyson,” Imogen said tightly, “has a wonderful way with words but a rather dreary choice of subject.”

“You find Mariana dreary?”

“She calls herself dreary.” Imogen’s voice was sharper than she would have liked. In exaggerated tones, she quoted, “‘Then said she, “I am very dreary, / He will not come,” she said; / She wept, “I am aweary, aweary, / O God, that I were dead!”’ There you have her, condemned from her own lips. One cannot have it on better authority than that.”

“Would you say that we are the best judges of our own characters?” He was looking at her far too intently. “We delude ourselves as much as we do others.”

“Save for the eagle eye of the artist?” Imogen said acidly.

“I’d hardly say that.” To her surprise, he laughed, a low, rough laugh, his eyes crinkling around the corners. “We painters, we’re—there’s a French term for it. Knowing idiots? We wield the brush, but we only see the half of what we convey.”

“The wise fool.” She knew better than to be fooled by a show of false modesty. Imogen countered, “But isn’t it true that a fool who knows himself is no fool?”

Mr. Thorne held up his hands in surrender. “You’re too sharp for me by half, Mrs. Grantham.”

She couldn’t tell whether it was meant as a compliment or an insult.

“Yes, she is that, isn’t she?” said Arthur, coming up beside her and taking her arm. “I had wondered where you had got to, my dear. Mr. Thorne. I see you’ve put our little collection to good use.”

“I cannot thank you enough for your generosity.” They were speaking man-to-man now and Imogen had faded back into the background, just another ornament, as insignificant as Mariana in her moated grange. “It’s the details that make the difference. Having a proper model, even for the smallest things—it brings a scene to life.”

Arthur regarded the painting thoughtfully. “Yes. Yes, I do see what you mean. There is a clarity to it, an immediacy. No more blurry backgrounds for you, eh?”

Mr. Thorne’s face was set and stubborn. “If there’s a daffodil, I want to paint a real daffodil, not just a generic imitation of one; if there’s sky, it will be the sky as I saw it, myself, with my own eyes. I won’t pay my viewers in false coin.”

“Honesty in art…” Arthur turned the idea around, prodding it gently. “It’s an interesting idea, although some would say it’s a contradiction in terms.”

“There’s truth in fiction, sometimes, sir,” said Mr. Thorne, “and I mean to keep my fictions as true as they can be.”

“A little too true.” Imogen hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud. As both men looked at her, she laughed awkwardly and gestured at the painting. “So much emotion—it’s almost uncomfortable to see.”

Her husband regarded her thoughtfully. “Do you know, Thorne, I might have a proposition to put to you.” Turning to Imogen, he said, “We had spoken of having your portrait painted.”

Yes, they had spoken of it—a portrait to match the portrait of Arthur that hung in the drawing room—but it was one of those projects that were always delayed to some indefinite time in the future. As for herself, Imogen was largely indifferent. It didn’t particularly matter to her whether she hung on the wall of Herne Hill for posterity. What difference would it make to her, once she was gone? Like Arthur’s poor first wife, forever immured in a miniature in a back bedroom, laughing at a world she had never lived to see.

But of one thing Imogen was quite sure: she didn’t want to be painted by Gavin Thorne. If Arthur must have her painted, let it be by someone safe and stodgy, someone who would translate her features to canvas and leave her emotions alone.

“There’s really no need,” she said quickly. “Besides, I shouldn’t wish to take Mr. Thorne away from his other compositions. There are all those individual daffodils to be painted, after all.”

“Nonsense,” said Arthur genially. “It’s a rare artist who isn’t in want of a commission. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

“We mustn’t presume—” Imogen began quickly, but Arthur cut her off with a quick gesture of his hand.

“You’re right, sir,” Mr. Thorne said to Arthur. “I would be glad of the work. And, of course,” he added, “grateful for the chance to paint someone so lovely as Mrs. Grantham.”

The gallantry sat ill on his lips. Imogen pressed her own lips tightly together, saying nothing. What could she say? She would only sound churlish if she were to protest.

“Good man,” said Arthur genially. “We shall expect you at Herne Hill—shall we say next Monday?”

The question wasn’t directed at Imogen. And why should it be? There was no activity in which she might engage that Arthur couldn’t rearrange for his own convenience.

“Yes,” said Mr. Thorne, and he looked again at Imogen. Imogen felt the color rise in her cheeks for no reason. She wondered if this was how a butterfly felt, pinned to the table of a naturalist, splayed, defenseless. “Next Monday should do very well.”

NINE

Herne Hill, 2009

By the time mid-afternoon on Monday rolled around, Julia made herself shut off her cell phone. Just so she would stop checking it.

It wasn’t that she was so eager to hear from Mr. Nicholas Dorrington, King of the Art World, she told herself self-righteously. He had clearly been tagged Property of Natalie, whether he knew it or not. If it mattered, which it didn’t. But Julia would like to know more about her painting, and he was her best bet.

She had done more than a little bit of scrounging around on her own, but the Internet was staggeringly uninformative. Of the seven original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, she only recognized three of the names: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. One of the seven was Rossetti’s older brother, added in to make up the numbers. That left three other artists, all unknown to her.

The painting itself wasn’t much more helpful. No matter how she looked, she couldn’t find a signature, not worked into the rushes on the banqueting floor, not hidden in the embroidery in the train of the lady’s gown. There was nothing on the back, either. The canvas had been stretched over a wooden frame. It all looked quite old to Julia’s unpracticed eye, but she vaguely remembered that the experts had their own ways of determining dates, something to do with the types of paints and canvas.

She knew enough of Arthurian legendry to be fairly sure that the scene represented in the painting was Tristan and Iseult, the doomed lovers who cuckolded the middle-aged King Mark of Cornwall. The king was appropriately middle-aged, his ginger hair and whiskers laced with gray. There was something rather sad about him, about the expression on his face as his eyes shifted sideways to his young wife and his nephew.

Googling “Tristan and Iseult” and “Pre-Raphaelites” yielded several images, but none were anything like Julia’s painting. Waterhouse had done one and so had Edmund Blair Leighton, but both were dated much later and neither portrayed the scene as her unknown painter had, with as much detail and action. In both of the others, the lovers trysted alone; only her version had King Mark watching them from the corner of his eye.

That had to be a good thing, didn’t it? If her painting was a copy, there would have had to have been an original off of which to copy, and if there was such an original, Google didn’t have it in its image cache.

And if it wasn’t in Google …

By this point, Julia had had a great deal of coffee and was beginning to feel more than a little bit slaphappy.

Julia closed the lid of her laptop with a click. She had propped the painting up against the back of a chair, eye level.

“You couldn’t have come with a museum plaque?” she demanded of the painting.

The painting didn’t presume to answer.

So much for all of her art history professors talking about paintings speaking to them. From long ago and far away Julia dredged up the memory of those classes, of “reading” a painting the way she now read financial reports, picking apart and decoding the smallest details. Somewhere, somewhere in the details of the scene, a real expert could find some clue as to the identity of the artist—not just the style and brushwork, but props that had been used elsewhere, costumes, a familiar model.

According to Julia’s reading, the artists tended to model for one another, at least in the early days when money was scarce. The man, lean and dark, might have been one of the Brotherhood himself, hard to tell when most of the pictures online were of the men much later in their lives, grown old and respectable, with bushy eyebrows and exuberant facial hair. She had found an early sketch of Rossetti, ringleted and romantic. She thought he might be one of the banqueters, sitting at the side of King Mark, but she wasn’t entirely sure.