That Summer: A Novel (17 page)

“Dad—” She didn’t even know what to ask. She was saved by a tiny electronic beep. “Oh, damn, that’s my call-waiting.”

“I’ll talk to you soon,” said her father with obvious relief. “Think about August.”

And he was gone, with a click. Julia didn’t know whether to curse or be grateful.

She jabbed the tiny flash button. The number on the screen was unknown, a UK number.

“Hello?” she said shortly.

“Julia?” The voice was British. Male. More than a little Jeremy Irons–esque.

Julia put on her best professional voice. “Speaking,” she said briskly. Always best to sound busy, as though one were efficiently handling multiple international trades instead of hanging out in shorts and tank top in a dilapidated Victorian mini-mansion.

“This is Nick.… Nick Dorrington,” he elaborated when his initial introduction was followed by blank silence. “Andrew’s friend.”

“Oh, right! Hi.” No need for him to know that she’d been waiting for his call like an overeager teenager.

“On that painting”—the dryness of Nicholas’s tone suggested he knew exactly what she was doing—“I believe I’ve got something for you.”

Any embarrassment Julia might have felt was subsumed in a tingle of pure treasure-hunting excitement. This, she thought, this was why people went on
Antiques Roadshow
and scoured flea markets for hidden treasure, this thrill of discovery. “Do you have the name of the painter?”

“Possibly.” Nicholas was the very model of professional caution. “Do you have a—
bollocks
.”

Julia choked on a laugh. There went professional. She manfully restrained the urge to say,
No, no, I don’t.
At least not if bollocks were what she thought they were. England and America, divided by a common language.

In the background, Julia could hear the tinkling of a bell and a high-pitched female voice raised in an extended and breathless monologue.

“Just a moment, Mrs. Cartwright,” said Nicholas with false heartiness. “I’ll be right with you. Would you mind terribly leaving Fifi outside? You remember what happened last time.”

A sharp bark illustrated Fifi’s feelings on the matter, but the discordant jangle of the bell suggested that her owner had complied.

Lowering his voice, Nicholas said to Julia in confidential tones, “My assistant is out today, so it’s just me minding the fort. Look, I know this is a bit of cheek—but would you mind terribly coming to the shop? I can show you what I’ve found.” There was a pause, and then, “It’s more effective with illustrations.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

“Sure,” said Julia. She ought to mind being dragged out, but it had been—how many days?—since she had left Herne Hill. Besides, she was curious about this shop. Natalie made it sound like a cross between Christie’s and Sotheby’s with a dash of the Frick Collection thrown in. “Where is it?”

“Are you driving?”

Do you drive?
would be the more pertinent question. She had no desire to ever get behind the wheel of a car, and, growing up in Manhattan, she hadn’t had to. “No.”

“Wise,” said Nicholas briskly. “The shop is in a cul-de-sac off Portobello Road.” He reeled off the address in a professional monotone that suggested he’d been through this same routine many times before. “Either Notting Hill Gate or Ladbroke Grove will do you equally well. Yes, Mrs. Cartwright!”

“Great,” said Julia. “See you there.” And then, because she couldn’t resist, “Have fun with Fifi!”

She clicked the
END
CALL
button before Nicholas could respond and went to go explore her suitcase to see if she could find any of her more respectable summer clothes. Preferably something without sweat stains.

Who knew? She might even shower.

Herne Hill, 1849

It was raining the following Monday when Mr. Thorne came for his appointment.

“We’ll have to be in here, I’m afraid,” said Imogen, ushering the artist into the drawing room. “Would you like a cup of tea? A cloth to dry yourself?”

Mr. Thorne looked wet to the bone, rain dripping from the brim of the hat he held in his hand, soaking his jacket. The hat didn’t appear to have done him much good; there was water matting his dark hair and trickling down his face.

He looked ruefully down at the hat in his hand. “The latter, if you don’t want me to drip on your carpets.”

Imogen cast a disparaging glance at the red cabbage roses Jane had chosen two years ago. She wasn’t sure they could be hurt by it. But she only said, “I’ll tell Anna.”

Imogen might not mind mud in the carpet, but Jane would, and when Jane minded she could make life very tedious.

Imogen watched as the artist toweled his face and hair dry, damp strands clinging to his cheekbones and forehead like streaks of wet paint. With his hair plastered to his head by the rain, he looked like a statue of a Roman emperor, the bones of his face strong and stark, his lips thin and mobile. He made the shuttered room feel small, crowded, and close.

Imogen hastily looked away as Mr. Thorne caught her staring. He must have thought the cause was something else entirely, because he hastily finished his ablutions and, handing the cloth back to Anna, said, “Is there anywhere else we might—?” Catching himself, he said quickly, “I don’t mean to sound particular. It’s the light, that’s all.”

“Or the lack thereof?” In the rain, the drawing room looked even gloomier than usual, the heaving drapes weighing down the windows, the dark, textured paper brooding on the walls. But the morning room was Jane’s province and the study forbidden territory without explicit authorization from Arthur.

“I am afraid not,” said Imogen apologetically. “But I can light the lamps.”

She set about the room, suiting action to words, adjusting the wicks, coaxing the small flames into life.

Mr. Thorne eased his bundles off his shoulder, onto Jane’s cabbage roses. “This is the first time I’ve painted a portrait. I want to get it right.”

Imogen paused in the act of fussing with a wick. “I was under the impression you’d painted a great many people.” The image of Mariana’s tortured face rose unbidden before her, Mariana, leaning yearningly towards the window, her whole body a pattern of longing.

“Those were models,” said Mr. Thorne. As Imogen watched, he unpacked the apparatus of his trade, setting up the easel with an easy skill that made his clumsiness of the week before even more remarkable. From the corner of her eye Imogen watched his hands, swift and sure, anchoring his canvas to the frame. “Women who are paid to play a role.”

Imogen fingered the stiff fabric of her dress, the dress that Arthur had insisted she wear. Arthur had decreed every aspect of her appearance for her portrait: where she was to sit, what she was to wear, how she was to arrange her hair. It was Arthur who had insisted it be in the summerhouse, “Since you are so often there, my dear.” She was to be immortalized as he designed, frozen into paint as the surface image of the wife he wished to display to the world.

“Is there such a difference?” Imogen said wryly.

Mr. Thorne’s amber eyes fixed upon her face, hawk-like in the gently diffused light.

All he said, though, was, “If done properly, there ought to be.”

“You are an idealist.” Her voice came out too dry; she licked her lips to wet them.

“No,” he said, and she could feel him watching her, assessing her, as if he could peel her away, layer by layer. “I simply strive to paint what I see.”

See a little less,
she wanted to say, but she was interrupted by the sound of heels clacking against the marble floor of the hall.

“Imogen?” It was Jane in the doorway, her skirts taking up the width of the frame, blotting out what light there was from the hall. Her eyes darted to Mr. Thorne, behind his easel, and back to Imogen again. “Cook can’t find the keys to the pantry.”

“Cook has most likely left them where she always leaves them,” said Imogen pleasantly. “Buried in the flour.”

Jane shrugged. “Be that as it may.” She made no move to leave. Instead, her starched petticoats rustled briskly as she bustled into the room, planting herself firmly down on a chair by the lamp. Imperiously she said to Mr. Thorne, “Will you be long?”

Imogen winced at Jane’s rudeness. However she might feel about this portrait, Mr. Thorne was a talented artist; he didn’t deserve to be treated like a delinquent chimney sweep. Imogen’s eyes met Mr. Thorne’s; his lips quirked at the corners, as though he understood, understood and sympathized. Biting her lip, she looked away.

Patiently, he said to Jane, “I shall endeavor to work as briskly as possible.”

Jane sniffed and took up her sewing, effectively blocking out the light of one of the lamps.

Imogen felt her temper rising.

So she was to be chaperoned, was she? Never mind that this painting was at Arthur’s wish, Arthur’s insistence; never mind that the door had been left, appropriately, a good foot open; never mind that she had never, in a decade of marriage, given the slightest cause for suspicion or reproach.

“I thought Cook needed her key,” Imogen said, keeping her voice low and pleasant. “Oughtn’t you make certain she has it?”

Jane looked at Imogen with narrowed eyes.

Imogen held her gaze.

Jane jabbed her needle sharply into her embroidery, making a small, displeased noise. Dropping her embroidery hoop onto a side table, she stood abruptly, her skirts belling around her. “If you will excuse me, Mr. Grantham will be home shortly. Someone has to see to supper.”

And with that parting shot she rustled her way out the door, pausing only for a pointed look at Imogen.

Was she meant to rise and excuse herself, too? Was that what Jane wanted? It was absurd, and all really quite unnecessary. Jane could perfectly well see to supper by herself. It wasn’t as though she had ever welcomed Imogen’s interference in her housekeeping.

Was it the intrusion of a male in the drawing room Jane minded, or that it was Imogen who would hang there rather than she?

Mr. Thorne kept his eyes on his paper and his voice neutral. “Miss Cooper is Mr. Grantham’s cousin?”

“His wife’s sister. His first wife’s sister.” Hastily, eager to change the subject, Imogen said, “Do you have enough light?”

Mr. Thorne’s eyes were still on the doorway, where the sound of Jane’s displeasure vented itself in the weight of her footsteps against the floor, each one an exercise in indignation. “It will have to serve.”

“But it doesn’t really?” Imogen said, to say something, to draw attention away from the slap of Jane’s footsteps against the floor of the hall. Imogen settled herself down on the stool that was meant to serve as the placeholder for the bench in the summerhouse. She shifted uncomfortably. There was a hard lump in the center, unfortunately apparent even through the multiple layers of skirt, petticoats, and pantalets.

On the verge of a polite demurral, Mr. Thorne shook his head abruptly. “It’s not the same, you see,” he said. “There’s light and there’s light. Even with all the lamps lit, lamplight casts a very different tone from sunlight, just as the sun at noon is different from the sun at dawn.”

“I had never thought of it,” Imogen confessed. She had been taught to sketch, indifferently, as a girl, and had produced the usual sorts of clumsy watercolors, but she had never had the eye for it, or the patience.

“It changes the nature of the picture.” Mr. Thorne paused, considering. He looked at Imogen, his eyes intent on her. “When you sit in the summerhouse, the light falls across you in a certain way. It changes every surface it touches; it lights your face and shadows your chin; it creates swirls and eddies in your skirts.” His hand rose, sketching the path of the sunbeam, and then fell. “No artificial light could replicate just that angle, just that touch.”

Imogen swallowed hard, breathing in against her stays. Even halfway across the room, that gesture had felt like a caress.

Nonsense, of course.

Sharply she said, “But don’t many artists work from their studios?”

Mr. Thorne dropped his eyes to his canvas. “They do, and so do I. But those are often a different sort of scene. Indoor scenes. Or the finishing touches on a painting that’s already begun.”

His words were terse, as though he regretted his earlier volubility.

“Is it all artists who are so careful?” asked Imogen curiously.

The question seemed to relax him. “No, not all,” he said. His chalk moved against the canvas even as he spoke. A bit displeased him and he rubbed it out. “Most aren’t. But my friends and I—we want to be as true to life as possible.”

A strange notion from men who painted works rooted in myth. “Isn’t the purpose of art to improve upon the mundane?”

“That’s only if you find the world as it is mundane.”

Nostalgia stirred, for the cliffs of Cornwall and the scent of the sea, the beauty of the patterns in the waves. “‘Sweet are the uses of adversity,’” quoted Imogen, “‘Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head … / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

She could remember when she’d felt that way, a very long time ago.

The corners of Mr. Thorne’s eyes crinkled. “I haven’t painted any venomous toads, but I’ve a friend who lost days on a painting because he wanted a water rat in the foreground and wouldn’t rest until he’d found a real one as a model.” A swift smile transformed Mr. Thorne’s saturnine features. “You’d be surprised at how hard such rats are to come by.”

Half-jokingly, Imogen said, “Is it the object alone or the circumstances as well that must be exact? For example, must the water rat be in the proper place on the riverbank to be painted?”

Mr. Thorne gave her question serious consideration. “It depends on whom you’re asking. I think that might be a bit much to ask of a rat, to expect him to stay as still as a model, but, if it were possible … yes, that would be preferable to seeing him through the bars of a cage.”

Imogen could feel the boning of her stays pressing against her sides, digging into her ribs, contorting her into the shape society found pleasing. “I imagine few things are entirely themselves in captivity.”