The Fraud (12 page)

Once she made the mistake of asking, in her enthusiastic Italian way, ‘What is the Uffizi Gallery?’ How was she to know that it was in Florence, her home, and one of the most famous art collections in the world?

‘My sister was not educated,’ Philip had said quickly, almost sarcastically. ‘She languished in the drawing-room, thinking only of husbands!’ and Grace was so mortified at this unjust description of her childhood that she blushed and the other guests laughed, charmed by the fifteen-year-old
signorina
who was blossoming into a beautiful woman in front of their eyes
.

Other painters from the town banged the big iron knocker; a writer was sometimes to be found at the hospitable table, occasionally an actress: whoever became part of the artistic and social circle of Signore Filipo di Vecellio, portrait painter, half a dozen people or ten, it did not matter. The few women present did not interrupt the conversations to go into another room, the gentlemen availed themselves of chamberpots in the cupboard outside the door. A great deal of food and drink would be consumed before the gentlemen would go off to their clubs and coffee houses: on many a late afternoon voices would echo out into St Martin’s Lane. The host’s favourite song was a round that, he said, he had heard Englishmen singing, in Florence:

Except that Mr Hartley Pond said that the words
he
had been taught were:

Signore Filipo di Vecellio’s big appointment book got fuller and the money rolled in: people came by the hour. He did not care to spend money on such things as assistants but he talked now of employing them, to paint sky and sleeves and background. But Grace Marshall thought,
No! I have learned much already. I will be his assistant!
She had observed well from the corners; now she insinuated herself nearer, anticipated her brother’s needs as he painted his sitters, handed him brushes. She began cleaning the brushes carefully with the Turpentine, fetching water when it was needed and clean rags. She watched and assisted as he mixed the colours with different kinds of oils: he despised watercolours he said, no matter that the great Michelangelo did not agree. It was oils he was interested in, oils were grand. Her eyes widened at his knowledge and his style and she thought oils grand also. More noble ladies came to the studio to be painted: beautiful ladies who smelled of potions and perspiration and food. Noble, florid gentlemen too were welcomed: they smelled of gin, or rum, and tobacco. Small children came, and exquisite actresses who smelled of flowers and paint: there were sometimes now several coaches at once outside her brother’s house in St Martin’s Lane, clients waiting, and the little sister assisting so carefully. And as the customers came to buy their likeness, preening themselves in a glass, she understood her brother was involved in trade now, of a kind. His studio was where he painted but his studio was also a showroom, and (how their mother would have fulminated) a shop.

All the time she studied his portraits carefully. She saw he often covered arms with sleeve or a drape of material (
He cannot draw arms and legs so well so he covers them
, her disloyal heart whispered,
I believe I draw as well as he
)
.
For at the bottom of all her energy and activity and watchfulness and learning, something lay coiled, waiting: she waited for Philip to see her own drawings, she waited to tell him of her meeting with the Mr Hogarth he spoke of, waited to show him her treasured portraits of their family.

She smoothed these precious pictures in the night, observed them in the candlelight in St Martin’s Lane, and she wrote her very first letter. She pondered on the words and on the writing for many hours.

And then Grace disgraced herself. She had completed her morning duties, whirling down St Martin’s Lane as she had once whirled along the streets of Bristol. Now she had placed herself, as usual, quietly in the studio ready to help, watching everything; she was so quiet she was hardly noticed by either her brother or his sitter, that morning a noble lady of uncertain age and of portly demeanour.

For some reason that morning the noble lady insisted on viewing her portrait for which she had had several sittings.

‘But
Signora bella
, Lady O’Reilly, it is not yet completed.’

‘I nevertheless have been very patient, and I want just a
tiny
view my dear Signore di Vecellio.’ She was proud of her Italian pronunciation for had she not travelled to Europe and seen real art? She repeated his name, ‘My dear Signore di Vecellio I must insist on one
tiny
peek.’ And she stood from the chair upon which she had been sitting and approached his easel with girlish laughter. Filipo di Vecellio
always
flattered: nevertheless the laughter turned to a little flurried screech.

‘No! But no.’

‘As I said to you,
Signora
, it is not yet completed.’

‘But no! That is not my face! That is not my hair!’ Grace longed to look at the portrait but did not dare move from the corner of the room where she cleaned brushes so quietly. ‘This is to be a Portrait of myself - and you were strongly recommended to me by the Duke, as you know - as a gift for my Husband. I do not care for the way that it shows my chin in quite that mode. I do not care for my hair to have that air of unreality. No, I do not care at all for the manner in which you are portraying me.’

Filipo di Vecellio was not known for his charm for nothing.

‘Lady O’Reilly,
cara mia.
You do not, forgive me, understand the way I work. I first paint a shell on which I shall soon place your own,’ he paused, ‘your own tranquilly strong features.’ Grace waited:
Tranquilly strong.
Was it enough?

Lady O’Reilly looked uncertainly at the painting.

‘And your Eyes,
bella
, the deep depths of Wisdom in your Eyes has yet to be shown.’
Deep depths of Wisdom
: Grace peered forward. Lady O’Reilly was almost mollified.

‘Until I have caught your Soul,’ said the painter, and he actually took her hand for a moment, ‘I have not caught your Likeness, and I view your Likeness with violent Admiration.’ And he kissed the hand that he held in his, and a little florid sigh emitted from Lady O’Reilly.

There was also a sound from somewhere in the studio: it sounded like a snort, as Grace Marshall tried to control her laughter. Lady O’Reilly quickly withdrew her hand and her eyes were suddenly very small and tight.

‘What is that?’

Grace’s hand was over her mouth and her body was shaking: the more she understood that she must not on any account laugh, the more the laughter welled up.

The artist threw a look of great disdain to the recesses of the studio and spoke extremely quickly. ‘My sister Francesca’, he said, ‘is suffering from a surfeit of emotion regarding her recent arrival from Florence. She is a foolish girl in some ways and I believe has not yet accustomed herself to your wonderful country, and sometimes she weeps. I believe she is weeping now. It is best, if you would be so gracious,
cara bella
, to ignore her.’ Lady O’Reilly peered into the corner of the room suspiciously but said no more, for after all it was well known that foreigners behaved in a very un-English manner at times. Filipo di Vecellio ended the sitting at once by suggesting they have a small
aperitivo
, and they left the studio.

Afterwards he informed his sister most severely that the noble sitter was paying
fourteen guineas
for her portrait. ‘That is more’, he reminded her, ‘than you could make in years as a milliner’s assistant, ’ and she tried so hard to swallow her laughter, looked down at her hands demurely, he saw her pushing her nails into her palms. And then he laughed, and they both laughed, and he made her heart glow with happiness by, at last, handing her one of his brushes and a colour blue, asking her to see if she could paint the sky in the background after he himself removed several decades from the visage of Lady O’Reilly.

And Grace Marshall felt a brush in her hand and smelled the paint and the oil and the canvas, and her eyes shone as she meticulously put precious paint on the brush and applied it for the very first time to the canvas, and as she painted she sang.

and although Philip Marshall allowed no mention of his past, that day he joined in with the song that their father had sung in Queen’s Square in Bristol when he mixed his little tubs of colour and painted his elegant horses.

And then something happened between the brother and the sister.

It was not clear to the people who came to the house, who had so liked to see the beautiful, dark-eyed, laughing young girl, what it was that had happened: nothing was ever spoken of, but she was no longer seen in the painter’s studio, not even in the dark, quiet corners. And when dinner was served she no longer laughed with her shining eyes.

Filipo di Vecellio suddenly hired two assistants, paying them (complaining at the cost) thirty-five guineas per year. Assistants now removed paint, cleaned brushes, were taught to paint the sky: the small things. They had to work hard, more work was coming in, they prepared Signore di Vecellio’s portraits so that they could be varnished and dispatched, and new ones begun. The assistants slept on small beds in one of the far dark corners of the studio.

Occasionally one of the sitters, remembering the eyes, asked of the pretty, quiet girl. ‘She is my housekeeper,’ said Filipo di Vecellio, ‘I teach her to buy fresh fish.’ And they all laughed, knowing the skill required with some of the rascally fishmongers who tried to hide the dead, pale eyes of the less fresh fruits of the Thames.

And sometimes they caught glimpses of the girl with her basket, and smiled, for she was a lovely girl, but she had become exceedingly elusive and they wondered what had happened and several smiled knowingly, presumed she had fallen in love.

The Italian sister still arranged the hospitable dinners, still lit the candles, drew the curtains. But they saw, all the guests who had found her so charming, that something had happened, something had changed. Miss Ffoulks and Mr James Burke and Mr John Palmer, there so often, understood perhaps more than the other guests that something must have—

 

—no, no! not ‘something changed’ - that is not right.

Everything changed: everything.

He unbalanced our sky, my brother Philip, and created monsters , and monsters are disguised, they wear embroidered waistcoats or their petticoats rustle as they pass by.

only -

only -

- oh I cannot do words well, I wish I could
paint
it:
the joy before
, before it changed, before everything - our Lives - changed forever, Philip and me. I wish I could paint the happiness, working for my brother in his Studio, learning learning learning - here at last was
my
Artistic Education, a hungry fifteen-year-old-girl, I was destined (I really really did think in big fancy words like Destiny then but of course I did not say them to my brother who would have laughed, who had not yet seen my Drawings), I was destined, it seemed to me, to be an Artist just as my brother was; but as I blossomed, like Flowers do, as I went from painting the sky that first time of laughing in the corner at poor Lady O’Reilly (who smelled not just of perspiration and perfume as all the ladies did, but of Madeira Wine like our Mother) - as Philip allowed me to paint what he called ‘the boring appendages,’ (he only cared to paint faces): as I painted the ground on the canvas, and then a cloud in the blue sky, and then at last - like a gift - the sleeve of a Doctor’s wife, the fall of the sleeve of a gown, the way the light fell to make the fold and the shadow (I looked at my own sleeve, I could see the shadow there) - oh then how my head expanded, no I mean my mind expanded, and in my dreams I saw candlelight catching the falling green silk and it was beautiful.

And that light falling on the sleeve in that way made me look,
look
at everything around me even more than I was used to - Miss Ffoulks had pale skin, it was like old paper and fine, and grey hair and wise eyes and the large bonnets that she favoured with the coloured ribbons that shook as she spoke
can I paint that?
her stiff kindness and her knowledge with the white skin like old paper; and in the early mornings there were birds low in the sky like a shadow, a chattering shadow of black small birds flying low across St Martin’s Lane from Leicester Fields -
can I paint that?
- and I noticed carefully that first morning light, the brightness before the fog so often came down - my eyes then, which had before been intuitive, began to be educated also - these were joyous days and I hugged to me the big words like Destiny because I knew this was to be my Life - and sometimes when we were quite alone we did sing the song of our Father,
if with me you’d fondly stray over the hills and far away
, holding on to a small piece of our past so that we might know, just for a short time, who we really were.