The Fraud (14 page)

‘You’ll be missing your Home, dear,’ she said, and I tried to think where my Home might be and she poured more wine into our glasses. ‘And your Family, your Mother and your Father, but Lord love you, there will be compensations, a pretty girl like you and those big eyes.’—Slowly as we drank, the first proper rays of morning sun rose up across the city and through the small window, and then almost at once disappeared again, as grey London fog came down - I gulped the wine in big, angry gulps, and I laughed, and I said, speaking at last (in my fake Italian accent), ‘
Signora
,
I do thank you for this delicious English wine!
’ and I felt giddy and numb and foreign and angry and gay, she talked on and on, I only had to nod a little, and try to smile - she recalled for me St Martin’s Lane as it had used to be, trees just like the countryside, she said, and chickens and pigs and sheep and we kept drinking and then the Colourman appeared, rubbing at his eyes, doing up his jacket, he seemed not at all put out that his mother was drinking wine at that hour with a strange young lady, grabbed a glassful himself as he went past to open his paint shop; by the time it was truly morning the Colourman’s mother and I had finished off a very large bottle of St Martin’s Lane wine.

Finally I stumbled to my feet, I immediately felt dizzy and hot, I collected myself and curtsied to the kind old lady and thanked her for her hospitality and said I must buy food for my brother’s table.

‘You are welcome, dear girl,’ she said so kindly, apparently not at all inebriated, and I suddenly wanted to weep, for hearing the kindness, I could feel tears at the back of my eyes and I
never
cried, I had never cried once since that night I drew Tobias and Ezekiel and the tears had come out of my eyes without me expecting them, and I pulled the gate at the end of her garden (quite missing it the first time) and then the latch clicked and I waved goodbye and further up the lane I vomited into the gutter - I was ashamed but not one person seemed to notice or say anything, people were always vomiting in open sewers in this city - I wiped my mouth with part of my gown then automatically I went to the butcherman, to the baker as usual; then I bought a penny glass of ginger beer from a woman with a jug in Monmouth-street with my brother’s money that I would have to account for, and I gulped it down trying to wash away the taste of the St Martin’s Lane wine, and the taste of pain; London spun about me and the basket of food was heavy on my arm, the glass eye of a dead rabbit stared out - I tore at a piece of bread and stuffed it into my mouth, I walked quickly, hardly knowing where I was going, yet going there all the same because somehow I did know exactly where I was going - I had seen hats in milliners’ Emporiums in the Strand that even the elaborate Mrs Falls would have been surprised by - I walked under a small swinging sign of one of them, and pushed at the glass door - there were hats everywhere: hundreds and hundreds of hats it seemed: some most elegant, some with strawberries even bigger than those of Mrs Falls, no sign of any milliners but I saw a shadow of a girl run down some stairs at the back into the basement below.

A woman appeared, looked me up and down, taking in the basket and the rabbit. ‘Yes?’

I did not know how one was meant to begin, ‘I wish to make Hats for you,’ I said, abruptly.

She had a hard, ugly face. ‘I have plenty of hat-makers,’ she said, ‘they are two a penny in the Strand.’

‘I am experienced,’ I said, ‘and my Hats were admired.’

She looked at me again, looked at the eye of the rabbit. ‘I do not employ Foreigners here,’ she said, and turned away.

‘But I am good at it!’ I cried, ‘I have made Hats and Bonnets for years, for many years, much better than your Hats.’ I tore my own off my head, ‘Look! Look at this stitching!’ but she kept her back to me.—Four more milliners shops I visited, more and more desperate , and I suppose dishevelled - not one would answer me, assistants did not just walk in off the Strand and I had nothing, no paper to prove that I had once been so accomplished, for Philip had whisked me away and I never thought to care about hats ever again, up and down the Strand and everybody saying no (and afterwards, when I recovered myself, I laughed at that: that I should walk inebriated down the Strand with my dead rabbit staring upwards and, likely, still Turpentine-scented hair - and demand a position in a millinery establishment!) but now I walked towards Covent Garden, the street-girls plying their trade even in the early morning with smiling, wheedling, desperate faces and in St Martin’s Lane the madwoman sang on her corner, a very mad song it sounded to me.

the high true voice, and in desperation, wanting to see the faces of my Family, and colours flashing inside my head as if I was the madwoman, not she who sang so sweetly, I thought
what shall I do?

‘
Seenyoureena
, where was you!’ cried Euphemia, opening the door as if she had been looking for me, and then looking at me properly in some surprise, the wine I suppose or my despair. ‘The Master says that that Painter is coming, that Joshua Reynolds! He says it must be Special and the cook says what is she to do Special with when you ain’t come back with it?’

For on that same grey, dizzy day, along with perhaps half a dozen other guests, Mr Joshua Reynolds, my brother’s Colleague and Rival, was to come to dinner and my brother Philip who had destroyed my precious Drawings in the night seemed to be dancing on hot coals with nervousness at the visit and drank several large glasses of wine and certainly gave no indication that anything had happened between us, as if I had dreamed it all so I threw water on my face and as the guests arrived I smiled and smiled as if I had suddenly turned into a frozen, smiling doll; but I was there, after all, I smiled, after all - I made sure the food was ready and lit the tall candles but I, for the first time I uttered scarcely a word: I could not speak, I was the housekeeper.

I was surprised on that - unforgettable - day to see that the acclaimed Mr Joshua Reynolds was nearly as short as Mr Hogarth and Philip towered over him (and enjoyed that he could do so) - a fool could see that my brother and Mr Reynolds were extremely wary of each other, competitors for Trade, and at first they talked carefully with the other guests of other things: of Mr Goldsmith’s plays, of Dr Samuel Johnson’s new English dictionary - but the critic Mr Hartley Pond was present and soon talk of Art was in full flow.

‘It was the ancient Greeks who elevated the figure of Man to that of a God,’ said Mr Hartley Pond. ‘That is the beginning of Art as we know it: nobody can speak of Art until they have studied the sublimity of the Grecian human form as crafted by the Master Sculptors,’ and as he spoke I felt my cheeks redden: what my brother had said was true - I knew nothing, I had never even
seen
a Greek statue, apart from the fake one in the Bristol garden.

Then Mr Reynolds began: he praised the Religious and History Paintings of the Old Masters - this was Sublime Art indeed, with Moral Purpose - but before he had got much further my brother poured more wine and laughed. ‘I think you know very well, Sir, that such is the Vanity and Self-love of this Age that a person would rather have a Portrait of himself on his wall than a moral portrayal of the Death of Judas!’

‘You sound like that untalented fellow, Romney,’ said Mr Reynolds somewhat impolitely. ‘But I insist that Morality is the Artist’s role - and, after all, engravings can be made of History Paintings, and there is much money to be made from Prints.’

‘But surely then, it is the Engraver that takes most of the money!’ answered my brother (who had failed miserably with his projected Epic Painting of the Coronation, all the Nobles looked like sticks) ‘nothing is as profitable as Portrait painting when you are at the top of the Field, as we are!’ and Mr Reynolds regarded Philip with a look that was indecipherable, and drank more wine also, nodding to me without actually looking at me as I filled his glass, and then the conversation turned back to canvas and paint and colour, and I could see Philip’s beautiful palette inside my head, all the bright colours flashing with my rage.

Someone spoke of Plagiarism (Miss Ffoulks, seeing my puzzled face, explained to me quietly it meant copying someone else’s work); they told of how one artist of their acquaintance had copied Botticelli.

Mr Reynolds sat back in his chair, holding the glass I had refilled ; I looked at his face - it was bluff and red rather than fine; amiable certainly - but there was something cold, there in the face, as Philip had and suddenly I thought - yet I did not know where the thought came from that night for I was exactly sixteen years old and ignorant -
Perhaps
,
to succeed
,
great Artists must lose some other part of themselves.

‘I believe’, said Mr Reynolds, ‘that there is no such thing as Plagiarism. We must find, I think, that by being conversant with the Intentions of others, we learn to invent ourselves. The mind is a barren soil which will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with Foreign matter.’

I looked at my charming, hospitable brother: the man who had thrown me against the bench and torn up my Drawings: Foreign matter.

‘I agree absolutely,’ said Mr Hartley Pond. ‘Artists can learn only from those greater than themselves, and that means old Artists from Europe,’ and he held a wine-glass delicately to his thin lips, and Miss Ffoulks nodded also and one long pink ribbon from her bonnet caught on the wig of Mr Hartley Pond, and seemed to suit him.

John Palmer had kept his old wig on as long as possible, in honour I suppose of Mr Reynolds’ visit, but now he took it off as usual and it hung on the back of his chair; he polished his bald head with his big kerchief and addressed Joshua Reynolds. ‘You say, Sir, that the mind must be enriched with Foreign matter. Of course.’ His kerchief still polished. ‘But what of “home-grown” matter?’ he added mischievously. ‘What, Sir, of the views of that fine English painter, Mr Hogarth?’

Mr James Burke laughed, and finally Mr Reynolds joined in. ‘You know very well, I think, yes, there should be an
English
Academy of Art, John Palmer,’ he said. ‘But Hogarth wants to have an Academy to help Artists survive. I think an Academy is to dictate taste. Hogarth is a fool to think that British Art can grow here with nothing to fertilise it. Without the example of the great Old Masters of European painting, without the example of Michelangelo, we are nothing,’ and they spoke then again of this mysterious thing they often spoke of, the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome: Michelangelo’s masterpiece, its scenes of the Old Testament, its wonderful figures, its beautiful colours.

‘It needs a great
clean
,’ said John Palmer suddenly into the praise and glory. ‘The smoke from all the candles in that Chapel over hundreds of years has dulled the ceiling, dulled the colours - it would be interesting to see if it could be cleaned. I would like to get up there on a scaffolding also, just like Michelangelo, only with a scrubbing brush!’ and everybody laughed for John Palmer was rather rotund, and who would attack such glories with a scrubbing brush? but Mr Hartley Pond nodded in agreement with him for once, took extra snuff. ‘I too wonder what Beauties might be excavated,’ he said in his thin, pompous way.

Mr James Burke spoke of paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens that had found their way to London, there was much talk of prices and bargains and True Art. And Money. Money.

They talked and argued all afternoon till the light had almost gone and more candles were needed.—I listened, I saw them all, and yet I saw them differently: Mr Reynolds’ rather bullish head, that handsome James Burke with his hair tied back like a sailor, Mr Hartley Pond’s elegant, supercilious white curls, Miss Ffoulks’ floating, insistent ribbons, John Palmer’s sad, intelligent eyes, my brother’s easy charm - and rage at my brother colouring everything I saw.

But then suddenly - as they talked on and on - with a great shock (so tremendous was my shock that I actually stood up wildly) I had if it does not sound preposterous a Revelation, a flashing wild Revelation.

They stared at me for my chair had fallen: I managed somehow to curtsey and retrieved the chair with the courteous help of John Palmer, I did not look at my brother, I went to find the candles, they went on talking - but I had seen what I had seen: my brother would not teach me, I could never study at any Academy, I could never go on a Grand Tour of Europe and see this Sistine Chapel - but of course
this dinner table
had already been my Academy and my Grand Tour - I was sixteen years old and I was a pupil here, I was privy to the thoughts and ideas of well known, influential Artists and Critics in a way that could teach me: did they not speak of Drawing and Painting all the time,
all the time
? - day after day here they talked of their own work and of the work of Old Masters, of the great Venetian artist Titian, of Michelangelo again and again - they talked of Rembrandt’s self-portraits that they had seen and studied and copied - they talked of Raphael and Miss Ffoulks said it was well known that Raphael and Michelangelo had worked together and fought with each other - and my brother and his guests fought also, they disagreed with each other, they were jealous of each other, sometimes they knocked over the wine or even threw bread at one another, but they
never
stopped talking - they talked of egg tempera: of the exact mixing of egg-yoke with colour and water and secret ingredients; they spoke of the best oils to mix with colours; or they talked of the Religious Paintings all over Italy, Madonnas, Jesus after Jesus. —Everything they said I knew I could learn from, I could take everything inside me and take it back to my attic room to consider, think about - if I listened carefully I could surely,
surely
learn even if I was the housekeeper, and the word mocked me -
housekeeper
- and then someone in my family
did
come into my head . . .
I saw a silent spinster in the dark dress
,
her hair pulled back under her white cap: the housekeeper who nobody noticed. I saw Aunt Joy -
and as the wine flowed freely and the laughter and the voices got louder and louder I understood what I might do to survive: I could be like Aunt Joy and
nobody would notice that I was learning
. —But then - but then - how would I paint? physically paint? for I could not just learn and not practise what I was learning - I would have to obtain paint, and brushes, and charcoal - very well, very well: I could work in my brother’s Studio in the night, steal from the dark corners where the discarded, damaged canvases and boards lay, use the old brushes (he was always discarding brushes) steal his paints, he had so many paints - all around me the Artists spoke of their work and the new, wild ideas poured into my head.