"Restoration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tremain Rose)

Chapter Three. My New Vocation

The most beautiful room at Bidnold (aside from the little circular space in the West Turret which, for the time being, I kept empty, my imagination not yet having discovered the most satisfactory way to reveal its perfection) was the Withdrawing Room. As one who had spent the greatest part of his life in meagre apartments, I could not prevent a foolish grin from breaking out over my face every time I remembered that I was now the owner of a room so designated. The title, "Withdrawing Room", entranced me. For it inevitably implies that one is living a busy and pleasurable life on its periphery, from which one occasionally "withdraws" in order to sip a little brandy by its excellent fire, or to indulge in sweet and silly talk with the likes of my handsome neighbour, Lady Bathurst, on its scarlet and gold sofas. Thus, with my usual excess of enthusiasm, I set about making certain that my life at Bidnold was full of diverting activity, from which I could "withdraw" from time to time.

I equipped myself with a Music Room (I had not, at that time, yet learned to play the oboe), a Billiard Room (I had not, then, ever held a billiard cue in my hands), a Card Room (I was already fond of Rummy and Bezique), a Studio (in which I would begin my new career as a painter), a Study (in case Pearce should visit me and find himself discomforted by the oriental brilliance of my Withdrawing Room), a Morning Room (facing east, where I would sit between nine and ten to do my household accounts) and of course a most sumptuous Dining Room (the abundance of its table such that one would need to "withdraw" a little after dinner to let the digestive system work in comfort and tranquillity).

My stipend from the King as Celia's husband was two thousand livres per annum – riches I could not, a year before, have dreamed of. This money enabled me to buy a great quantity of Chinese furniture for my Withdrawing Room, to hang the walls with ruched vermilion taffeta and Peking scrolls, to upholster my chairs in scarlet and fuchsia and gold and to lay upon the floor a carpet from Chengchow so elaborate in design it had been a thousand days upon the loom.

I was exceedingly pleased with these decorations. As I poured beer for my exhausted upholsterers, I congratulated myself that I had got the rampant tones of red, pink and gold so absolutely right that I must quickly hit upon some ingenious idea for ensuring that the guests, in whose company I would withdraw into this room, would not sully it with drabness. It came to me speedily: I would order to be made a dazzling collection of scarlet sashes, bilberry shawls, ruby slippers, pink bonnets and yellow plumes, with which to adorn my invitées, thus affording my eye considerable delight and my spirit a great deal of mirth.

Celia, as you will have understood by now, had no part in the designing of my house. Though it was thought that, when expedient, she would spend some time at Bidnold, the King preferred her to be nearer to him and had thus installed the new Lady Merivel in a pretty house at Kew, a short journey by water from Whitehall. It was gossiped, I learned from my Court friends, that on summer evenings, when his desire for my wife overcame his passion journalière for Barbara Castlemaine, he would skull himself alone and in disguise to Kew, thus putting himself grievously at risk from the vagabonds of the water. Unlike myself, so prone to cowardice with regard to my own mortality, the King appears to be a man without fear. I had become by this time, I feel obliged to admit to you, extremely fond of the King, and experienced some pain in the realisation that, now I had served his purpose and been rewarded with lands and a title, he could, if he chose, forget about me utterly. I thought with fondness of the smacking kisses he had once slapped on his Fool's lips, and earnestly hoped it would not be so.

Let me relate to you my first attempts at becoming an artist.

Thirty canvases, fourteen brushes, fifty-eight boxes of pigment and an easel were sent to me from Pelissier and Drew in London. My tailor made for me a floppy hat in the manner of the great Rembrandt, and a hessian smock, in which garment, I admit, I looked more like a swine feeder than a Renaissance Man.

The mixing of pigments was an activity to which I responded with great eagerness. If I have a visionary side, it is visions of colour and light that I see. Thus, I longed to dispense with drawing and dabble pure colour onto the virgin canvases. I was aware, however, than an artist must have a subject and the only subjects I could execute well with my charcoal were parts of the human anatomy – the very thing I has sworn to consign to oblivion, but found myself unable to forget.

My first picture, then, was of a man's thigh and buttocks. The background, I had decided, would be ochre, suggesting a pastoral scene, in which the severed half of my man was striding through a field of corn. (I made a rather feeble attempt at drawing some stooks in the distance and a few single ears of wheat close to.)

The musculature of the buttocks and thigh was, I think, reasonably well and accurately drawn but, such was its detail, that when I came at last, in a state of trembling excitement, to apply oil paint to it, I was all too aware that I had no idea whatsoever how to render shadow and light (and thus the third dimension) in this medium and, although I worked at it for hours and long into the night, my picture was an utter failure, resembling in the end a garish still-life of a plate of bacon and scrambled egg. I took off my floppy hat and smock and withdrew, this time to my bed, where I was forced to gnaw upon my sheet to stop myself shedding tears of frustration and rage.

The next day, a brilliant idea came to me. If I could execute parts of the body quite competently, it would surely be within my power to draw a body in its entirety, particularly with the help of a model.

After breakfast, I called for my horse, Danseuse (another gift from the King), and rode up the hill to the village of Bidnold and knocked on the door of the Jovial Rushcutters, a nice little inn I was in the habit of visiting from time to time, when in need of rough conversation and the smell of beer, tobacco and spittle.

The barmaid of the Jovial Rushcutters was one Meg Storey who, in her manner and in the teasing fullness of her breasts, slightly resembled Rosie Pierpoint, and to whom, in consequence, I was involuntarily drawn. I now managed to flatter Meg Storey sufficiently – with praise and promise of silver -for her to agree to coming to my Studio to pose for me. Not, I assured her, naked, but prettily draped with scarves and sashes and wearing quite possibly a posy of geraniums in her hair, thus giving me access to my reds, which I had used to baleful excess in the man's thigh, but without which I could not imagine any picture of mine succeeding.

She arrived on a rather chilly September morning. At the sight of me in my smock and hat, she let out a hoot of derisive laughter. I was further discomforted by her complaints, as she took off her cloak, about the cold and sunless nature of my Studio.

"It faces, as it must, north," I said, beginning to sharpen my piece of charcoal. "Artists must work in a northerly light."

"Why?" asked Meg Storey.

I looked up. I did not wish to admit to this saucy tavern jade that I had not the least idea. "Because," I snapped, "a north light is cruel."

After a great deal of shivering and protesting, Meg Storey agreed to remove everything but her drawers, sat down on a tall chair and allowed me to drape a magenta scarf around her neck to fall flatteringly over one of her large, bright-nippled breasts. I stood back. Her hair was sand-coloured, not unlike my own, but a deal finer and silkier. She looked exceedingly pretty. I felt my enthusiasm for my picture grow. Now I understand, I told myself, what the Flemish masters felt as they prepared to render their voluptuous Dianas, their fleshy shepherdesses…

I began to sketch in Meg Storey's neck, shoulder and right breast. At her waist, the drawers began, but I ignored them. In my knowledge of the form of the female leg, of the degree of fatty tissue in the upper thigh, I was able to depict what was, in fact, invisible to me. I was now excited by my work to such a degree that I felt my loins grow hard and had to force out of my mind, as I drew her hand, a sudden image of it flaying my bottom with its little pearly nails. Luckily, the size of the canvas and the voluminous nature of my smock prevented Meg Storey from witnessing any arousal in me, and for two hours or more she sat obediently still, despite the cold.

At mid-day, she had to leave to serve dinner at the Jovial Rushcutters. I pressed a florin into her palm and asked her to return the following morning. I made no attempt to touch her, though the urge in me to do so was very strong. Art, I told myself, must be put before beastliness.

But I couldn't stay away from my picture. Even on my return from an excellent supper with my neighbour, Lady Bathurst, at a very late hour, I went at once to my Studio and lit several lamps and stared at my drawing of Meg Storey and felt myself greatly pleased by it. It was a relief to see, reasonably well drawn, an entire body and not bits and pieces of it. Art, I thought picturesquely (and with a metaphysicality worthy of Pearce), will make me whole, where before I was but half made up.

The next morning dawned sunny, thus slightly altering the light in my studio. I had spent a peevish night trying to decide which pigments to use and in what quantities in order to achieve the exact colour of Meg Storey's neck, her hair, her heel, her nipples. I longed with such envious longing to put onto my canvas something that was more than a mere portrait of Meg Storey. I wanted to capture in colour her very essence, so that anyone seeing my picture would be able to "see" her, exactly as she is, both beautiful and vulgar, and these two opposing conditions conflicting in her with such subtlety that one's perception of her is a constantly changing thing. But how was I to do it?

I stood at my easel exhausted and downhearted. How can you capture in a medium which is static that which is constantly moving and altering? I began, without confidence, to mix my pigments. Meg's nose, I noticed, was red ("From the cold I caught, sitting here, Sir Robert"), so I thought I would start with that and work outwards. At once, I could see, I had made a bad decision. You do not, if you are striving for the essence of something, begin with a small detail. I darted to the nipple and painted that. Now, my canvas had two lifeless red spots upon it. Quickly, I mixed some umbers, vermilions and browns and began to colour Meg's hair. Again, there was no light upon it or life within it, and I began to understand now that I simply did not have the technique to paint a tolerably pretty picture of Meg, let alone a portrait that would reveal her essential nature and being.

I put down my brush. I picked up Meg's shawl and put it round her and told her sadly that I would pay her to return at some future date, when I had taken some lessons in becoming an artist.

I believe I might have succumbed, after this first ignominious flop in my chosen field, to a bout of sadness, had it not been for the kind attentions of my neighbour, Lady Bathurst.

Let me describe the Bathursts to you.

Bathurst is a hunting man. He is past his seventieth year and his memory parted from him in his sixty-eighth, when his horse threw him in the field and trod on his ear, through which orifice his mind dribbled away. He wears aged green clothes which are seldom cleaned, and so carry with them the stench of saddle soap, tobacco and boiled pudding. Of his wife's name, which is Violet, he has lost all remembrance and has been heard to enquire at the dinner table: "Who is that woman? Do I know her?" But if you imagine him confined to bed, or even to his room, you would be wrong. Every morning, he is hoisted onto his horse and with his greyhounds and terriers rampages about his fields and forests running to their death hares, foxes, badgers and even stags. The walls of his great hall are hung with game-keepers' poles, hunting whips, the skins of foxes, badgers and marten cats and the heads of deer, its floor strewn with marrow bones for his dogs, which are kennelled there and do their business all over the parquet.

I am fond of Bathurst. His claret is excellent and his table manners worse than mine. His conversation is pure drivel, but spoken with a perpetual passion, emphasised by his constant farting and thumping of the table. Though his memory has left him, his spirit has not. His friends, he tells me, have deserted him; he does not know who they were or why they have gone, but he senses a void, a vacancy, where once there was conversation and laughter, and seems delighted that I should be there to fill it up a little. Confusingly, he appears always to remember my name, or rather his own Anglicised version of if. Merryvale. "Welcome, Merryvale!" he thunders, across the braying and barking of the dogs. "Welcome and Good Cheer and Devil take the Laggards and the Hindmosts!"

If I were, like Pearce, prone to Godliness and guilt, I might find myself a little discomforted by the fact that, attached as I am to Bathurst, I am deceiving him. For I am embarked, I will now admit, on a most agreeable affaire de coeur with his wife, my Lady Bathurst, or, as I call her in the intimacy of her chamber, Violet.

Violet is some thirty years younger than her husband and a most handsome person, very witty and smart. She called on me not long after I took up residence at Bidnold Manor, and, on that very first meeting, related to me the lamentable state of Bathurst 's mind, putting particular emphasis on his forgetfulness of her existence, thus bringing into my head at once the idea that there could be something between us. For a man who has forgotten that he has a wife cannot care a great deal about which bed she chooses to inhabit, or with whom. Our amours are not of the tearing and clawing kind, but agreeably hot for all that and tolerably frequent, Violet being at that age when she sees her beauty starting to vanish and so wants to make hay while the sun still shines, albeit less radiantly than in her youth, in which, by her own account, an abundance of hay was made and time seemed forever halted at summer.

Thus it was to Violet Bathurst, lying in my arms under the silver and turquoise canopy of my bed, that I confessed my misery at my failure with art. "Without this," I said, "and abandoned as I seem to be by the King, I am a man without a direction and I very much fear that I will lose myself in drunkenness and excesses of all kinds."

Violet looked at me sharply. She was already a little jealous of my young wife and had made me swear on a copy of Thomas a Kempis that I had no carnal knowledge of Celia. The thought that I would fall into excessive behaviour clearly alarmed her a great deal.

"You must not worry, Merivel," she said, leaning on a white elbow and caressing the moths of my stomach with an elegant finger. "I will organise some painting lessons. I know a talented young man, very eager to make the acquaintance of gentry, who will be only too keen to oblige. I commissioned a portrait of Bathurst from him, and, considering that Bathurst is not able to sit still for a second, the finished work was admirable. His name is Elias Finn – a Puritan, one rather suspects, but so keen for advancement and success that he cuts his coat according to the times. He is desperate, of course, to get to Court, and perhaps, if he proves a good teacher, you might be able to set him on the road?"

"You forget, Violet," I said miserably, "that it is now three months since I had a word from the King."

"Is it? Then perhaps you should go to London?"

"I have no position at Court any more."

"But surely, His Majesty would be overjoyed to see you?"

"That I cannot know."

"He used to give you kisses, Merivel."

I smiled. "You and I both know, Violet," I said, "that kisses are as fleeting as pear blossom."

The entry of Elias Finn into my life was, I suspect, of some importance.

He describes himself as a portraitist, but leads, I discover, an almost mendicant life in the shires of England, going on foot from one great house to another, begging to paint its inhabitants. He is young, but his face is gaunt and grey and his wrists as thin as a cuttlefish. He has a shifting, uneasy glance. His lips, however, are sweetly curvaceous and feminine, giving evidence of some sensitivity. His voice is honeyed and polite. He is a paradox. On our first meeting, I didn't know what to make of him at all.

I led him to my Studio and showed him my bacon and egg man and my unfinished portrait of Meg Storey. He stared at them in alarm, as if they frightened him, which indeed they probably did, so far do they seem from anything one could possibly admire.

"Why do you wish to paint, Sir?" he said after a while.

"Well…" I began, "as a kind of act of forgetting. My studies have been in anatomy and disease, but I wish, for reasons of my own, not to continue with medical work."

"So you would be an artist instead?"

"Yes."

"Why, pray?"

"Because… because I must do something! I have a very immoderate nature, Mr Finn. Look at me! Look at my house! Since the Restoration, I have become inflamed, full of riot! We're in a New Age and I am its perfect man, but I must channel myself into some endeavour, or be lost to idleness and despair. So please help me."

He returned to my pictures. "To judge from these," he said, "you draw tolerably well, but have no sense of colour."

No sense of colour! I was dumbfounded. "Colour," I began to say, "is what excites me more than anything on earth. I was married in purple and gold! At the King's coronation, I fainted almost at the sight of his crimson barge…" But then I stopped myself. "You are right, of course," I said. "I have a great love for colour, but a love for something is never enough. What I utterly lack is the skill to turn love into art."

We began my painting lessons there and then. Finn had brought with him some of his own work, portraits mostly of fashionable women, which had presumably not been liked, in that they were still in his possession. I thought them admirable. "If, in time, I can execute one painting as good as any of these," I said, "I will be a happy man."

He smiled pityingly. He began to discuss his technique with regard to background, which, he said, should always be classical – a Palladian garden with broken columns, a naval battle, or a merry hunting scene.

"You mean," I asked, "that instead of drawing a window behind Meg Storey, I should have put in ships, or horsemen?"

"Yes," said Finn. "Naturally."

I couldn't recall that Holbein's famous portraits had classical backgrounds, but I didn't mention this, because I knew I would be very grateful to Finn if he could teach me how to paint Doric columns or a battleship in full sail.

"The background," he continued, "must flatter. More, it must lend permanence to the life of the sitter, no matter how brief his actual existence may turn out to be."

For these considerations, I had of course taken no previous thought, but I could see some truth in what he was saying, and so our first morning passed in discussion of how a picture must be composed so that no part of it is "dead", so that, wherever the eye wanders, there is interest, whether it is in the detail on the hilt of a sword or a minutely rendered rowing boat on a distant Arcadian shore. We furthermore approached the question of distance and perspective: how hills, for instance, which are further away will seem paler and less well defined than those which are near, and how the sitter's nearness and vigour will be emphasised if he or she inhabits a pool of light.

"When you are next at Whitehall," Finn concluded, "go and look at the Raphaels and the Titians the King reputedly has in his apartments and you will see some of the finest examples of everything I've talked about."

So, Violet Bathurst had already informed Finn of my acquaintance with the King. I merely nodded. It was much too early for me to decide whether Finn was worthy of any favours, but I detected that his longing to go to Court was even greater than my longing to learn to paint and decided at once that I might be able to use this finely balanced inequality to some advantage.

Towards the beginning of November, by which time, under Finn's tuition, I had painted a moderately bad picture of my Spaniel, Minette, asleep by an imaginary waterfall, my little dog became ill.

A rampaging fear gripped my heart. I loved Minette. Her presence was a constant reminder to me that I had been -and still hoped to be again – the King's friend and Fool, and I was certain that her dying would be a terrible portent of derelictions yet to come.

Very reluctantly, I got out my surgical instruments and my remedies, ointments and powders, but, having set them out next to Minette on the Dining Room table, found that I was at a loss to know what to do; in my desire to forget my former profession, I had succeeded in burying knowledge that was vital to me now.

I thought of Lou-Lou and Fabricius's dictates about nature. Would I be able to cure Minette by a similar attack of idleness? I did not think so. She was vomiting almost constantly, poor thing, and on her belly was a large dribbling sore.

I diluted a little laudanum with milk and spooned this down her throat, and after some minutes she entered a quiet sleep. I examined the sore. It was a foul and stinking thing. I imagined its poison entering her blood vessels and thus being carried to her heart. If only it had been a boil I could lance, but it was not, it was an open wound which, because it was on her belly, I had neglected to notice for several days, or even weeks.

I cleaned the thing as best I could with some warm water, moistened some linen with alcohol and laid this upon it. Minette whimpered in her sleep and then her body was suddenly wracked with terrible convulsions. Foam-flecked spittle appeared at the corners of her mouth. I held onto her and waited for the convulsions to subside. At my elbow, my servant, Will Gates, was sweating and pale.

"It's no good," I said to Will. "I don't trust my own knowledge. Where can I find Doctor Murdoch at this hour?"

"Doctor Murdoch is a quack, Sir, a regular empiric."

"Never mind. He's our best hope. Where is he to be found?"

"In one place and only one."

"Well?"

"At the Rushcutters, Sir."

Why did I not send Will to the inn? I did not send him because I thought a fast canter on Danseuse in the crisp November evening would help to rid me of some of the fear and anxiety by which I felt myself gripped. Shouting to my groom to saddle the horse, I carried Minette to my bedroom, laid her on my bed and told Will not to leave her side, on pain of immediate dismissal.

"What will I do if she rack and rigor again, Sir?"

"Hold her," I said, "try to hold her still."

I mounted Danseuse and was away through the park, sending the deer scurrying from our pathway. I pressed her to a fast gallop and, as I filled and refilled my lungs with the rich air, began to feel my terror depart a little.

I was sweating by the time I tied Danseuse to her post outside the Jovial Rushcutters and my face was aflame. I walked in, blowing like a whale. I cast around for the unmistakable sight of Doctor Murdoch, with his stooped shoulders and long clammy hands, but I couldn't see him. "Doctor Murdoch?" I asked one of the hobnailed peasants with his nose in his ale. "Was he here this evening? Does anyone know where he might be found?"

Through the malodorous crowd of pigmen, game-keepers and fowl-breeders came Meg Storey. In the dim candlelight of the tavern, her hair looked fiery. The dress and apron she wore were lilac. She bobbed a cheeky curtsey to me, then took my hand and led me without a word to the cool, dark stillroom where the barrels of beer were stacked and there reached up and placed a soft kiss upon my mouth. "That is to tell you," she said, and I caught the sour scent of beer on her breath, "I am sorry for what happened to your new vocation."

I let out a yelp of laughter, and, all hot and in a lather of body and brain, gathered Meg Storey into my arms. "Nature…" I murmured between kisses and caresses. "Let nature work upon Minette and upon me…" And in moments I had abandoned my poor dog to her fate and lay tumbling with Meg on the earthen floor.

An hour later, Doctor Murdoch came into the tavern, but so confused and excited was I by my amours with Meg Storey, that I no longer thought to find him there, but spent the rest of the night riding hither and thither in search of him, until Danseuse would gallop no more and we walked wearily home.

Will Gates was asleep on the floor of my bedchamber. Laid out on my bed, under a striped cloth I recognised as one of the large table napkins given to me by the King, was the dead body of Minette.

I knelt down and tried to think of a prayer, but found that, along with my all too insubstantial knowledge of disease, I had consigned to oblivion any number of the ancient words of God.