Ferney (11 page)

This time he was almost there, doing it just for fun, the horse circling him, five paces off, when it was distracted by something even more interesting. It led him to the hedge, attracted by
another oddity it couldn’t ignore. He looked over as it blew and stamped. There on the down-slope of the hill beyond lay an unidentifiable shape, a large white square flat in the grass. He
climbed the gate to investigate, but before he reached it he could see it was a canvas, flanked by an artist’s easel tipped on its side, paints strewn from a fallen palette. A painter?
Outside? You never saw painters outside. They belonged inside in their studios far away in the towns, not up here on the hill. Then he heard a sound to his right that could have been a cry of joy
or of pain and there, sticking up from the ditch, were the legs.

The man he helped up was perhaps twenty years older than him, in his late forties, tall and fine-looking, but with hair that had quite vanished from the top of his head, leaving only mutton-chop
whiskers and patches of greying curls over both ears. A keen pair of dark eyes fixed on him with a wild expression.

He remembered their conversation with unique clarity. It wasn’t long ago, after all, but more than that, it was rare in those days to talk to a man of education, a man whose ideas were
worth dwelling on, who could share his own thoughts with understanding. He’d thought through that conversation many times to keep it fresh, and if in doing so he had edited some of the words,
he knew he still had the meaning right.

‘Are you well, sir?’ he asked the stranger anxiously and got another odd sound in return, a sound which started with a yelp and turned into a giggle.

‘On a day like this? Why should I not be well? Look around you, man. Look at the beauties, the beauties all around you.’

Ferney did as he was told, but the scene was as familiar as it could be, less wild than of old, more signs of man’s incursions, but still a very fine view. ‘The sun’s out, for
sure,’ he said. ‘Did your painting displease you?’

‘Painting is all my joy and all my sorrow,’ said the other, suddenly quieter. ‘It is the reason I laugh and the reason those around me weep.’

He seemed suddenly to become properly aware of Ferney and looked at him with interest. Ferney knew this look, understood its roots in the effortless categorization of English class. He knew his
accent was now an English countryman’s accent, but he also knew his clothes showed him in an ambiguous light. They were not gentleman’s outdoor clothes, not impracticably stylish. They
were plainer though of good quality, the sort of thing for a quiet day in the garden. He had learned to appreciate good cut and stitching and he was not short of the means to buy it.

The man’s damaged, distracted air had engaged Ferney’s interest and he introduced himself. There was a silence while the other man, breathing heavily, looked up at the sky and all
around at the horizon.

‘I am called Ferney Tucker, sir.’ There was no response. ‘And you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ he pressed.

‘Me, sir? You would know my name? Why, I am John Nobody. You may call me that. It is easier to tell you who I am not. I am not Mr Landseer. Mr Landseer paints PAINTINGS. He sets nature in
its proper place. He CONTROLS it.’ He invested the word with a curling sneer. ‘I am not Mr Turner. Mr Turner gets five hundred guineas for his . . . his yellow pea-soupers. The Academy
likes them very much. The Academy does not like me. I am Mr Nobody. No, better, call me Mr Poorman, John Poorman, the bane of my poor parents’ life.’

He stopped and looked at Ferney closely for a moment.

‘Do you know France, sir?’ he asked.

‘Most certainly I do,’ said Ferney.

‘From the recent hostilities?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Think what you will of them. It is only the French who have any time for me, sir. They understand something of me and yet they are not admirers a man would seek out, not with the war so
recently past. They wish to buy my paintings, sir, while my fellow countrymen seek only to search out the fault in them.’ He stopped, grunted and swept an arm around the horizon. ‘Just
look, sir. All around us is the best part of England. Its very bones, its LANDSCAPE. I would pass up all human company just to sit and contemplate a view like this if that were the
choice.’

Ferney, who often thought the same, nodded. The man shook his head fast, blowing out like a horse.

‘The men at the Academy would like it if I would only paint more of their BROWN TREES, their fevered twistings of good English greenness into the knotted, dried relics of Italy or Africa.
I am too green for them, altogether too green, but I paint what I see and I can do nothing else. Now they are building their National Gallery to fill with their portraits and their historical
farragos and their parched, foreign views. There will be no more worthwhile painting in England for thirty years, sir, mark my words. They hate colour. They wage war on colour. I must be drab to
suit them and I will
not
be drab.’

Ferney found himself almost unnecessary, an ear which barely needed a head attached to it, but he felt moved to say something.

‘Well, paint then,’ he said, ‘paint as you see it. Paint as the view dictates.’

The other man sighed. ‘I have four children, sir. Four children, a wife in poor health and another child to come. The purse commands me.’

Ferney looked again at the painter. A gentleman did not usually talk of such things.

‘Why were you in the ditch?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Ah. I was seized with a fury. I threw down my sketch and ran away from the foul thing. I did not see the damned ditch until it had me.’

Ferney considered. ‘So what was it in your sketch that infuriated you?’

‘You are a fierce examiner, sir!’

‘You have told me something which interests me. Won’t you tell me all of it?’

‘I will show you.’

The artist led him over to the wreckage of the easel, picked it up, jamming a broken leg in place with difficulty, and set the canvas straight upon it. It was rapid work, energetic and bold. A
strong sky of writhing clouds drew the eye into the distance of the plain ahead.

‘It is just a preliminary,’ he said. ‘Only the starting-point for a work I shall make later.’

Ferney looked at it with interest. ‘I see nothing there to infuriate,’ he said in the end, turning to the man who stood watching him with a frowning face.

The artist pointed into the distance. ‘Look, sir.’

‘Where?’ asked Ferney, puzzled.

‘To the south. Do you not see the blot?’

In the distance a thin wreath of smoke wound into the blue.

‘You mean the chimney?’

‘That is just what I mean. It is a foul encroachment.’

‘You misunderstand perhaps. That smoke is from the new Boulton engine at the Gillingham brewery. Are you saying that steam power is an abomination?’

‘In this pure landscape? Yes! And that is not all. I have lately been sketching near that smoke at Parham’s Mill. Do you know it?’

‘This side of Gillingham?’

‘Indeed. Do you know they plan to tear it down? That beautiful place. They will erect some monstrous modern factory there instead!’

Ferney turned back to the rough painting and studied it. For a man who appeared to demand great constancy from nature, the artist had taken some considerable licence with the view. Two trees had
been conjured from their deep-rooted homes and brought fully a hundred yards closer together to frame the view down to the plain. The border of the woodland stretched far further in the picture
than it did in the view before him. That caused him a moment of wonder. The foreground trees apart, the view was just as it had once been before the shrinking of the forest.

He turned back to his companion. ‘You seem able to set right the damages of time quite well enough with your mind and your brushes. Surely one small speck of smoke cannot hurt?’

He was surprised by the strength of the despair in the man’s reaction.

‘It is not just the smoke! Do you not see? The whole of our land is changing. We are eating it up with our roadways and our vulgar new houses. Now the steam chimneys will stick their
intrusions across all our horizontals.’ He began to dance in agitation. ‘Verticals. Precious verticals. On a day like this my painting is full of verticals. I know that God is in his
heaven when I go all vertical. I DON’T WANT my verticals to be belching smoke. Do you understand me, sir?’

Ferney looked at the cloudscape in the picture and then at the landscape before him, and with the benefit of compressed time, he knew that the land writhed for him as much as the clouds did for
his companion. ‘No, I do not. You are unduly concerned. I believe you inflict unnecessary unhappiness on yourself.’

‘Unduly concerned!’ said the other in an affronted tone.

‘Try to let go of your fears. There is nothing fixed. The land does not stay still. Once maybe, but not at any time in the last ten hundred years at the least.’ He stretched out an
arm and pointed down the hill. ‘The wood you painted, down there, stretching across the first part of the plain, that was nibbled away. They started eating at it about . . . oh, shall we say,
1500? A hundred years it took. It went for fuel, for ships, for building, and into the void they poured their sheep and cattle. After that King James gave the rest to his benighted friends to hack
down for their private purses. You see those fields? They came as the trees went, quickset hedges, hawthorns you would say if you’re a townsman, grown and laid and knotted to divide them, but
not all as you see them now, oh no. Over there,’ he pointed south-east with a flourish, ‘there were two fields fifty times the size. You see your green squares now. You might have found
more variation for your palette then. They weren’t like that. Ragged strips and open pasture. All the colours of all the different crops. Not for long though. Bang!’ He turned on the
startled artist. ‘The commissioners had them. Enclosure. A crime against the countryside and against the common interests of the countrymen. They threw off the little men, gave the wealth to
those who already had the money, divided up their fields. Built their roads. You see down there?’ he pointed.

‘Where?’

‘Where it is straight. That’s the commissioners’ road. Drawn on a map. Clapped across the land like a sword-cut through the brotherhood of man. Then after that it was houses.
New farmhouses in the new fields. They all went mad about houses. About halfway through Elizabeth’s time, it was. Let’s see, when was that?’

‘Elizabeth? Halfway?’ said the other man. ‘My goodness, sir, you seem to be cracking along.’

‘History does not take long. Say 1570? Close enough. Houses went out sideways and they went up. Privacy. All at once privacy was the thing. Wealth and privacy. More rooms to hide away in.
Cleaner inside, too, so chimneys everywhere. Never mind your brewery chimney now, that was the time when the chimneys sprouted. Then there was the glass and how
that
changed
things.’

‘Glass?’ said the artist faintly, mesmerized. ‘Why?’

‘The glitter of it. On a bright day. Something never seen before. No glass down here until they started to make it cheap, then suddenly a thousand mirrors flashing back the
sunshine.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Now there’s the gas coming. You see that house?’ He pointed towards Milton.

‘No.’

‘Beyond the copse, by the line of willows.’

‘I think I do.’

‘The first gas you can see from here. They set the pipes last year. I come up in the evenings sometimes and look out at that light. I imagine it as it will be when all the houses have
those bright squares for their night-time windows. Heaven on earth. The sparkling firmament arrayed across our dark land.’

The artist shuddered.

Ferney looked at him. ‘You do not like the possibility?’

‘It is not MY England, and whether they like it or not, I must paint MY England. You threaten my picture, sir. How can you know? Are you an historian?’ His tone sounded doubtful.

‘You might say that.’

‘Well. I shall not argue then. In any case, you are an interesting man. I would like to talk more with you, but my gig will soon be waiting.’

‘Will you come back?’

‘If circumstances allow. I feel almost as though we are friends, you and I. Do you know what I am saying?’ He clasped Ferney’s hand and looked at him anxiously.

‘You feel yourself alone and that others understand less well?’ Ferney hazarded.

‘YES.’

‘Then I do know.’

‘I am not valued,’ said the other man quietly. ‘I lived from the generosity of my father until his death. He milled corn, he owned barges, he put the sweat of his brow into the
canals and the locks they passed through. He wanted me to work them for him and he never understood that instead I had to paint them. Now I live off the stipend he left. I paint because I must, I
absolutely must.’ His voice rose again, ‘There is nothing so grand as standing before a six-footer, stabbing and sweeping away to conjure nature out of the colours on your palette. But
I must live and that is getting harder.’

An idea came into Ferney’s mind.

‘There is a view near here that I like very much,’ he said, ‘and I think it might appeal to you, too. I should be pleased if you would come down to see it with me on your
way.’

The alarm on the Teasmaid woke Ferney from a dream of horses. He rolled over in bed to lift the steaming cup from the machine before the irritation in his lungs and chest got
him and he slopped tea on the duvet as he fought to control the coughing.

It wasn’t so bad now that he knew why he was ill. It was just the price to pay, that was all, but it told him that he had to take control. He was fully awake now, alert, thinking about
priorities. The best way would be the slow and gentle way if he could afford the time, but he knew he couldn’t, knew from the feeling deep in his gut that slow and gentle wasn’t an
option – knew, too, that he couldn’t count on another opportunity to kick it off when the man Mike would be away. What to pick on? That was the question. He turned to the bedside table
and the pile of books there.