The Center of the World (27 page)

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Let’s go look at some beautiful paintings.”

It was at this point that she told me her name was Gina. I told her mine. We walked upstairs together.

 
ABOUT TWO WEEKS AGO
, Turner came down to dinner for the first time in over a week. Egremont had called for a fresh ham to be served, as he knew it was one of Turner’s favorite dishes. Turner paid the meat his most gracious compliments, but the only part of the meal he did justice to was the wine. The conversation proceeded by fits and starts. Mrs. Spencer did her best, as did I, but Turner cast such a gloomy pall over the proceedings that it was all in vain.

Turner has put aside his pads and sketchbooks and has started to work on a medium-sized canvas. He often takes his meals in the studio. Sometimes, he sends his excuses at dinner, saying that he needs to take a ramble to clear the smell of turpentine from his brain. If he eats at all, he grabs something in the kitchen and eats it like a tramp as he marches along. Without Turner’s company our dinners have become quick and silent affairs. I can sense Lord Egremont chafing at the lack of
interesting conversation. I do my best, David, but I know that I am found wanting.

Turner’s face has become thinner. This means much in someone as devoted to the table as he. On those occasions when he has sent for me in the studio, he hardly greets me when I arrive. He has given up all pretense of considering my feelings, although, to be fair, he has also ceased asking me to take those undignified poses that had been so disturbing. Usually he asks me to stand with my back toward him. Often he has me lift a heavy iron bar over my head, or do some other exercise to exaggerate the articulation of the muscles in my back. My face, I was somewhat chagrined to realize, no longer holds any interest for him.

Mrs. Spencer has been required more often. When she returns from the studio her face is cold and hard, as if she is willing herself not to weep. It does not become her. Sometimes she goes directly to her chamber, but more often she seeks me out and asks me to accompany her on a walk through the park. By an unspoken agreement we have ceased to speak of what goes on when we are alone with Turner. She leads the way and I follow. When we first start out, she is grim and purposeful in her stride, as if she were a foot soldier escaping a bloody defeat. She marches so for perhaps half an hour. Then she slackens her pace and offers up some commonplace topic for conversation. I respond. She helps me along, and soon we are in the midst of the most delightful chat. It is only when she has outrun her demons that she graces me with a smile.

At last, when the cheese was brought in, Egremont looked squarely at Turner and said, “Come, this will hardly do. How goes your work, Turner?”

Turner looked up from his port. Something like a smile appeared on his face. “I am sorry, my lord. Behaving like a beast. Never before have I struggled as I have struggled this past fortnight. It takes its toll. It goes well, damn well, although I fear it may be the death of me. There comes a time in all of my paintings—all my paintings, you know, with weight:
Dido, Ulysses, Regulus
—when I feel like one of those naked fellows in the arena. Lions all about; other fellows with spears. The crowd roaring. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? One way seems as likely as another. Harrowing. But exhilarating too. Quite out of myself. More myself than ever. It’s a queer business. But that is why I have come down tonight. I am done with models, sir and madam.” He looked first at me and then at Mrs. Spencer. “I thank you both. You have been patient with me. You have been skillful. And, I hope, forgiving.” He raised his glass to me, and then to Mrs. Spencer. He held her eye for a moment, before turning to Egremont.

“My lord,” he said. “Our two friends have been most able assistants. I have asked much of them, and they have provided it. But, as I said, I am done with them. I must now gird myself for the final battle. I will not, begging your permission, take my meals with you any longer. Not until I am done. Or undone. I will send down for what I require, but do not expect to see me. If I should happen to go out for air, do not detain me. I know
myself in these times. I will not be fit company. Pray forgive me. And now I shall bid you good night.”

Turner rose to go, and we all bade him good night in return. Egremont added, “Godspeed, my friend, Godspeed.” Turner was visibly touched by His Lordship’s condescension, but he left the room hurriedly, without saying anything further.

He was as good as his word. I saw him only once in the week following, when I was sitting in the Carved Room with my book. Hearing footsteps on the Portico, I looked up and saw Turner, dressed against the rain in an oilskin coat such as a sailor might wear. He marched off into the wind, gesticulating to some internal interlocutor.

Mrs. Spencer and I were much together during this time. If the weather was fine we walked, but most often we sat together and read or engaged in desultory conversation. I began work on that article which was eventually published in
The Westminster Review
and which you were so kind as to say you admired. Sometimes Egremont joined us, although mostly he busied himself about matters of the estate. Time seemed suspended between the days that had been and the days that were to be.

It was about ten days after Turner had last joined us for dinner, the evening of October 23, 1830, when a servant entered and handed a note to Lord Egremont as the three of us were at our evening meal. He read it and handed it to Mrs. Spencer, who read it in turn and then handed it to me.

We all looked at each other. “We shall see,” said Egremont, “what all this huffing and puffing is about. He goes too far, I think. But the morning shall tell the story.”

I hardly slept that night. I felt like a child on the eve of some great holiday, or a soldier on the eve of some great battle. When I arrived in the breakfast room, Mrs. Spencer was already there. She confessed that she too had passed a sleepless night. A few minutes later Egremont arrived. He called in Mr. Gregs and made a great show of going over accounts as he drank his coffee, but he too seemed distracted and on edge. Mrs. Spencer whispered to me that His Lordship had also tossed and turned all night.

The coffee was cold, and poor Mr. Gregs had hardly ever seen his master so contrary by the time John, one of Egremont’s most trusted old servants, arrived. We had been waiting for about an hour by then. He stood before Egremont with his hands folded deferentially in front of him. He spoke awkwardly and formally, as if Turner had asked him to memorize his little speech.

“My lord,” he said, “Mr. Turner most humbly requests the honor of your presence upstairs in the studio.”

Egremont forgot his dignity to the extent that he was up and out of his chair before old John had quite finished. When he left the room Mrs. Spencer reached over and grabbed my hand, looking decidedly ashen. “I feel that I will be undone. But there is nothing for it but patience. The die was cast long ago.”

We had only been alone together for about ten minutes when old John returned, moving as fast as I had ever seen him. “Madam,” he said, “His Lordship bids you come upstairs at once. At once,” he repeated. “I have been in his service these sixty years and never heard him so agitated. Please, madam, hurry.”

Mrs. Spencer turned pale. She rose quickly and rushed off, only turning at the door to give me a pitiful look. I felt sorry for her.

Alone except for a servant who had come to clear away the breakfast things, I felt superfluous. I began to feel, David, that my time at Petworth must soon come to an end and that my dream of Paradise was over. I had taken part in the production of something momentous, but I was not a central character in the play; I was not even one of those peasants who tells the hero which way the army went. If I was anything I was a prop or a bit of decoration, perhaps an empty chalice sitting on a sideboard.

As I was engaged in these gloomy reflections, standing by the window overlooking the park, I saw Turner walking down toward the pond. He had his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his hat pushed back on his head. There was a spring to his step that I had never seen before. He appeared to be whistling.

I asked for more tea and took up my book. I think I sat for about an hour; I read perhaps four pages, although, when the hour was up and old John came in again, I had no idea what I had read.

He stood before me in the same formal pose he had taken when he spoke to Egremont earlier. “Mr. Grant,” he repeated, “Mr. Turner most humbly requests the honor of your presence upstairs in the studio.” He bowed and indicated that I should follow him. I did as he requested, feeling more than a little foolish, as if I was a child enacting some pantomime. When we reached the door of the studio, John bowed again and with the same gesture pointed to the door. “Mr. Turner, sir, bids you enter.” As soon as he spoke these words he turned on his heel and left. It was an absurd performance. I would have laughed except that I was almost overcome with anticipation and dread.

I opened the door to the studio. Turner had set up a black curtain on the small platform where I had posed for him. All his painting materials had been put away and the room seemed curiously bare and imposing. The late morning air came in through the open windows, but the breeze could make little headway against the smell of paint and spirits that was Turner’s stock-in-trade. An ornate cord, such as you might find on a bell pull or a tapestry hanging, was attached to the front of the curtain.

Turner, who had been standing behind the screen where I had changed out of my clothes when I was posing for him, stepped forward. He must have used the back entrance when he returned from his walk. He bowed to me gravely, but there
was a sparkle in his eye. He pointed toward the cord. “With my compliments, sir,” he said. “But first allow me to take my leave.”

The curtain fell to the floor. The painting was sitting on Turner’s easel, adorned with a simple gilt frame. There was a second black curtain behind it. The light flowed in from the windows behind my back, but my face was suddenly warm from the light that poured forth from the painting and illuminated my soul. I felt an understanding in my body like that I felt when you first took me to your chamber and introduced me to the mysteries of love. It was the purest moment I had ever known. I saw not only Helen in all her glory, but into the heart of the life the gods have given us. The vast chasm between Homer’s world and Homer’s truth and our world and our truth evaporated in an instant. Everything seemed clear and beautiful and holy.

When you took me to your chamber you gave me the greatest gift I had ever received, but I remember well my doubts, my sense of sin, my sense that no matter what we did, you were you, dear David, and I was mere sinful Charles Grant. What we had that night was as deep a pleasure as our fallen world allows, but when I looked at Turner’s painting my sense of sin, my sense of self, disappeared. I was left with nothing but light and beauty.

I could not so much see the beautiful gods as feel their presence. They lived in the light. I knew their invisible hands directed the golden ships that I could see on the far horizon. It was their hands that directed the flight of the spears which the heroes hurled at each other on the plain beneath the many-towered city. I cannot do justice to the clarity of the vision. It
was less that I could see what I have just attempted to describe than that I knew it was true.

In the foreground I saw Helen in her chamber, in a high tower overlooking the battlefield. She is the source of all light, but I cannot describe the trick of paint that made it so. The world of gods and heroes rages outside on the plain, but for that Helen has no regard. She is light. She is sublimely indifferent to the pain and suffering of the entangled armies. Her eyes are only for her lover Paris, who approaches. Her eyes, which I could only see reflected in the mirror, met mine as I viewed the painting. I saw myself in the figure of Paris who approaches her as she lies ready on her couch. It was my flesh as Turner had painted it that approached the divine beauty and they were my eyes that met her gaze. I saw that I had been perfected, but I knew that I was lost.

 
THE YOUNG COUPLE
had disappeared, to continue their quarrel elsewhere. We had the room of unfinished Turners to ourselves. At first we just wandered from painting to painting. We paused a moment before each one, and then, as if by some sympathetic magic, moved on together to the next one. For the longest time we didn’t say anything. The beauty of the colors was made more pure by the beauty of the woman who was standing next to me, moving when I moved. The sound of her breathing and the smell of her perfume got all mixed up in what I saw on the canvas. It was like a diluted version of looking at
The Center of the World
.