The Portrait (19 page)

For the first time in all the years I had known you, you had lied. You stepped over an invisible but crucial line. I had long had my doubts about the importance you gave yourself, but I could never before claim that you were anything other than an honest man. With that article you entered the darkness of calumny and deceit. The last threads of loyalty snapped, completely and irrevocably. You lost your protection, the only thing which gave immunity from vengeance. The only thing which had always made me forgive you.

Because her paintings were good. You knew they were good, and you had known it ever since you first met her. You unleashed your power in an ignoble cause, to protect and advance yourself alone. You became an outlaw, acknowledging no restraint but your own power. You sinned against the very art you existed to protect and nourish. And you know what I think about sin. And punishment, of course. Let me fill your glass once more. I see the colour coming back into your face nicely now.

It wasn’t even about her pictures, was it? Nor even your desire that there should be no challenges to those French-men you were championing. Nor even her dismissive attitude to you. Had it not been a review of her exhibition, you would have found something else. Some humiliation, some slight, the more public the better. Because you were frightened, desperate. You thought the triumph that you had just won might be torn from your grasp, that your reputation might be ruined.

Shall I tell you how I am so sure? Because you are here. Because I wrote Duncan a letter with that phrase in it—“many have drowned in his displeasure”—and you came, after nearly four years of forgetting that I existed.

I was surprised by the whole business, I must admit. Trumpeting the bohemian ethic in a literary journal is one thing, taking part in it yourself is quite another. I always assumed yours was a paper amorality, designed to titillate the salons but not so much that it reduced your standing. Even so, many a man has survived worse scandal with their reputation enhanced. Or was it an aesthetic matter? Was it, perhaps, that you didn’t mind the world knowing you had accidentally sired a little reproduction of yourself, but recoiled at the idea of who the mother was? Did you shudder at the idea of the sniggers that might go around if it became known that you were conducting a squalid little bedsit affair with a woman of such epic vulgarity?

With Jacky, of all people? A man such as yourself should bed only the crème de la crème, no? The greatest poetesses, the daughters of earls, playwrights or artists. Or at least someone with five hundred a year of her own. Not the artistic equivalent of a flower girl. Such people are all very well for artists. Expected, even. But for a critic? Dear me, no! And to commit the solecism of getting the woman pregnant? Oh, the fun of it!

So unlikely that my incredulous laughter was instrumental in persuading your wife that her unease was merest fantasy. You owe me much. The first I heard of any of it came from her, and she was so bothered at her suspicions and jealousy she came to me specifically, and risked humiliation to raise the subject. She wrote, asking to see me over a matter of some importance. I was bemused and agreed, not least because I wished to find out what it was all about. She had always rather disapproved of me; I was not her sort of person at all. She had not forgotten my visit to Hampshire to paint your portrait, and did not forgive bad behaviour. The very idea that she might need me I found somewhat exciting.

She arrived exactly on time—she was as punctual as you were late. Curiously, I had little experience with dealing with lady visitors; the only women who ever came to my studio were either models or clients. I did not know what to do with her, and all the inadequacies of my upbringing burst forth. I felt as though I should offer her tea or something, and the realisation that even after all these years I could still be made uncomfortable by a woman like her brought out all my natural rudeness.

I think she very nearly left without explaining why she’d come, but she was desperate. Eventually my discomfort exhausted itself and I asked her what she wanted, although I imagine I added something to the effect that if she could be quick then I would be able to get back to my work. No-one could say I wheedled my way into her confidence; quite the contrary.

“It is about William,” she began. “Have you heard any stories about him?”

“Many,” I replied. “He is one of those people who generates stories; it is part of the way he has become influential.”

Her distress was by now so obvious even I could not bring myself to continue her torment. She was beginning to look absurd, and that was unfair for someone so naturally sure of herself. Quite old-fashioned, she is; I had never realised it before. Something of a survival of the last century, tightly bound into her clothes, straight-backed and unbending. No-one would want to paint her now, I think; she does not have a modern air. Millais, perhaps, might have done her justice, and conveyed that plush velvet and window-closed soul of hers. I felt myself beginning to lose interest, so told her to sit down and explain a little more clearly what she wanted. It was not what I said, you understand, but the way that I said it that made all the difference. She only needed the barest hint of sympathy to let loose all her woes and become a different person entirely.

“I have been worried for the last few months. You no doubt think me a silly woman, with foolish ideas. But William has always been the best of husbands. . . .”

“Indeed he has. I have often wondered how he manages it. I know I never could. But then, he is married to you, and that is a powerful incentive to good behaviour.”

She blushed. “I know that men are not like women,” she began, “and I know that being faithful does not come easily to them. . . .”

“Oh. I see.” Her look of steely self-control as she brought herself to this point was far better explanation than anything she had said.

“Have you noticed anything, or heard anything? I know you would not think it proper to say, but if you knew the agonies I have suffered in the last few months, you would pity me.”

I had a choice here, you see. My response could take two forms; I could exploit the situation, feed her fears, offer her false sympathy and reap the rewards. For they were on offer, you know. That most virtuous of women could easily have fallen into my arms then with only the slightest encouragement. Millais’s women were often fallen, or about to fall. What a glorious triumph it would have been! And rather a pleasurable one, I imagine. I was always intrigued by that combination of icy control and the occasional flash of the eye, the way the façade sometimes failed to hide a hint of hunger. But, alas, you were my friend.

I sprang to your defence. I had seen nothing and heard less. Which was true, I had seen progressively less of you over the years; we were moving ever more definitely in different circles. Had you been having a grand affair, no doubt I would have noticed. But Jacky was not the sort of person you took to the opera, or entertained to lavish dinners. A squalid little encounter once a week in a Bermondsey boarding house could easily pass unnoticed, although when we were closer I would have caught even that. Only a wife might notice something amiss, and then not enough to form any solid conclusions. So I told her that any changes she noticed should be put down to your preoccupation with this great exhibition you were planning. She had to understand how all-consuming such a thing could be. “It is a terrible thing to say of a man, but faced with a choice between Cleopatra and a painting of Cleopatra, William would take the canvas.” She should not worry, I told her, firmly but gently. All would be well and her foolish fears would be soon forgotten.

She left soon after, giving me a look of such gratitude I half regretted my altruism. I bathed in the warm glow of my virtue for some time afterwards. But as she stood by the door, she turned, and her face hardened. “I am glad of what you said. It is the one thing I would never have forgiven in him.” And, by God, she meant it. The calm way she said it frightened even me, and I had nothing to do with it. I never realised quite how proud, quite how conventional she was. You must have known all too well, and knew what her reaction was likely to be. How would it be, William, to have to earn your own living for once? To give up the house, the works of art, the weekends at country houses, the balls? To have to become one of those hand-to-mouth bohemians you praise at a distance? That’s what her look implied. Having a mistress might be acceptable in Chelsea; it was not in Mayfair, and certainly not with a wife like yours. You tried to straddle both worlds, and for the first time you risked losing your balance.

So how could you make such a slip? I do not ask how you could do such a thing, consort with a common shop girl when a beautiful if somewhat well-controlled woman was already yours. That is all too clear; there is something quite horrible in a woman who will not bend to your will, when everyone else not only bends but breaks at your very nod. But the magnitude of the mistake! You, who had never taken a false step in your life! That is something I cannot understand. It almost makes you human. Almost makes you deserve sympathy—would do, except for the way you reacted. But Jacky? What was it? Was it sleeping with a woman artists slept with? Is that your frailty, that all along that was what you wanted to be? Does your unstoppable desire to control and direct painters come from a frustration at not being one yourself? I cannot believe it, and yet I cannot think of any other reason why you would choose her. Did you talk of tactility with her, after the passion had passed? Seek her opinion on Post-Impressionism? Or did you enter into her enthusiasms and quiver with anticipation as she showed you her latest rouge? Or was it the squalor of it that you needed; some respite from the beauty and aestheticism? A sordid and furtive animality to act as counterpoint to all that refinement. I hope you were satisfied with your choice, but I doubt it. You were no more able to arouse Jacky than I could, of that I am sure. Perhaps it was the payment that excited you, the reduction of human emotion to cash transaction?

I am being provocative; I apologise; I do not wish to set your weak heart a-flutter. There is a reason for it, though. I would like to see you angry again, to see you lose control for once in your life, in my presence. Otherwise Jacky will have triumphed over me, for you lost control with her, did you not? Hence the grey-green in my picture, to set off the shadows and echo the darkness back into your face. You will see it soon enough. The shadow in the background, the perfect man with the monumental flaw. The way the light falls on your face and is absorbed, so that there is a hint of something hidden behind. It is the fear that is in your life; a contrast with the earlier portrait, which has none of that, which has the blue and red of boundless self-confidence, of a world waiting to be tamed, a man who does not know his own weakness. Combine that with a slight hunching of the shoulders, as if you are protecting your soul from reality, and the point will be made, for those who can see. Only a true friend can do that, put that in. Only me.

I know about it only because Jacky came to see me a few weeks before her death to ask my advice, because I was your friend and would know best what to do. And because she feared to say anything to Evelyn, her friend and confidante, who could have given your wife a lesson or two in puritanism, so I thought. She shook her head when I suggested Evelyn might be a more appropriate person to talk to. “I couldn’t,” she said. “She’d never talk to me again.” There was fear in her as she said that; she made me promise I would tell no-one; certainly not Evelyn. Only I was to know.

Which just shows how desperate the poor girl was. Do you know what she said? That she had “compromised herself with a gentleman.” I was so delighted with the phrase—if you try it you will find it rolls around the mouth like a fine cigar—that I didn’t quite grasp what she was talking about for a while. She wanted to know what to do. She arrived at my studio just as I was beginning work, so I was probably rather brusque with her; I thought she probably wanted money or something to get her jewellery back from the pawnbrokers.

But no; she was compromised. And with a gentleman. I suppose a working man would merely have got her into trouble. Her face was a picture. I don’t mean that harshly, you understand. I’m not being comical. But as a model she always had this perfect deadpan look about her. No frown or smile ever troubled that pink face of hers; not with me, in any case. I didn’t hire her for her emotional register. Now, all of a sudden, she was a portraitist’s dream. The levels of emotion were extraordinary; shame, despair, hope, the pleasure of attention, fear. And something else as well, which I couldn’t pin down. Something fierce, almost animal-like. It was that look which ultimately brought you to sit in my chair here.

The interaction was ludicrous, of course; she talked in this bizarre language which was her own special parody of a drawing room conversation, so it was difficult to understand her at times. But eventually all became clear enough. She was pregnant; you were the father; and what could she do about it.

My initial reaction was one of complete indifference, once the astonishment at your foolishness had subsided. Such things happen, and they happen to people like her all the time. But then there was that fierceness. Do you know, I do believe things might have turned out differently had her expression not been so magnificent, and if she had not placed herself—quite by chance—by the window so the early morning light illuminated it perfectly? The way that emotion transformed her from a silly little woman into a queen, an empress, a goddess, even; the way her eyes shone and her skin took on a fiery grandeur; the tilt of her head as pride and defiance took over her soul. I could have sat her down and painted her then and there, just for that look. I knew that I should do my best to banish it, make sure that it never crossed her face again, to put out that light in her eyes forever. But it would have been a sin to do so. She was beyond beautiful, and her beauty was caused by the thought of that child. So I didn’t try to persuade her to do the sensible thing and go to the angel-maker, as the French so delicately say. Not because of her, or you, or because of what was right, but because of the effect of the light turning on her face. I gave her what she truly wanted. She hoped I would lend her the money for the abortionist. I told her to have the baby.