The Portrait (7 page)

I still enjoyed your company, long after we came back to London. I looked forward to our evenings, when you would, as much as possible, stop being the critic, and I would stop being—whatever I was trying to be at the time. It all ended when you married, alas; then you became domestic and proper, and went to clubs instead of taverns, and dinner parties instead of whelk stands. You lost the last slither of your integrity in Mayfair, and learned to hide the earnest intensity that had always redeemed you. Slowly you said less that was good about people, more that was bad. Didn’t you miss it, though? On those night-time voyages we were adventurers in the dark lands of London, seeing subjects for paintings down dingy alleys, or huddled in doorways. We thought of ever more exotic places to meet: a tea shop in Islington; a chophouse at Billingsgate; a tavern in Wapping; a dance hall on a Saturday night in Shoreditch where we would watch the clerks and the cleaners, the cooks and the shop girls as they forgot their cares for a few inexpensive hours. There was something of magic in those places for me, something you do not get at the Athenaeum. A recklessness, and an energy, and a desperation. The very stuff of paintings, I think, if only a means can be found of persuading people to buy it.

And there was that pub in Chelsea, the only place we went more than once. Poorly lit, with terrible food and the air so heavy with tobacco smoke you could scarcely see the person across the table from you. So thick that a river fog outside was easier to see through. Stiflingly hot from so many bodies crammed in, and smelling dreadful from the sweat and beer, cheap food and pipes. But I remember looking at it, and suddenly saw the place come alive; not tobacco brown, but brilliant colours—the red of a neck scarf, the orange of an Irishman’s hair, the purple of a whore’s dress. The gold of the landlord’s cherished watch-chain, the ambers and browns and whites of the bottles on the shelves. And all those bodies, contorted and hustled together like a Renaissance battle scene. This is where the great tragedies and comedies of the modern world are played out. Not on an imagined medieval battlefield. And not in the South Seas, nor yet in Paris. There.

But do you remember how it all faded as we settled in? I do; I remember those conversations as though we were in an empty room, with no difficulty hearing or being heard, with no one bumping into us, as we sat and talked and drank and laughed, with you leaning over the table, your eyes blazing with the fire that came over you when you were fully engaged with an idea. You did not yet argue for pleasure, or merely to win. The truth still mattered to you.

“What do all men desire, except fame?” I did look around then, and you took the point. Did these people desire fame?

“Of course they do, in their little way,” you said. “Fame in their limited universe; the fame of being a good drunk, a generous fellow, one amongst everyone else. They wish their reputation to extend as far as their eyes can see. But as that is not too far from the end of their noses, then that is what they aim at. Artists see farther, so their ambitions are greater. They want the world to bow down before them, not just in this generation, but in the generations to come.

“But how to do it? Eh? Do you think that merit alone can achieve it? Do you think Michelangelo without Pope Julius, Turner without Ruskin, Manet without Baudelaire, would be so famous? Do you think merely painting good pictures is enough? You are a fool if you do.”

I suggested, I think, that poor Duncan, who you were then avidly promoting, could hardly be compared with Michelangelo.

“You are being obtuse,” you said. “Duncan transfers my ideas into physical form. I am not a painter, never was, never will be. I see the pictures I want in my mind, but cannot paint them. Duncan will do it for me. The time of the patron is long gone. It is not the people who buy paintings who matter, not even the artist who paints them. This is the age of the critic, of the thinker on art. The man who can say what art means, what it should be.”

I suggested that perhaps the public could make up its own mind. Not seriously, of course.

A snort of derision. “The public wants cheap filth. Over-painted nudes and pretty landscapes. We live in an unprecedented age, my friend. For the first time in history one group of people has the money, and another has the discernment. Admit it. You know it every day. How do you earn your money? You paint one thing to survive, and another to feel honest.”

You swept your arms around at the room, which had lost its colour and had become tobacco brown once more. “Look at these people! Hopeless. But at least they are poor. They are unlikely to put their hideous taste into practice, and besides, their money is not worth having, they have so little of it. All those people who dine at the Ritz are something else, more dangerous. They must be persuaded to buy something they do not like. And that is my job. Don’t look so disapproving. Without me, you’ll be painting big pink portraits of big pink women, of little girls on swings, for the rest of your life.”

This is what I am putting down now, if you must know; just before the light changes and I will have to stop for the day. I hope I can catch it, and turn it into light and shade, greens and blues. It is a darkness, your ambition, a shadow on your face, and I fear I will not get it just right. I will hint at it merely, and develop the theme later. Because it is not all there is. You believed in your ideas, after all, and merely used doubtful means to promote them. The magnificence of your arrogance, the exuberance of your daring, your sincerity and your cynicism, all these must find their place, translated into reality through the mixture of shadow and light, of colour and texture.

No theories here, you see. I am done with them, never believed in them anyway, really. We went our separate ways, after all. As you pointed out, I did not have enough money to paint things no-one would buy. The Banker’s Wife must be made to look like a pillar of society; only then will you get a banking price for your work. I lived a double life, running between drawing rooms and the dingy meetings of your art clubs, trying to reconcile the two, and failing, as you knew I must.

A man must eat, my friend! A man must eat. You could disdain those wealthy bankers because you were as rich as one, thanks to your wife. But I could not; I could either have success in the world or esteem from you. You urged me to have both, but it was another piece of your trickery. Because it could not be done.

And you don’t know the half of it. Do you want a confession? I turned faker too, in those days. You faked opinions on paintings; I faked the paintings themselves. People would not pay for my work, so I would produce things they would pay for. What was more, I duped you, once.

Ah! At last, I have got through those finely hewn defensive walls of yours. Thank heavens. It was my last throw. If that hadn’t worked, I would have had to resign myself to failure. You see, you are vulnerable as well. A little flicker, a momentary uncertainty; that was all I needed from you.

That’s enough. I’m not going to do any more today. So you have an afternoon free to vegetate, read, go for walks, write letters. Whatever you do with yourself. You may have noticed it is getting cooler these days as autumn approaches. The seasons change fast here. Better enjoy the sun while it lasts. Another day or so and the atmosphere will become violent.

SO MUCH FOR my prediction! A fine morning, again, although I detect the first touch of cold in the wind, which has switched to the northwest. Believe me; I know what I am talking about. You would not notice it, I imagine; you have to live here for a long time before you become sensitive to the minuscule changes in the weather. It’s a certain freshness just after dawn, the lightness of the wind, the sound of the sea that makes the difference and lets you know we are on the slide down into another winter. We really will have a storm in a day or so; I hope so, I want you to see one. The moods of the weather delight me; until I came here I never realised how much I hated the English winter. You become the weather you live in—I know, it’s a cliché, but I never realised quite how true it was. The drabness of the English climate produces drab people, wrapped up, desperate to keep the outside at bay. They wear an emotional overcoat throughout their lives and scowl upwards, wondering whether it is going to rain again. Quite right, too; it is. But it is not uplifting, to be enclosed by a feeling that if it isn’t raining now, it will be tomorrow. And we Scots . . . how can anyone understand colour when half the year it is only light six hours a day? You can crave it, of course, stand in front of a Claude Lorrain and wonder whether such blues truly exist in nature, dream of being in a place where the evening sun lights up poplar trees with such contrast and intensity. But that is not the same as understanding it, sinking into that brilliance and losing your fear of it. Such colours will always be foreign.

Here it is different, although I’m not sure why. We are only off the coast of Brittany, after all, not in the tropics or North Africa. But the weather gods are more direct here, unlike in England where they insinuate that it is summer so quietly that you could easily miss it, or ooze their way into winter so slowly you scarcely notice the change. Here they announce it with a trumpet blast, with tempests and heat-waves, cloudless blue skies or rainstorms that can batter you onto your knees, with howling winds or air so still and quiet you can hear a woman talking half a mile away.

Can I tell you my earliest memory? You are being my confessor, after all, after a fashion. I know you do not want to be one, but you have no choice. You are my prisoner, trapped by your bizarre desire for a portrait by my hand. And as I said, I have been practising confession of late, and find it pleasing. Do you know, I was talking to my doctor a year ago in Quiberon—I had gone for another potion to help me sleep, although few have had much effect except laudanum, which gives me such a headache I prefer not to use it—and he told me about this man in Vienna who has revived the confessional and turned it into medicine. He is a little cut off, my poor doctor, a small-town provincial physician on the fringes of civilisation, so he subscribes to all the latest journals and societies. Anyway, this Austrian Jew has come up with this idea which rather struck my medical friend. You go along with some ailment, talk for months and—poof !—you feel better. And that’s it, apart from paying over the money. You look sceptical; I am not. Of course it works, I am merely astonished that people will pay for it. My confession to you is making me feel better, as well, and do not think I am talking for no purpose. I have a very real purpose; I am confessing my sins in advance, before I have committed them. Explaining my painting to you, so you will understand it. See why I have chosen to do it in this way, rather than any other.

So my earliest memory was of being beaten by my mother. I must have been about four, I suppose, maybe less. It was winter, and cold, and night-time. I needed to go to the toilet, but my mother had forgotten the nightstand and I couldn’t bear the long walk down to the privy at the end of our little garden, shivering with cold, and the wind cutting through my thin dressing gown. So I stood by the door and hesitated. Too long, and I peed in my pyjamas and it ran down my leg and over my foot and all over the floor which she had just finished washing down. I knew I’d get into trouble, and started to cry. I was right. My mother came down and beat me for it. Then she made me go down on my knees, and pray God for His forgiveness.

I know why, of course. There was never enough money or food or clothes, and she was exhausted, always near her wits’ end. She worked, cooked, cleaned, mended, made do on far too little. Kept up appearances—can you even guess how onerous, how inviolable that need is in a small Scottish town? That was most of it. The rest was Scottish; the need to punish and the hatred of failing. All things, all infractions must be punished, however unwilled they were. Remember it; punishment is in my soul. I have travelled far in many ways but I have long since accepted that I can’t escape. I am not complete without punishment, meting it out and being punished in turn. Life, like a good painting, needs balance, a harmonious arrangement to avoid being chaotic, a mess, a failure.

But it was at that moment, at the age of four, that I decided I would leave—which was precocious of me, you must admit. I swore that sooner or later I’d escape and never go back. Not to that home, that meanness, that littleness. That washing-on-a-Monday, watch-what-the-neighbours-think life, the castor-oil and prayer upbringing. Everything I have done has been propelled by that; this is what the priest says, as he tries to inculcate the love of Mary into me. He may be right, though I do not think things are so very different on this island. Besides, I will ever prefer God the avenger, the wrathful, the punisher. But I succeeded; I escaped.

Did you ever wonder how it was that a poor boy like myself, earning only five shillings a week in Glasgow, then a princely seven shillings a week in London, managed to make his way to Paris and live there without any work? Probably not; where money comes from has never been a concern of yours; it has always been there. It is no more surprising to you than water coming out of a tap. But I had to sell my soul for it.