Tennyson's Gift (4 page)

Watts was fed up; Ellen was fed up. He was forty-seven; she was sixteen, so they both had their reasons. But it was a bit rich to call Ellen ‘dramatic' in the derogative sense, even so. ‘Dramatic' had been a continual reproach from this weary grey-beard husband ever since that overcast day in February when foolishly they wed. Ellen wished ‘artistic' carried the same force of accusation, but somehow it didn't. Yelling ‘Don't be so artistic!' – though perfectly justified when your dreamy distant husband seriously calls himself ‘England's Michelangelo' and affects a skullcap – never sounded quite as cutting.

On the other hand, theatricality was certainly in the air. ‘Drrramatic, am I?' demanded Ellen in a deep thrilling voice (the sort of voice for which the word
timbre
was invented). She clutched a tiny butter knife close to her pearly throat, with her body leaned backwards from the waist. It looked terribly uncomfortable, and Watts was at a loss, as usual. He stroked
his beard. He adjusted his skullcap. Something was clearly ‘up'.

‘I only said Mrs Prinsep is very kind!'

Ellen groaned and whinnied, like a pony.

‘But she is our host, my patron. Really, Ellen, surely you see how lucky we are to live at Little Holland House! I hope I may live peacefully here for the remainder of my life.'

‘Painting huge public walls when they fall available, I suppose?' she snapped. ‘For
no money?'

‘Yes, painting walls. What insult can be levelled at the painting of walls? You make it sound trivial, Ellen. Yet when I beat Haydon in the Westminster competition –'

‘I know, you told me about Haydon and the Westminster competition, you told me so many times!'

‘Well, then you know that the poor man died at his own hand. Painting walls is of significance to some people, my dear. My designs for the Palace of Westminster were preferred to his, and Haydon was shattered, poor man. Walls let him down! Walls collapsed on him!'

Ellen narrowed her eyes.

‘But on the main point, my dear,' continued Watts, ‘Why –
why –
should I want to earn an independent living from my art when we can abide here quite comfortably at someone else's expense?'

And then Ellen screamed. Loud and ringing from the diaphragm, exactly as Mrs Kean had trained her. Watts ran to the door and locked it. This wayward Shakespearean juvenile was always transforming the scene into some sort of third act climax, butter knife at the ready. (The effect was only slightly ruined by the knife having butter on it, and crumbs.)

Watts collapsed on one of Little Holland House's many scented sofas. He had married this young theatrical phenomenon in all good faith, assured by his snooty patrons that she would thank him for his protection; he had been in love with
her profile, her stature – in short, her beauty with a capital B! But within five months he looked back on that marriage with confusion and even horror. This beauty was a real person; she was not an ideal form. She expected things from him that he could not even name, let alone deliver. This regular money argument, for example: it always went the same way. Here they were, comfortably adored and protected, and Ellen had to show off about it.

‘If you would let me work, George –' she would say. And then all this sixty guineas nonsense would be rolled out again. Watts did not want sixty sullied guineas a week. He did not want to paint lucrative portraits, either. No, Watts was the sort of chap who loses his invoice book down the back of the piano and doesn't notice for four and a half years. Watts wanted to live with the Prinseps, conceive great moral paintings of an edifying nature, sip water over dinner, and be told with comforting regularity that he was the genius of the age.

The sad thing was that when he married Ellen, he assumed she wanted the same release from her own career. After all, her career was the
theatre.
But he had learned that while you can take the child out of the theatre, it is a more difficult matter to extract the theatre from the child. She still dressed up quite often. She danced in pink tights. A couple of times she had sat next to him at dinner, dressed as a young man, and he had talked to her for two hours without in any way piercing her disguise, or noticing the absence of his wife.

‘My dear,' he began, ‘If you continue with this, I shall have a headache.' But she drew away from him and took a deep breath, so he gave up. If experience was to be trusted, Ellen would probably forge into a famous speech now, and – ah, here it was.
‘Make me a willow cabin.'

Such a shame it was from Twelfth
Night,
Watts reflected, as the recital progressed. Watts had been rather touchy about Twelfth
Night
ever since he painted a huge allegorical picture for the wall of a railway terminus on the theme ‘If music be the food of love' which had too much delighted his critics. A naked Venus with a bib at her neck sat down to a hearty lunch of tabors, fiddles and bagpipes. He still didn't see what was so damned roll-on-the-floor funny about it. The bagpipes – the exact size of an Aberdeen Angus – looked particularly delicious. Venus burped behind her hand. The knife and fork were four feet long.

Meanwhile, Ellen continued:

Watts liked Shakespeare, but only as stuff to read in bed. All this prancing about was too tiring. Acting was the lowest of all arts. Still, he thought Ellen's performance was going rather well, and he had in fact just got his eyes closed, the better for listening to the poetry with, when the emotional undercurrent turned abruptly again and his wife burst into tears. She flung down the butter knife and left the room.

‘What's wrong now?' Watts asked, jerked awake. It was all beyond him. Settling back on his sofa, with skullcap pulled over his eyes, he thought hard about what he had just heard from Ellen's lips. Yes, he thought hard. But on the other hand it would be fair to say that the expression ‘sub-text' meant even less to Watts than to any other Victorian luminary you could mention. So what preoccupied him now was not the underlying tenor of Ellen's theatrical performance, in particular its expression of tortured young female longing. Instead it was the following: should the ‘babbling gossip of the air' wear a hat? Should she sit on a gold-trimmed cloud, to indicate the airiness of her babble? And pondering these important questions Il Signor Michelangelo Watts arranged himself comfortably – though unconsciously – in a well-practised foetal position.

If it was hard to keep up with Ellen's stormy emotions, it was also impossible to contain them. The temperament of Mrs Watts was alarmingly dissimilar from Watts's own. For his own part, any vexation might be healed by the gentle removal of whatever thorn was temporarily in his paw (usually a big bill for buckets of gouache, which the Prinseps paid with their usual handsomeness); whereas Ellen turned hell-cat when offered assistance, especially in the form of Watts's edifying proverbs. Alas, he was a man who dearly loved a verity. ‘Youth's a stuff will not endure,' was the sort of thing. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,' the great allegorical painter now consoled himself, for instance – and was instantly preoccupied conceiving an enormous fresco for Covent Garden Market, of tough root vegetables turning their ungreased backs, perhaps, on a bunch of spouting poets with long hair and big shirts.

Ellen had let her nose go red, which was too bad. Such a ruddy child was quite wrong for the Victorians' popular aesthetic of alabaster flesh. In ‘Choosing', his latest portrait of her, Watts had allowed her a certain pinky flush, to reflect the surrounding camellias, but he now believed this a profound mistake, and intended to overpaint with a light green at the earliest chance. Overhearing two grand comic novelists at Little Holland House discussing the flesh tones in the picture, he had been quite wounded by their remarks.

‘Know what
she's
been doing,' said one great comic novelist, nudging with his elbow.

‘Very good, I must remember that,' said the other. Dickens and Trollope, someone said they were.

Despite its lovely pinkness, then, ‘Choosing' had few happy associations for Watts. For one thing, it had been a tremendous bother to get the violets into the picture (in Ellen's awkwardly raised left hand), and in any case the allegory failed. Not since ‘Striking a Careless Pose' (in which a tall king cuffed a young servant who had dropped something), had one
of G. F.'s notions misfired so badly. Ellen was supposed to be choosing between the big scentless showy camellia and the humble perfumed violet, yet it was quite clear from the composition of the picture that her preference for the camellias was pretty strong already. Meanwhile the humble symbolic violets were so extremely shy and retiring that whatever they represented in the picture (marriage? humility? Watts?) got no look-in whatsoever.

‘So she's choosing the big red flowers?' said Watts's devoted fans and perpetual support, Mr and Mrs Prinsep, when they first saw the picture. ‘Good for her! Mm, you can smell them, Il Signor, you can, really.'

Watts judiciously stifled his impatience. The relationship between an artist and his patrons is an unequal one, despite the flattery on both sides. The patrons flatter the artist (calling him ‘Il Signor', for example) because they can afford to be generous; the artist flatters the patrons because he likes eating, and lying down in the forenoon.

‘Actually,' he said, ‘the red flowers are mere ostentation. I abominate red flowers. They should all be painted white. No, Ellen, representing Woman in the Abstract, chooses between the superficiality of the scentless camellia and, ahem, the sincerity of the humble perfumed violets.'

‘Does she?' they said, eager to understand. ‘Oh. But what violets? Where?'

‘There.' He pointed.

‘Oh yes. I mean, no. Sorry, I can't quite –'

‘There.'

‘Oh yes.'

There was a short pause, while the Prinseps conferred
sotto voce,
and Watts looked out of the window at the fields, pretending he couldn't hear.

‘Perhaps he should make the violets bigger, what do you think?'

‘Dare one suggest it?'

They looked at each other, and then at Watts, who was now biting his nails. They decided against.

‘It is a
stupendous
picture, Il Signor!' Mrs Prinsep exclaimed, making Watts smile broadly with relief. ‘A great success! You are a genius, and we are privileged to sit at your feet. Come! Let us dine from the best fowl the capital can provide, and you our master shall taste the liver wing!' But this was all a month ago, and from Sara's adulation Watts must return bathetically to the present scene, in which the returned Ellen sank to her knees, clutching his trousers like a waif. His artistic reverie had changed nothing, apparently. Here was all the trouble with marriage, in a tiny shell: when you got back from your mental wanderings, the little wife was invariably
still there.

‘Are you still acting?' he whispered, at last.

‘How could I choose Viola?' she whimpered. ‘Of all the heroines!'

He didn't know what to say.

‘But the pose was quite lovely, nevertheless. You have a decided talent, my dear. And the moral of that is, waste not want not, for tomorrow I will sketch you in that exact position for my projected masterpiece, “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Hope”.'

Ellen sniffed.

‘Ah,' he continued, warming up at once (he loved talking about art). ‘You make no remark? Of course. But think, if you will, of the supreme challenge of depicting the
Absence
of Hope! For you see, if I merely
leave Hope out,
it won't do at all! Critics will argue with justice that my picture equally well represents “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Railway Carriages” or “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Soup”!'

Ellen nodded to show she understood, though secretly she
thought the absence of hope was a challenge to everybody, and Watts was the usual cause of it.

She rallied a little. ‘I don't know why, Viola just came out,' she snivelled. ‘But the point was, I wanted to do Lady Macbeth or Lady Ann or something. I want you to take me seriously! I want it dreadful bad!'