The Fraud (24 page)

They were very seldom invited into their father’s studio either, for people of fashion came there all day to sit to him. But just occasionally they sidled in and again the special scents caught them: the sharp pungent smells of oil and colour and pictures on the walls and boards and canvases leaning there; always they remembered the smells of mixtures and pigments and Turpentine and rags and easels. Sometimes they caught a portrait, half-finished, waiting to unfold; once they heard that a half-finished portrait was the Queen of England.

 

And then at last: King George III agreed to give his formal patronage to the forming of a first Royal Academy of Art. There was very much drinking and shouting and waving of goblets in Pall Mall that night as they waited to learn whom would be members, who would not: who amongst the Artists of England would be elected as Royal Academicians.

‘What does it actually mean, a Royal Academy!’ shouted John Palmer. ‘It will only be an Exhibition Hall after all!’

‘Do not complain of Exhibition Halls!’ said James Burke, laughing and raising his glass. ‘There is nothing wrong with Exhibition Halls, they will add greatly to Business!’

Mr Hartley Pond sighed. ‘It is all very well, this talk of a
British
Academy but nothing changes the facts: it is the Old Masters that can be learned from, and none of
them
are British!’ And Roberto squawked very loudly at Angelica’s side and Filipo di Vecellio’s heart was in his mouth, he could hardly speak: he had had one commission from Queen Charlotte at last but what if foreigners were not to be eligible?

The house in Pall Mall breathed again: Filipo di Vecellio was elected as an Academician (several foreigners were deemed acceptable). His old friend John Palmer congratulated his old friend Filipo di Vecellio on his elevation - John Palmer would never be a Royal Academician of course.

But: it was Joshua Reynolds who became president of the Royal Academy, it was Joshua Reynolds who was knighted.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
, said all the newspapers. There was also very much talk of a new wonderful Portraitist who had been elected even though he did not live in London: Thomas Gainsborough. The years had been passing and Filipo di Vecellio felt the first cold draught, a feeling in the air, of change, of fashion: the carriages outside the house in Pall Mall were not so numerous as once they had been. (And his sister Francesca di Vecellio felt it, as clearly as if he spoke to her, her brother’s keen, keen disappointment: he who had tricked them all with his charm and his brilliance now saw the first public signs that his own star that once shone so very brightly, had begun to fade. Joshua Reynolds had gone ahead of him.)

John Palmer spoke yet again of the Old Masters they had seen in Italy, perhaps hoping to cheer his old friend, but Philip was tiring of such talk.

‘You are becoming boring, Sir!’ he would shout. ‘Do you not understand what has happened now? We are the Masters now!’ And John Palmer, until more wine or Angelica’s charm loosened his tongue again, would fall silent or he would take himself off, with a gruff ‘good evening’ as dusk fell, to walk back to his life in Spitalfields, of which no-one knew anything. Or Miss Ffoulks, seeing old John Palmer hurt, would change the subject completely again, bring her distant cousin James Cook into the conversation - a master sailor who had set off to explore the world - and the talk might turn briefly to the Pacific Ocean and lost continents and the Transit of Venus and other stars.

And then all talk would turn back again to the main topic of conversation: Art and—

 

—and I was trapped of course—

The children were so small and they needed me and I felt them eating me,
eating me
, eating my Painting and my Plans and it was not their fault,
Zia Francesca! Aunt Fran! Where are you?
and I felt their small, warm arms reach up, and I cared about them and resented them and was trapped by them and wanted to dump them in the Foundling Hospital for Unwanted Children.—Isabella had dark eyes and smiled but Claudio was thin and scrawny and watchful , so like Tobias, and I looked at him and I remembered that Tobias had always seemed to me to be a beanstalk, a thin, black-eyed beanstalk; Claudio had a way too of trying to get a person’s whole attention - I had grabbed people by the arms when I was a child, he, rather, threw his arms about a person - that is, about me - demanding and absolute - all day long they took my time, I had no moment to think, to plan, until everybody was asleep and then I would take up my paintbrush once again and some nights now I was so tired I fell asleep with my brush in my hand: I actually had to destroy one of my gowns and tell Philip I had burned it, ‘I was too close to the fire in the basement kitchen, Filipo
mio
,’ for red, bright paint had seeped all down the front of my skirt as I slept and I could not remove it.

My time had gone: the children were my responsibility for weeks, months, years: exhausted always now I believed that although I still tried to work my Portraits were hardly ever successful ; when they talked at the dinner-table about classes at the new Royal Academy I listened in a kind of trapped rage: I felt I would have
killed
to get to those classes, I would have taken the Knife, of the famous Farmer’s Wife, and cut off their tails, or their heads -
whose heads? the children’s? the Artists’?
- to attend classes in Form and Construction and Technique - but of course the classes were not for women,
o God if I could sell one Painting
,
even one
,
I would run away from here so quickly
; and Claudio and Isabella grew, soon they learned to get into my sewing-room (that is, my precious Studio), they banged at the boards, they found pods of paint and jumped on them making colours jump out over themselves and over my Paintings so that all was Pandemonium, they hit each other with brushes or bits of old board - for God’s sake they hardly ever left my side,
Zia Francesca!
(their Father wanted them to speak Italian)
Aunt Fran!
- sometimes they would fall asleep there in my room and I would seize up my pencil and try at least to catch their faces and their tumbling dark hair and the small legs and arms that were still at last, believing I still must lack Form and Construction and Technique - I had had no proper lessons in those formal, technical skills although I had drawn the form and construction of my own naked body for many hours and I could paint an arm or the fall of a shoulder - and then I would carry the children into their own beds and try and take my brush and begin again and I occasionally, still, slipped through the house in the night to study the Rembrandt portrait, stared at that way he used light and shade itself to catch a mood, as I tried to do (not at all with his success, I speak of this dis-interestedly, I do not mean I was successful), but just sometimes I
did
catch the light in that way, and I believed I sometimes had caught an expression on a face (my own face?) in the way that he painted - I wasn’t sure of course, if I was doing the same thing as an Old Master, for there was no-one to guide me and my confidence seemed gone and then voices would call again,
Aunt Fran! Aunt Fran! Zia Francesca!
and sometimes like an echo I heard again my own, long-gone voice, or Venus or Tobias or Ezekiel,
Aunt Joy! Aunt Joy!
and one day at the dinner-table I heard the name of Mr Joseph Wright of Derby mentioned - he had become well-known - and I hugged my knowledge to my heart,
I chose him before he was famous!
and always I would hurry (with my bonnet and my shopping basket) past the chop houses and the taverns and past Old Slaughter’s Coffee-house just near where we had lived in St Martin’s Lane, and I could not help stopping there, I knew it was where Artists congregated, I looked in through the smoky glass and saw all the young ones: shouting, waving their arms about, holes in their jackets; they showed each other -
I could see it
- their own paintings, right there in the smoky room, heads together, looking, talking, disputing - the shadows and the light and their bright hats and their own hair tied back instead of white wigs and the jaunty girl in the corner pouring drinks, and then I hurried home again to the children - and the madwoman’s voice, still there on the corner of St Martin’s Lane, echoed in my head long after I dropped a penny into her dirty hat,
London Bridge is falling down.

 

And all the time, all those years as the children grew and I was trapped, I understood:
I am a Coward
-
I should have joined Poppy as soon as I met her and taken my chances
, I was getting older and older, I had lost my chance, I had lost my Art, my dream of a Studio was hazy now, only an easel and a hat-stand in an empty room - I had, truly, become Aunt Joy - what was the point any more of the boards in my sewing-room all turned to face the wall?

One early morning I caught sight of my unsuspecting mouth in the mirror - dour, turned down, disappointed (something, I saw, like John Palmer’s mouth: someone who knew they had failed) - so in some wild frustrated explosion I seized the mirror and I smashed it in the garden at the back where we burned rubbish and old canvases, and the children called
Aunt Fran! Zia Francesca!
ten now, eleven years old, running out through the house in the early morning and jumping on the glass and Claudio cut his arm, blood everywhere, and I was sure I heard a rooster crowing in Pall Mall (and indeed I had: Mr Thomas Gainsborough had moved to Town) and Claudio yelled at the sight of blood and Isabella wept at the sight of blood and I caught some glass in my finger and Philip called from his Studio for quiet - and so it all went on: their Lives, my Life.

One day I found that I was thirty years old and lost words echoed:
When I do count the clock that tells the Time . . .

I was a middle-aged woman.

The golden years had, indeed, waned.

Despite the success and the fame and the grand house and the hospitality, something was changing in the world of Art. There were some who now called Filipo di Vecellio’s portraits facile, some said his sitters all had the same privileged look: people much preferred Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough who painted (it was said) the soul (and sometimes the soul of ladies of less certain breeding, even actresses). Sir Joshua Reynolds, President, began to lay down laws regarding the Royal Academy:

Sir Joshua Reynolds had become even more famous. Mr Thomas Gainsborough who had lived far away, in Bath, had come to London; people clamoured to be painted by him. And the appointment books of Filipo di Vecellio became less and less full.

Mr James Burke, his friend and dealer, was abrupt and honest.

‘I am doing my best. But you have gone out of fashion, Filipo. It happens to everyone. It may be time for you to find another, younger dealer.’

Filipo begged James Burke not to think of this. Angelica begged James Burke not to think of this, and nobody could resist the charm and the beauty of Angelica.

Filipo di Vecellio was devastated by the change in his fortunes. But had some things with which to console himself. He was rich: he would never now want for money: it was not money that was lost.

And whatever happened to the fashion, Filipo di Vecellio had what Reynolds and Gainsborough did not have:
he had a son
. When he was old enough Filipo would take Claudio on the Grand Tour to Paris and Rome and Florence and Venice and Amsterdam. Claudio would experience the Old Masters and then he would paint Grand Epics, History Paintings: he would paint in the Heroic Style that the Royal Academy so cherished.

Filipo thought not at all of the once-noble name of the Wiltshire Marshalls.

It was the name of di Vecellio that he vowed would never die.

 

The young di Vecellio children did not walk the streets of London freely, their father did not want them to become common, but just occasionally he insisted their Aunt accompany them somewhere educational. One very particular evening he arranged for them to see a play by Mr Shakespeare called
The Tempest
: he said that, because tonight was special, their Parents would be waiting for them at home to hear what they had learned. Isabella and Claudio were excited at first - the crowds, the night, the red and gold theatre boxes, the gorgeous clothes, the stage, all the bright candles and the storms - but they quickly became bored with all the words and started kicking at the seats. Luckily (or unluckily) the actor playing Prospero set fire to his beard with a candle, to the children’s delight: there were shouts and screams and the last third of the performance had to be cancelled and the children came out of Drury Lane greatly excited again. The aunt walked them past Covent Garden and the
piazza
, their eyes widened at all the wild life there, and she showed them the house she and their father had lived in years ago. And there on the corner of St Martin’s Lane the madwoman, older now, still sang and the children too stopped for a moment, caught by the sweet sadness of the voice.

and their aunt told them, as Miss Ffoulks had told her, that the song had been written by the owner of a slave ship, who had repented his ways. But the children did not know of slaves and lost interest, yet the beautiful voice drifted down the lane in the distance and they listened still, without knowing that they did so.

And in the house in Pall Mall, most unusually, their Parents were, indeed, waiting.

‘You will be leaving this house tomorrow,’ said the father to the children.