The Fraud (3 page)

It was her brother Tobias who first noticed how Grace instinctively copied the looks on other people’s faces around her as she watched them.

‘Be Venus, Gracie!’ he would encourage her, ‘Be Venus!’ Venus was the most haughty of the Marshall family; she emitted little sighs of exasperation at the vulgarity that surrounded her even in her own home. Grace would sigh very softly in unison as she watched her sister, hardly knowing she did so, and then encouraged by her naughty brothers she would wrinkle her nose in a disdainful manner as Venus did, and her brothers Tobias and Ezekiel would snigger behind their hands as Venus, oblivious, suffered nobly from the vulgar trials of her Bristolian life.

Grace learned something important from Tobias. Ezekiel shouted and banged but Tobias could move without making a sound. Grace learned this skill from Tobias. He could be in a dim corner of a room and nobody would know, for nobody ever cared enough about him to say
Where is Tobias?
The family was too fractured to notice where small boys might be; he could be under a table, hidden by a long tablecloth, for hours, listening to the women talk of Nobility and Tribulation and Marriage. Why he should want to listen to such things was not known, but in broken families perhaps children try to belong when they can: often he would be there in the shadows. His mother was quite disconcerted if she suddenly understood he was near: ‘It is like having a French spy in the Family!’ she would cry, but Tobias had already disappeared.

 

Marmaduke’s wilder and wilder card-playing became a real danger: money was owed, perilous shame loomed in the shadows of the dark, damp Bristol streets where honourable men paid on the nail (gold exchanged on the huge tables shaped like nails outside the Corn Exchange). It became urgently imperative for the older children to make successful marriages before disgrace destroyed them all: already there had been whispers about dishonest antecedents and financial difficulties.

Quickly, O Lord, quickly,
whispered Betty to herself as she poured sweet wine,
Marriage, dear Lord, before we are entirely Doomed
, as she took very large and urgent gulps. But there was no dowry, their good name was long gone: who would have them? Finally through Betty’s more and more desperate machinations Juno became betrothed to the short-statured son of an iron exporter, and Venus to a vintner: it was, alas, not what was hoped for but it was something at least. Betty then put all her energies into looking for a rich wife in Bristol society (‘Such as it is,’ she was heard to say bitterly, her expectations not having been reached) for her son and heir, the charming, dark-eyed Philip Marshall.
But Marriage, not the Navy
, she whispered to herself: he would be away too long, the Navy could not make him rich enough despite the rumoured prize money that some received.
He must be rich now: he must find a rich Wife now and support us all
. So Betty, a squire’s daughter, was to be seen looking over the vulgar daughters of Bristolian ship-owners in a now panic-stricken manner - and what young Grace Marshall was doing now nobody knew or cared.

What Grace Marshall was doing now, aged eight, was following her father Marmaduke around Bristol, for she loved him and she thought to save him when he became too inebriated to play wisely at cards. By now Grace knew the streets of Bristol better than almost anyone. But following her father, sometimes a little behind him so that he would not order her home, was tinged with real danger: the Bristol gentlemen’s clubs were now banned to him. The sort of card-room Marmaduke was allowed into these days was a dark den inside a tradesmen’s club, or (the less salubrious and more violent ones) down dark Bristol alleys where small girls should never, ever go. But Grace had learned well from Tobias, she was scheming and clever as a cat, an ever-present nuisance in the hazy, smoke-filled rooms; no other little girl was ever seen in such places and when she somehow turned up in a dim corner or was half-glimpsed behind a chair it was never understood how she had obtained admission. As they seemed not able to shake her loose, as she seemed to be always, stoically, there, they finally ignored her.

Waiting in the gloom of dangerous rooms, always aware of her father, she became fascinated by something else: all the
faces
: the faces of the men as they watched their cards and watched each other. She saw on their shadowed, candle-lit faces the sly looks and the triumphant looks and the looks of fear - for they played for large sums of money: life almost, and death. Watching the gamblers she unknowingly copied their faces: a gambling man paused before making a wager, his face creased, he frowned, deciding, risking: the face of the eight-year-old girl creased up in anxiety also; he bit his lip in indecision, the girl bit her own lip over and over. And she saw also now the menacing looks that were cast often at the dishonourable Marmaduke, felt the danger in the air. When even his befuddled brain warned him that it would be politic to leave in the meantime, he would stumble home along to Queen’s Square guided by his watchful youngest daughter.

And then, unwilling to confront his shrewish wife, he would often repair to a room at the bottom of the tall, narrow house. There, he stumbled and mumbled and sat in front of an old family easel and once more painted his elegant country horses on a piece of board. He had an old book of pictures of horses, Grace would see how he looked at them and then drew, first with charcoal. Looked and then drew. Looked and then drew, still mumbling incoherently to himself. Later he painted the colours: he took the paint from little packets of colour which he mixed with some kind of oil and then applied it to his horses with a long, thin brush.

The only time Grace was completely still was when she was watching her father in this small downstairs room. She stared - immobile, beguiled - as, smelling of rum like the vicar in the library, her father bent over the small packets and stirred and mixed the colours, his long white wig occasionally decorated with unlikely bright blue spots as he patted the paints on to the board with his brush, and sometimes with his thumb. And just sometimes he might even sing: some song from his past.
When I laid on Greenland’s coast, and in my arms embraced my lass
, he would sing. And if some portion of a bottle of rum from the West Indies had found its way to the room at the bottom of the house, he would take a gulp and then his voice always rose to a crescendo when it reached the chorus, as if some memory of another time gave him strength.

Sometimes Tobias would appear from nowhere, and laugh slyly, and run away again. Philip might pass by, tossing a piece of charcoal himself and humming, as if he too might draw if he had the energy; he would observe his father for a while and then disappear again, humming still. Perhaps he drew other pictures in other rooms, perhaps Tobias did the same: who would know what anybody did in that disordered house?

 

Grace became so fascinated by her father’s colours that she began ‘painting’ also, with anything she could find. Her father would not allow her to touch his colours so she found her own. She found she could draw with coal; she started with laborious, rather strange-shaped horses, trying to copy her father, had more success when she turned to drawing her father himself, caught something of him as he bent to his easel. Then she found she could make an orange colour by squashing marigold petals from the garden with her small fingers, so she gave him an orange waistcoat. She could make marks with clay; her mother’s cheek-rouge gave her pretty pink; strong dregs of the new coffee from Africa gave her brown; even butter gave a hint of yellow before it melted - whatever she could lay her hands on: she was a menace and butter even got in her hair and her hands were slapped often. Her energy and her interests were most unladylike, her curiosity was insatiable - in short she was, quite simply,
unsuitable
.

‘I do not understand where her tiresome energy comes from,’ said her mother pettishly, ‘for it is surely not from her Father; and I would not be so frantic for all the World.’ But her thin, scrawny brother Tobias, ten years old, would sometimes follow her around: ‘Gracie!’ he would call, carrying a few green beans stolen from the kitchen, ‘Here’s a colour,’ and once he came to her proudly with a large, juicy hyacinth he had stolen, so that she could mix blue.

 

One hot summer afternoon when the sky was clear and the children were particularly vexatious in the stuffy Bristol house, her father (the cards had gone well that week and Grace turned nine years old that sunny day) gave Grace the greatest present ever given: some paper, some coloured chalks and some charcoal.

‘I beg you to draw me some pretty Flowers, Grace, and to be very quiet about it, like a good Girl.’ He sat in the back garden, in his once elegant waistcoat, on a fading chair. In the shadow of the tall, narrow house he seemed to sleep, his wig hung over his chair: his wife could hardly bear to look at him, so vulgar and troublesome did he now appear to her.

In the corner of the garden an ungainly pink delphinium drooped in the hot sunshine. Grace, trembling slightly with delight at the unexpected, wonderful gift, looked at the delphinium very carefully and then drew it exactly as she saw it, its pink, drooping despair. Most unusually, the family were all together in the garden, it being too hot to think of being anywhere else. (Except of course for Aunt Joy, who scraped together what she could in the stifling kitchen basement.) In the garden, escaping - frankly - the stink of the hot, un-aired house, the mouth-down-turned mother sat in an extremely large straw hat, clutching Beloved; Juno and Venus languished in tight corsets, dreaming of gentlemen and carrying parasols to shield them from the sun. Juno was to be married in the autumn to the short tradesman but the engagement of the vintner to Miss Venus Marshall had been most shamefully called off by the vintner’s father. Venus’s red-rimmed eyes told her rage and grief. Philip preened boredly by the marble statue; Tobias and Ezekiel fought angrily over a small cart they had no doubt stolen from somewhere. Grace’s delphinium was shadowed, odd: not at all pretty like flowers should be.

‘I shall be obliged to take all your chalks away’, said her mother sharply, fanning herself with the large hat (which was decorated with wax strawberries) ‘if you do not draw
pretty
Flowers.’ Immediately Grace drew an immaculate, oddly-green daisy. ‘But look, this is red!’ said her father, observing from half-closed eyes, pointing to the flowers in the garden.

‘There are green Daisies, Father,’ said Grace. ‘This is a green Daisy.’

‘That Daisy’, said Philip in a bored, patronising voice, ‘is Insane.’

And although her mother and her father and Philip would have much preferred pretty peonies or sweet roses to the drooping, rather spiky delphinium or the perverse green daisy, with those they had to be content.

Grace kept drawing, absolutely concentrated. The small boys fought on, laughing viciously, the older sisters sighed viciously, Venus flirted sentimentally with suicide (
then
the vintner’s cruel son would be sorry). Philip still leaned against the statue, watching idly: France was always there to be fought against if he joined the Navy, but he was prevented by his own lack of energy and by his adoring mother who gave him what coins she could while still she endeavoured to manoeuvre a financially-endowed young girl in his direction. So here he languished: no money, no prospects, no rich heiress, and life was passing him by.

Overcome then by a wild, angry burst of energy, Philip suddenly seized all nine-year-old Grace’s drawing materials from her and - quick as lightning - drew her outraged face.

‘My Heavens!’ cried his mother with more spirit than she had shown for a month. ‘Look at this!
Look at this!
Remember the dreadful Frenchman? My Boy has Talent!’ Marmaduke opened his eyes just a little.

Philip drew his parents, his sisters, his brothers: easily, catching their look. ‘I was good at Art at my School,’ he announced airily. ‘I draw in my room sometimes.’

‘Neater, Philip,’ said his parents, ‘prettier perhaps?’ Now everyone was alerted: all the siblings gathered round, the heat and the hot sunshine forgotten just for a moment.

Philip drew more neatly and more prettily with his sister’s birthday present.

Grace grabbed some of the chalk back. ‘I would have been good at Art also if I had gone to School!’ she cried with great spirit. She drew her parents too, but there was something uneasy, or wrong, about her quick portraits: her mother had a look of discontent, her father looked dark, uneasy. There was no more interest in Grace’s portraits than in her uncomfortable delphiniums.

‘Girls do not draw
Persons
!’ said her father. ‘Girls draw Flowers. And if they do not draw pretty Flowers, they will not be given Chalks another time.’

Philip drew his mother again in quick, clever strokes, making her look young.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife
, he sang, and Tobias and Ezekiel joined in gleefully and noisily,
He cut off their tails with a carving knife
, and the little girl suddenly grabbed hold of both Philip’s arms to get his attention.

‘These are
my
Chalks!’ said Grace Marshall very loudly, today aged nine, but nobody took any notice.

For Philip Marshall had discovered his vocation.

The next day, however, young Tobias came to Grace with another flower. Tobias was so thin: sometimes Grace thought he looked like a black-eyed beanstalk, that is an eleven-year-old black-eyed beanstalk. He stood there with a red, red rose.

‘I took it from a garden, Gracie,’ he said gruffly, ‘so you could make some red paint to paint red Daisies like they said,’ and he had run off at once before she had thanked her brother, who had remembered their parents’ complaints about her unlikely green daisy, and had sought to assist her, and neither Grace nor Tobias had any notion that red roses stood for love.