The Fraud (39 page)

And sometimes as she painted she would allow her dream again,
I will, I
will
before I die become a real, true Painter, like the other Painters.
The dream sustained her, night after night after night: she saw again that bright light room and an easel and a palette, and paintings on the walls.

And sometimes a thin, hurrying ghost in the night flitted down the staircase. A small light, a creaking door: she was in her brother’s studio, staring at the Rembrandt painting: the girl, the light, the way the sleeve fell, breathing it into her before she began her own work. One night the old sad parrot Roberto, living out his lonely nights in his cage in the old workroom of Angelica, shrieked out and the ghost stood stock-still, seemed to disappear into the shadows.

A girl appeared on the board. Almost she looked out at the world - not quite.

 

Lady Dorothea Bray, Filipo di Vecellio’s new friend, knew nothing of Mr Bounds, the frame-maker’s son. She made many airy promises to Isabella, spoke of Royalty, said that Isabella should be seen in more illustrious society. Her father agreed, but decreed that her aunt was also required, as chaperone. Isabella became swept up in new gowns and hair; her aunt wondered if Mr Bounds was quite forgot. Sometimes it was midnight, sometimes it was two in the morning, before the chaperone was free: it was like torture to her to sit through
soirees
and salons and opera and theatre that she had sat through twenty years before and Isabella giggling behind her fan at other young people across the theatre and the knowing face of Lady Dorothea Bray and no Mr Garrick crying to the heavens with his beautiful voice.

One night she was more tired, and more reckless: she took the small Rembrandt painting from the wall of her brother’s studio. With the painting in one hand and a small candle in the other she disappeared up the staircases and into shadows.
Paint with love
, James Burke had said and it seemed she could not. Perhaps she should try to paint one of Rembrandt’s actual faces after all: she was not to paint herself, which meant she was not to paint the imaginary Mary-Ann whom she had known since she was a milliner’s apprentice. She stared at Rembrandt’s woman: whoever she might be, this was not Hendrickje. She could
not
paint the right face: the night was almost morning and she had not found what she wanted. She fell briefly asleep, a candle singed part of her gown: it was the smell of burning material that woke her before she burned herself, the Rembrandt portrait, and the house in Pall Mall to the ground. She got such a fright that night that, as the first dawn light rose over St James’s Park, she crept down the creaking stairs, returned the portrait, and then told the servants that she was ill: all day she lay in her bed-room, the door of the sewing-room tightly closed and colours and shadows raced about her head unchecked, wild and mad and nothing like Rembrandt at all.

But then, like all the other times, she hauled herself up somehow, told herself again:
just let me do this: just this, this one chance, this one Magnificence
. . . She saw again the easel in the big, light room, a hat-stand in the corner.

Weeks passed. Winter set in, cold and hard, and her studio was freezing and she had to wrap herself in many shawls, and then had to throw them off as they restricted her movement with her brushes. Mr James Burke sent a message, asking how she was progressing. She did not reply. More and more she mixed the pigments and the special oil and then used her own thumb and fingers to find the texture she wanted, rubbing and rubbing afterwards to get the paint off her hands so that they became red and raw. Parts of a painting came together. The girl was there, sitting in a small chair, beside a table. She wore a beautiful intricate embroidered gown, the sleeve fell so gracefully where the arm reached out towards a book. The book was discarded on the table. Light from the window caught the side of the girl’s face in a way that Grace knew was right. It was right, but it was not finished. She filled with paint the shadows, the rich sumptuous gown, the particular way the head bent towards the book, the way light and shade caught the body and the head. But she could not paint the expression.

She had never had a real model, except for herself. She needed a real face in front of her. She had never sat at the easel and looked up and painted another person: she had never had another person there right in front of her and the old words from the dinner-table taunted her,
Women must do Countryside views if they must paint, for it is not becoming for Women to paint Portraits, it is not seemly that a Woman should stare so openly at a person in that way
.

Rembrandt had painted with love, James had told her. And the old
marquis
in Amsterdam had said it also. ‘
But who do I love
?’ she said to herself over and over
.

And understood again what she had lost, to gain what she had gained.

Night after night she battled with paint and with oil and with an image in her head, and with weariness: the more tired she got the more bizarre the mind-pictures became and the colours bright and wrong as the days declined and winter snapped angrily at the heels of the devious, bustling city.

Even her brother was concerned. ‘Francesca,
cara
, you look so tired, are you unwell?’ Unusually, he spoke across a crowded dinner-table, everybody drinking and eating. ‘Should we get more servants? You need only say,’ and he smiled at her, his charming smile.

‘Surely you know your Sister never sleeps,’ said Thomas Gainsborough, sprawled, his chair balanced backwards and a glass in his hand.

‘What do you mean?’ said Filipo startled, his glass halfway to his mouth.

‘I see her light burning.’

If Francesca di Vecellio could have turned paler she would have done so. ‘Are you often up late, Mr Gainsborough?’ she said quickly.

‘I like to paint by candlelight, Signorina Francesca,’ he said. ‘Our Portraits are so often viewed in artificial light on the walls of the houses of our Sitters - so it seems to me I must paint for them to be viewed that way.’

Francesca was so amazed that she said at once, eagerly, too quickly, ‘Yes, yes of course, you are right, yes, do you always paint by candlelight? - Is that part of your - that is - your Style?’

He laughed. ‘I have to confess that sometimes I close my shutters and draw my curtains even during the day! Not always - not my Landscapes - the painting that I enjoy most, not them. But Portraits, yes, I feel they should be painted in artificial light.’ And the conversation among the painters turned to colour, and oil, and the
signorina
’s night lights were forgotten.

Perhaps.

Mr Gainsborough lingered as the others began their walk down Pall Mall to a new gambling club in St James’s.

‘Signorina Francesca?’ She turned back to the doorway. ‘Signorina Francesca, do you yourself paint by any chance?’

She looked at him. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because,
Signorina
, I have observed that your hands and your gown more and more these days often have paint upon them.’

For a moment they stood in the dark hallway in silence,
if only I could talk to him
, then she moved to open the front door for him and answered at last. ‘I am just an
amateur
of course, Mr Gainsborough. Flowers.’ Voices called along Pall Mall and even just inside the open door their breath was frosty in the night as he regarded her. Francesca knew how heavily he had been drinking, how heavily he always drank: his eyes twinkled and he swayed slightly. She had no idea what he was thinking. And then he said casually, ‘At Mr Newman’s in Gerrard Street there is a new Remover. I find it very satisfactory. Thank you, Signorina Francesca, as always, for your Hospitality. I must leave you now, for tonight I again provide Thunder for the Eidophusikon.’ In the dusk he looked up at the sky: a storm was obviously brewing, and he laughed. ‘Our Thunder, in my opinion, is much better than the real thing!’ And Thomas Gainsborough, now the most sought-after Portrait Painter in London, bowed and smiled and wove off down Pall Mall at dusk as the coaches with their flickering lights noisily rattled and twinkled and threw filthy mud and overflowing effluent into the air, and just then a warning streak of lightning flashed across the sky.

Francesca di Vecellio went slowly back to the empty dining-room. For the first time in her life she picked up the unfinished decanter of wine and drank straight from it, gulped the liquid down as Artists, they say, have always done, as if it would help.

 

Next morning she looked away from a pale face in the mirror in despair. She went to Mr Newman in Gerrard Street to obtain the new paint remover, she walked with her basket to the fishmonger by the Strand, through huge puddles of muddy, mushy rain left by the storm. Her shoulders, should anyone have noticed, were hunched under her winter cloak in cold and weariness and defeat: she could not do it: it was
ridiculous
, a ridiculous dream: she would live forever in Pall Mall - housekeeper to the Artist. Up in the
piazza
at Covent Garden sellers called their wares: CABBAGES! CAULIFLOWERS! DRINK MY FRESH MILK! But the milk was weakened with bad water, all the regular shoppers knew.

As she was buying cheese, trying not to slip in the mud, she heard a girl’s voice.

‘May I have milk, Father?’

She turned and saw a rotund gentleman who looked slightly familiar to her, there with his daughter: they had stopped at the milkmaid, the father was searching his waistcoat for coins and the girl stared at the milkmaid, fascinated by the way she carried her pitchers of milk upon her head. Without thinking Francesca di Vecellio called out quickly in her Italian accent, ‘A moment
Signore
!’ and the rotund gentleman turned to her, startled. She was startled too, for he was a writer who had been a guest once at dinner, at the house in Pall Mall.

‘Signorina di Vecellio! Good morning.’

‘
Scusi, Signore
. The milk. It is not safe to drink the milk here.’

The milkmaid let out such a torrent of abuse that a crowd immediately gathered. She screamed at Francesca di Vecellio, spat at her, tried to attack her as she held her milk on her head; the gentleman and his daughter hurried the older woman away, slipping through the muddy snow and the shit and the slurry.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Francesca several times, trying to catch her breath. ‘We know not to buy her milk in the
piazza
, for it is dangerous to drink. It is mixed with bad water, it will make you ill.’

‘Why was the Milkmaid screaming?’ asked the young girl, more puzzled than scared.

‘I am taking away her living,’ said Francesca. And without thinking she added, ‘I would scream too if someone did that to me,’ and like a flash of lightning, just then, she saw herself screaming in the private room in Bedlam and she looked about her quite wildly in the London winter street and saw the face of the daughter.

‘
God!
’ she said.

The gentleman and his daughter looked shocked. The housekeeper’s basket was heavy on her arm, fish and mutton and a huge cauliflower and eggs and big loaves of bread with the paint remover right at the bottom. The rotund gentleman (she could not remember his name) took charge of the situation.

‘Shall we sit for a moment in the Church of St Paul?’ he said kindly, taking the basket, indicating the church at the side of Covent Garden.

‘Thank you,’ said Francesca. ‘Thank you.’

They sat at the back of the high-windowed church as black-gowned clerics glided by and Francesca tried to re-collect herself. She was so exhausted from lack of sleep that all had an air of unreality, yet she stared at the girl nevertheless. The gentleman reminded her they had met before, introduced himself in a quiet voice fit for a place of worship: Thomas Towers, writer. She nodded, remembering now, a jovial visitor who had worn a number of rather flamboyant waistcoats all at once in an odd manner, and arrived with Dr Burney. Now he introduced his daughter: Eliza Towers. She lived in Surrey but was visiting her father in London. Francesca could not stop looking at Eliza’s face. It was not exactly beautiful, but it was absolutely right. She felt wild and torn and out of control,
I have to use this face.
She could not be open but she was too tired to be closed. She made a gigantic effort to pull her sanity about her.

‘Mr Towers,’ she said, and she smiled at Eliza, ‘it is my brother as you know who is the Painter. But I- that is - sometimes, quietly, I - I try my hand - as an
amateur
you understand, I would not bother my brother with my fancies for all the world - I would never tell him of it,’ she added helplessly, she felt herself moving into deeper and deeper water, ‘what I am trying to say is’ - she took a deep breath - ‘is that if you and Eliza would allow me, I would be so grateful to draw her but I would not tell my brother what I was doing.’ It made - she knew - both of them seem so small, her brother and herself. At the front of the church the black-clad men lit candles.

Thomas Towers looked at her shrewdly, and then at his daughter. ‘Would you like to be drawn, Eliza?’ They saw that she was pleased, she nodded her head; she was perhaps fifteen.

‘If you are to draw her you must do it soon,’ said Thomas Towers, ‘for Eliza is to return to Surrey at the end of the week. I have rooms in Frith Street, number six, perhaps - if your Brother would allow it’ - he saw her face - ‘no, no I mean -’

‘- I walk these streets every morning, Mr Towers.’

‘Of course. I mean to say perhaps you could - join us there for coffee this time tomorrow - if you like coffee,
Signorina
, I know it is not to everyone’s taste.’

Francesca laughed: he saw how the laughter lit up her tired, drawn face, saw her dark, dark eyes. ‘I grew up in Bristol,’ she said, ‘where the trade ships came sailing home with—’ and then she realised what she had said and clamped her hand over her mouth in horror. ‘That is -
scusi
- we were briefly in Bristol once when I was a girl and I - because of the ships and the trade, you understand - I got a taste for coffee very early in my life,’ and she got up quickly, nearly colliding with a candle-snuffer.