Pulse (16 page)

Mr Tuttle had not offered lodging; but the limner willingly slept in the stable with his mare for company, and ate in the kitchen. And then there had been that incident on the third evening, against which he had failed – or felt unable – to protest. It had made him sleep uneasily. It had wounded him too, if the truth were known. He ought to have written the collector down for an oaf and a bully – he had painted enough in his years – and forgotten the matter. Perhaps he should indeed consider his retirement, let his mare grow fat, and live from what crops he could grow and what farmstock he could raise. He could always paint windows and doors for a trade instead of people; he would not judge this an indignity.

Late on the first morning, Wadsworth had been obliged to introduce the collector of customs to the notebook. The fellow, like many another, had imagined that merely opening his mouth wider might be enough to effect communication. Wadsworth had watched the pen travel across the page, and then the forefinger tap impatiently. ‘If God is merciful,’ the man wrote, ‘perhaps in Heaven you will hear.’ In reply, he had half-smiled, and given a brief nod, from which surprise and gratitude might be inferred. He had read the thought many times before. Often it was a true expression of Christian feeling and sympathetic hope; occasionally, as now, it represented scarce-concealed dismay that the world contained those with such frustrating deformities. Mr Tuttle was among those masters who preferred their servants to be mute, deaf and blind – except when his convenience suited the matter otherwise. Of course, masters and servants had become citizens and hired help once the juster republic had declared itself. But masters and servants did not thereby die out; nor did the essential inclinations of man.

Wadsworth did not think he was judging the collector in an un-Christian manner. His opinion had been forged on first contact, and confirmed on that third evening. The incident had been the crueller in that it involved a child, a garden boy who had scarcely entered the years of understanding. The limner always felt tenderly towards children: for themselves, for the grateful fact that they overlooked his deformity, and also because he had no issue himself. He had never known the company of a wife. Perhaps he might yet do so, though he would have to ensure that she was beyond childbearing years. He could not inflict his deformity on others. Some had tried explaining that his fears were unnecessary, since the affliction had arrived not at birth, but after an attack of the spotted fever when he was a boy of five. Further, they pressed, had he not made his way in the world, and might not a son of his, howsoever constructed, do likewise? Perhaps that would be the case, but what of a daughter? The notion of a girl living as an outcast was too much for him. True, she might stay at home, and there would be a shared sympathy between them. But what would happen to such a child after his death?

No, he would go home and paint his mare. This had always been his intention, and perhaps now he would execute it. She had been his companion for twelve years, understood him easily, and took no heed of the noises that issued from his mouth when they were alone in the forest. His plan had been this: to paint her, on the same size of canvas used for Mr Tuttle, though turned to make an oblong; and afterwards, to cast a blanket over the picture and uncover it only on the mare’s death. It was presumptuous to compare the daily reality of God’s living creation with a human simulacrum by an inadequate hand – even if this was the very purpose for which his clients employed him.

He did not expect it would be easy to paint the mare. She would lack the patience, and the vanity, to pose for him, with one hoof proudly advanced. But then, neither would his mare have the vanity to come round and examine the canvas even as he worked on it. The collector of customs was now doing so, leaning over his shoulder, peering and pointing. There was something he did not approve. Wadsworth glanced upwards, from the immobile face to the mobile one. Even though he had a distant memory of speaking and hearing, and had been taught his letters, he had never learnt the facility of reading words upon the tongue. Wadsworth raised the narrowest of his brushes from the waistcoat button’s boss, and transferred his eye to the notebook as the collector dipped his pen. ‘More dignity,’ the man wrote, and then underlined the words.

Wadsworth felt that he had already given Mr Tuttle dignity enough. He had increased his height, reduced his belly, ignored the hairy moles on the fellow’s neck, and generally attempted to represent surliness as diligence, irascibility as moral principle. And now he wanted more of it! This was an un-Christian demand, and it would be an un-Christian act on Wadsworth’s part to accede to it. It would do the man no service in God’s eyes if the limner allowed him to appear puffed up with all the dignity he demanded.

He had painted infants, children, men and women, and even corpses. Three times he had urged his mare to a deathbed where he was asked to perform resuscitation – to represent as living someone he had just met as dead. If he could do that, surely he should be able to render the quickness of his mare as she shook her tail against the flies, or impatiently raised her neck while he prepared the little painting cart, or pricked her ears as he made noises to the forest.

At one time he had tried to make himself understood to his fellow mortals by gesture and by sound. It was true that a few simple actions could be easily imitated: he could show, for example, how a client might wish to stand. But other gestures often resulted in humiliating games of guessing; while the sounds he was able to utter failed to establish either his requirements or his shared nature as a human being, part of the Almighty’s work, if differently made. Women judged the noises he made embarrassing, children found them a source of benign interest, men a proof of imbecility. He had tried to advance in this way, but had not succeeded, and so he had retreated into the muteness they expected, and perhaps preferred. It was at this point that he purchased his calfskin notebook, in which all human statement and opinion recurred. ‘
Do you think, Sir, there will be painting in Heaven?
’ ‘
Do you think, Sir, there will be hearing in Heaven?
’

But his understanding of men, such as it had developed, came less from what they wrote down, more from his mute observation. Men – and women too – imagined that they could alter their voice and meaning without it showing in their face. In this they were much deceived. His own face, as he observed the human carnival, was as inexpressive as his tongue; but his eye told him more than they could guess. Formerly, he had carried, inside his notebook, a set of handwritten cards, bearing useful responses, necessary suggestions, and civil corrections to what was being proposed. He even had one special card, for when he was being condescended to by his interlocutor beyond what he found proper. It read: ‘Sir, the understanding does not cease to function when the portals of the mind are blocked.’ This was sometimes accepted as a just rebuke, sometimes held to be an impertinence from a mere artisan who slept in the stable. Wadsworth had abandoned its use, not because of either such response, but because it admitted too much knowledge. Those in the world of tongue held all the advantages: they were his paymasters, they wielded authority, they entered society, they exchanged thoughts and opinions naturally. Though, for all this, Wadsworth did not see that speaking was in itself a promoter of virtue. His own advantages were only two: that he could represent on canvas those who spoke, and could silently observe their meaning. It would be foolish to give away this second advantage.

The business with the piano, for instance. Wadsworth had first enquired, by pointing to his fee scale, if the collector of customs wished for a portrait of the entire family, matching portraits of himself and his wife, or a joint portrait, with perhaps miniatures of the children. Mr Tuttle, without looking at his wife, had pointed to his own breast, and written on the fee sheet, ‘Myself alone.’ Then he had glanced at his wife, put one hand to his chin, and added, ‘Beside the piano.’ Wadsworth had noticed the handsome rosewood instrument and asked with a gesture if he might go across to it. Whereupon he demonstrated several poses: from sitting informally beside the open keyboard with a favourite song on display, to standing more formally beside the instrument. Tuttle had taken Wadsworth’s place, arranged himself, advanced one foot, and then, after consideration, closed the lid of the keyboard. Wadsworth deduced from this that only Mrs Tuttle played the piano; further, that Tuttle’s desire to include it was an indirect way of including her in the portrait. Indirect, and also less expensive.

The limner had shown the collector of customs some miniatures of children, hoping to change his mind, but Tuttle merely shook his head. Wadsworth was disappointed, partly for reasons of money, but more because his delight in painting children had increased as that in painting their progenitors had declined. Children were more mobile than adults, more deliquescent of shape, it was true. But they also looked him in the eye, and when you were deaf you heard with your eyes. Children held his gaze, and he thereby perceived their nature. Adults often looked away, whether from modesty or a desire for concealment; while some, like the collector, stared back challengingly, with a false honesty, as if to say, Of course my eyes are concealing things, but you lack the discernment to realise it. Such clients judged Wadsworth’s affinity with children proof that he was as deficient in understanding as the children were. Whereas Wadsworth found in their affinity with him proof that they saw as clearly as he did.

When he had first taken up his trade, he had carried his brushes and pigments on his back, and walked the forest trails like a pedlar. He found himself on his own, reliant upon recommendation and advertisement. But he was industrious, and being possessed of a companionable nature, was grateful that his skill allowed him access to the lives of others. He would enter a household, and whether placed in the stable, quartered with the help, or, very occasionally, and only in the most Christian of dwellings, treated like a guest, he had, for those few days, a function and a recognition. This did not mean he was treated with any less condescension than other artisans; but at least he was being judged a normal human being, that is to say, one who merited condescension. He was happy, perhaps for the first time in his life.

And then, without any help beyond his own perceptions, he began to understand that he had more than just a function; he had strength of his own. This was not something those who employed him would admit; but his eyes told him that it was the case. Slowly he realised the truth of his craft: that the client was the master, except when he, James Wadsworth, was the client’s master. For a start, he was the client’s master when his eye discerned what the client would prefer him not to know. A husband’s contempt. A wife’s dissatisfaction. A deacon’s hypocrisy. A child’s suffering. A man’s complacency at having his wife’s money to spend. A husband’s eye for the hired girl. Large matters in small kingdoms.

And beyond this, he realised that, when he rose in the stable and brushed the horsehair from his clothes, then crossed to the house and took up a brush made from the hair of another animal, he became more than he was taken for. Those who sat for him and paid him did not truly know what their money would buy. They knew what had been agreed – the size of the canvas, the pose and the decorative elements (the bowl of strawberries, the bird on a string, the piano, the view from a window) – and from this agreement they inferred mastery. But this was the very moment at which mastery passed to the other side of the canvas. Hitherto in their lives they had seen themselves in looking glasses and hand mirrors, in the backs of spoons, and, dimly, in clear still water. It was even said that lovers were able to see their reflections in each other’s eyes; but the limner had no experience of this. Yet all such images depended upon the person in front of the glass, the spoon, the water, the eye. When Wadsworth provided his clients with their portraits, it was habitually the first time they had seen themselves as someone else saw them. Sometimes, when the picture was presented, the limner would detect a sudden chill passing over the subject’s skin, as if he were thinking: so this is how I truly am? It was a moment of unaccountable seriousness: this image was how he would be remembered when he was dead. And then there was a seriousness beyond even this. Wadsworth did not think himself presumptuous when his eye told him that often the subject’s next reflection was: and is this perhaps how the Almighty sees me too?

Those who did not have the modesty to be struck by such doubts tended to comport themselves as the collector now did: to ask for adjustments and improvements, to tell the limner that his hand and eye were faulty. Would they have the vanity to complain to God in His turn? ‘More dignity, more dignity.’ An instruction additionally repugnant given Mr Tuttle’s behaviour in the kitchen two nights ago.

Wadsworth had been taking his supper, content with his day’s labour. He had just finished the piano. The instrument’s narrow leg, which ran parallel to Tuttle’s more massive limb, ended in a gilt claw, which Wadsworth had had some trouble in rendering. But now he was able to refresh himself, to stretch by the fire, to feed, and to observe the society of the help. There were more of these than expected. A collector of customs might earn fifteen dollars a week, enough to keep a hired girl. Yet Tuttle also kept a cook and a boy to work the garden. Since the collector did not appear to be a man lavish with his own money, Wadsworth deduced that it was Mrs Tuttle’s portion which permitted such luxury of attention.

Once they became accustomed to his deformity, the help treated him easily, as if his deafness rendered him their equal. It was an equality Wadsworth was happy to concede. The garden boy, an elf with eyes of burnt umber, had taken to amusing him with tricks. It was as if he imagined that the limner, being shorn of words, thereby lacked amusement. This was not the case, but he indulged this indulgence of him and smiled as the boy turned cartwheels, stole up behind the cook while she bent to the bake oven, or played a guessing game with acorns hidden in his fists.