Sir William (7 page)

Emma kept to her room, too weak with shame to take any nourishment other than a custard at noon and a very large tea, three oranges, a bowl of apples, a bunch of grapes, half a pound cake, two bowls of Devonshire cream, a basket of strawberries, half a saddle of mutton,
thirteen haws, to keep her hands busy, and two Anjou pears. Grief, she found, had made her hungry.

“What have I done?” she wailed. “What have I done?”

“You’ve been yourself, and it won’t do,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “Not in this household, anyway. From now on you must emulate others. There is no other way to please them.”

But it was Towneley who saved them.

*

“Of course I have heard about it,” he said, wagging a modish tasseled slipper. “It’s all over town. Which do you suggest, that I stuff my ears with loyalty, or cotton wool?”

Towneley was fond of Charles. If not his own sort of man, he was at least the next best thing—a fussy, prissy, predestinated bachelor, manly of course, but given to gossip in the right congenial way.

Someday the boy might marry. There are heiresses in Cumberland who will put up with anything. He had no desire to diddle him out of £10,000 a year. On the other hand, he had no desire to lose his company, either. Therefore he must be induced to keep Emma on. Besides, Towneley liked Emma, mildly. He judged people by his own evoked images—all of them artistic—and when he thought of Emma he saw first of all the Borghese hermaphrodite, and second, “St. Cecilia,” also in Rome, huddled up under her altar like Andromache in the snow. Since both these statues were among his favored female works (his favored male work was Georghetti’s “St. Sebastian” on the Palatine. Ah, if we had Georghetti’s “St. Sebastian” we should all be happy, if, as usual, bored), he had a soft spot in his heart for her. She was as sexless and as
séduisant
as a boy.

Towneley had a discursive mind. He returned abruptly to the point.

“My dear Charles,” he said. “You have mistaken your vocation. No wonder you are tired. You are minute in particulars, and have no principles whatsoever. Therefore you are either a scoundrel or a pedant. Since you live on unearned income, are precise in your accounts,
and related to almost everybody, clearly you cannot be a scoundrel. Therefore a pedant you must be. You want employment, you relish the antique, you have an eye for sculpture—at any rate you seem to have an eye for mine—nature has supplied you with a Galatea, so chip away. Fashion her into one of the hetaerae. And then, if you really cannot abide her, sell her, for by that time she will fetch a better price.”

“Sell her?”

“Oh come now, Charles, what else is there to do with her? Think of the future. Every man has two chances at a good match: when he is young and seems romantic, and when he is older and seems a good catch. There are many women eager to marry a minister, should you become one, with or without portfolio. Meanwhile enjoy yourself: instruct the girl.”

“It is true that I have much to teach,” said Greville, with the obliviousness of true humility.

“My dear boy, of course you have,” said Towneley, with a cockatoo prance. “So why not get it out of your system now, while there is still time?”

So Emily was saved, in the best Hannah More style, by education. Greville commenced at once, though he would need advice.

The most notable exponent of education, excepting always Hannah More, was Mr. Day, the friend of Erasmus Darwin, the friend of Anna Seward, the friend of Johnson, who in his turn was the friend of Mrs. Thrale, who had married a merchant, so none of them was exactly respectable. Nor would the Bishop of Derry do. He was an admirable sedentary old rip whom eminence had rendered plummy, who admired erudition, could pull odds and ends of Horace out of a hat with the best of them, read the worst parts of Procopius in his cabinet, and had no use for education whatsoever. He preferred, he said, learning, for you can educate a rabbit, but nothing will make him learned unless he wants to be, in which case he is not a rabbit, so why stuff the memory with forcemeat, like a Michaelmas goose? It is a waste of time.

There was Rousseau….

Looking up at the Paulus Potter, Greville uttered an ungulate groan: should he begin with Taste or Tacitus? Or would his own moral apothegms be better? He had already instituted a course of instruction in those.

“If you give compliments solely in order to give pleasure, you will get what you want,” he had said when she was trying to butter up Mr. Hayley. “If you give them solely to get what you want, you will merely displease. You have not the art to dissimulate, dear Emma.”

“And it must be said, you do not seem to need it,” said Hayley, about whom everything was pleasant but his verse. “If you wish me to inscribe the
Triumphs
of
Temper,
why of course I shall.”

“I do not like the girl to appear pert,” said Greville. “She is at times.”

“You must come to the country more often. So is my climbing rose,” said Hayley. “She is Serena to the life.”

“Reading it is one of her few diversions.”

“She seems to wish to improve herself, at any rate,” said Hayley, Serena being the heroine of the above-mentioned work.

Indeed she did.

“Being ignorant of Taste, her only thought, upon seeing the sculpture around her, is to ask the subject of the scene, and so, to feed her curiosity, I have thought it best to instruct her in the elements of Classic Greek Myth,” wrote Greville to his uncle.

As for the celestial tittle-tattle of Greek myth, Emma had seldom heard such disgusting carryings on in her life, but into the memory box it went, and down went the lid, while Hope droned around the room with all the random diligence of a mosquito.

“The gnats in this part of Delaware are as large as sparrows. I have armed myself against them by wearing trousers,” wrote the Earl of Carlisle. In it went. Had she not been so pretty, Emma would have qualified as a bluestocking tomorrow. She had the erudition of a magpie; that is, she did not care what it was, what it meant
or where it came from, but if it sparkled, into that jackdaw’s nest of a memory of hers it went. The worst was French.

“On
pent
comparer
la
sociét
é
à
une
salle
de
spectacle:
on
n’y
é
tait
aux
loges
que
parce
qu’on
payait
d’avantage,”
mouthed Emma.

“And what is this ubiquitous caterwauling, pray?”

“It is French.”

“Child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who lived in terror of foreign travel, for parsnips were not procurable abroad, “why?”

“It is a polite accomplishment and contains no ‘h’s,’” said Emma, holding out the book. “You see. There is an haitch. But you pay it no mind. That’s the beauty of it.”

“She is teachable. She shall vie with Mrs. Delaney,” said Greville.

“Ah, Charles,” said the Bishop of Derry, “you are a willful man. You would curdle cream. Have you not yet learned that artless prattle is superior to the artful kind?”

“Not twenty-four hours a day.”

“Ah well, perhaps not,” agreed the Bishop, and taking her hand, led Emma out into the garden, to name the flowers and plants and any animals therein at that time residing.

“Must I really read Dr. Johnson?” asked Emma.

“No, my child,” said the Bishop, who had been contemplating a zinnia, a most rare flower, and did not want his pleasure spoiled. “If an elephant could have written verse, he would have written much in the style of Johnson. It is not easy; it does not convince; but it is full of ponderous felicities. There is even here and there the gleam of a tusk. But though it is quotable, it cannot be read.”

“Not even the
Dictionary?
”

“The
Dictionary
is different. Here and there the
Dic
tionary
is amusing. As good as a novel, but with the words in their proper order, so I am told.”

“You are making fun of me.”

“No, I am only making fun with you. If Charles must
convert you into that horrid grownup thing, a gentlewoman, he is going about it the wrong way. Even he should know a gentlewoman never reads, except, of course, the ‘Court Gazette.’”

“There is little other diversion here, except to sing and play the spinet and sew.”

The Bishop of Derry was shocked. “How sad,” he said, “to be so serious so young.”

“I am not sad. I find it paradise.”

“A strange Methodistic paradise, all gray. Now had you read the
Alcoran,
you would know that true paradise consists of nothing but your pretty self and milk and honey. My dear, you
are
diversion.” And the Bishop went back to contemplation of his copper zinnia, a plant from the New World, but in England, a novelty.

*

It was Mr. Hayley who provided the diversion, not the Bishop of Derry, and most certainly not Greville. Mr. Hayley had gone to see his friend Romney, the painter, who though he had been living in London for some years, had only recently arrived, and was at the moment fashionable. “Romney’s pictures are hard, dry and tasteless, and such as you would not like in the least. And I am enough secure that he will never make a first-rate painter,” wrote Northcote to his brother. That showed you how well established Romney had become. In these matters, a word from Northcote was enough.

Mr. Romney was a paranoiac of great charm, which is to say, in his own day, an original. His studio in Cavendish Square was vast. It was not England; it was not Italy; it was not anywhere. Freed for a moment from his vanities, his insanities and his own innate inabilities, he shut his eyes and life came flooding in, sepia wave after sepia wave of women who writhed and turned and were waves and not women, badly drawn, not drawn at all, merely fixed in the act of being either that bright turbulence the nearly blind see by daylight, or else the promise of something unknowable.

What I am I am, and that’s a pity, thought Mr. Romney. But what I draw for myself is quite another
thing. For he had long ago given up hope that those half-understood and barely attended-to visions of his would ever find a model through whom he could express them.

He did not enjoy being a fashionable painter, for since all women of fashion desire to have the same face, he was forced to draw the same face always, which was not even the face of any particular woman, but only the face of fashion, and no relief in sight, but a change of style, which would merely be the same thing all over again with different eyebrows. Where is the woman with the courage to look like herself? Where, for that matter, the man? These do not exist. We are all afraid of something. Besides, he could not but hanker after the history or fancy piece, for since he had no talent for composition, that, of course, was what he longed to do.

In short, he was in the dumps. His talent was limited, in so far as he could draw accurately only what he saw. And who could get a woman to sit still long enough to show her character? She knows better. As soon as you begin to get close, she begins to fidget. As for sharing the canvas with anyone less undifferentiated than a child, that was out of the question, so there went composition. Even Reynolds had been constrained to draw the Waldegrave sisters separately.

Hayley wanted a portrait of Serena, engravable for a new edition of the
Triumphs
of
Temper,
and therefore an excellent advertisement for them both. The
Triumphs
of
Temper
is a poem of ideas. Where another poet would match words, therefore, Hayley matched wool. “He is a
workbasket
poet,” said Farrington, just as catty as Northcote and every inch the R.A. “His verses are upon every girl’s sofa.” And so they were, laid face down. A fresh edition appeared every year, at Confirmation time.

“But can she sit still?” asked Romney. “I am slow to compose.”

“I fear she sits still for quite long periods of time,” said Hayley. “She is a sweet thing, and has little else to do. Greville keeps her, you see.”

“Oh Greville,” said Romney, with a contemptuous
snort. He, too, had had to deal with the purity and exactitude of Greville’s taste. “Very well, bring her along, and we’ll take a look at her.” It was Greville who had told him he was not quite
ready
yet. He decided to up his price, should a commission be forthcoming.

And so the second lesson began, with the first one as yet unlearned.

T
HOUGH AMORAL
in important matters, Greville was strict in trifles, and insisted upon a duenna, so Mrs. Cadogan went along.

As the sittings progressed, and there were to be more than three hundred of them, she spent most of her time reorganizing the kitchen. Romney came from their own part of the world. The three of them understood each other at once. No matter what their vices, they were all innocent in a most venal town, and if Mrs. Cadogan was perhaps less innocent than they were, why that only improved her cooking, which was a blessing, considering what Romney generally ate. Within the confines of the studio they were quite gay, like prisoners in Bedlam, who do not care where they are.

“And where is your wife, Mr. Romney?” asked Mrs. Cadogan, a woman’s first question to any seemingly single man.

“At home where she belongs, I trust.” Romney liked women well enough. It was only their company he could not abide. Their company fell short of the ideal. And answering a woman’s second question before it was put, with a glance at the stack of portraits in the corner, waiting for delivery, he added: “She is well provided for.”

“And your children?” Mrs. Cadogan persisted.

“With my wife. I would prefer that in their younger
years they had some experience of the country, which is wholesome, so I am told.” Though it was all very well for Reynolds to do the Honourable This or That as the Infant Samuel, that was by no means the same as having the pudgy things pewling about underfoot. No doubt Reynolds loved children, but Reynolds was a bachelor, and so could well afford the sentiment. Sentiment is not the same as rocks in one’s best asphaltum, and three pounds’ worth of chrome yellow expended upon the funeral of a dead cat.

“Sir, you need a woman’s care,” said Mrs. Cadogan, unimpressed.

“The char comes in every second Wednesday. I also need peace and quiet.”

Neither one of them had won. It was therefore necessary, as it is after inconclusive battles, to declare an
entente
cordiale.
Mrs. Cadogan sailed off to the kitchen. He was, she confided afterward, a dear old gentleman.

He was nothing of the sort. He was merely a boy tortured by a vision he could not even see, who drew very badly, and who was forty-eight; in short, as lonely as a genius, even if he was not one.

“Ah,” he said, “the music of the spheres,” for he had heard a kettle boiling. Inside of two weeks the studio reeked of boiled cabbage, shepherd’s pie, jam tarts, Yorkshire pudding, brown Windsor soup, baked widgeon, jugged hare, blood pudding, venison patty, suet roly-poly, and all those other treats of the commonalty which in Edgware Row could be served only on the sly.

“She is a wonder,” Romney said to Hayley. “She can sit for hours immovable, and yet her face is never still. In the face she can be anything. In short, she is so vivacious that, tell me, what does Greville see in her?”

“He reads to her.”

Which he did. He hoped, by example, to rid her of her native Doric, or failing that, of those tones in it which made the Boston Stump sound like a dance. He instructed her as one would address oneself to the elocution of a parrot, but his voice was a drone, and do what she
would, Emma could not drone. She was too happy. Mr. Romney had asked her to come back again.

“It is useless,” said Greville. “But her French is not too bad.”

It was better than his own, since the proper English always speak that tongue as though groping around in a hip tub for the soap they cannot find but on which they have no desire to slip when they get out to dry themselves with their native tongue.

Serena was disposed of, but Greville had commissioned a three-quarter portrait (that being the cheapest size). Romney proposed to paint her in a poke bonnet, with a toy spaniel in her lap.

“What are you looking for, dear child?”

“The spaniel,” said Emma, with a disappointed air.

“The spaniel is hypothetical,” he assured her gravely. She was the most entrancing personage, the ideal daughter, and he had produced mostly far from ideal, and solemn, if reverend, sons.

“You mean it isn’t here?”

“It isn’t here,” said Romney.

“It never is, is it?” said Emma, and gave him a quizzical look.

So the next Thursday there was a toy spaniel which yapped and barked and relieved itself against a full-length portrait of Lord North.

“The dear thing. How I wish I could take it home.”

“You may if you wish.”

“Oh no, I mayn’t. Greville has a rooted horror of the animate; he has never explained why. But it is part of his system, I expect.”

So the spaniel stayed in the studio, to its own vast relief, with a soft-boiled egg in the morning and kitchen scraps, until Emma forgot the pretty thing and he could give it away. Romney did not mind. It was a happy time for him, his only one.

It was a very happy time.

I am an old man, he thought, with a few cronies. The only part I play in their lives is the part I play when I am asking to visit them. I sit inside the dungeon of myself,
a room as large as this studio and just as empty. I paint portraits the way a prisoner cards jute, and sometimes, if it is not always winter, there is a ray of pallid sunlight for a few minutes in the morning, before I cloud over again; though all the sun does is show the rings and shackles in the opposite wall, and the dust. I have waited in vain for the jailer’s pretty daughter to unbolt the door with a metallic clang, and open it. I was a young man once, but now my only visions are a purely physiological phenomenon occasioned by pressure when I blink in the dark, when the inchoate roils; the only light, the dead cells in the eye, for the inchoate is uncreatable, for I do not know where to begin.

But now the jailer’s pretty daughter comes regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and would come every day if she or I were free, and so the dark is light enough. I do not mind carding my jute.

She had become an obsession. He saw her everywhere, most clearly perhaps, because surrounded by a nimbus, where she was not.

*

Emma, too, seemed happier, more like her portrait, fresh painted, which had joined Paulus Potter and Thais in the library, with another ordered to balance it—Emma as Spinstress, half cottage ornée, half Graeae. But except for basking in the improved temperature, Greville scarcely noticed. Like Romney, he had been overwhelmed by a ray of hope. His uncle’s wife was dead.

“Good news, what, Charles?” said Towneley, in his best poke-a-stick-at-a-hedgehog way.

Greville curled into himself.

“I mean, since you are the favored nephew, no doubt you will inherit his wife’s estates, given he does not marry again and produce young.” Sir William was not only a doting uncle, he was also a childless man.

Greville did not consider this remark well-bred. It smacked of the frank.

“He is coming to England.”

“In that case you will be making a trip to Wales, I
expect,” said Towneley. “Lady Hamilton’s estates are in Wales, are they not?”

Greville curled tighter than ever. Towneley was amused. When he was a boy, a gamekeeper had once given him a hedgehog which he had fed sweet milk from a tube, and in time it, too, had uncurled and eventually died. Towneley, who like most eunuchs, was afflicted with immortality, poured the sherry—a plump, complacent Jupiter, with money of his own.

“He is bringing, I believe, a vase.”

Greville was alarmed. “That is not a matter to be spoken of.”

“Like what song the Sirens sang, and what name Hercules took among women? Alcmene, I expect; he was a mother’s boy and stuck with the heel of memory, like a crust of old bread. But I would like to see the vase.”

He saw the vase. He always saw everything, for his principles were sound; when you cannot wheedle, threaten and—if possible—do both, for the best doors are not only closed, but have two locks.

So one day Emma saw from her window a tall, lean gentleman who looked very like Greville, but a Greville made out of some more durable material—say bronze—accompanied by Greville and a packing case, descend from a carriage in front of her door. Since she had been told not to come downstairs until summoned, all she knew about him for the time being was that the two men went into the library and closed the door.

She was late for Mr. Romney, and had no desire to linger; if that was Sir William, she already had heard enough about him to be terrified. He was, said Greville, a very grand personage: a Knight of the Bath, a Minister Plenipotentiary, a man of impeccable taste, a member of the Royal Society, an Intimate of Royalty, an expert alike upon Correggio and Vesuvius. He played the flute and ate young women raw, and what on earth was she to say to him, and should she curtsy?

*

“Oh, George, George, I do get so tired of nothing but ladies and gentlemen!” she said. If it was not a
cri
de
coeur
, it was most certainly a
cri
de
cour.
If one does not know French properly, one can form these puns.

“The expression is perfect; don’t budge,” said Romney, and sketched rapidly. He had discovered that the knowledge that she could hold a pose made it easier for him to work fast.

“And what am I to be this time, George?”

Romney looked at his canvas. “Cassandra,” he decided, “for no one would listen to her then, and I have not the time to listen to you now.”

It was a circular portrait, to fit Hayley’s wainscoting, and one of the best things he had ever done. And what was more, here he was right now, in front of the easel, doing it spontaneously, without the need to plan it in advance. It was a Cassandra, however, eager, dubious, young; without one prophecy as yet fulfilled; hurt by childhood perhaps, but not as yet, thank goodness, by life.

“Emma, may the Gods keep you as you are,” he said, brushing busily.

She seemed puzzled. She did not understand. It was just that added nuance needed to show Cassandra when young, for the young are always puzzled. He set it down.

Jumping from the dais, she came to watch.

“Why, George, that’s how I used to look. Now how did you ever guess that?”

He felt a pang, for it was true. She was growing up. She would never again look the way she used to look. He must hurry to catch it.

“And how do you think you look now?” he asked. “Look around and show me.” He waved a marl stick at the studio.

In thirty different attitudes, not counting sketches, which were littered everywhere, there she was, as a Bacchante, as Miranda, as Nature, as St. Cecilia, as Euphrosyne, as Cassandra again, as Sensibility, as Alope, as Circe, as Allegro, as every dream he’d ever had, and all the same imaginary woman, with a chaste body, and everything an attitude.

“As Ariadne, I think,” she said. “It does look so respectable,
as though I’d never come from anywhere, as though I just was.”

He was disappointed. It was merely a pretty portrait. “My dear, you transcend the respectable. You are the thing itself.” he said. “And like the real, you can imitate anything.”

She giggled. “Did you know I was the goddess Hygeia once?”

He blinked. Warren Hastings had sent home from India some extracts from the ‘Bhagavad-Gita,’ with notes, and reincarnation had struck him as a wistful notion.

“Well, I was,” said Emma, and looked stubborn. “At Dr. Graham’s Temple of Health in Adelphi Terrace. It was ever so funny. I posed before old gentlemen up to their necks in hot mud—like this.” She struck an attitude. “I wore a real Greek costume, too.”

“You did what?”

“After I got tired of being pinched by Dr. Budd and selling apples, which wasn’t much better, and falling in love with Captain Knight …” She had forgotten about that. Love was not the same as gratitude or affection or security. Indeed it had been quite terrible, as she remembered. Then she forgot it again and laughed. At Mr. Romney’s she was allowed to laugh. Greville did not like it. So she did an imitation of one of Greville’s taut little smiles instead. The effect was startling. For a moment Greville flitted across her face, and then he was gone, as though he had never been, and the face was as placid as before.

“It was either sink or swim,” said Emma, “and they paid me a shilling a day. I left because he wanted me to demonstrate the Celestial Bed upstairs as well, and that was going too far. But he said he was sorry I did not find the work to my taste, which was nice of him.”

Romney found her better than a magic-lantern show, a hundred expressions, all different, all luminous. But he knew better than to ask what they meant. Besides, probably she did not know.

“Do you think,” he asked, “that you could manage a Grief?”

She was not sure. She ransacked mythology. “Who was Grief?” she asked.

Romney did not know mythology well, but had been commissioned by Alderman Boydell to do a fancy piece for the Shakespeare Gallery, and if that was successful, perhaps more than one. “Cordelia,” he said.

“Oh yes, of course,” said Emma, and without hesitation—now that she knew who had felt it—did Grief perfectly.

*

But when Romney was alone and Emma was gone and the fashionable or at any rate rich sitters had gone, and his work was done for the day, or after he had come home by himself after dinner at a tavern with friends, he lit a lamp in the echoing silence of the studio and went from picture to picture; and sometimes, instead of going to his narrow bed, would doze in a chair in the studio. When he woke, at foggy dawn, in the flannel light, there she was still, his niece, his inspiration, his company, his better self. For George Romney was an ugly, disappointed man. He could only draw beauty. And here, at last, after years of the most impeccable drudgery, was beauty to draw. Even those shapeless, desperate, blobby nightmares in sepia were now made bearable by taking on Emma’s gestures and Emma’s face.

He wept for joy. He had at last become a painter. She had transubstantiated him. Even his paid portraits now came to resemble Emma, in gesture, in expression, so that hers not theirs became the fashionable look and was bearable, since now she was the fashion. So when Alderman Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery opened and the “Cordelia” was shown, she performed that highest creative act of which woman is capable, and the only one she ever has any use for: she launched a new fad. You saw the Emma look everywhere.