Will & Tom (11 page)

Will has been asked this before, numerous times, and lectured on the need for modern subjects taken from the world, for a whole new approach. He’s seen Tom out on Dr Monro’s balcony at Adelphi Terrace, sketching the dome of St Paul’s, the lighters on the Thames, the long jumble of buildings on the south bank – a great span of London spread out across five or six pages. He slides the porte-crayone in his tail-pocket.

‘Any commissions, then, for your views of Blackfriars? What terms have you got?’

Another calculated remark. Much as he affects to scorn money and those men who make no secret of their desire to earn it, Tom’s financial requirements are as pressing as anyone’s. As he begins his answer – speaking of the possibility of
a different model
, as he phrases it, a way of funding their art that has been freed from the narrow tastes of the rich – Will darts forward and grabs for his sketchbook. Caught unawares, Tom tightens his grip on the spine; so Will lands a punch against his chest, just above the heart. The effect of this blow exceeds his expectations by some measure. Tom is brought down; at once he is coughing, convulsing, burying his face in his sleeve. The sound is harsh, raw barks forced from deep within his body – worse than any Will has heard from him. He stands by uneasily, waiting for his victim to recover. The sketchbook feels heavy, the leather cover slipping in his sweaty hands.

After a minute Tom rises onto an elbow; he spits and wipes his eyes, then pats the grass to his left and right, searching for something. There is laughter between his short, snatched breaths. What exactly has prompted this Will cannot tell, but relief nevertheless brings a hesitant half-smile to his lips. He sits and examines his calf again, poking his scraping nail through the tiny hole that has been scorched in the stocking.

‘Best cotton,’ he says. ‘That’s fourpence you owe me, Tom Girtin.’

Tom’s mirth increases. He rolls onto his back. ‘I’ve no damn fourpence, Will,’ he replies, gravel-voiced, ‘but I’ll make you a gift of my artistic opinion. If you honestly want a second view of this heap here, your best bet lies down the ridge.’ He throws out an arm, pointing vaguely. ‘By that river yonder, I’d say, facing back up.’

Will sees it straight away. This will give him what he needs. The schedule is revised: he’ll remain until sunset and catch the evening mail coach, as he’d planned to do the day before.

But Tom is with him now. The empty pipe – the item for which he’d been hunting, mislaid when he fell – is located and stuck back in his mouth. That Will had ignored his offer of help, that he’d made secret plans and had plainly been intending to quit Harewood without a farewell, doesn’t even appear to have registered in his mind. He insists on carrying the bundle and the umbrella, in fact, as if to demonstrate his vigour after the coughing fit. They head downhill, moving through a row of trees and along the edge of an undulating hayfield, crossing the river at a plain stone bridge.

Will turns to make his survey. Everything is right. The sun to the west, declining slightly, illuminating the trees and scattered clouds; the dark river passing in the foreground, below a bank of crumbling clay; the yellow hayfield, labourers scything channels in the dry grass; and the castle, planted to the rear, a weathered rock rising against the sky. He looks for somewhere to sit.

Tom stops to drink from the river, then returns to Will’s side. He drops the bundle and umbrella, lowers himself to the ground and reopens their debate. The next stage is always the same – Tom casting stones at Will’s conventionality. Will listens in silence; penance, he tells himself, for that intemperate punch.

‘You don’t care for any of my talk, do you, Will? Art for you is a straight road that simply has to be followed. More ruins and cathedrals and mountains. More maritime pieces. Perhaps, one day soon, a famous battle, then something from Milton, or Shakespeare, or one of your Greeks. Eight-foot oils in golden frames, hung on the line at Somerset House.’ Tom’s manner is lightly mocking, sincerely concerned, faintly frustrated; a typical mix for him. ‘I’ll wager that you’ll have bargained yourself a place among the Academicians before this century is ended, and will set about wagging your finger at younger men.’

Will remains impassive. He sketches in a fringe of river reeds, thirty close strokes of the porte-crayone, made with the unerring swiftness of a chef slicing an onion. There’s truth to Tom’s conjectures. He does indeed aim to join the Royal Academy at the earliest opportunity – to have those letters, so reassuring to patrons, appended to his name – and to paint in oil on the grand scale. He can see no advantage at all in remaining outside the room, kicking and swearing at the door.

Tom, meanwhile, is running on, moving from castigation of Will to the usual fantasies about an art without academies or aristocrats, popular and universal in character, available to the people of England as a whole. Will’s sense of contrition, weak enough to start with, abruptly expires.

‘Have you paper today, Tom?’

Tom stares back at him. ‘I have,’ he replies, slightly indignant, reaching into his tail-pocket. He takes out a painting kit – a roll of worn leather wrapped around a ceramic pallet the size of a saucer, and a small water flask – and nothing else. He checks the pocket again.

Will has already unclasped the larger sketchbook. He retrieves a single sheet of Whatman paper, the very best, bought in York for his studies of the house. The price for quiet, he thinks, handing it over.

Tom accepts the paper with a sigh. He clearly wants to expound further, to argue down the sun, but even in his present mood he can tell that his mule-like companion means to work and nothing else. For a while he gazes at the river, filling his pipe, smiling at a private recollection; then he unrolls his painting kit and selects a short-handled watercolour pencil with a well-chewed end.

‘So be it,’ he says.

*

The two artists separate soon after. Determined to capture everything, Will moves back from the river, then off to the east, setting down three good studies in as many hours. The last one is perhaps the finest of the day: a perfect triangle with the river as its base, the sunlit castle at its apex and the hayfield enclosed in its centre. After it is complete, Will feels his body flag. The afternoon is growing cool and overcast, the metallic taste of moisture seeping into the air; unexpectedly, he begins to hope that Tom might come over to propose a well-earned supper in the village tavern before his departure. He looks along the riverbank.

Tom Girtin is nowhere to be seen. Will is both disappointed and peevishly unsurprised. The fellow has most probably returned to the house to seek some inane diversion with Beau Lascelles. Shrugging off his hunger and his fatigue, Will resolves to keep working. He glances skywards. The clouds are turning rapidly from white wool to wet slate; away to the south, several of the largest have sunk so close to the earth that they seem ready to land upon it. One more exterior view, he decides, looking uphill from the north east, and then a foray inside. Interior scenes of ancient ruins – shattered columns, cloisters littered with rubble, fragments of carvings or statuary – have an established appeal, particularly to patrons of an antiquarian bent. He reproaches himself for not thinking of this sooner.

Five minutes later Will is back across the river, perched on a stile, commencing his sixth impression of the castle. He feels righteous and dutiful, yet also a touch disconsolate. He could draw this ruin from memory by now. Tom’s words return.
A mound of old stones. A commonplace landscape
.
Ain
’
t you tired of it?

The sketch is well advanced when a violent wind drives through the valley, sending the trees flailing this way and that, and whipping up a spiral of golden strands from the surface of the hayfield. Will holds down the page with his left hand, finishing off the gnarled trunk of an oak as the first raindrops tap on the brim of his sun hat. The umbrella is opened and propped against his shoulder; a number of Will’s best studies have been done beneath its black canopy. Within a minute, however, it has been knocked over and blown almost inside out. Will closes and clasps up the sketchbook, presses the hat onto his head and wrestles the umbrella towards the wind. Past the trees, a final sunbeam strikes through the approaching downpour, forming a trailing silver curtain that shimmers and billows across the hayfield. There are cries from the labourers as they scramble for cover, pulling shawls and jackets over their heads. The umbrella snaps into shape like a dislocated joint finding its socket. Awkwardly, Will scoops up the other sketchbook and fastens both beneath his coat. He swivels on the stile, facing the ruin. It’s time for that interior scene.

After the turbulent valley, the inside of Harewood Castle has the gloomy calm of a coastal cave. Beyond the arch of the eastern doorway lies what must once have been a hall. The wind disappears; Will’s hold on the umbrella relaxes. No roof survives, but the remnants of the upper levels are keeping out most of the rain. A stale smell hangs about, as if creatures have died there and rotted into the rough earthen floor. Will positions himself on a ledge in the outer wall and sets to work. He’s careful to keep his study economic, detailing only one especially well-preserved alcove; afternoon is edging into evening, and he is not going to miss that mail coach. Squinting in the sepulchral murk, he starts to think of Milton, mentioned so dismissively by Tom, isolated phrases and half-remembered lines looming large in his mind. Before very long he’s uttering them aloud.

‘Now still evening came on, and twilight grey had in her sober livery all things clad; silence accompanied, for bird and beast; all but—’

The laugh is quiet, yet clearly audible over the rainfall outside. Will halts his recitation, lifting the porte-crayone smartly from the page. Someone, a woman, is listening in. His ears grow hot beneath his hat; he is sorely self-conscious about his poetry, both what he reads and the scraps he has begun to write. There is a second laugh, slightly harder, a smothered giggle. He realises that it comes from the far side of the ruin, a chamber beyond the area he occupies, too far from his ledge for him to have been overheard. This brings little comfort. It must be labourers, come in from the hayfield in search of shelter. The ruin would serve this purpose well. Are they about to pour in by the dozen, jostling and spitting, filling the castle with their incomprehensible conversation – spoiling his sanctuary completely and obliging him to flee?

No others come. The laughter tails off into a moaning sigh. Will rolls the porte-crayone against his palm. It is lovers. The castle is a good place for this also, he supposes: secluded, a distance from the village, with many points of entry or escape. They’re no doubt taking advantage of the storm to slip away from their duties on the estate. He’s considering going back out, braving the rain to walk back up the ridge, when a man speaks, his voice low and light and tinged with hoarseness.

‘Did they warn you against that as well?’

Tom Girtin.

Will is amazed, then immediately annoyed by his amazement. It was
obvious
. The change in him earlier, that bullish swagger: here is the reason. He found himself a girl in the village or the fields while Will was making his first sketches of the castle. They arranged to meet after he’d paid a couple of hours’ perfunctory attention to his art. And now they are laughing together, the sound intimate and conspiratorial as they trade their caresses. Will is angered by Tom’s continued lack of seriousness, grudgingly impressed by the speed at which he has operated and achingly jealous of his success. That such a thing is even possible staggers him. He simply does not understand what a man must do to bring it about. His own sporadic, tentative attempts at courtship have met only with ridicule or chilling indifference. What knowledge he has gained thus far has been the result of transaction rather than skill, and he honestly can’t imagine any other way of accomplishing it.

As soundlessly as he can, Will steps over his umbrella and bundle and sneaks forward. He must see her. He must see what Tom has achieved out here. Past the hall is a narrow corridor holding three dim doorways. Tom and his farm girl are through the furthermost, their murmurs amplified by the empty stone. The sketchbooks are still in Will’s hands, his left index finger marking his place in the smaller one. It occurs to him that he could take a study, should he remain undetected. The notion has a powerful, clandestine appeal that he can’t quite explain; and of course it would also be a fine joke, back in the taverns of Covent Garden. ‘Here’s how
Tom
occupied himself in Yorkshire …’

Will spies a naked knee, creamy white in the surrounding dullness. Bathsheba, he thinks. Danae visited by Jupiter. Diana discovered by Acteon. It is smooth, pleasingly plump, hardly that of a milkmaid or field worker – and suddenly Will knows what awaits him. Unable to stop or retreat, he covers the last few feet to the doorway with rather less care than before.

The lovers are lying in a wide fireplace, upon a bed made of Tom’s brown coat and a ladies’ riding habit. They are undressed, in part at least, various items of clothing removed or unfastened to enable their coupling. Will sees Tom’s buttocks, moving between her thighs; he sees her feet and ankles snake across Tom’s long calves. They shift about, picking up their pace, Tom bracing himself against the edge of the fireplace; and there she is, Lord Harewood’s youngest daughter, staring off at the rain that hisses on the window sill, her pale skin reddening as she bites at the collar of Tom’s shirt.

Will draws back from the doorway, as if dodging the swing of an axe. Mary Ann looks over, her eyes going directly to his. She shows no trace of alarm or shame. The connection lasts perhaps three seconds; then she releases Tom’s collar from her teeth and gathers him closer, hooking her arms around his shoulders, squeezing hard with her legs.

‘They did, Mr Girtin,’ she says, her voice tightening. ‘Exactly that.’

*

The sketchbooks are Will’s first concern. The umbrella is collapsed and tossed on the floor; the sodden bundle kicked beneath a chair; the sun hat prised off his damp, greasy head and set at a far corner of the table. Laying the leather-bound volumes side by side, he goes through every page, making a meticulous search for the creep of rainwater. There is nothing.