My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He found her staring at the easel which had been pitched on the ground and beside her were two of the city boys staring down at it in a blasé way, their hands hovering around their pockets. There was also a large American-looking man with a red slabby face above a hideous tie which seemed to have a combination of purple and violet in it. The two boys were grinning and saying that it had been a mistake, that they had just stumbled as they were going past. Most of the other people had turned away and were busily eating sandwiches which they had taken from picnic baskets, or were simply gazing into the water.

  “Look at what these stupid gits have done,” said Lorna to him when she saw him. He looked down at the picture which was wet and black with stained bootmarks. It showed beneath the dirt two large bluish mountains staring downwards into the sea as if they were studying themselves. The two boys grinned, looked at each other and then at Mark. He was still carrying the Le Carre in his hand. The American was also looking at Mark, his stomach thrust forward, as if expecting that something would happen. He was smoking a large cigar. Mark bent down to look at the painting and pick it up and as he did so he could see the legs of the two boys in their tight trousers, almost like those of cowboys.

  Finally he stood up and said, “I wish you would be more careful. That’s my wife’s painting you’ve damaged.”

  One of the two boys who was chewing gum smiled at him and said nothing. Their shadows fell across the painting. He picked it up and handed it to Lorna who said to the two boys:

  “Bugger off and watch your big feet.”

  While she was setting up the easel again she said to Mark, “Well, you weren’t much help,” and then began to paint again as if nothing had happened. The two youths were aimlessly kicking at the frail wooden pier, looking over at them now and again and laughing loudly. The American with the cigar and the garish tie gazed at Mark in a puzzled way, hoisted his camera over his arm and walked slowly away.

  “Did you see the way they look at you?” said Lorna. “Their eyes are like bits of glass.”

  “Yes, aren’t they?”

  “They did it just for kicks,” said Lorna indignantly. “It wasn’t an accident. That’s why I didn’t like London. Types like that.”

  She began to paint again and he opened his Le Carre but he couldn’t concentrate. The youths were still looking towards them, talking loudly.

  “Come on,” he said to Lorna, “let’s go down here a bit. There’s a beautiful little church.”

  “All right,” she said. “This is spoiled anyway.” She got up (he carrying the easel for her) and they wandered together down to the church.

  Its door was open and in the vestibule, on top of some red velvet, were some booklets, one of which he picked up, leaving a shilling as payment. There was no-one in the church but themselves. It felt cool after the heat outside. It was a very small church with the pulpit on the right hand side as they went in, facing about twenty pews cushioned with a faded red cloth. The pulpit itself was covered in a blue cloth and behind it on the wall there was a large red cross. A miniature church, it might have seated a congregation of forty or so.

  They walked slowly up to the top of the church, and there they saw an effigy of a saint in bronze, lying full length on a leaden pedestal. He had calm hollow eyes and a narrow beard. His arms clutching a crozier were crossed at the breast. Above the effigy and set in the wall was an autobiography of him. Mark leaned over Lorna’s shoulder to read it. It told him that the saint’s name was Albertus and that he had lived in that area in the sixteenth century. Apparently he had lived by himself in the woods above the small village (which of course had not existed in its present form then) and had constituted himself the guardian of the white deer which were sometimes seen to wander among the woods, though they weren’t plentiful. It was understood that they should not be hunted, for they were very rare and timid and beautiful. No-one knew where they had come from or when they had come to the area. They were considered by the local people to be symbols of good luck, and to see one was an auspicious omen. However, there had come to the estate an owner who knew little of the saint and who one day gathered a hunting party together to go out and hunt the white deer, being convinced that their flesh would be more delicate than that of the ordinary deer. He and his men were met by the saint who had argued and pleaded with them not to harm the deer. The owner of the estates, a Sir Hugh Colgon, had insisted that if the saint didn’t move aside then he would put him off the lands forever. The saint had thereupon challenged him to a duel, on the result of which would depend whether the white deer would remain unmolested. So on a fine summer’s day in the wood, the saint and the owner had fought a duel with swords on the green sward surrounded by the squire’s (or laird’s) attendants. All of them thought that the result was not in doubt, and indeed in the opening stages of the duel it seemed that the laird would win, for he was forcing the saint backwards with his huge sword which he wielded two-handed. However, just as he was about to thrust his sword home, lightning had flashed from the sky, had hovered for a moment round the laird’s helmet and then flickered downwards, scorching his face in an instant so that like a tower he had fallen on the ground. His attendants of course scattered immediately and there stood the saint, sword in hand, above the dead man while from the woods around him the white deer gathered, no longer to be disturbed. The last they saw of him he was kneeling on the earth making the sign of the cross over the dead laird.

  “What a beautiful story,” said Lorna, gazing down into the hollow eyes which seemed to be full of light. “Do you think it really happened?”

  “Unlikely,” said Mark in a strange voice.

  When they came out into the churchyard again they found there a small neatly-dressed man who was leaning on a stick.

  “Ah,” he said, tipping his hat to Lorna, “and did you enjoy the church?”

  “Very much,” said Lorna.

  “Let me introduce myself. I’m the father of the minister in charge of the church.” He spoke in a curiously measured way. Mark had the impression that he must be about eighty years old, preserved by the good air in that protected arbour.

  “I used,” he added, “to be a headmaster in Garston till I retired some years ago.”

  Christ, another of them, thought Mark, you can’t go anywhere without running across them. Even in the Garden of Eden Satan would turn out to be an academic.

  “You look to me like one who would appreciate the church,” the old man was saying to Lorna. “What did you think of our legend?”

  “I thought it was beautiful. Is it true?”

  “True? I don’t know. But there are white deer around here,” he said. “I’ve seen one once or twice.”

  “And do they bring good luck?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said the old man, laughing a little. “But they certainly do exist. Actually they say that the saint was himself an ex-laird who had become religious and retired into the woods to defend the deer. That was why he even had a faint chance against the new laird who attacked him. Some people say that it was to do with an inheritance.”

  “Yes, they would say that, wouldn’t they?” said Mark.

  The old man looked at him without speaking, though for a moment it looked as if he might be about to say something.

  “I don’t know about their flesh though,” he said, “whether their flesh is sweeter than that of ordinary deer. I did try to follow one once when I was younger but he escaped. I don’t even know where they live.”

  “Wouldn’t it be marvellous to see one,” said Lorna excitedly to Mark.

  “Of course.”

  Eventually they got away and Mark said, “I can’t stand these bloody people. All these bloody dates.”

  “Well, he was only trying to be helpful and he is a charming man. His manners are beautiful.”

  “They can afford to be, living here. I wonder he isn’t bored to death. Why does there always have to be someone like him around, trying to explain everything and knowing bug
ger all about it?”

  For a moment in the church he had felt the presence of an ancient holiness, a musty smell of all the centuries that had passed since it had been built. He could imagine countless knees kneeling on the stone floor, and pale hands with hymn books. “Why do they have to corrupt everything with their dates?” he said again, “All these little bloody men among the roses.”

  So that they were disturbed again by the time they got into the car. In any case a fine rain was falling. Between the leaves, just as they were leaving the church, Mark saw the two youths grinning at them, their triangular heads with the small ears white between the green. When he looked again they had vanished.

  “I’m sorry,” he told Lorna, “he is a charming man and he probably planted all those roses himself.” But Lorna didn’t say anything. She appeared to be thinking of something. Suddenly he was invaded again by the shadow which had crossed him when he was asleep near the church and he put his arm around her. She looked at him briefly but didn’t smile. Her yellow jersey was a little damp from the rain.

  7

  Lorna started work on a picture of the hermit. She worked at it during the afternoons when Mark was writing his thesis in another room. She did a lot of sketches of it beforehand and indeed she sometimes thought that the sketches were better than the final painting. Mark didn’t know a great deal about painting though he had seen in some supplement or other drawings by some modern American painter by which he had been rather impressed.

  Actually her painting of the hermit turned out to be rather like a Sutherland, a thistly being against a background of white rather like whitewash. The face was thin and whiskered, ravaged by time as if by the machinations of rats, and the whiskery lines in the face were continued or echoed in a jersey of vague stripes. After she had seen the saint’s effigy in the church, part of him went into the painting also.

  As she progressed with the painting she changed the background of white to one of blue so that the hermit did actually look like a thistle set against the sky. She had great difficulty with the eyes: she couldn’t decide whether to make them indifferent or defiant. The hermit himself was a defiant person: he didn’t really want anyone to help him and he was always complaining that she and Mrs. Carmichael were shifting his minor possessions about, including in particular a red cup with a picture of Queen Victoria on it which he had hoarded from some inconceivable past about which he would never speak a word. His room was closely crowded with all sorts of broken paraphernalia but one thing she particularly noticed was that there were no photographs. The painting of the hermit was the most difficult thing she had tried. When working at it she would completely forget about meals and smoke cigarette after cigarette. It became an obsession with her and she would become very angry with Mark if he interrupted her. She discovered much about painting from her confrontation with the hermit, possibly because he was at the opposite pole to herself, for though she had led a gipsying existence and had been at times alone her nature was to be with others.

  Eventually she came to an instinctive conclusion about the eyes: they should exist as if they had forgotten about the body. The trouble was that she had no models for what she was trying to do. Tramps wouldn’t do. After all, tramps moved about in society: hermits didn’t. At one time she thought that perhaps she might learn something from stills of Charlie Chaplin, and for this reason would watch the extracts from silent films on the telly, but she found that these stills wouldn’t do. Chaplin was gay and irreverent. She did want the hermit to be like that too, that is, she wanted to be able to make him transcend his condition, but found it difficult to do so. Her visits to him contradicted the painting she was making of him. Her visits revealed him as dirty, bad-tempered and selfish. On the other hand she was trying to make the painting rather noble.

  She had him seated in the painting on an old chair with his hands clasped in front of him so tightly that they seemed to be clasping himself. At one time she would have him looking at himself in the mirror but decided that the pose would be too literary and artificial. If the hermit had been accustomed to shaving she might have got round the difficulty that way but of course he was too whiskery for that.

  Even the chair presented difficulties. Would it for instance be a chair which recalled its origins in a tree? If that were accepted then the hermit would come to be accepted as part of the natural order of things, organic, necessary. On the other hand, the chair, if there was one, ought not to appear new or modern. She decided after all that she would have to eliminate the chair and make him sit on a box. She set the box upright so that he appeared precariously balanced. This gave him at one and the same time a certain appearance of hauteur combined with insecurity and a certain comicality. She made Mark sit for her in order to get the pose reasonably accurate. She didn’t want any solidarity in the hermit’s life. She wanted people to know immediately that he was a hermit.

  As a matter of fact she had been intensely fascinated by his mode of life. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could go on year after year living by himself, receiving no letters, revealing and receiving no warmth. He didn’t read, he had no radio or TV. She found it almost impossible to understand how he could withstand the waves of time. She herself, she was convinced, would have gone mad, for she needed people. He must have hated the world a lot, she thought.

  She spent hours trying to get his expression right. The eyes must forget the body was there at all. It was a question more of mental neglect than of physical. It was therefore not simply a question of clothes nor even of the whiskers. It was a question of making him forgetful of the world. She changed the colours a lot. She painted him in a sort of blue which seemed to fade into the blue of the sky so that he gradually seemed to recede into the world behind him. She felt, however, that by doing this she was evading the issue. She ought to try and get the expression itself right.

  Eventually she got it from Mark himself. He had been reading a book and was lying back in his chair, his eyes half shut as if he had grown tired of what he was doing. His eyes took on a curiously unfocused look and staring at her he seemed not to see that she was there. She had—she could have sworn—become a part of the furniture as far as he was concerned. She got the look down on canvas immediately.

  After that she had rather a lot of difficulty with the boots. On the one hand they must not appear to be too worn: they must not give the impression of having been wrinkled by travel in a real world. On the other hand they must not appear too new. They must appear as if cracked by time itself, and this disintegration must be mirrored in the face. The painting dissolved itself into a confrontation with time, for that was what being a hermit must be about. The hermit had chosen to confront time, to fight it out on its own terms, to see it eventually as a sea which he was breasting as a swimmer breasts the waves, yet at the same time becoming more unreal as he did so. She could remember noticing that unreal expression in his face as if he had lived in a different place from herself, a place without domesticities or gardens or problems. She must be able to get time into her painting, its destruction, its malignance, its vagueness. She was almost driven into a pointillist technique but decided against it.

  She worked at the painting with single minded devotion. The paint itself seemed to crack under her hands so that the hermit seemed continually under the threat of disintegration by that which had actually composed him, that is the paint itself, or, transferred to another plane, time. He was being held in precarious existence by the paint which simultaneously threatened also to dissolve and leave nothing at all. She didn’t realise how much of Mark’s expression had gone into the painting.

  She felt herself wrestling with a real problem, as real to her as her attempt to come to terms with domesticity when she had married. She had of course wanted nothing better than to be a wife but she had been frightened of what it meant, for she had not been trained for the job and again she genuinely felt that in comparison with other girls she was neither pretty nor desirable. So she grew spiritually, as she
worked at the painting of the hermit. She couldn’t understand what it was like to be a hermit, that life without affection, but felt at the same time that she must try to understand it, however different it was from her own.

  8

  The warm weather was merely a memory (it was December) when Lorna said to him one night, “I don’t want you to go.” The two of them were sitting by the double barred fire in the kitchen.

  “It was me who asked,” said Mark, “and I want to go.”

  “That’s what you were talking about the night we were at the Wilkinsons’, wasn’t it? And you made an exhibition of yourself.”

  “I didn’t make an exhibition of myself. I was merely pointing out the truth, that we live in a sheltered place, which is true. I want to find out what it means to see the unsheltered place.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, unsmilingly, and then said: “Is it impossible for you to settle down? The night we were at the Wilkinsons you went on and on about that man who was dying and who wanted to know whether the book he had written was any good or not. You offended them. Can’t you see that?”

  “No, I can’t see that. It was a good question.”

  “And then you went on to talk about silent films or something stupid like that. What were you trying to show?”