Sir William

by David Stacton

  “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.

  Greville was annoyed.

  “I told her to dress simply, and now simplicity has become the fashion, however am I to get her to return to her senses and dress plain?” he demanded, certain, in a woman’s world, of but one thing—that cheap muslin would rise in price and the cost of ribbon soar enormously.

  Nor was he wrong.

  *

  Emma had come home to find Sir William standing before the mantelpiece, and had not been frightened one bit, for he had gone out of his way—which was not far—to please her. He seemed to know exactly what to say to a person, as though to give pleasure gave him pleasure and had nothing to do with the proprieties. She could romp with him when she chose, and called him Pliny the Elder, for fun; the Younger being Greville, though the Younger Pliny was an astute, pushy, contrived young man, far too concerned with the family properties at Stabiae.

  *

  They were in the garden, under the lilac tree, where the late summer sunlight was like pale tea not steeped long enough. Sir William was making invidious comparisons.

  “… whereas in Naples the sun shines every day, and if there is a cloud, it is out of Tiepolo,” he said.

  Emma did not know who Tiepolo was.

  “Like Canaletto, except that he paints well,” explained Sir William. “You must see one. You have the Tiepolo look.” He was wrong. One cannot have the Tiepolo look without a cicisbèo, which requires maturity of outlook, and Emma was not yet eighteen.

  The sky lacking Neapolitan consistency, they went indoors to open the packing cases, from one of which Sir William extracted the Barberini, the Byres, the Hamilton, and he hoped what was to be next, the Portland, vase, a squat, ugly jar of indeterminate color, cluttered with shrubbery and figures of white glass in cameo.

  “Not only is it unique, but it may well have contained the ashes of Alexander the Great,” said Sir William firmly. “We may expect eighteen hundred guineas, at the least.”

  “But where shall we put it?” wailed Emma, who did not altogether feel at her ease in a house where everything was beautiful but nothing ever stayed put for long, except the furniture, though she always put Mrs. Cadogan’s gin bottle in a good safe place, in case the sideboard should be moved in the night.

  “In a good collection, I hope,” said Sir William. “We have saved it for England, and no doubt at a tidy profit, too. But Greville must see to that.” He was in a good mood. He had taken the death of his wife Catherine with equanimity, for not only was he gracious to others, but—a man who lived up to his own principles—he saw no point in causing himself undue pain.

  With Emma he was pleased and agreeably surprised, since he was slightly deaf in the right—or woman’s side at any table—ear. She was a living statue. He was not without his human side, but then, he did not happen to find statuary inhuman. No matter what incongruous instrument she might be at, Emma fell into marmoreal poses naturally, as though Niobe had been pushed before a harpsichord; her breath had the soft cool freshness of marble, and all in all, she was a creature worthy the approbation of Winckelmann or Mengs. He went away delighted.

  *

  “My nephew,” he said next day at the Royal Society, to Sir Joseph Banks, “has got himself a pretty miss.”

  “My God, how?”

  Sir William looked put out. He was fond of his nephew. Charles was one of his hobbies, and one gets fond of any toy. Unfortunately he was also fond of the truth, so long as that deity could be kept at a distance, discreetly draped. Truth he saw always as a garden statue—the best procurable copy, maybe even an original, something at any rate with a pedigree dating back to Lord Arundel’s collection—at the end of an allée, backed by box, to improve the view. It had to be there, but on the other hand, one seldom went down that way. Sir Joseph and he, however, were old cronies.

  “I do not know,” he said. “She is naïve. She has yet to learn ingratitude.”

  “Some of us don’t, you know,” said Sir Joseph.

  “Perhaps not. But they throw scenes.” He was thinking of his wife, a conformable heiress whose career of discreet invalidism had so recently been rounded off by the appropriate distinction of death. She had played the harpsichord well (he had played the flute), and sometimes he looked around to say something to her, in the late afternoon, and found she was not there. She had not thrown scenes, but she had made her presence palpable. Greville’s toy had made him lonely.


  “She is called the Fair Teamaker of Edgware Row,” he explained, aware that that mincing, sneering tone proper to the ton did not always convey one’s true feelings.

  “You must take me to meet her. At times one tires of botany,” said Sir Joseph.

  “If I go, I shall.”

  “You will go,” said Sir Joseph, grunted, and swiveling around to a large folio volume on a lectern, began to display something that interested him: a series of engravings of landfalls, all similar, all different, meticulously drawn by the cartographer. He would never travel himself. He was too happy at his club. He was too happy with the Royal Society. But he would very much have liked to see a landfall one day from the sea; and when he looked at dried botanic specimens, he did so as a modern man would wistfully examine travel brochures. These are the places I shall never go. They are the more beautiful for that.

  As for Sir William, no matter how he might ape the pococurante, he was only waiting to be interested in something, for there was something wild, hurt and congenial about him. Though distant, he was a good man to drink with, and no fool.

  “The Little Teamaker of Edgware Row,” said Sir Joseph. “It sounds like one of Michael Kelley’s songs.”

  “It is like that, and when the performance flags, they actually wave real flags, to perk you up, like street buskers.”

  “Who, Charles and his doxy?”

  “She is not a doxy,” said Sir William, determining to take a carriage to Edgware Row. His curiosity was piqued, as it would have been by any odd animal in a raree show. One goes because it is a novelty, but puts up with it for ten years because it is a pet. He looked out the window at nothing in particular and fidgeted to get back to Naples. I am an Englishman. I find England congenial. Nothing else is quite so congenial. And yet I miss the sun. I miss the bay. I miss the inconsequence of their quarrels. I miss the fruit.

  “And what is that one?” he asked, pointing to one of Sir Joseph’s series of almost indistinguishable coasts.

  “They have yet to be lettered, but I believe it is Mooréa. An island in the South Seas. She is an English beauty, all peaches and cream, and speaks her native Doric still, so they say.”

  “Oh her native Doric,” said Sir William. “It is strange, we get these phrases from Greece and Rome, and yet I have never been to either. As a matter of fact, it is a light and coarse voice, but singularly pleasing.”

  “Charles would destroy the world, out of the foible that he is competent to save it,” said Sir Joseph. “But fortunately he does not know how to begin. I have imported some breadfruit trees.”

  “Breadfruit trees?” Sir William had been thinking.

  “Oh, they do not bear loaves, like something out of Sir John Mandeville, but their fruit is edible, and the leaf beautiful. No matter what we do to harm them, there are still a few harmless creatures in this world. Why not go to see her?”

  “She belongs to Charles.”

  “Nothing belongs to Charles but a few pieces of pinchbeck, and nothing ever will,” said Sir Joseph. “He is himself pinchbeck, and besides, if she pours tea and you drink it and it is good tea, what’s the harm in it?”

  “You must come to Italy; the strawberries are delicious. Small, and feral and bitter. The trouble is, I like her. It is much more dangerous than a passion, for a passion soon ends.”

  “In that case, I shall travel with my own sugar,” said Sir Joseph, “in a castor.” And he shut up his portfolio of landfalls. “I doubt if she gets much female company, poor dear, so perhaps the male will do. Take me along.”

  Sir William took him along.

  *

  It occurred to Greville that he had seldom seen so many pawky gentlemen in such congenial circumstances. The Teamaker of Edgware Row was invaluable. But though he had told her to flirt with his uncle, he had not told her to flirt with him that much. The girl was forward. She presumed. One tires of every toy in time. A rest from each other would do them both good, but it must be an inexpensive rest. And what is cheaper than home? She should go to Park Gate, where her grandmother kept the child. Sir William and he were off to inspect the family property in Wales.

  *

  Emma burst in upon Romney, her eyes sparkling with fright. He always marveled at her eyes. Only when sleepless did they have that poached-cod look inevitable to the lower classes from which she had sprung.

  “I am to be cast out. Abandoned!” she cried. “I need your help.”

  “What you mean is, you need to talk,” he said. Her emotions were too fluid. For this he would need water color. Where the hell was a pliable brush?

  It was what always happened. As soon as you settled comfortably in, once the nasty part was over, to be the hoyden younger sister, the favorite niece, even at last the wife, once you had relaxed, they flung you out. But that was not something she wanted to say to George.

  “I am to be sent to Chester while they go to Wales.”

  “In that case you can visit your daughter.”

  She had forgotten she had told him about that. She wished she had not.

  “And your grandmother, too. You are fond of your grandmother.”

  “Oh that was a world away, and I shall never be allowed to come back,” cried Emma, and sobbed away with a will.

  “Of course you shall,” said George, but wondered, with panic, if she might not be right. He had hundreds of sketches of her. He could work from those. But that was by no means the same thing as being able to work with Emma there.

  He proposed a game of blindman’s buff, for he was a selfless man, so what with sticking his left foot through the hands of Mrs. Hope Devis (due Thursday) and one thing and another, he soon made her forget her woes, which was just as well, for she would be left alone with them soon enough.

  As so would he. Mrs. Hope Devis was too much the parvenu to put up with patching, and so the whole thing would have to be fresh done tonight.

  Emma took a look around the studio, as though for the last time, which is what she always did in any house, surprised, if she came back, not to find that it was still there but that she was, and went to Chester.

  *

  “The chief peculiarity of Wales,” said Greville, stumbling on a piece, “is the prevalence of igneous rock.”

  “When you have conquered Vesuvius with a hired guide, Cadr Idris is an inferior peak, though Wilson, except for his portraits, is a wrongly neglected painter,” said Sir William. “There is his view of Tivoli. There is his view of this. Though it is a pity,” he added, peering round at the fog, “that this so seldom has a view.”

  “If you put money into the property instead of taking money out, we could make Milford Haven a port and double the revenue.”

  “No doubt,” said Sir William. “But for whom, lad, for whom?”

  Greville blushed.

  “By the way, my niece Mary has sold the vase,” said Sir William mildly. “You are a good boy, Charles, but you dawdle overmuch.”

  “Mary gossips.”

  “And what does she say?”

  “That you have been seen too much with Emma and have taken her to Reynolds to have her portrait done.”

  “Well, so I have. So where’s the gossip now?”

  “She is as perfect a thing as can be found in all nature, I will not have her traduced.”

  “She is better than anything in nature; in her particular way she is finer than anything to be found in antique art. So why should I not have her portrait by Reynolds if I wish? In his own way, he, too, transcends art. Indeed, he has very little to do with it. In those circumstances I consider the painter and the subject felicitously matched.”

  “Then you do like her?”

  “I like her appearance,” Sir William said cautiously. “Just what was it vou and Mary had in mind?”

  “Her voice is shrill.”

  “Her voice, fiddlesticks. There’s nothing wrong with her voice. She’s a country girl, that’s all. The world is not Middlesex, Charles, even though the world, for some inscrutable reason, c
hooses to live there. It is all very well for Towneley to speak of prunes and prisms, but a large, generous mouth is worth it all.”

  “Then you do like her.”

  “I was speaking of your cousin Mary,” said Sir William, with dignity, “who has not only accomplished the matter of the vase with her customary combination of finesse and dispatch, but has deposited eighteen hundred guineas in Coutts’ bank, sans peur, sans reproche and sans fee. I think we will now descend.”

  So down into the mizzling clouds beneath their feet they went. In Wales, as usual, it was cold.

  In Cheshire it was no warmer. Emma was in seaside lodgings, left to contemplate that ocean which Fanny Burney informs us is cold but pleasant, but which as far as she could see, was merely wet and damnably dull. Fanny Burney, however, had had a bathing attendant to divert her, whereas here the only human creature was an old winklewoman with a large basket and a very small catch, all grumble, beard and scratch.

  “Mama?” asked Emma Carew—for so the child had been named—aged two, but nagging happily, for children are as impervious to the weather as to most things. Emma seized it with a mixture of maternity and revulsion, for the child was damp.

  “Poor motherless lamb,” she said evasively, and cursed them all. It would be necessary to seat the child upon a horse to be certain of its paternity: Sir Harry had a most individual seat, whereas Greville resembled nothing so much, up there, as a pedestrian grown weary.

  She bent down, all Ariadne, to inspect the child. Two years ago she had wept inconsolably to give it up, and here it was, a stranger. Tentatively, she leaned over and made noises at it.

  Overhung by such generous glamor, the child smiled. Contact had been established. The terms of the treaty had been signed, including the secret clause. Whatever else happened, they would know each other now, which was harmless, delightful and no more innocent than snakes and ladders, skip the stone, Troytown, or any other game.