The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  He decided to leave it to the last and worked steadily at the remaining uncompleted passages of the painting. At last only two days remained before he was due to send the picture in.

  Elizabeth sent her apologies to an important committee meeting and came to sit for him. Again he transferred the liquid colours from palette to canvas, the carefully mixed greys, the faint blues, the whites and the near-whites. And again, stepping back to view the whole, he knew that he had failed. Now at last the happiness that had bubbled in him like a pot on an inextinguishable fire dwindled to nothing. Despair swept over him.

  He stood looking at the picture, with Elizabeth on the far side of the easel gazing tranquilly in his direction waiting to catch a glimpse of him as he looked across at her, and he let the blackness roll on and on in deeper and deeper waves. He would not finish the picture. The day after tomorrow would come and there would be a canvas with where the eyes, the very centre of the work, should be only criss-crosses and smudges of meaningless paint. He would not exhibit in the Academy in the year after his great success with the Torquato Tasso. His career, that might so easily have gone steadily on and upwards, would plunge into nothingness. He might never even once again pull off the trick that a painting was, never again perform the curious miracle of converting little dabs and strokes of pigment into something that spoke and spoke clearly to the hearts and the heads of other men.

  Briefly, and for the first time since Elizabeth had given him her clear and wonderful answer, he thought of Lisa. It was comfort he wanted. That forgetfulness of everything which she had brought him. He hardly thought of those nights they had spent together and what it was he had felt then. He simply sought comfort, like a baby turning to the blotting-out whiteness of a mother’s breast.

  But the longing lasted only a few seconds.

  No, he thought then, I shall not go that way. There are other forms of comfort, more rational, saner, cleaner.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, stepping round the intervening easel, ‘I am afraid that I have not succeeded once again.’

  She broke her pose at once and came round to look.

  ‘No,’ she said, with that invincible directness of hers, ‘I see that you have not.’

  ‘What shall I do?’

  It was a cry of plaintiveness.

  ‘Do? Why, try again later. No doubt you are tired. These last weeks have been altogether too busy. What you need is some good fresh air.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, perhaps it is only that. I shall manage it. I must. And, Elizabeth, believe me, I have done it before.’

  ‘You forget I have seen your Torquato Tasso. The eyes there said so much.’

  He laughed a little then.

  ‘Even that paint-brushes are preferable to scrubbing-brushes?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, come, that is past. But the rest you need and the fresh air, could you take me tomorrow to Greenwich on the steamer? Uncle Charles was telling me that that is something else in England that I ought to do.’

  ‘Yes, you ought. It’s a delightful experience. I went down last year after the Private View. There’s always a party that goes there then. But, I’m sorry, tomorrow’s not possible.’

  ‘Not possible? But why?’

  ‘Pohlmann, the art dealer, is coming. He asked to see what I was doing some weeks ago, and I gave him that time.’

  He gave a rueful bark of a laugh.

  ‘I had thought that the picture would be in all its final glory then. Now, I don’t know. Perhaps I ought to put him off.’

  ‘No,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Let him come. Let him come and he’ll find the work completed. We’ll go to Greenwich now.’

  ‘Now? You mean at once?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? It’s not too late, is it?’

  ‘No, the steamer goes down after dusk. You see the river at night and dine looking out over it.’

  ‘Well then, why not straight away?’

  The sight of her sparkling eyes—those damned unpaintable eyes—was enough to decide him. That Elizabeth, his serious Elizabeth, should propose to go off on such a jaunt at so little notice was such a gift to him that it sent his heart bounding once again.

  And then with the suddenness of a revelation he thought he saw, complete and intact, the solution to his problem on the canvas.

  Elizabeth had gone across to the chair on which she had put her bonnet when she had stepped up to pose.

  ‘No, wait,’ he said. ‘Wait. Go and sit back there. Look at me.’

  He snatched a brush and dipped it in one of the blobs of still wet pigment on his palette. He took one long look at her. He essayed a stroke. He looked again, painted again, snatched another brush for another colour, looked, painted, looked. The light was still strong, though before long it would darken. He worked in a fireball of concentration. And at the end of some ten minutes he stood back.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said.

  Elizabeth was round on his side of the easel in a moment. She bent towards the canvas, peering at it with an anxiety reflected in every line of her body.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, surely.’

  ‘I think so, I really do think so,’ Godfrey answered.

  The light was in her eyes still. He took a step towards her, grasped her hands in his and, bending his face to hers, kissed her on the lips.

  Afterwards, as they walked together down to the pier at London Bridge to catch the steamer, she asked about that one burst of activity that had given him what had so long eluded him. Could it really be that those few minutes’ work had stood between total failure and shining success?

  ‘If I have achieved success,’ he put in, experiencing a sudden twinge of doubt.

  For a moment he longed to turn and run back to Gillingham Place, to race up to the studio, to peer with a candle at those eyes, to make sure he had got them right. Had he? Had he?

  ‘Oh, come,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You know and I know that there is life there now, where before there was not. But I find it still a little hard to understand that it should have been arrived at so quickly.’

  ‘No, it isn’t that that worries me. Where is the difference between the greatest success in a painting and utter flatness? In a few tiny light touches only. The merest hair marks. But if they are put there with the whole spirit behind them, the true spirit, then they do what they must.’

  ‘Then my last anxieties fly. It’s Greenwich Ho!’

  And Greenwich was all they had expected of it, and more. Dusk fell while they were waiting in the steamer to depart and a moon, pale and lustrous, appeared from behind piled clouds over the river’s southern bank. One by one, too, stars flickered into the sky above them. From the buildings on either shore warm distant squares and rectangles of light appeared. They stood on deck and watched the bustle nearby.

  Then, once they had left, despite the steady churning of their paddle-wheels, everything seemed wonderfully quiet. On the north bank the old high walls of the Tower glided by bathed in the pinkish light of the tranquil moon, the narrow window slits made even darker by the soft shadows. Under the Gun Wharf a pair of barges was moored, black looming shapes.

  They chuffed their way past the anchored tiers of shipping in the Pool, their high hulls rising out of the placidly flowing river water like so many darkened houses. All along the length of a cluster of blackened colliers, moored stem to stern, a dog raced barking at them as it ran. They passed lighters and tenders, oyster-boats and barges of all sorts, dusty lime-barges up from Northfleet with their piled cargo gleaming whitely, hay-barges with their tousled loads looking soft and springy enough to sleep on for a night lasting till kingdom come.

  Now on either side were great black warehouses, the moonlight catching only occasionally the big square white letters of an owner’s name. ‘Ysac Whitely Sailmaker’, Godfrey read once and raised an arm so that Elizabeth too would see. Only every now and again was the darkness broken by the red glow of a fire of coals in an iron cresset on a hardly visible wharf. A little mysterious wherry, rowed by a single
bent oarsman, suddenly shot across their bows, a black silhouette.

  Then, as they passed a tall-masted Indiaman at anchor off the southern end of Rotherhithe, its rigging outlined for half a minute against the moon, its hull, solid and rakish emerging from the dark glistening stream, Elizabeth broke a long silence.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Uncle Charles was right, this is something not to be missed. It will be long before I forget it.’

  At length the brightly lit balconies of the pleasure houses at Greenwich came into view past the ships at anchor there, their lanterns to port and starboard glowing points of heavy colour. Slowly the steamer nosed her way towards the floating quay. Then, just underneath them, Godfrey saw in the chancy moonlight a boy lying asleep on the tarpaulin cover of a barge, calm, quiet and safe, with the lashed rudder of the wide vessel close beside him. It seemed to sum up the set-apart night for him.

  He silently pointed out the sight to Elizabeth. She said nothing but took his hand in the darkness beside the rail.

  They dined at the Trafalgar in one of the private rooms with tall windows looking out across the river. Godfrey ordered champagne cup, and Elizabeth, who seldom drank anything other than lemonade, needed no persuading that this was an occasion marked out from the ordinary days. And when it came to eating there was on the menu clear or thick turtle soup, both rich with choice morsels of the green fat. There were vol-au-vents, there was cold salmon. There was red mullet or eels or soles piled in artfully arranged pyramids. There was shrimp curry and lobster omelette and trout. And all that was only a sort of prelude to the whitebait, the speciality of the two big Greenwich houses looking out over the river. Cutlets followed with veal sweetbreads and stewed quail. Then came chicken and duck and saddle of mutton. To follow these there was lobster mayonnaise and artichokes. And then there were the sweets, ices, charlotte of apricots and, crowning glory, something called on the French spattered menu card Le Pouding à la Vénétienne.

  Afterwards, replete, high-coloured, fed as it were on ambrosia, they went out while they took coffee on to one of the triple narrow balconies that looked down on to the river. Godfrey equipped himself with a huge cigar.

  The tide was now well down and directly under them the mud-banks of the river glistened in the moonlight, their even expanse broken here and there by the shapes of old abandoned anchors, broken baskets and the half-rotted hulks of boats, long moon-shadows transforming them into things of curious beauty. Beside, above and below them fellow diners from the public rooms, the men in tall hats, the women in shawls that hinted in the half-darkness at the richness of their true colours, lounged like them and looked on at the wide moonlit panorama.

  Suddenly there was a burst of laughter from the far end and, turning to find out what had caused it, they saw that three boys had come skipping out across the mudbank leaving three black trails of pock-marked footsteps in the soft ooze. Someone threw a penny and the urchins, dressed despite the chill of the night in no more than flapping shirts and ragged trousers, scrambled for it energetically. Other coins were tossed out, sometimes glinting in long arcs as the moonlight caught them. More boys joined the original trio and perhaps a girl or two, though it was hard to distinguish one from the other in the tattered garments they wore.

  Then, again from the far end of the highest balcony where the diners seemed to be a group of Greenwich habitués, there came shouting more purposeful than the random calls of encouragement that the urchins had hitherto been receiving. There was almost a regular rhythmic chant. And in a minute or two more they were able to make out what the words were.

  ‘Head, head, head. In with a head.’

  Elizabeth turned with a slight frown.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. They seem somewhat in wine.’

  And then another voice calling loudly from among the chanters explained it.

  ‘Come on, you boys. Sixpence for a head in.’

  ‘Did you hear?’ he asked Elizabeth. ‘They’re offering any of the little brats sixpence to stick his head in the mud.’

  ‘But surely,’ Elizabeth said, with a quick flicker of concern, ‘no child … Why, you can smell that mud even from up here.’

  It was true that they had all along been conscious of a slight stench, though it was something to be pushed out of the picture. But down at the level of the river the smell could not but be vile.

  ‘Head, head, head. In with a head.’

  Elizabeth made a move of protest, as if she might even be contemplating going along to speak to the roisterers. But just at that moment there was a new cheer and, turning back to the urchins, Godfrey saw that the sixpenny offer was about to be accepted.

  One of the tattered band—it should have been a boy but its garment, stiff as a board with hardened mud, was skirt-like and Godfrey had a queasy suspicion that it was a girl—had come to the front and was standing with legs wide apart looking challengingly up at the lighted balconies.

  The little performer, with a cocky defiant pride, waited until a degree of quiet had fallen, the proper expectant hush. Then, loud and clear in the moonlit night, its voice sang out.

  ‘One. Two. Free.’

  And down between the outstretched legs went the tousled head. Down and into the thick mud. The silence was now such that Godfrey actually heard the sucking sound as the glutinous vile-smelling stuff parted. In went the head, and down. Down till it was covered to the neck. And then there was a tiny pause.

  ‘She’ll suffocate,’ Elizabeth said, looking wildly round.

  But at once came a renewal of the sucking sound, louder even this time, and slowly, slowly enough to cause a little real anxiety, the head came out of the tenacious oozy clutch.

  Through the moonlight a little silver shooting-star curved high from the top balcony and fell within five or six yards of the now totally black-faced urchin. She, or he, went forward, rather slowly, rather exhaustedly, and picked up the miniscule reward. Then, with a spurt of renewed cheeky defiance, the brat looked up at the rows of faces peering down and with pantomime leisureliness cocked a snook at all and sundry.

  Godfrey felt himself a sudden prey to mixed emotions. A coarse joke had been played by his fellow diners and he had not liked it. An innocent had been forced into doing something foul for money, and that was surely horrible. And yet … Yet how innocent was the innocent? There had been a lively willingness to participate, both before and afterwards.

  He experienced, across the gap between the lighted balcony and the dark mud below, a dart of sympathy.

  But Elizabeth had turned away.

  ‘Godfrey, it must be getting late,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t we be going?’

  They stepped back into the warm and lighted room behind them, with the remains of the meal not yet cleared away, the wine glasses with their dregs of flat champagne, the broken bread rolls, the crumpled napkins, the stains of sauces on the white cloth. Godfrey rang for the waiter and settled the bill. He took his hat and coat and they went out.

  They were both rather silent on the long cab ride home, up the Surrey bank, across London Bridge and on to Gower Street. But, though Godfrey more than once questioned Elizabeth, she each time assured him that there was nothing wrong. Yet, even after he had left her at Gower Street, he had a grain of trouble in convincing himself that the expedition had after all been a total success.

  But, he reassured himself almost angrily, it must have been so. It had been a trip through fairyland, a memorable experience, a foreshadowing even of what his life and Elizabeth’s would be together. It could not have gone wrong over one ridiculous little incident.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At home Godfrey deliberately did not take a candle to examine the Venus Verticordia. And next morning he found in himself still an odd but definite reluctance to look at the canvas on its easel. Beyond perhaps a touch or two here and there on one of the Varnishing Days at the Academy it ought to be a finished work now. He would let others judge it, the Hanging Com
mittee at the Academy tomorrow, Herr Pohlmann this afternoon. So he spent the morning on such mundane matters as visiting his bank in Lombard Street, lunched in the City and returned to Gillingham Place only shortly before the German art-dealer was due.

  Indeed he left it so late that he had time only to wheel the easel into the best light as he heard the dealer’s notoriously splendid carriage draw up in the street outside with an appropriate burst of jubilation from the local street boys.

  And then Herr Pohlmann, shiningly dressed from the very crown of his tall hat to the very toes of his double-polished boots, with a diamond pin glinting and glaring in his tie, with his whiskers lustrous with pomade, with his large nose, his strong sensual mouth and his hungrily brilliant eyes, was being ushered in by a young Billy so overwhelmed that he almost bent double in his bow of announcement.

  ‘My dear Mr Mann, this is a moment to which I have long looked forward.’

  ‘You are very good, Herr Pohlmann. I need not say how honoured I am that a dealer of your reputation should seek me out.’

  ‘No, no, my dear sir, the honour will, I am sure, prove in the end to be all mine. In last year’s Academy there was nothing to touch your Torquato. If ever there was a picture that I wished to have the handling of, that was it. But you are too slow a worker, my dear sir. Too slow.’

  ‘Yes,’ Godfrey answered, a little antagonistically. ‘I do find it difficult to bring works forward with any rapidity.’

  ‘Conquer that, my dear sir. Conquer it. Because it is a failing. I tell you, never till this time has there been such a demand for Art. They are the buyers. Up in the North of your great country. In Birmingham. In Manchester. In Liverpool. The men who have made their success and are asking now, are begging now, to be told what to buy. Let me bring one or two only to see you, and whatever you paint I can sell it to them in an instant. And for more than the six hundred Her Majesty gave for the Torquato.’

  Herr Pohlmann laughed with rich pleasure.