by Rose Tremain
I am ready now. The red and grey suit is very nice, but I think with a moment's regret of the lost gold striped breeches and the outrageous coat. They expressed the essence of Merivel with such perfection and finesse. As a memento of this extraordinary day, I have at least kept the purple ribbon tied round my prick.
I open the door of the closet and this is what I see: the King, completely naked, kneeling by the bed, his arms encircling Celia's spread thighs and his glossy head buried in her little brush. I stand rooted to the expensive carpet. My face, under the mask, becomes boiling red. I close my eyes. I cannot move. I retreat back into the closet and close the door.
Back inside the small room, I feel lonely and suffocated. Surely, the reward for what I've done today cannot be to condemn me to a night on the floor of a closet? I will wait, I decide till the King and Celia have got to the, "divine banque", (pace, Harvey) of the thing and pray that it will be done inside the curtains, or at least that it will be noisy enough to conceal from them my hurrying footsteps.
Meanwhile, what shall I do? I decide to think about my future. I cannot see it at all clearly. I take off the mask. What I believe I can see now is that I'm weary of medicine. All my anatomical studies seem to have brought me to a great sadness. When a man plays a viola da gamba, I want to share in his joy, not see his skull. For where will such visions end? What if, on an August evening, I am on the river with Rosie Pierpoint and I suddenly see, not the red of her lips nor the pink of her thighs, but the white of the maggots in her bones? Such a perpetual and visible awareness of mortality would, I am certain, bring me to despair in a very short time. And what would become of me then? Even my rooms at Bidnold wouldn't be able to comfort me. I'd go mad and be locked up in Bedlam, only to be visited by poor Pearce, who would shake his head and say he could do nothing for me.
I must avoid, then, coming to despair and madness. I must try to forget anatomy. Forget it utterly. I must whisper over it words of oblivion. I must forget the starling. I must forget Fabricius and the drowned pauper. I must forget the interior of the human temple altogether. Instead, I will do decorative things. I will buy more furniture and pictures and drapes. I will paint pictures, even, for like my father, I am a good draughtsman and I am not afraid of trying my hand at oils. So this will be it: forgetfulness of the cavity, the cavern, the cave, the ghastly deep. My life will move in reverse order: I have endured the night; now, with my mind on superficial things, will come the morning. I am, after all, a citizen of a New Age.
Some minutes have passed while I have conversed with myself about my future. I replace the mask over my eyes and nose and listen. I can hear laughter – Celia's and the King's – a hopeful signal that they're rowing noisily together to heaven.
I open the door and find, to my intense relief, that the bed curtains have been drawn. I duck down nevertheless and crawl on my hands and knees to the door, which squeaks loudly when I open it, but then closes on me with hardly a sound.
A while later, I am in the park of Sir Joshua 's house. Some hours have passed, in which I have jigged and polka'd and drunk and flirted and generally flung myself about in such an untrammelled way that I am now exceedingly dizzy. It is cool outside, because the sun has gone down and I am tottering towards a little shadowy copse in which, I have convinced myself, Pearce is hiding.
I stop to piss. I take down my breeches and see the ribbon on my cock. The ribbon slides off and falls to the ground and I moan gently to myself as I piss onto it.
I pull up my breeches. Ahead of me, just at the edge of the wood, someone is moving. It must be Pearce, to whom I will now confess that I am abandoning medicine altogether. "I cannot go on," I will say.
But it isn't Pearce. For now, the person has put on – I would recognise this confection anywhere, even in the coming crepuscule – the three-masted barque! Even to tease me, Pearce would be unable to bring himself to place such a thing on his head.
I hear laughter. It is high and cackling. And there, suddenly, in front of me, laughing up into my face, is the plump village girl I kissed that morning on my way to my wedding.
"Bridegroom," she giggles, "Sir Master Bridegroom!"
I reach up a hand to my face and realise with terror that my mask is no longer there.
"Come inny, Bridegroom!" cackles the girl. "Come to Bridey!"
She is drunker than I am. The hat falls over her eyes and she hiccups. I reach up swiftly under her skirt and cup and squeeze the flesh of her buttocks in my hands and in this way propel her forwards into the woods. As I pitch her down and feel myself stagger and fall onto her, it's as if the night descends on us like an executioner's blade, leaving our severed bodies to wriggle in the darkness.
Chapter Three. My New Vocation
The most beautiful room at Bidnold (aside from the little circular space in the West Turret which, for the time being, I kept empty, my imagination not yet having discovered the most satisfactory way to reveal its perfection) was the Withdrawing Room. As one who had spent the greatest part of his life in meagre apartments, I could not prevent a foolish grin from breaking out over my face every time I remembered that I was now the owner of a room so designated. The title, "Withdrawing Room", entranced me. For it inevitably implies that one is living a busy and pleasurable life on its periphery, from which one occasionally "withdraws" in order to sip a little brandy by its excellent fire, or to indulge in sweet and silly talk with the likes of my handsome neighbour, Lady Bathurst, on its scarlet and gold sofas. Thus, with my usual excess of enthusiasm, I set about making certain that my life at Bidnold was full of diverting activity, from which I could "withdraw" from time to time.
I equipped myself with a Music Room (I had not, at that time, yet learned to play the oboe), a Billiard Room (I had not, then, ever held a billiard cue in my hands), a Card Room (I was already fond of Rummy and Bezique), a Studio (in which I would begin my new career as a painter), a Study (in case Pearce should visit me and find himself discomforted by the oriental brilliance of my Withdrawing Room), a Morning Room (facing east, where I would sit between nine and ten to do my household accounts) and of course a most sumptuous Dining Room (the abundance of its table such that one would need to "withdraw" a little after dinner to let the digestive system work in comfort and tranquillity).
My stipend from the King as Celia's husband was two thousand livres per annum – riches I could not, a year before, have dreamed of. This money enabled me to buy a great quantity of Chinese furniture for my Withdrawing Room, to hang the walls with ruched vermilion taffeta and Peking scrolls, to upholster my chairs in scarlet and fuchsia and gold and to lay upon the floor a carpet from Chengchow so elaborate in design it had been a thousand days upon the loom.
I was exceedingly pleased with these decorations. As I poured beer for my exhausted upholsterers, I congratulated myself that I had got the rampant tones of red, pink and gold so absolutely right that I must quickly hit upon some ingenious idea for ensuring that the guests, in whose company I would withdraw into this room, would not sully it with drabness. It came to me speedily: I would order to be made a dazzling collection of scarlet sashes, bilberry shawls, ruby slippers, pink bonnets and yellow plumes, with which to adorn my invitées, thus affording my eye considerable delight and my spirit a great deal of mirth.
Celia, as you will have understood by now, had no part in the designing of my house. Though it was thought that, when expedient, she would spend some time at Bidnold, the King preferred her to be nearer to him and had thus installed the new Lady Merivel in a pretty house at Kew, a short journey by water from Whitehall. It was gossiped, I learned from my Court friends, that on summer evenings, when his desire for my wife overcame his passion journalière for Barbara Castlemaine, he would skull himself alone and in disguise to Kew, thus putting himself grievously at risk from the vagabonds of the water. Unlike myself, so prone to cowardice with regard to my own mortality, the King appears to be a man without fear. I had become by this time, I feel obliged to admit to you, extreme
ly fond of the King, and experienced some pain in the realisation that, now I had served his purpose and been rewarded with lands and a title, he could, if he chose, forget about me utterly. I thought with fondness of the smacking kisses he had once slapped on his Fool's lips, and earnestly hoped it would not be so.
Let me relate to you my first attempts at becoming an artist.
Thirty canvases, fourteen brushes, fifty-eight boxes of pigment and an easel were sent to me from Pelissier and Drew in London. My tailor made for me a floppy hat in the manner of the great Rembrandt, and a hessian smock, in which garment, I admit, I looked more like a swine feeder than a Renaissance Man.
The mixing of pigments was an activity to which I responded with great eagerness. If I have a visionary side, it is visions of colour and light that I see. Thus, I longed to dispense with drawing and dabble pure colour onto the virgin canvases. I was aware, however, than an artist must have a subject and the only subjects I could execute well with my charcoal were parts of the human anatomy – the very thing I has sworn to consign to oblivion, but found myself unable to forget.
My first picture, then, was of a man's thigh and buttocks. The background, I had decided, would be ochre, suggesting a pastoral scene, in which the severed half of my man was striding through a field of corn. (I made a rather feeble attempt at drawing some stooks in the distance and a few single ears of wheat close to.)
The musculature of the buttocks and thigh was, I think, reasonably well and accurately drawn but, such was its detail, that when I came at last, in a state of trembling excitement, to apply oil paint to it, I was all too aware that I had no idea whatsoever how to render shadow and light (and thus the third dimension) in this medium and, although I worked at it for hours and long into the night, my picture was an utter failure, resembling in the end a garish still-life of a plate of bacon and scrambled egg. I took off my floppy hat and smock and withdrew, this time to my bed, where I was forced to gnaw upon my sheet to stop myself shedding tears of frustration and rage.
The next day, a brilliant idea came to me. If I could execute parts of the body quite competently, it would surely be within my power to draw a body in its entirety, particularly with the help of a model.
After breakfast, I called for my horse, Danseuse (another gift from the King), and rode up the hill to the village of Bidnold and knocked on the door of the Jovial Rushcutters, a nice little inn I was in the habit of visiting from time to time, when in need of rough conversation and the smell of beer, tobacco and spittle.
The barmaid of the Jovial Rushcutters was one Meg Storey who, in her manner and in the teasing fullness of her breasts, slightly resembled Rosie Pierpoint, and to whom, in consequence, I was involuntarily drawn. I now managed to flatter Meg Storey sufficiently – with praise and promise of silver -for her to agree to coming to my Studio to pose for me. Not, I assured her, naked, but prettily draped with scarves and sashes and wearing quite possibly a posy of geraniums in her hair, thus giving me access to my reds, which I had used to baleful excess in the man's thigh, but without which I could not imagine any picture of mine succeeding.
She arrived on a rather chilly September morning. At the sight of me in my smock and hat, she let out a hoot of derisive laughter. I was further discomforted by her complaints, as she took off her cloak, about the cold and sunless nature of my Studio.
"It faces, as it must, north," I said, beginning to sharpen my piece of charcoal. "Artists must work in a northerly light."
"Why?" asked Meg Storey.
I looked up. I did not wish to admit to this saucy tavern jade that I had not the least idea. "Because," I snapped, "a north light is cruel."
After a great deal of shivering and protesting, Meg Storey agreed to remove everything but her drawers, sat down on a tall chair and allowed me to drape a magenta scarf around her neck to fall flatteringly over one of her large, bright-nippled breasts. I stood back. Her hair was sand-coloured, not unlike my own, but a deal finer and silkier. She looked exceedingly pretty. I felt my enthusiasm for my picture grow. Now I understand, I told myself, what the Flemish masters felt as they prepared to render their voluptuous Dianas, their fleshy shepherdesses…
I began to sketch in Meg Storey's neck, shoulder and right breast. At her waist, the drawers began, but I ignored them. In my knowledge of the form of the female leg, of the degree of fatty tissue in the upper thigh, I was able to depict what was, in fact, invisible to me. I was now excited by my work to such a degree that I felt my loins grow hard and had to force out of my mind, as I drew her hand, a sudden image of it flaying my bottom with its little pearly nails. Luckily, the size of the canvas and the voluminous nature of my smock prevented Meg Storey from witnessing any arousal in me, and for two hours or more she sat obediently still, despite the cold.
At mid-day, she had to leave to serve dinner at the Jovial Rushcutters. I pressed a florin into her palm and asked her to return the following morning. I made no attempt to touch her, though the urge in me to do so was very strong. Art, I told myself, must be put before beastliness.
But I couldn't stay away from my picture. Even on my return from an excellent supper with my neighbour, Lady Bathurst, at a very late hour, I went at once to my Studio and lit several lamps and stared at my drawing of Meg Storey and felt myself greatly pleased by it. It was a relief to see, reasonably well drawn, an entire body and not bits and pieces of it. Art, I thought picturesquely (and with a metaphysicality worthy of Pearce), will make me whole, where before I was but half made up.
The next morning dawned sunny, thus slightly altering the light in my studio. I had spent a peevish night trying to decide which pigments to use and in what quantities in order to achieve the exact colour of Meg Storey's neck, her hair, her heel, her nipples. I longed with such envious longing to put onto my canvas something that was more than a mere portrait of Meg Storey. I wanted to capture in colour her very essence, so that anyone seeing my picture would be able to "see" her, exactly as she is, both beautiful and vulgar, and these two opposing conditions conflicting in her with such subtlety that one's perception of her is a constantly changing thing. But how was I to do it?
I stood at my easel exhausted and downhearted. How can you capture in a medium which is static that which is constantly moving and altering? I began, without confidence, to mix my pigments. Meg's nose, I noticed, was red ("From the cold I caught, sitting here, Sir Robert"), so I thought I would start with that and work outwards. At once, I could see, I had made a bad decision. You do not, if you are striving for the essence of something, begin with a small detail. I darted to the nipple and painted that. Now, my canvas had two lifeless red spots upon it. Quickly, I mixed some umbers, vermilions and browns and began to colour Meg's hair. Again, there was no light upon it or life within it, and I began to understand now that I simply did not have the technique to paint a tolerably pretty picture of Meg, let alone a portrait that would reveal her essential nature and being.
I put down my brush. I picked up Meg's shawl and put it round her and told her sadly that I would pay her to return at some future date, when I had taken some lessons in becoming an artist.
I believe I might have succumbed, after this first ignominious flop in my chosen field, to a bout of sadness, had it not been for the kind attentions of my neighbour, Lady Bathurst.
Let me describe the Bathursts to you.
Bathurst is a hunting man. He is past his seventieth year and his memory parted from him in his sixty-eighth, when his horse threw him in the field and trod on his ear, through which orifice his mind dribbled away. He wears aged green clothes which are seldom cleaned, and so carry with them the stench of saddle soap, tobacco and boiled pudding. Of his wife's name, which is Violet, he has lost all remembrance and has been heard to enquire at the dinner table: "Who is that woman? Do I know her?" But if you imagine him confined to bed, or even to his room, you would be wrong. Every morning, he is hoisted onto his horse and with his greyhounds and terriers rampages about his fields and forests ru
nning to their death hares, foxes, badgers and even stags. The walls of his great hall are hung with game-keepers' poles, hunting whips, the skins of foxes, badgers and marten cats and the heads of deer, its floor strewn with marrow bones for his dogs, which are kennelled there and do their business all over the parquet.
I am fond of Bathurst. His claret is excellent and his table manners worse than mine. His conversation is pure drivel, but spoken with a perpetual passion, emphasised by his constant farting and thumping of the table. Though his memory has left him, his spirit has not. His friends, he tells me, have deserted him; he does not know who they were or why they have gone, but he senses a void, a vacancy, where once there was conversation and laughter, and seems delighted that I should be there to fill it up a little. Confusingly, he appears always to remember my name, or rather his own Anglicised version of if. Merryvale. "Welcome, Merryvale!" he thunders, across the braying and barking of the dogs. "Welcome and Good Cheer and Devil take the Laggards and the Hindmosts!"
If I were, like Pearce, prone to Godliness and guilt, I might find myself a little discomforted by the fact that, attached as I am to Bathurst, I am deceiving him. For I am embarked, I will now admit, on a most agreeable affaire de coeur with his wife, my Lady Bathurst, or, as I call her in the intimacy of her chamber, Violet.
Violet is some thirty years younger than her husband and a most handsome person, very witty and smart. She called on me not long after I took up residence at Bidnold Manor, and, on that very first meeting, related to me the lamentable state of Bathurst 's mind, putting particular emphasis on his forgetfulness of her existence, thus bringing into my head at once the idea that there could be something between us. For a man who has forgotten that he has a wife cannot care a great deal about which bed she chooses to inhabit, or with whom. Our amours are not of the tearing and clawing kind, but agreeably hot for all that and tolerably frequent, Violet being at that age when she sees her beauty starting to vanish and so wants to make hay while the sun still shines, albeit less radiantly than in her youth, in which, by her own account, an abundance of hay was made and time seemed forever halted at summer.