Читать книгу: «The Villa on the Riviera», страница 6

EIGHT

Polly worked at the Rossetti Gallery workshop three days a week. It was a job that had started when she was still an art student on slender means, keen to earn any extra money she could. It had seemed heaven-sent, a job working with pictures, rather than waiting on tables or cleaning houses or collecting debts or any one of numerous jobs that she and her fellow students took to make ends meet.

Rossetti Gallery, with its entrance in Cork Street, was smart, but the premises behind it in Lion Yard were anything but smart. Lion Yard was a narrow, cobbled cul-de-sac, and few of the well-heeled customers who bought at the gallery ever ventured down it. The gallery itself and the main restoration studio, with a discreet entrance further down Cork Street, were forbidden territory to the students, and there was no way into them through their dingy yard. Dickensian, Sam called Lion Yard, and Polly could well imagine some of the novelist’s grimmer characters lurking in the shadows there.

The workshop was a lofty, barn-like-place, redolent of linseed oil and turps and oil paint. Situated above a storage area, it was reached via a rickety wooden outside staircase. Students were taken on to touch up and improve unsaleable old pictures and canvases that the gallery had bought in job lots at country sales, or for a few shillings in the minor London auction rooms.

The truth was, Polly soon realized, that there was an awful lot of dull and downright bad art around. Yet even the most dismal picture, by a hopeless artist, could be made to look much more desirable with careful, skilled work and a sense of what was in fashion.

Polly was started on flower paintings, which always, so her boss, Mr Padgett, told her, found a steady market. Dreary collections of tired-looking blooms in frames that were often worth more than the paintings arrived at the back of the Rossetti Gallery premises, and were taken, minus their frames, up to the workshop to be stacked in daunting ranks on wooden pallets all along one wall.

Mr Padgett, who was quick to weed out those workers he considered would never make the grade, had watched Polly for a few days, and then told her that she would do. ‘Unlike a lot of art students, you can paint. I don’t know what they teach you at these colleges these days,’ he grumbled. ‘Some of you don’t seem to know how to hold a brush or draw a curved line.’

‘Modern art isn’t about painting or drawing curves, Mr P, ’ retorted Sam Carter, a cheeky young student with a lock of hair falling over his forehead. ‘Times have changed, you’ve got to keep up. Anything is art now, if you say it is.’

‘Maybe to you it is, but it’s not to our customers, so just you hurry up and finish that landscape before those cows there die of old age.’

Sam, a student at the Academy, could draw or paint almost anything, and Polly envied him his facility. Under his skilful hands, landscapes bloomed, animals looked as though they belonged to a known species, ships sailed and fought as though they meant it, and faces changed from blurred ugliness to beauty, which was why, despite the avant-garde nature of his own work and his scorn for all old-fashioned representational art, he was kept on at the workshop while others came and went.

Mr Padgett, seeing Sam idly sketch a Quattrocento face, or draw a detail of a hand in the style of Rembrandt, had wanted him to move on to the main restoration studio, where the fine and valuable paintings were dealt with. ‘You’d work on old masters there, national treasures even. Mr Dinsdale has a top reputation, you couldn’t learn from a better man. It’s a good, steady career for an artist of your talent.’

Sam had laughed and said he’d rather be poor and do his own work, thank you, and stayed on at the workshop.

Meanwhile, Polly’s work turning dreary flowers into skilfully and pleasingly-coloured flower paintings such as would adorn any home, gave satisfaction. She did some work on landscapes, adding various animals on Mr Padgett’s instructions. ‘Buyers go for cats,’ he would say. And he approved of her horses, which, added to another blank country scene, made an uninspired picture much more interesting.

Polly had her doubts as to the strict legality of what she was doing, but Mr Padgett assured her that since these works were almost all by unknown artists, and no pretence was made that they were anything else, where was the harm in making an unsaleable picture into one that a buyer was happy to hang on his wall?

‘Artists don’t always know best. If I had the painter of that landscape here, look at it, a few desultory hedges, a river going nowhere, a broken down bit of fence, I’d soon tell him what it needed to make a proper composition. And he’d be glad to learn, and wouldn’t make the same mistake again.’

Polly had gradually been allowed to pep up some portraits, giving some worthy gentleman or prosperous paterfamilias more appeal and a touch of style lacking in the mostly very wooden portraits that came through her hands.

‘People prefer not to have ugly or unpleasant faces looking down on them from their dining-room walls,’ Mr Padgett told her. ‘Of course, if they happen to be your ancestors, and your ancestors happen to be a lantern-jawed, disagreeable-looking lot, well, that’s one thing. But if you’re paying good money, then you want something more pleasing. A pretty woman will sell, where an ugly or even just a plain one won’t. And of course, if one of our pictures turns out to be of someone well-known, an admiral or a statesman or an actress, so much the better.’

‘Who buys these portraits?’ Polly said to Sam. ‘If you don’t know the person, and it’s not a wonderful painting, what’s the point?’

Mr Padgett, who was passing behind her, paused to give her question his usual careful consideration.

‘Sometimes a buyer wants to pass a painting off as an ancestor. Other buyers feel that having a few portraits hanging above the stairs adds a bit of class. And we sell a lot to hotels, of a certain kind, new places where they want to make foreign visitors feel they’re staying in a bit of Old England.’

There were times, however, when a portrait or a flower painting would come into the workshop only to be whisked away before it was passed over to Sam or Polly.

‘Hold on, Mr P,’ she had cried on more than one occasion. ‘That’s a promising bowl of fruit and flowers, I can do something with that.’

To which Mr Padgett, frowning, had said, that, no, this picture was staying as it was.

These, Polly found out after a while, were the older canvases. Mr Padgett, in an expansive moment, showed her how, under close scrutiny of the back of the canvas, it was possible to see whether the canvas was hand-made, meaning it dated from the eighteenth century or earlier, or was machine-made. ‘Machine-made canvases didn’t come in until the very end of the eighteenth century,’ Mr Padgett told her.

Of course if a picture had been ruined, then it was extremely difficult to judge whether the canvas had the irregularities that marked it out as hand-made, but Mr Padgett had an eye, and after putting his nose so close to the canvas that Polly thought he must make a dent in it, he would pronounce on its age and the picture would be handed over to her or her fellow assistants in the studio, or whisked away to the main studio.

Presumably Rossetti’s had scruples about refurbishing genuinely old paintings; well, she respected them for it, although a bad painting was still a bad painting, whatever its age.

Polly liked the work, and it certainly allowed her to pay her rent at the times, more and more frequent, when she could make no other money from her drawings or paintings. She’d had a run of luck earlier in the year with book jackets, for which WH Smith paid two guineas apiece; these had recently dried up, and so the twelve shillings a day she earned at Rossetti’s was a godsend.

That Monday was another wet day, the kind of day when the atmosphere became a grey cloud of drizzle, with the wetness creeping under collars and into shoes. Polly felt damp inside and out when she arrived in Lion Yard, she climbed the stairs with extra care, as the steps were always slippery in the rain, and pushed open the door to the workshop.

She was starting work on yet another flower painting, a small canvas, circa 1855, Mr Padgett had said. ‘Believe it or not, the Victorians loved those vivid colours. So did the Georgians, but taste today won’t stand for that kind of thing.’

So, under his watchful eye, Polly had applied his patent varnish-removing fluid, made up to a secret formula, and then the painting had been left out in the yard in the rain for a week, to fade the colours and leave a matt surface for her to work on.

It had dried over the weekend, and now her first task was to alter the colours to give a more realistic representation of the blooms in question. Then, she decided, looking at the picture through narrowed eyes, she would change the balance, to make the design less stiff and formal and give the flowers a more natural, relaxed look.

She took her tattered smock from the hook behind the door, and put some coffee on to brew, warming her fingers at the gas ring; she couldn’t paint with fingers numb from cold.

Sam came up the stairs and into the room. ‘Late again, Mr Carter,’ said Mr Padgett, but without rancour.

‘Sorry, Mr P, ’ Sam said, not sounding in the least apologetic.

Sam was working on what had been a battered seascape. He had a particular knowledge of ships which came from his belonging to a naval family; he had grown up in various ports around the world, and as a boy, he had spent hours out and about in boats. He pulled his easel round to get a better light, and, wiping a fine sable brush on an old rag, he set to work, painting delicate cotton wool puffs from the cannon he had added to an otherwise uninteresting sailing vessel. A man of war gave extra value to a painting, Mr Padgett said, and the more warlike violence a canvas contained, the more easily it would find a customer.

Sam was in a talkative mood when he and Polly were alone later that morning, Mr Padgett having gone off with a delivery of paintings.

‘Of course,’ Sam said, ‘we should go into this business on our own account, make ourselves more than the miserly pay we get here.’

‘What, set up on our own, touching up bad paintings?’

‘Why not? We could buy them up at country house sales and auctions just as Padgett and his scouts do. Cut out the middle man.’

‘Would you want to?’ said Polly, adding some blue dabs to a flat green leaf. ‘What about your own work? What about all that stuff about preferring to be poor, when Mr Padgett wanted you to train properly as a restorer?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sam. ‘One says these things, and one bangs on, in the name of art, but is one getting anywhere? I doubt it.’

‘You’re still studying.’

‘Yes, but you aren’t, and where’s your own work going? Do you sell it? Do you think your painting is improving, are you getting down the visions in your head? Is anyone remotely interested? I sometimes think I’ll end up painting Christmas cards, more jolly naval scenes. Robins, too, perhaps, I might have a go at robins.’

‘Could one give it up, just like that?’

‘Dunno. I suspect it gives you up, you wake up one morning and realize that you’ve nothing more to say. Look at you. Mr Padgett raves at your sense of colour, yet your own painting is all dreariness.’

Polly had invited Sam round for tea one Sunday and regretted it ever since. He, with all the braggadocio of a promising student, hadn’t been able to hide his lack of enthusiasm for Polly’s canvases. ‘Why are they all so small?’

‘Small canvases cost less and you use less paint.’ Polly had replied, but it wasn’t the entire truth.

‘They all look as though you’ve been painting what you can see through a windowpane in the fog. I like this, though,’ he had said, crossing the room to look at a canvas Polly had painted for her final show at college.

It was of three of her friends, students on the same course, a much larger picture than anything she had done recently. A red-haired, wild-eyed, hung-over young Irishman; she’d lost touch with him. Dark, sultry, soft-mouthed Fanny Powys, blowing rings of smoke into the air. The third grace, for that was how she had arranged her figures, was an ethereally fair and fragile girl, who was now living and working in New York. It was a good painting, and it was true, she hadn’t done anything half so good since she left college. Polly hated Sam for being so breezy and gung-ho about losing one’s artistic voice. Easy to talk about it when you hadn’t lost your way and had utter confidence that you never would.

They went back to their easels, and worked steadily, until Sam drew back from his canvas, put down his palette and brushes, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

Smoking was forbidden in the studio, which was full of inflammable materials, not to mention the canvases stacked up against every surface of the room. But Sam squeezed himself up to the skylight and pried it open, so that he could blow the smoke out into the already smoky London atmosphere.

Sam pulled a magazine out of his pocket. He read all the gossipy papers he could get his hands on, and knew all about the goings-on of anyone in the public eye. ‘My cousin in America sent this to me. Look, pictures of Mrs Cynthia Harkness, dancing at the Columbo Club. Don’t you love that dress?’

Polly took her attention off a strange-looking flower that seemed to be a cross between a blowsy rose and a chrysanthemum. She’d make it a rose, it was a better shape, she decided. She wiped her fingers on a rag and took the magazine Sam was holding out to her, turned back to a page of photographs shot in a nightclub. She looked at the slim figure with the perfect hair and beautifully made-up face, then at the dramatic close-fitting dress, which billowed out in a froth at ankle level.

‘I bet Sir Walter Malreward won’t be pleased if he sees that picture,’ said Sam. ‘He’s going to marry her, you know. Do you think he has a press agency sending him any pictures of her that appear in the press?’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Keeping tabs on her.’

Sam had followed every step of Cynthia Harkness’s well-publicized divorce, and he followed the progress of Sir Walter’s latest amour with keen attention. ‘It won’t last,’ he had predicted. ‘He rarely keeps his women for more than a year. Then he trades them in for a new model, randy chap that he is.’

Now Sam had changed his mind, and was inclined to think it might be different with Mrs Harkness. ‘He wanted her to get the divorce, that’s what it looks like. Mind you, is she wise? I think her husband looked rather a pet.’

‘Well,’ said Polly, as she squeezed a dollop of orange on to her palette, ‘no one could call Sir Walter a pet.’

‘No,’ agreed Sam. He tossed his cigarette butt out of the window and closed it with a bang. Then he returned to his easel, looked at the picture with pursed lips, and painted a pennant on to the eighteenth-century man-of-war with a dramatic flourish. ‘I’ve told Padgett that this is hopeless. There’s a raging sea, lashing waves against the cliffs, and he wants this ship of the line to be coasting along — as if any captain in his right mind would be so close inshore in a blow like that.’

‘Artistic licence,’ said Polly, and then, ‘oh, damn!’

‘What?’

‘I’ve used chrome orange, and this is a picture from the 1850s, it’s a mite early for it.’

‘As if anyone will notice. My ship caught on a lee shore is far more of a faux pas than a bit of anachronistic colour.’

‘I like to get things right.’

They were paid on Mondays, and at five o’clock Polly tucked into her purse the thirty-six shillings which Mr Padgett had counted out and given her. She’d pay her rent, which would take twenty-five shillings of it. Then, unless, miraculously, another book jacket came in, she’d have to last the rest of the week on the remaining eleven shillings. Which meant another raid on her almost empty piggy bank.

Sam walked beside her as they left Lion Yard. He’d noticed the way Polly had put her money away, and with sharp, inquisitive eyes, had seen the emptiness of the purse into which she had put it.

‘Care for a flutter?’ he said. ‘I’m going to the races with Larry tomorrow, he’s got a hot tip for the two-thirty.’

Sam’s friend Larry was a bit of a wide boy, in Polly’s view, and certainly not a likely companion for an admiral’s son. But Sam had had some remarkably lucky bets through him, and imagine if she won! She shook her head. ‘I’m broke, and they say if you’re broke, never put any money on a horse, because it will always cross its legs and fall over, or come last, or both.’

‘I don’t think your two bob is likely to make Amarantha trip up. Larry knows one of the stable lads, he’s sure she’s a winner.’

‘Oh, go on, then,’ said Polly, recklessly handing over a precious half-crown coin.

Mrs Horton was at home when Polly went to pay her rent. Which was a pity; Polly preferred to put the money in an envelope and thrust it under the door. She didn’t like Mrs Horton, who had hard eyes and was mean with everything to do with her tenants, from hot water to the cheap, low wattage lamps that so often burned out, leaving the staircase plunged into dangerous darkness.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ Mrs Horton said, drawing the shawl she always wore about her thin shoulders. ‘I wanted to have a word with you. You’d better come in for a moment.’

Polly’s heart sank. What had she done now? Left the front door ajar? Neglected to hang the bathmat over the bath? Forgotten to avoid the creaking floorboard on the landing when she came in late? She stepped gingerly across the threshold, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the pervading aroma of tomcat and boiled cabbage.

Unlike the Spartan rooms she let out, Mrs Horton’s quarters were almost sumptuous. Thick rugs were laid on the floor, overlapping in order to fit in. The sofa, a red velvet affair on stout legs, was piled high with plump cushions, and the lampshades always reminded Polly of a tart’s knickers, since they were pink and black with lace trimmings. It had crossed her mind that scrawny Mrs Horton, who did so well out of the several properties she owned in Fitzroy Street, might have started her career in quite a different profession.

‘I’m giving you notice,’ said Mrs Horton.

‘Notice?’ Polly stared at her, hoping she had heard wrongly.

‘Notice to quit. I want you out by the twenty-fourth of December.’

‘Oh, but Mrs Horton, why? What have I done?’

‘I’m not saying you’re a bad tenant, because I’ve had worse, but I want the room. My son’s coming home for a while, he’s quitting the merchant service and wants to look about for some new line of work. So I’ll be needing the room for him. His ship gets in on the second of January, and I want you out by Christmas, to give me time to clean the room. So you’ll have to move all your stuff out, and don’t go leaving it until the last minute.’

Polly opened her mouth to plead with her landlady. Why her? Why couldn’t one of the other tenants be turfed out? But she knew the answer to that, and knew that there was no point arguing. Her room was the smallest and cheapest in the house, and naturally, Mrs Horton would want to keep her higher paying lodgers on for preference.

‘That isn’t much notice,’ Polly said. ‘Can’t you give me time to find somewhere else?’

‘No, dearie, that’s the way it is. If I were you, I’d get your fiancé to name the day, you’ve been hanging about long enough, you’ll lose him if you carry on that way. A man gets tired of waiting when he’s decided to marry, even,’ and she gave Polly a sly glance, ‘even if he’s doing a bit of anticipating on the bed front. You get hitched in January, that’s my advice, and then you’ll not have to worry about finding a new room for yourself, will you?’

Polly positively stamped up the three flights of stairs to her room, working herself into a thorough temper. Damn Mrs Horton. Damn everything. She looked around at her familiar room, and sank down on the bed. All right, it wasn’t much, but to her it was home. She suddenly remembered the pictures Sam had shown her in a copy of Country Life, of the interiors of that Sir Walter Malreward’s recently built country house, and she sighed. Then she laughed at herself. She didn’t aspire to any such modern, chic opulence; she was content with her chilly and inconvenient attic room, which, compared to some of the places she had lived in before coming here, was almost luxurious.

With no money to pay a deposit, she’d be back in one of those dreadful places, like the room on the third floor of that house in Pimlico, which had peeling damp patches on the walls and where the nearest supply of water was down in the basement, and that a solitary tap. Moreover, the basement had had its own tenants, an impoverished, elderly artist and his wife — dear God, was that how she would end up, if she didn’t marry Roger?

She shook herself into sense. It didn’t arise. She was going to marry Roger, and besides, she wasn’t the kind of person who ended up in a damp and dingy basement, painting rural scenes on stones as Joseph Forbes, the inhabitant of that dank region, had done.

She must be practical. How could she find a new room at this time of year, one that she could move into before Christmas? Drat Mrs Horton and her son, she couldn’t have sprung this on her at a worse time.

Roger would be pleased. He would point out that she didn’t need to look for a new place to live, given that they would be married so soon. Why did that depress her so much? She looked at the ring on her finger, the neat hoop with a sapphire nestled between two diamonds. Not a flashy ring, but a good one, made from stones reset from one of his mother’s brooches. ‘No point splashing out on tawdry jewellery when you can have something decent,’ he had said.

She loved Roger, she admired him, she knew that he was the perfect balance for her: his intellect as against her emotional approach to life — so why did the prospect of their marriage make her more and more dispirited as the actual day grew nearer? She’d welcomed the brief postponement, but the weeks would fly by, and that would be that. Hitched. It was such a big step, marriage. They had discussed living together; Roger was quite keen on that, since as a good socialist, he considered marriage by and large an outmoded and bourgeois institution. His parents, however, although modern in their outlook, weren’t impressed by his idea of him and Polly living in sin. ‘The hospital won’t like it,’ his father had said.

Polly had raised the subject with her mother, and been surprised at her response.

‘No, dear, it would never do. It can work for some people, but Roger’s people wouldn’t like it, and there’d be all kinds of inconvenience. It’s one thing to have an affair’ — this with a sideways glance at Polly, what did she know about her and Jamie? — ‘but living together, setting up home together without being married, it won’t do, not for a man in Roger’s position. He’d feel it in the end, and then there are always problems with the income tax and landlords and so on. I dare say he’d end up blaming you, men tend to do that.’

How could she know about that, for heaven’s sake?

In the end, Polly knew, she would have to throw herself on Ma’s mercy, and stay in Highgate while she waited for Roger to get back from America. The prospect filled her with dismay. Perhaps Oliver knew of some artist who was going to be away for a few weeks, who would be glad of someone who would look after their studio and in return pay a modest rent. Unlikely, and what most people considered a modest rent would probably still be beyond her present resources, but still, she would ask him.

That night her sleep was haunted with dreams. She was watching Mrs Horton, improbably attired in Cynthia Harkness’s lovely frock, dancing with Sir Walter Malreward, who was wearing the brown overalls Mr Padgett put on while attending to the messier business of the workshop. Then the image faded, and she was standing on the doorstep of Sir Walter’s white country house, at the bottom of a flight of steps flanked by two creatures out of ancient Egypt. She had a suitcase in her hand, and was explaining to a lofty personage dressed in a black uniform that she was Polyhymnia Tomkins, come about the room.

To which he had replied in a resonant voice that there was no such person as Polyhymnia Tomkins, and so certain had been his utterance, that Polly woke up in a cold sweat, to find herself exclaiming out loud that it was true, Polyhymnia Tomkins did exist, there was indeed such a person.

She sat up in bed, too unsettled to want to go back to sleep yet. Her eye fell on the table where she had left some sketches she had done before going to bed. She had drawn a caricature of Mrs Horton, complete with sequinned slippers and shawl and expression of long-suffering weariness, and, peeping out from a battlement of cushions and frilly lampshades, the heavy features of Eric Horton, her son, whom Polly had met on the stairs some months previously and taken an instant dislike to. She hated the thought of him taking possession of her room, and, by the dim light of the bedside lamp, she glared at his exaggerated features as though she could compel him to change his mind and go back to sea, preferably to be wrecked and cast up on a desert island on the other side of the world.