Parlour Four Page 8

  Scurl advanced and shook hands with his visitor. He produced a polite murmur without, one felt, himself hearing it. He picked up an old-fashioned three-tier cake stand and elevated it in air so that Bibury could inspect, and choose from, a plate of petits fours. Then he sat down with an appearance of faint expectation, as if aware that conversation was something that sometimes happened and was possibly going forward in his daughter’s drawing-room now. Bibury was impressed by these evidences of good-breeding inflexibly maintained amid adverse circumstances. But he was a painter, and what compelled him more powerfully was the physical man. Scurl was spare rather than emaciated, but with cheek-bones so pronounced and thrusting as to seem about to break through their integument. They were also curiously slanted, so that if in fact projected as seemed to threaten they would act as a pair of pincers nipping the tip of the philosopher’s nose. Yet – as if here were a sketch by Leonardo of some old man glimpsed in the street – this note of grotesque had its own dignity as somehow speaking of the spirit struggling through the clay. Quite suddenly, Bibury knew that a challenge confronted him. In the strict sense of the word, Ambrose Scurl was pittoresco. There was nothing for it. He’d have to paint the man.

  Bibury had known such abrupt compulsions before, and believed they were not uncommon with artists generally. But in this case there was a hidden complexity of motivation. Scurl wasn’t merely visually stimulating in a tantalising way; he somehow at once occasioned one of Bibury’s intermittent lapses from serenity, induced that lurking feeling that he hadn’t got as far—or was it aimed as high?—as he might have done. He felt, in fact, a slightly frightening bond with the man! And Scurl was none of the things he had imagined, was not nobly and tranquilly resigned on the one hand, nor petty and embittered on the other. Had he been a fated depressive from his cradle, or was that just the way his missing out on high distinction had taken him? Here was perhaps a question for the consulting-room rather than the atelier. Nevertheless, Bibury felt it relevant to what must go on canvas.

  The immediate problem was the awkwardness of contriving a plausible volte-face, since he had laid on rather thick to Mrs Blond the extent of his existing commitments over an indefinite period ahead. It was something to tackle boldly and at once. He set down his teacup.

  ‘I need hardly repeat,’ he said, ‘that I’d very much like . . .’ But at once he had to come to an awkward pause. He had been about to address Mrs Blond and say, ‘. . . to paint your father’s portrait’. Just in time, he had seen this wouldn’t really do. Ambrose Scurl might be as remote and withdrawn as you please, but he wasn’t a landscape or a bowl of fruit – or even Micklethwaite’s Derby winner. He was a human being, and had now, indeed, risen and picked up that teacup with the evident intention of suggesting its replenishment by his daughter. He had to be brought in, and kept in, on the impending negotiation.

  ‘. . . to paint your portrait,’ Bibury said.

  ‘You are very kind, Sir Charles.’ Scurl’s features didn’t much go in for any change of expression. It is characteristic of the depressive that he wears a mask. But now Scurl was looking at his interlocutor with a definite hint of surprise. It was clear that this was the first the man had heard of the thing, or at least the first occasion upon which he had permitted himself to register it. At the same time, he had spoken in a tone of extraordinary courtesy. Swinburne himself – Swinburne had for some reason been in Bibury’s head – could not have received a proposal from G. F. Watts with more of aristocratic graciousness. Bibury fleetingly wondered whether the Scurls – it was a dreadful name – had in fact come over with the Conqueror. ‘If my memory does not betray me,’ Scurl went on, ‘nobody has taken my likeness hitherto.’

  This was sufficiently old world, but academic rather than positively archaic. When you painted a Provost or a Principal or a President of some college or another the activity was likely to be described as ‘taking a likeness’ in such formal letters as you received. And that relevant words had been coaxed out of Scurl at all was something that Bibury found encouraging.

  ‘There’s just one small difficulty,’ he went on. ‘I’ve already mentioned it to your daughter. It’s the matter of the time-element involved.’

  ‘You have certainly mentioned that,’ Mrs Blond said with a touch of asperity. It hadn’t been of a ‘small’ difficulty that she had heard before, and she was probably now thinking that Bibury was having second thoughts as a consequence of her offering that fat cheque. ‘But we are quite delighted,’ she added instantly and cordially, ‘that the thing will definitely come off.’

  Bibury didn’t much take to this. Mrs Blond, although doubtless an ornament of good society, was a commonplace and even slightly common little woman in comparison with her afflicted but distinguished father.

  ‘It so happens,’ Bibury went on, ‘that within the next few days I have to be off to New York to fulfil a number of commissions. There’s no getting out of it, and it’s a matter of several months. But I’d get back as soon as I could – say by the end of May or the middle of June – and we’d get cracking. How about it?’ Bibury was pleased with the briskness of these colloquial expressions, and also by the fact that he had now spoken the truth of the matter.

  ‘You must in no way incommode yourself,’ Scurl said. ‘For have we not world enough and time?’ This ought to have been encouraging, but was not so in fact. Its tone, although courteous still, had been without any warmth of interest. One simply had to remember, Bibury told himself, that despite an inflexible adherence to the forms Ambrose Scurl was never other than very far away. Or down – fathoms-deep in his smothering dejection. His daughter, on the other hand, was all there, and she immediately took up the running with the clear objective of pressing home what she saw as an advantage.

  ‘But, Sir Charles,’ she said, ‘if you were able to delay your departure by a week or ten days, might the portrait not be achieved within that space of time? Of course I know little of such things.’

  ‘That, my dear lady, I have to believe.’ Bibury perhaps surprised himself by the severity of this response. But it was as if the woman had been about to propose paying him overtime – and as if, too, she had relegated his mystery to the mechanic employments. But was that quite the state of the case? Was she not prompted to her unseemly urging of haste by some tolerably legitimate apprehension? Bibury stole a searching glance at the sadly superannuated philosopher. Scurl was, of course, in extreme old age – or at least in what, even at the present day in his class and country, must be regarded as the next thing to it. In her letter the lady had frankly owned to this as a point of anxiety, so perhaps her father’s health was under some threat that was not immediately apparent. Though not yet visibly wasting away, the man was undoubtedly haggard – a fact which possibly one was inclined to discount as attributable to his vastly obvious nervous condition. If there was danger here, it would be only humane to go easy with the lady.

  ‘Unless we were thinking merely of a sketch,’ Bibury therefore said, ‘it really wouldn’t do. It would be unfair both to the painter and to his subject.’

  ‘Then we must dismiss the notion.’ As usual, Mrs Blond was quick at tactical retreat. ‘Only give us good notice, Sir Charles, of the date on which you will turn up. A room must be made ready for the work. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Turn up?’ The philosopher, who had been at his most melancholy-remote during these exchanges, suddenly spoke with a sharpness quite new in him. ‘There will be no question of preparing a room. I will naturally wait on Sir Charles in his studio. The Rolls, my dear child, is extremely comfortable, and Graham is a most reliable man. There will be no difficulty at all.’

  With this speech – and rather surprisingly – Ambrose Scurl got to his feet, bowed with gravity to his daughter’s guest, shook hands, and walked from the room.

  II

  So in due season, and with Bibury’s American commitments honourably behind him, the sittings began. But although the month was June – and in London a June as
flawless as the month’s elevated social character deserved – Ambrose Scurl appeared to have carried into it a rather wintry suggestion of cough and cold. The chauffeur called Graham, who shared with Scurl’s butler his air of considerable sadness no doubt contracted by a species of infection from their employer, had to dive into that comfortable car and do a good deal of unsheathing of rugs and mufflers before the philosopher was decanted from it and ushered into Bibury’s studio. And Scurl soon revealed himself as a testing sitter. It wasn’t that he at all consciously ‘posed’. He didn’t preserve a sufficiently lively awareness of what was going on to be doing that. But there was something about him that came to almost the same thing. It was as if here were a professional model, a nude girl perched on a little dais, bored and with a high command of professionally acquired immobility. Bibury knew, of course, that in a sense this was what he was painting: a man absent from his surroundings, and from himself as well, for long stretches of time. Had Scurl, in fact, been a healthy young female innocently unclad in the interest of art this would have mattered very little. But serious portraiture cannot be achieved without some sort of rapport between artist and subject, and anything like that was substantially lacking. Fancifully, Bibury told himself that he would almost be resigned to catching the dumps of Graham and the butler if it would put him firmly on the same wave-length as Schopenhauer’s Hampstead epigone. But this wasn’t possible – simply because he was himself constitutionally disposed to look on the comfortable side of things.

  He had naturally developed over the years a fairly extensive repertory of dodges for coping with one type of sitter or another. Stodgy ones, self-conscious ones, and those frozen up or uneasily exuberant: he had an adequate manner, appropriate chit-chat, for them all. Dead-silly women, and men who, finding themselves in what they judged to be a ‘Bohemian’ environment, indulged in lascivious reminiscences: he had no difficulty with these either. But Scurl was a tougher test. It wasn’t that he was obstinately silent. If Bibury offered a commonplace remark, he frequently, although not invariably, received some sort of courteous response. As at his daughter’s tea-table, Scurl’s politeness was unfaltering without ever being awkwardly excessive.

  ‘You must always say,’ Bibury had explained on the occasion of the first sitting, ‘if you want to take a bit of a breather. Being stared at can be rather a bore – and even a strain at times. It’s the sense of being measured out in millimetres, I think. So do get up and wander round. There are just a few things in the studio that might interest you.’

  ‘Thank you. I will avail myself of your kindness at need. How incredible that any rational man could have taken it into his head that our universe is the handiwork of an omnipotent and benevolent creator.’

  So abrupt a dive into theology was disconcerting, but Bibury did his best to keep his end up in face of it.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that’s what the Manichaeans felt they were coping with.’

  ‘There is certainly much to be said for the view that Adam was Satan’s supreme creation. It is most kind of you to have your servant entertain Graham to tea.’ This further daunting inconsequence was succeeded by a long period of silence, and then Scurl spoke again. ‘They contrived, you know, both to crucify him and to flay him alive. It must have been a considerable technical achievement, and constitutes—does it not?—a striking excess of the odium theologicum. But the Persians always go in for undue elaboration. Consider their carpets. Let me not neglect to transmit to you, my dear Sir Charles, my daughter’s kind regards. Mani’s thought was no doubt rashly syncretic. But the admonishments of the Magians were undeniably on the drastic side.’

  It was only after three or four sittings that Bibury began to suspect that this wandering talk on the triste philosopher’s part was linked to an increasing physical disability. The cough was gaining ground and had become positively sinister in suggestion. The sittings grew shorter – and patently on instructions received by Graham from Mrs Blond. A cheerless Graham would enter the studio with wraps over his arm, and that would be that. Bibury was at once acquiescent in this slightly unusual drill. Better the Rolls than an ambulance – or, for that matter, an undertaker’s van. That last thought was almost certainly a product of undue alarm, since Bibury was intuitively aware that his sitter’s physique was not of the kind that issues in a sudden dropping dead. But the man wasn’t merely unwell; he was now wasting away. After a few more sessions Bibury was sure of it. He also saw that as the sittings grew shorter and were reduced to a couple in the week the exercise looked like extending itself over several months. He was, in fact, taking the likeness – endeavouring to keep up with the changing lineaments – of a patently dying man! At what point, he asked himself, was he to arrest on his canvas this process of dissolution? For how far ought he to call upon his art to pursue the mortal tenement of Ambrose Scurl within the obscuring, finally the obliterating shades? Such questions were bizarre indeed.

  It occurred to him that his own involvement in whatever impended could be a little curtailed were he to adopt Mrs Blond’s first notion that the sittings should take place in Hampstead. There was always a good deal of the vexatious in such an altered arrangement, particularly in regard to the changed lighting resulting from it. And there was awkwardness in speaking or writing to Scurl’s daughter about such fresh dispositions. His own apprehensiveness over the philosopher’s physical health was perhaps exaggerated, and might needlessly disturb the lady. He decided to bide his time.

  The result was a period during which the philosopher’s depressive state intensified. Steadily, he appeared to possess less and less even of surface awareness of what was going on. There were, of course, those expressions of courtesy. Such things are not required to have more than a modicum of feeling behind them. But with Scurl they now plainly had none at all. It was merely that, in early years about which Bibury possessed no information, standards of behaviour had been fed into the man, and now remained there when he was almost ceasing to be a man at all.

  It was all the more disconcerting in that, just now and then, coherence and a fleeting command of intellectual concepts would emerge. Or Scurl would utter, but with a strange tonelessness, scraps of verse. They were most often by A.E. Housman, and occasionally by Thomas Hardy, or by some poet Bibury couldn’t identify. ‘Ashes under Uricon,’ he might say obscurely. Or he would walk to a window – from which there was a charming view – and turn to inform the painter that high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation. Tempted to experiment, Bibury contrived to leave on a table a volume reproducing some of Durer’s engravings. And Scurl did look at it.

  ‘Ah,’ Scurl said – but listlessly. ‘Melancholy. The speculative intellect, though winged, is baffled amid the litter of its instruments. A powerful thing. I can recall being much taken by it when a child.’

  ‘The Melencolia 1,’ Bibury said gently. ‘There were to be two others, I believe, only Dürer never got round to them. I’ve read that he knew a lot about melancholy, and suffered periods of deep depression.’ Bibury was ashamed of this fishing even as he indulged it. But Scurl had already turned away, as from something without significance. It was clear that the man wouldn’t readily be tempted to exchange, so to speak, sitting behind a painter’s easel for lying on an amateur psychoanalyst’s couch. Bibury remembered the brandy and soda, and tried drink, although at a most inappropriate afternoon hour. Scurl accepted vodka without demur, but it made not the slightest difference to him. Bibury himself, on the other hand, it considerably upset. Such an experiment, freakish even if trivial, suggested that he was somehow becoming obsessed by his odd sitter. His hours with him were turning distinctly dispiriting. Thinking again of Graham and that butler, he realised that their employer wasn’t merely gloomy himself. He was also, and insidiously, a cause of gloom in other men. The sooner one was shut of the dreary and ailing old chap the better. So Bibury pushed on with the portrait with as much speed as he could conscientiously contrive.

  But soon there came a perp
lexing development. Scurl continued to ail – so rapidly and drastically that Bibury had to consider putting himself in communication with Mrs Blond with the aim of stopping the whole thing. But he felt that this course would be extremely difficult. It would be tantamount to saying to the woman: ‘Look, your father’s health is deteriorating so fast, and having so drastic an effect on his appearance, that I no longer know what I’m trying to put on my canvas.’ It was a proposition so grotesque and unexampled (or, if exampled, never in an instance he had heard of) that he couldn’t imagine himself by any means whatever articulating it to the lady. He even came to wonder whether it would not be best to feign illness or even permanent disability in himself. There were those terrible things that sometimes happened to an artist’s eyes – to Degas’s, for instance, or yet more terribly to Piero della Francesca’s. But Bibury, unlike Piero, had no flair for mathematics. He would have to remain a painter, and one conscious of having told an innocent woman a thumping lie. Bibury was startled at finding himself nursing such stupid fantasies. But they persisted, and got in the way of his work.

  It was through a vision thus at least metaphorically clouded that he presently became aware of a freshly disconcerting fact. Scurl, although he continued to ail, didn’t continue consistently dreary. He began to go in for what could only be called fits – or at first no more than glints, gleams – of excitement. He chattered – briefly but alarmingly. On several occasions he produced incomprehensible jokes that were like wild laughter in the throat of death. Although latterly able to move only on Graham’s arm, he would contrive to get on his feet unaided and totter with a kind of desperate curiosity round the studio. He managed to find the Melencolia 1 again, and was amused by what he called the ‘doggie’ contorted in it bottom-left. Bibury had thought of his sitter as permanently and, as it were, reliably sad. He now concluded that he was very much of the up-and-down sort. Bibury got hold of an appropriate textbook and read a chapter on manic-depressive psychosis. It was informative, but couldn’t be called particularly wholesome stuff. He began – as everybody does who seeks instruction about such matters – a good deal to wonder about himself. He hadn’t ever in his life felt less cheerfully disposed.