A portrait on a summer terrace
My phone rang when I was on the loo.
“I’m working for The Guardian,” he announced.
Well good for you, I thought.
“Yes?” I asked. I had noticed the toilet roll was used up
and was wondering whether I dared call my wife for assistance.
“I am calling about your uncle’s obituary,” he said.
“He is not dead,” I replied.
He let out the most appalling laugh, the sort of loud,
fluting sound one might hear from malign bird in a malarial swamp somewhere.
“No, no, you misunderstand,” he said. “We have a file of obituaries ready for
press, just in case. Naturally we get them down off the shelf and dust them off
a little now and then, to make sure they’re ready to use if we need them.”
My uncle was in fact frail, but I doubted if he knew that.
“I don’t think there is much to add,” I said. “He stopped painting quite
suddenly when he was a young man and told no-one why, as you will know. He went
to teach in a secondary modern in the North-East. Frankly he did nothing of note
thereafter.”
 |
| Albert_Edelfelt (1854-1905), The Parisienne (Virginie),1883 |
“I understand.” He paused a moment. “I should say that I do
also write, now and then, on art. I have therefore been able to add certain
details, and it may be wise if they’re checked. Besides, obituary apart, one
should love to know why things ended as they did.”
“He’s told no-one in 60 years,” I said, “and I doubt he will
tell me now. But if you wish you may send me a text with your name, in case
that should change.” I thought for a moment. “Perhaps you would email me a copy
of the obituary you have?” I asked. “It will be fastest for me simply to check
it, and update it if necessary.”
“I shall. Thank you,” he said, and emitted another avian
shriek. Any man with a laugh like that, I thought, must surely dismember small
mammals in the night.
He rang off. I heard my wife’s footsteps in the kitchen
outside.
“Jane, darling!” I called.
“In the cupboard above you,” she said wearily.
*
He did send the draft obituary and I sat down at my desk to
read it. The main facts of Uncle Tom’s life were known to me, of course. Birth
in postwar austerity, in a coastal coal village in the North-East where the seams went out under the sea. (“It
was a shithole,” he told me once, when I was in my teens. “But the people were
OK, weren’t they, Uncle Tom?” I asked, almost anxious. “It was a shithole,” he
repeated.) The father whose chest was weak, and took what work he could; the
mother who’d borne three boys before him, all three of whom worked in the mine
like the rest of the village and did not live to be old. Then the art master
who saw something he did not expect. The scholarship to art college. The loan
of a King’s Road studio. The shock of The Dying God, which was still in
the Museum of Modern Art, though they rarely hung it. The summer in Tuscany
with the Contessa Clara della Rovercella, whose portrait he was to have
painted, but did not. The…
“What?” said Jane. She came into my study, wiping glue off
her hands; she had been mending a teacup.
“Who,” I asked, “was, or is, the Contessa Clara della
Rovercella?”
“I have heard that name.” She sat down on the edge of the
sofa, avoiding the books and papers strewn there. “Wasn’t she some fashionable
socialite back in the 1960s? Often seen in the art world, I think.”
“According to this, he was to have painted her. But didn’t.”
“Why don’t you search her?”
I did. A string of results came up, but most were old
newspaper headlines, some in Italian or German. The Wikipedia item was only two
or three paragraphs; it confirmed that she had been a noted socialite and added
that she was a patron and collector of modern art. The faded news pictures
suggested that she had been quite lovely. The birth date was uncertain.
“It seems Uncle Tom spent a summer in Tuscany with her,” I
said. “And she was rather beautiful.”
“My goodness. She was, wasn’t she,” said Jane, looking over
my shoulder.“ Is she still alive?”
“No.” A brief obituary had appeared in The Times
about 30 years earlier.
“Well, fancy the crafty old sod not mentioning her,” I said.
“I’m going to see him on Saturday. I shall ask him about it.”
“Are you sure you should?” she asked.
*
I never liked visiting Uncle Tom; but that was not his
fault. He had been kind to me when I was a child. I remembered sitting on his
knee and daubing the rough grey paper he always put on his easel so that I
could play. In later years he said little, but always welcomed me, and later
Jane too, when we passed through the North-East on our way to Scotland. Even
now he greeted me warmly. But he said less than ever, and the care home
depressed me; a converted Edwardian businessman’s home, large, detached,
extended, in its own grounds, yet somehow lacking in warmth. The staff were
kind but busy. When he had moved at last from his cottage, some well-meaning
soul found an old easel in it, and brought it down to stand in his room; but at
first the staff stood it in front of the window, where it blocked off his light
until I moved it. Now that he could no longer easily get out of bed, a nurse
would come to help him to the toilet – a quick, clinical process that I felt
must depress him though he gave no sign of it. I blessed the older nurse who,
as she helped him, always talked to him about something else; the weather, the
World Cup, a volcano lately erupted in Indonesia. He knew why she did it and
she knew he knew but that was not the point and he liked her for it, and so did
I.
I parked, and picked up the The Economist, which I
always brought for him though I was unsure if he still read it, and a recent
detective novel whose author he had said he liked. I went into the hall, signed
my name and my time of arrival and jotted down my number plate. In his room, I
found him lying back on the pillows; lately he had begun to sleep more in the
day, but today he was wide awake.
“Thought you’d come today,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s raining. You can’t work in the garden, can you? And
Jane can’t drag you out shopping. So you come round here.”
“Still a Northerner, aren’t you, Uncle Tom,” I said.
“How is she, all right?”
“She’s good,” I said.
“She’s not good. She’s well,” he said. “Silly modern
language.”
“All the same in the
end, isn’t it,” I said.
“I know that. But that’s me, isn’t it. When I finally bugger
off, they’ll all say what a grumpy old man I was,” he said. “Right to the end.”
“That’s it. Grumpy Old Sod Dies at 110, it’ll say on
your obit,” I said.
“Obit of me! No bugger’s going to bother, I’ll tell you that
now,” he said.
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Matter of fact I meant to
tell you. I got this call from a man at The Guardian on Thursday. He was
a little odd.”
“Well, he would be, from The Guardian, wouldn’t he.
What did a bloke from the papers want with you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “He was interested in you.”
“Oh.”
He looked at me, and there was a sudden caution.
“He was updating your obituary,” I said.
“I’m not dead yet, the cheeky sod.”
”I did tell him that. But they update and fact-check them
now and then.”
“So I suppose it was all about how I was born in a blast
furnace and sent down the mine when I were nine years old and made to torture
pit ponies,” he said.
“Didn’t know about the ponies. I’ll tell him.” I took out
the printout of the draft obit. “One thing I meant to ask you. Who was the
Contessa della Rovercella?”
He looked at me again but said nothing, and his face was
like thunder. Then he looked away, and his face seemed to soften and split into
many parts.
“She was,” he said, “beautiful.”
*
“it was the year I painted The Dying God. Roddy
Miles-Brett had lent me his studio in the King’s Road. He hadn’t been painting
much that spring. I had told him I wanted to paint this allegory, of a God
disintegrating – into artefacts… Cogs and nuts and suchlike and a TV. But
you’ve seen it, haven’t you? It was that April it came to me. It was the famous
Time cover that month. Is God
Dead? it said, in stark red letters on a black background. Its articles
asked, had Nietzsche been right? Had the selfish nature of Man destroyed God?
Did we now seek a theology without religion? The cover, and the issue, was a
scandal at the time.
“In any case, I was finishing the piece. It was a late
afternoon in May; we had had cold weather that spring, but that day was warm
and there was that very clean light, so unlike the summer in London then, and
it was streaming through the skylight, although it was coated in grime; the air
was dirty then. I was in a good mood as the work was nearly done. I caught a
feminine scent on the air, and turned round. Roddy was standing there, in his
brown tweed herringbone jacket and his green tie, his hair just a little too
long. And with him was a slim woman of about thirty in a white summer dress,
her hair a thick, glossy chestnut, her eyes a deep blue, her face split by a
challenging, brilliant smile; and there was a delicacy, a compelling femininity
about her. My heart flew, and I at once felt like a clumsy hulk in her
presence; a Caliban, or Grendel.
“’Thomas,’ said Roddy, ‘this is the Contessa Maria Clara
della Rovercella.’
“’Really, Roddy,’ she said, smiling, ‘Chiara will do.’ Her
voice was low and smooth. And I swear my bowels turned to water.”
He stopped for a moment then, and his head relaxed back onto
the pillow; I wondered if he had lost the thread. I was about to prompt him,
but he continued:
“’What on earth is that painting about?’ she asked, and I
replied, ‘It’s called The Dying God.’ Her eyes opened wide. ‘Oh, my
goodness me,’ she said, and crossed herself.
“Clara is a good Catholic girl,’ said Roddy.
“‘Oh, do shut up, Roddy,’ she said, and hit his arm with her
glove; but she started laughing. Then she stopped, and turned to me. ‘Will you
tell me about it?’ she asked. ‘If you wish. If you do not insist – as some do?
– that a piece speak for itself.’
“So I began to explain – about Nietzsche’s phrase, about
what he had meant by it and what he did not, that he did not propose a literal
death of God. And I talked about the recent Time cover, and where
theology could go in a world where the spiritual dimension was being ripped
away. She seemed to follow me closely, asking a question or prompting briefly
here or there. After some time Roddy tried to interrupt, fearful I think that
she would be bored; but she shushed him gently. I felt the entire object of her
attention; I would find that she could do that, and you would reveal to her
your very soul.
“In the weeks that followed I saw her now and then, at
exhibitions, or at picnics on the river, or garden parties with other former
students. Roddy I saw less and less. Then one day I received two notes. The
first was a brief – very brief – note from Roddy; he required the return of his
studio at an early date. I was puzzled, but moved my belongings to a friend’s
bedsit in a nearby mansion block.
“The other note was in a lavender envelope, and I fancied I
caught her scent. She would return to her home in the Apennines for the summer,
she said; but would I consider joining her after a week or two, and perhaps –
if I wished to – paint an informal portrait of two of her? Her husband had
wanted it done for some time. I wrote at once and assured her I would come. Two
days later, a man arrived from a Kensington travel agent, bearing an envelope
with a ticket for Rome. I was taken aback to see that it was by air.” He looked
at me. “This was 60 years ago, remember. Only the wealthy flew, unless on
business.
“The day before I was to go, I ran into Roddy outside the
Crown in Dovehouse Street. It was early evening but he was rather drunk. ‘I
hear you are going to Clara’s,’ he said. His voice was thick with alcohol, and
was not friendly. I explained that her husband wanted her portrait done. ‘Her husband?’
he said, and laughed – not pleasantly. ‘He spends his time in Tangier.’ I asked
what he would be doing in Tangier. ‘Looking for lithe young boys to bugger,’ he
replied. I must have looked a bit shocked. I began to reply, but he said: ‘Oh,
go away.’ And he went into the bar.
“The next day I went to the West London Air Terminal to
catch the BEA flight to Rome. As I sat on the bus from the Terminal out to
London Airport, I happened to look at my ticket. It was in an envelope from the
travel agent’s, and on the outside the name Roddy Miles-Brett had been crossed
out and replaced with mine. I thought nothing of it.
“And at Rome her driver met me in a blue Lancia saloon.”
He was quiet for a while and this time I did prompt him. “So
what happened, Uncle Tom?”
“What happened? A beautiful summer.” He looked out at the
grey dusk beyond the window; it was wet and blustery, and there were branches
moving in the wind. “It was warm,” he said. “We ate on the terrace that night,
then drank limoncello as the sun went down over the valley below, sending
shafts of late light onto the walls and lighting them with warm tones. I
thought of the grey stone at home, and summer drizzle. Later her maidservant, I
suppose that’s what you’d call her, took me to my room, a large square chamber
with a ceiling of wood beams, and paintings of saints and rural scenes on the
wall, not by expert hands, but oddly beautiful; I judged from the paint that
they were 18th century. In the next few days we sat together on that magic
terrace, drinking what she called limoncello artigianale, made she said
by relatives in Campania. In the evening we would have a simple pasta dish; it
was always good. And we talked. Of art, of course; and books – I read a lot
then. I cannot even remember much of what we said; I can hear only her voice,
low and smooth, he constantly changing expressions, her deep sparkling eyes,
her lustrous hair framing her oval face against the backdrop of the valley and
the cypresses, and one night the westering sun moved round behind her and lit
her hair gold and I said, ‘This is how I shall paint you.’ And she smiled and
said, ‘Bene; così farai; so you shall.’ And I did.”
“So everyone was wrong, Uncle Tom? There was a
painting!”
He did not answer, but looked first at me and then at the
window again; a gust of wind had blown a filigree of spray against the pane.
“I posed her for two nights,” he said. “She sat
straight-backed, but with her legs swung round to her left; she wore a white
evening gown but her feet were bare, and she had arranged a fine silver chain
around her ankle. On the third night she reached to the gown with her fingers
and eased it apart, revealing her breasts; she covered one of them with her
fingertips and left the other bare. Then she watched me as I worked. She could
see that I fought to concentrate. But she knew exactly what she was doing. At
length the light was gone, and I could do no more. Then she stood, her gown
loose across her chest, and took me by the hand and led me to her rooms.”
We stayed silent for a while.
“It ended,” he said, his voice quiet and rather weary. “For
a month or two we were happy. Then she said – quite out of the blue – that we
were spent; that she must welcome others.”
“But you were in love,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And she made you go?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Not long afterwards she was joined by a
wealthy collector from New York. But I found that out later. The day before she
was to go, her chauffeur brought me my ticket back to London. The painting, he
said, was to remain on its easel in my room.”
“And you left.”
“Yes.”
“And no-one ever saw the painting,” I said. I suppose she
wasn’t satisfied with it.”
“It’s toad-in-the-hole tonight!” A cheerful face looked
round the doorway. “You ready, Tom? You keep saying like it’s your favourite!”
“Well, I must admit it is.” He looked up and suddenly he was
smiling.
“Good. And we got some of that HP Sauce you like,” she said.
“Right.” He pointed at me. “Just let me get rid of this
tosser and I’m all yours.”
She chuckled and went off to the trolleys in the corridor.
“It doesn’t matter now, you know,” he said to me. “Maybe it
never did. I came home. I got messages from galleries and art reporters and
that, but I’d been patronised enough; and I never did answer them. In time they
stopped coming. And I went off back north and taught art to schoolboys.
Snot-nosed little sods. But thing is, I knew who they were, do you see? And I
knew who I was too.”
He thought for a moment. The cheerful nurse was wheeling the
meal trolley towards us; I could hear the wheels rumbling in the corridor.
Another gust of rain blew across the window; it was nearly dark.
“I was just some raggedy-arsed clod from a mining village,”
he said. He spoke quite slowly now. “There was nothing there. I’ve told you
before. It was just a shithole.”
“Yes,” I said.
“The place were as ugly as sin and the weather stank and
there was no beauty; no love even; my mum and dad meant well enough but where’s
love when every day’s a struggle. And then suddenly people were looking at me.
And this beautiful creature came wafting into my life. And the cypresses and
the golden light. I was defenceless. Don’t let your world be grey, or you’ll
fall to the first ray of colour that enters it.”
I nodded.
The toad-in-the-hole had arrived, with a bottle of HP Sauce
and a bowl of chips.
“I’ll bugger off now then,” I said.
“Thanks for coming, lad,” he said. “I do like it when you
come.”
I drove home through the rain. Jane had made a spaghetti
sauce. She wanted to watch the figure skating, so we sat and ate together in front
of the TV. At about 10pm my phone buzzed. I wondered if I could be bothered to
answer, but at length swiped it. There was a message to call the nursing home.
Somehow I knew why at once.
*
Two days later I collected Uncle Tom’s belongings, such as
they’d been; he hadn’t kept much when he’d moved in there. The older nurse he
had liked gave me a trunk with his clothes, his books – there weren’t many, but
he’d still liked to read – some letters he had not yet answered, and an a
cardboard box five or six inches deep and about four feet square. The latter
mystified me. “He was adamant,” said the nurse. “He kept it under his bed. He
said as it was to go to you and your lady wife. Don’t let the lawyers snarl it
up, he said. It’s theirs in the will, anyway.” I put everything in the boot,
except the box, which I put on the rear passenger seat. Then I passed quickly
round the floor where his room had been, thanking the staff and shaking hands;
they were kind but busy and it did not take long.
The following afternoon Jane and I went through them
together. The clothes could go to the Oxfam shop. There were a few keepsakes
that we would not want to throw away, though I was not sure what we would do
with them. And there was the cardboard box. “I’ll get a knife,” I said.
She frowned.
“I think,” she said, “that we should open it very
carefully.”
The canvas slid slowly out of the box. I breathed in
sharply. Jane took it and stood it on a chair at the end of the room. The
autumn sun streamed in through the window and lit it with a gentle gold.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”
“He must have taken it when he left Italy,” I said. “And
kept it in this box. I wonder if he ever looked at it.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s seen it for sixty
years.” She sniffed. “Oh, God. She was beautiful. Beautiful,” and I saw her
eyes glistening.
I took her hand.
“Don’t let your world be grey,” I said.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
We knelt together in front of the portrait as the November
sun sank slowly, and it fell into shadow.
________________________________
More short fiction from Mike Robbins
The Key It's more than a key to Fleur
Sport is Character-Forming A migration through a muddy river
It Turns on a Sixpence The CEO has a rotten day
The Man Who Lost the Plot When the character you write is cardboard
The Long Road from the Black Death A history lecturer retires
Who Killed Walter Williams? Don't ask, even now
A Difficult Life When the world dislikes your birth
Come and See the Chickens A rather English love story
In Search of a Plot Be careful. Elspeth may put you in a bacon slicer
A Question of Character Pity the nation...
The End A gun on a brownstone roof
The Last Time A figure skater leaves the ice
After the Flood An end? Or a beginning?
Remembered Time The past is a dangerous place
A Train Journey One's sister comes to visit
Time After Time When you have to warn the children
Fashion Wokeness and subversion. With style
A Time of Darkness History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes
Another Time A tear in the fabric
Evolution The world is turning
When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square
Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala
A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip
A History Lesson Why do we study it? So we can spot it happening
The Creatives Meeting a tech bro
Cold Everything is cold here
Homecoming A sort of love story
Solitude A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography
Hiraeth A yearning…
Strange Places A spirit in the sky
A Sideways Journey Things might have been different
Displaced Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
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