Читать книгу Richard Temple - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 7

He did not win any scholarship, not even the smallest; the recollection of this time arose cold and dark in his mind – the first adult, whole and irremediable unhappiness. It mingled with that of his father’s death, though this was an emotion that also overflowed into diffuse awe, agitation and excitement, as well as sorrow and dread of the void; and the visual image for both was the same. It was the cross-piece of his window, black against the shining grey of the sky, while the cold twilight filled the room behind him and all comfort drained out of it: he sat there so long on the floor gazing up in that wretched time between the examinations and the results and so long when all his worst suspicions (although they had been exaggerated to take off the curse) became the facts that he was to go to bed with; and in the same way he sat there some weeks later, in the same silent, cold, uncoloured light, during those unending hours when there were strangers in the house and his father was to be buried.

Llewelyn Temple had been kind when the news came. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Richard bâch, but there it is. Perhaps it is all for the best. We must try not to be too disappointed.’ It was the kindest thing he had ever said, and the sudden spurt of tremulous affection that Richard had felt then had not died away in twenty years.

Perhaps it was all for the best: it was certainly not entirely for the worst. At all events it turned out to be nothing like the terrifying fate that he had imagined. Before the new rector came to take his dead father’s place they moved to a cottage within bicycling distance of Easton Colborough, and he went to the local grammar school.

The school at Easton had remained very much what it was when it was founded, some four hundred years before, a place of instruction for the boys of the town and the immediate countryside. Its meagre endowment had tempted no man’s cupidity, and it had neither become a minor public school nor part of the state’s system of education. It was a grammar school: the chief subject was grammar, Latin grammar, and the boys bawled their way through hic haec hoc as their predecessors had always done. The great part of the school was housed in one vast barn-like hall which had three classes in it, three separate classes with three masters and three distinguishable pandemoniums; the noise in this hall seemed to be quite chaotic, but somewhere in the din there would always be a pack of boys going through their hic haec hoc. The cobwebs in the bare rafters had stirred to this noise for centuries, and it was not likely that the school would change its ways now: in all these years it had never turned out a classical scholar of any reputation, but perhaps that had never been its intention – although up to the end of the eighteenth century it still sent a few boys on to the university. It was certainly not its intention now. Its intentions, as far as it was conscious of having any, were simple and direct: for a small fee it sold a small amount of information. It taught the boys a certain amount of Latin and a little history and geography: it prepared them for no examination, and it no longer had any notion of their going any further; it took the boys in at any age their parents saw fit to send them and it kept them until they were thought wise enough, which was usually between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. The cleverest boys might come to read Cicero or Ovid with some degree of ease, though scarcely with enjoyment, but the dull boys would learn nothing but their copy-books and the majority went off with little more than the three Rs. However, this satisfied the town; and certainly the boys were a very decent lot, upon the whole. They were far more tolerant than the boys of Grafton, and they received him without any of the inquisition or ill-treatment that he had dreaded. They formed an almost classless society, in which parents’ status was accidental and of little importance; and in this society accent counted for nothing – some of the country boys spoke broad and some of the town boys spoke with a nasal whine, but it made no odds: after a week it was imperceptible.

In its way it was a very restful school. There were no games at all except those which the boys played by themselves for fun, and with scarcely a sigh Richard abandoned the tightly-organised ritual of cricket and football (as well as the more sophisticated delights of Grafton) and took to the ancient, common, childish games of marbles (called alleys here), conquerors and tops. He had never spun a top in his life before, but presently he learnt, being taught by a broad-faced, kind, hoarse boy, a love-child who was brought up with the son of the farm where the love-token had passed, and who looked exactly like a Flemish Boor.

Out of the vagueness of musing recollection, while he was trying to build up the brown planes of Jocelyn’s face there came a sudden precise detailed brilliant image of the market at Easton Colborough, of himself standing there with Jocelyn and the boy who shared his desk – Ham, the posthumous son of a turncock, a mother’s boy with a girlish nature and a sweet and gentle look. It was the half-holiday, and Richard was coming from Miss Theobald’s drawing-class through the market-place, where the week-long desert was cram-packed with sheep, pigs, cattle, poultry, bright red ploughs, blue harrows, pedlars, hucksters, bone-setters and respectable long-established stalls that sold harness, saddles, brasses, girths, curry-combs and plaited whips.

It was one of those days full of limpid air, when white clouds pass across the sky, and the light changes. They were standing on the north side of the market, between the part where the horses were and the outer range of stalls. On the right there was a flimsy trestle set out with cards of celluloid studs and cuff-links, brilliantly striped, penknives with many blades, patent glasscutters and frail inventions for slicing beans; and on the left, on the other side of the cobbled way, in a pen by himself stood an enormous horse, a bright bay Shire gelding with his mane and tail done up with scarlet ribbons, Jocelyn, the boor-like boy, stared with love and admiration at the horse; Ham and Richard, turning from the bean-slicers, looked at it without much understanding, and while they stood there the horse straddled and staled. It stared intently straight before it, and from its huge extruded mottled yard gushed a foaming jet of piss, inordinate in quantity. Jocelyn laughed, chuckled hoarsely: he was delighted. He said, ‘You ought to draw him. He would be worth drawing.’ Ham walked on, blushing; but Richard stared – he was amazed, not only by the particular grandeur of this horse, but also because he had never seen a gelding stale before, and because it was indeed worth drawing. Partly because of its size and its rigid, unaccustomed pose, partly because of its dangling penis (so startling) and partly because of some quality of the light he was suddenly seeing a horse for the first time – an intimation of the ideal horse.

They moved on, lingering past a man who wished to sell them a gold watch wrapped in a ten-shilling note for sixpence, providing they could tell the right packet from the packets full of chaff, and dawdled through the penetrating reek of swine to the herbalist’s, where a grave, attentive crowd looked at a picture of a transparent man, or rather of a partially transparent man, for where none of his vitals were concerned he was solid enough: only here and there his purple liver, his spleen and bowels showed through. His bearded face, however, with its serious and evangelical expression was scarcely one that could rightly belong to an undressed body, far less to a transparent one; it floated on another plane, surrounded by pinned-up shrivelled plants, a dusty halo; and there were other bunches round the body below, with ribbons leading from them to the parts they healed, and with a wand the herbalist pointed them out as he described the diseases. Rising of the lights; strangury; horseshoehead and head-mouldshot; dropsy, marthambles, the strong fives and the moon-pall; stone; gravel; pox. Some of the audience were willing to pay their money early on – there were shillings and half-crowns held up in the air – but the herbalist would not stop or spare them anything; in a high, unfriendly, didactic voice he went right on through cancer, consumption, bloody flux, the quinsy and worms. Jocelyn and Ham, shocked and fascinated, stayed on; but Richard was still amazed by his discovery of the horse and he was unreceptive; and as he also had a message to deliver he left them standing there.

He went up one of the steep lanes that led towards the High Street, and as he turned the corner the bawling of the calves, the squealing, baaing, roaring and shouting of the market place died to a mild composite hum: only by some freak of acoustics a single voice pursued him up the lane, calling out with passionate conviction, ‘Honest Bill Podpiece. Honest Bill Podpiece gives everyone a chance. Some has a watch, some has chaff. I will not deceive you, gents: pick the right one and you get a valuable prize. Come on, gents, a gold watch for a tanner – you only have to pick the right one, gents …’

He turned into the broad, mild splendour of the High Street and stood looking up and down it, for his message was to Mr Atherton, who would be painting there: on the left was the barbican, then the pink brick and white stone court-house with its curving flight of steps and the royal arms in its pediment, then a long row of bow-fronted shops; on the right the Harp and Crown with its enormous sign, the Palladian corn-exchange and the little Regency theatre, followed by a recessed line of the grander houses of the town, with white steps, green doors and brass knockers. The pavement in front of these houses was remarkably broad, wider than the street, and this allowed one to see round the ascending curve to the Norman towers of Saint John’s, which closed the vista. Mr Atherton’s easel was there, far off on the corner of Butter Lane, and the back of his canvas could be seen, a sudden white square against the soft, diversified background; from time to time little knots of people gathered behind it, to look with that invariable penetrating knowing glance from the canvas to the view and back again. But there were not many of them, and they did not stay – the town had known Mr Atherton, man and boy, for more than seventy years: he was an Academician, and they were proud of him; furthermore he had a way of lunging backwards and stabbing the air (and sometimes those who bored him) with a loaded brush.

It was to avoid this that Richard stepped forward and delivered his message: Miss Theobald was sure that Mr Atherton would not forget Mrs James at five o’clock.

‘Oh, it is you, is it? Thank you, thank you, Richard,’ he said. ‘I shall not forget her. What did you say her name was?’ He stared shrewdly at his picture, with both Richard and Mrs James receding from his mind: he could pin the floating tower by making the tree much more determined. He worked else to the easel for five minutes and then stood back again. ‘No. It was a mistake,’ he said, resuming the low monologue that always accompanied his painting, ‘a bloody error – should have left it alone – that silly green – vexed. Now I shall have to start again. Why did the old fool daub on the green?’

Richard gazed at the picture. The High Street itself did not move him – the High Street pure remained unseen: but the High Street on canvas, filtered through Mr Atherton, stirred him profoundly – once he had seen it in pictorial terms it acquired a new prestige. The picture seemed to him excellent: he could not see why Mr Atherton was unsatisfied. And indeed no one could deny that the picture was wonderfully accomplished, from the technical point of view: as for the Venetian light that bathed Easton Colborough’s corn-exchange, Richard thought it a great improvement. But whereas Richard at that time knew nothing about Guardi, Mr Atherton did, and he turned away from his easel with a sigh. ‘I shall not do any more today,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come back with me? We can do a little drawing until this woman arrives.’

They walked off, with Richard carrying the easel respectfully and attentively, a symbol of their religion, and at the next turning they left the gentle business of the High Street for the tree-lined quiet of Hog Lane and the alley labelled No Thoroughfare that led to the green garden door in the wall.

‘Mind the easel in the fig,’ said Mr Atherton. ‘That reminds me, I must tell you about fig-tree sap as a medium. You use the milk from the young shoots on the south side. Cenino says …’

They came to the door, a lumpish green door in a brick wall covered with rank ivy – a door which opened outward and brushed against the ivy, so that whenever Richard passed through it he smelt the coarse green smell of the leaves, and damp and snails; but every time he passed through it and closed it behind him, he stepped into the scent of turpentine and paint, for although the door had all the appearance of a garden door it opened straight into the studio, a quiet, vast, luminous room with soft dust on the floor, and canvases and stretchers against the walls, frames, buckets here and there to catch drips, a model’s throne, three easels: a benign great place, a world in itself.

Miss Theobald was Mr Atherton’s god-child and cousin; she lived with him and she kept the living part of the house in a state of old maid’s cleanliness; but this was not occupation enough for her boundless maiden energy and for the last twenty years she had been running drawing-classes in the town. In almost every one of these years she had found a budding Michael Angelo and had brought him to Mr Atherton; but she was more enthusiastic than discerning and in spite of his benevolence Mr Atherton had grown so disgusted by a succession of mediocre young people who would not work that he had sworn never to put himself in the way of disappointment again – no more prodigies: and he would never have broken his oath this time without an uncommon certainty of talent.

He had had a good many disappointments, and the earliest and most striking of these was Miss Theobald herself; for it was he who had encouraged her as a child and it was he who throughout her adolescence had insisted upon conscientious work and had taught her the arduous, painstaking techniques that would ensure her productions a dreadful immortality: the children with huge feet and cheeks like buttocks, the fubsy bunnies and the pussies would last a thousand years. However, this did not affect his belief in hard work as something of more than rational value; and by hard work he meant primarily drawing, all kinds of drawing, from plaster cones and prisms to the most elaborate anatomical studies. In an appropriate, tall cupboard he kept a skeleton, mounted upon lead-alloy wire; he encouraged Richard to draw it from every angle, and he often joined in the holy exercise himself. But he also attached great importance to the crafts of the studio, and Richard ground colours until he was first blistered and then calloused from the wear of the pestle. He grew intimately acquainted not only with linseed, sunflower and poppyseed oil, egg tempera, wax emulsions and so on, but also with the more recondite preparations of honey, rabbit-skin size and Armenian bole; and he was obliged to make his own stretcher and stretch his own canvas upon it before ever he was allowed to begin to lay on the paints that he himself had ground. Mr Atherton could do all these things well: his manual dexterity could have earned him a comfortable living as a handyman if a revolution had made it necessary, and he valued it highly in others. His aesthetics were much simpler, being summed up in the expression, ‘Theory is all stuff.’ The only exceptions to this broad statement were some parts of Reynolds’s Discourses; but as far as Richard was concerned no exception was called for – he worked for the delight of working and wasting no time in asking why some shapes, colours, textures made him happy. Indeed, Mr Atherton had never had a harder-working pupil, one who came voluntarily all through the summer holidays; and once, when he found that Richard was unable to construe Sir Joshua’s serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco, he warned him solemnly that he must not neglect his Latin and his sums, and all that sort of thing, as being of the greatest use in after-life.

So his time went by, in a golden haze, and memory did not serve to break it down into its elements: it remained an infinitely distant period of normality, when happiness was in the natural order of events. In those days he passed continually from one world to another (or even between three, if his low school, his upper-middle-class Philistine home and Mr Atherton’s studio were all to be set at equal intervals) but it scarcely worried him, and if at odd moments he had a suspicion that he did not entirely belong to any one of them, that he did not quite seem to belong anywhere, it did not then seem to have any immediate importance. After all, his mother was always there at home; school was not at all unpleasant, but for the confinement and the waste of time; and he could at least aspire to Mr Atherton’s spacious way of life.

In this golden haze he could not now distinguish near and far: he could scarcely make out its most general chronology, even after probing back to link events with the seasons in which they occurred; but it must have lasted for years – perhaps for three. Most of the time, as he remembered it, seemed to have been summer; and certainly it was summer when first he began painting the backgrounds to Mr Atherton’s big commissioned canvases. The umber landscape came back to him, the first one he ever did, with its four brown trees in the distance: then again he was painting Mrs Foster’s shoes, handbag and parasol, left for the purpose; and at another time Apollo’s hams, under the admiring gaze of Colonel Apse, who was to occupy the middle of the heroic picture, a more gentlemanly Mars, and who posed to that effect, in moistened drapery, all August through. But there must have been winters too, for he saw the lonely pond again, and felt the thin ice bow as he skated round and round in the gathering darkness. He was alone and it was perfectly silent except for his skates and the strange pervasive sighing of the ice as it bent; the outlines of the pond were vague – blurred scraggy trees rearing up as he sped by – and the ice was black. In his delight he raced across the middle from time to time, promising, if he passed over the thinnest ice again, that he would do whatever he most disliked. What was it? That had faded past recall (some domestic virtue, no doubt); but he remembered the peculiar silence of the cold – the cold’s own silent nature – and his solitary dark flying on the ice.