‘The thoughts of our minde can conceive the images of any thing, sayth Tullie. Our thought can conceive any Country, sayth another, and fashion in it such a situation of place as may best agree with our liking. Maximus Tyrius presseth this same point somewhat neerer, when he maintaineth that Invention is proper and naturall unto the minde of man: see Max. Tyrius Dissert. xxviii. Although then a man, for as much as he is a man, cannot but be full of Invention; yet such men as have studied do excell in their Inventions.’
Franciscus Junius,
The Painting of the Ancients, 1638
In the dream Thomas Provis has repeatedly over the next couple of months, he is in a hot air balloon. It rises from St James’s Palace into a pale blue sky, but as the crowd below gasps and cheers all he is aware of are the squeaks and whines of the wicker basket. His hands tremble as they hold tightly to the edges, he is conscious of the sweat on his temples. The louder the cheers become the more sickened he feels. Then he looks up and sees the black cloud.
Yet it isn’t a black cloud. The way it moves is different. As it comes closer he realises it is a murmuration of starlings, striping themselves against the winter sky. The first time they pass over, he becomes aware of the vibrations of hundreds of tiny wings. As they pass again he sees that some are breaking out of the flock to peck at the balloon. At first they have no impact. The balloon continues to rise, and the starlings swoop and dance around him. Then all the birds start pecking at the balloon at once, and it pops, yet still he is suspended in the air. He looks down at his feet, which are treading the air as if he were in water. It is at this point that he normally wakes up.
Though Darton and Opie have assured him that they will not reveal the secret, he does not trust them. His worries devour him from the inside, he feels like a silhouette of a man. The method has been sold, and now the artists of the Academy are preparing their paintings, ready for the critics to confer their final judgement. With every week that passes, Provis and Ann Jemima find the demands to pronounce on the latest experiments becoming more and more urgent.
It is on the second visit to Farington that Provis feels the first fluttering in his chest – as if one of the starlings has become trapped inside him. At first it is mild, but soon it becomes so strong that he has to sit down, coughing. Both Ann Jemima and Farington turn to him in concern, but he waves their anxieties away. He takes a few deep breaths and feels the fluttering die away.
Thoughts jab at his mind all the time now. It was only the daze of bereavement that made him offer to take the girl in. His mother had just died. Wounds had opened up that he thought could give him pain no longer. New grief breeds with old grief, he had ruminated. He regretted the passing of his mother. But he regretted more that it made the grief for his wife and his daughter bleed afresh. The horrors of a decade and a half beforehand walked beside him once more. He talked to his wife and daughter in dreams, wept when the cold mornings woke him and they were no longer there.
He had gone one night to St James’s Coffee House to meet Richard Cosway. He had discovered a rare bronze, a miniature of Laocoön, and thought he might be interested. ‘Beware the Greeks bearing gifts,’ Cosway had quipped. He had regaled him with the strange story of the gawky little girl he had met at a brothel earlier that week. Provis had not wanted to listen. Shreds of words worked their way into his understanding. Then he heard how old the girl was. There was not one day when he did not think of how old his daughter might have been had she lived. Straight away he realised they would have been the same age.
He heard himself, as if in a dream, offering to take her in. He said he would pretend she was his own. Mrs Tullett was his confidante those days, and he had told her his plan. Predictably she was outraged. But his idea was straightforward. The girl would not live with him, he would send her away to school. When the scraggy little thing turned up, he did not warm to her – he just thought of her as a soul saved and packed her off to Highgate in carriage.
It had been, he remembered wryly, her ability to draw that awoke him to the idea there might be some affinity between them. He had visited the school one day, and flicked through one of her notebooks while he was waiting for her to put her cape on to go out for a walk. In it he found caricatures of Mrs Tullett alongside a grotesque’s gallery of her teachers and fellow pupils. If the name on the notebook were Gillray, he remembered reflecting, he would have been able to sell it for a few guineas.
Intrigued, he had taken her to tea on the high street and had talked to her about her drawing. The cross little girl who had been too numb from grief and shock to talk to him properly suddenly opened up, and a friendship was born. In that first glimmering of affection between them, he now realised, lay all the ingredients that had finally led them to disaster. She had talked to him then of her painting master lighting a glass of brandy with static electricity from his finger. He had been beguiled, but that night he had dreamt of a conflagration.
• • •
A Tuesday morning. The wind was making leaves dance in the air and reddening the cheeks of anyone who ventured out in it. She had announced she had something important to say to him.
He did not know what to say when she had presented him with a sheaf of papers. She had asked, ‘What would you say if I told you I had devised the secret of painting like Titian?’
‘To what end?’
Stupidity scrawled across his brain.
‘To sell it, Mr Provis.’
Something inside him shrank, both at the nature of the address and its content.
‘You have given me so much. I cannot possibly ask for you to provide for me until I am married,’ she continued.
‘You will sell it… as your own work?’ he asked, his voice faltering.
‘No one with money will be interested in a text written by myself.’
On that level, you see sense at least, he thought to himself.
‘I decided an anonymous text would have more…’ she hesitated, ‘allure.’
He wanted to laugh – but the intentness of her expression forbade him.
‘You are a man of the world – you can help me.’ Something flared in her eyes – insolent and conspiratorial at the same time. ‘You sell objects you have discovered all the time – what makes people desire certain things and reject others? You have often told me that you believe it is the story behind a thing, as much as the thing itself that gives it its worth. What story might we tell to sell this?’
He had promised her he would think on the matter, but in truth hoped that it would drop from her mind. That, he laughed to himself, was genuine self-deception. He had never known her let any intention go before it had borne fruit. After repeated goadings on her part, he had finally come up with a fiction that pleased her – his grandfather’s pursuit of esoteric secrets in Venice. She clapped her hands and danced around. ‘To say I have found it in family papers – why that is perfect.’ And so he had become her co-conspirator. Built up the image of his grandfather in her mind, taught her to evoke him just as powerfully as if she had known him.
How many times does a story have to be retold till it becomes like truth? They had rehearsed it several times before approaching West. Ann Jemima had reported that Cosway was delighted on hearing it – he had declared it to be the apple that garnished the roasted hog. Provis had been nervous that West would see the artifice of the scheme within minutes. But as he saw the belief on the artist’s face grow, he found his own belief growing. His outrage when he had eventually realised that West was trying to cheat them was surprisingly authentic. It occurred to him his fury was inappropriate, but by this point there were so many fictions in his life he decided to play the lie’s logic to the bitter end.
Over the weeks the starling flutterings became worse. Provis started to wonder if he was going to die. He would find himself suddenly awake in the middle of the night, gazing into the dark as he tried desperately to catch his breath, his heart hammering in his ears. He became grimly fascinated with where he was most likely to expire. In the drawing room of an artist he detested, or in the Chapel Royal during the last throes of Sunday communion?
The madness reached its most transcendent moment a couple of weeks before the Royal Academy Exhibition opened. It was the start of April, and the sunshine was beginning to assert its dominance. The painters had delivered their pictures to the Academy, and the debate over who should be selected had been superseded by the bloodier quarrels about which painting should be hung where. In a rare moment of calm Provis stood alone in front of the fire in his apartment. Beside him was a bottle of claret, two-thirds emptied.
Who cannot say this has all been for the good? he thought. Reality has caused so much unhappiness – to myself, to Ann Jemima. Through a few harmless falsehoods, on the other hand, we have made many individuals ecstatic. The artists have shown their admiration for Ann Jemima in a way that they never would have if they had realised it was she who had devised the method. Their belief that it is an anonymous work both satisfies their pride and allows her to receive accolades for her cleverness.
He looked with some satisfaction at the ivory sphinx on his mantelpiece. Then suddenly the fluttering in the chest began again, and he coughed. It would not stop this time, so he sat down and puts his head in his hands. ‘If this foretells the end of my life, then so be it,’ he said to himself. When he was sure it was safe to move again, he went to the mantelpiece and poured another glass of claret.