When I had caught up with him, he led me quickly through two smaller rooms – which might have furnished the text for some moralist’s sermon on the dangers of excess; for they were crammed with treasures, each of which individually would have repaid an hour’s attention, but which seen together simply stupefied the senses, as a surfeit of fine food jades the palate – and knocked on the door of a third. After a moment, we heard a faint ‘Come in!’; and, entering before me, the man announced, ‘Mr. Hartright, sir,’ and stood aside to admit me with the jerky grace of a mechanical toy.

After my strange introduction to the house, it was, I have to say, with some surprise (and not a little relief) that I found myself in a pleasant library, not much larger than our drawing room at Limmeridge, to which one might almost have applied the term ordinary. The immediate impression was of warmth – warmth from the bright coal fire in the marble fireplace; warmth from the fading sun creeping in through the windows, and giving its last lustre to the yellow-gold carpet; warmth from the ranks of leather-bound books lining the red-painted walls, and from the two hissing gas-chandeliers, hanging in the entrance to an alcove at the far end of the room, that made the polished hide and the gilt lettering sparkle. A cream-coloured cat preened itself on a large round table in the middle of the floor; and all about were thickset sofas and chairs, covered in a pretty white fabric patterned with flowers, that seemed to beg you to sit down, and take your rest.

Colonel Wyndham, however, was clearly not of the same mind. He was a broadly built man of about seventy, with sallow skin and a mane of white hair; and, from the moment he saw me walk in, he made it perfectly obvious that he would not be easy until he had seen me walk out again. He did, it is true, come forward to shake my hand; but as soon as he had done so he sprang away again – like a magnet forced close to another of the same polarity, and then suddenly released – and paced about the room, rubbing his fingers on his well-cut grey coat.

I waited for him to speak; but he remained stubbornly silent, and after a minute or so I saw that, if we were to have a conversation at all, I must initiate it.

‘You may remember’, I said, ‘that I wrote to you. About Turner?’

He nodded.

‘I was wondering if -’

‘I barely remember him,’ he mumbled, without looking at me (and, indeed, the whole time I was there, his eyes never met mine directly, but kept straying behind me or above me or at my feet, as if, even for him, the room had not yet revealed all its secrets, and he was constantly finding new objects of interest to distract him).

‘But surely’, I said, ‘Turner must’ve been here a great deal when you were younger?’

‘A soldier’s away a lot, Mr.… Mr.… Mr.…’

‘Hartright.’

‘And this is a big house. People don’t necessarily see each other.’

I waited for him to go on, but he turned towards the fire, pressed his hands together, and then spread them before the heat, as if the subject were closed.

‘What about servants?’ I said. ‘Would any of them -?’

‘Most of the staff came with us,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘From the previous house. Don’t think any still here would’ve known him.’

Again I waited – there must, after all, be scores of servants at Petworth, and surely a moment’s thought would yield the name of at least one who had been here in the Third Earl’s day? – but again in vain. He continued to stare morosely at the fire; and at length I was once more forced to break the silence myself.

‘Would it be possible for me to see some of the paintings your father commissioned from him?’

‘Afraid not,’ he said, shaking his head again. ‘All the pictures are being cleaned and catalogued at the moment.’

‘Or the room where he worked?’ I went on, nothing daunted.

‘Shut up for the winter.’

‘His bedroom, even?’

‘The whole end of the house,’ he said, flapping his hand impatiently.

This was, I suppose, a plausible answer – all those cavernous apartments, whose only purpose was to be filled with people and laughter and music, must have been a constant reproach to a solitary man like himself, reminding him only of his own puniness and isolation; and it would be natural enough to keep most of them sealed off. I could not, however, avoid the suspicion that he was lying, for he flushed slightly, and, fixing a marble bust on top of the bookcase with a trance-like gaze, set about tweaking the end of his nose between thumb and forefinger, as if it were the most absorbing occupation in the world.

But I could not, of course, challenge him; and, after waiting a few seconds, in the futile hope that his conscience might do so on my behalf, and prompt a change of heart, I saw that – as, to be fair, he had suggested – I was merely wasting my time.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

He appeared not to notice my tone – which would have turned another man to ice – but simply nodded, as if he were at last able to agree with something I had said, and gratefully seized the bell-pull. Then, as we waited, he said nothing more to me, but paced fretfully up and down the room, twining and untwining his fingers; while I, anxious to preserve my dignity, gazed out of the window at the park – which was as cunning a piece of artifice as I have seen, with a Grecian temple on a little knoll, and graceful slopes dotted with deer, and planted with copses and broad sweeps of trees. As I watched, the last few drops of crimson were seeping out of the dying sun and soaking into the horizon – making, for a moment, the sky redder, and the earth blacker, than any paint could make them; and I knew why Turner had loved this view, and returned to it again and again.

‘Where is the damned fellow?’ muttered Colonel Wyndham, under his breath; and, as if in response, the door opened, and the footman reappeared. A few minutes later – less than a quarter of an hour after I had passed it on my way in – I found myself once more at the porter’s lodge; and distinctly saw the lodge-keeper smirking out of the window at me, as much as to say: I thought I should see you again, soon enough.

It was, as you may imagine, in a thunderous mood that I retraced my steps to the Angel. It sprang, in part, from my natural disappointment at finding that my journey had been fruitless; but I was also nagged by an obscure sense of grievance, such as you might feel if you suspected that you had been cheated at cards, but had no way of proving it. A faint taint of dishonour seemed to cling to me, and I could not go down to dinner until I had washed, and put on a fresh shirt.

Once installed at a small table close to the fire, with a girl spreading a clean cloth before me, and cheerful guests all about, and the old man who had shown me to my room – now in the character of a waiter – hurrying to do my bidding, I found my spirits somewhat recovered; but I knew that this comfort was only temporary. It would keep me company as far as my bed, but forsake me in the small hours of the night, leaving me to wake all alone, and lie there in the darkness and the cold, agonizing over my humiliation.

But then, the good fortune that had aided me so often that day – call it fate, or chance, or providence, or what you will; though for myself, I cannot but see some benign power at work in it – took a hand once again. I had finished my soup, and was just making the first inroads into my steak pudding, when a woman’s voice close to my shoulder suddenly said: ‘Why, Mr. Hartright!’ and, turning, I saw my companion on the coach, her eyes wide with surprise and pleasure, with a bearded man next to her. I was, of course, delighted to see her; but also astonished – for I could not recall telling her my name, and I certainly did not know hers. She must have seen my confusion; for she laughed, and picked up the key to my room, which I had laid next to my plate.

‘There’s no mystery to it,’ she said. ‘Giles told me a Mr. Hartright had taken room 7. Though I own I never supposed it might be you.’

‘Giles?’ I said.

She jerked her chin towards the porter/waiter, who was just emerging from the kitchen with a tray laden with dishes.

It took me a moment to grasp the import of what she had said; and while I did so she stood there smiling at me, like a child who has baffled you with a riddle.

‘Oh,’ I said, at last, ‘so you’re …?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We keep the Angel.’ She gestured towards the bearded man, drawing him into our conversation. ‘My dear, this is Mr. Hartright, the gentleman I was telling you about.’

‘How d’ye do, sir?’ he said. His voice was strong and businesslike, but he flushed slightly, and briefly inclined his head.

‘Mr. Hartright, my husband, Mr. Whitaker.’

I rose to shake his hand. ‘Would you both sit down, and take a glass of wine with me?’ I said.

‘No, sir – please – do us the honour of taking one with us, in our own house,’ said Mrs. Whitaker.

I started to protest; but she insisted, and I soon saw that I should only cause offence if I continued to refuse.

‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Giles!’ she called. ‘If you please!’

They drew chairs to my table; and, as soon as a fresh bottle of wine was before us, and the glasses poured, she leant towards me and said quietly:

‘So. How was the colonel?’

‘Very much as you described him,’ I said. ‘Only perhaps more so.’

She laughed – the delighted, mischievous laugh of one who expects to hear a piece of illicit gossip, and intends to enjoy it.

‘Tell us!’ she said, confidentially – as if, instead of hotel-keepers and guest, we were three friends who had chanced upon one another at their club.

And, strange as it may seem, I did; for I felt I owed Colonel Wyndham no debt of loyalty, and had nothing to lose by being frank about him, since there seemed no possibility now that he would ever help me. And it was a relief, truth to tell, to unburden myself to an attentive audience – particularly one that seemed so ready to take my part.

‘Bless me!’ cried Mrs. Whitaker gleefully, when I had finished. ‘That’s surly enough, even for him!’

Her husband chuckled, and looked into his glass – like a man embarrassed by his wife’s forthrightness (for it must be perilous for a tradesman in Petworth to be heard criticizing the colonel) but powerless to stop her.

‘And you must wonder’, she went on, ‘why you troubled to come here at all, if that was all you were going to get for your pains?’

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised at her perspicacity (though it shames me to admit it – for she was an intelligent woman, and why should an innkeeper know less of disappointment than we do?).

She bent towards her husband, and whispered something in his ear. He gave a startled grimace, and then, almost immediately – with such practised rapidity that you could only suppose this was not the first time he had been taken aback by one of his wife’s suggestions, and subsequently forced to accede to it – nodded, and muttered something I could not hear.

‘Mr. Hartright,’ she said, facing me again. ‘Are you game for an adventure?’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘When some good may come of it.’

‘Why, then,’ she said, leaning closer, and dropping her voice. ‘Whitaker’s nephew, Paul, is a footman up at the house. And a good boy, who’d do anything to oblige us.’

‘That’s because he hopes to follow us here one day,’ said Whitaker. ‘And is consequently more eager to please his uncle than his master.’ He nodded at his wineglass, and gave a knowing little smile that seemed to say: I may be under my wife’s thumb, but don’t imagine I’m a sentimental fool.

‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Whitaker, mock-chidingly, tapping him playfully. She turned back to me. ‘We’ll get word to him that you want to see Turner’s studio, and arrange for him to meet you in the cowyard.’ The wine had heightened her colour and brightened her eyes, and given her voice a kind of reckless animation.

‘But surely’, I said, ‘it would be dangerous for him. If he was found out -’

She shook her head. ‘We’ll say you’re a relative, visiting from London.’

‘That’s right,’ said her husband, with a grim little laugh. ‘From the gentry side of the family. Come to pass a pleasant evening in the servants’ hall.’

‘Ssh!’ said Mrs. Whitaker. She pulled back her head, and squinted at me appraisingly, like an archer taking aim. ‘In one of your hats, my dear, and one of your coats, he’ll look well enough.’ She stared a moment longer; and then, evidently satisfied, nodded. ‘Well, sir, what do you say?’

I still don’t know exactly why – did I truly think I should learn something of value, or was I simply attracted by the chance to outwit the man who had humiliated me? – but I did not hesitate.

‘Yes,’ I said.

And so it was, an hour-and-a-half later, that I set out for my second appearance at Petworth House, wearing a curly-brimmed bowler hat, and an old muffler, and a heavy worsted coat that was too tight at the shoulders, and too baggy at the waist, and left six inches of wrist showing below the cuffs. Had you been in Petworth that night, and seen me walking towards you along one of those narrow little streets, you would not, I am certain, have known me for your husband, but thought me a different sort of man altogether, and crossed the road to avoid me.

The cowyard gate, it transpired, was on the London road, a little away from the centre of the town – which was just as well, for I had to wait there twenty minutes or more, and had I been in view of the porter’s lodge, or of curious passers-by, I might have been challenged, and asked to explain what I was doing. As it was, though I managed to keep myself out of sight, I could not feel entirely easy, for I was tormented by the thought, which had not struck me before, that the Whitakers’ nephew might be the footman who had admitted me that morning. It did not seem likely, for they had spoken of him as a boy; but I could not feel entirely convinced until I saw a tall young man in a blue cape hurrying out of the blackness towards me. It was, of course, quite dark now, and he kept his head lowered; but I caught a glimpse of a fresh-faced complexion, and almost-white golden hair, that told me, beyond doubt, that I had never seen him before in my life.

He glanced up and down the street, and then said, in a quiet voice:

‘Good evening, sir. I’m Paul Whitaker. I’m sorry you was kept so long.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s good of you to help me.’

‘I should have been here punctual,’ he said. ‘Only Mrs. Smith said to see her; and I couldn’t say no, her being the housekeeper.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘It was only a small matter,’ he said – just in case, doubtless, I should imagine he had stolen the plate, or murdered the under-butler.

He conducted me quickly across a dank, gloomy courtyard stinking of dung and wet straw, and then, through an archway, into a second, as different from the first as light from day – for it was full of the noise and smells of the kitchen, and paved with light from its windows. His policy (which I could only applaud, for I should have done the same myself) was to tread softly, and to keep as far as possible to the shadows, in order to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to himself – yet not to appear so surreptitious as to suggest, if anyone did stop him, any consciousness of wrongdoing.

Looking round sharply, to see if we were observed, he opened a door to the side of the kitchens, and led me into a broad, well-lit passage – which, save for the dingy yellow paintwork, and the pervasive fumes of pickles and jams and boiled cabbage, was not unlike that by which I had entered the house earlier in the day. An old man with no teeth and a moth-eaten white beard, who was just coming out as we went in, stopped dead when he saw us, and watched open-mouthed as we passed. I feared that he suspected something amiss, and would instantly report us when we had gone; but as soon as we were out of earshot, young Whitaker whispered:

‘Don’t mind him, he’s only an old man, and won’t say anything; and no-one will believe him if he does, for he’s half mad.’

At that moment, however, he clearly sensed a greater danger; for he took my elbow, and pushed me ahead of him, just as a door to our right opened, and a surge of laughter and conversation and the heavy, drowsy scent of wine spilled into the corridor. I had time only to glimpse a stout man in a black coat, and the gracefully tapering legs of an old-fashioned mahogany sideboard, before we had turned a corner, and were descending a flight of stone steps.

‘Upper servants’ dining room,’ muttered Whitaker. ‘Best avoided if we can.’

We were now in a long, low underground tunnel, with a curved ceiling and worn flags on the floor. It was lined with pipes, and lit by gas-lamps, although there were little niches set at regular intervals in the clammy walls where, presumably, lanterns had once stood. To the right, about halfway along, was a brick arch, barred by an iron gate, which seemed to lead into the void. Whitaker jabbed his thumb towards it.

‘The well,’ he said; and then, as if divulging this titbit had reminded him of my ignorance, and made him feel he should explain more: ‘This is the way into the main house.’

When we finally emerged, we did not continue straight ahead, but turned into a small courtyard, like one of the older and pokier quads at an Oxford college, which – from the crude construction of the surrounding walls, and the shape and alignment of the plain square windows – was clearly of an earlier date than the rest of the mansion. To my surprise, however, I felt no change in the air, such as you normally experience when you go outside; and when I looked up, instead of the stars I expected to find there, I saw a pattern of rough roof beams, and, beyond them, a blackness more profound than even the darkest sky. And in an instant I realized that this sprawling monster must have been built about an entire other house, which still stood within its walls, invisible to the outside world – like the ghostly leg-bone that, according to anatomists, lies trapped beneath the skin of a seal.

‘Turner’s studio’s up there,’ said Whitaker, nodding to a dark upper window. He opened a narrow door, and, reaching into the gloom, brought out a lantern – further evidence of his intelligence and forethought, for he must have placed it there earlier, to avoid rousing suspicion – and quickly lit it. Then, lifting it high, he led me stealthily up an old spiral stone staircase, so rank with the stench of dust and mildew that it seemed to cling to the roof of my mouth like grease – and, indeed, the taste of it lingers there still, even as I write. And I was suddenly, forcefully, reminded of another place – although it was so unexpected that it hovered for a few seconds at the edge of my mind, like a powerful but half-forgotten image from a dream, before I could put a name to it: Hand Court.

‘Just a moment, sir,’ whispered Whitaker, when we reached the top. He appeared far more nervous now, and peered out gingerly, to ensure that the coast was clear. And when he did at length stride on to the landing, beckoning me to follow, he moved so fast that my next distinct memory is of being in a large dark space, and of Whitaker closing the door and then leaning against it, half panting and half laughing softly with relief.

‘Pardon me, sir, if I don’t light the gas-lamps,’ he said, when he had got his breath back, ‘but I fear we might be seen.’

It might not have been strictly true to say that the room had been shut up for the winter, but it certainly had an unused air about it. The atmosphere was chilly and damp, and the only evidence of a fire was the fusty smell of long-dead coals. In the centre of the end wall was a huge arched window, unshuttered and uncurtained, and against its weak grey light I could see the silhouettes of a sofa and two or three chairs, and the outline of a convoluted statue – rising from its pedestal in the form of an enormous ragged cone, like a drunken witches’ hat – which seemed to show some mythic mortal combat between man and man or man and beast. It was difficult to make out much else – for Whitaker’s lantern, swinging in his hand, illuminated no more than a few square feet of carpet – but as my eyes grew more accustomed to the dimness I noticed that the walls were lined with bookshelves, and realized that this must be another library. (How many books can Colonel Wyndham own, in heaven’s name?! How many of them has he read?) There was no evidence of it ever having been used as a studio – no obvious connection with painting at all, in fact, save for a few pictures hung over the fireplace.

And yet, for all that, I could not help but feel Turner’s presence strongly – so strongly, indeed, that for a fleeting moment I almost fancied I saw his shadowy little figure standing before an easel in the window, a brush clenched between his teeth, another in his hand, a gleam of furious pleasure in his eye. It may be that I really am starting to know him, or perhaps I was merely following the train of thought that had begun on the staircase, but I seemed, in an instant, to understand why he was easy here: it was a kind of ideal Maiden Lane, giving him, on a far grander scale, and with unimaginably greater comfort, the same relation between society and seclusion that he would have known when painting in his bedroom as a boy. The great door that so effectively protected him from the prying eyes of the world could, quite as easily, re-admit him to its company; for beyond this private island stretched a giant warren, teeming with servants and children and fellow-artists, all presided over by his kindly patron – just as, years before, Hand Court, too, must have teemed with familiar faces.

Conceive, my love, my feelings when, in the midst of these ruminations, without warning, I heard, not a dozen yards away, the stifled giggling of a girl. I defy any man, however brave – unless he be a turnip, with no imagination whatever – to deny that he, like me, would have gasped, and felt his scalp tighten with fear, and the sweat break out on his back.

‘Nancy!’ said Whitaker. He sounded almost as startled as I was, and his lantern shook visibly, slopping splashes of yellow light on the floor and walls. In its palsied glow I saw the girl rear up behind the sofa, patting the dust from her print skirt. She was still laughing, but it was the uncertain laughter of one who hopes to escape censure by making light of what she has done.

‘I thought you wasn’t here yet!’ said Whitaker.

‘I waited ten minutes on the stairs,’ she replied, in a wronged tone. ‘But when you didn’t come and didn’t come, I thought I’d bestest hide in here.’

He clearly felt he could not reproach her further; but could not keep his anger at being taken by surprise, and made to seem frightened, from his voice. ‘Well,’ he snapped. ‘Have you got it?’

‘Course,’ she said, starting round the sofa towards us. She was walking with small, awkward steps, and as she came into the light I could see why: she was clutching something beneath her apron.

‘Nancy,’ said Whitaker, more gently. ‘This is my cousin from London. Mr.… Mr.…’

I was, I must confess, momentarily at a loss; for if – as seemed apparent – Nancy was a fellow-conspirator, why should he not introduce me as myself? Almost in the same instant, however, I guessed the answer: he was (again with admirable prudence) trying to protect both her and us. If we were discovered, she would be less likely to betray us, and would herself appear less culpable, if she was ignorant of my true identity, but really thought that she was merely helping to entertain a visiting relative of Whitaker’s.

‘Jenkinson,’ I said – and, had you heard me, I’m sure you would have said: There’s a man born in Covent Garden, who went on to better things.

‘How do you do, Mr. Jenkinson?’ She was young – only fifteen or sixteen – with a strong, fine-featured face and an almost gypsy-brown complexion; and there was a kind of modest attentiveness in the way she took my hand that made me think she was anxious to win my good opinion, perhaps as a suitable wife for my supposed cousin.

‘Let’s see it, then,’ said Whitaker.

Nancy crouched down, slipped an old oilskin pouch from behind her apron and laid it in the pool of lamplight on the floor. ‘He gave this to my ma,’ she said, drawing out a flat package covered in tissue-paper, and starting to unwrap it.

‘Turner?’ I said.

I don’t know whether she replied or not, for at that moment I saw, beneath her fingers, the first patch of that familiar burning orange-red, and then a dark strip of foreground, and then a brilliant button of sun, furious as a raw wound, leaking its radiance into a sky ribbed with cloud.

‘Here,’ she said.

It was, I saw, as I took it, a little watercolour of the park, which might perhaps have served as a sketch for a larger oil. The brushwork was so rough and indistinct – sometimes an object would be suggested by no more than a line, or a single speck of paint – that it was difficult to make out anything clearly, but I was able to identify the Grecian temple; and a herd of deer (no more than a cluster of dots, really) roaming across the hillside; and something that looked like an empty chair in the bottom left-hand corner, on what must be the terrace in front of the house.

‘Did your mother know him well?’ I said.

‘She saw him often enough, I believe,’ said Nancy. ‘She was a housemaid here, like me.’

‘And why’d he give it to her?’ I said, with a leer that made me cringe inwardly.

‘I don’t know, Mr. Jenkinson,’ she said. ‘She never said. Why do you suppose?’ She looked me straight in the eye, and gave a little smile, but I noticed she was blushing.

I felt I could not ask more without seeming to act out of character; so I chuckled, and gave her the picture back, and said – with the air of a man whose limited curiosity has been satisfied – ‘That’s very interesting, gel. Thank you.’

This encounter, you may think, afforded me little enough; and yet it gave my visit to Petworth some point and purpose, which it would have otherwise lacked, and left me feeling – whether rightly or wrongly, I still cannot tell – that I had learnt something of value about Turner, and gained an insight into his character.

I should, indeed, have come away quite satisfied, had it not been for an incident on the way back, when – just as we had emerged once more from the tunnel into the service wing, and I was starting to breathe more easily – I saw, coming towards me, with a tray laden with glasses and a decanter for the house, the man in all the world I most, at that moment, dreaded meeting: the footman who had taken me to Colonel Wyndham that morning. There was no point in turning around, or pulling up my collar to hide my face, for he was already watching me, with a little frown of puzzlement, and would have undoubtedly seen any hesitation or evasion on my part as a confirmation of guilt. My only hope, I realized, was to make him doubt the evidence of his own eyes; and when he slowed his pace, therefore, and made to waylay us, I stopped, and gave him a frank smile, and said:

‘Who’s this, Paul?’

‘Mr. Bond,’ said Whitaker. ‘Mr. Bond, Mr. Jenkinson. My cousin from London.’

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bond,’ I said. I did not offer my hand, for he could not take it; but bobbed my head respectfully. ‘Paul’s a good boy, and writes often, and never fails to say what a help you are to him, in learning his duties.’

Bond made no response, save to look deep into my eyes, and then at Whitaker, and then back again. At length he said:

‘And where do you put up, Mr. Jenkinson?’

Before I could reply, Whitaker – anxious, no doubt, to show that he had not flouted the rules by inviting me to stay at the house – said:

‘At the Angel, Mr. Bond.’

Bond said nothing more, and, after a moment, nodded and moved on. As he turned into the tunnel, however, he looked back at me with a cool gaze that plainly said he was not convinced; and I knew that he might tell the housekeeper what he had seen; and that she might tell Colonel Wyndham; and that the colonel might send to the Angel to make enquiries after me. I resolved, therefore, that to avoid the risk of embarrassment for my kind hosts, and of disgrace – or perhaps even dismissal – for their nephew, I must quit Petworth within the hour.

And so it was that I thanked Paul Whitaker at the cowyard gate, and gave him a sovereign for his pains, and five shillings for Nancy, and made my way back to the hotel, and ordered a fly to drive me to Horsham, where I supposed (correctly, as it turned out) that I should be able to take an early train to London. Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker implored me to stay, saying they were sure no harm would come to them or to Paul; but I would not be swayed. Then they refused payment for my room, since I should not have slept in it; but I insisted, and at length they relented, and we parted with many professions of thanks and good will on both sides.

I was so exhausted that even the cold air could not keep me fully awake on that journey through the night, and I slipped between sleep and consciousness, and half-dreamed that I was fleeing some dark confinement with Turner, who chuckled gleefully at our escape – or, rather, that I was Turner, and the chuckle was mine.

But now – you will be relieved to hear! – I am fully restored to myself.

Your loving husband

Walter

XIX

From the diary of Marian Halcombe,
29th September, 185–

I have been on my knees, giving thanks. I shall, I know, meet grief and pain and weariness of heart again, as surely as I have met them before; but today – let me joyfully acknowledge it – I have been truly happy. Thank you, Lord.

The morning, it must be said, gave little enough hint of what was to come; for I had slept poorly, and gave myself a momentary fright when I peered into the glass and saw there, instead of the lively, cheerful face I had expected, a haggard, half-familiar woman in middle life, with dark rings beneath her eyes and the first silver threads in her tangled black hair. By energetically plying the hair-brush, and smiling brightly (as you do on being introduced to a stranger), and murmuring silly little phrases of encouragement – ‘You’ll do very well, Marian, indeed you will’ – I soon banished her; but the baleful image lingered in my memory, like an awful vision of the future.

Matters were not greatly improved when, leaving the house a little later, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a dense fog, as still and chilly as the tomb, which stung our eyes, and clogged our mouths and noses, and speckled our hands and faces with sharp little crystals of soot. I had – I now realized – been looking forward to our boating expedition with unreasonable, childish pleasure, and the certainty that I should be deprived of it cast me down as palpably as a physical burden, bowing my shoulders and slowing my step. I tried, however, to conceal my disappointment; and, taking Walter’s arm, laughed, and said with as much bravado as I could muster:

‘We shall be fortunate to find the river at this rate, let alone see anything from it.’

The journey to Brentford seemed endless, for the cabman – unable to see further than his horse’s ears, and fearful, presumably, of colliding with another vehicle, or running down a child – crawled along at a snail’s pace (and a cautious snail at that); and when we looked out of the window we could make out nothing to tell us where we were, or how far we had come – so that, for all we knew, we might have been travelling very slowly in a circle, and still only a hundred yards from our own front door. But then, all of a sudden, the fog thinned to reveal a line of black battlements (belonging, alas, not to the romantic old castle I at first imagined, but to a row of hideous brick villas, which seemed to think they might disguise their newness with a show of trumped-up antiquity); and then it had dwindled to a few wisps of mist; and by the time we neared Brentford, ten minutes later, you could see, through a dazzling chalky gauze, the unmistakable brilliance of a cloudless sky.

We turned into a broad, tree-lined road, and pulled up, about halfway along, in front of a modest gate crammed between a coach-house and a tall boundary wall. The house itself – which stood back a little way, behind a worn carriage sweep mottled with weeds – seemed, from the street, entirely characterless: neither large nor small, neither old nor new; quite indescribable, in fact, save as a catalogue of angles and dimensions. As soon as you walked through the door, however, you found yourself in a charming, well-proportioned hall, hung with delicately drawn portrait sketches, and freshly painted in pale, old-fashioned colours that accentuated the impression of light and space.

A stocky manservant of about thirty, with a florid complexion and a sweet smile (that peculiarity alone, surely, must make the household remarkable, for how many footmen are encouraged to smile at visitors?), led us to a large parlour at the rear of the building. For an instant, I had the illusion that I was entering Elizabeth Eastlake’s boudoir; for this room occupied the corresponding corner of the house, and exerted, as it were, the same architectural force: you felt the shadowy bulk of hall and staircase bearing down on you, pressing you forward as insistently as a hand on the neck, and the big french window drawing you towards it, with its promise of freedom and fresh air. It took but a moment, however, to see that the presiding spirits of the two places were entirely different; for where Fitzroy Square is all oak and varnish and titanic chaos, this was brightness and elegance and classical order. The books were ranged with military discipline along their shelves, without a single mutineer on chair or table; there were no curiosities to be seen (unless you count a pair of graceful porcelain figures on the chimney-piece); and in place of the bulging bureau was a little writing desk, with fluted Grecian legs, and a drawer barely deep enough to accommodate a small family of envelopes, that looked as if it might have been used by the Empress Josephine to compose billets-doux to her husband.

A slender woman of perhaps sixty-five – who contrived, somehow, to appear fashionable in a straight powder-blue dress that would have been considered démodé twenty years ago – rose from a scrolled chaise longue to greet us.

‘Miss Halcombe! Mr. Hartright!’ she said, advancing towards us with arms outstretched. ‘You’ve brought the sun!’ Her voice was soft and melodic, with none of the roughness of age – so that if you had heard it without seeing her, you would have imagined that it belonged to a woman thirty years younger. She glanced at the window, flung up her hands in a kind of priestly invocation, and then – in a single sweeping movement, as gracious as a dancer’s – extended them towards us, taking Walter’s hand in one and mine in the other, so that we stood like a chain of children preparing to play ring-a-ring-o’-roses.

‘If we stop to be polite,’ she said, ‘the day will be gone. So shall we agree, this very minute, we’ll take our chances, and venture out, now?’

‘Yes,’ said Walter and I together, without a moment’s hesitation.

She coloured and nodded with evident pleasure. ‘I confess I didn’t entirely despair when I saw the fog,’ she said, moving towards the door, ‘but my poor husband was quite determined we were doomed. He’ll be more than glad to hear that matters have mended.’ She paused, and added, as if as an afterthought: ‘You will not, I hope, object to taking the oars, Mr. Hartright? There will not be room for our man as well.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Good.’ She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her hands with excitement; and then – with a little ‘Oh!’ that was as much a cry of joy as a word – disappeared into the hall.

Sometimes, when their little one has done something especially charming, you may see parents give each other a conspiratorial smile compounded of fondness and indulgence and shared delight; and it was just such a smile that Walter and I exchanged now. Then, without a word (for why speak, when your meaning has already been so perfectly conveyed?), we gravitated to the window, and gazed out on an artful confection of paths and lawns and rose-bushes – still dotted here and there with flowers, and with the last vapours of mist clinging to them like fleece snagged on a bramble – surrounded by formal little hedges. We had been standing there, in companionable silence, for a minute or more, when Walter suddenly startled me by saying:

‘He must be blind.’

‘What!’

‘Her husband. Look.’ He gestured towards the french window; and then, realizing he might make his point more strongly, opened it. ‘No. Smell.’

I did so. The air was hard and cold, and thick with the smoky residue of fog; but mingled with it, like the last echoes of a forgotten world, were the pungency of thyme, the narcotic sweetness of rosemary, and the dying breath of the roses.

‘The garden is planted for scent, not sight.’

‘That’s a small enough foundation for a great edifice,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they both just prefer sweet smells to brilliant spectacle.’

Walter shook his head. ‘If he could see, he would have known without being told.’

‘Known what?’ I said, half-laughing (and, it must be said, entirely lost).

He raised his face to the clearing sky. ‘That the weather was better.’

‘How do you know he didn’t?’

‘Because she said: “He’ll be delighted to hear that matters have mended.”’

I considered a moment. He was right, of course: Mrs. Bennett had said that, and it did seem curious, now I came to reflect on it, though I had paid no attention to it at the time.

‘Very good,’ I said. ‘We shall lose you to the detective police.’

It was at that instant, I think, that I first became aware of the change in Walter – a change I should, perhaps, have noticed before, for the signs must have been there since his return from Sussex, and, once I was conscious of it, I found myself remarking it again and again. Instead of laughing, and replying in kind – as, assuredly, he would have done only a few weeks ago – he made no response at all, but continued looking out of the window, his brow slightly creased with the effort of pursuing some train of thought I could not even guess at. It was not that he was cold or distant, exactly – only that our friendship, with its teasing and its affection, its rituals of mockery and self-deprecation – had been supplanted in his mind, at least for the time being, by something larger. For a few seconds, it is true (I could not help it then, and cannot deny it now), I felt wounded and bereft, like a child whose boon companion has entered the adult world, and left her behind; but, almost at once, this tincture of bitterness was swept away by a flood of joy – for had I not hoped and prayed that my dear brother would recover himself, and grow to manhood again? And was he not doing so, before my very eyes? And should we not then be truer, deeper friends yet?

‘Now, I think we are quite ready,’ said Mrs. Bennett’s voice behind us. We turned and saw her standing in the doorway, next to a stout old man in a thick black redingote. He was almost bald, but with heavy white whiskers – as if his hair had decided to migrate, like Mrs. Booth’s balcony, but in the opposite direction, from the top of his head to his cheeks – which gave the odd impression that his face was wider than it was tall.

‘My dear, this is Miss Halcombe, and her brother, Mr. Hartright,’ she went on. ‘But time enough for proper introductions later.’

She had already started back into the hall; but her husband stayed where he was, and held out his hand, and mumbled ‘How do you do?’, staring at a point exactly mid-way between Walter and me with the dull milky eyes of a blind man.

Quite a spectacle we must have made, as we processed to the river: Mrs. Bennett, in a brilliant red cloak and carrying a small guitar, talking to Walter in the vanguard; then me, talking to no-one, but simply glorying in the sun that shone more brightly on us with every step; and finally the manservant, with Mr. Bennett hanging on to his elbow, and a basket of provisions and a stack of railway rugs in his arms. At length we entered a small untidy boatyard littered with planks and wood-shavings and coils of rope brittle with dried tar, where the servant vanished without a word. Mrs. Bennett was talking animatedly to Walter about cutters and skiffs and dories, her hand darting about like a frantic wren as she illustrated her argument with a mast here and a thwart there; and her husband, though he stood a little apart, as immobile as a Buddha, and could presumably see nothing, seemed to be listening with keen interest; so I ventured by myself on to a rickety wharf to admire the view.

Even this far upstream the Thames was strewn with filth, which the current had thrown against the piles of the jetty and formed into little islands – with plains made from fallen leaves and waterlogged paper, and mountains from the necks of half-submerged bottles, and, in one instance, an entire hinterland created from a drowned cat, its sodden fur as sleek as a rat’s. But the far shore was another world; for there, rearing up like an exotic temple, was the new Palm House at Kew Gardens, its billowing glass roof shot through with light, and the gorgeous red leaves of an American maple flaming beside it; and beyond that, towards Richmond, the tree-fringed slopes and hollows of the Old Deer Park, rising and falling and rising again with the sweet regularity of a calm sea, or of some gentle pastoral melody. The associations with Turner were not hard to see: indeed, this whole scene was a kind of mirror image of London from Greenwich Park, with the foreground dominated by the mighty Thames, the father of our greatness, now reduced to little more than a stinking cesspool by the greed and venality of the modern age; while, in the distance, an Elysian landscape, restored to glorious life by the unclouded sun, seemed to show us a vision of a happier time. Less explicably, I also found myself thinking of another painting I had seen at Marlborough House. There was no sea, and no figure that might remind me of Apollo or the Sibyl; there were no ruins; and – while its character was undoubtedly classical – this vista of beech and chestnut, of copse and meadow, had none of the parched brilliance of the Mediterranean, but seemed to glow with that deep-hued, temperate lushness you see only in England. Why, then, was I so forcefully put in mind of The Bay of Baiae, and of the vague, troubling sense of mystery that still seemed to hang about it in my recollection? The answer must be there before me; but, try as I might, I could not find it, and was still vainly searching when the manservant returned to announce that our boat was ready.

‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ said Mrs. Bennett. She led the way through the yard (to my surprise, she seemed to know all the workmen personally, and greeted them by name, receiving in return a grimy thumb and forefinger raised to a frayed cap, or a muttered ‘Good afternoon, ma’am’) and down a flight of stone steps. At the bottom, a broad little skiff, neatly furnished with rugs and cushions, with the basket set squarely amidships and a pair of oars resting in the rowlocks, bobbed and shivered at the end of its rope. She held it steady while Jonathan handed her husband in, and settled him in the bows; then she climbed nimbly into the stern herself, helped me to the seat beside her, and smiling up at Walter said:

‘Very well, Mr. Hartright, if you please.’

And so began six wonderful hours. Walter took his place amidships; and then Jonathan cast us off, and stood watching and waving from the steps (truly, he seemed more like the Bennett’s son than their servant) as we glided into midstream and turned to go upriver. There was no space for a tiller, but steering expertly with a piece of ribbon attached to the rudder, and calling instructions to Walter – ‘A little harder with your left, Mr. Hartright,’ or ‘We should not, I fear, come well out of a fight with that. Why don’t you take a well-earned rest for a moment, and let it go?’ – Mrs. Bennett brought us safely past a string of barges, and astern of a clanking collier that set us bouncing and rocking in its wake. For a moment we seemed lost in the pall of black smoke that gushed from its funnel and hung threateningly over the water, blotting out the sky and dimming the sun to no more than a pallid silver disc; but then it was gone, as miraculously as the morning’s fog, and we emerged into that sunlit other world I had seen from the boatyard.

We could not, of course, entirely put the ugliness of modern life behind us: it was there in the ceaseless traffic of the river, and the broken cigar-box that slapped against the side of the boat, and the streets of mean, anonymous little houses sprawling along the north bank. But it ceased, from that moment, I think, to be the dominant reality. Lulled by the rhythmic dip and groan of the oars, delighted by the sight of a wild tangle of roots here, or the gothic ruin of some old coots’ nest there, we drifted along in a kind of enchantment – saying nothing, and each of us thinking his own thoughts, of which the only outward sign was the dreamy smile on every face. I think, indeed, I must have really fallen asleep, though I have no idea for how long; for one moment I was watching Mr. Bennett put his hand over the side of the boat, with a look of beatific pleasure, as if by trailing his fingers in the water he might feel the colours that he could not see; and the next we had stopped with a jolt, and Walter was making us fast to an overhanging branch; and Mrs. Bennett was opening the basket, and saying:

‘I hope you care for cold veal pie, Miss Halcombe?’

‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘Yes, indeed.’

She took out a white cloth, and laid it, still folded (for there was not space to spread it out) in a narrow strip at our feet. ‘I have chosen the bill of fare on purpose, Mr. Hartright,’ she said. ‘If you cannot share a picnic with Turner, you shall at least know what it would have tasted like. A pie’ – here she started removing the dishes as she named them, and setting them before us – ‘Beef. A chicken. A lettuce, cut this morning, if you will believe me, from our own glasshouse. Pull-bread. A cranberry tart. Then it would have been strawberry tart, but, alas, the autumn is upon us.’ There was a gravity and wistfulness in her voice, as she said this, which I had not heard before, and which made me suppose she was thinking: And not merely the autumn of the year, but the autumn of life, too.

‘I like cranberry just as well,’ said Walter.

She made no response, save a shake of the head; and realizing that he would not coax her from her melancholy by making light of it, he took another approach, and tried to distract her with a simple, direct question:

‘How was it that you came to know Turner?’

‘Oh, his uncle was a butcher at New Brentford,’ she said – and I knew instantly that Walter had judged right, for there was a renewed liveliness in her voice that told you this was a subject close to her heart, and that it was a relief to her to speak about it. ‘Mr. Marshall.’ She shook her head and smiled. ‘I still remember him. Turner stayed with him as a child, I believe, and later continued to visit him. We lived nearby – my father was a clergyman’ – here she nodded and smiled at Mr. Bennett, who, as if he mysteriously sensed it (or perhaps merely because he anticipated her next words), nodded also – ‘like my husband; and a fine amateur artist. He met Turner one day when they were both sketching by the river, and saw immediately that he had genius, but that he stood in need of friends.’

‘Because he was poor, you mean?’ said Walter.

‘Yes,’ She hesitated. ‘Well, I don’t know about poor, exactly. He was, I believe, quite successful, even then. But -’

‘Forgive me,’ said Walter, ‘but when was this?

‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. Some time in the middle or late ‘nineties, I suppose.

Walter nodded encouragingly; and, drawing a notebook from his pocket, started to write. ‘So Turner was still a young man?’

‘Yes. Little more than twenty, I should say. But he had started exhibiting at the Royal Academy by then – just watercolours, you know, but still . . . And working for Dr. Monro, and . . .’ She smiled at some sudden recollection, and paused to grasp it before it vanished back into the abyss. ‘I remember him telling me once,’ she went on, ‘the doctor had a great collection of pictures, and employed him and Thomas Girtin to make copies of them, for two-and-sixpence or three-and-sixpence an evening, and a bowl of oysters.’

I laughed. ‘I’m sorry to seem so ignorant, but who was Thomas Girtin?’

‘You would have heard of him had he lived,’ said Walter quickly, without taking his eyes from Mrs. Bennett. ‘Another young artist, as gifted as Turner himself, supposedly. But Dr. Monro .. .?’

‘Oh, he was a famous mad-doctor,’ said Mrs. Bennett, with an edge of pride in her voice, as if Monro’s professional eminence somehow redounded to Turner’s credit. ‘He helped to treat the late king.’

I could not help smiling, for there had been two ‘late kings’ since the one who had required the services of a mad-doctor. The strange petrifying process that had arrested her idea of fashion, and fixed it for ever about 1830, had clearly had the same effect on her notion of history.

‘And he was already travelling a good deal, as well,’ she went on.

‘Travelling where?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He couldn’t go to the continent, of course, for we were still at war. But all about England and Wales – wherever there were picturesque views to be found of lakes and mountains, or ruined abbeys, or old castles,’ She laughed. ‘Places where you might imagine a skeleton in a crumbling tower, or a maiden locked in a dungeon beneath the black waters of a moat. Those sorts of subjects were very popular at the time. He did not want for commissions.’

‘Why then did your father think he needed friends?’ said Walter. ‘If he was already so successful?’

She did not answer at once, but suddenly busied herself with taking plates and glasses from the basket, as if she had only just remembered that they were there, and must attend to them at once. At length she muttered, ‘I believe there were domestic difficulties’; and then, before Walter had time to reply, handed him a wine bottle and a corkscrew, and said: ‘Come, Mr. Hartright, we mustn’t let your sister starve. Would you be so good as to open this?’

‘Of course,’ said Walter. But if she had hoped thus to deter him, she must have been disappointed, for as he set to work he went on: ‘What sort of domestic difficulties?’

She seemed entirely absorbed in cutting a loaf of bread, and a casual observer might have supposed that she had not heard him at all. But she was a poor actress, and could not prevent her throat working uncomfortably, or her tongue darting out to moisten her lips.

‘Do you mean, perhaps, he had differences with his parents?’ said Walter, gently, but with absolute determination. When she still did not reply he continued:

‘You can imagine, I am sure, Mrs. Bennett, how difficult it has been to find anyone with reliable information about his early life. So anything you can tell me …’

‘I really know very little,’ she said, reddening, her eyes cast down. ‘But. . . but – by all accounts – his mother had an uncontrollable temper.’

Walter’s gaze suddenly lost its focus, and drifted past her. ‘Like a gale,’ he murmured.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mrs. Bennett. I knew Walter well enough to see that her words had recalled to his mind something he had heard or thought before, but she seemed uncertain whether or not he was joking, and half-smiled at him tentatively.

‘Like a gale,’ he said more loudly, returning her smile.

She nodded (though I think she was still puzzled, for her expression continued to hover between seriousness and jest) and said:

‘She was, I believe, a great trial to him and his father, and died mad.’

‘Really?’ said Walter. ‘She was committed, you mean?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was barely audible. ‘To Bethlem Hospital, I think. Though I – I’m not certain.’ She hesitated a moment; and when she went on again it was with a kind of breathless urgency that made her sound, for the first (and last) time, harassed and defensive. ‘He never spoke to me about it. We all knew that he confided in my father, but it was too sacred a subject to be openly discussed.’ She wrung her hands, as if she despaired of making us see. ‘What you must understand, Miss Halcombe – Mr. Hartright – is that he was more like one of our family than a friend. And no family can long survive if its members do not respect each others’ sensitivities and secrets.’

Walter stared at her for a moment; and then nodded and laid down his notebook and pencil.

‘Shall I pour out some wine?’ he said.

‘If you please,’ said Mrs. Bennett, with a grateful look.

At the mention of the word ‘wine’, I noticed, her husband held out his hand in readiness, and kept it there patiently until Walter tapped his wrist to alert him, whereupon it closed on the proffered tumbler like a sprung trap. He did not drink, however, until we were all similarly provided, and Mrs. Bennett cried:

‘We should do as we always did! Raise your glasses, everybody! Here’s health and happiness to us all!’

To listen to the Right Reverend Bishop of This, and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for That, telling us that innocence must at all cost be preserved and protected, you would think that no virtue excited greater public admiration; yet can we imagine a man of the world, or a woman of fashion – or a costermonger, or a lady’s maid, come to that – freely admitting to being innocent, or thanking the man who so describes them? No, for to be innocent is not merely to be blameless – it is also, is it not, if we are entirely honest, to be childish, and foolish, and ignorant (horror of horrors!) of how things really go on? Yet sitting there, a tumbler of brown sherry in my hand, and seeing Mrs. Bennett’s unfeigned joy at the sunshine playing on the murky water, and the caress of the cold air on her cheek; her delight at the company of friends yet living, and the memory of others now dead, I could not but reflect that we are the fools – for have we not, in our thoughtless desire to seem practical and sensible, taken strength for weakness, and weakness for strength? Here was an elderly woman, who had known her share of the tragedies and reverses that befall us all; and yet somehow, miraculously, they had not embittered her, or – whatever marks they had left upon her outer form – corroded the girlish loveliness of her soul. She still (you could hear it in the exuberance of that strangely young voice) took simple pleasure in the mere fact of being alive, in loving and being loved, in wondering at the beauty of God’s handiwork – and surely that made her stronger, and more fitted for existence, than the most worldly-wise cynic on earth, who thinks he has seen the essential hollowness of life, and seeks only to while it away as agreeably as possible before it is taken from him?

‘Health and happiness to us all!’ we called back, as lustily and unselfconsciously as children, and quite impervious to the quizzical looks of the captain and his mate in a passing tug.

‘Now, Miss Halcombe,’ said Mrs. Bennett, taking up a plate, and searching in the basket for cutlery. ‘Let me help you to something. Some beef and salad?’

‘Thank you.’ I had half-forgotten the purpose of our expedition already, and would have been quite content if no-one had mentioned it again all afternoon; but Walter was not to be so easily deflected, and pursued his quarry with a doggedness which – though I had seen it before, when he had been fighting for Laura’s happiness and honour – still took me by surprise. Setting down his glass, and reaching once more for his notebook, he said:

‘You saw him often at your house, then?’

‘What, Turner?’ cried Mrs. Bennett. ‘Oh, yes, constantly! It seems, indeed, when I look back, that all my earliest recollections are in some way bound up with him. Truly, Mr. Hartright, you never met a merrier creature!’

The food was quite forgotten again, and she settled happily back in her seat. This, you could see, was the Turner she loved to talk about: not the madwoman’s son, but the light-hearted playfellow.

‘He would romp endlessly with us children,’ she went on, ‘making houses for us with wooden bricks, and then knocking them down, or letting us wind and unwind the long cravat about his neck as if he were a maypole.’

Walter laughed. ‘And did you continue to know him in later life?’

‘Oh, certainly. For a few years, indeed, we saw more of him than ever, for he built a little lodge for himself and his father at Twickenham – I can’t remember when exactly, it must’ve been ‘thirteen or ‘fourteen, I suppose, there’s a Miss Fletcher there now; and so we became neighbours, after a fashion, and we were forever meeting at either our house, or his, or getting up picnic parties together on the river.’ She impulsively stretched a hand towards her husband, and smiled at him, though he could not see her, with her head on one side, and her eyes bright with tender recollection. ‘Charles there, and his brother Tom, who became a surgeon, and me and my sisters, and our father, and Miss Phelps the singer, and Ben Fisher, who went to India, and Sam Fisher, who joined the army, and Mr. Maxwell -’

‘Humph!’ said her husband, loudly, startling us all; for (save when he had raised his hand to drink) he had been as impassive as a statue, and this was almost the first sound he had uttered.

‘My husband did not approve of Mr. Maxwell,’ said Mrs. Bennett, with a teasing laugh – which seemed, nonetheless, to contain some undercurrent of sadness, or regret.

‘Why not?’ I began; but she silenced me with a sharp nod towards Mr. Bennett, which plainly said: Wait, and he will tell you himself.

And, sure enough, after a few seconds, he said, in a ponderous, wheezing voice:

‘Not so much I didn’t approve of him, my dear. He depressed my spirits, that’s all, with all his talk of rocks and bones.’

‘What, he was a geologist?’ said Walter.

The old man nodded. ‘Every generation has its own trial. For mine it was geology.’

‘Not all your generation, my dear,’ said his wife, with a weary smile that suggested this was an old dispute, rehearsed between them many times before. Then, evidently determined to wrest the conversation back from him, she hurried on, before he had time to reply: ‘It certainly wasn’t a trial for Turner, Mr. Hartright. Mr. Maxwell told me he might have been a geologist himself, so great was his understanding -’

‘Turner was not obliged, as I was, to sit by a dying woman,’ said Mr. Bennett, suddenly, the passion of his words curiously at odds with their slothful delivery, ‘and try to persuade her that she could still trust in God’s love for her, and for the dead infant at her breast, despite the discovery of so much evidence that seemed to contradict His word. If He has lied to us about the age of His world, why should we believe His promise of redemption?’

There was something plaintive, even desperate, in his tone, as if the perplexity was his, and he was hoping we might ease it; but what comfort can a layman – and a stranger, at that – bring to a clergyman whose mind has become a muddy battlefield, so trampled by the ceaseless advance and retreat of faith and doubt that every argument and counter-argument must already seem wearyingly familiar? No-one spoke for a few moments; and then Walter said cautiously:

‘Was Turner not, then, much occupied with religion?’

Mr. Bennett shook his head. ‘He was a pagan!’

‘He came to church with us, when he was staying,’ remonstrated his wife, gently; but the old man only shook his head the more, and gave a disgusted ‘Hah!’.

‘I never discussed theology with him,’ said Mrs. Bennett, pursuing her theme with some warmth now, ‘but no-one could have felt the sufferings of his fellow-creatures more keenly, or tried harder to obey our Lord’s injunction to love his neighbour as himself.’

This seemed to reduce her husband to speechless incredulity; for he could not make a sound, but merely continued shaking his head so vigorously that I feared he must become dizzy, and faint.

‘There are, I think, some who would be surprised to hear you say that,’ said Walter, mildly. ‘Many people think he was cold, and mean, and -’

Mrs. Bennett reddened – she was incensed – her friend was under attack, and she must fling herself into the task of defending him, even if it meant forgetting her manners, and not allowing Walter to finish.

‘They would not think so if they had known him as I did,’ she said. ‘He could appear rough and suspicious sometimes, I know – that was a deficiency of his early upbringing and education. But look within – and there you’d find the truest, most affectionate heart that ever beat.’ She paused, searching her memory for some telling incident or characteristic to prove her point. At length she found it; and burst out:

‘Another man, for instance, might have neglected us, in favour of more fashionable acquaintances, as soon as he had become wealthy, and much sought-after, might he not? History, I am sure, is full of men who have done so. But not Turner – his feelings for us were as a son for his father, and a brother for his sisters, and were not to be changed. The day my father died, Mr. Hartright’ – her voice rose, and became more animated, as if this was the coup de grace, and proved her case beyond all reasonable doubt – ‘Turner wept like a child, and threw himself into my arms, sobbing, “Oh, Amy, I shall never have such a friend again!”’

It struck me that if Turner had been the paragon she was suggesting, he might have shown more concern for her loss, and less for his own; but Walter merely nodded, and said:

‘So you never found him morose, or taciturn?’

‘The kindest of us can be morose sometimes, Mr. Hartright,’ she replied, glancing at Mr. Bennett. ‘I’ve seen Turner gloomy, particularly in his last years. Once or twice I recollect coming upon him looking melancholy, and asking him the matter, and being told (here she adopted a gruff voice, with a distinct cockney twang), “I’ve just parted with one of my children, Amy” – by which he meant he had sold a painting. But how I remember him best – out here, in a skiff, or cooking dinner on the bank with the rest of us, or’ – pointing to the shimmering park that stretched away from us, until it seemed to vanish beyond a flimsy muslin haze at a bend in the river – ‘Tying up there in the hay, – no! Never! He was always singing, or making jokes – though often no-one else could understand them. If he was quiet it was because he was looking at the effect of light on the water, and trying to draw it, or struggling to write a poem.’

‘A poem!’ said Walter, surprised.

‘Oh, yes, he loved poetry.’ She hesitated, and then – with a faint blush – went on: ‘Once, after a picnic, I found a scrap of one of his verses on the bottom of the boat, and – I know I should have given it back, but please remember, I was very young! – I kept it.’ She reached inside the collar of her dress, pulled out a little gold locket on a chain, and opened it. ‘I carry it still, to this day,’ she said, removing a tiny pellet of folded paper and handing it to Walter. ‘Here.’

As if, in that simple act, she had broken the spell that tied her to the past, and brought herself back into the mundane present, she laid a hand on my arm and said: ‘Now, I am being a miserable hostess, Miss Halcombe, and’ – raising her voice, and calling indulgently – ‘yes, I know, my dear, a miserable wife, too. We must all eat, without delay.’ She handed me the plate she had already prepared for me, and quickly filled another. ‘Mr. Hartright, would you be so good as to pass that to my husband?’

But Walter was still engrossed in reading, and seemed not to hear; and when she repeated the question he said:

‘Would you mind if I transcribed this?’

‘No, not at all,’ said Mrs. Bennett. ‘But I fear my husband will die of hunger.’

‘Why don’t you let me do it,’ I said (for Walter, being seated in the middle of the boat, was the only means of conveying anything back and forth), ‘and you can resume your proper function as a waiter?’

So he handed it to me; and I copied into his notebook the following lines:

pure and clear

Past meadowo sweet meadows tree-fring’d meadows and blessè;d golden glebes

Where linger still the shades of Pope and Thomson;

And Albion’s mighty workshop, wreath’d in blackest smoke industrious yet,

And wreath’d in blackest smoke; until at length

He flings the fragile barks of HOPE and BEAUTY, HOPE and JOY

Into the raging sea, where th’ensanguined sun bloodies bloodying the clouds

Tolle Speaks of the storm to come

When I had done, Walter and Mr. Bennett were eating voraciously; while Mrs. Bennett, having taken one-and-a-half mouth-fuls, had quite forgotten about food again, and was in the middle of a story about Turner and Miss Phelps. I had missed most of it; but it seemed to concern a debate about the refraction of light from floating objects, which Turner had tried, finally, to resolve by dropping a lettuce-leaf into the water. Standing on the bank, however, he had lost his balance, and fallen into the river himself, flapping his arms, in the vain attempt to save himself, like the wings of a bird – at which Miss Phelps (here Mrs. Bennett began to giggle at her own anecdote, something any etiquette book will tell you you should avoid doing at all costs) had cried: ‘Ah, Joseph Mallard William Turner!’

I could not help reflecting, as I pictured the scene, and saw the simple pleasure it still brought Mrs. Bennett after so many years, on my own upbringing. Had Papa (dear man that he was) been right to protect me quite so assiduously from the unregulated company of male friends? Would I really have come to so much harm – looking at Amelia Bennett it was hard to think so – if I, too, had been allowed to mix with intellectual young men on terms of easy equality?

The meal over (most of Mrs. Bennett’s disappeared over the side of the boat as she was carelessly stacking the plates, as if it had finally despaired of ever arousing her interest, and decided in a fit of pique to give itself to the ducks), she took up her guitar, and announced that she would sing us some of ‘the good old songs that Turner loved’. She did not, like some amateur performers, bully and embarrass us by insisting that we join in; and yet we did, of our own volition, whether we knew the words or no – for only a block of stone could have heard such unconstrained delight and remained untouched by it. It seemed, indeed, for a moment, to reach even into the depths of her husband’s soul, and to bring a ray of warmth to the lump of ice that had formed there – for after half a minute or so, to my immense surprise, his wavering baritone, too, swelled the chorus.

I had never, to my knowledge, heard any of the songs before, and I can remember nothing about them now (beyond a general impression that they were all remarkably silly), save for the refrain of an absurd ditty about a nun and a gondolier:

He fiddled like the mad emperor Nero

And sang: ‘O Lady, if you’ll be my Hero

I’ll be Leander

Tho’ I stand a

Simple gondolero!’

Or something to much the same effect.

Lulled by the music, and the wine, and the sunshine and fresh air, I at length lay down, and half-closed my eyes, and allowed fancy to carry me back forty years. The same river, the same songs, the same voice: not hard to imagine (the idea suddenly filled me with a strange, intense feeling, in which joy and longing were inextricably intertwined, that rose from the pit of my stomach, and plugged up my throat, and disturbed the motion of my heart, like a finger laid against the pendulum of a clock) that I, too, was of that same party of young people, lolling in the long sweet grass, and talking of great things, when Amelia Bennett was yet a girl, and the trees of Arcadia covered in their summer green.

It was already twilight when we again reached the boatyard. Walter seemed unnaturally silent as he shipped the oars, and helped the Bennetts ashore, and I wondered whether the afternoon might have fatigued him, or made him disconsolate for some reason; but when I glimpsed his face by a flare of light from the open shed, I saw he was merely preoccupied with his own thoughts, for his skin was taut and highly coloured, and his shining eyes kept wandering off in pursuit of some new idea. I was not surprised, therefore, when he politely declined Mrs. Bennett’s invitation of a glass and a light supper, and said we should be on our way – for he intended to walk along the river, and it would be quite dark before we got home. She, for her part, absolutely refused his offer to carry the basket and the rugs back to her house, saying she would not dream of taking more of our time, when we had so little to spare, and would give sixpence to a lad from the yard to go with them. And so we thanked and not-at-alle d each other for a minute or two, until Mrs. Bennett suddenly shook Walter’s hand, and (to my astonishment) kissed me on both cheeks, and said ‘Goodbye’, and turned on her heel, and hurried her husband into the night without another word or a glance over her shoulder.

I had imagined that Walter would break his silence as soon as we were alone together, but he barely spoke at all until we had gone a mile or two, and were passing a little waterside tavern, with welcoming yellow lamplight in the windows, and a wooden balcony carried out over the water on knock-kneed piles that looked as if they were about to give up the ghost, and tumble into the river, and drift off towards France. Stopping by the door, he said abruptly:

‘Shall we have something to eat?’

It was not the kind of place I should normally have expected Walter to choose (or not, at least, since Laura came into her fortune), but I fancy that this evening he had had it in mind to stop here, or somewhere like it; for as we made our way through a bar parlour smelling of smoke and river-mud, where little knots of boatmen, their faces ravaged by weather and drink, turned curiously to watch our progress; and past a poky kitchen, from which the heat blasted like a furnace; and upstairs, finally, to the coffee-room, he had the satisfied look of a man whose life is unfolding perfectly to plan.

‘Let’s order chops,’ he said, with a conspiratorial smile, as we sat at a table in the window. ‘They’re hard to spoil, even in a kitchen like that. And we’ll have porter, don’t you think, in honour of Turner?’

If I touched his skin, I thought – looking at his flushed cheeks, and feeling their warmth even across two feet of tablecloth – it would resonate like a drum, or the rind of a ripe melon: he is so full, so buoyed with wild excitement, that it must break out in a mad rush of words, or a flamboyant dance – or else he will strike some unsuspected rock, and explode, and all will go to waste, soaking into the barren soil.

‘So what do you think? What do you think?’ he said. ‘Is Ruskin right?’

‘About what?’

‘Turner. Was he a tortured genius?’

‘A genius, certainly,’ I said, cautiously. ‘As to tortured … Well, what do you think?’

He dismissed the question with a shake of the head.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘What kind of a man was he?’

‘Well,’ I began tentatively (for I did not wish to deter him by offering a view very different from his own, and so prove, unwittingly, to be the rock myself), ‘what do we know? He was humbly born; a little eccentric, perhaps – but no more, probably, than anyone else so dedicated to his art; a man who loved England – its countryside, its coasts, its people.’

I looked questioningly at Walter, who nodded enthusiastically, giving me the courage to continue more confidently:

‘He was somewhat rough-and-ready – that we must attribute to his troubled childhood – and could appear stern, or even rude, sometimes – but at bottom kind-hearted, I believe, and a loyal friend.’

Walter nodded again; but then a shadow seemed to cross his face, and he said:

‘And what of his morals?’

‘His morals,’ I repeated slowly. His gaze was so intense that I had to look away, and was too confused for a moment to reply. Then I said:

‘I wonder – I wonder, Walter, in all sincerity, whether it is possible to be a great artist, and yet live a life of monastic seclusion and purity?’

I could not tell whether he was amazed or appalled at what I had said, or merely indifferent to it, for his expression changed not one iota, and he continued to stare at me. Eventually (for I found it embarrassing to be scrutinized in that way, and doubly so when the scrutinizer was my own brother) I looked past him through the window at the Thames. The fog was silently returning, and casting a white film over the river – so you could barely see it at all, but only trace its course by the chain of reflections from gas-lamps, and oil-lamps, and the red glow of a ship’s boiler, smeared on its surface like broken fruit.

At length Walter turned to see what I was looking at, and at once let out a gasp.

‘Wouldn’t Turner have loved that?’ he said. ‘The ghostliness. The imprecision.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Not just a great artist,’ he said, facing me again, and taking my hand. ‘The greatest artist in the history of the world!’

XX

Letter from John Farrant to Walter Hartright,
1st October, 185-

20 Trotter Street,
Farringdon

Dear Sir,

I have heard you intend a life of the late Mr. J. M. W. Turner, and cannot rest easy until I have told you what I know of him; for I fear you shall never have the truth from his ‘fellow artists’ – I mean, Mr. Jones, Mr. Davenant &c., &c. – or from the polite ladies he kept company with at Isle worth and Brentford. They saw only the face he cared to show to the world; I saw the other.

I was an engraver by trade – and would be to this day, if my sight had not failed me. You will not, I hope, think me proud when I tell you that I had a name for a good eye and a sure hand, for any who knew my work would say the same; and it was on account of that that Mr. Turner heard of me, and asked if I would make some plates for him. This was, I think, in the spring of 180-. He told me that a publisher had engaged with him for a set of coastal scenes, to be engraved and printed in a book; but they had quarrelled, and he had decided to publish them himself. I should, I suppose, have taken warning from this history, but I was young, and little acquainted with the ways of the world, and gratified that a coming artist like Turner should have chosen me to execute his design. He seemed reasonable enough, and quite businesslike, and we soon agreed terms: he would etch the outlines, and then pass the plates on to me to add aquatint, mezzotint, and any further engraving that might be necessary. For this I was to receive eight guineas a plate.

The life of an engraver is a solitary and an arduous one, even at the best of times; you spend twelve or fourteen hours a day in the closework-room, poring over a plate with a magnifying glass, trying to realize an artist’s most brilliant conceptions by carefully removing small pieces of metal – and then, quite often, when you at last come to ‘prove’ it, you find there is some small deficiency in the plate, which obliges you to efface the effort of many days, and do it over again.

Do not think I exaggerate when I tell you that, with Mr. Turner, this hard existence became a kind of hell.

Item. He did not keep his word about the outlines, but required me to do them, saying ‘he was too occupied with other matters to attend to them’. He thus loaded me with a deal more work when I scarce had time enough to do what I had already undertaken with him; but when I asked for a deferment he grew angry, and said ‘if I could not accommodate myself to his requirements, he believed there were other engravers in London who would be glad to do so’.

Item. He constantly found fault with my workmanship, demanding that I should re-do plates in which neither I, nor my wife, nor any other person could discern any imperfection whatever – so that I might have done five engravings for anyone else in the time it took me to complete one to his satisfaction.

Item. All this might yet have been tolerable had he treated me as an artist like himself, engaged with him in a common endeavour; but his manner towards me was always that of an irascible master towards a wilful, good-for-nothing servant. One day in November, soon after I had sent Mr. Turner the proof of a plate over which I had laboured long hours, and of which I was – I think justly – proud, and expected great things, I came into the parlour to find my wife (who was then carrying our first child) crying. On my inquiring the matter, she showed me a letter that had come that moment from Mr. Turner, in which he thanked me stiffly, and said (I still remember his words, tho’ it is more than fifty years since I saw them) that ‘he noted that I had extended the aquatint into the sea, an indulgence for which he had not asked; and he was sorry so much time had been lost, for it would not do, and I must rework it’.

My wife said she could bear no more, and begged me to go and see him, there and then, to see if I might adjust matters between us; and fearing for her health, and for that of the child (which we lost, indeed, less than a month later), I did as she asked. And so we come to the meat of my story.

Mr. Turner was living then at Harley Street, where I found him at home; but when I tried to explain to him the difficulties I was under, and told him I thought I should have ten guineas a plate, instead of eight, for all the extra work he had put me to, he grew livid, and flew into a rage, and seemed unable to speak, but only trembled, and ground his teeth, and slammed the door in my face.

I was, as you may imagine, too agitated to go straight home to my wife, and went instead to a public at the end of the street, where I had something to steady myself; but far from calming me, it only made me feel the more aggrieved, and emboldened me to think I should return to Mr. Turner’s house, and confront him once more with my demands – matching his anger, if necessary, with my own.

Whether I should really have had the courage to carry this plan through I cannot now say; for as I approached his door – my legs feeling heavier, I must confess, with every step – it suddenly opened, and Mr. Turner himself emerged, dressed in his tall hat, and a long coat, and looked about him surreptitiously, as if satisfying himself that he was not observed. I was no more than fifty yards from him, and he would surely have recognized me – but for the fact that it was dusk, and a fog was starting to form, and I had the presence of mind to turn quickly into another doorway, from which I was able to watch him without his seeing me.

Mr. Turner glanced this way and that two or three times more, and then set off down the street at a quick pace. After scarcely a moment’s hesitation, I began to follow him. Even at the time, I remember, I was puzzled by my own actions, and justified them to myself by reasoning that some opportunity might present itself to speak to him again, when he should not find it so easy to escape me. I now realize that this was a young man’s self-delusion, and that my real motive was the hope that I might learn something which would give me greater power over him, and so assist me to redress the imbalance between us which I felt so bitterly.

Without a backward glance, Mr. Turner turned east into Weymouth Street, and, crossing Portland Road, made a dog-leg into Carburton Street, and then turned again into Norton Street. Here he took me by surprise; for, about halfway along, he stopped suddenly before a certain house, and again looked about him suspiciously. I only avoided discovery by dodging quickly behind a passing brewer’s cart, and crossing the street; from where I saw him disappearing into the hall, and the front door closing behind him. My first thought was that this must be a bawdy house or an accommodation house, for why else would he wish to conceal his business there? Yet only the lower windows were lit, and I saw no-one else either entering or leaving; and after only a few minutes Mr. Turner himself came out again – too soon, I imagined, for anything in that way to have happened. He still seemed to fear detection, however; for he had taken pains to disguise himself, by putting on a heavy cloak in place of his coat, and winding a muffler about his face; and before he finally stepped into the street he once more glanced furtively about him.

He did not return to Harley Street, but instead turned back on to Carburton Street and continued east, walking with the same quick, darting gait. Wary of being taken unawares a second time, I decided to follow at a greater distance, so that if he stopped suddenly again I should be able to conceal myself; but I did not make sufficient allowance for the fog, which grew so thick, as the night came on, that I lost him altogether in Fitzroy Square. I ran to catch him up, and after half a minute or so made out a murky figure ahead of me on Grafton Street, but it seemed a little too tall for Mr. Turner, whom I concluded (or rather guessed), therefore, must have turned on to Upper John Street; and so I went that way myself. And I was right, as luck would have it, for I had not gone fifty paces – still running, and choking on the cold unwholesome air – when I came upon him suddenly.

I shall never, as long as I live, forget the picture he made standing there, the mist swirling about him, before a shabby door with the number ‘46’ painted on it (I see it still, the ‘4’ not quite straight, and the ‘6’ blotched and disfigured, as if it was being consumed by mould). His hand was already on the handle; but even now he hesitated, and peered over his shoulder to make sure that no-one saw him, his little bird-like eyes turned yellow by the sulphurous haze, and burning with the most malevolent expression I have ever seen. For a moment I thought he had recognized me, for he started, as I appeared, like a frightened animal; but I immediately lowered my gaze, and hurried on, and when I glanced back he was entering the house.

There was a small public on the other side of the street, which commanded a good view of number 46, and I found myself a place by the fire, and settled there to watch. But an hour passed, and then another, and still Mr. Turner did not come out, and no-one else went in; and at length, thinking I could delay going home to my wife no longer, I told the landlord I thought I had seen a friend enter a house opposite, and asked him, as casually as I could, if he knew who lived there. He could not meet my eye, but blushed (for he must have thought my ‘friend’ was Mr. Turner), and looked down at the mug he was wiping, and mumbled:

‘There’s a young widow there, sir, a Mrs. Danby. She’s kept by an artist, they say, who treats her, if you’ll pardon me speaking plain, as his whore – and none too kindly, by all accounts.’

This is all I know for a certainty, and I shall not lie to you, or pretend to more understanding than I have. I have heard from others, however, that in later years Mr. Turner’s habits of secrecy and dishonesty became ever more vicious, until at length he deceived even his closest friends – living, unknown to them, under a false name, in a poor little cottage in Chelsea. Do not, I beg, allow yourself to be deterred by certain persons from doing your duty, and discovering what this extraordinary conduct was intended to conceal.

For my part, I can say only that J. M. W. Turner was the most tight-fisted, black-hearted devil of a man I ever met. I see him still in my dreams, and wake thanking God that he now has no other power to hurt me and my family.

Yours very truly,

John Farrant

XXI

Letter from Miss Mary Ann Fletcher to Marian Halcombe,
1st October, 185-

Sandycombe Lodge,
Twickenham

Dear Miss Halcombe,

I shall be delighted to receive you and your brother here, any morning you please. I should warn you, however – lest, like the generality of visitors, you imagine it to be some great villa, that can profitably occupy you for a day – that Sandycombe Lodge is only a house in miniature, and you will be done in no more than half an hour.

I do believe, though (but you may perhaps consider me partial!) that you will find it well worth the journey: it is a charming little curiosity; and affords an interesting glimpse into Turner’s mind, and into his unusual mode of life.

Yours very truly,

Mary Ann Fletcher

XXII

Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
2nd October, 185–

Brompton Grove,
Saturday

My dearest Laura,

Your strange letter arrived by this morning’s post. You silly girl! How can you think – let alone write – such things? Do you really imagine that I can bear this separation any more easily than you (who at least have little Walter and Florrie to comfort you)? – or that I would willingly protract it an hour longer than was necessary?

It grieves me – as it would any man – to hear that our children ask, ‘Has Papa forgotten us? Does he not love us any more?’; but what wounds me a thousand times more is that you say you are at a loss how to reply. Great God! How can you be at a loss? Does not your heart answer for you: ‘Of course not, my darlings; he thinks of you, and misses you, every minute of every day; but he is engaged on some great undertaking that shall one day make you proud of him.’? Or do you think so poorly of me that you no longer believe it yourself, but really suppose that I care nothing for family and home, and that I linger in London, like some shallow, worthless man of the world, merely to indulge the whims of idleness and pleasure?

You say that my letters no longer sound like your ‘old dear Walter’ – that while they are addressed to you, you feel I am really directing them to someone else entirely. My dearest – have I not explained?! I have not time enough to keep a journal and to write to you (if I did so, I should be always at my desk, and have to delay my return still further!), and must consequently depend on my letters to preserve a record of my thoughts and impressions. So, yes, others (God willing!) shall one day read some of my words – but would you sooner I confided them all to a diary, and so excluded you, my life’s companion, from the very marrow of my experience?

This book – let me state it plainly, when I should have hoped I had no need to – is very dear to my heart. Through it, I believe, I shall be able to say something of true value about the life of a great artist, and about the nature of art itself. If I do as you ask, however, and return to Limmeridge now, all my efforts (and the hardship we have both endured) will have been in vain; for there are more doors I must open, more corners I must peer into, more questions I must ask, before I can confidently reach a judgement on this elusive man and his work. I shall not, therefore, deceive you (as I unwittingly did before) by saying: I shall be home in so many weeks. I shall be home when I have done what I must do; and that – trust me – will be as soon as I can possibly contrive it.

My love as always, and kisses to the children.

Walter

XXIII

From the notebook of Marian Halcombe, 5th October, 185-

Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham

Neat, plain, geometrical

Whitewashed walls, low slate roof

So small, at first think it’s a real lodge – expect to see gate, and long drive, with great man’s house at end of it

Only inside see it for what it is – Lilliputian classical villa, conceived on different scale from modern houses surrounding it (presumably not there in Turner’s time?)

Even on a dull day – first impression (like Turner’s paintings): Light

Tiny hall – barrel-vault ceiling – simple decoration – entrance to an elegant dolls’-house

To left: curving staircase, lit by oval skylight, up to two bedrooms

Beyond hall, transverse corridor: dining room at one end; library at the other; in the middle, Turner’s studio, with a great window overlooking garden. Light! light! light!

Miss Fletcher – answered door herself. About 40 – long, pale, anxious face, eyes rather close together. Frail, trembled, as if with cold. Sat with her while Walter went outside to sketch house and garden.

Semi-invalid – amuses herself finding out ‘all I can about Turner, and his odd mode of life here’. Thinks he was ‘a funny little man’. [There – ‘funny’ again]

Turner moved here 1813.

Why Twickenham? Air. Light. View of Sir J. Reynolds’ house – also poet James Thomson’s.

Solus – Solis

Blackbirdy

‘Billy’

Pony & trap – sketching

‘Daddy’ or ‘Old Daddy’ – looked after house

Also gallery [strange!]

Market gardener – cart – gin

Left 1826

House sold to Mr. Ford – sold to Miss Fletcher’s fath

From the diary of Marian Halcombe, 5th October, 185-

I have sat here a full hour, and written no more than ‘5th October’ – and shall soon be obliged to change even that, for looking at the clock I see it now wants but ten minutes to be 6th October. Walter depends on me for an account of the day’s events, and all I shall finally be able to give him is my notes.

And yet as soon as I start to write for myself rather than for him – see! – the words begin to come. Why? Do I all of a sudden no longer feel at ease with him? No longer trust him?

Certainly I was puzzled, and not a little embarrassed, by his manner today. He was so withdrawn, so wound about with his own thoughts, that for whole minutes together he said nothing at all, but acted as if he were quite alone, opening a cupboard door, or unfolding the shutters on the window, without question or comment. Miss Fletcher seemed not so much offended by this off-handedness as astonished by it; perhaps assuming that such behaviour would be considered quite normal in London society, she watched him open-mouthed, like a child bemused at the strangeness of the adult world but determined to learn its secrets. Only once did she try to engage him in conversation, as he stood sketching the fireplace in the dining room, and she burst out admiringly: ‘Oh! I wish I could draw like that! How fortunate – to have the Muse of Art as well as of Literature!’

To which Walter did not reply at all (surely a modest ‘You overstate my talents, I’m afraid’, or a polite ‘I’m sure you have remarkable gifts, Miss Fletcher’, would have cost him little enough?); but merely looked away, with a half-smile that seemed to say: Yes – you are right – I am infinitely your superior; and you are of so little consequence that I needn’t waste breath denying it. The poor woman was left staring and gulping like a stranded fish; until at length, unable to bear the humiliation any longer, she was forced to resort to the pitiable fiction that she had been talking to me the whole time, and muttered:

‘Hm, Miss Halcombe?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said. I was debating whether to add, ‘But sad that the Muse of Good Manners seems to have deserted him completely,’ when Walter forestalled me.

‘I think I shall go outside now, if I may,’ he said suddenly. I should have liked to go with him, but decided to stay and talk to Miss Fletcher instead – partly to show my anger with him, and partly my sympathy for her.

‘You must forgive my brother if he seems a little distracted,’ I said as he left. ‘He is very preoccupied with his book.’

‘Oh! – no – I quite understand!’

‘Turner is proving a difficult subject.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said sorrowfully, as if living in Turner’s house somehow made her responsible for his vagaries. ‘But I suppose that’s the privilege of genius, isn’t it? To be a little odd?’

‘Do you think you would have liked him?’

‘What, Turner?’ she said, surprised (as, indeed, I had intended she should be; for jolting her into another train of thought was the only way I could conceive of avoiding a none-too-original lecture on the artistic temperament). ‘I really don’t know.’ She thought carefully for a moment. ‘It all depends, I think. Solus or Solis.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I don’t know why he later changed the name to “Sandycombe Lodge”, but when he first moved here he called the house “Solus” …’

‘“Alone”,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘But my brother thinks he meant “Solis”, S-O-L-I-S. “Of the sun.” Or perhaps just “Sunny”. Turner’d barely been to school, you see, and didn’t have Latin, so it would have been an easy enough mistake for him to make.’

My mind’s eye was suddenly dazzled with the array of suns we had seen at Marlborough House. ‘That seems likelier, doesn’t it?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But you’d certainly suppose he wanted solitude, for he put bars on all the windows, and made the garden a thicket of willows.’

I looked outside. A few yards away I recognized the top of Walter’s head. Beyond it, sure enough, was a thick wall of trees.

‘And the boys called him “Blackbirdy”,’ said Miss Fletcher, ‘because he wouldn’t let them bird’s-nest.’

That might, I thought, have simply been because he liked blackbirds; but before I could say anything she went on:

‘And there were only the two of them in the house.’

Two? Was there a wife, then? A young Mrs. Booth? I could not, for a moment, think of a delicate way to phrase the question; but she must have see it in my face, for she said:

‘Turner and his father.’

‘His father!’

She nodded. ‘“Billy” and “Daddy”.’

‘And not even a servant?’

‘Daddy was the servant, Miss Halcombe. I know – an eccentric arrangement, but there it is – while Billy was out in his pony and trap, sketching, Daddy was here, taking care of the house and garden. And as if being his son’s cook and valet weren’t enough, he was also expected to stretch his canvases, and varnish them when they were done, and go up to London to open the gallery.’

‘What gallery?’ I asked.

‘Oh – did you not know? – Turner kept on his house in Queen Anne Street, even while he was living here; and there was a gallery there, where buyers could view his work. And Daddy, of course, was a tight-fisted old man – it was something of a family trait, as I’m sure you’ve discovered – so to avoid paying the coach-fare he’d give a market gardener a glass of gin to take him into town on his cart.’

She started to laugh, but then stopped abruptly as Walter entered the room. All through my conversation with Miss Fletcher, one part of my mind had been silently composing a thinly veiled rebuke to him, with which I hoped, on his return, to jar him back to some semblance of politeness; but I at once saw that it would not now be necessary. His languor and aloofness seemed to have evaporated like mist before the sun, and he was once again – as he’d been on his return from Petworth, and during our visit to the Bennetts – all enthusiasm and attention. I couldn’t imagine the cause of this transformation, but I quickly realized it was not simply a bad conscience: there was an unmistakable sense of direction in his manner as he sat next to Miss Fletcher on the sofa, and complimented her on her garden, and amused her with a silly anecdote about a black kitten which had leapt on him from behind a currant bush, and half-killed his boot. After a minute she started visibly to relax, and shot me a glance so brimming with gratitude – See! He likes me, after all! – that I shuddered with pity.

‘What I was wondering’, said Walter – after a tiny pause that told me that this was his true purpose – ‘was where are the kitchen and the other offices?’

‘Ah, yes!’ said Miss Fletcher eagerly. ‘A good question, Mr. Hartright. Let me show you.’

She rose, and led us back into the miniature hall.

‘There,’ she said, pointing to a plain, inconspicuous door beneath the stairs. ‘Turner’s triumph. You’d never guess it was there, would you, if you didn’t know?’

‘No,’ said Walter.

And I must own that I hadn’t noticed it before, either, and that if I had I should have assumed it was nothing more than a modest cupboard.

‘Why his triumph?’ I asked.

‘Why, he designed the house,’ she said, with the complacent air of a woman giving a well-tried performance, and seeing from my startled expression that it was having its usual gratifying effect. ‘Oh, yes, he quite fancied himself the architect. So this’ – reaching for the handle, and turning it – ‘must have been in his mind.’

I confess I couldn’t (and still can’t) imagine what ‘this’ might have been – unless it was that Turner, the master of chiaroscuro, having contrived to make the upper floors wonderfully light, decided, by way of contrast, to leave the basement as dark as possible; for beyond the hidden door you could see nothing but the top of a mean spiral staircase, which disappeared after two or three steps into the gloomy grey haze of a dungeon. Any urge I might have had to explore further (and I felt little enough, faced by this uninviting prospect) was immediately quelled by a sickly waft of cold air, laced with the smells of stale cooking, which rose from the darkness like the breath of a dying animal; so I contented myself with turning back to Miss Fletcher and saying:

‘Yes, very ingenious.’

But Walter was not to be so easily deterred; pressing past me and Miss Fletcher (who seemed on the point of closing the door again), he descended the first few steps. After a few seconds he stopped, and cried, ‘This is remarkable!’ and then continued on his way.

‘You are wise to stay here, Miss Halcombe,’ said Miss Fletcher, backing away from the doorway. ‘It’s rather cold down there, I’m afraid, and you might easily catch a chill.’

I have wondered, since, whether there was anything in her manner – some hint of foreboding or secret knowledge – that might have alerted me to what was about to happen; but all I can recall is a frail, hunched woman, her hands crossed and rubbing her arms, and a smile of humorous apology on her thin lips.

It cannot have been more than two minutes before we once again heard Walter’s footsteps on the stairs. I shall never, I think, forget his appearance as he re-emerged a few moments later: the vigour of his movements, the vitality of his form (which seemed suddenly to have expanded, so that it risked bursting out of his sober town clothes); above all, his face, which bore an expression I have never seen before, and don’t know whether I should wish to see again – an expression compounded all at once of excitement, of satisfaction, and (as it seemed to me) of a kind of wild, desolate terror.

Perhaps this is the true root of my uneasiness: in that instant, I recognized Walter’s features well enough – but not the mood, the beliefs, the thoughts they expressed. Only last week, I thought he had truly become himself again, for the first time in years (and congratulated myself, poor vain wretch that I am, on having engineered this transformation, by introducing him to Elizabeth Eastlake); now I wonder whether what then seemed his true self was no more than a temporary phase – not a terminus, as it were, but merely a small station, through which he has already passed on his way to somewhere else. And that somewhere else is a place I do not know, and will make him a stranger to me. Or -

Later

Heavens! Why did I stop again? A strange storm in my head – my thoughts all lashed together, so I could not unravel them.

It is now past two in the morning, and still Walter has not returned.

He told me he was going to Mayall’s photographic studio in Regent Street. He cannot still be there now. Where is he?

Perhaps my anxiety has deprived me of the power to think and write about him.

This will not do.

Concentrate.

One question, naturally, preoccupied me as we got into our cab, and left Sandycombe Lodge.

What had Walter seen in the basement?

Yet I felt I could not ask him directly, for fear that in doing so I might drive him further from me. The truth was, I suddenly realized, I could no longer predict how he would behave. If I revealed that I had seen how deeply he had been affected, he might, indeed, confide in me; but I could as soon imagine his airily denying it (You are too fanciful, Marian; I never thought I should find you guilty of that); or else becoming embarrassed and confused.

For a few minutes I said nothing at all, hoping that he might be moved to fill the silence himself, and so spare me the necessity of declaring my curiosity; but he only sat quietly staring out of the window. At length, unable to bear it any longer, I said:

‘A pretty little house, I thought. Or at least the parts of it I saw.’

An irresistible invitation, you would suppose, to describe the parts I hadn’t seen; but he merely nodded absently. I must either hold my tongue, or be more direct.

‘What was the basement like?’ I asked.

You would think he had been struck deaf.

‘What is it, Walter?’ I said. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

But again he said nothing; and after a minute or two opened his notebook, and began studying the drawings he had made.

It was intolerable – I must discover what he had seen – and yet I was at a loss to know how to prise it from him. It was clear, however, that the more desperately I pursued him now, the more stubborn he would become; so I resolved to ponder the matter in silence.

What might one find in a basement, to excite such a response?

Something that Turner had left there – an undiscovered picture, or pictures. But in that case, surely, Miss Fletcher would have shown them to us, or at least mentioned their existence?

Evidence of a crime – a bloodstain (heaven help us!). Hard to believe – but it was undeniably odd, was it not, that Miss Fletcher seemed to be the only person in the house? Suppose she’d fallen out with the housekeeper, and taken an axe to her in the scullery? Or perhaps she’d had a lover, and he had spurned her?

No, no – inconceivable – if there had been anything of the kind there, she would not have allowed Walter to find it, and he could not have remained silent about it.

Why was my mind running on such terrible things? Was it just that the place made me think so powerfully of a dungeon?

A dungeon. A dungeon. A lightless room. A barred door. Dripping walls, covered in moss. A set of rusting manacles -

The cry of a hawker in the street brought me out of my reverie, and I looked out of the window and saw that we were entering Putney. The road was crowded with carriages and carts; the pavements thronged with dull, decent people thinking of nothing save whether it would rain, or where the cabbages might be best and cheapest. If they could see my thoughts, they would indubitably suppose I was mad.

I was somewhat chastened by this reflection (for if I have had nothing else to boast of, have I not always prided myself on my good sense?); but then it struck me that I could turn my newfound weakness to my advantage, by making light of it.

So was there a prisoner in chains there, Walter? Did you find Old Dad, still locked up after fifty years, and raving piteously about varnish?

I turned cautiously towards him, rehearsing the words in my head. He was still engrossed in his notebook, adding a line here, or a scribbled word there, whenever the motion of the cab allowed. Something in his posture, the obstinate set of his neck and shoulder, told me, beyond doubt, that he would not be amused, and I should fail again.

I was suddenly overcome with tiredness – sleep seemed to ambush me, whether I would or not, pressing me to my seat, and turning my eyelids to lead. No dreams of horrors – no dreams of anything, so far as I can recall; and I was woken again after only a few minutes – for we had gone but a mile or so, and were still a little way from home – by a sharp slapping sound. The cause, I soon discovered, was Walter’s notebook, which had slipped from his lap on to the floor. I was surprised, for an instant, that he did not bend forward to retrieve it; then I saw that he, too, had fallen asleep, and I picked it up myself.

We are brought up to believe that letters and diaries are sacrosanct, and that it is the blackest dishonour to violate their secrets – but what of a notebook? Surely (I told myself) that is something else entirely – a mere collection of facts, as neutral as a column of figures, which cannot be held to belong to any person in particular. It was only as I lifted the first page that I suddenly imagined what I should feel if the situation were reversed, and I found Walter making free with my notebook without my permission.

I stopped myself, but not before I had glimpsed one of his sketches. It was not the gloomy interior I had expected, but an outside view of the garden front. There were the two little single-storey wings, with their stucco walls and trim slate roofs; there in the centre Turner’s studio, where Miss Fletcher and I must have been talking even while Walter had drawn this (indeed, I could just make out two ghostly little crescents in the window, which might have been our heads).

But below it was another window, which I had not seen before: a lunette, protected by an iron grille, half hidden by a tangle of bushes. Beyond it must lie the basement.

It reminded me of something – something unexpected, though for a moment I could not say what it was. The curved top; the glass (at least in Walter’s drawing) so shadowed that it looked like an empty socket – why did they seem familiar?

And then, with the force of a physical shock, it struck me: the half-buried arches in The Bay of Baiae.

Later still

He is back. I cannot imagine where he has been – I do not wish to imagine – but he is back. Thank God.

The sound of the door woke me. I had somehow persuaded myself that I had finished, and fallen asleep at my desk.

I have just re-read what I wrote. I had not finished. I had not described our homecoming.

As we descended at last from the cab, I missed my footing. Walter caught me, but not before I had twisted my ankle. The pain must have shown on my face, because, as I hobbled towards the door on Walter’s arm, the driver said:

‘Your missus all right, sir?’

So kindly meant. And yet those words laid bare my heart so mercilessly that even my poor self-deluded eyes could not fail to see it.

Oh God, I am so miserable.

XXIV

From the journal of Walter Hartright, 6th October, 185-

Am I mistaken? Could I be mistaken?

There is something about a photographic studio that makes you doubt the evidence of your own senses. There is the painted backdrop, telling you that you’re in the library of a country house or a garden strewn with statues; there are the clamps, half hidden by a curtain, that fix the subject in a pose of apparent naturalness for long minutes together.

But surely it is childish superstition to distrust a man simply because he lives by creating illusions?

Considered rationally, is there any reason why Mayall might have lied?

I cannot think of one. He appears a plain, unaffected, businesslike sort of man. Being American, he has no connections here. If he is now the most successful photographer in London (that was, I am sure, Sir William Butteridge I saw emerging from his studio), he has become so entirely through his own efforts, and the excellence of his work. It is true that he suddenly seemed more obliging when I mentioned Lady Eastlake’s name, but that, I am sure, is because she has taken such an intelligent interest in his profession.

So what exactly did he say?

‘Turner came to my atelier several times in ‘forty-seven, ‘forty-eight and ‘forty-nine. There was something rather mysterious about our early meetings. In one of them he led me to believe he was a Chancery Court Judge, and he did nothing to dispel this impression, later on.’

Led me to believe. Odd, but not inconceivable that it was simply a misunderstanding of some kind. Turner was, after all, an old man (he must have been what? – seventy-two? – when they met?) – perhaps his weak eyesight prevented him seeing the puzzlement on May all’s face, or he mis-heard a question.

And yet…

‘He came to see me again and again – so often, indeed, that my people used to think of him as “our Mr. Turner”. And every time he had some new notion about light. One day, I remember, he sat with me three hours, talking about its curious effects on films of prepared silver. The whole subject seemed to fascinate him. He asked whether I’d ever repeated Mrs. Somerville’s experiment of magnetizing a needle in the rays of the spectrum, and said he would like to see the spectral image copied.’

Not the conversation of a man with failing faculties. Nor, indeed, you would imagine, of a Master in Chancery. Surely Mayall must have been curious enough to question him further? ‘If I may say so, sir, you know more about optics than any judge I ever met…?’

That would have been the moment for Turner to disabuse him, if it had been an honest mistake. But he did nothing to dispel this impression, later on.

It is true, of course, that Turner made no attempt to conceal his name – but then there was little chance it would betray him: there must be thousands of Turners in London.

What, then, of the pictures?

‘At first he was very keen on trying the effects of light let in on the figure from a high position, and he sat for the studies himself. Later, I took several daguerreotype portraits of him. In one, he was reading – a favourable position for him, because his eyes were weak and bloodshot. There was a lady who accompanied him [presumably Mrs. Booth] and I recall that he gave one of these pictures to her.’

But none of the portraits was full-face; and when I asked May-all if he still had any of them (for, apart from the early self-portrait Ruskin showed me, I have still seen no image of Turner, and can form no mental conception of him in his later years) he replied:

‘Alas, no. I did set aside one curious portrait of him in profile, which of course I immediately looked up when I found out who my mysterious visitor really was. But unfortunately one of my assistants had effaced it [did Mayall hold my eyes a little too fixedly here, as people do when they lie?] without my permission.’

And how had he found out who his ‘mysterious visitor really was’?

‘Oh, I met him at the soirée of the Royal Society, in – I think – the spring of 1849. He greeted me very cordially, and immediately fell into his old topic of the spectrum. Then someone came up and asked if I knew Mr. Turner, and when I told him I did, my informant said, rather significantly: “Yes, but do you know that he is the Turner?”

‘I was rather surprised, I must confess. I ventured to suggest that I might be able to help him, by carrying out some experiments for him on his ideas about the treatment of light and shade, and we parted on the understanding that he would call on me. But he never did call on me, and I never saw him again.’

Perhaps I am mistaken, then. If Turner’s intention had really been to deceive Mayall, then surely he would not have acknowledged him at the soiree.

And yet and yet and yet…

We are still left with this:

- During his visits to the studio Turner pretended to be a judge.

- He allowed himself to be photographed, but avoided poses in which he could easily be recognized.

- Once Mayall knew his identity he never called on him again, despite having undertaken to do so.

Geniuses are not like other men.

But is not this all of a piece with Sandycombe Lodge?

You are an artist – you worship the sun – you know that no man since the beginning of time has caught its moods and effects with such fidelity and power.

You build a house so full of light that any visitor must say: This is a temple to the sun.

But what if Farrant is right? What if this is only the face you care to show the world, and there is another, concealed behind an almost invisible door?

As I stood in that basement, and stared out through the cavern-mouth window with its fearful iron bars, was there not but one thought that overwhelmed me: This house was designed by a man with a secret?

Farrant may be lying, of course. I must remember that. A letter so at odds with everything else I’ve learned may simply be the product of a diseased and envious mind. If that’s all it is – which, let me not forget, was certainly my assumption when I first read it – then all this speculation is mere fancy, and I have evidence of nothing more sinister than eccentricity.

But if he is telling the truth …

There is no help for it. I must go and see him.

A mere five hours has passed since I last closed this book – but what a five hours! In that time I have changed my coat for another – changed my name for another – gone from the Reform Club to a low tavern, and from there to the Marston Rooms in Piccadilly (a place that even a week ago I could not have conceived of entering), where I sit now, next to a woman and a late theatre-goer at the neighbouring table who laugh drunkenly at each other’s remarks as – I presume – they negotiate terms. (Small wonder that London is so full of vice, when a man seeking rest and refreshment late at night is forced to resort to an establishment such as this.)

And what to make of it all? I cannot tell – too many impressions, and speculations, and novel experiences. I must try simply to set it all down, and trust that some pattern will emerge.

The notion that Farrant was the key to resolving all my doubts had struck me with such force, and filled me with such nervous agitation, that my only thought as I set out was: Find him! It was only after I had gone half a mile, and the raw fog had cooled my excitement, that I realized how precipitate I was being. Suppose I did find him – what then? My object was to discover why he had written to me, and whether his charges against Turner were true; but a man who had lied to me on paper could as easily do so in person. Try as I might, moreover, I could think of no way to phrase the question (my best effort was: ‘A story so extraordinary is hard to credit, Mr. Farrant’) that would not imply I did not believe him, and so risk antagonizing him – which I was particularly anxious to avoid, since he might well be of further service to me.

But some impulse that would not be denied drove me on. I knew that if I abandoned the quest now, and returned home without the truth – or, at least, the satisfaction of knowing I had done everything in my power to get it – I should find no rest there. I had no choice but to keep going, and trust to fate and to my own wits to guide me.

This resolution seemed to clear my mind, and I immediately saw that I must consider my situation with the cool strategy of a general on the eve of battle – survey the landscape, assess the strengths and weaknesses of my forces, and order their disposition accordingly. What was at once apparent was that a direct attack would fail: if Farrant knew – or even suspected – who I was, or my motive for talking to him, I was lost. My only hope, then, was to approach him at a tangent, finding – if I could – some pretext to engage him in conversation and nudging him towards the subject of Turner. If he repeated the same story then, to a man who – so far as he knew – had no interest in the matter save natural curiosity, and no power to influence the views of others, then there must be a strong presumption that it was true. And if he was lying, I might detect it in his manner – for a liar often betrays himself with tell-tale gestures of unease, either revealing his dishonesty by weak smiles and fidgets, or trying to conceal it by too great a display of frankness.

My first aim must be to appear as inconspicuous as possible, so that I might enter his street, and, if necessary, station myself for some time before his house, in order to observe his habits, without drawing attention to myself. And here, at once, I encountered a difficulty: for a man dressed for business in the West End and an evening at the Reform Club cannot hope to escape notice in the back-alleys of Farringdon. I had other clothes at home, of course, but they were too formal, or too rural, or too bright – none of them suggested that sad air of straitened respectability that alone, I felt, could make me invisible.

I wrestled with this conundrum for twenty minutes or more, all the while continuing at a fast pace – for if I faltered, I knew I should be lost. I must be like the Pilgrim, confident that if my faith was great enough – but only then – every obstacle could be overcome.

And so, indeed, it turned out. As I approached Covent Garden, it suddenly struck me that Hand Court was no more than a quarter of a mile away, and that I might go by it with only the smallest deviation from my way. To see Turner’s birthplace once again; to view it, this time, with the eyes of knowledge and experience rather than of ignorance – surely this might deepen my understanding of the man, and help me better to evaluate what I learned from Farrant?

Or so I argued to myself at the time; but now I wonder if I was not prompted by something else: a memory so apparently inconsequential that it could not make itself known at once, but must adopt another form entirely, until the moment when I should be able to recognize it. That moment came when I turned into Maiden Lane – and saw, of a sudden, in an illuminated shop front, three red balls on a blue ground. There! – Eureka! – the answer to my problem! The place was kept, of course, by the mother of my young guide on my last visit, and there was always the chance that she might remember me – but what if she did? She would hardly refuse to do business with me on that account; and if she questioned me directly I would simply deny I had ever been there before. Tonight I must become another man altogether; and it would be a useful test of my powers as an actor to see if I might carry off the transformation now.

As is often the case in such establishments, there were two entrances: one facing the street, and the other through a little court to the side, where those who yet retain some pride may slink in (so they hope) unobserved, and surrender their remaining treasures in the seclusion of a private booth. This second door was locked, presumably because it was thought that only the most desperate would need to avail themselves of a pawnbroker so late in the evening. Even though no-one who knew me as Walter Hartright could possibly have seen me, I confess that I hesitated a moment, and went through the pitiful charade of looking in the window, and pretending that I was contemplating buying the stuffed pheasant in a glass case, or one of the cheap rings and brooches neatly laid out like geological specimens on a card, before I finally summoned the courage to go inside.

The only gas-jet was at the front of the shop, where it could cast its light into the street, and act as a beacon to the poor souls seeking its bitter succour. The rest of the interior was lit by two oil-lamps, whose soft glow gave an unfamiliar romance to the pyramids of depressingly mundane objects – a clockwork spit, watches and snuff-boxes, cups and dishes and vases – clothing them in tantalizing shadows, and creating the illusion that somewhere among them you might stumble upon something rare and wonderful. Behind the counter were shelves lined with ticketed bundles, and another door, its presence marked only by an irregular rim of light, which must lead – I deduced from the murmur of voices beyond it – into domestic quarters.

An automatic bell announced my presence, and all at once the voices stopped, and the door at the back opened, and a figure appeared. Not the woman, but – I knew it instantly, from the slender form of the silhouette, and its rapid childish movements – the girl herself. She stopped and stared when she saw me, but whether because she recognized me (the brightness of the gas-lamp was behind me, and must have made my face indistinct) or merely because she was surprised to see such a well-dressed man in the shop at such an hour, I could not say.

‘Good evening,’ she said after a moment, with a tentative smile.

I removed my coat. ‘I should like to leave this,’ I said (and was surprised to hear that, without conscious thought, I had dropped once again into the voice I had last used at Petworth). ‘And take another in its place.’

She seemed puzzled, and glanced uncertainly behind her.

‘Come on, girl,’ I said. ‘It’s worth a pound, at least. You can allow me five bob for it; and must have something I could take, doesn’t matter how old, older the better, for a shilling or two?’

Perhaps she wondered if I had stolen it (a thought that must occur to a pawnbroker ten times a day); for she ran her gaze over my tie and waistcoat and boots, as if to see whether they were all of a piece with the coat. At length, evidently satisfied, she said:

‘What is it, then? Trouble with the ‘orses?’

‘That’s it,’ I said, simultaneously grateful that she had supplied me with a story, and angry with myself for not having had the foresight to invent my own. ‘But my luck’ll change tomorrow. Meantime, a man needs money to drink.’

‘Yes,’ she said; and then, turning her large brown eyes directly upon mine, and with a knowingness that seemed to penetrate me like a blade of ice: ‘And for somethin’ else, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Did she, in that moment, know who I was? Had her mother convinced her, after all, that my purpose in befriending her on that earlier visit had been to debauch her? Or was this what life had taught her to assume of any man who came into the shop at night in need of money?

I looked away, affecting not to have heard her. ‘So, girl, what do you say? Five bob?’

I thought she might say she needed to ask her mother; but she instantly replied, with the confidence of a seasoned haggler:

‘Four.’

In truth, I should have been happy enough to take a penny, provided I could have a satisfactory replacement to go with it; but I could not tell her so, so I gruffly answered:

‘Let’s see what you got, then.’

She was back in a moment, with two coats. One was long and black, well cut from a fine worsted cloth, and speckled with neat darns and patches; and I was tempted to take it, for I knew it would keep me almost as warm as my own. It was so old-fashioned, however, that it could not fail to look odd on a man of my age, and in the end I chose the other – a cheap confection of brown serge and cream piping, with bound pockets and turned-back cuffs, such as a clerk with aspirations to fashion (if such a thing exists) might wear.

‘That one’s dearer,’ said the girl. ‘Three-and-six.’

I think she expected me to try to beat her down, but this was not the moment to argue, so I merely nodded and said:

‘Very well.’

She handed me the ticket for my own coat, and a sixpenny piece. ‘You won’t get much for that,’ she said, with the same knowing look, and a smile that was almost a leer. ‘Couple of pots of beer, and off ‘ome to your missus.’

For all I remember now of the route I took to Farringdon, or of what I saw and heard upon the way, I might as well have been sleep-walking. My every thought – beyond that required to place one foot in front of the other, and to avoid obstacles – was devoted to but one object: to try to concoct a plausible story. My want of one in the pawnbroker’s shop had caused nothing worse than embarrassment – indeed, thanks to the girl, I had been spared even that – but with Farrant it would certainly prove fatal. But how to devise something that would meet every eventuality? I am looking for a friend, who told me he lodged here. What if he had no lodger – or, worse, did have one, who said he’d never seen me before in his life? Cousin Farrant! Do you not know me? True – I was only a child when we sailed for Australia, but surely – ? No – the stuff of melodrama; and, besides, I knew nothing of his family circumstances. In the end, I decided I must simply gather as much intelligence as possible; and then rely on fate to give me a pretext for talking to him, and my own resources to furnish me with a character appropriate to it.

Trotter Street, it turned out, barely deserves the name of ‘street’ at all; it is no more than a row of tall, pinched, grey houses overlooking a long straggle of workshops and builders’ yards and odd pockets of waste ground. There is but a single line of gas-lamps, which seem scarcely equal to the task of lighting it – at least on a night like tonight, with no moon, and with a heavy fog rolling up from the river; and even when your eyes have adjusted to the darkness, there is little enough to lift your spirits. The road is rough and treacherous, the cobbles broken here and there by black puddles; and at one end of it – just at the point where you think you should be able to turn a corner, and escape to somewhere less desolate – you find your path barred by the locked gates of a blacking works. Farrant’s story might yet, of course, prove to be true; but it was easy enough to imagine how a man living here might fancy he had suffered a thousand wrongs, when his real grievance was against life itself, for condemning him to such a cheerless place.

Number 20 was almost indistinguishable from its neighbours, save that the painted figures on the door had faded, and you could identify it only by observing that it stood between number 19 and number 21. There was a dim glow behind the fanlight, and a brighter one in the first-floor window, but otherwise the building was dark. I looked about – as had Farrant himself, if he was to be believed, when he was pursuing Turner – for an inn or public, where I might make enquiries about him, and take shelter while I was watching the house; but there was none to be seen. I leaned against a buckled fence on the opposite side of the street, hoping I might see someone going in or out; but after ten minutes all that had happened was that my hands and feet had grown numb with the cold. Time, I decided, to take some other action.

There was no light in number 19; and when I approached number 211 heard, from inside, the sound of a glass breaking, and two voices – a man’s and a woman’s – trying to outdo one another in drunken argument. I edged away, therefore, all the while keeping my eye on Farrant’s house, and knocked at number 18. After a moment, a woman of thirty or so opened the door a foot or so and peered out.

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs. Farrant?’ I said.

Her forehead creased, and she drew in her lower lip and shook her head.

‘Mr. Farrant does live here?’

‘You got the wrong house,’ she said.

‘Oh, pardon me. Then . . .?’ I pointed down the street, and raised my eyebrows.

‘What you want with him?’ she said. ‘You a dun?’

‘No,’ I said; but before I could go on a child’s voice behind her said:

‘What is it, Ma?’

‘Ssh!’ she said; but the boy squeezed past her skirts, forcing the door wider open, and stood in front of her, looking up at me. He was about eight, with fair curls and curious blue eyes.

‘I think he may be my uncle,’ I said.

‘May be!’

‘My ma always said she had a brother who was an engraver in London,’ I said. ‘Only they had a difference, when they were young; and last thing she said, when she was dying, was: “Find your uncle, and make it right with him.”’

If I had expected this affecting tale to melt her, I was mistaken; for she continued to skewer me with a suspicious gaze in which there was no hint of a tear. The boy, however, at that moment came to my aid.

‘Who’s he talking about?’ he said, tugging at his mother’s apron. He completed the question by forming the thumb and forefinger of each hand into a circle, and then holding them before his eyes.

‘You didn’t ought to make fun of him,’ said the woman. ‘What with all his kindness to you.’

I remember feeling a great tiredness pass through me, weighting my legs and sapping me of the will to go on. It was late – it was cold – I had come all this way, and learned nothing for my pains save that Farrant had once been kind to a child, and there seemed no prospect that I might learn anything more.

But then, the next instant – it all happened so quickly that it is still confused in my mind – the boy darted out on to the pavement, before his mother could grab him; shouted, ‘Come on, I’ll show you!’; ran two or three steps; and then abruptly stopped.

‘There!’ he said, pointing to a figure moving slowly away from us. ‘There he is!’ Something in the way he braced himself and tilted his head told me that he was intending to call out; but I stopped him just in time.

‘Hush,’ I said. ‘I want it to be a surprise’; and then, before he could question me, or protest, I handed him the sixpence the girl at the pawnbroker’s had given me, and left him and his mother staring after me as I set off in pursuit.

More than half a century ago, Farrant had followed Turner through the fog; now, here was J, following him. This symmetry, for some reason, exhilarated me, as the resolution of a piece of music may please the ear, or the perfect balance of a composition (think of Turner’s own Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus) satisfy the eye. I was so distracted by it, indeed, that I became careless, and almost gave myself away; for – somehow foolishly conceiving him still to be the strapping young fellow he had been then, and imagining that it would be all I could do to keep up with him – I started at a tremendous pace, and came upon him far too quickly. Hearing my footsteps, he stopped and turned, and looked about him like an old bear sniffing the air; and would, I am certain, have seen me, save that – as I saw at once from his heavy spectacles, and half-closed eyes – his sight was now too weak. I stood quite still, holding my breath, until at length, hunching his shoulders, he lumbered on again, feeling his way with a stick. I had learned my lesson – as he, I recalled with a smile, had learned his in Norton Street; and waited half a minute or so before setting off once more, this time being careful to keep a prudent distance.

I did not have to continue in this manner for long. At the end of the street he turned into the main thoroughfare, and then, after fifty yards or so, into a small public house – which I must have passed on my way there, though I had no recollection of it – called the White Post. Fearing that, if I went in after him immediately, he might associate me with the footsteps he had heard, and correctly guess that I had been following him, I decided to linger outside for a few minutes. To the left of the door was a low, uncurtained window through which I could see a crowded parlour hazy with tobacco smoke, and hear the cheerful chime of glasses and the ebb and flow of laughter and conversation. Although I could not stand directly before it without being noticed, I found that if I pressed myself against the adjacent wall and craned my neck, I still had a clear view of one half of the room – some rustic prints; the end of a long table (the people sitting at it were largely invisible, but I could just see an assortment of elbows, and two tankards, and a hat); and a small modern fireplace, bright with coals. In the chimney corner were two comfortable chairs – one empty, the other occupied by an old man with a grimy red neck-tie and a round, beef-red face. Something in the way he tapped his fingers, and then looked up questioningly, made me suppose he was waiting for Farrant; and so indeed it proved, for a few seconds later my quarry shuffled into view, and shook the old man’s hand.

I say ‘the old man’s’; but as he removed his cloak, and gently eased himself into the vacant chair, I saw that Farrant was in fact the older of the two. Time had made sad work with him, but he must once have been an impressive figure: even now, bent and frail though he was, his large girth and broad shoulders made him seem almost too big for the little room, and his big-nosed, wide-mouthed, craggy-browed face gave him the imposing presence of a Roman emperor – an impression accentuated by his skin, which the cold had turned as white and luminous as marble.

Within a few moments the two men were talking intently – Farrant leaning forward, and rotating his hand to emphasize his words; the other nodding in agreement (though there was a certain wariness in his eyes, it seemed to me), and drumming his fingers ceaselessly against his wrist. When the barmaid brought their mugs of beer, Red-tie looked up and smiled at her; but Farrant appeared not to notice her, and continued speaking without pause. I waited for two or three minutes more, and then, when Farrant at length sat back and cast about for his drink, concluded that I might safely go in.

Two or three of the men sitting at the table glanced briefly at me as I came through the door, but otherwise my appearance seemed to provoke no response at all, and I knew that about the coat, at least, I had made the right decision. The smoky warmth pressed against my face, as tangible and stifling as a blanket, and made me suddenly aware how chilled I had become. It required no great feat of acting, therefore, as I picked my way between chairs and stools, to shiver and rub my hands and mutter ‘brrr’ under my breath – or not, at least, until I started to come within earshot of Farrant’s conversation, and heard (so I thought), amongst a torrent of words I could not make out, one that stopped me dead: ‘Turner’.

My first impulse, naturally, was to stand still and listen; but to do so would be to risk alerting them to my interest; and with a great effort of will I forced myself to continue my dumbshow. They fell silent as I approached; but Red-tie looked on with a kind of distant amusement, like a man who happens by chance upon a street-entertainer, while I stationed myself before the hearth, and began stamping my feet, and blowing on my hands, and shaking the steam from my mist-sodden clothes.

‘Evening,’ I said, at length, seeing that if I was to get into conversation with them I must initiate it myself. They nodded, but did not reply; and after a moment – as if he thought this small show of ceremony had concluded their business with me – Farrant leant towards his companion and said, in a strangely light, womanish voice:

‘Undoubtedly it would have greater weight from you.’

Whether because he felt uneasy at continuing their discussion in my presence, or merely because he was curious about me, I cannot say; but Red-tie ignored him, and continued to watch me. After a few moments he said:

‘You been out all night?’ He looked towards Farrant. ‘You see him, Jack? He’s wet as a dog.’

Farrant screwed up his eyes to look at me. The effort made him frown; but any appearance of sternness immediately vanished when he drew in his breath with a soft whistle of pity, and said:

‘Oh, you poor chap. What happened to you?’

‘Missus threw him out of the house,’ said Red-tie, with a laugh, and I started to join in; but Farrant silenced us by lifting his big hand, and shaking his head.

‘No,’ he said gravely. He continued to look at me, not unkindly, as if giving me the chance to explain myself.

‘I came to see my sister,’ I said. ‘Only she wasn’t in.’

Farrant nodded. ‘Where’s she live?’

‘Trotter Street.’ That, I knew as I said it, was a mistake; but I couldn’t immediately bring to mind the name of any other street in the vicinity. Cursing my own carelessness, I waited for him to ask me what my sister was called, and which her house was; but he merely nodded again, and went on:

‘And where do you live?’

‘Other side of town. Putney,’ I said.

‘That’s a fair way,’ said Farrant. He looked about him, and prodded the air with his foot until he struck a stool, and then hooked his boot under the stretcher and drew it towards me. ‘Here. You don’t want to stand after a walk like that.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, sitting down.

‘Something urgent, was it?’ said Farrant. ‘I could give her a message, if you like. I’m just at number 20.’

For a moment, I had absolutely no idea how to reply; and then, as if someone had suddenly set off a flare, illuminating a landscape that until now had been lost in darkness, I saw with perfect clarity what I must say:

‘That’s very kind of you; but the fact is I’m just back from Petworth.’

Did I imagine it, or did Farrant and his companion exchange furtive glances? I went on:

‘Her boy’s in service at the house; and I came to tell her how he goes on there.’ I paused, but neither of them spoke – though they seemed to be watching me so keenly that I felt I must comment on it, or again risk rousing their suspicion. ‘Do you know Petworth, then?’ I said, looking from one to the other. ‘In Sussex?’

‘Only by repute,’ said Farrant, with a dry smile.

‘Lord! you should see it! Regular catacomb of a place. Most of, it empty, and the servants kept running one end of it to the other from morning to night.’ I laughed. ‘My nephew, he’s a droll young fellow, he says it’s no wonder they call them footmen, for that’s the bit that does most of the work.’

The barmaid, a thin, dark-haired girl of eighteen or so, came to take my order. I wondered whether to offer them something, but decided it would seem too forward.

‘Put a drop of something in it, Kate, to warm him up!’ Red-tie called, as she was leaving. ‘Else he’ll take and die of a chill!’

She turned and shouted something over her shoulder, but it was lost in a sudden spasm of laughter which spread through the room, and ended with Red-tie himself.

‘I’ll be honest,’ I said, ‘I was hoping to get a position there myself; for Paul’s a good boy, and I thought they might be happy enough to take another from the same stable, so to speak. But -’

Farrant raised his hand, and craned towards me. ‘A position as what, Mr.…?’

‘Jenkinson,’ I said. ‘Oh, you know, an upper servant. I was the under-butler in my last place’ – I paused here, for effect, and lowered my voice – ‘but the old man died before I could get a character from him.’ I laughed – or rather Jenkinson did, for I could barely recognize the sly, cynical, man-to-man sneer that issued from my lips as my own. Red-tie chuckled too; but we were quickly shamed into silence by Farrant, who refused to ingratiate himself by joining in (surely the fellowship of facile heartlessness is the largest gentlemen’s club in the world, and resisting its blandishments must have required some courage), and continued to regard me with the same unsmiling expression.

‘But turns out Colonel Wyndham – that’s the master now – only wants people that have come with them from their old house.’ I winked at Red-tie. ‘His wife’s an Evangelical, you see, and very particular about the servants’ morals.’

The girl brought my porter; and I winked at her, too, for good measure.

‘Your health, gents.’

Farrant gravely raised his glass, but did not drink.

‘I’d have done well enough there in the old days,’ I said. ‘If what Paul says is to be believed. Place was full of people, painters and poets and what-have-you, and Lord knows how many women – not a corner or a cubby-hole didn’t have a Royal Academician in it, or one of his lordship’s bastards.’ I shook my head, conveying – I hoped – my deep regret at having missed such colourful goings-on.

‘You’re talking of the Third Earl’s time?’ said Farrant.

‘Yes,’ I said – making, I think, a fair show of surprise. ‘Why? Were you acquainted with him?’

‘I knew his name,’ said Farrant. ‘Everyone knew his name then, leastways in my line of business.’

‘Indeed?’ I was on the point of going on: Are you an artist, then? when I thought better of it. My ‘guesses’ must not appear too accurate, and I must not seem too eager to ingratiate myself. I glanced at Red-tie; and then, with a waggish little smile, and in a manner bordering on the insolent, said:

‘And what business is that, Mr. …?’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Red-tie’s lips twitch. Farrant still looked at me impassively, but I noticed the broken veins on his pale cheeks starting to colour.

‘Farrant,’ he said. ‘I’m an engraver.’

‘Ah,’ I said, with an air of indifference. I took a deep draught of my beer, and grinned at Red-tie. ‘That fortifies you, Mr. …’

‘Hargreaves,’ said Red-tie, laughing.

‘Better than a warming pan.’ I barely heeded the critical voice in my own head saying That sounds foolish – warming pans don’t fortify; I was too busy trying to think of a way to direct the conversation back to Petworth, and then to artists, and then to -

‘Did they say anything of Turner?’ Farrant asked suddenly.

I could scarcely believe my good luck. ‘Turner?’ I said.

‘The landscape painter,’ said Farrant, looking not at me but at Hargreaves, with a meaning expression that seemed to say: See, I know what I am about.

‘Yes, as it happens,’ I said, laughing. ‘Though I don’t know how much of it to believe.’

Farrant leaned forward. ‘Why, what did they tell you?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that he was a strange, secretive little devil, who locked himself in the library, and would admit no-one save the Earl.’

Farrant nodded. ‘Is that all?’

‘He had a housemaid for a . . . friend – you know the kind of friend I mean, Mr. Hargreaves? – and gave her a little picture to remember him by. That part’s true at least, I think, for her daughter showed it to me – the poor girl’s soft on Paul, I fancy, and thought no doubt she’d impress his uncle.’

Hargreaves guffawed lewdly.

‘And I’ll tell you, the funny thing – what do you think it was?’

Hargreaves shrugged, and looked away; while Farrant was so intent on hearing the end of my story that he could not bear any distraction from it, and shook his head impatiently.

‘What you or I’d have done is leave her with a sentimental miniature, wouldn’t we, Mr. Hargreaves? Or a peaceful country scene? But not Turner – he had to give her a blood-red sunset, and a rising storm. “Here you are, darling. Something to remind you of me.”’

Hargreaves began to laugh again, but Farrant cut him short.

‘That does not surprise me,’ he said. His voice was quiet but tremulous, and he clenched his fists like a man struggling to keep some great passion in check. ‘Nothing of what you say surprises me – save that he gave her anything at all.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Did you know him, then?’

‘Well enough,’ he muttered. ‘Well enough.’

I said nothing, waiting for him to go on; but after a few moments he shook his head and said:

‘Anyway, it is no matter.’

‘No,’ I said; and then – thinking it was at last safe to do so – ‘I should like to hear.’

He shook his head again. ‘What good’s tittle-tattle? I tell you what I know, and you tell the next man, with a bit added here, and another there, to season it; and he does the same in his turn, and soon there’s a hundred different stories, and no-one believes any of them. I want people to have the truth, here, in front of them, black and white. And they will, soon enough.’

His face was so grave, and his voice so urgent, that it was impossible, in that instant, to believe he had lied to me.

‘What,’ I said, ‘are you writing a book?’

‘No,’ he said darkly. ‘But there are others interested in Turner.’

My skin prickled, as it does at the onset of a fever. Was others just a rhetorical flourish, or did he mean more than one? If he had found out about me, of course (which was clearly the case, although I did not know how), was it not reasonable enough to suppose that he also knew something of Thornbury, and had perhaps communicated with him? But what if there was a third – or even a fourth – biographer, of whom I had never heard at all?

‘Really?’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘Who?’

He took a leisurely sip from his glass and then set it down again, wiping the suds from his mouth. ‘You will forgive me, sir,’ he said with a sigh, avoiding my gaze, ‘but I barely know you; and this is a delicate matter.’ And I could not help noticing – dear God! how complex are our emotions, and how contradictory! – that while his shoulders were bowed under the weight of some great burden, yet his eyes shone with the consciousness of the power he enjoyed at that moment.

‘The truth is,’ said Hargreaves, with a wheedling smile, watching Farrant closely all the time, ‘there’s a value now, to stories about Turner. There’s a gentleman as pays good money for them. What Mr. Farrant’s saying is, you want him to tell you, you’ll have to put your hand in your pocket -’

‘No!’ roared Farrant, so loudly that the room suddenly fell quiet, and every face turned towards us. ‘I don’t care anything about that. I want the facts straight, number one; and number two, no-one knows about them till they’re published. That’s the first rule of war: don’t give your secrets to the enemy.’

‘Who are the enemy?’ I said.

Farrant didn’t reply at once, but instead stared thoughtfully before him. At length he turned abruptly to me and said: ‘Turner had powerful friends.’

‘Indeed -’ I began; but Farrant was already preparing to leave, pulling his coat about him and searching for his stick. ‘Oh, please,’ I said, touching his arm. ‘Don’t go. Let me buy you a drink.’

He knocked my hand away and shook his head emphatically. ‘I shall wish you good night.’

My palms felt dry and empty – I longed to clasp them round his rough sleeve, and drag him back to his chair – but I knew nothing would be gained by it. If he was not angry with me yet (and it seemed to have been Hargreaves, rather than I, that had provoked him), he soon would be if I persisted in trying to detain him. All I could do, during the unconscionable time it took him to get ready, was to stare at the fire, and exchange sheepish grins with Hargreaves. At last, he fastened the final button on his coat, and without another word, began his stately progress towards the door.

‘You can buy me a drink,’ said Hargreaves, when Farrant was out of earshot. ‘And I’ll tell you what I know.’

‘About the gentleman?’

His face took on the surly, puzzled look of a slow-witted man who suspects he is being mocked. ‘What gentleman?’

‘The gentleman who pays good money for stories about Turner.’

‘Oh!’ He clearly hadn’t expected this; and he frowned as he wrestled with the troubling question of why I should want to know. Fearing that I had gone too far, and given too much away, I said hastily:

‘I was thinking of my nephew. He could spin him a tale or two.’

‘Ah, I see!’ He smiled and nodded, and for a moment I thought he was going to tell me, for he gave me a crafty sidelong glance that seemed to say, I get your meaning now; you’re a man of the world like me, which I interpreted as a prelude to doing business. But then he suddenly looked away and said: ‘I won’t deceive you – I know no more than Jack Farrant told me, and that’s little enough.’

‘His name?’

Hargreaves shook his head.

I cursed inwardly. Could it have been Thornbury? That was the likeliest explanation, but it failed to explain Farrant’s letter to me. An author might naturally give a useful informant money; but he would scarcely pay him to send his story to a rival. Perhaps there was someone else . . .? Or perhaps Farrant had merely heard about me from Davenant or George Jones (for did not his letter mention both their names?) and had written to me on his own account, for his own reasons? I should gladly have given fifty pounds for the answer, though I knew better than to say so. Something of my feelings must have shown, however, for, before I had time to speak, he went on eagerly:

‘But I’ll tell you something else – a sight tastier – about Turner.’

I forced an indifferent smile on to my face, and said laconically: ‘As good as the housemaid?’

‘Oh, better!’

‘Very well.’

He shook his head, and wagged a finger at me. ‘Drink!’

I summoned the barmaid. The question of what he should order at my expense seemed to exercise Hargreaves terribly, and he agonized over it for some seconds before finally saying:

‘A pot of porter, if you please, and a tot of brandy’ – here he leered comically at me – ‘just to keep it company on the way down,’ And then, as if he feared I should cavil at this extravagance, and withdraw my offer, he laid his grimy fingers on my cuff, and said: ‘It’s worth it, Mr. Jenkinson. You’ll see.’

And so, indeed, it proved; for this, as near as I can remember it, is what he told me – his face thrust forward, his eyes gazing up into mine with the anxious look of a dog that expects another biscuit if its master likes its trick, and a kick if he does not:

‘I’m a waterman by trade; I was a hog-grubber once, but, what with the new bridges, there’s no living to be made on that stretch of the river now; so the last fifteen year or more I mostly been plying Wapping. And that’s where I saw him – oh, must’ve been a dozen times, at least.

‘He was a rum one – you knew that the minute you laid eyes on him – not much taller’n a child, with a big hat, and a long coat. You couldn’t see his face clear, for he’d wrap a scarf around it, to keep the cold out o’ doors, as he’d say, and besides, it was dark more often than not; but I remember his big Jew’s nose, and his eyes looking at you like a ferret, and his grey hair sticking out under his hat – for he was already an old fellow by this time.

‘He liked me, he said, on account I’d been a sailor; and usually he’d ask for me special, to go to Rotherhithe. It was always the same: I’d take him across of a Saturday night, and bring him back again Monday morning. General, he wouldn’t say much, just sit staring over the side of the boat, as if he was looking for something in the water; and once . .. once or twice I saw him take out a notebook, and scribble in it.

‘I didn’t know who he was – he never told me a name – but I wouldn’t have guessed it was “Turner”, for one time, as we was putting in at Rotherhithe, an old seaman who’d had a bit to drink come up to him and says: “Back again, Mr. J.? Lord, give the girls a chance!” Might have been “Jay”, I suppose, but it didn’t sound like that – too quick, if you know what I mean. So perhaps he went by “Jones”, or “Johnson”.

‘But then one time, he’s going ashore at Wapping, and another gentleman steps down to take the boat, and sees him, and says: “Why, Turner!”; but he just shakes his head and marches off without a word. When the other gent’s settled himself, he says: “You know who that was? Turner, the Turner! J. M. W.? R.A.? I’d heard stories about his adventures, of course, but I never believed them before now.”

‘So I says, “What stories, sir?” And he says: “Why, that he’ll finish painting on a Saturday night, and put a five-pound note in his pocket, and go and wallow in some low sailor’s house by the river till Monday morning!”

‘And the rummy thing is, after that, I never saw the old man again.’

My mouth was dry; I could hear my own heartbeat throbbing in my ears; I was filled with that strange tumbling excitement you feel when your wildest intimation suddenly becomes a certainty. Hargreaves must have seen the effect he had had, for he concluded by exhaling dramatically, and sitting back with a triumphant glint in his eye, as much as to say: There! What did I tell you?

‘Well,’ I said, still striving to sound nonchalant, even if my glowing cheeks betrayed me. ‘That was tasty enough, I suppose.’ I got up, squinting at the clock above the bar counter.

‘Worth another pot?’ he said quickly.

I hesitated, and then laughed and said:

‘Oh, why not? But you’ll drink it alone; for I must off home.’

It was while we were waiting for the barmaid that Hargreaves suddenly leaned over and tugged my sleeve.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, looking round to see that we were not overheard. ‘The funniest thing. Fair turned my stomach. One time, we was nearly at the south bank, and Turner looking in the water as usual, when he suddenly points to something and says: “Over there! Row over there!” “What is it?” I says; for I couldn’t see nothing; but he just says: “Row! Row!” And he takes out his little book, and starts to sketch something, frantic like, as if all of a sudden it’s just going to vanish away.’

Hargreaves looked about him again; and when he turned back to me there was such disquiet in his eyes that I realized he was telling me this not for gain, but to unburden himself.

‘I didn’t see what it was until my oar struck it, Mr. Jenkinson. So help me, it was a body – a poor girl, couldn’t have been more than sixteen, as’d drowned herself. And there was Turner, lost to the world, drawing her face.’

XXV

From the private notebook of Walter Hartright,
7th October, 185–

Others may read a journal.

No-one must read this.

What is a man who slips like mercury between the fingers, who is never where you think to find him, who goes abroad under an assumed name and a borrowed identity?

A man who never marries; and maintains no household; and even in those places where he hides from the world has secret chambers in which to conceal himself still more completely?

A man who consorts with whores in stinking taverns? A man who responds to seeing a corpse not with some pious exclamation of pity, but by taking out his notebook and drawing it?

He is a genius.

Last night, for the first time in my life, I was like mercury.

I have never been so free.

Leaving the White Post I might have -

What?

Gone anywhere. Done anything. Walked to the docks, and taken passage for Java. Returned to Maiden Lane and found a girl, and enjoyed her in the alley where she stood. No-one could have said: That was Walter Hartright. No-one could have blamed me. No-one could have blamed me.

Gravity held me by a thread. At any moment I might have snapped it, and drifted away altogether.

But I let it draw me homeward, as a child draws a kite.

Until I reached Piccadilly. And the Marston Rooms.

I did not seek her.

But I did not send her away.

I had set down my journal. I was so tired I had lost all sense of time. I was watching a drunk man lurching towards the door.

She said: ‘A penny for your thoughts.’

I turned. She was perhaps twenty-five, wearing a close-fitting blue dress and crinoline. She had thick fair hair pinned loosely over the nape of her neck. She smelt of musk.

‘What are you about?’ she said.

I smiled, and weighed the open journal in my hand.

‘What, are you an author, then?’

I said nothing.

‘Must be lonely work, being an author. I expect you feel like a bit of company, don’t you, sometimes?’

I nodded.

‘That’s good,’ she said, sitting beside me. ‘I’m fond of company, too.’ She leaned close. She was warm. I smelt the hot biscuit tang of powder on her cheeks.

‘You going to buy me a drink, then?’

I jerked my head at the waiter.

‘I like champagne,’ she said. ‘It makes me gay.’

The drunk man had finally stumbled into the street. Through the window, I saw a woman in a wide-brimmed hat accosting him.

‘I’m Louise,’ said my companion. She pouted teasingly, and gave a little nod that invited me to tell her my name.

I said nothing, but merely looked at her and smiled.

‘Gentlemen are often shy about that,’ she said. She put her head on one side and appraised me, running her tongue over her blood-red lips. ‘What about Leo?’ she said at last, in barely more than a whisper.

‘Leo,’ I heard myself say.

She spread her hand on the open page of my journal and caressed it, as if she might coax the meaning from it. ‘So, Leo, what are you writing?’ When I did not reply, she suddenly seized the book and began to read at random:

‘What’s this – “wallow in some low sailor’s house by the river”?’ She broke off, laughing. I snatched the book back.

‘You bad boy,’ she said. ‘Is that what you get up to?’

The waiter came. His smile said: I know what you’re doing. I wanted to hide my face in shame. I wanted to acknowledge his gaze, and bask in the warmth of his admiration.

‘Champagne,’ I heard myself say.

‘Very good, sir.’

‘And something for yourself. Make the night go a bit sweeter.’

‘He’s a gent, ain’t he?’ giggled the woman, catching the waiter’s eye.

His smiled deepened. ‘Thank you, sir.’

When he had gone, she took my wrist in her hot fingers and leaned closer. Her breath smelled of licorice and wine.

‘I like to wallow,’ she whispered.

‘I bet you do.’

How can I explain it? I cannot say it was not my voice. But it was the voice of a me whose existence I had never suspected. He must have been there always, sealed away in some blackness so profound that I had never thought to try to penetrate it. But now the shutters had been thrown open, and we could see and hear each other.

‘I know a nice place,’ she said. Her lips brushed my cheek, and she whispered in my ear: ‘What would you like to do with me?’

We were poised, Leo and Walter; balanced on a pinpoint.

It’s natural enough, ain’t it? A man and a woman were made to give pleasure to each other.

Think of …

You can’t pretend you don’t feel

You can’t pretend you only want to fuck your wife.

I could see the pulse in her throat, as if some tiny creature were trapped beneath the skin.

See? Her heart’s pounding, too.

If I go with her, I shall cease to be me.

Isn’t that the point?

‘Mm?’ she murmured again. ‘What would you like?’ She drew my ear-lobe into her mouth, nipped it, rolled it on her tongue.

I can imagine. That is enough. I can see, and imagine.

I must freeze this moment; I must stop time; I must hold my breath; and be as adroit as an acrobat with a pole.

I laid two sovereigns on the table, and left without another word.

XXVI

Letter from Laura Hartright to Marian Halcombe,
7th October, 185–

Darling Marian,

Walter has written me such a cold, angry letter. Why is he so cross with me? Do you know? I can think of nothing I have done, save to tell him that we miss him, and long for his return. That would never have made the old Walter angry. It would have brought him back to us. I know it would.

I am so unhappy. This morning Florrie said, ‘Why are you not pretty any more, Mama?’ I could not tell her the answer: that I had lain awake half the night, crying about her father.

Am I – I can barely write this – am I losing him? Has he changed? I pray to God not. But I am so far away – I cannot touch him, or see his dear face, or hear his voice.

You are so much cleverer and wiser than I am. Please – is there anything you can do to make things well between us again?

Your affectionate sister,

Laura

XXVII

From the journal of Marian Halcombe, 9th October, 185-

This cannot go on.

God, is there to be nothing in life but gritting our teeth, and doing our duty?

XXVIII

Memorandum of a letter from Walter Hartright to
Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes, 10th October, 185–

1. Am engaged on Life of Turner.

2. Mr. Ruskin tells me you knew him well – would be able to give me invaluable information.

3. Will be passing close to Farnley on Thursday, and wondered if might call upon you?

4. Please forgive me for not giving you more warning. Will of course understand if unable to see me at such short notice.

XXIX

From the journal of Walter Hartright, 12th October, 185–

It is as well

It is as well I did not write ahead to tell her I was coming, for I shall not now be home tomorrow after all. What delayed me was a strange accident, into which I cannot but read some significance.

Just before we reached Leeds, there was a tremendous bang from the front of the train, and we jerked and rocked and squealed to a halt. My neighbour, a florid, grey-haired man of about fifty, wearing a brown suit and no overcoat, as if his own internal furnace were enough to keep him warm, lowered the window and looked out.

‘Can you see what’s the matter?’ I said.

‘Burst boiler,’ he replied, turning back. ‘I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be here for a while. They’ll need to send another engine.’ And with that he leant out again, unfastened the door, and gingerly lowered himself to the ground.

I was sure this must be against company regulations, but I heard no-one remonstrating with him, and after a minute or so I took out my sketch-pad and pencil and jumped down after him – partly out of curiosity, and partly to avoid the purgatory of having to exchange grumbling platitudes with my fellow-passengers for an hour or more.

At first all I could see was a dense swirl of vapour and gritty smoke, which seemed to engulf the locomotive and half of the front carriage; but as I drew closer I could make out blurred figures hurrying about, or standing talking in little groups. Among them I saw my brown-suited companion, apparently deep in conversation with a bearded man in a round cap and white canvas trousers whom I took to be the driver. No-one seemed to have been hurt; and yet there was something undeniably awful about the scene: the flailing rods and pistons; the dreadful spouts of steam shrieking from the split boiler (it is only when they are wounded that you see the terrible power of these brutes); the ferocity of the still-raging coals, glowing red through the fog like the mouth of hell.

Awful, but strangely beautiful, too. I took out my pencil, and started to draw.

I was so engrossed in my labours that I did not notice the approach of the man in the brown suit, until he was standing at my shoulder.

‘You’re an artist?’ he said, after a moment.

I nodded.

‘You put me in mind of Turner. He loved mists, and fires, and machines. You’re familiar with his work?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I admire it very much.’

‘I knew him, you know,’ he said. His voice sounded matter-of-fact enough, but he pushed his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet, as if his sense of self-importance, having been denied the outlet of words, must express itself in some other form. ‘I’m Elijah Nisbet.’

He clearly expected me to be impressed, and I think my ‘Oh!’ contrived to suggest that I was, though in truth I had never heard his name before in my life.

‘I have some of his later paintings,’ Nisbet went on. He glanced at my drawing again, and then nodded approvingly. ‘It would be a pleasure to show them to you, if you’re ever near Birmingham. A professional like yourself might appreciate them better than my neighbours do.’

‘Thank you. I should like that very much.’

‘Let me give you my address.’ He took the pad, and scribbled on the back. ‘There,’ he said, returning it to me. ‘Now I must go and write a complaint.’ He cast a speculative look towards the crippled locomotive. ‘The driver’s to blame. He reported it “correct” last night, but there must have been some evidence of a flaw.’

He did not explain how he came to speak with such authority, or why it was his business to complain; and I did not ask him, for fear it would reveal that I didn’t really know who he was.

It was only after he had gone that I realized I hadn’t told him my business, either. Why had I been so secretive? Was it merely that he had connected me with Turner not as a biographer, but as a fellow-artist, and I had not wished to disabuse him?

*

The relief engine did not finally arrive for nearly two hours, with the result that I missed the train to Arthington, and arrived in Otley too late to see Mr. Fawkes. I therefore sent a note by the carrier to say that I should call on him in the morning, and have put up for the night at the Black Bull, where I write these words.

It’s easy to see why Turner loved this place. If Lord Egremont’s Petworth – a Renaissance palace presided over by a Renaissance prince – appealed to the classical side of his nature, then Mr. Fawkes’s Farnley must have fed his hunger for the sublime. In the streets of Petworth you are aware, above everything, of the inescapable presence of the great house; in the streets of Otley – which must be approximately the same size – you are aware only of the presence of nature. The town is bounded on one side by the River Wharfe, with majestic moors rising gradually beyond it; and on the other by an enormous hill – called ‘the Chevin’, according to the driver from Arthington – that seems to blot out half the western sky. The sun was setting behind it as I arrived, and I took out my notebook and did a series of quick sketches, screwing up my eyes and craning my neck to see the clutter of craggy rocks on the summit, until at length it was too dark for me to work, and I approached the inn.

The Black Bull is a solid, welcoming, unpretentious kind of place – constructed, like every other building I have seen in Otley, of rough-hewn local stone smudged with grime from the nearby mills – which stands at the corner of the main square. As I entered, the last few stalls from the day’s market were being dismantled by lantern-light, and a pack of small boys was scuffling among the trampled cabbage-leaves and broken turnips on the ground. For a moment I was put in mind of my first visit to Maiden Lane – though here the children’s faces glowed with health and merriment, and the cold air was misty with their breath, and rang with the sound of their laughter – and found myself wondering whether Turner had ever seen such a scene in Otley, and been moved by it to the same thought? This notion gave me a sudden start: what images, what private memories and associations – which I could never now know – might then have flitted through his consciousness; and what old pains and needs and hungers might they have stirred? And should I find any traces of this secret, inner Turner here – as I had, for an instant, in Twickenham and Farringdon; or was I fated merely to discover clues to his artistic life, and hear Mr. Fawkes reiterate what I have come to see as the official line: a strange, eccentric little fellow, but no man could have been more tender-hearted, or a truer friend.

I was greeted in the flagged hall by a thickset, round-faced man, wearing a heavy apron, and collarless white shirt, with the sleeves rolled back to reveal a pair of massive forearms, and a sprig of grey hair showing at the unfastened throat. Through the half-open door to the right I glimpsed a trestle table lined with plainly dressed men and women, and heard the powerful thrum of twenty or thirty voices. Farmers and their wives, I thought, relaxing after market-day.

‘G’d evening, sir,’ said the innkeeper. ‘Would you be looking for a room?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you have one.’

‘That’s just about all we do have,’ he said – not insolently, but with a kind of good-humoured relish. His eyes searched the row of hooks behind him, and at last lighted on a key.

‘You want to see it first, sir?’ he said.

‘No, I’ll take it,’ I said hastily, suddenly realizing how tired I was, and how unprepared to trudge round the town looking for an alternative. ‘As long as there’s a bed, and a table I can sit at, and write.’

‘That I think I can promise you,’ he said with a smile.

Following him upstairs, I tried to guess his age. He was still hale and strong, but from the deep lines in his powerful neck, and the wisps of silvery hair about his ears, I supposed he must be about sixty. Walter Fawkes, I recalled from my researches, had died in 1825; and Turner had never again returned to Farnley, so his last visit here must have been around forty years ago. Unlikely, therefore – but not impossible. As we reached the landing, I said:

‘Do you by any chance remember Turner?’

‘Turner?’ he said, surprised. ‘What, th’ironmonger?’

‘The painter.’

‘Painter! Nay. What, here in Otley, was he?’

‘Sometimes.’

He shook his head. ‘I never knew him. But see, I only come from Ilkley fifteen year ago, like,’ He opened the door to my room, and carried my bags inside. ‘Here you are, sir. I’ll just set the fire going for you.’

While he worked, I stood by the little casement and gazed out. The room overlooked a side-alley, but beyond it I could see the town stretching away – an irregular horizon of roofs and chimneys, oil-lamps winking in uncurtained windows, and strings of street-lights so feeble that they quickly petered out as they approached the foot of the Chevin, as if they knew they could not challenge its black looming bulk, and might as well give up altogether. Somewhere in that bewitching pattern of light and shade, I thought, there must be somebody who recalls Turner – somebody who knows something about him that will deepen my understanding of the man, and give me an advantage against Thornbury, who appears so far ahead of me in London. I had an empty evening before me; and there and then resolved to spend it trying to find this person, and learning what he – or she – could tell me.

My first thought was to join the farmers, and take my dinner with them; for among them there might well be one from the Farnley Estate, who, if he had not known Turner himself, could at least perhaps refer me to someone who had. When at last I descended again, however, and was about to enter the dining room, I found my way barred by the innkeeper.

‘If you care to step into the back parlour, sir, there’s a table set for you there.’

‘Oh, please don’t trouble yourself with that,’ I said, thinking they must suppose it would be beneath my dignity to eat at the common board. ‘I’m happy to sit with everyone else.’

‘It’s no trouble, sir,’ he said – and I fancy my words had taken him aback, for he flushed, and his voice had a phlegmy edge as he went on: ‘Quite the other way about; for they’re nearly done in there, and my wife wants it all sided and neat like afore the lasses go home.’

And so I found myself sitting all alone at a white-clothed table before a snug coal fire, in a comfortable little room at the rear of the house. I did not, however, forget my purpose, even when it turned out – to my disappointment – that I was to be waited on by a spotty girl of fourteen or so, who would not only clearly not remember Turner herself, but whose mother had probably not even been born at the time of his last visit here.

Tell me,’ I said, when she had taken my order (standing stock-still, and frowning and biting her lower lip with concentration). ‘Who is the oldest person you know in Otley?’

For some reason, this reduced her to uncontrollable giggles; and, quite unable to speak, she shook her head, and retreated to the kitchen. A couple of minutes later, however, as she reappeared with my soup and set it before me, she said:

‘Mrs. says to try Druggist Thompson.’

‘Why?’ I said – unsure whether this was a belated answer to my question, or a reference to some other topic altogether. She froze like a frightened rabbit; so I coaxed her by saying:

‘Is he very old?’

She shook her head again, and left without another word; and it was only when she brought my steak pie (a full twenty minutes later) that she said:

‘Nay, but all the old folk go to him for their potions an’ that. You won’t have far to look. He’s only out in th’market place.’

And so he was – or, rather, so his shop was; for by the time I had finished my meal, and retrieved my coat from my room, and ventured out again, ‘Thompson: Druggist’ was firmly closed.

There seemed nothing to be gained by returning at once to the Black Bull, so I decided to take a walk. If nothing else, I should enjoy the childish pleasure I still find in exploring new places – observing the names of shops and taverns, and looking into the houses as I pass, and imagining what it must be like to live in them; and if I was lucky, some chance encounter might yet allow me to discover something of Turner. A raw wind was starting to blow in from the north-west, carrying – above the stench of a nearby tannery – a wild moorland smell that seemed to call out the spirit of adventure; and with a sudden spasm of exhilaration I turned up my collar, and set off down the narrow path at the side of the hotel.

I found myself – as soon as my eyes had adjusted to the darkness – in a maze of mean passages, that turned and twisted and doubled back so unrelentingly that after a few minutes I should, I think, have had difficulty retracing my steps. I was not concerned about getting lost, however; for I knew I must come out somewhere, and that that somewhere could not be very far from the Black Bull, which I would be able to approach by way of the main streets. At every lighted window I peered inside, hoping to see some elderly person sitting alone before the fire – for surely Turner, if he knew of this knot of secret alleys, must have come here again and again, drawn by the opportunities it offered for being unseen and unknown? – and someone might remember him yet, if I could but describe him well enough. Beyond one white-bearded old patriarch regaling a group of younger men in an ale-house, however, I saw nothing but rooms full of children and their mothers (including, once – through gnarled little panes of glass grey with steam – a tin bathtub before the fire, and a baby splashing in it. Why, I cannot say – but this scene stabbed me so fiercely with the recollection of my own family, and the realization of how far they have been from my thoughts lately, that I had to bite my lip to stop myself weeping.).

At length, turning a corner, I felt the wind and a spatter of rain full on my face; and a few moments later emerged in an open yard at the edge of a street I did not recognize. The Chevin rose up directly before me, no more than a mile or so away; and for a moment I had the strange impression that it had grown since I’d last seen it, for its dark mass seemed to reach as far as the eye could see. Then I saw that what appeared to be the ‘top’ was moving, and was in reality no more than a great black storm cloud rolling towards us at a fearful pace. I wished now that I had paid more attention to the way I had come; for it was clear that if I did not return to the hotel at once, I risked being soaked to the skin, and having to put on wet clothes in the morning.

From somewhere to my left, I heard the strains of music, and thinking there might be a hall or an assembly room nearby, where I might turn my predicament to advantage by sheltering pleasantly until the storm was past, and perhaps falling into conversation with an elderly doorkeeper, I set out briskly in that direction. After no more than two hundred yards or so, I came to a brightly lit, plain stone building which looked as if it had once been a chapel, but which now boldly announced itself to the world – by means of a large painted board above the door – as ‘Otley Mechanics’ Institute’. The music came from a room on the first floor; and as I drew nearer I was conscious that there was something strange about it, though for a moment I could not have said what it was. The melody was familiar – a piece by Mendelssohn, I think; the playing more than competent, for such an out-of-the-way place; and yet…

And then it struck me: I could identify the first two instruments easily enough – a violin and a piano – but what in heaven’s name was the third? A piccolo? Too deep. A flute? Too rich and deep.

I was still wrestling with this conundrum – heedless of the rain that was now hammering the top of my head – when the door opened, and a tall, slender man peered out, and grimaced up at the sky. He held an umbrella, which he started to unfurl; but as soon as he felt the wind catch it he closed it again, and set off with no other precaution than a violent shrug to lift his coat higher about his neck and shoulders. He had gone no more than five paces when he saw me. The puzzlement must have shown on my face, for his expression promptly changed from hawkish severity to a broad smile, and he said:

‘You know what that is?’

I shook my head.

‘Come and see.’

There was a kind of boyish eagerness in his manner that suggested he welcomed the excuse to delay his departure – either because he feared a wetting, or because he was less than enthusiastic about his next engagement; and, before I had a chance to reply, he turned abruptly and led the way back into the Institute. The ground floor was chill and gloomy, with dark-painted doors marked ‘Library’, ‘Reading room’ and ‘Classroom’; but a cheerful brightness fell on the stairs, as if they rose from this world to the next. And indeed, as we ascended towards the gas-lit landing, we heard – more loudly with every step – the breath-catching tones of a tender adagio – which, if not quite an angelic choir, yet seemed heavenly enough in contrast to the sullen drumming of rain on roof and windows.

Directly before us, as we reached the top, was a pair of heavy panelled doors. My guide opened one, and wedged it ajar with his body so that I might see past him. A few people just inside, hearing our arrival – or else feeling the sudden blast of cold air against their necks – turned towards us, greeting me with a stare that was neither hostile nor friendly, but merely curious; and then nodding and smiling as soon as they saw my companion, who smiled and nodded back.

I found myself looking into a long room running the entire length of the building, and set out as a lecture hall, with tightly packed rows of chairs – every one, so far as I could tell, occupied – and, at the far end, four or five men sitting behind a baize-covered table on a raised dais. The musicians were clustered round the piano at one side of the stage; and one glance was enough to tell me why my guide had brought me here, and why his eyes were even now searching my face, in anticipation of some evidence of astonishment. The piano-player and the violinist were just such a young woman and a young man as you might expect to see appearing in the public hall of any small provincial town; but the third performer was something else entirely. He was no more than eighteen or nineteen, with close-set eyes, dark ringlets and a hook nose. He stood before a music stand, following a score like the others – but his only instrument was his own lips, which he was using to whistle his part, with a range, and a depth of feeling, that I should not – had I not seen him – believed possible.

My guide laid a finger on my arm and whispered in my ear:

There. That’s Whistling Albert.’

‘Whistling Albert?’

‘Printer Walker’s boy.’

‘Ah,’ I said, trying to give the impression that I knew who Printer Walker was, and realized that he was an adequate explanation of the miraculous whistler. I was evidently unsuccessful, however; for my companion said:

‘You haven’t heard of the Printer?’

I shook my head.

‘I thought maybe you’d come to see him,’ he said. He backed out on to the landing, leaving just his foot in the door, and continued in a louder voice: ‘We don’t get many visitors in Otley, and most of them are for him. Or Dawson and Payne.’

No point in further pretence. I smiled, and shrugged helplessly.

‘Why, they make “Our Own Kind”,’ he said; and then, seeing I was still baffled: ‘The printing machines. That’s what we’re principally known for, nowadays, Mr. . . .’

‘Hartright.’

‘Hartright. Yes, the Printer says in a few years Otley machines’ll be known all over the world. Or rather, “celebrated in every clime and corner of the globe”; for he’ll never use a simple English phrase when an ornate Latinized one will do.’ He gave a pleasant laugh, with no hint of malice in it. ‘He would find it hard, I think, to rise to the challenge I once set myself, of composing a sermon entirely in words of one syllable.’

A clergyman; but of what denomination? A Methodist, like as not, in a place like this. For an uncomfortable moment I imagined his sharp eyes uncovering the secrets of my soul, and making a damning catalogue of all the levity and wantonness he found there. I was relieved when at length he said:

‘I’m Joshua Hart, the vicar here.’ He held out his hand. ‘And what does bring you to Otley, Mr. Hartright, if not the printing trade?’

‘I’m writing a book.’

‘Ah, the printing trade after all – at least, after a fashion. We should have had you here tonight.’ He made a gracious little bow in the direction of the hall. They always like to hear literary men. Doubtless the thought of all that paper from the mill, and all that occupation for their machines.’ He laughed, again without any appearance of ill-feeling. ‘And what, may I ask, is your subject?’

‘The life of Turner.’

His eyes brightened. ‘J. M. W., R.A.?’ he said; and then, before I had time to reply: ‘Ah, I understand. Farnley Hall.’

‘I go there tomorrow,’ I said.

He nodded. Encouraged by the warmth of interest in his face – and by the sudden reflection that a vicar should be at least as well placed to advise me as a druggist – I went on: ‘I was hoping tonight that I might find someone in Otley who had some reminiscence of him.’

‘There, I’m afraid, I cannot help you,’ he said, smiling. ‘I only came here in ‘thirty-sev-’

At that moment, the music ended; and a sudden explosion of clapping made all conversation impossible for the next half minute, during which time we could do nothing but stand smiling impotently at each other. As the applause finally died away, however, his eyes seemed to stray past me; and then he nodded to himself, as if acknowledging some sudden insight. Leaning over and touching my arm again, he said:

‘No, I may be able to help you,’ He held up his hand, signalling me to wait, and looked towards the hall, where one of the men at the table had begun to speak in a deep, treacly voice:

Thank you, Miss Binney; thank you, gentlemen – a charming musical interlude. We now come to the moment that certain small boys have been waiting for’ – laughter from the audience – ‘the lecture on electricity by Dr. Kerr and Mr. ‘Druggist’ Thompson. Ladies of a sensitive disposition should be warned that at some point during the demonstration an electric spark will be used to fire a concealed cannon.’ (More laughter, and squeals.) ‘If you want to leave now, no-one will think worse of you for that.’

‘Come,’ said Mr. Hart. ‘Let’s go before we’re trampled to death by fleeing women.’ As he guided me towards the staircase, he said:

‘When we met just now I was on my way to see three of my parishioners. One of them, Mrs. Swinton, is a widow. No more than sixty, I should guess, or thereabouts. But she grew up at Farnley.’

‘Ah.’

‘She is in a sad way now, poor woman; very lonely since her husband died, and crippled by arthritis; but some company would do her good, if I can persuade her to it. Where are you putting up?’

‘The Black Bull.’

There were footsteps on the stairs behind us. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, and urged me hurriedly to the door.

‘If you care to wait for me there,’ he said, ‘I’ll see what I can do, and call in on you on my way home to tell you how I’ve fared.’

I thanked him, and asked him

Later

Am I just seeing monsters in the dark?

God knows the soberest man might fancy he glimpsed something in the shadows after such an evening as this.

But surely

No. I must keep myself in check.

Once again – record what happened – judgement later.

*

He came for me about ten, when I had almost given him up. His face was tired and weatherbeaten, and his clothes so wet that they had abandoned all pretence of protecting him, and merely hung like dripping rags; but he seemed cheerful enough.

‘I’m sorry I’m so late; my first call was a mother who’s lost her boy, and these things won’t be hurried. But the upshot is, Mrs. Swinton’ll see you, if you’re still willing. She’s a strange old body, and I don’t know what you’ll get from her; but nothing ventured, eh?’

I followed him like a blind man, guided more by sound than by sight; for the rain was coming down so hard when we got outside that it stung my eyes; and even when I shielded my face with my hands I could see little more than an unbroken sheet of water, which all but hid the buildings on either side of us, and made it impossible to make out where we were going. Beyond the clack of his boots and the gush and gurgle of the choked gutters was another, more distant noise: an ominous rumbling, so vast and portentous that – like the Chevin – it seemed to speak of some power unimaginably greater than ourselves, which might at any moment sweep us and all our puny works from the face of the earth, leaving not a trace behind.

‘What’s that?’ I shouted, pointing towards it.

‘The weir!’

‘Is it always so angry?’

He shook his head. ‘There’ll be floods tonight, if this don’t let up.’

How long our journey took, I cannot say – for when you are as wet as it is possible to be (a state I attained in less than two minutes); and your clothes stick to you like drowning men clinging to a log; and you can discern no change in your surroundings from one moment to the next, time quickly loses all meaning. At length, however, we came to a row of small stone cottages, with roofs of tattered, dripping thatch, and odd little mismatched windows that looked as if they had been set into the walls anyhow, with no concern for symmetry or proportion. Mr. Hart paused at the second door, and knocked; and then, without waiting for an answer, lifted the latch and went inside.

A smell of smoke and fat and bacon – the feeble glimmer of two or three tallow candles – a brilliant orange fire in the grate, with the dark shape of a cooking pot cut from its heart, and a pair of old bellows hanging to one side: those were my immediate impressions. It was only after I had cast about for a few moments that I noticed her. She was sitting in the darkness on the far side of the hearth, wearing a black dress and a grubby old crinkled cap, with her arms protectively hugging a large bowl in her lap, as if she feared we might be robbers, and meant to take it from her. Next to her was a chair laid on its front, with planks placed across the back to form a kind of table. Her bright unsmiling eyes never left me as Mr. Hart said:

‘Dolly, this is Mr. Hartright.’

‘Good evening,’ I said, removing my hat. She did not move or speak, but only nodded. As she did so, the light from the fire caught the contours of her face, showing a broad brow and high cheekbones and a mouth held so tightly shut that it was no more than a black crater between nose and jaw.

‘Poor Mrs. Swinton – she finds it difficult to get up now,’ said Mr. Hart, as if by way of explanation.

‘Oh, please don’t stir on my account,’ I said – somewhat redundantly, for it was plain she had absolutely no intention of doing so.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Hart, quietly, holding his hand out to me. ‘I’ll leave you now.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘I hope some good may come of it.’ He smiled. ‘If it does, you may recompense me with a copy of your book.’ He turned towards Mrs. Swinton, and raised his voice.

‘Good night, Dolly.’

‘G’d neet, Mr. ‘Art,’ she muttered – and the sound of her voice startled me, for it was almost as deep as a man’s. She watched him leave, as alert as a wild animal; and then said:

“E en’t put the sneck ‘ome.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

‘The sneck,’ she said. She extended her hand and pivoted it at the wrist, from which I deduced she meant the latch. ‘Neet like toneet, wind’ll ‘ave t’door off ‘is ‘angers if ‘e’s not fixed reet.’

As if to prove the point, the door flew open as I reached it, and would have knocked me off my feet if I had not jumped out of the way in time. My struggle to close it again, and to secure it firmly (no easy matter, for the wood was badly warped) must have made an entertaining spectacle; for when I turned back suddenly towards Mrs. Swinton, she was shaking with silent laughter. As soon as she saw she was observed, however, she resumed her previous dour expression; and said:

‘Tha’s nivver ‘Artright.’

‘What?’ I said, too taken aback to make any other response.

Tha reet name’s not ‘Artright,’ she said, looking squarely into my eyes.

‘What is it, then?’ I said, with a sheepish smile, and an uncomfortable tightness in my throat. I held my breath, convinced, for one wild giddy instant, that she was going to say ‘Jenkinson’. After studying me for a few seconds more, however, she merely shrugged and said:

“Ahsumiver, tha’s sodden wi’ weet. Come by t’fire, and get dry.’

I accepted gratefully, even though the stench of burnt lard and dirty clothes and unwashed flesh grew riper and more oppressive with every step. As I drew near – mastering my revulsion by breathing through my mouth, and so contriving to smell nothing at all – I saw that the makeshift table next to her was lined with rows of little freshly cooked cakes; and that suspended from the beamed ceiling was an ingenious kind of rack – much like the ‘creels’ I have seen in cottages in Limmeridge, save that it was attached to a pulley and a length of rope that allowed her to lower and raise it without leaving her seat – to which she had transferred a dozen or so dry. She must have seen me looking at them, for she said:

“Ayver-bread. Will tha teeaste ‘un?’

In truth, the thought of it turned my stomach; but I felt I could not politely refuse, so I reached up to take one.

‘Nay,’ she said, ‘tha oughta ‘ave it ‘ot, to warm tha guts; I’ll make tha one fresh’; and pulling a piece of dough from the bowl in her lap, she quickly pinched and patted it into a little disc. As she laid it on the bakestone in the fireplace I tried to persuade myself that the dark smears on the surface were a trick of the dim light, rather than grime from her filthy fingers; but it was with some difficulty that I forced myself to take it from her, and bite half of it off, and say:

‘Thank you, it’s very good.’

‘Tha don’t want to stand,’ she said, gesturing to an old chair – crudely held together with thick wooden slats nailed to the legs and the back, that put me oddly in mind of a child sitting on the floor holding his knees – which was half hidden in the shadows on the other side of the hearth.

‘Tha’s been to th’Institute, parson says,’ she said, as I pulled it out, and sat down. ‘What’s tha reckon to tha’?’

‘I was very impressed,’ I said. ‘I don’t know when I’ve heard better, even in London.’

‘Oh, ay?’ she said, with an odd little smile, which I could not decipher, and found slightly unsettling.

‘Yes. It’s a fine hall. And Whistling Albert is a phenomenon.’

She let out an almost soundless gust of derision – though whether it was directed at me, or at Whistling Albert, or at the Institute, I could not tell.

‘Why,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

She laughed. ‘They reckon as I’m addled. And I reckon as they’re a cletch o’ gawbies.’

‘Gawbies?’

‘Don’t use their yeds,’ she said. ‘Tha’s what I mean. Think on account they don’t see nowt, there b’ain’t owt to see.’

Cold as I was, I suddenly felt colder. ‘See what?’ I said.

Perhaps she had not heard me; for she made no reply, but gazed at the fire, shaking her head sadly, and muttering ‘Ay, ay’ under her breath. After a few moments she picked up an emberrake, and absently riddled the grate with it; and then, without looking at me, said:

‘Hast tha bin up on t’Chevin?’

‘Not yet.’

She nodded, but said no more, merely studying the flames in silence. At length I said:

‘Why, what’s up there?’

She laughed. ‘Nowt, if tha’ll credit t’Printer, and Druggist Thompson, and t’doctor man, wi’ all their bangs an’ flashes.’

‘But you -’ I began.

‘Tha ivver ‘eeard tell of t’Barguest?’ she said, suddenly looking me full in the face.

‘The Barguest?

She nodded, and rattled the ember-rake against the cooking pot.

I was bemused for a second or two, but then all at once – miraculously, I think now – seemed to grasp her meaning.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Is he in chains?’

She nodded. She was watching me intently now; and I knew that if my expression betrayed the slightest sign of mockery or disbelief she would clamp shut, and I should get no more from her.

‘What kind of a creature is he?’ I said. ‘A ghost? Some poor fellow that was hanged there years ago?’

She shook her head. ‘A beast,’ she said, in little more than a whisper. ‘I ‘eeard ‘im once, years sin, when the bairns was small, and we was up there bleggin’. It were a’most dark, and rawky, so’s tha couldn’t hardly see; and Adam, our boy, ‘e were freetenin’ th’ lasses – tha know, “Best run, or t’Barguest’ll get tha,” an’ sich-like – and I were tryin’ to ‘ush ‘im, when there were this gert noise be’ind us – like a snufflin’, tha’d call it, and a tiftin’, and -’

‘Tifting?’ I said.

She pushed her tongue out, and took two or three rapid breaths, before going on: ‘And ‘e were roarin’, and pawin” – here she made her hands into claws, and scraped some imaginary surface – ‘and jumpin’ at ‘is chain, so’s tha could ‘eear it twangin’.’

‘How near?’ I asked.

‘Reet there,’ she said, pointing towards the door. ‘No more’n ten paces.’

‘And did you see him?’

She shook her head. ‘We was too flayed to look. We just ran, tumblin’ an’ bangin’ all t’way down; but there were no bones brak, thank the Lord, tho’ we was tha’ clarty an’ moithered comin’ ‘ome the mester a’most died o’freet to see us.’

I nodded. A dog, presumably – perhaps an escaped mastiff; but if I said so I should indubitably offend her. She seemed to guess my thoughts, however, for she went on:

‘Course, all tha doctors and druggists and ranters says t’were nowt – we fancied it, or t’were nobbut a dog, or a doddy, or a sheep, or some sich – but there were summat there, reet enough, an’ I nivver ‘eeard mortal beast make sich a noise, not afore or sin.’

‘It must have been very frightening for you,’ I murmured, thinking that a show of sympathy might be enough to reassure her that I took her story seriously, and so deter her from asking whether I actually believed it.

She appeared not to have heard me, however; for she was quiet for a moment, and suddenly laughed and said:

‘One of them Methodies says, “Oh, Mrs. Swinton, I’m sure it was just a pow-cat.” “A pow-cat!” I says to ‘er; “no-one’s ivver seed a pow-cat as could ‘oiler like tha’, but there’s plenty of fowks seed the Barguest – so which does tha’ think is likelier I ‘eeard?” ‘Er says, all reasonable-like, “There b’ain’t no sich thing as a Barguest, Mrs. Swinton.” “What,” I says, “and no boggards, neither, I suppose?” “Nay,” she says – jus’ like she’s preachin’ a sermon – “Truth is, there’s too mich darkness in the world, Mrs. Swinton; and too mich in our een; and tha’s why we ‘ave streetlights and schools, so’s fowks can see wha’s there, and wha’ b’ain’t. Has tha’ ‘eeard tell as anyan seed a boggard sin the gas were put in?” So -’

‘A boggard’, I said, ‘is what? A spirit of some kind?’

She nodded. ‘I says to her, “Course they won’t come when there’s mickle light, or mickle gabble.”’ She sat back in her chair and scrutinized me through shrewdly narrowed eyes, trying to decide – I supposed – whether she could trust me with some still greater confidence. I held her gaze, and consciously relaxed the muscles of my face. At length, she leant towards me again.

‘Oft-times, at neet,’ she said, so softly I could barely hear her, ‘I see the mester, a-sittin’ in tha chair as tha’s in now. An’ I nivver leets a cannle, then, for I knows I’d only freeten him off, an’ I like the company.’

I shivered – I could not help myself – my damp clothes felt suddenly as close and clammy as a shroud, and I longed to shake them off. It was all I could do not to turn, and see if the mester was standing at my shoulder, waiting to claim his place. I forced myself to breathe normally; and resolved to change the subject.

‘Mr. Hart says you grew up at Farnley,’ I said, my dry tongue sticking and clicking against the roof of my mouth.

She nodded.

‘Do you by any chance remember Mr. Turner, the painter?’

‘Ay, I remember ‘im,’ she said gruffly, not meeting my eyes. She took up the poker and busied herself with the fire. I waited for her to go on.

“E knew,’ she muttered at last.

‘Knew what?’

‘Awlus about, a’ sorts o’weather, he were,’ she said, as if this answered my question. ‘Muckier t’better. Up t’Chevin. Out on t’moors in t’rain.’ She jabbed a finger towards the shuttered window. “E were ‘ere now, tha’s where tha’d find ‘im.’

‘I imagine he was drawing, or painting-’ I began.

‘Ay, tha’s wha’ ‘e said.’

‘He loved stormy effects -’

She stopped me with a vigorous shake of the head.

‘Why,’ I said, ‘what do you think he was doing?’

“E could make it come to ‘im, an’ do ‘is biddin’,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said. I could not conceive what she was talking about. The Barguest? The weather?

She was silent for a few seconds; and then she said:

‘Tek ‘em bellowses, and give t’cowls a bit o’ puff.’

I knelt before the fire. As the first shower of sparks erupted, she gave a murmur of satisfaction, as involuntary as the purr of a cat. Then she cleared her throat; and speaking in a slow, gentle voice said:

‘I knew a lass once, Mary Gallimore. More like a sister to me, she were, ‘an a friend; for we lived anent each other as bairns, an’ was awlus lakin’ together. She were nivver quite reet – a bit gaumless, tha know, cuddy-wifted, an’ couldn’t climm a set o’ keekers wi’out she’d get ankled up at t’top, and fall down ‘em again. But t’kindest body tha’s ivver met. Wouldn’t ‘urt nee-a-body or nowt, would Mary.’

She paused. I turned to look at her. She was shaking her head, and exhaling in a kind of sad noiseless whistle that was oddly affecting. She caught my eye, and continued:

‘Once, I seed ‘er tek th’ole mornin’ tryin’ to get a tom-tellalegs from out the ass-nook, for fear it’d be burned when her mother mek t’fire. Th’other bairns laughed at ‘er, but she wouldn’t let it bide. Tha’s the way she awlus were.’

I replaced the bellows, and sat down again. Perhaps there was some impatience in my manner; for she said:

‘Ay, I’ve no’ forgot tha’ Mr. Turner.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Please. What happened to her?’

‘Well, owd Mr. Fawkes, ‘e were a gradely man, after ‘is fashion – ‘e tek a interest in ‘er. ‘E knows she won’t nivver be like rest o’ us young roisters; so he says to ‘er mother: “Tha send ‘er to the ‘all when she’s thirteen, and we’ll find a place for ‘er there.” So tha’s wha’ she does; an’ Mary fetches up as under-’ousemaid, tekkin’ out slops an’ sich-like a’ t’big ‘ouse.’

There was an odd stirring of dread and excitement in my stomach.

‘Ay,’ she said. ‘Yon’s where she met ‘im. Back-end o’ th’year, it were -’

‘Which year?’ I said, taking out my notebook – and silently congratulating myself for having had the foresight to wrap it in oil-cloth.

‘Oh, ‘eleven, I should say, or ‘twelve, mayhap. November, any road; for t’last time I seed ‘er we was out chumpin’ for Bunfire Neet, my brother an’ me, down by t’river.

The last time! Dear God! Where is this leading?

‘I’ll nivver forget – we come on ‘er all sudden-like, reet anent t’bank, atween a pair o’ willows. We mun’ve freeted ‘er; for she jumped an’ bloddered when she ‘eeard us, and a’most fell i’ t’water; and when she turn’ round, she were a’ spew-faced – save her een, which was red fro’ cryin’. “Lor’, Mary,” I says, “wha’ever is t’ma’er wi’ tha?”; but she can’ say nowt reet off, but just shaks ‘er yed. So I puts my arms round ‘er; an’ after a minute or two she tells me.’

She paused, and fiddled with the fire again, even though it was burning brightly now, and had no need of her attentions. For a moment I felt a flush of anger: she was deliberately tormenting me by making me wait, for no good reason other than that it pleased her to do so. And then I reflected how rare this experience must be for her – to have another person hanging on her every word, and to read in his face the dramatic effect of a story that no-one else, perhaps, had ever accounted of any interest – and realized that her enjoyment was innocent and understandable enough, and that it would be churlish to begrudge it.

‘There now,’ she said, sitting back. ‘Well, first thing she says is, “Am I a bad lass, Doll?” “No, doy,” I says, “course tha b’ain’t – whyivver should tha be askin’ tha’?” “I’s yon Mr. Turner,” she says, “as is stoppin’ a’ th’ouse. I goes in ‘is room this mornin,’ an’ ‘e were tha” – she couldn’t barely speak – ‘“e were tha’ maungy to me.” “Why?” I says, “whativver’d ‘e do?” She just sniffles an’ shaks ‘er yed; but I coaxes her, like, and ends up she says: ‘“E called me names – said I were a beltikite, and a buffle-yedded greek, an’ sich.”’

Whatever the truth of the rest of it, I could not believe this – for if Turner had been moved to speak at all (and he was, of course, famously taciturn with strangers), he would surely not have resorted to local terms such as ‘beltikite’ and ‘buffle-head’, which must have been as unfamiliar to him as they were to me. Again, Mrs. Swinton seemed to guess what I was thinking; for she said:

‘I don’ reckon tha’s reet – I reckon as tha were summat else, but she were tha’ ashamed she couldn’ bring ‘ersel’ to say it.’

‘You mean you think he behaved improperly towards her?’

She shrugged. ‘What does tha think? ‘Im an’ a thirteen-year-old lass, in a sleepin’-room?’

It was possible – I had only to remember the girl at Petworth to realize that. But surely it was at least equally likely that she had merely disturbed him while he was working; and that her description of the response this had provoked – an outburst of (to her) quite unaccountable anger – was accurate enough, even if she had translated the actual words Turner had used into her own dialect?

‘Ahsumiver,’ Mrs. Swinton went on, ‘I couldn’ get nowt more from ‘er; so I kisses ‘er, an’ I says: “If tha’s fashed about owt, doan’ keep it to thasel’, else it’ll go bad on tha – what tha’s to do is tell Mr. Fawkes, for ‘e’s a fair mester, an’ a good man. Will tha promise?” An’ she does; an’ at-after she’s a bit bruffer, an’ ivven shows us a lahtle smile when we bahn.’

Her voice wavered suddenly, and her breathing became jerky, as if the need for air and the urge to sob were struggling for mastery of her. She steadied herself by bunching a corner of her apron in her hand, and continued:

‘Nex’ morn, I sees tha Mr. Turner, walkin’ till t’Chevin in ‘is long black coat, no’ lookin’ to left nor reet of ‘im, an’ goin’ tha’ quick tha’d think Jack Lob were after ‘im. Soon after, it comes on to rain; an’ then it’s teemin’, jus’ like toneet, so thick tha can’t see tha nose afooar tha; an’ a’ the talk’s o’ floods, an’t’farmers start movin’ t’beeas fro’ the cloises by t’river.’ Her lips trembled, and she drew them between her teeth for a moment, and clenched her fist again.

‘Tha’ neet, we ‘eeard as ‘ow Mary were missin’; an’ t’men ou’ in t’storm wi’ lanterns, lookin’ for ‘er. They foun’ ‘er in the mornin’, no’ far fro’ wheear we seed ‘er. All ankled up in t’weeds an’ willows, she were, drownded.’

‘Dear God!’ I said. ‘What a terrible thing.’

‘They carried ‘er to a byre, and set ‘er i’ t’fodderem. And tha Mr. Turner, so I ‘eeard, went there after, and drawed ‘er liggin’ there.’

Yet again, I thought. Why?

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.

She said nothing, but watched me unflinchingly, as if waiting for me to draw some obvious conclusion from the evidence she had laid before me. A fearful idea suddenly struck me.

‘Surely’, I said, ‘you don’t think he was somehow responsible for her death? It was clearly a tragic accident – you said yourself she was clumsy, and it’s all too easy to see how such a girl…’ My voice trailed off in face of her implacable stare.

‘When I were a lass,’ she said slowly, ‘there were an ol’ woman a’ Pool as could put th’evil eye on a pig, and make t’rain come.’

‘Are you . . .? You’re not suggesting – that Turner could – that he would …?’

She smiled, and I hesitated, wondering if she were laughing at me. But it was not, I decided, that kind of smile – rather the martyred, resigned grimace of a woman who sees what others are blind to, and is accustomed to being mocked for it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said – knowing that in that instant I was joining the ranks of doctors and druggists and Methodists, and feeling a spasm of guilt for it – ‘but I cannot believe that.’

And I couldn’t. Yet as I went on to make polite small-talk for ten minutes (conscious, all the time, of her sullen coldness, and knowing that I had caused it, and that nothing I could say now would mend matters); and then at length rose and thanked her and left, and blundered back through the rain to the Black Bull, I could not get what she had told me from my thoughts.

Was it just the fact of the drowned girl, with its echoes of Hargreaves’ story, and of Mrs. Booth’s account of Turner’s last days?

Or was it the idea of Turner as a wizard, which strangely recalled Davenant’s description of his behaviour on Varnishing Days:

If a savage had seen it, he’d have sworn it was magic.

I remember a young Scotch fellow watching it once, and muttering something about sorcery.

I don’t know.

I must go to bed.

XXX

From the journal of Walter Hartright, 13th October, 185-

God! What a night!

I dreamed I was by a lake. It was black, and unnaturally still, but fringed by half-submerged trees, from which I knew it had but lately flooded. As I watched, the moon came up, and I saw that there was something white stirring beneath the surface. At first I thought it was a great shoal of fish; but then I noticed that it did not move, but merely seemed to ripple in some invisible current. And then, all at once, I knew: these were bodies – hundreds, thousands of them – broken from their graves by the deluge.

In the same moment, I became aware that a man was standing next to me. He was short, and wore a long black coat and a black hat. It seems obvious, now, that he was Turner; but in my dream, although he appeared faintly familiar, I thought he was an undertaker. I sensed he was burdened with some great sadness, some terrible apprehension. At length, he let out a dreadful sigh, as if he could no longer put off the fatal moment, and began to whistle.

As though in response, a girl – so white, so dazzlingly white I could not look at her – rose from the lake; and I knew (though how, I cannot say, for no voice spoke) that she had been summoned to accuse her murderer.

I waited. I felt sick. I could not move.

She pointed at me.

As she did so, the Last Trump sounded.

I woke – I half-woke – in my room at the Black Bull. I could still hear the horn: it was coming, quite distinctly, from outside. I went to the window and peered out, but it was quite dark, and I could see nothing. I lit the lamp, and looked at my watch. It was just past five. I had slept for little more than ninety minutes.

I returned to bed and lay down; but still the horn sounded, and in my fuddled condition I could not rid myself of the idea – even as, in some part of my brain, I recognized it as ridiculous – that it was calling me. Knowing I should not sleep again, I got up after a few minutes, and dressed, and went down into the street.

I cannot account for my behaviour during the next hour, save by saying that it was as if I were simultaneously awake and asleep. My waking self knew that I was in Otley; that the storm had blown itself out overnight, leaving the cobbles wet and shiny, and tearing great rents in the clouds, through which appeared a scattering of stars; that this was the cause of the shimmering black expanse I saw before me; and that the noise I heard was made by a mortal agent, who almost certainly did not even know I existed, and was blowing his horn for some rational reason (though I could not guess what it was) that had nothing to do with me at all. And yet, at the same time, I was still in my dream; and the black expanse was the dark lake; and the horn was speaking to me alone, and drawing me, for good or ill, towards my destiny.

I could not see the pied piper; but I could hear him clearly enough, making his way through a tangle of small streets to the east. As I set off in pursuit, lights appeared in bedroom windows to either side of me, as if to confirm that I had chosen the right direction, and to show me the path ahead. After a few minutes, however, I realized that the sound of the horn was growing fainter; and when, at length, I came out in a broad thoroughfare, it had become so distant that I could no longer say with any certainty where it was coming from, or whether I must go left or right to follow it. My waking voice said: You have lost him; go back to bed ; but to my dreaming self it seemed evident that the horn had brought me here for a purpose (for there are no accidents in the world of dreams), and I at once looked about to see if I could discover what it might be.

Before me, in the middle of the road, was a tall column like a maypole; beyond that, the louring, inescapable blackness of the Chevin. And as I looked at it – saw the knife-sharp line of its ridge; and the jumble of rocks at the top, as grim and ugly as a clot of blood – I was suddenly seized by the overwhelming conviction that I must climb it. If I could but conquer that darkness, my confusion would evaporate, and I should at last be able to see clearly.

The first mile or so – past a gasworks, and a tannery, and through an orderly little orchard, where the trees stood as still and uniform as soldiers – was easy enough; but with every pace the Chevin bulked larger and more fearful; and when at length I reached the bottom, and saw nothing but an apparently unrelieved wall of rock and scrub, I wondered if the task I had undertaken was, after all, impossible. My waking self (conscious that in a few hours I must present myself at Farnley Hall, and that I should not cut a very respectable figure if my eyes were bleary from lack of sleep, and my clothes torn and mud-stained) was all for giving up; but the hero of my dream – for whom the greatness of the obstacles to be overcome merely demonstrated the importance of the quest – would not hear of it. After a minute or two I found a narrow gap between two overgrown bushes, and saw a jagged black scar scored into the hillside above it; and concluded that this must be a path.

And so, indeed, it was, for perhaps two hundred slippery yards; but then, as the slope grew rapidly steeper, it became little more than a muddy waterfall, with last night’s rain still trickling down its miry face. I hauled myself up, clutching at tufts of gorse and bramble, and feeling for rocks with my feet, until the incline eased again, and I was able to walk (arms outstretched for balance, and gingerly testing the ground with every step, in case it suddenly slid away from under me) for a hundred yards more, to the next waterfall, where I had to begin my struggle with rocks and tufts afresh.

I cannot say how long I continued in this manner, climbing and slithering, climbing and slithering; but at length the going underfoot seemed to become easier, and a cold wind started to finger my sweating face. I dimly saw, not a quarter of a mile away, the tops of three or four stunted misshapen trees jutting above the ridge; and I knew that they must be on the other side, and that I was approaching the summit. And then, without further warning, I was there, and upon the rocks.

They were larger than I had imagined, and blacker – for the dawn had just begun to lighten the sky, and they towered above me in chaotic silhouette. My first response, on seeing them this near, and realizing their size, was to wonder at the tremendous force that had placed them there; for they seemed to have been strewn along the crest as carelessly and easily as pebbles thrown by a child. But it was not this that made me pause and tremble – rather a curious, disturbed jolt of recognition. It took me but a moment to identify the cause:

What I had taken for rocks was, in fact, an enormous dragon.

I blinked, and looked again. It was unmistakable: there was its blunt head (which only a moment before I had seen as a huge crag), the mouth pulled open by the weight of the jaw, surveying the town below; behind it lay the spikes and folds and billows of the curled body.

I knew it was not a dragon; and yet I knew, in the same instant, that it was, and that I must defeat it.

I clambered to the very top, over its rough pitted skin, the bony spines of its wings, and stood there shivering. After a minute or two, the rim of the sun appeared to my right, streaking the sky with violent orange, As its first feeble rays spread along the valley, they caught the facade of a house on the other side of the river – no more than a speck of white at this distance – which I knew from its position must be Farnley Hall. A few minutes later it was gone again, lost behind a haze of vapour rising from the sodden ground. Soon the whole scene was covered in a brilliant diaphanous mist, through which blotches of brown and yellow and green appeared – pure colour, detached from any object; and I knew with absolute certainty that Turner must have stood here on such a morning as this, and taken from nature those very effects which his critics thought most unnatural.

I looked down at my feet. No scales. No wings. No talons. I was standing on rock.

I laughed with relief.

The landlord of the Black Bull made a passable job of cleaning and drying my clothes. His wife mended a tear in my sleeve.

At breakfast I asked the girl about the horn-blower.

‘Oh, that’s John, sir,’ she said, giggling. ‘Does that every mornin’, when ‘e knocks off t’night shift. Tell them’s “as work to go to it’s time to get up.’

I was at Farnley by 11.00; but when I explained my business to the old man at the lodge he sucked his gums and shook his head. ‘Tha can try, sir. But I’ve ‘eeard as t’mester’s bahn abroad today.’

It was a blow; but there was nothing to be gained by turning back now, when I had already come so far. There was always the chance that the old man was mistaken, or that, at the least, Mr. Fawkes would be able to spare me half an hour before he left; and I set off down the drive at a brisk pace.

But I had not been going five minutes before I saw, coming towards me, a black carriage and pair. Perhaps it is only a visitor, I told myself; but even as I did so I had to admit that the evidence of my own eyes gainsaid me, for there was something in the easy movement of the horses and the relaxed attitude of the driver that made it clear they were on home ground. The carriage slowed as it drew near; and then – when I had stepped out of the way to let it pass – halted beside me. A square-jawed man of about sixty, with wavy white hair, lowered the window and looked out.

‘And you’re Mr. Hartright, I’ll be bound,’ he said.

‘Mr. Fawkes?’

He nodded. ‘I had your note, sir,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘And should have replied, had I known where you were putting up. The damnable fact is I have to go to London today.’

‘I ought to have stayed a few days longer, then, and seen you there,’ I said.

He laughed, and opened the door. ‘If you’d care to come with me to Arthington, we can talk on the way, and afterwards Hayes can take you back to Otley, or where you will. That, I’m afraid, is the best I can offer you.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ I said, setting my foot on the step, and preparing to seat myself opposite him. As I entered, however, I saw the place was already taken by a thin, bilious-looking manservant, who shrank away from me as nervously as if I were a leper. He looked anxiously at Mr. Fawkes.

‘Shall I sit with Hayes, sir?’

‘If you’d be so good, Vicary.’

The man bolted through the door on the other side, and stood buttoning his coat and drawing on his gloves against the weather. Mr. Fawkes knocked on the glass, and held up his watch.

‘If you please, Vicary.’

The man scuttled up on to the driver’s seat.

‘I fear I’m an uneasy traveller,’ said Mr. Fawkes, as the carriage set off again with a lurch. ‘I never much relish going from home, and always fancy a wheel will break, or one of the horses will cast a shoe, or we’ll be set upon by brigands.’ His face broke into a frank smile, making him appear the very image of the bluff good-hearted Englishman – until you saw that it did not reach his eyes, which remained guarded and full of shadow, as if life had indeed taught him to expect the worst. ‘So I always leave early, and generally end by having to wait half an hour at the station, which vexes the servants dreadfully.’ He laughed, and wagged a finger at me. ‘But you, at least, should be satisfied, for it means we shall have longer together.’

And he was right; for, in the end, despite everything, I did not fare so badly. The circumstances of our meeting deprived me of the chance to see the pictures at Farnley, of course; but – by way of compensation – they seemed to have a strangely galvanic effect on Mr. Fawkes. Confined within the swaying carriage, and keenly sensible of the pressure of time, he told me more in fifty minutes than he would have done in as many hours surrounded by the distractions of a busy household. My only difficulty was that the constant motion, and the necessity of letting him speak without interruption (for the smallest pause might cost me a vital piece of information) made it hard for me to keep adequate notes.

So here, as well as I can remember them, are the most important parts of our conversation:

HF: I wish to God now I’d paid him more heed, Mr. Hartright; but you know what boys are. I cared precious little for art, I fear, and far too much for foolishness and pleasure – with the result that my early memories of him are mostly of the fun and frolic and shooting we enjoyed together. [A sweeping gesture of the hand, indicating the moors]

WH: Was he a keen sportsman, then?

HF: Keen, if not entirely accurate. [Laughs] He once contrived – Lord knows how – to bring down a cuckoo. We taunted him mercilessly for weeks afterwards, but he took it in good part. Indeed, he was often the first to allude to it, and tell the story against himself.

I don’t know what others have said to you of his temper and disposition, but in our hours of relaxation together I always found him as kindly-minded a man, and as capable of every kind of fun and enjoyment, as any that I ever knew.

[There – I was right – the official line.]

WH: Was he well liked by the servants?

[HF shrugs. Plainly considers it a strange question. At length:]

HF: They may have thought him a little eccentric.

WH: Do you remember a girl called Mary Gallimore?

HF: No. Why? Did she complain of him?

WH: She said he insulted her once in his room.

HF: Insulted? You mean …?

WH: Called her a fool.

[HF laughs.]

HF: He hated to be walked in on when he was working.

WH: Why?

HF: There’s nothing very mysterious about it. He liked to work alone, that’s all. Perhaps he feared people would think him odd, for his mode of painting was, undeniably, strange.

WH: Can you describe it?

HF: I can, as it happens; for I was once lucky enough to see it. [Wonderful! – at last!] One morning, at breakfast, my father challenged Turner to make him a drawing that would give some idea of the size of a man-of-war. Turner chuckled, and turned to me, and said: ‘Come along Hawkey, and we will see what we can do for Papa.’

And for the next three hours I sat and watched him. At first you would have supposed he was mad; for he began by pouring wet paint on to the paper till it was saturated, and then he tore and scratched and scrabbled at it in a kind of frenzy – ripping the surface with his thumbnail, which he kept long for the purpose – and the whole thing was utter chaos. But then, as if by magic, the ship gradually took shape; and by luncheon time it was complete, every rope and spar and gunport perfect, and we carried it downstairs in triumph, and Turner said: ‘Here we are! A First-Rate Taking on Stores!’

WH: He had no model to work from?

HF: None.

WH: Then how…?

HF: I’ve often asked myself that question; and the conclusion I’ve come to is that it was an unusual faculty of the brain. Just as some musicians can repeat a piece from memory after hearing it once, so he could retain an image. And then, of course, he refined his gift still further by constantly drawing and taking notes on everything he saw – so that when he stood before that piece of paper, all he had to do was move the colours about until they resembled the picture already printed on his mind.

WH: Not magic, then?

HF: [Laughing] It seemed magic, that’s all I meant, to a young man. On another occasion – I must have been twelve or thirteen – I remember him calling me to the window to see a thunderstorm. It was rolling and sweeping and shafting its lightning out over the Chevin; and he was saying, ‘Isn’t it grand, Hawkey? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it sublime?’ and all the time making notes of its form and colour on the back of a letter. I suggested some better drawing-block, but he said: ‘No, this does very well.’ Presently, when it was finished, he said: ‘There, Hawkey! In two years you will see this again, and call it Hannibal Crossing the Alps.’

And so I did. He had remembered it so exactly that he could reproduce every last detail.

[Perhaps why we see the same motives again and again in his work? Once they were rooted in his mind he could not expunge them?]

HF: My father, I believe it’s fair to say, was Turner’s closest friend while he lived; and after he died Turner couldn’t mention his name without the tears coming into his eyes. It’s for that reason, I think, that he never came back here in later years, even though he was often enough invited. As a result, I only saw him on my infrequent visits to London; but up to the very last time, about a year before his death, he was always the same to me – addressing me by my boy name, and showing me the greatest kindness, as if in doing so he could continue to express his attachment to my father, and his glowing recollections of his ‘auld lang syne’ here.

[The official line again.]

Yes, but that does not mean it is untrue.

Who is more likely to describe Turner accurately? A man who knew and loved him for fifty years; or one who glimpsed him once or twice in moments of weakness?

I have seen dragons where there are only rocks.

One more night at the Black Bull, to purify myself of my folly.

And then, tomorrow, home.

XXXI

Letter from Walter Hartright to Marian Halcombe,
22nd October, 185–

Limmeridge,
Sunday

My dear Marian,

You were right – I confess it (and when were you ever not?) – this was for the best. The quest for Turner had temporarily disordered my mind somewhat, and to be here with my darlings is the best cure possible. I feared they would not know me – that I should not know myself in the gentle light and domestic calm of Limmeridge, but would mope about the house like a spectre at the feast, carrying my darkness with me. But the darkness is gone, and the spectre with it. I am truly myself again – even Florence is happy now, and as sweet and natural with me as if I had never been away!

As for Turner: I am painfully conscious of how much time I have wasted chasing shadows – and of all that, in consequence, remains undone. (I torment myself at night sometimes, imagining what Lady Eastlake would say. Is this all you have discovered, Mr. Hartright, in almost five months? That Turner was a strange man?) It chastens me that I must therefore accept your offer – but accept it I do, with a grateful heart, and the certain knowledge that man never had a truer or a more generous sister. You promise to write to me regularly with your discoveries; I, for my part, swear to treat them as judiciously and dispassionately as a palaeontologist treats the bones of a dinosaur. Like his extinct titan, mine shall be resurrected on the basis of facts alone. No more unruly imagination!

Your devoted brother,

Walter