A Masterpiece of Revenge Page 9

  We came together like visions, soap bubbles, ephemera afloat on the wind. It was all so dreamlike.

  Our love took place in a dimension that had nothing to do with our daily lives. Meeting was a way of fleeing reality, not embracing it, eschewing all those bothersome, bodily details — kisses that taste of nicotine, nakedness after love-making, flushing toilets. We wanted to live in allegorical time, not human time. We touched each other without touching.

  You can’t fornicate with an allegory. You don’t put him in your bed, you place him on a pedestal.

  This time I didn’t abandon myself. And it was because I didn’t abandon myself that Peter abandoned me. He went off in search of more fleshly happiness. Oh, how I hated him for this, Papa. Sometimes I wake up in the night with a thousand ideas for revenge spinning in my head.

  Being abandoned by Peter sharpened my hunger for a world in which the idealized was possible. The world of art. I started spending all my free time at the National Gallery and in the British Museum. I even bought a flat off Russell Square so that when I was in London I could get to them easily.

  I spent hours staring at paintings, and in particular those of Claude Gellée, known as “le Lorrain” and Claude Lorrain. He fascinated me most of all. I read everything I could about him. I wanted to know everything about his methods, his theories, his life.

  And that was how I first heard about Charles Vermeille — through his remarkable studies of Lorrain. Vermeille did far more than teach me about Lorrain. He gave expression to my feelings about art itself. In his limpid, graceful prose I found thoughts I believed only I had — he seemed to have discovered the vocabulary for the miracle of creation. He was able to show how a work came to be.

  I saw a photo of him in an art magazine and became infatuated. He was a bit old for me, and I knew perfectly well his appeal was as a father figure, but the look of penetration yet kindness was extremely seductive.

  I wanted him to feel as I felt. Let it stand at that. I wanted him to look at me one day and recognize something. Deep down, I knew that one day I was fated to meet this Charles Vermeille. You’re probably laughing at me, Papa, but I need to tell you everything.

  I often thought of writing him, telling him of my admiration. I must have started a dozen letters, then tore them up. Vermeille would have thought I was a lunatic.

  The dream of meeting him did not become a reality until later. The occasion was a conference in Nice at which I was invited to speak. Oh, it was such an honor, Papa. Some of the world’s greatest historians and curators would be attending. I took precious time away from work to prepare my talk.

  Just thinking about that conference fills me with deep shame. But at the time, knowing that Vermeille would be there was exciting beyond words. I imagined all sorts of things — that he would fall in love with me, that he would see we shared a spiritual bond through Lorrain. Perhaps he would adopt me. My fantasies ran wild.

  The gala dinner at the end of the convention. Oh my God. I remember doing myself up like a dream. I let my hair down. My turquoise lame dress fit like a glove. A little eye shadow, a little rouge. I had never been so beautiful. When I crossed the filled dining room I could feel the collective gaze of the men.

  Except for Vermeille, at whose table Pd been assigned. He looked at me coolly. There was no recognition. Out of politeness, he rose when I arrived at his table, bowed slightly when he took my hand, and pulled my chair out for me. Then he filled my wine glass, smiled, and went back to his conversation.

  He clearly felt nothing. I was paralyzed with insecurity. Vermeille was sitting on my right. The man on my left was some squalid little art critic who kept breathing acrid breath down my neck. The room became a jangle of noise — the sounds of glasses and laughter and empty flattery. At our table attention revolved around Vermeille, this man with whom I was supposed to be sharing an intimate sense of connection. I sank immediately into a stupor. I felt mortally tired.

  I had wanted to tell Vermeille how close I felt to him, but the words stuck in my throat. I drank glass after glass of wine to build up some courage, and when I did finally open my mouth I babbled like a schoolgirl. I wasn’t eloquent, I was pathetic and simpery To this day I haven’t forgiven myself. I offered my heart to him on a platter, and he refused it.

  Vermeille had looked at me without seeing me. He listened to me without hearing me. I was invisible to him, inconsequential. He didn’t take my hand and say, “I've wanted to meet you for so long.”

  I barely remember running back to my room. The next morning I caught the first plane back to London.

  A throbbing migraine haunted me for three days. It probably had something to do with the half bottle of Scotch I had drunk after this miserable spectacle, in an effort to forget the whole bloody thing. The pain was terrible, blinding me. I cried out every time I tried to move my eyes. I lost the sight in my right eye; the whole side of my face went numb. Oh, it was so frightening, Papa.

  I ran to the bathroom to look at my reflection in the mirror, but nothing had changed. I looked the same. There was no disfigurement that I could see. I decided to call my doctor, but my legs would barely carry me to the phone. My hands had become cold and were tingling with pain. Dialing was agony.

  The doctor told me not to panic but to come over straight away.

  I have never been a hypochondriac. You know that, Papa. I am not the sort of person who scrutinizes every ailment and examines herself minutely all day long, complaining about every small ache and pain. But I will confess I was scared out of my wits when he made me move my eyes from right to left, and asked all sorts of questions that had nothing whatever to do with my eye. He wanted to know if I'd had any childhood diseases such as chicken pox, and at what age, and if I'd ever had difficulty walking, or felt any loss in sensation, or experienced involuntary muscle contractions.

  What was so terrifying was that I had been feeling precisely these symptoms for some time. I had thought it was due to exhaustion. The doctor listened with careful attention, then replied that my vision would return in two or three days, but that I ought to make an appointment with an ophthalmologist.

  I went immediately for the examination and returned to see my doctor that same afternoon with the results. He looked at them and started to drum his fingers.

  “Fine, good. I don’t think it’s anything serious. My guess is that the optic nerve is in spasm. Probably a simple inflammation. Still, go to see a friend of mine at Radcliffe Hospital. It is important we learn the source of the inflammation.”

  I asked him if this was really necessary. He said it was. Best to tend to this immediately.

  I went to Radcliffe Hospital. They kept me there for three days, putting me through a battery of tests, each one more horrific than the other. There were MRI scans, spinal taps, blood tests, and reflex examinations. All this for a throbbing optic nerve? I wondered. My eyesight had returned, at least, as had the feeling in my face.

  Finally they released me, having told me that the inflammation ought to go away by itself I should live and work normally.

  This was a good thing, for I had sunk all my money into my laboratory, and the default of the bank controlling your estate had nearly left you ruined. Oh, Papa. I was so worried I wouldn’t be able to keep you at this clinic, and would have to transfer you to one of those dreadful state hospitals where the indigent and abandoned end up. How could I bear that? I needed to find some way to make money. Keeping you here costs five thousand pounds a month.

  Before then I had somehow managed to equip the lab and cover the costs of this clinic. I eked out a living from my savings and from what I could get for my services. I knew that in the end the laboratory might go under and that I might have to liquidate everything.

  We always had had an easy life, you and I. There was always enough for whatever we wanted to do. After your stroke, I took over your affairs. If there was any problem, I simply dipped into your accounts. They would be mine sooner or later, in any case. I never kept tra
ck of how much remained in them. You know perfectly well we never discussed money. That would have been vulgar.

  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have talked about it. Or found some way of accumulating more of it. A great deal more. With a heavy heart I sold two small Reynolds I had bought when I was running the company and felt flush. The proceeds meant you could stay in the clinic for another six months. I prayed that would tide us over until I could find a way of replenishing the family coffers.

  I knew I would do anything I could to become rich.

  9

  I had never borrowed money from anyone. I’d never had to. But it seemed quite natural that the first person I would think of should be Quentin Van Nieuwpoort. Quentin had been mooning after me since we were at Oxford together. Asking him for help would be a delicate matter, given his feelings for me, but he was, after all, an old friend. A wealthy admirer.

  So I thought of him while pacing around my storeroom among all the frames, easels, rolls of that special tissue used to repair damaged canvasses, and cases of dissolvents.

  My eye caught a ruined old wreck of a painting I'd bought from Quentin a few years before.

  It was shortly after he’d come into an inheritance from a great-uncle who died just short of his one hundredth year and left Quentin a country estate in the Ardennes. Shortly after his great-uncle’s funeral, Quentin invited me to come visit. I accepted the invitation. It was October, and I knew how beautiful the Ardennes would be.

  Quentin’s estate was situated deep in the forest. It was a kind of Gothic folly, built during the medieval revival in the midnineteenth century with turrets and crenellated walls and leaded windows. A man’s castle, that sort of thing — though it had undeniable charm and a stunning view.

  We spent the afternoon nosing around the place and looking in forgotten corners. There were not more than fifteen rooms, each one crammed with dusty and rather hideous hunting trophies.

  After a picnic lunch in the dining room, whose ceiling, not unattractively, was painted after the Italian fashion, we decided to have a look round the attic. I have always adored attics. Every dusty trunk or hat box might contain some treasure.

  We found trunks of dresses with Belgian lace and corsets, porcelain vases, boxes of letters, pictures without frames, frames without pictures. In a corner under a canvas stiff with age was a very old-looking framed painting. It had been long neglected, but we could just make out the dim outlines of a landscape, the tops of a few trees, and, in the left-hand corner, painted prettily though covered with grime, some classical ruins.

  I dabbed at the painting with a handkerchief to see what was hiding beneath the dust.

  “Who knows,” I said to Quentin. “It may be worth something.”

  We brought the painting closer to a window and I examined it from all angles. All I could make out was a confusion of indistinct and damaged images, spotted with mold. Time and humidity had taken their destructive toll on the poor old thing. The painting was a shambles. Still, the frame and supports were in reasonably good shape, and the canvas didn’t seem to have been too damaged.

  “Looks like a total loss, I’m afraid,” said Quentin. “I’ll have it carted out to the rubbish.”

  One should never say such a thing to a restorer. My new career involved bringing “unreadable” paintings back to life.

  “Quentin, I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy the painting from you for a hundred pounds. Have it sent to Oxford. If I manage to restore it, and if it turns out to be worth something, we’ll split the proceeds fifty-fifty. Sound all right?”

  Quentin of course wanted to give me the painting outright, but I insisted. In the end he gave in with a grin.

  My initial bravado behind me, I put the painting in my Oxford storehouse and in the back of my mind, telling myself that one day I’d have a crack at it.

  Anyway, as I say, I was pacing around the storeroom when it caught my eye. This was the time to have a look at the thing, I suddenly thought. I took it to the lab, rolled up my sleeves, and went to work. Two precious days I spent trying to salvage that wreck, only to discover in the end that it was a pleasant and innocuous landscape of absolutely no distinction. A few cattle grazing among Roman ruins. It had doubtless been painted in the seventeenth century by some Italian hack. Most certainly no masterpiece.

  I might have gotten three hundred pounds for the painting, but I decided to keep it. I liked the frame, which was original. And, God knows why, I thought it might one day prove useful.

  Meanwhile, I continued to look for ways to make money. I needed it for you, for me, and to pay off my debts. I spent money I didn’t have to place advertisements for my laboratory in art magazines, in the hope of attracting the notice of European curators.

  And I continued to marvel at the works of Lorrain wherever I traveled. Temple in Delphi in Rome; the religious works in the Prado; Hagar, Ishmael, and the Angel at the Pinakothek in Munich; Dido and Aeneas in Hamburg; and the extraordinary Psyche Saved From the Water at the museum in Cologne.

  The more of his work I saw, the more I seemed to discover things about myself.

  Yes, Papa, I know. Some might find this passion for Lorrain just a little strange. Most people might not even stop to look at his paintings when passing by them in a museum.

  Understanding his work takes time. His is a world of visual poetry and subtle harmony. One needs to find a way to respond to him.

  Lorrain’s universe is not for everyone. His work provides a refuge, a place of dreams, of airy landscapes and inner peace. The whole point is not just to look at what he is showing you, but to experience it. The gentle breeze wafting through those magnificent valleys and refulgent landscapes. The sun descending behind trees and mountains. The smell of roses at that magic moment when dawn dissolves to day. Lorrain gives us visions of paradise lost, and one’s reaction can only be that of deep longing. What are those lines of poetry, I forget whose?

  To hear the lark begin his flight

  And, singing, startle the dull night,

  From his watch-tower in the skies

  Till the dappled dawn doth rise;

  * * *

  The strange pains I’d experienced earlier came back while I was returning from a trip to Rome. Tingling in the fingers, painful inflammation in the legs, terrible migraines.

  “Not to worry,” my doctor told me over the phone. “You’re tired and you’re under stress. It’s nothing.”

  I waited for the symptoms to go away, but after a week they didn’t. I went to see the doctor and again he sent me to the hospital for yet more tests.

  Do you know that pain that seizes your entrails and makes you think the world is coming to an end? For five days in hospital I lived face to face with this dreadful reality. After the second exam — a myelograph test, I think — I knew what the doctors were looking for. Their elliptical comments made it all the more clear: the shaking, the migraines, the ataxia, the paresthesia. It all amounted to one thing: multiple sclerosis.

  I felt condemned, Papa, condemned to a death that would come in small installments. Each crisis would get worse. I’ve seen someone die that way before. It is the way you are dying. And while waiting for it I would live in terror of the next attack. What would be the first to go? My eyes? My mind? Would I have to be restrained? The interval between the two first crises had been short. The disease would now progress rapidly.

  I would die unsatisfied, unfinished. The imminence of death posed unbearable questions: Why had I been born? What had I done with my life? I had spent my life waiting. “I wasted time and now time doth waste me.”

  On the fifth day of my stay in the hospital, my doctor came into my room and sat on my bed. He was smiling.

  “Miss Caldwell, you’ve got an hour to pack your bags and leave. After midday, checkouts are postponed to the next day”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What I mean is that there is absolutely nothing whatever the matter with you.”

  He explained t
hat the symptoms had been caused by a virus that went undetected the first time around, and whose symptoms are exactly the same as for multiple sclerosis.

  The first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was run to see you to tell you the joyful news. I half expected my release would bring about your own.

  We shared a glass of champagne. Don’t you remember, Papa? I sat with you until late into the evening, near the window, watching night fall over the trees in the park.

  In my euphoria — my tipsiness, I suppose — I felt as if something had happened between us. Something, well, like the breath of life, life that would continue to be mine for a little longer. Perhaps you felt something.

  Then my joy seemed to collapse under the weight of the certainty that it was too late for you and me. Always, forever, too late. You were somewhere else now. You always had been. Light-years from me.

  I left you, Papa, to go and taste something more of life. I wanted to make life. I went to the house of a former lover and simply gave myself to him. I didn’t have to say anything. We rolled together in a voluptuous union that had the urgency of death. Time’s winged chariot.

  The next morning I faced once again our financial problems. I, Jane Caldwell, thirty-eight years old, beautiful, gifted, filled with regrets about her life yet driven by a crazy desire to do something grand, something wonderful, something that would turn her life around.

  I would create an immortal work of art before death, which had brushed against me once, made a second pass.

  A revelation came to me during one of my meditative visits to the National Gallery.

  I was sitting on a bench in the little rotunda that houses the Turner painting, the one the artist himself had bequeathed to the museum — with the stipulation that it be surrounded by two Lorrain paintings that he had also donated. As usual, I was lost in reverie before these luminous portals, but this time my feelings of immersion were tempered.