Iain Pears - The Portrait

I suppose she was right; I hardly made a good case for myself, and at the time I had little to offer except a vast selfishness and a small income. I had never learned courtship, had never needed to; I thought that directness spoke for itself, but hadn’t realised that the English like their ritual and distrust plain speaking as somehow mendacious. Everything has a hidden meaning, does it not? And the more direct the speech, the more carefully hidden the true meaning must be, the more effort must be expended to understand what is really being said. So much for my efforts at courtship, though, come to think of it, I have just summarised your philosophy as a sage of the modern. Your criticism is merely the sensibility of the English bourgeois applied to canvas. Nothing can be without explanation.

“I will never marry,” she said, once the surprise had dissipated and she could speak again. At least she did not smile as she said it; that would have been too much. “I am not fitted for it. I do not desire children, and I believe I can look after my own needs, so I see little point in it. I can think of no man I like more than you,” she went on, “and no man whose company I enjoy more. But that is hardly sufficient. No, Henry MacAlpine. Find someone else. I would never make you happy, and you would never make me content. I’m sure someone else will do a better job for you than I ever could.”

And that was that. She discouraged any return to the subject, and even avoided me for some time, just in case I was minded to take up the matter again. So off I went to walk in the rain of the Highlands. My pride was hurt, of course, whose would not be? But I discovered that the occasional pangs of jealousy I felt whenever I saw her in the company of some man—a rare enough event—faded soon enough. It took some time before we resumed our old friendship, before she felt safe enough in my presence and was sure I was not about to go down on my knees again, but eventually calm was restored. I didn’t know what she wanted, but soon enough I accepted that I was not it. And I easily persuaded myself that she would have been quite the wrong choice for me, as well. She was, after all, a very difficult person to be around. Moody, withdrawn, quixotic. No; it took only a short while to persuade myself I had been saved from a terrible mistake.

Don’t think, by the way, that I didn’t notice the look of scorn on your face as I was talking of my beloved homeland. Oh, so poetic about Scotland, and so far away from it! If it is so wonderful what am I doing on a little island off the coast of Brittany? If so patriotic, why head south instead of north? True enough; the most rapturous Scots are the nostalgic ones. Scotland stifles me; the landscape gives you a sense of freedom, the civilisation oppresses. I cannot paint there, because I am too aware of God’s disapproval and of the impossibility of ever pleasing Him. Here I have at least persuaded myself He is a little more open to persuasion.

YOU SEE that my style has changed? Of course you have; you never miss anything. Along with the brushes, I have jettisoned the method. What were we taught? Line, line, line. And the immediacy of the impression; the two great irreconcilables that have destroyed a generation or more of English painters. There we were, slopping down great gobs of paint trying to fix something glimpsed for a moment then half forgotten. As Monet had shown us, so we did. Well and good; it produced a few pretty things, although personally there was always some little Calvinist inside me tutting away about French corruption. By all means, try and capture that brilliant flash of light on the lily pond; the play of autumn sun on the cathedral façade. But we never get much sun in Scotland, you know. Not much light, either. We have fifty-nine different shades of grey. We are a nation en grisaille , and can see all of God’s creation in the difference between an overcast dawn and a threatening, squally morning. Even the green of the hills is grey, if you study it properly. The heather and the lochs, all on a grey ground. The sun itself is a grey sun. Grey is not an immediate colour. It makes no instant impression. You cannot paint it like that. You have to study grey for years—generations, I might say—before it will reveal its secrets. And then you have to paint deep, not on the surface. It would be like asking Tiepolo to paint his confections using the city councillors of Glasgow instead of the nobility of Venice. If you tried, the result would be laughable. Better not to try, and think of something else.

Or leave, of course. There are some Scots who have reached that conclusion, abandoned the land of their birth and headed for the Mediterranean so they no longer have to use so much grey paint. I can imagine what they must say back in Dundee. “Och, mon, it’s sae very garish. Will ye just will look at that, noo? Have ye everr seen a girrul with an orrrange face before? I wouldnae hae’ that in ma hoose if ye paid me.” I used to sneer at the Jute merchants of Dundee as well, all import ledgers and profit tallies, living in a world of penny counting and constraint. But they are right, after all. You have to make sense of what is around you, not dream of something so far away it is unattainable. You never do get girls with orange faces in Dundee; never see the sun refracted on the clear blue water.

So I have changed the style. Out with the brushes, out with the splodges. I want depth, not immediacy, so I have gone back to the methods taught me long ago and investigated others so long disused they have not been taught for generations. I build up the paint, layer by transparent layer. I have investigated glazes made of oil and egg yolk, different layers of transparency to add depth, to make the viewer work a little. Nothing now can be done or seen or understood instantly. Instead you have to look deep, as you do in a mist, slowly seeing what lies underneath the surface, making out the vaguest outline of—what? A hill, a skull, a hint of malice in an expression covered by the sheen of perfect manners.

All this takes time, of course. It used to be that I could belt out a portrait in little more than an afternoon; then I would have to make my poor sitter rest immobile for hours while I doodled away, to clock up the hours and justify my fee. Or I would send them away, and the canvas—perfectly finished—would gather dust in a corner for months. Now they really do take a long time; I have become uneconomic; the prices I would have to charge would be extravagant indeed to maintain any lifestyle above the primitive.

Money? Heavens, I have enough. It wouldn’t see you through a weekend, I’m sure, but my ancestors gave me that frugality which was so much of their character. I tried to fight against it; almost succeeded for a long period, but I’m afraid dissipation cannot withstand a good Scottish education in kirk and school forever. We try, some of us, but our hearts are never really in it. There is always some minister in the background, warning of eternal damnation. It makes me a particularly strenuous sort of Catholic. I am of a Jansenist disposition, half a step away from flagellation and birch rods. The Sacred Heart appeals, that wounded and bleeding organ, dripping with grief for the sins of others. It fills me with a guilty pleasure at the suffering and agony I have put our Saviour through.

I take satisfaction from being cold, from having to bathe outside in icy water in winter. The people hereabouts think I am mad, but in truth the winters are not so harsh in comparison to Scotland; I earn my reputation on the cheap. Besides, I am not really concerned about the present; my eyes are fixed on the hereafter.

You do look embarassed. You are convinced that I have lost my reason; that I have sunk into a religious mania which is but one stop from the asylum. Not so; I do not mean my place in heaven, because if that is not already lost to me, it will be, soon enough. I mean my posthumous reputation.