Rosie Thomas - The Illusionists

She shifted her position so that she sat more perfectly upright. It was tempting to let her eyes lose their focus, even to drift into the reverie of her hours of posing – for all her energy, this state of suspension always beckoned her – but there was work to be done. Why would a pair of lovers tumble into separate cupboards? To escape from the duenna, perhaps. How would the cabinet interiors conceal and then reveal their contents? Whose advice should she seek on these technical matters? Not Devil’s, she instinctively knew that. Carlo Boldoni’s, perhaps. At the prospect of this collaboration the tight wire that ran between her shoulders loosened a little. Frowning like a schoolgirl, Eliza wrote a few lines of dialogue that she hoped were tender and sprightly.

Reports of the show at the Palmyra circulated at the Rawlinson. The young men visited it a second time, recruiting more of their friends to accompany them, and on this occasion they continued with a long night in and out of the drinking parlours behind the Strand. Someone had narrowly avoided being arrested after snatching a bobby’s helmet, someone else had fallen asleep on a porter’s barrow in the fruit market and had only woken up when the man threw him off in favour of a few bushels of pippins.

‘Viney, poor Viney proposed marriage to a young lady who sat on his knee for an hour and whispered her dark spells into his ear,’ Charles Egan crowed.

This riotous evening rapidly became a totemic event for the whole group, and as a result they adopted the Palmyra and the Philosophers illusion in particular as their badge of dishonour. Ralph Vine swept through South Kensington in a long black cloak like Devil’s, and the others started calling him Socrates.

Devil had told Jacko Grady that if there was to be no place for Heinrich Bayer in the company there would be no Philosophers either, and Grady had reluctantly agreed to include him again. Now a rival student coterie struck back by proclaiming their admiration for Bayer and the amazing Lucie. Two of them came to school wearing an approximation of his old-fashioned evening clothes, and one persuaded his fiancée to dress up like the doll and smile fixedly to the applause as they waltzed over the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall.

As a result of this exuberance more and more of the Rawlinson School’s students and their friends began to make their way to the Strand, and now they sat through the entire show as a collective demonstration of their commitment to understanding (prior to rejecting) the broadest spectrum of public taste.

A young polemicist from the sculpture school wrote an article entitled ‘Art and Every Day. Static Gallery versus Mobile Music Hall’ for a pamphlet that was read by some of the professors. As a result of this, Raleigh Coope and his current best protégé, a versatile young man of artistic promise, took two seats in the front row at the Palmyra to see the Execution of the Philosopher.

And at the end of the next life class Eliza was surprised when Mr Coope unrolled a sketch for her attention.

It was a lively pencil drawing of Devil in his robes, holding up Jasper’s waxwork head of Carlo Boldoni.

‘It’s a very strong likeness,’ she murmured.

Raleigh Coope waved this aside. ‘Mr Gardiner knows how to draw.’ Unlike some of the present company, he might have added. ‘He is much more interested in the subtext, the way that the piece subverts the biblical and classical mythologies. There is a subject here, Miss Dunlop.’

‘Yes, I see.’ Eliza did not think mythological subversion had been Devil and Carlo’s first intention.

‘If you are acquainted with the performer, you might enquire whether he is interested in sitting for Mr Gardiner?’

‘Yes, Mr Coope.’

‘The show has its slender merits, as Mr Gardiner has noticed. But it lacks an audience. The house was half empty on the night we visited. Doesn’t the management know how to attract paying customers?’

‘It seems not,’ she had to say.

A development which Eliza could hardly have foreseen now took place at the art school.

Attached to the back of the building was a mews and in this more humble environment – where the windows were not so tall, the north light less plentiful and the heating governed by economy – another establishment was housed. It had been set up as a philanthropic gesture by Professor Rawlinson himself and it was dedicated to the teaching of what he and Raleigh Coope chose to call commercial art.

‘For all the world,’ Charles Egan had once scornfully remarked, ‘as if that were not a contradiction in terms.’

The students at the secondary college were boys and young men who possessed a degree of artistic talent but did not aspire to become artists, and were in any case from poor families unable to afford the much higher fees at the school itself. Those applicants who were fortunate enough to be selected were taught by expert practitioners the techniques of signwriting, illustration for manufacturers, magazines and catalogues, and even of constructing models and mannequins for display purposes. Once they were Rawlinson trained, they easily and quickly found employment. When Eliza told Jasper about this he had sighed enviously.

‘If only I had known of such a school when I was sixteen years of age.’ Jasper’s own studies and apprenticeship had been hard, although easier to endure than his childhood in Stanmore.

Mr Coope had a fondness for lively and ambitious young men and he diligently involved himself with the curriculum of the technical school. One afternoon he addressed the class of illustrators and signwriters on the use of art as a means of selling goods.

‘How might you employ a visual image to encourage a purchase?’ he asked them. This was not a question he would have put to Mr Egan and his cohorts, who were paying for the chance one day to be able to write RA after their names.

‘By making a positive association?’ someone attempted.

‘Yes. Very good.’

The group dutifully discussed the possible combination of sturdy oak trees with health-giving patent medicines, and of portraits of beautiful young women with face creams. Mr Coope swallowed a yawn. Mr Gardiner and his enjoyment of the Philosophers illusion crept into his head and he was thinking idly of the Palmyra theatre’s rows of empty seats as he asked his class, ‘What if it were not a commodity to be sold but – say – an event?’

There was some more tedious discussion, this time of handbills and posters.

A red-haired boy at the back of the room raised his hand.

‘You could do the opposite, couldn’t you?’

Raleigh Coope arched one eyebrow.

‘I mean, sir, by not telling the people too much but in some way making them want to know more?’

‘Please go on.’

The boy’s face flushed as bright as his hair.

‘Sir, if I’m lectured over and over about, I dunno, who is going to preach in church on Sunday and if I have to listen to parson telling me what I have to renounce so as to save my soul, with my ma always reminding me even on a working day, then I starts saying to myself, I don’t care. But if it’s kept a secret, say, what really will get me to heaven, then I’m going to try my hardest to find out, aren’t I? It’s only natural.’

The rest of the class was tittering but the boy said defiantly, ‘Well, I am going to. It stands to reason.’

‘You have an idea there, Mr Cockle. Continue with it,’ Coope said. The boy’s forehead furrowed as he thought even harder.

‘So, if I wants to get people to come to my meeting perhaps I’d leave a hint they can see everywhere, not giving away so much but making them feel hungry to find out more. The idea is they will be worrying inside their noddles, “Am I going to miss what he’s got? Whatever it is?” ‘The boy jabbed a paint-splotched finger at his grinning neighbour.