All this was alarming enough in the middle of the day: once, they passed through just as a grey, whirling dusk fell and for the first time Grace held her brother’s arm like a child (Grace, brave Grace, clinging to the arm of her brother like a faint-hearted maiden). Philip told her that some said there were ghosts to be found in the recesses of the dark alleys nearby: there were whispers, and cries, and the sound of footsteps as the dank fog swirled round them. A lady would not walk here alone; nor a gentleman either, be he prudent.
Suddenly a man ran through the narrow alley where they had found themselves, the man pushing past people, running, running: fleet, barefoot, they heard his fast, wild breathing as he passed them. In the half-light they saw he was a black man. Almost at once another man, an Englishman, appeared.
‘Stop! Stop him!’ The second man was sweating, unable to run further, his wig dis-arrayed. ‘Stop him! He is my Property! Thief!’
‘What’s he stolen?’ A voice echoed out from a shadowy doorway.
‘He is mine! He is my nigger! I
bought
him from a trader. He is trying to run away, stop him!’ He was mopping his face with a kerchief, the black man had disappeared. ‘I will give him such a whipping when I catch him. Go after him. I will pay!’
A crowd had gathered around the perspiring gentleman.
‘What are you waiting for, useless, useless drones!’ he shouted in anger. ‘Get after him!’
But nobody moved. A strange surliness came over the crowd, and as if in unison the flotsam and jetsam (for such they were) seemed to form a barrier, preventing further chase. Nobody spoke but the message was as clear to Grace as if they were shouting,
These are our streets
. Grace looked suddenly for her brother but Philip had turned away, moved on. The young girl followed her brother, glad to be away from the menacing crowd, but she could not help looking back, saw that the sweating gentleman was now making his way towards darker alleys by a different route. They heard his voice in the distance: ‘Stop! Nigger! My Property!’ one more cry in the raucous bawdy continual noise: fighting and shouting and music and the loud rumble and rattle of carriages and carts and dogs barking unceasingly, and somewhere babies crying unceasingly, and the knife-grinder grinding his knives unceasingly, and calling his trade. They pushed their way through the
piazza
again and crossed down towards the Strand. And there, along the Strand only a few minutes from the
piazza
, they were in a different city where emporiums emitted perfumes of flowers and foreign lands. There were silks and Indian cottons and cardomom seeds and chocolate (much of it arrived through the port of Bristol, like the black man they had seen running) and everything so exciting, for this was the greatest city in the world: this was London.
And they heard the voice of the madwoman, still singing as they came back along St Martin’s Lane, so high, so sweet, in the exciting strange night.
Her brother trained her to be his housekeeper.
One day, as she was going reluctantly down the stairs that led to the basement kitchen, a flash of memory came to Grace of her father’s old Aunt Joy in her dark gown and her white cap who nobody noticed. She felt sudden, deep shock:
I shall never, never, never be like her
. Immediately she threw up her hands and said
Dio mio
loudly as she bustled about, as if she had been supervising Italian kitchens since she was a child, so that nobody could possibly confuse her with a retiring maiden aunt, and Euphemia the housemaid giggled and looked at her mistress from under her eye-lashes.
Philip took her to the fishmongers and the bakers and the butchermen and the little vegetable shops round St Martin’s Lane and Tower Street, as well as the stalls in the Covent Garden
piazza.
He showed her how to choose fresh produce, not old food: he taught her how to pick up and examine fruit and cabbages before she parted with his money; he took her to look carefully at the eyes of dead fish; he taught her to put meat to her nose. He taught her how to keep an account of her spending with a pencil and a notebook that he gave to her; regularly, at the end of each week, she was to explain to him every penny that she spent: if he considered she had paid too much for mutton he would show her where mutton might be bought cheaper. She tried to be stoic about the new, un-wished-for role she was somehow being pushed into: told herself that one day soon she would be her brother’s colleague, not his housekeeper. But for now she did not demur, bided her time: because she had understood her own ignorance -
There is much, much for me to learn about painting, I know nothing, after all
- she saw the sense of it, she must be useful. It was hard for her to be so disciplined, it was not in her wild character to be disciplined, but she was strong also: she wrapped up her longings inside her heart and worked hard, she wanted to please Philip very much, she tried not to mind the tedium, tried not to long to be in a studio of her own for she knew that that would come, when she was worthy.
But: she was nevertheless still Grace Marshall of Bristol. Already she had her own plans. She told Philip she must be with him all the time, to hear his accent, to copy him (but Italian words came easy, being an Italian was easy - had not her young brothers always encouraged her, in that forbidden past, to imitate other people?). Perhaps he thought that was what she was really doing, there in the dark corners of his big studio, listening to his accent? But she was watching him (moved as she had moved so long ago in her father’s betting-dens, down alleys, quiet, cunning, there but hardly noticed). Every day as soon as she had finished buying food she was in his studio, watching him work: watching carefully everything he did, drinking it in, learning every small thing - the preparing of the boards or the canvas; the mixing of the paints; the colours. He always removed his wig to work, wore a fashionable dark velvet cap as was the custom. He took out little bags of paint colours that had been already ground, little parcels wrapped inside pigs’-bladders: he would make a hole in the parcel with a tack, empty out colour on to his palette to mix with oil, and then put the tack back in the hole again to seal up the little parcel till next time.
Grace bloomed; early every morning now she set off alone at great speed in her respectable gown and bonnet with her basket over her arm: at great speed so that she could get the tedious business of purchasing food over, and insinuate herself quietly into a dark corner of her brother’s studio. She realised very quickly that she was expected to arrange supplies of fish and beef and potatoes and bread and wine and beer and pies and fruit for anybody who might come for dinner: luckily the old cook was good at her job, finally took pity on Grace and told her what to buy, how to save something for the next day if it was not used. Down cheerful, busy St Martin’s Lane, past houses and street-stalls and the madwoman singing, people hurried by, and carriages too, or a lady being run past by footmen in a sedan chair. Every early morning Grace stared in amazement - as she hurried from small shop to small shop, or to the stalls on the
piazza -
at the people, at the plentitude, at the filth, at the energy around her.
Occasionally if she had time, with her basket over her arm, she went back to the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the hope of seeing some Italians. Once she saw there two large women sitting under a tree, eating from a bread-loaf and talking Italian loudly; there were children with them, a boy with a bird-cage and two girls playing hopscotch on a path. Grace moved nearer casually, wanting to overhear everything (or perhaps what she really wanted was to join in the hopscotch, that she used to play with her brothers). The thin, dark boy was keen, she understood, to open the cage door so that the bird,
il uccello
, could fly round the fields. The women called out in Italian,
Fermi! No!
and then looked fiercely at Grace who was so near, as if it was all her fault, so she bobbed an apologetic curtsey, but she saw that the two girls played on so gracefully, almost as if they were dancing. Suddenly the small boy did open the cage and the bird flew out at once, straight up into the sky like a mad thing and the children screamed in Italian and the women screeched in Italian and Grace put her hand to her mouth in dismay. The children all ran about in vain with their arms reaching up, like demented trees, and then the little bird, it had yellow feathers, flew straight back again to the small boy and everybody laughed and included Grace in their laughter, and Grace laughed too, even as she hurried home with her basket, to continue her education.
One morning, her shopping finished, she was making her particular way - almost dancing herself, like the Italian hopscotch girls - back through the
piazza
, observing everything with great interest and curiosity but wanting to get back to her brother’s studio, when she suddenly came upon a young woman being violently attacked by two older men with sword-sticks. Grace was surprised, horrified, nobody assisted the girl, everybody went about their rushing business, hurrying to make money. The girl herself did not make one single sound as she tried fiercely to fend them off, but the men were yelling at her in an incoherent manner and bringing their sticks down upon her head and shoulders. Grace was so incensed at such obvious bullying that, without any consideration, she quickly moved close enough to the
mêlée
to put out her foot sharply and unexpectedly: she felled one man who made a big noise,
splat
, as he fell in a pile of horse dung and then lay sprawled there. The attacked young woman then had a chance to kick the other man in a very particular place; she motioned Grace to run fast with her: they quickly ended up in a dark alley off the
piazza
before the two men had the chance to recover their advantage.
Both young women bent over to catch their breath, half-scared, half-laughing: apart from a kind of excited fear, Grace was breathless because she had had to run with such a heavy basket of shopping (a dead eye of a turbot stared coldly), and the young woman was breathless because she had been beaten quite badly by her attackers.
‘Are you all right?’ said Grace at last, peering back towards the
piazza
but there was no sign they were being followed. ‘Whatever were they doing to you in such a terrible manner? Are you all right?’
‘Goddam!’ said the other girl, still trying to recover herself. ‘Thanks, girl, yer came just at the right moment, so yer did, and the other girls are useless trolls. I don’t usually work in the mornings.’ Then she looked at Grace and at her basket carefully at last, as she rolled up a torn stocking. ‘Why did yer help me?’
‘They were hitting you!’
‘It’s dangerous getting involved like that.’
‘They were hitting you,’ repeated Grace obstinately. ‘But why were they? Are you all right? There’s blood on you.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘What is your work?’ asked Grace. ‘Whyever would they hit you?’
The girl looked at her again. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘but thanks. Go back that way,’ and she pointed to a street at the side of them, ‘they won’t find yer down there.’ And she disappeared down a different alley and Grace realised at once, mortified:
of course, she is a street-girl.
She wondered why she hadn’t realised from the beginning, but the girl was so pretty and so -
what is the word I am thinking?
- defiant.
Another day, hurrying home with her basket, she saw a whole garden of grapevines growing further up St Martin’s Lane. An old lady was tending them.
‘You must come and taste my wine one day,’ said the old lady, ‘I make it for my son, the Colourman.’ And sure enough, just beside the grapevines which were such an unlikely vision in the city, she saw another vision - a small shop that advertised its wares thus: COLOURS FOR PAINTERS, and she laughed aloud for joy and at the changes that were coming to her life. Mr James Burke, the dealer with such piercing grey eyes, was walking down St Martin’s Lane and came upon the laughing girl.
‘What is it that amuses you so,
Signorina
?’ he asked but she only blushed and curtsied and hurried away, indicating the shopping under her arm. And then there she would be, somewhere in the corner of her brother’s studio, watchful as a cat.
Philip saw how quickly she had taken on her new persona, perhaps remembered the days when he taught his little sister to read and she would say to his friends so proudly,
When I do count the clock that tells the Time
and Philip did not know how impassionedly she did indeed count the time now, and wait for her moment.
Several days a week now people came for dinner at three o’clock. The house filled with scents and smells: the arriving guests brought their own aromas and their own odours which mixed with the meat cooking and the fish cooking and the wine. The Nobility whom her brother sometimes painted were not present of course, that was not a Painter’s social scale (or not
yet
, as Philip Marshall saw it) but Mr James Burke the dealer was often present; occasionally (though not as often as her brother would have liked) the feared critic Mr Hartley Pond.
‘
Buongiorno
, Signore Pond,’ said Grace Marshall, her head was bowed demurely but she watched him most carefully, this important person, the Art Critic. Mr Hartley Pond was a thin, scented, supercilious gentleman who took snuff from a beautiful enamelled snuff box decorated with an exquisite miniature painting, and who dominated the conversation with his very definite opinions. Grace, as instructed, listened carefully to every word. Mr Pond had what people described as a Roman nose but would have preferred it to be Greek: art began with the Greeks, he said - indeed
life
began with the Greeks as far as Mr Hartley Pond was concerned. Grace imagined he must spend all his spare time learning things from books so that he would know, always, better than anybody else.