The Fraud (5 page)

There were no letters, no messages from across the sea. As night followed night, Grace Marshall, milliner’s assistant, staring out at the darkness from the attic window, or lying in bed hearing the night sounds and staring at the wooden beams of the ceiling, understood herself an orphan, alone in all the world. Tobias was surely a pirate by now -
I could have been a Pirate too!
- and Philip -
who stole my own coloured chalks and my charcoal
- was studying to be an artist in exciting foreign parts, and Grace making hats in Bristol. Sometimes that old voracious energy would be sighted, briefly, but then it was gone, a poor thing, as if the world had wrought too much damage upon it. However that was not exactly the situation: the energy had only gone underground, her chin only lifted just that little bit higher.

‘
Goddam!
’ she heard the sailors muttering, down on the wharfs as the ship-owners shouted.

‘
Goddam!
’ Grace Marshall muttered to herself.

She was lonely, but she was also
furious
, and her fury sustained her.

 

It went on then, this early morning haunting of the quays, month after month after year, though perhaps even Grace Marshall no longer really expected to find her brothers. She might have seemed to be a street girl but she was not exactly a street girl, except that she knew the streets. One of the other milliner’s assistants who also haunted the streets, but for different reasons, found she was with child: she drank much gin and fell down the creaking stairs, blood everywhere. Mrs Falls discharged her immediately with no pay. Mrs Falls’ contribution to her girls’ welfare was to remind them of the prints on the first floor landing that a famous artist had made as a warning: Gin could only lead to destruction, it was Beer that would make them strong and hearty and she provided beer on Saturdays (water of course would kill them). Occasionally Grace too might be accosted by men down by the quays, or up by the Customs House, but the bargemen and the ship’s clerks and the sailors and the tradesmen knew her, protected her in their indifferent way, for there was something about her resolute twelve-year-old stride, thirteen-year-old stride, fourteen-year-old stride: something about the determined little chin. She was part of the morning, always there and, besides, she looked as if she might bite.

The milliner girls were lucky: not only did someone care for their welfare and give them beer on Saturdays, they also had one half-day free a week. If Grace wasn’t wandering down by the docks she sometimes would go to the Bristol Public Library and see the rum-drinking vicar with the red face. Her brother had taught her to read but he had never told her of one person who wrote a book except Mr Shakespeare, so (not knowing what else to look for) she would ask the red-veined but kindly gentleman if she might look again at the fragile, water-stained book. The library was so ill-used he was pleased to have a customer, even a rather untidy young girl. Some of the plays and sonnets, he thought, might be somewhat unsuitable. But he found for her the play of
Twelfth Night
thinking, with great breadth of mind for an inebriated vicar in Bristol, that it might interest her, as it was about young people, shipwrecks and love and there was much laughter also.

He sat and helped her with the more difficult words. The reading began auspiciously with the short first words:
If music be the food of love, play on
, and she thought of her father painting and singing,
If with me you’d fondly stray, over the hills and far away
, and she even smiled. It was more difficult when they came to the second scene.

Grace shed a small, angry tear which she brushed away rudely, and asked the vicar where Elysium was, and he had not the heart to speak of death, and just said ‘far away’. Then they found that the next pages were so damaged by water stains that they were not to be read: the kind vicar told Grace the story of love and misunderstanding as best he could and assured her that the brother and the sister were re-united in the end. She bit her lip very hard, she never cried, she stared up at the picture of the fine gentleman with the beautiful clothes, on the wall.

‘Who is that?’ she asked crossly.

‘That is a copy of a very great Painting,’ said the vicar. ‘The man in the picture is an Italian Duke, and he was painted by a great Venetian Artist called Mr Titian.’

She looked more carefully. ‘How did Mr Titian paint those beautiful colours?’

‘I expect he had beautiful paints, young lady.’ She stared upwards, fascinated.

‘What is Venetian, that Mr Titian is?’ The kind vicar heaved down an old atlas, and showed her the world, and Venice, and she wondered if Philip and Tobias were sailing to such places and peered in astonishment at all the countries and all the sea.

‘Show me Elysium?’ she asked again, but the vicar (although he was one of God’s servants) said he did not know, exactly, the whereabouts of Elysium.

She would come back to the library and look at the maps and the vicar would find a bit more un-water-stained Shakespeare and read to her, explaining words that she did not understand. She was always glad when he told her - the story cut short again by damaged pages - that nevertheless everybody lived happily ever after.

‘Does everybody always live happily ever after?’ she once asked him, and because he saw the longing in the small face he did not think of his own life.

‘Yes,’ he said gravely, and he added, although it was against every experience of his existence, ‘Life always ends Happily Ever After,’ and her smile lit up the cold library afternoon.

However they did graduate, after many months, to
Romeo and Juliet
, and Grace put her hand over her mouth in horror when the warring families went too far, thought of herself as Juliet, of course, but had no contender for Romeo. She perfectly understood that Mr Shakespeare was writing about the thing called
love
that the other apprentice girls sometimes giggled over in the night. She made up her own Romeo in her mind: a little like one of the bright-eyed laughing sailors she had noticed without perhaps exactly meaning to, down by the docks, and, perhaps, a little like the older, handsome brother who had deserted her. One afternoon, the vicar read:

‘Have him Dead, and Cut him out?’ she said in amazement, for that was not how the milliner girls talked. ‘Is that what Love is?’ and the vicar explained that Mr Shakespeare was making word-pictures.

‘Do you mean that words can make a Picture, just like painting can?’

‘Yes,’ said the vicar.

She looked up at the colours of Mr Titian on the wall. ‘I would much rather make a Picture with paint,’ said Grace finally and firmly.

But that night the word-picture of Mr Shakespeare stayed inside her head and from the attic window she stared for a long time at the stars in the Bristol sky with an angry tenderness and a strange longing that she hardly understood.

Next morning, down by the docks, scanning the horizon as was now her ingrained habit, she saw the sailor of her Romeo imagination waving goodbye to a young girl with a baby as his ship set sail. Tears poured down the girl’s cheeks; Grace was near enough to see that the tears fell on the baby’s hair in the pale red dawn. She turned away from the docks with a tiny, inaudible sigh. She did not go straight back to the workrooms, walked further along the road, found herself beside a big Bristol church, the Church of St Mary’s Redcliffe, that had big stained-glass windows. Usually the door was locked, but this morning it was wide open, like a black yawn. She stepped cautiously inside. It was summer and the early morning light soon began to insinuate through tall windows, and then - suddenly - caught the coloured glass spectacularly, making the blues and golds and red shine and glow in an unimaginable way. She stared up, like a hungry person.

She drifted further into the church. The daylight shone now on to a long curtain with a faded painting upon it, above the altar-place; dust caught in the shafts of sunlight, and an angel looked rather shabbily downwards from one of the high walls.

As the morning grew brighter, Grace became aware that the church was not after all empty. A small stocky gentleman sat there also, to the side, contemplating the altar with a fierce, concentrated expression: Grace thought that perhaps he was praying with his eyes open.

The open eyes had already taken in the girl: the huge, dark, curious, rather sad eyes, the delicate bones, the determined little chin. Feeling her eyes upon him now, the gentleman turned again to her.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

‘Good morning,’ answered Grace Marshall.

‘See that Altar?’

‘Yes.’

Their voices rose above them, echoing eerily in the empty building like disembodied bells, a deep sound and a high sound.

‘Tell me, young Lady, what would you like to see hanging up there behind it? What Miracle would please you?’

‘My Brothers,’ she said at once. ‘My Brothers returned for me from across the World.’

He did not seem in the least surprised by her answer, was staring again at the painted curtain above the altar.

‘How would you have them look?’

‘They would be shining,’ said Grace. ‘Like this light, like this light now - I mean the sun shining through that beautiful coloured glass, it would be shining all around them.’ She saw now he had a crayon or a pencil, was writing something quickly. ‘And my Brother who will be an Artist and I, who will also be an Artist, would have a painting Studio, like a Church -’ he turned his head quickly, stared at her. ‘The Light, I mean,’ she said, thinking she may somehow have been blasphemous, ‘I mean the way the Light shines in through these high windows so early in the morning and the way the Light from the candles moves and flickers and I would draw . . .’ She thought for a moment, remembered the Frenchman and the Conversation Piece. ‘. . . I would draw my Father and my Mother and my sisters and my brothers.’

‘Would they sit to you, your Family?’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means: if you draw a person it is best if they are there, in front of you. Would they all sit quietly, for as long as it took you to draw them?’

‘They are quiet. They are in my head.’

‘What is it that you mean, that they are in your head?’

‘They died with the Fever.’

His pencil stopped. ‘All of them?’

‘Except my two Brothers, who will come back for me. The other one is a Pirate.’

The pencil started again. ‘Shining, as you described.’ He was smiling slightly, perhaps he was laughing at her. She saw the way the light was changing: it was time for her to go back to Christmas Steps.

‘They will be shining,’ she said obstinately. And then she stood quickly.

‘What is your name?’ he asked, detaining her.

‘Grace. I have to go to my Work.’

‘How old are you, Grace?’

‘Fourteen years.’

He stood also. To her surprise he was shorter than she. ‘I hope you
will
draw in your Studio with your brother, Grace,’ he said. Maybe he saw something bleak in her face. ‘Let me tell you something. If I see a face I would like to paint and I cannot keep it in front of me, I sometimes make a quick sketch of it on my thumbnail. ’ Startled, she actually laughed in the empty church: the childish, uncertain laugh echoed upwards as she looked at her own very small nail and back at the short man. ‘But of course you can also draw that which you remember, that can be a way of drawing too.’ And he moved towards her with his hand outstretched, to give her a paper. ‘I am going to make a very large Painting for this Altar, Grace. And there will, I promise you, be Shining.’ And then the short man was gone to the front of the church where the small candles flickered and made shadows, and then he disappeared through the side door.

Grace stared after him in surprise,
is he an Artist? is that what real Artists look like? he seems rather short for an Artist, although I am sure it is allowable for short people to be Artists.
In the summer morning light, shining even more brightly now from the high windows, she looked down at his paper. A sudden gasp of surprise echoed. It was an
exact
drawing of herself as she looked up at the altar. She saw her own black eyes in her thin face. Her own chin. As if she looked in a mirror. Underneath, rather untidily, it said
Grace. Bristol. Fourteen years
. And underneath that the signature was clear:
Wm Hogarth
.

Hooped petticoats had never been a hindrance to the running of Grace Marshall. She ran along the cobbled paths and winding alleys, up the hill towards the milliner’s house, she did not stop as she got to the bottom of Christmas Steps but ran up, holding her skirts before her, she burst into the house and ran up the stairs even as Mrs Falls’ voice admonished her for her unusual tardiness, and on the stairs she looked again at
Gin Lane
and
Beer Street
.

There was the same signature underneath.

Wm Hogarth
.

 

It was as if a magic key had been turned in her.

With the drawing he had made beside her, as a talisman perhaps, she began to draw her memories: she began to draw her life.

She acquired some proper paper, she acquired some more charcoal. In the attic room while the other girls slept she sat on her small lumpy mattress and heard mice scurrying and drew, by candlelight, the faces of all the people she had lost from her life, all the people who had gone. She drew them as she remembered them: her mother’s petulance and disappointment; her father’s rum-soaked eyes - she surprised herself as she caught a slightly shifty look in his face, the eyes slid away, did not look openly, just like Tobias. Her own lip turned down sulkily as she drew her two sisters, their petulance echoing their mother’s; she drew her brother Philip’s seductive smile: all that charm and good fellowship, the eyes that laughed and charmed, and laughed again. She drew her two younger brothers fighting: quick strokes. She saw at once that that drawing was bad - her brothers looked more like animals than little boys, she was unable to catch their bodies and their fierce, remembered battles, she rubbed at the charcoal marks and - suddenly - she was weeping. Big silent tears fell down her face, on and on, Tobias disappeared for ever and Ezekiel dead before he was twelve; once long ago, thin, dark Tobias, a black-eyed beanstalk, had carefully brought her the red rose he had acquired from somebody else’s garden for her to make a colour. Tears fell upon the paper and she did not understand from whence they might have come, she had not properly cried for many years and she saw her Father, and the cart of bodies clattering away from her.