lived a double life, running between drawing rooms and the dingy meetings of your art clubs, trying to reconcile the two, and failing, as you knew I must.
A man must eat, my friend! A man must eat. You could disdain those wealthy bankers because you were as rich as one, thanks to your wife. But I could not; I could either have success in the world or esteem from you. You urged me to have both, but it was another piece of your trickery. Because it could not be done.
And you don’t know the half of it. Do you want a confession? I turned faker too, in those days. You faked opinions on paintings; I faked the paintings themselves. People would not pay for my work, so I would produce things they would pay for. What was more, I duped you, once.
Ah! At last, I have got through those finely hewn defensive walls of yours. Thank heavens. It was my last throw. If that hadn’t worked, I would have had to resign myself to failure. You see, you are vulnerable as well. A little flicker, a momentary uncertainty; that was all I needed from you.
That’s enough. I’m not going to do any more today. So you have an afternoon free to vegetate, read, go for walks, write letters. Whatever you do with yourself. You may have noticed it is getting cooler these days as autumn approaches. The seasons change fast here. Better enjoy the sun while it lasts. Another day or so and the atmosphere will become violent.
SO MUCH FOR my prediction! A fine morning, again, although I detect the first touch of cold in the wind, which has switched to the northwest. Believe me; I know what I am talking about. You would not notice it, I imagine; you have to live here for a long time before you become sensitive to the minuscule changes in the weather. It’s a certain freshness just after dawn, the lightness of the wind, the sound of the sea that makes the difference and lets you know we are on the slide down into another winter. We really will have a storm in a day or so; I hope so, I want you to see one. The moods of the weather delight me; until I came here I never realised how much I hated the English winter. You become the weather you live in—I know, it’s a cliché, but I never realised quite how true it was. The drabness of the English climate produces drab people, wrapped up, desperate to keep the outside at bay. They wear an emotional overcoat throughout their lives and scowl upwards, wondering whether it is going to rain again. Quite right, too; it is. But it is not uplifting, to be enclosed by a feeling that if it isn’t raining now, it will be tomorrow. And we Scots . . . how can anyone understand colour when half the year it is only light six hours a day? You can crave it, of course, stand in front of a Claude Lorrain and wonder whether such blues truly exist in nature, dream of being in a place where the evening sun lights up poplar trees with such contrast and intensity. But that is not the same as understanding it, sinking into that brilliance and losing your fear of it. Such colours will always be foreign.
Here it is different, although I’m not sure why. We are only off the coast of Brittany, after all, not in the tropics or North Africa. But the weather gods are more direct here, unlike in England where they insinuate that it is summer so quietly that you could easily miss it, or ooze their way into winter so slowly you scarcely notice the change. Here they announce it with a trumpet blast, with tempests and heat-waves, cloudless blue skies or rainstorms that can batter you onto your knees, with howling winds or air so still and quiet you can hear a woman talking half a mile away.
Can I tell you my earliest memory? You are being my confessor, after all, after a fashion. I know you do not want to be one, but you have no choice. You are my prisoner, trapped by your bizarre desire for a portrait by my hand. And as I said, I have been practising confession of late, and find it pleasing. Do you know, I was talking to my doctor a year ago in Quiberon—I had gone for another potion to help me sleep, although few have had much effect except laudanum, which gives me such a headache I prefer not to use it—and he told me about this man in Vienna who has revived the confessional and turned it into medicine. He is a little cut off, my poor doctor, a small- town provincial physician on the fringes of civilisation, so he subscribes to all the latest journals and societies. Anyway, this Austrian Jew has come up with this idea which rather struck my medical friend. You go along with some ailment, talk for months and—poof !—you feel better. And that’s it, apart from paying over the money. You look sceptical; I am not. Of course it works, I am merely astonished that people will pay for it. My confession to you is making me feel better, as well, and do not think I am talking for no purpose. I have a very real purpose; I am confessing my sins in advance, before I have committed them. Explaining my painting to you, so you will understand it. See why I have chosen to do it in this way, rather than any other.
So my earliest memory was of being beaten by my mother. I must have been about four, I suppose, maybe less. It was winter, and cold, and night-time. I needed to go to the toilet, but my mother had forgotten the nightstand and I couldn’t bear the long walk down to the privy at the end of our little garden, shivering with cold, and the wind cutting through my thin dressing gown. So I stood by the door and hesitated. Too long, and I peed in my pyjamas and it ran down my leg and over my foot and all over the floor which she had just finished washing down. I knew I’d get into trouble, and started to cry. I was right. My mother came down and beat me for it. Then she made me go down on my knees, and pray God for His forgiveness.
I know why, of course. There was never enough money or food or clothes, and she was exhausted, always near her wits’ end. She worked, cooked, cleaned, mended, made do on far too little. Kept up appearances—can you even guess how onerous, how inviolable that need is in a small Scottish town? That was most of it. The rest was Scottish; the need to punish and the hatred of failing. All things, all infractions must be punished, however unwilled they were. Remember it; punishment is in my soul. I have travelled far in many ways but I have long since accepted that I can’t escape. I am not complete without punishment, meting it out and being punished in turn. Life, like a good painting, needs balance, a harmonious arrangement to avoid being chaotic, a mess, a failure.
But it was at that moment, at the age of four, that I decided I would leave—which was precocious of me, you must admit. I swore that sooner or later I’d escape and never go back. Not to that home, that meanness, that littleness. That washing-on-a-Monday, watch-what-the-neighbours-think life, the castor-oil and prayer upbringing. Everything I have done has been propelled by that; this is what the priest says, as he tries to inculcate the love of Mary into me. He may be right, though I do not think things are so very different on this island. Besides, I will ever prefer God the avenger, the wrathful, the punisher. But I succeeded; I escaped.
Did you ever wonder how it was that a poor boy like myself, earning only five shillings a week in Glasgow, then a princely seven shillings a week in London, managed to make his way to Paris and live there without any work? Probably not; where money comes from has never been a concern of yours; it has always been there. It is no more surprising to you than water coming out of a tap. But I had to sell my soul for it.
I am not joking. I cannot even claim that it was on impulse, or something that I truly regretted. I stole the money from my mother. Her life savings, all she had for her old age after my father died. You notice I do not say borrowed, or took. I am not trying to hide anything. Stole. It was my only chance, my only hope of survival. It was her or me. When I decided I had to go to Paris, I made the long journey home, went to the little package she kept hidden under the bed, and took it all. She knew it was me, of course, but never said a word. It was her punishment for having brought me into the world. She knew it, and so did I; I was an agent of chastisement only. I think I did tell myself that I would give it all back, with interest, when my career prospered. But I never returned a single penny. She died before I had anything to give back, but I am not sure I would ever have done so. I didn’t want to. She had to live out the rest of her life knowing she had a worthless, greedy, cruel son, and her pride and dignity meant she could not even tell anyone. It made it certain I could not go back there, ever. The guilt was like the walls of a fortress, forever keeping me out of Scotland, barring my way back to where I came from. And when she died, I did go back. But not to her funeral. She was buried alone, and I don’t even know where. She was a wicked woman, harsh and punishing, who used her own sufferings as a weapon against her child and her husband. She deserved no pity, and got none from me.
Now, to work. I have finished sketching, had enough experimenting with your fine features. I tried all sorts of angles and poses in my head, and have settled on the one that was in my mind from the very beginning. The characteristic one you have of sitting in a chair with one shoulder slightly forward, and your head fractionally turned towards it. It gives you a sense of being about to move all the time, of energy. Quite undeserved, I think, as you are one of the laziest people I have ever known. Your energy is not physical at all; it is a fine case of the body reflecting the mind, creating an illusion which has nothing to do with the pills for the heart, weak arms and your tendency to puff and wheeze your way up stairs. It is an example of the superiority of the will over reality; I could beat the hell out of you, pick you up and carry you halfway across the island even against your will. Most people could; but I suspect the idea has never crossed anyone’s mind since you were at school—where I imagine you were bullied, as children do not appreciate the power of the intellect. A further problem to be solved, of course—
