All My Sins Remembered. Rosie Thomas
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Eleanor said, taking up the newspaper again.
The painter was almost an hour late when the maid finally showed him into the drawing room. He had refused to part with his big black hat, and from the doorway he flourished it and swept a theatrical bow.
‘Ladies, I can but apologize. May I be forgiven?’
‘Come and sit down, Mr Prynne. Or is it Mr Pilgrim?’
He bent over each of their hands in turn. Eyeing his clothes, Eleanor and Blanche felt that they were at least being repaid for their long wait with a full measure of artistic eccentricity.
‘For all my professional affairs, my name is Pilgrim. Just that, neither Mister nor anything else.’
‘I very much admired your designs for the ballet, Mr, ah, Pilgrim.’
‘La Nuit et la Rose? Thank you, Lady Leominster. Now, won’t you tell me exactly what sort of commission you have in mind?’
While Blanche told the story of The Misses Holborough and explained her wish to have another double portrait, this time of Clio and Grace, to hang alongside it, Pilgrim sat comfortably in his red silk-upholstered chair and looked around him. Eleanor saw that he examined the pictures on the walls, his expressionless stare shifting from the English watercolours to the dark oils of long-dead Stretton dogs, horses and ancestors.
When Eleanor finished, Pilgrim sighed.
‘I see. You had not thought of discussing this second portrait with Mr Sargent himself?’ Pilgrim needed the fee that Lord Leominster had mentioned, but even the size of the fee failed to persuade him that it would be interesting to paint the débutante daughters of these ladies. This room had already told him more than he wanted to know about their opinions and attitudes.
There had been some discussion between Blanche and John about the possibility of Sargent painting the new portrait, and John had very quickly concluded that he would be too expensive. ‘Get the best of the young fellows, the next Sargent,’ he had advised Blanche, and Blanche had done her best.
‘We would prefer a more modern approach,’ Blanche told Pilgrim.
A glint of amusement appeared in the painter’s reddened eyes. ‘You are interested in the modern movements? In Fauvism? The Cubists, perhaps?’
Blanche and Eleanor looked at each other. For a moment, it seemed that they might laugh. But then Blanche met Pilgrim’s eyes and answered valiantly, ‘Of course.’
Malice took hold of Pilgrim, a sensation he always enjoyed. ‘I commend your interest, Lady Leominster, Mrs Hirsh. I think, then, that I should meet the two young ladies?’
Blanche rang for the maid, and a moment later Grace and Clio came in together. They looked faintly sulky for having been kept waiting upstairs. Pilgrim stood up. He shook each hand in turn, and then walked slowly in a circle around the two girls. He rubbed his stubbled jaw, as if thinking.
He had seen, of course, that the mothers were twins, but that had not interested him particularly. What was more intriguing was the physical similarity between these daughters, spiced with the differences in expression and manner. They looked far less dull than he had feared, less conventional than their mothers had led him to expect. One of them in particular, the Lady Grace, appealed to him strongly. There was a challenge in her eyes when she looked at him. Her face was plumper than her cousin’s, and her mouth made a more sensual curve. The other one, Miss Hirsh, was more defensive. She didn’t pout, but held her chin up, turning her face a little aside.
Pilgrim held out one finger to her jaw and turned her to look full at him. He put his head on one side, as if appraising what he saw. He enjoyed the suppressed whisper of protest from the mothers.
Pilgrim decided that the girls were pretty enough, and that it would be amusing to launch a leisurely, elaborate tease on the parents. He was also, he reminded himself, in serious need of their money. They would get their portrait, but it would be the picture that he chose to paint.
‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘I accept the commission. For the first sitting, my studio at number twenty-two Charlotte Street, next Wednesday at three o’clock sharp, if you please.’
Afterwards, Clio said to Grace, ‘Well. What did you make of that?’
Grace yawned, pretending lazy indifference. ‘Of those clothes, and that hat? And was it my imagination, or did he smell, rather?’
‘He smelt.’
‘But he did have quite wonderful eyes,’ Grace added. They were coal-black, under thick black brows that met over the bridge of his nose.
‘He did, didn’t he? Do you suppose anyone has ever before appeared in Aunt Blanche’s drawing room looking so unshaven, so disreputable?’
‘Never. Wasn’t it delicious? They took it like lambs. He must be very clever or sought-after, or something.’
‘What do you think it will be like having our portrait painted?’
‘Less boring than I had feared,’ Grace answered.
The first sitting took place as Pilgrim had commanded. Grace and Clio presented themselves at his studio in their white dresses, with Blanche as chaperone. Pilgrim found her a hard chair in a corner, and then turned his back on her. Blanche noted that the high room under its glass skylight was clean, if bare, and that Pilgrim himself was clean-shaven and tidily dressed in a blue painter’s smock over flannel trousers.
He spent a long time positioning the girls, prowling around them and lifting an arm or turning a shoulder. At length, he had them sitting side by side, but so close together that Clio’s shoulder was in front of Grace’s. They looked as if they were leaning together for support, but their heads were turned in opposite directions, away from each other. Pilgrim was satisfied. He retreated behind his easel and began to work, making quick flicks with his wrist. The only sounds in the studio were his cuff brushing over the canvas, and the dim popping of the gas fire. Blanche was only too aware that she had been sitting still for an hour and a half without so much as a cup of tea. The painter took regular draughts from a cup at his elbow, but he didn’t offer anything to the sitters or their chaperone.
At last, he stood back from his work.
‘That is enough for today,’ he announced.
Blanche stood up with relief and strolled over to look at what he had done. She was surprised to see that there was a sheet of coarse paper pinned over the canvas, and the only marks on it were a series of rectangles, thick charcoal lines, boxes within boxes, receding within themselves like a Chinese puzzle.
Pilgrim removed the paper. ‘I prefer not to have my work in progress inspected in ignorance,’ he said.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Blanche said humbly. Grace and Clio looked at each other with awed expressions.
At dinner that evening, Blanche told John that she had found the portrait sitting very boring and uncomfortable, and that she did not intend to stay for the next. ‘There are two of them, after all,’ she reasoned. ‘I would not leave one of them alone with him, but they can look after each other. I’m sure Eleanor would agree, if she were here.’ Eleanor had gone back to Nathaniel and her younger children in Oxford. ‘Don’t you think so, John?’
‘If you say so, my dear,’ John Leominster answered, without much interest.
For their next sitting, Blanche’s chauffeur drove the girls to Charlotte Street, and was instructed to call back for them in two hours’ time. Pilgrim met them at the door.
‘No Mama today?’ he enquired.
‘I’m afraid that Mama found your studio draughty and dull,’ Grace answered.
‘Is that so?’ Pilgrim was all innocent surprise.
This time they found that the room under the skylights was much warmer, almost cosy, that tea had been assembled on a little table near the fire, and that the bench on which