Chapter Eleven
Rachel was miserable. She had been unhappy when Mama forbade her to marry Angus, but that had been different. There had been a sort of nobility in the suffering, a feeling that they were defying the world together, which had made her feel like the heroine of a story.
But this was stupid misery, and all her own fault.
She had been angry with Angus for breaking the engagement and had wanted to punish him.
On cooler reflection she could see that it had been fair-minded and generous of him to give her the opportunity to enjoy herself while they were not free to marry.
He had even said that if she met someone she preferred he would understand.
But supposing he met someone else? She had seen him twice with Miss Canning, at such widely separated dates it seemed likely he had been seeing her all along.
And he had seen her kissing Jervis: suppose now he decided she did not love him?
Or that, misbehaving in a public place, she was not worthy of him?
Only a few weeks left until her majority – how could she have been so reckless? She had made a fool of herself. She had flirted with Jervis, thrown herself at him, only to have him reject her in the most humiliating way. Suppose Angus did not renew his proposal, what would she do then?
She had to try to make things right. She must see Angus, tell him…
No, that was impossible without explaining to Aunt what she was about, and she couldn’t bear to do that.
She must send a note. Yes, that was it. Not to the office, where it might get lost in the mass of correspondence.
No, it must be sent to his lodgings, where he would read it after work, at his leisure, and have time to reflect on how much they had gone through together, and how she had proved her love for him over the years.
It took her several attempts to phrase it just right, then copy it out in a fair hand.
She couldn’t go out and deliver it herself.
While she was at Aunt Caroline’s, one of the housemaids, Doris, maided her.
Doris was a stout, sensible girl with pale skin, pale blue eyes and crinkly ash-fair hair.
They had become cautiously friendly over the past year, to the point where Doris had confided to Rachel the ups and down of her ‘understanding’ with a local young man called Horace, a chair-caner.
Rachel had even advised her on how better to arrange her hair. So she was a likely ally.
Doris had once expressed a wistful admiration for a certain sky-blue blouse in Rachel’s wardrobe.
It happened that Rachel hardly ever wore it – it was only a ready-made, and she didn’t like the shade very much.
It would suit Doris’s colouring much better than hers, anyway.
She was pretty sure that if she offered it to Doris, the girl would be willing to deliver her note for her, and not talk about it.
In the event, Doris proved rather sharper than Rachel had anticipated, and she had to give her a blue ribbon and an ivory comb as well (not real ivory, of course).
Rachel felt a little indignant at having her pocket picked in that way, but it would be worth it to secure the maid’s service and, more importantly, her silence.
Rachel handed over the note while she was being dressed in the morning of Doris’s half-day off.
She waited on tenterhooks all day, trying to imagine what Angus would think when he got it, what he would feel, what he might do.
Doris was not there, of course, when the evening dressing-bell went.
Another girl, Clarice, attended her. Rachel asked casually where Doris was. ‘Isn’t she back yet?’
‘No, my lady. We don’t have to be in until nine on our half-day. I think she went to see her mother.’
Rachel hesitated on the brink of asking for Doris to come and see her as soon as she came in, but thought better of it. It would draw attention and prompt questions. Aunt Caroline did not approve of getting too friendly with the servants.
She sat through dinner in a state of distraction, thinking, He must be home by now.
And Perhaps he’s reading it right this minute.
And I wonder if he’ll come here tonight.
Is it too late? She imagined the knock at the door, the surprise and faint disapproval of Forbes as he announced the visitor, the way Angus’s eyes would fly to her face.
Perhaps he would hurry across the room to her…
No unexpected visitor disturbed the evening, and she trod up to bed knowing she must wait at least until the morning, when a note, or perhaps Angus himself, would surely arrive at the earliest moment.
Clarice had only just left her, when there was a soft tap at the door, and it opened to reveal the gilt head of Doris, decorated with a bow of familiar blue ribbon.
Rachel beckoned her in, and she hurried across the room, and held out an envelope.
Rachel’s heart lifted, then plunged as she saw it was her own letter returned to her.
She turned hurt eyes up at the maid. Had she failed to find the house?
Had he – oh, Lord, not that! – refused to take it?
‘He wasn’t there, my lady,’ Doris said, in an urgent whisper. ‘The housekeeper come to the door, and when I ast for Mr Tullamore, she says he’s not there. So I ast what time she’s expecting him, and she says he’s gone back to Scotland, my lady.’
‘Back to Scotland?’ Rachel said, bewildered.
Doris nodded. ‘That’s right, my lady. Two days ago. She says, “Oh, Mr Tullamore’s gone back to Scotland,” she says, and she shuts the door in my face.’
Rachel waved Doris away, lay back on her pillows with her letter in her hand, and felt the tears rising.
Gone back to Scotland. So it was over. He had given up on her.
If only she’d written sooner! But would it have made any difference?
He’d seen her kissing Jervis Farocean, and taken it as final.
She had done this to herself, thrown away the one man in the world she loved.
He would marry some Scottish girl and she’d never see him again.
She turned on her side and let the pillow-slip absorb her tears.
Wentworth had told Alice that painting flesh was the hardest thing of all: not only to get the colour right, but to convey the texture, the smoothness of skin, the tautness of muscles, the yieldingness of flesh.
You had not only to make two dimensions become three, but to make that which you could not touch become tactile.
Fortunately, there was Miss Partridge. For the past four weeks Alice had been painting Miss Partridge’s naked form in various poses and learning how to make skin look like skin, to make the curve of a breast ‘feel’ different from the curve of a thigh.
And in the process she had lost all her concerns about nudity.
When the model came in from the back room and dropped whatever covering she was wearing, Alice no longer had that shamed, embarrassed feeling of heat behind the eyes, only frowned over the way in which the light was different that week.
When she was at the studio it seemed natural.
Away from there, she knew that her relatives would be shocked, and want to snatch her away.
Truly the world of art was like a foreign country with different customs.
Alice was just finishing clearing up when Miss Partridge came out from the back room in her street clothes, and stood waiting for Mr Wentworth to give her her pay.
Alice glanced at her, but she did not look at Alice or say goodbye as she went away, clattering down the stairs and out into the street like any other worker at the end of her day.
She never did acknowledge Alice’s presence, which had ceased to seem strange – in fact, it was part of what had made it easier to look at her naked body.
In a way, she hardly seemed real – a dressmaker’s dummy.
Alice was about to take her own departure when Wentworth said, ‘Don’t go. There’s something I want to show you first. Come with me.’
He led her into the back room, where the model changed her clothes.
She had never been in there before. It was similar in size to the front room, but had a square glass-roofed extension with windows all around, like a transparent box fixed to the back of the house over the garden.
There was a chaise longue covered in coral velvet and freighted with colourful cushions, an elaborately patterned Turkish rug in front of it.
Otherwise the room was utilitarian, containing nothing but wooden tables on either side covered with painting equipment, two easels, a couple of high wooden stools, and stacks of canvases leaning against the walls.
The air smelted pungently and excitingly of oil paints and turpentine.
‘I thought the other room was your studio,’ Alice exclaimed, excited by her admission to this sanctum.
‘No, that’s just for classes. I do my own work in here. Come and see.’
On one of the easels there was a large fresh canvas, on which he had drawn in charcoal, with the bold, free strokes she now recognised, a figure of a woman.
‘I’m calling it The Bath of Psyche,’ he said.
‘It’s to be my big work for the exhibition in the autumn.
’ He told her of the legend – that Psyche had been held captive in Cupid’s palace, and that Cupid spied on her all day, and came to her secretly in the dark at night and lay with her, she having no idea who he was.
‘She is about to step down into the marble pool to bathe herself in readiness for her secret lover,’ he went on. ‘You see, here, the columns, the steps.’ He indicated the background lines. ‘We see her turned away from the viewer, looking down at the water.’
The figure was naked, a three-quarter back view, the face only glimpsed in part profile. Trailing from one hand was some kind of robe that she seemed to have just taken off and was about to drop on the floor.