My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

Chapter Two

London, 1907–14

Riley, the Waveneys and Sir Alfred lived in a part of London that, from one street to another, couldn’t make up its mind. Riley’s home was a little house up by the canal, a working man’s cottage, in a row, damp, with a yard with a privy in it. Two minutes away was Paddington station, through which the whole empire passed, observed for pick-pocketing purposes by Johnno and by Riley out of pure human curiosity. (Riley did not pick pockets. He’d promised his mum.) Five minutes from there was Kensington Gardens, where the trees were tall and the grass was smooth and children in white petticoats dashed after hoops, and nannies in uniform dashed after them. If Riley went with Johnno, the park-keeper chased them out. If he went alone, and was clever about it, he could play there all day, watching ducks, climbing trees, diving and dipping in the Serpentine, spying on gardeners, learning statues by heart, hiding.

Beautiful houses lay along the north side of the park: Georgian villas with magnolias in their wide gardens; high white stucco-fronted mansions, mad fairy-tale apartment buildings six storeys high, with curved balconies and conservatories, and ornate bay windows at unlikely angles. The Waveneys’ was the first Riley had been into. Sir Alfred’s, in Orme Square, was the second. At the Waveneys’ he had fallen for the comfort; at Sir Alfred’s, it was first Messalina, the great dane, big enough to pull a cart, with her ebony satin jowls and quivering legs, and second the paint: the colours, and the smell, and the rich oily shining magnificence. And then the paintings: heroines and beggar maids, knights in gleaming silver-grey armour, coiling strings of flowers and loops of braided hair, emerald weeds floating under water, gauzy drapes of cloth you could see through to the wax-white glowing flesh beneath, glimpses of cavernous blue skies . . . all made of paint, and light seeming to come from inside the canvas. It looked like the real world, so real, but much, much better. It was a kind of miracle to Riley that such things could be created out of thick coloured oils squeezed from lead tubes.

And there was Mrs Briggs, purse-lipped and holy-minded, who gave him cake and hot tea.

Riley knew perfectly well that this was not his world. He recognised that if he did not act swiftly it might be whisked away from him as quickly as he had been whisked into it. If someone were to look closely at the expression on the face of the young faun garlanded with vine leaves standing to the left of Bacchus in Sir Alfred’s famous painting Maenads at the Bacchanale, they might detect in it a badly concealed combination of desperate desire, cheerful delight and devious determination.

‘What are you painting next, sir?’ he asked, with bright, transparent disingenuousness.

‘The Childhood of the Knights of the Round Table,’ Sir Alfred said, amused.

‘Any of ’em look like me at all, sir?’ Riley said, putting on a noble expression, and turning a little towards the light.

He almost wept with joy when Sir Alfred agreed that his face was just right for the young Sir Gawaine fighting his way through a thorn bush (representing the Green Knight he was to face in years to come), which would require another few weeks of his presence.

Riley applied his mind to ways of making himself useful to Sir Alfred, his various pupils, and to Mrs Briggs. There were plenty: errands, tidying up, fetching, copying, sharpening, lining up, climbing to the upper shelves, which neither Sir Alfred nor Mrs Briggs could reach. Every day, modelling or not, he turned up after school ‘in case Sir Alfred needs anything, Mrs Briggs’ – and he always did: someone to run to the art suppliers, someone to take Messalina to run and play and leap about in the park, someone to clean up the studio without actually moving anything the way Mrs Briggs always did, someone to sit for an anonymous young shoulder or a foot, someone who didn’t mind being bossed, who loved being told things by an old man with many, many stories to tell, who was young and strong and delighted to learn how to prepare a canvas and had none of the vanities of an art student. After some months of this, Mrs Briggs, who liked everything in its place, pointed out that the position was unregulated, and the boy should be paid for his work. After a burglar stole Sir Alfred’s late mother’s jewellery, it was decided the boy should live in, as extra security. (Riley was aware of the irony.)

Bethan and John were invited to tea in the kitchen by Mrs Briggs because, after all, it was not as if they were hiring a servant. Riley, only half aware that this was improper, dragged them upstairs to meet Sir Alfred, and to see his studio, and his paintings. John thought the paintings beautiful, and Sir Alfred very gentlemanly, and said cautiously: ‘As long as he’s going to school . . .’

Sir Alfred said: ‘Of course, Mr Purefoy. He’s an intelligent lad.’

Bethan said very little, and that night she cried because she knew she was outnumbered.

From the beginning, Riley wrote down every word he heard that was unfamiliar to him. On Sundays, when he took his wages home, he would ask his parents what these new words meant. If they didn’t know, he would ask Miss Crage at school. If she didn’t know, he would go through the tall, feather-leaved volumes of Sir Alfred’s Encyclopedia Britannica. Or ask Mrs Briggs. Or Nadine, who came every Saturday morning for her drawing lesson. Or he would ask Nadine’s mum and dad, when she invited him back there – like that day when she dragged him to see the new statue of Peter Pan, which had appeared overnight in the shrubbery by the Serpentine, gleaming bronze among the heavy leaves, and afterwards they went to her house, and Sir James Barrie himself was there, drinking tea and laughing about the big secret and surprise of the statue, laughing such a wicked little laugh, and Riley had imitated it so well, and Sir James had said he wished he’d known Riley before because he would have modelled a Lost Boy on him, and Riley felt a momentary pang of unfaithfulness to Sir Alfred and Art, in favour of Sir James and Literature.

But, best of all, he could ask Sir Alfred.

‘Come on, you little sponge,’ he would say. ‘I only wanted a boy to clean my brushes, and now I’ve got a miniature Roger Fry on my hands.’

‘What’s a Roger Fry, sir?’ said Riley.

‘Pour me a whisky and I’ll tell you.’

*

‘Well, he’s bettering himself, isn’t he?’ said Mrs Briggs to Mrs Purefoy, when she called at the house one day to take him to buy a shirt, he was growing so fast. Mrs Briggs had bought him a shirt only two months before, but she didn’t want to make anything of it.

Bethan was glad he wasn’t running around with those boys at the station any more, but she wasn’t happy. It wasn’t just that the son of a free working man was – sort of – in service, because he wasn’t in service, quite. If he was in service, how come he was going to school each day, and how come he and the girl Miss Waveney were down Portobello together that time with that giant black dog as if it was theirs, gawking at the Snake Lady and sharing a bag of humbugs? And it wasn’t that he was getting educated beyond his station, because she knew that education meant a lot to John, though, herself, she didn’t see the point as he wasn’t so much learning a trade, was he? It wasn’t even that she didn’t see enough of him – who would expect to see a big working schoolboy of fourteen, except to feed him and make him wash if you were lucky? Many women didn’t see their working boy from one year’s end to the next. What bothered her was that he didn’t talk the same. He tried to hide it from her, when he came home, but she knew. He was learning to talk proper. They might not have done it on purpose but they had transformed him, from a blob of a boy into – well, it wasn’t clear what.

*

Robert Waveney and Sir Alfred were about to go to the Queen’s Hall to hear the marvellous Russian, Rachmaninoff, playing his new piano concerto, under Mengelberg. Riley, it turned out, was coming too.

‘He’ll appreciate it more than I will,’ Sir Alfred said truthfully. ‘In fact – actually, Robert, what do you think of this – his school chucks them all out at the end of the year – what shall we do with him? I was thinking more school.’

‘He wouldn’t get into Eton, surely,’ Waveney said. ‘He’s hardly educated at all, is he?’

‘Well, now, selfishly, I don’t want to send him away. And one doesn’t want to encourage any . . . illusions . . . or any sense of injustice. About money and so on. Resentments. I thought perhaps Marylebone Grammar . . .’

Waveney agreed that that would be more appropriate, and knew one of the governors. Riley, whose dad had told him, ‘You’re lucky if you even get one opportunity in your entire life, and when you do, I advise you to recognise it and grab it by the bollocks, and don’t let go,’ swelled with joy. A school where everybody wanted to be there was a revelation to him; the teachers spread panoplies of glorious knowledge before him, and when the other lads mocked him for this or that he hit them. All was as it should be, and he strode the territory fearlessly.

It was hard walking past the end of his parents’ street each day without having time to stop in and say hello, but he had so much to do, working like a demon at his studies, and at his duties, not to let Sir Alfred down. As well he always wanted to see what his mentor had been painting each day, and he couldn’t bear to miss any visitors – men of the world, blasé young students, knights of this and that, Nadine – or interesting outings where he could carry Sir Alfred’s sketching things and hear what he had to say about ancient Egypt or Sebastiano del Piombo or whatever turned up. And he needed time to draw, himself, because it seemed he wasn’t bad, actually . . . not good, but not bad . . .

Patterns and habits grew up, and it all seemed very normal. Time passed, and it was normal. Even for Bethan, the sudden lurches of maternal loss subsided after a year or two. They were lucky. Placing a boy was like marrying off a daughter – the good parents’ first responsibility. And Riley was, it seemed, placed, and happily. The years of Riley’s late childhood were, by any standard, long and nourishing and golden; blessed, not riven, by the double life he was able to lead. The weeks belonged to school and Sir Alfred, and Sundays to his family, when he would eat, and let the little girls climb all over him and use him as a seesaw and make him throw them up in the air. Loads of older brothers and sisters lived away, after all, and came back slightly too big for the little house they’d been born in. It only made them more glamorous.

*

Early one mild spring Saturday morning, seven years after he had first come to Orme Square, Riley, now eighteen, took the long, unwieldy pole that Sir Alfred could no longer manage and unwound the bolts on all the skylights and high windows in the studio. A beautiful soft air slipped in off the park and the squares, limpid, blossomy, dancing with cherry and lilac. Riley was thinking, How would you paint that? Who could paint that clean lightness? Even the horses’ hooves outside on the Bayswater Road sounded lighter. What a day!

Nadine arrived as usual about nine for her drawing lesson, though it wasn’t till ten, and as usual Sir Alfred was still at his coffee, talking to the newspaper. So, as usual, Nadine perched herself on the old workbench up in the studio, wearing her dark blue pinafore, swinging her legs, and watching as Riley laid out brushes, checked supplies, made a list. When he had done he stopped and sketched her instead, light pencil, just a quick thing. He didn’t think it was very good. She was much better than him at getting a likeness. There was a bunch of hyacinths in a glass jar beside her on the dark wood, also blue, the blue of the Madonna’s cloaks in Sir Alfred’s books of Renaissance paintings. He would have liked to paint them, and her. He was fascinated by the variability of colour, by the adjustability of oils. He longed for an excuse to stare at her for hours.

‘I came on my bicycle today,’ she said, testing him out.

‘Can I have a go?’ He had been idly trying to persuade her to come swimming in the Serpentine; she was resisting. She would never come swimming any more. The thought interested him. Maybe he could use the testing of the bicycle to get her into the park, at least.

‘It’s a girl’s bicycle,’ she said.

‘All bicycles are boys’ bicycles,’ he said.

She gave him an evil look. She had long ago persuaded him that the suffragettes were right, but he still liked to torment her. ‘That’s too nearly true to be funny,’ she said. ‘I shall have a motorcycle when I’m older. I’ll go abroad on it, all over the world, drawing and painting everything I see, and paying my way in portraits. No one will stop me.’

‘They wouldn’t dare,’ he said. Why do I keep saying stupid things? Mean things?

‘You mean you wouldn’t dare . . .’ she said, but she said it fondly.

‘I’d dare anything where you’re concerned,’ he said boldly.

‘Oh, you won’t have to. After I’ve been all over the world on my motorcycle I’ll want to come back and be a famous artist and have a lovely house and babies. I’ll bring a kangaroo to be my pet. You can share it.’

‘The kangaroo? Or the house?’ He had a sudden quick vision of an adult life: two easels at opposite ends of a sunny studio.

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘You can even share my motorcycle, so long as you don’t pretend to everyone that it’s yours.’

She said it so easily, he thought she must not have any idea what she was saying. Of course he let the delightfulness of the image dazzle its impossibility into invisibility. Her future, after all, was planned and certain: marriage. His was more . . . open – which allowed him to think impossible thoughts.

Don’t get attached to the girl, Riley. They’re not like us. His mother’s voice.

Change the subject.

They talked about who could paint a spring morning like this one.

‘Samuel Palmer,’ he suggested. She was of the opinion that Palmer was more June, heavier and more lush. He liked to hear her say the word, ‘lush’.

‘Well, Botticelli, of course,’ she said.