quite –’
‘There.’
‘Oh yes.’
There was a short pause, while the Prinseps conferred sotto voce, and Watts looked out of the window at the fields, pretending he couldn’t hear.
‘Perhaps he should make the violets bigger, what do you think?’
‘Dare one suggest it?’
They looked at each other, and then at Watts, who was now biting his nails. They decided against.
‘It is a stupendous picture, Il Signor!’ Mrs Prinsep exclaimed, making Watts smile broadly with relief. ‘A great success! You are a genius, and we are privileged to sit at your feet. Come! Let us dine from the best fowl the capital can provide, and you our master shall taste the liver wing!’ But this was all a month ago, and from Sara’s adulation Watts must return bathetically to the present scene, in which the returned Ellen sank to her knees, clutching his trousers like a waif. His artistic reverie had changed nothing, apparently. Here was all the trouble with marriage, in a tiny shell: when you got back from your mental wanderings, the little wife was invariably still there.
‘Are you still acting?’ he whispered, at last.
‘How could I choose Viola?’ she whimpered. ‘Of all the heroines!’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘But the pose was quite lovely, nevertheless. You have a decided talent, my dear. And the moral of that is, waste not want not, for tomorrow I will sketch you in that exact position for my projected masterpiece, “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Hope”.’
Ellen sniffed.
‘Ah,’ he continued, warming up at once (he loved talking about art). ‘You make no remark? Of course. But think, if you will, of the supreme challenge of depicting the Absence of Hope! For you see, if I merely leave Hope out, it won’t do at all! Critics will argue with justice that my picture equally well represents “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Railway Carriages” or “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Soup”!’
Ellen nodded to show she understood, though secretly she thought the absence of hope was a challenge to everybody, and Watts was the usual cause of it.
She rallied a little. ‘I don’t know why, Viola just came out,’ she snivelled. ‘But the point was, I wanted to do Lady Macbeth or Lady Ann or something. I want you to take me seriously! I want it dreadful bad!’
‘I see. And the moral of that is –?’
‘That I want you to take me seriously. I’m your wife and I love you.’
‘And Viola won’t do?’
‘No. Because she’s too much like me. Viola loves an older man, and he doesn’t see her for what she is.’
‘I know. The Duke Orsino. And the moral of that is –?’
‘Whereas, you see, I don’t want to watch and wait like Viola. I am not patience on a monument. George, we have been married five months.’
‘Ah.’ Watts winced at the use of his name. ‘Could you not call me Il Signor? The Prinseps call me that.’
She seemed calmer now, and Watts took her hand. He was a kind man by inclination, but unfortunately if an allegorical picture of G. F. Watts were to be considered, it would show ‘Inclination Untutored by Practice and Doomed to Disappointment’, for he had spent his first forty-seven years unmarried, depending largely on the generosity of patrons, and letting other people pay for the luxury of his high-mindedness. In short, he had never been made to care. His most vivid emotional engagement had been, in childhood, with a small caged cockney sparrow, which he tragically murdered by trapping its head in a door.
Watts never recovered from the guilt or the grief of that accident. His emotion on the subject of that little squashed bird made Alfred Tennyson’s great In Memoriam look like nothing. It had hindered him for years; disqualified him from happiness. This complex of emotions had now stretched a dead hand into his marriage, too. For whenever he thought about touching his wife in a marital way, the ghost of poor wronged Haydon (for whose suicide Watts was really not responsible) rose up and cried, ‘Remember Westminster!’ thereby throwing him completely off his stride.
‘Let’s go to Freshwater,’ said his wife brightly, as if she had just thought of it (she hadn’t). ‘I want to leave London dreadful bad. Let’s go tomorrow. I could pose for you there, and for your friend Mrs Cameron, who is beginning to like me a little, I think. You know how well I pose. You know how well I embody an abstract when I set my mind to it. Mrs Cameron needs sitters for her photography. The summer is too hot for London, especially considering your headaches.’
Watts looked unconvinced, so Ellen continued with her list of reasons, realizing she needed to butter him a little.
‘You could paint Mr Tennyson again – it must be months since the last time – and then Mrs Cameron could take your photograph, making you look so very handsome, my dear! You have such excellent temples, George! And then we can all pose for each other and never stop having fun and larks!’
Ellen was accustomed to getting her own way. Her drop-dead prettiness had a miraculous effect on men of all ages, turning princes and politicians into fawning servants at the merest wiggle of her prominent but tip-tilted nose. This quality was to be her great salvation in life: that a childhood spent portraying Shakespearean nobility had led her to expect slavish devotion as her due. She need only turn the full force of her ingénue good looks on Il Signor, and like all other mortal men he felt privileged to kiss the hem of her gown, or carry her picnic hamper that extra mile up Box Hill. Beauty has power but no responsibility. It is terribly unfair, but there you go.
‘Would you?’ was generally Ellen’s way of saying ‘thank you’. ‘Would you really?’ she said, as she strode ahead of her puffing volunteer minion. Once at Little Holland House, the First Lord of the Treasury pointed out that the wheel of Ellen’s carriage was running badly. ‘Oh please don’t feel you have to do anything about it,’ she had assured the astonished prime minister, and although everybody else laughed like rills down a mountainside, Ellen was puzzled. She was quite sure she hadn’t meant it to be funny.
How could Watts deny her a trip to the Isle of Wight? What was good enough for the Queen must be good enough for his princess. ‘I don’t know about the larks,’ he said, ‘but I agree it is a good plan. What a shame Mrs Prinsep cannot accompany us, she would love to see Julia. I have never known sisters so fond and close.’
‘Except mine,’ objected Ellen.
‘What? Oh yes, well, the Terrys,’ said Watts, in a tone that suggested the emotional closeness of Terrys did not count.
‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘it will be refreshing to see Mrs Cameron, and she is bound to make us welcome. You know how Mrs Cameron loves to give, give, give!’ (‘Which is fortunate,’ thought Ellen, ‘when you prefer to take, take, take.’)
‘Such selfless generosity,’ he continued, as though reading her mind, ‘is not within the means of all of us. Poor men must rely on the currency of talent to buy their friends. And I am a very poor man, Ellen, I never misled you about that. A very poor man. Yet I esteem Generosity
