and nudged him aside, not unkindly. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, sitting slumped for a moment with her back to him.
‘Can I see you again? Can I meet you?’ Jake asked, understanding that their present encounter was at an end.
‘If you like, dear. You know where to find me.’ She stood up and went behind the screen in the corner. He heard water splashing and the faint squeak of wet rubber.
‘I know,’ he said happily.
He parted with her at the street door downstairs. She was back in her satin dress, in a hurry to be off. He wanted to kiss her goodbye, like a lover, but the gesture seemed inappropriate. He let her go, with regret, and walked back through the empty streets to his student digs in Bloomsbury.
Quintus Prynne woke up late, with a headache that made him feel as if he had been clubbed. He opened his eyes and saw that he had fallen asleep on the divan of his studio, instead of in his bed at home. The litter of empty bottles and dirty glasses scattered between the paints and canvases and jars of brushes reminded him of some of the events of the night before.
He tried closing his eyes again in order to dodge back into sleep, but it was too late. He was awake, with a mouth that felt full of sand and a vague sense of some obligation waiting to be fulfilled. Groaning softly in sympathy with himself he crawled out of bed and picked his black and white tweed suit out of a heap on the floor. After a careful search he found his pocket watch, and examined its accusing face.
It was eleven-twenty in the morning, and he remembered what he was supposed to be doing. Calling on Lady Leominster in Belgrave Square, to discuss a portrait of her damned dough-faced daughters, that was it. He staggered across the room, groaning still. At the sink he splashed cold water over his head and face and then, in the absence of a towel, rubbed himself dry with yesterday’s shirt.
The lack of a dry shirt, let alone a clean one, presented the next problem. The painter rummaged behind a curtain where he kept a small stock of old clothes in which to dress up his models. He found a grubby white cambric smock, and pulled his tweed trousers and coat on top of it. The addition of a piece of black silk foulard, extravagantly knotted around his neck, hid most of the smock front. He crammed his big black hat on his head and picked up a piece of stale bread and cheese left over from the night before for his breakfast.
Quintus Prynne was humming as he sauntered down Charlotte Street, his headache almost forgotten.
In the first-floor drawing room at Belgrave Square, Blanche was working at her embroidery and Eleanor had been reading the morning paper. She put it aside and looked over the top of her spectacles at the little gilt and porcelain clock on the mantelpiece.
‘This young man is very late, Blanche. I don’t believe he can be coming.’
‘Perhaps artists are less fettered by notions of punctuality than ordinary people? I think we should wait. Mary Twickenham was saying that Pilgrim is the most admired painter of the young generation, and that we will be lucky to get him. His designs for the ballet were the most beautiful, Eleanor, I wish you had been with us. I’m not even sure why he agreed to come this morning. Perhaps John’s name impressed him?’
Eleanor smiled. ‘Perhaps. But I think your Pilgrim is much more likely to have been impressed by the size of the fee.’
Blanche answered with a touch of irritation, ‘If one wants the best, then of course one must pay for it. John agrees with me, we must have a portrait marking the girls’ year that is as fine as our Sargent. It should be a picture worthy to be hung next to ours at Stretton. Don’t you think so, Eleanor?’
‘Of course, if that is what you both want. And if you say that Pilgrim is the finest portrait painter of his generation, then I can only accept that too.’
‘He is very modern,’ Blanche added, as if that clinched the matter.
‘That will make the girls happy,’ 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.
