Chatterton

by Peter Ackroyd

  ‘I’ve been a bad boy, have I?’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure of that.’

  He took a step towards Merk but the young man was more interested in the canvas. ‘It’s not so much the varnish that has cracked, right? It’s the paint. There are so many different layers.’

  Cumberland came over and stood behind him. ‘Could it just be the underpainting?’

  ‘No. There’s definitely another painting behind this one, and there may be more. You see here, yes?’ Merk traced the outline of the face. ‘Someone has changed it. The flesh tints are too bright.’

  Cumberland considered this. ‘And if the original painting is much older, we could strip this off and keep the one underneath?’

  ‘So you want me to strip, do you?’ Merk was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the canvas. ‘You want me to touch it up?’

  ‘I’m in your hands, Stewart. Stew.’

  ‘I’ll do anything for you. Of course I will. Now that we’re partners.’ In fact Merk had realised at once that the painting contained the residue of several different images, painted at various times: the flesh tint of the hands had faded but that of the face was still bright, the white lead of the candle flame had become slate-coloured while that used for the titles of the books had retained its tone. The face itself seemed to have acquired the characteristics of three or four different images: he assumed that this was why it had such an unsettling effect and why the eyes, in particular, had depth but not brightness. He had already realised that it would be necessary to strip the paint altogether and, using the outline on the canvas, begin all over again. But he was still trying to determine which painter of the period he would use as his model: as Seymour had known, Stewart Merk was a fine and subtle painter but one who was preoccupied with technique. For him the pleasure of painting rested in formal execution and not in imaginative exploration, in mimesis rather than invention. And now he was saying to Cumberland, ‘I can restore the finished outlines, but I can’t revive the lost colours. I’ll have to use fresh pigments.’ There was a knock on the door, but both men were too preoccupied to hear it. ‘Don’t worry. I can darken the paint with coffee and dirt. And then pop the canvas into the oven.’

  ‘The oven?’

  ‘Just for the cracks, yes? And then I finish them off with a needle. It will be the best fake you ever saw. Better than this one, anyway.’ There was a sharp intake of breath behind them, and a sudden movement; they both turned around at the same moment, to see Vivien Wychwood falling in a faint upon the floor.

  Chatterton enters his room and locks the door behind him. Posture on, my master, I have a different world to win. I shall kill or cure. Then for a moment he searches frantically in his pockets for the arsenic and laudanum; but they are there, in his coat, the spinning has not dislodged them. You stick to me as to a lodestone. I am the Arctic region and you shall be my ice and snow. But, for now, hide yourselves. He climbs upon a chair and places the bag and the glass phial upon a high shelf, behind a copper warming pan. Unless Mrs Angell has wings, she will not find them. But what was it he used to say over and over to himself, in the shit-hole of Bristol? God sent his creatures into the world with arms long enough to reach anything, if they choose to seek it. So the slut may discover my remedies, but what of it? She may cure herself, also, though no doubt she will spurn the poison for the laudanum.

  It is time to deliver the elegy. The songs of Apollo must take precedence over the joys of Morpheus. He jumps down from the chair, shaking the floorboards as he lands, and snatches up the poem which he has left on the table. This is a pretty verse, he says out loud, a very moving piece of work. Then he sits down on the side of his bed to read over the satire, and he smiles at his own invention.

  Mr Chatterton! Mr Chatterton! He hears the heavy footsteps of Mrs Angell climbing the last flight of stairs. Mr Chatterton! He springs to his feet and tiptoes over to the door, saying nothing but putting his ear against it. Mr Chatterton! She knocks softly and then tries the handle. It is your Sarah, Mr Chatterton. Did I hear you fall? Is there something heavy upon you, Mr Chatterton, which I may relieve? He keeps his ear to the door and says nothing, hardly daring to breathe. I know you are there, she says in a harsher voice. I saw you enter.

  He hears her taking out the keys which she keeps tied to her apron, and suddenly he is overwhelmed by anger. It was always thus as a child, when his mother disturbed him at his composition. Let me alone, Mrs Angell. Leave me!

  But why lock your door against me, a poor relict who has shown you so much kindness? And that in more ways than one.

  His fury mounts. I must be alone! I must work! I must write!

  Oh, she says, disappointed, you are always at your devotions. I hear you pacing above my head. But all work and no play, as the saying has it…

  His anger has abated a little, and he lowers his voice. I must work to live, Mrs Angell. Sarah. So please leave me for a little. I will come to you later, and I will bring something that will mightily please you. I will bring her the arsenic and the opium, so that we may be cured the same night.

  Oh, so you will show your poor Sarah poetry of another kind? She gives a little laugh. What are words compared to deeds? I will be waiting, Tom. And with a shake of her head she descends the stairs.

  Chatterton sighs with relief and then goes back to his satire, reading it over and over again until his own words calm him. If I have Mrs Angell beneath me, I still have the world before me: no one can touch me now. In his new mood he takes up a pencil and on a small fragment of paper he inscribes two fresh lines against Alderman Lee: Have mercy Heaven, now that he has ceased to live And this last act of wretchedness forgive.

  But the printers are waiting for the elegy. This satire can wait, and he puts aside the new lines; they fall from his table onto the floor, where they will be found the next morning.

  He is about to leave when he stops at the door, and takes down from its pin his brown cloth greatcoat; it is in the latest style, with its long buttonholes and deep pockets, and despite the heat of the morning he puts it on. Now he is defended against the world. He opens the door slowly and creeps down the stairs, whistling softly as soon as he enters the street and sees that the posture master has gone.

  The office of The Town and Country is above a printer’s shop in Long Acre, so from High Holborn he turns left into Chancery Lane and crosses through Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Then, pausing before the tenements of Clare Market where the stench assails him, he turns left down Duke Street and walks briskly up Great Wild Street where the lime pit has been but lately dug. The alleys and houses all around here have been cleared of their tenants, because of the danger of subsidence, but as he passes one of the empty houses he senses a sudden movement in one of the bare, stripped rooms. He stops, peers around the door half-torn from its hinges, and for a moment he thinks he sees a child, standing in one corner with its hands outstretched. But a cloud passes across the sun and, after the sudden change of light, there is nothing there. This may be a phantom of his imagination: he knows its tricks and he knows, too, that the only inhabitants of this place are the labourers who, with their leather caps tied to their heads and their faces streaked with white and grey ash, look like so many spirits of the earth.

  Chatterton turns the corner of Great Wild Street into Misericord Court, and sees two horses tethered to the iron posts there. The horses dip their heads, and in the silence of this place he can hear them quietly breathing. This is the breathing of the world, he thinks, its rise and its fall. But just then there is a roaring, a splintering and a cracking which turn him around like a fierce wind. The ground shakes beneath his feet and the horses rear up toward him in fright: looking back from where he has just come he sees the old house shaking as if with a fever, the air quivering around it, before part of the building falls. With a shriek he rushes towards it, until he is stopped by two workmen who wipe their eyes and grin at him. There is a child there, he shouts, I think I saw a child.

  Oooh noo, no cheeld.
An eempty hoose, sur, an eempty hoose. Eet moste fall.

  No house is empty, he replies, and they laugh at him. But now he runs towards it, shouting.

  Chatterton’s house had gone. Harriet Scrope had travelled to Brooke Street, to find the attic where the young poet committed suicide, but a computer centre had been built along that side of the street and on its bright red brick was fastened a blue plaque: ‘Thomas Chatterton died in a house on this site, 24 August 1770’. She sat down on the edge of a concrete flower-tub, and glanced up at this small memorial. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if they’ll put up anything for me?’

  A middle-aged couple passed her, giving only the briefest glance in her direction, but Harriet heard the woman distinctly say, ‘Poor old dear, talking to herself like that. She ought to be in a home.’

  And suddenly she felt very tired, tired of Chatterton and tired of herself for pursuing him. At first his memoir, or ‘confession’ as Charles Wychwood called it in his introduction, had intrigued her; eagerly she had read all the papers which Vivien had given to her. But it was the element of mystery which had appealed to her. Now that everything had been explained, she was losing interest. She always preferred stories in which the ending had never been understood. And what did any of it matter, anyway? ‘The caravan moves on,’ she said out loud again, half remembering a poem from childhood, ‘chuck the stone into the bowl and spit.’ She wriggled her toes. ‘And there’s some spit in the old girl yet.’ But she was getting old. She would soon be joining Chatterton under the ground, so why try to find him now? Why should she concern herself with the dead when she could see the living all around her? She got up from the flower-tub, and started walking back along Chatterton’s street. But it was not his street. He had left it centuries ago, and why should she follow him?

  14

  CHATTERTON STOPS in front of the ruined house. The front and one side have already collapsed, and he chokes on the dust still hovering in the air; in the momentary silence after the fall, he can hear the carts rattling down Long Acre. And there, in a jagged corner of the front room, close beside a stairway which sags but has not yet snapped, he notices a cheap wooden doll lying among the debris – a doll without a face, the limbs and torso held together by rusting wire. And this is the corner where he thinks he saw the child. The sun beats down upon his head, and he can smell the sourness of the old house as a thin pillar of smoke rises like a libation from the rubble into the bright sky. He hears something moving in the space beneath the stairway and, fearing vermin, he steps back. But then he bends down and peers into the shadows; and he sees the face. Come out, he says. For God’s sake come out. The stairs will fall. Come!

  The face of the child opens, and from it emerges a strange high note. To Chatterton it sounds like the call of some animal which has lost its young, and for a moment he is afraid. Come now, he says, before we are both pressed to death. On a sudden instinct he picks up the doll and holds it in front of him; slowly he retreats, waving the doll, and the child creeps after it, wailing. Chatterton reaches the street and then stops, while the child waits in the ruined doorway: although he is partly in shadow, Chatterton can see that he is wearing a mouldy shirt and breeches that are no more than rags. He seems to be about ten, or eleven, and then Chatterton notices how large his head is, how small his body. Hydrocephalus. An idiot boy.

  Come, take your doll. I mean you no harm. He stretches out his hand, and holds it in front of him.

  The child comes out from the shadow of the house, and speaks. Passey me.

  Chatterton gives it to him. What is your name? See, my name is Tom. Tom. He points to himself. Who are you?

  Whoyoo? The boy kisses the doll, and then presses it against his cheek.

  Tom. I am Tom. Who are you?

  Tom. The boy points to himself, in imitation, and smiles. Tom.

  For some reason Chatterton is ashamed. You must leave here, he says, or you will die. The house will fall.

  Dyen? He puts his head to one side, and looks at the doll carefully. Dyen?

  Without words, Chatterton thinks, there is nothing. There is no real world. Without words I cannot even warn or protect you. Look, he says, taking a coin from the pocket of his greatcoat. Look, this is for you. Food. He holds up the sixpence, and it gleams in the sunlight. But the boy is still crooning to the doll. Without words you are in a different time. You exist in some other place, where you are calm. The boy notices the winking coin, and snatches it from his hand. Food. You must buy food with it. Chatterton makes motions as if of eating. Do you understand that word?

  Worlds. The boy puts his hand into his mouth. Wordso. Woods.

  Well, Tom, you can learn, I see. How the boy lived Chatterton could not imagine, but he had heard stories of deformed children abandoned by their parents and left to wander the streets. And did they then become like the city itself – brooding, secret, invulnerable?

  The boy offers him the wooden doll to hold. You. Dolly. You.

  No, he says, no. It is your own. And if he had been abandoned, too, would he have become as this child now was? For a moment, as he looks at the boy, it is as if he were looking at himself.

  The two labourers pass by. Ees eet the cheeld then? Ees he oonharmed by the fall?

  Yes, yes, he is safe now. Chatterton does not want them to come too close. He wants them to go on their way.

  A parish-cheeld, is he? Sure he ees a ragged one. The labourers laugh, and the boy laughs with them – holding out the doll for them to see. Ees Mr Punch ees he? And they walk away, still laughing.

  Better to give him arsenic, Chatterton thinks, than to leave him undefended against this harsh world… but there is no more time now. The elegy must be delivered at once. I must go, he says. I must see someone. He turns to leave and the boy lets out a wild cry. Oh no. Don’t let him need me. Chatterton turns around. He does not want to touch him – he sees the filth encrusted upon his skin – but he takes a step towards him. I will come to you again. Tomorrow. I will come here tomorrow. He makes a movement with his hands to suggest the next day. Tomorrow. I will be here. Your friend. Tom comes here.

  Chatterton hurries away towards Long Acre and the office of The Town and Country, where he describes the idiot boy to Mr Crome, editor, publisher and printer of that esteemed journal.

  But what can we do? The mobile vulgus, Mr Chatterton, the mobile vulgus. In any case, better the streets than Bedlam.

  Where lies the difference, Mr Crome?

  Ah, sir, I see you are not happy in our enlightened age.

  When I first came to London I thought I had entered a new age of miracles, but these stinking alleys and close packed tenements seem to breed only monsters. Monsters of our own making…

  But you seem to take pleasure in it, Mr Chatterton. You see the poetry in it, do you not? There is a smile playing about your face.

  And, indeed, Chatterton bursts out laughing.

  On the next morning, the boy waited by the ruined house; he stayed there all that day, crooning to his doll, but Chatterton was not to be seen. And he returned there each day, looking for the red-headed stranger who had given him the bright coin, but no one ever came. Gradually Chatterton faded from his memory, and the street itself was changed, but the idiot boy was always known as Tom.

  ‘But why did Harriet give them the picture?’

  ‘Well, perhaps –’

  Edward interrupted them. ‘Philip, why is the field green and yellow?’

  ‘Some parts of the grass are living, and some parts are dead. But they’re all part of the same field.’

  Edward contemplated this for a moment, and then thought of something else. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the rain is like a ghost isn’t it?’ He pointed across the field, as a sudden shower drifted slowly towards them. It was their Sunday in the country. For the last few weeks the three of them – Vivien, Philip and Edward – had climbed into Philip’s beige Ford Cortina and had been driven on what he called a ‘mystery trip’. On this particular afternoon they were in Suffolk; they
were walking along a path between two fields, and had now come to the edge of a small pine forest. ‘Come on,’ Edward shouted, ‘the ghost can’t get us here!’ He ran ahead of them into the forest, across the fallen pine needles, and his laughter wavered among the slender trees.

  ‘Why did she give them the picture?’ Vivien repeated her question. It was now two weeks since she had seen the portrait in Cumberland’s office and had heard Stewart Merk say, ‘It will be the best fake you ever saw. Better than this one, anyway.’ And she had fainted. She had known at once that it was the painting which Charles had brought home in triumph, but in these unfamiliar surroundings it seemed flimsy, unreal: it became for her yet another token of Charles’s death. And the sudden realisation that it was a forgery – that Charles had been wrong – so overpowered her with a feeling of helplessness that she had fallen to the floor. All the misery since his death had come to a point.

  They followed Edward into the pine forest. ‘Harriet probably wanted to have it authenticated,’ Philip told her. In fact he suspected her of less honourable motives, but he knew that any hint of this would distress Vivien still further. ‘She was just checking. Or, more likely, she gave it to them for restoration. You know, to clean it properly. And they discovered that it was a –’

  ‘A fake. A cheap forgery. How could we have it for so long and not realise?’ There seemed to be a note of accusation in her voice, and Philip blushed. They walked on in silence while Edward ran ahead of them, kicking a blue football between the trees. ‘1 remember how much it meant to him,’ Vivien said after a while, her tone changed now. ‘He always kept it by his desk. Sometimes, you know –’ and she laughed at this – ‘sometimes he used to talk to it.’

  Philip looked away for a moment. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that his poetry changed after he found it.’