Violet is some thirty years younger than her husband and a most handsome person, very witty and smart. She called on me not long after I took up residence at Bidnold Manor, and, on that very first meeting, related to me the lamentable state of Bathurst 's mind, putting particular emphasis on his forgetfulness of her existence, thus bringing into my head at once the idea that there could be something between us. For a man who has forgotten that he has a wife cannot care a great deal about which bed she chooses to inhabit, or with whom. Our amours are not of the tearing and clawing kind, but agreeably hot for all that and tolerably frequent, Violet being at that age when she sees her beauty starting to vanish and so wants to make hay while the sun still shines, albeit less radiantly than in her youth, in which, by her own account, an abundance of hay was made and time seemed forever halted at summer.
Thus it was to Violet Bathurst, lying in my arms under the silver and turquoise canopy of my bed, that I confessed my misery at my failure with art. "Without this," I said, "and abandoned as I seem to be by the King, I am a man without a direction and I very much fear that I will lose myself in drunkenness and excesses of all kinds."
Violet looked at me sharply. She was already a little jealous of my young wife and had made me swear on a copy of Thomas a Kempis that I had no carnal knowledge of Celia. The thought that I would fall into excessive behaviour clearly alarmed her a great deal.
"You must not worry, Merivel," she said, leaning on a white elbow and caressing the moths of my stomach with an elegant finger. "I will organise some painting lessons. I know a talented young man, very eager to make the acquaintance of gentry, who will be only too keen to oblige. I commissioned a portrait of Bathurst from him, and, considering that Bathurst is not able to sit still for a second, the finished work was admirable. His name is Elias Finn – a Puritan, one rather suspects, but so keen for advancement and success that he cuts his coat according to the times. He is desperate, of course, to get to Court, and perhaps, if he proves a good teacher, you might be able to set him on the road?"
"You forget, Violet," I said miserably, "that it is now three months since I had a word from the King."
"Is it? Then perhaps you should go to London?"
"I have no position at Court any more."
"But surely, His Majesty would be overjoyed to see you?"
"That I cannot know."
"He used to give you kisses, Merivel."
I smiled. "You and I both know, Violet," I said, "that kisses are as fleeting as pear blossom."
The entry of Elias Finn into my life was, I suspect, of some importance.
He describes himself as a portraitist, but leads, I discover, an almost mendicant life in the shires of England, going on foot from one great house to another, begging to paint its inhabitants. He is young, but his face is gaunt and grey and his wrists as thin as a cuttlefish. He has a shifting, uneasy glance. His lips, however, are sweetly curvaceous and feminine, giving evidence of some sensitivity. His voice is honeyed and polite. He is a paradox. On our first meeting, I didn't know what to make of him at all.
I led him to my Studio and showed him my bacon and egg man and my unfinished portrait of Meg Storey. He stared at them in alarm, as if they frightened him, which indeed they probably did, so far do they seem from anything one could possibly admire.
"Why do you wish to paint, Sir?" he said after a while.
"Well…" I began, "as a kind of act of forgetting. My studies have been in anatomy and disease, but I wish, for reasons of my own, not to continue with medical work."
"So you would be an artist instead?"
"Yes."
"Why, pray?"
"Because… because I must do something! I have a very immoderate nature, Mr Finn. Look at me! Look at my house! Since the Restoration, I have become inflamed, full of riot! We're in a New Age and I am its perfect man, but I must channel myself into some endeavour, or be lost to idleness and despair. So please help me."
He returned to my pictures. "To judge from these," he said, "you draw tolerably well, but have no sense of colour."
No sense of colour! I was dumbfounded. "Colour," I began to say, "is what excites me more than anything on earth. I was married in purple and gold! At the King's coronation, I fainted almost at the sight of his crimson barge…" But then I stopped myself. "You are right, of course," I said. "I have a great love for colour, but a love for something is never enough. What I utterly lack is the skill to turn love into art."
We began my painting lessons there and then. Finn had brought with him some of his own work, portraits mostly of fashionable women, which had presumably not been liked, in that they were still in his possession. I thought them admirable. "If, in time, I can execute one painting as good as any of these," I said, "I will be a happy man."
He smiled pityingly. He began to discuss his technique with regard to background, which, he said, should always be classical – a Palladian garden with broken columns, a naval battle, or a merry hunting scene.
"You mean," I asked, "that instead of drawing a window behind Meg Storey, I should have put in ships, or horsemen?"
"Yes," said Finn. "Naturally."
I couldn't recall that Holbein's famous portraits had classical backgrounds, but I didn't mention this, because I knew I would be very grateful to Finn if he could teach me how to paint Doric columns or a battleship in full sail.
"The background," he continued, "must flatter. More, it must lend permanence to the life of the sitter, no matter how brief his actual existence may turn out to be."
For these considerations, I had of course taken no previous thought, but I could see some truth in what he was saying, and so our first morning passed in discussion of how a picture must be composed so that no part of it is "dead", so that, wherever the eye wanders, there is interest, whether it is in the detail on the hilt of a sword or a minutely rendered rowing boat on a distant Arcadian shore. We furthermore approached the question of distance and perspective: how hills, for instance, which are further away will seem paler and less well defined than those which are near, and how the sitter's nearness and vigour will be emphasised if he or she inhabits a pool of light.
"When you are next at Whitehall," Finn concluded, "go and look at the Raphaels and the Titians the King reputedly has in his apartments and you will see some of the finest examples of everything I've talked about."
So, Violet Bathurst had already informed Finn of my acquaintance with the King. I merely nodded. It was much too early for me to decide whether Finn was worthy of any favours, but I detected that his longing to go to Court was even greater than my longing to learn to paint and decided at once that I might be able to use this finely balanced inequality to some advantage.
Towards the beginning of November, by which time, under Finn's tuition, I had painted a moderately bad picture of my Spaniel, Minette, asleep by an imaginary waterfall, my little dog became ill.
A rampaging fear gripped my heart. I loved Minette. Her presence was a constant reminder to me that I had been -and still hoped to be again – the King's friend and Fool, and I was certain that her dying would be a terrible portent of derelictions yet to come.
Very reluctantly, I got out my surgical instruments and my remedies, ointments and powders, but, having set them out next to Minette on the Dining Room table, found that I was at a loss to know what to do; in my desire to forget my former profession, I had succeeded in burying knowledge that was vital to me now.