Did it matter to Chinnery that he, who had once been thought of as the equal of Romney, Raeburn and Hoppner, should be languishing in a place that was so far from the salons of Europe, a distant backwater where he had to serve a clientele of the grossest philistines? That he affected to be indifferent to such considerations needed hardly to be said – yet it was rumoured that the cognoscenti’s neglect of his work, in London, had filled him with so much bitterness that he had taken to the opium pipe in order to escape his distress. Whether or not this was the usual idle blather of the canting-crew Mr Hobhouse would not say: but even though he was unwilling to venture an opinion of his own on this subject, he did express the hope that Fitcher would look into the matter and throw some light on it when he returned to Britain.
Paulette listened to the tale in silence, and was careful to do nothing that might suggest that she knew anything at all about the artist or his career – but in point of fact, the Chinnery name was not unknown to her: far from it. Indeed, on at least one aspect of the painter’s life she was far better informed than was Fitcher: this was the matter of his other family – the two sons he had begotten with his Bengali mistress, Sundaree, during his twelve-year sojourn in Calcutta.
Paulette’s acquaintance with George Chinnery’s ‘natural’ sons had arisen out of a fortuitous connection between Sundaree and her own beloved nurse, Tantima. Tantima was Jodu’s mother and she had looked after Paulette since her infancy: it so happened that she hailed from the same village as Sundaree, on the banks of the Hooghly. The two women had renewed the bonds of their childhood in Calcutta, when they both found themselves presiding over the households of unconventional and somewhat addle-pated sahibs. But there the commonalities ended, for Paulette’s father, Pierre Lambert, was always something of an outcast within white society, and his circumstances, as a mere Assistant Curator of the Botanical Gardens, were never anything other than extremely modest. George Chinnery, on the other hand, had earned fabulous sums of money while in Calcutta and his household was as chuck-muck as any in the city, with paltans of nokar-logue doing chukkers in the hallways and syces swarming in the istabbuls; as for the bobachee-connah, why it had been known to spend a hundred sicca rupees on sherbets and syllabubs, in one week…
An adoring lover, Chinnery had lavished luxuries upon his cherished Sundaree, giving her an outhouse on the grounds to share with the two sons she had borne him. She had also been given her own little retinue of retainers: a khaleefa, several ayahs and khidmatgars, and even a paan-maker, who did nothing but fold betel leaves to suit her tastes. This arrangement had suited them both – Sundaree because it allowed her the freedom to eat and live according to her fashion; and Mr Chinnery because it meant that his precious little passion-pit was readily available when needed, yet safely out of sight when sahibs and ma’ams came to visit.
Sundaree was herself quite a colourful figure and had once enjoyed her own share of fame and glamour: the daughter of a village drum-beater, she had made a name for herself as a singer and dancer – this was how she came to Mr Chinnery’s attention, for he had paid her to sit for him after attending one of her performances. On becoming pregnant with his child, Sundaree had stopped performing and taken with gusto to a life of indulgence, bedecking herself with expensive textiles and unusual kinds of jewellery. In her prime, she had had no compunctions about ma’aming it over Tantima, pitying her for her cramped quarters and cluck-clucking over the straitened circumstances of the Lambert household.
But all this had changed dramatically when it came to be known that the artist’s other family was soon to descend on Calcutta. As with many another bohemian, Chinnery was in some ways, extremely conventional – the possibility that his legal wife and children might learn about his Bengali ewe-mutton and her two kids, threw him into a panic. The delectable little butter-bun of the day before suddenly metamorphosed into a gravy-making gobble-prick: she and her two boys were summarily evicted from their quarters and packed off to a tenement in Kidderpore, where a khidmatgar would visit them occasionally to hand over a monthly tuncaw.
The arrangement deceived no one, of course, for amongst the sahibs of the city Mr Chinnery’s private life was a matter of almost as much interest as the fluctuation of prices at the Opium Exchange. Marianne Chinnery had found out about her husband’s other family soon enough, and to her great credit she had tried to ensure that they were provided for and that her husband did his duty by them. She had even arranged a church christening for the two little boys: known to their friends as Khoka and Robin, they were christened ‘Henry Collins Chinnery’ and ‘Edward Charles Chinnery’ respectively – which became a source of great hilarity to their playmates, who continued of course, to use their Bengali nicknames.
More usefully perhaps, Marianne Chinnery had also prevailed upon her husband to take the boys into his studio, so that they might learn his trade, and both of them had spent a few years working under their father’s tutelage. Unfortunately for them, this interlude in their lives was not to last long: they had not yet reached their teens when their father fled the city, abandoning both his families.
This was a double blow, for by that time Marianne Chinnery too had lost interest in Khoka and Robin: perhaps the death of her own son had made it more difficult for her to deal with them; perhaps her daughter, having married an English District Magistrate, had pressed her to sever a connection that might be an embarrassment to her husband; or perhaps it was merely that greater exposure to colonial society had coarsened her own sensibilities. In any event, after George Chinnery’s departure, Sundaree and the two boys were more or less abandoned to their fate: the little money the painter sent was not enough to live on, and Sundaree had had to supplement her income by cooking and cleaning for a succession of British families. But Sundaree was a formidable woman in her own right: despite all her difficulties, she had done what she could to ensure the continuation of her sons’ training in the arts – other than the paintbrush, she liked to say, there was nothing to keep them from sharing the lot of every other street-chokra in Kidderpore.
Of the the two Chinnery boys, Khoka, the older, was a strapping, swarthily handsome lad, with light brown hair and a personable manner: He was an easy-going sort of chuckeroo who had a certain facility with the brush even though he had no great interest in art – had he not happened to have a painter for a father, no lick of paint would ever have stained his fingers. His brother Robin could not have been more different, either in appearance or in disposition: with his rounded cheeks, prominent eyes, and coppery hair, Robin was said to closely resemble his father; like him, he was plump, and short in stature. Unlike his brother, Robin was endowed with a genuine passion for the arts – a love so fervent that it all but overwhelmed his own very considerable gifts as a draughtsman and painter. Feeling himself to be incapable of creating anything that would meet his own high standards, he directed most of his energies towards the study of the works of other artists, past and present, and was always looking around for prints, reproductions and etchings that he could examine and copy. Curios and unusual objects were another of his passions, and at one time he was a frequent visitor to the Lambert bungalow, where he had spent hours rummaging around in Pierre Lambert’s collection of botanical specimens and illustrations. Although he was several years older than Paulette, there was a childlike aspect to him that made the difference in age and sex seem immateriaclass="underline" he kept her informed about the latest fashions, bringing her little odds and ends from his mother’s dwindling collection of clothes and trinkets – perhaps a payal to tie around her ankles, or bangles for her wrist. Paulette’s lack of interest in ornaments always amazed him, for his own pleasure in them was such that he would often string them around his own ankles and wrists and twirl around, admiring himself in the mirror. Sometimes they had both dressed up in his mother’s clothes and danced around the house.