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The week I traveled to Pemberley’s island was the week the old king and the last elephant had both died, and although any connection between the two deaths seemed too glib to make, for several days one was hardly mentioned without the other. Two exemplars of their respective species, two mighty symbols of venerability and distinction, that sort of thing. You could write it yourself in five minutes, if you were fool enough or had news to sell.
They died days apart; the elephant went first. Accounts of them drawing their last breath at the same moment were later revealed to be nothing but sensational fabrications, the fevered work of journalists who should have taken up fiction instead. Although looking at what followed, perhaps the double extinction was significant after all.
Once the king went, the eradication of the earth’s largest remaining species was immediately relegated down the news order. Our country had been elderly for decades, and the death of our leader after years of stodgy, comforting inactivity felt important. It was another nudge of the wheel, another change of course sending us off the road into unknown country. Our national subconscious muddled the two; across the country people dreamed of elephants in crowns squeezing through palace gates, or of the old king himself, his skin gray and rugose, his nose warping into a trunk.
I forget the king’s name now, but the elephant was called Nala, and she had been the last of her kind for over a decade. There had been thousands of other extinctions by now, of less memorable creatures, but Nala seemed to be the perfect example of our great carelessness. Some had suggested breeding from her, but the notion seemed freakish, and the proposal was treated as the folly it was.
That was one clear difference between Nala and His Majesty—the old king had his replacements, the glassy-eyed children he had produced late in life. To see a facial feature—a look in the eye, the twist of a smile—repeated from one generation to another is greatly comforting. It tells us our ancestors have survived, if only in ghostly, half-glimpsed fragments. The young princess who took the old king’s place had the same smooth manner as her father, the same high cheekbones, and that was good enough. And so the country stumbled on, surveying its dimming reflection in the mirror with anxiety and vanity alike.
I didn’t pay much attention at the time. I was working that week. My notebook, left in the city, will have a one-line record of the fact. It has probably been torn or burned or mulched by now, but if not, the week will appear on the final page: two dates, a sum of money, a phone number, and a name. Bywater.
I finished the Bywater commission in five days flat; more fool me. Another day would have paid for a week’s living back in the city, but I couldn’t bear to drag it out any further than necessary. Apart from anything else, I was coming home to Cara. I even found myself hurrying over the final brushstrokes, and heard Anthony in my head chastising me for it. As it happened, that wasn’t the reason the job ended badly.
The Bywaters’ Village was one of the most exclusive in the country: a huge service settlement outside the walls, great beauty on display within. The sittings had taken five days; days that stretched out even as I sat through them, trying without success to lose myself in my work. I’d offered the family the option of working from photographs, but I could tell in my initial interview they would be the kind of clients to insist on what they considered the full experience.
They were a family of three—father and mother, him a decade older than her, and their son. The father was a type common in these places: tall, broad, and vicious. He was wide-shouldered, with a breadth just on the turn, a suggestion of jowl beginning to make itself known above the collar of the shirt. The kind of client who makes you relieved you’ve brought enough paints to mix a decent quantity of pink. His work was something in the city. I loved that phrase. By then, most people who worked in the city didn’t.
It was Mrs. Bywater who’d come up with the—to her—rather daring idea of having the family painted. My work was not exactly fashionable, but it had somehow outlasted the new technologies, as faith in them waned. There was an eternal quality about my medium, or so most clients thought, and I was loath to remind them of the thousands of portraits lost across the centuries, torn or binned or carelessly dismantled, their frames used as firewood. The older way of doing things had somehow survived into our own age, and I wasn’t going to correct anyone deluded enough to think my work might last.
It was more often the wife than the husband who commissioned me, but it was closer to half-and-half than you would think. It did, however, tend to be mostly groups of at least two. The few single people I painted tended to be receiving their portrait on behalf of an institution, and usually there was a bit of awkwardness about the process.
I preferred single portraits despite that tension; maybe because of it. They produced an agreeable sense of struggle—the subjects’ resistance and awkwardness matched against my determination to capture their features, and the slow process of making sure it happened, stroke after stroke. Pemberley, of course, my final portrait, was the perfect example.
The Bywaters, though, had presented all the difficulties I least enjoyed working with, and none of those I treated as a challenge. Mrs. Bywater was the opposite of her husband, physically. It was as if two average people had pooled their assets—the size, the color, the movement—then divided them unequally. Where he was broad, she was slight. Where he was pink, she was pale; and while he treated the sittings with a bovine stolidity, she made the constant quick movements customary to the unnerved or the disappointed. A difficult client.
The son was sixteen, and clearly was at the exact age where he simultaneously craved his parents’ approval and wanted nothing to do with them. He hunched himself in the foreground like a folded deck chair and looked off to the side.
After each morning’s sittings, I withdrew to a small timbered office at the end of the garden to work on the details. I was in the office when Mrs. Bywater brought me tea and the news of the old king’s death. It hadn’t been unexpected, but it was a shock nonetheless—a storm wave glimpsed from a distance, no less destructive when it hits. She asked me what I thought would happen, and I childishly replied that the family would probably just carry on with the next generation, an option not open to poor Nala.
Mrs. Bywater pursed her lips, and for the rest of the week, her expression in the sittings as she looked toward me was one of mild distaste. I allowed a little of that look into the final painting; not enough to lose my fee, but enough for honesty.
I’m sure they were a family like most others. But the root of their urge to be painted—not for the sake of art, not to engage with the process, but simply for another image of themselves—gave me the feeling I had in all my least happy commissions, the feeling of sheer unimportance from the wrist upward. I may as well have just bought them a mirror.
On the last morning, I came into the studio at the end of the garden to see the son trying to prize off the cover I had fitted over the canvas, to keep clients from looking at work before it was complete.
“Excuse me. Please don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because the picture isn’t ready. I still need an hour or two to finish it.”
He gave me an impassive look just like his father’s, then moved to the next corner of the cover and started working it free.
“Could you please stop that?”
He paused and looked at me with amusement. The precious artist, in his home, telling him what to do.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirty-three.”
“My dad says you want to live in a place like this. He said you never will. If you’re not here by twenty-five, you’ll never make it in, he says.”
That made me angry. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to live anywhere near a young man like you. Will you just leave it alone?”
He wasn’t quite confident enough to challenge me physically, and as I stepped toward him, my fists balled in annoyance, he moved back, wide-eyed, raising his hands in innocence. A pantomime gesture.
“What’s this?” The boy’s mother was behind me in the doorway.
“Your son was interfering with my picture.”
“He threatened me, Mum. He said I’d better leave it alone or else.”
All of which explains how I found myself leaving the Bywaters’ compound unpaid, and escorted by Village security to the gate.
If they could get over the row, I thought, the family would be happy with the result. They would get what they had asked for, barring the finishing touches—a glimpse of their younger selves, a sliver of eternity to hang in their front room. No matter what joys or sorrows followed, the painting would keep them fixed in a time of relative youth and possibility. The pictures I produce are not meant to be nostalgic, but they almost inevitably end up being so for their subjects. “How young I was,” clients would say to me, the few times I saw them again. “How little I knew.”
These were the thoughts that occupied my attention as I made my way through the Village’s gatehouse, bid the security team farewell, and passed onto the service road outside. They faded to insignificance as a new thought replaced them: I was finally free to return to Cara. Our life together was about to begin.
It was a morning of crystal skies and unwarranted warmth, the latest in a long line of such mornings, and each new day dawned with no change in the blue color of the sky. Only the land beneath it changed, the open grasses yellowing to straw and the trees bowing their branches in mourning for their dearly departed friends, the clouds. A hot spring.
The queue outside the Village this morning was long, even though I left after ten. Seeing it gave me a feeling of relief at having been in the Village’s hostel—some clients would have kept me outside the walls in the service hub. Like the majority of my subjects, the Bywaters had seen me as an artisan, which earned me a little more respect than the average support worker.
The line looked much the same as all the queues outside these places: the young outside the walls, waiting to serve the old (plus their occasional fortunate brats) within. Building teams in their hi-vis jackets, smoking the final guilt-free cigarettes of the day; a cadre of tired-looking women I guessed must be cleaners; a huddle of chefs with tattoos on every spare inch of skin. Half a dozen schoolteachers, smartly dressed, kept themselves apart.
One of the builders, a thickset man in his thirties, had sat down against the wall to sleep. He could have been hungover, but it’s likelier he was overworked. He looked beaten. If I’d had more courage or creative impetus, I’d have stopped to sketch him. But I was suddenly in a hurry and didn’t want to risk a confrontation. Cowardice always was a weed scattered through the underbrush of my character. Anthony told me it would stop me becoming a great artist, although if he could have seen my final painting, he might have recanted.
Neither the queue nor my cowardice nor the Bywaters mattered, though, because I was on my way home to Cara, and she was on her way home to me. I knew when her coach was scheduled to arrive back in the city. I would be there two hours earlier—long enough to tidy our home until it looked as good as the day before she left. I would have something cooking by the time she got back, something full of comfort: a stew with crusty bread on the side, or the better brand of chicken. I wanted her to know we would be comfortable together, that she could safely imagine growing old with me.
The coach to the city was a cut above the usual. It served the Village itself, not the satellite dwellings of the workers, which meant better seats and suspension, a more amiable driver, a happier experience in every way. I took out Cara’s last letter to me to read. It had come through two weeks ago, before the Bywater trip, and although it was short, I could not help taking it with me to reread in the evenings. It had ended:
I’ll be back on the fourth, sometime in the late afternoon. Knock off work in advance, won’t you? I want to have your full attention when I tell you about this place. I think it’s on the brink of something entirely new. I think I am too.
I wasn’t concerned by her brevity, of course, but it was a noticeable change. Her first notes from the island had been several pages each: long paragraphs interrupted by sketches, extra observations and footnotes crammed in at the sides, the ink blotching here and there as though too eager to get out of the pen. Even in those letters, and in her one phone call, she hadn’t told me too much about her work on Pemberley’s island—commercial confidentiality—but her first notes had been full of life, and love for me. That seemed to have been draining away.
As I say, I wasn’t concerned. She would be coming back to me shortly, and we would be free to marry at last.
The journey back toward the city was the same as always. First, we were in the rough ring immediately surrounding the Village, and still felt the glorious glow cast by all that money behind us, like a patch of sun. The crops waved in the fields, and there was an atmosphere of life and purpose in the people I saw. The few lone buildings we passed looked clean and somehow contented.
Then, the aura of money disappeared from the land, ray by ray. Tiles absconded from rooftops; beams sagged. The buildings we passed took on a lowering aspect, their windows transformed to ranks of bared teeth interrupted by gaping cavities. Any lone houses had windows edged with mold and thin, bedraggled curtains. Behind those windows were shadows, punctuated by dim figures that moved in the darkness like lost souls. The road itself coarsened, and the coach swayed as the driver avoided potholes. Across the fields and the stubble, shreds of plastic danced a fitful tango with the crows pecking uncertainly at them. This was how the country was broken down.
That day, I paid little attention. I was interested in nobody but myself and Cara. I looked only at the seat in front of me, and dozed, imagining reunion scenes in films, transposing us into them. Cara, Cara, Cara.
For some time now I had avoided using the word fiancée. It seemed so childish somehow, the remnant of a bygone age of courtesy. The word evoked brides-to-be petulantly rejecting a dozen dresses in a row, bluff grooms visiting their tailors, worries about canapés. It seemed a pure archaism in today’s world—something Village-dwellers might like to play at and normal people could not. Cara felt just the same way, whenever we’d discussed the matter. But now, on the brink of her return, I could think of the word with joy.
I was nearly asleep by now, but one more troubling thought struck me as I drifted off. For a couple who so disliked the idea of the “fiancée,” we had spent two years in that temporary state, without actually taking the final step to bring the condition to an end.
