Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

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      They walked off, with Richard carrying the easel respectfully and attentively, a symbol of their religion, and at the next turning they left the gentle business of the High Street for the tree-lined quiet of Hog Lane and the alley labelled No Thoroughfare that led to the green garden door in the wall.

      ‘Mind the easel in the fig,’ said Mr Atherton. ‘That reminds me, I must tell you about fig-tree sap as a medium. You use the milk from the young shoots on the south side. Cenino says …’

      They came to the door, a lumpish green door in a brick wall covered with rank ivy – a door which opened outward and brushed against the ivy, so that whenever Richard passed through it he smelt the coarse green smell of the leaves, and damp and snails; but every time he passed through it and closed it behind him, he stepped into the scent of turpentine and paint, for although the door had all the appearance of a garden door it opened straight into the studio, a quiet, vast, luminous room with soft dust on the floor, and canvases and stretchers against the walls, frames, buckets here and there to catch drips, a model’s throne, three easels: a benign great place, a world in itself.

      Miss Theobald was Mr Atherton’s god-child and cousin; she lived with him and she kept the living part of the house in a state of old maid’s cleanliness; but this was not occupation enough for her boundless maiden energy and for the last twenty years she had been running drawing-classes in the town. In almost every one of these years she had found a budding Michael Angelo and had brought him to Mr Atherton; but she was more enthusiastic than discerning and in spite of his benevolence Mr Atherton had grown so disgusted by a succession of mediocre young people who would not work that he had sworn never to put himself in the way of disappointment again – no more prodigies: and he would never have broken his oath this time without an uncommon certainty of talent.

      He had had a good many disappointments, and the earliest and most striking of these was Miss Theobald herself; for it was he who had encouraged her as a child and it was he who throughout her adolescence had insisted upon conscientious work and had taught her the arduous, painstaking techniques that would ensure her productions a dreadful immortality: the children with huge feet and cheeks like buttocks, the fubsy bunnies and the pussies would last a thousand years. However, this did not affect his belief in hard work as something of more than rational value; and by hard work he meant primarily drawing, all kinds of drawing, from plaster cones and prisms to the most elaborate anatomical studies. In an appropriate, tall cupboard he kept a skeleton, mounted upon lead-alloy wire; he encouraged Richard to draw it from every angle, and he often joined in the holy exercise himself. But he also attached great importance to the crafts of the studio, and Richard ground colours until he was first blistered and then calloused from the wear of the pestle. He grew intimately acquainted not only with linseed, sunflower and poppyseed oil, egg tempera, wax emulsions and so on, but also with the more recondite preparations of honey, rabbit-skin size and Armenian bole; and he was obliged to make his own stretcher and stretch his own canvas upon it before ever he was allowed to begin to lay on the paints that he himself had ground. Mr Atherton could do all these things well: his manual dexterity could have earned him a comfortable living as a handyman if a revolution had made it necessary, and he valued it highly in others. His aesthetics were much simpler, being summed up in the expression, ‘Theory is all stuff.’ The only exceptions to this broad statement were some parts of Reynolds’s Discourses; but as far as Richard was concerned no exception was called for – he worked for the delight of working and wasting no time in asking why some shapes, colours, textures made him happy. Indeed, Mr Atherton had never had a harder-working pupil, one who came voluntarily all through the summer holidays; and once, when he found that Richard was unable to construe Sir Joshua’s serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco, he warned him solemnly that he must not neglect his Latin and his sums, and all that sort of thing, as being of the greatest use in after-life.

      So his time went by, in a golden haze, and memory did not serve to break it down into its elements: it remained an infinitely distant period of normality, when happiness was in the natural order of events. In those days he passed continually from one world to another (or even between three, if his low school, his upper-middle-class Philistine home and Mr Atherton’s studio were all to be set at equal intervals) but it scarcely worried him, and if at odd moments he had a suspicion that he did not entirely belong to any one of them, that he did not quite seem to belong anywhere, it did not then seem to have any immediate importance. After all, his mother was always there at home; school was not at all unpleasant, but for the confinement and the waste of time; and he could at least aspire to Mr Atherton’s spacious way of life.

      In this golden haze he could not now distinguish near and far: he could scarcely make out its most general chronology, even after probing back to link events with the seasons in which they occurred; but it must have lasted for years – perhaps for three. Most of the time, as he remembered it, seemed to have been summer; and certainly it was summer when first he began painting the backgrounds to Mr Atherton’s big commissioned canvases. The umber landscape came back to him, the first one he ever did, with its four brown trees in the distance: then again he was painting Mrs Foster’s shoes, handbag and parasol, left for the purpose; and at another time Apollo’s hams, under the admiring gaze of Colonel Apse, who was to occupy the middle of the heroic picture, a more gentlemanly Mars, and who posed to that effect, in moistened drapery, all August through. But there must have been winters too, for he saw the lonely pond again, and felt the thin ice bow as he skated round and round in the gathering darkness. He was alone and it was perfectly silent except for his skates and the strange pervasive sighing of the ice as it bent; the outlines of the pond were vague – blurred scraggy trees rearing up as he sped by – and the ice was black. In his delight he raced across the middle from time to time, promising, if he passed over the thinnest ice again, that he would do whatever he most disliked. What was it? That had faded past recall (some domestic virtue, no doubt); but he remembered the peculiar silence of the cold – the cold’s own silent nature – and his solitary dark flying on the ice.