Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [157]
He glanced again, involuntarily it seemed, at the veiled portrait on the easel. ‘If they live long enough, that is. Death is good for my business as well as Kalabanda’s. Or the threat of it, at least. There is nothing like the shadow of mortality for inclining a man to have his portrait painted. But what the sitter pays for, Mr Paris, is the promise of life. Just take a look at this, sir.’
Delblanc finished what was left in his glass and moved towards the easel. After a final moment of hesitation he threw back the cover.
‘Good heavens!’ Paris exclaimed. Whatever he had expected it had not been this. ‘What have you done to him?’
The likeness was remarkable: the artist had perfectly caught the high-bridged, disdainful nose, the languid eyelids; but the eyes were fixed, the bloodless mouth frozen in avarice and the whole face stark with ultimate composure. It was a mask of death that looked at him.
‘Now do you see what I mean?’ Delblanc spoke as if making a point in an argument. ‘A man who lives in perpetual fear of dissolution, who is for ever dosing himself and taking his own pulse, and I have depicted him as a death’s head. It only happened in these last two days. The portrait was finished, or so I thought, he had done his sittings. I was intending only some finishing touches, heighten the flesh tones, ennoble the expression and so on, the usual embellishments, you know. Then, I don’t know how it happened, a touch here, a touch there, the line of the mouth, the set of the eyes, and this face emerged under my brush. And I can’t bring myself to change it – it is the truth of the man, and something more than that. But of course he won’t like it.’
‘No,’ conceded Paris, ‘he won’t like it.’ He felt a little lightheaded, after the wine at dinner and the brandy now, and the lapping light and shadow in the room, and this staring, moon-touched portrait of a stricken miser. ‘He won’t like it at all,’ he said.
‘And if he doesn’t like it,’ Delblanc pursued, with a sort of gloomy logic, ‘he won’t take it, and if he doesn’t take it, he won’t pay. But it’s not really that – I’m not short of money for the moment. No, but you see, he could make things devilish unpleasant for me, if he wanted, and he would want, I feel sure.’ Delblanc gestured at the portrait. ‘You only need look at his face to see that. I could find myself in the dungeons on some trumped-up charge. We are a long way from home and justice is a relative concept at the best of times. Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence … It was Pascal said that, wasn’t it? I don’t feel like taking the risk. It is for that reason I thought of taking passage with you.’
‘As to that,’ Paris said, ‘I think it would be best if you deal direct with Thurso himself. My recommendation would not dispose him in your favour, quite the contrary.’
Delblanc nodded. ‘He did not appear very fond of you. My purse, such as it is, will best recommend me to the captain. He will take me, I have no doubt of it. It is not only to save my skin I want to get away.’
He paused to replenish the surgeon’s glass and his own. ‘To be quite frank,’ he said – and it was difficult to imagine his ever being much else – ‘I am fair sick of what I am doing and assisting in here. I have had to paint a good number of faces in order to get to this one. For eighteen months now I have been painting likenesses of company officials and agents and resident merchants up and down from James Fort to Elmina, not only English, but Dutch and French too. And now I have come upon their collective face. It is no accident that it has sprung out under my brush. Since I came to this coast I have seen things and heard of things, Paris, that I will take to the grave with me. The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which