The Fallacies of Hope

Tuesday, the Thirtieth of December 1851

‘Pray bid the Stone ingravers

Where’er my bones find church-yard rooms

Simply to chisel on my tomb

Thank Time for all his Jewels’

James closed the tatty front door behind him. It groaned in complaint as the latch clicked.

Mrs Tanner nodded towards the stairs; too early in the morning and too serious an occasion for pleasantries.

James could see candle light flickering into the gloomy hall from the upstairs doorway.  

‘All night?’ he said.  

She nodded again and shuffled off towards the kitchen.

 The familiarity of the hallway, the smell of sooty dust and damp, enveloped him like a favourite woollen jumper, the knit unravelled with time.  Mrs Tanner had brushed the carpets but they still betrayed neglect and patchy discolouration, the dirt of a generation lining the edges where carpet and floorboard meet.  He climbed the stairs, almost holding his breath, passing the studio then into the gallery, dark and sombre.  

Delicate washes of pale morning light descended from the filthy sky lights, softly brushing the faded walls and cracked plaster between the rows of paintings that kept vigil. 

The gallery had been cleared of familiar clutter; the derelict piles of canvases along with the tail-less cats that had nested among them.  All that remained were several of the better dining chairs, a tatty round table, the hair-covered sofa and a solitary pan lying on the floor in the corner, the rear-guard of many objects that had caught the rain coming in from the cracked and missing panes of roof-light glass. 

The coffin sat on two trestles, lit by a single candle, its light breezing over the great painting of Richmond Hill on the wall behind it.  Beside the coffin, the diminutive figure of Hannah Danby, dressed in black.  Her face shrouded with a heavy black mourning veil. 

James was suddenly conscious of his tired mourning clothes, the sleeves too long, tempting him to curl his fingers round the cuff, just as his old mentor would have done.   

Taking Hannah’s arm, James felt the weight of her tears as she sobbed silently, her breath visible in the cold damp of the unheated room.  Neither spoke.

The casket was large for such a small man; ebony black and thick.  Solid looking.  James had somehow expected something more austere.  Opulent didn't suit him, the rippling cream satin and flawless lacquer, watery in the candlelight.

He looked different in death, lying there.  Though the face was his, long beak and thin lips, the cheeks had sunk and the eyes were closed.  His eyes were never closed.  This drawn and pale mannequin betrayed the illness he had hidden over the last years through darting, questioning eyes that had given him life.  

At least they had put his teeth in before sewing his mouth shut and powdering his face.  Tentatively, James broke the silence.  

‘About the first time I've seen him without a hat on,’ he said.  Hannah laughed once, quickly, painfully, between sobs.  

The clothes they had put him in were mostly new, apart from the frock coat which had been his best but not his favourite.  The undertaker had bleached the stained fingers and clipped the singular, long thumbnail he had used to scrape and scratch wet paint.  

James looked at the tiny figure, so large and so full of character in life and realised the body was now without its soul, clipped with the thumbnail and bleached away to leave an inanimate facsimile of what had once been.

‘It’s the first time he’s had properly clean hands in forty years,’ Hannah said, gripping James’ arm tighter.  

James understood.  Her life had stopped with the old man's last breath.  She may have become accustomed to him returning fleetingly and less often, but her life was now empty in a way that James could only imagine: her time, her service and her dedication.

James helped her to a chair.  She slumped, head down.  Hannah had aged terribly in these last weeks, he thought.

‘All night?‘  

She nodded twice.  He knelt down and put his hands on the sides of her shoulders.  

‘Come on,’ he said firmly, ‘you need tea.  Just for a few minutes.’  

She reluctantly nodded.  James supported her gossamer frame, taking one arm and guiding her towards the stairs and the sound of Mrs Tanner below, busying herself with clinking china.

They sat in the parlour.  James had hung the old man's favourite painting, his ‘old darling’, on the wall above the fireplace so that when the undertaker moved the coffin downstairs, it would preside over him.  It had been the first painting James had seen on that summers day two years ago.  The day he first met “Admiral Booth” at the little cottage by the river in Chelsea.

‘I need your help with something James,‘ she said.

James could see Hannah’s good eye was red and puffy, even under the veil, her handkerchief heavy and sodden.  She looked deflated.

‘Anything,’ he said.  ‘You know that.’ 

Hannah pulled a gold locket on a long chain from under her collar, caressing it as she teased it open.  To one side, a small daguerreotype picture of the great man and on the other, two tiny locks of fine hair, fashioned into a miniature plait and laid to make a heart shape behind the glass.  

Hannah's fingers trembled, eventually managing to remove one lock of the hair, placing it with care in a little velvet bag that lay on the table.  She replaced the locket, safe and out of sight, then sipped her tea, sniffing and dabbing behind the veil.  

‘Would you be kind enough to place this in his breast pocket?  It belonged to Georgiana,’ she faltered, welling up again.  

‘It's important... it's important to me that he has it.’  

James touched her pale hand, taking the tiny symbol of something long lost and held it cupped as he moved to the stairs, climbing alone to the silent gallery.

He leant over the coffin and lifted the freshly brushed jacket lapel.  James shivered, even though he knew the old man wouldn’t have cared less.  

‘So I am to become a non-entity then,’ he had said, a few days before dying. 

He had not been a superstitious man, nor a great believer in the after-life, hoping instead for immortality through his work, the legacy that now surrounded him in a state of dilapidation.  James slipped the tiny parcel inside the pocket and quickly, delicately kissed the forehead; cold, tight and powdery.  

‘Thank you for everything,’ he said aloud, blushing as his voice cracked and a single tear dropped onto white satin.  

Downstairs the doorbell rang.