[FICATHON] Pity My Picture Burning, for aka_centimetre2
Title: Pity My Picture Burning
Author: highfantastical
Recipient: aka_centimetre2
Play: Richard II
Rating: R
Pairings: Richard/Henry, Richard/Aumerle, Richard/Anne, Henry/Mary.
Warnings: Angst, possible crime, allusions to suicide attempt, possible self-injury triggers, reference to past child abuse.
Summary: In 1983, an acclaimed English artist dies in mysterious circumstances, far from home. Fourteen years later, it's time to revisit the story.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to my very kind beta readers.
Oxford, 1997
The other man sat across from him, his hands flat on the sticky tabletop. It was an icy day outside: English February.
The windows were thinly steamed with breath. "Edward," he said, "I want to know what happened."
New York, 1977
Henry drew the curtains closed, and they stood in the dark, changed room, their arms loosely locked round one another's bodies. The march was loud in the streets outside, a defiant parade of love they had no part in.
Richard felt thin and pliable under Henry's hands. He sank down easily to kneel, as if he was water slipping through Henry's grasp, and as the car horns outside sounded louder and louder, his hands worked at the fly-buttons, and when Henry's cock was free, he kissed it. Henry felt his cheeks heat up at such whimsicality, such marvellous disdain for dignity.
The matting which covered the apartment floor was hurting Richard's knees. He remembered his small toy dog, covered with brown felt. The first time they met, Henry had dropped the dog behind the nursery sofa, and when Greta retrieved it, the felt was caked with grubby fluff. She was a very small girl, not strong enough to pull the sofa out and clean behind it.
His hands had a good purchase on Henry's hips. It was the easiest thing he had ever done.
There were no brushes small enough for a felt dog, only the large combs used every week to bring his father's animals to glossiness.
New York, 1976
"He's a compatriot," said Ziman, in a murmurous voice. "Of yours. Go and talk to him, he looks ready to fall down in a dead faint."
Yet Edward did not quite like to go and speak to the man, even though his strained white face had some of that undeniable beauty that Edward loved to find in objects. He didn't want to speak to the man before he had looked at the paintings, that was the truth. In case his voice was an unattractive Belgravia drawl, or an affected transatlantic muddle-or perhaps he smiled too much. Edward was so caught by the paintings, even just glancing round the room, that he wanted to look at them neutrally, half-fearful of anything that might spoil the trembling responsiveness springing up within him.
Edward walked to the end of the gallery where nobody else stood. He saw instantly that it was a painting of England-but England refracted, spiced with a furtive brilliancy belonging only to the mind of an exile.
There was one human figure in the painting, a woman turned away so that her face was not to be seen. Her outline merged with the landscape, but at the same time seemed to move, to walk through the painted world in which she found herself. Her dress was of dark orange, with intricate and faint patterns upon it, traced in sienna, only just visible against the background, the colours were so close-and even her hair was similar, with more of brown to it, untidily coiled against her head.
Oxford, 1997
"Henry said that they'd seen each other earlier that day-his face was all marked-I mean Richard's face. That was the first thing I saw, and I thought he was ill. Or he'd been beaten up again. But Henry said later they'd tried some new stuff-I couldn't believe it, not when he said it. I'd believe it of Richard, that's not impossible. He'd have been willing. I don't think Henry would."
Edward watched the slow tremble in his hands. He put them around the thick white teacup. Richard would have disliked it. "His face was twisted-it was the worst damn thing I ever saw," Edward said. The other man's face was calm as a priest's.
"A lot of people still think he died of AIDS," the man said.
"Oh, that story went round everywhere-it was put about with the greatest enthusiasm, by everyone who hated him. And that was quite a lot of people." Edward took slow breaths, trying to lay other images over the image of Richard's face. "It wasn't all malicious-he looked like hell for the last few months. But I'd swear he didn't have the virus. He was sick with-well, misery, I suppose. Smoked all the time, never seemed to eat. He looked rotten. Didn't you come over at all, during that time?"
"I was at Summer Fields, you know. It was my scholarship year, he didn't want me to be distracted."
"Well, he did look rotten. You'll have to take my word for it." Edward's teaspoon chimed on the cup.
New York, 1979
"The knave of diamonds," Richard said, liking the way his red cards looked in his white hand.
"I haven't got it," Henry said. "Sorry." He wore an antique jersey in an evening blue. It had been very badly darned at the elbows with lumpy grey wool. Mary always looked as though she would be good at such tasks, but this appearance was deceptive. Their immensity was such that the more she tried to do them, the more misery accrued to her and to those who were unfortunate enough to share her household. The pitiful relics of her reign still threaded through Henry's life and effects at unexpected moments.
"Oh, you have got it," said Richard. "Don't dissemble, you do it so ineptly. And you know that I am simply marvellous at these games-and I know quite well that you have it. Stand and deliver."
Henry smiled and shook his head. "You've counted wrong," he said. "Try again."
Richard was so unconvinced by this denial of his perennially superior skill that he determined to disprove it by force. Henry was the larger, but the virtue of surprise was on his own side. He scrambled forward over the sofa cushions, grabbing for the cards and momentarily filled with fury as Henry held them out of his reach.
Henry's loose blue sleeve had fallen down his arm and for a moment the arm swam before Richard's eyes, until the pattern of red and white, so like in colour to the sight of the cards in his own hand, resolved itself into Henry's arm striped with long scars, still quite new.
New York, 1976
Almost everyone had left by the time that Edward had worked his way around the room. He couldn't bear to miss one of them, it was like seeing his own country again, without having to scrape together the money for the fare-Grantchester, the Dart, the Quantocks, St Ives, all were laid before him, always with their strange lady guard.
In the last painting, hanging between the windows, you could see a little of her face. The eye that could be seen was dark as the massy trees filling the painting's more distant prospects. Edward recognised the north of England, the moulded greys of the sky. There were faint buildings, unfamiliar in scale and design-not mills, much older.
He was most interested in the woman, though. She was so solidly present in that English landscape, but at the same time there was something not very English about her face, with its broad mouth and the marked epicanthic fold over her eye. He leaned forward to look more closely at her features, and then straightened up again quickly, because there were quick footsteps tapping over the floor behind him, and Edward knew he looked like an eager child, let loose in the National Gallery and imitating the behaviour of earnest grown-ups.
Before the thought was decently gone, he was no longer alone. The painter stood at his side, looking curiously into his face. Struggling out of the pictures' plangent England, Edward groped for words, saying in a rush, "Are these your dark satanic mills? I like them awfully." He flushed as he said it-it was a gauche beginning, especially as he knew quite well that they were not even the third cousins to a mill.
But the painter did not seem angry. "Ampleforth," he said. "Well, a bit of it. Hullo-I'm Richard." He gave Edward a cold hand to shake.
Edward said his own name, and then added, "You were away-when you painted this? You must have been."
"No," said Richard. "No. I was staying with friends. In Cheshire, actually, I have a lot of friends there. I know what you mean, though. Everyone thinks that."
Edward's hope that he had been rather peculiarly perceptive withered, but he couldn't hold back the next question. "Why do people think that? Because it's there, you know. There's a quality-something. It's almost impossible to believe you were in England when you painted these."
"In a way," Richard said, "I suppose I wasn't, exactly. I was in Cheshire, that's quite true. But I was-unhappy. Very unhappy. So you could say, perhaps, that I wasn't there, not all of me. I don't mean I went mad, you needn't look worried. But it was like being-in two worlds at once, and I think that got into the pictures. Anyway, the Americans like them, so perhaps I shan't go bankrupt this year, after all."
Edward said, not bothering to hide his scepticism, "Are you very poor?"
"I lost my money, you see. Betting on the gees. And other things-well, it was more the other things, really. So I've got to sell some paintings, and you know how well Americans always pay."
Oxford, 1997
"When I went to tell Henry, he was eating scallops," Edward said. "I remember that he ate them slowly, but with a sort of-controlled voracious hunger, somehow, in his wielding of the fork. He seemed to enjoy the fact that he could eat so slowly. He was swimming in money, but his face looked-as if he hadn't had a meal for weeks. I walked through the whole restaurant, looking for him, all those people at their tables, staring into my face. He was right at the far end of the room."
"He never liked to sit at the most conspicuous table," the other man said.
"Richard telephoned me the night before, you know. I've never told you that. He begged me to go with him, he wanted to see Nagasaki. What happens -- destruction. I thought he was drunk, or something, so I said that of course I'd go with him. It was crazy-he just said he'd had enough of New York, he was never going back to England-somewhere that has once been ruined, he said. That was what he wanted."
New York, 1979
Henry pulled the sleeve down to his wrist again, his hands steady and solid. Richard began to sob, and Henry said, "Stop bawling. Christ, I can't deal with this-it was nothing, nothing at all to do with you." He gathered up the untidy cards, shaping them into a pack and absently shuffling them, ready for another game. He watched Richard crying. His nose was running, but with that single hand pressed to his face he looked for all the world like a tragic saint.
"I can't stand it," Richard choked. "I can't bear it."
"Perhaps I can't," said Henry tightly. "Perhaps it is I who cannot-bear it. You've borne a lot, you know. Maybe you can bear a great deal more. I know you suffer with the very best, but it hasn't killed you, in a way-you almost do enjoy it a little." He laid the cards on the floor beside the sofa, and fixed his eyes on the rising sun outside the windows. Neither of them had slept.
"You conceived this idea that you were ill-starred," he said, without looking at Richard. "Because you were buggered at Gilling Castle. I'm sorry you were. I've often wondered what you would have been like if you weren't so inexorably fascinated by your own life."
He waited for Richard to stop crying, because then he could fuck him, and kiss his swollen eyelids, and perhaps they would sleep before it was quite light.
New York, 1976
They walked around the gallery again, not talking very much. Richard liked to look at his own paintings.
"That's my old studio," he said. "It was at Shene."
Not wishing to be inquisitive, Edward refrained from pouncing on the 'was', even if it were intended as a cue. It might have been-he was finding Richard singularly difficult to read.
The painted studio was sunk in the night, greyed out, but with its angles visible, as if some moon were shining from outside the picture's limits. Edward thought that Richard had been terribly lucky to have a studio like this, even if he had it no longer. There were faint bright glimmers at its windows, an unsettling flare of light, as though a brush had accidentally caught against the canvas and dashed the wrong sort of paint upon it.
"Actually, it burned down," Richard said, in an empty voice. "And England's used up, now. That's why I've come here, though it's dirty and I rather detest lots of it. I had to leave, though. Richard to England-drop dead. Even if it's not absolutely true." His tone had grown tender. "I miss the early mornings," he said. "The light's best then."
Oxford, 1997
"The summer we spent at MacDowell," Edward said. "That's my best memory."
"I don't remember that-when was it?"
"Oh, it must have been 1980-yes. I drove us all the way up to New Hampshire-Richard just sat there with this bottle of wine, saying poetry. When we went through the towns and there were lights, I kept looking across at his face. When we were held up at the lights he'd lift the bottle to my mouth-it was such good wine. I'd forgotten that, actually, till now. I've no idea how he got it, probably a present. The best Bordeaux I ever drank." Edward's hands were folding his napkin into a tidy stack. "And so my soul, more earnestly released-it's as if we'd just done the drive last night. I can hear him saying it."
New Hampshire, 1980
Edward sat cross-legged on the floor of Richard's studio. He never seemed to spend any time in his own. Richard did not object to his presence.
He watched Richard's easel, more than Richard himself. When the paint stopped going on so quickly, with those strong tiny strokes, Richard would be almost ready to halt for a while.
So it was no surprise to Edward, when Richard said, "I'll get the lunch," laying down his brush and lightly rubbing at his hands, which did no good. His skin was marked with a blue pigment, impossibly bright. Richard opened the door and stepped out.
The sun began to filter in through the doorway, and Edward watched as it licked across the scattered canvases. He thought perhaps he would never see it again without the echo of Richard's voice, "I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink." He'd hardened, right there in the dark car, his skin sore with desire because he wanted to touch Richard so very badly, Richard who sat there marooned in wine and poems, his hair occasionally glinting brightly in the headlights of oncoming cars.
Oxford, 1997
"When I've finished with the Ruskin, I shall come out to New York."
"Will they let you go?"
"Oh, they will. I intend to be very persuasive. I'm a good teacher, you know, but it makes me bored. I'd like to see some of those old haunts."
"I've never heard New York described like that.," Edward said. "But I suppose that's what it is, to you."
MacDowell, 1980
Richard didn't come back with the basket of lunch, so Edward pushed his feet into his sandals and went out into the full light. Richard was crouched on the ground, so that for an instant Edward thought, is he weeping? He was small as a martyr. But in his hand there lay a little pallid snail.
"Henry makes me feel like this," he said, his palm cupping it, pale as the shell. He rose to his feet, and Edward saw that there was dirt on his shorts and on his bare knees.
"Turnbull and Asser, seasoned with a little New Hampshire earth," Edward said. He touched the snail with one fingertip, then put his hands on Richard's shoulders and kissed his hair.
Oxford, 1997
Edward caught the eye of their waitress. He wanted her to bring the bill as quickly as she could, and he tried to put a little urgency into his gaze itself. After this, he was driving to Heathrow-it was time to get on the road, because it was icy today, and he'd need to take it slowly.
He sought some words of valediction, but none presented themselves. At last he said, hearing the shyness in his own voice, as if to prove that he was still the same man whom Richard had accosted twenty-one years ago in a New York gallery, "Nothing was ever proved against your father, of course."
Hal said, "I know."
Notes
The timeline of this story mostly fits the historical events, in terms of births and deaths. The differences include: no second marriages, and the deaths of Anne and Mary being two years earlier than they should be.
All quotations are from the poems of John Donne, as is the title, which comes from 'Witchcraft by a Picture': I fixe mine eye on thine, and there / Pitty my picture burning in thine eye.
Summer Fields is an English preparatory school, from which many boys go on to Eton. Henry did not wish his son to follow him to Ampleforth.
and are locations and geographical features in England.
Ampleforth is a Roman Catholic public school in England.
Gilling Castle used to be Ampleforth's preparatory school.
MacDowell is the oldest artists' colony in the US.
The Ruskin is Oxford University's Fine Art Department.
Turnbull & Asser is a Jermyn Street clothier.
Author: highfantastical
Recipient: aka_centimetre2
Play: Richard II
Rating: R
Pairings: Richard/Henry, Richard/Aumerle, Richard/Anne, Henry/Mary.
Warnings: Angst, possible crime, allusions to suicide attempt, possible self-injury triggers, reference to past child abuse.
Summary: In 1983, an acclaimed English artist dies in mysterious circumstances, far from home. Fourteen years later, it's time to revisit the story.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to my very kind beta readers.
Oxford, 1997
The other man sat across from him, his hands flat on the sticky tabletop. It was an icy day outside: English February.
The windows were thinly steamed with breath. "Edward," he said, "I want to know what happened."
New York, 1977
Henry drew the curtains closed, and they stood in the dark, changed room, their arms loosely locked round one another's bodies. The march was loud in the streets outside, a defiant parade of love they had no part in.
Richard felt thin and pliable under Henry's hands. He sank down easily to kneel, as if he was water slipping through Henry's grasp, and as the car horns outside sounded louder and louder, his hands worked at the fly-buttons, and when Henry's cock was free, he kissed it. Henry felt his cheeks heat up at such whimsicality, such marvellous disdain for dignity.
The matting which covered the apartment floor was hurting Richard's knees. He remembered his small toy dog, covered with brown felt. The first time they met, Henry had dropped the dog behind the nursery sofa, and when Greta retrieved it, the felt was caked with grubby fluff. She was a very small girl, not strong enough to pull the sofa out and clean behind it.
His hands had a good purchase on Henry's hips. It was the easiest thing he had ever done.
There were no brushes small enough for a felt dog, only the large combs used every week to bring his father's animals to glossiness.
New York, 1976
"He's a compatriot," said Ziman, in a murmurous voice. "Of yours. Go and talk to him, he looks ready to fall down in a dead faint."
Yet Edward did not quite like to go and speak to the man, even though his strained white face had some of that undeniable beauty that Edward loved to find in objects. He didn't want to speak to the man before he had looked at the paintings, that was the truth. In case his voice was an unattractive Belgravia drawl, or an affected transatlantic muddle-or perhaps he smiled too much. Edward was so caught by the paintings, even just glancing round the room, that he wanted to look at them neutrally, half-fearful of anything that might spoil the trembling responsiveness springing up within him.
Edward walked to the end of the gallery where nobody else stood. He saw instantly that it was a painting of England-but England refracted, spiced with a furtive brilliancy belonging only to the mind of an exile.
There was one human figure in the painting, a woman turned away so that her face was not to be seen. Her outline merged with the landscape, but at the same time seemed to move, to walk through the painted world in which she found herself. Her dress was of dark orange, with intricate and faint patterns upon it, traced in sienna, only just visible against the background, the colours were so close-and even her hair was similar, with more of brown to it, untidily coiled against her head.
Oxford, 1997
"Henry said that they'd seen each other earlier that day-his face was all marked-I mean Richard's face. That was the first thing I saw, and I thought he was ill. Or he'd been beaten up again. But Henry said later they'd tried some new stuff-I couldn't believe it, not when he said it. I'd believe it of Richard, that's not impossible. He'd have been willing. I don't think Henry would."
Edward watched the slow tremble in his hands. He put them around the thick white teacup. Richard would have disliked it. "His face was twisted-it was the worst damn thing I ever saw," Edward said. The other man's face was calm as a priest's.
"A lot of people still think he died of AIDS," the man said.
"Oh, that story went round everywhere-it was put about with the greatest enthusiasm, by everyone who hated him. And that was quite a lot of people." Edward took slow breaths, trying to lay other images over the image of Richard's face. "It wasn't all malicious-he looked like hell for the last few months. But I'd swear he didn't have the virus. He was sick with-well, misery, I suppose. Smoked all the time, never seemed to eat. He looked rotten. Didn't you come over at all, during that time?"
"I was at Summer Fields, you know. It was my scholarship year, he didn't want me to be distracted."
"Well, he did look rotten. You'll have to take my word for it." Edward's teaspoon chimed on the cup.
New York, 1979
"The knave of diamonds," Richard said, liking the way his red cards looked in his white hand.
"I haven't got it," Henry said. "Sorry." He wore an antique jersey in an evening blue. It had been very badly darned at the elbows with lumpy grey wool. Mary always looked as though she would be good at such tasks, but this appearance was deceptive. Their immensity was such that the more she tried to do them, the more misery accrued to her and to those who were unfortunate enough to share her household. The pitiful relics of her reign still threaded through Henry's life and effects at unexpected moments.
"Oh, you have got it," said Richard. "Don't dissemble, you do it so ineptly. And you know that I am simply marvellous at these games-and I know quite well that you have it. Stand and deliver."
Henry smiled and shook his head. "You've counted wrong," he said. "Try again."
Richard was so unconvinced by this denial of his perennially superior skill that he determined to disprove it by force. Henry was the larger, but the virtue of surprise was on his own side. He scrambled forward over the sofa cushions, grabbing for the cards and momentarily filled with fury as Henry held them out of his reach.
Henry's loose blue sleeve had fallen down his arm and for a moment the arm swam before Richard's eyes, until the pattern of red and white, so like in colour to the sight of the cards in his own hand, resolved itself into Henry's arm striped with long scars, still quite new.
New York, 1976
Almost everyone had left by the time that Edward had worked his way around the room. He couldn't bear to miss one of them, it was like seeing his own country again, without having to scrape together the money for the fare-Grantchester, the Dart, the Quantocks, St Ives, all were laid before him, always with their strange lady guard.
In the last painting, hanging between the windows, you could see a little of her face. The eye that could be seen was dark as the massy trees filling the painting's more distant prospects. Edward recognised the north of England, the moulded greys of the sky. There were faint buildings, unfamiliar in scale and design-not mills, much older.
He was most interested in the woman, though. She was so solidly present in that English landscape, but at the same time there was something not very English about her face, with its broad mouth and the marked epicanthic fold over her eye. He leaned forward to look more closely at her features, and then straightened up again quickly, because there were quick footsteps tapping over the floor behind him, and Edward knew he looked like an eager child, let loose in the National Gallery and imitating the behaviour of earnest grown-ups.
Before the thought was decently gone, he was no longer alone. The painter stood at his side, looking curiously into his face. Struggling out of the pictures' plangent England, Edward groped for words, saying in a rush, "Are these your dark satanic mills? I like them awfully." He flushed as he said it-it was a gauche beginning, especially as he knew quite well that they were not even the third cousins to a mill.
But the painter did not seem angry. "Ampleforth," he said. "Well, a bit of it. Hullo-I'm Richard." He gave Edward a cold hand to shake.
Edward said his own name, and then added, "You were away-when you painted this? You must have been."
"No," said Richard. "No. I was staying with friends. In Cheshire, actually, I have a lot of friends there. I know what you mean, though. Everyone thinks that."
Edward's hope that he had been rather peculiarly perceptive withered, but he couldn't hold back the next question. "Why do people think that? Because it's there, you know. There's a quality-something. It's almost impossible to believe you were in England when you painted these."
"In a way," Richard said, "I suppose I wasn't, exactly. I was in Cheshire, that's quite true. But I was-unhappy. Very unhappy. So you could say, perhaps, that I wasn't there, not all of me. I don't mean I went mad, you needn't look worried. But it was like being-in two worlds at once, and I think that got into the pictures. Anyway, the Americans like them, so perhaps I shan't go bankrupt this year, after all."
Edward said, not bothering to hide his scepticism, "Are you very poor?"
"I lost my money, you see. Betting on the gees. And other things-well, it was more the other things, really. So I've got to sell some paintings, and you know how well Americans always pay."
Oxford, 1997
"When I went to tell Henry, he was eating scallops," Edward said. "I remember that he ate them slowly, but with a sort of-controlled voracious hunger, somehow, in his wielding of the fork. He seemed to enjoy the fact that he could eat so slowly. He was swimming in money, but his face looked-as if he hadn't had a meal for weeks. I walked through the whole restaurant, looking for him, all those people at their tables, staring into my face. He was right at the far end of the room."
"He never liked to sit at the most conspicuous table," the other man said.
"Richard telephoned me the night before, you know. I've never told you that. He begged me to go with him, he wanted to see Nagasaki. What happens -- destruction. I thought he was drunk, or something, so I said that of course I'd go with him. It was crazy-he just said he'd had enough of New York, he was never going back to England-somewhere that has once been ruined, he said. That was what he wanted."
New York, 1979
Henry pulled the sleeve down to his wrist again, his hands steady and solid. Richard began to sob, and Henry said, "Stop bawling. Christ, I can't deal with this-it was nothing, nothing at all to do with you." He gathered up the untidy cards, shaping them into a pack and absently shuffling them, ready for another game. He watched Richard crying. His nose was running, but with that single hand pressed to his face he looked for all the world like a tragic saint.
"I can't stand it," Richard choked. "I can't bear it."
"Perhaps I can't," said Henry tightly. "Perhaps it is I who cannot-bear it. You've borne a lot, you know. Maybe you can bear a great deal more. I know you suffer with the very best, but it hasn't killed you, in a way-you almost do enjoy it a little." He laid the cards on the floor beside the sofa, and fixed his eyes on the rising sun outside the windows. Neither of them had slept.
"You conceived this idea that you were ill-starred," he said, without looking at Richard. "Because you were buggered at Gilling Castle. I'm sorry you were. I've often wondered what you would have been like if you weren't so inexorably fascinated by your own life."
He waited for Richard to stop crying, because then he could fuck him, and kiss his swollen eyelids, and perhaps they would sleep before it was quite light.
New York, 1976
They walked around the gallery again, not talking very much. Richard liked to look at his own paintings.
"That's my old studio," he said. "It was at Shene."
Not wishing to be inquisitive, Edward refrained from pouncing on the 'was', even if it were intended as a cue. It might have been-he was finding Richard singularly difficult to read.
The painted studio was sunk in the night, greyed out, but with its angles visible, as if some moon were shining from outside the picture's limits. Edward thought that Richard had been terribly lucky to have a studio like this, even if he had it no longer. There were faint bright glimmers at its windows, an unsettling flare of light, as though a brush had accidentally caught against the canvas and dashed the wrong sort of paint upon it.
"Actually, it burned down," Richard said, in an empty voice. "And England's used up, now. That's why I've come here, though it's dirty and I rather detest lots of it. I had to leave, though. Richard to England-drop dead. Even if it's not absolutely true." His tone had grown tender. "I miss the early mornings," he said. "The light's best then."
Oxford, 1997
"The summer we spent at MacDowell," Edward said. "That's my best memory."
"I don't remember that-when was it?"
"Oh, it must have been 1980-yes. I drove us all the way up to New Hampshire-Richard just sat there with this bottle of wine, saying poetry. When we went through the towns and there were lights, I kept looking across at his face. When we were held up at the lights he'd lift the bottle to my mouth-it was such good wine. I'd forgotten that, actually, till now. I've no idea how he got it, probably a present. The best Bordeaux I ever drank." Edward's hands were folding his napkin into a tidy stack. "And so my soul, more earnestly released-it's as if we'd just done the drive last night. I can hear him saying it."
New Hampshire, 1980
Edward sat cross-legged on the floor of Richard's studio. He never seemed to spend any time in his own. Richard did not object to his presence.
He watched Richard's easel, more than Richard himself. When the paint stopped going on so quickly, with those strong tiny strokes, Richard would be almost ready to halt for a while.
So it was no surprise to Edward, when Richard said, "I'll get the lunch," laying down his brush and lightly rubbing at his hands, which did no good. His skin was marked with a blue pigment, impossibly bright. Richard opened the door and stepped out.
The sun began to filter in through the doorway, and Edward watched as it licked across the scattered canvases. He thought perhaps he would never see it again without the echo of Richard's voice, "I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink." He'd hardened, right there in the dark car, his skin sore with desire because he wanted to touch Richard so very badly, Richard who sat there marooned in wine and poems, his hair occasionally glinting brightly in the headlights of oncoming cars.
Oxford, 1997
"When I've finished with the Ruskin, I shall come out to New York."
"Will they let you go?"
"Oh, they will. I intend to be very persuasive. I'm a good teacher, you know, but it makes me bored. I'd like to see some of those old haunts."
"I've never heard New York described like that.," Edward said. "But I suppose that's what it is, to you."
MacDowell, 1980
Richard didn't come back with the basket of lunch, so Edward pushed his feet into his sandals and went out into the full light. Richard was crouched on the ground, so that for an instant Edward thought, is he weeping? He was small as a martyr. But in his hand there lay a little pallid snail.
"Henry makes me feel like this," he said, his palm cupping it, pale as the shell. He rose to his feet, and Edward saw that there was dirt on his shorts and on his bare knees.
"Turnbull and Asser, seasoned with a little New Hampshire earth," Edward said. He touched the snail with one fingertip, then put his hands on Richard's shoulders and kissed his hair.
Oxford, 1997
Edward caught the eye of their waitress. He wanted her to bring the bill as quickly as she could, and he tried to put a little urgency into his gaze itself. After this, he was driving to Heathrow-it was time to get on the road, because it was icy today, and he'd need to take it slowly.
He sought some words of valediction, but none presented themselves. At last he said, hearing the shyness in his own voice, as if to prove that he was still the same man whom Richard had accosted twenty-one years ago in a New York gallery, "Nothing was ever proved against your father, of course."
Hal said, "I know."
Notes
The timeline of this story mostly fits the historical events, in terms of births and deaths. The differences include: no second marriages, and the deaths of Anne and Mary being two years earlier than they should be.
All quotations are from the poems of John Donne, as is the title, which comes from 'Witchcraft by a Picture': I fixe mine eye on thine, and there / Pitty my picture burning in thine eye.
Summer Fields is an English preparatory school, from which many boys go on to Eton. Henry did not wish his son to follow him to Ampleforth.
and are locations and geographical features in England.
Ampleforth is a Roman Catholic public school in England.
Gilling Castle used to be Ampleforth's preparatory school.
MacDowell is the oldest artists' colony in the US.
The Ruskin is Oxford University's Fine Art Department.
Turnbull & Asser is a Jermyn Street clothier.