“Mon ami, if you offered me a painting in lieu of payment, I should not accept it, because a painting has no value to me,” Nico pointed out. “They have value to you. No?”
“Well, yes, but that’s just things I like. Not—not artistic taste.”
“What is taste except things you like? Why do you not put your pictures on your walls?”
Titus looked positively panicked by the change of direction. “Uh, because…”
“Mmm?”
The oars plashed. A lascar on a cargo ship let out a stream of words that, despite the distance and their unknown language, scorched the air.
“Because it’s putting myself forward,” Titus said at last. “Just as learning to paint would be. It’s announcing,I shall do what I want. That’s not— I have not been encouraged to do that.”
He had the look of a man for whom something had just come into focus. Nico clamped his lips shut against things he very much wanted to say, and waited.
“But I could,” Titus went on slowly. “It is nobody else’s affair what I put on my walls, is it?”
“If they don’t like it, they may look at other walls.”
“Quite. And why should I not learn to paint? I daresay some people might find that self-indulgent in a grown man—”
“Who would care? And why let yourself be ruled by what others might say?”
“Don’t you care what people say?”
“Rarely,” Nico said. “I lack stature already; I cannot afford to let others make me smaller.”
“I suppose I have done that,” Titus said. “I don’t like arguments; I don’t do them well. I always feel in the wrong, and then one does make oneself smaller, so as not to offend, but itnever stops the argument, does it? It doesn’t matter how little space one takes up, because it’s always too much, and so you give more and more ground till you’ve barely enough left to stand on.”
Nico’s breath caught. He wanted to ask exactly who Titus was thinking about, and then he wanted their address for a quiet conversation.
“There is no reason at all I shouldn’t learn to paint,” Titus went on, picking his way. “It wouldn’t harm anyone, and it is—itissomething I would very much like to do. It wouldn’t be selfish, and if it is silly nobody need care, and anyway I can spend my time as I please. I don’t have to justify that.”
“No. You do not.”
Titus exhaled long and hard, then flashed Nico a quick, rueful grin. “I daresay all that seems obvious to you. It’s easier to feel entitled to things with money. Or a title, I suppose, by definition.”
“Limitless effrontery helps too,” Nico assured him. Titus gave a startled yelp of laughter, and the boatman rowed them on.
Chapter Thirteen
Two days later, Titus sat at his writing desk. There was another letter from Henry, so he was contemplating his walls rather than open it.
He had feared the Thorpes might object to the removal of the old mistress’s paintings, largely her own work along with some uninspired watercolours of London vistas, but in fact Mrs. Thorpe had assisted in taking them down and removing boxes full of vases, china ornaments, and faded lace while she was at it. Perhaps Alma had got tired of dusting it all. In any case, Miss Whitecross’s multitude of things had gone, replaced so far by Titus’s few framed paintings, with plenty of space for the remainder of his collection once it was all framed in its turn.
“Collection” seemed a somewhat grand word for his motley assortment of oils, watercolours, and prints, portraits, landscapes, and still lifes: a selection of gifts or payments in lieu from the artists who had frequented his shop. All the same, their cumulative effect would, he thought, be rather pleasing. The oils were rich, the watercolours evocative, and the linessatisfying. It wasn’t a set of masterpieces, but he had no reason to feel apologetic about covering his walls in these works.
They wouldn’t be nearly enough for this house, though, and he was considering buying more. He knew plenty of artists whose works he liked, had some pieces in mind that he’d quietly longed for more sight of. And he had seen some things at the Royal Academy Exhibition…
He could actually buy paintings from the Royal Academy Exhibition. That realisation, along with the conversation after Greenwich, had brought the scale of his good fortune into sudden, stunning focus that had left him breathless, and given him a rush of determination to live up to it. Not to shrink away, or squeeze himself into other people’s ideas of what he should do, but instead to discover what felt right to him.
That meant he would explore the interest in art he had so often been told was self-indulgent. He had decided to start funding the constantly needy Indigent Artists’ Society, as a first step in sharing his good fortune. And he was going to learn to paint.
In that daring spirit he had contacted Gideon Marks, a painter he knew to be a respected teacher. Gideon had not told Titus he was too old to learn, or found the suggestion absurd for a grown man, or worried that his pupil might disgrace him. In fact, he’d seized the opportunity with both hands, and they were to begin at once. Titus was trying very hard to remember that he was learning for his own pleasure and edification, and he was not obliged to justify it to anyone.
Limitless effrontery, Nico had said. Titus would give a lot to have even limited effrontery. He was sure it would make life easier.
Henry had effrontery, or at least, he had never seemed embarrassed about how he behaved with Titus. And he certainly didn’t seem put off by Titus’s silence, because he kept writing. There were three unopened letters currently throbbing likebad teeth in Titus’s desk, as well as this latest one. Titus spent quite a lot of time telling himself that Henry could do nothing, wouldn’t dare make a scene, would surely give up and leave him alone soon, but his former lover was a continual source of unease all the same.