A Fatal Likeness Read Free

pace or two towards it and finds himself face-to-face with the father of the man he has come to see. Or, at least, with his likeness. Framed in over-ornate gold, the painting hangs above a pier-table which along with the books holds an arrangement of wax lilies under a glass dome, and a candle in a silver chamberstick. The candle is lit, even in broad day, and someone had carefully pasted dark blue paper spangled with stars to the back of the book-cases. The overall effect is unsettlingly shrine-like, and far too queasily mawkish for Charles, but he’s drawn to the portrait none the less. He’s seen it before somewhere—no doubt reproduced as a frontispiece—but he looks at it now with a more professional interest. From a purely technical perspective the painting has little to recommend it, but it is the subject, not the style, that will make this one of the century’s most recognised portraits. The dark jacket and the white shirt open at the neck; the unruly curls and the intense gaze; the pen held poised in the long slender fingers. When this man died he was an exile and a pariah, ‘an outcast from human society,’ denounced for his beliefs and reviled for his conduct, his works condemned and largely unread. And yet by the end of the century this image will have become an icon of all it means to be ‘Romantic’—all it means to be a poet, and a genius, and an unacknowledged legislator of the world. An appropriate quotation that, because the man this portrait shows—as the inscription confirms—is none other than
    PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
    4th August 1792–8th July 1822
    He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
    Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
    And that unrest which men miscall delight,
    Can touch him not and torture not again.
    Charles moves closer, struck by the dates. The poet was not quite thirty then, when he died, and this likeness must have been produced some time before that, but there is all the same an oddly child-like quality to the faint, almost girlish flush, and the pink bud of a mouth. And if he was not quite thirty in 1822, that means (as Charles quickly calculates) his son must be about that age now.
    “They all do that.”
    Charles swings round, too absorbed in the portrait to have heard the encroaching steps.
    “I’m sorry?”
    The man before him is stout, rather paunchy, and a good three inches shorter than Charles. He has watery hangdog eyes, a beaky nose, and a sandy nondescript beard that is in need of a good trim. Nondescript rather sums him up, in fact, since there is nothing remotely unusual or distinctive about him. So much so, indeed, that Charles initially assumes he must be some or other household retainer—a secretary or steward—but as the man starts talking it becomes obvious how wrong that assumption was.
    “The painting. Everyone who comes here looks at it like that. Copy, of course. Real one’s in the mater’s room. But I’m told this ain’t bad. Wouldn’t know myself. Never did have an eye for art.”
    He talks in that clipped, tight way so redolent of a public school education, and for all that he looks nearer fifty than thirty there is still something of the overgrown schoolboy about him. Part of it, no doubt, is down to his rather gawky awkwardness—something that most men in his position outgrow long before their majority, and which suggests to Charles that he was not always destined to hold the title his father never lived to inherit, and the money that title brought with it has come to him late, after years of stringency. Which may, now Charles thinks about it, go a long way to explaining the character of this house. Meanwhile, the man in question has wandered over to a table in the centre of the room, and begun to fiddle absent-mindedly with a scale model of a sailing-boat. Charles stares at it, and at him, for a brief dumbfounded moment, for Shelley drowned aboard just such a vessel as that, and in all probability it was the unstable and extravagant