My Dear I Wanted to Tell You Read Free

he had been whisked into it. If someone were to look closely at the expression on the face of the young faun garlanded with vine leaves standing to the left of Bacchus in Sir Alfred’s famous painting Maenads at the Bacchanale , they might detect in it a badly concealed combination of desperate desire, cheerful delight and devious determination.
    ‘What are you painting next, sir?’ he asked, with bright, transparent disingenuousness.
    ‘ The Childhood of the Knights of the Round Table ,’ Sir Alfred said, amused.
    ‘Any of ’em look like me at all, sir?’ Riley said, putting on a noble expression, and turning a little towards the light.
    He almost wept with joy when Sir Alfred agreed that his face was just right for the young Sir Gawaine fighting his way through a thorn bush (representing the Green Knight he was to face in years to come), which would require another few weeks of his presence.
    Riley applied his mind to ways of making himself useful to Sir Alfred, his various pupils, and to Mrs Briggs. There were plenty: errands, tidying up, fetching, copying, sharpening, lining up, climbing to the upper shelves, which neither Sir Alfred nor Mrs Briggs could reach. Every day, modelling or not, he turned up after school ‘in case Sir Alfred needs anything, Mrs Briggs’ – and he always did: someone to run to the art suppliers, someone to take Messalina to run and play and leap about in the park, someone to clean up the studio without actually moving anything the way Mrs Briggs always did, someone to sit for an anonymous young shoulder or a foot, someone who didn’t mind being bossed, who loved being told things by an old man with many, many stories to tell, who was young and strong and delighted to learn how to prepare a canvas and had none of the vanities of an art student. After some months of this, Mrs Briggs, who liked everything in its place, pointed out that the position was unregulated, and the boy should be paid for his work. After a burglar stole Sir Alfred’s late mother’s jewellery, it was decided the boy should live in, as extra security. (Riley was aware of the irony.)
    Bethan and John were invited to tea in the kitchen by Mrs Briggs because, after all, it was not as if they were hiring a servant. Riley, only half aware that this was improper, dragged them upstairs to meet Sir Alfred, and to see his studio, and his paintings. John thought the paintings beautiful, and Sir Alfred very gentlemanly, and said cautiously: ‘As long as he’s going to school . . .’
    Sir Alfred said: ‘Of course, Mr Purefoy. He’s an intelligent lad.’
    Bethan said very little, and that night she cried because she knew she was outnumbered.
    From the beginning, Riley wrote down every word he heard that was unfamiliar to him. On Sundays, when he took his wages home, he would ask his parents what these new words meant. If they didn’t know, he would ask Miss Crage at school. If she didn’t know, he would go through the tall, feather-leaved volumes of Sir Alfred’s Encyclopedia Britannica . Or ask Mrs Briggs. Or Nadine, who came every Saturday morning for her drawing lesson. Or he would ask Nadine’s mum and dad, when she invited him back there – like that day when she dragged him to see the new statue of Peter Pan, which had appeared overnight in the shrubbery by the Serpentine, gleaming bronze among the heavy leaves, and afterwards they went to her house, and Sir James Barrie himself was there, drinking tea and laughing about the big secret and surprise of the statue, laughing such a wicked little laugh, and Riley had imitated it so well, and Sir James had said he wished he’d known Riley before because he would have modelled a Lost Boy on him, and Riley felt a momentary pang of unfaithfulness to Sir Alfred and Art, in favour of Sir James and Literature.
    But, best of all, he could ask Sir Alfred.
    ‘Come on, you little sponge,’ he would say. ‘I only wanted a boy to clean my brushes, and now I’ve got a