“My . . . grandmother lives here with you?” Joel asked.
“Are you not listening, young man?” Cox-Phillips said sharply. “She died seven, eight years ago. How long has it been, Orville?”
“Mrs. Cunningham passed eight years ago, sir,” the valet said.
“Passed,” the old man said in some disgust. “She died. Caught a chill, developed a fever, and was dead within a week. I expected that she would leave what she had to you, but she left it to me instead.” He peered up at Joel and suddenly looked even more irritated. “Why the devil are you standing there, young man, forcing me to look up at you? Sit, sit.”
Joel seated himself on the edge of the sofa and drew a few deep breaths. “And my father?” he asked. “The Italian artist?”
“Artist.” The old man snorted contemptuously. “In his own imagination only. He disappeared in a hurry. I daresay my niece told him her glad tidings and he took fright and flight in quick succession, never to be heard from again, and good riddance. I daresay he is dead too. I cannot say I care one way or the other.”
“You are my great-uncle, then,” Joel said rather obviously. His ears were still buzzing—so, it seemed, was the whole of his head. His grandmother had been Mrs. Cunningham. That had presumably been his mother’s name too.
“You are doing well enough for yourself, or so I hear,” the old man said. “A fool and his money can always be parted when someone offers to immortalize him in paint, of course. I suppose you flatter those who pay you well enough and make them appear twenty years younger than they are and many times better-looking than they have ever been.”
“I study my subjects with great care and sketch them in numerous ways before I paint them,” Joel told him. “I aim for accuracy of looks and a revelation of character in the finished portrait. It is a long, painstaking process and one I do with integrity.”
“Touched you on the raw, have I?” the old man asked.
“You have,” Joel admitted. He was not going to deny the fact. It seemed incredible to him that after twenty-seven years he had just been told who he was by his own great-uncle, yet the conversation had moved on to his art as though such a sudden, earth-shattering revelation could be of no importance whatsoever to him. Why had he been summoned here?
It was as though Cox-Phillips read his thought. “You expected, I suppose, that I was bringing you here to have you paint me,” he said.
“I did, sir,” Joel said, though his great-uncle had not brought him here, had he? The hired carriage was presumably still waiting outside, the bill growing higher with every passing minute. “I certainly did not expect that I was coming here to discover my identity. My grandmother never came to see me.”
“Oh, she contrived numerous times to see you,” the old man said with a dismissive wave of his free hand. “I told her she was a fool every time she went. She was always upset for days afterward.”
But she had never made herself known to him. She upset herself by seeing him from afar, but never considered how a child who grew up knowing nothing about his birth or his family might feel. The loneliness, the sense of abandonment, the feeling of worthlessness, the total absence of roots . . . But it was not the time to think about any of that. It was never time. Such thoughts only spiraled downward into darkness. One had to deal with reality in one’s everyday life and find daily blessings for which to be thankful.
But if he could have had just one hug from his grandmother . . . It would not have been enough, though, would it? It was better that she had never revealed herself. Perhaps.
“I do not want myself painted,” his great-uncle told him, “especially if you could not be persuaded to flatter me. There would not be enough time anyway if you do all that studying and sketching before you even lay paint to canvas. In a week or two’s time I expect to be dead.”
The valet made an involuntary motion with one hand, a wordless protest on his lips.
“You need not worry, Orville,” his master said. “You will be well enough set up for the rest of your life, as you know, and you will not have me to bother about any longer. I am dying, young man. My physician is a fool. All physicians are in my experience, but this time he has got it right. I am not quite at my last gasp, but I am not far off it, and if you think I am looking for sympathy, you are a fool too. When you are eighty-five and every last morsel of your health has deserted you and almost everyone you have ever known is dead, then it is time to be done with the whole business.”
“I am sorry you are unwell, sir,” Joel said.
“What difference does it make to you?” Cox-Phillips asked, and then he alarmed both Joel and his valet by cackling with laughter and then coughing until it seemed doubtful he was going to be able to draw his next breath. He did, however. “Actually, young man, it will make a great deal of difference to you.”
Joel gazed at him with a frown. He was not a likable old fellow and perhaps never had been, but he was, it seemed, the only surviving link with Joel’s mother and grandmother, whose name he bore. This man was his great-uncle. It was too dizzying a truth to be digested fully. Yet it seemed there was very little time in which to digest it at all. He was about to lose the only living relative he would probably ever know, yet he had found him just minutes ago.
“I have four surviving relatives,” the old man said, “of whom you are one even though you are a bastard. The other three never showed the slightest interest in me until I turned eighty. A man of eighty with no wife or children or grandchildren or brothers and sisters of his own becomes a person of great interest to those clinging to the outer branches of his family tree. Such people begin to wonder what will happen to his belongings and his money when he dies, which is almost bound to be soon or sooner. And with interest comes a deep fondness for the old relative and an anxious concern for his health. It is all balderdash, of course. They can go hang for all I care.”