The empress of ice cream

Louise

He wa.nts to have me painted. ^Now that your figure has returned, he says casually. ‘And before you are pregnant again.’

‘My figure hasn’t returned. I am like an elephant.’

‘My dearest Pubs,’ he murmurs. ‘I like you like that.’

From the reference to my figure I understand that it is not my face alone that he wants painted. ‘You wish me unclothed?’

‘Why not?’ He looks at me sideways. ‘I was thinking of Sir Peter Lely. A most discreet gentleman, and an excellent painter. Besides, hardly anyone will see it.’

Lor the kind’s pleasure alone. But the king’s pleasure, I am coming to realise, lies partly in what is his alone, and pardy in imagining how others will see it. ‘In France it is considered very lewd indeed to be painted without clothes.’

‘I know what an extraordinary favour you would be granting me. I would endeavour to find some extraordinary way to make it up to you.’

A title? ‘Imagine the shame if my family heard of it.’

My protests are exciting him. He has something new to chase, a new maidenhead to take.

‘For actresses or orange girls,’ I add, ‘it is nothing, of course. But would a king ask a queen to do such a thing? I think not.’

‘Unless he loved her very much,’ he murmurs.

We both know how this dance will end. I cannot afford to resist him for too long. Not while he has Nell Gwynne.

In the end we compromise on a silk chemise, unbuttoned. It covers nothing, but it means that I am not, strictly speaking, naked. I recline on a divan, spread open to Lely’s gaze as he pecks and dabs and flourishes at a canvas I cannot see.

If I drop my eyes, even for a moment, he murmurs, ‘Look at me.’ My gaze, you see, must meet that of the men who view the painting. How strange to think that when I look at Peter, at his dark impersonal frown of concentration, I am looking direcdy into the eyes of every man who will stare at me. There could be dozens, hundreds who will stand before that painting, some even after I am dead.

And every single one will look at me and think how shameless I am, that I do this for the king’s private gratification.

Not realising that it is them, not me, who do that.

Charles comes to chat. He was worried that I might be bored, he says. He strolls across to look at the painting. Peter stands aside, as patient as the king is impatient. Occasionally he involves his patron in some detail of design or technique. Here. This is culled impnsto. Do you prefer the^reen, here, or this aquumurine?

There is something about all this that excites Charles: the two men, fully clothed, glancing at my naked body, discussing me. Almost as if I were a bone that Charles might drop from his mouth, for another dog to sniff at.

I remember Colbert’s words. A most unfettered debauch.

Lely suggests some fruit, on the left, to balance the composition. ‘Not oranges,’ I say firmly. >

He raises his eyebrows, a little. '

‘Oranges make me think of orange .girls.’ ’

He smiles at that. It was him, of course, who painted Nell.

‘I know,’ Charles says. ‘Ice cream! There should be ices in the picture.’

‘They would melt before Peter had painted them,’ I say.

‘They could be replenished,’ the artist says. He taps the canvas, thoughtfully, with the blunt end of the brush, to show the king where they might go. ‘Just here, at the side, they could be replenished without disturbing the mise en scene. It would be interesting, actually. People would wonder how it had been done. A moment

captured. The illusion of instantaneity, in the midst of frozen time. It is the longest speech that I have heard him make in five days of painting.

Another woman, I refiect dryly, might be a little offended that he is so much mpre excited by the technical challenge of painting an ice cream than by her naked figure.

‘Indeed,’ Charles breathes. ‘A platter of ices. Will you paint them just as they are thawing.^’

Just as they start to, sir. The ice softening. Like a fruit ripening in the bowl, caught at the very moment before it rots. Anticipating the inevitable corruption of the flesh.’ He glances at me, and I realise that it is not only the technical challenge that interests him. There is symbolism here too, of a kind.

And so they send for ices. Hurry. Tell him it is for the kin^. At Lely’s studio. Carlo enters with the ice chest. I cannot move, cannot warn him. I am fixed and immobile on my divan, like Daphne rooted to the spot as she turns into a bush.

‘Ah, Demirco. Put them over there.’

He has stopped dead, staring.

‘Come on, man. Anyone would think you’d never seen a naked woman before.’

He recovers himself quicldy. ‘Never one as beautiful as this, sir.’

‘Yes.’ Charles strokes his moustache, pleased. ‘She is quite lovely, isn’t she?’

He glances at Peter, then at me. Peter has stopped, his brush raised from the canvas, startled. They both stare.

A blush - deep and crimson, like the turning of a vine leaf in autumn - has travelled up my pale skin, all the way from my exposed legs to the tips of my ears.

Nell, at court. ‘Oh, Madam Carwell. I hear you were recendy painted in nothing but a silk chemise.’

‘Indeed, Nell. Sir Peter’s portrait is very fine.’

‘Perhaps we will hang next to each other in the king’s gallery

room. So that his gentlemen friends may compare us, side by side. As a whore, of course, I should consider that a great honour, to be compared with a grand lady such as yourself.’

I do not reply.

‘Tell me, have you seen Charles the Third this morning?’ she enquires.

I sense some kind of trap here, but even so I blunder into it. ‘Why do you call him Charles the Third? He is Charles the Second.’

She ticks them off her fingers. ‘My first Charles was Charles Hart, my second was Charles Sackville, so Charles Stuart is my Charles the third. You have only had two Charlies then, I take it?’

There is nothing to be done when she is like this but to remain calm. It is like having a child who refuses to be sent to bed, whose only way of talking with the grown-ups is to shock. I say gently, ‘Before I met the king, Nell, I had not had any other men.’

‘Oh well,’ she says with a shake of her head. ‘There’s still time. He never minds, you know. Barbara Villiers took four at one sitting, and the king only said that what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose.’

A simple, obvious insult, like so many that she makes. But it sets me thinking.

The crown jewels are on display in the Tower of London, where any man can view them for a penny. They were almost stolen a few years ago, but Charles will .not lock them away, out of sight. Why not?

An actress. A woman who plays many parts. A king who is forced to do the same.

A whore. A woman who has had many lovers, and few of them for love. A king who chooses to do the same.

Playing me off against Nell Gwynne - could it be, in some way, deliberate? Is it all part of the same trait?

There is in Charles, I am coming to realise, i deep, deep cynicism - almost a darkness. To his natural scepticism has been added

the effects of his experiences in exile: wandering from court to court, welcomed in case he might prove useful, tolerated only until shifting political considerations made his hosts wary of letting him

Nell and I haye this in common, I realise with a start, both with each other and with Charles himself: we have known what it is to be penniless, powerless, and cold.

Is that why he keeps men like Lord Rochester around him does he find in their bitter, mocking sarcasm an echo of what lies within his own mind?

And when he says that he and I are alike - is this what he means? Will he only truly be happy when I have given him the satisfaction of proving him right?

Does he need me to show him that I can stoop as low as he?

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