by Janet Todd
They walked holding hands along the sand below chalk cliffs as the waning moon rose and the light faded, the darkness engulfing everything except the back of his hand from the light of his pipe. When it went out he struck his tinder and it glowed on his face as well. Then they held hands again.
There was dust or sand sticking to some hairs on his neck. She brushed it off and he looked away.
They tried once more. He spent too soon again and against his breeches. He was angry. She repeated that it didn’t matter, but that was wrong. ‘It does matter,’ he snapped and got up. He left her dazed. He’d given her such amazing pleasure and she was grateful, for no one had bothered before or known how. Poor Gregory.
In Grantchester meadows she’d felt the grass prickling her back through her muslin dress. Gregory had been entirely rapt. He’d once been stung by a wasp, which made a welt on his fair skin with long trails of red like tiny threads travelling from it up his arm. It didn’t concern him. He hardly noticed.
But Robert was attuned to prickles and weather and everything around. Somewhere a dog barked or an insect hummed unmelodiously in a nearby tree: it was enough to disturb him.
He cared not one whit about privacy. What space he occupied was his entirely. He took his clothes off and threw them aside, not with the haste of desire but indicating their casual unimportance. Yet they were important, very much so. A dark-blue jacket, the whitest shirts and fine thin breeches.
He was never naked with his hairy chest, those densely covered shoulders. But there was movement under the skin as if his flesh formed the surface of an ocean of boiling underwater currents.
On her own body she noticed where the veins would soon show below the skin, when Caroline’s hands would become hers, a parchment telling an unavoidable true story. And legs? She’d never seen, or didn’t remember ever seeing, Caroline’s no doubt portly legs. Hers were thin, unshapely. But whatever Robert touched – and he touched her parts so gently, so amorously – that part of her became valuable and beautiful.
Her hand was too cold, he said. And in any case he didn’t like being caressed – there.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said once more.
He looked coldly at her. Surely he could make this a comedy. Was there not a voice of the Member? Why did he not turn his humour on himself?
She’d heard that some men wanted a woman on top or to come from behind (she blushed to think it), not in the wrong place of course, not that. But rather like animals, cats and dogs and so on, not facing each other. She thought she’d mention the idea delicately to Robert. But was she ever delicate enough? He was uninterested. He saw no problem, he liked holding her breasts, sucking them, kneading them.
It was generous. Her breasts were her best feature. He once said he would like to have had them himself, but he didn’t do the Voice of the Breasts either. What would they have said?
They both smiled. So that was that.
Then they had a quarrel. She forgot the reason, it was unimportant. It was a terrible unexpected thing. It must be their last, she told herself. She could prevent it in future. She would see that she was always swept up in the listening and the laughter, never provoking. She, the insolent daughter, would be the submissive lover.
Yet it was after this quarrel, so devastating she thought it would end her life, that they made successful, rapturous love, achieving their pleasure together in a rush of tears and clasping. He nuzzled into her breasts and was happy.
She was always entranced. There was no one like him. She felt him all through her body from her neck to the pit of her stomach and down her legs. He was so far beyond thin Gregory Lloyd, and even wordy Gilbert, that he was altogether another kind of being. To be noticed for what she said or did, even what she was, to be wanted – yes loved perhaps – was really too much. It was to crave beyond her deserts, and yet she did crave and hope. She was what Gregory called her in their final days together, when she was leaving him and would not say why: bewitched.
‘Ann,’ he said, ‘Ann.’ And it thrilled her that he said her common name. He made it sound like Annabella.
Without having arrived there with words, with none of the amazing devotion Caroline had reported from Gilbert, she knew well enough she was burning up with desire, bodily perhaps but even more – what? – spiritual was wrong, mental was wrong. She only knew she’d caught something febrile. She welcomed it like a baby tiger into the cosy lodgings of her mind.
Was it Love? Was this the thing she’d been reading about in the circulating library books since she was a sulky schoolgirl in the Putney attic, the thing Caroline boasted about when she bored her daughter to death with her stories of Gilbert – there they were, these equally spectral parents, intruding again – the thing she, Ann, had used in her tales to wrap up the true plot of torture and horror, a passion taken for granted as if it were the easiest thing in the world to feel, quite distinct from those fearful states of terror, grief, disgust, obsession? Was it?
She wouldn’t answer. What she knew above all on her pulse was that she had increasingly to see Robert James or be nothing. This new velocity of life took her breath away as thoroughly as any childhood asthma.
Emotions were bodily like material words: he showed it in himself. Desire was substantial, it was no flimsy thing that could be filled by thought, or destroyed by some small physical failure. The body is just a vehicle for the soul. So he said. This was not the thin religious concept she’d heard enough of in Fen Ditton, so she told herself. What then was it?
Energy coursed through everything, and especially through his body. ‘Listen,’ he said one day in Islington fields, holding her arm and twisting her round, ‘listen to the rustling, the whispering.’
She thought he meant little creatures, maybe mice or voles, but it wasn’t that at all. It was something quite other that she was supposed to hear. It was the world resonating in him and round him. You could if you listened hear an echo of all the past.
Everything was more intense in his shadow, the water more glittering, the sun more violent, the waves on the sea more purely blue-green, the river, the ripples on a puddle more sparkling. A glass of water caught the sun, a weed in the crack between bricks in the courtyard: both sprang to life when he looked at them and she looked at him.
He was a single sharpened shard cutting through a spongy surface. Then the surface shimmered.
He kept drinking tea so strong it exploded in the mouth like gunpowder, enough to keep a weaker man awake for days. She couldn’t drink a tenth of it. She admired him even for that. Though when he slept soundly but jerkily, filled with tea, wine, a little brandy and laudanum, he snored to bring the rafters down. Even if she’d been a good sleeper she couldn’t have slept against such uproar.
When he stayed the night in her rooms – having just occasionally achieved that ecstasy which was as nervous as sexual and rarely mutual – he remained noisily in the bed. While she, sometimes weak with desire, silently got up to spend most of the dark hours on her narrow couch by her desk.
It was convenient for early-morning work. She could reach her paper and pens from where she lay and make dungeons and lascivious brigands in the raw early-morning light.
Outside, the night-soil man trundled by with his cart of filth. He loved an audience, a discipleship. Men were drawn to him. Grave, gentle Richard Perry, who almost worshipped him; huge Frederick Curran, who’d known him at Trinity in Dublin, both being pleased and furious to be among the first Catholic students there; Suffolk-born John Taylor, who’d interrupted law practice to paint watercolours of the English coast, most delicate when the artist was in liquor – his face mellow then but with harsh undertows increasing as he sobered; John Humphries, who, like Richard Perry, digested books for journals, a man’s man who avoided women’s eyes; boyish, raw-faced Henry Davies, quiet, earnest, with a little of Gregory’s yearning look but more intensity. All of them and others who came and went, hanging on his words.
They took her in as a disciple – n
o, like an appendage. She was grateful. It was warm in this manly fog of alcohol, sweat, tobacco and talk in the Castle and Falcon or the Swan Tavern or The Queen’s Arms in Bird-in-hand Court in Cheapside. Other women occasionally hung on sleeves but they were never part of the inner circle and Ann didn’t see them as separate beings. Of the men she should have liked Richard Perry most, for he was more gentle to women than the others and he adored Robert, but there was something disturbing there, some core best not deranged – she heard he’d lost a young wife, perhaps that had marked him. No, if she had to do with anyone beyond Robert James, it would be with big Irish Fred Curran. Once she fancied Gilbert might have looked like him. He gave his flesh to Gilbert and Gilbert responded with his eclectic words.
Robert had so much promise – far beyond what he’d already done as a young man. Everyone said so. He had fire in his brain, he would make a difference in the world. They were lesser beside him. He draped his personality over the company like a bright bespangled cloak.
He didn’t care for politics, he’d said so often. That was not it; he cared so deeply the quotidian was neither here nor there. His ‘politics’ were capacious. Anarchists and radicals were old-fashioned. They wanted simple things: money, fairness, equality. They had had no vision, no Vision. They were Protestants, secular Protestants, Separated people. They lacked the grandeur of the universal, of transcendent thought. It took a lapsed Catholic to see that. Urbi et orbi, after all.
Back in that quotidian world Richard Perry and Frederick Curran both suspected Robert was being watched. Fred Curran said he knew he’d been followed – and Robert was a bigger fish. Activities on the Continent? Were they not both Irishmen, obnoxious to English authority, any authority?
Robert James denied it, but he was suspicious in strange ways none the less. Sometimes he sensed men lurking in corners of taverns or in dark hallways.
Ann registered Fred Curran’s words. She asked Robert how he’d got into trouble with ‘authorities’ and where it happened. He looked at her for some moments, then away, and let out a deep breath.
‘Who said that?’
‘Richard Perry.’
‘Richard Perry knows nothing.’
Politics didn’t matter. Only poetry of philosophy, philosophy of poetry – purity of language which is its beauty. He’d tried to say something of this in Attila, showing brute power grappling with words, but he’d failed. He knew that. The form was wrong.
‘See, see,’ he said, holding her hand and letting his thoughts ripple through his body and into hers. ‘Do you see? The metaphysics of beauty develops the concept of the beautiful in its pure form. It’s abstracted from particulars, through the unity of the elements which appear – always appear – where the Beautiful truly exists. Of course, of course, they’re so intrinsically contained in the ideal unity of the idea that each demands the others. Only words contain them. See?’
She had no impulse to say Not quite – certainly not while his burning hand held hers.
‘This is an abstraction insofar as it can only be realised by unaccommodating Truth. A pure concept as such can have no objective existence. But – and this is important – it’s not to be seen as a mere form created by thought; it’s the foundation and content of its truth. This principle is always right. It must be.’ His eyes shone. ‘In a new kind of poetry that isn’t just poetry, not just writing, much more than that, I can capture this very thing, this principle, this purity.’
Then, with Richard Perry and Fred Curran in a room in Gray’s Inn which Curran treated like his own, though Ann never knew whether he actually lived there, Robert simply continued his talk, as if different time and place and audience had no need to interrupt the monologue. ‘Of course there’s an essential difference between the concept and its realisation, and the former is, if you use the language of logical thought, assigned to the category of abstraction. I discredit this point of view, I erase it.’ He lit a cigar – one of several given to him by generous John Taylor – waved it around in his hand, then thumped the table with the other. ‘It’s obvious that the concept itself is truly present as it’s realised, as a creative and moving soul and the soul lives in its potent words.’
They would go on listening, sometimes talking, sometimes just agreeing, long into the night.
And she, Ann St Clair, server of gothic pap, would be among them.
5
So they trundled on for another year. Genius, Robert said, was a dream of the old century made into fulfilled desire in the nineteenth. Ann was now less thrilled by this idea than she’d been initially.
Robert never said he was a genius – he didn’t have to. Wasn’t a genius the master of antithesis, and wasn’t everything he said antithetical? So there you were then.
In which one of his voices would he have said this if he’d said it? she wondered later. Would it have been the Fantasist or perhaps the Poet? The Fantasist who wove together self and the external or the Poet who pulled twine from himself? Was it the Poet who had that throbbing need to go back and back into his past thoughts and lay them on chairs and tables and beds?
He was beyond fantasy and poetry, though he had to use their terms. His words, words as counters of the self, they were the Thing. ‘Not that the words are the things, you understand, Ann, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Imagine that words could be physical, not words as we know them, concrete words. These words are truth, a violent truth, because they shatter the obvious, the superficial, that is how they are concrete, heavy and dangerous.’ He would make poetry that was equivalent to philosophy and beyond. Not philosophical poetry – not doggerel for superficially enquiring minds. No, poetry – always qualified by ‘if it could be called poetry’ – that was the same as philosophy, that expressed the comedy and sublimity of the world.
He would march through ventriloquism, not just the individual voice of an intricate conqueror but the language of everyday man, to reach a something beyond, an absolute.
Of course he could do voices, for, to go further than every man, he had to be a sort of Everyman, he said. Richard Perry said, Yes, yes, Robert had a marvellous plastic ability. Henry Davies added quickly, for he’d rehearsed the lines, ‘We all have bits of others in us. You show us and make us more ourselves.’
There was plenty of such talk. But Ann saw no equivalent work, nothing since the early wonderful fragment composed so many years before. Only writing would be a permanent record of his present imaginings and make Robert’s mark on the world. Was she affecting the great work, just a little, by her presence?
Or was Robert beginning to fear and she’d caught his fear? The task he’d set himself, or had been chosen for, was so great. Should he compromise, try for less?
He’d said something of the sort not specifically to her but rather to all of them and only once, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. They scorned the idea. He could do whatever he wanted. He’d shown that already.
Of course he could. So he abandoned his act as tortured sacrifice to emerge triumphant once more. Richard Perry patted his shoulder.
Always he went to the universal. Yet at home alone, even so early in their time together, even as she almost worshipped, to her the ideas seemed brilliant fragments. After all, his marvellous tragedy had been unfinished, unacted. He made a virtue of it, for great work could not be closed. But still, it remained true, it was partial, and he knew it. She’d always lived with scraps and splinters of truth and she suspected that these were all there were. That was no problem for her; under all her froward ways she’d always been humble.
They were sitting drinking and eating in the Queen’s Arms in Cheapside one winter’s day, not caring who would pay. Curran had brought along a young woman called Lydia, his cousin’s friend. She was making sheep’s eyes at John Taylor, who’d been introduced as a lapsed lawyer as well as an artist, a man in whom she sensed possibilities from his smart address near St Sepulchre, mentioned in passing. Otherwise she was bored. The men had drunk a lot, the women less.
‘The inner and the outer come together in a visionary world,’ said Robert. ‘The art describing it is never overblown, always austere by definition.’
John Taylor laughed, flecks of froth were sticking to his beard. Lydia ignored it and smiled at him. ‘We do not deal in mere ephemera,’ he said, ‘not we.’ He waved his hand. ‘We are free, uncircumscribed.’
‘We none of us want to be regulated,’ said Richard Perry.
‘Well we are. We are mastered twice over,’ said Frederick Curran, who was the drunkest of them and felt the melancholy of his state. He seemed unsure of the purpose of his bulky person.
‘We are,’ said Robert.
‘Oh no, not this Irish bragging again, always the grandest victim,’ said John Taylor. He hiccuped.
They all laughed but Ann saw that Robert and Fred Curran were a little hurt. To her mind there was something uncomfortable, discomfiting about John Taylor. He admired Robert – they all did of course – but not as unconditionally as Richard Perry and Fred Curran.
Robert tapped his forehead and addressed it, his eyes swivelling to the ceiling. ‘The head is austere.’ He loved the word tonight and elongated its syllables.
‘Exuberance can be austere,’ said Curran airily, having difficulty with the ‘x’.
She might have thought it rubbish, but not here.
‘Anything but the whimsical, the sentimental,’ said Robert. ‘When thought is correct there’s no difference between fact and fiction, dreams and experiments, science and poetry. Look there’ – and he pointed to his brow – ‘it contains a universal grammar, words are its servants. A single form is near infinite, a single word, all in there.’
‘A single drink,’ laughed John Taylor, who’d mastered his hiccups and now raised his tankard for someone to pour in more liquid. Dark blue paint stained his knuckles.
