by Janet Todd
‘Of course, a sip, ship,’ said Curran lifting the jug unsteadily towards him. ‘Drink is ritual.’
Lydia gave up trying to attract John Taylor – maybe he was nothing but an artist after all – and was pulling at Curran’s arm. He jerked it away. ‘Do you know that my mother has been sewing a fantastic garment to be worn on judgement day?’
‘That is a serious business,’ said Robert. ‘I am the tailor of the garment.’
‘Oh you,’ shouted John Taylor, ‘me rather. You are just an old alchemist.’
‘I am,’ said Robert, ‘and one day you will see gold.’
‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Richard Perry. There was no mockery in words that might, in another mouth, have seemed scoffing.
Ann coughed. Richard Perry glanced at her, then turned away.
‘To the unknowing everything is hieroglyphics,’ said Robert and raised a hand in blessing.
Lydia took no pains to stifle a snort. Having failed to move Curran or charm John Taylor, she’d gone past boredom. She was irritated and wanted to leave this gang of childish men.
Robert looked at her pretty pinched face. ‘We have distorted bodies because we have distorted words,’ he said. ‘We can free the one with the other. No need to be enigmatic, secretive; it’s all open, clear as light and day, bright as the sun.’
He addressed Lydia directly. ‘You are just there, suspended between life and death, past and future, here now. And this “now” is no more important than the other “nows”.’
‘What’s he saying?’ said Lydia in a hoarse whisper to Frederick Curran. He ignored her.
‘It is always the present,’ said John Humphries, who was content in his companionable silence but liked to ease where he could, especially when women spoke when they should be silent. He relished the chiming bass voices of men even in their cups, but winced at the higher register of females – it was like cats mewing. Henry Davies, so eager now to please it almost took his speech away, looked round trying to focus his eyes; he started to say something to his blurred companions, then thought better of it. Nobody heeded him.
It was John Taylor’s turn to have the drinker’s gloom as he waved his blue-stained hand, raised his head and closed his eyes.
‘You are only a painter, you are naturally dark,’ said Robert.
‘I am lugubrious melancholy,’ shouted John Taylor, his eyes still firmly shut. ‘I am not dark. I shine in the night.’
‘Then you are drunk,’ said Robert.
John Taylor collapsed into a bearded sack.
‘Don’t brood on it,’ said Robert James, ‘Everyone is drunk some time and a good number here – except of course Miss St Clair and Miss Um . . .’
Lydia hissed ‘Minogue, Miss Minogue,’ but no one heard or paid attention.
John Taylor inflated again. ‘True, true I am that. I am magnificent. My skies and seas are a marvel. My skies are divine.’
Frederick Curran reached across Richard Perry to pat John Taylor on the knee. ‘They are pure,’ he said, and the ‘p’ sent spit on to Richard Perry’s waistcoat.
‘Divine, spiritual,’ said young Henry Davies, content at last that he could expel his remark.
Richard Perry ignored them both. ‘Purity matters,’ he said, looking at Robert.
‘It does indeed. Purity is boundless, it is love and truth.’
John Taylor deflated again and was suddenly on the edge of sleep. This time his eyes closed involuntarily. Henry Davies, his raw face shining with excitement, nudged him without effect.
‘Sleep the inscrutable,’ said Robert gently.
‘We are the saints,’ said Frederick Curran as if pricked to speak.
‘They are the Puritans,’ said Ann.
‘Oh the pedantry of Protestantism,’ said Robert, waving his tankard at the others but looking at her. As he looked he smiled with a soberness only for her.
She felt warm, included in all this rich nonsense. Robert James was becoming her own Gilbert, not exclusive to be sure, but more publicly admired. That she could be admired by a man admired by others was so very sweet.
‘Images are power,’ said Robert and sent his boy, an Irish lad with white eyelashes, for more drink and more of the beef suet pudding they’d been consuming earlier. It was not his dinner to command, but no matter. Who was the host, who the guests, who the entertainer?
‘Bless you,’ said Robert, again raising his hand and waving it at the group. ‘Bless you all. We all have grace.’ He paused a moment, then looked round again. ‘That moment of my conception. Imagine how the clouds moved, the earth convulsed. My poor father and mother. They were hardly material to it.’
‘I paint,’ said John Taylor, suddenly waking up, ‘I revive the dead.’ His eyes closed again.
‘Life is a mnemonic,’ said Robert, ‘a grand gesture pointing at something else. I extend myself into it but I am not enclosed by it.’ He leaned over the side of his chair, then swung back. ‘I become like you.’
Curran was growing less drunk, more aware of Lydia scratching on his arm. ‘Should we go to the theatre?’ he said abruptly.
‘To that pitiful place? It’s for fools,’ said Robert. ‘They might as well wear Grecian masks for all the feeling they show. There’s been nobody since Garrick.’
‘Did you ever see him?’ asked John Humphries.
‘Of course not. That’s why he was so great. You didn’t need to.’
Lydia felt her moment of escape disappearing. She looked from one to the other and tried not to catch Ann’s eye, assuming a woman who kept such company would be no help.
‘We usher in our own theatre,’ said Robert.
‘Such innocence. To think of theatre speaking in the head as you do,’ said Frederick Curran. There were tears in his eyes as he looked at Robert. At least she thought so.
‘Innocence doesn’t speak, it is infans,’ said Robert. ‘It is impervious, pointless, almost unborn.’
Suddenly Robert sang out in a resonant baritone a line from the Latin hymn to the martyred innocents. He stopped abruptly.
‘I think,’ said Richard Perry, ‘that we who are alive are a bestiary. We live in a zoo.’
‘We want ecstasy but can’t reach it or hold it if we could,’ said Fred Curran mournfully, his slurring tensely controlled.
‘Ecstasy is blind,’ said Robert, ‘we want clarity rather. That’s the point of art, it blazes and clarifies, not intoxicates.’
Fred Curran looked abashed. ‘We are all emissaries of something else,’ he muttered.
The candles were spluttering. They had not been replaced. When more drink and food arrived it was nearly dark. They set to consuming it, continuing to speak to the group, to each other, or to themselves, it did not seem to matter. Polyphony or just cohesive noise?
She said things she didn’t remember because she mainly remembered the words of others. How deep the melancholy had been!
6
Sometimes he seemed short of money, perhaps when his allowance had run out. She was never quite sure where this came from. His family – the maligned Catholic progenitors in County Cork, or a Dublin relative? He borrowed freely from his friends. They were never grudging. She remembered saying so.
He gave generously, indiscriminately, to beggars. Then his face went moist as if he identified thoroughly with them or with his own act. He gave too much to the wrong ones. Wasn’t this more generous, more profound than her calculating way, thinking of deserts?
Imagine, he said, that our words, the truths of philosophy, could form sentences that had physical substance. Marble words. He’d said ‘concrete’ before. Was it the same meaning if not the same substance? How about it, Ann?
He held her waist and swung her round her tiny room, dislodging her papers on her writing desk and scattering them on the floor. They’d been placed ready for the printer’s devil. She hoped he wouldn’t pick them up and read. When he didn’t, she was in a tremble he would tread on them. She really couldn’t write that stuff again. B
esides, all her quills were blunted and would spit ink.
‘It’s not the words that are the things, don’t you see?’
No, of course she didn’t. Did anyone else know what it meant, really meant?
She’d told him now that she lived in splinters. A shame of course, but she could live with shame. He’d no such need and certainly no practice.
She mentioned Caroline and Gilbert – delicately, she hoped – and he didn’t probe. She wanted to repeat more of Gilbert’s words because, though not at all to the point, they’d lodged in her child’s brain. Perhaps he might explain or modify them and the emotion they’d begun to raise.
He said he’d severed himself from his past. Yet it repeatedly rumbled into view, the boyhood, the potatoes, the priest, the garish altar, the raucous faith, the easy politics of resentment. Ireland was an English idea, he said to Fred Curran, who agreed.
With the genteel he was sullen, hating social chitchat. But he grew so effusive over wine, good or bad, and strong ale taken in company with men he liked. They spoke excitedly or listened with simple exclamations. Such joy then.
‘Gilbert,’ Caroline smiled dreamily, ‘used to say that I thought him so strong because he was big and expansive. But really he was – he often said as much – weaker than I, far weaker. I was the strong one and he needed my strength. My intuition was better than his reason, more right, even my judgement. Sometimes he was confused and didn’t know something till he was with me. Then he knew.’
Ann would be picking her nose by now and staring at the ceiling or hanging her head elaborately. But she was unseen.
‘Only then did everything grow clear. I had strength from my own mind, you see. Then he would say so very lovingly and over and over again, “What I do know is what I desire and need and love. I want you more than anyone in this wide world. No one else will do.” That’s love, girl.’
It was boring for a child of eight to be told this once, let alone twice or thrice. Yet these over-used words must have been sinking in even as she was angry that Caroline hadn’t ordered a new frock to be made for her to go to school and look like Other Girls.
Gilbert was no help at all. She decided not to try his words on Robert James.
Yet something not to do with Gilbert, something fantastical that Caroline knew, perhaps remembering some leftover tract from the radical ’90s, might connect with Robert. It was a woman’s right to initiate just as well as men’s.
Had Ann imbibed the idea with mother’s milk? But no, it was a ridiculous image. Caroline had employed a wet nurse.
Not mother’s milk, then. But she felt sure that Caroline had at one point said that women need not wait for men and that her forwardness did no harm with Gilbert.
It wasn’t easy. Like discovering a new continent, not knowing on what plants to place your feet as you pushed into the undergrowth without a light.
There were no conduct books to tell you the words. Their advice all of a piece: hide your feelings, fool the man who’d likely enough fooled you. But Ann was no young inexperienced girl. She should have the right words to handle this. For, with all the love she felt sure he felt and knew she felt, he made no further move to bring them together, not exactly marriage, though perhaps . . . but just together.
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ she said, her heart pounding with such daring.
Then simply, with his grey eyes fixed so kindly on her, expressing infinite intimacy, he’d replied, ‘Then you should not.’
What other man would have been so very right?
Her desire, the craving, continued. Out in the world, in the street or in a shop or market, Ann had that thrill in the pit of her belly when a figure with Robert’s outline came closer, turned to a surge of joy if it was indeed he.
Was desire too consuming? Were human beings meant to go at this speed? Was she? Was this aching elation a kind of sickness? She refused to answer. She shut off part of her mind. The rest of it hurtled onwards, together with all her body.
More of that stimulation, that titillation that he’d once so generously given to meet her physical desire, might have helped. Though now, in the solitariness it occasionally caused, it could turn to something akin to pain, made almost shameful when she saw through her pleasure his tender but unmoved face.
More sleep would have made a difference. But she’d always been a poor sleeper. Even as a small child when Martha did her best to combat wakefulness with her single lullaby of ‘Baby Bunting’. Caroline had a clock – an heirloom, she said, though it didn’t look so old – that chimed and whirred through the night. Caroline wound it herself, not leaving it to a servant. Ann asked Martha to try to stop it but Martha would not go against the mistress – she respected Caroline because she sat on cushions and was idle, like a lady should be.
‘You won’t sleep,’ said Caroline to her, ‘you fear dreaming. It’s a sign of a bad conscience in a child.’ She never believed this: the day was simply too short for thoughts. You had to use the night.
He decided one day they should eat strange foods, strange to her – the kind her mother’s cooks, the Hannahs and Marys who never stayed for long, would tell her to throw to Jonah’s pigs. Caroline had liked only English food. Wistfully Signor Moretti had described the Roman confluence of garlic and oregano and olive oil when Ann had sat in his stuffy rooms trying to master irregular Italian verbs, but he’d not cooked for her. She’d mentioned the mélange to the second Mary, who laughed and laughed, then went on wrapping her suet pudding. When she’d had to feed herself after the years of root vegetables in Fen Ditton, she’d bought a lot of chicken and cured meat.
Robert saw food as expression, a language with which to engage the body.
So he threw out her white bread and sent his pale boy to bring back dark rye instead. She’d thought it peasant fare but no, not this tasty rich bread, eaten with onions cut in rings and salted herring.
She didn’t enjoy it. She disliked the lingering smell in her lodgings, too. Was Robert’s taste superior to hers? Of course.
That night after dinner he was the Fashionable Lady from out of town, from Tunbridge Wells, who wasn’t sure this was quite the smartest place to be. And she laughed and laughed, for he was so good at being other people.
‘You are so marvellous at this, your characters are so believable, why don’t you write a novel?’
He looked at her in bewilderment.
Did any of it come from memory? she wondered. Did he mock acquaintaces or were his imaginary people born of fragments in his capacious head? He recollected his family differently at different times. His father had been a bully, he said, and he the son had walked out on him shouting, ‘I want nothing from you.’ His simple quiet mother had been saintly; she adored him. That was what he said. But he also said that his dull mother had pulled down his clever father, who would have been – what he would have been was unclear. Instead, he’d remained a country doctor and who would not drink to excess with such a fate and such a dismal wife? And she? She in her dullness and despair turned more and more to the priest and her love for her only son.
She had some delicate pots, Chinese, French and Meissen, inherited from her own mother. He’d learned to hold and value them and know about their making: about candling and dipping, crystal glaze, gum arabic and vitrification. He found Ann’s cups too thick-rimmed and coarse for his use, so he bought her new fragile bone-china ones from Spode. He pointed out where the hazy colour shadowed from green into grey. It was at that point, the numinous, that things happened, he said. ‘It’s like the sky and sea, John Taylor’s painting, what he tries to capture, you don’t know where one begins and the other ends.’
As she looked at these fragile vessels, she felt his eyes and fingers on them as if she’d been what he caressed, as open and as empty to be filled.
It was fondling. He fondled her. She responded. It was her fault that she, only occasionally now but with such pain, grasped after more.
With Robert the commonplace was insight. Al
ways the senses must be intense as if candle lights were stars. If he drank apple juice from a coloured glass, it became the gods’ nectar.
He prized a gold Swiss watch. It had been an old priest’s – he didn’t explain why he prized it since he’d abandoned the beliefs of the giver. He loved to look at its unequal hands moving round the dial. He could sit on a sofa and stare for minutes on end at these hands on the watch’s face. She marvelled at the absorption.
Was it laudanum he took, alcohol, mercury? Or was it just a grace?
He knew he had a temper. In school in Cork he knocked down a boy who’d insulted him. He didn’t consider it unusual, either the arm that hit or the temper that propelled it. He was not a violent man, he said. He was simply tense with intellectual excitement. And volatile, he knew that. He either sang or was petulant.
Always he was one hop and a skip from outrage, but early on Ann thought she knew his dangers. The quicksand would appear before her and she should and could jump aside. So she believed.
They went on a walk in the country out beyond their usual paths in Islington fields but still close to town, not far enough away to lose all sight and smell of London. She was enjoying the fresher air, but he was morose; the muddy earth was dirtying his new blood-brown boots. He didn’t want them stained with paler soil.
The scene ahead was picturesque. He forbade use of this modish word – or rather he laughed at her when she used it. But it was true. It was like a detailed watercolour: a hawthorn in a foreground with a gentle blue-and-green slope behind, the grass blurring to set off the sharply delineated twigs for the focused eye.
‘For heaven’s sake, shall we go home?’ she said at last.
‘Yes, why not,’ he said. ‘It’s filthy here.’ He prodded a weed with his cane.
‘But lovely.’
‘If you are properly shod it might be but I’m not.’
‘I did tell you to wear something stouter.’
‘Can’t you ever leave me alone?’
‘We wanted to be together.’
She felt ridiculous tears rising to her eyes.
