by Janet Todd
This was not the first time. When it happened, to counter it she found her voice becoming deeper, slower – and consequently more irritating. When he could hide his vexation no longer, he would mutter; then, if they were in her rooms, go out, slamming the door. The women behind curtains in the other apartments would listen for more. She was sure of it.
Once in general talk – they were in the lodgings he shared with Richard Perry – at a moment when Robert was not listening, she’d said something on the edge of critical about his temperament; Richard Perry watched her in silence as the talk flowed on. Then, when the night was deep and conversation no longer general, he took her aside. ‘He is beyond wonderful,’ he said, earnestly engaging her eyes. ‘You may not understand it enough. Not because of his tragedy, one that could never be finished. But because of what he is. I owe him my life. He saved me. Let me tell you some time. You are close to him? I would like you to know.’
So, when he was eating again in her apartment, he seized his moment. Robert left to see Frederick Curran about some matter in Cork, and Richard Perry waited behind. By now she’d learned some listening skills though she dreaded a long tale. She settled herself in her chair. She liked Richard Perry more now than at first, mainly because he so much liked Robert: he buttressed her feelings – and simplified them.
‘It was some years ago. I was a bookseller then, not a reviewer. It was before my business went bankrupt. No matter, I have a different existence now. I had to journey to Hamburg in the dead of winter. I took passage with a trader going up the Channel into the sea. It lost its way among shelves of ice on a sandbank off Cuxhaven. It sank. Three of us including the master managed to pull ourselves on to this sandbank while the others were drowned in the icy water. I think some tried to make for the shore instead. It was just after Christmas, before the twelfth night, a night I always remember for it was when my wife died.’
She was about to comment when he prevented her by adding, ‘It was sad but we had not been married long, not become used to each other.’ He wanted no interruptions.
‘The three of us, the master, a sailor and I, had managed to pull towards us some stores that floated past amidst the pieces of ice, a small cask of wine and some biscuits and cockles. I had a few nuts which I’d put about me when I knew the boat was in trouble. On this fare during nearly a fortnight we all managed to live. But the sailor had been longer in the sea than I. He was always weak – I think he sustained some splinters from the ship’s side when the ice hit it. At the end of two weeks he died. To tell truth I resented the nibbles of biscuit he took, for I knew it was only postponing the inevitable. He died without my noticing. No rattle or convulsion, just one moment breathing, the next gone. The master seemed to give up after that though he’d been the bigger and the stronger man. The cold was so bad you couldn’t tell whether either of them died for lack of food or froze to death. Anyway the master followed his man in a matter of hours. We’d huddled together for warmth. Now my mates were dead.
‘In the day I crawled round on the icy sandbank eating a few cockles but never managing to lean into the water to catch a fish. I am not a country or coastal man. My bookselling business had been in Holborn, the skills you need there are quite different. I was a boy in Lichfield and have lived always among houses. At night I thought my blood would freeze if I slept long, and it would have done. So I stretched out the body of the sailor still bearing warmth, then lay on top of him and pulled the master over me. You might think they were decomposing – you turn up your nose – but they were not, the cold was preserving them, they were quite intact. I smelled nothing. But of course my own nose was no longer sensitive. I had to rub it often against the cold.
‘The body on the top grew colder than the one beneath, so the next night I changed them round, do you see? Putting the sailor on the top and the master underneath. And so I went on, while eating up the rest of the biscuits and the cockles – I hate them still, it’s an unnatural food for men. And then. Such a fright I had. I’d known the sandbank was icy but thought the ice was only on top, and that the whole was fast tied on to roots in the earth and close enough to the shore to be seen one day. But then to my horror it began to move. I had for some days detected a little warmth in the daytime air, a little less absolute cold. Now I saw that my sandbank was no such thing; it was just a piece of ice and I and the bodies of the sailor and the master were drifting out to sea. I had prayed, I suppose – yes, often, but perhaps not enough – and counted my sins. I was never a pious man though I’ve always gone along with something. I don’t think my feeble prayers were answered, but I don’t know. I have not Robert James’s assurance on this. I was spied by a boat. It was from Schleswig-Holstein.
‘They hauled me in, made me warm, fed me small bits of mush, for I could take little – I had not eaten at all for some days. They listened to my story – or rather understood the gestures I made, coupled with some little German I’d learned for my business. I could see horror in their faces. Indeed I mirrored it then, but I cannot say I felt much while on the sandbank. Fear I felt in plenty but not horror. Those dead men gave me their warmth. I would have done the same for them. I was sorry I didn’t say farewell to either as we sailed away. The bodies of the men who’d saved my life were pushed off the ice and made to sink. The pilot was superstitious I think for, though without clerical authority, he mumbled some words as they sank which sounded like a bit of the burial service. It’s strange they have no worry about sending bodies to the fish but need to mumble something while they do.’
At the end of his story he gave a chuckle from the relief of telling, then continued.
‘On land in Esbjerg, for my sailors were going there, half-starved still, my mind almost dead, senses quite bewildered, I met Robert James and stumbled out my story. Where the boatmen had fed me little pieces of food, he fed me special delicacies and, more important, he fed me just enough of hope and life to make my mind start to live, to work again, not grow fat but at least begin to stir. He treated my mind as if it were his own, do you see? cared for it, nurtured it.’
Ann was silent, thinking of Robert and his kindness to strangers, to men. Why not always to her? Was her story not good enough?
Watching her unusual silence, Richard Perry feared she might be squeamish. He wished he’d not said so much, but either he told all his story or none of it.
She roused herself. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she said.
The sympathy unleashed more. ‘Do you know he, Robert James, had tears in his eyes when he saw me. He took new lodgings to accommodate me and cared for me like a child, a beloved brother.’
She still felt some resistance.
‘But he didn’t actually save you,’ she said, ‘that was the boat and the German sailors.’
‘No,’ Richard Perry said, ‘no, you are wrong there. It was Robert James. I would have been mad without him. And what good is life without a mind? He made me human again. He is a wonderful man. There can be no one like him.’
In the end resistance dissolved and she swallowed the words gratefully.
‘He stayed with me in those cramped rooms in a bleak coastal town day after day, week after week. Just for me.’
‘That was kindly done.’
‘Yes. And to make me comfortable he said it was right for him, said it suited him too, for he was in hiding from authorities, in Denmark, maybe Copenhagen, no, rather a nearby island, he didn’t say clearly where he came from, probably many places. None liked England, too swaggering in her power. Maybe he helped her enemies. It would have been the English authorities after him. Imperial arms stretch far, he always said. He wasn’t even using his right name. He told me it but I was not to speak it then; I was to call him Peter O’Neil instead.’ Richard Perry smiled to encourage response. ‘But in fact I had little occasion to use this subterfuge. I could hardly speak to anyone for many weeks and I never went out. Neither did Robert. He sent a man to buy what we needed. I think he may have said these things for my sake.’
&n
bsp; He was back in that time of secret intimacy, two men snugly shut up together. ‘He sent out for good things for me – to tempt me to eat,’ he repeated.
She was struck by the strange naming. Peter O’Neil.
‘He uses his own name now?’
‘Oh yes, the danger is passed. And he has moved from politics. They are of this ordinary world, and he is beyond it. He always was, but he thought once that some preparatory change might be political. That was why he began his great work to show what energy might do in the world. He knows now he was wrong.’
Yet he retained strong views of that despised world. He loathed the mad King George and his flabby son. Ann remarked that Napoleon was no longer the taut young hero but had cradled his paunch long before being toppled from his throne.
Robert scoffed. ‘So many false images the English make of someone they couldn’t conquer without the help of half the world.’
‘But they, we, have conquered him all the same. He was just a show in Southampton. He walked up and down on his prison ship for everyone to see before they sailed to St Helena. How will he cope on an island without courtiers and audience?’
‘I could do it. I could have been a hermit,’ said Robert.
‘You could have been a monk,’ Ann countered. ‘I think you fancy it.’
His face creased into a tender smile, ‘Well, a cardinal,’ he said and held out his hand with his fingers splayed for kissing. She knelt down and put her lips to his flesh. ‘You look like a cardinal.’
‘Indeed, yes,’ he said, ‘my other self. To be called sua eminenza and have jewels on my plump white hand. Delicious.’
She was standing again. ‘And decadent.’ She thought of her cardinal villains gazing at her sobbing girls.
‘You mean Catholic, my little Puritan.’
‘Well yes. Papist.’
He listened to her – sometimes. It was not perhaps in the way Caroline had described Gilbert doing: listening in rapture, touching hair and skin reverently, looking into eyes whose colour could not be told. She banished this memory with her old childhood scorn, for she’d known that Caroline’s eyes were dirty green. How despicable to repeat these words to a child! How irritating that she remembered them now in so different a world.
When with a glass of wine in hand Robert James gave her his attention, she told him what she’d not had time to tell even her cousin Sarah Hardisty, or which perhaps it had been best to repress, for Sarah was conventional regarding the church. But Robert was encouraging.
‘I lost the little faith I’d found in the community through a fall when no power outside saved me from drowning.’
He studied her intently, his wonderful grey eyes on her alone, then he exclaimed, ‘Bravo. It’s a good step taken when you see no one’s at your elbow. My mother told me that everyone had a special guardian angel by their bed. I called mine Percy. He was mine alone, though perhaps he’d had other little boys before me, I didn’t think of that.’
Had he ever suggested marriage? She wondered this when she remembered the early time, when she went back and back to it as to a heaven glimpsed but on whose threshold she’d somehow missed her footing. She thought he had, but as a throwaway remark to please. But it would have been sincere – for after all he didn’t try to please.
Much later, very much later, she asked him if he’d said something of the sort and could say it again.
He could not, he could not repeat himself, he was no lapdog to sit in the same position day after day. He was a passionate man.
7
Through all the turbulent months she felt Sarah’s presence, warm, stable and comforting.
‘I have really met someone special,’ she said once towards the beginning after they’d taken tea with Sarah’s friend Mrs Lymington, and Ann had waited till this bubbly laughing companion left them together alone in the drawing room.
What a thing to say, how bald a statement! Any moment now, she would answer herself, How delightful! as Robert said when he became the Holborn Lawyer, How exquisite, Madam!
‘You – you, but I thought you were so happy alone,’ laughed Sarah pressing together her chubby hands. ‘I always knew it. It is the giver of the pea-green gown?’
‘No, Sarah, I didn’t say I was. I happened to be alone. I was and still am content.’
‘Oh, more than that. You are so independent. What you said about going to live with those people in Fen Ditton. Wasn’t that a remarkable thing for a young woman to do? We thought you a marvel, Charles and I, when we heard of it – I didn’t tell him quite all, cousin Ann! To leave home alone. I would never dare. But now, how delightful!’
‘I’m still independent, Sarah.’
A fine thing, independence. Sarah saw housekeeping money. The rest trivial. She wouldn’t trade it for an umbrella held over her head in the last weeks of pregnancy when she had to prop up her sagging belly with her two hands.
To Ann it was money for warm clothes and snug lodgings. It was the going out and in without asking leave, the familiarity with London streets, the travelling alone in stages or hackney carriages, and the knowledge that the right money must be proffered to avoid being cheated.
There were things she could not do. She couldn’t carry her heavy box when filled with books – but many a fine gentleman couldn’t do that either. She couldn’t sit alone with a tankard of beer in a tavern and become invisible. She couldn’t watch the world go by as a man could; couldn’t overhear, move, travel inconspicuously. Her skirts were always vulnerable. A man might protect her, but he couldn’t give her freedom when she left his arm. There were always limits to independence for a woman.
‘He is different,’ she added.
‘Well, tell me about him.’
This was so kind, for she knew Sarah wanted to be elsewhere hearing little Charlotte tell her lessons. Yet she couldn’t respond.
Was he handsome?
She had no idea. Bald as a coot, someone might have remarked, and he did sometimes dart like a coot, but no coot had his brooding stillness when he chose.
No, he couldn’t be called handsome by anyone, certainly not a maker of heroes with dark eyes, slim hips and tousled curls. Yet there was something about even that fair head, certainly about that face, that you stared at again once you caught sight of it. By now she had it firm inside her skull, burnt on to the back of her eyes: she saw it quite clearly in dark or light.
Then there was the genius thing, the talent, call it what you will. How explain that?
She thought to repeat a line or two of Attila: ‘A curse may weigh heavier than lead but is light as feathered quill on the sun’s . . .’ – no, it would not do. Perhaps some of the words spoken to her? But nothing emerged in a credible or creditable way. He said he couldn’t bear the tyranny of other people’s thoughts, of ready-made creeds. She luxuriated in his thoughts but couldn’t, it seemed, repeat his words and make them significant.
Difficult even to mention his sense of the numinous. ‘Do you believe in God?’ she said at last, noticing that Sarah couldn’t bear much longer the conflicting pulls of needy cousin and importunate child.
The tension dissolved. ‘What a thing to ask,’ laughed Sarah. ‘Of course, everyone does.’
Then up she went to Charlotte, who was calling from the stairs while the nursemaid tried to restrain her.
Ann waited. She really wanted to explain. It was so important that Robert see Sarah, that these two people on whom she set such store should be acquainted and impressed with each other.
‘He is lots of people,’ she said lamely to Sarah when after too long she returned, surprised to see Ann still sitting where she’d left her in the drawing room. ‘He can imitate – no, he can become other people. It’s truly very funny.’
Sarah looked doubtful. She let out a deep sigh; her lips puckered. ‘Oh, cousin Ann, do be careful. You are cleverer than me in so many ways, but you know I think of you in this sort of matter a bit – forgive me, dearest – well, a bit like a child.’ She blushed,
then went on before Ann could speak. ‘Bring him here, let us meet him. Charles will like to have another man at table. They can talk of manly things. I make a good venison pie. You know that.’
Yes, as any reader of a life could tell, it was a foolish idea. She’d known how sullen he became in commonplace company. He couldn’t possibly have appreciated how much this ordinary couple in ordinary Phoenix Street meant to her. Why in the world had she risked putting the author of Attila on show?
All were dispirited. She threw out subjects, urged Charles and Robert to speak by imploring looks. But it was no good. Robert, so lively with her and in the tavern, was morose and uncommunicative. His mood spread over the table and dulled the blue-and-white china and dainty glasses. She wished he’d do his funny voices, but he sat silent and unresponsive.
It was as well. Would Charles and Sarah have found the Billingsgate butcher amusing or the fashionable Mayfair dame or the Irish priest in Brighton or the unctuous Holborn lawyer?
And indeed, if she were honest, she knew he’d begun to tire himself with his invented people. He spoke more and more only of his ideas, in his own voice. And these ideas were not for such company.
As soon as minimal politeness allowed, Charles excused himself, he had to see someone urgently. It was probably true – he was no expert liar – and he could have done nothing if he’d stayed. But Ann was hurt.
The evening dragged on until Sarah declared she could no longer bear the needs of the twins pressing on her. Ann heard no cries, but she supposed only a mother was attuned to faint sounds.
After that dinner, etched on her mind, she remembered Sarah saying nothing for a while. Then, much later, while they were drinking tea near the Haymarket or in her lodgings (the cups were not Robert’s bone-china ones, and there were almost imperceptible cracks so they couldn’t have been at Sarah’s place – her cousin was proud of her perfect china and never let the children handle it), she had said somewhere – it didn’t matter where – she’d said, ‘I cannot say anything of your Mr James. He didn’t like me, I’m sorry – for your sake.’
