A Man of Genius

by Janet Todd

  Cousin Sarah.

  Over the last months, she’d rarely thought of her cousin; now she longed for her motherly plumpness, her kindly voice. If only she could be one of Sarah’s little brood and snuggle up to that comforting bosom. Yet she could not fix her cousin’s face and voice in her head, it was crowded with men no good for her: with Robert and Aksel Stamer and Gilbert.

  It must have been Gilbert who spoke of death, for Ann remembered how often Caroline had told her he knew all about life and death. But she hadn’t heard his accents apart from Caroline’s voice. It couldn’t be he.

  It was Robert then, thinking of mortality. Or was it just her own voice grown gruff?

  She was lying in a bed and whether she was becoming weaker or stronger she couldn’t tell. The maid had said she was getting well. But surely death had not yet packed his bags and walked off.

  ‘I think of death often: it gives me strength. With it I have a free mind, don’t you see? A free mind and a strong heart to think and feel, a firm hand to write and tell others of infinity. We are all moving to death.’ So said the voice.

  ‘Well, yes,’ ventured another, and this was surely hers but not quite hers here in this bed. More like her voice when she’d been one of the circle in William Bates’s house in Fen Ditton. Could the other be young Gregory speaking to her? No, not after all this time. ‘But surely we would kill ourselves if we thought it so admirable a goal.’

  The first voice looked contemptuous, for it was a voice with a voice’s body. ‘You cannot truncate the journey. Whatever we do we are on the road, we have to be. Death is plenitude. Death will come soon enough and we will yearn for it but never be ready.’

  The woman who was herself and not herself was now sipping coffee in a Holborn coffee shop; she’d put down her cup and thought it best to say only ‘Hmmm’ to Robert and Gilbert.

  ‘Death is the only perfection. It is the only primordial. It makes water and earth and space and time more vivid. We are mere clockwork swans on a glass sea. We stop when the mechanism tires.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said a young man who had materialised beside the voice, ‘the freedom of disintegrating, of being in nature, being in all things.’

  Ann would normally have said, How do you know, not having died? But instead she picked up her cup and looked towards Robert’s shadow. He absorbed her look and the young man’s views, then deflected them graciously.

  Now the words were coming thick and fast in bundles as if someone were throwing her life at her from a great height, so that the bundles exploded their contents round her when they reached their goal like the bulbs of Sardinian asphodel. But the contents were just fragments, words, images, nothing secure.

  ‘Absurd is a bird,’ sang out the young man whose features she couldn’t see.

  ‘Jesus Christ is metamorphosed,’ said Robert’s voice.

  ‘Fucking and frigging should be free, free as any other bodily function,’ said the young man.

  ‘Like childbirth that comes after,’ said the Ann in the coffee shop.

  Everyone turned to look at her. Robert was cross at the attention she received. ‘You want a mama, not a living man,’ he snapped. There was no menace in his words unless you looked at his eyes which came now yellowy, rheumily into focus.

  Ann slept and woke, then slept again. She sensed hours, perhaps days, going by.

  When she woke definitively she was a little refreshed, her voices gone.

  But her fever or simply exhaustion from all the past was still there wracking her. She couldn’t say how much was disease of the mind, how much the body, how much each feeding on the other. The eyes, tired and sore, felt like hers but they looked out on a body she now hardly recognised.

  She shuddered at her hands. They’d become thin and veined from travel and unaccustomed dryness, from a lack of lady’s gloves. They were like Caroline’s.

  She was glad there was no glass close by the bed or she would have been tempted to look at her face, and who knows whose reflection she might have seen? Or the mirror might have become a pool in shadow giving back nothing. She shuddered again. She’d been so out of her skin and mind these last weeks, so caught in a state or place between dream and real that she was reluctant to test memory or fear. She felt unsure of everything.

  Best keep inside and quiet until she knew who and exactly where and, above all, what she was.

  What she did know for sure was that she was alone. Aksel Stamer had really gone – he would not suddenly appear, stern and comforting.

  How long had she been sick, how long had he been away? The maid had said a few days, maybe three or four. Then others had followed.

  She struggled to raise herself and get out of the bed. There was fresh water in a bowl and she sprayed it over her face and neck and arms, too tired to do much more, then used the chamber pot. There were her clothes, the ones she’d bought with Aksel Stamer, only they were freshly laundered and ironed. With pauses she managed to dress herself in clumsy fashion, not all ties tied or buttons looped. The clothes now hung loosely on her.

  On the side table there was cold chicken and an egg, an odd combination, perhaps leftover of meals that had been kindly brought to her by someone expecting her to wake, then not touched, left to congeal and dry, one day, two days, more? Or perhaps the maid had brought this in while she was sleeping for the last time, having left gruel earlier and found it uneaten.

  Surely she could not eat anything, certainly not this incongruous collation. And yet, although no tempting smell rose from the chicken or the egg, she had a sense somewhere about her, not necessarily in her mouth, that she was ravenous and she rather thought she could dispose of anything at all.

  There was noise outside in the street, and it brought to mind the inn that Aksel Stamer had found for her, for them both, though this was not the room she’d first been in, she was sure. She contemplated it while swallowing every last morsel of quite tasteless chicken and egg. Chicken and egg. A laugh rumbled up from her belly but didn’t quite reach her mouth. Chicken and egg. She stood up, meaning to go to the window. Chicken and egg.

  Then with a rush, as though they’d been waiting in the next room and suddenly flung open the door into her head, back came Robert, the dreadful face and dripping body, and Caroline, the near corpse curtained in pink.

  She sat down abruptly and raised her hand to push them aside.

  She tried again to take stock.

  Beside her old hemp bag new clothes were laid out; they’d been near those she’d just put on but she’d not seen them at once. They included undergarments, fresh tan gloves and a bonnet with blue ribbons. There was also a set of toilet items, brush, comb and smelling salts in a light-brown leather case. No one except Aksel Stamer could have bought them for her. He must have put them there while she was with Caroline since by the time she returned to the inn he’d left. Why? How did he know what to buy a woman? He’d spoken of no wife, and he didn’t appear like a man who’d been married. Yet no bachelor would know so accurately what a woman needed.

  She was moved. Especially the undergarments. Martha had tried hard to keep her neat but the mistress had so many wants in the Putney house and she often went out with puckered stockings because they were the wrong length, her bodice ribbons knotted rather than properly tied.

  Beside these items lay the pouch, still full of money. She was in an honest house.

  There was no mention of the gifts in an open note which she now saw by the washstand. Aksel Stamer’s hand? She was uncertain for she was not familiar with it.

  The note told her that, when it was appropriate and when she wished to return to England, she should go to the Paris Sous-Préfecture Police Office near the Pont-Neuf. There she could pick up the passport in the name of Ann St Clair. It would have come from Marseilles where they’d landed from Sardinia. She knew they’d done nothing of the sort, nor been in quarantine there as would be implied; once again Aksel Stamer had worked some magic.

  So Ann St Clair she was again. Sign
ora James was as dead as Signor James.

  The passport should be signed by the British Ambassador and she could go to his office between eleven and one in a morning. The directions were precise, and she would follow them – she recalled the painful delay in the Alps when they lacked correct signatures; but that was in another life. Then she should return to the Police Office with the passport and go on to the Ministère des affaires étrangères in Rue du Bac. Ten francs from the pouch he’d left should be handed over at this stage. For the journey to the coast she should take the diligence: it was quite comfortable.

  He’d thought of everything; she’d only to follow the detailed instructions. He had not known she was so ill – he must have believed she was just weak and emotional when she leaned on him outside her mother’s house, dwelling on the past and imagining the future with Caroline. She wished he’d stayed. She missed him beyond anything.

  Still feeble and nervous, none the less she felt the strengthening effect of the food. She believed she could walk unaided and, by taking a cabriolet for part of the journey, get to the Marais. She’d come to see Caroline and must see her again now she was more prepared for the sight. She put the pouch of money into her pocket. She was ready to go out.

  An older more portly servant entered her bedchamber. What was Madame about? It was too soon to get up, to go beyond the inn. It was folly. Madame should be in bed another day or days. She would bring soup. On she clucked, standing squarely in the doorway.

  ‘No,’ said Ann, ‘no, my mother is dying, I must go.’

  A dying parent was compelling. There was no answer to it.

  The servant still looked disapproving but made no effort to argue further. Ann wondered fleetingly whether she was anxious that her patient return to pay. She had only her bundle and her new clothes but she purposefully glanced at them so that the woman would follow her direction and take them as some surety – if indeed that was the problem. Then she remembered that the young maidservant had said all had been paid for by her ‘brother’. How could it be when he’d not known she would be ill? Did he have some special credit here? Ann felt so unsure of everything that she was unable to judge whether this stout middle-aged person were the mistress of the house or just another maid. Dress, gestures, speech, nothing was giving up its usual meaning.

  She hesitated but the woman stood aside even as Ann tottered a little in her steps. She must be acting more normally than she felt. And, if this were the ordinary world, would Aksel Stamer perhaps come back into it?

  29

  Without having much idea of the time of day she managed to get down the stairs and make her way out into the street. She felt autumn in the air or it might simply have been the chilly temperature of this northern town after the sweltering travels they’d taken.

  She was weaker than she’d hoped and after a few paces she almost slipped on some buttery milk thrown out by a careless milkmaid. She returned to the inn and asked for help and instructions. She’d almost forgotten how to take charge of herself.

  Part of the way she used the conveyance, then walked with increasing steadiness towards Le Marais. She concentrated on bricks and pavement and on passers-by, hawkers, horses, manure, beggars, carriages, anything external to keep herself intact and upright. The vibrancy of everything almost overwhelmed her.

  Then she turned into quieter roads; the bustle subsided. By the time she reached Caroline’s street, she was alone except for an old man with a bundle of firewood on his back trudging slowly away from her, away from that house.

  When she arrived before the door, the building seemed to her more humble, more pitiful than it had appeared a few days or a week – who could tell her? – before. It was not poor exactly, not dilapidated, but it was greyer. A few geraniums would have brightened it, made it come alive as a house.

  There was nothing cheering on Caroline’s two floors or above. Indeed, now she looked again she realised that the green shutters were still closed and the curtains in the bedchamber drawn. They didn’t look pink from this angle, perhaps it was a lining that obscured the colour; they were thicker than she remembered, more definite in their exclusion of the daylight outside.

  She still didn’t know the time, the weak sun and shadows were telling her nothing. She didn’t even know what day it was. But the crowds in the main streets she’d passed through must indicate late morning or midday and a workaday world. Why not pull the iron ring or knock?

  She did neither at once. She stood anxious, just as when she’d first come here but with no Aksel Stamer to lean on. She’d hardly leaned on him on the journey, not even when her ankle and blisters had given her such pain. But yet he’d been there to catch a fall, had she been the kind of woman who collapsed. His subtle care had let her stay upright. Until they reached this door in Le Marais.

  She knocked. She waited. Nothing happened. Then she pulled the iron ring. This time she heard no answering clang within the house. Could the bell have been broken in so short a time? She knocked once more with greater force. After another pause she heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

  The harsh-faced maid opened the door and looked stonily at her. Again no greeting of the sort commonly given even to an importuning stranger or doorstep hawker.

  Ann hesitated, then blurted out, ‘My mother?’

  ‘She’s not here, Mademoiselle Ann. She’s gone to the mortuary, Saint-Denis.’

  Ann looked uncomprehending. The words meant nothing.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, why, Mademoiselle? Why? Because she is dead and that is where the dead go.’

  Ann leaned against the door frame with such suddenness that a splinter pierced through her dress and into her arm. She winced.

  A silence followed. The maid made no move to let her enter the house, even stand in the passageway. Nor did she speak further.

  ‘Dead,’ said Ann at last, fact or question she didn’t know.

  ‘She told you so, I think,’ said the servant unsmiling, ‘when you came once.’

  ‘But I have been ill.’

  ‘So I see.’

  Silence followed again. They stood at the door both staring into a distance, making no contact of eye or hand.

  In Venice the dead went in their own boats, floating out to their special island.

  At last, the woman spoke, ‘She left you . . .’ she paused, then turned and went down the passage into the gloomy interior.

  Ann roused herself, presuming she was to follow. Still she expected somehow to see Caroline, even the old repellent Caroline, for such a woman could not be dead, dying yes – that had been going on for years – but not dead. It was impossible. After all, she’d lived on through all Ann’s delays in Venice and her circuitous journey. To die now?

  They mounted the first stairs and entered the green-shuttered room. An oil lamp was burning in the gloom. It made the room seem full, giving a momentary illusion it was inhabited. The illusion came even more from a huge armchair covered in brown velvet, still squashed where a body had been. Coloured shawls were folded and placed over its arms. Caroline had not lost her liking for violent drapery.

  The chair had a looming presence. Ann hoped the servant wouldn’t ask her to sit down: she had a horror of sinking into this dreadful furniture.

  The maid left her standing while she crossed towards a small bureau in the corner of the room. She pulled a handle which clicked as a drawer opened. Then she lifted out a little silver box patterned with two stags. With a jolt, Ann remembered it from the Putney days. It had stood on the table beside Caroline with a book and a flower in a vase that Martha always put for her. Why as a child had she never risked those contaminating finger marks and disobeyed her mother to look inside, even when Caroline placed the locket within it?

  Perhaps it would contain the memory of her birth and childhood, or explain that sudden strange statement that she was not Caroline’s and Gilbert’s child. It must do.

  She rallied herself before her hand could take it. She knew it would cont
ain nothing of the sort.

  Only in her novels did such boxes hold secrets of birth and lineage. In real life they held rings, pendants, brooches, perhaps for other mothers a lock of a baby’s hair tied with shiny ribbon.

  Instead of giving the box into her hand, the maid put it on the little side table beside the great velvet armchair. The table was the one that had been in the bedchamber, moved now down here to be with its chair. With a crooked index finger the maid pointed at the box, then looked at Ann with eyes much shrewder, sadder, than she’d expected. ‘She left you that.’

  Trinkets, thought Ann. Cheap trinkets.

  She was ashamed of her bitterness, but it would well up.

  She still had the sense that Caroline was there, upstairs in bed waiting to hear what her unsatisfactory daughter would do. She thought of the Princess. Oh, Caroline. She didn’t know for whom she sighed. Chicken and egg, she thought suddenly and felt a terrible laugh welling up. She pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth.

  ‘I will take Madame’s clothes,’ the servant was saying. It was not a query, but Ann nodded. Clothes of the dead, if Caroline were dead, were dreadful things. She used them in her novels, when they rose up to speak of wicked deeds or refused to sink into the mire or lagoon or stay hidden in trunks and caves.

  The maid had turned again to the bureau. Ann thought she was being dismissed, instructed by this gesture to find her own way down the stairs along the corridor and out before seeing anything more substantial of her mother’s life. In fact the maid had gone back to open another drawer in the bureau. From it she took some folded paper.

  ‘This letter is for you. She write it before you come,’ she said in heavily accented English. ‘Then when you don’t come again, she write some more. With difficulty, Mademoiselle Ann. She was not then in her real mind.’

  She stopped and stared at the chair and the little side table next to it as if her mistress were still sitting there. It was on this table with its spindly legs then that Caroline had written. She had lain back in the chair, pulling herself up to write every sentence. Then the shrivelled arm and hand had finished off the note from her bed. Or more likely she’d dictated it. That claw-like hand could never write.