A Man of Genius

by Janet Todd

  ‘I am looking for lodgings,’ said Ann.

  ‘Of course, and you are back for good? Let me help you. Why not find something near us? And please stay here while you look.’

  The little crowded house almost spoke its welcome, but Ann could not trust her grave presence to its warmth, even if there’d been room, and surely there was no nook or cranny without its little body stuffed into it.

  Sarah saw her hesitate. ‘We can move a bed into Charlotte’s room. She will like an aunty to chat to at night.’

  Ann doubted it and could not imagine herself much company for a child, but she found the offer soothing.

  ‘No, Sarah, I will not impose like that. I am already looking at apartments that might suit.’

  ‘Then I will accompany you in your search. I can see where you would be most comfortable. I am good at finding out the possibilities of a room. Oh, I would enjoy it.’

  ‘No,’ said Ann again, ‘do not come with me. I will look for my own lodgings but, when I have found somewhere, please come and see it with me. I don’t know that I’m capable of judging what is comfortable.’

  ‘Dear Ann,’ said Sarah, and pressed her hand.

  Her lowness of spirits was so palpable it repelled some acquaintances. A few weeks after she arrived she met Mary Davies going to the booksellers. She stared at Ann complacently from her healthy plumpness. She was better dressed than Ann remembered; she understood why when Mary announced she’d moved her talents to John Harris, who appreciated them rather more than Mr Hughes had done. They talked a little of nothing in particular and made no plan to meet. Ann learned again the lesson of all returning travellers: that those who stay at home are little interested in what they did not see or choose to see. Even she perhaps, stationary in London, would not have wanted to hear of the huge sea wall, the cormorants, the Titian Assumption, the forsaken chapel, the dripping hanging body and the old, old woman. No, as she reviewed the past year, she was sure that she would not.

  She found rooms in Bloomsbury near the Judd Street inn where she was staying and not so far from Somers Town with Sarah and Charles and their brood, near enough to walk over for a dish of tea or share an afternoon dinner when she would not be in the way.

  It was wet and cold for the season and the building she’d chosen looked grimy. The smoke over the city was thicker than she remembered and it mingled threateningly with the low cloud to form a pall on the houses. Venice had been freezing or at the least very cold and damp much of the time, misty so that she could hardly see a gondola bobbing on the lagoon. She told herself to hold on to the bitter cold of a town that denied it was ever cold, the houses so beautiful, so palatial in the heat but chilly caverns in the long winter. She must try not to exaggerate the greenness of the past. Yet now it was Venice’s twinkling water and swooping seagulls in the azure sky she remembered most.

  In this prelude to the northern winter, it was hard to capture the dried-out rivers of Sardinia, the sweltering stones of Italy, the fragrant smell of pine, earth and salt. Images yes, but the full experience on her mind and body had gone with the sunshine.

  Anyway, there was something deathly about that intense pure sky, at least for a northerner such as she. It was too close to an infinity a mortal couldn’t share. Surely the grey covering and scudding clouds were more honest, more human in scale, nearer to the quotidian experience of everyone.

  Still, underneath the remembered blue sky and the experienced grey one, the body twisted in her mind and dangled through her thoughts. The dying mother had largely disappeared. Buried, she supposed, in a respectable grave with a Frenchwoman to mourn her. And the father who had shifted his shape, who still lived: it was impossible at once to destroy him. Through Gilbert’s ludicrous words and Aksel Stamer’s crazy possibility, wasn’t he still there?

  In the daytime memories and visions could on the whole be contained, even banished with determined effort, but they were not to be shifted in fitful sleep.

  It was early December by the time she moved fully into her new lodgings. They were satisfactory but not as fine as the old ones had been. The money from Aksel Stamer was almost gone and she must soon start making her own living. She couldn’t be sure of earning enough for anywhere too lavish.

  Cousin Charles helped with the move by organising the retrieval and delivery of her furniture from store near Holborn. Sarah came round, bringing some hothouse flowers that must have cost her trouble to find and afford – and some new teacups and saucers to welcome her in. Perhaps she knew how saturated with memory her thin Spode ones would be.

  Ann bit her lip to prevent being too moved. Her feebleness irritated her. She wanted to be light and laughing with this kind cousin, but all she could do was turn a grave face towards her and mouth appreciation.

  ‘You must see your friends, cousin Ann. You are too much alone.’

  ‘I see you.’

  ‘Oh, we are family, Charles and I and the children. We don’t count. Move back to London properly. You were so snug here when we first met.’

  But she didn’t feel snug any longer and she doubted she ever would again.

  Why had Aksel Stamer gone so suddenly? She feared she knew.

  Sarah had brought over from her house as another present to brighten her dull rooms a pretty glass with flowered and bevelled edge; she’d placed it in an angle that proved unflattering and cruel when Ann caught herself within it. Now she saw this image she wondered if Aksel Stamer had simply been appalled at her hollow gaunt appearance, daughter or no daughter, and fled before it.

  How did others see her? A thin faded spinster, a bastard presumably, certainly a whore – by conventional standards for she’d been with two men and married neither. Luckily they’d not made her with-child – there was a relief; she would not have grown easily into a mother, no aptitude, no experience. None the less, to those who knew, she was as damaged in reputation and character as in appearance.

  Yet Sarah, the conventional wife, never seemed to mind – there was the miracle.

  How had she never before appreciated just how wonderful this gentle cousin was? Perhaps by contrast Aksel Stamer was, deep down, an ordinary man who was simply disappointed at women who did not look bright and modest and walk with masculine strides. He had helped but wanted no more of her.

  But, as it all twisted round her mind, she found it hard to contradict that moment when he soothed her ankle. Was she misremembering the time and its emotion? After all, she’d been half-dazed with tiredness and pain. If it was not a father’s love, it was at least a rare tenderness.

  It rained incessantly. Or so it seemed. The London streets were mud and dung through which the butchers’ and bakers’ hacks shambled. At night the pattering of drops on the roof slates kept her awake. And then in the dark early hours of the morning the sweetness of what she had lost overwhelmed her, while the horror of the losing burnt on.

  She couldn’t hide herself away. If she didn’t at once take Sarah’s advice and seek out old acquaintances, she must at least deliver her work. She still had with her the pages of Isabella: or, the Secrets of the Convent. They were crinkled and creased, being wet then dry, then wet again, and some of the ink had smudged. She’d carried these bedraggled words all across Europe. She would need to rewrite or copy the material before she could present it anywhere.

  As she spread out the pages she felt traces of fine sand and smelled the faint odour of rosemary and pine needles.

  Although she’d been gone so long she still retained her reputation for fast writing, for meeting deadlines, for doing what was required, no more, no less. But she needed to keep up with changes, with public taste.

  When she’d visited Mr Dean and told him what she was writing and planned to write, he looked at her quizzically. She supposed it was her altered appearance or perhaps this time away had made her seem a revenant to those who stayed.

  She offered her castles and chains and weeping girls. Of course, of course, they were always welcome, she knew that, but she must
know too that something else was now wanted. The times required more moral teaching.

  She was surprised. Was this directed at the author or the work? She hoped the latter.

  ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘you think I am a little behind the public taste? People want less sensation and more goodness, more virtue?’

  ‘No, Miss St Clair, certainly not. More sensation and more morality. It may seem contradictory to you but you can do it, I am sure. Young Mr Munday and I will always want what you write.’

  Mr Dean patted her arm in an avuncular way, felt her thinness and gave her an encouraging smile.

  But no one would encourage long without proof that she could make him money. No more than other booksellers like Mr Hughes or Mr Newman did Mr Dean or Mr Munday give favours. And they were never a certainty. She must move with the times and move quickly. She had a horror of poverty. It was her only spur.

  Mr Hughes probably still held his weekly dinners for authors but he proffered no invitation to her – in any case she’d never been a regular. When they met in the street after her return, he was polite and uninterested.

  It was just as well. Mr Hughes knew Richard Perry and Luigi Orlando, and they would ask after Robert if she were there. She had no stomach yet for sociability. No prepared story to tell.

  The flowers Sarah had delivered had long wilted and Ann had bought no others to cheer her lodgings. They were an extravagance just at this time. The room was not unpleasant but not light, in fact a little dismal even when it was bright weather outside. She’d done so little to decorate it. Some coloured cushions and prints might make a difference.

  Sarah called round but didn’t stay. It was nothing to do with the discomfort of the lodgings but Amy had gone to visit a very sick sister and Jennie couldn’t look after the children alone; the girl employed to help was worse than useless. Sarah laughed. Again, there was no time for any real talk, just that sizing up of each other without comment.

  She was not eating well. Since Aksel Stamer left she’d hardly taken or bought food sensibly, preferring instead to live on what was hawked in the streets, the pies and buns of dubious nourishment. Sarah had brought round some homemade stew, being sure her cousin was not living properly. ‘You must eat, Ann,’ she said as she went down the stairs, ‘put some flesh back on your bones.’

  33

  So this was her life.

  After Caroline, after the glorious Gilbert – Gilbert who had never added up – how could she have been so credulous, she who prided herself on seeing through deceit, she a maker of stories? After Gregory Lloyd even, after Robert James, and after Aksel Stamer, here she was.

  Caroline had loved somebody, an elderly Frenchwoman it seemed, and not her. The selfishness she’d resented was impressive – her mother had needed no Gilbert by the end – though it had once been her bulwark against a nasty world. So she’d simply destroyed him for her daughter and herself.

  Ann sometimes feared she’d inherited this selfishness, at other times knew it for a skill she lacked but should learn. Often she’d no idea which was true. She had no illusion she knew what and who she was. Now there was no one left through whom to find out more.

  She should have been relieved to be back. Apart from work there was much to do in London. She could go to the theatre, she could shop in the bazaars and markets and look at the windows in Bond Street; she could walk in St James’s Park and Lincoln’s Inn Fields; she could visit Montagu House on Monday, Wednesday or Friday and see the Parthenon sculptures so cried up by poets, meet Mary Davies and other genteel hacks at an East India tea-room or in Lloyd’s Coffee House where people still collected for the Patriotic Fund though Napoleon’s war was long over. It was a life as others lived it.

  And yet the melancholy was enveloping her more and more. As inexorable as the fever that had descended on her in Paris. It inhabited her rooms, as if she’d rented part of them out to this lodger who was each day taking up a bit more of the space, making it danker and darker and less fit for anyone else to live in. It had crept inside her glass jar.

  Nothing was how she’d anticipated. The horror of both her dead had not gone. In her head she was at a perpetual funeral. But people at funerals were always a little glad, a little gay within their black velvet and crisp bombazine. It was worse than that.

  One night she was on her bed fully dressed, not bothering to light a candle, not preparing for sleep, though she was usually so fastidious about keeping the bedchamber as the place for rest. Instead she lay there as a stranger might, letting Robert flow over her, Robert as he’d been before his ideas were litanies, before they both became itinerants not inhabitants, before he thought that God had forsaken Attila and himself and was shitting on his worlds.

  Was it right to forgive him in this way – for surely that was implied? Would it not be better to hold on to the outrage, to continue to hate the thing? But she could not avoid the truth: that she forgave him everything. He was violent because he couldn’t stand losing the vividness – vividness that he’d momentarily given her and she had lost with him.

  No, there should be no forgiveness, no excuse for him or for her. Since it was – also – her fault. She had thrown away the only person who’d enthralled her, who’d overshadowed Gilbert in all his imaginary splendour. If she hadn’t murdered him literally, she had done so in other ways, by hating him and wanting him dead, and more, by being dull, by being ordinary and needy.

  She deserved all the violence she’d suffered.

  If she deserved it, what was the point of lamenting? She was better not being. Robert had had the courage to see that – for himself, she knew it now. But she averted her eyes from the memory of what that courage had achieved. It was a man’s way to go so explosively.

  The images hovered before and behind her eyes. There was no point in closing or opening them. What she saw in front and inside the lids, dissolving and recomposing, was sometimes so bright it scorched her brain.

  Then suddenly Aksel Stamer was present, stern and tall. Yet he was merging with the butterfly he named. It gave his silhouette a dazzling, translucent, shimmering quality. It was no image for a man so grounded on the earth, so stolid in mind, so present even where so little expected.

  She bought pens and sheets of paper and set to work copying Isabella; or, the Secrets of the Convent, trying to move the elements of her work around to look like invention. It was hard going. Indeed, there were times when nothing seemed worthwhile, not even making a living. A hopelessness tinged everything.

  Why struggle on? Robert had shown the way.

  It was no disgrace to yearn for blackness, that perpetual night he feared but never quite believed true – he was always a Catholic boy. She would never leave life in his disgusting manner, but there could be grace in the going. It was possible to drift away more easily, with less repugnant display. Had he died quietly and alone on the Lido he might have been covered in sand and beauty, like the white bones she’d fixed there in her mind for so long.

  She began to imagine her own scene, a scene as it should be. After days of silence, Sarah would come to visit her lodgings. She would find her peacefully on her bed on a check blue-and-white coverlet. Nothing would be disgusting, none of that dreadful incontinence of the hanging corpse. She could buy enough laudanum to do the job. She’d know the amount. She was susceptible to its power: she was a poor sleeper but with only a small portion of this drug she fell into the limbo she craved. It would be easy enough to take more and go beyond.

  She would finish the book she’d agreed to write. She had a sense of duty – God knows where it came from. Wryly she noticed that, unlike Robert, she would not leave a few incoherent scraps and a fouled pile of paper, but a simple, tidily written manuscript of absolutely no value, competent, decent and ordinary. Isabella; or, the Secrets of the Convent would be on the table beside a note for Sarah and Charles asking them to deliver it to Dean & Munday and receive the payment.

  She collected laudanum from two apothecaries in Camden and
Bloomsbury. She hid it in case Sarah came and suspected what she might be about.

  Then she decided not to leave a note. What did it matter what happened when she was not there? Or perhaps she would leave something cryptic, so that no coroner could report that she was a suicide in sound mind.

  The main point was that she would go without fuss. She’d like to have been anonymous but that could only work if she took a room in a distant inn. She wouldn’t fancy travelling on that special day; she’d wish to be at home, she was sure of it.

  She thought again of the note, whether or not to leave one. She must not appear to have died through any extravagance of emotion but through reason. It was quite simply that she had had enough. ‘Thank you very much,’ the note could say. That would be short and to the point.

  But to whom could this note be addressed? Those she would ‘thank’ in that tone were all dead.

  No, she would depart without undue seriousness or levity, without glamour or staginess, just go because it would be pleasant not to be here. She would declare no desperation or fashionable ennui from too much high or intense living. She would simply admit to being bored with being herself, having had such a bad hand that she’d always been in debt to every passer-by who wished to play with her.

  She knew of course that no imaginary watcher would think her death pragmatic or sensible. It was not in the nature of the comfortably cheerful. Was it not enough that she thought so?

  But she remained unsure of practicalities. Did they still bury bodies at crossroads at midnight? She rather thought not, at least not often, though she’d created such bizarre burials in her tales. A mare would shy at the spot, at that place where no Christian rites had been said; quaint will-o’-the-wisp lights would emerge to lure travellers to their doom. Nothing like that. England was an improving if less heroic nation. Here her act would be accounted less blasphemous than wayward. There would be no essential ghost in these modern times, no thin veil over a spirit as it crossed that boundary, no stake to keep it hidden, no traffic back and forth tramping and impacting the grave.