by Rose Tremain
It was an exceedingly splendid autumn morning, burnished by the sun, but my mind wouldn't rid itself of the sodden and bedraggled figure, with my father's long but awkward stride, I had sent off into the rain. Had the poor man died of damp and cold? Or had my Court-wisdom shocked him into abandoning the gentry and their corrupt ways – to paint pictures of the likes of Meg Storey, perhaps, in return for a pint of ale, or a quick favour on the stillroom floor?
The day was altogether too fair to waste on worry or remorse. Finn's fate was not mine to control. I put on my floppy hat and my smock and, with Will's help, carried my easel and my painting equipment to a far corner of my south lawn, from which I had a most magnificent perspective of the park – the purple and gold beeches, the russet elms, the fiery chestnuts and the soft sweep of brown beneath them that was the line of grazing deer.
I stared at this scene. I knew that to render the foliage of a tree in all its complexity was beyond my skills as a draughtsman, let alone as a painter in oils. What I could try to capture, however, were the colours. Thus, without sketching anything in charcoal on my canvas, I began furiously to mix my pigments and to lay the paint on in bold sweeps and flourishes, colour upon colour, a scrabble of white for a cloud, wavering lines of green and yellow for the rich grass, cascades of oranges, reds and golds for the chestnuts, a deep mass of purple and brown and black for the further beeches. I worked like a furnace-feeder, like a glass-blower, puffing and straining. My temperature rose and my heartbeat quickened. I was ablaze with my painting. I knew that it was as wild, as undisciplined, as excessive as my own character, but it perfectly expressed, all unskilled as it was, my response to that autumn day, and thus, to me, had a satisfactory logic to it. Furthermore, when it was at last finished and I stepped back from it a few paces and looked at it through half closed eyes, it did resemble to some degree the scene before me. It was, perhaps, as if a child had painted it. It was crude. The colours were too bright and too many. And yet it didn't lie (not even as much, Finn, I wanted to say, as your beautifully painted Greek columns or shepherdesses' picnics). It was, in some essential way, what I had seen. I walked round to the back of the canvas and scribbled a title on it in French: Le Matin de Merivel, l'automne.
It was then, as I looked up, that I saw Finn, dressed I noticed rather gayly in Lincoln Green, striding towards me across the lawn. I was glad he hadn't starved to death, even more glad when I read from the knowing half smile on his face that he had heeded my words and brought me some little inducement to carry out the favours of which he believed me capable. For I am extremely fond of receiving presents. Possessing, as I do now, an abundance of useless knick-knacks and objets d'art, has not diminished my enthusiasm for accepting more, and the gift, say, of a fine pewter tippling jug or even the head of a marten cat from old Bathurst can cause me an entire day's good spirits.
"Finn!" I called warmly. "You are not starving in some hovel like Poor Tom, as I imagined you to be!"
"What?" said Finn, checked in his stride.
"Oh, never mind my follies," I laughed. "Come and look at my painting."
Finn approached. The sun had now moved and was falling smack across my picture, causing the colours to seem even more gaudy than they actually were. The artist stared at my work. Across his face began to spread a look of recoil, as if, upon the clean waistcoat of this Robin Hood, his Maid Marian had thrown up her pudding. I saw him struggling with words, but they seemed to choke him and he turned away.
"Well?" I said.
"It is," said Finn, "an excrescence."
"Yes," I commented, "probably that is the right word for it."
"In the time of Cromwell, you would…"
"What, Finn?"
"No. I do not mean that. But really, you cannot…"
"What?"
"You must not show this picture to anyone. You must, I think, burn it."
"It offends you, I see."
"It breaks…"
"What does it break?"
"All the laws, all the procedures and disciplines I have been at such pains to try to teach you."
"Yes. You're undoubtedly right. It is a grievous mistake. And yet to me, you see, it's a rather memorable rendering of all that I feel about the colours of my park. Which only illustrates, does it not, that feeling, however passionate a spur it may be to the poor dabbling painter, is, without technique, an impotent and ridiculous thing, like a eunuch in love, one might fancifully suggest."
I laughed, but Finn did not even smile. I felt light-hearted, despite his loathing of my work, and sorry for him that his spirit seemed so grave.
"Well," I said, "let's forget the picture. I shall put it on the fire presently. Will you take a glass of wine, Finn, to restore your lightness of heart?"
Poor Robin agreed and we returned to the house, where I ordered some cool white wine to be brought from my cellar to the Morning Room.
Finn gulped his drink like a parched traveler. His hand shook. Almost before he had sat down, he leapt to his feet again and announced to me that he had taken good heed of my advice on how to get on in what he called "this heartless age" and had therefore spent a great deal of money and time preparing a gift for me, in the hopes that now, at last, I would speak of his talents to the King.
"Excellent, Finn!" I said. "You're learning fast. Would that you could say the same of my painting, what?"
A little nervous smile crossed his angelic mouth. Then he darted out and returned a few seconds later, carrying in his arms a large cylindrical object covered in a pretty embroidered cloth, which he laid carefully at my feet.
"What is it, Finn?" I asked, fearing suddenly that he had brought me the kind of truncated piece of Corinthian column he was so fond of dotting about in his own pictures. But he wouldn't answer, only looked from me to the object and back to me again, like a timorous fieldmouse looking for danger as it spies some split grains of wheat.
I removed the cloth. Before me stood a birdcage of great delicacy, painted a deep Prussian blue and gilded with gold leaf. Inside it, on a swing perch, was a bird, which at first I took to be a stuffed thing, so still and staring did it remain. Then it turned its yellow eye on me and opened its beak and let out a sweet trill. "My word, Finn," I said, "it's alive!"
Finn nodded. "It's an Indian Nightingale," he announced proudly. "It has traveled the seas."
I will at once confess that I was delighted with this gift. Seldom, I thought, can more pains have been taken over a bribe. The cage was an object of wistful beauty, like something from a departed time. The bird inside was ordinary in its appearance, with a sleek blue-black body and an orange beak. Its song, however, was a pure and brilliant sound, a sound I seemed to have heard in my mind, but could not recall in nature.
"They say," said Finn, "that it may be taught other notes, even tunes, if you play a wind instrument to it, particularly the oboe."
"How astonishing," I said. "Why particularly the oboe?"
"The oboe, I believe, is within its register."
"Ah."
"But you do not play?"
"No. But I will learn. I could, I think, acquire a strong appetite for music."
Across Finn's countenance darted a momentary flicker of fear. I knew what he was thinking and his little discomfort amused me, but I chose not to comment upon it and we sat for a few moments in silence, both staring at the Indian Nightingale.
"So," said Finn at last. "When you are next at Court…"
"Your gift is very fine. Thank you."
"When you are next with the King…"
"Hush, Finn," I said, "for I am quite unable to raise your hopes over your own matter. The King at the moment is very burdened down with affairs of State and I must bide my time until the more frivolous side of his nature turns again to me."
"I understand."
"Timing is all. And it may be that we must wait out the winter."
"The winter?" said Finn with dismay. "But I will starve, Sir Robert. I will die of cold and chilblains."
By my inadvertent inclusion of the word "riff-raff", Finn looked utterly downcast. I was about to explain that, as the son of a glovemaker, failed anatomist and failed physician, I included myself in that category of people. We are all, I nearly said, so much chaff, so many airy feathers, blown by wind, burned and suffocated by fire, but I refrained, preferring to conceal from Finn, in case he might one day teach me how to paint something of worth, my modest lineage, my failures in medicine and my deterministic pessimism which could so cruelly cross the grain of his own faith. I contented myself with slapping Finn's green-hosed knee and saying boisterously: "Don't sulk, old Finn. No one could say for certain that you won't be in Whitehall by Christmas."
After several weeks had passed and I had no word from the King, I began to recognise that, while my letter to him had momentarily relieved my anxiety, the sending of it had now thrown me into a worse distress than ever. For before I had sent it I had been able to convince myself that the King's thoughts might turn to me again at any moment, that his mind had, in fact, mislaid me for a while, but that he would rediscover me during, perhaps, a game of ninepins or in the course of some immodest banquet. Now, on the other hand, I could only interpret his silence as a deliberate act of forgetting. Not even the death of Minette had moved him sufficiently to write to me. This in itself was proof enough that he no longer regarded me with any of his former affection and that I was, from his radiant inner circle, now cast into outer darkness.
The profundity and Stygian gloom of this darkness oppressed me most fearfully during the hours of the actual night, so that I began to keep a candle by my bed, or, better than this, to flee my house entirely and spend my nights in Meg Storey's garret in the roof of the Jovial Rushcutters, keeping sleep at bay with ale and rowdy couplings and foolish stories about my travels in the Land of the River Mar, a country of my imaginings, located in Meg's ignorant head as "just above Africa" and about which I invented the most absorbing lies. "The preferred element of the natives of the River Mar," I told her, "is water. And this is how they sleep, with their bodies immersed in the river. And all along the banks of the Mar, hanging from the mangrove trees, are loops made out of hide, to hold the sleeping heads out of the water, so that they do not drown." Meg would sigh with wonder at such unimaginable things and threaten to drift to sleep, lulled by my voice, while outside I would hear poor Danseuse paw the frosty ground and whinny with cold.
Though the solace afforded me by Meg Storey's plump and energetic body was considerable, I felt urgently in need of some spiritual comfort, and began, at about this time, to send out messages to God. I imagined these feeble communications as minute blips of light, little wriggling glow-worms which, unless God had a telescope pointed directly at them, he would be unlikely to notice. The days when God and I engaged in daily conversation had long since passed away. They passed away at the time of the fire, which, as surely as it consumed the bodies of my poor parents, together with the ribbons and feathers that were the stuff of their innocent trade, had also burned up what remained of my faith. I had found, since my rejection of Galen's theory of divine perfection, that anatomy had begun to lead me away from God. My comparative study of the uterus bovinae and the uterus hutnani had shown me that the generative process of the cow is so similar to that of the woman as to make me wonder whether there is not some essential thread connecting us to the animal kingdom and thus toppling us from the pillars of divinity upon which, not merely kings and rulers have set themselves, but upon which the vilest rogue and murderer believes himself to stand. These heretical thoughts I had kept to myself of course, but when I saw how swiftly, how cruelly my good parents died, how, without the least sign of God's lamentation, their lungs burst and their flesh burnt up like meat, I felt compelled to cease my own conversing with an omnipotent and benevolent God. For surely, He is neither? If He is benevolent, why did He send such terrible destruction on such honest and hard-working people? And if He is omnipotent, why did He not prevent it? "Ah," Pearce, would say, "but suffering redeems, Merivel. In their agony, the sins of your parents passed from them."
"They had no sins, Pearce," I reply. "They attended two sermons on a Sunday. They said their prayers morning and night, kneeling by the bed from which neither of them ever strayed. But look at me! I am boiling with lust, immoderate in my consumption of wine, irreverent in my speech and a self-deceiver. Why did the fire not consume me? Why is suffering so arbitrary? No, Pearce, it will not do. If God exists, He is surely cruel. He is the old and terrible God of Moses, the God of Abraham. But the most logical conclusion is that He does not exist at all."
It is interesting to note the ease with which I had let my faith fall from me. Any love I had hitherto felt for God, I had given to the King, who had reciprocated (not as God had done, by speaking through the mouths of fat bishops and having frequent recourse to long periods of enigmatic silence) by laughing at my jokes and giving me royal kisses far sweeter to me than any embrace I'd had from any woman. It was the absence of these tender expressions of friendship and affection that had plunged me into such despair and sent me scrabbling about in the darkness once more, in search of my lost Redeemer, however cruel He might turn out to be.
This search of mine, these glow-worm prayers I sent out into the starry sky above Meg Storey's roof, if they failed to bring God back to comfort me, did, after a few weeks, send me my old friend, Pearce, who arrived at Bidnold on a mule. Strapped to the mule's back, were Pearce's pitiful worldly possessions (referred to by me, rather wittily, I think, as his "burning coals", in reference to a mad Quaker at Westminster who had wandered about calling the fops to repentance with a dish of the said coals balanced on his head). What Pearce owned, in fact, was the following: three Bibles, one copy of his beloved Harvey's De Generatione Animalium, various other anatomical tracts, including works by Vesalius and da Vinci and Needham's Disquisitio Anatomica De Formato Foetu, some quill pens, a black coat and hat, two pairs of black breeches, some torn shirts and stockings, a box of rusty surgical instruments, a single pewter mug and plate and a china soup ladle made in Lancashire. This ladle was the only legacy of his mother, who had died in poverty to send Pearce to Cambridge. Sometimes, in the melancholy moods that so frequently afflict him, Pearce would hold the ladle close to his body and let his long fingers caress its cold surface, in the manner of a lute player plucking a living tune from its dead, hollowed wood.
I was glad, I will admit, to see Pearce. When Will Gates informed me that a man with a long neck and dressed in black was coming up the drive on a mule, I knew it could be none other than my old friend and former fellow-student and I ran out to greet him.
It was drizzling slightly and both Pearce and the mule appeared wet and muddy.
"We have come from the Fens," he announced in his voice of doom.
"From the Fens, Pearce?" I said. "What were you doing there?"
"I am a Fenlander now, Merivel," he said. "My work and life are there."
"I notice that you put them in that order, Pearce: work first, life second."
"Naturally. Except that the two are inseparable."
"Well, I do not work at all, except a little painting."
"Painting? How peculiar."
"You've left the Royal College, then?"
"Yes. I work only with the insane. Take the mule, will you, and see she's fed? We're both very weak."
Pearce then dismounted, staggered a pace or two and fell to his knees. I shouted for Will Gates, who came running like a bullet, and together he and I helped Pearce into the house. I asked the groom to rescue the "burning coals" quickly, before the mule died and rolled over on the soup ladle.
We put Pearce to bed in the least colourful of my rooms, the Olive Room, a north-facing bedchamber, in which I had
left intact some dark panelling and had curtained the bed in a sombre green, only enlivened by a little crimson fringe. Here, after drinking some venison broth and enquiring whether his books could be sent up to him, he fell into a sleep that lasted thirty-seven hours. During most of this time, I stayed at his bedside, checking his pulse now and then, listening to his breathing, dozing a little and sipping claret and staring at his elongated grey face, which I found at once so irritating and yet so inexpressibly dear to me.
When he woke up at last, I was anxious to tell him of the despair into which I had fallen and to see whether he could suggest any remedy. But he had, it turned out, made the arduous journey on the mule from the Fens for one reason only: to reveal to me that he had found, in his work with the mad people of what he called the New Bedlam, located somewhere between Waterbeach and Whittlesea, a deep and profound sense of peace, and to try to persuade me to leave my life of "vanity and show" to join him in his labours.
"I sense," he said, staring at my freckled, ruddy and be-wigged visage, "that you're not at ease, Merivel. The light has gone out of your eyes. Luxury is suffocating your vital flame."
I looked down. Though I had a terrible urge to confess to Pearce, amid childlike tears, that it was not luxury that had robbed me of my happiness, but the King's abandonment of me, and that I was indeed a desperate man, though not at all for the reasons he surmised, I refrained from doing so, knowing that it would only lead Pearce into more flowery discussion of how the insane are the innocent of the earth, and how, only by succouring them "like little children" can we be saved.
"Thank you, Pearce, for your concern," I said, "but you are completely wrong. If my eyes appear a little lacklustre, it's merely because I have watched at your bedside for a great quantity of time with hardly any sleep. As to my vital flame, it is burning very brightly."
"I know you, Merivel. When you stood in my room in Caius and put your hand on that man's heart, then it was burning!"
