A Man of Genius (3 page)

Sarah still sat tranquilly sewing, saying not a word. So Ann rattled on. ‘I'm very fluent. All I have to do is vary elements. I never run out of plots.'

Sarah bit the thread to break it and looked up encouragingly. She had absolutely nothing to say. Neither she nor Charles had ever read any of this sensational stuff.

‘You make some surmountable trouble between delicate heroine and handsome hero, but only after the girl has been nearly frightened out of her wits by the villain in his gloomy castle.'

Sarah looked up and gazed at her cousin. Strange indeed to have a head full of such things – on a body sitting familiarly in her back parlour. She would ask her novel-reading friend Jane Lymington to procure a volume from her circulating library; then she could glance into it and compliment her cousin when the right moment occurred. She smiled.

‘Sometimes,' Ann went on, warming to her talk, ‘I've wondered what would happen if the heroine chose the villain and pushed the hero down an abyss or shut him away like an idiot in a madhouse.'

Evidently the idea, the words, were simply too strange for Sarah. She pricked her thumb with her needle, frowned, bent her head and licked the blood, then pressed the thumb against a rag from her basket.

Could there really be disapproval?

‘No one reviews my little productions, you know, Sarah. No one has to say to me, “Pray Miss, put down your pen and take up your needle.” I write to earn my bread, that's all.'

Sarah looked up then and laughed heartily. ‘My poor cousin, my poor Ann, why these apologies? I have never thought to be an independent
woman. It's not possible for me and I do think women are made for marriage and the home, and to be cared for. But I can admire those few who don't take this common path. Charles is less admiring I think, though he much respects and will love you, cousin Ann. Only I wonder whether it is possible to find content without following what our nature wants for us.'

Before Ann could reply, Sarah hurried on, ‘But come, I hear the twins stirring. Please to see them after their rest. One of them is lisping words and both coo so prettily. You cannot but be charmed.'

She was never quite charmed. All those wriggling limbs, all that mess, the incontinence. But she visited the house often.

Why did this early conversation ooze into memory so many years later? Surely not because of that awkward defence of her way of living. Had Sarah anything to do with Robert? Doubtful. Ann expected compassion not shrewdness from such a lactating, sewing, buttressing being. At the time, that is.

No, it was what she'd said to her cousin about the might-have-been plot. It raised a question. Did anyone in life
choose
the villain?

3

W
as Gregory Lloyd the preface to the meeting at Mr Hughes's dinner?

Because of him she was no virgin.

She set little store by the change. There'd been no unwelcome price to pay. But there were those out in the world who put great weight on such activity, productive or not. She knew that.

Whether he was seen as fall or freedom, Gregory Lloyd was the fault of the Putney house. As isolated as if on a rocky isle off Essex. In fact it stood a mere stone's throw from the crowded public bridge.

Caroline had a pair of widows for occasional gossip and cards, Mrs Graves and Mrs Pugh. They usually visited one at a time. Then they could talk simultaneously, Caroline of her irritating child, the guest of her relief at childlessness and her better-preserved furniture. Mostly they spoke in agitated undertones of shocking scandals from the newspapers. They loved the extravagance of royalty. Such pleasure tutting about the blubbery Prince of Wales and his malodorous princess, Caroline of Brunswick.

Young Ann sat in the corner of the room with a book on her lap letting out sneering breaths.

Apart from these women there was no community round them; not even a distant uncle or great aunt visited.

Once a year her mother put a peacock-feathered ornament on a large turban leaving a fringe of false red curls, arrayed herself in a rainbow-coloured shawl, reddened her cheeks with crimson, looked in a small silver-edged mirror, and then entered a hired one-horse chaise. She was going to town ‘on business'.

To the Strand, she'd say grandly for Martha to hear, to the main office of Moore & Stratton.

The turban was because Gilbert had admired the headdress. He'd been to court and seen royal ladies in turbans of black and coloured velvet with high feather plumes; Gilbert cared nothing for pomp but he knew the ways of men and women in all degrees.

On other rare occasions, similarly turbaned and shawled, she'd take herself and Ann to church for form's sake. They were never detained by the vicar or the vicar's wife, who pursed her lips as her eyes rested on Caroline's extraordinary garb, then slid away when they caught Ann's sullen gaze. Caroline was the daughter of a rector in Hereford but she made nothing of this to the vicar's supercilious lady.

Mostly she was content even on Sundays to loll in her chair, sketch flowers and objects brought to her by Martha, and leaf through the
Lady's Magazine
.This was intended for her alone. So at dead of night, Ann padded downstairs to read it by a very flickering candle. She looked only at the stories, ignoring the romances but ingesting the monthly monitory tales.

Through these she learned that to suffer with patience, to rise superior to misfortune and to repay unmerited ill-treatment with benevolence were virtues which provided happiness and recalled the licentious to paths of duty.

She tried ‘benevolence' on Caroline for several days. Caroline thought it ‘insolent'.

Ann believed she failed because ‘licentiousness' was not her mother's prevailing fault.

The impotence of such edifying stories confirmed her preference for Mrs Radcliffe's monks and brigands. These she found in books from the circulating library which Susan Bonnet, another unpopular but less saucy girl at school, borrowed from her mother and lent to Ann.
There
was a world to live in, since Putney was so disappointing.

Once Caroline and Mrs Graves took her to visit Mrs Wright's waxworks in London. A woman with unlined face stood in antique dress. Ann thought her alive and they laughed. She never went to
Vauxhall but it was more real in memory than Mrs Wright's waxworks.

Of course it was, for Caroline had told her of it: over and over.

We had supper at nine in a superb box, such an elegant collation, and so expensive. All so fine, even the thin ham, the lights, a thousand glass lamps, and we bathed in a glow so that it became fairyland. I was in my Indian cotton with ruched lace, my crimson-and-yellow shawl and . . .

Ann had tasted the thin ham. It lingered on her tongue.

Despite all these memories, Gilbert was, except for his words, largely absent for his daughter. She'd glimpsed him in a faded picture set in a locket. Sometimes this hung round Caroline's neck, but usually it lay in a silver box patterned with two stags, their noses touching and their antlers fanning out to form silver trees. The box was kept on the spindle-legged table beside a bottle of eau de cologne and a single flower in a china vase.

The child had been told never to put her fingers on the box for they would tarnish the silver.

Ann asked to look at the picture in the locket to see if she resembled Gilbert. At this Caroline, usually so sedentary, rose up and stepped towards her, almost as angry as when she'd stood before her open-mouthed. ‘How dare you?'

But Ann was now fourteen, not ten, old enough and sufficiently well read in cautionary and gothic tales to know that Caroline was not like other Mamas. She stood her ground.

‘I would look like him,' she said with tears in her voice but not quite in her eyes. ‘Why should not a child look like her father? I must have his hair or teeth or complexion . . .'

Caroline sat down again and put her head in her hands. ‘You, you are not worthy to speak of him in this way. He was like no one else. How could you resemble him?'

Martha had once hugged her and said in a voice that came from deep within her bolster of a bosom, ‘Don't judge your Mama too harshly, Miss Ann. It is a terrible thing to lose a husband and so beloved. The poor mistress cannot even bear to have a portrait of him about the house. She has a broken heart.'

‘But didn't I lose a father?'

‘You didn't know the loss, Miss Ann. It's different.'

‘She hates me.'

Martha sighed so that her breath rippled from her great bosom and rolled down the folds of her belly. ‘Don't say that, Miss Ann. She cares in her way. She gives you masters to make you a lady too.'

‘Too?' gasped young Ann into Martha's linsey-woolsey breast. ‘I won't be a lady. I won't be like her.'

Children say that kind of thing. They make absolute statements and think they can conform to them. They don't know they're already formed.

Then Martha, warm, ample, beloved Martha, who'd sewn her clothes and dampened her sobs in her early years, Martha who'd crept up the stairs with a bowl of buttered bread in hot milk for the older dry-eyed child shut in the attic, remembering to avoid the stair that would creak and give her away to her mistress, this dear Martha went to look after a sick sister, whose husband had just been killed at sea near Barbados by the French.

Caroline let her go without a murmur.

So, when Ann met some sectarians on the wooden Putney bridge, she joined them. Just like that. Despite the shadowy clerical past, there'd never been much religion in Caroline's house; one god seemed as good as another to her daughter. She was eighteen now.

William Bates, the founder, was a man of the inner spirit, a Quaker originally but wanting something even less constrained than Quakerism. He'd inherited money and a house with a little land and a well-stocked library in the village of Fen Ditton near Cambridge by flat marshy fields. There, with his friend Jeremiah Ellison, he would form a community of equal beings, to join in prayer in each one's own way, study, work together and share everything. Each would do what he or she could and expect the same of others. They would be vegetarians. Betty, ten years older than Ann, had also joined, along with three other men.

Caroline snorted as Ann packed her bags with her few clothes and books. She would be rid of the burden of supporting the girl. What had been the use of the Italian lessons from Signor Moretti and the music from a dismal harpist who hated teaching, when Ann had a character so contrary?

Wanting no made-up tales of elopement or disgrace to entertain the Mrs Graves and Pugh, Ann told Caroline her purpose.

Her mother raised her drooping lids: her greenish eyes sparkled as they did whenever she was in a passion. Ann would learn soon enough that men and women might be equal in theory, oh yes, but there were ways in which they weren't and
never
would be. She shuddered to mention their power. She closed her eyes against the thought.

Sexual congress, Ann supposed, having learned a good deal from the letters section of the
Lady's Magazine
. Much her mother would know of that!

Ann was too big to be slapped and too unschooled to argue. She left Putney, treading the bridge's wooden planks, not looking back even once.

Yet she took a precaution. The office in the Strand where Caroline went on her annual visit was the anchor of the Putney house. As she moved through her separated years she told them of her whereabouts. In case.

The community lasted longer than anyone outside, and perhaps inside, expected.

‘We will work four hours a day,' William Bates said. ‘That should take care of our needs. We will sell the excess farm produce and sew rough clothes to make an income. The rest of the time we will pray, read, discuss, explore our inner selves and commune with nature.'

Ann's enthusiasm waned as she found the housework, the cooking of so many root vegetables, the organising of communal linen, becoming women's work despite the talk. They had outside help for washdays and harvesting, but there were divisions of labour, and not to her advantage. William Bates was attuned to the flat land for he'd been raised nearby. He loved the earthy fare of turnips, swedes, beetroot
and parsnips grown on his own fields. But on dark days Ann looked bleakly at the sodden low-lying ground; she even yearned for the suet puddings and lamb stews of Caroline's impermanent cooks.

Among the men was young Gregory Lloyd.

Lanky, tall, very pale, with nearly white hair. Almost grotesque, she thought him at first. A widowed mother, now dead, had raised him. Their situations felt similar. So they became friends, amorous. Both were at an age when anyone will do. Sometimes they lay in the long grass.

As time passed he grew fonder and fonder, taking every chance to touch her as they went about their work. He said they should be married one day. But by now they'd anticipated most aspects of marriage in the fields near Grantchester and it seemed a limp affair to Ann. Besides, there'd been no consequences – and why else did one marry?

He appreciated everything she did. The unfamiliar approval became oppressive. He was earnest about the praying, wanting to make them both spiritually deeper. She asked why they couldn't live like other people and was as embarrassed as surprised by her words. He was hurt. He wrung his thin hands.

She then made an even crueller remark: ‘We are still living with our mothers.'

None of this suited the spirit of the community. William Bates wanted them all to be chaste and amiable, to avoid lascivious looking and doing, but he must have noticed something going on with Gregory and Ann, though they kept their ‘congress' to the fields.

It was worse when she lost the little faith she'd mustered in the first heady months before housework chafed her.

She'd been walking back from town one winter's evening along the Cam when the night came on too fast. The towpath was little more than a muddy track in places and, careless of the danger, she lost her footing and slid on her back into the river. She was caught by growth just under the surface. It tangled round her legs and snaked into her shoes.

For a moment she thought she'd drown, thought dramatically that
a short life was unkindly over. And all because a heavy cloak pulled her down into the cold water.

Then she found a foothold on a stone and pulled herself up out of the vegetation and into the slime of mud and wet nettles on the bank. Shivering and shocked, she stumbled along in the darkness, teeth chattering and head whirring.

By the time she flopped into the hall, her clothes wet and dripping on the flagstones, her face streaked with dirt, she knew she no longer believed even in the vague god of that house and would stop making any effort to do so. She'd been saved on the riverbank but not by anything divine. Rather by some effort on her part and mainly by luck that her foot had caught a stone. Bad luck, a little less effort, would have seen her drowned.

Gregory rushed to help her as she staggered into the house. He held her tight. ‘Thank God,' he said.

‘No, not that.'

She pulled away. He thought her hysterical.

Gregory was loyal to the community; yet, as the years went by, he, like Ann, grew restive, no longer immune to a world outside the house and grounds, no longer so keen to engage in discussing his faults – with so few to present. He would walk down the muddy bank of the Cam into the city and watch the university men strutting around, hear their taunts of the poorly dressed like himself, their arrogance. He would gaze at the bookshop, the learning denied to him, though quite as clever as any. At the house they studied without authority; they had good teachers, people William Bates and Jeremiah Ellison had known in their past lives, learned men who arrived to demonstrate the globes and microscopes. They knew more of science and natural history in that draughty mansion than the college scholars in their courts and towers, but it didn't give them what the Latin and quaint theology delivered: self-confidence in the World.

The time for tearing down the unholy trinity of church and king and college had gone. They lived in the wrong era. William Bates admitted it.

Then Betty left – after some incident with Jeremiah Ellison, Ann never knew exactly what. William Bates came out of his pious reverie to take notice. She and Betty had not been close, simply tolerating each other and sometimes making common cause over the unshared housekeeping. But it was hard to be the only woman.

The others planned to invite in an older widow met in Ely market who'd seemed drawn to their way of life. But, before they did so, Ann decided to leave. Then one evening just before she packed her bags, William Bates was too honest about the inadequacies of those who depended on his spirit and diminishing inheritance, and the group disintegrated.