A Man of Genius (8 page)

Robert threw away so many sheets of paper, used up so many fine feathers of goose and swan and raven, so many words he'd written and rejected, because he would not leave anything behind that wasn't perfect. Even the fragments of
Attila
were deficient now, a mere shadow of what he wanted and would produce. He would catch the universal style when he'd tried out all styles, all selves, as he'd once tried out the voices. He would get the tone.

But she knew he feared.

He was serious about leaving. Even he could admit he was on edge these days. Out of England he might be calmer, his strings of life less taut. And if Robert James went, so would she.

9

B
ut why? In heaven's name why? She'd looked at her diary of marks, added up the contrary ones, and saw no record of ‘happiness'. The fact did not alter her travel plans.

She knew her love was flecked with revulsion, both from him and from herself – for what she was becoming under the influence, not of his personality exactly, but of her dependence on it. She wouldn't look too closely: for she couldn't combat the deadly longing, the sweet need for him.

She was like a babe that clings to a cruel mother who bites and burns and tortures it while kindly onlookers try to pull it away to unwanted safety.

The image swam into her mind and she did her best to banish it. Quite wrong: it didn't and couldn't answer. After all, there was something so utterly ridiculous in her attitude. You really ought to laugh.

Cuddly Martha said, as the child burrowed into her soft flesh gasping out how much she hated Caroline, ‘We all need a mama, Miss Ann.' Martha held her so close and for so long she smelled the sweet sweat from the deep dark armpits. This was what a mama should be. A warm body with few words.

Well, she wasn't getting that anywhere else.

Robert brought her no kin. But he would have said, if he'd ever thought like this, that he'd delivered something better: a chosen circle of devoted friends. Yes, she relished the warmth of being part of it.

But she never knew how to move inwards. She was there only for and through Robert.

Besides, she was jealous of them. He should be only hers. There was a paradox. But down there, by the confines of consciousness, she knew full well his glamour would diminish without them. If he were taken away from London, if she had him alone, wouldn't he be lessened?

And another danger. If she abandoned her comfortable life in London, she must never imagine she did it all for him – it would be too big a burden for anyone to bear or be given.

She'd wanted to travel ever since Signor Moretti's book of Italian scenes had roused an appetite for dry, sunny places – why else did her heroines tramp through pine forests and canter over hot dusty plains if the idea of foreign lands hadn't stirred her deeply?

So why not take this chance to go to a distant country with a man so beloved?

She dropped the baize over the
camera obscura
of her mind before it could investigate and sharpen the image of questions best left indistinct. Travelling with the uncaged tiger.

He seemed to have some money left from his allowance. Perhaps enough to take him where he wanted. She never knew. She'd be paid what was owed to her by Dean & Munday before they left, and she could send work back and receive drafts through offices – there must be such in foreign parts. For now it was possible to manage on what they had – if they travelled carefully, thinking of the pennies. Well, she should have abandoned that thrifty idea as soon as formed.

There was always excitement in the idea of going, changing places, leaving everything behind.

Even if you took most of your heavy baggage with you.

She suggested Germany or Denmark, since she'd heard he'd been there and might have friends in place.

‘How did you know?' he asked. He must have disliked being discussed when absent, for he gave her a cold, almost angry, look.

It was a poor suggestion. He wouldn't have chosen such dull Protestant countries. Hamburg – a snivelling, constricting town. She knew his prejudices by now. Not there, then. Despite the rye bread.

‘What about Ireland?'

‘You are wilfully tormenting me,' he said with half a smile. ‘If we go, we will go to the sun. For what other reason does one travel?'

‘I'm not sure I have enough money for a long journey.'

‘Money, money! I have money. We will spend it. We will go to the end of the world.'

As he said it, the light from the setting sun through her window caught his face. It looked older, more distinctly lined, simultaneously tight and flabby. She loved that face the more for the tale it told, but also she felt – for the first time – it might evoke some pity. He would never forgive even the shadow of pity.

To the end of the world they would go, though where to get passports?

Italy, it had to be. France was no country without its Emperor. There'd been an Italian at Mr Hughes's dinner, Luigi something. She suggested asking him about expenses and lodgings in Venice. It would be cheap now, in a conquered city that had lost its power and purpose.

Robert waved his hand and grimaced. Byron is there, is he not? A man so proud to be a lord. Terrible. He would go nowhere near that mountebank.

Telling herself not to mention money, she mentioned money. He erupted. So Protestant, he said. ‘Protestantism is all about money, making money out of other people, grubbing, grabbing, cheating, littleness. I want nothing to do with it.' And out he went.

It hadn't been a sectarian matter, just whether to pay the butcher before they left, the real butcher not the one whom he'd once so comically imitated; the one who sold the meat they'd eaten in her lodgings these last months.

And what about Robert's unpaid boy?

Luigi Orlando was easily found and brought to the Swan. Since he'd discovered exiled Italians, he was no longer so often around the English but, through Richard Perry, he'd met John Taylor and admired his misty watercolours – to such an extent that he'd been offered a bed in the artist's spacious north-facing rooms near St
Sepulchre where the light was just right for painting. His time with edgy John Taylor and his Italian friends had made him less peaceable, more outspoken than when they'd first encountered him.

‘Venice is, of course, not what she was,' he said. ‘A colony, pah!'

‘You don't like Venice?' asked Ann.

‘I am not from Venice originally though I lived there many years. I am Veronese, a foreigner, always that. But now, since the French invasion, we are all strangers.'

‘A city of great painters,' said John Taylor, who'd been drinking in the Swan much of the day, ‘great men. I forget their names.'

‘Leonardo da Vinci is the only one,' said Robert.

‘Our Venetians did not admire him,' said Signor Orlando. ‘He stayed only a year and you know what they wanted of this great artist?' He paused for effect. ‘To build defence to keep their money safe. They caricatured his
Last Supper
.'

Luigi Orlando was about to go on, for he enjoyed mocking a city which made him feel provincial, but Robert interrupted.

‘Do you know, Leonardo made a mechanical lion? To show Florence's friendship to the King of France it moved its legs towards him, opened its chest and presented French lilies. Something eh? Art, science, politics and ostentation all together. The great artificer.'

Frederick Curran cared nothing for paintings or automata. He refused to let a promising political argument evaporate. ‘It was not the French that killed Venice,' he said to Luigi Orlando. ‘The old monarchies always win. Nobody must dent their privileges and power. How could the French be anything beyond what they were allowed to be? See, Robert was showing us in
Attila
how the System conquers in the end.'

‘The French do not rule Venice now,' snapped Luigi Orlando, misunderstanding Curran's tone. ‘It is the Austrians.'

‘Just so,' said Curran, ‘you are given to the old regimes, just so.'

Luigi Orlando was about to reply angrily, when Richard Perry interjected, ‘The Venetian republic was something admirable.'

Fred Curran was undeterred. ‘Not at all, not a proper republic, not a revolutionary republic, just an old elite, an oligarchy trading in
secrecy and deceit, no liberty in its stone bones. Greed. Do you know, Venetians betrayed each other by stuffing malice into a gaping lion's mouth? Better to marvel at Leonardo's mechanical beasts.'

Before Luigi Orlando could respond, Robert waved his hand round his friends. ‘Perhaps after all we will go and see. Can it be worse than this stew-pond of London?'

‘Liberty,' pursued Curran, ‘was as repugnant to old Venice as it is to the imperial court of Vienna. Venice is Ireland.'

Luigi Orlando was puzzled but calmed by the last notion. ‘We set up for neutrality,' he said. ‘It was a stance without power, it was weakness. Our rulers were absurd.' He spat on the floor. ‘The serene republic was swept away – whoosh – ' (and he pushed the glasses on the table towards Fred Curran) ‘because it was led by donkeys. The French and Austrians rode their backs. Now our taxes go to foreigners. Once the Venetian sequin was honoured through the world, it was of pure gold. Now it is nothing. The invaders have killed our city.'

‘It died because it wanted to,' said Robert. ‘It wished for death. States die when they want to die, like people.'

‘That is too heroic, my friend,' said Luigi Orlando, ‘they were outwitted – they, the great republic, were of no account to France or Austria. They played every hand badly.'

‘Ah, but they had an heroic conqueror,' said Robert. ‘“I shall be an Attila to Venice,” announced Napoleon. There's nothing like the former Emperor for magnificence.' Robert drank long and heavily to indicate the talk was over. They all thought of his heroic fragment.

Had Napoleon simply coincided with him, Ann wondered, or upstaged him so completely there was no more to say? Or could he be quoting the fallen Emperor without irony because he saw them now as two of a kind?

She turned away. ‘I shall be an Attila,' she thought. Imagine saying that! What woman could even quote it, say it aloud?

It was evident they were going to Venice, despite Lord Byron and his doggerel.

‘Why not,' he said, when she asked later, ‘the place of Leonardo da Vinci, why ever not?'

‘He'll benefit from a change of scene,' said John Humphries when she met him walking along the Strand. ‘Bright skies, Italian beauties.' He turned briefly to Ann and gave her, she thought, a mocking smile.

She realised how heavy her heart was becoming, how daunting was the prospect – unless Robert had some hidden reserves, how little money they had to undertake so long a voyage and stay in foreign places.

But she couldn't break away. Whether consumed by love or hatred, she simply knew he must not leave without her and her heavy heart.

She would tell cousin Sarah in a message sent to her address in Somers Town. But only when all arrangements had been made and the post to Dover booked. Sarah was busy with the new baby and the twins still so young: that must be her excuse.

She knew her cousin would be appalled when she heard; she'd have many anxious talks with Charles. They were unmarried; he was not right for her; she was taking a most dreadful risk; she must be restrained; Charles would come to talk to her; it was madness.

10

S
he busied herself round London getting passports and passage for at least the first lap of the journey; other documents must be obtained or countersigned on their way. Did Robert understand? She asked him several times.

How did any man with a strong arm put up with this?

First, passports for Mr and Mrs Robert James, Ann James. Fred Curran knew about such things. He knew the value of having different identities. So she'd requested papers in these names as well as others for Miss Ann St Clair. He had a friend, an Irishman from Ulster, who could help in such matters. He'd already helped Robert once and would do so again. Curran didn't elaborate. Peter O'Neil? Everything cost money, of course.

She bought a plain ring from the Soho Bazaar, put it on awaiting comment that never came. A ridiculous thing, marriage, and yet: Mrs Robert James. It was the best honorific. Well, she smirked to her mirror, she'd earned it.

Then, ring on finger, to the French embassy to get passes to travel through France to Italy. Everything took time and effort and money. Robert abhorred the new France but it wasn't easy to avoid it without more expense. Spain was as bad.

They should take the military route over the Alps, said Fred Curran. His usual steady eyes flickered as he made the suggestion. Created by Napoleon, he added to please Robert. Rocks blown up with gunpowder to wrest a road out of the mountains.

From Robert's response to this temptation, he knew what he'd lately feared: his friend was ill equipped for the journey. He was
nervous and too excited one minute, at another apathetic. To Frederick Curran he declared the adventure simply a voyage through rocks and water to nothing.

Did not a road formed of scattered rocks appeal?

‘Better than scattering limbs,' said Ann.

Frederick Curran gave her a swift uncommon glance and turned away before she could respond again.

They made abortive attempts to leave through Calais. But the boats, the tide, the fares, always something was wrong.

The waiting agitated them. They had to leave soon for both their sakes.

Finally they went. Not from Calais but on a sailing smack from Brighthelmstone heading for Dieppe, trunks and boxes stowed away, clothes for the journey and for Italy, his slim pile of papers containing what remained of his manuscript of
Attila
and good blank sheets for what should come. Her own few papers she kept apart, putting them in a floppy hemp bag which could be shoved under beds and behind chairs, then pushed into a trunk for moving. She did it as instinctively as she coughed on opening a stuffy wardrobe. Yet the bag held nothing of consequence: a few plans for future tales, addresses of Sarah, of Moore & Stratton, of an office in Paris where Mr Munday had said a bill might be changed if payment had to be made and she was nearby – a kind thought that had, to his surprise, made her giggle.

The boat was called
The Swift
. It belied its name as it strolled across the water in the limp breeze.

As England faded Robert leaned over the ship's wooden rail beneath the slack canvas, biting on his tobacco pipe. He could be alone with the sun or stars.

Ann looked at him and sighed. She was with him, that's what mattered. She could neither follow his intensity nor accept his apathy. Both intrigued, worried, excited and overwhelmed her without allowing her a share.

For the first time she had him entirely to herself. What would she make of the gift? The weight, rather. But had she ever really had his
body? She sighed for how much she'd made of so few satisfactory encounters, how much desire had to stand in for performance.

He of course had her entirely. Not since childhood when she manoeuvred through and round Caroline's moods had she been so beholden to a single person, so responsible for sustaining their temperament. Would she be tempted to misuse the power?

She was rightly frightened. But the colourful paint of adventure varnished her fear. She, Ann from near Putney Bridge, who'd lived a life in London and flat lands, was going to see the Alps where sedentary Mrs Radcliffe, for all her sublime describing, had never been.

It was early September, not the best time to be setting out on a long journey.

She had Thomas Nugent's grand tour guide for the Continent. It listed sights to be seen by the cultured traveller, usually one more affluent and attended than they were, but at least it told them where to stop and stare.

Robert pushed it away irritably when she placed it before him – on more than one occasion. What had ‘sights' to do with him? There was the natural outside world, a poor jumbled thing, and there was the language that formed it. To harness that was to harness the world.

Yes indeed. But the world was on its own now. He could not and would not deal with it. He could not hear it.

Why did she not mind her own business?

Now they were alone together, it
had
become her ‘business'. She said as much but he didn't hear, or pretended he didn't.

How could anyone not be excited that even children spoke French? But Robert had travelled on the Continent before as she had not, though the enthusiasm for rye bread and Richard Perry's admiring tale suggested rather out-of-the-way voyaging.

To her relief, their papers functioned well on the way to Paris. There they must be countersigned by the Austrian ambassador. Robert held the documents and the money, it was a man's right. She knew better now than to ask him too often if he'd obtained all the signatures.

They passed through Paris in a blur of rain and mud and hostile glances. Some years since Wellington had finally defeated Napoleon. But glamour remained with the defeated hero. Not every Frenchman had loved the self-made Emperor for turning the Revolution into imperial conquest. But no one appreciated England's part in the ending of such a gorgeous adventure.

In Fontainebleau Ann wanted to visit the royal château. Robert was in no mood. Not even when told of a table where Napoleon had signed his abdication. A fellow passenger described how the Emperor – for he was and always would be that – struck the table with a penknife to aid his thoughts. Robert liked the detail but had no wish to see the marks.

Going south they passed ruined châteaux and convents: made into manufactories. The result of a mundane peace. Some surviving aristocrats were back with the return of the old monarchy but not to their castles and landed power; rather, to a shared world of money and bourgeois trade. The ‘nation of shopkeepers', as Napoleon had termed England, had infected France.

Industry was less picturesque than castles and lords.

Often they stayed at the best inns. Ann wanted to conserve money by seeking the cheapest and suffering bedbugs and fleas. She looked disapproval but said nothing. It was the kind of loud ‘nothing' he especially hated and in which she often indulged.

His lowness enveloped everything. What had caused it? Doubt, she supposed. Doubt of himself. Could he ever do what he wanted, fulfil his purpose, embody his vision, do much more than write an inspired fragment?

This Vision, this thing apart, was hungry; it needed to be fed. It was taking from his substance, like an unborn child within a starving woman.

She was not even trying to feed it from outside, even had she the right sustenance.

Once devastated by imperial wars, the villages were now recovering,
seeking a living in the old way: by fleecing travellers.

‘It would not have been so under Napoleon,' said Robert James.

They were eating stale oily food in an inn close to where the land began to rise steeply. In the distance were outlines of mountains, at intervals indistinguishable from clouds.

It was old talk. In the past she wouldn't have contradicted, but the context had changed. She was weary of agreeing or being silent, tired of the tension of another's mood, tired of her own contingency. ‘I thought Napoleon betrayed the Revolution,' she said.

‘Glib, glib. You are wrong. Energy is always to be welcomed.'

‘The Revolution was energetic. It ended in massacre, in Terror. Look now, nothing is altered.'

He was impatient, his hands grabbing and pulling strands of his residual hair. ‘The ideas are separate from the people who mauled them. The upheaval occurred on shaky foundations. Napoleon took the moment and made it great. Even
you
might see that. He was wrong-headed, he was a man of action but a genius, the rest were little men.'

He wanted to lapse into silence, as she well knew. She wouldn't let him. She niggled at him, a lurcher worrying a bone.

‘But they believed in equality. He didn't.'

‘That sort of equality, pulling down the exceptional, the great, produced the guillotine. If the people had risen up on behalf of truth and greatness, it would have been different. They didn't. It was for envy and bread. But, still, they acted; that's more than you have done. The English are puny. It's the legacy of Protestantism, it brings down everything majestic and beautiful. You, they, abuse language.'

‘You are still a Catholic,' she mocked.

‘It has nothing to do with being Catholic. Didn't I create Attila, the scourge of Catholics, routed by their nauseous cant? I speak of the moral relationship to language, the universal. I have told you often enough.'

Often indeed.

She was too weary to go on. However he protested, it was all Roman, all magic, all preposterous, all achingly grand.

After eating, Robert went outside. She saw him sitting on a stone bench, a breeze blowing over a face gone slack. She went over to him and clasped his limp hand.

Could they not be quiet bodies? He was too tired to respond or pull his hand away.

Was he ill? Or disturbed, a little mad? What did that make her?

At the Hôtel de Genève in Poligny he turned on her, using force conserved in long silences. ‘Go away, go away,' he said. ‘I don't want to be with you.'

Could it be clearer than that? If there'd ever been love, surely it was dead now. And yet . . .

She could not be without Robert James.

It would be to lose her essence: Caroline without her Gilbert. If she would avoid this horror, she must adapt to another's richer existence. That was what love was, wasn't it? She was Mrs Robert James, even without his or society's permission.

All that nearly repulsed her still tugged at her heart whenever there was a chance she might lose him: the balding head on the muscular body seemed disarming weakness grafted on strength; the short legs a manly refusal of the sportsman's effeminacy; the pale eyes telling of a creative spirit that looked through not with. The inside was all-important, the body a shell covering wonders.

What sort of object of desire was this and what was it to do with her?

Comforting comfortable ordinary Sarah could have helped perhaps in this dilemma, had she allowed her. But she'd not let her cousin try, or try hard enough.

She'd overheard her friend Mrs Lymington say something when they all met once at Sarah's house for a child's birthday celebration. Mrs Lymington had said, ‘He would not last long with
me
,' and tittered. She'd strained her ears to hear Sarah's reply but failed. Jane Lymington couldn't know Robert, so she was responding to what Sarah said of him.

Could simple cousin Sarah be wiser than she was? She'd said as much. Ann assumed she spoke in jest.

Once when Sarah had sat with a plump twin on her knee, pulling at her hair and pushing against her swollen belly, Ann tried to tell her cousin something of what was happening. She approached the topic warily. She eschewed the word ‘horror' and came nowhere near explaining the abject state she was often rebelliously in during those last weeks in London.

Sarah had laughed, then smiled, ‘Surely as the writer of tales with mouldering castles and clanking chains you'll know what to do with a little real-life difficulty.'

Now, so far away, over so much water and so many dirt miles, she understood Sarah's delicacy. How kind to stop her confessing what must in memory give pain.

They ascended the mountains, following the road through deep valleys, by rocks and craggy summits. When she pointed out the sublimity of the lofty heights and slopes with firs and torrents, a sublimity worthy of Mrs Radcliffe at her soaring best, Robert was dismissive.

The mountains were a tomb, he said.

Even she knew sublimity was better in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
than through the window of a jolting carriage. But still there was this tremendous thing, just outside.

It was not Robert's tremendous thing.

‘Do you want to visit Voltaire's house at Ferney?' she'd ventured near Geneva.

‘No, I will not pay that compression of vanity such a compliment.'

What had caught Robert's attention was the hydraulic machine powering the city fountains.

She remembered how he'd admired the gas lights and mirror curtain in London while scorning the plays; he'd been enthralled by Leonardo's mechanical lion. Could more of such marvels have taken him out of his lethargy, even out of his treacherous poetic self? Could
he have been amused quite simply, with toys? Like a child.

Then a hitch. The passports had not been signed by the Austrian Minister at Paris or indeed the French Minister of the Interior; Robert had left them in the offices and picked them up later, but hadn't checked they'd been signed. He was impatient; it was not his fault. No one had queried them as they passed along through city gates. Why now?

More expense, for a messenger must ride to the sub-prefect of the district to get permission. It arrived after long delay with a warning that the pass was only partial: there would be constant harassing on the rest of the way out of France and into Italy.

Snow, white and green ice, porphyry rocks, grottoes and archways of granite failed to move him beyond the remark that it was all earth unmade. Only the signs of Napoleon roused him: the greatness of the vision that had caused these rocks to be blown sky high with gunpowder. Engineers had done the deed but they answered the will of one man who had the intellect to understand and conquer the virgin snow and ice.
He
ordered the explosions.