Anticipation (8 page)

On a dim grey day in London’s County Hall, my mother is excited.

‘So the Hardings were Huguenots?’ she asks.

‘They might well have been,’ nods our new associate, a local historian called Miss Bickley.

For the last five days, my great-great-great-grandfather has led us on quite a dance. As Maggie suspected, one George Harding, aged forty-two, was at home in Cloudesley Square with his sons on census night in 1840; fourteen years earlier, we find George presenting baby Harry to be baptised in the church around the corner. But the parish registers of St Mary Islington refuse to yield further trace of him. We learn that he paid his rates on time. But we don’t know where he came from, or when he died.

Maggie, stumped, watches the clock in the Central Library tick our eight-week trip away. The tired librarian recommends a professional researcher. Reluctantly, my mother agrees to meet Miss Bickley.

Who sweeps us south, across the windy churn of the Thames, to stern-pillared County Hall and the Middlesex Deeds Registry.

‘John Emmett built Cloudesley Square,’ she explains efficiently, ‘around 1826. The registers will give us details of who the leases were sold to.’

And sure enough, there he is, George Harding, gentleman, of Spitalfields, London. Another gentleman of Spitalfields, Joshua Harding, witnesses the deed. Spitalfields’ parish registers have Hardings galore. We’re back in business.

Today, Miss Bickley has her unfiled fingernail below the name of baby Joshua’s father, one Hal Hardynge, a silk weaver of Fournier Street.

‘What are Huguenots?’ I ask.

‘French Calvinist refugees,’ Miss Bickley says, as if that explains it.

‘A bit like Presbyterians,’ adds Maggie. ‘They were persecuted in France, so they escaped to England.’

Susan Fisher is Presbyterian. I’ve been to her church, and it wasn’t very exciting.

‘They gave up everything — risked their lives — for what they believed in,’ my mother continues, irritated by my lack of awe. ‘They had to leave by boat in the dead of night, with nothing more than they could carry on their bodies, and French soldiers hunting them down. If they were caught, they’d be tried for treason.’

‘Pure souls,’ says Miss Bickley. ‘And so hard-working. They gave England the silk industry.’

I think of the pattern books in the V&A, the gorgeous, glowing flowers. It seems a nice thing to have given England.

‘Does that mean we’re French?’

‘Yes,’ says Maggie happily. ‘Our name must have become anglicised, from something like Ardenne or’ — pulling out her third-form French — ‘Jardin …’

‘That sort of thing did happen a good deal,’ Miss Bickley agrees. She looks at her watch. ‘Shall we say the same time tomorrow?’

Outside, the wind has dropped and the Thames has risen to greet us. It’s nearly three o’clock, and the day is fading. We still have the Hungerford Bridge to cross, but this afternoon Maggie is in love with all of London, and in no hurry to go home. We wander along the Southbank, past the Royal Festival Hall, under Waterloo Bridge, through the National Theatre.

‘Would you like something to drink?’ she asks, when we find a café.

What do French people have?

I order a hot chocolate.

Safe in our concrete bastion, we watch the still, spread river gleam, a bolt of dark silk spangled with fairy lights, and forget to be afraid. 

T
hey say everybody remembers their first love. Mine is a house in Fournier Street, shuttered and dark below London street lights.

Maggie makes it shine. It’s one of her best moments.

We stand outside on drizzle-slick cobbles in a puddle of orange light. A ferret run of a street, this one, between the cabbage-strewn market and the beginnings of Banglatown. Maggie holds my hand and talks. The smell of curry, the whoosh of cabs in Commercial Street, fall away. Maggie lights the chandeliers and the logs in the marble fireplaces, and 30 Fournier Street begins to glow as only a Georgian townhouse can, that alchemy of candlelight and
handmade
glass, of silk and smoke and mirrors.

‘This is where she lived,’ says Maggie. A grandmother with too many greats for me to remember. ‘Your great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s great-grandmother,’ clever Maggie says. ‘This is where we come from.’

Four crumbling storeys of London brick. I feel no greater sense of belonging here, with this house, today, than I felt outside the infill terrace in Haldwyn Street, or the semi in Kings Close. But I look at 30 Fournier Street, and I feel something. A pull.

I love this house. I want it. I covet its long oak shutters and wavy glass, its swollen, grimy, naked front door, the glimmering rooms that once were and could be again behind them.

‘This house,’ my mother says, ‘is in our blood.’

Despite appearances, Number 30 is not vacant. A young couple from South Africa are squatting in the basement. In time, they plan to do the whole place up, they tell us, when they arrive home with their tarka dhal to find me peering through their letterbox.

It seems strange now, looking back, that they should invite us in. And stranger still that Maggie should accept. A shared colonial foolhardiness, perhaps. (Funny, isn’t it, what makes us trust a stranger? Perceptions of commonality, accidents of birth. Belief. I suppose we looked harmless, Maggie and I. Which just goes to show. Ignorance plays its part.) But for whatever reason, the South Africans let their curry go cold, and show us round the house.

‘Isn’t this just so French?’ the blonde girl says, in the peeling drawing room. ‘So light. You can tell the English didn’t build it.’

In fact, the house was built by a Cornishman, as we shall learn. Still, he must have had an eye on his resale market, for what would a West Country carpenter want with an attic made of glass?

‘It was for the weavers,’ Maggie says, in a pub back out on Commercial Street, while we eat our nice bangers and mash. ‘That was where they made the silk.’

I’ve never been in a public bar before. Another on this day of firsts (first mosque, first bagel, first Hasidic Jew, first conversation overheard in a foreign language). I half expect to be thrown out. We don’t have a car here, and I don’t want to have to finish my bottle of fizzy by myself outside in the rain.

‘Imagine,’ orders Maggie, ‘twenty or thirty looms up there, all working away, making those intricate patterns.’

I do. I imagine clear-eyed Frenchwomen with pure white skins and dove-grey dresses, under the gentle light of Georgian glass and the English sky. The shadows of pigeons on a bleached-oak floor. Soft-fingered industry. A glowing, chapel quiet.

‘They might have come here,’ Maggie says. (The sign above the door of the Weaver’s Arms reads 1730.) ‘Just think, your
great-grandmother’s
great-grandmother’s great-grandmother might have sat right here’ — she taps the late-nineteenth-century pine with poetic licence — ‘at this very table.’

I can’t see her yet, this great-granny to the power of three. She hovers, a mixture of Nanny Biggs, of Maggie, and of me. But it’s like trying to imagine your own face. The features shift and stretch and shrink, and will not be pinned down. So I continue imagining 30 Fournier Street instead while I chew my dinner. Like the South
Africans, I have already begun its redecoration in my mind.

I carry the house away with me, racketing west on the Circle Line, pressed up against pin-striped suits that smell of beer and fry-ups, thinking of Spode dinner sets and silver candelabra. In our stuffy twin room in Bayswater, I listen to the plumbing groan, and dream of starched white linen and silk dressing gowns, of pewter jugs and Flemish carpets.

In the morning, while Maggie takes a bath, and beyond mildewed secondary glazing the double-deckers roar down Queensway, I am furnishing Fournier Street with the contents of the V&A. My great-grandmother Harding (cubed) is left behind in Spitalfields, a shadowy stranger in a pub, an old woman half glimpsed in a corner.

But Maggie, of course, will not leave her there. My mother emerges from behind the brown concertina door, damp and pink and unsoothed, armed with a Tube map and that mind of hers, a pointy stick for turning stones and poking sleeping dogs with.

‘Don’t forget your mittens,’ Maggie says, and drags us back across town to County Hall.

She doesn’t find it that first day, I’m sure. There are several such excursions. I’m busy choosing wallpapers, so I miss the intake of breath, the flinch, the precise moment. But in that haystack, that dragon’s hoard, Maggie’s searching fingers strike things that are cold and sharp. A name on a deed. A name on a warrant.

She says nothing to me, not then. I see the Hardynge name in the register, ink swirly and unimaginably old. For me, that’s where the story stops, and something else begins, and for a long time, I fail to make the connection.

My mother is not herself, again, for the rest of our time in England. Our headlong quest now jerks to a halt, like a faulty Tube train. Stranded in Bayswater, I’m bored and annoyed. It rains for four days. Maggie won’t take me to the Tower of London, no matter how much I whine.

I’d like to say I’m concerned for her. That I begin to think less
about Fournier Street, and more about my mother. In fact, the reverse is true. The house seems to get brighter the more that Maggie fades.

She buys a facsimile of it, that deed. Rolls it up in a cardboard tube and carries it all the way home, through JFK, LAX, Honolulu, Tahiti, nestled like a pipe-bomb among knickers and stockingettes in the bottom of her suitcase. Twelve years later she hands it to me, still ticking.

And at first I think it’s a gift. It is, after all, my birthday.

Then Maggie opens a bottle of whisky, and tells me the story of Fournier Street. She’s had a long time to embroider it, stitch by pretty silk stitch, in her mind. And by now, she knows just how it should start — with Theresine.

The first name on the lease of 30 Fournier Street is Samuel Beckwith. A West Country carpenter with, no doubt, all an eighteenth-century property developer’s demons and dreams. It’s Beckwith who builds the house. His initials are still there, if you look, in the stone above the cistern.

But it’s Theresine, surely, who plants the mulberry tree, Theresine who paces out the as-yet-unnumbered plot,
un-
deux-trois
, in her little boots, assigning space to potager and flower beds, watching the arc of the English sun, searching out the warmest spot in which to place the fig tree.

Each summer, she battles the squirrels for its ripening fruit, rising early, armed with faith, and a little stool and basket. First one fig, then two. Finally, one blazing hot September, balancing on tiptoes now, she fills the entire basket.

She neither asks for, nor receives, any help from the servants. They loiter inside, pretending to wax the dining table while looking out at their mistress through Samuel Beckwith’s extravagant windows (so fashionable still, never mind the draught, and the light that shows every smudge on the mahogany, and the whole of Spitalfields seeing your business). And why shouldn’t they?
One can’t surround oneself with glass and then complain of being looked at.

When Theresine re-enters the house, she finds yesterday’s boots uncleaned and the brass in the dining room unpolished. She pretends she hasn’t noticed. Theresine is shy of speaking to the servants, lank Thomas and swarthy Beth, afraid of the glances that pass between them as she mangles her English words. The serving man’s bulbous eyes alarm her, as do the housemaid’s hairy eyebrows, which meet above her nose, and look like a fat black caterpillar wriggling on her forehead.

Theresine distrusts their silence, followed as it often is by sniggering in the kitchen. The housemaid has a laugh so sharp it pierces every floor of the house, reaching even into the attic, where it works its mischief into the weavers’ songs.

Theresine, therefore, says nothing. No. She waits, and tells her husband. Their ill-favoured household and its godless ways don’t worry Guillaume. He’s good at dealing with the English.

Guillaume’s own footwear is always cleaned to his satisfaction. Still, he would almost certainly speak to Thomas about the neglect of his wife’s, were he listening to her, instead of watching the brush move through her hair and thinking about the falling price of mantua in Antwerp.

But he wouldn’t scold Beth. A man shouldn’t interfere in the business of women. And to be fair — Guillaume wishes, always, to be fair — his wife is in London now, and must adapt to its standards of housekeeping, and the impertinence of its servants. He himself finds Beth a good enough sort of girl, attentive and quick, always there at his elbow, almost before she is called. The dining room’s greening sconces have quite escaped him. But then, Guillaume has a lot on his mind.

The very next morning, for instance, just before half-past ten, he receives a second visit from Monsieur LeBlanc. LeBlanc’s card, carried up by Beth on a silver salver, declares that gentleman to be a wool merchant of Bruges. If Guillaume’s hand flutters, just a little, as he reads it, it is because he knows that his caller is in fact
Marc-Antoine
d’Etevenaux, the agent of an infamous Swiss banker.

D’Etevenaux’s departure, some hours later, provides a degree of relief to his host. But still, Guillaume is left in no mood for lunch. Neither can he concentrate on Jean-Pierre’s designs for the spring silks. He withdraws to his closet, orders Armagnac, and silence.

Poor Guillaume. The brandy only curdles with his anguish. Such a choice! What is a good Calvinist to do?

He meant what he said to d’Etevenaux, two Sundays ago, when he still thought him Jean LeBlanc. Guillaume would do anything to ease the sufferings of his co-religionists in France — sufferings of which he was well aware before d’Etevenaux’s spirited descriptions.

The pile of letters on his desk bears witness to the many relatives Guillaume has left behind him, as far-flung as they are impecunious. Indeed, his own second cousin is among those women still chained in the
Tour de Constance
, and the husband of a friend of his niece was sent to the slave galleys just last month. The very thought of such faithful, tortured souls brings tears to Guillaume’s eyes.

And now here he is, with the power to help them in his hands. On the face of it, the price is not even high. All that is required of him is a small investment, perfectly safe, and returning eight per cent. Just like the Bank of England. Except that the bank which the Swiss propose to start is new, and its client is the King of France.

A monarch whose heart, on receipt of the loan of his wealthy exiles’ capital at such a benevolent rate, will soften, d’Etevenaux swears. Once he has the funds to pursue his Austrian campaign, Louis’ men will overlook the lights of Huguenot services in the woods at night; those Calvinists foolhardy enough to remain in his realm may quietly practise their trades and leave their fortunes to their children.

But there is a catch, a rub, an ulcer the brandy is stinging under Guillaume’s tongue. Can it be right to buy freedom for the French Calvinists by funding their oppressor? Shall he pay the debts of Louis the Debauched, Ravisher of the Faith, Devourer of Huguenot babies? Shall he bank-roll Louis’ papist plague of dragoons against the Protestant English Army, with whom
(
The Times
reminded him this morning) France is still officially at war?

Remembering last week’s sermon, Guillaume puts his brandy aside. He paces around his closet twice, then sits down and scratches his forehead. It’s true that with or without the exiled Calvinists’ help, Louis will fill his war chest. Either way, the pestilential dragoons will continue to get their pay. Perhaps d’Etevenaux is right, and there is only one thing to decide. Shall their brothers in France be free?

Guillaume is still grappling with this question the following day, as his servant Beth makes her way towards Spitalfields Market. She has her handkerchief to her nose against the ever-present miasma of foreign food that rises from the streets. Garlic and onions, frogs and snails. The tails of oxen, stolen from cesspits behind the fellmongers’ stores, rendering down to soup. The strangers will eat anything, if left to their own devices.

Beth buys good clean English meat from her butcher friend, paying only a few pence below the receipted price, and thinks her employers are lucky to have her.

On her way home, she pays a call of her own, upon a gentleman who is waiting for her in a private room at the Weaver’s Arms.