Restoration (14 page)

"There's the place," he said, "that's she."

"Ah," I said, "but there's no house."

Fox shrugged. "It's there," he said.

I had him tie up to the jetty. With some difficulty, I clambered out of the small boat (now earning its name by tilting riotously the moment I stood up) and made my way along the landing stage. A pretty iron gate guarded a narrow path running between squat bushes I took to be hazels and hawthorns. At this moment, the moon disappeared behind a cloud, plunging me suddenly into blackness. I stood still, waiting for the moon to reappear. Though behind me I could still hear the slapping of the water, I had the illusion, for a moment or two, of having lost my way.

I walked cautiously on, aware of the night around me, some scuffling animal in the dead leaves, a night bird putting forth a little stuttering cry.

And then I heard music.

Moments later, as the clouds once again uncovered the moon, I found myself in a small knot garden and before me stood the house. It was not grand or large. Its principal rooms seemed, from the size of the windows, to be modest. It is, I thought on the instant, the kind of small house I would give my daughter, were I to have one. But I could not dwell long in my mind on its size, because it was clear to me now that one of the rooms, from which came the sound of a harpsichord and a flute, was full of people. Lamps and candelabra had been lit. On the window seat, a man lolled with his arm round some pretty wench's neck. A musical supper appeared to be in full swing. As I stood and breathed and tried to warm my hands by rubbing them together, I heard a sudden flight of laughter.

All the way back to Lambeth (where I intended to lodge for the night at an inn called the Old House) I pestered Fox, telling him he must have been mistaken. "Either," I said, "it was not the King whom you saw or else he did not tie up at that jetty." But his rodent features were hard and set, as was his mind, he informed me. He vividly recalled the ease and grace with which the King tied up his skiff and climbed out of it ("as if he had been a very waterman, Sir") and he insisted that there was no similar small jetty for another half mile upstream or more.

At the Old House I dined well and fell into conversation about the art of marble cutting with a likeable fellow from the Navy Office who recounted to me that the marble-cutter's life hangs in its entirety upon patience, for though the mass of stone that confronts him may be as large as a four-poster, he can, with his little tool, cut a mere four inches a day.

Pondering such steadfastness and perseverance and wondering if I would ever be capable of it in regard to my painting, I all of a sudden remembered, with a surge of bile to my stomach, my pledge to Violet Bathurst to spend this very night in her bed.

I had a dream of a drowned body. I was at Granchester Meadows with Pearce and a group of medical students and we sat on the banks of the weedy Cam and we saw this lumpen corpse come floating towards us. We had but one thought: we must retrieve the body for our anatomical studies. We took off our coats and lay on our stomachs and reached out and took hold of the swollen limbs. And then I perceived that the body was Celia's. Her hair streamed among the waterweed and her mouth was blueish and open, like the mouth of a fish. I was about to cry out to my fellow students to let go of her arms and legs when I woke. I was shivering and my throat was sore and my nose full of mucus and my thirst had returned.

I lit a candle and stumbled to the wash-stand in the unfamiliar room in the Old House and gulped some water and then got into the bed and tried to warm myself, but the dream of drowned Celia frightened me so much that I was afraid to sleep again in case it returned to me, as dreams are in the terrible habit of doing.

"God is the engineer of all dreaming," Pearce once announced to me. "He fills the sleeping mind with all we have neglected."

"Tosh, Pearce!" I said at the time. "For the great part of my dreams are about food. My nights are pleasantly filled with rabbit fricassées, venison pasties and chocolate syllabubs, none of which I have in the least neglected." If I remember rightly, Pearce then made some acidic rejoinder about God giving me a vision of my own gluttony, which I utterly ignored, but now the idea that this dream of drowning had been "sent" to me seemed entirely plausible. For, so confused and dismayed had I been by the sight of Celia's house filled with people and music (indeed as if the poor girl was dead and all memory of her drowned) that I had "neglected" to decide what I was going to tell her and in my conversation about the marble cutter had managed to put all thought of her from my mind.

So I lay and shivered and nursed the ague that had come upon me so suddenly and tried to weigh the whole matter in my mind without consideration for myself and in a detached and proper manner, as if Celia were my patient and I not I, but some wise Fabricius, some unparalleled physician utterly unprone to error.

By the time dawn broke and I permitted my snivelling self an hour of soothing sleep, I had come to the following decisions:

I would return to Celia and inform her that the King appeared to have forgotten her, that it was rumoured some new mistress had taken up residence at Kew, that he had expressed very forcefully to me his displeasure about her importunate behaviour but had not given me to believe that he would ever summon her back. I would then counsel her – exactly as Pearce had counselled me – about the folly of hope. "If," I would say to her, "you permit yourself to hope, you will come to insanity, Celia, and then I cannot tell what will become of you. Perchance you may come to poor Ophelia's end, drowned in a stream." I would explain to her that I had at last understood of what element the King was fashioned: "He is mercury," I would say. "He is of that same metal he spends hour after hour in his laboratory trying to extract from his flasks of cinnabar, but which is ever elusive and restless and cannot be fixed and held. And how will it profit any man or woman to love mercury?"

What I could not foresee was how I was to find any remedy for Celia's grief. I knew myself inadequate to the task. I was not Fabricius. I was not even Pearce. I had no wisdom.

This ague of mine, got no doubt from the extremes of heat and cold through which not only my body but my mind had passed in the preceding night and day, forced me to remain in my truckle bed at the Old House for an entire week.

When my fever worsened and I began to detect in my groin and in my neck some slight swelling, terror filled my heart. Plague was coming and where might it arrive more swiftly than to the malodorous Lambeth marshes? For more than fifty hours I imagined myself dying. I wept and cried out. I beseeched my poor burned mother to intercede with God for me, knowing my own prayers to be unheard. "Dear parents," I heard myself say in my delirium, "make God the gift of a hat. He is fond of plumes. Give Him a fine hat in exchange for my life!" I ranted and blubbed. My cowardice was as infinite as a well sunk from Norfolk to Chengchow.

Then on the third day, my fever lessened and my swellings began to go down. To the poor serving woman who brought me broth, I declared that I had been resurrected, which statement she read as an out-and-out blasphemy and quickly made the sign of the cross upon her bosom.

Still somewhat weak from my illness I took a stage coach to Newmarket, where I spent the night. At dawn the following morning, I was reunited with Danseuse and gratified by the little whinny of delight with which the mare greeted me. I am most fond of animals. I enjoy about them, in equal measure, that which is graceful and that which is gross. And they do not scheme. No man, woman or child exists in this boisterous Kingdom who is not full of plotting, yet the animals and the birds have not one good ploy between them. It is for this reason above all others, I suspect, that the King is so attached to his dogs.

Danseuse galloped home like a chariot horse, her spirits far out-distancing mine on this return journey. Though I clung to the reins and pressed my knees ardently to her sides, she unseated me near Flixton and as I lay winded in a ditch I suddenly perceived, not far from me, an old wrinkled woman lifting her hessian skirts and pissing onto the brambles. It amused me and I would have bid her good-day, except that I had no breath within me.

I struggled upright at last and remounted Danseuse, who was foraging for grass in the frosty lane. I tried to persuade her to trot sedately for a while, but she would not and we arrived at last at Bidnold in an unseemly sweat.

My clothes being frankly filthy and full of stench, I was in no mind to talk to Celia until I had soaked for some hours in a hot bath and put on clean linen. I called at once for Will (who reminds me sometimes of a small, nimble animal in his unquestioning loyalty to me) and within a short time I lay at my ease in a tub, regarding the moths on my stomach, while Will poured more and more hot water round me and I told him of my stay at the Old House and how Death had come into the room and laid an icy hand on me and caused me to snivel like a baby.

"If plague does come to Norfolk," I said to Will, "I shall try to show courage, but I am bitterly afraid it will be the false courage of a desperate man and not the true bravery of one whose mind and spirit are at peace."

Will shook his head, about to flatter me, no doubt, with his erroneous belief that when the hour approached I would conduct myself like a Parfit Gentil Knight, but before he could speak we heard suddenly the most lovely sound of a viola da gamba, coming, it seemed, from beneath us in my Music Room.

I sat up, causing a small tidal wave to splash over the rim of the tub. "Will," I said, "who is playing?"

"Ah," said Will, "I was about to inform you, Sir Robert: your wife's father is come."

"Sir Joshua?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Sir Joshua has come to Bidnold. But why, Will?"

"I do not really know, Sir, except or unless it be to take your wife home."

"Take her
home
?"

"Yes."

"You heard that mentioned?"

"Yes, I did, Sir. That as soon as you were returned, they would leave."

The music continued. I began vigorously to soap my body. I heard myself say to Will very tetchily that I would not permit Sir Joshua to take my wife away, that the King had commanded that she reside with me and that, besides, I had much to discuss with her.

Will gaped at me, being surprised, I dare say, at my apparent strength of feeling upon a subject to which he believed me to be utterly indifferent.

Bathed and scented, with a clean wig concealing my hog's bristles and a blue silk coat upon my back, I descended my stairs. As I did so, the sound of the viola ceased and I became aware – as so often in the wake of pleasant music – of the degree to which my mind is lightened by it, as if it gave to the dark mass of my brain a momentary sheen such as I had perceived upon the viscera of the King's toad.

A moment later, Sir Joshua recommenced his playing. This time, it was a song I had heard long ago at Cambridge, entitled
I
Lay Me Down in a Wood of Elm
, a most sweet tune but with the scansion a little strained, there not being a great abundance of words that rhyme with "elm". I stood in my hallway and listened as an exquisitely high and beautiful voice began to sing. It was Celia's voice, which I had never until this moment heard, but which I now knew to be a soprano of astonishing purity. A cold shiver of delight ran through me. More than her white skin, more than her languid, silky hair, more than her small mouth or her firm breasts, it was surely this
voice
of hers which had so charmed and seduced the King. Compared to it, her person was nothing, pretty enough, womanly enough, but giving no hint that concealed within it lay a matchless sound. I sat down on a tapestry-covered stool and fell to considering the probability that every one of us conceals some secret talent, though what mine may be I was not yet able to determine. Pearce's, despite his harsh criticisms of the world and most things within it, was a talent for kindness. Violet's, I was tempted to suggest, was anger, for I knew of no other person in whom rage was more delicious or becoming. And the King's? Well, he was a person of a thousand talents, but whether there was yet one more that he kept secret from us all, only time will reveal.

The song continued. "Celia, Celia," I wanted to ask, "why did no one tell me how exquisitely you sing?" And a vision of myself, suddenly skilled upon my oboe, playing enraptured while my wife sang, momentarily rilled my mind. How different, how ordered and knowable life would be, if it could be arranged around a simple duet! As it was, I knew that the moment I entered the Music Room Celia would stop singing. I could play no part whatsoever in her music and by tonight she would be gone to her parents' house and Bidnold would be utterly silent, except for the occasional trilling of my Indian Nightingale. I took out of my pocket an emerald-coloured handkerchief and blew my nose, still intermittently blocked with mucus. I felt myself once again excluded from something to which I desired to contribute – however negligible my contribution might be. There is, I said to myself, as I stowed away my handkerchief, a degree of sadness in this observation.

I stood up. As soon as Celia knew of my return, she would press me for news of her situation and the moment was approaching when I would have to say what I had planned, thus smothering in her heart the small ember of hope which Pearce had led me to recognise as so fearful a thing. But as I walked towards the Music Room, I knew that I had faltered: I could not utter the words I had decided upon. For I knew beyond question that if I said them Celia's indifference towards me would turn again to loathing. As Cleopatra whipped the bearers of bad tidings, so Celia would flay me with her scorn and hatred. I, who was nothing to her, would become less than nothing. She would leave my house for ever and the whole magnificent story that the King had set in train would have reached an ending, long before its proper course had been run. And besides… ah, dangerous consideration!… I did not want to relinquish Celia's voice. So there you have it. At whatever cost to Celia's sanity and mine, I had become determined to keep her with me under my roof, at least for the two months decreed by the King.