A Man of Genius (2 page)

2

H
e cared about clothes. He wanted them to seem negligent but he took trouble. She didn't much mind for herself. She'd disliked Caroline's finery, her turbans and garish coloured shawls. But she loved to see
him
well dressed.

Now he wanted to dress her. She demurred. She was not beautiful. He didn't disagree. Instead he said that beauty could go rotten and become ‘loathsome', more than ugliness. More than adders and toads.

He had a family allowance, not large – she rather surmised than knew this – or maybe Richard Perry said something. But he went off and bought expensive material for her, pea-green, striped and shiny. He let the material slither through his fingers while he closed his eyes.

He came with her to a dressmaker to have it made up so that for once – so he said – for once she would have clothes that fitted well and were stylish. She could be smart, she had the figure for it. Why did she not take more trouble? He sounded like a mother, she thought, and giggled.

Then he became the dressmaker and was amusing, just for her. Later he bought her an intricately sewn blue silk scarf. It suited her colouring, he said.

She would try to take trouble and did so for a while. His admiration mattered.

She had told him – why, for she'd not before spoken much of her past? – that father Gilbert had loved material things, the cabinets of curiosities. He knew the names of shells: the magician's cone, the glory-of-the-seas, the precious wentletrap, the nutmeg snail – the list
had gone on but she remembered no more now, the words had come with no images attached. He had carried her mother – with difficulty she said Mother instead of Caroline, sensing a social conservatism below the radical talk – to Montagu House for the purpose. Caroline could still remember those shells. It was part of her tribute to the dead. ‘Name them to me, child, those curiosities,' she'd demanded after her relating.

‘I will show you the curiosities of the mind,' said Robert James.

When she had a toothache and found the cloves no help, she was about to consult a dentist. He threw up his hands in protest. ‘Medical men know nothing. Keep away. They are all quacks.'

Perhaps. Often her mother had consulted Buchan's
Domestic Medicine
while Martha, her old Putney nurse, had provided more homely remedies that almost always worked – in time.

Robert was scornful. ‘Poor little hen,' he said. ‘Martha indeed. There is only one sure treatment for any body part: electric shock. It shakes the frame and jostles the teeth. What could be more healthy than a jostling? Or would you rather place roasted turnips behind the ear as my great aunt did in County Cork? Maybe a toasted fig between the gum and cheek?'

He was off, for he had become the dentist and was unstoppable. ‘Perhaps some vomiting, a purging of what is unwholesome, some leeching might help, Madam. Or perhaps a hot iron on the tooth which I personally, Madam, would apply. Or maybe something a little less common, more unusual and special for a special patient: might I insert three drops of juice into the ear on the side the tooth aches? They could remain there an hour or two, while I, Madam, would stroke your hand for comfort. If all this fails, we will gently pull it out without disturbing a single nerve. Personally I always think a little excellent wine shared with your physician is much to be recommended, though taken without advice one might, I admit it' – he clapped his hands and then stroked his hair, ‘one might become plethoric. Madam, I abhor home doctoring. Leave it to the professionals. There are so many injurious effects by people using their
common sense and calling things by simple names. It will not do, Madam, it will not do. Not a one of them has a real understanding of physic. The eel of science, Madam, will not be caught by the tail. It will not, it will protest.'

His gestures were so comical, so typical of the type he mocked that she had to laugh. She was flattered he did it for her. And it
was
for her, she the only audience of a man who could enthral a crowd of men.

Sure enough the pain died away.

He brought her a lily, some lilac, a rose, and all together. How could they have all been in season? But she remembered the scents mingling, so heady that they went beyond flowers. That was the point, he said. All making one.

But why would separate smells mingle to make a better? Common sense would argue . . .

‘Reason, my little Puritan, is the critic and interpreter of nature. Then intuition finds dark corners in the mind where reason stumbles. It is not common-sense to rely on common sense,' and he pranced around holding a flower in each hand. He twined them in her hair and looked intensely at the result. Then very gently he stroked her cheek with the lily's softness until she sneezed.

They went to the theatre, but had to avoid Edmund Kean, all the rage among the vulgar. He'd once given his fragment of
Attila
to Kean to read aloud to auditors. The great man had turned his inward tragedy into fustian, the kind of melodrama Robert particularly despised. Horrified, he'd torn the pages from the little actor's surprised grasp.

She knew the story. She'd heard it from several sources.

So she took Robert to
The Castle Spectre
with its bleeding nun and devilish seductress. No pretension there to high art, no bathos where no heights. He was bored.

Better bored than furious, she reflected.

What he liked, it seemed, were new tricks, the famous gas lighting at the Lyceum and Drury Lane. She couldn't share his joy: an evening in gaslight made her chest heave and her eyes water – the effect lasted
for fully three days. He loved too the mirrored curtain which showed the audience itself; they saw it later when they went down to Lambeth Marsh to watch the jugglers and harlequinade of the new Royal Coburg. Such simple entertainment was, Robert declared, more real than the sensational stuff strutted by Edmund Kean.

Her cousin Sarah was quietly amused when she saw the new pea-green gown and heard of the visit to Lambeth Marsh. She knew Mary Davies a little through some acquaintance of Charles's sister and, from the trail of gossip, learned that Ann and a male companion had been seen walking in Hyde Park together, close together, and talking all the while. Mary Davies had been restrained: no hint of the dislike she'd felt at the behaviour of her boorish guest.

‘Are you in love?' Sarah asked playfully – on important matters like family and children her broad face became prettily serious, not now. ‘I know there's a man in the case.'

‘He's not exactly in the case, an acquaintance,' Ann replied. ‘You know me. I've done with that sort of thing. I'm growing an old spinster. I shall soon adopt the Mrs style. Gregory Lloyd was enough.'

Yet on the tip of her tongue to say that this was so very different. ‘I just want to make my own living,' she said.

‘You know that I cannot believe you,' smiled Sarah.

‘I've always known I might have such a relative,' Sarah Hardisty had said when years before Ann had fallen into her life from another world. She laughed as she often did to punctuate her thoughts, ‘but our mothers quarrelled. I was told yours was rather, shall we say, unusual?' She glanced anxiously at this new cousin.

‘We shall indeed,' replied Ann, smiling back. ‘But I haven't seen her for years.'

‘I'm so sorry.' Sarah was about to reach for Ann's hand when the other's expression stayed her.

‘Don't waste pity. Caroline and I are better distant. She never approved of me. She was full of Gilbert as if I had had nothing to do with either of them.'

Sarah was bewildered. With a shock she understood: it was her
aunt who was Caroline. She'd never heard any woman call her parent by a Christian name. It was very strange. ‘Oh, I'm sure she did, somewhere, underneath. You are so clever. And besides, mothers always do.'

‘Do what?'

‘Love, so in the end they approve.'

‘Is that your experience with your little brood?'

Sarah's fair face puckered. ‘Well, yes, I suppose it is.'

‘No favourites among them, one you care for more, one less?'

‘That's a different thing.' She stopped, then grinned. ‘I expect your mother was impressed by your writing, cousin Ann – it is Ann not Annie? You a woman making books. That is something.'

‘Now there you are quite wrong, Sarah. We parted long before I did it for a living.'

A shadow crossed Ann's face. ‘She thought I was stupid. She said it often.' Her eyes focused behind her cousin. ‘I had a weakness in my chest, an asthma, and when it came on me I breathed through my mouth. Caroline – I was not to call her Mama except when told to in public – left me standing as she spoke about my father's mania for astrolabes. I was just ten years old. My mouth fell open. Caroline saw it, stopped in mid-sentence, stood up and screamed, “Close your mouth, you stupid girl. You look like an idiot, an idiot I say. Get out of my sight.•”

The telling of this distant, so demanding memory was too savage. Ann was ashamed. But there'd been something in Sarah's placid face that urged her on when she'd better have been reserved.

She swallowed, ground her teeth a little, smiled and tried to rescue the moment. ‘I believe, if she thought of my future at all, Caroline wanted to see me married to a powerful – yes powerful – gentleman, the mistress of a mansion where she could preside as a lady. But how . . .' Ann trailed off.

Sarah chuckled with relief – though her eyes remained serious, her pale face showing a fading blush. ‘What mother does not want that for her daughter!' She paused. ‘Do not you think, dear Ann, that perhaps we daughters want something of the sort for ourselves when we are out of pinafores?'

‘Not me.'

‘Possibly so, cousin Ann. Or perhaps you thought you might not have it.' Afraid she'd offended, she added, ‘Not that you could not, but that you had not the way of wanting it enough. You have said as much.'

‘I doubt many men could have made me happy or would have wished to, and I don't know how I would have made them so.'

Sarah had no response. She tried to keep pity from her eyes. She'd seen the bitterness in her new cousin; it made her angular where she'd be better round and smooth. She herself was used to adapting. It was what women did, what her mother had taught her to do, and what in time her daughters would do. But she already knew enough of Ann's eccentric life to see she lacked a useful model.

‘Tell me about what you write,' she said much later. ‘You have hinted but not described it to me. I think it so bold a step to take. I could never do it.'

‘Do you really want to know?'

‘I really do.'

They were in the small snug back parlour beside a cheery log fire. Sarah sent the maidservant for more hot water and settled herself further into a comfortable armchair. ‘Sit back, Ann, you are at home here.'

She did speak – haltingly at first, then more loosely.

Suddenly Sarah clapped her plump hands. They made hardly a noise beyond a soft fleshy thud. Then, with her usual little chuckle, she asked, ‘Do you base the books on your own life?'

‘No,' smiled Ann, ‘no, no, of course not. They're full of horrid adventure, lots of blood and corpses; my life is not. I'm too plain, too complicated.' She laughed. The habit was catching. ‘Yet, if truth be told, I suppose, though they rarely know their fathers and I too . . .' She stopped. How odd to feel this rush of emotion, ‘you know, Gilbert . . .'

Sarah looked anxious. Her cheeks flushed bright red.

Ann was puzzled. Her cousin must still find these Christian names
too strange. She'd not expected her to be so sensitive. ‘Perhaps too, sometimes, Caroline, my mother – perhaps she has crept into the books as the Stepmother.'

Sarah patted her hot face with the back of her cooler hand. She remained flushed.

This introspection, this thinking aloud and about oneself and one's childhood, was perhaps too much, thought Ann. Could she be irritating Sarah by running on – though her cousin was too polite or kind to show it? But no, she'd caught pity in her face, not irritation. Or – and the thought struck her suddenly – perhaps Sarah hadn't wanted to be so long separated from her babies and was embarrassed to admit this to her childless cousin.

Was this the alternative to Caroline? Was this kindly milky flushed being what a mother should be?

Sure enough, Sarah soon excused herself and went to check on the nursery. A small child played with pieces of material in the corner, making hats and gloves for a rag doll. Charlotte? When she returned Sarah kissed her. Then the nursemaid came to take her upstairs. The child objected and cried out but was picked up and carried off still protesting.

No, it struck Ann suddenly, Sarah hadn't meant to ask about mothers and fathers at all. Her cousin was referring to imaginary
lovers
. Of course. How slow she was! After all, she created these tales for yearning women. What else were stories for?

When Sarah was seated, she rushed on again. ‘Some people might have expected me to feel shame displaying myself, but my name is not on the page. In any case I don't feel any – any shame I mean.' She paused and looked at Sarah. ‘I know what you're thinking. A man would see this as too independent, too encroaching on the masculine sphere. But I never claim there's anything in my work that has merit beyond a moment's read.' She hesitated. ‘Besides, what does it matter what a man thinks?'

She looked at her cousin enquiringly. Sarah caught her eye but remained silent. Her face had resumed its usual pallor. She picked up
her basket of sewing and chose some little pantaloons to mend, her chubby fingers expert at feeling what tears could be repaired, what consigned a garment to the box of rags so useful in a house of infants.

Ann waited. ‘All right then, so it might? In any case it gives me a regular income,' she went on quickly as she saw Sarah searching for a way to respond. ‘It's not so different from millinery or teaching in a school. No one thinks that not feminine.'