A Man of Genius (22 page)

By now the long journey, the privations, the fear, the aching muscles, the dirty hair, the baggy trousers, the returned skirt round a thinner waist, all of it had begun to dissipate the horror left in Venice. Pain and strain changed things, diminished disturbances of the mind. Something was appeased – at least by day.

‘My mother will probably be dead by the time I reach Paris,' she said.

‘Probably,' Aksel Stamer replied. She thought he smiled but her lips were still so cracked from the dry air she couldn't smile back to make him smile again – perhaps he'd never done so.

He glanced at her, then rooted in his bag and pulled out his small jar of rose balm. He put a small amount on his finger and stretched it out to her. She took it off and smoothed the waxy substance on to her lips.

He'd never said why he was going to Paris. Most probably he needed to get papers there to cross back to London, unless England were really his home.

Or did he want to see Caroline? It was possible. The suspicion had been lying in her mind. But silly, gossipy, cruel Caroline?

Or had he been a friend of Gilbert's, a young relative through the half-English mother? She'd mentioned him and his repeated words a few times on the journey. She couldn't remember what she might have said or not have said in these long extraordinary days. She registered no response.

She'd not said much about Robert. In fact when, by her face perhaps or some gesture, she'd started to betray that she thought of him and was about to speak, Aksel Stamer seemed to notice, then drew attention to something outside themselves: some stooping woman with a bundle on her back, some quaint feature of the passing landscape, some animal scampering into the bushes. It was not the copious detail of Giancarlo Scrittori and his seagulls, little beyond pointing and an adjective. See the sunset over the hill; look at the girls loading the donkey with more than the poor beast's weight; notice the tracery round the door of this poor inn – it was once a lord's palace, and so on. The asphodels had been such a moment. The tactic did not quite serve, but it staunched confession.

By the end she herself had become so mute she'd ignored the few chances for conversation. She had no worry: time enough to talk when they reached Paris and they would both see Caroline alive – or hear of her dead.

Then would be the moment for thinking back on those terrible events in Venice. Then would be the time for explanation.

27

A
s they came to the end of the journey, near places where she and Robert had been together, she heard her own voice speaking through his. Within her own head she'd become like one of his comic characters, those people he conjured up to amuse his followers, then dismissed as the shallow, simple souls they were. He'd never done intricate personations; or rather, he revealed a secret: that the intricate were really simple. If they thought otherwise, it was vanity. She knew she was simple now.

She stilled the voice that was hers only through him. But there was something she couldn't control. Why, now that beds were softer and food more edible, did the nightmares become more vivid?

For so many months in Venice she'd dreamt the same dream. She was lost in obscure streets, rushing, running breathless to be home, a home that was always an elusive Robert. There was danger too, violent danger but it was there in his absence, not his presence. His person was never reached. She feared she would be dashed to pieces from a fall before she found him, drowned in whirlpools, or asphyxiated in brown duck feathers. Now as she travelled these dreams had almost stopped and in their place arose the image of that hanging body, washed with a horrid yearning. Underneath was the dread that this yearning would be fulfilled and she would embrace and be embraced by the corpse.

When she reached consciousness with the morning, she was flooded with gratitude that desire could not be, and had not been, acted on. Then she found tears on her face for Robert in all his forms – and for her profound, remorseful relief that he was gone.

As with the old dreams, the day diminished the new ones and she found that his image stayed behind in the bed, shared on one occasion with a lady's maid from Marseilles. She could not have credited it. She thought Robert had moved inside her forever.

Signs streaked behind her eyes at intervals, of course. The high-backed chair in his study that had held his body, then fallen. Like the sofa of Princess Caroline which everyone remembered long after ceasing to think of its owner. Like Gilbert's solid-silver swan. Like Caroline's coloured shawls. Why did her mind fix so helplessly on these unseen objects?

Something was amiss with it. There was a lump within her head. It had settled just beneath her temple and at times travelled to the nape of her neck. Heat flashed and subsided.

During the last part of their long journey through France, they'd stopped when demands for papers and passes required payment, bribes, or counter-signings by more expensive dignitaries. Aksel Stamer dealt with it all, producing whatever would serve or knowing how to circumvent what would not. He made people accept that they'd landed properly at Marseilles from a regular packet boat – not been dumped by Sardinian fishermen on a deserted beach.

She let him handle all of it, documents and identities, with the trust of a child or beast.

So they reached Paris.

By now she was trembling. Why? So many dreadful things had happened that an encounter with an old woman who'd always been indifferent to her, just a distant figure in false red curls, could not provoke this emotion.

Perhaps to help her struggling mood, Aksel Stamer became more forthcoming. ‘Paris is filthier than London,' he said, ‘it's laid out impressively on a grand scale as Napoleon wanted, a Roman imperial capital – but all show. Walk away from the wide boulevards and there's filth and narrow streets. Yet there are still swans on the Seine. Look, one is moving its head up and down. It looks like a clockwork fowl from this distance.'

She couldn't reply, not even to that detail of the mechanical bird; she felt too listless. He looked worried then. He had gone too fast for her, he said, it had been too much, he should have thought.

It was he who suggested she acquire new clothes now they were in a city. He didn't choose them as another man had done, or lovingly finger the feminine material, but he took her where the young maid at their inn knew there were clothes bespoke for someone else and not collected. She could have them quickly altered to fit her. He paid for what she wanted.

Back at the inn the same maid helped her make her short hair passably like a modern woman's.

Then, dressed in new light jacket and skirt, her
turquois
-coloured one beyond cleaning or repair after serving as pillow and sunshade during the long weary miles, her hair surmounted by a clean trim cap, she was ready to visit Caroline and – watch the ‘dying scene'.

The phrase came unbidden to her befuddled mind. What could be happening? She could no longer distinguish fictive from real, life from a play, or indeed waking from dreaming.

One thing had taken hold in her mind. Aksel Stamer had come for Caroline. Why else had he grown gentler to her now they were in Paris?

She'd worked some of it out. He'd heard the name Ann St Clair in Palazzo Grimani when he – for it was he – stood too close as she picked up the letter from ‘A Friend'. Ever after in Venice he'd been haunting her, ready for the moment to make himself known. On the journey he'd looked at her papers, some with her unmarried name. He must have used this name to acquire – somehow – the right documents for France. Her head ached and she could think no further.

She must go to Caroline and see what Aksel Stamer made of her – and she of him.

He was with her as she walked the last paces to the address in Le Marais given by the ‘Friend'. He too had bought new clothes and looked smart in contrasting coloured waistcoat and jacket and new
linen. He was as at home in this urban place as thoroughly as he'd been in his worn leather jacket on the sand dunes and in the woods of Sardinia.

It was a street on its way down, hotels turned into modest if not quite impoverished apartments.

They arrived at the right number. The shutters were closed on the first floor, green shutters with flaking paint. It was the kind of detail Ann saw while failing to take in the whole.

She swayed: was the idea of seeing Caroline after all these years so very moving? She was surprised. Aksel Stamer gave her his arm to steady her. ‘Be careful,' he said, ‘it need not be frightening. You are a brave woman.'

She had a pocket dangling from her belt. He raised it and put in it a fat pouch. ‘For you,' he said. ‘I will leave you now. You are home, or nearly home. God bless you.'

She didn't at once understand his words. Then they struck her. Struck her a blow on her face. As shocking as the fist she so well remembered.

‘You . . . you are going? What will become of me?'

‘Don't become, Ann, just be.' He kissed her lightly on the cheek, turned and left, walking briskly back down the street.

She was so surprised she had to steady herself against the door, the dizziness, the sick feeling expanding. Sweat was falling from her brow although the day was cool. She put her hand to her face and touched it, almost expecting to find a bruise beginning. She felt only heat and damp.

The kind delicate kiss, the pouch of money, the departure before he'd seen Caroline, before she'd shown her gratitude, before they could talk about everything, above all his going, his going. What could it all mean?

She pulled herself together as far as she could and tried to stop swaying. Then she jerked an iron ring by the door. A bell clanged deep inside.

Silence.

At last she heard footsteps.

She waited.

An old woman with careworn brown complexion and deep-set eyes came to the door. Her neat cap was laced and clean white, so good for a maid. Ann was about to introduce herself when the woman spoke without greeting or smile.

‘So you are come, Mademoiselle. At last. She has been waiting long.'

Caroline was alive then and attended, it seemed, by a very creditable if discourteous servant.

The pounding in her head increased and again she had to steady herself against the wall as she mounted the stairs. Her hesitation made the maid look back at her. Did the woman assume she was upset? She'd crossed all of Europe for this moment. Perhaps she was.

‘
Bien
,' said the maid. ‘Follow.'

They mounted one flight, passed the room with the closed green shutters, and went on up the second flight to a bedchamber.

It was dimly lit: pink curtains covered the windows towards the street and kept out the sun. Framed sketches of flowers and ferns were on the wall. The kind of thing Caroline used to draw in Putney while sitting on cushions and being waited on by Martha.

The room smelled of decay, of bodily effluent, not too intense but not quite masked by a scent of some kind of flower, lilies she thought, with perhaps lavender in the mix. It conjured up the lily and lavender and rose from another era. That body. Odour was a strong mnemonic.

The bed was large and whatever was in it lay to one side, its outlines softened by the white coverlet. A woman, a corpse? Not the latter for there was loud, hitched breathing coming from it. There was hardly any flesh to see between a frilled white cap and high tied collar. No sign of that false red hair Caroline used to wear.

One arm lay outside the coverlet on the bed with the sleeve pulled up. Had it clutched at the bedclothes or the face, crumpling the sleeve as it did so? It must have gone limp and been left unattended.

On the table were phials and gallipots. Accoutrements and signs of the dying person? Everything said so; yet Ann would not believe for, if this were her mother, she would not die. The mantelpiece in
the Putney house had been cluttered with medicine bottles, very pretty with their coloured mixtures young Ann used to think, but smelly too. Concoctions for a weak heart and delicate nerves. Sometimes they were frightening for they grew things inside as if living creatures were trying to escape. Away in her bedchamber she'd imagine the dangling limbs easing out the cork, floating free, massing and slithering up the stairs – but by then she'd let out a scream and Caroline would shout, ‘Quiet, girl, I must have my sleep.'

‘Your daughter,' said the servant to the thing in the bed, ‘your daughter has come.' She retreated, leaving Ann in the room.

She felt so strange, so dizzy, she simply couldn't comprehend what she was seeing. She gazed at the body. Slowly it became an old, old woman.

It was not, could not be, Caroline. Yet the medicines, so common from her childhood days, and the servant's words, declared it surely was. Her heart staggered. She was hot. A white flame zigzagged round her head. Was she about to faint? She bit her lip and crushed her nails into her palms.

The woman was so much older than she'd ever imagined. How old was she? Caroline had been an elderly mother but this person was extreme, old enough for the flesh to be decaying before death. It sagged from the shrivelled arm like the tattered remnant of a flag on a wooden pole. The hand was ridged and splotched.

Time is short, said Caroline. But of course she said nothing of the sort. Too pithy.

I doubt it, replied Ann. Did she speak? Was either of them talking?

The lips were dry, her own lips. Had she said anything? It is too much of a coincidence, my being here and you dying.

What was the matter with her? With them both? No one had spoken at all.

‘Caroline?' she said, her voice sounding hoarse and distant.

The face twitched and eyes opened just a little under the frilled cap, no longer dirty green but yellow. They slowly closed again.

She had no wish for memories and yet they came. The last time
with Caroline, the real one, not this thing. ‘You are hard,' she'd said.

Ann saw the scrawny old hand lift up from the coverlet and tug at the rolled cream ribbon at the neck of the nightgown. Her mother's hands had always been veined – but she'd never imagined them turning into these tortured claws.

The mouth from the bed opened and a phlegmy, gurgling sound emerged from layers of thickened liquid. No word came.

Then there was Robert hanging and twisting in this sombre room against the polished wooden bed and little table with its spindly curved legs. Ann shook her head to expel the sight. She was here, in this place without him. It smelled of effluent and the sickly lily; that was all that laid one scene over the other.

She looked again at the face, then the hand. Dying, yes. Perhaps after all. And if so, if this were indeed the dying scene, it would be long. There was no hurry.

A glass jar was descending over her, cutting her off from everything without: this woman, if woman she still was, and this suffocating room. The sides reflected herself. She swung in the jar with that familiar body which was this body too. Swung in it like the foetus in the Conte's studio in Palazzo Savelli, twisting slowly in its pickling element – or the trapped and growing thing in Caroline's medicine bottles. All of them both living and yet too dead to struggle out.

Was all this confused emotion just to fend off a dying woman? She litanised to herself, A mother is dying, my mother is dying.

The stern maid came in and removed thick strands of sputum from Caroline's chin. They had glistened even in the dim pink light but till now Ann hadn't noticed.

It was the epitome of old age, its horror and disintegration – or rather its failure to disintegrate fast enough so that the living need not see it and could go on their way in ignorance. Why was the thing still alive? Ann felt only the horror of decay, no pity.

The yellow eyes opened again, stayed open this time, seeing or unseeing? Ann couldn't know.

She should lean over and kiss the wizened cheek like a daughter,
like girls did in her stories when faced with the dying stepmother they must forgive on the final page. But she couldn't do it.

‘Caroline, I have come. I have come from Venice.'

The mouth moved a little. But not to say words. Instead it gasped. Did it want water? But she couldn't see how such a body could swallow. Indeed she didn't really believe in any live thing under the white coverlet, for, though the mouth and eyes moved, and once the hand, everything else was still. If those eyes hadn't opened and the rasping sound weren't emerging from the mouth, she would have thought all of it now quite dead.