Curiosity (14 page)

Mornings he reads and draws and afternoons he walks. He walks down to the new floating harbour, and admires the marvel of ships sailing right into the city. Boys his age swing from ropes, intent on their trade. He aches with all he doesn’t know. He
wanders around the old friary and looks down at the gleaming mud of the Avon at low tide, and then he sets off for Clifton Wood, one lane delivering him to the next. New growth clamours around him, reproaching him with immateriality. He walks with eyes lowered, deflecting the glare of light and the raucous bird-song. Pinks and yellows assault him from gardens on either side – he doesn’t know their names.
I’ll be away from here soon
, he thinks.
I’ll go to the Continent. When this war is over, when I come into Halse Hall
. An image from his reading lifts itself in his mind
: I’ll climb Mont Blanc
. He sees himself towering at the peak, substantial against the barren snow.
I’ll join the Royal Society
, he resolves,
I’ll deliver a paper on glaciation
. He walks until he’s hungry and then takes a straight trajectory back to town, blundering through gardens and scrambling over walls. He pictures them sending dogs out after him, savouring the confusion when they corner him, a gentleman caught tramping, heedless of boundaries.

One day, as he returns at dusk, a man and woman stroll towards him. As they pass he turns, and just as they vanish into darkness, he catches a glimpse of the man’s hand creeping up to the nape of the girl’s neck, sees the
intention
in the hand. Then there’s no shutting it off. He falls into it, he’s forced into speculation regarding each house he passes, where and how often it is happening behind dark windows. In the attic chamber of a townhouse, or in the loft of the carriage house. A telling nimbus hangs over the carriage house, of smoke and shrouded torchlight. It is the high attic windows that stir him most, the maids’ quarters, where you could go straight in, as you can with the low-born, you just say what you want.

St. Nicholas Street is full of ladies crowding into teashops, coming out of the milliner’s. In the sunshine, girls wear gowns of a thin, limp fabric cut low over the breasts. Surely a girl donning this sort of dress understands its language? Finding
yourself fortuitously alone with her, you could take her at her word, nudge the gown off. It would slip like the dust cloth from a statue, fall to a pool of white at her feet. He can see a cage of narrow ribs, but he can’t get the whole picture, the way these small breasts are fixed to the chest, for example. Or the contour of the abdomen. In Jamaica, naked or almost-naked women squatted on flat stones at the stream, scrubbing their laundry, waded into the water with light splintering brilliantly between them. Perhaps they wore aprons like the woman he saw on Piccadilly; he can’t remember.

Back in his room, he picks up a charcoal. It’s the Hottentot Venus he draws: her torso, the great breasts hanging like gourds. He pins it to the wall behind his desk. It is quite good. In the tent of his bed curtains, he lies in his underwear in a litter of drawings and books. Twined bodies float on the walls of the tent, a frank alphabet of legs and torsos. He’ll paint them in India ink, the whole series, and leave his folio in the dining room. His uncle (with his sagging bolster of a belly that has never known love) will pick up the pages and puzzle over what Henry has drawn, as over an oriental script. Or Sullivan, standing baffled at the sideboard on old legs like wooden stilts, or the Scottish housekeeper, Mrs. Witherspoon, frowning, or the thin maid with the cast to her eye, passing indifferently by.

None of them will have an inkling. It’s in him, Henry, that the energy of the house hums. He’s an unlikely champion of love, with his way of talking that makes young ladies smile with private amusement and dart away to the buffet table, and the hints of Uncle Alger he sometimes sees in the looking glass – the long upper lip, the tufted eyebrows. He stands up, pushes the bed curtains aside, feels his new height and the bulk of his shoulders. Outside, rain has started up. An underground current runs below the houses of Bristol and it’s bubbled to the surface in
him. This is the purpose of his banishment. It will happen here, he thinks while rain patters on the window. In
Bristol
, he thinks, and the scrolled letters float across the window, glowing with erotic light.

Eventually, the force of his desire produces her. It plants her in the overgrown garden of the Irish captain next door. It’s laundry day and unusually windy, and Mrs. Witherspoon’s gaunt little helper has hung their washing on a clothesline. Between flapping sheets and linen napkins and the long, writhing legs of his own underwear, he spies a girl. She’s standing facing him. She wears a white cap over a haze of apricot-coloured hair. White napkins and their shadows dance over her face. Watching her between the waving towels is like trying to read the meaning of a flag show at Marlow. She’s looking straight at him, a square of something held breast-high in front of her. She’s signalling, part of the flag show. Then the wind flips a napkin right over and he sees it’s an easel she has before her. She’s not looking at him at all, she’s painting with studious attention some object he can’t see. He watches her through the fluttering laundry until noon. Then Captain Whyte’s butler comes out and speaks to her and she goes in, leaving her easel for the butler to carry.

The next morning, the laundry’s gone and from under the ragged fringe of thatch protruding over the casement, he has an unimpeded view. She has somewhat repositioned herself; she’s turned to a three-quarter perspective. She wears a soft gown of pale rose with an orange sash tied under her breasts – a bold combination. Her subject is propped on a ladder-backed chair. A lacquered tray, perhaps, or it may be someone else’s painting, a copy exercise set by her painting master. She has a long neck and a fine, pert-featured face. His mind flips through a catalogue of thin, faun-coloured animals. Fauns, of course. But
she’s livelier: quick, intent, squirrel-like. She never looks up to the tangled garden or the birds jousting in the vines on the wall. Except once, when she glances around, lifts her cap from her head, and smooths her hair before resettling the cap. She smiles constantly: it seems her subject amuses her.

He takes up his folio and turns the pages, past the shaded diagrams of sea mortars, past the drawing of the tendoned earth (a turnip with its roots grown round it), past the frail bones of the birds. He finds a blank page, where he sets about sketching her in pencil. He works quickly. This is an angle he likes; it presents a charming, inescapable line of brow and cheek and chin. He can’t see lashes from this distance, but he draws them in. They will be pale but thick. Her eyes will be drawn from the same pale palette as her hair and gown: green, ideally. Who could she be? He doesn’t know Captain Whyte’s household. He’ll persuade Alger to present his card tomorrow. He’ll accompany Alger on a morning visit, wearing his green waistcoat
. In London just briefly in the fall
, he’ll say to the young lady.
Amusing exhibitions on Piccadilly
. These are tactics – but to what end? To portray himself as a young man with prospects, of course. And if he’s successful, then – well, then: he sees himself ensconced in Captain Whyte’s drawing room, handing dowagers in to tea, dozing at the whist table. The supporting player in endless rehearsals for a life of tedious domesticity. He falls back onto the bed and lets the folio slide to the floor.

That’s the folly of beginning with
tactics
and not with
object
. He sits back up on the bed and watches her bend gracefully over her easel. The object is clear. How to attain it? He’d need to arouse in her a corresponding hunger. Is that so preposterous? Animals mate, the female is persuaded – and without the artifice of billets-doux and flowers. Of course, a young lady is not of the animal kingdom. Although a young
man
is. Man is a beast, made
in the image of God though he may be. Curious that the human male and the human female should be so different, when in the majority of species the sexes are almost indistinguishable. Two modest, brown creatures, scurrying together into earthen tunnels, drawn wordlessly into the dark. Cruelly, his mind produces his own mother, one day on a secluded bench in the park at Hammersmith, breaking apart from Mr. Ridd when she saw Henry on the path (her hair come undone under her hat, her breast flushed raspberry, her bright eyes darting in every direction but his).

When next he sees the young lady in the garden, he puts on his hat and walks quickly down Pennyworth Lane in the opposite direction to Captain Whyte’s house. This tactic is a feint. Pennyworth Lane curves around a woods, and narrows into a path, and wanders back through the woods until it ends near where it began, behind Alger’s and Captain Whyte’s gardens. He hurries along the dwindling path, almost running. Sooner than he expects, he sees her framed by greenery, cut off at mid-thigh by the garden wall. He stops and watches. She has her back to him now and he can see her canvas. A pale bulb rises from the lower margin. It seems she’s painting a cabbage.

Henry reaches into his pocket. A sixpence, that’s all he has. He throws it in her direction. It’s too small, she’s not disturbed. He crouches and finds a toadstool, uproots it and tosses it. Then a shell, an oyster shell dropped incongruously by the path. This time his aim is better; the shell lands almost on her foot.

She turns and looks curiously in his direction. She’s facing the sun: she can’t see him. There is a gate at the back of her uncle’s garden that’s been left open and can’t be closed; it’s been stitched to the earth by the brambles growing up it. She passes through the opening, holding her skirts, and comes lightly down
the path. In little white slippers, she
trips
along the path – that’s what they say for this way of walking, so feminine, so consciously feminine even now, when she thinks herself alone. Then she sees him and she stops. “Oh!” she says, wrinkling up her eyes. “What are you doing in my uncle’s garden?”

He’s still crouching. “Pardon me,” he says. “I’ve disturbed you. Although I’m not, strictly speaking, in your uncle’s garden.” He stands up. Her eyes are, as he hoped, unusual: truly green, at least in the green light of the woods. Light and shadow dapple her face and throat and bosom, her bosom nakedly white in patches of light above her flimsy gown. He has her in the woods now and he is without a further tactic.

“I’m watching the birds,” he says. “The dunnock. People call them hedge sparrows. But the bill of a dunnock is much finer than a sparrow’s.
Prunella modularis
, I believe is the formal nomenclature.”

She gives a little laugh. “You paint birds?” she asks. She has seen him through the window after all! She glances to either side. “But there are no birds here.”

“Not this morning. But they’re often here. They shuffle along the ground, a modest, nervous bird. I watched them as a boy. The male and female are identical. I found a nest close to here, with eggs. Blue, like a robin’s. Except for one larger egg, which was grey. They are often host to cuckoos, inadvertent hosts. Rather like my uncle Alger’s situation at the moment.” He stands among the bracken and watches her, letting a long moment pass. He notes the tendrils of orange hair escaping from braids coiled under her cap. Here is the subject of a grand canvas – their two forms under the trees, painted from above. The green that frames her is made of tissues of light, not material except where each tissue overlaps the other and manifests itself as leaf. “Do you watch birds?” he asks.

Again she gives the little laugh that seems to preface every speech. “Last October, I went out with a party from Bath,” she says. “We had opera glasses and we looked at wild geese in the priory garden. There were some who took great interest, but I didn’t really see the appeal.” Her smile and her tone are pert.

“Well, there is something very interesting about the dunnock,” he hears himself saying. “The females are polyandrous. That’s very rare in the bird kingdom. It’s a term used more for flora than fauna. It’s used for flowers that have more than one stamen.”

“Stamen?” she says, with the little laugh.

He moves towards her. She stands still. She does not back up, but stands and looks at him with an expression of intense interest and excitement. He understands her stillness: it is a subtle, wordless offering, as large a gesture as the female is allowed.

“I paint birds because I lack any other model,” he says. In the moving light, he sees the notch at her collarbone, as though it were moulded by a thumb. He reaches out as though to thumb it himself, but instead pinches a bit of her gown between his fingers. It’s just the colour of her skin. “What is this fabric?” he asks.

“Muslin,” she says. She smiles up at him.

“But what is that? Is it cotton?”

“I have no idea.”

Something black clings to her bosom just above the lace of her gown. A spider, perched on the lip of the shadowed drop between her breasts.

“Don’t move,” he whispers, leaning over her, still not touching her. He pictures a gallant young gentleman in his place on the path, pinning the gown closed with his finger and gently blowing the spider off.

“What?” She is also whispering.

“A spider. It’s landed on you. Careful, it will run down your gown.”

He bends over her. To his surprise, she tilts her face up towards his and offers her lips to him. They are soft, as they must be. He presses his mouth experimentally against hers, opens it a little, and then he wants her to tip her chin higher, he wants to plant a kiss under it, on the underpart of the chin that curves so beautifully, like the merrythought of a bird. As he bends, he spies again the dark spot on her breast. It’s not a spider. It’s a bit of pigment, a mole growing darkly on her white skin. He moves his lips along the pure line of her jaw, and suddenly her breath catches and she leaps away from him.

“Sir,” she cries. “You presume!” He reaches a hand tenderly, reassuringly, towards her, but she has turned by then and is scrambling up the path, running in her little white slippers for the garden. He laughs. The excitement in her voice is so at odds with her words that he understands this rebuke as a move in a contest they have just begun.