Curiosity (27 page)

“God took his eyes but gave him a bright-eyed son,” said Miss Philpot, “and I dare say your father regarded it a fair exchange.”

“Indeed, it made of me a man of science.” With a wave, he was off over the rocks and she was left with the tinny aftertaste in her mouth of her last ridiculous remark, her preposterous, overreaching effort to flatter him.

The encroaching tide was forcing them to the big rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Mary Anning climbed steadily ahead, seemingly unperturbed. The genial young De la Beche paused and offered Miss Philpot a hand. The solicitude they showed Miss Philpot might impress an observer, but (she thought) it had an absence of genuine interest in it. Except in the case of Colonel Birch, who, when they stopped to catch their breath, and were all drawn by the drama in the clouds to look back at the Isle of Portland, could not resist telling her about the mermaid found on
the shore at Church Ope Cove of a Sabbath morning, and carried up past the pirates’ graveyard and into the church, where, forthwith, it died. “Did you often see mermaids from the deck of your ship?” Elizabeth asked.

He turned his eyes back to the mirage of Portland. “I was never a sailor,” he said. “I was lieutenant colonel in the First Regiment of the Life Guards,” he said. “A senior cavalry troop, as you know. I had the honour of serving under Charles Stanhope, Earl of Harrington, until my retirement. I have travelled this twelvemonth throughout the Southwest, awaiting the Lord’s direction regarding a new vocation. The day I disembarked from the coach and set eyes on that young miss’s curiosity table, I knew that my Lord had spoken.” With an apologetic smile, Miss Philpot hurried ahead to join Mary Anning, and Colonel Birch, left walking alone, knew that she despised him and returned to that story which was taking on the quality of a legend (the old soldier’s quest) but had within it the moment he could not convey – the ammonites coiled in enduring beauty on the table, a sight that went to the marrow of his aching bones.
This will be my life
, he’d vowed to himself (as he had been waiting to vow, about something, ever since he’d been pensioned, and even before).

“Mr. De la Beche is shortly going away,” Miss Philpot found herself saying abruptly to Mary Anning. He was engaged to be married, she went on. Such a well-favoured, well-spoken young gentleman – how could he not be engaged? The tide was closing in, the waves were splashing at their feet, but still she talked as she scrambled breathlessly over the rocks. “Mr. Aveline was telling me. And I had a conversation earlier today with Mrs. Aveline outside the bank. I understand Mr. De la Beche will be spending time with his fiancée in London, and then going to Scotland. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Or he may go to Oxford to study with Professor Buckland.”

They were at the place where Mary’s father had lain one lonely night – Mary did not so much think this as feel a habitual squeeze to her heart. Mr. Dilabeach, she thought hopelessly. She had not even had his name right. She looked back at him and the other tall gentleman, tramping through new-fallen mud at a dangerous proximity to the cliffs, where they might provoke another landslip.

A wave broke on the rock beside her and she felt the weight of the water hitting her skirt. Out of nowhere, the text of James Wheaton’s Sunday sermon came to her, his last sermon before he was stricken and carried from the chapel.
If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light
. The text resounded in her mind in his voice, and with such force that she knew it would lodge there until she discovered its meaning.

Then they were scant yards from the path that would take them up Church Cliffs and into town. Rain fell in a narrow sheet across the Channel and a rain-washed patch of sky opened to heavenish light before them. At the sight of it, a rainbow occurred to all among them who knew their Scripture, to all of them. In spite of their haste, each wet-shod member of the party balanced on a slippery rock for a moment to look at the sky, the breathing world colliding for a moment with its diminished image in each mind.

But it was only a trick of the light; there would not be a rainbow this time. A double closing off – the encroaching water coinciding with the dying light of day. Across the Channel, the golden light greyed. A breaker slammed on the rocks at their side, leaping at the cliff: they had less time than they thought. But there was the path, and one by one, they scrambled up it. The last to go panting up was Colonel Birch, and then the light was fully gone and the last narrow ribbon of shore was taken over by the sea.

SEVENTEEN

nder the eaves in Aveline House, Henry hangs suspended in darkness. Like the Ichthyosaurus: no eyelids to close. He’s face down on the horsehair mattress, a watcher, intact, self-nourished. Larger than the margins of his body, his bones thinned by age: he’s a shape he’s tending towards. Then he’s awake, Henry is seeping back, recalled by grey light at the window. Kicking a foot to untangle the bedclothes pinned under his thigh, rolling over, hitching the quilt back. Too early to rise, and too cold.

He reaches down, flicks his jaunty morning erection. Oh, the joys of the morning, when the world is made new! Flicks it, cradles it. The girl he posits has Letitia’s slender waist, she has that merrythought jaw and lovely throat. He puts her in a coach, the two of them alone in a public stage while the fields reel by. When he buries his face in her bosom, she’s the girl who served him the other night at the Monmouth Inn, her breasts tumbling out of her bodice, bringing all the joy of existence gratuitously into his dim bedchamber. Then she’s Maggie, his mother’s maid, Maggie with her laughing
mouth, and a passage opens swiftly in the dark to the marrow of Creation.

He floats gasping on the mattress. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! His rapture radiates outwards, waves of it dispersing in the dim air. Too soon it subsides, too soon he’s back in the dusty smell of cotton ticking. His roughly woven Hebrides blanket, and the bedstead with acanthus leaves ineptly carved on its low posts. He dabs at himself with the quilt and rolls to his side, the horsehair mattress hard and saggy under him. There’s a murky taste in his mouth from last night’s wine. He punches at his pillow and rolls over again. All that ecstasy surging up unprovoked within a single mortal – what a matter for scientific investigation, if you could get a man to talk about it! He sees George Holland’s amused eyes, the mobile black brows. A fine, frank fellow. On the trip to Scotland, they enjoyed several wine-fuelled conversations about the mysteries of carnal love. One night, they sat and watched a middle-aged baronet making open efforts to lure a serving maid up to his rooms. All the gentry lusted for common women, Holland insisted. “It’s the lewdness of low females. Sexual instinct is stifled in the upper classes – in highborn females, I mean. And why is that so? By nature or by moral tutelage – what do you say?” But it seemed to Henry that George Holland’s premise was wrong. Gentlemen are drawn to serving girls because they are
girls
, as pretty as any other, popping up in your private quarters every hour of the night and day. Regarding the sexual appetites of high-born women, he really has very little to draw on.

He rolls out of bed and walks over to the corner to pull the chamber pot out of its cabinet. On that whole trip, he drank too much and talked too much, it was a fact. He told Holland about Maggie, about the smear of blood left on his sheets and the mischief-making sow of a laundress who went to his mother in
a grotesque parody of concern (“I hope Master Henry’s having his wound seen to?”). Pain rises at the thought of Maggie, the way his bed would shake with their stifled laughter, the tender little sound she made then in her throat when he entered her, clamping his head to her breast as though she were comforting a grieving boy. She was from Evershot. Likely that’s where she went when his mother dismissed her. Why did he have to make a sordid story of her? And then there was Holland asking slyly every chance he got:
I hope Master Henry’s having his wound seen to?

He crawls back into bed and pulls the covers over himself. He had passed the signpost to Evershot last year, driving through the Frome Valley in a closed carriage. He was with Letitia and three or four others, on their way to a country house. The week comes to him as one protracted and acrimonious faro game, throughout which he toyed with the thought of borrowing a horse and riding to Evershot, although he never did. There was a many-fingered lake on the grounds and he slipped out one day and rowed, glided alone in a still green pool surrounded by cedars. He was in the middle of the lake when Letitia appeared on the shore. She slipped her shoes off and sank onto the landing, dangling one white-stockinged foot towards the water. He sat still in the skiff and watched a slender, inverted figure materialize in the green mirror of the lake, one raised toe just kissing the dangling toe of the girl on the landing, so that it seemed the two white forms had been cut from a single sheet of paper by an oriental prestidigitator. After a minute, he reached out and touched an oar, he sent waves undulating across the lake. They overtook the water nymph, foreshortening her, carrying her off in pieces to either side, while the forest nymph inclined unconscious in a white muslin gown.

She’s not talkative, as she once was. Her charming face invites you in and then presents an impenetrable curtain. Once when he
saw her in London after a long absence, the little laugh that used to bubble out before every remark was gone, replaced by a poised smile. Her clear green eyes, the graduated hairs that make the fine arch of her eyebrows – she cannot be unintelligent. She unfailingly says the right thing, as though she has a store of graceful comments at the ready in her breastbone.
If she is vapid, it’s because she wills it so
, he says to himself, getting up again and striking a light. She avoids any thought that might leave traces on her face, as part of a beauty regimen, perhaps.

It’s only half four, but he won’t drift off again. This comes from napping on the drawing room settee through rainy afternoons. He pulls his dressing gown on and goes to his desk, where a letter from the attorney in Kingston lies open. The birth rate on the plantation is up – that is the good news – but the attorney is sorry to report that the overseer has found a hidden cache of cutlasses.
To the extent the Negro thrives
, muses the attorney,
he becomes a threat to his masters
. Henry buries this sheet in a pile of letters, pulls out fresh paper, and settles himself to write.