George Mills (57 page)

Which was when the man who could claim—for himself and for everyone in his family who had come before—never to have signed a neighbor’s petition or written a letter to the editor or raised the mildest embarrassing question in public, let alone seen his name in the papers or done anything at all to make anyone nervous, produced from his very person, as the King of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover warily watched, a document, character reference, personality sketch, which at once testified to his, Mills’s, rude ambitions and to his squire’s (“squire” because the man was merely a modestly prosperous small freeholder in Mills’s district, some younger son of some younger family) cheerful disdain of, and sniffy scorn for, George Mills and George Mills’s curious goals. The letter was not a hoax. (The man to whom it was addressed was actually known to the writer, and had actually lived in London, though now, three years dead, was no longer in a position to do anything for the young aspirant. And anyway, the directions he had given Mills, though careful and precise, were quite inaccurate, based both upon a lightly liquored memory and a flaw peculiar to the writer which caused him, whenever he was in the capital—occasions rare enough to strike him
as
occasions—not only to become overly excited but to lose, if not
all
sense of direction, at least that part of it which oriented him as to the side of the river he actually stood on at any given moment. Here was the fluky fortuity: that he had somehow managed to describe to Mills, even providing him with a hand-drawn map, which not only replicated the area to which George had come—with the exception of the house itself which was considerably smaller and in a different style than the one he’d described, a discrepancy George, who understood him, put down to the squire’s sense of his own importance—but which was correct in all particulars save this: that the place George wanted was on the other side of the river in Fulham and not on this side in Putney.)

So the letter was no hoax. George Mills, fearing one, had even tampered the crude seal and read it, understanding well enough its heavy sarcasm and the dubious light in which he was portrayed, but putting it in
this
light, figuring it
this
way:

His sort don’t mean my sort harm. They’re afraid. As they might be afraid of Vandals or Visigoths. As they might be afraid of trained bears doing comic turns on the high street. They’ve heard things. Stuff about rough ways, muck about manners. They fear for their game, for their gardens and daughters. They misdoubt our religion, and put it about our condition is our character. They think we drink too much and dance makes us crazy.

His jokes are just nervous. All to the good in the end. Serving my purpose. ’Cause he don’t mean me harm, not
real
harm. One toff to another.

Now the King will read it. Who to the fellow what wrote it is like me to some dog dead in the road.
He’ll
know. And discount the jokes and mark down the leg pull, all that lively pokebanter, all that scoff-merry and scoldbutt.
He’ll
know. He’s a king.

King George IV took the greasy letter his subject handed him and, when he saw to whom it was addressed, began to read the letter of introduction as if it were some document intercepted by agents and delivered by urgent and pressing couriers.

He read:

Forgive if you can my blatant impertinence in addressing you in this way about a matter of absolutely no importance and of no small irrelevance, it being the very rule of scientific displacement that that which is of no weight, which is
no thing,
saving of course our souls, which at all events are, if not by the laws of God then, to our shame, to our shame, at the very indiscreet least by the practices of men, more than we are inconvenienced to believe is good for us, “matters” of substance delayed, due bills to which, through the best grace of that same Divine Agency, accrue no interest, compound or even simple, though admittedly such “small” matters being the exception
—the
exception,
nota bene—
while that to which I now direct your offhand attention still participates in that aforementioned phylum or category relating to the antichronistic, metachronous and just plain out of date, and distracts in almost inverse mathematical degree to the extraneous pressures it puts upon us and has, for weightiness, no more power to signal fish than a sinker of soap bubble.

The damned thing’s in code, the King thought. And read on.

Thus the stone in our shoe. Thus idle, vagrant worries which turn us from all true and dutiful concerns to peripheral speculation, random and curious as sudden unexampled messages from the villagers, their puny command-performance performances, shoddy balls, recitals, bumpkin dramatic entertainments and mystery plays, all those abrupt summonses at which our attendance is owed more to custom than obligation. Thus, in brief, all subtly finessed attentions to the self. Welcome enough, and noble enough too, Laird knows, when such attentions are diverted to God and Country, but disconcerting as a fly on your face when all that’s at stake are the caterwaulings of silly young boys whose voices have not yet changed. Thus then this.

Laird? the King thought.
Laird
knows?

Which I cannot continue without first making certain courteous and proper, albeit, I do assure you, good fellow, entirely sincere inquiries regarding the healths and happinesses of your lovely lady and your remarkable bairn. It has of course been some time since I have been in your wonderful city. After the current reignant first brought Johnny Nash up from Brighton to do his royal imperial his Regent Street for him, but not since it was completed. Completed not, I’m relieved to hear, in the hybrid rajah cum emir cum mehtar cum, I-don’t-know, chinoiseried cacique so many of us had at first feared (after the expensive vulgarity of Brighton itself), but a toned-down and at least
vaguely
European architecture. I’m even told by some who have actually seen it that it reminds them of a sort of classical Greece, Athens say, if Time hadn’t trashed it. I’ve seen prints of course. Athens indeed! We’ve lost a toned-down Oriental fantasy to a tarted-up Mediterranean one. At least the street appears broad enough. Which must be welcome to one in your profession.

Thus
then
this.

Bairn? he thought. Remarkable bairn?

The piece of work you see before you calls itself George Mills. I must tell you at the outset that while he is not entirely native to our neighborhood, he has been in residence hereabouts four years, since 1821 I believe, doing agriculture, the sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, threshing, reaping and picking so peculiarly designated to his race and class of stoopers and benders. Though he claims in his more defensive moments family
—
or, rather more particularly, genealogy. It is a long and sometimes tedious story and if you would hear it you will have to hear it from him. If you regard it as his command performance, recital or dramatic entertainment, as, in short, your own capital call to custom, you will have discharged something so close to obligation that only a talmudic philosophe might tell you the difference.

Four years? 1821? The year Wife Cousin Caroline died, the year after I received my crown and she popped back from Italy to claim her “rights” as Queen Consort. Where was that solicitor now that England needed him? Now that even
I
needed him? The bill to dissolve the marriage and deny her claims actually introduced and passed in Lords, though she died before it could be put to the vote in Commons. In
Commons!
When did I grow old who never gave a fart for scandal? Who asked perfect strangers to wet-nurse me and tweaked the tits of titled grandmas? Tweaking before barristers and retainers and the not-so-loyal opposition and even on her deathbed even my wife cousin’s milkless, bloodless old dugs. Our daughter would have been dead four years. Caroline would have been sixty-seven. Where was that damned solicitor? It would never have gotten as far as Lords or Commons with him on the case. He wouldn’t have needed any bills and petitions to quitclaim. She’d be alive today. She’d be alive and back in Italy and thankful to God that the laws he would have told her she’d violated didn’t apply there. Seventy-one and alive and happy and cultivating her olive and lemon trees, taking their juices, at least their odors, at least some extract of them in her pores now so that if I ever saw her again and rubbed her breasts out of passion or even only its phantom, the skin on my hands would at least have come away with the remnant oils of the breathing, breeding earth. So where was that jurisdictional solicitor, that legislature and police force and magistracy of a man?

“
Sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, thrashing, reaping and picking,
” he read.

Picking?
Picking?

“
…his command performance,
” he read. “…
your own capital call to…obligation.
”

He looked at Mills sadly.

When did I grow old? he wondered again. When did good time Charlie become the battler king?

But this was later, this was afterward, when George Mills, driven to understand his predicament, had gone over it a hundred times in his head, when he had ceased thinking of it in terms of the artifact he now knew it to be, a pretentious letter of introduction, and began to look at it as the one man in the world must have done who not only had never been intended to read it but who, now that Mills understood what he had done by showing it to him, was the single person it should at all costs have been kept from. Mills would never forgive himself. But this was a later construction. Now the King was reading about him, and Mills was beside himself in dizzy, crazy glee.

The King read. The damage was done and the King read.

I know him to be, for his sort, a hard enough worker in precisely those areas his sort, though qualified for by Nature and Nature’s God, too often and too often too deliberately neglects when push comes to dig. It may even be a sort of unwitting deception on my part, a benefit of the doubt too generously given (though we both know that if no doubt had its generous benefit, there wouldn’t be a king left on his throne or a satrap on his elephant in all the world), but I actually believe the baggage to have some ambition and even a kind of quality. Though, admittedly, of a most irregular and not immediately recognizable, or recognized, sort.

Mills was never regularly employed on my holdings. Like many of the peasants hereabouts he found it more to his taste and, quite frankly, to ours in this backwater, more rattleborough than riding, to declare himself rather more the day laborer than the tenant farmer, though my managers tell me that he always appeared whenever he was scheduled and went through the motions of his motions with no complaint and some enthusiasm. One has gone so far as to declare that if we had more like him we might actually manage to bring in a crop now and again.

But to the point.

He first called my attention to himself one day when I was driving past on the road in the quaint little cabriolet which I think I may have spoken of, either to you or to Ann, when I last visited your fair city
—
can five years have passed since that golden time? While I was still some distance off I glimpsed this callow, raw-boned gawk standing at the edge of a field. To speak truth I might not have noticed him at all,
would
not have noticed him at all
—
well
you
know the people, how they partake in their very aspect of the landscape itself, seeming as much to belong there as the scrawny trees against which they lounge for shade, as much a part of it as the clayish soil which hides their boots (the pun intended of course; what else has an exile like myself to do than make word games?), dry and dusty as the leaves, more like a sort of crop than a sort of man
—
if it had not been for the fact that he must have heard me coming even before I spotted him and snapped to with an alacrity which would have been alarming had it not been so dextrous and, well,
practiced.
When he whipped off his cap and bowed low as a serf in my direction. I swear, old friend, that even if I had not noticed the gesture, I would have heard its whoosh and snap two furlongs off. He startled me. He startled my horse, and I was already reining in, on the verge of a decision to turn to go back the way I
had
come lest he should prove a highwayman. What checked me was the thought that I had probably passed his confederates and, if I had, they would have done me, running me to ground like some damned fox. Why, by the very act of so suddenly reining in I had probably already lost the momentum I needed. Using my whip, I pressed the horse on and in that moment decided that if the murderous son of a bitch should take but one step out into the road I would run him down.

But damn me, old friend, if the worthy not only did
not
take that step but held his bow and scrape like some foppish frozen commissionaire till I had passed. This was two furlongs, mind. In that field he looked at once like some sculpture of rural servility and a piece of organic camouflage. Well. He was there the next day, not in the same field of course
—
he was no shirker
—
but the next one over. When he bowed in that way and flourished his cap he might have been a border guard of some picturesque country famous for its wines say, not so much questioning credential as already recognizing it two furlongs off and
—
I cannot say waving one on; he never moved a muscle after that ridiculous show of moving them all at once
—
seemed to encourage me past some imaginary finish line that could have been his own bent being. And there the next. And the next. Always advancing, mind, daily breaching the front lines of his tasks. And now I was deliberately slowing the horse, bringing it down from the full-out gallop of that first startled day to a canter the second and then to a walk and finally to a sort of lazed limp. I wanted to see how long he would hold that servile pose. It was scientific. (I have to have more than puns and word games; I have to have human nature itself, in nothing like the abundance in which it thrives in London of course. That’s understood. That’s given. Oh, soon shall I have to quit this lumpen, oafish exile and return once again to civilization! I swear it to you, I positively envy the bearer of this letter!) Not could,
would. Could
he could have done forever. It was would I was interested in.