A Man of Genius (23 page)

Then the claw hand clutched at the sheet.

The servant was in the room, pushing Ann aside. She moistened a piece of cotton with vinegar and held it to the lips, then withdrew it so that they glimmered like thin pieces of lard. There was more thick liquid too, so the body could still create. The eyes swivelled towards Ann, then returned and closed.

The servant left the room as quietly as she'd come. Or perhaps she waited in the shadows, ready to help her mistress since the daughter could or would not. Ann didn't turn her aching head to see.

There was silence again as she stood, victim to such oscillating feelings from hate of this thing, to a new painful compassion for all crumbling bodies; from relief that her own unsatisfactory self, though ageing, was not like this, to horror that she too would be there, that she too would and could become such a foul thing. It was not her flesh; it would be her flesh.

Was she as self-obsessed as Caroline that such thoughts swam into her head? She had no urge to weep but a great one to howl at such desolation. There was no Robert for her to humour, no Aksel Stamer to protect her. Only herself and her future alone in a stuffy room turning slowly from Ann into Caroline.

The eyes were now more human, and, yes, she saw they were becoming Caroline's, just a tinge of murky green in the yellow. But the room was pinkly hazily dim, she may have imagined it.

With the partial recognition came all the old emotions.

She stared at her mother. What would she say? Would she speak
of Gilbert, now in this slow, extreme moment? Surely, for so much of their life had been around this man, his memory, his legacy – it was his money and his spirit that had kept them going all those years in Putney, so unhappily conjoined.

Ann would stop her if she started to speak his words again: she couldn't bear that.

‘Gilbert, my father,' she said.

A flaccid snort, then a low, tremulous whisper: ‘You're no child of his.'

She was too surprised to respond. What could the woman mean? It was an absurd confession made for effect. Had she imagined it? Was it a line from one of her novels?

‘Then whose, then what?' she said.

There was no reply. It was obviously a lie. There was no more reason for truth on a deathbed than anywhere else.

Why would there be? Caroline didn't believe in a last judgement; there was no crucifix in the room, she'd not changed. Why give a lie to a life by confounding it with a final truth?

She wished she could speak to Aksel Stamer. But he'd gone, defeated perhaps by what he feared to see of Caroline. His long travels thwarted at the end.

Her head was thumping and banging and her knees and ankles growing weak. A result of all that walking on Sardinian sand dunes, the one ankle never quite right despite his kindness. She steadied herself on a bedpost.

The breath from the bed grew noisy again. If there were to be confessions, she wanted to mention Robert, for surely she'd killed him in one way or another. She'd run right across Europe to avoid his avengers. Caroline would like to hear that.

The thin slippery lips moved. Was there to be a surprise, a forgiveness, an absolution, even a benediction? Ann swallowed her revulsion and put her ear closer to the face, keeping her eyes averted.

She could make out nothing of the words at first. But Caroline was trying to express something.

‘What are you saying?'

The lips moved and a thin sound emerged through the phlegm.

With difficulty she made out some syllables.

‘Did you see her?' whispered the voice.

Ann was puzzled. She was sure this was what had been said.

But why? She moved away, then held her breath. Sweat was pouring from her forehead, running into her eyebrows; yet it could not be so very hot in the room. There was only a low fire gently hissing in the grate.

She brought her ear closer again. ‘Who? Who do you mean, Caroline? Mother?' She used the word after some hesitation. She was assuredly
her
child. Then she waited.

‘The Princess in Venice? Did you see her?'

A momentary eagerness entered the yellow eyes as Ann raised her head to look, then the thin lids came down.

She pulled back, wiped the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve and stumbled out of the bedchamber.

By the time she reached the rooms that Aksel Stamer had taken for her and himself she was swaying, sweat was streaming from her face, down her neck and from under her arms along her sides and between her breasts.

He was not there. He had said goodbye. And yet, she'd hoped.

Robert James or Aksel Stamer: for so long she'd thought of one or the other, always pulled along or pulling, that now being alone was impossible to grasp. She sat on the bed, and let herself collapse into sobs.

She cried on and was still crying as her head fell on to the pillow and the room turned itself on to its side. Her tongue was growing large and furry in her mouth, filling her head and blacking out her eyes and nose. She could hardly breathe or see or hear. The sides of the glass jar had contracted and were pressing on her temples.

The fever – for she knew it for what it was now – had been approaching for a while. It was not new; she accepted its thirst, hot headache, pulsation and near delirium. Perhaps it came from the
many biting insects in Sardinia or southern France, a malaria from the swamps, a kind of typhus, a disease of the foul water, perhaps from the detritus of all her life.

She had no power to think further. Darkness was coming over her and she was burning into it.

28

T
entatively Ann opened her eyes. They felt sticky and raw. For some minutes she tried to think where she could be and what had happened. She'd been in and out of consciousness for some time, that much she knew, but how was she in this particular room in unfamiliar clothes? They felt damp, almost wet, beneath her.

A young servant girl came into the bedchamber. She seemed familiar. She saw Ann had woken at last. She'd hardly moved but her eyes flickered.

‘You are so weak, Madame,' said the maid in slow French.

Ann found it hard to grasp what she was saying. Yet the language and her presence brought with it some sense of place.

With sense came anxiety. How long had she been here, in this bed? Who had been caring for her? Even more insistently as consciousness flooded in: what was this care costing? She recollected the pouch of money Aksel Stamer had given her but had no idea how much it contained, how far it would stretch – or where it was.

The young girl saw her unease. ‘You have been ill these three days,' she said. Ann could still not quite comprehend her words and didn't reply.

‘You are hungry, yes?'

‘No, no,' she said, rousing herself and finding her lips could speak, though the sound she made resonated in her head more than in the room. Where were her purse, her things?

‘Did the man . . .' she began.

‘Your brother, Madame?'

‘What?'

‘Your brother, Madame. He left money for lodging however long you are here, it is enough, all paid.'

Of course. Aksel Stamer was her brother.

‘He is gone?'

‘But yes, before you came back. He had to go for business. He explained.'

‘Explained?'

‘He had to go.'

‘Go where?'

‘You are weak, Madame,' said the young woman primly. ‘Rest and we will give you some gruel. The doctor says once you were sleeping all would be good. He sees such fevers often. They go in five or six days, maybe a week, then weakness. You have been lucky.'

‘Days?'

But the maid was leaving the room.

Ann closed her eyes and dozed. She heard a voice speaking distinctly. Whose? Why were there so many men in the bedchamber when she wanted only Sarah?

Cousin Sarah.

Over the last months, she'd rarely thought of her cousin; now she longed for her motherly plumpness, her kindly voice. If only she could be one of Sarah's little brood and snuggle up to that comforting bosom. Yet she could not fix her cousin's face and voice in her head, it was crowded with men no good for her: with Robert and Aksel Stamer and Gilbert.

It must have been Gilbert who spoke of death, for Ann remembered how often Caroline had told her he knew all about life and death. But she hadn't heard his accents apart from Caroline's voice. It couldn't be he.

It was Robert then, thinking of mortality. Or was it just her own voice grown gruff?

She was lying in a bed and whether she was becoming weaker or stronger she couldn't tell. The maid had said she was getting well. But surely death had not yet packed his bags and walked off.

‘I think of death often: it gives me strength. With it I have a free mind, don't you see? A free mind and a strong heart to think and feel, a firm hand to write and tell others of infinity. We are all moving to death.' So said the voice.

‘Well, yes,' ventured another, and this was surely hers but not quite hers here in this bed. More like her voice when she'd been one of the circle in William Bates's house in Fen Ditton. Could the other be young Gregory speaking to her? No, not after all this time. ‘But surely we would kill ourselves if we thought it so admirable a goal.'

The first voice looked contemptuous, for it was a voice with a voice's body. ‘You cannot truncate the journey. Whatever we do we are on the road, we have to be. Death is plenitude. Death will come soon enough and we will yearn for it but never be ready.'

The woman who was herself and not herself was now sipping coffee in a Holborn coffee shop; she'd put down her cup and thought it best to say only ‘Hmmm' to Robert and Gilbert.

‘Death is the only perfection. It is the only primordial. It makes water and earth and space and time more vivid. We are mere clockwork swans on a glass sea. We stop when the mechanism tires.'

‘Yes, yes,' said a young man who had materialised beside the voice, ‘the freedom of disintegrating, of being in nature, being in all things.'

Ann would normally have said, How do you know, not having died? But instead she picked up her cup and looked towards Robert's shadow. He absorbed her look and the young man's views, then deflected them graciously.

Now the words were coming thick and fast in bundles as if someone were throwing her life at her from a great height, so that the bundles exploded their contents round her when they reached their goal like the bulbs of Sardinian asphodel. But the contents were just fragments, words, images, nothing secure.

‘Absurd is a bird,' sang out the young man whose features she couldn't see.

‘Jesus Christ is metamorphosed,' said Robert's voice.

‘Fucking and frigging should be free, free as any other bodily
function,' said the young man.

‘Like childbirth that comes after,' said the Ann in the coffee shop.

Everyone turned to look at her. Robert was cross at the attention she received. ‘You want a mama, not a living man,' he snapped. There was no menace in his words unless you looked at his eyes which came now yellowy, rheumily into focus.

Ann slept and woke, then slept again. She sensed hours, perhaps days, going by.

When she woke definitively she was a little refreshed, her voices gone.

But her fever or simply exhaustion from all the past was still there wracking her. She couldn't say how much was disease of the mind, how much the body, how much each feeding on the other. The eyes, tired and sore, felt like hers but they looked out on a body she now hardly recognised.

She shuddered at her hands. They'd become thin and veined from travel and unaccustomed dryness, from a lack of lady's gloves. They were like Caroline's.

She was glad there was no glass close by the bed or she would have been tempted to look at her face, and who knows whose reflection she might have seen? Or the mirror might have become a pool in shadow giving back nothing. She shuddered again. She'd been so out of her skin and mind these last weeks, so caught in a state or place between dream and real that she was reluctant to test memory or fear. She felt unsure of everything.

Best keep inside and quiet until she knew who and exactly where and, above all, what she was.

What she did know for sure was that she was alone. Aksel Stamer had really gone – he would not suddenly appear, stern and comforting.

How long had she been sick, how long had he been away? The maid had said a few days, maybe three or four. Then others had followed.

She struggled to raise herself and get out of the bed. There was fresh water in a bowl and she sprayed it over her face and neck and arms, too tired to do much more, then used the chamber pot. There were her clothes, the ones she'd bought with Aksel Stamer, only they were freshly laundered and ironed. With pauses she managed to dress herself in clumsy fashion, not all ties tied or buttons looped. The clothes now hung loosely on her.

On the side table there was cold chicken and an egg, an odd combination, perhaps leftover of meals that had been kindly brought to her by someone expecting her to wake, then not touched, left to congeal and dry, one day, two days, more? Or perhaps the maid had brought this in while she was sleeping for the last time, having left gruel earlier and found it uneaten.

Surely she could not eat anything, certainly not this incongruous collation. And yet, although no tempting smell rose from the chicken or the egg, she had a sense somewhere about her, not necessarily in her mouth, that she was ravenous and she rather thought she could dispose of anything at all.

There was noise outside in the street, and it brought to mind the inn that Aksel Stamer had found for her, for them both, though this was not the room she'd first been in, she was sure. She contemplated it while swallowing every last morsel of quite tasteless chicken and egg. Chicken and egg. A laugh rumbled up from her belly but didn't quite reach her mouth. Chicken and egg. She stood up, meaning to go to the window. Chicken and egg.

Then with a rush, as though they'd been waiting in the next room and suddenly flung open the door into her head, back came Robert, the dreadful face and dripping body, and Caroline, the near corpse curtained in pink.

She sat down abruptly and raised her hand to push them aside.

She tried again to take stock.

Beside her old hemp bag new clothes were laid out; they'd been near those she'd just put on but she'd not seen them at once. They included undergarments, fresh tan gloves and a bonnet with blue ribbons. There was also a set of toilet items, brush, comb and smelling
salts in a light-brown leather case. No one except Aksel Stamer could have bought them for her. He must have put them there while she was with Caroline since by the time she returned to the inn he'd left. Why? How did he know what to buy a woman? He'd spoken of no wife, and he didn't appear like a man who'd been married. Yet no bachelor would know so accurately what a woman needed.

She was moved. Especially the undergarments. Martha had tried hard to keep her neat but the mistress had so many wants in the Putney house and she often went out with puckered stockings because they were the wrong length, her bodice ribbons knotted rather than properly tied.

Beside these items lay the pouch, still full of money. She was in an honest house.

There was no mention of the gifts in an open note which she now saw by the washstand. Aksel Stamer's hand? She was uncertain for she was not familiar with it.

The note told her that, when it was appropriate and when she wished to return to England, she should go to the Paris Sous-Préfecture Police Office near the Pont-Neuf. There she could pick up the passport in the name of Ann St Clair. It would have come from Marseilles where they'd landed from Sardinia. She knew they'd done nothing of the sort, nor been in quarantine there as would be implied; once again Aksel Stamer had worked some magic.

So Ann St Clair she was again. Signora James was as dead as Signor James.

The passport should be signed by the British Ambassador and she could go to his office between eleven and one in a morning. The directions were precise, and she would follow them – she recalled the painful delay in the Alps when they lacked correct signatures; but that was in another life. Then she should return to the Police Office with the passport and go on to the Ministère des affaires étrangères in Rue du Bac. Ten francs from the pouch he'd left should be handed over at this stage. For the journey to the coast she should take the diligence: it was quite comfortable.

He'd thought of everything; she'd only to follow the detailed instructions. He had not known she was so ill – he must have believed she was just weak and emotional when she leaned on him outside her mother's house, dwelling on the past and imagining the future with Caroline. She wished he'd stayed. She missed him beyond anything.

Still feeble and nervous, none the less she felt the strengthening effect of the food. She believed she could walk unaided and, by taking a cabriolet for part of the journey, get to the Marais. She'd come to see Caroline and must see her again now she was more prepared for the sight. She put the pouch of money into her pocket. She was ready to go out.

An older more portly servant entered her bedchamber. What was Madame about? It was too soon to get up, to go beyond the inn. It was folly. Madame should be in bed another day or days. She would bring soup. On she clucked, standing squarely in the doorway.

‘No,' said Ann, ‘no, my mother is dying, I must go.'

A dying parent was compelling. There was no answer to it.

The servant still looked disapproving but made no effort to argue further. Ann wondered fleetingly whether she was anxious that her patient return to pay. She had only her bundle and her new clothes but she purposefully glanced at them so that the woman would follow her direction and take them as some surety – if indeed that was the problem. Then she remembered that the young maidservant had said all had been paid for by her ‘brother'. How could it be when he'd not known she would be ill? Did he have some special credit here? Ann felt so unsure of everything that she was unable to judge whether this stout middle-aged person were the mistress of the house or just another maid. Dress, gestures, speech, nothing was giving up its usual meaning.

She hesitated but the woman stood aside even as Ann tottered a little in her steps. She must be acting more normally than she felt. And, if this were the ordinary world, would Aksel Stamer perhaps come back into it?