A Man of Genius (30 page)

‘You are very sane, Ann, no one saner.'

A strange thing to say.

They drank their tea in silence, hearing each other's swallows as if they were their own. The little girl was now kneading the paper shapes like dough. She was still quiet.

‘Yes,' said Sarah at last, keeping her eyes down as she twisted the tight rings on her plump right hand. ‘I will tell you all I know. But Ann, it is not so comfortable a truth.'

‘Tell it, Sarah, my dearest, tell it. I have a right to know.'

This made Sarah smile sadly. ‘Not a right, Ann. I think people speak so easily of rights they have no claim to. I am not sure there are such rights at all. But maybe, if it will not set your mind at rest, it will at least stop you imagining too much.'

Ann was about to speak when Sarah raised her eyes to her cousin's face and stopped her. ‘Oh, I know you do, Ann. It's not possible with so much unknown to avoid speculating, and speculation can be wild. You deal in strange stories. Charles and I have looked at some.'

‘All right. Go on.'

Another silence followed. Ann found it hard not to break it.

Then Sarah spoke. ‘Before I say more, you must promise me that, after this talk, after you hear what I have to say, you will search no further in this, not seek anyone who doesn't want to be sought, or go where there's been a breach for so many years. I ask this for your own good, dear Ann – and I ask it seriously.'

She hesitated. It was difficult to promise not to do something, not
to be curious when she'd lived with curiosity so long. Could it be given up?

‘Yes, Sarah, I promise.'

‘Good, I ask it for your benefit. I see you will tire yourself out by trying to discover what need not be discovered and you will only do yourself harm, my poor cousin.'

Sarah poured out another dish of tea. It was cold but Ann drank it eagerly for her mouth was dry. Her throat tensed as she swallowed. ‘You make me alarmed with this talk. But go on. Just go on, Sarah, I beg of you.'

Sarah glanced at the little girl and found that she'd fallen asleep, her head on the coloured paper. She walked over and moved her so that her curly head lay on a cushion from the sofa, then returned to her seat. She spoke without looking Ann in the eye.

‘Caroline, your mother, was not a usual daughter. She was much older than my mother, a bit – I don't know, really – perhaps a bit rebellious. Our grandfather had only a small income and if the girls didn't marry they had to do something to keep themselves. But your mother didn't learn enough to be a governess in a gentleman's family like Aunt Louisa, and she didn't marry when she should. She was unhappy at home – I don't know why. She quarrelled with our grandfather and left his house.

‘I know nothing of the next years. But later she was a sort of companion – in a Scottish family settled in Shropshire.' Sarah looked up at her cousin. ‘But truly, Ann, I do not know where it was.'

‘Don't be so anxious. I've promised and will keep my word.' She hoped she would. Thank God she'd not shared her suspicions of Aksel Stamer with her cousins. They'd have judged her demented.

Sarah saw Ann's emotion but she'd begun and must go on. She put her hand across the table and touched her cousin's arm. They exchanged looks. Ann remained silent.

‘I really know very little. But there was in this family a son, a not-well son, I believe a simpleton, somebody not quite usual. He was kept at home, the mother was devoted to the boy. He should have
been sent away to where he could have been cared for properly but he was her only son and she wouldn't have it. And it was at home that, despite his baby ways and lack of speech, he grew to be a man – in size and needs. The person there – she was called the housekeeper – was really his carer. She was supposed to keep him from harm and harming others. The husband could not bear to see him.'

As she spoke, Sarah's usually placid face grew strained and flushed; her lips trembled.

‘This boy, this man, this mad creature . . .?'

‘No, no,' said Sarah, ‘he had fits, something had happened at birth. I heard his mother blamed herself, cruelly blamed herself.'

‘All right. So this idiot did what?'

‘Ann, I don't know.'

By now Sarah was in agonies, twisting the lace on her cuff round and round as if wringing water from it.

Ann's anxiety gave way to anger. She would explode if Sarah didn't vomit out the truth. All of it. ‘Are you saying I am the daughter of this idiot? Is that it?'

Tears started in Sarah's pale eyes. They rolled down her burning cheek. She brushed them aside with the back of her hand as she let go the twisted lace.

‘Oh, Ann, I shouldn't have said anything. Charles warned me. Why did you push me so?'

‘Oh, don't blame me. You've known this all along and never told me.' She felt so savage she could gladly have hit the weeping woman and smashed her china against her prettily papered walls.

‘The mother was at fault. He'd grown to be a man with a man's desire, and the housekeeper was not always close at hand.'

Ann got up abruptly and walked round the room, stared at the sleeping child, then sat down. She looked coldly at Sarah, who could no longer control her sobs. Though she was so miserable now, Ann thought bitterly, she was usually so complacent in her tranquil love, her tranquil life.

At last anger subsided. She felt empty. ‘Go on, Sarah, please, just
go on. I am calm. I cannot be left in any more ignorance. It is not fair.'

Sarah pulled out her handkerchief, wiped her hot face and swallowed hard. She'd never done anything so difficult in her life. Why hadn't she waited for Charles or asked him to do this? But he wouldn't have let it happen. In any case he didn't know it all.

‘Something bad happened. Your mother was sent away. Mrs Sinclair, that was I think the family's name, had to dismiss her. I don't know all of it. Then the family moved away. Indeed, I know they did but have no idea where.'

So, Ann thought, I was born of a desperate ageing mother, who may have been seduced or was more likely raped, and a beloved idiot. A fine origin for a hack writer of sensational tales: a crazy coupling followed by years of thraldom to a ghost created after one imbecilic act.

It was indeed marvellous. That all these years Caroline had hidden this truth with such imaginative brilliance. How had she sustained it?

And again she asked: had it been created for the benefit of the daughter born of this disaster?

No, she'd kept it up for herself. Did she go to bed nightly with the shadowy Gilbert to erase over and over the memory of this nameless fool?

Ann remembered her shudder at the idea of sexual congress; maybe Gilbert's ultimate benefit, his genius for a woman, was that he never demanded the duty of a wife, that he could give admiration, adoration and total fidelity that a lady wanted without the baser payment, forever untainted by consummation.

He alone could wipe out that memory.

She didn't dislike Caroline less for what she'd suffered, for perhaps hating servitude and not expecting her rebellion to end like this, desperate for some affection as the creation of Gilbert showed, but unwilling or unable to give it to the daughter born of the worst
act of her life – a child who reminded her daily of it. Grimly she wondered if Caroline had been able to chuckle when she heard she'd determined to earn her living writing tales of gothic silliness.

But Caroline had had no sense of comedy.

Sarah was still talking as her own thoughts rattled round her head. She would've liked to ask questions about the man who couldn't bear to see his mad son or the curate who'd not prevented his wilful daughter leaving home – to see if either had any lineaments of Gilbert. But she knew there could be no answer.

‘So why Ann, not Annabel or Arabella?' she asked suddenly. ‘Caroline said I was named after Gilbert's mother.' She snorted and changed her scorn to a cough. ‘Was it the name of the Sinclair lady?' A sudden thought. ‘Was it our grandmother's name?'

‘No, Ann, our grandmother was called Jane.'

She looked sadly at her cousin. ‘Ann was the name of the housekeeper who took you to be christened.'

They sat in silence. The child awoke in the corner and Sarah got up to lift her up despite her heavy weight. She went to the door and called for the nursemaid. When she didn't come at once, she left the room carrying the drowsy child up the stairs. Ann stayed alone with the remains of the cold tea.

When Sarah returned with a basket of mending from the parlour, she found her cousin exactly where she'd left her. She had no more to say, she was empty.

Mechanically she rummaged in the basket for the breeches that had just made a man of William. Already they needed strengthening in the seams and darning where the material had become thin from his tumbling. He was still a child in his man's clothes.

‘Ann, I have only one more thing to say. You are my cousin and we love you dearly.'

‘Thank you, but I must ask again. My birth?'

‘The mistress paid for it, I assume, I don't know details, and the
housekeeper, who was so repentant for her lack of care, helped to arrange all. Money was sent but everything else kept quiet. We never knew anything more of your mother. And even I knew nothing of it until Aunt Louisa told me something before she died. It's a cruel thing, Ann.'

‘The world is cruel.'

‘Not all of it.'

Sarah swallowed hard, smiled and put down her mending. She came round to where Ann sat and tried to embrace her.

Ann pushed her gently but firmly away. She felt near to tears herself. But she'd determined not to cry before anyone again.

‘I'm sorry, Sarah,' she said as her cousin looked pityingly at her. ‘It's too soon. I know you mean well to me, but you should have told me this long ago. I will need time to take it all in, to learn to live with it.'

Sarah bent her head, perhaps acknowledging this truth. Ann didn't know or care.

‘I will go now but come back in a few days and we'll not speak of it further, I promise. I've learned that no good comes of talking once a thing is known.'

It took time, much time. She gave herself some of the advice that Mr Dean now wanted peppering the sensational novels. She had much to be grateful for. Though the truth was grim, she was not a wretch wandering in the streets covered in sores and rags.

Yet she also knew wretchedness could not be measured from outside; she knew that well enough. She'd seen a once healthy body hanging dead through sheer self-torment.

None the less, best to hold on to those sores and rags. She didn't have them.

Shame had been imposed on her from so many sides it was hardly worth interrogating it further. As for the anger, it couldn't last forever.

Comforting to know with certainty that, unlike her, Robert would
have preferred to be that beggar with the sores and rags than accept there'd been no mission and he'd simply been thrown on the scrap-heap of life – like everyone else.

She met Sarah again when she was holding a party with other ladies, mothers by their conversation. She joined them. Perhaps her presence drove them away for they didn't stay long after she arrived. But this time she thought she'd chatted quite amiably without being able to add much about weaning and breeching.

As she was leaving, she had a chance to say something she hoped was soothing to Sarah about the revelations it had cost her such pain to divulge.

‘Do not be bitter, cousin Ann.'

‘I'm not, really. You can't undo the past with rage or pity for yourself or anyone else. I've been a little mad sometimes.'

‘You weren't mad, Ann, but maybe your heart was mad for a while. It can happen.'

It was so strange a thing for plump, placid Sarah to say, so much what she might have said herself, that Ann laughed out loud on the doorstep.

39

O
bese, extravagant and addicted to laudanum, George, ex-Prince Regent, was to be crowned King in an expensive ceremony in July. His wife Caroline intended to be at his side as Queen Consort. Some people were with her in this. She continued to be most entertaining.

On the day, the 21st, she arrayed herself regally and was driven to the Abbey. At both North and South entrances she was refused entry. So she tried Westminster Hall. Guards held bayonets under her chin until the door could be slammed in her face.

She made a further assault on the Abbey, failed, and was persuaded to desist.

She'd been popular with the disgruntled, but the English are royalist under their prating of liberties: the fickle crowd jeered her as she was driven off.

That night she fell ill and three painful weeks later she died. She believed she'd been poisoned. She'd arranged for her burial back in her native Germany; the tomb should read ‘Here lies Caroline, the Injured Queen of England.'

With the rest of the nation and many people on the Continent, Ann read the accounts of such undignified scenes. She felt sad for the lady and for the end of an extravagant, flamboyant era.

Despite such different spheres, the two Carolines had not been dissimilar. Both so self-deluding, so self-creating, facing and overcoming the travails of life by audacious feats of imagining. Both rearranged their past to control the present and neither could deal with those who darkened the brilliance of the creation. Both were
unlikely heroines, one squat, plain and, it was reported, foul-smelling, the other plain, injured and neglected. Both rejected the reality of a life that had been damaged by terrible men. Rejection provoked creation of an existence that was, Ann reflected at last, no sadder than anyone else's. It simply came to an end – like everyone else's – and had had some pleasure and much pain on the way. Now both women had to suffer the condescension of the living.

Was it so very bad to be the daughter of an idiot beloved to distraction by his mother and a fictionist of life on so robust and dedicated a scale?

It was perhaps not good.

Ann got up and smiled into her flowered, unflattering glass. She felt pleased that an image was smiling at her. Then she glanced down at Caroline's hands. Whatever they looked like, until arthritis clutched them they would go on scribbling. She thought of the pretty plump fingers of Beatrice as they sewed her sampler. She was glad she'd known the girl.

Now she looked at, not into, the glass and saw less of herself and more of a gift from Sarah. It was a tangible object to hold to, it was seeing the thing, as Giancarlo Scrittori had advised. She'd refused to look into her dead mother's silver-edged glass in Paris. At will she could bring up the dim and beautiful Savelli mirrors and believe she'd just glimpsed herself in passing.

She would develop solitary pleasures, look at the world as it was, alone, while never becoming a recluse. She would not regain the optimism of the young. That was good. Disappointment was hard work.

By late summer it had rained so much that Ann could hardly remember dry ground, the swollen, hot dunes in Sardinia, the bristles of cones, the heavy smell of brittle thyme. Here everything was sodden and, when she walked, the water came up from the pavement and over her boots and pattens, splashing her skirts. Rain flung itself against her small window pane. Some of it got through. She rolled
up a napkin to place against the crack where water seeped in. She changed the napkin when it was saturated. Life as she knew it, a daydream of security, pathetic perhaps, but she could laugh – and did smile – at such warm pathos.

It was autumn. Leaves had begun to change but no really chill winds were blowing. Aksel Stamer knocked on the outer door and came up the stairs into her lodgings.

He was older than she remembered but not old enough for what she'd once made of him, a bit careworn, stern as ever, and wet, shedding droplets of water.

From another angle he looked boyish. He carried a copy of
Isabella; or, the Secrets of the Convent
. He was familiar. He was dear to her.

‘I nearly told you,' he said. ‘It was when we sat on a wooden plank outside the hidden chapel.'

She let him go on.

‘Do you remember? Then you thought it a hermit's place when it was merely a shepherd's. I knew it was not fair to constrain a woman with your feelings. I knew that too well.'

‘Your sister?' she said.

She had surprised him. They sat a moment in silence. ‘Ah, you are a maker and reader of plots. You worked it out. Yes, my sister, my half-sister. Our parents were dead. My mother had a late child, Kirsten Marie.' He hesitated. ‘I raised her on Fyn, but I did not do so good a job. She feared me, I think. I am a man. I was perhaps not as tender as I might have been. She was soft, gentle, lovely. Many young men looked at her, but she was also a dreamy, sentimental, romantic child, she wanted to be admired, yes, all young girls do, but also to admire. Not a manly man who might have protected her as I sought to do. No.' He paused. ‘Then he – ' he paused again, he found it difficult to say the name, ‘then Robert James came into her life. He – well, he – wrote her some verses, very beautiful verses.'

‘Where are they?'

He glanced at her, then away, ‘I don't know.'

‘Did you ever see them, read them?'

‘No, no. She, my sister Kirsten, hid them from me as she hid so much.'

‘Beautiful'? Indeed. How was something unseen beautiful? She remembered: Robert James could answer that.

‘I had journeyed to London. I never met him then. You know this.'

She saw with amazement he was near tears, that man she'd judged so stern, so controlled. And yet she felt something angry still, beneath the grief. She touched his arm. His softer clothes made it less hard than it used to feel.

He went on, in abrupt sentences. ‘I loved her like a father – and a mother – she was all I had of family. I protected her too much. I hid the horrors of the world from her. She was educated as a lady, for she was a lady. She did not see the bad side of life. She did not know what men could do.'

‘Both sexes are pretty equal in what they can do, I imagine.' She blushed, realising Caroline gave a lie to this platitude. ‘My mother . . .' she began, then stopped, swallowed, and, when he did not interrupt the silence, blurted out, ‘You know there was no – father.'

‘No, well? Perhaps not the one you heard most about.'

‘Did you always know? But how could you?'

‘Of course not. You once told me something he had said, that's all. Maybe I know men better than you.'

She doubted that, but let it go. He didn't expect contradiction.

When he left it was arranged he would return next afternoon and eat with her, but only when she'd done her work. Women's work – sewing, painting flowers, writing stories – was important to them. He respected it. Soon his visits were regular.

‘He killed her,' he said one day.

‘Do you mean Robert really killed Kirsten Marie, murdered her?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Robert James hit her – and she so loving and sweet and soft. Then he hurled a large china vase at her. Perhaps he did not mean to kill, but so it happened. And he, even he, knew something was then wrong. He disappeared.'

‘He was not all bad,' she interrupted.

Aksel Stamer hadn't listened. He was deep in thought and memory. ‘I had gone to Altona – I was in business then, dealing in scientific books. They had come to Denmark. She was headstrong, secretive, as she usually was with me. I should have been there. I should have warned her, stopped her, shut her up if necessary. I had had to do that once before. He meddled in what he didn't understand and left debts, but not enough that people would pursue him. I sought but the trail was cold.' He held his head a moment in his hand. ‘I inherited some money from an uncle – it would have been part hers, her death killed him, he called her his angel-child . . . Two deaths, do you see? I gave up my business not long after. I travelled south. I was not at first actively seeking him but my hatred never for a moment diminished. Indeed, I may say it increased though it did not overpower me. I returned north.' He stopped.

She caught the phrase ‘at first'.

‘If life could be relived,' he continued.

‘I have thought as much, at least a few chapters of it.'

‘Do you see life in chapters?'

‘It has advantages. There can be gaps and new starts.'

‘If you had a few chapters to do again differently, which would they be?'

‘No, I am wrong. I would do the whole book again.'

‘Not all of it, perhaps.' He pressed his hand on hers.

She couldn't restrain herself. ‘You should know I'm the child of an imbecile.' She gave a wry smile to cushion her words. She felt the heaviness of his hand.

‘Aren't we all?' he said.

‘I knew a man of artistry in Venice, of genius. He was considered mad and the family cared for him.'

Aksel Stamer removed his hand, got up and looked down at her.
She willed herself to keep still. She couldn't see his face.

‘Francesco Savelli was indeed most gifted. But leave them, him, this father who may or may not be as you say, but whose main act was over in minutes, seconds. Francesco Savelli – let him go with Robert James.'

‘Oh, but it is worse,' she said, forcing herself to smile. ‘I am the child of two idiots.'

‘Remember how the air was full of gold and black butterflies in Sardinia? You didn't know their name. I told you. When we slept outside, I watched over you sleeping. You threw off the covering for a while and pulled it back when you were chill. I watched all night. I appeared hard, perhaps. I would not for the world take advantage of a woman's weakness, of any human weakness when the body or mind is unaware. I called you Ann as I would have called my dear sister by her name. I startled you.'

‘With Robert . . .'

He put a finger across her lips. ‘Close the door on memory and when it starts to open, press your foot hard against it. Then there is no need to lie.'

He removed his finger slowly.

‘You, too.'

‘I, too. Certainly I too.'

‘But I must know. Did you . . .?'

He placed his hand where her shoulder swelled up to her neck. She wouldn't remove it. She couldn't have removed it.

It was a clear winter day when they walked side by side along the gravel paths in Kensington Gardens as horsemen and carriages trundled past. She looked up. A flock of birds with long silvery necks were flying in formation, sketching and blurring. Her heart leapt at their beauty. She would not ask or seek to know their name.