A Man of Genius (5 page)

They would go on listening, sometimes talking, sometimes just agreeing, long into the night.

And she, Ann St Clair, server of gothic pap, would be among them.

5

S
o they trundled on for another year. Genius, Robert said, was a dream of the old century made into fulfilled desire in the nineteenth. Ann was now less thrilled by this idea than she'd been initially.

Robert never said he was a genius – he didn't have to. Wasn't a genius the master of antithesis, and wasn't everything he said antithetical? So there you were then.

In which one of his voices would he have said this if he'd said it? she wondered later. Would it have been the Fantasist or perhaps the Poet? The Fantasist who wove together self and the external or the Poet who pulled twine from himself? Was it the Poet who had that throbbing need to go back and back into his past thoughts and lay them on chairs and tables and beds?

He was beyond fantasy and poetry, though he had to use their terms. His words, words as counters of the self, they were the Thing. ‘Not that the words are the things, you understand, Ann, don't you?' he said. ‘Imagine that words could be physical, not words as we know them, concrete words. These words are truth, a violent truth, because they shatter the obvious, the superficial, that is how they are concrete, heavy and dangerous.' He would make poetry that was equivalent to philosophy and beyond. Not philosophical poetry – not doggerel for superficially enquiring minds. No, poetry – always qualified by ‘if it could be called poetry' – that was the same as philosophy, that expressed the comedy and sublimity of the world.

He would march through ventriloquism, not just the individual voice of an intricate conqueror but the language of everyday man, to reach a something beyond, an absolute.

Of course he could do voices, for, to go further than every man, he had to be a sort of Everyman, he said. Richard Perry said, Yes, yes, Robert had a marvellous plastic ability. Henry Davies added quickly, for he'd rehearsed the lines, ‘We all have bits of others in us. You show us and make us more ourselves.'

There was plenty of such talk. But Ann saw no equivalent work, nothing since the early wonderful fragment composed so many years before. Only writing would be a permanent record of his present imaginings and make Robert's mark on the world. Was she affecting the great work, just a little, by her presence?

Or was Robert beginning to fear and she'd caught his fear? The task he'd set himself, or had been chosen for, was so great. Should he compromise, try for less?

He'd said something of the sort not specifically to her but rather to all of them and only once, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. They scorned the idea. He could do whatever he wanted. He'd shown that already.

Of course he could. So he abandoned his act as tortured sacrifice to emerge triumphant once more. Richard Perry patted his shoulder.

Always he went to the universal. Yet at home alone, even so early in their time together, even as she almost worshipped, to her the ideas seemed brilliant fragments. After all, his marvellous tragedy had been unfinished, unacted. He made a virtue of it, for great work could not be closed. But still, it remained true, it was partial, and he knew it. She'd always lived with scraps and splinters of truth and she suspected that these were all there were. That was no problem for her; under all her froward ways she'd always been humble.

They were sitting drinking and eating in the Queen's Arms in Cheapside one winter's day, not caring who would pay. Curran had brought along a young woman called Lydia, his cousin's friend. She was making sheep's eyes at John Taylor, who'd been introduced as a lapsed lawyer as well as an artist, a man in whom she sensed possibilities from his smart address near St Sepulchre, mentioned in
passing. Otherwise she was bored. The men had drunk a lot, the women less.

‘The inner and the outer come together in a visionary world,' said Robert. ‘The art describing it is never overblown, always austere by definition.'

John Taylor laughed, flecks of froth were sticking to his beard. Lydia ignored it and smiled at him. ‘We do not deal in mere ephemera,' he said, ‘not we.' He waved his hand. ‘We are free, uncircumscribed.'

‘We none of us want to be regulated,' said Richard Perry.

‘Well we are. We are mastered twice over,' said Frederick Curran, who was the drunkest of them and felt the melancholy of his state. He seemed unsure of the purpose of his bulky person.

‘We are,' said Robert.

‘Oh no, not this Irish bragging again, always the grandest victim,' said John Taylor. He hiccuped.

They all laughed but Ann saw that Robert and Fred Curran were a little hurt. To her mind there was something uncomfortable, discomfiting about John Taylor. He admired Robert – they all did of course – but not as unconditionally as Richard Perry and Fred Curran.

Robert tapped his forehead and addressed it, his eyes swivelling to the ceiling. ‘The head is austere.' He loved the word tonight and elongated its syllables.

‘Exuberance can be austere,' said Curran airily, having difficulty with the ‘x'.

She might have thought it rubbish, but not here.

‘Anything but the whimsical, the sentimental,' said Robert. ‘When thought is correct there's no difference between fact and fiction, dreams and experiments, science and poetry. Look there' – and he pointed to his brow – ‘it contains a universal grammar, words are its servants. A single form is near infinite, a single word, all in there.'

‘A single drink,' laughed John Taylor, who'd mastered his hiccups and now raised his tankard for someone to pour in more liquid. Dark blue paint stained his knuckles.

‘Of course, a sip, ship,' said Curran lifting the jug unsteadily towards him. ‘Drink is ritual.'

Lydia gave up trying to attract John Taylor – maybe he was nothing but an artist after all – and was pulling at Curran's arm. He jerked it away. ‘Do you know that my mother has been sewing a fantastic garment to be worn on judgement day?'

‘That is a serious business,' said Robert. ‘I am the tailor of the garment.'

‘Oh you,' shouted John Taylor, ‘me rather. You are just an old alchemist.'

‘I am,' said Robert, ‘and one day you will see gold.'

‘I have no doubt of it,' said Richard Perry. There was no mockery in words that might, in another mouth, have seemed scoffing.

Ann coughed. Richard Perry glanced at her, then turned away.

‘To the unknowing everything is hieroglyphics,' said Robert and raised a hand in blessing.

Lydia took no pains to stifle a snort. Having failed to move Curran or charm John Taylor, she'd gone past boredom. She was irritated and wanted to leave this gang of childish men.

Robert looked at her pretty pinched face. ‘We have distorted bodies because we have distorted words,' he said. ‘We can free the one with the other. No need to be enigmatic, secretive; it's all open, clear as light and day, bright as the sun.'

He addressed Lydia directly. ‘You are just there, suspended between life and death, past and future, here now. And this “now” is no more important than the other “nows”.'

‘What's he saying?' said Lydia in a hoarse whisper to Frederick Curran. He ignored her.

‘It is always the present,' said John Humphries, who was content in his companionable silence but liked to ease where he could, especially when women spoke when they should be silent. He relished the chiming bass voices of men even in their cups, but winced at the higher register of females – it was like cats mewing. Henry Davies, so eager now to please it almost took his speech away, looked round trying to focus his eyes; he started to say something to his blurred
companions, then thought better of it. Nobody heeded him.

It was John Taylor's turn to have the drinker's gloom as he waved his blue-stained hand, raised his head and closed his eyes.

‘You are only a painter, you are naturally dark,' said Robert.

‘I am lugubrious melancholy,' shouted John Taylor, his eyes still firmly shut. ‘I am not dark. I shine in the night.'

‘Then you are drunk,' said Robert.

John Taylor collapsed into a bearded sack.

‘Don't brood on it,' said Robert James, ‘Everyone is drunk some time and a good number here – except of course Miss St Clair and Miss Um . . .'

Lydia hissed ‘Minogue, Miss Minogue,' but no one heard or paid attention.

John Taylor inflated again. ‘True, true I am that. I am magnificent. My skies and seas are a marvel. My skies are divine.'

Frederick Curran reached across Richard Perry to pat John Taylor on the knee. ‘They are pure,' he said, and the ‘p' sent spit on to Richard Perry's waistcoat.

‘Divine, spiritual,' said young Henry Davies, content at last that he could expel his remark.

Richard Perry ignored them both. ‘Purity matters,' he said, looking at Robert.

‘It does indeed. Purity is boundless, it is love and truth.'

John Taylor deflated again and was suddenly on the edge of sleep. This time his eyes closed involuntarily. Henry Davies, his raw face shining with excitement, nudged him without effect.

‘Sleep the inscrutable,' said Robert gently.

‘We are the saints,' said Frederick Curran as if pricked to speak.

‘They are the Puritans,' said Ann.

‘Oh the pedantry of Protestantism,' said Robert, waving his tankard at the others but looking at her. As he looked he smiled with a soberness only for her.

She felt warm, included in all this rich nonsense. Robert James was becoming her own Gilbert, not exclusive to be sure, but more publicly admired. That
she
could be admired by a man admired by others was so very sweet.

‘Images are power,' said Robert and sent his boy, an Irish lad with white eyelashes, for more drink and more of the beef suet pudding they'd been consuming earlier. It was not his dinner to command, but no matter. Who was the host, who the guests, who the entertainer?

‘Bless you,' said Robert, again raising his hand and waving it at the group. ‘Bless you all. We all have grace.' He paused a moment, then looked round again. ‘That moment of my conception. Imagine how the clouds moved, the earth convulsed. My poor father and mother. They were hardly material to it.'

‘I paint,' said John Taylor, suddenly waking up, ‘
I
revive the dead.' His eyes closed again.

‘Life is a mnemonic,' said Robert, ‘a grand gesture pointing at something else. I extend myself into it but I am not enclosed by it.' He leaned over the side of his chair, then swung back. ‘I become like you.'

Curran was growing less drunk, more aware of Lydia scratching on his arm. ‘Should we go to the theatre?' he said abruptly.

‘To that pitiful place? It's for fools,' said Robert. ‘They might as well wear Grecian masks for all the feeling they show. There's been nobody since Garrick.'

‘Did you ever see him?' asked John Humphries.

‘Of course not. That's why he was so great. You didn't need to.'

Lydia felt her moment of escape disappearing. She looked from one to the other and tried not to catch Ann's eye, assuming a woman who kept such company would be no help.

‘We usher in our own theatre,' said Robert.

‘Such innocence. To think of theatre speaking in the head as you do,' said Frederick Curran. There were tears in his eyes as he looked at Robert. At least she thought so.

‘Innocence doesn't speak, it is
infans
,' said Robert. ‘It is impervious, pointless, almost unborn.'

Suddenly Robert sang out in a resonant baritone a line from the Latin hymn to the martyred innocents. He stopped abruptly.

‘I think,' said Richard Perry, ‘that we who are alive are a bestiary. We live in a zoo.'

‘We want ecstasy but can't reach it or hold it if we could,' said
Fred Curran mournfully, his slurring tensely controlled.

‘Ecstasy is blind,' said Robert, ‘we want clarity rather. That's the point of art, it blazes and clarifies, not intoxicates.'

Fred Curran looked abashed. ‘We are all emissaries of something else,' he muttered.

The candles were spluttering. They had not been replaced. When more drink and food arrived it was nearly dark. They set to consuming it, continuing to speak to the group, to each other, or to themselves, it did not seem to matter. Polyphony or just cohesive noise?

She said things she didn't remember because she mainly remembered the words of others. How deep the melancholy had been!

6

S
ometimes he seemed short of money, perhaps when his allowance had run out. She was never quite sure where this came from. His family – the maligned Catholic progenitors in County Cork, or a Dublin relative? He borrowed freely from his friends. They were never grudging. She remembered saying so.

He gave generously, indiscriminately, to beggars. Then his face went moist as if he identified thoroughly with them or with his own act. He gave too much to the wrong ones. Wasn't this more generous, more profound than her calculating way, thinking of deserts?

Imagine, he said, that our words, the truths of philosophy, could form sentences that had physical substance. Marble words. He'd said ‘concrete' before. Was it the same meaning if not the same substance? How about it, Ann?

He held her waist and swung her round her tiny room, dislodging her papers on her writing desk and scattering them on the floor. They'd been placed ready for the printer's devil. She hoped he wouldn't pick them up and read. When he didn't, she was in a tremble he would tread on them. She really couldn't write that stuff again. Besides, all her quills were blunted and would spit ink.

‘It's not the words that are the things, don't you see?'

No, of course she didn't. Did anyone else know what it meant, really meant?

She'd told him now that she lived in splinters. A shame of course, but she could live with shame. He'd no such need and certainly no practice.

She mentioned Caroline and Gilbert – delicately, she hoped – and he didn't probe. She wanted to repeat more of Gilbert's words because, though not at all to the point, they'd lodged in her child's brain. Perhaps he might explain or modify them and the emotion they'd begun to raise.

He said he'd severed himself from his past. Yet it repeatedly rumbled into view, the boyhood, the potatoes, the priest, the garish altar, the raucous faith, the easy politics of resentment. Ireland was an English idea, he said to Fred Curran, who agreed.

With the genteel he was sullen, hating social chitchat. But he grew so effusive over wine, good or bad, and strong ale taken in company with men he liked. They spoke excitedly or listened with simple exclamations. Such joy then.

‘Gilbert,' Caroline smiled dreamily, ‘used to say that I thought him so strong because he was big and expansive. But really he was – he often said as much – weaker than I, far weaker. I was the strong one and he needed my strength. My intuition was better than his reason, more right, even my judgement. Sometimes he was confused and didn't know something till he was with me. Then he knew.'

Ann would be picking her nose by now and staring at the ceiling or hanging her head elaborately. But she was unseen.

‘Only then did everything grow clear. I had strength from my own mind, you see. Then he would say so very lovingly and over and over again, “What I do know is what I desire and need and love. I want you more than anyone in this wide world. No one else will do.” That's love, girl.'

It was boring for a child of eight to be told this once, let alone twice or thrice. Yet these over-used words must have been sinking in even as she was angry that Caroline hadn't ordered a new frock to be made for her to go to school and look like Other Girls.

Gilbert was no help at all. She decided not to try his words on Robert James.

Yet something not to do with Gilbert, something fantastical that Caroline knew, perhaps remembering some leftover tract from the radical '90s, might connect with Robert. It was a woman's right to initiate just as well as men's.

Had Ann imbibed the idea with mother's milk? But no, it was a ridiculous image. Caroline had employed a wet nurse.

Not mother's milk, then. But she felt sure that Caroline had at one point said that women need not wait for men and that her forwardness did no harm with Gilbert.

It wasn't easy. Like discovering a new continent, not knowing on what plants to place your feet as you pushed into the undergrowth without a light.

There were no conduct books to tell you the words. Their advice all of a piece: hide your feelings, fool the man who'd likely enough fooled you. But Ann was no young inexperienced girl. She should have the right words to handle this. For, with all the love she felt sure he felt and knew
she
felt, he made no further move to bring them together, not exactly marriage, though perhaps . . . but just together.

‘I don't want to leave you,' she said, her heart pounding with such daring.

Then simply, with his grey eyes fixed so kindly on her, expressing infinite intimacy, he'd replied, ‘Then you should not.'

What other man would have been so very right?

Her desire, the craving, continued. Out in the world, in the street or in a shop or market, Ann had that thrill in the pit of her belly when a figure with Robert's outline came closer, turned to a surge of joy if it was indeed he.

Was desire too consuming? Were human beings meant to go at this speed? Was she? Was this aching elation a kind of sickness? She refused to answer. She shut off part of her mind. The rest of it hurtled onwards, together with all her body.

More of that stimulation, that titillation that he'd once so generously given to meet her physical desire, might have helped. Though now, in the solitariness it occasionally caused, it could turn to something akin to pain, made almost shameful when she saw through her pleasure his tender but unmoved face.

More sleep would have made a difference. But she'd always been a poor sleeper. Even as a small child when Martha did her best to combat wakefulness with her single lullaby of ‘Baby Bunting'.
Caroline had a clock – an heirloom, she said, though it didn't look so old – that chimed and whirred through the night. Caroline wound it herself, not leaving it to a servant. Ann asked Martha to try to stop it but Martha would not go against the mistress – she respected Caroline because she sat on cushions and was idle, like a lady should be.

‘You won't sleep,' said Caroline to her, ‘you fear dreaming. It's a sign of a bad conscience in a child.' She never believed this: the day was simply too short for thoughts. You had to use the night.

He decided one day they should eat strange foods, strange to her – the kind her mother's cooks, the Hannahs and Marys who never stayed for long, would tell her to throw to Jonah's pigs. Caroline had liked only English food. Wistfully Signor Moretti had described the Roman confluence of garlic and oregano and olive oil when Ann had sat in his stuffy rooms trying to master irregular Italian verbs, but he'd not cooked for her. She'd mentioned the mélange to the second Mary, who laughed and laughed, then went on wrapping her suet pudding. When she'd had to feed herself after the years of root vegetables in Fen Ditton, she'd bought a lot of chicken and cured meat.

Robert saw food as expression, a language with which to engage the body.

So he threw out her white bread and sent his pale boy to bring back dark rye instead. She'd thought it peasant fare but no, not this tasty rich bread, eaten with onions cut in rings and salted herring.

She didn't enjoy it. She disliked the lingering smell in her lodgings, too. Was Robert's taste superior to hers? Of course.

That night after dinner he was the Fashionable Lady from out of town, from Tunbridge Wells, who wasn't sure this was quite the smartest place to be. And she laughed and laughed, for he was so good at being other people.

‘You are so marvellous at this, your characters are so believable, why don't you write a novel?'

He looked at her in bewilderment.

Did any of it come from memory? she wondered. Did he mock acquaintaces or were his imaginary people born of fragments in his capacious head? He recollected his family differently at different times. His father had been a bully, he said, and he the son had walked out on him shouting, ‘I want nothing from you.' His simple quiet mother had been saintly; she adored him. That was what he said. But he also said that his dull mother had pulled down his clever father, who would have been – what he would have been was unclear. Instead, he'd remained a country doctor and who would not drink to excess with such a fate and such a dismal wife? And she? She in her dullness and despair turned more and more to the priest and her love for her only son.

She had some delicate pots, Chinese, French and Meissen, inherited from her own mother. He'd learned to hold and value them and know about their making: about candling and dipping, crystal glaze, gum arabic and vitrification. He found Ann's cups too thick-rimmed and coarse for his use, so he bought her new fragile bone-china ones from Spode. He pointed out where the hazy colour shadowed from green into grey. It was at that point, the numinous, that things happened, he said. ‘It's like the sky and sea, John Taylor's painting, what he tries to capture, you don't know where one begins and the other ends.'

As she looked at these fragile vessels, she felt his eyes and fingers on them as if she'd been what he caressed, as open and as empty to be filled.

It was fondling. He fondled her. She responded. It was her fault that she, only occasionally now but with such pain, grasped after more.

With Robert the commonplace was insight. Always the senses must be intense as if candle lights were stars. If he drank apple juice from a coloured glass, it became the gods' nectar.

He prized a gold Swiss watch. It had been an old priest's – he didn't explain why he prized it since he'd abandoned the beliefs of the giver.
He loved to look at its unequal hands moving round the dial. He could sit on a sofa and stare for minutes on end at these hands on the watch's face. She marvelled at the absorption.

Was it laudanum he took, alcohol, mercury? Or was it just a grace?

He knew he had a temper. In school in Cork he knocked down a boy who'd insulted him. He didn't consider it unusual, either the arm that hit or the temper that propelled it. He was not a violent man, he said. He was simply tense with intellectual excitement. And volatile, he knew that. He either sang or was petulant.

Always he was one hop and a skip from outrage, but early on Ann thought she knew his dangers. The quicksand would appear before her and she should and could jump aside. So she believed.

They went on a walk in the country out beyond their usual paths in Islington fields but still close to town, not far enough away to lose all sight and smell of London. She was enjoying the fresher air, but he was morose; the muddy earth was dirtying his new blood-brown boots. He didn't want them stained with paler soil.

The scene ahead was picturesque. He forbade use of this modish word – or rather he laughed at her when she used it. But it was true. It was like a detailed watercolour: a hawthorn in a foreground with a gentle blue-and-green slope behind, the grass blurring to set off the sharply delineated twigs for the focused eye.

‘For heaven's sake, shall we go home?' she said at last.

‘Yes, why not,' he said. ‘It's filthy here.' He prodded a weed with his cane.

‘But lovely.'

‘If you are properly shod it might be but I'm not.'

‘I did tell you to wear something stouter.'

‘Can't you ever leave me alone?'

‘We wanted to be together.'

She felt ridiculous tears rising to her eyes.

This was not the first time. When it happened, to counter it she found her voice becoming deeper, slower – and consequently more irritating. When he could hide his vexation no longer, he would mutter; then, if they were in her rooms, go out, slamming the door. The women behind curtains in the other apartments would listen for more. She was sure of it.

Once in general talk – they were in the lodgings he shared with Richard Perry – at a moment when Robert was not listening, she'd said something on the edge of critical about his temperament; Richard Perry watched her in silence as the talk flowed on. Then, when the night was deep and conversation no longer general, he took her aside. ‘He is beyond wonderful,' he said, earnestly engaging her eyes. ‘You may not understand it enough. Not because of his tragedy, one that could never be finished. But because of what he is. I owe him my life. He saved me. Let me tell you some time. You are close to him? I would like you to know.'

So, when he was eating again in her apartment, he seized his moment. Robert left to see Frederick Curran about some matter in Cork, and Richard Perry waited behind. By now she'd learned some listening skills though she dreaded a long tale. She settled herself in her chair. She liked Richard Perry more now than at first, mainly because he so much liked Robert: he buttressed her feelings – and simplified them.

‘It was some years ago. I was a bookseller then, not a reviewer. It was before my business went bankrupt. No matter, I have a different existence now. I had to journey to Hamburg in the dead of winter. I took passage with a trader going up the Channel into the sea. It lost its way among shelves of ice on a sandbank off Cuxhaven. It sank. Three of us including the master managed to pull ourselves on to this sandbank while the others were drowned in the icy water. I think some tried to make for the shore instead. It was just after Christmas, before the twelfth night, a night I always remember for it was when my wife died.'

She was about to comment when he prevented her by adding, ‘It was sad but we had not been married long, not become used to each other.' He wanted no interruptions.

‘The three of us, the master, a sailor and I, had managed to pull towards us some stores that floated past amidst the pieces of ice, a small cask of wine and some biscuits and cockles. I had a few nuts which I'd put about me when I knew the boat was in trouble. On this fare during nearly a fortnight we all managed to live. But the sailor had been longer in the sea than I. He was always weak – I think he sustained some splinters from the ship's side when the ice hit it. At the end of two weeks he died. To tell truth I resented the nibbles of biscuit he took, for I knew it was only postponing the inevitable. He died without my noticing. No rattle or convulsion, just one moment breathing, the next gone. The master seemed to give up after that though he'd been the bigger and the stronger man. The cold was so bad you couldn't tell whether either of them died for lack of food or froze to death. Anyway the master followed his man in a matter of hours. We'd huddled together for warmth. Now my mates were dead.