Conceit (21 page)

“What starts with P and rises out of its own ashes?” Jo asked, wriggling his ears. “What palsies the body and greys the hair? What gives a man gout?”

“Playing with his phoenix,” George responded, illustrating how it was done with quick strokes of his wrist.

There was no good telling them that the phoenix in the poem was the two resurrected lovers, for even the rising sun had been reduced by her brothers to a male member standing to attention at break of day. Their favourite conceit was
the drawing-compass—an object Jo imbued with lewdness by driving the legs apart with his thumb and then snapping them back together. They found the compass in a poem written to convince Ann that, even when separated, their two souls were joined like stiff twin compass legs. Ann was the fixed foot left with child in England while John travelled to France, growing
erect
and longing to
end
where he began.

Now Pegge knew the puns better than her brothers. In their imaginations, all the poems blended into one. But so they did in hers, though Ann and John’s story, as she knew it, was no longer shared by another living being, for her father had driven it into some phantom limb, then cauterized it.

As her parents sank in poverty, his poems spoke of desperate thoughts and deeds, the man’s heart ripped beating from his chest, the woman feverish and dying. Then he turned to writing holy poems, and before long Ann was truly dead. However, Pegge had learned from his deep mumblings that her father’s weak-kneed God could be chased off by one pungent memory of Ann, one putrid whiff of decomposing female flesh.

And now these holy poems were the only ones he wanted saved. Reading such betrayals, Pegge became her mother’s subterranean ally, their voices knitting into one. Night after night, Pegge lay with Ann in the damp cottages described by Bess, bearing a child with her every year. But Bess needed a quart of sack to be primed for storytelling, and her tales were never the ones Pegge craved. Though Bess could recall every remedy she had dispensed in the
Donne household for thirty years, she could not recall the story behind a single poem that John had given Ann.

It had fallen quiet in her father’s chamber, a heavy-lidded silence like dusk along a country lane, and Pegge was watching her father slumber, trying to decipher his twitches and contortions.

She felt a draught and saw a shadow in the doorway. Izaak Walton in his old riverwalking shoes that did not even squelch in warning, admiring the pigeons roosting on her father’s toes. How long had he been standing there listening to Pegge and her father?

She stopped him at the door. “Why have you come while he is sleeping?”

Walton dismissed her anger with a cheerful wave. He was just looking in. “Now the Dean is so happy as to have nothing to do but die,” he said, leaving dull footprints behind him.

She watched Walton’s back and legs going down the stairs. He had not lost any of his shapeliness while running errands for her father. In the absence of the Dean’s sons, Walton had set himself up in the library as a secretary. Men had been coming and going for days, talking with Walton about her father’s Will and the disposition of his manuscripts.

However, Jo had arrived that morning and his voice was now drifting up the stairs. He had come, she heard him tell Walton, to take charge of his father’s papers, but Walton seemed reluctant to turn the library over to him. The printer John Marriot was with them and Pegge stepped into the stairwell to listen.

Offering hard coin, the soft-spoken Marriot had come to pry as many manuscripts from the Dean’s stewards as he could. He knew that Pegge was ordering the holy poems, and Walton the sermons, but he was concerned about the fate of the Dean’s early poems. Marriot became distressed—his voice rising so sharply Pegge need not have bothered descending to the landing—when Walton announced that the Dean had destroyed some of his old papers.

Walton was in high spirits. “His poems were loosely, God knows too loosely, scattered in his youth,” he was saying. “It is fit and right that such impieties be burned, for he wished to witness their funerals before his own.”

Pegge heard Marriot’s indrawn breath. He wanted to print, he said, from copies written in the Dean’s own hand. Pegge knew that Marriot would have better luck with Jo, for her brother was already hemming and manoeuvring, leaving the door ajar to take the printer’s money as soon as they were out of Walton’s hearing.

In this Pegge could be of some assistance. “Mr Walton,” she called down, “my father is waking. I believe I hear him calling out your name. Soon he will be propped up on his pillow and have some little task for you.”

13. LOVE’S DIET

I once said, Ann, that I would rather owner be of you one hour than all else ever.

Chills, palsy, grey hairs—I have them all. Only my ruined fortune has repaired. My thoughts rattle in this pomegranate-skull and the dogs gather at my deathbed, smelling a cadaver as they smell sex upon a cleric’s hose. What do they know of love? What is its quality to such as them? I pay my debts with my bones, paying for the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary of my age.

Voices squabbling over my manuscripts. Mr Walton ushering great men in and out. Our eldest son arriving. Pigeons bound to my feet to draw the vapours away from my head. The hands of our daughter preparing my skin for death. Every so often, she hesitates, frowning at Mary Magdalen swinging on a loose nail above my head.

For fourteen years, you have pursued me from your grave. Let me go now, to face my God alone. I must die in the first person and rise omniscient. I will collect you when the time is right, for Time cannot weary you where
you lie now. When you are six thousand years old, you will have not one wrinkle of age or one sob of weariness in your lungs.

The body of a woman but the reasoning of a girl—what a drug was there! You were barely fifteen when I met you in York House.

Each day I studied the perfection of your limbs, ripening into womanhood. In my chamber at night I wrote poem after poem. Not all my verses were pure of heart. I thirsted after you, claiming you with my words. I warned you to take heed of loving me, for I was insatiable. My love expanded to such cumbersome unwieldiness and burdenous corpulence that it had to be dieted, fed with only one sigh and one tear.

Years later, I became a priest and this youthful play at dieting became sour truth. When did you begin to collect your sweet salt tears—when I began to thirst for God, not you? Before I took orders, I found you crying in our chamber, your hand supporting your back, for your womb was full of Pegge. You reached to tidy the wisps of hair at your neck, a gesture I had not seen in years, but now your hair was grey. So was mine, but I did not tug it out by the handful. I took you by the arm and led you to Bess, who found some way to calm you. I had no choice but to become a royal chaplain. King James refused to prefer me to any other post, and eleven years in the country eating salads and onions was enough.

Pegge fought her way out of you with such ferocity that you did not have the strength to name her. Called
the baby
, she slept in a box beside your bed for months, a stout, robust infant. As a priest, I could not come to your bed on fast days and feast days, I could not come when you were bleeding, or suckling, or with child, or even when you had given birth but not yet been churched. Such dieting sat ill with both of us, making your belly ripe with another hastily sown child.

When you were churched after Betty was born, I could not wait for night. I unlaced your gown and all your undergarments for you. In the afternoon sun, your flesh breathed in and out like a live sponge. I laid you on the bed and was quickly finished. My fingers left holes that would not close, for the blood had oozed out and gone elsewhere. You were a map of veins, a spongy hydroptic cushion. The image tempted, but I could not get a poem from it, no matter how many pages I blotted in my library.

You announced you were with child for the twelfth time while Bess was carrying a spotted-dog to the table. She raised the pudding high enough to throw it at me, then slammed it down and cut it with a knife. The children quarrelled over the squares, arguing over who should get the biggest. They poked their fingers into the pieces and poured cream into the holes. Then they sucked out the cream as rudely as they could. Bess refilled the jug to keep them quiet, but Pegge would not hush. She had just learnt a new word,
maggot.
Hearing it, the older children stopped their sucking and looked at you. Another birth, they knew, might mean another death. The cream from your pudding
dripped over your chin and spotted an already unclean bodice.

Bedridden for weeks, you let the children make a playhouse of your bed. I told Bess to chase them out, but she said they did you less harm than Dr Donne, who had made your belly a house of death. Afraid of night, the children slept with one another, leaving beds empty elsewhere in the cottage. Sometimes I woke to find that Pegge had crawled under my blanket and curled into a ball behind my knees.

As the birth neared, the doctor eased your bloating by making pinpricks up and down your legs. The children stared at the morbid fluid weeping from you until Bess finally took them out. After a day and night of labour, the doctor warned me you were too weak to deliver. A small foot emerged and I baptised the infant while it still had a soul to save. Your eyes opened as my lips closed. I will never forget that look. You brought forth that twisted child more in anger than in pain. Your reason escaped in a single tear, though your body wept three days longer.

Your father handed me a list of sculptors, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. I took it without a word. Dumb, blind, crucified—what metaphors did not apply?—I chose one for his name, and composed an epitaph for Nicholas Stone to carve.
This stone is commanded to speak the grief of her husband John Donne (by grief made speechless like an infant) who hereby pledges his ashes to her ashes in a new marriage wedded.

This was no idle conceit, for my grief was unutterable. What tears were left to shed? I had become that very stone,
that infant without a mother. I buried you next to your five dead children in St Clement’s. I still have the accounting.

for the burial of a stillborn

child of Dockter Dunes

for the grave in the church…… iiii s

for the knell……………… viii d

for the burial of Mrs Dun

for the knell………………. v s

for the passing bell………… iiii d

Should I have withdrawn my seed like Onan and spilt it on the floor? You might have lived another thirty years, but God counts onanism a crime. Since your death, I have paid a price that would make Onan blush, for your fingers call me forth each night to share remembered pleasures. I sometimes wonder, my gentle wife, if you are taking your revenge.

Four years after your death, when I became Dean of Paul’s and moved the children into this house, I found Bridget’s tinder-box with nail parings. She confessed that she had clipped your nails as you lay dying to entice your soul back to collect them. I rooted out all the children’s relics—the hair that Constance had combed out of your brush, the flannel in which Jo had caught one of your tears. I threw them on the fire as the children watched, and condemned such Catholic idolatry. In truth, I had no wish to encounter your soul gliding about the Deanery at midnight, seeking lost nails or hairs or tears, and rousing allies to avenge imagined slights.

The children have outgrown their memories of you, except for Pegge, who refuses to be weaned from the few she has. Once in a while, when Sadie barks for no reason, Pegge looks about as if a spirit might be present in my chamber, then lays a hand on the dog to quiet her. For months the dog has shadowed me, even into the chancel of St Paul’s, tracking the rank odour of human flesh. I do believe the animal has some gift, for she knew before my own doctor that I was dying.

My marriage-bed is now a deathbed. You must leave me, Ann, to the corruption of my body. I can smell it beginning. Let me putrefy and vermiculate, incinerate, dissolve, desiccate, and be dispersed until I am motes of dust. When God is ready, he will call back each mote from wheresoever it has flown, in whatsoever filth, and from these particles he will reintegrate and recompact my body, and revivify it in the blinking of an eye. At the last busy day, when the numberless infinities of souls arise and go to their scattered bodies, my ashes will wed your ashes and we will be young again in one another’s arms.

14. ENGLISH LAW

At first light, I was jolted out of John Donne’s embrace by the pipes and clanging pans outside our window at Lincoln’s Inn.

“Good-morrow to our waking souls,” my lover said, tying my shift for me.

My clothes were only just back on when the law students burst through the door to toast our health from the leather phallus once again. The hoots and jests were so loud I thought the window-glass would shatter. According to Francis, rubbing his cold hands, they had spent the long midwinter night on Lincoln’s fields where a tavern called the Blue Balls kept late hours.