The Skull and the Nightingale (50 page)

These reflections were greatly influenced by a long talk I had with Mr. Semple on the day preceding my departure. It seems that my future prospects must be a matter for the courts, who will adjudicate on the delicate issue of Presumption of Death. Mr. Semple is confident, however, that in this case the balance of probabilities is so clear that at no distant date I will inherit my husband’s possessions and become a very wealthy woman. (Once again I am grateful that, if only by chance, I did not quite betray this generous, awkward benefactor.) I will be inevitably translated into a very different person, with a very different mode of life.

If I rightly understood what you said to me when we parted in London, your own fortunes have taken, or are about to take, a very different turn. You are cut adrift and may be left penniless.

Given these circumstances, I am ready to put to you a bold plan. If I write with audacious bluntness, it is because I am confident that I will not be misunderstood: you and I have spoken together very frankly on some past occasions.

The plan I am proposing is this. I will remain in York for some few weeks or even months. When I return to London I shall invite you to visit me—more than that: I will be so forward as slyly to encourage you to pay court to me. I will respond to your overtures with bashful warmth. In course of time—it can hardly be sooner than two years from now—we shall be married. In the intervening time I shall take steps to ensure that you are discreetly enabled to continue living in London in the style to which your godfather enabled you to aspire.

How rash my letter is! How outrageous to propriety! Yet I am proud to be writing it: I exult in being so blunt and taking such risks. Sustaining me in my intrepidity are two mighty considerations.

First, you and I are matched in mind. I have known you all my thinking life. We share memories, of course, but also beliefs and tastes. We understand one another very well. We can communicate not only through words, but through the language of eyes, expression, tone, and gesture.

And we are attuned in passion. I need say nothing further on that score: you know as I know how we have caught fire when we have so much as touched.

I write this letter hastily in the heat of a compelling mood, but I mean every word that I have said. I long for an answer—a declaration of ardent acceptance. But do not answer yet. Consider my plan to be no more than hypothetical. I know, and so do you, that in matters of moment I have weakly changed my mind before now. So wait: ponder what I have said. Do not reply until I have written once more, probably in a very few weeks. If I then confirm, as I am sure I will, that my intention holds, I will hope for an answer from you which will seal the compact between us.

Yours, &c.

I had to read the letter twice before I could fully comprehend what it meant for me. Having just been transformed, my life was to be transformed once more. Curiously my first response was one of disinterested mental relief, as though at a difficult mathematical calculation producing a neat answer or a philosophical speculation resolving itself into a compact proposition. All was clear, all was well. But this abstract satisfaction was almost immediately overwhelmed by a rush of exultation. I was like a man fallen from a tower and alighting safely on his feet—with his pockets stuffed with gold.

I sat savoring the elegance of what had happened. My godfather had unknowingly cajoled and bribed me into the very predicament which was to free me from his clutches. Mr. Ogden, in his anxiety to avoid cuckoldom, had kindly bequeathed me not only his wife but his fortune.

My life, which I had hitherto improvised, now took on shape and sequence. Two years previously I had been in France; two years hence I would be living in London, a wealthy married man, ready to become a respectable citizen. I was not, after all, condemned to be an outcast like Francis Pike: I had been born under a lucky star. As one cornucopia was snatched from my grasp another was proffered. After weeks of despair and guilt I was bubbling with facetious glee.

It was true that I would have a tiresome secret to hide from my wife: the fact that I had—if unintentionally—killed her first husband. Perhaps I could all but forget the matter. Or on some mischievous night when we had both drunk more than we should, perhaps I might tell her the truth, and we would giggle with horror at the enormity of it.

The thoughts that energized my mind began to activate my body. I threw aside coat and wig and paced the room, pausing at the mirror to grin at my grinning reflection. I poured myself a glass of wine and drank it in a single draft. I burst into song, aware that Mrs. Deacon would hear me down below:

“Pray fill up my glass: I must drink again.

A beggar I may be—what then? What then?

My credit is good, though my coat may be poor:

Old Nick will come later to settle the score.

Pour me some more, pour me some more:

Old Nick will come later to settle the score.”

Rejoicing to be frivolous again, for the first time in weeks, I reached for pen and paper and composed some burlesque couplets to celebrate the occasion:

Thus random deeds sequentially connect:

Effects breed causes, cause begets effect.

The plan which fails to achieve what we intend

Perchance conduces to some unseen end.

Today’s confusion may, in time to be,

Revert to pattern and to symmetry.

So monstrous billows, that convulse the deep,

Subside at last, and rock themselves to sleep.

The sapling rises as the old tree dies,

And one man’s fall procures another man’s rise.

I was half sorry that I no longer had my godfather as a correspondent. He might have been intrigued to see how neatly the old hackneyed maxims applied to my situation. Perhaps he would even have been blackly amused by the turn his experiment had taken.

I drank more wine and read Sarah’s letter yet again. For weeks I had all but exiled her from my mind. What a fool I had been. Here was an exceptional woman. How fearlessly she spoke out, heedless of caution or convention. How generously she offered me everything she possessed. Together we would forge a remarkable partnership, shining together in London society as solitary Mr. Gilbert withered toward death at Fork Hill.

She was once more fully alive to my imagination. I remembered her as she had been in the landau, in darkness, all warmth, all longing, her breath mingling with mine. Closing my eyes to lose myself in the memory, I was at once swelling with lust. Not since the nonsense with Mrs. Hurlock had I known venereal relief of any sort. Now body displaced mind, my whore pipe was once more in my hand, and in moments, with a joyful roar, I was spending exultantly, snatching up my poem to protect my breeches.

Chapter 28

My dear Richard,

After my recent illness I was for some time a little weak, but I recovered sufficiently to compose a letter to you. Before it was posted, however, I myself received a letter from Matthew Cullen, the content of which you can guess. In the light of what he said I discarded what I had written. Subsequently I made a number of attempts to start afresh. However, each time I attempted to set down my thoughts, the emphases shifted: something had been omitted or exaggerated. I conclude that there can be no perfect version of what I wish to say; what seems true in the evening may appear doubtful next morning. This letter will fall short of my intentions, but will be as complete as I can make it. I admit to certain inconsistencies in my character: it follows that in trying to speak the truth from day to day, I will prove guilty of self-contradiction.

I gather from Cullen (who has now received a final payment and is out of the account) that you are resentful and wish to sever all contact with me. It irritates me to know that, through ill health, I myself let slip the clues that aroused your suspicions. On the whole, however, I do not regret what has happened. The time had come for clarification. This letter is intended as a step in that direction, and is an attempt to reconcile us.

Where to begin? As a boy I never learned to swim. I knew the strokes and practiced them on land, but to no practical effect. I could never yield myself to the water and trust that I would float. When I grew older I experienced what seemed to me to be comparable difficulties elsewhere. Brought up to value self-command, I shrank from drunkenness: repeatedly I found myself the one sober man at a carousal. In the company of women my social self was rendered clumsily incapable by my observing self. I was deeply envious of those such as your father, who freely and easily followed their instincts. Lacking such confidence, I would flinch from a courtship on the pretext of some physical reservation rather than risk rejection. I affected fastidiousness as a cover for my fears, and the affectation hardened into a habit. Rather than repine at my lack of animal vitality, I preferred to pride myself on discrimination and clarity of thought.

When I inherited the Fork Hill estate, as a young man, I therefore seized eagerly on the excuse to preside over the lives of others rather than take the risk of living my own life to the full. At the practical level I enjoyed some little success: my estate flourished and my tenants prospered. Some of my more ambitious ventures, however, fell short of my hopes. I sought to nurture a second Pope, a second Newton, but engendered merely a Quentin and a Yardley. Several doubtful marriages, including that of the Hurlocks, took place at my instigation, as I found husbands for those I had feared to embrace.

Over the years I became increasingly dissatisfied with the detached existence to which I had condemned myself. At Fork Hill House I had everything I needed to gratify eye and ear and palate. I was considered a man of taste—but what had become of my appetite? Where were my Passions? My contempt for Hurlock could be transmuted into contempt for myself. I feared I had become his fleshless obverse, an elegant shell, merely.

It was no doubt for this reason that I acquired a relish for tales in which an author assumes an alien personality. Thus Defoe can write as seafarer, whore, or pickpocket. Through an imaginary traveler Swift exposes his own obsession with the odors and what he sees as the ugliness of the human body. Fantastically he seats himself, as Gulliver, astride the jutting nipple of a stinking giantess and the self-denunciation is lauded as satire. Yet more revealing has been Richardson’s immersion in his fictional works. Why is Clarissa so grotesquely long? Because the author could not bear to let it end. It gave him freedom to dress and to undress his heroine, to observe and to assault her—and all in the name of morality. Does he not display a self-deception indistinguishable from hypocrisy? Of course he does. But it enabled him to write, through Lovelace, with a wit and iconoclasm that he could never have achieved in his own voice. By indulging a moral weakness, he discovered an artistic strength, and a hidden dimension of his own personality.

It was in this spirit that I myself looked to experiment. For better or worse I wished to know myself. The possibility of involving you in the project emerged only by degrees. Although your godfather, I saw you but rarely in your early years. When I assumed responsibility for your upbringing, you were a child. At this stage I did not think to make plans for you. I was already conscious, however, of a small seed of curiosity. As you know, your father was a friend of mine at university. He charmed me, dominated me, and in certain activities surpassed me. I found myself wondering—rather in the spirit of Yardley—whether as you grew older you would recapitulate the Fenwick I had once known. As the years passed you did indeed prove to resemble your father, both in appearance and in disposition. I came to be intrigued by the possibility that you could become both a reincarnation of your father and a substitute self for me. You could be my Roderick Random, my Lovelace, but a flesh-and-blood instigator rather than a verbal figment.

It seemed to me that our partnership promised well. We have enjoyed a happy division of moral responsibility. My excuse can be that it is you, not I, who have been the active performer. But you have had available the disclaimer, equally specious, that you indulged yourself only at my insistence. Setting aside such casuistry, I confess to having learned a great deal about myself, much of it discreditable. The human body still disgusts me, but I enjoy that disgust. I have succeeded in vindicating my detachment, skepticism, and fastidiousness, but through the very process of participating greedily, if vicariously, in their antitheses. Your awareness of the duplicity of my position cannot be keener than my own. I confess that my pleasure at Hurlock’s humiliation was exquisite, and that my conduct with regard to his wife was essentially more gross than yours. But it is in just this respect that my experiments have been bolder than Richardson’s. He escapes the implications of his tale by the arbitrary imposition of a “moral” conclusion in which the good are lauded and the wicked condemned. In any case he purports to stand to one side as a mere narrator. I have been denied recourse to any such crude evasion. I cannot tell how the stories I initiate will conclude—and it is that very uncertainty which most particularly solicits my attention. Moreover, I cannot anticipate just how deeply I will prove to be immersed in them and perhaps deformed by them. I have been as much a subject of these experiments as have you.