The Absolute cook, Nancy, was bent humming over a steaming kettle and did not notice him. He warily ascended the stairs, gained the ground floor and the steady rumbling that had accompanied him since he’d made the garden grew clear.
‘Misbegotten … kiss-my-arse … wastrel … jackanapes,’ were just some of the milder epithets that nicely covered Jack’s climb up the somewhat creaky main stairs. Once in his room, it was a matter of moments to strip off his cricket clothes and pull on a fresh lawn shirt, his emerald waistcoat, mauve coat, green breeches. With a quickly-tied blue stock, a glimpse in the mirror told him he was both fashionable and presentable. The only problem was that someone appeared to have removed all his shoes. So slipping back into the ones he’d arrived in, he descended.
The roaring had subsided, replaced by a vigorous slurping. Nancy exited as he arrived at the door, gasping at his sudden appearance, then giving him a warning look. But since there was nothing to be gained from timidity he took a deep breath and marched into the room.
‘Mama,’ he cried, heading straight for her, ‘congratulations on your birthday!’
Lady Jane Absolute, née Fitzsimmons, rose from her chair, her face summoning up the complexity of emotions that had made her such a sought-after actress in the days before she became a Lady. There was delight within the eyes, a spark raised by the recognition of her only child. A mother’s love showed in the lips, which looked as if they would frame words of thanks and welcome … were it not for the anger spreading like flame from two spots on the cheeks to the high forehead, in a red almost as deep as the framing curls. Yet if there was a storm within the beauty, it was as nothing to the tempest that erupted at the other end of the table.
‘You dog!’ Sir James yelled. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Upstairs, Father.’
It was not the answer expected, the word swallowed and sticking in the older man’s throat. ‘Up … stairs,’ he gurgled.
‘Aye, sir. Composing an ode on Mother’s birthday. I heard you call, of course. But Mama always tells me that when the Muse descends, one must listen and never turn away from her, howsoever pressing the summons. And I believe I have been visited this night. Oh, let me recite it, pray. It begins, “In fairest lands, the fairest do display—”’
It was as far as he got, further than he expected and he was thankful for the interruption. Extemporizing was not his strength.
‘Ode!’ His father’s already florid face had grown purple with the effort of expelling the monosyllable. However it was the sole impediment to the flow that followed. Sir James’s language had been bred in the country and expanded in the barracks. It included oaths in all the languages he spoke, for he had served in three other countries’ armies as well as his own. His periwig slipping further and further back over his greying stubble, his words drew him from his seat the better to level his volleys at Jack. He seemed as wide as the table end, his powder-blue coat spreading around him like the tail feathers of an enraged peacock.
Helpless before the storm, Jack looked to his mother for succour. The anger was still there in her colouring yet had been displaced by something else in the eyes, something that disturbed Jack even more. He could withstand the fusillades from Sir James, so long as they were confined to words and not actions – he may have grown taller than his father in the last year, but he had not one half his strength – but what he found harder to take was what he saw in his mother’s eyes. Disappointment. He had hurt her, she whom he loved more than any in the world.
So he stood silent, head bowed. And when the storm abated while Sir James took a deep drink of punch and drew breath to continue the assault, he spoke.
‘I am so sorry, Father. And Mama, a thousand apologies for this rudeness. It was only my regard for you that delayed me, determined to get my poem right. If I may be permitted to continue with it to show that my lateness has not been all waste?’
He calculated on his father’s wrath – and hunger. Sir James was not a man who brooked delay once sat at supper, and his idea of poetry was his hunter clearing a hedge. At a pinch, Jack could produce a recently conned love poem from Ovid – a schoolfellow had bought some of the more scurrilous verse from a ‘print’ shop in St Giles. He thought he could adapt it and they might not know it. Not always certain with his mother who was fiercely well read. But he had calculated his father’s reaction perfectly.
‘Damn your poem, sir!’ he shouted.
‘Sit, Jack,’ his mother softly said. ‘We can discuss poetry later, methinks, when the soup does not grow cold.’
There was always something in her voice, as if all the words she spoke were taken straight from a ballad. The music came from the Irish lilt that yet lingered, the delivery on a breath that had carried whispers to the furthest gallery in the largest theatre in the realm. Sir James had confessed one night, when mellowed by a fourth bumper of claret, that it was the voice that first entranced him. ‘Could lure a fleet to the rocks and the sailors would drown content,’ he’d declared.
It contented now. With a subsiding growl, he sank back into his seat and reached for his spoon. Jack, under cover of the renewed slurping, took his seat, set, he noticed thankfully, closer to the female end of the table.
Silence accompanied the turtle and punch. A few words of a strained and general nature were exchanged over the soused eels and Rhenish. His mother spoke of the latest play she’d penned, a one-act farce containing a veiled attack on the government she hoped would slip by the Chamberlain, while they cleaned the bones from the Pigeons Fricando and sipped at a Calcevella. Jack merely picked at the Attlets of Fat Liver – he was not overfond of oysters – but the accompanying Porter was as good as at the Five Chimneys and led Jack, by association, to describe, in some detail, the cricketing victory and his part in it, remembering to say that the game was played the day before to maintain his ‘ode’ alibi. This finally drew Sir James out of his grouch, for he had been a Westminster too and a keen batsman, before a never-explained incident had led to him leaving school for the army at the age of fourteen. By the time the Veal in a Sharp Sauce had been washed down with an excellent Claret and even more so after the Duke of Cumberland’s pudding had been flamed, consumed and enlivened with a Lunel, the conversation had become general and boisterous. His mother’s hair had slipped down in places and she leant with her elbows on the table; Sir James had thrown off his coat and three times Nance had had to put it on the chair back as she brought the next dish in. At that third time, she was encouraged to sit and take a glass of port as reward for the splendour of her feast. Jack observed again how there were few airs around the Absolute table. His father had spent more than half his life in barracks before his valour on the field at Dettingen had earned him a battlefield knighthood from King George and the death of his brother Duncan had given him the baronetcy. Whilst Jane had risen from the streets of Dublin on the strengths of beauty, the singing voice of a goddess and an instinct that told her the traditional way of acting – the rolling, roaring declamation of the old Stagers – was a thing of the past. A talent that James Quinn had recognized when he brought her from Dublin to Drury Lane.
This was when he loved his parents best, away from the public gaze, unafraid of being themselves. Yet even as he watched them laugh and flirt – they had a highly embarrassing way of appearing still to deeply desire each other – he was aware that the fun was transitory. It could not last. There would be a return to business, there always was since he boarded at school and saw his parents but rarely. Recently they had never failed to discuss the subject he most dreaded – his future.
It was the brandy that did for him, as brandy usually did. It followed the final course, sorbets conjured from the ice house beneath the cellar. It was a luxury, a treat for a birthday, for the Indies lemons, together with the smuggled French brandy, may have cost as much as the rest of the English-supplied meal altogether. Both made Sir James think about money. And money made him think about Jack’s future.
‘So, boy,�
�� he said, beginning his campaign as he licked the last of the lemon ice from the bowl and reached for his bumper, ‘have you thought more on our last discussion?’
‘Discussion’ was an odd word for the diatribe loudly delivered a month before to the effect that Jack’s allowance and the fees at Westminster were bleeding the Absolute coffers near dry and that, now he’d turned sixteen, he should be out and earning his own living in the world.
‘And what discussion was that, James?’ His mother had placed her own glass down as her husband’s rose. She spoke mildly, her elbows coming off the table to settle at her side. Her husband recognized the war-like stance.
‘The boy expressed an interest in the army, is all,’ he muttered.
It was a palpable untruth as all there knew. Jack cleared his throat to begin his defence. But his mother was quicker. ‘The army? That is the first I have heard of it.’ Another lie but she didn’t leave a pause. ‘Yet I thought all this was settled, James, dearest? We agreed, didn’t we? He is to make use of the brains that God has given him.’
She was using her voice to manage him, and a memory that was selective at best, but brandy always rendered him unmanageable. ‘Brains my arse!’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Too many brains never did a man any good. Look at me. Never had a use for ’em in my life!’
‘You are being disingenuous, sir,’ she replied.
Before she could continue, Sir James guffawed, ‘I’ll tell you what use brains are, shall I? For I’ve seen enough of them spilled on the battlefields of the world to know whereof I speak!’
He glared at them triumphantly. Jack and his mother exchanged a look of mutual incomprehension. After a long pause, Jane ventured, ‘Your … point, my love?’
‘My point? Ah yes, my point.’ He leaned forward, a finger thrust at his son. ‘My point is easily made.’ He stabbed with his digit on all the main words. ‘Brains are of little use when you are wiping them off your sleeve. Eh? Eh?’
Since this was directed straight at him, Jack could not just ignore it. ‘I am still not quite clear, sir, what—’
His father breathed deep, drew himself up. ‘Ye Gods! Am I speaking Hindi? It’s obvious, isn’t it! Life’s a fragile thing, gone in a moment. Certainly its sudden absence takes many by surprise. So you seize the opportunities life presents to live before you die. There is no better place to do that than in the army. Now,’ he leaned back, chin raised and pointing at them like a gun barrel, ‘I have been speaking to an old colleague who is raising a regiment for Canada. It will cost me, of course, but to get my only son on the ladder …’ he smiled, waved a hand, ‘… least I can do.’
‘I am still not quite clear, husband.’ Jane’s voice was frighteningly calm. ‘Let me see if I have it. In order to utilize our son’s brains, you would send them where there is the best chance … of a savage stoving them in?’
Sir James flinched but did not withdraw. ‘Stove my arse! Our country fights a war against our oldest foe, madam. The Absolutes have always fought, I and my father before me, in a line back to … for ever. My father died at eighty and I do not doubt that I will live just as long to plague you both. We are thus talking, madam, of duty.’
‘Well, I have no illustrious ancestors to conjure from my past, to be sure,’ said his wife, her voice returning to Dublin. ‘I have only myself and what I have done with my life. Those experiences have taught me that one’s highest duty is to oneself. A man need no longer lurk in the barbarous shadows with the herd. Man has taken his rightful place, solitary in the sunlight.’
‘And woman too, Mama,’ Jack added, knowing his mother’s inclinations.
‘Of course. I was speaking generically.’
‘Generica … lize my arse!’ James bellowed, turning puce with the effort of adding the unknown word to his favourite curse. ‘You and your … philosophies, madam. They’ve overruled your reason and they are castrating our son. What duty would you have him perform, eh? That of an Unitarian minister dispensing tea and witticisms in the country? A coffee-house dandy in the town?’
‘I would have him be true to the gifts that God has given him. There are better ways to serve your country than having your brains extruded for it. Nay! Jack, as he and I have discussed, will compete for the Election to Trinity College, Cambridge.’
Sir James was having a little difficulty breathing. He pulled at his stock. ‘Cambridge. And pray, madam, what will he do there?’
‘Study the Classics, of course, Latin and—’
‘Latin? Latin? He needs one word only of that. One word, along with its declination.’ Sir James now rose and began thumping the table like a war drum. ‘“Bellum, Bellum, Bellum, Belli, Bello, Bello. War! O war! A war! Of a war! To a war! By, with or from a war!”’ He beamed, triumphant. ‘That, madam, will suffice for his Latin while the only other language he needs is French. To read the great military texts in that tongue. To converse with his prisoners.’ He turned to Jack. ‘You are still religious in your attendance at your French classes, are you not, boy?’
‘Oh yes, Father.’ Since they did not bother with such fripperies as living languages at Westminster, they had to be sought outside. Sir James had arranged for Jack to attend a French jeweller in Soho, as well as fencing and riding lessons, to complete a more martial education. These latter he undertook enthusiastically enough, but French was his passion, his attendance ‘religious’ for reasons his father must not know, for they had little to do with the Frenchman and all to do with his daughter. As he thought of the divine Clothilde, his heart gave a leap. But his mother’s next words brought it swiftly to earth again.
Lady Jane had used her husband’s draining of a glass to interpose. ‘What he studies is immaterial. It is whom he studies with, do you not see? At Trinity, he will mingle with the future great of our land. He will then use these connections to get elected to the House, to join like-minded radicals in Parliament, to actually bring the philosophies you deride to our benighted land.’ Jack sighed. His mother came from a family of rebels and espoused the rebel cause in all things, and she had aligned herself with a group forming around a ranter named John Wilkes to the continual disgust of her husband, a Tory of the old school. Her writings and satires supported that cause.
Sir James, meantime, reacted to more than the politics. ‘The House?’ he began to stutter in his horror. ‘Do … do … do you have any idea, woman, how much that would cost?’ he finished in a roar.
The heat of this old battle was building between them, both now standing at their chairs and Jack may as well not be there; indeed, he could probably slide from the room now and neither would notice. But victory to either side might lead to consequences that he would only have to deal with later. For he had a very clear idea of what he wanted in life. And it had nothing to do with either war or politics.
‘Actually, parents both, I know myself the course I would pursue.’
They turned. Under their fierce attention Jack wilted slightly. But this was his life they were deciding upon, after all; so taking a breath he stated his desire: ‘I wish to be a poet.’
The silence that greeted this statement was profound, intense and twice as terrifying as the tumult.
‘Um … with perhaps, some … uh, dramatic works thrown in?’
This last was aimed at his mother. Still they stared, held in their previous attitudes of combat. The words had lodged in his father’s throat as effectively as a pigeon bone. So it was his mother who spoke first, subsiding into her chair. ‘Jack, dearest,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘as I am sure you have observed in my life and from my associates, no one makes a living from the playhouse.’
Aware of the storm about to burst upon him from the other end of the table, Jack rushed to secure an ally. ‘But this is why I shall write poetry, too. And articles for the journals. I had that small piece in the Gentleman’s Magazine last month, remember?’ It had been more in the nature of a notice but it was Jack’s first words in print and he’d been thrilled. ‘And like you, Mama, I wi
sh to use my pen to persuade, to agitate, to subvert.’
During her career on the stage, Jane had been flattered by the very brightest in the land, from very different motives. She had not succumbed then and would not now. ‘Jack,’ she said gently, ‘you are too young. You have nothing to write about.’
This outrageous idea now halted Jack’s next words. Nothing to write about? Were not his journals full of his life, with characters he encountered, scrupulously observed? Did he not have a sheaf of poems on every subject whose style had been compared favourably by an usher at school with Thomas Gray’s? Was he not halfway through his first play: Iphigena or Lost Love Lamented? Well, he’d written the first scene and that a cracker. His mother was talking nonsense. It was not that he had nothing to write about. It was that he had too much!
Of the two male Absolutes, his father recovered his voice first. As so often was the case, he was three sentences behind the conversation.
‘Poet … poxed … poltroon!’ he roared. ‘D’ye think for a moment that I am going to pay you an allowance so you can sit in a room and … versify!’
‘So long as I have pen and paper, what need is there for money?’ Jack replied, loftily, ‘I may live on air.’
It was odd how arguments took these turns. It must have been the liquor – his parents’ standing order to water down each glass having been ignored since the age of fourteen – but it was strange how often it made his tongue say the thing most likely to provoke his already overtaxed father.
It did. ‘You puppy!’ Sir James was up now, his chair smashing to the floor behind him. ‘By God, you sneer at me, sir, at the money I have spent educating you, turning you from the Cornish peasant I found into this … simulacrum of a gentleman. And here I have been offering to spend yet more to get you a commission and you … you …’ He was swaying alarmingly and staggered back, only to lurch forward and around the table towards Jack, who hastily leapt up and moved away behind his mother. ‘Damn me if I don’t disown you, lodge three and fivepence with the trustees and make you live on the interest, take you from your damn, Whiggish school and get you an ensignship … in the Artillery! I’ll be buggered if I don’t disinherit you and leave my all to Craster!’
The Blooding of Jack Absolute Page 6