According to Queeney

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Mrs Thrale was not surprised that her daughter had been noticed; she had observed the extraordinary crookedness of posture exhibited by the inhabitants of Paris, and the predominance of trusses and the like displayed for sale in shop windows. Deformities of the spine in such numbers, she reasoned, were to be explained by the French habit of putting children into stays as soon as they could stand upright. The resulting inhibition of limbs and retardation of growth had produced a population unable to walk in an easy manner. That here, as at home, Samuel was stared at in the street was due more to his remarkable freedom of movement than to the dramatics of his rolling gait and his sometime revolvings.

  Queeney herself was far from overwhelmed at being the subject of royal attention, but then her looks had never been matched by a warmth of temperament. From infancy she had shown coldness, though it was true she had shed tears when Papa had flown into the chalk pit. ‘It is an honour to be singled out by the Queen of France,’ Mrs Thrale remonstrated. ‘It would do you no harm to appear gratified,’ to which the child tartly retorted that her mother was showing enough gratification for both of them.

  They found Henry tramping the straw of the royal stables. When told of the attention Queeney’s presence had aroused, he said it was no more than he would have expected and that he had no idea where Johnson might be, save that, like a man long incarcerated underground, he had sought the air.

  Some quarter of an hour later it was Queeney, striding sullenly ahead of an exasperated Mrs Thrale, who spied him in the distance seated on a bench beside a luminous stretch of ornamental lake. Mrs Thrale told her to run on ahead and fetch him. ‘I am not a dog,’ the girl murmured and deliberately slackened her pace.

  It took some time for her to reach the bench. Mrs Thrale watched intently and was astonished to see Johnson remaining in his seat and Queeney returning alone. She was limping again, an affectation assumed following a lesson with her Parisian dancing master, during which she swore she had suffered a stubbed toe, an injury requiring the temporary postponement of further instruction. Mrs Thrale suspected the toe to be an excuse, the girl having run about quite agilely the following day when taken for an airing in the gardens of the Tuileries.

  Queeney coming within earshot, she called out, ‘What is wrong? Why is Mr Johnson not with you?’

  ‘He insists he is not fit company’, Queeney said, ‘and is saying his prayers.’

  Much perturbed, Mrs Thrale hurried down the path. Johnson sat bent forward, leaning on his stick, eyes lowered. ‘Samuel,’ she shouted, ‘we are ready to leave—’

  ‘Go about your business … I am best left to myself,’ he replied, in such tones of muffled despair that she stood momentarily aghast.

  Familiar as she was with his moods it was not always possible to find the correct approach. Sometimes he was so angry and out of sorts that it did no good to reason with him; at others it was talk he needed and a sympathetic ear. Glancing at his face, it was pitiful to see the misery etched upon it … and yet, the dying day was so lovely in its aspect – the purple shadows on the grass, the silver sheen upon the water, the flash of wings as birds swooped from the fiery canopy of the trees – that she could not feel his sadness, and with an honesty of spirit was compelled to tell him so. Seating herself beside him she placed one small hand on his stout knee, where it perched like the lid on a teapot. ‘Look up,’ she bade him. ‘Look up at the sky.’

  For some time he could not bring himself to obey her; patiently, she waited. Presently, voice hoarse as though from speechifying or weeping, he said, ‘I am not such a good traveller as I thought myself to be.’

  She knew this to be true, for she and Baretti had remarked on his lack of ease away from London, and in particular his refusal to speak French, which kept him out of the conversation when in the company of strangers; he would either talk Latin or not talk at all.

  ‘The French are a silly people,’ he said. ‘They have no common life. Nothing but the two ends, beggary and nobility. Nor do they have any common sense, common manners, common learning … with them it is either gross ignorance or les belles lettres—’

  ‘We shall all be glad to be in England again,’ she lied; she herself found Paris more stimulating than either Streatham Park or the Brewery in Deadman’s Place. Still, she was touched by his obvious homesickness and tapped his knee affectionately.

  He looked up then, but she could tell he did not take in the radiance of the fading day; she had been in the right of it when sometime past she had accused him of being a man who lived in the head rather than the body.

  Suddenly, he said, ‘I have had cause to remember my brother, Nathaniel—’

  ‘Little Natty,’ she prompted.

  ‘Little Natty,’ he repeated, and lapsed into silence again.

  She watched the scarlet streaks flooding the darkening sky and thought of other things: of the Queen’s gown made of gauze adorned with flowers and of the pearl bracelets on her wrists; of the French way of cruelly whipping their horses over the face; of the infants in the Foundling Hospital pining away to perfect skeletons and expiring in neat cribs with each a bottle hung to its neck containing a milk mess, which if they could suck on they might live, and if not, would die; of the anniversary of her wedding day some two days past and of Henry presenting her with flowers and stammering she had been a good wife to him. That she had never been in love was not a great deprivation, for what one had never known was scarcely to be fretted over.

  ‘I have had reason to think of the manner of his death,’ said Johnson.

  For a moment she could not recall who it was that occupied his mind, and then, remembering his dead sibling, asked what it was that had revived the memory.

  What Samuel told her was incoherent, and besides, she who had suffered the loss of so many children could not be expected to waste much thought on a man who had been dead for nigh on forty years.

  ‘He died but a few hours, a day at the most, after Davy Garrick and I left Lichfield for London.’

  ‘He was ill when you set off,’ she probed.

  ‘No. Not so—’

  ‘A sudden illness, then—’

  ‘I had not seen his face, not even in dreams, until today—’

  ‘It is strange’, she said, ‘how an image can suddenly come into the mind. Some years ago, I remember I was—’

  ‘He was lying in the dust—’

  ‘The dust …’ she repeated, distracted by the sight of Queeney whirling round and round on the path.

  ‘In fetters in the dust.’

  At once, she gave him her full attention. When Samuel dwelt on restraints it was a sure sign he was beginning to allow a morbid melancholy to overpower his senses.

  ‘It was in my gift to have helped him’, he said, ‘and I did nothing.’

  ‘He died in prison?’ she asked, trying to make sense of it.

  ‘Neither in a prison nor a madhouse’, he said, ‘and for that is now in a worse place than either,’ after which curious utterance he beat his fist against his breast with such force that she started up in alarm and attempted to tug him to his feet.

  ‘Sorrow’, she cried, quoting one of his own metaphors, ‘is the putrefaction of stagnant life and is remedied by exercise and motion.’ He laughed at this, but there was no humour in the sound. She shouted to Queeney to seek out Papa and Baretti; her voice was so charged with urgency that the girl sped off immediately.

  ‘In the dust,’ Johnson repeated. ‘In the everlasting dust—’

  ‘Samuel,’ she said, ‘there is little in my own life to keep me in that state of mind called happiness, but such is my trust in God that I do not question His will and am convinced there is a purpose to it all.’ At that moment, fearful for his sanity, she believed in her fairy tale. ‘You yourself’, she continued, ‘have written that the antidotes with which philosophy has medicated the cup of life, though they cannot give it salubrity or sweetness, have at least allayed its bitterness and tempered its malignity. The balm which she drops
on the wounds of the mind abates their pain—’

  ‘—though it cannot heal them,’ interrupted Johnson, and reminded her that those were Seneca’s thoughts, not his. ‘I am missing a button,’ he suddenly confided. ‘Mags Hewson found but two to sew on my coat,’ and got to his feet.

  Giddy with relief, Mrs Thrale linked her arm in his and guided him towards the distant windows glowing with first candlelight.

  As they walked, he endeavoured to conduct a conversation, but the sense of it was hard to follow, punctuated as it was by prayer. ‘The ducks on the lake’, he said, ‘are very fine specimens … giver and preserver of life, by whose power I was created, and by whose providence I am sustained, look down on me with tenderness and mercy … but not so fine as those at Streatham Park—’

  ‘They are indeed fine’, Hester gabbled, ‘and of a rare breed—’

  ‘Grant that I may not have been created to be finally destroyed; that I may not be preserved to add wickedness to wickedness … I have a mind to buy a new wig before I leave Paris—’

  She said, ‘There is a wig-maker further along the rue Jacob. Count Manucci told Henry he has a good reputation—’

  ‘Repent me of my sins, and so order my life to come, that when I shall be called hence, like the wife whom thou hast taken from me …’ Here Johnson stopped in his tracks and gazed about him with a face so expressive of despair that Mrs Thrale fought back tears; to succumb to the emotion of the moment would have been of little benefit to her dear friend.

  ‘When I think of my dead father,’ she said, ‘which I often do, I take care to think of the times when we were in accord. I remember him taking me fishing—’

  ‘Tetty had golden hair,’ he interrupted, ‘bright as though the sun shone on it—’

  ‘Like Marie Antoinette,’ she said.

  ‘I was not a good husband,’ he groaned and lumbered ahead of her down the path.

  ‘Wait,’ she called, and watched as a single streak of gold leaked from the sinking sun and stained the sky.

  ‘Gold as corn,’ Johnson called back, and allowed her to catch up with him. ‘On our wedding day,’ he said, ‘I taught her a lesson and rode on ahead … Almighty God, forgive me my transgressions—’

  That night Mrs Thrale told Henry of the anguish she had experienced. ‘He was not himself,’ she wailed, ‘and I am still in the dark as to what caused the disturbance.’

  Henry said there had been intimations earlier, when he and Johnson, lost in the cellars of the Palace, had witnessed an act of buggery in the archway of a wine vault. He himself had not been affected unduly, but Samuel had trembled with disgust at the sight of the coarse hairs sprouting from the buttocks of the perpetrator, and had afterwards hidden himself in a storeroom.

  Mrs Thrale climbed into bed and turned her face to the wall. Though her eyes were closed she could see her anniversary flowers dead on their stems.

  The Thrales left Paris on November 1st and arrived in the town of Lille a week later. The closer they got to the coast the higher Johnson’s spirits rose. He became remarkably even of temper, so much so that Baretti, try as he might, was unable to provoke him into argument. When the Italian, in the course of an intemperate evening in an inn at Douay, impudently asked if it was not a disadvantage to remain sober, Samuel replied mildly that though the habit of drinking eventually led to a dysfunction of the intellectual mind, it was of considerable benefit – in that it released the appearance of thought – to those persons who had little in their heads and much to say.

  Foolishly, Mrs Thrale had turned on Baretti and told him that Johnson’s sobriety had arisen from the best of motives, a wish to set an example to a wife grown dependent on brandy and opium. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she regretted them, yet such was Johnson’s tranquillity of mood that save for a lowering of the brows he gave no evidence of displeasure. Then, on the afternoon of their departure for Dunkerque, an incident took place which convinced all who witnessed it that Samuel had lost his mind.

  In the morning they had driven about Lille in a fiacre, the streets of the town being too dirty to traverse on foot. They stopped to visit a very showy church adorned with pictures of souls in Purgatory and statues of saints hung about with little silver ears and eyes. On enquiring as to what these trinkets signified, the party was informed that various miracles had been granted to supplicants requesting restoration of sight and hearing.

  Mrs Thrale, anxiously viewing the scenes of Purgatory, whispered to Baretti how fortunate it was that Johnson’s eyesight was poor, at which he reminded her of their visit to the Bibliothèque du Roi, and how when inspecting the incunabula it was only Sam who had been able to deduce from the appearance of the letters in several volumes whether they were printed from wooden or metal types. His deficiency of vision, Baretti observed, was generally most in evidence when he had no interest in the subject before him. True or not, on this occasion it was the moneyboxes fixed beneath each depiction of Hell that appeared to vex Johnson, an irritation he showed by striking out at them with his stick.

  Next, at Thrale’s insistence, they visited a magazine of corn, a vast building with nothing in it save a heap of rice in one corner. Henry said the French had little knowledge of agriculture and failed to make proper use of their land. Mrs Thrale thought the lack of industry had something to do with their frequent holy days which were scrupulously kept, though they appeared to have scant respect for the sabbath. Monsieur Le Liever, Queeney’s dancing master, had cried off on All Saints’ Day but had been only too willing to attend her on Sunday mornings, a request dear Queeney had declined on the grounds that it was against her Christian principles.

  On leaving the corn magazine Mrs Thrale instructed the driver of the fiacre to take them back to their lodgings; Queeney had earlier complained of a pain in the belly and she was anxious to dose her with ipecacuanha.

  They had gone a little way along a narrow street when their vehicle halted beside a house under scaffolding. Henry, stepping down to investigate the cause of the delay, found himself in the rear of a crowd silently peering at some object close by the front door. He was attempting to push himself closer when a low muttering began, after which, as though seized by a common anger, fierce shouting broke out accompanied by the shaking of fists. He was still trying to force his way forward when the crowd surged back a pace and stared upwards, and now hats were thrown into the air and cheers rang out.

  Mrs Thrale and Baretti, peering into the street, were astonished to see Johnson hauling himself up the front of the house by means of the scaffolding. Above him, at an open window beneath the eaves, could be seen a solitary figure, who stood with arms held out as though ready to catch bounty from the heavens.

  Even as she watched, the tail of Samuel’s coat caught on a projection of rotten wood and he was jerked sideways. The spectators let out a hiss of alarm. Queeney started to laugh hysterically. Mrs Thrale turned to admonish her; she moved too abruptly and the child lost her balance and cracked her head against the seating.

  And now Johnson had drawn level with the attic window; he swung himself inwards, collided with its framed occupant, clutched him in a necessary embrace and tumbled from view.

  Mrs Thrale saw Henry reach the steps of the house. He was taller than those around him, and as he stood there, head bent, he brought his arms up, either in shock or to hold back the crowd pressing at his heels.

  On his return he stepped into the fiacre without uttering a word. All his movements – the way he shook his head from side to side, the way his clenched fists drummed on his knees – expressed disquiet; as for his face, never before had Mrs Thrale seen such horror in his pale blue eyes.

  Baretti demanded, ‘What is the commotion about? Where is Samuel? What is happening?’

  ‘A child,’ came the faltering reply. ‘A fallen child.’

  ‘Fallen,’ echoed Mrs Thrale.

  ‘Dropped,’ Thrale said. ‘Either by accident or from intent.’

  ‘A dead child,�
�� screamed Mrs Thrale.

  ‘A dead one now,’ said he. ‘I saw its auburn curls.’

  Mrs Thrale began to weep. She knew it was foolish to shed tears over an unknown infant, but oh, the sadness of it – to spill like a fledgling from the nest.

  Presently the door of the house opened and Johnson came running down the steps. Approaching the carriage, he shouted, ‘Money, give me what money you have.’ Taking off his hat, he held it out like a begging bowl and urged them to hurry. The occupants of the fiacre obeyed him without question, and when the hat was heavy with coins he sped off, the torn pocket of his coat flapping at his side, and disappeared once more into the house.

  The story Johnson told them later that day was a curious one. The object Thrale had seen was not the body of a child, but that of a small sack filled with river mud and bound about with rags. Some years before, the man at the attic window had been employed as a nightwatch in the courtyard of the Bastille; he had a wife and a little daughter. He was, by his own admission, a prodigious drinker, and for this reason was shortly dismissed from his work. One stifling Sunday in summer his wife had given him the child to hold while she went to beg food from a neighbour. The bells were pealing for mid-day mass, and he stood at the open window rocking the babe in his arms and dreaming upon a time when he would be able to provide for his family. I will provide, he thought, and on the thought opened his arms to embrace the future. Soon after, his wife drowned herself in the Seine.

  Ever since, he had wandered from town to town, always living in attics, always standing at an open window to drop his burden, always waiting with arms held out lest by some miracle time reversed itself and God gave back his daughter.