The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I read his book,’ Stokes said again, and again was over-ridden.

  ‘What was it he claimed to have lived on for a year?’ Castleford inquired. ‘Was it the meat of seals, or whale meat, or – well, I recall I was most impressed, and thought how much he must enjoy his London beefsteak now, excellent, thank you, Mrs Meagles. Yes, why should we not enjoy the company of so superb a popinjay? It would be amusing for a season.’

  ‘I read,’ Stokes said very markedly, ‘his book, but I am not, I fear, qualified to talk about it – a great fog of oblivion has mercifully arisen between me and it, and when I made the gentleman’s acquaintance and he asked me for my honest opinion, I fear I had nothing to contribute. Not that it matters greatly; in reality he was asking me for my admiration for his daring feats, and not for my opinion on his ability to describe them. Well, whether my admiration was to be had or not – and I must say, it was not – hardly seemed to matter to the gentleman, since he proceeded to enlighten me in the richest possible detail about the various culinary approaches to blubber until I pushed away my own dinner, quite untouched.’

  ‘An entertaining fellow, though,’ Castleford said nervously.

  ‘That I do not concede,’ Stokes said. ‘But on its own, that recommendation – gentlemen, I thought we had always been firm in our resolution that literary distinction, and literary distinction alone, would admit a man to our number. Carlyle, you are very young, but when you attain my degree of venerability, you will come to appreciate that an explorer of some distant and desperately dull region of the earth arrives in London with the tale of adventures at the most predictable intervals – I should say every two years. And they drive London mad with enthusiasm for three months, and then they and their book disappear from our minds, and nothing more is ever heard of them. I am most unwilling to sentence myself to the prospect of dining with so very temporary a phenomenon for the rest of my life, and still be listening to the bestial doings of the Esquimaux in thirty years’ time. Come now, who was that fellow – you know, surely, who I mean—’

  ‘You must be more precise, sir.’

  ‘The fellow who came from Bokhara. And Kabul. Went there, rather. Was that not a mere two years ago? Now, what was his name—’

  ‘Yes, I recall—’

  ‘Ah—’

  ‘His name was Burnes,’ Stokes said. ‘You see, gentlemen, the point I make – how wild we all were for his exotic tales, and how quickly it is all forgot. No, no, no explorers, no heroes for me, or, at the very least, not at this dinner table. Do you think so meanly of your own merits that a man who buys a camel and goes a thousand miles to a place of no conceivable interest should be of our number?’

  ‘Burnes,’ Stapleton said. ‘I recall. I read his book. Very fine – the camels – the dyeing of the beard in disguise – the savage Ee-mir throwing his wives into pits, all that, Stokes – really fine stuff. I read it in a day and a half, found m’self very much better informed at the end of it, very much amused. Yes, what did happen to the fellow?’

  ‘Was there not some talk of his wooing one of the Garraway girls?’ Carlyle offered. ‘We were talking of them before you arrived, Stokes. Perhaps they married: they are both of them quite vanished, after all.’

  ‘I believe not,’ Stokes said. ‘Yes, that was the talk, but I think it came to nothing, if it were anything but tattle in the first place.’

  ‘Good luck to the fellow,’ someone said, quarrying a sole with his fork. ‘A fine catch, that girl, for a daring fellow.’

  ‘Five thousand a year, and that great place in Gloucestershire.’

  ‘The wilds, the wilds, the barren moors and steppes of Gloucestershire,’ Stokes put in. ‘I know of that great place. Highly picturesque, I grant you – a highly picturesque state of semi-dilapidation – but far more in the line of a necessary liability on whoever takes the girl than a dowry. But gentlemen. Gentlemen,’ he went on, pressing his forefingers to his temple in an exaggerated gesture of pain. ‘What is this? I had not thought that this was a club where the names of ladies were bandied about by members so lightly.’

  ‘We weren’t bandying her name about,’ Chapman supplied. ‘We were doing no more than bandying her fortune about. But we’re quite prepared to start on her, if you would prefer.’

  ‘Do so,’ Stokes said; his timing was good as ever, and brought a great roar of laughter from the table. ‘That, in truth, is the only reason I allowed myself to be roused so rudely, to be chivied out, in the vulgar expression, by our friend Stapleton, and brought down to this disreputable den of thieves; I felt the need to listen to a lady’s name being dragged through the mud.’

  ‘Five thousand a year,’ the youngest member of the Club put in, dreamily chomping on his dinner like a printing press on paper. ‘For that, I’d marry Queen Adelaide.’

  ‘Five thousand, and a castle. A highly picturesque castle—’

  ‘Moat and drawbridge, seven hundred years old—’

  ‘Seven hundred years’ worth of repairs and rebuilding. Myself, I think the fellow had a narrow escape. Enough to swallow up a trifle like five thousand a year,’ said Chapman. ‘As well marry the National Debt. Unless you prefer to live in, as Stokes so wittily says, a highly picturesque state of semi-dilapidation—’

  ‘Quoting, dear boy, merely quoting—’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it, sir; I had thought the theft of wit beneath you, unless you meant it as a compliment to our learning. But each day to wake and find that you have shared the ambrosia of your sposal bed – have, in the hours of darkness, actually pleasured yourself upon not your youthful bride, but half a dozen furry owls.’

  ‘Sell the damned place, and live in Hanover Square with two trim chestnuts and her old nurse for the rest of your days, then.’

  ‘The nurse would not have been the problem, I fancy,’ Chapman said in tones of horror. He paused, until he had silence, and then said it again. ‘It is hardly a matter of a nurse. There is – let us admit the dimensions of the case – a father, as well.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Stapleton said, and the table all started to guffaw. ‘There is, I believe, a sister, too.’

  ‘Of whom nothing is known,’ Chapman said. ‘I talked with her once for an hour, and even rose to the intimacy of holding her fan and pocketbook at the end of it. And still nothing has been reported back by explorers to that icy region of the globe.’

  ‘The old Colonel seemed barely to know where he was when I saw the old fellow last,’ the youngest member, whose name was Carlyle, put in. ‘I dare say he was a great hero in his youth.’

  ‘A great hero of Waterloo,’ Stokes said. ‘Or so they say. The old Colonel no longer possesses the capacity to talk sense on the subject of this morning’s breakfast, let alone so very remote a historical event. Certainly, Waterloo was in another country and a very long time ago.’

  ‘What do you mean, Stokes?’

  ‘I mean,’ Stokes said, taking a substantial draft of claret in lieu of breakfast, ‘what really matters, for those who are interested in such stuff, is the girl and her prospects, and not her father’s – habits, shall we term them. Let us be frank, and say that his life cannot be worth ten years’ purchase. Not five, in fact. Now, for myself, I should not have taken the girl, with father or without, with five thousand, or ten, or fifteen, even if she had moated castles enough to fill Gloucestershire. I presume the fellow fled whence he came, to our Indian possessions, the second he realized the facts of the case, and I am not entirely sure I should not have done the same thing myself. But for those who like that sort of thing, I should say Miss Garraway offers an excellent property, with substantial holdings and views of three counties. Eh, Chapman?’

  ‘Quite right, Stokes,’ Chapman said, loyally.

  ‘But for heaven’s sake, let us have no more talk of explorers,’ Stokes wound up. ‘And, now, gentlemen, a competition. I believe the old Colonel, in his youth, wrote and even published a volume of verses. Let us turn our minds to that, and, gentlemen, you have y
our challenge. A sonnet, in full Garrawavian style, date circa 1816. Subject? To the Moon? To Cynthia? Which has the more authentic – ah – period charm? Well, you may decide. Gentlemen, let battle commence. And Mrs Meagles – the claret needs refreshment, and subsequently, so do I.’

  5.

  The sonnet was done, and the dinners concluded severally, and the prize awarded. The business of the afternoon, such as it was, was concluded, and now all those sad captains departed; leaving singly and in pairs, according to some notion of precedence. Stokes, last to arrive, was first to take his leave, and the Club took its cue, and melted away into the great paragraphs of the London streets. First, the lions, to their busy quills and their crowded desks, and afterwards, the evening acclaim of some drawing room; then the rising men, preparing in their heads a sentence of denunciation to top or tail this afternoon’s essay, thinking it through even as they said their farewells; then the comfortable, the idle, the family men returning to the family board. They all went, singly, and in pairs, to their several purposes, and finally over the empty table, all that was left of the Club was its two eldest members, comfortably settling into their chairs.

  ‘They did not stand upon the order of their going,’ one said.

  ‘Macbeth,’ the other said triumphantly. ‘Indeed, not, although the parallel is inexact: I fear we would not make very promising assassins, the pair of us. Increasingly, you know, as I grow older, I think Macbeth truly the best of Shakespeare. How marvellous that scene—’

  ‘Rot, sir,’ the first said. ‘For myself, the more I think on it, the more I doubt that very much of it is from Shakespeare’s hand at all. Come, now, can you prefer so absurd a farrago to Hamlet?’

  ‘I can, sir, and I do,’ his companion said, but since this was an old and a comfortable argument between the two of them, he changed the subject. ‘I saw old Robinson died.’

  ‘No age at all,’ the first said.

  ‘Sixty-one. Still, his best work long done.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed. I recall him as a boy, no more – did he not make a fourth in our party in Scotland? Heavens above – that must be thirty years or more ago.’

  ‘A dull fellow.’

  ‘Nonsense. Do you not recall the rumpus we created in Edinburgh, drinking until dawn, and me challenging that odd Scotch fellow to a duel? He played his part, did he not? We have lived, you and I, we have lived.’

  ‘Did you hear the clock chime, just now?’

  ‘Six, I believe.’

  Mrs Meagles entered; this was the moment she evidently took pleasure in, when the Club had dispersed, and there was no one left but her two easy old friends. With them she did not stand on ceremony, but took her seat, and from her capacious skirts produced her work, stitching, picking, her head bent over.

  ‘We have lived too long,’ one said, quite suddenly. ‘There is no place for us, here, now.’

  ‘Come, sir,’ his companion said. ‘It will not do to be gloomy. And we are not dead, and old Robinson is, and soon to be forgotten.’

  ‘We are forgotten, too,’ the first said. ‘My books make no more noise than if I dropped my manuscripts in the river, now, and no one cares. I thought I would change the world once, and the world has changed, but without me. Who cares for wit now, or poetry, or Pope? No, I have wasted my life, and it is too late now to pretend otherwise. Had I a son, I should advise him to take up the profession of a bargeman, or a burglar – anything but poetry.’

  ‘I shall not stay, if you prefer to entertain the blue devils to me,’ his companion said. ‘This is too bad, too severe a judgement upon yourself, and not one anyone but yourself would make. Forgotten?’

  ‘Yes, forgotten,’ the first said. ‘All gone now, all into oblivion. Ten years I spent, you know, sir, Englishing Juvenal, and I felt at the end as if I had written it with my blood: I dreamt, ten years long, of doing something which would stand by Pope’s Horace, and at the end of ten years, the world did not notice, and now it never will. What does it want? A story of love, in which the squire’s daughter marries the squire’s neighbour; three volumes of virgins and dungeons, skeletons and phantoms; poetry no gentleman could keep in an unlocked cabinet, odes to obscenity, sonnets at which one blushes at the matter, and blushes again at the scansion; novelty after novelty, and what is old is cast aside without a thought that the ancients are still with us because there is nothing more to add. We have lived too long, you and I, and have lived to see everything we held dear fall into oblivion.’

  ‘You must not listen to our young men,’ the other said. ‘We were young, too, once, and in love with novelty. They will learn, you know, and discover what you have done, you and I, and Juvenal, at least, will not be forgotten. The battle is not lost, not lost at all, but we will not live to see its end: what we did, we did, always, in trust.’

  ‘The battle was not lost, and there was no battle – we offered a fight, and they turned away, not seeing us, and left us, proclaiming to the empty air. I am sick at heart, sick at heart.’

  ‘Tell me how Robinson died, at the last.’

  ‘I heard something of it,’ the first said, slowly. ‘You know his health had been weak for some time, and he had exhausted himself. He improved, quite markedly, and took it upon himself to travel to Bath, for the waters, and his physician thought it an admirable idea. There was no prospect of anything but improvement, and he seemed quite past the worst, and he set off. The first day, his spirits were high – his wife, you know, told me something of this – but in the course of the second, he seemed out of sorts. No doubt those abominable roads. They stopped for the night at an inn, and Robinson took to his bed. In the night he was uncomfortable – it was a wretched little inn – and in the morning, there was no thought of moving him for the moment. Still, it seemed no very serious matter, a day’s delay. His wife hardly thought it necessary to send for a physician, indeed. The end came in the most unfortunate way: the landlady’s daughter, who was deputed to sit by Robinson, left her post for an hour without notice, and while she was gone, Robinson struggled out of bed, for some purpose, and fell, quite heavily, striking his head. It was an hour before he was found, and unconscious, and then it transpired that no physician could be had within two hours’ ride of the place, and that did for him. A sad end. I saw no notice of his death.’

  ‘No,’ the other said thoughtfully. ‘Of course, he had not published for many years. I thought his last book rather fine, his book on Derbyshire. He was always an admirer of the picturesque. His widow?’

  ‘There is no money, I think,’ the first said. They relapsed into gloom; the evening, outside, was deepening. Mrs Meagles, who had been half-listening, laid down her work, and picked up a sheet of paper, left there, and read it with some attention.

  ‘A bagatelle, my dear lady,’ one of her gentlemen said, kindly.

  ‘I think—’ Mrs Meagles said, looking up, and her eyes were shining, ‘—I think it most beautiful. May I keep it?’

  6.

  Mr Castleford’s Winning Entry in the Garraway Sonnet Challenge Cup (Prize, 5 shillings)

  Moon not at me, bright lady of the night

  Lest ‘neath thy silver spell I lose my mind

  Blest lunacy! No more long Day’s coarse light

  Shall fade my dreams: thou, Goddess, art more kind.

  [caetera desunt]

  EIGHT

  1.

  THERE ARE SOME WOMEN ON BOARD HERE. They suffer as we do from the violent motion of the seas. They complain, less quietly than we do, about the inevitable worsening of the food as the ship heads southwards. Their wardrobes have long since lost their initial crispness, and will soon abandon any pretence to elegance. Their desperation is plain to see.

  One of them asked me about India. ‘Tell me about India,’ she said, one evening, as the table and floor bucked like a horse, unbroken; her eyes flinched in her head as she tried to keep the conversation, at least, steady. ‘What would you like to know?’ I asked. She pulled, in distress, at her fingers; she had th
ought that her possession of the fact of India would be enough to start me off, and hardly knew how to tread further. ‘Are there wild beasts?’ she said in the end. ‘Snakes and tigers and mongooses?’ Poor girl, she knew nothing but a child’s picturebook for India, where there were snakes and tigers and mongooses. Or mongeese. And that – the correct plural for mongoose, an animal none of them has ever seen – is a conversation which someone on board ship starts up at least once a day. I know which it should correctly be, mongooses or mongeese, but keep my counsel; they should have their entertainment, after all. Her name is Miss Brown, the girl who had heard of the tigers of India; she is very plain, I assure you.

  Eight days out of Portsmouth, the wind suddenly stilled, and the jolly breeze which had blown us along seemed to have some more urgent task to pursue in some other quarter of the world. For the first week, we had blown along like a tin boat on wheels, scudding under the unresisting clouds. I sat on deck for long hours, watching the land recede, and then the little wind-flecked sea, and then more sea, and more, until we were flying along and there was nothing to show we were moving at all, nothing except sea and sky and the tight sting of the wind on the face. The slap of wind on canvas and the bright rebounding light of sea and sky, like the beating of sheets of tin. I will not say what I felt, as the boat took me further and further from you. I know you felt the same, as if England were a great ship, pulling you northwards away from me into icy-hearted regions where the breath of the warm-blooded freezes in the air like speech.

  There was a deal of jubilation around me. I saw it as if from an enormous height. For everyone on board the Jane, our swift progress was cause for joy. We were out of Portsmouth like a hungry hound, released from its traps. To the prow runs a small boy, wild with joy, and at the prow he swings his cap and cries huzzah! to the blue empty world. His family looks on, indulgently. Where is he going? Why, to the tropics, to India, to cross the equator, a feat he will not stop boasting of if he lives to be eighty. A feat he himself has achieved, he knows, standing with his legs braced, riding the deck, being taken where the winds want the ship to go. He swings his cap in the wind, and cries huzzah!, and all at once I am thinking of my Bella. At first, you are troubled by the salt, drying and cracking on your unwashed skin; it is not long before the taut tang on your cheeks starts to seem ordinary.