Restoration

by Rose Tremain

  "There are no guests," I said. "No one is coming."

  At this moment, Finn appeared in the hall, dressed in his scarlet and gold attire and his blond wig. He looked reproachfully at my hand gripping Celia's wrist. "You may take off your silly garb, Robin," I said acidly. "There is to be no evening."

  (My jealousy of Finn is like a tumour on my liver. It spreads and I grow jaundiced and sick.)

  So I climb up to my roof, pulling Celia after me. We step out onto the freezing leads. I stare up at the sky and there is the crowded Cosmos, infinite and beyond measure. Of all the conflicting rules that govern its existence, I am ignorant, even, of the first one, or so I discover.

  Celis is shivering. I take off my coat (a black camlet thing, frogged with gold braid) and put it round her shoulders.

  I put my eye to the telescope. As I scan the sky, I see, at first, only the meaningless dust of the heavens. Then I notice that the planet Jupiter, with its little girdle of moons, is very bright tonight. "Ah," I say, posing as a man who knows his way about the planets and the stars, "voilà Jupiter. Uncommonly bright. Excellent. A good portent. Jupiter being of course the reigning planet of all earthly Kings. So we are smiled upon from on high."

  I guide Celia to the telescope. Despite the little warmth afforded by my coat, she is still trembling. I am reminded of the fear of the afternoon. The knowledge that Celia is afraid dismays me. I must soothe and quieten her. So I put my arms around her. She cannot pull away from me, for we are on the very precipice of the roof. "No, Merivel!" she cries out. But I cannot let her go. I cannot. I have not the will. I turn her towards me. She tugs her head away from me, just as Wise Nell tried to do so that I would not touch her teat. It is not my hand that reaches for Celia's neck, but my lips. On the very place where a witch may suckle her creature, I begin to kiss her. She struggles and cries out again, but I do not let go. And now I am no longer satisfied with the smooth flesh of the neck. I want her mouth. Using all my strength, I bring her head towards mine. I feel her breasts against my chest. My head is throbbing and my breath coming in short gasps. And I force upon her a lover's kiss.

  Not for one moment does she yield, but struggles every instant to be free of me. I am hot now. As heated as a boy with wanting. Celia arches her back, frees her mouth from mine. In place of the lost kiss I smother her with words. I beg her to think no more about the King. "If he is not weary of you now, then in one year he will be. For have I not said it, he is mercury and cannot be held or kept. He will never give you the child you want, Celia. Never! But I could give you a child. Have my son! For I am your husband and all I ask of you is that you allow me to love you!"

  And then she spat at me. She spat in my eyes, blinding me for a brief moment – long enough for me to slacken my grip and for her to stumble towards the window through which we had climbed, letting my coat fall from her shoulders. When I turned, she was clambering in and screaming, screaming for Sophia, the odious Farthingale.

  I could have followed and caught her. I could have thrown her down on the attic floor.

  I did not. I wiped her spittle from my eyes. I damned God and damned my parents for my foul nature. I cursed a world in which I had no one to love me but whores and courtesans. I kicked violently at the base of the telescope, thus cruelly bruising my toe.

  Though shivering very grievously, I stayed upon the roof for a while, as if trying to fill my being with the icy night.

  I do not know what time it was when I crept back inside the house. I closed the window. As I walked through the attic towards the stairs, I noticed a sweet but sickly smell which I knew to be familiar, yet I could not remember what it was.

  I have slept a little. How many days have passed now since my birthday, I do not know. I seem to have lost hold of time.

  I had a diabolical dream. Finn, naked but for a green singlet, made love to my wife up against a wall. I killed him. I shot him in the buttocks with twenty-nine arrows.

  When I woke, I remembered where it had come from, that sweetish smell in the attic: it is the smell of Finn's wig. And so I conclude, he is a spy. Either of his own making, or sent here by the King. There is no doubt he saw all that passed upon the roof, and will report it to Whitehall, thus causing me to appear, not merely silly, but grievously misguided – an opinion of myself I find it most easy to share.

  And I enquire of this sottish Merivel: "How have you arrived at this state of affairs? (You, who thought yourself to be utterly indifferent to quiet Celia, liking only women of vulgar plumage.) Is vanity the key? On your wedding night, the King lay with your wife, while you plunged to oblivion with a village jade; have you, since that night, aspired to replace the Monarch in Celia's heart?"

  It is beyond my comprehension. Love has entered me like a disease, so stealthily I have not seen its approach nor heard its footsteps. My mind recognises the folly of it and yet I still boil and burn with it, precisely as with a fever.

  To whom or what shall I turn in order to be cured? From his damp habitation, I hear Pearce make a Pearcean reply: he does not pause or hesitate before instructing, "To yourself, Merivel."

  I am composing, upon paper, an apology to Celia. I have set down that "certain events occurring upon my birthday so troubled me that my brain was prey to a sudden spasm of madness, causing me thus to force myself upon you so odiously", but seem unable to proceed with my letter further than this, causing me to wonder whether the lies and fictions underlying all human discourse may be a primal cause of the impenetrable silence we hear within our own skulls.

  I sit and stare at my piece of vellum. I brush my lip with my quill. My anus aches with a fidgety tiredness, likewise my right leg. My hand upon the paper is chill. I cannot lie to myself about how ill I feel. I conceive the idea that I may be dying and feel cheered by it, releasing me as it does from the burden of declaring myself to be mad. My thoughts, as you will have discerned by now, are in a boiling muddle. To add to my discomfort, I have found lice in my hogs' bristles, which vermin plague me with an unendurable itching. I have instructed Will Gates to prepare a head bath of vinegar and guaiacum, a remedy I patented myself while at Cambridge and for which my fellow students, unwashed and lousy as they were, came eventually to thank me.

  Until I have finished and despatched my apology to Celia, I do not wish to be seen by her, so I do not stir from my room, eating my meals off a tray, like a convalescent. I thus have no idea what is occurring in my house – whether my servants are wearing their fur tabards as instructed (Will Gates is not), whether the portrait is nearing its consummation (in the rendering of a Scottish glen, perhaps, bathed in sunlight behind Celia's fair head?), whether Finn has informed upon me to the King. I sense myself to be in danger, but cannot determine from whence it will come. The visage of Nell the witch returns very often to my mind. The welts on my shoulders are slow to heal.

  Today, Will brings me a letter. But this is no Royal summons. It is a poor illiterate note, written by one calling himself Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman. The handwriting is so vile and shuddering, it gives the appearance of having been written at sea in a Hebridean gale. The tidings it relates, when at last I am able to decipher it, are dramatic. This is what is says:

  Most Kind and honourable Sir,

  I write upon request of the widow Pierpoint, who has not the gift of any alphabet.

  She begs me to inform you how that her husband, George Pierpoint, Bargeman, was drowned this Wednesday last under London Bridge while leaning from his boat to catch a haddock and falls into the boil about the stanchions and is gone down, lost.

  She requires me to say to you she knows you to be a Person of Kindness. She begs you to remember that she must buy coal for her irons and her washing cauldrons or else come to a poor end which may be the Workhouse.

  In sum she requests me to ask of you the gift of thirty shillings, in consideration whereof she blesses you and declares you to be a most Proper and Charitable Man.

  From A Humble Servant of the Nation,

  Se
ptimus Frame, Merchant Seaman.

  So Pierpoint is drowned! The wise river will hear no more of his knavery and cheating and foul language, but has taken him to her deep. And Rosie eats her little suppers of bread and whelks alone…

  I feel momentarily cheered by news of this death. I imagine for a moment the jumping haddock slipping through Pierpoint's rough hands and, as he falls, his barge going away on the current. Aloud I whisper, "There was no Overseer," but cannot determine precisely what I mean by this. All I know is that I have no feeling of pity for Pierpoint: I am glad his life has ceased.

  In times other than these, it would have been my first thought, upon receiving such a letter, to make my way speedily to London, to press into Rosie's hot hand the money requested and cheerfully usurp her husband's place in her bed for a number of rumpled nights. As matters stand, however, I feel too ill, contrite, confused, lovesick and afraid to stir out of the house. I am shipwrecked here with my passion. In the distance, I can easily imagine I hear guns of a great Man-of-War. I must go to work again upon my apology…

  Now, I perceive why I cannot write it. I cannot write it because it must end with a promise I cannot make. I construct the sentence: "On my honour, I vouchsafe never again, as long as you do not wish it, to touch you or impose upon you declarations of feelings I know you to find most loathsome," but I know, even as I write, that I will not be true to this. I know that, such is my nature, it will on some future occasion explode with the very words my wife does not wish to hear. I sense the stuff of this explosion already gathering about my heart, like pus. Does an unrequited love, in time, make a corpse of the lover? Shall I see the drowned Pierpoint before I ever lie with my own wife? (How much I despise my own self-pity.)

  Sweet Rosie, I write, knowing she cannot read, but desperate at last to speak my thoughts to a friend. I shall send, with this collection of Merivel's ramblings, a Japanese purse containing thirty shillings. The purse itself has some value and is yours to keep or sell as you will.

  I am sorry for the drowning of Pierpoint. To die for a mere haddock is most lamentable.

  I would journey to London to console you for the loss of a husband except that I appear to have tumbled into a very profound melancholy and unease of body and mind so that I find myself unable to move from my room. Where I stay wrapped in badgers' pelts staring at a grey and solid sky. In short, I am not Merivel, but a mopish phlegmatic and futile person I do not like at all. My old self, though most outlandish, was amusing company. This new man is loathsome. I have asked him to leave and never more return, but there he sits, scratching, fidgeting, blowing his nose, sighing,yawning and doing a little paltry writing. I wish he would get into his grave.

  This person – whom I shall rechristen Fogg – recently had a dream of the King, in which His Majesty asked him: What is the First Rule of the Cosmos? Fogg, in his solitude, finds his mind tormented by this question. It adheres to his thinking like a mussel to rock and yet cannot be prised open. Last night, however, on hearing of the dying of Pierpoint, it began to yield a little to his probing. Thus, Fogg set this down as a probability; that the First Rule of the Cosmos is the Separateness of All Things. As each planet and star is entire of itself and not joined to any other planet or star, so must every person upon earth remain separate and alone, even in death. Thus in impenetrable solitude did Pierpoint die.

  But whereas the planets are serene in their separateness, knowing any collision with one another likely to destroy them and return them to dust, Fogg remarks that he, along with very many of his race, finds his Separateness the most entirely sad fact of his existence and is every moment hopeful of colliding with someone who will obscure it from his mind. Yet what he now perceives is the folly of such a collision. Collision is fatal because it transgresses the First Rule. In collision, Fogg is split apart. In collision, he turns to jealous gas, to heartless dust…

  At this inconclusive (and somewhat incoherent) point, my scribbles to Rosie were interrupted. Will Gates came up to my room and informed me that Mister de Gourlay had arrived and urgently requested to see me.

  "Look at me, Will," I said. "I can see no one until I am well again."

  "He asks me to tell you that he has brought with him something to make you well."

  "Ah," I said, "the blood of swallows, perhaps."

  "I beg your pardon, Sir?"

  "I would prefer to remain alone, Will. I have much to think about."

  "He is very pressing, Sir."

  "There's the reason he is not popular. He has not grasped that life is a quadrille, necessitating backward as well as forward pas."

  Upon saying this, I immediately reflected that my apology to Celia was one such backward pas, without which I would not be able to resume any dance whatsoever, unless perhaps a Dance of Death. Thus, while Will was further pressing Dégeulasse's suit, I quickly laid aside my letter (if such it was) to Rosie Pierpoint, took up a clean sheet of vellum and wrote the following simple message:

  Fair Celia,

  I am mightily sorry for my foul behaviour. I beg you to forgive me this transgression, that I may remain your friend and loyal protector.

  R.M.

  I then instructed Will to bring Dégeulasse to my room and, having done so, to deliver my short note to Celia.

  I put on my wig. The anxiety within me had lessened by a small measure, seeming to cause a sudden drop in the temperature of my blood. Whereas I had been boiling and burning, I now felt chill. I reached for my tabard and put it on and sat with my arms tucked under its apron. What, I wished to enquire, as I waited for my guest, had happened to my painting of Russians? Was it ever begun anywhere but in my mind?

  Dégeulasse's arrival interrupted me before I could find an answer to this. The sight of him relieved me of worry about my appearance. He is one of those people who is most horribly and voluptuously ugly, but whose ugliness one seems to forget the moment he leaves one's sight, only to remember it more forcibly again the next time one lays eyes upon him. (I do find myself wondering whether he appears thus to his wife and children, so that his family like him most when he is not with them.)

  To compound the fleshy grossness of his features, Dégeulasse has upon his left cheek a very virulent psora he is in the habit of trying to conceal with his hand. It pains me to see him do this. There must be some remedy, I found myself thinking, but of course I had forgotten what it was. It was he, at all events, who had come to play the role of physician, not I. He appeared honestly concerned that "since the night of your intended party, it is reported you are not much yourself" and proceeded to put before me a bottle containing some green cordial. "Got from a mountebank, a regular quack!" he announced. "Not worth the threepence charged!"

  "Ah," I said. "Then why do you bring it to me, Mister de Gourlay?"

  "Because it is the most efficacious cure for melancholy that has ever been distilled."

  "And yet you said it was not worth the small sum you expended…"

  "So I did! And which do you believe, Sir Robert? Is it valueless or is it beyond price?"

  "I believe neither…"

  "Very wise."

  "Until I have taken some…"

  "Precisely. Thus, you have invested it with no expectation? You are neutral?"

  "Yes."

  "You believe in equal measure that its properties are worthless and that it may also work a wonderous cure?"

  "I believe less in the cure."

  "Yet you admit it to be a possibility?"

  "Yes."

  "Excellent. And you will promise to take some before sleeping?"

  "I will."

  "Perfect."

  De Gourlay sat down. He was beaming. I have noticed this about human beings: secret knowledge makes them smile. It is the smile of power. It is invariably irritating but, on this occasion, I found myself intrigued that Dégeulasse was playing a little game with me. I was wondering what, precisely, the game was about, when Dégeulasse gave his large belly a comradely slap and declared: "Expectation, you
see! Reason's whore! And there she clings round all our necks, n'est-ce pas?"

  "You may be right."

  "I am right. Consider your soirée, so lately cancelled. I cannot describe to you with what expectation of happiness and lasting consequence my wife and daughters had invested it, I cannot describe to you!"

  "I am sorry…"

  "No, no. Do not apologise. No one had informed my wife that great and influential men from Court would be there, who would, in the space of that one evening, advance our fortunes by three thousand livres per annum. No one had promised my daughters that at your table they would meet the sons of Marquises or young nephews of Prince Rupert. And yet this is what they expected of it! And when informed the party was cancelled, do you know what they did, all three of them? They fell to weeping!"

  "Well," I said, "I regret that no eminences from Court or kindred of Rupert had agreed to come to it."

  "As I did not believe they would, or at least, I did and did not believe they would in precisely equal measure and so stored up for myself no hope whatsoever."

  "Most wise, I would venture."

  "Precisely. Now do feel at your ease to confide in me what has happened to you, if it pleases you to do so. I am a man of absolutely no wisdom at all. Then again, my mother believes me to be one of the most clever people ever to reside in Norfolk."

  Dégeulasse laughed heartily. This was the first time I had heard laughter in very many days and it reverberated in the room most curiously, like an echo or like a sound coming from under water. Then it ceased and there was silence, and, in the silence, my gaze fixed upon the crusty, enflamed skin of de Gourlay's cheek, the remedy for the psora returned to me and I said: "Alas I do not know what has happened to me. Thus, I can confide in no one. On the other hand, I know what will cure the suppurations on your face."

  "No!" said Dégeulasse quickly. "Do not say you know! Say you know and yet you do not know."