‘Well, she looked quite different, with her white robes all torn and her hair down. Her hair wasn’t curly like yours is. It was all red. Deep red and flowing.’
‘Don’t be silly, James. On stage you can have hair any colour you like. She was wearing a wig.’
Alice chewed a long stalk of fresh grass. Barry saw a thin shaft of green sticking to her front tooth.
‘You have to be born into an acting family. The stage and the paint have to be in your blood. How can I acquire the right sort of blood, James?’
She leaned over, peering into his grey eyes. ‘Tell me how?’
‘Alice, I sincerely wish I knew. I don’t think that you can become something you’re not. And now I feel like two people. One of them is true and one is a charade. I don’t know which one is real. And mostly I feel that neither one really exists.’
Barry waved his hands in the air, gave up trying to explain and began chewing his fingernails. Alice did not believe in the truth of the body. The truth, so far as she was concerned, was what you could get away with. She sat up straight, eloquent with revelation.
‘Oh no. Don’t you see? It’s all changed. How can I explain? Look, when we first met I wanted to know what you were, because I couldn’t be certain. But now I am. Now you’re really a man. Soon you’ll be a real doctor. You can be a gentleman. Last year was a game. It isn’t a game anymore. Now it’s the real thing. Games are all finished.’
Barry looked at her hopelessly.
‘You’ve got to change your way of thinking. That’s all. What’d be waiting for you if the General and Mrs Bulkeley had brought you up as a girl? No real studies. Just a little French and piano playing. Maybe botany and flowers. Never any corpses to chop up or babies to haul out into the world or horrible diseases to cure. You’d have to go out in carriages to keep your feet clean, wait around for gentlemen to notice you and end up marrying someone old and rich and boring . . .’
‘Mary Ann made me promise never to marry,’ protested Barry.
Alice continued undaunted with the dire tale of women’s lives.
‘Did she? That’s odd. But if you’d been a woman you’d have done it anyway. And then when you were married you could never go anywhere unchaperoned, because it wouldn’t be respectable. Whereas now . . .’
She gazed up into the huge, flecked green ceiling of sunlight and shadow above them, dreaming of oceans and continents where the people were painted black, or wore nothing but feathers. Or the Arctic waste where ice cliffs, breaking free from the uninhabited mass, plunged into the freezing seas. The world was all before them, beckoning.
‘Louisa goes everywhere unchaperoned. You aren’t trapped. And you’re a girl.’
Barry looked at Alice’s feet. They were never clean, and servants were not called upon either to have morals or to be respectable. They surveyed one another, assessing their different states.
‘That’s true. I’ll get a better situation now that I can read. And you’ll teach me to write more than my own name. But I can’t go where I like. Not yet. Nor do all I want to do.’
Alice pulled Barry’s hat down over his nose, which was peeling, and picked greenfly off his collar.
‘Maybe you’ve got to think a bit like a Freemason. You’re part of a secret society. You’re gathering information. You’re learning all the things that you can use. You’re out for yourself alone . . .’
‘Like you,’ Barry grinned.
‘All servants are spies,’ retorted Alice, ‘That’s normal. You have to know things. Otherwise you wouldn’t get on.’
‘We aren’t children anymore.’ Barry felt the flaming sword of Eden at his back.
‘So much the better.’ Alice never had any regrets. She rolled towards him, her eyes glittering.
‘I’ll teach you women’s secrets. It’s all easy. There’s not much to learn. And you’ll teach me what men know.’
Her excitement was infectious. She gazed at Barry. She expected everything of him.
‘If I was you, nothing’d stop me.’
He believed her. And all around them the buzz and whirr of the insects crackled in the silence. Barry saw the dragonflies flit, dart, hover and vanish on the churning green surface of the stream. Alice’s nose was an inch from his own.
‘Like I said,’ she repeated, ‘nothing.’
* * *
Some way away from the track back to the house, well out of Cook’s yelling distance, lay Alice and Barry, reading in the long grass. They were invisible to passing eyes; even one of the men in the carts returning home would have been unlikely to notice them. They were reading novels. Barry was reading in French, a volume purloined from Louisa’s bedroom, guessing words he didn’t know. Alice was reading an old Jacobin novel, from which the cover and the title page were missing. By now she knew all the words.
‘Listen to this, James. “Madam, I have waited long enough for your reply. I can wait no more . . .” ’
Alice clutched her forehead dramatically.
‘ “Sir, you have had your reply. I am of the same mind that ever I was in the dignity and safety of my father’s house. Did you imagine, that, sequestered here, I would willingly yield to your desires?” ’
‘What’s “sequestered”?’
‘Locked up, idiot. Don’t interrupt.’
Alice stretched out one bare sunburnt arm, pushing her unwelcome suitor away from her. He promptly turned into a rapist.
‘ “Madam! Look not upon me so. I am a man, with all the passions of a man. You will make me desperate.” ’
‘ “Ha! And do you think that if you were to make yourself master of my person you would become the master of my mind? Nay, sir, you are deluded. Mind is the source of liberty, the rose of human freedom. Mind has a ductility like water. It can pass through stone walls, locked doors and prison bars . . .” ’
‘Get on with it, Alice.’
‘But that’s what she says!’ Indignantly. ‘If a man wants you and is determined to have you, just think otherwise and you’ll see it all differently and so will he.’
‘My arse!’
Alice giggled. ‘Shut up. Listen.’
‘ “I speak not of virtue. How should I be ashamed? No violation can ever touch my honour, sir. I can never be conquered by force.” This bit’s really good.’
‘Does he do it?’
‘What?’
‘Rape her! As in The Rape of the Sabine Women.’
‘No. He caves in and rushes back down the stairs. Then he gets sick and she goes and sits by his bedside and educates him in the powers of the mind.’
‘How do you know? You haven’t got that far.’
‘I read the last chapter to see if she dies.’
Insects buzzed indifferently across the text. The children were harassed now and again by a persistent horsefly. Barry lay biting his nails. Alice chuckled peacefully as the heroine persuaded the villain that all attempts at rape would avail him naught. He duly tottered back down the stairs to his decline. Then Barry found a passage that presented an adequate sexual challenge.
‘Alice, listen. Here’s a bit where it all happens. I’ll translate it.
‘ “The Marquis fingered the lock for a moment, then slipped silently into Céline’s darkened bedroom. He could hear the girl breathing gently behind the curtains. There was no sound from the adjoining chamber. He found the bolt” – I think that verrou means bolt – “and pushed it home.” ’
‘Who’s in the adjoining chamber?’
‘Céline’s mother. It all happens in a château. Lots of rich aristocrats at a country houseparty. Before the Revolution happened. They flirt like mad at dinner, then go on walks and boating trips, a bit like they do here, only in more expensive clothes, and then at night no one sleeps. They just creep round the corridors, hiding behind tapestries and trying to get into one another’s bedrooms.’
‘Just like here. Only you can hear all the floorboards creaking and we don’t have any tapestries. Why doesn’t the mother wake u
p?’
‘I don’t know. Wait a minute. She also admires the Marquis. She’s made that quite clear. So he’s been flirting with the mother in order to pass his time with the daughter. Listen.
‘ “As he parted the lace curtains, a shaft of moonlight fell upon the lovely sleeping form. Her robes were disordered and he discerned the pale curve of her bosom beneath the silk.” ’
‘Oh, yes. That’s good,’ cried Alice.
‘ “As she stirred in her sleep her lips parted and she murmured a name. He pressed closer. Was it his name that she whispered, betraying her dearest desires?” ’
‘Well? Was it?’
‘ “The Marquis, ravished in turn by her innocent abandon, her vulnerable loveliness, paused as he bent towards her soft face. Am not I the first, he thought, to pluck this Lovely Rose. She must be treasured, cherished, savoured . . .” ’
‘You can’t savour roses,’ said Alice.
‘ “His lips softly brushed the maiden’s cheek, then, as he gently plucked the lawn aside and bent to kiss her throat, the nymph stretched out her arms to embrace him. Into her dream he melted, caressing her soft loveliness . . .” ’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ said Alice, stretching out in the aspect of an expectant Psyche.
‘ “The Marquis was in raptures. His lips closed upon the piquant summit of her naked breast, and now his goal, that Heavenly Seat of Pleasure, was even within his grasp. His fingers were entwined within that Soft Foliage that had scarce begun to burgeon, and gently voyaging into the remoter reaches of the Beloved Promised Land, he found that Cave of Sweet Delight. His gentle touch had met with no resistance. He knew himself a welcome traveller, and he did enter there. The maiden yielded up her Rose with passionate abandon. The Marquis was within moments of achieving his desires, when suddenly –” ’
‘I knew it! The mother!’ Alice, mistress of the plot, diviner of events, the sibyl of all narratives, sat up shrieking.
‘You’ve got it, Alice. He bolted the wrong door.’
‘Cheat. You read on ahead too.’
‘I had to. To translate.’
‘Quick. Tell me what happens.’
Barry fluttered the pages, his nose puckered at the pale French print. Alice was sitting astride his thigh, leaning down, peering at yet another language, whose hieroglyphics were still unyielding and opaque.
‘He gets away with it! Look. The girl pretends to wake up and yells when the candlewax falls upon her arm. Ouch, Alice, you’re too heavy. Look here –
‘ “The Marquis, overcome with emotion, drew the outraged lady aside . . . Madame, I dreamed that I held you in my arms. I never doubted that we had an understanding and you, so generous and loving as you are, had consented to put an end to my sufferings and to bring me to those Delights, after which I have so sadly languished. My passion was welcomed! I was greeted with answering tenderness! What sweet scents and moist warmth were here . . .” ’
Alice rode Barry’s thigh like a jockey, urging him on with a makeshift grass whip.
‘Quick, quick. How does it end?’
‘How’d you think? He goes off to bed with the mother.’
‘Better an old hen than no white meat at all.’
Alice fell off into the grass, displaying a mass of grubby white petticoat and bare, brown legs.
‘Kiss me, James. Pretend you’re the Marquis and I’m the delicate maiden.’
Barry thumped his arm down across the girl’s chest.
‘There’s a beetle creeping up your left leg and aiming straight for your bum,’ he whispered, in a voice thick with menace.
* * *
DE MEROCELE
Do not consider my youth,
but consider whether I show a man’s wisdom.
Menander
TO
GENERAL FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA
with the author’s eternal gratitude and admiration,
remembering always the father’s solicitude, interest and care,
with which he has generously supported
every endeavour on the part of the author,
&
to his benevolent and magnanimous patron
DAVID STEUART ERSKINE
EARL OF BUCHAN
in whose debt the author shall always be,
This Thesis
is respectfully dedicated.
JAMES MIRANDA BARRY
Barry showed Alice his thesis, beginning with the dedicatory flourishes, the rest written in Latin, each page full of wonderful italic curves. Alice put on a clean apron and clogs in honour of the occasion. She read the dedication aloud, several times, but refused to touch it because she had been scrubbing potatoes. They stood together, in front of the lectern in the library, hovering on different levels of the steps. Alice was attentive and silent for about half a minute. Then she wrinkled her nose.
‘Hmmmm. Well done, James. I’ll stick to English, I think. I’ve copied out that passage from Gulliver’s Travels which you set me to do. Though I don’t see why I have to learn to spell Houhynhmn. They don’t exist. Why’d you have to write in Latin? Nobody speaks it anymore.’
‘You just do. Everybody does. And you have to defend it in Latin too. But it’s very formal. Like delivering prepared speeches.’
‘I see. It’s tradition.’ Alice was both sceptical and astute. ‘I don’t think much of tradition,’ she added in tones of decisive rejection.
‘You represent the modern spirit,’ said Barry sadly, ‘progress at all costs.’
‘You’ve got to have progress in medicine. So that we die off less.’
Alice wiped her hands on the pockets of her apron. Then she kissed Barry on the cheek. He trembled slightly at her warm touch upon his habitual cold. Outside the shut rooms with their smell of leather, termite powder and ancient dust, the summer sun glittered on thick banks of straw, spiky in the fields. This year’s crop was already home. They were gathering apples in the orchard. Despite the lateness of the season, Alice had a batch of new arrivals.
‘Come and see the chicks.’
Alice’s chickens were part of her economy. She took a percentage on all the eggs and live poultry which she sold in the market. David Erskine was trying to develop cooperative projects with his tenants so that the estate would increase its yield. The theory was simple. Each tenant had the right to a small profit from the increase in the estate’s revenues, if the new crops, one of which was Dutch Brussels sprouts, a new variety of doubtful provenance, proved successful. If the sprouts flourished, Lord Buchan threatened his agent with acres of tulips, purchased from the same dealer. Tulips were fashionable, especially dark ones with dull stripes. The Master truly believed that if the tenants had a vested interest in a successful harvest they would work harder and better. In practice, popular resistance was total and inflexible. The farm workers suspected a trick that would rebound upon them. David Erskine put on a clean waistcoat and made a radical speech from the mounting block in the stableyard and everyone dutifully gathered round to listen. A reference to ‘our courageous brothers in the colonies’ proved to be a mistake. Cook instantly detected revolutionary sentiments, emanating from France, and muttered about the kitchen that the Master was forgetting his place. Others said that it was a plot to keep them away from their own land and make them work harder on his. Alice said that of course the Master would do better than they would. But then, he always did anyway. That was the order of things. She negotiated a separate deal on her chickens with the bailiff. Although disappointed at the negative scepticism of his tenants and domestic staff, who felt excluded from any arrangement that would clearly only benefit the field workers, David Erskine was nevertheless heartily amused at the acumen of Alice Jones. He suspected Barry’s ingenuity behind her. But in that he was wrong. Alice called upon Barry’s skills, to which she had no claim, and exploited tham all she could. But she never relinquished her intellectual independence. Barry might know more than she did, but it was Alice who knew how to assess the weight and significance of rum
ours, events, whispered conversations, looks and smiles. She knew when to insist on having her own way and when to leave well enough alone. She knew how to flirt without consequences, how to cajole, persuade. She knew when to accept and when to refuse gracefully. She guarded her virginity with the vigilance of a poacher overseeing a rabbit trap. And she advised Barry to do the same.
Alice was his Virgil, his guide through the infernal kingdoms. He had given her all the education that she had, but it was he who asked her opinion, her advice, her views. Concentrated and rapacious, Alice applied herself to the acquisition of knowledge. But she remained critical, unintimidated. She bit hard on true gold and spat out false coin. She mistrusted easy answers and long words. She ate well, slept well, and never remembered her dreams. Alice looked outwards at the world. She accepted the immutable, being an excellent judge of what was in fact immutable, and put her shoulder hard against everything else. Hers was a philosophy of dailiness. She neither anticipated events nor regretted them. But she saved money. Money was the trump card she played against the future, the only card with which she could not cheat, the victor’s card in her hand.
* * *
James Miranda Barry was terrified of sex. Particularly if it occurred outside the pages of a book. It was the serpent at his feet. It would be the moment of his unmaking. Men and women of no ambiguity must be kept at arm’s length. He never laughed at the kitchen jokes. He never understood the kitchen jokes. David Erskine’s groom was a hideous man called Joss. His teeth were rotten and his fingernails were foul with ingrained manure. He drank neat gin for hours, without flinching. He made most of the kitchen jokes.
The groom decided that Barry needed to be taught the more fundamental truths, given that the General’s away at the wars, and the poor little midget clearly isn’t even given to fiddling with his own broomstick when the candle’s out. Joss trapped Barry in the coach house, a cavernous, dusty enclave filled with battered elderly carriages, some of dubious construction and indifferent suspension. The relics were now managed by a team of very successful spiders who left an ornate trail between the tarnished brass lamps and split seats. What’s a man’s best weapon in the bedroom battle? Well, one fine day, my boy, you’ll kiss that Jones girl right here where her throat meets her sloping breasts and right here where her nipple sprouts pink from those dark circles, and don’t think that she doesn’t let me suck them till they’re stone-hard points when she’s in the mood and feeling bored, and if she lets you close your mouth round those delicious little orbs, you’ll find that your gun is so loaded that white smoke is oozing from the barrel, and what should you do when that’s the case? Why, lift up her skirts, prise the target apart with your fingers, that’s what she wants, that’s what they all want, and don’t you listen to any of them that try to tell you otherwise, stick your gun down the hole as far as you can, and fire, fire, fire. Nothing like it. Sets a man up for the day. Puts a grin on his face and a bounce in his step. And if she’s let you do it once then she’ll want you back down there pumping away, often as you can take time out to reload.
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