Madame Isabella de Miranda
regrets to inform Dr James Miranda Barry that
General Francisco de Miranda
passed peacefully away early this morning at home,
surrounded by his friends and family
MAY HIS SOUL REST IN PEACE
I sit frozen before the sightless eyes of this evil sibyl. Yes, of course I had known. But the gulf between knowing, somewhere in the cleft between your shoulder blades, where the knowledge can do you no harm, and being told, clearly, aloud, so that you cannot escape or deny knowing, so that you cannot pretend not to know – these are two different things. And no, he never told me.
But Louisa has lost interest in the dead. She is remembering her girlhood in Ireland.
‘The Erskines always knew the Barrys. We had land in Ireland. Your grandfather used to go hunting with my father. We celebrated Christmas in each other’s houses. My brother held your mother in his arms when she was christened. It’s a very old connection. David and your uncle travelled on the Continent together. I knew your mother before she could walk. Apart from those last two years when she went off travelling to all those pestilential islands with Francisco, I saw her almost every day. I knew your mother all her life. Not that I knew anything about her.
‘She was very beautiful, James, very, very beautiful. Francisco always loved beautiful women. Would he have gone on being in love with her when she was no longer beautiful? She must have asked herself that question. Wives can develop thick waists and heavy steps, but a mistress must always be light and laughing, with shining eyes and a pretty smile. Why do you think I never bothered with the whole merry-go-round of sexual capers? I never married because I won’t trouble myself with dishonesty and pretence. But if I had been a man like you I would have begged your mother to marry me.
‘My brother was in love with her. I was in love with her. We all were.
‘When she was sixteen she was extraordinary, that pale cream skin, grey-green eyes and a vast cloud of red hair. Red hair is often thin and fine, not hers. She had the most beautiful, heavy mass of red curls. She was clever too. She read widely. She wasn’t shy and she had a sharp wit. Her temperament was egalitarian. She was equally at home with the gentlemen farmers as with the county aristocracy. She was invited everywhere. And she never sat out once at the pump-room dances.’
Louisa stretched out a twisted claw to find the child’s cup with the thin crack from which she sucked greedily.
‘She always loved dancing,’ I remembered sadly. ‘Tell me about her husband.’
Louisa screwed up her milky eyes, and spat into her handkerchief again. Her face darkened.
‘Him? You want to know about him? Well, that’s easily told. She married him when she thought Francisco had abandoned her to cook up revolutions on the Continent. Her husband had a lot of money. But there was nothing else to be said for him. He was drunken, abusive, off his head most of the time. But he was in love with her. That much was clear. He wanted her to be his private possession. He threw my brother out of the house once. And that caused a scandal. Bulkeley threatened legal action, divorce and what not. He even appealed for evidence by putting advertisements in the newspapers. Of course, no one came forward. But it took some living down afterwards. Drunken fool, he accused David of seducing his wife.’
‘And had he?’
‘Look, James, I can’t see your face, but I can read your tone. And you needn’t take that line with me. In these times, appearances seem to count for everything. What you do is your own affair. The great thing is never to be found out. I’m not saying that the formalities and civilities counted for nothing then. But we were more honest about liaisons in my circles. Mary Ann was a beautiful, sensual woman. She had many lovers. And my brother was one of them.’
She paused.
‘You must have known. You spent all your time in the kitchen. Everybody knew.’
‘I suppose I half knew. I suspected. I guessed. He was so much older than she was.’
‘Age is no barrier to sex, my dear child. Men never retire from the bedroom. And neither would women if the opportunities were to go on presenting themselves. Well, when Bulkeley died she went to live with David and Elizabeth. I was there too most of the time. We were old family friends. Your grandparents were dead. James Barry was in Rome. It was all perfectly respectable. Apart from the echoes of Bulkeley’s legal tub-thumping. Francisco was in jail somewhere in France. I can’t for the life of me remember why. But they got along together perfectly well. These arrangements are more usual than you think. Elizabeth loved Mary Ann. I’m not saying that she never felt any jealousy. But we were all very discreet.’
For the first time Louisa weighed her words.
‘You were the problem, really.’
‘I was?’
‘Yes, of course you were. David was desperate for children. And like all men, he wanted sons. Elizabeth was barren. It was her greatest grief. David loved his wife too. There was no question of putting her aside or anything like that. His younger brother had three sons. It wasn’t likely that they would all be carried off by the scarlet fever. The estate would stay in the family. And so it has. But he wanted to adopt you officially, as his child. That was his overriding desire. Elizabeth was willing. All he had to do was persuade your mother. Mary Ann appeared to accept her position. She was his mistress and that was her role. The only person who could not accept any of this was your uncle, James Barry.
‘He came thundering back from Rome, breathing moral fire and Catholic slaughter. He made trouble. He made scenes. He abused Mary Ann to her face, in front of us all. He was an impossible man, James. Impossible.’
She tapped her stick on the floor. Psyche froze, fearing another reprimand. She stood poised on her paws, like little pig’s trotters. I gestured to her to lie down. She collapsed on the rug with a profound sigh.
‘Keep that dog out of my workbox,’ snapped Louisa. I realised that her hearing was still uncanny and accurate.
‘Of course Elizabeth knew that David made love to her. And it’s my belief that she hoped Mary Ann would bear another child. She had offered to bring you up. The second one would have been hers by right. Her position was secure. She wanted nothing more. Mary Ann was playing the role of Hagar to my brother’s Abraham.
‘Then General Francisco de Miranda broke out of the French jail where those ungrateful insurgents had locked him up for safe-keeping. In the Palais de Luxembourg, I believe. He escaped the guillotine by a whisker. And he arrived back in England, full of mad politics and atheistical opinions. He fell in love with Mary Ann all over again. And she with him.’
Louisa is a romantic, after all. She has clasped her hands, remembering.
‘James, you have no idea how good-looking Francisco was in those days. He was a giant of a man, with a weight-lifter’s shoulders. He bulged out of drawing rooms. When he sat down on sofas, they collapsed. He had the most magnificent moustachios, long before they were fashionable. He was daring, outspoken, well-read. We were all in love with him. Every one of us. He had such magnetism, such authority. He swept into our quiet lives like an army, galloping through history. He was full of enterprise, ideas, plans. He entertained us with fabulous tales of his voyages in lands where the ice never thaws and the sun never sets. He had crossed deserts dressed up as an Arab in long white robes. He rode like a corsair. He was one of Byron’s heroes. He had a beautiful bass-baritone voice. He sang with such passion, such feeling. He had no inhibitions.’
Louisa smiled, remembering. I too, saw him again, as I first had, at a house in the country, long ago, when the century began. A huge puff of smoke floats out of his mouth. As if he were a dragon. There is a chain hanging from a pin only a few inches away from my nose.
‘Dragon. Gold.’
‘Stand to attention when you’re addressing me, my girl.’ He peers into my eyeballs. I see that his own eyes are grey, but flecked with gold. ‘You don’t look like your mother yet, you know. But there’s hope that
you will.’
Is he wearing a uniform? Gold, shiny buttons and a silk cravat? I put out my fingers and touch the gold. I unleash a strange smell: herbs, musk, forests. And the weariness of immense distances.
‘Travelling dragon.’ I look up at him, already in love with his adventures. ‘Give me gold.’
‘When he was in the room,’ said Louisa, dreamily, ‘we looked at no one else.’
And I believed her.
Then she continued, ‘Mary Ann? Well, she was a woman who loved first and asked questions afterwards. You may think she always had an eye to the main chance. But it wasn’t in her interest to fall in love with Francisco. Yet she did. We all did.’
‘So long as Francisco was there, nothing mattered. Everybody knew. Nobody cared. Not even David. He was a much older man, James. A girl of eighteen cannot be expected to stay faithful to a married man who is nearly fifty. And he loved Francisco too.
‘The only person who wasn’t caught up in the glamour of it all . . .’
I finished the sentence for her.
‘. . . was James Barry.’
Louisa was irritated by my interruption.
‘Do you want to hear all this or don’t you?’ She pulled a face at me and her skin folded into a thousand wrinkles.
‘Go on, go on,’ I said sadly. And the reason for my sadness was simple. She has conjured up the drawing room with the damp brown water marks by the bay window, the stuffed fox under the glass dome, the oval sillhouettes in hierarchical order across the yellow patterned wallpaper, all the jewelled and jowled outlines of the Erskine family, renowned for their breeding and their inherited diseases. I see the straight-backed chairs, pushed against the walls of the dining room, the glass cases of fossils, each hand-written label pinned gently down upon the baize. Here are all the shells and stones, which David Erskine gave me to hold, closing his huge, dirty hand gently over mine. The smell of polish in the hallway, the clock’s sudden whirr before the chimes, and damp rain on the great pots of geraniums outside the front door, the uncarpeted, treacherous staircases, the Welsh slate floor in the pantry and the kitchen, cold, cold under my bare feet. Why is childhood so sensuous, so bitter and so poignant? I cannot displace this past.
Out in the patterned sunshine, in the brick yard peppered with chickens, sits Alice Jones. She has been shelling beans. Here they lie, bright green ovals in the basket at her feet. I have watched her work, her fingers hard and rapid as the potter’s hand, thumbing the slits open, and from the cradle of her apron there falls a shower of vivid, fresh, green beans. Now she plucks at the seams of her dress, retrieves a small loaf from her pocket and leans back, crumbling stale bread between her grimy fingers. The chickens gather, expectant, all around her. She gazes up, into the sun.
I hear the nicker and stamp of the horses, shouts from the gardens, far away on the other side of the house, and above us, the great rustling sway of the horse chestnuts, a green shining tent of leaves, the pink and white candles luminous in full bloom.
I smell the scythed grass, see it lying in uneven yellow rows as the whole earth breathes the warm damp of early summer. Violets and aubretia cover the rock garden, and on the other side of the ha-ha, screaming with pleasure because he has discovered a giant toad among the wild irises and cowslips, is an old man with a musty wig and a dented straw hat. I hear his excited yells.
‘Elizabeth, Mary Ann, come and look, come and look.’
I am the first one over the ha-ha and he catches me in his arms. He is like a Hogarth cartoon, all red cheeks and breeches.
‘Here you are, my boy! Look!’
And I see the broken veins on his nose and his contented happiness when I stroke the unwilling toad, delighted, and look up to return his smile.
‘She loved two men, James. My brother and Francisco de Miranda. But they all loved you. David’s opinions on the education of women were very advanced for the times. It’s true that he had always wanted a son. But he didn’t want you to be wasted. So they decided to share you too, as they shared Mary Ann, and to invest in you together. But it was all Mary Ann’s doing. They’d never have dreamed up this scheme on their own. They wouldn’t have dared. She put them up to it.’
‘The meeting in the labyrinth,’ I whispered.
Louisa peered at me sightlessly and leaned forward. Her collar smelt of musty lavender.
‘What? What did you say? Speak up, child.’
For a moment I said nothing. Psyche jumped up, her claws catching in my trousers. I cannot believe that I am over sixty years old.
‘What of James Barry?’ I asked carefully. I wanted to avoid all the obvious questions.
‘Ah,’ Louisa stiffened, ‘this is not easy to tell. You’re a doctor. You must have seen these things many times.’
But there was a terrible pause, nevertheless, as Louisa’s sightless eyes bulged and glistened. She lashed out a little with her stick and Psyche growled softly.
‘Keep that animal quiet. Or put it out.’
She dropped her cup. I felt like a canary under a bell jar, running out of oxygen. The old woman went on talking softly, as if to herself.
‘What does a man see in his sister? The lost female part of his own soul. James Barry loved Mary Ann too. He was already a grown boy when she was born and her mother died giving birth to her. Mary Ann was therefore his charge, his responsibility. He brought her up. She looked to him for everything. And he worshipped her every gesture. She was so graceful, so sinuous, like a young sapling. When she was a child they were inseparable. You have her eyes, James.
‘They were Catholics, all mired up together in a big draughty house in Ireland living through the winters with next to no company. The old father was quite mad. He sat in the kitchen, spitting into the fire, when he wasn’t openly engaged in doing unspeakable things with his housekeeper. I think our house was a sort of refuge for the children. Barry kept all his paints at our house. My father fitted him up with a studio.
‘Your grandfather opposed his son’s ambition to be a painter for as long as was decently possible. But David Erskine and old Burke, Edmund Burke, the philosopher, talked him into putting a little money into Barry’s education as a painter. Then he won the Prix de Rome and that was it. His vocation was settled. But he already carried the enemy within, his father’s nature, which erupted in rages and paranoias, like a sequence of wens and boils. Barry always believed that everyone was against him. He behaved as if they were. And then, mostly, his fears came true.’
She paused. Psyche had closed her eyes, overcome with heat, and was beginning to snore slightly.
‘And Mary Ann?’ I asked.
‘Well, he couldn’t take her to Rome, could he? She was left behind in Ireland. Left to grow into that beautiful young woman who liked making trouble and breaking hearts.’
Louisa paused again. Then she yawned.
‘Remember James, I’ve only ever had her version of her brother.’
The muted rattle and crash of the passing cabs shield the silence from becoming oppressive. But the stuffy thickness of the old woman’s cluttered rooms tickles my throat. I have lost the thread. What does it matter if my mother and her brother were once lovers? The passionate intensity between them was their affair, their business. Mary Ann was never the kind of woman who could have been seduced or forced. Not even by a bully like James Barry. She was never powerless. If she posed naked for him in his studio, it was because she wanted to do it. If she lay down beneath him when they were young, to draw him back to her in the world of wet green, which they had shared as children, then it was because that was what she had desired.
Louisa is right. I am a doctor. I have seen terrible things. I have seen human lives casually shredded and thrown away. I have watched the endless wretched toll of poverty and disease. I have seen men turn upon their own children, gluttonous as Saturn for their shrivelled, wasted flesh. But my mother loved her brother in ambiguous, private ways. He made her angry. But she was never afraid of him. She never abandoned him.
She was not his victim.
Louisa’s mouth drops open and she gurgles slightly. She has fallen asleep in the midst of her own narrative.
I rise quietly, scoop Psyche off the floor and tiptoe out. The maid is waiting anxiously at the door. I leave a note on the back of my card, assuring Louisa that I will visit her again tomorrow, that I am neither offended nor distressed by her stories and that I will cherish all that she has told me as a sacred confidence. With any luck she will entirely forget whether she has revealed anything at all, either vital or incriminating, and the past will rest like an ageing grave, where the lovers slumber in peace beneath the lichen and dead leaves.
I walk out into the terrible damp chill of a February afternoon in London. The murky light lifts a little in the gusts which splatter drying flecks of mud against my trousers. Psyche whimpers and demands to be carried inside my coat. We stride away across Hyde Park Gate towards the mansions of Mayfair, while the damp collects in drops along the rim of my hat.
Alice is waiting for me, dressed up for battle like a Christmas tree. She is wearing an array of expensive trinkets which Adolphus no doubt hung upon her over the years. Her cheeks are slightly flushed and her black eyes polished and glittering. I am certain that she has been drinking.
‘Well? And what did the old cow have to say?’
‘Watch your language, Alice.’
She glares.
I fling myself down in the nearest chair and Psyche flies up onto my lap. I gaze at Pomona’s naked bottom as Vertumnus grabs her robe. I can see it through the open door. The tapestry is hanging on the landing. And then I see James Barry’s painting of the same scene, the nymph’s basket of apples strewn across the unlikely marble floor of a neo-classical building. I remember the woman’s face, my mother’s face, open-mouthed in fear, confronting the satyr’s treacherous, leering grin. And now I see the grimace of elderly lust, the wicked caricature of his rich friend and patron, which James Barry has embedded in the painting. The old goat rampant before young flesh. Age is no barrier to sex, my dear child. Men never retire from the bedroom. And neither would women if the opportunities were to go on presenting themselves. But how can I know if that version was the truth? James Barry never painted the reality. He painted his jealous desire for revenge. And yet . . . I sink into my chair, uneasy at the images which return. The truth lies beyond my grasp. But I cannot bring myself to care, no matter how disturbing my memories become. They are dead, dead, dead decades ago. I am past sixty years old, and I have walked two miles in windy spring cold.
James Miranda Barry Page 38