“It was kind of him,” said Lacroix.
“He says you were a soldier.”
“I do not remember telling him so. I am not sure that I did.”
“But is it true?”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“Now? I don’t know.”
“A traveller,” she said. “A rider of cows.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling.
“Mr. John Lovall,” she said.
“I would prefer to be called just John.”
“John then.”
“Yes.”
“You are welcome to stay with us,” she said. “Cornelius is delighted to have another man in the house. He will take you to his excavation. He will want your views on the origins of the world. He cannot take seriously the thoughts of his sisters on such matters.”
The rest of the morning was given up to correcting his appearance. He took his bag with him down to the water. There was a boathouse there, and by positioning himself at the far side of it he was hidden from the main house, though in such a landscape—all light, open ground and water—any sense of hiding was relative, unconvincing.
He shaved, made his face raw with the blade, then cooled it with the water. He took off his boots, stockings, shirt, glanced over his shoulders and peeled off his trousers. He walked into the water, gasped as it reached his belly, then squatted down, rubbing at himself vigorously. He plunged his head under the water and kept it there until it throbbed. Each man his own baptist. But you couldn’t stay long in such water, or he couldn’t. He came out and dried himself with his shirt then carried out a cautious audit of his bruises. In places his skin was spoiled paper. Odd streaks and flarings of brown and yellow and green. Amazing no bones had been broken, though he wondered if one or more of his ribs might be cracked. If so, there was nothing to be done about it. He pressed the water out of his hair, tilted his head to clear his ears of the sea.
When he opened his bag he saw that his nankeen trousers had been carefully rolled up and put back in. He dug deeper hoping for a clean shirt, touched the writing case, a waistcoat, a pair of woollen stockings, a neck-stock, the bundled pistol, but no shirt. His shirts were being worn by footpads in Glasgow. The soft linen. The careful stitching. Somehow the thought didn’t trouble him much. God knows they were wretched men, a wretched woman with them, but make a jury out of those he had met on the island—the singers in the house, Ranald, these curious Frends—then see who they thought most fit to wear good linen.
He dressed in the nankeen trousers, put on fresh stockings (they felt wonderful), his boots, and finally the old stinking shirt, damp now. He started back for the house but paused to lean an eye against the gap between two boards in the boathouse wall. Inside, like some patient creature in its stall, was a rowing boat twelve or fifteen feet in length, a pair of slender oars resting across the beams above. He could not imagine the Frends in such a vessel, could not at all picture Cornelius pulling at the oars. It had, presumably, come with the house and would stay in there, afloat on shadow, until they left.
He went in through the kitchen door. Emily, on hands and knees, was cleaning the floor. No servants then. She looked up at him. He wondered if he should offer to help her stand but she got to her feet without difficulty. He said he had been down to the sea, hoped he had made himself more presentable.
“You will miss your wild self,” she said. She stepped closer. It was evident to him now that there was something amiss with her eyes. She must, he thought, come close to see me well, as I must have her close to hear her. She lifted a hand as if to touch him, but stopped short. “Is that shirt wet?” she asked.
He said it was and that he did not have another. He told her, briefly, the reason for it.
“Cornelius’s shirts will be too small,” she said. “But ask Jane if she will allow you one of Thorpe’s. She keeps them like relics but you must make her give you one.”
He nodded, bit back the question as to why Jane would have Thorpe’s shirts, why she would treat them like relics. “And where might I find her?”
“She will be in her room upstairs,” said Emily. “It is the door painted with the dove and the owl.”
He went up. The stairs were almost as steep as the steps up to the hatch on the Jenny. At the top was a corridor lit by a window overlooking a patch of garden, the garden enclosed by a stone wall that did not look high enough to keep much out, not even hens.
The first door he came to was a plain white door but on the next he found the owl and the dove. They were, undoubtedly, the work of the same artist who had painted the horsemen in the room below. The dove, he thought, was particularly well done, though there was something farcical in the pairing, the owl too large for the bough, the dove somewhat in love with itself.
He knocked. A voice invited him to enter (he was fairly sure it did), but going in he found the window curtained and the room in twilight. The air was warm, scented, slightly stale. Clothes, some glimmering like flowers at dusk, were heaped over the back of a chair. The bed, twice the size of the one Cornelius had been sleeping in, took up nearly half the room. He could see her head clearly enough, her hair spread over the pillow, one plump arm curled on the covers.
“Your sister,” he began, “thought you might be kind enough to give me the loan of one of Mr. Thorpe’s shirts. Just until this one of mine is washed and dried. I was careless enough to be robbed of my bag in Glasgow. The one with the shirts in. But I will return at a more convenient time.”
Her eyes. And the somehow rosy glow of her.
“The bottom drawer,” she said, moving her hand a little to indicate the chest behind the door.
“The bottom drawer?” He went down on one knee, opened the drawer. He reached in, touched gauze, silk, silky things that seemed to cling to his skin. He squeezed the ribs of a corset, got his fingers tangled in smallclothes, in ties, lappets, hooked whatnots. His rummaging released a scent, a more intimate version of what hung in the air of the room.
“Not in here, I think,” he said.
“Try the middle one,” she said.
He tried it, found unpinned sleeves, mob caps, pockets. Finally, thank God, an item that might be a man’s shirt. Unless it was one of her shifts. What if it was and he put it on?
He closed the drawer and stood up. “You have been very kind,” he said. “And it is only for a day or two, I hope. If there is a shop on the island I might buy some shirts.”
“There is no shop,” she said. “A pedlar comes up sometimes but there are no shops.”
“I suppose not.”
“Will you ask Emily,” she said, “to bring up my coffee?”
“To . . . ?”
“Bring up my coffee.”
“I will,” he said.
“Are you going to be staying here?” she asked.
“If I may,” he said. “For a while.”
He left her, took the shirt down to the room where he had slept. The music room, the secret room. He stripped off the damp shirt and pulled on Thorpe’s. It was too big—too big by several sizes. He tucked in the tail, rolled up the sleeves. He had thought it might smell faintly of Jane’s things, but it smelled of something else, and after sniffing at the arms, the armpits, he realised it must be Thorpe. It was not offensive, though his skin did not feel wholly his own.
He put on his waistcoat (the moleskin) and went back to the kitchen. Cornelius was sitting at the table, shoulders hunched under the hieroglyphic gown. He was sipping something from a bowl. He moved a hand in greeting but did not speak.
“He is a martyr to his teeth,” said Emily. She did not sound particularly sympathetic.
“Your sister,” said Lacroix, “wondered if she might have her coffee.”
He went out to ramble. He learned that the house was quite as isolated as it had seemed on his arrival. From the top of the nearest hill—not a parti
cularly high one—he could see no other houses, no other human figure in the landscape, though to the south he could see the smoke of the weed-burning and knew there must be people there.
He watched birds, seabirds, some of them big, wheeling on the long grey span of themselves, suddenly swooping. He walked through grasses studded with clover. Down on the strand he found the corpse of a young seal, part devoured. He hurried away from it. He tried to think clearly about his new circumstances, to have a view of himself, a man in another man’s shirt stalking about an island he did not, he realised, even know the name of yet. But what was there to think? He spoke in a hushed voice to his sister. He told her about the Frends, about the community, the mysterious Thorpe. Later—further on—he woke himself out of deep reverie crying, “Damn you, Wood!”
It did not take him long to weary himself, and when it came it came suddenly, as if he had been walking hard all day. He hauled himself back to the house, went in unnoticed, pushed at the wrong part of the tongue-and-groove wall and had to work his way down until he found the door. He hurried to his bed, sat on it to take off his boots, thought he would take them off in a while and woke, bewildered and briefly frightened, in a light that slanted into the room from the west. He sat up, felt wild with thirst, and went out to the larger room to find the family sitting at their supper. They looked at him in a way that mixed kindness with something like appetite. These people, he thought, are starved of company. He might not be Thorpe (even in Thorpe’s shirt) but he was someone.
He sat in the remaining chair, Jane on his left, Emily to his right, Cornelius opposite him. There was a lot of drink on the table—a bottle of whisky or brandy, two bottles of wine. Also a chipped blue jug of water. He filled a glass with water and emptied it, twice.
“We are eating cockles,” said Emily. “And sea carrot and bread. And this cheese, which does not look pretty, is, we think, almost the nicest we have known. It was made by Jesse Campbell, whose house you were staying at.”
“Then I honour it,” said Lacroix. He served himself, took something of everything. Of the others, only Jane seemed to have much interest in the food. He smiled at her, nodded. She was wearing a spencer jacket over a muslin dress, the jacket red as a soldier’s but worn loose, undone.
Cornelius preferred to speak rather than eat. He had put on a waistcoat of green silk with two rows of metal buttons and a high collar. He was excited, slightly drunk. Lacroix, picking out the little bodies of the cockles with a pin, heard clearly about half of what he said but enough to piece together a sort of family history, and one that might have been made no truer by his hearing the other half of the tale. The Frends were Londoners, the children of a man in trade, though one whose true vocation had been teaching some personal and bramble-wild version of the Gospels. They spoke of their father—the sisters adding occasional asides when Cornelius paused to refresh his glass—with a wry, elliptical humour, that seemed to have at its roots more fear than love. The impression was of a great high-coloured puppet, a Mr. Punch, spouting Revelation and using his tools more for the disciplining of his children than the earning of their bread. There were followers (tailors, printers, carpenters). Sunday meetings in the parlour, hours of prayer. Visions, trances. Jane was the angel lifted on to a stool to sing the psalms. Emily was valued for her prophetic dreams—“She made them up,” said Jane; “I made up some,” said Emily—though valued even more for her ability to make two and six feed them all for a week.
“Of course,” said Cornelius, “they were not called Jane and Emily then.”
Lacroix raised an eyebrow.
“I was Basemath,” said Emily. “Jane was Tapeth.”
“Tapeth?”
“And Basemath. The daughters of Solomon.”
“You chose new names for yourselves?”
“Not I,” said Cornelius. “I am unaltered. Original.”
“Thorpe chose our names,” said Jane. “He said our new names should be like empty boxes. For us to fill as we liked.”
“So you are no longer the daughters of Solomon,” said Lacroix. “We are Thorpists!” cried Cornelius. “Phyrronists! Free livers!” Lacroix tried the ugly cheese. It fizzled on his tongue, tasted briny, rotten, creamy, unaccountably good. He drank a glass of wine. He didn’t want anything stronger. He was experimenting with clarity, with time in its ordinary clothes. And he liked these people, liked their company, felt no urge to blur their faces with strong drink.
Through the windows, the day seemed powerless to put itself away.
Cornelius set out in a new direction. He spoke of his excavations, the things he had found in the hill—not the hill behind the house, another, further down the coast. Beads, pottery. He had even found bones, though Emily insisted they were merely the bones of a cow. “But tell me, Lovall. How is she qualified to tell a man’s bones from a cow’s?”
“I am as qualified as you are, brother.”
“Thus speaks Basemath!” said Cornelius, raising his arms above his head as perhaps the congregation had once done at their father’s prayer meetings. Then he winced and touched, tenderly, the sides of his face.
“Your teeth,” said Lacroix. “Is there not a surgeon on the island?”
“He will come with me to Glasgow,” said Emily, “when I go to see Mr. Rizzo.”
“How will an eye surgeon assist me?” asked Cornelius.
“He is afraid,” said Jane.
“I am busy,” said Cornelius. “I am très occupé!” He grinned desperately. His teeth looked terrible, even for teeth.
Lacroix turned to Emily. He was trying to follow this. He hoped he was. “You are to see an eye surgeon?”
“I am to be the patient of Mr. Rizzo. At the new hospital in Glasgow.”
“Rizzo was recommended to you?”
“We saw his name in the Review. He had penned an article on the poetic eye. I wrote to him.”
“But he is a surgeon?”
“He is eminent.”
“She hopes he is eminent,” said Jane.
“And are you to go soon?” asked Lacroix.
“I shall go,” said Emily, “while I can still see my way.”
Lacroix nodded. He tried to think of something comforting to say. When nothing came to him he said, “I am half deaf.”
“I know,” she said. “It is why you watch my mouth.”
“Enough of this!” cried Cornelius. “I refuse to be miserable! We shall have music. You be Dionysus, Lovall. My sisters can be two of your maenads. I will be Apollo or some such.”
“What if he does not wish to play?” asked Emily.
Cornelius shrugged. “Then he has carried his fiddle an awfully long way for nothing.”
Instruments were fetched. A lamp was lit, though it was still not entirely needed. The three musicians—Emily, Jane and Lacroix—moved away from the table, Jane to the ottoman, Emily and Lacroix on their chairs at either side of her. Cornelius, alone at the table, made himself a smoke with tobacco, dried hemp and a quartered sheet of writing paper. The hemp he called “bang.” They had managed to grow a tolerable good crop of it in the garden last summer.
Lacroix’s fiddle was held and admired. When he looked for his rosin in the little box inside the case, he found the cartridges he had made on the Jenny. He had forgotten them, and wondered now exactly what he had made them for.
He and Emily tried to tune their instruments to a common pitch. Jane sang notes to help them. After several minutes of turning keys and pegs they declared themselves close enough. Emily played first, something decorative and Italian. Music for a garden, music that might best be accompanied by the scent of jasmine. She played with her eyes closed, her right hand, thumb and forefinger, touching the strings between the brass rose and the bridge. It lasted three or four minutes. When she stopped they applauded her. Fat sparks fell from the end of Cornelius’s smoke. He extinguished them with his finge
rs. He looked happy.
Then it was Jane’s turn. She sang with perfect confidence, a voice rising out of her throat with no more sign of effort than an ordinary breath might take, an exhalation. There was no trickery, or trilling or false notes. Something to do with gypsy boys and gypsy girls, their lives under the trees. You could not listen to it without smiling.
Lacroix watched her closely. It is permitted, of course, to watch the singer—nor did he think she was one who would object to being looked at. Was she not used to it from childhood? The girl on the stool, the angel. At some point near the end of the song it suddenly occurred to him—the unbuttoned spencer, the curve of her dress, her full breasts—that she was not merely luxurious of form, but pregnant.
When it came to his own turn he chose the prelude he had played in the boat to the islands, and though it did not sound—would never sound—quite as it had that night at sea, it sounded well enough and they were full of compliments for him.
They tried to find music they all knew, swapped titles, hummed snatches of a tune, settled on “Greensleeves.” Lacroix carried the melody, Jane sang, Emily played the four, five chords the piece required. Cornelius joined in. He too could sing a little, and for several minutes, as the song spooled out in the dimness of the room, the summer grey, they were self-forgetful and unopposed to the world. Their private histories, the private suffering of their bodies, released them. They escaped their names. Religion and its shamings might never have been thought of. Even their own fates, separate and shared, appeared to them with subtle alterations that altered everything. One more round, one more verse. Pleasure crept up their limbs like hemlock.
Lacroix lifted his bow from the strings. Everyone looked at everyone at once. It seemed possible. And in the silence that followed, the two or three seconds before the weight of “what next” came in, the music’s echo ebbed away towards the whispered beating of the sea, as if for safe keeping.
Cornelius filled his glass and raised it to the musicians. “The Frends and Lovall,” he said. “Lovall and the Frends! Is it not perfect?”
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 18