Rose Tremain - Restoration

"Can you be certain that it was he?"

"Certain."

"How might you be able to tell?"

Fox spat again. Perhaps he was a Puritan and a Commonwealth man.

"It were morning," he continued,before dawn even come and nothing much moving on the river. I, Sir, I were taking cherries from Surrey to vendors at Blackfriars. Half light it were. Four o'clock in summer. And I saw this thin skiff coming on with a man very tall in it and his cloak cast aside and in this fine golden coat, and I says out loud, "That's one man in the Kingdom and one only!"

"Did you wait and watch? Did you see where he tied up?"

"More than that, Sir. I sold him some cherries."

"You did? So you saw his face close to, and it was he?"

"He all right. Gave me a penny for the fruit from a little jewelled purse."

"And you saw him land?"

"Yes."

"Could you show me the place?"

"Not in this dark, Sir."

I cleared my throat. "My excellent man," I said. "As I predicted, it is not dark at all, with that large moon up."

"Darkish, Sir."

"Nevertheless, please try, if you will, to remember the place and point it out to me."

We glided on. My face, that had burned for so many hours, was cool now and my hands were beginning to feel a trifle numb. Cold as I was, I felt inside me the heat of trepidation and anxiety. At any moment, I would see Celia's house. And then, as we turned and headed back against the wind and the tide, I would have to make up my mind…

I instructed Fox to steer the boat towards the north bank and to slow it. I offered to take the oars while he concentrated upon his task of remembering, but he would not entrust me (quite reasonably) with so precious a piece of his livelihood, informing me instead that he could row from here to Spital-fields blindfolded, and in so doing utterly negating his badinage about lost channels and collisions with lighters with which he had wheedled from me two poxy shillings. Dependent upon him as I was, however, I could not afford to show any anger. We crept forward in silence, turning once and retracing our route along some thirty or forty yards of bank and then going on further till at last Fox spied, in the cold, glimmering light, a small wooden jetty with steps leading up to it from the water.

"There's the place," he said, "that's she."

"Ah," I said, "but there's no house."

Fox shrugged. "It's there," he said.

I had him tie up to the jetty. With some difficulty, I clambered out of the small boat (now earning its name by tilting riotously the moment I stood up) and made my way along the landing stage. A pretty iron gate guarded a narrow path running between squat bushes I took to be hazels and hawthorns. At this moment, the moon disappeared behind a cloud, plunging me suddenly into blackness. I stood still, waiting for the moon to reappear. Though behind me I could still hear the slapping of the water, I had the illusion, for a moment or two, of having lost my way.

I walked cautiously on, aware of the night around me, some scuffling animal in the dead leaves, a night bird putting forth a little stuttering cry.

And then I heard music.

Moments later, as the clouds once again uncovered the moon, I found myself in a small knot garden and before me stood the house. It was not grand or large. Its principal rooms seemed, from the size of the windows, to be modest. It is, I thought on the instant, the kind of small house I would give my daughter, were I to have one. But I could not dwell long in my mind on its size, because it was clear to me now that one of the rooms, from which came the sound of a harpsichord and a flute, was full of people. Lamps and candelabra had been lit. On the window seat, a man lolled with his arm round some pretty wench's neck. A musical supper appeared to be in full swing. As I stood and breathed and tried to warm my hands by rubbing them together, I heard a sudden flight of laughter.

All the way back to Lambeth (where I intended to lodge for the night at an inn called the Old House) I pestered Fox, telling him he must have been mistaken. "Either," I said, "it was not the King whom you saw or else he did not tie up at that jetty." But his rodent features were hard and set, as was his mind, he informed me. He vividly recalled the ease and grace with which the King tied up his skiff and climbed out of it ("as if he had been a very waterman, Sir") and he insisted that there was no similar small jetty for another half mile upstream or more.

At the Old House I dined well and fell into conversation about the art of marble cutting with a likeable fellow from the Navy Office who recounted to me that the marble-cutter's life hangs in its entirety upon patience, for though the mass of stone that confronts him may be as large as a four-poster, he can, with his little tool, cut a mere four inches a day.

Pondering such steadfastness and perseverance and wondering if I would ever be capable of it in regard to my painting, I all of a sudden remembered, with a surge of bile to my stomach, my pledge to Violet Bathurst to spend this very night in her bed.

I had a dream of a drowned body. I was at Granchester Meadows with Pearce and a group of medical students and we sat on the banks of the weedy Cam and we saw this lumpen corpse come floating towards us. We had but one thought: we must retrieve the body for our anatomical studies. We took off our coats and lay on our stomachs and reached out and took hold of the swollen limbs. And then I perceived that the body was Celia's. Her hair streamed among the waterweed and her mouth was blueish and open, like the mouth of a fish. I was about to cry out to my fellow students to let go of her arms and legs when I woke. I was shivering and my throat was sore and my nose full of mucus and my thirst had returned.

I lit a candle and stumbled to the wash-stand in the unfamiliar room in the Old House and gulped some water and then got into the bed and tried to warm myself, but the dream of drowned Celia frightened me so much that I was afraid to sleep again in case it returned to me, as dreams are in the terrible habit of doing.

"God is the engineer of all dreaming," Pearce once announced to me. "He fills the sleeping mind with all we have neglected."

"Tosh, Pearce!" I said at the time. "For the great part of my dreams are about food. My nights are pleasantly filled with rabbit fricassées, venison pasties and chocolate syllabubs, none of which I have in the least neglected." If I remember rightly, Pearce then made some acidic rejoinder about God giving me a vision of my own gluttony, which I utterly ignored, but now the idea that this dream of drowning had been "sent" to me seemed entirely plausible. For, so confused and dismayed had I been by the sight of Celia's house filled with people and music (indeed as if the poor girl was dead and all memory of her drowned) that I had "neglected" to decide what I was going to tell her and in my conversation about the marble cutter had managed to put all thought of her from my mind.

So I lay and shivered and nursed the ague that had come upon me so suddenly and tried to weigh the whole matter in my mind without consideration for myself and in a detached and proper manner, as if Celia were my patient and I not I, but some wise Fabricius, some unparalleled physician utterly unprone to error.

By the time dawn broke and I permitted my snivelling self an hour of soothing sleep, I had come to the following decisions:

I would return to Celia and inform her that the King appeared to have forgotten her, that it was rumoured some new mistress had taken up residence at Kew, that he had expressed very forcefully to me his displeasure about her importunate behaviour but had not given me to believe that he would ever summon her back. I would then counsel her – exactly as Pearce had counselled me – about the folly of hope. "If," I would say to her, "you permit yourself to hope, you will come to insanity, Celia, and then I cannot tell what will become of you. Perchance you may come to poor Ophelia's end, drowned in a stream." I would explain to her that I had at last understood of what element the King was fashioned: "He is mercury," I would say. "He is of that same metal he spends hour after hour in his laboratory trying to extract from his flasks of cinnabar, but which is ever elusive and restless and cannot be fixed and held. And how will it profit any man or woman to love mercury?"