Rose Tremain - Restoration

I dismounted and tied the mare to a spindly ash. On the right of the lane was a small wood, to the left common land where the cottars of Bidnold grazed their sheep and goats. I had some vague notion of searching for the two Paupers, not with the intention of asking anything from them or indeed endeavouring to place them with one of Justice Hogg's three categories, but merely of regarding them face to face and seeing what state of misery or despair I could determine in them. In the near darkness, one of them holding a small lantern on a pole, they had struck me as people in terrible need, their faces cadaverous, their eyes fearful. In their masses, I beheld, unmoved, such poor folk in London, yet the sight of these two, a man and his wife in rags, had troubled me sufficiently to send me wandering into the wood in search of the hovel in which I supposed them to live.

I found nothing. Indeed the air in the wood was so still, it was difficult to imagine it disturbed by any living breath. After tearing my stockings on some briars, I abandoned my search and returned to my horse. As I re-mounted, I told myself that, were I in a condition of wretchedness, I would not seek out the Overseers in their wigs and wanton finery, but rather be at pains to conceal myself from them by whatever means I could devise.

At Bidnold, just as I feared, I found Finn at work upon the infernal portrait.

Celia, in a dress of cream-coloured satin, had been seated upon an ottoman (removed without my permission from the Withdrawing Room and placed near the Studio window). She held a lute in her lap and by her side sat her trembling Spaniel, Isabelle.

"Finn," I said, "you have positioned my wife in a draught. See how the dog is shivering."

To my delight, the artist looked momentarily dismayed, but Celia, without moving one half inch from her pose, informed me brusquely that she was not in the least cold.

"Ah," I said, "but you will surely catch an ague if you sit long there. I suggest we adjourn to the Music Room, where a fire has been lit."

"What time is it?" said Celia.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What hour is it?"

"I have no idea. I could, if you wish, consult the handsome timepiece given to me by – "

"I believe my guest will arrive at mid-day."

"Your guest? What guest, pray?"

"Am I not allowed guests, Merivel?"

"Naturally. I only wished to enquire – "

"He is my music teacher. At my father's request, he has agreed to make the journey from London."

"Ah."

"Thus my days will not be as tedious as they were. I will have the pleasure of sitting for a fine artist and the pleasure of singing for an inspiring Musikmeister."

"I'm sorry you have found the days 'tedious'."

"It's not your fault, Merivel. I don't belong in such a life."

"Happily," interrupted Finn, "you will soon be back at Court."

"Yes," said Celia. "Once the portrait is done, you will have to let me go, Merivel. Though it has been difficult for me to practise my singing without an accompanist, that is now remedied, thanks to my father. I am thus doing as you suggested, trying to come to a clearer understanding of my destiny through song. Thus, you must report that I have done all that the King requested."

"We shall see, Celia…"

"No. We shall not see. If you will not make a good report of me to the King, I shall return to London nevertheless. For the portrait changes all."

"How does it change all?"

"You are obtuse, Merivel. Would the King commission a portrait of a woman he did not intend to see again?"

"Very possibly," I replied. "In remembrance of former times, now departed – as a mere souvenir ."

Celia shook her head and glared at me coldly.

"No," she said, "I know the King. He would not do this."

I was on the very verge of revealing to Celia what I had seen that strange night upon the river, the lights in her house, the revellers at the window. But I hesitated. Not only was I unwilling to hurt Celia so cruelly, but the night in question had taken on the colours and insubstantial quality of a dream in my mind, so that I could not now swear I had seen what I thought I had seen or merely dreamed it because I wanted it to be so. Likewise, on that early morning of the death of the Indian Nightingale, had Celia clung to me as she cried? Had she let me stroke her hair? Since then, she had been colder with me than before and I now foresaw a time when, surrounded by an entourage of Finn and the music master, she would forget me entirely.

I sighed and left the Studio, aware as I did so that there had been a strange sweetish smell in the room, most cloying and odious, which I knew must come from the powder adhering to Finn's wig.

Tired to my marrow, I feel. So tired, I feel the pain of exhaustion in my anus. But here I am at supper, attired in blue with a yellow bow on my lace collar, eating venison with Celia and her Musikmeister, whose name is Herr Hummel. His family is from Hanover and he dresses like a Puritan and complains of chilblains on his feet. "Musikmeister Hummel is a person of great refinement," Celia has informed me, but his refinement appears least in evidence at the table for a very slight paralysis of the lower lip has occasioned a tendency to dribble. I try to guess the man's age and deem it to be about fifty. His English is excellent, heavily accented but quite without fault. I find his presence moderately agreeable.

We are drinking a good claret. The pains of exhaustion fade somewhat. I am conversing with Herr Hummel on the subject of madrigal harmonies (about which I know very little but he a great deal, thus sparing me the effort of talking) when I suddenly remember my dream of the King on my roof and how, when asked how I was ever to master the art of oboe playing, he had advised me to "learn in secret". I interrupt Musikmeister Hummel to propose a toast to the King. We raise our glasses and I drink with great relish, aware that, though the arrival of Finn is most irritating to me, the arrival of Herr Hummel may prove most fortunate. For around his temporary habitation in my house I am now constructing a plan.

I glance at Celia. Warmed by the wine, she is smiling, but not at me, of course. I lower my gaze and for a few brief seconds allow myself to watch the rise and fall of her breasts.

My birthday is approaching. I was born under the constellation of Aquarius, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, the sign of the water-butler, that humble but indispensable slave who fetches from wells and rivers the element so vital to the structure of human tissue. I imagine this Aquarius as an old, stooped man, his spine warped by the weight of a wooden yoke from which hang a pair of brimming pails. On he staggers, day after day, year after year, with his precious burden, but his strength is waning, he totters and stumbles and, as he moves through time, more and more water is spilled, thereby engendering in the bellies of the ancient gods an irritation stronger even than thirst. They long to give the slave's skinny buttocks a vengeful kick. They would, if they dared, send a rod of lightning to pierce his ragged neck. And yet they must not. Hopeless as he is, they cannot do without him.

Despite my birth date, the twenty-seventh of January, I have never, I think, held any notion of my own indispensability. As a child my mother looked at me lovingly and would no doubt have wept a while had I been eaten by a badger in the woods of Vauxhall. But this is all. She would not have died without my hand to hold. As a student of medicine, I prayed that my knowledge and skills might one day lie between a man and his death, but I cannot recall now that they ever did. In my brief delirious sojourn at Whitehall, I verily believed I was becoming indispensable to the King, but time has shown me that here I deceived myself utterly. More recently I have longed for Celia to esteem and value me and hold my life to be of prime importance, but much of the time she behaves towards me as if I was not there. Since the arrival of Finn with his commission for the portrait, she no longer regards me as her overseer. With her picture done, the King will, as she suspects, call her back and that will be the end of it. The duet of my imaginings will never be played. And yet I go on trying to please her. Her voice still moves me more than I can express. When seated near her, before the fire in the Withdrawing Room or at the supper table, I long to reach out and touch her. When she returns to Kew, I know that I shall mourn her loss. I may even write foolish letters to her, saying what I do not dare to say to her face. For I am a paradoxical thing: a dispensable Aquarius. I lie foolishly sprawled in the gutter of the via della vita . My pails, brimming not with water but with my own appetites and vain pleas, have toppled me; I have not been kicked.