Rose Tremain - Restoration

One Tuesday evening, I returned home to find a third plaque on the door. Elias Finn , it read, Portrait Painter to the Rising Man. When I went in, I found him drinking Alicante with Frances Elizabeth and he was dressed from neck to foot in new clothes. Apart from the shirt and the shoes, they were all green, even the stockings. "Ah," I said,. "I see you have been back to Sherwood Forest." But he only smiled thinly. The thin smile said: "The day for those old jokes has long gone, Merivel."

I can report to you that during this summer of 1666 I began to feel comfortable with my life, for the first time in a very great while, as if it and I were once again in step. When I am old, I shall remember it: The Time of the Three Plaques Upon the Door.

Then there was a June morning that came and after that morning almost all of this comfort that I felt went away.

It was a Sunday. I woke very early. I looked out of my window and saw that the sun was not yet up and I had (I really cannot say why) a sudden desire to see it come up over the river – something I had not witnessed for a great while.

I dressed and crept down the stairs and went out. The streets were silent. I heard the bell of St Alphage toll four o'clock. The air was cool, almost cold, and I began to think that, after all, there would be no visible sunrise. Yet I walked on. And when I came to the water, I sat on some little steps where tilt-boats and barges land their passengers and waited. Lying on the river was a white mist, so thick that I could not see the further bank.

The sky began to lighten and now I could see that there were no clouds in it at all and that, but for the mist, the sunrise would be as perfect as those I used to see from my Whitehall chamber.

I stared at the mist, or thought that I was staring at it and then I suddenly found that it was all around me and that I and the steps and the few boats moored by them were all become invisible within it. I looked up. I could no longer see the sky. Yet I did not walk back up the steps nor move any of my limbs. I knew that something was about to happen. It was as if time had stopped or held its breath.

I waited. I could feel my heartbeat very heavy in me. Once again, I sensed a lightening of the sky. I felt cold and put my arms around myself. Then, coming near to me, I could hear the splash of a pair of oars and heard the water at my feet begin to slap against the river wall and the steps.

The mist rose. As the sun came up over the housetops, it began to lift off the water and disperse.

And then I knew what I was about to see…

His back was towards me. He was skulling upriver and the sun, as it fell onto the river, caught at his jewelled sleeve and glinted there.

His skiff drew level with the steps. He was so close to me now that I could hear his breathing. I put a spread hand in front of my face so that he would not recognise me, but I need not have done so, for he did not look in my direction but only at his pathway on the water and at the sunlight making it gleam.

He went past me, but I did not take my eyes from him. Through my fingers I watched him until he went round the curve of the river and was out of sight.

As I have told you, my life just prior to this June morning had become an ordinary, industrious and quiet thing and I found myself at peace within it. I believe that if, during this time, I had been able to go fishing with Pearce instead of being visited by his Silence, I would have conducted myself like a true angler and not frightened away the trout.

From the moment, however, when I glimpsed the King on the river, my old foolish desire to see him and be returned to his favour began to possess me so completely that I could no longer feel at peace with anything at all. I became curt with my patients. At mealtimes, I was silent and morose. The joys of Tuesdays seemed less than they had been. And instead of going to the coffee house or the tavern to drink and talk, I would embark on solitary walks to the river and sit where I had sat that morning and scan the water for the sight of the little skull-boat, and write, in my mind, innumerable drafts of the letter telling the King of my usefulness.

As the summer progressed, the contents of this letter changed for I had thought up a new ploy (beyond the simple mentioning of my own diligence) to get the King's attention: I would write to suggest that because I was now a mere physician, with little money and no estate, His Majesty might come to feel that it was no longer fitting for me to continue to hold the titular role of Celia's husband. In which case, should he so decide, I would offer no obstacle to an annulment of the marriage, believing as I did that it was Celia's right to be married to a man more honourable than I could ever be…

I did not send this letter. I recomposed it fourteen or fifteen times in my head and one evening, while Finn played cards with Frances Elizabeth by the parlour fire, I sat down in the letter-room and wrote out a very elegantly phrased version of it, putting particular emphasis upon my return to medicine, my daily usage of the King's gift of the surgical instruments and my great repentance for my foul behaviour towards Celia, "a sweet, innocent woman who deserved much better of me than I gave and for whose happiness I say a daily prayer."

I folded the thing (after reading it so many times, I soon knew it all by heart) but did not seal it or put the King's name upon it. I went up to my room and took down Pearce's battered copy of De Generatione Animalium , put the letter inside it and returned it to the bookshelf.

I said to myself: You have written it now, Merivel, so let the writing of it quieten your mind, so that you can return to where you were and be happy, once again, with what you had. And after the writing of the letter, I tried to bring this about. But I did not really succeed. And the yearning that I had to see the King was as deep and immovable as the yearning of a lover.

Sometime towards the end of July, I went one evening into Finn's studio (for so the letter-room was now designated) and saw on his makeshift easel the portrait that he had painted of me.

"I suppose you are going to obliterate me by painting over me, is that it?" I asked Finn. "You put me over the top of a piece of pretend masonry and now you are about to white me out- the seven shillings notwithstanding."

"No," he said calmly. "Not at all. I am very fond of my portrait of you."

"What is my face doing on the easel, then?"

Finn came over to the easel and took down my portrait and lifted onto it a newly-finished picture of a woman, aged about fifty-five, dressed in a little lace bonnet and a black dress of puritan simplicity.

"See?" he said. "An identical pose to yours. The same attitude, the same concentration upon the hands, the same cold light on the face. The moment I saw her come in, I decided I would position her exactly as I positioned you. I had your portrait on the easel because I was trying to compare the two."

I looked at the woman, whose face had been finely rendered by Finn. It was a face of great gentleness, which reminded me very forcefully of my mother. And when I looked down at the hands, I saw that Finn had placed between finger and thumb a small feather, dyed red.

"Who is she?" I asked.

"I forget her name," he answered. "She is a haberdasher's wife."

I looked up sharply at Finn. He shrugged his green shoulders, as if to say "this is all I know". I then looked back at the portrait. The resemblance of this person to my mother seemed now so remarkable that I found my thoughts wandering away to a place where they had never before been: Supposing it was my mother? Supposing she had not died in the fire? Supposing the woman Latimer had tried to rescue had not been my mother, but the maid?