Rose Tremain - Restoration

He is very fond of sack. He likes to pour himself and his clients a good few thimblefuls of it while he measures their heads and displays his different styles and quality of wig for them to see. So we sat down together in his shop and he talked about the world ("for the world, though seeming big to some, is of course very little, is it not, Sir Robert, being really no larger than the shadow cast by the Palace of Whitehall?"), and who had found favour and who was out and what were the fashions of the summer, and I learned from him that the King had a new mistress called Mrs Stewart who outweighed all the others in beauty. "And they say," said the wigmaker, "that his old loves are gone from his mind to make room for this new one, even Lady Castlemaine herself."

"And my wife?"

"Ah, your wife, Sir Robert. There is a mystery! For she has not been seen anywhere for some time and the gossip goes 'either she is a-bed with child or else she is a-bed with Sir Fancy Newlove or else she is a-bed weeping', but I can tell you that no one seem's to know for certain which kind or condition of bed she is in!"

It was almost suppertime when I left the wigmaker's shop, with the hot sun beginning to go down. I walked-home slowly, leading Danseuse by the bridle, and what came to my mind were some words of Sir Joshua Clemence, that to get the King's love he believed his daughter would sacrifice everything and everyone in the world, including her mother and father. I sighed as I remembered them and the voice of quiet resignation in which he had uttered them.

These moments I will not forget until I die:

I am not left to wait in the Stone Gallery. I am shown into the Royal apartments as soon as I announce myself to the guards.

I enter the familiar rooms. Though it is a stifling evening, a fire is burning in the grate of the first chamber.

William Chiffinch, the King's most trusted servant, bows to me and tells me that His Majesty, being very hungry on a whim, has begun his supper which he has ordered to be served in the small room where all the clocks are kept.

I follow Chiffinch and, as we near the room, which is no bigger than a closet, I hear once again the riotous ticking and jangling of time, by which the King is so fascinated and moved.

I go in. The King is wearing a cream-coloured coat, but tied around his neck is a scarlet dinner napkin.

Though I am sweating and my heartbeat is as noisy as any of the clocks, when I see the dinner napkin I smile. And so it is my smile that the King first sees when he lifts his eyes from the chicken leg he is devouring. And it is as if this smile of mine has some magical property to it, for the King lays down the chicken leg and stares at me and it is the stare of someone spellbound. He brings the napkin to his mouth and wipes his lips, but does not take his eyes from me.

I bow very low, sweeping my new hat before me and when I come up from this obeisance, I see that the King has risen and moved out from the little table on which his supper has been set and is now walking towards me. At my back, I hear Chiffinch close the door.

His Majesty stops, two feet from me. He reaches out a gloveless hand and puts it under my chin and tilts my face up, examining, it seems, every crease of it and every pore and even the shape of the skull beneath, so intently does he look at it. Then he shakes his head, as if in great sorrow at something, and yet over his face spreads a smile of such infinite kindness that I know on the instant that not one vestige of his anger with me remains and that, even if on the very morrow his mood will again turn against me, on this particular evening, the second of September 1666, he feels for me nothing but affection.

I begin to speak. "Sir…" I stammer, "I am so glad to find you well…"

"Hush, Merivel," he commands, "say nothing. For as you know, I see it all and understand it all. N'est-ce pas ?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Exactly!"

And then he laughs and brings my face to his and smacks a kiss upon my lips and orders me to sit down and eat.

"It's a picnic," he says. "This is what I thought we would have: a picnic. We may eat as messily as we please, so go on, Robert, put a chicken on your plate and some eggs and there is a little cold salmon here and Chiffinch will return in a moment, as I have instructed, to pour you some white wine."

I have no appetite. I tell the King I have been living very frugally and do not think that I can consume an entire hen.

"Well," he says, "they are Surrey hens – very noisy while they lived, we are told, and very succulent in their flesh, so why do you not take up a little thigh and taste it and then, as you eat, your appetite will come back to you."

I do as instructed and, indeed, I do find the taste of the chicken thigh as delicious as any meat I have ever eaten. Chiffinch returns and some cold, fruity wine is poured for me and I sip it slowly and feel its sweetness entering my blood and moving round me, making me feel calm and serene. The noise of the clamouring clocks, of which there are above two hundred, seems to diminish after a little while and it is as if the King, too, has noticed this diminution when he looks up from his food and says: "Time has waited for you, then, Merivel. As I believed it would."

I only nod, not knowing what comment I am expected to make upon this statement. The King puts his jewelled hands into a finger bowl and rinses them and wipes them on his napkin and continues: "So that now you can teach me something instead of being my pupil: you can teach me about madness."

I hear myself sigh. "Sir," I say, "there are so many kinds of madness and folly – of which love, perhaps, is both the sweetest and the most fearful – that I hardly know where to begin. However, one evening when I was in this Fenland place, which is a place quite outside the world that we inhabit here, I did find myself moved – by the scent of some flowers, it seemed to me! – to speak my thoughts about the Footsteps of Madness. These I could relate to you, if you wished, for it was a most strange thing to me that they were never heeded or commented upon, it appearing to me quite as if my listeners did not hear them, or could not hear them. And what I now wonder is whether no one in my life can ever hear them or understand them, except you."

"Most probable. Relate them, then."

And so I begin. I do not merely set out for the King my thesis upon the tangled pathways to madness and the great reluctance of the world to explore the reasons why each one is taken, but lay before him everything I have learnt about my own foolishness and everything I have done to cure myself of it. In short, I anatomise my heart. I reach inside myself and take hold of it and lay it before him. And all the while, he listens sometimes grave, sometimes smiling, as if – even though he "knows it all and understands it all" – the story that I tell him is new and full of extraordinary things that have never before been told to him, neither in the Clock Room nor in any other place in his Kingdom.

Presently, it grows dark and Chiffinch brings lighted lamps and positions them round us.

We eat grapes, spitting the pips into a silver spitoon.

And the King comes at last to the subject of Celia, intertwined with which is the subject of his new love, Mrs Stewart, for whom, he whispers to me, "I have a most maddening folly, Merivel, so that were I with her upon a certain parapet, and supposed to be showing her the planet Jupiter, I would turn my back upon the entire starry universe just to cup her breasts in my hands."

We burst out laughing and this laughter turns into the kind of giggling we used to indulge in on spring afternoons on the Whitehall croquet lawns. And so the whole question of Celia is accorded no seriousness at all, as if she were a toy we had once thrown about from one to the other and had long grown tired of.