Rose Tremain - Restoration

When we came to Lincoln 's Inn Fields, we stopped and sat down there on the dry grass, as did everyone else going out of Cheapside and its lanes and alleys. And by late afternoon a vast multitude of people had come there and for every one of them crying and lamenting there were four or five beginning to laugh and gossip and sing songs and share food around, as if they were on a picnic outing with no cares in the world. From Frances Elizabeth's kitchen seven jars of plums had been saved and some bottles of ginger wine and a white cheese in a bag of muslin, so we supped on these and on other provisions given to us in exchange for them and began to make instantaneous friendships with everyone around us.

The talking and the eating went on far into the night, when the fire once again lit up the whole sky and it was all, in the strangest of ways, an enjoyable thing. Near two or three in the morning, I heard Finn begin to tell everybody round that he was a portrait painter and to offer to paint portraits then and there for twenty-five shillings, notwithstanding the fact that not one person there had any wall on which to hang them. The knowledge that, even in adversity, his commercial heart could now beat so strongly made me smile and I think it was with this smile still upon my face that I fell asleep.

I parted from him and Frances Elizabeth the following morning. Neither the escritoire nor the truckle bed had got as far as Lincoln's Inn Fields, so I was now forced to set down on the grass beside them all the things they had loaded onto Danseuse, and the sight of them surrounded by half-finished portraits and copper saucepans and pairs of shoes would have been somewhat sad had it not been for their great cheerfulness. I had anticipated that the loss of the house in Cheapside would put them into despair, but it did not. For what they seemed to have discovered was that it had not only housed them and their little fledgling businesses; it had also harboured their mutual liking and affection. And I was certain, as I left them, that when I found them again it would be in some place together and I imagined them in a low room smelling of oils, lying side by side in bed and doing their sums.

It took me all of the day to skirt round the fire, going as far north as I could to avoid the smoke, but by evening I had reached the Tower and could see from there that the cluster of tall houses among which was the money-lender's house still stood and had not been touched by the fire, so I whispered into the hot air a prayer of gratitude.

When I arrived at the house, it was the money-lender who greeted me and I went with him into his Accounting Room and he showed me some new scales and weights of which he was very proud, "precision", he said, "being my great passion, for everything in the world can be weighed and measured in some form, can it not?"

I was about to open my mouth to say that I did not believe that it could be when his wife came into the room carrying Margaret, who was wide awake and not bound all in swaddling as she had been when I had seen her last, but dressed in a pretty bonnet and wrapped in a shawl.

The wet-nurse began to talk about the fire and how she and her husband and all the children had knelt down in a long line and prayed that the direction of the wind would not change. As she recounted this to me, she put Margaret into my arms. This was the first time that I had held her or indeed held any baby at all and I did not know if I should lay her in the crook of my arm or put her little face over my shoulder, or what. So I sat down on the hard chair where the clients of the money-lender sat and laid Margaret on my lap and looked down at her. She had grown very much and her face was as round as the moon. Her eyes, I now realised, were very large and clear and she looked up at me gravely for a while, then began to kick her legs inside the shawl and to blow little frothy bubbles out of her mouth.

"See her hair, Sir?" said the wet-nurse after a while. "Colour of fire, it is." And she bent down and eased back the rim of the bonnet and I saw some soft red curls there. I touched them gently and felt, under my hand, the living warmth of her head.

That night I spent with Rosie Pierpoint.

This being Tuesday and I not coming to her in the afternoon, I flattered myself that she would have become anxious for me, imagining me burnt alive or crushed beneath falling timber. But when she saw me, she seemed neither relieved that I was still living nor even particularly pleased to find me there, but preoccupied only with the film of soot and ash which, having been thrown up into the air, was now falling and settling on everything and turning grey every piece of linen that she washed and ironed.

Her house was stifling. She had closed all her windows and sealed every crack and draught in her efforts to keep out "the poxy grime." "But it still comes there," she said. "No sooner do I hang up a sheet to dry it or spread out a kerchief to press it than it comes there, see?" She held up some items to show me the dirty streaks upon them, then threw them back into the soiled pile and screeched: "How am I to get any work done or make one penny while this goes on? I shall starve, that's what I shall do! I will die a slow death by starving and I would have preferred a quick one in the flames!"

I took her into my arms and tried to quieten and soothe her with kissing and after a while her crossness did begin to wane sufficiently for me to tell her that I had no home or place to sleep any more and that I would pay her a good rent if she would let me stay with her for a time, until I could find some rooms and make yet another new start upon my life.

She pulled away from my embrace and looked at me squarely. She put her hands on her hips.

"For how long?" she asked.

"What?"

"How long will you stay? A week? A month?"

"Well," I said, "I cannot say. It may be difficult to find rooms, for I will not be the only one seeking them."

"Then I must have compensation, Sir Robert."

"Compensation for what?"

She sighed and turned away from me, busying herself with the lighting of a lamp.

"Can you not guess?" she said.

So then I understood. It was not merely the "craze for washing" or the perfuming of pillow cases with lavender that had caused Rosie to prosper. With Pierpoint gone, she had resumed her whore's antics with a ready will and it was the money got in this way that had enabled her to buy capons and cream and all the rich foods she could no longer live without. And I thought how strangely my mind had worked, over the years, with regard to Rosie Pierpoint. I had known from the start that she was a drab and a jade but, whenever I had needed her, I had put this knowledge from me, liking to imagine her on her own, doing her work and eating her meals and rising at dawn to perform her little ablutions that I had once witnessed, and never ever picturing her with other men. It is the same thing, I said to myself, as the story of the Indian Nightingale: I have believed what it pleased me to believe.

I crossed to Rosie and put my hand out and stroked her hair. "Of course," I said, "there will be compensation. But now let us go to bed and love each other and drive from our minds everything but this – even the smut and the soot."

I found two cold, airy rooms above a lute-maker's shop on the south side of the river. The sounds of the lutes came up through the cracks in the floor, stretched and fragile and thin.

Autumn rain fell onto the blackened city and turned the ash to paste and bloated the river so that all the half-burnt wharves fell away and floated on the water to the sea. I looked out of my high windows and tried to rebuild London in my mind as it had been. But I found that I could not remember how it had been, so that it was lost to me entirely and this realisation made me so moody and sad that I fell into the habit once again of staring for very long periods of time at the backs of my hands as if I vainly believed that I, Merivel, could remake the city.