James Miranda Barry Page 19

  She pulls back her scarf and her dark curls are shining in the sun. My boots have heels and are a little unstable on the turf. I am hard pressed to keep pace with her. There goes the redoubtable Mrs Jones, her day’s provisions flung over her shoulder, followed by her devoted toy soldier.

  ‘Alice, slow down.’

  She stops a little way ahead, and looks round, jeering.

  ‘You’ve got soft, Dr Barry. Too much riding about in carriages in the company of fine ladies. You’re too good now for tramping across the fields with the scullery girl.’

  I take her hand and we walk on briskly.

  ‘I see no kitchen slut. I see the famous Mrs Jones.’

  Alice contemplates her imminent rise with just enough apprehension to suggest that she is not utterly immodest. But she smiles complacently all the same.

  ‘Do you think I’ll be really famous one day, James?’

  ‘I have no doubt whatsoever.’

  ‘I pray for success every night.’

  And then it is my turn to smile. I feel for the unfortunate deity, besieged by pleas for money and fame in the kingdom of this world. Alice never queries her religion. It is part of the backdrop, in front of which she is in continuous performance. She accepts the Lord with the same easygoing good nature with which she accepts her lecherous admirers, these obsessive artists, anxious to paint her every crevice, and her temperamental, greedy employers.

  Alice met Lucy, the matronly Hecuba, when the older actress was playing a bawdy dame in one of Farquhar’s farcical romps. Lucy’s animation with a beau and a broomstick had resulted in a huge shout of applause from the house and a major dislocation of her bodice, all of which, including the naughty revelations, were thought to be part of the stage plot. Alice did some emergency repair work in the near-absolute darkness which reigned backstage and sewed the actress safely into her costume, without pricking her nipples. These were dark brown and enormous, for she was nursing her sixth child at the time. Alice was rewarded with a kiss and Lucy’s friendship. Lucy’s family had always earned their livings in the theatre, as players, set painters, prompters and stage hands. Not one of them was famous. They were solid and essential, used to poverty, hard work, continuous travelling, mostly on foot, the rapacious public and a professional existence of perpetual Gethsemanes. Lucy, once a ravishing Juliet, was having an autumnal success in the related parts of Hamlet’s mother, one or all three of the witches and various seventeenth-century bawds, for her girth had now expanded with much child-bearing. She took Alice under her wing.

  And to some extent Lucy’s protection kept the vultures, always on the watch for fresh pickings, at bay, circling. The old painter believed that Alice had gone home to Shipton to care for her ailing mother – that had been Alice’s story – during the two months when she was in fact playing Katharina in The Shrew at Winchester and Faringdon. As I listen to this part of the tale I deduce the significance of that scene with Rupert in the kitchen. It was her role as Kate, played opposite a sadistic Petruchio with evil breath, who would clearly have liked to carry things further offstage, and even began the hopeful process in front of the public, which won her the arrangement with Richardson. Alice had been prudent. She did not abandon her regular employment until she was assured of at least a summer’s income. Richardson had plans for her. But she was still learning her trade.

  One night in Winchester, a well-heeled and, as it turned out, well-lubricated suitor followed them back to their lodgings and gained entry by describing himself as Petruchio. Alice found herself undressed and alone with a gentleman who would not be denied, while Lucy was down the street at the wet-nurse’s cottage, handing out her ample nipples to one of the various infants. The gentleman, awash with good wine, was very anxious to arrive at the same state of undress as Mrs Jones, and made haste to remove all his clothes, crying out, ‘Katharina! It’s our wedding night!’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t be the first lord I’d seen without his underclothes after all the goings-on after dark in the upstairs corridors at Shipton. Men always think that you’re going to be impressed by the scale of their desire. And that delicate persuasion is just a matter of force. But no one likes to be slobbered over, do they? He made all kinds of protestations and announced that he would fall at once into a fatal decline if I refused to yield. Utter nonsense. No man dies of a woman saying no. And he was too drunk to make me say anything otherwise.’

  Alice said no, decisively, with the aid of a warm poker. I wonder if she always says no. For there is only one point upon which Mrs Jones demonstrates that behind this pliant cheerfulness there is a wall of steel. Money. When she negotiates her price she is cunning, adamantine, and ruthless. Already Mr Richardson has found himself paying out substantial sums for potential performances. Alice never stints the work. I am heartened to watch how carefully she is studying her first parts. She stands beneath the willow trees and becomes one woman after another, before my enchanted eyes. Her watchword is nature. Her gestures and movements are fluid and unaffected. She inhabits her speeches with an ease that makes the words ring like a wine-glass, as if they were being spoken for the first time.

  But Alice will never be a great tragic actress. She could never present terror, madness, infinite passion, repentance, anguish, loss. All these things are foreign to her very bones. Alice’s world is one of comic disappointments, miraculous discoveries, naughty songs, hidden birthmarks which betray all, farcical revelations and dancing, dancing, dancing. Thalia is her Muse. She is fantastical–comical–pastoral, from her slender ankles to her practised smiles. I look at her carefully as she slithers down the river bank before me to a little cove of warm grey stones. Thalia, the comic Muse, from the Greek verb, thallein – to bloom. Alice ripens. Alice blooms.

  The sausage she has brought with her is far too salty for my taste and I suspect that her coarse loaf of bread is inhabited by weevils, although I cannot track them down with any certainty. Even the cheese looks elderly and doubtful. I realise what my moderate wealth has done for me. I am accustomed to good food. We pull off our boots and paddle in the stream. She begins a water fight, which ends with both of us lying half undressed as our coats sway, drying on the willow branches, the sleeves hanging empty amidst the soft, fine green. We lie dozing in the grass.

  ‘I’ve nothing against the profession, Alice. But don’t you loathe being ogled and pawed? It’s clearly one of the common hazards.’

  ‘James! What on earth do you think went on in the scullery and summer houses at Shipton? You don’t have to be an actress to find men lying in wait behind sofas, mangles and hahas. I’ve never been a fine lady. I’ve always been fair game. But now that I earn my own money I can afford to say no. And I’m not a tiny creature like you. I’d take some overpowering.’

  She notices my irritation at her reference to my size. She reflects for a moment.

  ‘Good thing that you can shoot straight, James. Do you have your own pistols now? Do you still go out shooting?’

  ‘Mmmmm. Sometimes. When things are quiet at the hospital Jobson and I walk up to the hangers.’

  ‘Don’t you have to go back and hack sailors’ legs off?’

  ‘Not every day. Not at the moment. David Erskine arranged extended leave for me. So that I could see Barry out of the world.’

  There is a sudden silence. Alice has laid her head in my lap, but I can feel the tension in the back of her neck.

  ‘Alice, he’s asking for you.’

  ‘I won’t go back.’

  She says nothing for several minutes, then changes the subject.

  ‘Lucy says that I could be as good as Peg Woffington if I worked hard, although no one could equal Mrs Jordan.’

  Alice now launches into the narrative of her ambitions, the great tale of what is to come, laying an unembarrassed emphasis on the fact that she has managed to save a little nest of florins. She still does not mention the old painter, nor does she utter the name of Mr Benjamin Robert Haydon. I see the pale shapes of cows in the f
ields across the river, unmoving, staring. And above them, the first sign of summer, a Babel’s tower of tiny flies. Alice is fast asleep, her face resting on her shawl, but her cheek is taking on the shape of the pebbles beneath. I see the single earring, still there, pure gold, stolen too, no doubt. She has worn that earring since she was a child. It gives her the raffish look of a gypsy girl, a changeling. She wrinkles her nose against a fly’s assault, without waking. I brush the fly away and reflect upon this strange and lasting love. I want her to stay with me always. I want nothing to change.

  We walk the chalk ridges. A couple more miles to the east and the landscape opens out into orchards and oast houses. We keep to the shade of the woods. The foliage is not yet too thick, and the sun enters, streaming through onto a sweeping mass of bluebells, and paints the forest floor in broad stripes of pale blue and a deeper blue coated with gold. The forest floor is dressed with an untouched blue flood, a rustling river of blue, through which we saunter in single file leaving one trail of crushed stalks behind us, the sign of our quiet passing across the slopes.

  Alice tells me about her daily world, the ogling and avaricious Mr Richardson, and Mrs Richardson, his Baptist wife, who assembles the entire company for prayers and sways with her eyes closed as she invokes the power of God over the theatre-going public with her holy rhapsodies. She acts out her struggles with the grasping landladies who overcharged them at Winchester, the generosity of the fertile Hecuba and her infant prodigies who upstage us all – ‘that was two of them you saw in the tableau vivant; the one who sneezed is called Jamie’ – but she never mentions the old painter James Barry or Mr Benjamin Robert Haydon. Alice? Barry’s model? You appear to know who she is. All the painters know Mrs Jones. She is quite a famous model. Artists will pay a good deal for her services. I am being given the selected poems, not the complete works.

  Mary Ann taught me never to ask too many direct questions, on the grounds that you may not like what you hear.

  So I don’t ask.

  I have also learned that sexual arrangements between other people are exceedingly mysterious. They have nothing whatever to do with official custom and practice. They cannot be regulated after any single law. We must be content to police appearances. I am a doctor. I do not believe that venereal infections or ending up with child are just punishments for sin. Or indeed that such a fate is evidence that my tearful patient is lost to the grip of the Evil One. It is simply all very unfortunate. But in this I am of an unusual and independent mind. I see the tell-tale purple blotches, the blood in the urine, the unhideable swellings. But I do not make judgements. I run a hospital, not a courtroom. And in any case, it is not my business.

  I would never judge Alice Jones.

  ‘We ought to go back.’

  Alice’s eyes are cloudy with regret. And I should take that as my reward for this day. But I want more. We all, always, want more. I cannot bite the day to the core and throw the rind away. I want this moment, this day, to lie on the palm of my hand forever. I want time to stop.

  I look up at Alice, who is chewing the bitter and probably poisonous stalk of a bluebell. I snatch at perpetuity.

  ‘Alice, will you marry me?’

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ She wrenches her hand from mine. She is shouting. ‘Marry you? James! You’re off your head!’

  I turn scarlet. I know that all my freckles are suddenly visible.

  ‘Don’t insult my sanity, Alice.’

  She bursts out laughing. I am ready to box her ears.

  ‘Please, James, don’t be pompous as well as dotty. How can I possibly marry you?’

  I assume that the challenge she presents to my masculinity is the reason for her refusal, and I therefore become intimidatingly dignified. But – mirabile dictu – this hasn’t even occurred to Alice.

  ‘You can’t marry an actress, James. You’re in the army. I’ll get contracts that take me all over the place. I may even visit the Americas. You’ll be posted overseas. You can’t marry a woman who has no intention of following you wherever you go.’

  I burst into tears, all dignity flung to the winds. She takes me in her arms and produces a grimy handkerchief.

  ‘Oh James, please don’t cry.’

  We collapse in the bluebells and find that the ground is soaking wet. Alice hugs me close. Then gives me a violent shake.

  ‘You don’t love me,’ I wail. ‘You promised that you would always love me and now you don’t.’

  Alice replies to this infantile moan with a ringing slap across my cheek, nose and left ear.

  ‘Shut up. Listen to me.’

  My face stings from the intimacy of her assault. I stop sniffing and listen.

  ‘Will you never understand me, James? Of course I love you. I love you more than my own soul. If I were to marry anyone it would be you. But I want my life. I want what every woman wants, if she’s honest with herself. Money and independence. I don’t want to be ordered about anymore and I won’t be treated like dirt. I’ve got talent. I deserve to succeed and I’m going to do so. Don’t you see? I want to please myself. I don’t fall in love with any of my patrons, if that’s what you’d like to call them. That’s not the point. I need them. They like me. The contract is perfectly clear. And if they stop liking me, or I stop needing them, the deal’s off. I please myself now, James. I’ve spent quite enough of my time pleasing other people. I want my life. For me. And I don’t want to share it with anybody else. I will never marry. Neither you nor any other man.’

  She watches my face. I say nothing.

  ‘Oh James, don’t look like that. You must have known what I’d say. I want to make something of myself. It’s very important to me. I want to do it. You had help from a gang of rich men. And I had help from you. I told you I’d never forget that you taught me to read.’

  I feel her hot breath on my bruised cheek.

  ‘Go on writing to me. I adore your letters.’

  I begin crying again. She rattles my teeth.

  ‘Oh James, don’t pander to the plots of old stories. You want to live in the one where the son of the household takes up with the kitchen maid and turns her into a respectable woman. She gives a passable performance in the parlour but is initially not received; then wins them all round with her pious observances, eventually turning the rake in question into a religious man.’

  ‘I am not a rake,’ I explode indignantly.

  ‘And you’re not religious either. James, listen to me. I don’t want your money or your life. I want my life. To spend as I choose.’

  The wind lifts above us and the first evening shadows are rushing across her face. I cannot say that I have not been fully answered.

  * * *

  It is past ten and quite dark when I trudge into the hallway. The May night is cold and I have mislaid my gloves. I catch sight of myself in the great mirror, and I am fearfully humiliated: a pale smudged image, my red coat stained with grass.

  Rupert flings himself up the cellar steps.

  ‘Good news, sir. I’ve located Alice Jones. She’s been taken on by Richardson’s Touring Theatricals at Greenwich. She was playing in The Siege of Troy at the Easter fair.’

  I stand staring at him, eaten up by wretchedness. This was not the reaction Rupert had expected. And I see by the quickening of his eye that he would relish the task of laying his finger on the elusive Mrs Jones.

  ‘Well, sir? Shall I set out for Greenwich tomorrow?’

  ‘No, Rupert. It’s not necessary. Bring me some hot water instead.’

  Slowly I climb the stairs, leaving Rupert standing in the hallway, open-mouthed, unthanked and, no doubt, furious.

  * * *

  In the last week of May the old painter’s condition deteriorates. He refuses to eat and it is with some difficulty that Mrs Harris and I persuade him to swallow a little chicken soup. He is now pitifully thin, his hands almost transparent, bony and frail as winter twigs. I order him to be carried to a cooler, quieter room behind the parlour downstairs, which has e
asier access to the kitchen. I sleep on a cot beside him. He does not miss his paintings because he is no longer aware of his surroundings. Mary Ann gazes at the shut and silenced face. He no longer rails at her, for he no longer knows who she is.

  ‘Should I call the priest again? He’s already had the last rites. Over six weeks ago.’

  Mary Ann is undeterred.

  ‘Oh yes. Francisco says that you can’t have them too often.’

  I look sadly at Barry. He believed in these scented charades. He thought they were mysteries.

  Then Mary Ann whispers, ‘You can have last rites, very last rites, ultimate rites . . .’

  I put my arm around my mother and I can feel the macabre laughter inside her slender body. She turned Papist all over again for the love of her soldier. She goes to church with Francisco three times a week, a fine black mantilla of lace covering her reddish curls. She believes in nothing. I admire her courage.

  ‘Go and call the priest then, Mary Ann. We should do this for Barry and Francisco, if not for us.’

  But later, long after the priest has gone, and as the unseasonably hot afternoon ripens into cooler shadows across the street, James Barry’s breathing becomes more laboured, more uneven. I doze in the cot beside him. Mrs Harris has gone home and the house is quiet. I have sealed the doors, so that the city’s cries come from an ever-increasing distance. I have lowered all the blinds. Death waits on the doorstep, sensing my preparations. We are ready to receive him now. There has been no crisis, no marked transformations in this steadily yellowing, sinking face. The nose now protrudes, hawk-like; his habitual chubbiness has long since dropped away. But I awake at once when I hear the sudden shift in his lungs. His breath seems to come from somewhere far within his diminished frame, the last place where his angers still rumble, with ever-lengthening intervals between their manifestations. He drags up each breath with an effort, a great, rattling heave. I do not need my wooden stethoscope. I know at once that the end has begun.