realise for the first time the one flaw in the plan. In order to return to the party – which of course it is agreed I should do – my only route is back through the bedchamber, in which, by the time I've struggled into the new clothes, the King and Celia will be engaged in some nuptual tumblings. I am not, as I've told you, squeamish, but I really have no desire to bear witness to these, nor to interrupt them. I can only hope that they will remember to draw the bed curtains and that I will be able to creep out of the room without being mistaken for a spy or a voyeur.
I dress as speedily as I can. As a famed lover, the King I imagine will not go to the act in a hasty way, but precede it with well-placed kisses and caresses and teasing words. Thus, I have a little time. I put on the mask. It squashes my flat nose even flatter and the eye-holes are so small that I feel like a horse in blinkers. The thought of keeping this thing on for the remainder of the night is exceedingly irksome but, if I want to go down and enjoy myself without revealing my identity, I have no alternative.
I am ready now. The red and grey suit is very nice, but I think with a moment's regret of the lost gold striped breeches and the outrageous coat. They expressed the essence of Merivel with such perfection and finesse. As a memento of this extraordinary day, I have at least kept the purple ribbon tied round my prick.
I open the door of the closet and this is what I see: the King, completely naked, kneeling by the bed, his arms encircling Celia's spread thighs and his glossy head buried in her little brush. I stand rooted to the expensive carpet. My face, under the mask, becomes boiling red. I close my eyes. I cannot move. I retreat back into the closet and close the door.
Back inside the small room, I feel lonely and suffocated. Surely, the reward for what I've done today cannot be to condemn me to a night on the floor of a closet? I will wait, I decide till the King and Celia have got to the, 'divine banque',
Meanwhile, what shall I do? I decide to think about my future. I cannot see it at all clearly. I take off the mask. What I believe I can see now is that I'm weary of medicine. All my anatomical studies seem to have brought me to a great sadness. When a man plays a viola da gamba, I want to share in his joy, not see his skull. For where will such visions end? What if, on an August evening, I am on the river with Rosie Pierpoint and I suddenly see, not the red of her lips nor the pink of her thighs, but the white of the maggots in her bones? Such a perpetual and visible awareness of mortality would, I am certain, bring me to despair in a very short time. And what would become of me then? Even my rooms at Bidnold wouldn't be able to comfort me. I'd go mad and be locked up in Bedlam, only to be visited by poor Pearce, who would shake his head and say he could do nothing for me.
I must avoid, then, coming to despair and madness. I must try to forget anatomy. Forget it utterly. I must whisper over it words of oblivion. I must forget the starling. I must forget Fabricius and the drowned pauper. I must forget the interior of the human temple altogether. Instead, I will do decorative things. I will buy more furniture and pictures and drapes. I will paint pictures, even, for like my father, I am a good draughtsman and I am not afraid of trying my hand at oils. So this will be it: forgetfulness of the cavity, the cavern, the cave, the ghastly deep. My life will move in reverse order: I have endured the night; now, with my mind on superficial things, will come the morning. I am, after all, a citizen of a New Age.
Some minutes have passed while I have conversed with myself about my future. I replace the mask over my eyes and nose and listen. I can hear laughter – Celia's and the King's – a hopeful signal that they're rowing noisily together to heaven.
I open the door and find, to my intense relief, that the bed curtains have been drawn. I duck down nevertheless and crawl on my hands and knees to the door, which squeaks loudly when I open it, but then closes on me with hardly a sound.
A while later, I am in the park of Sir Joshua 's house. Some hours have passed, in which I have jigged and polka'd and drunk and flirted and generally flung myself about in such an untrammelled way that I am now exceedingly dizzy. It is cool outside, because the sun has gone down and I am tottering towards a little shadowy copse in which, I have convinced myself, Pearce is hiding.
I stop to piss. I take down my breeches and see the ribbon on my cock. The ribbon slides off and falls to the ground and I moan gently to myself as I piss onto it.
I pull up my breeches. Ahead of me, just at the edge of the wood, someone is moving. It must be Pearce, to whom I will now confess that I am abandoning medicine altogether. 'I cannot go on,' I will say.
But it isn't Pearce. For now, the person has put on – I would recognise this confection anywhere, even in the coming crepuscule – the three-masted barque! Even to tease me, Pearce would be unable to bring himself to place such a thing on his head.
I hear laughter. It is high and cackling. And there, suddenly, in front of me, laughing up into my face, is the plump village girl I kissed that morning on my way to my wedding.
'Bridegroom,' she giggles, 'Sir Master Bridegroom!'
I reach up a hand to my face and realise with terror that my mask is no longer there.
'Come inny, Bridegroom!' cackles the girl. 'Come to Bridey!'
She is drunker than I am. The hat falls over her eyes and she hiccups. I reach up swiftly under her skirt and cup and squeeze the flesh of her buttocks in my hands and in this way propel her forwards into the woods. As I pitch her down and feel myself stagger and fall onto her, it's as if the night descends on us like an executioner's blade, leaving our severed bodies to wriggle in the darkness.
Chapter Three. My New Vocation
The most beautiful room at Bidnold (aside from the little circular space in the West Turret which, for the time being, I kept empty, my imagination not yet having discovered the most satisfactory way to reveal its perfection) was the Withdrawing Room. As one who had spent the greatest part of his life in meagre apartments, I could not prevent a foolish grin from breaking out over my face every time I remembered that I was now the owner of a room so designated. The title, 'Withdrawing Room', entranced me. For it inevitably implies that one is living a busy and pleasurable life on its periphery, from which one occasionally 'withdraws' in order to sip a little brandy by its excellent fire, or to indulge in sweet and silly talk with the likes of my handsome neighbour, Lady Bathurst, on its scarlet and gold sofas. Thus, with my usual excess of enthusiasm, I set about making certain that my life at Bidnold was full of diverting activity, from which I could 'withdraw' from time to time.
I equipped myself with a Music Room (I had not, at that time, yet learned to play the oboe), a Billiard Room (I had not, then, ever held a billiard cue in my hands), a Card Room (I was already fond of Rummy and Bezique), a Studio (in which I would begin my new career as a painter), a Study (in case Pearce should visit me and find himself discomforted by the oriental brilliance of my Withdrawing Room), a Morning Room (facing east, where I would sit between nine and ten to do my household accounts) and of course a most sumptuous Dining Room (the abundance of its table such that one would need to 'withdraw' a little after dinner to let the digestive system work in comfort and tranquillity).
My stipend from the King as Celia's husband was two thousand livres per annum – riches I could not, a year before, have dreamed of. This money enabled me to buy a great quantity of Chinese furniture for my Withdrawing Room, to hang the walls with ruched vermilion taffeta and Peking scrolls, to upholster my chairs in scarlet and fuchsia and gold and to lay upon the floor a carpet from Chengchow so elaborate in design it had been a thousand days upon the loom.
I was exceedingly pleased with these decorations. As I poured beer for my exhausted upholsterers, I congratulated myself that I had got the rampant tones of red, pink and gold so absolutely right that I must quickly hit upon some ingenious idea for ensuring that the guests, in whose company I would withdraw into this room, would not sully it with drabness. It came to me speedily: I would order to be made a dazzling collection of scarlet sashes, bilberry shawls, ruby slippers, pink bonnets and yellow plumes, with which to adorn my
Celia, as you will have understood by now, had no part in the designing of my house. Though it was thought that, when expedient, she would spend some time at Bidnold, the King preferred her to be nearer to him and had thus installed the new Lady Merivel in a pretty house at Kew, a short journey by water from Whitehall. It was
