Read Online A Man of Genius by Janet Todd - Free Book Online

night. Caroline wound it herself, not leaving it to a servant. Ann asked Martha to try to stop it but Martha would not go against the mistress – she respected Caroline because she sat on cushions and was idle, like a lady should be.
    â€˜You won’t sleep,’ said Caroline to her, ‘you fear dreaming. It’s a sign of a bad conscience in a child.’ She never believed this: the day was simply too short for thoughts. You had to use the night.
    He decided one day they should eat strange foods, strange to her – the kind her mother’s cooks, the Hannahs and Marys who never stayed for long, would tell her to throw to Jonah’s pigs. Caroline had liked only English food. Wistfully Signor Moretti had described the Roman confluence of garlic and oregano and olive oil when Ann had sat in his stuffy rooms trying to master irregular Italian verbs, but he’d not cooked for her. She’d mentioned the mélange to the second Mary, who laughed and laughed, then went on wrapping her suet pudding. When she’d had to feed herself after the years of root vegetables in Fen Ditton, she’d bought a lot of chicken and cured meat.
    Robert saw food as expression, a language with which to engage the body.
    So he threw out her white bread and sent his pale boy to bring back dark rye instead. She’d thought it peasant fare but no, not this tasty rich bread, eaten with onions cut in rings and salted herring.
    She didn’t enjoy it. She disliked the lingering smell in her lodgings, too. Was Robert’s taste superior to hers? Of course.
    That night after dinner he was the Fashionable Lady from out of town, from Tunbridge Wells, who wasn’t sure this was quite the smartest place to be. And she laughed and laughed, for he was so good at being other people.
    â€˜You are so marvellous at this, your characters are so believable, why don’t you write a novel?’
    He looked at her in bewilderment.
    Did any of it come from memory? she wondered. Did he mock acquaintaces or were his imaginary people born of fragments in his capacious head? He recollected his family differently at different times. His father had been a bully, he said, and he the son had walked out on him shouting, ‘I want nothing from you.’ His simple quiet mother had been saintly; she adored him. That was what he said. But he also said that his dull mother had pulled down his clever father, who would have been – what he would have been was unclear. Instead, he’d remained a country doctor and who would not drink to excess with such a fate and such a dismal wife? And she? She in her dullness and despair turned more and more to the priest and her love for her only son.
    She had some delicate pots, Chinese, French and Meissen, inherited from her own mother. He’d learned to hold and value them and know about their making: about candling and dipping, crystal glaze, gum arabic and vitrification. He found Ann’s cups too thick-rimmed and coarse for his use, so he bought her new fragile bone-china ones from Spode. He pointed out where the hazy colour shadowed from green into grey. It was at that point, the numinous, that things happened, he said. ‘It’s like the sky and sea, John Taylor’s painting, what he tries to capture, you don’t know where one begins and the other ends.’
    As she looked at these fragile vessels, she felt his eyes and fingers on them as if she’d been what he caressed, as open and as empty to be filled.
    It was fondling. He fondled her. She responded. It was her fault that she, only occasionally now but with such pain, grasped after more.
    With Robert the commonplace was insight. Always the senses must be intense as if candle lights were stars. If he drank apple juice from a coloured glass, it became the gods’ nectar.
    He prized a gold Swiss watch. It had been an old priest’s – he didn’t explain why he prized it since he’d abandoned the