Restoration

"In the time of Cromwell, you would…"

"What, Fi

"No. I do not mean that. But really, you ca

"What?"

"You must not show this picture to anyone. You must, I think, burn it."

"It offends you, I see."

"It breaks…"

"What does it break?"

"All the laws, all the procedures and disciplines I have been at such pains to try to teach you."

"Yes. You're undoubtedly right. It is a grievous mistake. And yet to me, you see, it's a rather memorable rendering of all that I feel about the colours of my park. Which only illustrates, does it not, that feeling, however passionate a spur it may be to the poor dabbling painter, is, without technique, an impotent and ridiculous thing, like a eunuch in love, one might fancifully suggest."

I laughed, but Fi

"Well," I said, "let's forget the picture. I shall put it on the fire presently. Will you take a glass of wine, Fi

Poor Robin agreed and we returned to the house, where I ordered some cool white wine to be brought from my cellar to the Morning Room.

Fi

"Excellent, Fi

A little nervous smile crossed his angelic mouth. Then he darted out and returned a few seconds later, carrying in his arms a large cylindrical object covered in a pretty embroidered cloth, which he laid carefully at my feet.

"What is it, Fi

I removed the cloth. Before me stood a birdcage of great delicacy, painted a deep Prussian blue and gilded with gold leaf. Inside it, on a swing perch, was a bird, which at first I took to be a stuffed thing, so still and staring did it remain. Then it turned its yellow eye on me and opened its beak and let out a sweet trill. "My word, Fi

Fi

I will at once confess that I was delighted with this gift. Seldom, I thought, can more pains have been taken over a bribe. The cage was an object of wistful beauty, like something from a departed time. The bird inside was ordinary in its appearance, with a sleek blue-black body and an orange beak. Its song, however, was a pure and brilliant sound, a sound I seemed to have heard in my mind, but could not recall in nature.

"They say," said Fi

"How astonishing," I said. "Why particularly the oboe?"

"The oboe, I believe, is within its register."

"Ah."

"But you do not play?"

"No. But I will learn. I could, I think, acquire a strong appetite for music."

Across Fi

"So," said Fi

"Your gift is very fine. Thank you."

"When you are next with the King…"

"Hush, Fi

"I understand."

"Timing is all. And it may be that we must wait out the winter."

"The winter?" said Fi

"You must believe me," I said, "no one thirsts for the return of His Majesty's gaiety and laughter more than I. But until such time, I can promise you that he will take no more painters, oboists, te

By my inadvertent inclusion of the word "riff-raff", Fi

After several weeks had passed and I had no word from the King, I began to recognise that, while my letter to him had momentarily relieved my anxiety, the sending of it had now thrown me into a worse distress than ever. For before I had sent it I had been able to convince myself that the King's thoughts might turn to me again at any moment, that his mind had, in fact, mislaid me for a while, but that he would rediscover me during, perhaps, a game of ninepins or in the course of some immodest banquet. Now, on the other hand, I could only interpret his silence as a deliberate act of forgetting. Not even the death of Minette had moved him sufficiently to write to me. This in itself was proof enough that he no longer regarded me with any of his former affection and that I was, from his radiant i

The profundity and Stygian gloom of this darkness oppressed me most fearfully during the hours of the actual night, so that I began to keep a candle by my bed, or, better than this, to flee my house entirely and spend my nights in Meg Storey's garret in the roof of the Jovial Rushcutters, keeping sleep at bay with ale and rowdy couplings and foolish stories about my travels in the Land of the River Mar, a country of my imaginings, located in Meg's ignorant head as "just above Africa" and about which I invented the most absorbing lies. "The preferred element of the natives of the River Mar," I told her, "is water. And this is how they sleep, with their bodies immersed in the river. And all along the banks of the Mar, hanging from the mangrove trees, are loops made out of hide, to hold the sleeping heads out of the water, so that they do not drown." Meg would sigh with wonder at such unimaginable things and threaten to drift to sleep, lulled by my voice, while outside I would hear poor Danseuse paw the frosty ground and whi

Though the solace afforded me by Meg Storey's plump and energetic body was considerable, I felt urgently in need of some spiritual comfort, and began, at about this time, to send out messages to God. I imagined these feeble communications as minute blips of light, little wriggling glow-worms which, unless God had a telescope pointed directly at them, he would be unlikely to notice. The days when God and I engaged in daily conversation had long since passed away. They passed away at the time of the fire, which, as surely as it consumed the bodies of my poor parents, together with the ribbons and feathers that were the stuff of their i