A Man of Genius by Janet Todd Page B

Ireland was an English idea, he said to Fred Curran, who agreed.
    With the genteel he was sullen, hating social chitchat. But he grew so effusive over wine, good or bad, and strong ale taken in company with men he liked. They spoke excitedly or listened with simple exclamations. Such joy then.
    â€˜Gilbert,’ Caroline smiled dreamily, ‘used to say that I thought him so strong because he was big and expansive. But really he was – he often said as much – weaker than I, far weaker. I was the strong one and he needed my strength. My intuition was better than his reason, more right, even my judgement. Sometimes he was confused and didn’t know something till he was with me. Then he knew.’
    Ann would be picking her nose by now and staring at the ceiling or hanging her head elaborately. But she was unseen.
    â€˜Only then did everything grow clear. I had strength from my own mind, you see. Then he would say so very lovingly and over and over again, “What I do know is what I desire and need and love. I want you more than anyone in this wide world. No one else will do.” That’s love, girl.’
    It was boring for a child of eight to be told this once, let alone twice or thrice. Yet these over-used words must have been sinking in even as she was angry that Caroline hadn’t ordered a new frock to be made for her to go to school and look like Other Girls.
    Gilbert was no help at all. She decided not to try his words on Robert James.
    Yet something not to do with Gilbert, something fantastical that Caroline knew, perhaps remembering some leftover tract from the radical ’90s, might connect with Robert. It was a woman’s right to initiate just as well as men’s.
    Had Ann imbibed the idea with mother’s milk? But no, it was a ridiculous image. Caroline had employed a wet nurse.
    Not mother’s milk, then. But she felt sure that Caroline had at one point said that women need not wait for men and that her forwardness did no harm with Gilbert.
    It wasn’t easy. Like discovering a new continent, not knowing on what plants to place your feet as you pushed into the undergrowth without a light.
    There were no conduct books to tell you the words. Their advice all of a piece: hide your feelings, fool the man who’d likely enough fooled you. But Ann was no young inexperienced girl. She should have the right words to handle this. For, with all the love she felt sure he felt and knew she felt, he made no further move to bring them together, not exactly marriage, though perhaps . . . but just together.
    â€˜I don’t want to leave you,’ she said, her heart pounding with such daring.
    Then simply, with his grey eyes fixed so kindly on her, expressing infinite intimacy, he’d replied, ‘Then you should not.’
    What other man would have been so very right?
    Her desire, the craving, continued. Out in the world, in the street or in a shop or market, Ann had that thrill in the pit of her belly when a figure with Robert’s outline came closer, turned to a surge of joy if it was indeed he.
    Was desire too consuming? Were human beings meant to go at this speed? Was she? Was this aching elation a kind of sickness? She refused to answer. She shut off part of her mind. The rest of it hurtled onwards, together with all her body.
    More of that stimulation, that titillation that he’d once so generously given to meet her physical desire, might have helped. Though now, in the solitariness it occasionally caused, it could turn to something akin to pain, made almost shameful when she saw through her pleasure his tender but unmoved face.
    More sleep would have made a difference. But she’d always been a poor sleeper. Even as a small child when Martha did her best to combat wakefulness with her single lullaby of ‘Baby Bunting’.Caroline had a clock – an heirloom, she said, though it didn’t look so old – that chimed and whirred through the