The Rings of Saturn (18 page)

spent a large part of his time either by the sea or on board the ocean-going yacht he had had built and named Scandal. From Woodbridge he would sail down the Deben and up the coast to Lowestoft, where he hired his crew from among the herring fishers, all the time looking for a face that reminded him of William Browne. FitzGerald sailed far out into the German Ocean, and, just as he had always refused to dress for particular occasions, so, insteading of donning one of the newly fashionable yachting outfits, he would wear an old frock coat and a top hat tied fast. The sole concession he made to the stylish appearance expected of a
yachtsman was the long white feather boa which he reportedly liked to sport on deck and which fluttered behind him in the breeze, visible at a good distance. In the late summer of 1863, FitzGerald decided to cross to Holland in the Scandal in order to see the portrait of the young Louis Trip, painted by Ferdinand Bol in 1652, which was in the museum in The Hague. Upon arrival in Rotterdam, his travelling companion, one George Manby of Woodbridge, persuaded him to view the great seaport first. Consequently, wrote FitzGerald, the two of us went about all day long in an open carriage, now this way, now that, till I no longer had any idea where I was, and that evening I fell exhausted into my bed. The following day passed in Amsterdam in a like unpleasant fashion, and not until the third day did we finally arrive in The Hague, after all manner of tedious incidents, only to find the museum closing until the beginning of the next week. FitzGerald, his patience already sorely tried by the irritations of travel on land, interpreted this incomprehensible exclusion as a mean trick the Dutch were playing on him personally, threw a fearful fit of rage and despair in which he variously berated the narrow-minded Dutch, his companion George Manby and himself, and insisted on returning to Rotterdam forthwith and setting sail for home. – In those years, FitzGerald spent the winter months in Woodbridge, where he had lodgings at a gunsmith's on Market Hill. Often he was to be seen walking about the town lost in thought, wearing his Inverness cape and usually, even in bad weather, only slippers on his feet. Behind him followed his black labrador, Bletsoe, which had been a gift from Browne. In 1869, after a dispute with the gunsmith's wife, who found her lodger's eccentric ways unacceptable, FitzGerald
moved into his last home, a somewhat dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of Woodbridge, and there, as he put it, he settled to await the final act. His requirements, always modest in the extreme, had become even fewer in the course of time. For decades he had eaten a diet of vegetables, offended as he was by the consumption of large quantities of rare meat which his contemporaries considered necessary to keep one's strength up, and now he altogether dispensed with the chore of cooking, which struck him as absurd, and took little but bread, butter and tea. On fine days he sat in the garden surrounded by doves, and at other times often spent long periods at the window, which afforded a view of a goose green fringed by pollarded trees. In this solitude, as his letters show, he continued in remarkably good cheer, even though he was at times assailed by what he called the blue devil of melancholy, which had been the undoing years before of his beautiful sister Andalusia. In the autumn of 1877 he went to London once more, to see a performance of
The Magic Flute.
At the last moment, however, he was so dispirited by the November fog, the wet, and the dirt in the streets, that he decided against the planned visit to Covent Garden, which, he wrote, would doubtless only have spoiled the memories of Malibran and Sontag so dear to him. I think it is now best, he wrote, to attend these Operas as given in the Theatre of one's own Recollections. But there was to be little time for FitzGerald to stage such performances in his mind, for the imaginary music was drowned out by the tinnitus that troubled him now. Moreover, his eyesight grew steadily weaker. He was obliged to wear spectacles with blue- or green-tinted lenses, and had his house-keeper's boy read to him. A photograph from the 1870s, the only one he ever had taken, shows him with head averted because (he wrote

apologetically to his nieces) his ailing eyes blinked too much if he looked directly into the camera. – Every summer, FitzGerald paid a visit of a few days to his friend George Crabbe, who was vicar
of Merton in Norfolk. In June 1883 he made the journey for the last time. Merton is no further than sixty miles from Woodbridge, but travelling there over the meandering railway network that had spread everywhere during FitzGerald's lifetime involved five changes and took a whole day. What was stirring within FitzGerald's breast as he leant back in his carriage watching the hedgerows and cornfields pass by outside is not recorded, but perhaps it resembled the feelings he once experienced as he sat in the mail coach from Leicester to Cambridge, when the sight of the summer countryside made him feel like an angel because suddenly, without knowing why, he found he had tears of happiness in his eyes. At Merton, Crabbe met him from the train in his dog cart. It had been a long and especially hot day, but FitzGerald remarked on the cool air and remained wrapped tight in his plaid as they drove. At table he drank a little tea but declined to eat anything. Around nine he asked for a glass of brandy and water and retired upstairs to bed. Early next morning, Crabbe heard him moving about his room, but when he went somewhat later to summon him to breakfast he found him stretched out on his bed and no longer among the living.

The shadows were lengthening as I walked in from Boulge Park to Woodbridge, where I put up for the night at the Bull Inn. The room to which I was shown by the landlord was under the roof. The clinking of glasses in the bar and a low murmur of talk rose up the staircase, with the occasional exclamation or laugh. After time was called, things gradually quietened down. I heard the woodwork of the old half-timber building, which had expanded in the heat of the day and was now contracting fraction by fraction, creaking and groaning. In the gloom of the unfamiliar room, my eyes
involuntarily turned in the direction from which the sounds came, looking for the crack that might run along the low ceiling, the spot where the plaster was flaking from the wall or the mortar crumbling behind the panelling. And if I closed my eyes for a while it felt as if I were in a cabin aboard a ship on the high seas, as if the whole building were rising on the swell of a wave, shuddering a little on the crest, and then, with a sigh, subsiding into the depths. I did not get to sleep until day was breaking and the song of a blackbird was in my ear, and shortly thereafter I awoke once more from a dream in which I beheld FitzGerald, my companion of the day before, sitting at a little blue metal table in his garden in his shirtsleeves and wearing a black silk jabot and a tall top hat. Hollyhocks grown higher than a man were flowering around him, chickens were scratching about in a sandy hollow under an elder tree, and his black dog, Bletsoe, lay stretched out in the shade, whilst I, though in the dream I was unable to see myself and was thus like a ghost, sat opposite FitzGerald, playing a game of dominoes with him. Beyond the flower garden an even green park, utterly deserted, extended to the very edge of the world, where the minarets of Khorasan soared. It was not, however, the park of the FitzGerald estate at Boulge, but that of a country house at the foot of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Ireland where I had been a guest for a short time some years ago. In my dream I could make out far off in the distance the three-storey ivy-covered house where the Ashburys presumably still lead their secluded lives to this day; at least, it was a very secluded and indeed quite bizarre life at the time when I met them. Coming from the mountains, I had enquired after accommodation in a small, gloomy shop in Clarahill. I remember
that the proprietor, a Mr O'Hare, who was wearing a curious cinnamon-coloured overcoat of thin calico, involved me in a lengthy conversation concerning Newton's theory of gravity. At some point in this talk, Mr O'Hare suddenly interrupted himself and exclaimed: The Ashburys might put you up. One of the daughters came in here some years ago with a note offering Bed and Breakfast. I was supposed to display it in the shop window. I can't think what became of it or whether they ever had any guests. Perhaps I removed it when the letters had paled in the sun. Or perhaps they came and removed it themselves. Mr O'Hare then drove me to the Ashburys in his delivery van and waited on the weedy forecourt until I was asked in. I had to knock several times before the door was opened and Catherine stood there in her faded red summer dress, with an odd stiffness that suggested she had been arrested in mid-movement by the sight of this unannounced stranger. She gazed at me wide-eyed, or rather, she looked right through me. Once I had explained why I was there, it took some time for her to recover her composure, to step a pace aside, and gesture with her left hand, scarcely perceptibly, for me to come in and take a seat in the hall. As she walked away across the stone flags, in silence, I noticed that she was barefoot. Without a sound she vanished in the darkness of the background, and just as soundlessly reappeared a few minutes later, to escort me up a staircase the broad steps of which made climbing astonishingly easy, to the first floor and along various passages to a large room, where the high windows afforded a view over the roofs of the stables and outhouses and the kitchen garden onto haymeadows combed by the wind. Beyond there were trees in various shades of green and, above them, the faint line of
the mountains, barely distinguishable from the even blue of the sky. I cannot say how long I stood by one of the three windows, engrossed in that view; all I remember is hearing Catherine, who was waiting in the doorway, say, Will this be all right? and that, as I turned to her, I stammered some incoherent reply. Only when Catherine had gone did I take in the full size of the room. The floorboards were covered with a velvety layer of dust. The curtains had gone and the paper had been stripped off the walls, which had traces of whitewash with bluish streaks like the skin of a dying body, and reminded me of one of those maps of the far north on which next to nothing is marked. The only items of furniture in the room were a table and chair and a narrow collapsible iron bedstead of the kind that army officers used to have with them on campaigns. Whenever I rested on that bed over the next few days, my consciousness began to dissolve at the edges, so that at times I could hardly have said how I had got there or indeed where I was. Repeatedly I felt as if I were lying in a traumatic fever in some kind of field hospital. From outside I heard the cries of the peacocks, which went right through me, but what I saw in my mind's eye was not the yard in which they perched on the very top of the junk that had been piling up there for years but a battlefield somewhere in Lombardy over which the vultures circled, and, all around, a country laid waste by war. The armies had long since marched on. I alone, falling from one swoon into the next, was left in a house that had been looted of everything. These images became the more real in my head because the Ashburys lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up. It struck me
that all the members of the family were continually wandering hither and thither along the corridors and up and down the stairs. One rarely saw them sitting calm and collected, singly or together. Even their meals they usually ate standing. What work they did always had about it something aimless and meaningless and seemed not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress. Ever since leaving school in 1974, Edmund, the youngest, had been working on a fat-bellied boat a good ten yards in length, although, as he casually informed me, he knew nothing about boat-building and had no intention of ever going to sea in his unshapely barge. It's not going to be launched. It's just something I do. I have to have something to do. Mrs Ashbury collected flower seeds in paper bags. Once she had written the name, date, location, colour and other details on the bags, she would clap them over the dead heads of the blooms, in the overgrown flower beds or further afield in the meadows, and tie them up with string. Then she would cut off the stalks, bring the bagged heads indoors and hang them up on a much-knotted line that criss-crossed what was once the library. There were so many of these white-bagged flower-stalks hanging under the library ceiling that they resembled clouds of paper, and when Mrs Ashbury stood on the library steps to hang up or take down the rustling seed-bags she half-vanished among them like a saint ascending into heaven. Once they had been taken down, the bags were stored under some inscrutable system on the shelves, which had evidently long since been unburdened of books. I do not think Mrs Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seed she collected might one day fall on, any more than Catherine and her two sisters Clarissa and Christina knew why they spent
several hours every day in one of the north-facing rooms, where they had stored great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multi-coloured pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items. Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. The movement they made as they drew the thread sideways and upwards with every stitch reminded me of things that were so far back in the past that I felt my heart sink at the thought of how little time now remained. On one occasion Clarissa told me that she and her sisters had once intended to start an interior decorating business, but the plan came to nothing, she said, both because of their inexperience and because there was no call in their neighbourhood for such a service. Perhaps that was why they mostly undid what they had sewn either on the same day, the next day or the day after that. It was also possible that in their imagination they envisaged something of such extraordinary beauty that the work they completed invariably disappointed them. At least that was what I thought, when on one of my visits to their workshop they showed me the pieces that had been spared the unstitching. One of them, a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb-fashion, which hung on a headless tailor's dummy, was a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection that it seemed almost to have come to life, and at the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.