A Man of Genius Read Free

the completed manuscript in her bag towards Dean & Munday in Paternoster-Row when she didreally see him. It was he. She knew she was often too forward, but now she hung back. This was strange. And after so many detours to encounter him. Perhaps it was because the cathedral bell clanged in her ears.
    Then by coincidence she was at tea with Mary Davies and in he walked, along with Richard Perry.
    â€˜We have met,’ he said smiling as Mary Davies came forward to make an introduction.
    â€˜We have,’ she said. ‘I think you had recently returned to London, Mr James.’
    He must often have been absent or she’d have seen him. How could he not be noticed?
    â€˜Yes,’ he replied. With only a trace of the lilt she’d discerned at Mr Hughes’s dinner. ‘I travel a little, on the Continent and Dublin.’
    He’d said Dublin, she remembered, but he’d not mentioned other cities.
    â€˜You are Irish?’
    He nodded gravely as if she’d offered a deserved rebuke and looked her straight in the eye. ‘But do not hold it against me, Miss St Clair.’
    When the first cups of tea had been drunk and Mary Davies’s small hard cakes crunched and the general talk on new plays, books and music had subsided, Robert was back on the dullness of the present post-war moment, adding this time the failure of England to have a proper revolution. It had, he said, peaked too early. If it had waited, it might have gone beyond France, shown the world a real ending of thrones and domination, of regurgitated thought. Napoleon was a great man, yet he could not avoid his French heritage.
    Mary Davies pulled her scarlet Indian shawl tight round her shoulders to express discomfort. Her young brother had died fighting this bad man in the wars he caused, but she was too polite openly to protest. ‘Would you care for more tea?’ she asked, raising the pink china pot.
    Robert was undeterred. For whom was he speaking? For his friend Richard Perry – or for her? It must be for her: she had quickly surmised that Richard Perry was a frequent, captive and captivated auditor.
    The French had ruined it all, sullied the noble ideas of liberty and equality in government and art. England had colluded. No one had now the stomach to change anything. He’d once thought to go to America. But it was all money there, it was money they’d fought their masters for. Money! What was money? So now, so long after all this chaos and error, this was the place for real change, for complete revolution. He thumped his broad chest, then struck his forehead. ‘Here.’
    Richard Perry smiled and nodded, his intense eyes sweeping his friend’s features. He knew enough not to interrupt Robert James in full utopian flow.
    What did he really think of the ideas rather than the man? What did she?
    Surely she thought nothing at all. Just watched and listened, enthralled by the sound of his speaking.
    So many years of hearing Gilbert’s impenetrable words repeated by her mother like psalms and litanies to a Sunday congregation. They swept over and through her infant, childish, then adolescent head as Caroline fell into an almost religious reverie.
    It irritated her daughter as physically as any eczema with its pustules on her neck and ears.
    This talk was quite different, of course.
    Mary Davies was thoroughly annoyed. It was not conversation for the tea-table and mixed company. Thoughts pinged and twanged over the pink, gold-rimmed cups in only one direction and in a most ungenteel manner.
    The guests left all in a rush. Mary Davies was further offended that her friend didn’t stay behind to chat woman to woman and exclaim on this odd vain man. But, though Ann professed independence, Mary always thought her too concerned with men and their talk.Richard Perry, a widower, was in a hurry to visit an only sister who’d just borne a son in Clerkenwell. So Ann and Robert were left walking off together