Introduction

THE SUBJECT OF romantic love has been fiction’s prime obsession ever since Heathcliff called to Cathy from the Yorkshire moors, ever since the faithless Willoughby broke Marianne Dashwood’s heart – and long before. And it’s easy to see why. As people in the West believe less and less in religious salvation, so they seek meaning and redemption, happiness and comfort in union with a beloved other. That this search may sometimes engender jealousy, pain and disappointment only adds to its fatal attraction as a subject for the novelist.

I’ve added my bit to the vast store of literature about love in several of my books, but I have also paid close attention to love’s quieter relation – friendship. For it’s my belief that friendship, which often begins in early childhood and follows us all through our lives, is a formative and precious thing, able to influence our moral positioning in the world, teach us the rules of kindness and generosity, and anchor us to sanity when times are bad.

This small book traces two significant friendships: the bond between Robert Merivel and John Pearce in Restoration, and that between Gustav Perle and Anton Zwiebel in The Gustav Sonata.

It was interesting to note that in the 1995 movie of Restoration, the producers felt that the primary subject the novel explores, namely the bond between Merivel and Pearce – forever in conflict with Merivel’s helpless adoration of the King and the material blessings his power can bestow – wasn’t a strong enough theme for the film. They rewrote the story to give centrality to the role of Celia, the youngest of the King’s mistresses, Merivel’s ‘paper bride’ whom he is forbidden to touch.

Celia is placed in my book as the agent of Merivel’s downfall. She serves the arc of the story, but emotionally, she isn’t important. What Merivel feels for her is simple forbidden lust. What he feels for Pearce is not only lifelong affection; he also understands that Pearce is the living embodiment of his own conscience, that only in Pearce’s stern heart resides any true knowledge of what he, Merivel, is, what he has been and what he could become. Merivel’s persistent failure to live up to Pearce’s vision is the engine that drives the narrative. It is through these multiple failures that we get to know Merivel: his acts of generosity, his talents as a doctor, his weakness for material splendour, his moments of repentance and self-laceration. It is also where much of the humour of the novel resides. In downgrading the friendship between Merivel and Pearce to an incoherent sub-story, the movie writers literally lost the plot.

No film has yet been made of The Gustav Sonata. It would be difficult to realise, because this story traces a friendship that lasts for sixty years. We meet the boys at a kindergarten in Switzerland when they are five years old, and what is set down straight away is Gustav’s instantaneous longing to make Anton his friend.

Anton’s life, as the talented and emotional son of rich and affectionate Jewish parents, differs in almost all respects from Gustav’s. Gustav is the lonely, neglected son of a hard-hearted single mother, given no toys, no physical nurturing, no encouragement, and only told repeatedly that he must practise ‘self-mastery’. What he sees in Anton is a child who is free, who can become what he wishes to become, with the blessing of everyone around him.

It is as though, for Gustav, Anton has something god-like about him, an aura of wonder and power. By attaching himself to Anton, never able to let that attachment fade or die, Gustav will suffer much heartache. But he intuits early on that the other boy has a deep need of him, and that eventually, he may be the one person who will stand between Anton and his wilful self-destruction. This task, too, can sometimes be the duty of a friend.

I have tried to make coherent the trajectory of these friendships in the extracts from Restoration and The Gustav Sonata that follow. Inevitably, there are ellipses in both stories – events taking place ‘offstage’ where we can’t see them. But it’s my belief that readers are much cleverer than some authors assume, and that here, they will enjoy the process of filling in the gaps.

Restoration

The beating heart

AT CAIUS COLLEGE, Cambridge, in 1647, I met my poor friend, Pearce.

His room was below mine on the cold stairway. We were both by then students of anatomy and, though our natures are so antipathetic, our rejection of Galenic theory, coupled with our desire to discover the precise function of each part of the body in relation to the whole, formed a bond between us.

One evening, Pearce came up to my room in a state of hilarious perturbation. His face, habitually grey-toned and flaky, was rubicund and damp, his stern green eyes suddenly afflicted with a louche brightness. ‘Merivel, Merivel,’ he babbled, ‘come down to my room. A person is standing in it who has a visible heart!’

‘Have you been drinking, Pearce?’ I asked. ‘Have you broken your vow of No Sack?’

‘No!’ exploded Pearce. ‘Now come down and you will see for yourself this extraordinary phenomenon. And, for a shilling, the person says he will permit us to touch it.’

‘Touch his heart?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not a cadaver then, if its mind is on money?’

‘Now come, Merivel, before he flees into the night and is lost to our research for all eternity.’

(Pearce, I report in parentheses, has this flowery, sometimes melodramatic way of speaking that is interestingly at odds with the clipped, odourless and self-denying man he is. I often feel that no anatomical experiment would be capable of discovering the function of these ornate sentences in relation to the whole, soberly-dressed person, unless it is a universal but contradictory fact about Quakers that, whereas their gait, habit and ritual are monotonous and plain, their heads are secretly filled with a rapturous and fandangling speech.)

We descended to Pearce’s room, where a fire was burning in the small grate. In front of the fire stood a man of perhaps forty years. I bade him good evening, but he only nodded at me.

‘Shall I unbutton?’ he asked Pearce.

‘Yes!’ said Pearce, his voice choking with anticipation. ‘Unbutton, Sir!’

I watched as the man took off his coat and lace collar and began loosening his shirt. He let the shirt fall to the floor. Bound to his chest, and covering his heart, was a steel plate. Pearce, at this moment, took a handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his moist brow. The man removed the plate, under which was a wad of linen, a little stained with pus.

Carefully, he unbound the linen and revealed to us a large hole in his breast, about the size of a Pippin apple, in the depths of which, as I leaned forward to look more closely at it, I saw a pink and moist fleshy substance, moving all the time with a regular pulse.

‘See?’ exclaimed Pearce, the heat of whose excited body seemed to fill the room with a tropical dampness. ‘See it retract and thrust out again? We are witnessing a living, beating heart!’

The man smiled and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A fracture of my ribs, occasioned by a fall from my horse two years ago, was brought to a terrible suppuration, voiding such a quantity of putrefaction that my doctors feared it would never heal. It did, however. You can see the sconce of the old ulcer at the edge of the hole here. But its ravages were so deep as to expose the organ beneath.’

I was dumbfounded. To observe, in a living being, standing nonchalantly by a fire, as if about to welcome friends for a few rounds of Bezique, the systole and diastole of his heart affected me profoundly. I began to understand why Pearce was in such a lather of excitement. But then – and this is why I set down the incident as a possible beginning to the story now unfolding round me – Pearce produced a shilling from the greasy leather purse in which he kept his pitiful worldly income and gave it to the stranger, and the man took it and said: ‘You may touch it if you wish.’

I let Pearce go first. I saw his thin, white hand creep forwards and tremblingly enter the thoracic cavity. The man remained still and smiling. He didn’t flinch. ‘You may,’ he said to Pearce, ‘put your hand around the heart and exert gentle pressure.’

Pearce’s thin mouth dropped open. Then he swallowed and withdrew his hand. ‘I cannot do that, Sir,’ he stammered.

‘Then perhaps your friend will?’ said the man.

I rolled back the lace at my wrist. Now, my own hand was shaking. I remembered that, just prior to Pearce’s appearance in my room, I had cast two pieces of coal onto my fire and hadn’t washed my hands since, but only wiped them carelessly on the seat of my breeches. I examined my palm for coal dust. It was faintly smudged with grey. I licked it and rubbed it again on my velvet buttocks. The open-hearted man watched me with an utter lack of concern. At my elbow, Pearce, in his vaporous dampness, was breathing irritatingly through his mouth.

My hand entered the cavity. I opened my fingers and, with the same care I had applied, as a boy, to the stealing of eggs from birds’ nests, took hold of the heart. Still, the man showed no sign of pain. Fractionally, I tightened my grip. The beat remained strong and regular. I was about to withdraw my hand when the stranger said: ‘Are you touching the organ, Sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘don’t you feel the pressure of my fingers?’

‘No. I feel nothing at all.’

Pearce’s breathing, at my side, was rasping, like that of a hounded rodent. A pearl of sweat teetered on the tip of his pink nose. And my own mind was now forced to contemplate an astounding phenomenon: I am encircling a human heart, a living human heart with my hand. I am now, in fact, squeezing it with controlled but not negligible force. And the man suffers no pain whatsoever.

Ergo, the organ we call the heart and which is defined, in our human consciousness, as the seat – or even deified as the throne – of all powerful emotion, from unbearable sorrow to ecstatic love, is in itself utterly without feeling.

I withdrew my hand. I felt as full of trouble as my poor Quaker friend, to whom I would have turned for a tot of brandy, except that I knew he never had any. So while our visitor calmly strapped on his linen pad and his steel plate and stooped to pick up his shirt, Pearce and I sat down on his extremely hard settle and were, for a good few minutes, devoid of words.

From that day, I was unable to have the same reverence for my own heart as other men have for theirs.

Differences of opinion

IT IS INTERESTING to note the ease with which I had let my faith fall from me. Any love I had hitherto felt for God, I had given to the King, who had reciprocated (not as God had done, by speaking through the mouths of fat bishops and having frequent recourse to long periods of enigmatic silence) by laughing at my jokes and giving me royal kisses far sweeter to me than any embrace I’d had from any woman. It was the absence of these tender expressions of friendship and affection that had plunged me into such despair and sent me scrabbling about in the darkness once more, in search of my lost Redeemer, however cruel He might turn out to be.

This search of mine, these glow-worm prayers I sent out into the starry sky above Meg Storey’s roof, if they failed to bring God back to comfort me, did, after a few weeks, send me my old friend, Pearce, who arrived at Bidnold on a mule. Strapped to the mule’s back, were Pearce’s pitiful worldly possessions (referred to by me, rather wittily, I think, as his ‘burning coals’, in reference to a mad Quaker at Westminster who had wandered about calling the fops to repentance with a dish of the said coals balanced on his head). What Pearce owned, in fact, was the following: three Bibles, one copy of his beloved Harvey’s De Generatione Animalium, various other anatomical tracts, including works by Vesalius and da Vinci and Needham’s Disquisitio Anatomica De Formato Foetu, some quill pens, a black coat and hat, two pairs of black breeches, some torn shirts and stockings, a box of rusty surgical instruments, a single pewter mug and plate and a china soup ladle made in Lancashire. This ladle was the only legacy of his mother, who had died in poverty to send Pearce to Cambridge. Sometimes, in the melancholy moods that so frequently afflict him, Pearce would hold the ladle close to his body and let his long fingers caress its cold surface, in the manner of a lute player plucking a living tune from its dead, hollowed wood.

I was glad, I will admit, to see Pearce. When Will Gates informed me that a man with a long neck and dressed in black was coming up the drive on a mule, I knew it could be none other than my old friend and former fellow-student and I ran out to greet him.

It was drizzling slightly and both Pearce and the mule appeared wet and muddy.

‘We have come from the Fens,’ he announced in his voice of doom.

‘From the Fens, Pearce?’ I said. ‘What were you doing there?’

‘I am a Fenlander now, Merivel,’ he said. ‘My work and life are there.’

‘I notice that you put them in that order, Pearce: work first, life second.’

‘Naturally. Except that the two are inseparable.’

‘Well, I do not work at all, except a little painting.’

‘Painting? How peculiar.’

‘You’ve left the Royal College, then?’

‘Yes. I work only with the insane. Take the mule, will you, and see she’s fed? We’re both very weak.’

Pearce then dismounted, staggered a pace or two and fell to his knees. I shouted for Will Gates, who came running like a bullet, and together he and I helped Pearce into the house. I asked the groom to rescue the ‘burning coals’ quickly, before the mule died and rolled over on the soup ladle.

We put Pearce to bed in the least colourful of my rooms, the Olive Room, a north-facing bedchamber, in which I had left intact some dark panelling and had curtained the bed in a sombre green, only enlivened by a little crimson fringe. Here, after drinking some venison broth and enquiring whether his books could be sent up to him, he fell into a sleep that lasted thirty-seven hours. During most of this time, I stayed at his bedside, checking his pulse now and then, listening to his breathing, dozing a little and sipping claret and staring at his elongated grey face, which I found at once so irritating and yet so inexpressibly dear to me.

When he woke up at last, I was anxious to tell him of the despair into which I had fallen and to see whether he could suggest any remedy. But he had, it turned out, made the arduous journey on the mule from the Fens for one reason only: to reveal to me that he had found, in his work with the mad people of what he called the New Bedlam, located somewhere between Waterbeach and Whittlesea, a deep and profound sense of peace, and to try to persuade me to leave my life of ‘vanity and show’ to join him in his labours.

‘I sense,’ he said, staring at my freckled, ruddy and bewigged visage, ‘that you’re not at ease, Merivel. The light has gone out of your eyes. Luxury is suffocating your vital flame.’

I looked down. Though I had a terrible urge to confess to Pearce, amid childlike tears, that it was not luxury that had robbed me of my happiness, but the King’s abandonment of me, and that I was indeed a desperate man, though not at all for the reasons he surmised, I refrained from doing so, knowing that it would only lead Pearce into more flowery discussion of how the insane are the innocent of the earth, and how, only by succouring them ‘like little children’ can we be saved.

‘Thank you, Pearce, for your concern,’ I said, ‘but you are completely wrong. If my eyes appear a little lacklustre, it’s merely because I have watched at your bedside for a great quantity of time with hardly any sleep. As to my vital flame, it is burning very brightly.’

‘I know you, Merivel. When you stood in my room in Caius and put your hand on that man’s heart, then it was burning!’

‘Indeed! And if you had seen me in the park the other day with my oil paints –’

‘You hope to find salvation in art?’

‘I’m not speaking necessarily of salvation …’

‘But I am, Merivel. For is not death the supreme moment of mortal existence, the hour in which we reap what we have sown?’

‘You choose to see it like that, Pearce.’

‘No. I do not choose. The Lord tells me it is so. And what are you sowing, Merivel, here in your palace?’

‘It’s merely a manor, Pearce.’

‘No! It’s a palace! And full of iniquity, if these scarlet tassels are anything to go by.’

‘They’re nothing to go by.’

‘Answer me, Merivel. What are you sowing?’

Again, I looked down. The agricultural metaphors with which the Bible is strewn have always struck me as simplistic and crude, but I particularly did not like Pearce’s repeated emphasis on the word ‘sowing’, for it somehow evoked in my mind my letter to the King, which had been intended as a seed in the forgetful Royal brain, but which had indubitably fallen upon stony ground.

I looked up at Pearce, white and gaunt on his white pillow.

‘Colour,’ I said. ‘Colour and light. I am sowing these.’

‘What pagan, freakish piffle you do spout, Merivel!’