The romantic, p.1
The Romantic, page 1
William Boyd
* * *
THE ROMANTIC
The Real Life of Cashel Greville Ross
A Novel
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
About the Author
William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France.
by the same author
NOVELS
A Good Man in Africa
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
Armadillo
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960
Any Human Heart
Restless
Ordinary Thunderstorms
Waiting for Sunrise
Solo
Sweet Caress
Love is Blind
Trio
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
On the Yankee Station
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
Fascination
The Dream Lover
The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth
NON-FICTION
Bamboo
PLAYS
School Ties
Six Parties
Longing
The Argument
For Susan
A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the mystery.
John Keats
A novel is a mirror, taking a walk down a big road.
Stendhal
Author’s Note
‘I was born somewhere in Scotland, in the early morning of 14th December 1799. Later that day, the former President of the United States of America, George Washington, died at his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. I believe there was no connection between the two events. It is my birthday tomorrow and I will be eighty-two years old.’
And so begins the unfinished, disordered, somewhat baffling autobiography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), an autobiography – plus related material – that came into my possession some years ago. It consists of around a hundred pages of handwritten reminiscences, dated December 1881, along with tied bundles of letters received, drafts of letters sent, some little sketches, maps and plans, some photographs, some published books filled with notes and marginalia, some small paintings, etchings and silhouettes and a few objects – a tinder box, a musket ball, a belt buckle, a tiny brittle lock of hair tied with a faded silk ribbon, a few silver dollars, a fragment of Greek amphora, and so on.
This small but intriguing trove was all that had eventually amounted from the life of this individual. It was, in a real way, everything that remained of him and was a fragmentary history of the time he had spent on this small planet. He had tried to write the story of his life, but failed.
However fascinating, these scribbled pages and these few artefacts are not much upon which to construct a portrait of the man – not much for a lifespan of eighty-odd years. What do we leave behind us when we die? At first it seems prodigious: all that mountain of ‘stuff’ we acquire, all the possessions, the bric-a-brac and copious documentation accumulated over the average life. But inexorably, and surprisingly swiftly, it begins to diminish and after a few decades, a half-century, a century, it can amount to virtually nothing.
It depends on who you are, of course – but most people don’t leave much of a trace or record behind them once their goods and chattels are dispersed; once the memories of this or that individual quickly blur and fade as the younger familiars die out themselves. Diaries and letters moulder and become either bland or incomprehensible; legal documents lurk unsought-for in filing cabinets and bank vaults; photographs of family and friends become unidentifiable – become photographs of anonymous people – and while anecdote and legend may survive a little longer, assuming that the person did anything of note or achieved any sort of fame, modest or otherwise, the fact is that for the huge majority of people in human history their fate, after a couple of generations or three, is to become effectively unknown, forgotten, a ghost. All that remains is a name on a headstone, a notation in a census-count, an online obituary, a mention in a newspaper and – if they’re lucky – a date of birth and a date of death.
So, who was this Cashel Greville Ross? What was the nature of his real life? How can its unique ontology be reconstructed? At least there is some evidence to hand, to begin with, but how far can it be trusted? There are many large, conspicuous gaps. To attempt to embark on writing a biography of this person – a total stranger – a man born well over two hundred years ago, seemed to me to be, if not entirely impossible, then an enterprise that would consist of meagre, unsatisfying supposition, in the end – all ‘perhaps’, ‘conceivably’, ‘might have’, ‘possibly’. It would be half a life.
Maybe that is true of biography in general. A wise man once said, ‘All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts.’fn1 If this first part is correct, then perhaps it’s a more interesting proposition to extend that licence. The objective should be to go further than the documented facts, to go beyond that boundary of the factual palisade. And, intriguingly, it is only fiction that allows us to do this. Instead of trying to write a biography of Cashel Greville Ross, I thought there was a very good case to be made that the story of his life, his real life, would, paradoxically, be much better served if it were written instead – openly, knowingly, candidly – as a novel.
W.B.
Trieste
February 2022
1
Cashel always claimed that his first memory was of a man in black, leading a black horse. A man who – he then suspected – wanted to kill him, for some reason. This occurred when he was about four or five or six years old (he would vaguely recall) and the encounter took place when he was mooching around late one wintry afternoon in the big copse behind the cottage where he lived in County Cork, Ireland. He heard distant hunting horns and snatched halloos from the fields beyond and then, closer to hand at the fringes of the copse, out of sight, came a thrashing and snapping of vegetation, of something sizeable pushing and forcing its way through the undergrowth.
For some reason Cashel felt fear grow in him and chill his body. And then, wheeling round a substantial stand of holly, came a man leading a horse, a big, muscled, ebony stallion, huffing and blowing, its neck and shoulders clotted with a beige lather. Cashel could smell the tack and the musky, salty whiff of the horse’s sweat thickening the air beneath the trees. The tall man holding the reins was in a black, knee-length coat, silver-buttoned, wearing a black top hat that made him seem even taller. His black riding boots were polished to a bright glossiness, with small blunt silver spurs, Cashel noticed.
This was Death, Cashel thought – so he claimed – come to seek him out. Or the man in black was the Devil himself.
But it wasn’t Death and it wasn’t the Devil – it was a man leading an exhausted horse through a wood. A square-jawed man with a wide moustache, tobacco brown.
‘What’s your name, little boy?’ he asked.
‘I’m Cashel, sir.’
‘Where do you live, Cashel?’
‘In the cottage on Glanmire Lane.’
‘Ah. Do you, now …’
The man stared intently at him from his great height and reached out his free hand as if to touch his face – or catch me by the throat, Cashel thought, and strangle me dead. But then the stallion stamped its feet and whinnied, tugging at the reins the horseman held in his gloved left hand.
‘He’s lost a shoe so I can’t hunt,’ the man said reasonably, as if he owed Cashel an explanation. ‘I’ll give that bastard farrier a kick up the arse, all right.’
He pronounced the word ‘ahse’. His accent was strange, Cashel noted, the same as the girls who lived in Stillwell Court. English voices. They didn’t speak in the same way as he did or the other people he knew.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’d better cut along home, Cashel, old chap,’ the man went on. ‘The hunt’s coming through and they might take you for a fox.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Cashel turned and pelted breathlessly home to the cottage where he lived with his Aunt Elspeth.
He found her in the scullery, peeling potatoes.
‘I’ve just seen the Devil,’ he said, trying to control his panting, and described the man in black with the wide moustache, leading the giant horse, and the strange accent he had.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ his aunt said, drying her hands briskly on her apron. ‘That’d be one of Sir Guy’s friends, over from England for the hunting. Don’t be a gomeral. The Devil’s not coming for you yet, no, no.’ She laughed quickly to herself. ‘He’s got plenty more work to do before he comes looking for you, Cashel Greville.’
She heaved him up into her arms – she was a tall, strong young woman – kissed his cheek and took him into the parlour to look out of the window onto the lane. Half a dozen hunters were cantering heedlessly do wn it, great clods of mud thrown up, spattering, from the horses’ hooves.
‘Was he nice to you, this man in the top hat? Was he a nice man?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he ask you your name?’
‘He did.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. Good.’
‘And he asked me where I lived.’
‘And did you tell him that?’
‘I did.’
She set him down on the tiled floor.
‘Was that wrong to tell him, Auntie?’
‘Come along and have your tea.’fn1
Elspeth Soutar, Cashel’s aunt, a Scot from the Dumfries region, was unmarried and in her early thirties. She was an educated woman and governess to the two daughters of Sir Guy and Lady Evangeline Stillwell, of Stillwell Court, County Cork, Ireland. The girls were Rosamond (sixteen) and Hester (fourteen) and Elspeth had been responsible for their education for almost ten years, now. It was tacitly apparent to everyone that her tenure as governess was coming to its inevitable conclusion as the girls’ entry into society approached. Thereafter, there would be no necessity for any more pedagogical refinement.
Cashel knew Rosamond and Hester well. They would play with him when he was a toddler, almost as if he were a household pet. Sometimes they would dress him up as a doll, in a frilly skirt and bonnet, or a toy soldier, or a savage Aborigine. They were fond of him and kissed and carried him and hugged him a great deal until he grew too rough and ungainly. But the familiarity remained. They had a host of nicknames for him: the Cashelmite, Cash-Cash-Coo, Cashelnius the Great. They could almost have been older sisters but for the social distance. Elspeth Soutar was staff, after all, and, therefore, so was her little nephew.
Cashel never saw Sir Guy. A remote, almost mythic figure, he seemed always away – in Dublin, in London, on the Continent – and Cashel never really ventured into the grand salons of the house. He tended to stay in the nursery with the girls. Consequently, he very rarely met Lady Evangeline either, who, it seemed, was always ill and stayed for months at a time in her suite of rooms on the second floor, attended by a nurse and receiving weekly visits, all year round, from old Dr Killigrew with his patent medications from the nearby town of Castlemountallen. The few glimpses and encounters he managed left him with the impression of someone very stiff and upright, but at the same time very pale and fragile. As thin as paper, he thought – as thin as crumpled waxed paper.
Once, when Rosamond and Hester were wheeling him around the corridors in a small toy cart, they bumped into Lady Evangeline, fully dressed in a lace headcap and a gown of shimmering ultramarine silk, being helped down the stairs to some social engagement.
‘Who is this little boy?’ she asked Rosamond.
‘He’s Elspeth’s charge, Mama,’ Rosamond said. ‘Her little nephew. The orphan, remember?’
‘I don’t recall,’ Lady Evangeline said vaguely. ‘Or perhaps I do, now you mention it. The orphan. Yes. Is he a well-behaved little boy?’
‘Oh, yes. He knows that if he misbehaves we’ll give him a good thrashing,’ Hester said.
Lady Evangeline smiled thinly and the nurse led her carefully down the stairs to the drawing room.
When he was old enough to understand – when he was five – Aunt Elspeth sat him down and told him the sad story of the deaths of his mother and father, Moira and Findlay Greville, both drowned in 1800 when the packet to Belfast had sunk in a storm in the Irish Sea. There was a small amateur double portrait of a wooden-faced couple set on the mantel of the sitting room, the only visual record of his parents.
‘They left on a boat for Belfast before you,’ Elspeth explained. ‘You were meant to go with them but you were sick with the croup so I was told to follow with you a week later. Thank the Lord you didn’t go with them.’
‘Was it a shipwreck?’ Cashel asked.
‘Yes. The ship went down with all hands.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘There were no survivors. Everyone was drowned.’ Elspeth smiled sadly. ‘That’s how come you’re living with me, my darling.’ She stroked his thick fair hair, ploughing it with her stiff fingers. ‘I’ll never be your true mother but in every other shape or form I’m just as much a mother to you, wee lad, don’t you worry.’
Elspeth had placed the double portrait in his lap as she gently related the story to him. Cashel looked at the ashen-faced puppets that were meant to be depictions of his mother and father. The man had a dense, spade-like beard. The woman wore a tight bonnet and seemed to stare out of the picture with sightless eyes.
‘That’s Findlay Greville,’ Elspeth pointed. ‘And that’s my dear wee sister, Moira, bless her soul.’
‘So, if I was on that ship I’d have drownded as well,’ Cashel said, the reality of his situation slowly beginning to solidify itself in his young mind. He didn’t know the words then, but he was beginning to understand the concept of his being parentless, of being an orphan.
‘I’m very glad I didn’t go on that ship, Auntie,’ he said. ‘And I’m very glad I came to live with you.’
He was surprised at the ardour of the hug she gave him and by the shine of tears in her eyes.
‘You’re a good boy, Cashel Greville. The best.’
Of course, Elspeth Soutar, being a very proficient governess, made sure that Cashel was as well educated as the Stillwell girls had been. He was writing and reading at the age of five. When, aged seven, he was sent to the dame-school in Castlemountallen he was immediately moved up two classes to study with the nine- and ten-year-olds. He still found the lessons – Latin, Greek, composition, mathematics, divinity – very easy and straightforward, he said.fn2
Life at Stillwell Court in the early nineteenth century was as ordered and seemingly unchanging as it had been throughout the eighteenth. The extensive demesne had been gifted to one Colonel Gervase Stillwell, an officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army of 1649. The grant consisted of some five thousand acres in total, spread largely along the north bank of the valley of the Baillybeg river between Castlemountallen and Fermoy, with other plantations and farmlands added elsewhere in County Kerry and County Waterford. Gervase Stillwell, in addition, became the 1st Baronet Stillwell in 1659. In 1782 when Sir Guy Stillwell, 5th Baronet, inherited the property on the death of his father, Fielding, he sold off the distant Kerry and Waterford farms and woodlands and used the capital to build Stillwell Court, a project that took the best part of a decade, cost many thousands of pounds and resulted in the Stillwell family incurring serious and lasting debt. Mortgages were taken out with banks in Dublin, London and Amsterdam – and then the mortgages were re-mortgaged, the debt underwritten by the ceaseless flow of rents from the Stillwell estate’s farmer-tenants. Yet, as far as the Stillwells were concerned, nothing in the quality and style of their lives ever changed at all. The funds required to live exactly as they wished seemed always to be available – in Ireland, as elsewhere, there were many ways and means for the privileged aristocratic minority to thrive.
And, as the house was slowly built over the years, so were the gardens laid out, a wide parterre constructed, hundreds of trees planted, a small river dammed to create a substantial lake with cascades, and a long ‘ride’ carved through dense beech woods. Sir Guy was determined not to compromise or sacrifice the vision he had of the Stillwell family seat. They were finally able to move in shortly after Rosamond was born and, fifteen years later, by the time Cashel had begun to take some kind of stock of the place he was growing up in, it had already achieved a patina of permanence, of longevity. The limestone of the big house’s facade had weathered; dense ivy covered an entire gable end of the east wing; the stable block had seen two generations of hunters; the trees in the landscaped park were substantial; thick rushes and alder grew on the banks of the artificial lake; the crested, ornate gates – portals to the east and west drives – with their twinned lodges on either side, seemed to declare that Stillwell Court had been here for many ages and would remain for many more to come.fn3
