A Man of Genius Read Online Free PDF Page B

Caroline’s impermanent cooks.
    Among the men was young Gregory Lloyd.
    Lanky, tall, very pale, with nearly white hair. Almost grotesque, she thought him at first. A widowed mother, now dead, had raised him. Their situations felt similar. So they became friends, amorous. Both were at an age when anyone will do. Sometimes they lay in the long grass.
    As time passed he grew fonder and fonder, taking every chance to touch her as they went about their work. He said they should be married one day. But by now they’d anticipated most aspects of marriage in the fields near Grantchester and it seemed a limp affair to Ann. Besides, there’d been no consequences – and why else did one marry?
    He appreciated everything she did. The unfamiliar approval became oppressive. He was earnest about the praying, wanting to make them both spiritually deeper. She asked why they couldn’t live like other people and was as embarrassed as surprised by her words. He was hurt. He wrung his thin hands.
    She then made an even crueller remark: ‘We are still living with our mothers.’
    None of this suited the spirit of the community. William Bates wanted them all to be chaste and amiable, to avoid lascivious looking and doing, but he must have noticed something going on with Gregory and Ann, though they kept their ‘congress’ to the fields.
    It was worse when she lost the little faith she’d mustered in the first heady months before housework chafed her.
    She’d been walking back from town one winter’s evening along the Cam when the night came on too fast. The towpath was little more than a muddy track in places and, careless of the danger, she lost her footing and slid on her back into the river. She was caught by growth just under the surface. It tangled round her legs and snaked into her shoes.
    For a moment she thought she’d drown, thought dramatically thata short life was unkindly over. And all because a heavy cloak pulled her down into the cold water.
    Then she found a foothold on a stone and pulled herself up out of the vegetation and into the slime of mud and wet nettles on the bank. Shivering and shocked, she stumbled along in the darkness, teeth chattering and head whirring.
    By the time she flopped into the hall, her clothes wet and dripping on the flagstones, her face streaked with dirt, she knew she no longer believed even in the vague god of that house and would stop making any effort to do so. She’d been saved on the riverbank but not by anything divine. Rather by some effort on her part and mainly by luck that her foot had caught a stone. Bad luck, a little less effort, would have seen her drowned.
    Gregory rushed to help her as she staggered into the house. He held her tight. ‘Thank God,’ he said.
    â€˜No, not that.’
    She pulled away. He thought her hysterical.
    Gregory was loyal to the community; yet, as the years went by, he, like Ann, grew restive, no longer immune to a world outside the house and grounds, no longer so keen to engage in discussing his faults – with so few to present. He would walk down the muddy bank of the Cam into the city and watch the university men strutting around, hear their taunts of the poorly dressed like himself, their arrogance. He would gaze at the bookshop, the learning denied to him, though quite as clever as any. At the house they studied without authority; they had good teachers, people William Bates and Jeremiah Ellison had known in their past lives, learned men who arrived to demonstrate the globes and microscopes. They knew more of science and natural history in that draughty mansion than the college scholars in their courts and towers, but it didn’t give them what the Latin and quaint theology delivered: self-confidence in the World.
    The time for tearing down the unholy trinity of church and king and college had gone. They lived in the wrong era. William Bates admitted it.
    Then Betty left – after some