Restoration by Rose Tremain EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Rose Tremain
- Language: English
- Genre: British & Irish Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The Five Beginnings
I am, I discover, a very untidy man.
Look at me. Without my periwig, I am an affront to neatness. My hair
(what is left of it) is the colour of sand and wiry as hogs’ bristles; my ears are
of uneven size; my forehead is splattered with freckles; my nose, which of
course my wig can’t conceal, however low I wear it, is unceremoniously flat,
as if I had been hit at birth.
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Was I hit at birth? I do not believe so, as my parents were gentle and
kindly people, but I will never know now. They died in a fire in 1662. My
father had a nose like a Roman emperor. This straight, fierce nose would
neaten up my face, but alas, I don’t possess it. Perhaps I am not my father’s
child?
I am erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad. Perhaps I am the
son of Amos Treefeller, the old man who made head-moulds for my father’s
millinery work? Like him, I am fond of the feel of objects made of polished
wood. My telescope, for instance. For I admit, I find greater order restored to
my brain from the placing of my hands round this instrument of science than
from what its lenses reveal to my eye. The stars are too numerous and too
distant to restore to me anything but a terror at my own insignificance.
I don’t know whether you can imagine me yet. I am thirty-seven years
old as this year, 1664, moves towards its end. My stomach is large and also
freckled, although it has seldom been exposed to the sun. It looks as if a flight
of minute moths had landed on it in the night. I am not tall, but this is the age
of the high heel. I strive to be particular about my clothes, but am terribly in
the habit of dropping morsels of dinner on them. My eyes are blue and
limpid. In childhood, I was considered angelic and was frequently buttoned
inside a suit of blue moire, thus seeming to my mother a little world entire:
sea and sand in my colours, and the lightness of air in my baby voice. She
went to her fiery death still believing that I was a person of honour. In the
scented gloom of Amos Treefeller’s back room (the place of all our private
conversations), she would take my hand and whisper her hopes for my
splendid future. What she couldn’t see, and what I had not the heart to point
out, was that we no longer live in an honourable age. What has dawned
instead is the Age of Possibility.
And it is only the elderly (as my mother
was) and the truculently myopic (as my friend, Pearce, is) who haven’t
noticed this and are not preparing to take full advantage of it. Pearce, I am
ashamed to admit, fails to understand, let alone laugh at, the jokes from Court
I feel obliged to relay to him on his occasional visits to me from his damp
Fenland house. The excuse he makes is that he’s a Quaker. This, in turn,
makes me laugh.
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