My mother’s untruths were wholly different, for they were not coercing me into lies but rather omitting the truth. In fact, perhaps it was my mother’s mystery that affected me more. For years, right up until I went on Tour, I used to keep a locked box under my bed, hidden amongst other boxes. I kept the key to it under a floorboard. My mother, even if she had found the box, would never have been able to find the key. But I was sure that she might become angry enough to force the lock open with a knife, and sometimes I worried she might. What would she say, finding what was inside?
I collected secrets – mine and hers. Inside the box were two pages torn from my mother’s book of etchings, the ones of Apollo and Mars. (I burned the rest of the book on a bonfire the servants had built in the back garden.) The newspaper article I found about the two boys hanged for sodomy, I kept that too.
And what of my mother’s past? There was so little evidence, and what I possessed, I had accrued slowly over years and kept like relics. There was a book on my mother’s shelves on the history of England, in Spanish, in which the words LA PROPRIEDAD DE SOLOMON FONSECA were written. A letter from 1742, which I found one day in the records room of the Company offices, which confirmed the transfer of ownership of the Fonseca Shipping Company from ‘the late Solomon Fonseca’ to the newly incorporated Bowen Maritime. The new owner was listed as William Bowen, and the letter mentioned the inheritance of the first company by ‘Mister Fonseca’s widow, Rachel’.
I stole the letter from the records room and hid it away. I waited for my father to complain bitterly about its loss, but he never did.
Another time visiting the Company, I found in the archives, written again and again, a name and an address in Paris: CARDOSO, RUE DES ROSIERS. I knew that ‘Cardoso’ was my mother’s maiden name. That, together with the existence of the first husband and the fact that she grew up in Amsterdam, was literally all we knew of her. Of parents, or sisters, brothers or cousins, we knew nothing. It was the weight of her mystery, its totality, that made me write down the name and address on a separate piece of paper, and hide that in the box under my bed too.
I think of the boy who did these things. In part, I see a boy with desires, unaware of anyone else in the world who shared them. I also see a boy who spent his life concealing things: his own secrets, and those of others. How should he make sense of them? By keeping them in a safe place, where he could retrieve them, and study them for himself. Or maybe it was just a small act of rebellion in a house that allowed none.
Seven months separated the night of that supper on Red Lion Square and the date of our departure. At first, it seemed impossibly far away, but the day soon neared – and our sense of urgency increased. In the final few months, we had a wave of shopping of the sort that only London truly provides. Wigs – white and black and grey – and men’s face powder suitable for French society, bought in a shop in St James’s. On the cheek, the proprietor said, it was like a deadening snow. Tailors came and pinned us up for fitting; coats, waistcoats and breeches were cut and cut again. My mother would say that one styling was too manly, too short, or too tight, too revealing, ‘inappropriate for boys’ – but we were not boys, of course. She would ask which silk we liked; sometimes she would agree with our choice, and sometimes she would sniff and hold another: ‘No, this one is better.’ And that would be the end of that. We had always dressed in the fashion of twins – the possibility that we might not had never even occurred to us – so everything was ordered in sets of two. Trunks were bought, two large, for jackets and shoes; two small, for shirts, breeches, stockings and cravats; wig and hat boxes in good number; bags to hold boxes of powder and scents. We were not taking our own servants – we were not that level of society – but would hire porters and carriers as we needed en route. Mother believed we would make the greatest impression as a pair.
For the most part, the preparations were fun – every bit for our mother as much as for us, perhaps even more so. Based on her own knowledge of the Continent and with the help of our tutor Herr Hof, she had already prepared our itinerary. She excitedly guided us through the concertinaed map our father gave us. ‘The western half looks much like England: France, Spain and Portugal, these are big countries like England itself,’ she said, showing borders relatively unchanged for many years. ‘But go east, go south, and Europe – literally – shatters,’ she explained. ‘Italy is just a cluster of tiny states: Florence, Modena, Genoa, Padua, Parma, Rome and Venice.’ She showed us the Empire and we saw how Germany was even more atomised, a pulverised rubble of territorial shards, Holsteins Gottorp and Gluckstein, Brunswicks Celle or Wolfenbüttel, very many Saxonies, a Bavaria and a Bayreuth.
I have never loved maps. But for our mother, to gaze at the map of Europe was to read a scripture. It was to see all of the Continent’s history and thought in a single glance. We were channelling not just the names of countries and capital cities but also of our Enlightenment saints: Cicero and Tacitus, Dante and Erasmus, Descartes and Voltaire. My mother adored all of it, and sincerely and openly and lovingly wanted us to do the same. Her joy in knowledge was her truest quality; I admit that, even now, all these years later.
We were to leave in March, the very start of spring in London. On the eve of our departure, I remembered the box under my bed. I did not want my mother to find it while I was away, in asking the maids to give our room a good clean. I did not want her to get that knife and force it open, to find inside stories of young men hanged for sodomy, pictures of rippling male bodies torn from a book only then would she realise she had lost; her first husband’s name, Solomon Fonseca, inscribed on its endpapers. I decided that I would finally have to dispose of the contents of this box. My childhood was ended, and those small, unknown acts of rebellion must be too. I took the key from under the floorboard and went back to my bed, knelt down and retrieved the box. There was a fire lit in the bedroom – it was still cold this time of year – and one by one I burned my secret artefacts on the flickering coals. The last thing I came to was a name and address in Paris, written by me on a slip of paper, another clue about my mother’s past.
CARDOSO
RUE DES ROSIERS
I stared at it. Were we not about to go to Paris? Were we not about to be in the vicinity of some truth about our mother? I slipped the paper into the pocket of my coat. Then I closed the now-empty box and put it on a high shelf, where no one would even notice it.
That evening, we ate supper in a strange, uncertain mood that would not shift no matter how much we proclaimed excitement at what lay ahead. We had always been together, the four of us, and soon we would not be. That frightened us. To avoid the truth of our agitation, my mother fussed about whether we had enough clothes. We each had three large oak chests, two of which were filled solely with clothes, wigs, kerchiefs and fans, and the third half filled with ten pairs of shoes apiece. My father told her not to worry. He said, ‘You’ve done everything, cariad,’ the Welsh word for one whom you love absolutely, ‘everything.’ Towards the end of supper, my mother rose from the table and went to a sideboard. On top was a large leather-bound book, which she handed to Edgar. ‘Open it, please.’