Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

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       CHAPTER FIVE

      From those early days in Chelsea when he was a student at the Reynolds he recalled – what? A confused jumble of impressions: parties, keen but unreal poverty (an allowance stood between him and the world): a variety of living places: but over all there floated a general feeling of impatience and dissatisfaction. The period was nearer to him, as far as anything could be near to this strangely isolated present, which scarcely had the ordinary dimensions – but it was the part of his life that he had revisited the least; the person he met there was sometimes barely recognisable, and although he did feel a kind of impatient pity for him sometimes, it was difficult as well as humiliating even at this distance to be identified with that person’s more embarrassing excesses.

      However, that young stupid man’s maladies of growth were perhaps not so much worse than those of the general run: at any rate they should be looked at impartially; and in an attempt at putting order into his thoughts he tried to recall the sequence of his rooms, from that first enchanted den with a window on the Thames to the house with the pigeon-loft on the King’s Road which saw the last days of his protracted adolescence. He remembered leather-aproned Hare, the removing man, who lived with Burke, his little horse, in a green triangular place, a hay- and stable-scented vestige of the rural village, near the sad walls of the workhouse, and how he had walked so many times by Hare’s van: Dovehouse Street; Smith Terrace with its monstrous bugs, immune to sulphur-fumes; the World’s End; the lower end of Redcliffe Road.

      At the lower end of Redcliffe Road there was a cat-haunted landing: in front of him there was a cupboard and directly to his right the door of a room with a tea-party going on in it. There came back to him the nature of the dim, filtered light on the landing, the shadowy colour of the door, the smell of that London staircase in the winter and the sound of the tea-party, to which they had asked him. He was rather late, in so far as it was possible to be late for one of these indefinite meetings, which took place at night: later, at any rate, than he intended; for in that rabbit-warren of a house, now abandoned to a multitude of people with one room apiece, the servants’ staircase forked into three, and dark passages wandered here and there among the cisterns, promising short cuts. However, he had reached the door and he was in the act of feeling for the handle when on the other side of the matchboard partition a voice as clear as a bell said, ‘Richard Temple.’

      ‘Richard Temple, the new person in Andromeda’s old room, is also a painter.’

      ‘So she told me. Tell us about him.’

      ‘Oh, he is not so bad, really,’ said a man, as if he had been appealed to; and content with this tepid recommendation Richard would have opened the door if another voice had not cried out passionately, ‘No, no, no. He is a silly bastard. Temple is a very silly bastard.’

      Richard could not for the moment decide what face to put on this, and he stayed where he was.

      ‘That is no news,’ said Julia (and the treachery pierced him where he stood). ‘He told me he was the illegitimate son of somebody or other, but it was a great secret, and not to be known. By way of keeping it dark he told Kate Hassel, too.’

      ‘I mean bastard in the sense you say he’s a bastard. If you want to be literal you say basstard.’

      ‘Everybody has hoped they were illegits or foundlings at some period.’

      ‘Yes, but they do not go on with their mysterious nods and becks after sixteen. Missing heirs and strawberry marks are not grown up.’

      ‘Who is this? Who is your bastard?’

      ‘Richard Temple. The young man who has Andromeda’s old room.’

      ‘I know him. He is one of those popular phalluses.’

      ‘I do not know him.’

      ‘Of course you do. He is the young man who got Anne with child, the one she said practically invented art.’

      ‘He is at the Reynolds. They say he is very good.’

      ‘No they do not,’ said Spado, a fellow-student. ‘He is very slick and clever, if you like, but nobody says he is very good except the duller members of the staff. He came as protégé of Atherton’s, so naturally old Dover and old Wilson loved him from the first. He is just their cup of tea: very dainty and competent.’

      ‘No one could call poor Spado competent. Everybody else at the school says Temple is very good – he won the Haydon.’

      ‘Exactly,’ cried Spado, with an immense sneer in his voice to show how discreditable it was to win an official prize. ‘Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit: that’s exactly what I object to. Painting is not an amusement.’ There was a great deal of confused noise at this, and the conversation broke up into several parts; there was movement, changing of seats, and suddenly, right next to the door, so near that his voice resonated in Richard’s ear like the diaphragm of an earphone, a new man said very confidentially, ‘There are always contacts, isn’t it absurd? I heard of him a great while ago, from my aunt’s cousins: an extraordinary fellow, who burgled his school, and set fire to it.’

      ‘Who?’