Back then, when it had all been new to him, he’d been completely mesmerised by every surface and each texture, getting lost in woodgrain or the worn pink threads of Phyllis Painter’s jumper. Though he hadn’t noticed it occurring, since then his appreciation of the wonderful displays surrounding him had grown more dull and blunted, as if he were coming to take this extraordinary afterlife and all its finery for granted. Not until his faculties had been enlivened by this vicarage tea-party had Michael realised how complacent he’d become, or how much he was missing. Now he looked around him at the kitchen with its milky morning light and the dear scuffs or marks of wear on its utensils, glorying in all the humble wonders and the profound sense of home that they entailed.
His gaze alighted on the decorative tiling of the fireplace beside him and he saw for the first time its stupefying detail. Each tile had a different scene delineated on it in the graded blue tones of a willow pattern saucer, fine lines of rich navy on a background of an icier and paler shade. After a moment or two, Michael understood that the square panels were arranged in order so that all the separate pictures told a story, like they did in Alma’s comics. If that was the case, it seemed to him that the most sensible place to commence the tale would be the bottom left side of the fire’s surround, next to where he was sitting.
Looking down, he was immediately absorbed in the depicted episode, his enhanced vision swimming in its deep blue intricacies until with a start he comprehended that it was almost an image of himself, a small boy staring at a story told in painted tiles around a fireplace, pictures in a picture in a picture. Michael was more fascinated by this endless regress than he’d been by all the spectacle and sparkle when he’d glimpsed the Attics of the Breath for the first time. Although the infant in the miniature didn’t resemble him, having dark hair styled in a pudding-basin cut and wearing buckled shoes with knee-length britches, Michael felt himself being sucked into the exquisite illustration. He was not sure anymore if he was Michael Warren, sitting in a kitchen eating cake and staring at a tile, or if he was the painted youngster leaning on his mother’s lap as she perched by the fire and pointed to the bible stories on the painted tiles around it. The warm room about him and its crowded table melted to a wet ceramic gloss, became a parlour in another century and doing so acquired a lustrous Prussian tint. His own hands were now cyan outlines on a wash of faint ultramarine and he was …
He was Philip Doddridge, six years old and learning scripture from his mother Monica, her blue-limned right arm round his shoulders as she read from the worn Bible resting on her slippery skirted thighs. She gestured with her other hand towards the Delft tiles round the fire by which she sat, each one emblazoned with a scene from the New Testament, a crucifixion or annunciation to illuminate the passage she was reading to her son. It was a rainy afternoon during the autumn months of 1708 and by the fireside of the drawing-room in Kingston-upon-Thames all things seemed holy. On the mantelpiece a pair of paper fans flanked an ornate brass clock enclosed within a giant bullet of clear glass, and royal blue firelight glistered on a lacquer screen to one side of the hearth. Monica Doddridge’s soft voice continued its instruction while her son’s glance darted back and forth over the beautiful Dutch tiling. Here an enormous Jonah was regurgitated by a whale no bigger than a chubby pike, while not far off a prodigal son in a periwig was welcomed back into the fold. So entranced was the boy in the beguiling tableaux that he almost felt a part of them, a nearly-turquoise figure underneath the glaze, perhaps an infant Jesus lecturing his dumbstruck elders on the temple steps. Becoming lost among the indigo embellishments, Philip composed himself and pulled back from the biblical scenarios before he was immersed completely. He was …
He was Michael Warren. He was sitting in a sunlit kitchen in Mansoul, gathered around a table with five other children and three grownups, all of whom were chattering convivially and paying Michael no attention whatsoever. Wondering what had just happened to him, he let his attention creep back to the tile-work, this time peering cautiously towards the second tile up from the bottom on the left. It didn’t look …
It didn’t look like much of an occasion, on that August morning in the Congregational Church there at Fetter Lane in 1714. Philly was twelve, a sickly sketch in blue fountain-pen ink, sitting between his father and beloved Uncle Philip in the front pew, listening to Mr. Bradbury the minister delivering his morning sermon. Philly’s mother had died suddenly three years before, and the frail, uncomplaining child did not believe his father or his uncle would be with him for much longer. It was not a family that knew rude health, with Philly and his elder sis Elizabeth the only two survivors out of twenty children and the other eighteen all dead before he was even born. A movement in the upper gallery roused Philly from his reverie and looking up he saw a falling handkerchief, a lacy thing with cornflower stippling, caught in its leisurely descent towards the flagged church floor. Everyone gasped except for the boy’s father, Daniel Doddridge, who began to cough. The kerchief was a signal, dropped deliberately by a messenger from Bishop Burnet to announce the passing of Queen Anne, the Stuart monarch who had done so much to harm their Nonconformist cause. Indeed, her latest effort to discomfit them, her Schism Act, was due to be made law that very day. It was a clear attempt to undermine the grand tradition of religious discontent that reached back to John Wycliffe’s Lollards in the fourteenth century or the great radical dissenter Robert Browne two hundred years thereafter. It attacked the faith of Bunyan and his revolutionary affiliates the Muggletonians, Moravians and Ranters, but the Schism Act would almost certainly now be abandoned with the passing of Queen Anne, its instigator. Shuffling on the hard pew Philly felt extremely nervous but was not sure why. Alerted by the signal from the gallery, the minister curtailed his sermon hurriedly and offered up a prayer for their new King, the Hanoverian George the First who had already sworn support for Nonconformity. By now the church was rustling with excited whispers and the thrilling realisation that the hated Anne was dead at last. Smiling with private satisfaction, Mr. Bradbury led the singing of the 89th Psalm before once more reading sternly from the text. “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.” Philly’s ears were ringing as he realised he was present at the dawn of a new age, an era of religious freedom that the boy could scarcely visualise. He felt …
He felt the hard edge of the kitchen chair pressing against his thighs, the sweet and slimy gobbet of unswallowed fairy cake at rest upon his tongue. He gulped it down and took a hasty swig of tea before inspecting the next tile. He found that he …
He found that he was dressed up in a nightgown and a borrowed petticoat, wearing a pudding-tin atop his dark hair as a helmet. He was twenty-one years old, performing Rowe’s play Tamerlane with friends and fellow students from the Dissenting academy in Kibworth, Leicestershire, acting the part of the illustrious Sultan Bazajet. All the impromptu cast were laughing until tears rolled down their cheeks, including good old Obadiah Hughes, whom they called Atticus, and little Jenny Jennings whom they nicknamed Theodosia, the daughter of the reverend conducting the academy. His own cognomen was Hortensius and as he flounced his lavender-blue skirts he wished that this hilarity could last forever, that he could somehow stop time and thus preserve the moment for eternity, a giggling and joyous fly in amber. The Lord knew that there’d been precious little laughter in Hortensius’s life thus far. An orphan at the tender age of thirteen, he’d been made ward to a gentleman named Downes who would lose all the lad’s inheritance to ruinous financial speculations in the City. Following a shiftless and unsettled period living with his big sister Elizabeth and her husband the Reverend John Nettleton, Hortensius had found a place in the Kibworth establishment, where by God’s grace had been instilled in him the discipline and the humility that would, he hoped, sustain him all his days. The Reverend John Jennings and his wife had been almost a second set of parents to the boy, so dear were they and so concerned with his development. It had astonished him to learn that Mrs. Jennings’ father had been one Sir Francis Wingate from Harlington Grange in Bedford, who’d committed poor John Bunyan unto Bedford gaol. Now, doubled over in his mirth with his makeshift tin helmet clattering down upon the floor and all his friends about him, he was stricken by the contrast between this frivolity and the abiding loneliness he felt throughout most other areas of his life. There was the passion that he felt for Kitty Freeman, his Clarinda as he called her, though he feared that his affections by and large went unrequited. Tripping on the lapis line that was his nightgown’s edge, thereby provoking renewed squeals of merriment, he wondered if some perfect partner waited in the future for him. Was that in God’s plan, if God’s plan should indeed include Hortensius? Did a wife and suitable vocation figure in that great, ineffable design? What was his destiny? What was …?