Golden Hill Quotes

“Life is a mess of accident, I find.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“No, no, not in the law, it ain’t. Not in the end, I mean. When a man is dead, sense must be made of it; and it might as well be sense as serves the living, for it won’t serve the dead, nohow.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“No, no, not in the law, it ain’t. Not in the end, I mean. When a man is dead, sense must be made of it; and it might”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“gluttony. Six weeks I have been at sea, and every wave looking just like the one before, in wet procession.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“A task begun is easier than a task contemplated;”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“He laid his white right hand tidily atop his white left hand, on the tabletop. Smith smiled appreciatively, but still declined to come out to play. Septimus tapped the toe of his shoe on the floor. Tap-tap-tap: a foot tutting.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“I think," he said, "that you may be the kind of dog who bites because she is chained up."
He expected her to laugh, or to flash out at him, or to do both. She did not look up, but with a melancholy kind of trouble in her eyes.
"A lovely analogy: I thank you," she said. "But what if I am the kind of dog who bites because it pleases her?"
"I don't believe it," said Smith.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“had”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“She ran her hands into Smith's wet hair, and he--
But why always Smith? Was it necessarily true, that because she seemed to HIM to be the ripe, round, straightforward antidote to the complications of his hopes, the scene looked as simple through her eyes? Was she not taking the greater risk here? Did she not have to set aside cautions, sorrows, hopes, fears, loyalties, to permit herself the role of the plump and ready siren in the steam-room? Have we not heard enough already of Mr. Smith's desire, and seen Mrs. Tomlinson quite sufficiently as he did? Should we not, at least, pay a little attention to Terpie's view of him, lounging like a freckly satyr on the wooden benches, grinning at her with a young man's lazy sense of entitlement now the surprise of her gift had faded; grown almost all the way into his strength but still long-limbed, with the knots of bone at his knees and his elbows giving him the lingering gawkiness of a foal; with the film of sweat on his chest, and his curls thickened to dark emphatic coils with water drops at the end; with the last unremoved traces of the paint around his eyes rimming his gaze in black depravity; with his wide mouth laughing, and his cock lolling? No, not lolling any more. Stirring, as she filled her hands with him, to her pleasure and his.
The reader may imagine the occasional mismatches of desire or of endurance caused by their different ages. By the differences, at times in what followed, between twenty-four-year-old impetuousness and forty-six-year-old guile; between twenty-four-year-old muscles and forty-six-year-old backache. The reader may imagine, as she knelt on the bench en levrette--a technical term Terpie had learnt from a French gentleman, meaning with your bum in the air--that the pleasure of a boyish lover's deep wet rooting inside her did not entirely cancel the pinching of the skin of her knees between the wooden slats. And yet the two of them made for themselves, successfully, that little encompassing sphere of sensation which seems while it lasts to be, if not a home in the great world to be relied upon, at least a little world in itself, outside which not much matters, for a while. And yet, they arrived together, if not at rapture, then at those melting convulsions which come as close to it as you may, where gratitude and mutual greed are all you have to furnish the place of trust.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“You do not chuse where You bestow your Heart. Your Heart bestows Itself, will-you-nill-you, in the Midst of other Business. —”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“Me? Never in life!’ said Smith, giving them his familiar beam of amiability: only now with a ragged carelessness, a desultory approximation, like a man who briefly raises a mask on a stick to his face but cannot be bothered to line up the eye holes. Septimus and Hendrick glanced at each other involuntarily, to share the dismay that each for different reasons was feeling.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“You have warned me so many Times, of the Dangers of the World, for such as Us, should We but stray one Step beyond the Bounds of our Safety, that You will not be surprised to discover (after so long a Silence) that my present Accommodation is a Gaol. Not, however, one of the common Bridewells of London, where You may expect Me to have tumbled, after the Misadventures You predicted, when I quit the Patronage of Lord ——, and declined to submit Myself tamely to the Connection He had devis’d for Me at Oxford, in the perpetual Role of Hanger-On to his Son. Instead an Ocean lies between: my Confinement is American. I find Myself lodged in the Debtors’ Prison of the City of New-York. Which is, to particularise less grandly, an Attic of the Town-Hall here. The”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“I can hear the cries of the Costers upon Wall Street, below; and the calling of the Hour; and lately, now the Day darkens, a Dialogue between two waiting Chair-Men, upon the Chances of a Horse they favour to run at Flushing, named Royal Roger. Merriment, and bawdy Jests on the Subject of this Name. But I could make Nothing distinct of the Voices coming up directly through the Floor, from the Court and Assembly. They were too muffl’d, and Business down below is now prorogued, to judge by their Dwindling. It is a melancholy Reflection, that only a few Days past, I was dancing across that very Floor, and there receiving the Solicitations (albeit more terrifying than flattering) of the Powerful. I am imprison’d today, in gross Proximity to my swelling State of yesterday. The”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“All the same now, practically,’ said Van Loon. ‘Separate in name, but we have grown together. The cane plantation, together – a leedle more me than him; the ships, together – a leedle more him than me. He distils, I distribute. Together.’ And an injury to him is an injury to us both, Van Loon did not have to say. Smith glanced at the far end of the table. Flora was glowing – with happiness, but also with importance; sitting next to Joris as if they had been voted King and Queen of the May. Of course, it made dynastic sense.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“At dinner he was placed three-quarters of the way towards the top of the long table, in what was evidently the tail of the Governor’s invitation list, with Septimus opposite him, and the great men of the colony clustered together to his right, where he might have the pleasure of overhearing their collisions, yet was plainly not bidden to participate. The Van Loons and Lovells were far down the lane of white linen. Half a dozen different conversations were rattling on between: leaning to look, he received the performance only in dumbshow, quite soundlessly, of Flora laughing, and settling herself in state with the folds of the pink silk around her, and both Joris and Hendrick leaning solicitously in, to confirm her rights in acting the princess on this royal evening; and Tabitha, finding no purchase for mischief in this impervious happiness, sitting bolt upright on the other side of the table, looking isolated and even a little lost. He”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“The twist of the stairs tightened; the carpet beneath their galloping feet gave way to boards; a door presented itself with a simpler, barer flight of staircase beyond. Glancing back down the well, Smith saw beneath the spiral of astonished faces tilted up at him that there was a commotion in the hall now, with shouts and banging, but that, judging by the banging, the door to the street had not been opened. Not yet, anyway. Up the next flight. Oilcloth, plain wood, a child’s wooden horse: a nursery. Past a nurse with a babe in arms that began, reliably, to bawl. Last flight: up among the eaves, servants’ bedrooms, grey plaster, cold air, truckle beds. Along a mean corridor, Septimus counting along the rooms on their right. Last room. Door of plain pine. Door locked from inside. Septimus rapped on it. No answer but a faint, sickly groan.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“Smith had imagined that there would be time again for serious speech between the two of them, on the return leg to New-York; but as well as a hold full of sacks and a deck laden with casks, the lugger had also taken on a moderate clutch of New-York-bound passengers, from Dutch farm-wives carrying baskets of eggs to several more would-be sailors for the Indies voyage, and a talkative attorney, up, he said, from Baltimore to view the northern colonies. Smith and Tabitha were parted by the casks and the crowd, and he spent the journey back into fog and darkness on the ebb tide, obliged to lob back the attorney’s conversational sallies; and thinking wonderingly, where he could betwixt the distractions, as young men are likely to do in these circumstances, how very ordinary and general and unremarkable a destiny it must be, how predictable a part of the universal portion of mankind it is, to love and to feel oneself beloved; and yet how astonishing it seems when it happens to you, yourself; what a stroke of glorious, undeserved, unprecedented, unsuspected luck it turns out to be, that you should be permitted, in your own person, to share in the general fate. It was not until the end of the voyage that she squeezed her way back to his side. They”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“Smith considered her, interpreting anew the temper and the bitten lip, the grinding teeth, the contempt for stories of courtship or adventure: which, he could now see, might be pre-emptive, rejection before there was a chance of being rejected. He had been warned, with teeth, away from pity; but he could not afford it anyway. It could not be his concern what the effect on her might be, if payment of the bill should damage or ruin Lovell, if it should in some wise undermine the room in which she sat. This was – it was doubly plain now – not the place for him to play, beyond the necessary play to support the business that had brought him. Not the place for any expenditure of sentiment, beyond the general appetite for life it had seemed fitting for a Mr Smith to show. Yet an unwelcome compunction was moving in him, sharp-pointed, stitching him through to the spot where he sat, attaching him by thin threads.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“Done,’ echoed Lovell. ‘Jem, note and date the document, will you? And add a memorandum of this agreement; and make another note that we’re to write to Banyard’s on our own account, by the first vessel, asking explanations. And then let’s have it in the strongbox, to show in evidence, as I suspect, for the assizes. Now, sir, I believe I’ll bid you—’ Lovell checked himself, for Smith was feeling through the pockets of his coat. ‘Was there something else?’ he asked heavily.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“Mr Lovell, to whom few things retained the force of novelty, and who misliked extremely the sensation when they did, as if firm ground underfoot had been replaced on the instant by a scrabbling fall in vacuo – was, at the moment the door opened on Broad Way, hesitating in his parlour. Flora was downstairs, commanding from Zephyra the supper that would have arrived whether she commanded it or not. Only Tabitha still sat on the sopha, her hands quite still in her lap. It had been his custom, since his wife died these three years past, to call from time to time on his elder daughter’s intelligence, in the same office her mother’s had served; but now, for particular reasons, the issue might touch on her own self in terms that made advice unwise to solicit.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“First, the white ceiling. Then the slow realisation that this was not the dark, damp timber six inches above his nose to which he had woken for six weeks in his bunk aboard Henrietta. Then the memory of his purpose; and the whole variorum mosaic of the evening before; and a burning curiosity. The light through the gable window was full sunshine. He”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“The lawyer’s stakes at the table turned out to be not even colonial notes of the usual baffling variability, but certificates drawable upon a tobacco warehouse in Virginia, and Smith presented one without much hope, the first time he tried their use as payment. But it was accepted without demur, at fifty-five per centum of face, New-York’s merchants seeming all to maintain within themselves a register of values for every conceivable money-substitute they might encounter. Wampum, tobacco bales, rum by the gallon: it was all money, in a world without money. Between the tobacco tickets and his own pointedly-returned guineas, Smith calculated he now possessed enough to reach Christmas in relative ease – if he could avoid being knocked on the head for spoiling De Lancey’s game against the Governor, or offending in some other role pressed upon him, or falling victim to a misadventure entirely unsuspected.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“The brig Henrietta having made Sandy Hook a little before the dinner hour – and having passed the Narrows about three o’clock – and then crawling to and fro, in a series of tacks infinitesimal enough to rival the calculus, across the grey sheet of the harbour of New-York – until it seemed to Mr Smith, dancing from foot to foot upon deck, that the small mound of the city waiting there would hover ahead in the November gloom in perpetuity, never growing closer, to the smirk of Greek Zeno – and the day being advanced to dusk by the time Henrietta at last lay anchored off Tietjes Slip, with the veritable gables of the city’s veritable houses divided from him only by one hundred foot of water – and the dusk moreover being as cold and damp and dim as November can afford, as if all the world were a quarto of grey paper dampened by drizzle until in danger of crumbling imminently to pap: – all this being true, the master of the brig pressed upon him the virtue of sleeping this one further night aboard, and pursuing his shore business in the morning. (He meaning by the offer to signal his esteem, having found Mr Smith a pleasant companion during the slow weeks of the crossing.) But Smith would not have it. Smith,”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“The violinist launched into the figures of a minuet, and Zephyra came and went with a tray until the table was loaded with the soups and meats of the first course, in silver dishes stowed among the candelabras. Mr Lovell carved from a grand ham blackened with molasses. While he passed along plates, and exchanged pleasantries, Smith was able to consider upon the informative and (as it were) strategic design of the plan according to which the diners had been bestowed at table: his own placement amidst the knot of the adult men, where Captain Prettyman and Van Loon senior could rake him from opposite, and Mr Lovell could contribute enfilading fire from his left, while Hendrick remained just in range should reinforcements be required, and the careful removal meantime from out his conversational reach of all the women except Tabitha, who was presumably considered an armament in herself. Little”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“It was possibly the worst of Mr Colley Cibber’s notoriously awful odes, the one, three years old, hymning King George’s personal valour on a German battlefield. Yes, here came the rhymes of ‘Seligenstadt’ with ‘defeat’, and ‘Dettingen’ with ‘joyful strain’. Here came the martial blasts from the Poet Laureate’s personal wind machine. Septimus was all wince. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured, through unmoving lips and closed teeth. ‘Oh God. Oh God.’ James De Lancey was feeling the need to clear his throat, rumblingly, every few seconds. The stares of the Assemblymen seemed fixed, if not on the spectacle in general, then in particular on the way the pose bunched and elevated, beneath the rising hem of the tabard, the muscles of Mrs Tomlinson’s magnificent arse.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“When he had ate his fill, and proceeded from the urgent first cup and necessary second to the voluntary third which might be toyed with at leisure, without any particular outcry seeming to suggest he should be on his guard, he leant back, spread the city’s news before him, and, by glances between the items, took a longer survey of the room. Session of the Common Council. Vinegars, Malts, and Spirituous Liquors, Available on Best Terms. Had he been on familiar ground, he would have been able to tell at a glance what particular group of citizens in the great empire of coffee this house aspired to serve: whether it was the place for poetry or gluttony, philosophy or marine insurance, the Indies trade or the meat-porters’ burial club. Ships Landing. Ships Departed. Long Island Estate of Mr De Kyper, with Standing Timber, to be Sold at Auction. But the prints on the yellowed walls were a mixture. Some maps, some satires, some ballads, some bawdy, alongside the inevitable picture of the King: pop-eyed George reigning over a lukewarm graphical gruel, neither one thing nor t’other. Albany Letter, Relating to the Behaviour of the Mohawks. Sermon, Upon the Dedication of the Monument to the Late Revd. Vesey. Leases to be Let: Bouwerij, Out Ward, Environs of Rutgers’ Farm. And the company? River Cargos Landed. Escaped Negro Wench: Reward Offered. – All he could glean was an impression generally businesslike, perhaps intersown with law. Dramatic Rendition of the Classics, to be Performed by the Celebrated Mrs Tomlinson. Poem, ‘Hail Liberty, Sweet Succor of a Briton’s Breast’, Offered by ‘Urbanus’ on the Occasion of His Majesty’s Birthday. Over there there were maps on the table, and a contract a-signing; and a ring of men in merchants’ buff-and-grey quizzing one in advocate’s black-and-bands. But some of the clients had the wind-scoured countenance of mariners, and some were boys joshing one another. Proceedings of the Court of Judicature of the Province of New-York. Poor Law Assessment. Carriage Rates. Principal Goods at Mart, Prices Current. Here he pulled out a printed paper of his own from an inner pocket, and made comparison of certain figures, running his left and right forefingers down the columns together. Telescopes and Spy-Glasses Ground. Regimental Orders. Dinner of the Hungarian Club. Perhaps there were simply too few temples here to coffee, for them to specialise as he was used.”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

“Not the law, Mr Smith, nor even the custom.’ Tabitha leaned forward into the candle-light, the dark silk of her dress gleaming. ‘Our grandees go unmolested, I assure you. Mijnheer Philipse can walk up Broad Street without a soul tugging his sleeve and asking what’s in his pockets; Mr De Lancey can rule in the court without the plaintiff saying, “Now, sir, what’s this about the block for lease by Rutgers’ Farm I hear you’re buying?” Mr Livingston can take his pinch of snuff in the Black Horse without the waiter asking, “Wheat or oats for you, sir, this sowing season?”
― Francis Spufford, Golden Hill