Imposture, page 10
After the interval, circumstances conspired against Kean’s Overreach. He lost his land to forgery, his daughter, in marriage, to a servant-boy. Confronted by his accusers and confounded on all sides, he gave way to a rage so pure it had the beauty of virtue. ‘Why, is not the whole world included in myself?’ he began, but his anger consumed his meaning; the rest of his speech being scarcely articulated. A stunning display of natural power, Munden cowered before it, forgot his lines, was pulled gaping from the stage. The audience applauded in mid-scene; the contest was over, Kean had won, even as he lay breathless on the ground. Such fury seemed almost unacted. It wasn’t susceptible to counterfeit, being so inhuman in its force; consequently, beyond the pale of comparison. Polidori was utterly involved in it. His eyes fixed on the prostrate figure, even as he felt himself falling in his seat. A rush of blood had swollen his head, and he gave way to its hot darkness, childishly: an almost conscious letting go, though it was consciousness itself that he let slip through his fingers. Still, it wasn’t the first time in the past month he had fainted. Later, he found Colburn’s large face bent over him, felt his hand against the bones of his neck. ‘Why, feel how thin you’ve got, man; and you hardly touched your dinner.’
Colburn, with Polidori’s arm bent at the elbow around his shoulder, carried him into the corridors and down the marbled stairs, out into the air. The crowds had dispersed; it was only a cold night under hot stars. Polidori had been watching his own heart tick in the line of his wrist, a little indentation of skin, pressed and released, again and again. How frail he was, his arm strained under his own half-weight. Colburn was right, Polly had let himself go. It was sheer weakness of vanity; without a mirror to remind him, he tended to starve himself. A headache had come to stay, one of that crowd of unpleasant, interior guests – blindness, tinnitus – which had visited him on his travels with Lord B. He knew how much depended on internal balances: our health, our vision. It required the constant adjustment of delicate sensory mechanisms to keep at bay a universal nausea, which threatened otherwise to overwhelm us. He both felt and enacted the clutch of his stomach, the upwards lurch. A stream of heat filled the sour path of his throat; he opened his mouth onto the cobbles, and retched. God knows why Kean’s rage had afflicted him so terribly. There was something both pure and purifying about his anger – without limits or modesty. Polly felt better for it afterwards, almost clear-headed. Colburn handed him into a hansom cab and left him there; he still wished to catch the curtain calls. Munden, he remarked in the pleasantness of admiration, had stood transfixed; the other actors had had to drag him off the stage, Kean’s fury had undone him. He’d forgotten his lines. ‘I wonder if the old man has the heart to come back on.’ On the journey towards the river, Polidori permitted himself a weak tonic of self-congratulation. He had got out, after all, undiscovered. But more than that, the incident reminded him of how powerful his feelings still were, his appetite for life: Kean’s rage had found its echo in him.
Colburn, it turned out, had not paid the fare.
It was only as he lay in bed that night, going over the events of the evening – the dirty pallor of Eliza’s complexion was almost Italian and reminded Polidori of the peasant girls auctioned by their fathers under the balcony of Byron’s palazzo in Venice; he used occasionally as he said to ‘indulge their paternal pride’, which didn’t prevent him from haggling shamefully over the prices – that Polidori remembered Lord Byron had once attended a performance of Kean’s; had been painfully struck by it; had collapsed in the theatre, and been driven home.
Byron himself had told him the story. He had met Kean in what he called the ‘second blush of fame’, shortly before his marriage. Hobhouse and he had gone to Drury Lane to see Macbeth, and afterwards dined at their friend Kinnaird’s, where Kean himself appeared later, large-headed, quick with leftover nerves. He was ready to embark on, as Kinnaird put it, ‘one of his happy drunks’. It was a night B never forgot. (For a famous man, Polidori often thought, Byron was peculiarly susceptible to fame in other people; the glow of it persuaded him of his own.) Even so, he always liked the company of men. And he’d just come back from the Noels’ country place at Seaham, and a week enduring the ‘inconstant ardours’ of his bride-to-be, and the rather more ‘unebbing’ garrulity of Sir Ralph, his future father-in-law. That late dinner with a famous actor, a few friends, struck him as the best and last of his bachelorhood.
He mentioned all this to Polidori on a late ride home along the shores of Leman, to the villa he had rented overlooking the water. In the morning, Byron continued, somewhat chastened by a hangover, and tender on account of it, he felt the need to write to Annabella. He still remembered his letter, and recited some of it to Polidori. ‘I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.’ Nothing was too private for Byron to delight in repeating it. Still, Polly couldn’t help but acknowledge the charm of the line. It was just like the poet to squeeze a little sweetness out of the sourest moods. He looked at Polly now, reining in, and said, in his famously melancholy tone, ‘I wonder, if we were still married, should I love her as much as I do?’
They had been up at Coppet, visiting de Staël. The conversation had turned to ‘famous actors’; and the ‘grand gargoyle’ had been curious to hear Byron’s report of Kean. ‘I know no pleasure,’ B had said, ‘so sensual as good acting.’ A lady novelist, just shy of her sixty-fifth birthday, had actually fainted away. Talk of Kean had awoken in Byron the whimsy of confession: his intimate manner was utterly irresistible, precisely because he seemed to need kindness so sharply. The warmth off the water put their horses in a soft sweat; the air had the taste of flat soda. Kean, he said, had played his part on either side of B’s marriage, standing guard, perhaps, like the ‘lions of paradise’, or the ‘dogs rather, watching the gates below’. The actor had presided over his ‘last supper’ as a bachelor. And then, in the course of his marriage, Kean had, on a number of occasions, thwarted Byron: innocently enough perhaps. Turned down the roles that Byron, as a member of the committee at Drury Lane Theatre, had offered him; refused to read his address on the death of Sheridan, etc. Byron also took a dislike to Kean’s acting. The poet had, in his ‘old age’, acquired a taste for modesty, for natural proportion.
Still, shortly before sailing for the continent, Byron had gone to see Kean at the theatre once more. B was carrying on a ‘thoroughly pleasant affair’ with one of the actresses. ‘These,’ he added, ‘are rarer than one might think.’ His marriage, hardly a year after that dinner at Kinnaird’s, was in ruins: his daughter stolen from him, and taken to the country; his wife now cold to him ‘as statues or virtues’; lawyers swarming ‘like wasps at a picnic’; rumours of this and that flying. The bailiffs, ‘as you saw, Polly’ haunting his door. And that night, Kean went into one of his rages. Drunken spittle flew thick as grapeshot; he shouted his lines so loudly they drowned themselves in their own noise; the actors quailed before him. And it tallied so forcefully with Byron’s own sense of futility and what the Austrians call Wut (to which the English owed their rather gentler expression of ‘wroth’) – at the world, at the way in which everything he loved had been taken from him, often by the objects of that love – that he absolutely fainted away, ‘from sheer exhaustion at having his own thoughts so violently voiced’. Polidori silently inclined his head; he was afraid of disappointing such a confession by his own weak sympathies. Still, he remembered noting for the first time, after months spent wrangling with his jealousy and admiration, that Byron was unhappy. That he suffered, too; indeed, owing to the grander scale of his life and sentiments, that he probably suffered more than Polidori could.
Polly lay in bed, in the bloodless light of the moon, which poured through the open window of his bedroom and over his knees and ankles. The recollection had struck an almost physical blow; recovering from it involved a kind of returning to his senses, a feeling for wounds. Three years after Byron’s confession, Polidori had swooned at the theatre, watching one of Kean’s ‘rages’. It never for a minute occurred to him that he simply shared his master’s sensitivities; it was clear to him that he had borrowed the poet’s susceptibility, even to the point of unconsciousness. And, in fact, the fainting fit began to replay itself in his mind, from a sharper internal view. The wilful release of his balancing muscles, in his hips, his stomach; the unchecked rush of blood to his eyes as he forced them shut; his softly delayed collapse to the balcony floor. His waking gratitude, instant because anticipated, at Colburn’s looming sympathies. For the thousandth time since leaving Byron’s service, he sensed the hand of the poet on him. (A sound like Byron’s voice, ‘soft and low, an excellent thing in woman’, sometimes surprised him at odd moments, under the noise of carriage-wheels on cobbles, in the cry of a woman scolding her child, calling after him. A scent like Byron’s, like the violet of his toilette, once stopped him cold amid the general odours of spring.) Polidori felt haunted and began to be afraid. The space in which he lived and felt – in the solitude of himself, free of the taint of other lives and feelings – was shrinking. He felt a lightness in his heart like the weak beat after a loss of blood.
CHAPTER NINE
IN THE MORNING, Polidori had to pack up his books.
Wherever he went he bought books; he could hardly read them as quickly as he acquired them. In Milan alone, after Byron had dismissed him, for consolation he purchased over three hundred volumes. Now they lay in tumbled stacks about his rooms: Caesar, Pliny the Younger, Sallust, Seneca, Tacitus . . . Byron had said to him once, not unkindly, ‘You are more an antique Roman than a Doctor.’ Their presence was a constant reproach: how little he had read. Another world in which he had failed to make his way. Better to sell them, to be rid of them, to begin again: with empty shelves, an uncluttered life. Colburn had promised to send a man around that afternoon to appraise them. As usual, Polly had turned first for help to those who abused his trust. The publisher would sell them on, whatever struck him, for an ‘honest’ commission; and Polly could not repress his filial relief at entering into relations with a powerful man.
It was a bright early summer day, dusty and glaring, though not without its chills. Polidori sat on the floor in a heap of books. He’d awoken, after a restless night on an empty stomach, late in the morning, hollow-hearted and red-eyed; but the sense of physical weakness had rather sharpened than dulled the clarity of his thoughts. He was cleaned out; he could fill up. The refrain of his intentions ran through his head: I am going to set my life in order; I am going to begin again, from scratch; I am going to begin. Yet he could not lift a title without glancing in. His curiosity, easily fatigued, nevertheless had its own kind of persistence. He liked to touch everything that came to hand. The task sufficiently absorbed him that he did not notice the low knock and shy step of Eliza Esmond, until she stood in his room. Her cheeks were flushed, either with exercise, or a consciousness of the risk taken. ‘My lord,’ she said, somewhat breathlessly. ‘My lord.’ It was just as she might have pictured him: a poet surrounded by his inspirations; dishevelled, dirty, indifferent to the sunshine beckoning from the city window; a man of his words. ‘I feared for you. You left so suddenly. You would not speak to me.’
‘I was taken ill, it could not be helped. The air in the theatre was stifling. The press of other people.’
‘I thought perhaps you were displeased with me. I thought perhaps you suspected me of giving you away.’ She wrung her hands till the knuckles reddened unpleasantly; her spareness betrayed a kind of greed, an appetite for life that would not be satisfied by ordinary human foods. He guessed that whatever she suffered as disappointment, some internal heat transformed into guilt, into her own wrongdoing. She could be easily played with.
‘Not at all.’ He decided to please her, to appeal to her sense of himself. ‘Only, I am very susceptible to the . . . the force of others. Kean was magnificent. His anger was tremendous; it undid me.’
‘I know just what you mean; it took me just the same; it was all I could do not to cry out when he shouted so.’ There followed an awkward silence. They could only speak when their various postures touched upon each other, like glancing foils. In their natural shapes, they hung back, silently.
She, taking violent courage, began again abruptly and too loudly. ‘I only wished to say I had read your tale; I was never more affected by anything’ – she seemed to stagger slightly, her agitation was painfully apparent – ‘by anything in my life. It is the finest thing you have done. I have not slept this week.’ She leaned in his doorway, and Polidori hastened to support her. She wore a long peach-coloured pelisse, and a very small bonnet, shaped like a bee-hive. A charming dress; she was really not at all ill-looking. Her fidgets, her nerves, were only the checked expression of something rather fierce. She’d make, he thought, a beautiful consumptive, the way she fought for life. Besides, she had this fact tremendously in her favour: she had liked his book.
‘You are very brave,’ he whispered, taking her elbow in his hand and guiding her to his single chair. ‘Very brave.’ His open neck shamed him; he had rolled his shirt-sleeves to his elbows, and now carefully unrolled them again.
It seemed to her that a pane of glass, already cracked, had fallen away. The view was not only clearer for it, but the fresh wind in her face struck her with a kind of violence. She was almost free, outside herself, in the world. She had taken this step on her own – come what may, she had done her duty. This thought she repeated feverishly in her head. Duty to whom, to what, still undefined. He poured her a glass of water from his nightstand. She had prepared a little speech, and now, with his back turned, she summoned the courage to deliver it.
‘I presume, I know, upon a very slight acquaintance: two dances at a ball three years ago. Or rather, only one; the other we sat out together. I suppose you’ve forgotten inviting me that night, to bid you farewell in the morning. You were leaving for Dover, I believe.’ She paused to gather her thoughts; and then, as if entering at last upon her proper confession, continued. ‘I came. You did not see me; but I watched you standing in the balcony window. I nearly called out to you – but the world was all before you, and I did not suppose it would wait for my interruption. I was hardly more than a girl. Your glance passed over me then, and as it did, I fell in love with you. It may seem a strange assertion, but it is none the less true that I place my happiness in your hands. If a woman, whose reputation has as yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control her, she should throw herself on your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years . . .’
Polidori interrupted her with the glass of water; she had started to pant. He lifted her chin, and she drank. Her swallow, plainly audible, struck her as an almost shameful avowal of the physical self: she had really begun to believe she was all words and feelings until that cool lump of liquid passed down her throat into the stomach. He resigned the glass to her and retreated to the window. Bowing her head, she resumed: ‘Could you betray me, or would you be as silent as the grave?’
It amazed him, afterwards, how easily he’d adopted his role. Childe Harold, of course, was the model for it. And Polidori, as he entered into the love-sick character, was surprised by the sympathy it taught him for Lord Byron. So this was it, the painful little contradiction from which the poet suffered: between the amusement one felt, at playing a part, and the really tender feelings it evoked. ‘You hardly know what you ask of me, of whom you ask it. My touch,’ and here Polidori paused and just turned his head till the sunshine caught the light sketch of his profile, ‘my touch is contagion. There is scarcely a creature – who comes within my orbit – and does not suffer some terrible humiliation. Whatever is innocent and nourishing in this world, I corrupt and destroy. If, indeed, I could learn – if I could strive – to deserve the honour you have thus entrusted to me, my first thought, my first regret, would be – that I did not at once, for your own sake, turn you from my door.’
The pose seemed to carry his feelings with it, on the crest of which he forgot for a moment his various embarrassments. The dusty poverty of his rooms. Its odours: the mulching stench of well-travelled books, the damp oppression of a young man’s solitary life. The port stains on his old silk shirt, the glare of his threadbare pantaloons, the loose-stitched squalor of his shoes. All the lies he’d told; all the patients he had killed. The lies he was telling still . . . For just that minute, his possession of the part was complete. It was only a whisper of self-congratulation that brought him down again. Come, he thought of saying to Lord Byron, this is talking.
She raised her eyes to him. ‘My lord, I should die, I should perish. You could not be so cruel.’
It was almost too perfect, the way she played up to his role. And yet the tenderness she aroused in him could not be doubted. He imagined his palm taking the measure of her cheek, as Goose had taken his own face in her hand. The smell of her, as dry and sweet as powdered sugar, seemed to offer a return of the feminine into his life: its quiet promise of niceness. A world governed by taste and gentleness. This is what Byron had always enjoyed in the female presence: the way one appealed to it. They had both flourished in the world of their sisters’ love; they had both suffered from being cast out of it. For the first time he looked at Miss Esmond and thought, who are you? And staring at her, he brought the question out. ‘But what’s your history?’ he said.
