Imposture, page 13
No, no, Mr Esmond averred, shaking his long head. Nothing of the sort.
‘Or perhaps you took me for a mere sing-song driveller, full of poetical enthusiasms?’
Not that either, no.
‘Then what?’
‘I didn’t,’ Mr Esmond said – he had stopped in his tracks and let go of Eliza’s arm, and stood now face to face with the poet – ‘I didn’t expect yours was a character I had the wit to imagine. I didn’t dream of imagining anything. I knew it would fall short.’ He hesitated, he was visibly moved by his own humility, his humility indeed seemed to matter a great deal to him, and Polly had for the first time the occasion to look him up and down.
Eliza’s father was, undeniably, a strange-looking creature: about the average height, but so narrow and straight, he appeared taller. His face was covered ineffectually by a beard, which, it seemed, no matter how long he let it grow, refused to thicken and fill in. His brow was high and noble in its way, with what seemed the print of an angry knuckle just above the strong line of his nose. His cheeks inclined sharply and, as it were, hungrily to his chin, but it was the quality of the skin that seemed most striking: smooth, beneath the hairs growing out of it, pale, utterly childish. Eliza’s dark complexion clearly came from her mother, from whom she must also have inherited her animal restlessness and fine spirits. Mr Esmond never fidgeted at all; his long arms hung limply by his side. His lips alone, as pink as Eliza’s, though a little encumbered with whiskers, allowed the expression of subtlety and humour. ‘To tell you the truth, sir,’ he added, conscious of venturing on something obscurely impertinent, ‘I did not expect to find you at all, here. I expected to find that this was another one of Eliza’s – I won’t call them lies, because she’s a good honest girl’ – the good honest girl was writhing and blushing uncontrollably – ‘but what we call in the family her Ideas. I expected to find you were merely another one of her Ideas. She can’t help them; it’s her imagination; I wish I had it. But Eliza’s capable of believing anything she thinks, and she thinks a great deal, you’ll have found that for yourself. All kinds of things.’ Polly didn’t know what to answer, was struck suddenly fearful he had been discovered, and for the first time guessed how little he wished to be found out, until Mr Esmond added, ‘But there’s one more thing about Eliza’s Ideas, which is this, that they sometimes turn out to be true. You can’t just reckon against them, not reliably. And I’m grateful, and honoured, I’m sure, to find that this is one of those occasions.’ And he bowed at last, glad to have delivered himself, gracefully enough, of what he meant to say.
Polly felt mostly relief at the time, and bowed in return. It was only later he realized, and reflected upon the fact, that something important had been confided to him. A proper increase of intimacy. And that Eliza’s misapprehension of him had in its way been blinding him to her. She was a girl who made things up, who lived, privately and powerfully, in the court of her own imagination. It wasn’t entirely his fault; this kind of mistake was what she was always making, what she desired to make. He began to see her more clearly. If she was a fool, there was also a rareness to her, an indifference to present circumstances, not unlovable, especially for a man like Polly, given the ‘present circumstances’ in which he found himself, and, more generally, his own passion for dressing up. After all, he couldn’t pretend that her mistake was groundless, that he hadn’t played into it himself, that it didn’t, also, reveal something about him. They suited each other, in fact.
And he began to like her father. He wasn’t at all what Polly had expected, the gloomy misanthrope Mr Esmond had at first appeared to be. Failure seemed to agree with him; it had made him humorous; it had taught him to enjoy himself. Once his tongue had been loosened, there was no holding him back. Polly, with a charming modesty he could only carry off in the role of Lord Byron, had begun to flatter Mr Esmond with questions about the old man’s historical romances. Wonderful, how much it lifted his heart, to tell his tales. His inert limbs would spring into violent, and worrying, life. Time and again, he let go his daughter’s arm to make a point more forcibly, to act out the gesture of one of the desperate heroes of his unpublished imagination. In his first novel, The Garden of Interrupted Spring, his heroine fights off the attentions of an ungentlemanly suitor, while walking with him in the family orchard. She heaves at him the body of a crow, who seems to have died from surfeiting on rotten apples, and who, mysteriously, revives to beat his wings against her assailant’s neck. Mr Esmond played the part of the crow; Eliza’s neck played the part of the ungentlemanly suitor’s. Polly wept with laughter; conscious that he was being deliberately amused, and that there was also something cruel in the fact of his amusement. Also, he dimly envied her father’s freedom with Eliza; she bent her head girlishly against her breast to ward off his tickling.
‘Luckily,’ Mr Esmond said, subsiding and winking, and consciously giving himself airs, ‘I never wrote to be read.’ No, exactly, Polly answered, missing the wink, hoping to make up for his laughter by playing one of Byron’s familiar tunes: poetry for him was merely the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevented an earthquake . . . ‘Or,’ Mr Esmond cut in, ‘in his own case, prose was the drizzle which prevented a shower.’ No, no, said his daughter, taking his arm again, and squeezing her side against his.
Yet what joy it gave Eliza to see him happy, how sweetly it suited her. And there was something about their company that suited Polly, too: the easy assumption of their insignificance. His own father was hardly as genial. Gaetano’s fatness belied him; he was cold to the touch with disappointment in his son. Polly imagined passing his Sundays with the Esmonds, the comforts to be found in their small corner, their quiet warmth. The Bagnigge Wells appeared; and for a minute they stood observing the dirty stagnant waters surrounded by cracked urns, the loose sketching of the midges flying over them. Trickles of overflow gathered dust and thickened. The ground was scored with the tracks of wet shoes. Should he confess now? Did he dare? He slapped a mosquito against his cheek; Eliza turned to look at him fearfully. Mr Esmond said, soberly, in a moment’s quiet, ‘Joking aside, I wish to make clear how much we feel the honour of your . . . how much, in particular, I myself, as a humble practitioner of a craft . . .’
Polly couldn’t wait to interrupt him. He was terribly embarrassed, and also, just a touch, gratified and humbled by the mere expression of the sentiment, as if the words carried a weight independent of their truth. ‘I assure you,’ he said, ‘nothing would give me greater pleasure than the chance to look over some of your works. Eliza, perhaps, could offer me a sampling.’ Mr Esmond nodded his large ungainly head; and Polly thought, what a world Byron lived in, the powers he had of giving joy. He also remembered the way his own dramas had been received by the circle at Diodati.
They parted at last at the door of Mr Esmond’s cottage, a short walk from the Gardens. A very humble home. The pointwork was going, the yard was a tangle of weeds and rose – this early in the spring, mostly thorns. A coop of chickens made scratching, irritable noises, somewhere out of sight. Polly, lingering, said he was grateful for the air off the canal; it was always cooler, as if it lay in shadow. He had removed his shortcoat and held it again over one arm. A clump of his fine chestnut hair stuck to his brow. Mr Esmond remarked: that may be so, but the damp did terrible things to his bones. When he came home from the naval registry and sat at his desk in the evenings, which he made sure to do, the one virtue his muse could boast was her patience!, besides which, the desk was very prettily placed, and he overlooked the slow drift of water, a row of poplars, a field just now beginning to show its corn . . . Besides which, he repeated, conscious of losing his way, but unwilling to see his lordship go, the life of a widower was rather quiet, now that Bea was married, and Liza out of the house. But what he meant to say was, that, as he sat at his desk, often the only thing that came into his head was the ache in his knees; and he had to rise every few minutes to shake it off, before he sat down again.
Eliza had never looked fresher. Suppressed pride had brought colour to her cheeks, and vividly expressed her sense of having carried off a difficult enterprise. Now she impatiently ushered her papa inside, and said, she would only just point the way for his lordship and be back in a minute to put on his dinner. Polly himself took her arm this time as they walked into the road. She thanked him with downcast eyes; and confided, what her father had managed to whisper to her in the course of the afternoon, what a wonderful thing it was, the acquaintance of poets; how much impressed he had been by his lordship’s grace and humility. What a fine young man he seemed. Polly could only repeat a phrase he had often heard Byron use when he wished to be kind, when he wished to please: that he was always better entertained by the company of honest scribblers than famous authors, who tended only to puff their latest book. Then he urged with heavier sincerity, that Mr Esmond seemed to possess the true passion for his craft . . . Eliza at this stood on tip-toe, just balancing her slender weight on the point of contact between her long-fingered hand and the soft upper half of Polly’s arm, and then she kissed him quickly on the lips, tasting of lemon and cream gone slightly sour from the syllabub she’d eaten earlier in the afternoon. Before Polly could take her head in his hand and answer more fully, she was gone, skittering back with her skirts held in her fists above the dusty footway, and not even glancing back. Polly almost had to sit down on a rock, he felt so faint-headed; he rested instead both hands on his walking-stick. He had hardly eaten. He had hardly known, in months, in a year, the kindness of her sex – that sense of being blindly forgiven anything that a face pressed against one’s own seemed to grant. After a minute, he set off the way she had pointed, in the direction of town, where he was engaged to dine at his father’s house, to welcome Frances home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FRANCES WAS ASLEEP WHEN Polidori arrived in a hot-weather stink that seemed to him to announce against his wishes something unhappy about his temper and circumstances. His mother said to him, first thing, hardly rising from her chair in the stony garden: ‘Lower your voice; we’ve given her your old room.’ Its window overlooked them, not five feet above Polly’s head. Glancing up, he saw that she had left it open on the shady air. Polly heard a kind of reproach in his mother’s news: as if he, of all people, should sympathize with Frances’s weariness; as if he had a special understanding of its cause. But perhaps he was only going mad. ‘How is she?’ he asked, but his mother only repeated, ‘Hush, keep your voice down.’ He said he would just go inside to wash.
His sister Esmé ran helter-skelter down the steps to give him a warmer greeting. She had heard him come in. She was being terribly punished for some unnamed offence; they had compelled her to play with William, her nephew, just arrived. ‘Is William here as well?’ Polly said. ‘I thought she had left him with his father.’ She held onto Polly’s legs as he bent his face to the basin. ‘Compelled’ was the word Esmé used herself. The girl was now almost seven; it seemed to Polly that she had aged as unhappily as he. ‘Oh, it’s cold,’ she complained, as a few drops from the splash on his face struck her skin. She let go. Gaetano had once remarked to his son, that he wondered if perhaps Esmé was the ‘cleverest, most prodigal of them all’. Polly thought she probably was, but the child could not bear changes of any kind and had what seemed to him an unhealthy firm grip on things past. Even at six, she wore the same little bonnet she’d been given three years before, ragged as it was – loose threads of it grew tangled in her hair, fell around her ears; the same frock, which bit into her shoulders and pinched her armpits and exposed an inch of freckled skin above her knees. She always clung to Polly as soon as he arrived, and would not let go without being prised free in a manner that seemed to her brother too brutal to be frequently attempted. Gaetano had always indulged her; but, having been his darling, she now seemed the object of a less happy, more frightened dispensation. She wept bitterly, extravagantly, whenever Polly left.
‘How is Frances?’ Polly said to her, holding the girl up to his face. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘Frances is unutterably old,’ Esmé answered.
Polly, in fact, did not lay eyes on her till she came down late to dinner. A cloud hung over the meal. Polly could not put off the growing conviction that something was wrong – that the more normally everyone strove to behave, the worse it was. Gaetano intoned grace, over a fine roast lamb. The sour sweetness of an apricot gravy filled Polly’s nose; but he was too upset to eat, being all nerves and fine feelings. His father, he noticed, had got so fat, he could hardly get his arms to the table; Ellie, the maid, had to help him to his potatoes. There was something wilful and selfish about his weight; he had built, it seemed, these comfortable walls around himself, and now no one could reach him. God knows when the family began to go wrong, but that something was off was as easy to taste as sourness in wine. It probably began, Polly reflected, in the usual way of things, with the eldest son.
Frances appeared at last, in that way she had when late: just opening the door sufficient to let her narrow hips slip through, and shutting it behind her with the flat of her hand. She had, she said, only just got William to sleep. He’d got used to having her in bed with him; she had spoiled him. She hadn’t the heart, these days, to let him cry. And then, quickly, seeing her brother, she said, ‘Polly, my love, how cold of me, how are you?’ And came round the table to take his face in her hands from behind. He hadn’t been able to make her out clearly, so quick she was. He felt only her hands and her warm breath on his neck and closed his eyes.
He said, as she sat down now to her plate of food, ‘The last time I saw you, you were . . .’
But she interrupted him, laughing, ‘Many years younger, I know.’
He looked at her now, and couldn’t keep out of his glance the chill of assessment. Her face was older, true. She seemed to have aged without any clear outward marks, but the essential difference was still strongly conveyed. She hadn’t got fat or thin or grey; her dark complexion hid well the rough use of the Italian sun. But where before she had the unwashed look of a lively child who wanted scrubbing, her face now had a more durable weathering, as if no amount of bother could ever rub her pink again. Still, the cleft chin and the sharp hook in her nose suggested an unblunted spirit; and her brown eyes, large and clear as Polly’s own, were quick and liquid still. But her hands had begun to show the purposes to which they were put. He saw the fine green leaf-print of veins along the back of them, a faint arthritic swelling in her knuckles; and his cheeks remembered from her recent touch a dry aggressive sureness.
He had not seen her since that autumn in Milan, three years before. That long summer, Polly had felt Byron’s patience with him slipping, and the more he tried to please, the worse he succeeded. He was conscious of what an irritant he had become. He suffered from it, too: it was his own irritation with himself, like a poison-rash, that wore off on others, infectiously. The polish had come off his eagerness, his vanity – one was liable to cut oneself on the surface underneath. Byron, after a month of Polly’s purging him, had got lean and hungry again. As his master grew healthy, Polly began to give in to little complaints, a bad stomach, headaches. He wanted, of course, Byron to take care of him in turn. He wanted to feel, on one side or another, the tenderness of the nurse, of the patient. It was the only intimate role Byron had reserved for him. His lordship had always possessed, among his charms, a winning weakness; but as his strength returned, he began to deny Polly the doctor’s power to be kind, to be loving towards him; and it stunned Polly how bereft he felt, at this rejection. He tried to flatter Byron into taking care of him. He missed terribly the sick-bed warmth of their relations; but Byron, recovering from a difficult year and disastrous spring, felt that he had the world before him now. He always tired, in the end, of his young men.
And when everything else failed, Polly began to get into fights. He wanted to show Byron what the passion of loyalty was. He wanted to show Byron what a young man of spirit he was. Polly knocked the spectacles off an apothecary’s nose, for trying, as Polly insisted, to sell them ‘bad magnesia’. Polidori was arrested; Byron had to plead for him in court. And the doctor got off, with a fine of twelve florins, and a thin, wild sense of elation, that B had gone to such trouble for him. He considered the result ‘a triumph’, and couldn’t help boasting to Byron, to tease from him an expression of concern. ‘I think,’ the poet said, ‘you might cause me less bother in gaol.’
Later, he got into a silly scrap with Percy Shelley, who beat him in a boating contest, by ‘stealing his wind’ at the start. This gave way, afterwards, to several punning put-downs; Shelley could never resist his own flights of fancy, especially, that is, after winning anything. (He was beginning to suffer, too, in Byron’s company; and took out his ill-humour on the doctor. Shelley, guiltily, secretly, loved winning: at pistols, at cards, at boats, at love.) Polidori said, in a pale and pompous heat, ‘I have become sensible that in this party I have begun to be treated with contempt’, and challenged Shelley to a duel. Shelley only laughed. The fair young man grew rosy in high humour, and nothing amused him more than the lightness of his own indifference to propriety. ‘I never duel,’ he said, ‘especially with doctors. It seems ungenerous, when mostly we pay handsomely for you to kill us.’
Polly answered, ‘Well, as for that, for no charge at all, I’ll shoot you where you stand.’
Byron in the end stepped in. ‘Remember: though Shelley has some scruples about duelling, I shall be perfectly prepared to take his place.’ Polly, in tears, backed down; he stood at the edge of the water, while the boats knocked against the pier. Shelley was balancing on the cross-bench, an occupation that seemed to require his full attention, and made him look boyish and happy. It was nearly lunchtime; in spite of everything, Polidori felt the simpler claims of hunger. Byron, in a curious gesture the doctor never forgot, touched the side of his forefinger to Polly’s chin, and flicked it up. Polly hadn’t shaved, and the rough stubble against Byron’s nail made a noise like a struck match. Polidori couldn’t tell, if Byron had meant to cheer him up, or suggest the cocking of a gun against his face.
