Imposture, page 14
Not long after, the poet and the doctor parted company. What Polly could bear least of all was the thought of disappointing his father; but he consoled himself with the reflection, that Gaetano had said from the first it would end badly and might take pleasure from the fact of being proved right. He wrote to his father at once, in terms carefully chosen to flatter the old man’s sense of his son. ‘We have parted, finding that our tempers did not agree. He proposed it and it was settled. There was no immediate cause, but a continued series of slight quarrels. I believe the fault, if any, has been on my part, I am not accustomed to have a master, and therefore my conduct was not free and easy.’ But Polly wasn’t yet ready to return home and burden his father: ‘I hope I am still off your hands for some while.’ He planned to ‘walk over Italy and look over the medical establishments – see if there proves a good opportunity to settle. Besides,’ he added, ‘I might look up Frances and her amante in Milan.’
Byron, the morning Polly set off, seemed listless and peevishly affected. He lay sulking in his rooms ‘like a dog’, as he put it. And Polly had to seek him out in his bedroom: he smelled the thick air of Byron’s sleep as he took the poet’s hand. Byron would not rise from his low couch. ‘Well, it’s your own fault,’ he said pettishly, raising a few limp fingers to be touched. And then, ‘I am sorry to see you go. I soon get attached to people.’ Polly asked for permission to look him up, should their paths cross in Italy. ‘You may do as you like,’ Byron said, ‘it’s all the same to me. Everyone leaves me in the end.’ Polly, as he turned in the doorway, told himself to fix in his memory what might be his last view of the great poet: his angel’s face, in which the beauty of man and woman were so remarkably mixed; his full curved ears, half-hidden in dark curls; his startling blue gaze. He looked pale, with a little colour just under his eyes, to show he had slept poorly; his lame foot hidden in the fold of an oriental rug, for he was never too idle or sad to attend to the necessary adjustments of his vanity. Polly had learned to recognize B’s famous melancholy for what it was: the grace of his peevishness. But he now learnt to see beneath his self-pity another warmer melancholy. Byron was becoming lonely. He had learnt for the first time in the past year that he hadn’t the charm or the patience to keep his friendships, even the least of them, intact – in touch.
In fact, Polly saw Byron again before the year was out. His lordship decided to pass the autumn in Milan, where Polidori was staying at his sister’s establishment: her new husband, Rossetti, had been appointed consul. It occurred to the doctor, as soon as the news of Byron’s visit reached them, that he had now at his disposal another means, another attraction, by which to bind the poet to him once again.
Frances and he hardly had a minute to themselves all evening. Which was just as well: what had passed between them, all those years ago, was present to both of them, and too difficult a subject for them either to broach it or leave it unmentioned. Besides, Frances was being, as Esmé complained, ‘treated with cushions’. Even Gaetano insisted that she drink a little wine, not too much; that she eat well; that no one plague her with questions and news. Frances hardly seemed to need such indulgence. She was quite well, she insisted, and hungry and thirsty enough to let her own appetites guide her. But she gave way, after a few protests, to their ‘cushioning’, if only because she guessed, in the end, that it softened the shock of her presence for them.
After dinner, Gaetano and Polly withdrew and drank cognac and smoked each half a cigar. Polidori asked, if Senior Rossetti was shortly expected? Gaetano, who rested his glass on the button of his waistcoat, said only that ‘Senior Rossetti was a very important and busy man. Also, very attached to Italy; he could not bear to leave it in the spring.’ Polly said, ‘I have not yet seen William.’
‘No,’ Gaetano agreed. ‘A charming child. Exactly like his mother.’
Polidori, who had hoped to refrain from boasting of any of these things, said ‘that he had begun to write again. Henry Colburn, a very reputable and successful publisher, had promised him a large advance for his memoir of Lord Byron; it wanted, he said, only a little adjustment.’ When Gaetano did not answer, Polly continued: ‘I have not asked you if you have heard any mention of a new gothic tale, The Vampyre, which has sold already in the thousands, and received a great deal of attention. As it happens . . .’
‘I have never, as you know,’ Gaetano interrupted, ‘bothered myself over such trifles.’
Polidori drank and looked into his glass.
‘Your godfather,’ Gaetano continued, ‘has written me to say, that you planned to enter the law. He did not think it a good idea. I must say I agree with him. At a certain age, for a man to change profession – I don’t think you would find it easy. Even if you managed to establish a career in the law, about which I am by no means sanguine, even in the best case, that is, it would look unsteady, a sign of weak character. Your own profession seems to me perfectly satisfactory.’
‘Why,’ Polly asked, with more spirit, ‘which profession is that?’
‘Doctor, of course,’ his father said.
Polly thought, I kill whatever I touch, I have always killed whatever I touch; but said nothing.
Gaetano announced at last ‘that he wasn’t so young any more, he could suffer himself to drink a second glass of cognac, or finish a cigar.’ He rose and brushed the ash from his stomach. ‘I wish you good night, son,’ he added, turning in the doorway uncertainly round. He had aged, too. The girth of himself, self-made, seemed now an unhappy encumbrance; he couldn’t, even had he wanted to, have reached his arms around himself to embrace his son. ‘Your mother,’ he muttered, ‘asked me to tell you, that neither of us consider, that what has . . . brought Frances home . . . has any relation to you – to what happened between you in Milan, that is. I mean with Lord Byron. Your mother asked me particularly to reassure you.’
Polly ducked his head, blushing so hot that he couldn’t say a word. His father, taking this gesture for a bow, bowed himself, and quietly shut the door behind.
Frances managed to catch him alone just as he was going. He had stepped outside and taken a breath of the dense spring evening, cold with cloudlessness. As he turned to close the door behind him, he felt a soft resisting weight. At first, he couldn’t understand it, and pushed harder, until a little cry from his sister made him stop, and he saw her face in the crack. ‘I wanted to say goodnight,’ she said, and followed him out, leaving the door on the latch. This was the second time that day, he noted wryly, a girl had seen him out and on his way.
‘I feel we’ve hardly exchanged a word all evening,’ Frances said. She sat on the cold front steps and pulled him down to her. He had the sense of being taken in hand – as if he were the last of her goodnight duties to fulfil. There was little traffic in the road. The waning moon had the sky to itself and appeared both plain and large, its skin marred by blemishes, like any human face. Frances asked permission to warm herself on him, and when Polly said nothing, she slipped her hand around his back and under his arm, and pushed herself against his near side. The comfort of this almost made him tremble, but he with difficulty restrained himself.
‘We mustn’t tire you with questions,’ he said, mockingly.
‘That only counts for the rest of them. We have always answered to each other, haven’t we?’
‘Not in years. Not in many years.’
She nodded at this, taking it in; and then, consciously adopting a different line, asked, ‘Well, how are you then? Papa I can tell is . . . hopeful for you again.’ And then with kindly irony, she went on, ‘He feels you have had enough of . . . your own way. He thinks you are ready to listen to him, again.’
‘On the contrary,’ Polly said, ‘I am almost free.’
Frances had nothing to say to this, and for a minute they sat, companionably enough, in each other’s arms, and watched the lights in the houses opposite come off and on. A thick-set man on a slow horse looked at them, trotting past, letting his head turn with them; and they met his stare, without offence or curiosity. Frances broke the silence again. ‘I had forgotten how vast London is. It is almost a relief after Milan.’
‘What’s happened to you?’ Polly said, giving in at last, ungraciously, to the gentle insistence of her intimate tone.
But she drew back now, and recited, as if repeating a difficult declension she was always getting wrong: ‘Nothing, only . . . something slowly became clear, which I had hoped to conceal. It has brought about, when it could no longer be denied – when it could no longer usefully be denied – the expected consequences. But concealment was never for the best, and I am glad of it now, I am glad. Only too sleepy to go over it all again. I’ll go over it all again tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps I shan’t see you tomorrow.’ And then he added, rather grandly, ‘I’ve got out of the habit of coming home.’ It was the voice of the child who had stayed on, boasting of his new life, to reproach the child who had gone away – for knowing nothing any more about the family she had left behind.
‘I see.’ She looked him over. ‘Well, another day then; it isn’t a bedtime story.’ The words seemed to summon the scrabbling on the stairs they heard behind them, like the sound of a dog struggling on hard ground. And just as the door pushed open against their backs, Frances said, ‘The short of it is’ – she looked up at him, smiling a little, ‘I’ve been given my congé, too.’ And then, ‘Oh, William, my love, why aren’t you in bed?’
Polly had never met his nephew, who was born within the year after he left Milan. He made space for him now, easing away from Frances, who quickly replaced her brother with the child in her arms. She kissed his sleepy face. The kisses seemed to bring out her son’s tears and quench them at once. The boy was not yet three years old, girlish in figure and complexion, and extraordinarily pretty, with features Polly recognized at once: his rich locks, fine, harp-shaped ears, and astonishingly blue eyes. He almost wept himself to see them again, so carefully reproduced in miniature; but they inspired in him also a sense of the full horror of his shame. Frances had risen, the child was shy and buried his face in her neck. Polly stood up and took a step towards the road. She looked helplessly at him. ‘He doesn’t sleep any more without me,’ his sister said. ‘We’ve grown used to each other, lately, on our travels. I’ve been very weak, but I can’t refuse what’s so comfortable to us both. Not yet. But I wanted to say, brother, how sorry I was, for everything that happened. I never got the chance before. I hardly dared write and ask you to forgive me; but I very much hoped that you had.’
Polly put his hand around the boy’s bare foot, which hung at his sister’s waist, and rubbed it. ‘There was never anything to forgive,’ he said. ‘And what there was, I believe, was mostly on your side. But perhaps we can agree to call it quits.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and as he turned to leave, she added, ‘William, bid your uncle good night.’ But the boy was too shy, and Polly heard nothing else as he walked away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COLBURN’S PARLOUR LIGHT WAS LIT. The house was only a little out of his way home, and Polly, not knowing why, had taken the road that ran past it and for a minute wondered whether to knock on his publisher’s door. He wasn’t in any case ready for sleep again. He also had, in the first shock of his recent knowledge, an idea of coldly putting it to use. Colburn, he believed, would be very much interested in the story he had to tell. Even if it touched, rather intimately, on the personal; he now had his claim to the private closets of Byron’s life. But then the parlour light went out, and the street darkened with it, and Polidori had the sense of a quiet turning to rest that a doused light always suggests. The sight of it put him in mind of his own bed, and having stopped in the street, he now continued on his way: sobbing dryly, with a forced grief akin to anger, which it quickly turned into.
An unhappy hesitation had begun to infect his least decision. There seemed to be no one on St Giles, aside from drunks of various degrees. Then a woman in a doorway called to him, in a plaintive voice not unlike a cry for help, and exposed, in the light of the moon under a ragged skirt, a scarred red knee. He didn’t at once understand what was offered – for an instant he stopped in sympathy for the stricken and shelterless – and when he did, it amazed him, how the simple fact of the offering could colour her abused form: the dirty line of the bone in her ankle, the free play of her toes in their torn slippers. These now hinted to him the pleasure that might be had from something willing to be roughly handled. He tested himself for such desires. He was unhappy enough to act on anything that might put off, for an hour or so, the consciousness of it. And he had brought a prostitute to bed before: the daughter of an Italian peasant who stank of garlic and who had cheerfully bartered his child, hoping perhaps to advance her fortunes, to the famous English milord. Byron had a reputation for charity towards his cast-offs. And in fact having haggled and paid for the creature, who also reeked sharply and sexually of the kitchen, he took a kind of pity on her and declined to touch her after she undressed. His sympathies were like sudden fancies: she had stood before him in the blue pallor of girlhood, her knees and elbows pressed shyly together. They did not, however, prevent him from passing the use of her onto his young doctor. Cast-offs, both of them. She had long, high-arched feet, and was by no means as innocent as she at first appeared. But the thought of her reminded him of another girl Byron had shown less restraint in enjoying, and, tearless and angry now, Polidori said to the woman in the doorway, ‘Cover your shame. In this condition you inspire only disgust.’ The outburst gave him no relief.
Turning away, he thought he saw Colburn himself passing ahead of him in the road, a broad-backed man with a brisk deliberate stride walking in the direction of Gronow’s, his club on Drury Lane. Conscious of clutching at straws, Polly ran after him, across Shaftesbury Avenue, and onto Endell Street. All the while, one of Lord Byron’s quips repeated itself in his thoughts. ‘The doctor,’ B once said (it was Shelley who cruelly passed on the joke) ‘is just the kind of man, who, if he were drowning, one would reach him a straw, to see if the old adage be true: that drowning men clutch at straws.’ But the image seemed to him now more unhappy than humorous – almost as if Byron from the first had seen the pathos in it, sympathetically. He caught up with the broad-backed man at the door of the club, a simple blue house-door with a hat-shaped knocker. By this time, in spite of the coolness of the cloudless night, Polidori was unpleasantly damp with sweat. It was Colburn. He seemed scarcely surprised to see the doctor, and said smiling, ‘Finished already? I thought I’d leave you to it.’ Polly was too hot to hear him, and, asking Colburn for a word, was duly invited inside.
Gronow’s was fashionable among the theatre set and those gentlemen who wished to entertain their sporting but professional acquaintances in a mixed crowd. It sprawled over several floors of a narrow house. Candles lit the dark small rooms, which were heaped with furniture, and the smell and heat of tallow thickened the air of confined humanity. The atmosphere suggested guests making free with the hospitality of a host who has been unexpectedly detained from home. Colburn, in high humour, said he liked the place because the poets who came were always too drunk to plague him with their manuscripts. They descended, gingerly, the fretted iron stairs leading to the basement. Polly put his hand on Colburn’s shoulder to steady himself, and then hardly liked to let go of his comforting mass. In the uncertain light, the publisher’s broad, pock-marked face had the look of a friendly devil’s.
Colburn ordered brandy for both of them from a waiter wearing tan doe gloves. When it came he set his glass against the ledge running the width of the room, and glanced over the tables occupying the middle of the floor. ‘It is best to survey the field,’ he said in his heavy ironies, ‘before one ventures into it.’ The rattle of the dice sounded like the quickening of a pulse; and Polidori, in spite of everything, found himself thrilling to the rapid and plain unfolding of fates the games represented. It amazed him always, the fact of chance: the notion, how hopeful! that his life might depend on the action of inhuman forces; that it could be redeemed by luck. It was clear to him by now that whatever depended on his own will, on his human qualities, on himself alone, was doomed to failure.
Gronow’s was slow to take up new fads, and the game of the hour was still hazard. Cries of ‘nicked it’ and ‘crabs’ rang out, variously, from the several tables in operation, among the haggling over bets laid. Colburn was looking for a lucky hand before joining in, and Polly, repeating something B had once said to him, told the publisher, ‘I have a notion that gamblers are as happy as most people – being always excited. One tires of everything else before long: women, ambition, fame. But every cast of the dice keeps the gambler alive. Besides one can game ten times longer than one can do anything else. As soon as I hear the dice I feel – entirely awake. And by the contrast afterwards see how much of my life I pass in a kind of half-sleep.’
Colburn nodded, and then, in a quieter gap, said, ‘It’s the gamblers themselves I never tire of observing. How hopeless they are: whatever they win will be lost in a minute. I play only to keep my hand in. As I said, it’s the spectacle of them that moves me.’
‘You have, however, the reputation of a sharp.’
Polly had wondered whether he was being insulting, but Colburn turned and smiled suddenly at him. This was the kind of praise he enjoyed, with a spice of resentment in it. His large face reddened benignly; he liked being kind to those he was capable of hurting. ‘I’ll tell you, Polly, the secret of it: indifference. You’ll never win anything if you care a hang for it either way.’
