Imposture, page 18
Her father had stopped by in the evening. Lady Walmsley had never met him. She was pointedly charming; she said, ‘I’ve told Eliza a hundred times, I’d like to meet you. We’ve become rather dependent on each other. I think of her quite as a daughter.’ None of it was true – Mr Esmond was being coddled into taking their side. Yet even Eliza was flattered by her insincerity; perhaps she wasn’t as forlorn a creature as she believed herself to be. Father and daughter took a turn in the garden. A high moon rode between the trees. It was cold when the wind gathered weight, but they had the warmth of each other, until Eliza abruptly inquired, ‘So, has she persuaded you?’
‘Your sister,’ he began, but she let go of his arm and broke in, ‘You can’t have forgotten his charms, so soon. The acquaintance of poets.’
‘Your sister has made me sensible of my duties, as a father. You and I, my dear, have let our enthusiasms run away with us, again.’ And then, more bitterly: ‘I do as I’m told. Perhaps it’s for the best, this once, you do the same.’
‘Has it made you happy?’ she asked.
As she lay in bed, she hardened her heart once more against the unkindness of that last remark. ‘You have a cruel tongue,’ he’d told her, taking firm hold of her hand, which she had tried to wrench from him again. ‘Everyone is grabbing at me,’ she’d shouted. ‘I don’t want to be touched any more.’ She needed to break free at last from her cramped innocence; she couldn’t breathe in it. What had her father said earlier? . . . that he was too afraid of putting himself in the wrong?
She sat up, with quick decision, and kicked the covers away; sleeplessness had made her palms and feet sweat. Under her bed, she kept a writing-box with pen and paper in it. She searched for it on her knees, then brought it out and set it on her bed. Still on her knees, she began to write, feeling entirely practical and clear-headed – not so much passionate as conscious of taking a decisive step. This was what moved her now, even more than the image of him. (His upright delicate posture, that of a strong man resting on a weak leg; the fine-feeling in his face; the taste of his skin in her mouth.) – The thought that she was taking her fate in her hands. It was only a question of how to get the note to him; she suspected they were watching her mail.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IT WAS DAYLIGHT WHEN POLIDORI AWOKE. He’d dreamed in his sleep of the wind’s kicking up. The rattle of a sash window in its block had obtruded itself upon these dreams. Someone was trying to get in. In his dreams, he woke fitfully, and disturbed by the noise, rose to look out the window. Streets and houses had disappeared, and in their place, the prospect below him of a wide unsettled sea hardly surprised him. He tried to make out the horizon, but thunder clouds had cast their entrails into the water, and all he could see was the light shot through them. No land in sight. Lord Byron, he knew, in spite of his adventurous pride, was a poor sailor; he would suffer heavily if it came on to blow. And Polly considered what physic to make up for his relief, and then, a little spitefully, turned over in bed to sleep more. Well, let him suffer, too; there was time enough in the morning to play doctor. When the banging continued, he had the guilty but not unpleasant sense of being demanded, of putting somebody important off.
The knocking at the door brought him at last to his senses. God, he had needed that rest. He tried to guess the time and felt the luxury of being able to go back to sleep, if he liked, straight through the day again and into another morning. Was there anything to get him out of bed? He knew how late he’d got into it; and the memory of that ushered in others, less comfortable to him. ‘I’m ruined,’ he thought; and when the banging persisted, called out, irritably, ‘For God’s sake, what time is it?’
‘Almost three, sir.’ A young man’s voice, respectful, common enough, but unembarrassed.
‘Who are you?’
‘Jeb Willis, sir. I’ve been sent –’
‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve been sent by Miss Eliza Esmond. She was very particular I deliver it straight to your hands.’
‘Deliver what?’ Polly called out, as he got up to answer the door. Was the feeling that rose in him, at the mention of her name, more shameful or loving? What an odd mixture the two made – how strangely they enhanced each other. A memory, suddenly, returned to him, a fragment from the wreck of the day before: Eliza standing on childish tiptoe to kiss him, the sidelong nudge of her nose against his. Another gift of credit he couldn’t make good on. His power of disappointing her inspired in Polidori great tenderness; he knew what it was to be disappointed.
Mr Willis was a burly young man with freckles that had begun to thicken into blotches. He gave Polidori a small envelope, sealed with the initials E. E. Polidori, thanked him and moved to shut the door. ‘Expecting an answer,’ Willis said. So Polly sat down on his bed and began to read.
My dear Lord,
I did not, as you know, expect you to love me; yet much to my surprise, more to my happiness, you betrayed passions I had believed no longer alive in your bosom. Have you then any objection to the following plan? On Tuesday evening we may go out of town together by some stage or mail about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning.
They are trying to keep me from you; but I shan’t be kept any longer. I am being constantly watched; and shall appear before you, if you accept my offer, disguised. Your honour is safe; rely on me to approach you at the appointed hour. I shall ever remember the gentleness of your manners and the wild originality of your countenance. My happiness is in your hands. I will be waiting at seven o’clock, tomorrow evening, at the Bull & Mouth, 40, Regent Circus, Piccadilly.
Ever thine,
ELIZA ESMOND
Poor, foolish girl, he thought; what a pair we are. And he smiled: how perfectly suited. Then he remembered that Willis was waiting for him. ‘She is,’ the boy began, more hesitantly, ‘she is a most kind-hearted lady, and much put-upon. Have you anything to reply, sir?’
‘Tell her, yes,’ Polidori said.
He had a night and a day to wonder at himself. After Willis left, Polidori finished the ruby dregs of laudanum in the glass vial, and tried to sleep again. He took it as a sign of good luck, of constitutional revival, that he managed to recompose himself. He awoke this time in a stream of morning sunshine, feeling light-headed and refreshed. He’d hardly eaten in three days; starvation, he reflected, suited him, and he remembered his spirited boast to Henry Colburn: ‘I eat the air’. It was one of Lord Byron’s favourite lines.
He washed and dressed, with greater than usual attention, and decided to go out. A fine, brisk day, sunshiny, where even the shadows of the clouds had a black brightness to them and cast illumination. The air, spring-cold, was very clear and rich to breathe. He wandered along Regent’s Street and took pleasure in the sight of the shops and the gentlemen shopping. It was only a question of how to tell her, that he couldn’t go. It was only a question of breaking the news, gently and confidentially. This was the trouble; he didn’t want to compromise her position. He stopped off at The Nose Bag for a pint of porter, and listened, with real pleasure, to a pair of bucks betting over a game of vingt-un. For a minute he was tempted to join in, but he had no money in his pocket. He was also surprised by how perfectly the role of mere observer had satisfied him. It was time he got his affairs in order. He knew now, with final certainty, that he would never write another word. He’d known such conviction before, of course, and understood himself well enough to suspect above all his sense of certainty. But the relief he felt, at the thought of giving up – his ambitions, everything – made him want to justify this intuition with a decisive act. Colburn had once pointed out to him a money-lender named Nathan, who lived off Oxford Street, in the basement flat of a vivid green town-house. A very reasonable Jew. Expensive, true, but what mattered more was, he understood an Englishman’s sense of honour. He didn’t kick up too much fuss about the forms.
Polly, feeling pleasantly busy, decided to search him out. Finding the house gave him a little surge of satisfaction, on the strength of which he managed to convince Mr Nathan (a surprisingly florid young man, straight-backed, with large familiar hands) to lend him two hundred pounds, at one hundred per cent interest annually, on the security of his father’s name. Barred sunshine made its way into Nathan’s front parlour; Polly sat with his back to it, trying to read the terms spread out on a round table. He had to push his chair over – his shoulder was blocking the light – and then he forged his father’s signature, without a second thought, on the deed of loan. Nathan, licking his thumb, counted out the money. ‘On a day like this,’ he said, ‘I like to keep the door open to let the air in.’ Polly set a loose volume on the signed paper, which was threatening to blow away. A copy of The Vampyre, he noted: another good omen, another shot of pleasure. ‘I can see by the way you look at the book you’re an admirer,’ Nathan said. ‘Though to my taste, not one of his finest. My uncle is a good friend of the author. He set some of his poems to music.’
‘Indeed?’ Polly said.
He asked to borrow an envelope and a sheet of note-paper. ‘My dear Colburn,’ he wrote, ‘I hereby discharge my debts to you. Your servant, P.’ After he’d dropped off the sum – he didn’t wait to see if Colburn was in – it was almost time to meet Eliza at the coach-station. He didn’t have anything else to do; and there was still a hundred pounds left in the envelope he carried inside his light coat.
He arrived at The Bull & Mouth ten minutes late. A very mixed crowd loitered outside the Western Coach Office. A thirst for travel, he reflected, brought together a stranger assortment of men than the other, simpler thirst being satisfied at the public house. There was a mother, well-dressed, taking leave of a small boy. She held the hem of her skirts in one hand and gave him a faint embrace: clearly, anxious to be gone; the press of people upset her nerves. On her way out, she unfolded from her sleeve a scented handkerchief and began to breathe through it. The boy, happily enough, sat on his school-satchel and peeled an apple. There were two young men setting forth together in sleepless high spirits. They pitched their banter above the general noise, making a great display of affection. It was only a sense of their tenderness, the embarrassment of it, which occasionally hushed them. The family of a vicar, a short, slope-shouldered gentleman with a moley complexion, sat in little heaps on the makeshift furniture of their portable belongings. Their father was warming a glass of ale in his hands.
The loose wind in the course of the day had blown away the clouds; the heavens were high and clear. A hundred stars burned growing through the dusk. It was cold, too. A pair of drivers gathered at the bar to fill their flasks. Polly couldn’t see Eliza. It struck him for the first time, how unhappy he would be if she didn’t come. What he needed, he decided, was a nip of something, to keep up his spirits; and as he waited for the attention of the bar-man, he felt a boy jostle him, and was about to push back when he saw who it was. ‘I’ve only just managed to escape them,’ Eliza said breathlessly. ‘I’ve only just got away.’ She wore a page’s costume. Her faded hair was bunched and hidden under a peaked cap; a high ruffed collar flowered around the narrow branch of her neck. The cut of her trousers and the little fawn tunic dressed her in straight lines, like a boy: from her shoulders to her hips to her shoes. Her breasts were hidden in the loose hang of it, and Polly found nothing so tantalizing as the small secret of them. He wanted, comically, to reach out his hand and make sure of them. She had never looked prettier, in fact, more feminine. Fine dresses, by contrast, emphasized only her boyishness; the uniform exposed, to a knowing eye, what was womanish in her, softer and unshaped. Lord Byron, Polidori remembered, had once expressed to him his delight in late girlhood, which combined, he said, the beauty of the boy and the woman. The doctor suspected him at the time of merely dressing up less palatable desires, and Polly himself still burned with shame at the recollection of an afternoon, when, in the wake of their master’s ill-temper, he had covered the page-boy Rushton with a series of caresses, which encroached upon, and finally overstepped, the bounds of comforting. Yet now he saw the simpler truth of Byron’s claim: how delightful it was, innocently, to play with desires one could not explore so fully and clear-headed in their guiltier enjoyment.
Eliza, looking up, said to him, ‘My lord, where will you take me?’ Her pupils, he saw, had shrunk in the blue of her eyes. She was in high, feverish spirits. That stubbornness or disdainfulness which resided in her bottom lip, in the narrowing line of her jaw, and usually embittered her looks had been transformed into something appetitive and capable of delight. He guessed there was nothing she would stop short at, now; it was only his pity, or forbearance, or the failure of his desire, which could save her from ruin. But for the first time he suspected himself of a real attraction. She had gone quite mad with what she was willing to risk.
He said, ‘Shall we make our escape?’ At the coach-office, he bought two seats, inside, on the Brighton mail. They were harnessing the horses even then, and Polidori and Eliza had to push their way anxiously through the crowds in order to take their places. A comfortable-looking professional man with a bag of dried figs on his lap sat opposite Eliza. His face was very healthy and red, but mostly hidden in braids of white beard. He said, ‘A kind master, who pays for his boy to ride below.’ She smiled at him painfully, not yet trusting her voice. Polidori said, ‘It’s such a clear night, I guessed it would be cold.’ There were four of them in the plush interior; already, the air was softening with their combined warmth. A plain square-jawed woman in a black bonnet – her plainness bespoke neither kindness nor cruelty, was in fact the absence of either quality – took out a ball of grey wool and began to knit. What a relief it was when they were off at last; Eliza, he could see, had half expected to be caught. Only after they were finally, snugly, settled (the unsteadiness of the coach pressed them helplessly into each other) and the road had dipped into the fields and woods south of the river, did they begin to feel the awkwardness of their situation. Even the friction of their silence, however, tended towards an increase of heat. Polly began to consider what they might do to each other when alone.
A gentle exchange of intimacies proved impossible given the confines of the carriage. They were both, in their ways, grateful for this fact: they hardly knew each other. Eliza was mindful of the woman’s eyes upon her. They seemed to narrow with suspicion, and Eliza felt positively inflamed by the alternation within her of bravado and embarrassment. Of course, a woman would see through her at once. But then Eliza noticed her hands resting loosely on her lap in a tangle of wool, and realized she was only asleep. The gentleman with the figs followed soon after. His head fell back, leaving his mouth wide open; strands of his beard shifted in his noiseless breath. Polly bent to Eliza’s ear and whispered, ‘I suspected him for a snorer.’ The tension in her was almost singing; she couldn’t repress the snort of a giggle. But then, she looked for something suitable to answer in reply, lightly conspiratorial, and nothing came into her head. She could only think of his hand on his thigh which touched her own, from time to time, in the shift of the carriage. They both began to drift into and out of the shallow waters of a travelling sleep.
At midnight they stopped to change horses and stretch their legs. The skies were high and utterly cloudless; a moon on its back burned the colour of lit parchment. Polly, by nature of the roles assigned them in their masquerade, was forced to take the lead. ‘Would you like a sip of something, Rushton?’ he said. The name only then came into his head. He bought a bottle of scotch, and in the light of the carriage lamp, they passed it from hand to hand. In spite of the cold, the scent of fresh horse dung, not unpleasant, reached their breath. They were both particularly conscious of the slickness of the bottle-mouth, wet from each other’s lips, as they raised it to their own. Polly opened the carriage-door and gave Eliza his hand, helping her onto the running board. He followed her inside. Their fellow travellers had not yet returned, and while Polly stooped to take his seat, they began to kiss, with an instant fierceness, that made it nearly impossible for them to recompose their breathing as Polly sat down and the red-faced gentleman clambered in behind him.
Eliza felt she could not bear the tension between them a minute longer; but the minute passed, and the driver returned, somewhat unsteadily, and whipped the fresh horses on their way. The bearded man offered around his bag of dried figs, which only the lady accepted. She chewed with a hard, practical thoroughness. Eliza watched the dimpling of muscle at the hinge of her jaw. But the pair of them were soon asleep again, and Polly passed the bottle of scotch, releasing it slowly, into her hands. Eliza, feeling the fire in her head and throat (she had never tasted whisky before), summoned the courage to ask Polidori a question. ‘My lord,’ she said, pitching her voice just above the rattle of the wheels, ‘there has been something upsetting me.’ Polly bent his ear to her mouth. As soon as she spoke she was conscious of the change in tone she was ushering in. Their conversation had not yet learned the intimacy of their hands and lips, but she continued nonetheless, and felt perhaps more easy and natural in this form of discourse than in the other. ‘Last night, I re-read The Vampyre; the beauty of it moved me again to tears. You have, I am sure, never done anything finer. But I was struck again by how terribly sad it was and wondered why it seemed sadder to me than all of your other sad tales. Until it occurred to me that for once you take no pity on yourself – on your hero, I mean. For Conrad, for Lara, even for Harold, you show some forgiveness; but for Lord Ruthven, there is none. No pity at all; no sympathy. And I thought, the man who wrote this cannot be happy. The man who wrote this is living without hope.’ Polly at once saw his chance, to explain himself fully – to a woman he’d lied to and was beginning to care for. Fully, that is, in his own roundabout fashion, and conscious of the risk he was taking.
