Imposture, page 20
A windless day. Even at eight in the morning, they sensed the gathering heat of it, and by noon, with the sun doubling off the water, Eliza became conscious of her own slick odours. She would have liked to remove her cap, but feared the tumble of girlish curls it would let loose. Only in the gardens of the Pavilion, behind a row of cherry trees, did she dare, for a minute, to shake her head free of its constraints, while Polidori took her neck in his hand and stooped to kiss her. She waited for him to finish and then carefully clipped the bunching of her hair on top and restored the cap. Not that she suffered his ardour in silence, but she felt, after his confession, and for the first time, sure of him; and this security had instantly suggested to her the more conventional role. She had the patience to tarry till the evening; though the thought of what awaited her then surprised in her, from time to time, a fit of trembling Polidori himself was too preoccupied, by his own growing expectations, to note.
He felt he had left everything behind him. His father, Frances, the debts of every kind he owed in London: filial and brotherly, financial, literary. Polidori wondered now why he had been so slow to fall in love. Eliza, it seemed to him, had the courage to confine herself to a life lived narrowly in her imagination. She wasn’t restless for proof; it was enough for her to colour what she saw herself. And Polidori had often thought that if he had never known Lord Byron, if he had never travelled to Italy with him, if he had never been cast off, he might have been content to do the same. Ended up, perhaps, like Eliza’s father: a man for whom introspection was the secret of an indifference to everything else. But Lord Byron had taught him what it was to live in the world, to put one’s sense of self to the test. It occurred to him, now, that he had been so slow to appreciate her charms only because, in Lord Byron’s shoes, he enjoyed a privilege of selection he didn’t dare aspire to in his own. The story he had spun for Eliza, about the true nature of the vampyre, had allowed him to see his own life in the clear warm light of self-pity. He was another sufferer. Another helpless victim of Lord Byron’s appetite for life. Another innocent, etc. The recognition allowed its own measure of freedom: to love a poor girl who hadn’t understood yet what a fool she was making of herself; what a fool her lover was. He wanted to let Eliza know he had suffered, too.
Again and again, in the course of the afternoon, he endured in silence the temptation to confess everything to her. He couldn’t get out of his thoughts the hope that her real forgiveness would redeem him. They walked to the end of the Steine, and in the stillness of the growing heat, surveyed the breadth of the sea around them. She confessed to him that she had never seen the sea before. She was amazed above all by the flatness of it, which seemed to her more than physical, but spiritual, too. It was a landscape which had no human variety to offer; what there was was rather ‘mathematical’. She had always ‘delighted particularly in your description of it’, she said, pausing and staring out, before resuming again in her tone of comical hauteur:
O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
But she found now, she continued in her own familiar voice, on observation, that though the ocean certainly suggested to her the nature of the infinite, the prospect of it seemed rather confining than otherwise. What poor creatures we appear against its scale! how little anything human would avail us, to make an impression upon that expanse.
They had reached a quiet stretch of the promenade, and Polidori, with a smile, by way of contrary persuasion, recited for her:
There be none of Beauty’s daughters
With a magic like thee,
And like music on the waters,
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When as if its sound were causing
The charmed ocean’s pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming
And the lull’d winds seem dreaming.
It was almost as if the poet were wooing himself. He had once heard Lord Byron console a girl with those lines – it was one of his tricks, to soften the effect of the misery he himself inspired. Byron used to joke that the Greeks had neglected in their roll-call of muses to name the muse of Apology; a creature both practical and tender, she had always served him well. While Eliza closed her eyes to hear him, Polidori added, ‘There is nothing, no mountain or sea or sky, that might not be rendered human again, by the poetic imagination.’ When she looked up again, her cheeks were wrinkled with wet, and she, feeling her own daring, took his arm and declared, ‘I never guessed I was capable of such happiness.’ He hadn’t the heart then, to reveal himself to her.
At one o’clock they watched a parade of the Prince’s regiment, the 10th Hussars, outside the gates of the Pavilion. Their horses were especially fine and marched in bright synchronicity. The sight of the sea, as she remarked, had attuned Eliza to the beauties of repetition. Then a guard discharged them, and the soldiers dispersed to find something and somewhere to drink. Eliza was shocked to see the swarm of dissolute girls who attended them: creatures whose chief attraction seemed to be their shamelessness. Ragged petticoats, loose bodices, exposed the dirty pallor of thighs and bosoms. The sight of them sobered her a little. Sometimes two or three crowded the brisk, indifferent step of a single soldier. What must they have suffered, she asked, to reduce them to this state? What can such men find in the ugliness of their female shame to attract them? Polidori didn’t answer. She began to worry that she lacked the free appetite to satisfy a man of Lord Byron’s taste; and she imagined herself, stripped bare as these girls, with their black hands and bruised ankles and torn shoes, hanging on his neck, as if every humiliation were only the real language of her desire.
They dined at a chop-house, like master and servant: on livers and bacon and a pint of stout each. Eliza began to enjoy her masquerade. But the beer went to her head, and she worried that the flush of drink on her cheeks ill-suited her ashy complexion. Standing up, she was forced to rest her hands on the table for a minute until her head cleared; and for the first half-hour afterwards, as they looked for somewhere to spend the night, Polidori had to keep Eliza on the wall side of him, to prevent her from straying into the road. She said to him, almost singing, as she bumped from time to time against his shoulder, ‘Will you show me what to do? Later, will you show me what to do?’ He remembered his own first sexual encounter, the maid washing her hands in the soap bucket afterwards, and Lord Byron’s consolation: ‘My first taste of passion was rather thrust upon me. But the worst of it was that I longed to repeat – the trial.’ He nearly confessed everything to her then. Instead, he said, ‘Nothing will astonish you more than how easy and natural everything seems.’ She nodded her head, perfectly sober again.
They found a hotel which pleased her at last: the Castle Inn, in whose Assembly Rooms they took their tea. The ceiling above them rose, on classical columns, almost fifty feet in air. Every Wednesday in the summer months a ball was held within it; that night was to be the first of the season. And Eliza was instantly anxious to secure a room for the evening, at whatever cost. She had never been to a ball, but she said instead, ‘Do you remember, when we danced at the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball – what is it, now, almost four years ago? And you invited me to your rooms, to see you off, as you said? You were travelling to Dover in the morning. It seems to me too perfect, the notion of dancing at last the waltz we sat out together.’ Polidori still had over ninety pounds in his pocket. They meant almost nothing to him, he could not imagine the stretch of his life beyond their spending. Inquiry revealed that several rooms remained, including a suite, which Polidori accepted. They were led up at once. It had a bedroom with a large four-poster bed, curtained with blue silk; the mattress was covered in white satin. In the sitting room, a chaise longue had been raised onto a dais and draped with brocade. The porter, with a knowing look, said it could be made up to accommodate the young man. The day-bed stood under a gilt mirror, which reflected the French windows opposite. These gave onto a balcony, protected by a fretwork grille; it overlooked the promenade and sea. Polidori, at a signal from Eliza, declared his perfect satisfaction. The porter took his leave, shutting the door behind him, with his hand against his back. The arrangements and the view occupied Eliza and Polidori, in delighting over them, for several minutes before they realized that they were perfectly alone for the first time that day.
Eliza lay on her back on the bed, and Polidori turned from the bedroom window to join her. She had taken off her cap at last; a fan of her pale hair spread across the white satin. She closed her eyes and felt a tremor in her throat of grief or happiness suspended and waiting for release, and then sensed the pressure of Polidori on the edge of the mattress. To think, she thought, that Lord Byron himself is observing me now! To think, what he plans to do with me! And then, to break the awkwardness of their silence, and in a rush of real enthusiasm, she sat up, wide-eyed, and declared, ‘I must have a dress for the ball.’ She could hear the strains of the orchestra rehearsing below them. Polidori, who had been reaching his hand towards her hair, now retracted it again. ‘I should like, more than anything, to dance with you,’ she said; and then, conscious of the snub in her remark, repeated, ‘I should like it, that is, very much.’
The sun descending on the waters cast its level light into the room. Polidori felt himself entirely at her mercy or pleasure, and answered with real gentleness, in a phrase suggested indeed by his dependence, his consciousness of it, that he put himself entirely at her disposal. It was decided between them that to preserve her disguise Polidori would undertake to purchase her dress, her shoes, and all the necessary accompaniments. Eliza, indulging her own high spirits, gave him very particular instructions. It was rare, she thought, that she could play the grande dame, and she borrowed some of her enthusiasm from expressions she had known her sister to employ. Polidori sent out for a measuring-tape. When it arrived, Eliza had to guide his hands, around her waist, her bosoms, along her ankles and arms. She trembled violently as he touched her, and Polidori himself was deathly quiet and slow; they did not dare to kiss yet, and partly enjoyed the agonizing protraction of their enjoyment of each other. Polidori noted carefully, in a little book he had bought to jot down his literary inspirations, the dimensions she required.
And then he was gone, and she had the room to herself. She lay in bed for an hour in the white mist of sunshine, and fell asleep, and awoke with a hot face, just a little burnt in the light. How childish she felt, in her afternoon languor. She was not ungrateful for his absence, for the expectation of his arrival. She felt the pressures of keeping up her role very keenly, and looked forward to the moment when a simpler, more passionate and quieter part would be expected of her. Another form of imposture, no doubt; she did not yet trust the honesty of her pleasure-seeking. She stood up and drank a glass of water from the pitcher set on their night-stand, and then walked barefoot over the rough wool of the carpet to the balcony in their day-room. She looked out, over the Steine, the water; observed the tiny people and boats below her, busy in their unimportant lives. It was only when she noted the heaviness of the sun, taking on colour as it sank in setting, that she began to worry; and once the worries began, they arrived in floods.
First, she thought that Lord Byron had tired of her, had found some other, more willing, sacrifice to his amusement; and there were plenty, she knew, she had seen them herself, in that harbour town, willing to amuse. Then, that Bea and Lady Walmsley had tracked them there, to Brighton – had followed in the calèche and spotted Lord Byron outside the hotel, with a gown draped over his forearm and his intentions clear. That they had persuaded him to ‘spare her’, that was the word she imagined their using, ‘spare the poor girl’. Perhaps, this minute, they were climbing the stairs to her room. She could almost hear the knock at the door and bitterly regretted that matters, even now, had not gone ‘far enough’ to commit her to the course of life she was determined to lead. Her innocence remained intact. That word itself suggested to her another fear, her sister’s warning. (It amazed Eliza afterwards, how easily she had reconciled her doubts to each other.) Perhaps they had discovered at last some proof of his imposture. The real Lord Byron himself might have appeared to denounce the tender and handsome young man she had kissed outside her father’s cottage only two days before.
But even this worry tended only to increase her impatience, that whatever would happen would happen at last. And she realized, with a perfectly sober and clear view of herself, that she could not return unchanged to the narrow existence she had been leading: that she needed to break out, finally and irrevocably, from the sweet constriction of her imagined life. For a minute it seemed to her, with the rail of the balcony in her hands, that the easiest course would be to lean out over it until the weight of her head and heart and breasts carried the rest of her with it; and she saw, peering over, the spot of ground where she imagined lying. Saw Lady Walmsley, Beatrice, Lord Byron standing over her body; felt the pity they felt for her. Felt his hand on her face as he stooped to caress her, the hand she had suffered only that afternoon to touch her neck, her hip, the ribs underneath her bosom. And she turned back into the room, exhausted again, by the weight of what she wanted from the world. If only, she thought, Lord Byron would come back, come back soon.
Polidori, by contrast, was rather relieved than otherwise by the solitude of his afternoon. But even in him the sense of expectation began steadily to increase. At first he enjoyed putting on lordly airs and throwing money around. He inquired after the costliest dressmaker in town and was directed to a dark little shop on North Street, where a matronly old lady in a pink bonnet, buying a frock for her youngest daughter’s debut, instantly took him in hand. Polidori explained that his sister Frances had lately returned from the continent, only to discover that none of her Italian clothes were suitable for the English climate or English customs. He wished to give her a new gown, to speed her re-introduction into London life. He was presented with a number of materials, gingham and cambric and silk. The feel of them in his fingers offered a secret sensual thrill when he considered the skin against which they would slip and run that evening. Even the mathematical dimensions, as the cloth was cut, suggested vividly to him Eliza’s boyish shape, the pressure of her small bosoms, the narrow hand’s-breadth of her hips. He settled in the end on a pale green silk from France, patterned with a very small check; and asked, laying a ten-guinea note on the table, for the dress to be made up at once, since urgent business required him to return to London by the morning. Then he set off, under his instructions, to acquire the other necessary props to a lady’s appearance, while they busied themselves over the material.
With all his errands run, he had another hour to wait while the dress was being finished, and he spent it on the promenade, looking out to sea. With an opera glass, Eliza might have recognized him from her balcony window: a straight-backed young man with his chin up, resting his weight on a walking stick. A row of temporary stalls had been erected against the barricades laid down to preserve the innocent relations of the water and the land. From one of these, he bought first a glass, and then the rest of the bottle of champagne, which he drank quietly in the equal yellow glow of the setting sun. He was summoning ‘the nerve’, for what exactly, confession or seduction, his internal silence left pointedly unclear; but the wine, at least, had the effect of cooling his own overheated anticipation. It had been almost a year since he had taken a woman to bed. He had forgotten, he told himself, remembering, the consolation they offered. Lord Byron had once remarked to him that he found something very softening in the presence of a woman, some strange influence, even if one was not in love with her. A caveat that instantly brought to mind the state in which Polidori had discovered Frances, after Lord Byron, deserting them both, it seemed, had departed for Venice. She sat in the garden overlooking the changing colour of her vineyards under the beautiful twilit autumnal Italian heavens and said to her brother, ‘I don’t want to live; I don’t want to live any more. I see no reason why I should.’ He reflected, and not for the first time, on how tawdry his own account of the affair appeared beside the quiet enduring gravity of the real thing; and murmured, not without a certain satisfaction, the last lines of his ghostly tale: ‘she had already glutted the thirst of a Vampyre’.
He was steady, but perfectly drunk, by the time he collected the dress and returned to the hotel.
Eliza was fast asleep in the jagged red light that blew in through the curtained windows. By opening the door, he let in the full force of the orchestra tuning below; and it was this, not his own quiet step, that awoke the girl. ‘I was dreaming,’ she said when she saw him, and the door behind him had softened the music again, ‘that I was only dreaming; that none of it was true.’ She stretched like a cat, arching her back, and just as suddenly eased into a ball again. He unwrapped the gown and laid it on the bed beside her. She ran her finger along the cut of it. ‘What I mean is, I thought you wouldn’t come back. I’m so happy you have.’ And then, rousing herself: ‘I must try it on at once; such a beautiful green.’ She stood up and began to undress, sleepily, like a child; but the unfamiliar fastenings of her costume required Polidori’s assistance. She confessed blushing that Willis, Lady Walmsley’s driver, had stolen the page’s outfit for her. It had taken her over an hour to put on, which is why she’d been late to the coach-station. Together they removed her tunic; and the band of cloth which had wrapped her bosoms to her chest; and her trousers. She was wide awake by this time and stood perfectly naked before him. Her figure, girlish and half-formed, had something sisterly and unembarrassed in it, as if they were only children in summer preparing to swim together. Then she turned towards the mirror and held the dress against her skin. He saw her twice: a green and respectable lady in a silk gown in a gilt frame; and a naked back, the line of it curving between her shoulders, her buttocks, splitting in two and straightening at her knees, which were shaking. He came up behind her and held her to stop her shaking. Her face was already wet when she looked over her shoulder to kiss him.
