Imposture, page 5
Presently, a broad-shouldered figure in a long coat stopped outside Colburn’s door. He stood there a moment uncertainly – Polidori, through the gloom, could just make out his searching hand against the red – until, with a brisk step, he pushed his way in. Polly picked up his stick and ran after him into the street.
Colburn himself answered the door in something of a hurry. He was about to step out again; he had only gone in for a minute. He hadn’t another to spare. Polly suffered strangely from a sense of his own good looks; their feminine niceness. Colburn was a rough-faced gentleman, much abused by time, broad-shouldered, thick-haired. Handsome in a massy way, like a prominent crop of rock, very much in the weather – as Lord Byron himself might have said, ‘rather sublime than the alternative’. Polly stared past the publisher’s shoulder into the shop-room, a high, panelled chamber tiled with black and white squares. Shelves deep with books cast a comfortable gloom. Terrible, the effect of riches upon him. He couldn’t help feeling their contrast in circumstances: money sometimes seemed to him almost to possess the force of logic. Still, he summoned as much indignation as he had within him. The pressure of it put a squeak in his voice, but he managed to get out his complaint. ‘I think you might stop for a minute, after all. You see, I wrote The Vampyre.’
Colburn gave him a hard look. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said at last, ‘though I’m only changing to go out. I suppose you can watch me.’
Polidori followed him into the shop. A small door at the back, hidden between the shelves, opened onto a kind of store-room; Colburn ducked his head beneath the doorframe. Inside, columns of pamphlets and books lay stacked between armchairs, haphazardly placed. A table in the middle was covered in copies of The Vampyre; Polidori began to suffer from a sense of the weakness of his claim. What had been made of it was clearly larger, grander than his own week’s idleness of composition. A fire, freshly laid with coal, was beginning to burn its way through the black heaps. At the back of the room a staircase, decorated curiously enough by pairs of shoes, led into more private apartments, and Polidori followed Colburn up its steps.
The publisher, meanwhile, had been keeping the conversation to himself. There was no shirking about him; no dressing-up of facts. He hadn’t any intention of testing Polidori’s claim. The fact was that he’d taken the authorship on faith, from a man he didn’t care to give away, except to say that his character was such, one couldn’t reliably count on it either for truths or lies. Well, he was perfectly equal to the fact that that faith might have been misplaced. In any case, he had decided (within the time it took them to mount the stairs) to offer Polidori thirty pounds, on one condition: that he wouldn’t kick up a fuss about the authorship. Colburn looked round over his shoulder then, to fix his eye on the young man. They had just reached the door of his dressing room. Colburn’s unembarrassed pursuit of a fortune, by literary means, afforded him a kind of winning frankness. There was no cant about him; he dealt unsentimentally with money. (This was new in Polly’s experience of patronage.) ‘Thirty pounds is perfectly reasonable; one could hardly give more. Without the suggestion of Byron’s name, after all, The Vampyre would be worthless. Come, shall we say thirty pounds? Consider it something from nothing.’
He broke off his gaze and turned in. In a rallying tone, he added, ‘The tale is flying off the presses. The last thing anyone (including its author, I suppose) would want, is to cast a shadow over its authenticity. Of course, Doctor Polidori can see that.’ The ‘Doctor’, perhaps, was a respectful touch; but it had the intention of subtly including him in the expression of Colburn’s point of view. In fact, what Polidori saw was the publisher’s back, as he entered the dressing room. Polly was unsure of his invitation, and keenly felt the indignity either of waiting outside, or of waiting within. This may have been what suddenly decided him to ‘kick up a fuss’. He followed Colburn inside.
Polidori refused to ‘see it’. Thirty pounds was the price of a legal apprenticeship; it might be the making of him. But ‘he would rather throw away his life than his honour, his title to immortality,’ etc. There was a certain chasing, beseeching quality to these effusions; Colburn let him have his shout. He began to dress and interrupted ‘the doctor’ at last only to ask him to press hard against the fresh cravat around his neck, to keep the knot in place. Polidori complied, but found it difficult to carry on talking with his finger on another man’s neck. He recalled once helping Byron into his costume on the night of a carnival, a memory that carried with it the force of original confusions. Under its influence he fell into a silence, which was broken at last only when Colburn selected a scent. Polidori sniffed the air once or twice, closing his eyes to the puffed mist, to answer his asked-for preference. Then he followed him out again, in the awkward shuffle-step of a man keeping pace at another man’s back heel – down the stairs again and through the store-room into the shop.
The publisher opened the door for Polidori; then, at the threshold, took the young doctor by the elbow. The rain had loosened again and fell in thick lines. Colburn had to shout above it, but Polly was standing in it: the circling spray dampened the hems of his trousers. These had stiffened in the heat of the coffee-house; he felt them now soak and sag. He hated wet ankles. ‘I tell you what,’ Colburn said. ‘I’m dining at Long’s. We’ll talk over a bottle of champagne. See what we can do for you.’
The table at Long’s was almost full. Polly had to perch on a chair angled into an unused doorway. He imagined Lord Byron smiling at him and, internally, acknowledged his joke: yes, they had painted him into a corner. He struggled to keep up his end of the conversation. Colburn’s acquaintance were older, more forceful men, engaged in business of various descriptions. Polidori’s charms, such as they were, depended on the charity of women. His refinements wilted in the strong steady climate of masculine company. Speechlessly, with something like vengeance, he began to drink. The champagne was excellent; cold and clear as a bell, with a tone as sharp as if the bell had been vigorously struck. And he consoled himself, secretly building up courage, with the thought of refusing to pay for it. He could hardly stretch out his leg without knocking a knee; he was practically coiled with rage. By the time the bill came he was drunk and hot for a fight; but Colburn, handsomely, never let the question come up. He quietly settled their share of it. Polly felt the wind go out of his sails; and the taste of gratitude in his mouth, as he stuttered out thanks, sickened even himself.
Supper was followed by a ‘third of a daffy’ at Tom Belcher’s; and, afterwards, descending to one of the Hells in Covent Garden, they ended up at the faro tables. Polly found his tongue at last. ‘I used to have rather a weakness for faro,’ he confidentially declared, to no one in particular. He was forced to repeat himself, somewhat louder: ‘I used to have rather a weakness,’ etc. until Colburn, finally, took him up. ‘Should you like a hand or two?’ Polly, somewhat chastened with fear, shook his head. He dutifully sat out the first game; but, as the run of cards unfolded, he could not refrain from dispensing a bit of advice. ‘Come,’ someone said, ‘I should like the benefit of that young man’s experience; only, it is wasted in speculation.’ The young man, drunk on grape and grain, permitted himself an indulgence – a hand or two only. He leaned a little heavily towards Colburn; might he perhaps beg a small advance . . . ‘Call it a debt paid,’ Colburn replied with a smile. ‘Shall we say, thirty pounds? I believe you understand me.’ Polly, silently, agreed. ‘He’s sharp, is Captain Sharp,’ a waiter warned him, nodding at Colburn. ‘Don’t let him take you for a Flat.’
By the end of the night, he’d lost half his stake and had the sense, returning home at last in the damp uncertain dawn, that he was capable of gambling away anything at all. There was nothing that couldn’t be wagered: his life, his soul.
He remembered later, being too cold to sleep, that strange encounter with the pinch-faced girl. Another worry, which afflicted him more than it ought: that Miss Eliza Esmond, the guest of Lady Walmsley, might visit him in his rooms and discover his imposture. Why had he played the fool? A sign of how unhappy he was – the brief surge of pleasure at her mistake. He did not like to think of the disappointment she would feel at seeing through his pretence. ‘I had taken you for a gentleman, but now I find that you merely played the part, to seduce an innocent girl, whose only sin was her sensibility,’ etc. He remembered her voice quite vividly. It was reedy, but fine and clear, like the ring of a tin tongue in a silver bell. He lay in bed and foresaw not her anger, but his own deepening shame. The truth of his life seemed so much the worse for the contrast he set up, for the shock of her discovery. He must be coming down with a head-cold. Otherwise, why would that word ‘seduce’, uttered, as he imagined it, in the heat of her outrage, roll so feverishly around his thoughts?
He awoke at noon to find a note under his door – from his godfather, a pursy-lipped Catholic named Deagostini, who was rather devoted to his ‘charities’. Deagostini had written to say that he could not in all conscience pay for the young man’s pupillage. There were so many more deserving candidates for his largesse. Besides which, to be frank, he was tired of what he called Polidori’s ‘waxing and waning’. Taking up the law did not strike him as a good idea at all; and he bristled at what had been Polidori’s attempts at persuasion: ‘I must intrude upon your judgement with a few observations prompted to me by my humble conception founded upon forty-five years’ experience both of myself and of many others to my knowledge . . .’ Polidori understood exactly what was meant: Deagostini liked the objects of his pity to do as they were told. Well, Polly was too proud for such stooping; he had not fawned on Lord Byron, and saw no reason to prostrate himself before a glorified grain merchant.
His sense of righteous indignation put him, strangely enough, in better spirits. That afternoon, in the restless hopefulness of unemployment, Polly turned once more to his travel-papers; it was time he brought them into shape. Murray had at one point offered him five hundred pounds for a memoir of Byron. When Byron dismissed him, at the end of that famous summer, Polidori had returned home and approached Murray with his journals. They strolled through St James’s Park together, arm in arm; it had been a dry summer, and the leaves were brown on the trees. Murray cosily hinted at the good such a publication could do for a young man’s career; he looked forward to a long relationship. Afterwards, they repaired to Murray’s set of offices on Albemarle Street. A glass of whisky and soda in an easy chair; the rough, snug pleasure of a good cigar. Murray bade him farewell with a firm hand, the MS pressed between his elbow and rib. He promised to read it at once, a quick response. Indeed, a week later, he respectfully declined the journals, and was never heard from again.
The bad news had seemed to Polly at the time in keeping with his growing self-suspicions: that he came naturally at everything from the wrong end; that he killed whatever he touched. But Colburn’s rough good-nature – that was Polly’s phrase for it; abuse tended to awake in him a sense of trust, a desire to please – inspired him to make a second trial of the journals. It gave him, at least, something to work for; and he spent the next day in a fever of revisions. The hard work itself struck him as the outward evidence of some internal spring of renewal; what couldn’t be doubted was the fact of the rising within him. A few mornings later, Polly slipped the manuscript under the large red door on Great Marlborough Street. Walking away, he felt a strange elation. This, he told himself, was the great blessing of literary labours. One had always a second chance at fame. The Vampyre, after all, as he reminded himself, with the pleasant modesty of self-congratulation, had been doing rather well; maybe his luck was turning.
CHAPTER FIVE
ELIZA LAY IN HER BED under the eaves in an absolute ferment. If she sat up she knocked her head, an external constriction that had begun to feel innate. Wherever she turned, inside or out, there were walls obstructing. Sleep seemed impossible: her eyes felt as wide and bright as the moon. In the nightshine, high trees shifted, this way, that, like a thought lazily repeated. She was conscious of green spaces storeys of air below, the backs of gardens walled away from the dirty road. He had touched her hand. His own copy of The Vampyre lay on her nightstand; she had read it again before sleep; and now, of course, could not sleep. It amazed her, of course it did, that he could take an interest in her; but she had heard his appetites were promiscuous. It satisfied her, at this early stage, that whatever womanly virtues she possessed he desired in quantity. Though she had only the dimmest sense of them: a smell? the pull of her dress, as she walked, between her legs? the lure of her bottom lip? Whatever they were, hers had hardly been tested or tasted. Even so, a quiet sense of her own importance had never left her; an arrogance which had twisted this way and that to survive, and grown only stronger. She was confident she could persuade him to love her.
Beatrice had recommended her to Lady Walmsley, a tall stooped woman, heavy-headed as a picked tulip. Eyes large as eggs stood on end. Her powdered hair cast a cloud about her: she seemed, intimately, to inhale only herself, her careful preservation. And moved to deliberate rhythms; her lightest gesture required an answer afterwards, a slow return of weight. She was nobody’s fool. Her conversation, placidly agreeable, made everyone else agree. Her son, amiable, fattening, childish with filial piety, had nevertheless died bravely at Waterloo. And she had welcomed his widow, Mrs Violet, rather forcibly to the family hearth. Mrs Violet was a stupidly beautiful creature, hardly human, her prettiness weightless and ineffectual. The worst she could do was cut – fine paper-cuts, that hurt more than they bled. She disliked playing the widow, and practically refused the name Webster. ‘Mrs Violet’ had been agreed on as a kind of compromise; and to Eliza’s ear, it just suited her. The name had a cold, a threatening beauty. Lady Walmsley did not trust her daughter-in-law with the education of the twins. And Mrs Violet did not trust Eliza, who was taken in, under no strict terms, as a something between a guest and a governess, and consequently, as nothing at all.
The house in Mayfair overlooked bright terraces across a lozenge of green park that grew dark and rich in wet weather; a comfort to the eye, a filling-in. Eliza took great pleasure in these views. Her father’s cottage backed onto the miserable new canal, still dirty from construction. The prospects it offered were various degrees of brown. She lingered often on the landing of the stairs, pressing her face against the cold broad windows, to enjoy her larger outlook; but never felt confident enough to assume the run of the drawing room. She had once been asked, in the first week of her stay, ‘owing to the state of the parlour’, to make use of the servant’s entrance, through the side door, into the gardens, and round the back. Lady Walmsley apologized in puffs of genial powder. ‘Only you see,’ she said, shaking her head lightly, ‘one must follow fashions.’ They were having the tiles replaced by parquet. Mrs Violet looked on; her bright little smile just loose enough one might slip a letter knife between her lips. Eliza understood, and never again entered by the front door, except in general company.
She had come in November, in an early snowfall. Beatrice’s coachman held the umbrella above her sister’s head, leaving her own neck free to the air, and together they skittered up the tufted steps. Introductions had already been made. Her sister only wished to see Eliza ‘settled’; she was great friends with Lady Walmsley; she had danced several times with her son. He was a wonderful dancer, with dry hands – so rare in young men these days, and a great comfort to a girl. Well, a woman could understand the trouble one took with one’s lace. Such a shame, what a waste it was: she had absolutely wept for weeks on end to hear the news. For days. And so many unpleasant young men returning, who trod on one’s toes, absolutely untouched. They installed Eliza in a long, low room under the eaves, until more suitable accommodation could be found. At the dark end of the year; and now it was nearly summer, and she had not shifted from the narrow bed under the slant of the roof. It amazed her how quickly, how painlessly indeed, she had learned her place in the world.
The children were her only consolation (until now), though they were brutish enough in their way, little Hopewell and little Caroline, shortened to Hope and Care in their grandmother’s affection. Foul to each other and false to everyone else; they were not unloving, at least, in the pinch of tears. What a large cold house it was to be so small in. They had guessed, almost at once, the station of their instructress, and made her feel it whenever they could. Even so, no one could comfort them better; and it often amused Eliza to observe in their pink faces the wrinkles of conflicting calculations. No, but she loved them still. There was no one else in the world who ever touched her, whose weight she felt, day to day, pressing against her arms, her breast, her lap. She felt the absence of them like an ache when Lady Walmsley took them to the country for Easter; though they were cold to her on their return, proper and superior, ‘quite grown up’ she called it to their faces, to show she didn’t mind. And she had, as she put it to herself, to ‘wait them out’ – until the inevitable miseries of childhood brought them to her breast again.
Not that she didn’t have her own uses for them. The nursery was the only room in which she felt assured of her place. It overlooked the narrow alley between the houses, a dark high corridor that caught a distant slant of light in the late afternoon. She often sat on a very small chair in the window when the twins were asleep and read by the glow reflecting off the stuccoed walls: Marmion, Little’s Anacreon, The Bride of Abydos. Her mouth moving to the insistence of the couplets, her pulled-out lower lip clinging lightly to the top. This was loneliness to her at its sweetest, and even the threat, constantly suggested, of the children’s waking only sharpened her pleasure in the privacy. It was there she fled to, after meeting, as she supposed, Lord Byron himself at Colburn’s door.
