Imposture, page 7
He was unspeakably jealous that her husband spoke Italian, a language to him almost as intimate as sex. The newly-weds hoped perhaps to see Polly on the Continent. Their honeymoon would deposit them at last in Milan. Mr Rossetti mentioned this, with a hand across his brother-in-law’s shoulder, a fraternal gesture Polidori silently resented. Hobhouse bumped against him in the carriage and prattled on, meaning to shock. ‘You know why he calls her Goose, don’t you? From Gus, of course, short for Augusta. But Byron has other reasons.’ He explained what they do to a goose, ‘filling it from behind, to make foie gras. Until it explodes, you see.’ His manner, insistently knowing, came across as rather sour. He played the part better of upright Horatio. Sarcasm drew from him secret reserves of poison. In truth, Hobhouse was a little shocked himself. But he had begun to resent his reputation for sobriety and innocence and was hoping to push the burden onto someone else.
They arrived at Dover in the evening. Hobhouse insisted on bringing the carriage aboard in case the bailiffs followed them and seized it. But the wind the next day was contrary. Byron, as usual, had risen late, but they still had an afternoon to waste. His lordship was in strange high spirits: both bright and squally, swiftly changeable. He never loved England so much, he declared, as in the leaving of it. A cemetery, he said, would suit his mood exactly. There is a kind of restlessness nothing but graves will satisfy. So they visited the church of St Martin and passed a pleasant hour in the churchyard, deciphering the gravestones.
Polidori was growing accustomed to Byron’s suggestive pauses. ‘One has,’ Hobhouse whispered, ‘always to keep a weather eye on his Lordship, to be certain, that in case he falls silent, it is sufficiently remarked upon.’ It was the first kindly, conspiratorial word Hobhouse had addressed to the doctor. Byron had paused in front of a particularly neglected plot. ‘Churchill’s grave,’ he said simply; ‘only think . . .’ Hobhouse and Polidori, catching, as always, quickly at the poet’s mood, joined him beside the mossy gravestone. It resembled nothing so much as a tooth broken in a dirty mouth. The sexton then being nearby, his Lordship called him over, and asked if he knew whose grave he tended.
The man considered the stone carefully. ‘I cannot tell; I had not the burying of him.’ A yew tree cast its shadow and dripped; the day had been interrupted by sudden showers, out of a cloudless sky. The plot at the foot of it, uncut, had overgrown. It withered in its own shade, and the faint wet stink of yellow grass filled out the sea air. ‘But I believe the man you mean was a famous poet in his day.’ The three young men smiled at each other. It seemed impossible that Lord Byron could ever suffer from such neglect: it was a ghost tale, to frighten children, when of course there are no such things as ghosts. ‘People often come out their way to pay him honour.’ He had crooked, large-fingered hands, black as spiders, and a head of uneven growth, like a potato. Still, there was a canny look in the sexton’s eye. ‘And myself,’ he added, ‘whatever your honour pleases.’
Byron gave him a crown to fresh turf the grave; and the old man hobbled away, three-legged, on his spade. Polidori, in his bright voice, just sharpened by his father’s Italian, said, ‘Only think’ – elaborating, as he hoped, on Lord Byron’s sentiment. ‘Here stand two authors. One, the most distinguished of his age. Another,’ nodding graciously at Hobhouse, ‘whose name is rising rapidly. And a third scribbler, still ambitious for publication, for literary fame. What a lesson it is for us.’ The wind off the Channel blew his collar up and his words away. The flatness of the sea, as always, seemed its most surprising aspect. Only human landscapes can’t be taken in at a glance: the ocean exposed itself all at once. White rags appeared where the wind tore the water.
Hobhouse gave Byron a look. But the poet, more kindly, answered, ‘Indeed. Indeed it is.’ And then, after another pregnant pause, he dutifully added, ‘I had not known you wrote.’
Later, Polly regretted showing them his tragedy. The party spent the night on shore and got drunk in the bow-window of The Grapes. Byron insisted on giving the play a reading. It was titled Ximenes and based on the sacrifice of Abraham. It did not serve to diminish their merriment. Byron himself took up the text and declaimed:
’Tis thus the goiter’d idiot of the Alps
Follows the goat-tracks on the mountains’
scalps,
And carols loudly to the peaks above,
Of shepherdesses and their chilly love.
Byron singled out the word ‘goiter’d’ for praise. ‘Goiter’d’ was a fine word, a beauteous word. He had never before encountered it in verse. Then he added: ‘Nor scalps, for that matter, very often.’ The medical profession, it seemed, had a great deal, in the way of vocabulary at least, to offer the inky tribe. As for the shepherdesses, however, he hated to see the fair creatures maligned. Perhaps the doctor would speak more kindly of them, once he had kept himself warm at their indiscriminate hearts. Polidori, in the end, could no longer stand their laughter; he retired sullenly, in a hot stamping mood not far from passion.
The three young men were sharing a room. He encountered in it one of the chambermaids making up the beds. Not for the last time, Polly was mistaken for his master. She blushed to the roots of her yellow hair and could not look at him. A pretty girl, full-faced, with a long broad nose and a nimble mouth. Polidori found her thin lips peculiarly expressive, practically hidden, as they were, by the general rose of her complexion. One had to stare to keep track of them; they wriggled into sight. Her brightness suggested nothing so much as warm blood on a cold night. And as she moved to leave with her head bowed, he caught her by the shoulder and began to kiss it, shifting quickly from the rough, unsensual cloth of her kerchief, which made him feel foolish, to her neck. ‘My lord,’ she said, ‘my lord,’ patiently; then growing hotter, she lifted his head to kiss him back.
Polidori said, seeking a kind of revenge, ‘Will you call me brother? As you touch me, will you say, sweet brother, sweet brother.’ The scandals surrounding Byron’s separation were fresh in his mind: the sight of Augusta in her négligé; the sound of Byron’s low laughter; Frances’s marriage. He was scarcely nineteen himself, and still a virgin. The maid, perhaps as little as a year younger, greedily complied. ‘My sweet brother,’ she whispered, between kisses, while he pressed her hands with growing force between his thighs. He felt the gradual blindness of ecstasy and closed his eyes. ‘Will you miss me,’ he murmured, ‘when I’m gone?’
‘My sweet brother,’ she said. The room abruptly grew colder; he muttered, disconsolately, ‘My dear, kind sister.’ The maid, less embarrassed than disappointed, moved to clean her hands in the pail of water she’d left standing in the hallway. She glanced round quickly at him, but did not return. Only his head was hot now; he was terribly ashamed. Afterwards, when Byron and Hobhouse joined him at last in bed, he confessed his sins – omitting, however, his peculiar instructions. The urge to confess in him was strong as love.
Hobhouse said to him, ‘It isn’t only that you ruin your own reputation. There are others at stake, for which I care rather more.’ He settled the cushions behind his head dramatically; nothing would serve; he wished it to be understood how much he had been personally put out.
Polidori had never before felt so far from home. The men whose company he kept seemed unutterably strange. He longed for his father’s consoling reproofs. Gaetano was right; the poet’s influence was pernicious. For the first time in his life, Polidori had sinned. There had been no consequences, and worse still, the pleasure was too brief; it was the after-silence that endured, that signified. The only respite, it seemed, was to repeat the sin. He felt again the girl’s hand between his legs: to have that acknowledged, and cared for, which had previously been only a source of shame . . . which remained a source of shame.
Byron’s reproach, in the end, was softer. ‘You might at least have given me a cut off . . . your muslin.’ He rested his palm on the young man’s head, a kind of benediction; then turned to blow the lamp out against his hand. The three young men lay in the awkwardness of sleepless silence. Polidori was too frightened even to rustle in his bedclothes. Hobhouse, who slept by the window, turned pointedly away from the young doctor. His back bulked like a low wall against the moonlight. Byron himself broke the silence at last, remarking, that ‘the world was never more terrifying – than when it pleased us. My first taste of passion,’ he added, ‘was rather thrust upon me. But the worst of it was that I longed to repeat – the trial.’ Polidori cried like a child to receive this comfort; but silently, and Byron did not guess the effect of his words.
Polidori imagined, as Colburn led him by the elbow to the nearest chop-house, Eliza Esmond playing the part of the chambermaid. ‘My brother,’ she had said; ‘my sweet brother.’ He smiled somewhat shamefully to himself. Eliza’s complexion, it is true, was worse on the whole, not quite so fresh; but she had the same long face and restless lips. Indeed, there was something about her eyes, a hesitation in them, which Polidori supposed might prove sweet in the drawing out. There was little, in the end, that Byron’s mistresses tended to stop short at. Miss Esmond, it is true, had an air of innocence about her; but if he remembered her rightly, she wore it as other women wear their guilt, as a kind of complication. There were in her, undoubtedly, knots to be untied. Knots might just suit him; and he himself was rather more innocent than simple. Byron’s remembered comfort had brought on other memories: ‘And the worst of it was I longed to repeat – the trial.’ At that, the smile on Polidori’s face, and the shame of it, returned. Along with another worry: how completely he gave into these reveries. God knows what Colburn made of his stupid silence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AFTERWARDS, WHAT ELIZA REMEMBERED most was the constantly deferred sense of arrival. It was like a word on the tip of her tongue; the breakthrough depended on internal vagaries she couldn’t quite bend to her will. First, Mrs Violet returned late from Hyde Park with Lady Walmsley’s gig; she had wished, she said, to give the dogs an airing. One of them had entangled itself filthily with a gentleman’s boxer. The untangling had involved them in very awkward explanations, which tested the young man’s gallantry to the hilt. Mrs Violet’s careful innocence was more a question of manner than matter; she touched every subject with a cold light, but there was nothing she wouldn’t put her hand to. She raised it now to her cheek as she described her new ‘beau’. A real blood, swagger-shouldered, in a bright red coat that just brought off his complexion . . . He meant to pay his compliments later at their box. Meanwhile, Eliza pressed her palms together till the bones rubbed. ‘Oh,’ Mrs Violet broke off at last, ‘was you waiting for the gig?’
What a relief it was to be away; it was only in these interims she could breathe freely. The coachman, Mr Willis, a young man still, badly chapped by sunshine and rough leather, took them by the remains of St Mary’s fish-market – the stench of the glistering trout, both fresh and foul at once, suggested to her more intimate decay. They shifted in the slick of their own loose scales. Risking her voice, she begged Willis to stop first at Lincoln’s Inn, where she left a note for Mr P (the name he had asked her to use) with the gatekeeper. Her heart beat a sharp tattoo in her throat. Handing over the ribboned card brought her a little closer, closer; something would happen soon; it must. If she pushed herself far enough, the natural gravity of events might take her the rest of the way. But she was waiting for the first slipping sense that she had lost her feet. Willis gave her an odd look as she climbed back in. He had a young man’s curiosity still about his trade.
As soon as the maid let her into her sister’s drawing room, Beatrice said, ‘My dear, what’s the matter?’
‘Why, nothing,’ Eliza answered in surprise. She was conscious only of the upright flame of her high spirits. It was Beatrice who seemed to demand pity: her small face swollen and thickened, the tip of her nose as tight-skinned as a flexed knuckle. She sat in the fat heat of a spring fire, on her hands and knees; they pressed carefully against a bearskin stretched across the hearth-tiles. She rose at last to greet her sister. Beatrice said, ‘You look as if you’ve been out to sea; a real wind-blush.’
‘Only I was so late,’ Eliza offered.
‘You mustn’t overexcite yourself. It spoils your colouring; you haven’t the pallor to carry it off. Too brown. Now let me look at you,’ she said, holding her at arm’s length. Eliza couldn’t help sweating against the push of the coal-heat. The May day was rather bright than hot, but still she had caught a flush in the open air. She felt herself overflowing; the touch of her sister’s hands against her shoulders was a tremulous containment, the lid on the pot that brings the water to boil. Suddenly, she confessed, ‘I – I – have made an assignation, for the theatre.’
‘My dear child.’ Beatrice’s voice ran thick and cluttered, unlike her. As if walking in borrowed clothes, a man’s attire which didn’t quite fit, she had to drag her heels. ‘Wherever did you meet him?’
‘At a bookshop. In a doorway.’ It seemed utterly remarkable to her that the subject of her compressed excitement could be so easily let loose upon the air. A transformation, not from fiction into fact, but from feeling into action – as striking as if, dismissing a thought, she discovered the gesture had upset a candlestick. ‘You have met him,’ Eliza added coyly. ‘You have danced with him – years ago.’
Beatrice’s gossipy scream descended to a croak. There was just the hint of jealousy in it, too; the uneven pressure of a forced action. A flurry of questions followed: but who is he, where have we met, how far have you compromised yourself, and so on. Eliza only shook her head. It was a wonderful feeling, not budging. As if she possessed the greater weight. ‘He sends his compliments,’ she lied at last, ‘but has particularly desired me to keep his presence a secret.’ A secret from whom? His presence? Has he only just returned – from where? Was he a soldier, a sailor? Is he terribly battered, and ashamed to be seen? Eliza feared she had already given too much away. But a younger sister has large resources of silence, and she depended on these, shaking her head, pushing her chin out. Her drooping lip just revealed a line of wet mouth-flesh.
Time was pressing, however. They moved upstairs to the dressing room, where Beatrice began to fling clothes onto a low settee: morning and evening and afternoon dresses, opera cloaks, and mantuas, pelisses, gloves and scarves and hats. Eliza sat demurely to the side with her knees together and her hands pressed between them – as quiet as a corpse on a doctor’s table. Her sister soon forgot her jealousy. She had that slight sweet generosity of pretty women; she delighted in draping, in petting and praising, her uglier sex. Eliza, unused to the shared fuss of being dressed, enlarged her eyes and drew in her lip and lifted her back in a drawn-out gesture of hauteur. Her vanity was doubled and redoubled by the various reflections, in the looking glass, in her own, in her sister’s gaze. For a minute or two she felt like a broad palette of her own finer tastes and enjoyed that large freedom which extends even to the composition of the self. She had the making of a lady in her. They argued fiercely over the depth of her décolletage.
But the final gap had yet to be bridged. What she was straining against was her inability to act. Such make-believe was only a deeper assertion of her own carefully protected walls; it was the stepping over them that mattered. When the front bell rang, the sisters had not resolved the issue. Eliza pinched and tucked low the line of her dress. Small-breasted, she wished to suggest the pressure of her heart, outwards. The hoops of her ribs were visible; one could almost imagine dragging one’s knuckles across them. A pink-brown fan of skin spread wide beneath her neck. Quickly, Bea tied a red band of velvet around Eliza’s throat: a compromise, to draw the eyes away. Some of her hairs, curled after the fashion, had caught in it; but there was hardly time or attention to spare for her any more. She was being sent forth. Lady Walmsley waited in her carriage. Mrs Violet had carefully prepared a thin smile of praise to greet her. She was doubly annoyed at the delay; she didn’t want it to spoil. Bea kissed Eliza quickly in the doorway, untucked her straggling hairs and glanced her over. ‘You look lovely,’ she said and thought: rather tightly bound. Her narrow face: long lip; sharp nose; ash skin. The fierce slight swell of her breasts; those tiny hips. My poor lonely sister, she thought. Not unsensual. God knows, of all that, what will first come undone. She softened suddenly, remembering forgotten fevers. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, in a sisterly whisper, ‘has been done before. Whatever happens, has happened to others. To everyone.’ And she was gone.
Eliza thought, nothing that happens to anyone happens to me.
They dined at Wilmers first. Another place to wait, and defer arrival – the arrival of what, of whom, was growing to her increasingly unclear. If Lord B appeared, what should she say to him? Could any event answer the force of her expectation? At Wilmers the party gathered weight. Eliza was vaguely conscious of increase, the added difficulties in manoeuvre. There was Dab Hansen, the MP, a fat young buck with a twitch in his left eye and a charming stammer. He looked up painfully to Lady Walmsley. It was rumoured, after all, that she had once bedded Fox in his youth (in hers, too, of course). Lady Walmsley had, over the years, acquired a certain power of blessing, of bestowing favour, whatever was meant by the word. Her nod of recognition conjured significance out of thin air. Even Eliza was conscious of the warmth of her ladyship’s shadow.
