Imposture, page 8
Then Admiral Withers ‘had a sighting of them’, as he said, and joined them at their table in the window: a heavy-headed, thin-necked old man, in a balding wig. Lady Walmsley, with her knotty hands, drew him to herself. She was particularly glad to see him; and they gossiped together at their end of the table, a flow of talk that did nothing to prevent his ordering several dishes of food. He tackled his turbot, Eliza quietly remarked, ‘as if he continually hoped to surprise it’. Mrs Violet laughed; Eliza’s sharp tongue sometimes startled the widow into undissembled amusement. At Lady Walmsley’s age, to be making up to such an ostrich! Her ladyship wore a piled-up turban on her head; it was forever undoing, and required a constant and delicate ‘putting in its place’. For once, Eliza indulged in unspoken condescension: poor old woman, petting herself.
Miss Esmond did not guess how little her own white gown suited her. Beatrice had tried to persuade her against it, but Eliza believed firmly that her chief distinction, the only thing her narrow features and form allowed her to aspire to, was elegant simplicity. Her nut-brown skin cast its dingy shadow across the lace; she looked rather unwashed. Yet her high spirits almost made up for it. A pink flush had begun to spread on either side of her nose; she seldom took wine at dinner. What could Bea have meant, that ‘whatever you do, has been done before’? Eliza hadn’t intended to do anything; she wouldn’t know where to begin. She felt brave only in her thoughts. In these, Lady Walmsley and Mrs Violet, even the beautiful Beatrice, played unflattering supporting roles: the gorgon, the shrew, the wicked sister. Eliza, naturally enough, was the heroine of her own romance, the sweet, abused child making her way untainted through the world. And now the wine was making her talk.
Mrs Violet said, in the carriage afterwards, ‘I wish, at least, we was going to a modern play. I can’t bear anything old-fashioned.’ The crowds had begun to fill the streets around Covent Garden; Willis, once or twice, cracked his whip to part them. Bridges Street itself was almost impassable; there was some kind of protest under way outside the theatre. Men filled the lane, shoulder to shoulder, their shadows doubled and redoubled under the swaying gas-lamps. Eliza caught the odour of them in the spring air, and covered her mouth. The press of people shocked her; the violence they threatened, their undeniable high spirits. Admiral Withers, at last, mounted the coach-box himself and roared a path clear. In spite of his age, he had a voice for all weathers. Hansen handed them out, and then Mrs Violet’s new beau appeared, and ‘cut a swath through them,’ as he later said, ‘with his stick. These pit-boys instinctively respect the force of a gentleman.’ They squeezed together into the theatre-lobby, which was hardly less crowded or oppressive: a grand ante-chamber, square and high, overwrought with gold vines. Marble pillars guarded the doorways, topped by various busts: of Macklin, Cibber, Mrs Siddons. Eliza, in her strange way, never felt a clearer sense of belonging to her little party.
‘The play is a great favourite of mine.’ Lady Walmsley made a point of appearing undisturbed. They had reached the safety of their seats under the gratifying impression of a task accomplished. ‘I remember seeing it first when Lord Frederic was courting me. He took a box, on purpose, across the gallery; and tried to cast the shine off his lorgnette in my eyes.’ Lady Walmsley was plumply sinking into a reminiscence.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Violet responded, put out, ‘but one knows what one means.’
‘I do, indeed,’ Eliza suddenly broke in. She had caught something of the crowd’s high spirits; the wine, too, was beginning to take its toll. Her eyes as she spoke scanned restlessly across the way. A new fear was growing inside her, that she mightn’t recognize him if he came. Besides, he was sure to disguise himself – for reasons she was dimly conscious of leaving unprobed. It pleased her too much, the sense of being in his secret, complicit. ‘I have been saying to my father (you know my father writes romances), that he relies too much on histories and chronicles. Monks in abbeys, castles, harems. What is wanted, as you say, Mrs Violet, is the modern touch. Clubs, coffee-houses, and the like. A ride in the Park. The action of a play.’
The settling, unquiet air of the theatre reached a new pitch; then swiftly declined at the chastening hush of drawn curtains. Eliza noted that the pit was half-full. Mrs Violet’s ‘dog-friend’ (as Lady Walmsley afterwards referred to him, in a tone impossible to convict of irony) informed the party that the theatre had raised its prices: these riots were the unhappy result. He was a square-jawed, handsome man; just the coal-black hint of the next morning’s beard dusted his white complexion. His features suggested the rigidity of a mask, as if he suffered helplessly his own set expression of smiling self-regard. A Mr Tom Chancery. Not an unkind soul; he handed even Eliza to her seat and offered her the services of his fan. A mark of attention whose chief reward was the pointed and politic kindness Mrs Violet chose to show her for the rest of the evening.
As soon as the play began, all conversation resumed, a low rumble of talk as common and continuous as the sounds of carriage wheels on cobble stones. ‘My father had this answer for me,’ Eliza whispered, during a scene change. It was all she could do to keep her head straight. Her glance darted here and there, leaving faint electric tracks in her mind’s eye, the beginnings of a headache. ‘He complained it was impossible; that the present day was too familiar. An author could not shape it as he pleased. His readers would for ever be comparing this or that against the real thing; his fictions could not but suffer by the contrast. There was another consideration, too. That what seems to us now terribly modern is only a matter of fashion. In ten years or so, one might not remember how we dressed or swore or passed the time. An author, my father says, who aims at posterity, had better set his feet firmly in the past.’
Admiral Withers intervened, clearing his throat with a swallow of something from a small hip-flask. ‘But surely that is giving up the chase too easily; it shows a poor faint heart. The past is easily boarded, if you follow me; what we want is to tackle the present, in all its confusion.’ Dab Hansen took the flask off him afterwards and passed it to Chancery. There was a general air of consumption and loose happiness – what Eliza thought of afterwards as ‘manly snuggery’. Withers continued. ‘Besides, I can never stomach all the monks and knights; call it the sailor in me. They talk painfully by the book. It’s quite shocking, the way these historical writers steal from each other. I dined once, by the way, with Walter Scott. Perfectly amiable man; kept a decent table; and, as I learnt at dinner, his own brigade of infantry. Called them the Aldershots, or some such nonsense. Hadn’t any notion how a war was fought. Didn’t much care, either; admitted he only liked the dressing up. No, as Mrs Violet says, give me a modern play.’
Eliza found herself taking her father’s side, somewhat against the grain. ‘There seem to me a hundred different ways of dressing up, and not all of them require old clothes. It’s an awful business, my father once confessed to me, and almost the worst of authorship: the eavesdropping, and peering over shoulders, just to see how other men live. More often than not, one only paints them like oneself regardless. It seemed, after all, more honest to him, beginning with make-believe; and from there, to work out his own ideas, without worrying too much over likenesses.’
‘I only said,’ Mrs Violet cut in at last, with a wincing smile, ‘that I preferred a modern play, because it don’t go on so long.’
There was a space of silence, of attention to the stage: the stage’s own silence had produced it. It seemed that someone had forgotten his lines; the quiet stretched out painfully. A man from the pit called out, ‘Aren’t you going to answer the gentleman?’ General laughter. Even Lady Walmsley joined in; her handsome old head looked blind and common, screwed up in high spirits. Mrs Violet let out a shrill cackle; her tastes were really quite low. They deserved each other, after all, the old grande dame and her mismatched daughter-in-law: one pretty and foolish and young; the other, none of those things. Yet they were strangely complicit in their bickering. Eliza offered a half-smile. It seemed beneath their party to favour such outbreaks, but she didn’t wish to appear sour-humoured. ‘Might I ever,’ the Admiral inquired, ‘have picked up one of your father’s books?’ He had looked on disapprovingly. It didn’t sit with his general ideas to laugh at strangers; he believed in keeping men in order.
‘This is just it,’ Eliza admitted, changing tack, ‘this is just my point. He cannot afford a publisher; and none, as yet, has been willing to take on the expense. He should try something new, I tell him. Only, he lives a rather retired life. He spends more time among books than people. It seems only natural to him to set his romances among the scenes familiar from his daily life: his shelves.’
‘But surely he lives in a house, on a street. He has neighbours. Eyes and ears. More particular memories.’
Eliza nodded. His life, since her mother died, had been uniformly drab. He spent his days at a desk in a wide hall of desks, tallying figures. His evenings at a table in his back room, composing. Weeks, years, passed without event. He seemed capable of acting only under the prick of his pen. She answered at last, ‘My father once confessed to me that there were two great difficulties in telling tales. The first I’ve mentioned. Imagine yourself, he said, in a room full of people, of perfect strangers. So they seem, at least, until you discover that each of them, down to the merest child, bears your own face. Your own failures and habits; your own shabby knowledge of the world. Such terrible reproach they turn on you; as if to say, look, this is what you have made me – made us.’ Eliza herself looked around, then, at the audience: at the pewter dimpling of a crowd of faces, their thumbprint impressions, the bright variations of pink. ‘This unhappy family.’
‘And the second?’ Lady Walmsley inquired, somewhat recovered.
Eliza’s social ease surprised herself, but the conversation was well-rehearsed. ‘Forging the hand of Providence. My father admits to being a fractious and fickle god; his heroes tend to suffer under him – from the most unlikely coincidences. But he has no patience for the slow accumulation of events: it is too much like life.’
Lady Walmsley gave her a sharp look. Eliza’s throat was sore from the wine and talking; she blushed at having forgotten her station, her dutiful silence. At having exposed her father to their indifference. Lady Walmsley said, ‘I suppose, then, he is hardly surprised at remaining unpublished?’
Admiral Withers answered more simply, ‘In the navy, you see, we have few such fears. We hope our men think as much alike, as much like us, as flogging will make them. And then, we are seldom short of circumstances to test their mettle.’ Eliza gave him a grateful glance. Her father had always got on, she remembered, with intelligent, practical men. It once surprised her; he was so impractical himself. But now she had learned to expect it. Even the relation of his troubles brought out their sympathies. It was then she considered – hesitant as she was, of her voice, of her charms, of her place in society – how suitable her education had been. For wooing poets. Her father had taught her, if nothing else, the language of romance, of swooning and reproach, of love. If only she could put it to use.
Lady Walmsley broke in suddenly, ‘I believe that’s Sam Whitbread, giving himself presiding airs. And beside him, Henry Colburn. Do you see, Hansen? There, just across the way. With a third man, in a black coat, talking. I haven’t seen him since he launched your little history of Ireland on the unsuspecting world. Flutter your fan at him, Mrs Violet. There. He has just caught my eye. I suspect we shall have his compliments at the interval.’ Then, smiling with satisfaction: ‘The actors must grow thirsty soon.’ Eliza had seen him, too. Lord Byron’s distant animation awoke in her a kind of pity – she saw what miniature his gestures were reduced to, at thirty yards. It wasn’t quite the sense of arrival she had anticipated, but something near to it, nearer. At that range, he still seemed largely a creature of her own imagination; imbued, however, with the power of approach. Capable also of unguessed-at qualities; a life outside her mind.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A FEW HOURS EARLIER, OVER DINNER, Colburn had said to Polidori, ‘Now I’ve had a look at your memoirs of Byron.’ They sat in a back room at The Nose Bag, a tavern just off Grosvenor Square: low-roofed, stinking of men, spilt beer. Colburn cut bloodily into his chop. ‘I’ll tell you what the trouble with it is.’ Polly’s heart sank. It seemed to him suddenly he had spent his life listening to that preamble. ‘Don’t despair,’ Colburn added, in his kindly, practical way. ‘It’s easily mended.’ In Colburn’s eyes, everything was merely a question of adjustment. He freely confessed he had no original talents, but prided himself on his gift for tinkering. What he professed to know – the way of the world, how to satisfy its tastes – was precisely in its way just what Polidori despaired of coming to grips with.
‘The trouble,’ he repeated, ‘is plain enough. You’ve written a charming memoir of a young man’s continental travels. Full of art and adventure and pretty girls.’
‘This is just it! This is exactly what I set out to do. A charming travelogue, etc.’
‘Only you’ve picked the wrong young man. You’ve written about yourself.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Nobody cares a damn about Dr Polidori. I don’t. She doesn’t.’ He gestured at the waitress; then at a table of gentlemen, who were picking over a pot of mussels. ‘They don’t. I suspect, really, neither do you.’ Having caught the girl’s eye, he ordered two more pints of porter. ‘That’s the trouble. Nobody does; though, as I say, it’s easily mended. Shall I tell you a young man they might pay two shillings five pence to read about? Lord Byron. Shall I tell you a fitting subject for a continental journal? Lord B. Shall I tell you what John Murray would pay five hundred guineas, with a kiss on the lips, etc. etc.’ Colburn, in the midst of this tirade, spotted an acquaintance at the bar; and touching Polidori on the shoulder, rose from the table and made his way over. One of his characteristic vagaries, that he could shift the full heat of his attention on a whim, leaving the young man to consider his position alone.
Of course, Polly knew it was true. Had always known it; had resisted just because he knew. He remembered landing at Ostend, shortly after that unhappy episode in Dover. Byron had proved a poor sailor, and Polly preened himself on being ‘sea-worthy’; this at a time in his life when he could still fancy himself blessed or charmed, almost untouchable. When he trusted his sister’s faith: ‘We rely on you. All of us. We rely on you.’ The months that followed helped him to revise that self-opinion. By the end of the summer, Byron had dismissed him; and Polly had put to the test his sister’s preference, for her husband, among others, and come out second best. Being untouchable struck him in a different light, with a different meaning: he was unable to touch, make contact with the world. Reconsidered, his steady legs and iron stomach seemed only proof of how little life affected him, how out of tune he was. Byron’s easy upset suggested his more sensitive gauge.
Still, it made Polly smile to remember the poet: how green and grateful he looked, to see the little town of Ostend, as the ship beat its way into the harbour. He shouted at Polidori, for standing to windward of him, for looking cheerful, for anything at all. By the time, however, they reached their hotel, his lordship had fully recovered his humour and his land-legs. He apologized to Polly for barking at him; only, he said, ‘It helped him to keep down his dinner.’ And then he fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.
She was a perfectly unremarkable girl of seventeen, who had reached just that age, that span of months, when her commonness seemed like the freshest, simplest language of youth and beauty. Round cheeks, that would soon hang slack; wide eyes, before they reddened; a full, plain mouth unlined by any fixed expression whatsoever. She hardly resisted him at all. Polly left his portmanteau on his bed and retreated to the hallway. He meant to descend to the dining rooms, but lingered a minute, listening to the sounds within. The maid, strangely enough, had most of the shouting to herself: a pigeon-like cooing deepening in her throat, till she lost her breath altogether and resorted to gasping. Lord B distinguished rather by his silence. Polly couldn’t help but reflect on his own abrupt performance in that line; he had begun, as his father predicted, to feel the force of impossible comparisons.
They journeyed north and east through Belgium. At Brussels, they ran into a friend of B’s mother, Pryse Gordon: a man of about forty, curly-haired, with a youthful, amiable expression, and a nose that looked somewhat bitten off. Lord Byron wanted to take in the fields of Waterloo; Pryse offered to serve as ‘cicerone’. Polly guessed already that Byron was planning more poeshies (B’s word), and secretly hoped to test his own muse against him. Indeed, Gordon’s wife kept an album of occasional verses, in which Walter Scott himself had recorded his impressions of the field of battle. Polidori felt the exaltation of his company; he nursed secret hopes of ‘announcing’ himself by some grand poetical flourish. The mockery of Ximenes still rankled, though he had, on a calmer consideration, removed the offending words – stricken ‘goiter’d’ and ‘scalps’ from the MS. This was his second chance to prove himself.
The visit brought out all Byron’s pomp and foolishness. His grand carriage had made a palpable impression overnight, not particularly favourable: it was only too faithfully Napoleonic. The farmers had suffered heavily in the war. B himself was on his worst behaviour. A certain, perhaps understandable, conflation in his mind made him sensitive to unintended slights. He had last travelled that way as a young man, with his life before him; an unknown. The journey, recorded in the first cantos of Childe Harold, had made him famous, and he expected some evidence of that fact to accompany his second pilgrimage like a glow of lights, an easing of the way. Of course, this was often the case. But even the best of travellers grow irritable at the inevitable delays and discomforts, at the obstructive indifference of the natives. And Byron’s temper had never been steady. Their inn at Brussels had been especially foul; he violently fought off his ill-humour with forced wit and loudly repeated Pope’s lines to Bathurst, ‘In a bad inn’s worst room’, as their host left them a last inch of tallow candle to light their dirty bedside. All pretence of sanguinity left him when Polidori foolishly corrected him. ‘I believe you’ll find,’ he said, ‘that the line runs, In the worst inn’s, etc.’ Byron grinned horribly and then hissed, as Polly had known Italians hiss at women, with both hands raised. Later, more calmly, as they undressed, Byron insisted on making an early start, on rising at first light, in the morning’s glory, etc.
