Imposture, p.15
Imposture, page 15
‘I suspect then,’ Polidori said in a high whisper to push his voice above the noise, ‘that I shall never win anything.’
Colburn, coming to a decision, clapped his hands together, and called for rouleaux, a cup of coffee. He sat down at one of the tables and pulled out a chair for the doctor. Polidori asked for another glass of brandy; he was beginning to lose his head and beginning to enjoy it. There were four other men gaming with them. A young captain named Sheetcroft with thin pale hair and a white face and very pale blue eyes. He had been losing steadily and plucked nervously, in rapid alternation, his thumb against his forefinger: Polly imagined he could hear the rub of the skin. ‘The thing is,’ he kept saying, ‘I’m about to be married, you see.’ Polidori recognized another one of the players, a friend of B’s, known as Scrope – to rhyme with ‘dupe’. A small, compacted man, he wore a severe collar, very stiff and high, that brought out the green in his narrow face. His pupils twitched restlessly, and he half-blinked, in a kind of eye-pinch – an expression in which Polly recognized the suppressed frown of calculation. ‘I believe we’ve met before,’ Polidori said, feeling the brandy in his chest and reaching his hand out, ‘in happier company. Doctor Polidori.’ Scrope looked him over quickly, then touched his fingers to Polly’s palms. He clearly had no recollection of the doctor. He had aged since the four of them set out, that long-ago summer morning, for Dover: Scrope and Byron in that ridiculous carriage, Hobhouse, resentfully, confined to the calèche with Polidori. ‘I expect you mean I owe you money,’ he said, with a thin smile. Polly was almost glad to see that he wasn’t alone in falling on hard times since parting with B.
‘No, we got drunk together at The Grapes in Dover, the night before Lord Byron left for France.’
Scrope, still unremembering, said, ‘I expect we did. Getting drunk with Lord Byron was one of my better habits.’
‘Are you playing?’ Colburn cut in.
Polidori put his wrists together and opened out his hands. ‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘I always thought that was why one gambled in the first place,’ Scrope said, who had the cast and threw down the dice with a practised gesture. Three ‘mains’ running brought a pretty heap of rouleaux between his elbows. Colburn began to follow his lead, putting his bets on the ‘dapper little fellow’, as he called him; though secretly, between rounds, he complained to Polly of Scrope’s ‘miserable dandified manner’. Colburn had lately affected a prejudice against the whole tribe. It was a ‘terrible waste of niceties’, the attention they gave to their collars, their cuffs; their odds-tables. There were two other players, a small rounded gentleman named Tulk, who owned quantities of Surrey. He said little and bet heavily and marked all his winnings and losings in a notebook he kept inside his bright yellow waistcoat. And a banker whom Scrope referred to chummily as K. He had large hands and a slow manner, and whenever Scrope won, he carefully extracted a portion from his friend’s pile, and arranged the chips in a neat row beside his own.
It was almost two in the morning before Polly joined in the game. Colburn had grown ‘tired of the sport’, having won a little for himself, about a hundred pounds. ‘The trick,’ he said, ‘was knowing when he was bored. He always quit as soon as he was bored; there was a very fine line between indifference and boredom, but everything depended on knowing when it was crossed.’ He was also sober, unlike the rest of the company, and wanted to enjoy the contrast with greater detachment. Polly, by this stage, had a brandy-fire in his head; the easy exchange of money, of fortunes, thrilled him as it always did. The thought of what he might do with a hundred pounds! There were tradesman’s debts to be settled, of course; but even so, he’d have enough to take up that apprenticeship in the law. ‘He had a fancy for the law. It struck him as an honourable profession’ – he was beginning to explain himself, carefully and loudly, to Colburn; it seemed to him very important that Colburn should understand his position. What he wanted to say, what he wanted Colburn to see, was that his own particular difficulty, the blankness or barrenness from which he suffered, might count for less in the law than it did in the literary game. But even in his inflamed state, Polidori guessed this was the wrong line to take with his publisher, and he said instead, that experience had taught him that nothing ever turns out as you think it will, and it’s a nonsense to say that it turns out better or worse, it simply turns out otherwise, and by otherwise he means of course worse. And that when he was young it struck him as the most natural thing in the world that the most famous poet in the world should seek him out and beg him for his professional services. Beg him; and that in fact Polly, at a very green nineteen, had, at the time, for some time hesitated whether or not to oblige. He wanted Colburn particularly to understand the way he used to think, of the world, of his place in it, when he was young. But his father from the beginning had warned him that he would suffer, and he had suffered!, from the force of impossible comparisons. There were some things it was impossible to compare. It was impossible to compare Lord Byron and Doctor John William Polidori. Yet they were in some ways very much alike and had on more than one occasion been mistaken for each other. A fact he considered highly suggestive . . .
This train of thought put him in mind of Eliza; and he wondered sentimentally how far a hundred pounds would go towards setting them up in life together, in a little cottage, like her father’s perhaps, in Somers Town by the canal. Though, of course, he would also have to explain himself and his conduct to her very convincingly. He, paradoxically, began envying Lord Byron afresh, believing that the poet’s powers of persuasion would make short work of any apology he had to offer for pretending to be the poet. It was a motto of Mrs Shelley’s that ‘everything came easier if you were Albé.’ Seeing Frances had loosened something in his affections; he no longer clung to the memory of her, to the memory of the affection he felt for her. It occurred to him that the time had come at last for him to find her replacement, for him to replace the comfort she offered with new comforts and pleasures. And he tasted again Eliza’s warm breath, the leftover sourness of the syllabub on her tongue. Colburn asked him, bending his mouth to Polly’s ear, how he was getting on with the memoir of Lord B. There was always something conspiratorial about Henry Colburn; he tended to demand a full and hushed attention, especially from his authors. Polly almost said to him, you always seem to be conspiring over the most natural arrangements in the world. But instead, he said, that he had recently begun a sequel to The Vampyre, which had lately occurred to him, owing to a piece of gossip that had come his way from Byron’s life abroad, of a very intimate and scandalous nature. That it concerned a brother and a sister, and the issue of an illicit connection, but he didn’t wish to go any further into a description of the story, as he often found it spoiled his appetite for telling it later, in the quieter company of a goose-quill and a sheet of paper.
It was at this point that Colburn offered to stake Polidori what he called a bit of play-money, for playing with, as he said. Colburn liked to experiment with people and situations. He also liked his acquaintance to be beholden: it left him such scope for generosity and manipulation. His large friendly devilish face seemed to have swelled in the course of the evening, in the glow of the candles, until it loomed over Polidori as bright with blemishes as the moon that had illuminated Polly’s chat with Frances on the doorstep of their father’s house what seemed now several night-times ago. As an advance, of course, Colburn continued, on the fulfilment of various arrangements understood between them.
Polly again was tempted to complain of Colburn’s conspiratorial manner, which seemed to suggest that a simple transaction between men of the world had sinister undertones. But thinking better of it – and this struck him at the time as a lucky omen, that, drunk as he was, he had managed to forestall his own stubborn penchant for what Byron used to call his ‘getting into scrapes’ – he simply accepted the sum of a hundred pounds, the full ration of Colburn’s earlier winnings, by raking the heap of them with his forearms onto the green baize between his elbows on the table. A rough gesture that signalled his willingness to take his chances, roughly, and live by the results. ‘Come when it will,’ he thought, ‘we snatch the life of life’: one of Byron’s lines, which served as a kind of refrain to his inward commentary on the rest of the night. He felt like a young man striding free again, for the first time, after a long bout of illness; or – and this was perhaps the apter image – after leaving behind the constraining company of an ageing father, whose arm he had taken, and to whose gait he had adapted his own.
Sheetcroft had by now two spots of hectic colour on his cheeks, round and pretty, as if painted on. He had continued to lose heavily and played on in the not unreasonable belief that since he was ruined already, the only swing in his fortune that signified was an upward turn. He rolled up his silken shirt-sleeves, and set his forearms on the table. Tulk, the landowner, had done very well by hedging against the captain. He was the kind of man who could not repress the satisfaction in his pity. Pity, in fact, was the only sentiment that inspired in him fellow-feeling. ‘I’m beginning to warm to you, Sheetcroft,’ he repeated, a little smirk playing on his lips, as if it took the full strength of his character to prevent the outbreak of a smile. He put his plump-fingered hand on the young man’s naked wrist. ‘I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve done rather well off your bad luck.’
Sheetcroft turned briefly towards him, with the timidity of a man about to depend on the kindness of the rich. ‘I thought I’d just have a quiet game or two, to see if I was warm. I’m about to be married, you see; I thought it might bring me luck.’ He had the cast, and as he said it, touched the box against Tulk’s wager and let the dice fly. Tulk recorded the result in his little book, a two and a three. Sheetcroft took up the dice again, and rolled a two and a five. ‘A good “chance”,’ Scrope kindly remarked; but he didn’t trust Sheetcroft’s run of fortune, and hedged with a bet of five pounds, at three to two odds, on the ‘main’. The captain shook the box and threw again: he was hardly breathing. A six, a nine, another six. Polidori said, ‘I love the glorious uncertainty not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all. These little postponements, when nothing, after all, has been decided.’
‘No, no,’ Sheetcroft replied. ‘It’s much worse, waiting. I’d rather lose at once if I’m going to lose.’
Polly took this as an ill omen for the captain, and laid down five pounds on the ‘main’. Colburn, being out of the game, had decided to get drunk again. He ordered a pint of arrack punch from the waiter, and then called after him once more, and, on his return, asked for a beefsteak and an apple tart. ‘Anything for the doctor?’ he added, but Polidori did not hear him. The waiter, a handsome thin-faced man with honey-coloured skin, stood hesitant, until Colburn kicked him in the foot, and sent ‘Narcissus’ on his way. Sheetcroft rolled, and exhaled again, painfully, when another seven came up. His smile was sweetness itself, the soft brightness of winter sunshine. Even Tulk had the graciousness to congratulate him; Polly watched his five pounds being raked away. Well, it was only the beginning. He had the sense of entering at last, after a long absence, the arena in which he could do justice to his passion for life. He felt invincible, and was savvy enough to recognize the feeling as the result of brandy and sleeplessness; at the same time, he couldn’t entirely discount it as evidence of the luck he was in.
Sheetcroft’s fortunes were turning. On his next cast, he threw a three and a one, and, with the betting heavily against him, two twos: another four. ‘Nicked it, by God,’ Colburn cried; and the captain gathered the stakes to himself. He became expansive. Once, off the coast of Cherbourg, he let a French frigate, a 34-gun beauty, high in the water and quick on the turn, get the gauge off him. He fired, for what it was worth, at range; broke a stay, and awaited the returning volley. But the wind backed suddenly and caught the Frenchman across his bows. A rough day with long rollers, the gale had been steady all week – what a lucky gust it was. It showed, if you were looking, as a faint flat row of silvering over the tops of the waves. Sheetcroft let it fill him from the quarter, and followed it through the Frenchman’s wake. Giving up the gauge for good, he crossed the stern of the 34 and raked her up and down; broke her mizzen, which tore from its stay and fell flat across the deck, till the wind caught the loose sail and pressed her like a dog from behind. She struck at once. But what he’ll never forget is that quiet in the blow just before the wind backed; not so much calm as noiseless with the tension. You felt the pressure in your ears like ten feet of cold water. He thought he was dead, by God; he thought he was dead for sure.
The blood had filled the rest of his face; he was getting his colour back. ‘I should be in bed by now,’ he said. ‘I promised Margaret I would be in bed by three.’ He looked round the table, anxious to confide, to exchange intimacies, and declared, as if for the first time, ‘I’m getting married in the morning. But I’m just beginning to enjoy myself.’
‘Congratulations, old man,’ Tulk repeated, largely out of habit.
Polidori, by the end of the first hour, had lost sixty pounds. ‘He was getting his hand in,’ he joked. Scrope was losing, too, very quietly, under great control. K said to him, ‘Easy, easy,’ when the dapper little man reached over, stretching the starch in his collar, to retrieve the chips from his friend’s pile. ‘You didn’t expect to keep them,’ Scrope said, lifting his brows. ‘Well, we’ll settle accounts, afterwards,’ K replied, giving way. ‘I thought you’d take the sporting view,’ Scrope answered. And added, with only a touch of what B used to call Scrope’s Special Horseradish, ‘after all, you’re only a banker by trade.’
‘Easy, easy,’ Colburn echoed, taking Polidori by the arm. He wasn’t yet drunk, and had begun to fear for what he called his ‘investment’. ‘Sit out a round and eat something. It’s bad luck gaming hungry.’
‘I eat the air,’ Polly said, strangely high-spirited. No sense of loss had yet afflicted him; he was proof against his usual quick response to misfortune. He tended, sensitively, to fall in line with it; but now he felt impervious. Another good omen; he drank half a glass of brandy to fix the feeling of it within him. His spirits were just on the boil; he didn’t want them to go off yet, he dreaded the inevitable flatness to follow. He said to Colburn, ‘I believe that gamblers, even those confirmed in their depravity, feel freer than most men. Their profession demands a cool head and a calculating mind; but in the end, they give themselves over, night after night, to a quite inhuman force. The fall of the dice or the turn of the cards has more to do with their happiness than any qualities they possess themselves: they step, as it were, out of their own skins. They are unbound.’
And, in fact, his luck turned, and he began to win. First he shared the spoils with Sheetcroft and then, as Sheetcroft began to lose again, with Tulk. He took a particular pleasure in seeing his own successes carefully recorded, in a cramped bad hand, in Tulk’s book. ‘Yes, write it down, write it down,’ he cried. His drunkenness was becoming obtrusive; he kept looking over the landowner’s low round shoulder, to see exactly what his little notes recounted. ‘Write it down,’ he repeated: he had the sense his good humour was lacking an echo, something to resound against. ‘I am going to be married myself,’ he said, taking Sheetcroft intimately by the elbow. He too wanted something to confide, and picked Eliza as the nearest secret to hand. ‘To a very pretty girl,’ he went on, ‘who is under a . . . certain misapprehension regarding my character. She believes I am what I am not. She believes I am not what I am.’
Colburn at this point asked for Polly to return his stake; he was retiring to bed. ‘You have plenty there to be getting on with.’ Polidori looked happily at his winnings. ‘Would you like to count them?’ And then, suddenly sad, touched by presentiments of the ease of loss, in the broadest sense, he urged his ‘old friend’ to ‘stay, stay. It was only for the happiness of the thing that he continued. It was only to keep the company in spirits. They were all bound together now, were they not, by ties of pleasure?’ The light of false dawn was beginning to drift through the bars of the window that gave onto the street above them. Most of the tables had emptied. There was an ugly streak of red wine on one of the waiter’s gloves. His face looked haggard now; his prettiness was only for show, beneath it lay a mean, tired spirit. Polidori yawned wide and slow. ‘It was only a release of nerves,’ he insisted and ordered coffee with a dash of brandy in it. In fact, he felt himself standing on the edge of a tremendous coming-down. The least slackening would leave him boneless, childish with misery. His sister, his poor sister. He was, perhaps, some two hundred pounds to the good. Tulk was ready to call it quits; Sheetcroft had fallen asleep at the table, and K was standing to go, when Scrope, who had lost five hundred pounds in the course of the evening, said evenly, ‘I believe the cast is mine’ and took up the dice. Polidori’s coffee arrived. K sat down again. Sheetcroft woke up, with a raspberry of warm blood lingering on the tip of his nose and the creased skin of his forearm where they had pressed together. Colburn called for another beefsteak, beaten thin, a glass of Tokay.
When true dawn came at last, white with the promise of a hot day, Polly had lost everything. The first two hundred pounds had ‘dried up’ (Sheetcroft’s phrase) within the hour. Then, fighting hard again, and grimly, soberly awake, Polly gambled away the rest of Colburn’s stake by sunrise. A disaster which, in its own way, seemed strangely to suit his mood. He had a strong, almost comfortable sense of the snug fit of things: the way people lived up to their habits and fates in the end. Scrope had cleared his debts and come out again on the other side; he and Tulk rose victorious from the table, and followed each other up the corkscrew steps, delicate and careful with somnolence. Then out into the street again, into the air, light-hearted and blinking against the light. Polidori followed Colburn; his knees ached with sleeplessness. He stumbled at one point and steadied himself on Colburn’s ankle. The publisher waited for him to let go, then resumed his climb. Standing outside again, in the air already pregnant with the heat of the day, Polly could just make out the flow of people on St Giles: the business of ordinary life continuing. He said to Colburn, ‘I wonder if most men suffer from a sense that their life has not amounted to what they thought it would. I wonder if that is a general lament.’
