Imposture, p.16
Imposture, page 16
Colburn answered, that as he got older, he put more and more of his faith in ‘mere pleasure’, which he had found to be a simple but effective physic against any, and even the most spiritual, malaise. He was often astonished at how happy he could make himself simply by satisfying his appetites. He had ceased to worry over his place in the world. When he was low, he ate a beefsteak; when he was hipped, he drank a bottle of champagne; when he was bored, he counted over his money.
Polly, taking the hint, said that it was ‘very decent, very white’ of Colburn to lend him the hundred pounds; he was only sorry it had gone to waste.
Colburn said, not at all, he intended always to get what he paid for, and Polidori knew very well what he had paid him for. Then, taking his watch from the fob, he added, ‘I expect we both have business to attend to.’ Bidding the doctor good morning, he set off towards St Giles; his gait slower than it had been arriving, the night before, but strong and steady still. Polly watched him go, he didn’t dare keep pace beside him; and only after Colburn’s broad back had disappeared into the traffic of the high street, did he make his own way towards home. Sheetcroft, patiently shy, stood waiting for him at the corner of Macklin Street. He had, just about, got off honours-evens by the end. Large-hearted and sleepless with relief, he was fastidious about his farewells. He wanted to feel that no one had been hard done by, he wanted to touch all hands. ‘I thought at first that I had missed you, that you had gone ahead. Is it very bad?’
‘Nothing is very bad any more,’ Polly answered.
‘That’s just it,’ Sheetcroft said, ‘that’s just what I remember thinking,’ and bowing, he took his leave.
The sun had already risen above the terraces by the time Polidori reached Lincoln’s Inn; he could see it glancing off the windows of his rooms. It cast shifting squares of light on the houses opposite. He nodded, in spite of everything, with the satisfaction of the late-returning, at the porter, and climbed the stairwell not so much heavy-hearted as confident that in some way his present manner of living would be brought to an end. He could not go on as he was. For the first time in many days he fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ELIZA TRIED AND FAILED TO READ. She half sat up in bed, with her books like children in her lap: Byron’s Pilgrimage, The Bryde of Abydos, The Giaour. She picked them up and put them down with the quickness of incomprehension.
Her father, after Polidori’s departure that afternoon, had been in a very nervous state. Eliza came back with Polly’s kiss on her lips and found her father trying to fit his knees under his desk. He said that he wanted very much to write something, to preserve something from their day together; he wanted, as he put it, ‘to write everything at once’. (And this is exactly what Eliza felt now: she wanted to read everything at once, and consequently, took in nothing at all.) ‘You may write as much as you like after you’ve eaten,’ Eliza had called to her father from the kitchen, as she set about lighting the stove. Mr Esmond didn’t answer. When she looked up, he was observing her from the doorway. ‘But you don’t understand,’ he said, in a not unhappy agitation quite unlike his usual patient disappointment. ‘I feel I have wasted my life entirely.’ She didn’t answer him; there was nothing she could usefully say. And he stayed in the doorway, and with great curiosity, watched his daughter prepare their meal.
As they sat down to eat, he said, ‘I have never been more impressed by anything in my life, than his easy manner and condescension.’ He said he had no appetite for food but ate greedily and thoughtlessly; his long forearms ranged from his plate to the pot without his elbows’ shifting from the table. A level sunset, coming through the window to the back, blinded him to his daughter; he spoke more freely at the glow of her. ‘I had expected arrogance, and he was not without a fine sense of his own high spirit. But there was a softness to him, a willingness to please. One felt almost that he depended on it, and this was very charming in itself.’
And then he continued, with a pleasurable heat and interest in his own words; he did not see Eliza slowly giving way to tears. ‘I have been very poor in the company of men. Your mother was my great love but also my first love, and I was by some years the younger. She had seen more of the world than I, and I was happy to take what she believed on faith: you know how much I relied on her. After we married, I found the roughness of men uncongenial. They presume too much upon . . . shared humours; they have no respect for what is womanish in us and delights only in the company of women. Our best nature. I felt this strongly at the time. I found it impossible to put up the show of indifference to all things that I felt was demanded of me. But perhaps I was too squeamish; and in fact, I saw so little of life, first-hand, so little of the world outside your mother’s view, that I think even she began to despair of me, and she sometimes complained, that there was nothing hard in me to push against, I was always giving way. I’m afraid none of this is very clear. What she wished for is that I could give her what she had given me, a firm shape, if only by resisting now and then, by standing fast. When Captain Simons (he was a mere lieutenant at the time) courted Beatrice, your mother wanted to know what manner of man he was, if he could be trusted. He was so sure and easy that she couldn’t confidently judge him, she had not the comparisons inside herself to hand. And I was forced to confess that I knew as little of such men as she, that I stood in just the same awe of them. She grew very angry at this. It was proper for a man, she thought, to have a fighting sense of life; and this is just what I saw in Lord Byron. Here is a man, I thought, who has seen the world, and who has not been afraid to put himself in the wrong. I have been too willingly constrained by a woman’s understanding of harm done. I have hardly touched the world at all, I was so frightened of spoiling something. The friendship, even the company, of a man like Lord Byron, might have done much to . . . might have given me an appetite for . . . success.’
After the meal, they sat together picking from a bowl of plums, which Polidori had bought for them at a stall outside the Wells – each eating and sucking and laying the stones with wet fingers in the dirty pot. Eliza’s father repeated his remark about the ‘acquaintance of poets’. ‘It is wonderful,’ he said, ‘to feel properly observed.’ Eliza was too happy to interrupt his flow. She also enjoyed playing her mother’s part, feeding him, listening, clearing up afterwards – he had always depended greatly on the women in his life to hear him out. It was one of her mother’s sayings: ‘Let him talk.’ It kept him happy, a steady blood-letting. She was also conscious, just a touch, of falling away from him – she saw him through Lord Byron’s eyes. What was his phrase, an honourable scribbler? Yes, she had confined herself too long to her father’s narrow expectations of life. She understood now, at last, the game Bea had played in catching Captain Simons; her strong desire to leave home. How strange, how false, her sister had first appeared to her, as a lover, a seductress. But this, she thought, is what being in love is like. You can recognize it most clearly by the little cold ticking of calculation in your thoughts: perhaps I can change my life.
Her father insisted on accompanying Eliza home. He was restless; in any case, too restless to write. He wanted to think and talk; he wanted to go over everything. Besides, the sun had gone down a half-hour before. There was only the glow of it, cupped in the hands of the horizon, and tossed upwards. Even that was streaking and disappearing. By the time they reached Oxford Street, the lamps had been lit. Her father took her more closely by the arm. They walked like lovers almost, close-hipped; their shadow, under their feet, had only three legs, a bulging middle. It was one of his beliefs, that intimacy, its display, forms an inviolable shell, that lovers were less likely to be robbed. She understood him, how starved he was of human warmth; she after all had the two children in and out of her arms. She had Lord Byron’s kiss.
Even so, when they reached the door of Lady Walmsley’s house, she was grateful for her powers of detachment. They stood in the milky shadow of the broad stucco façade. All was softness. Even the air smelt costlier than the wind that blew across her father’s yard, and she felt the slight retraction in his posture. He had put on, already, that humility of manner which embarrassed her in the company of Lady Walmsley’s set. He said, to keep her a minute longer, ‘I have always been proud of you, Eliza. Your mother and I were always proudest of you – perhaps because Bea never worried us, she had everything so well in hand. But your mother feared you would never be rated as you deserve.’ She unwound his arm, and then her fingers from his hand, and kissed him, retreating already, with one foot on the steps. He addressed her now, looking up, and continuing, ‘She worried that you were too much your father’s daughter! and I am only sorry she has not seen such proof, of the esteem in which you are held; that the first poet of the age has taken such an interest in you . . .’ And she stooped and kissed him again, scratching her face against his soft beard. He blinked at her; his pale childish skin reflected flatly the light where his cheeks were wet. At the top of the steps she waved him off, in truth glad to return to the glittering world, to leave her father, the homely air of his honourable humility, behind her. And only when he had disappeared, with a backward glance, around the corner, did she skip down the steps and hurry along the alley towards the servants’ entrance at the back.
Sundays were her day off, and she just stopped in to tell the cook that she had dined already before she retired to her room – to read, as she believed. But the books, which had once been her only solace, seemed poor comfort to her now. Eliza wondered what this signified, about her, about Lord Byron. Her room had a squat window, just at the height of her knees, overlooking the gardens behind. Often, in the mornings, she refreshed her eyes on the beeches rising high as houses, on their patient, superior company, their growing indifference to the little lives below. But in the shine of her candle, the window reflected blackly at her; and if she got down on her knees, she could see herself in it, peering back. Her feet and calves were tired from walking, but she pushed the books away, and, candle in hand, crouched to her own crouching image and considered her face. Her ashen complexion and stubborn lower lip; her thin, delicate, pernickety nose; her almond-green eyes, that gave her narrow face just the look of true elfin wildness which saved her from appearing merely stingy and hungry.
Was there anything to fall in love with in her face? How greedy she seemed to herself, with a fierce little selfish appetite: greedy and . . . and finicky at once. The look of a child who wants more and more, and disapproves of whatever she is given. She had never liked her face; but now as she stared at it, imagining in herself a man gazing at the woman she was, Eliza saw the promise of something else. There was innocence, there, but also a touch of cruelty, not unsensual. She looked like a girl who could give as good as she got. She looked like a woman willing to go certain lengths to please herself. (After all, hadn’t she risen on tiptoes suddenly to kiss him, unbidden?) And Eliza supposed that there might be something irresistible, to a man, in the fat scorn of her bottom lip.
But her knees had begun to hurt her, and she looked again and saw only a sleepy and stubborn child, wide-eyed, who needed to be told to go to bed. She blew out the candle and breathed in thickly the masculine rough sulphurous odour of its snuffing; then squeezed into bed, with the weight of her books at her feet. The moonlight cast a ladder of light across the boards of her room, climbed over her knees. She was happy, she was happy at last. Lord Byron had kissed her. It seemed to her then that the passage into adulthood resembled nothing so much as an entrance into the world of her books – a world she had pored over and dreamed of, and which she now touched and tasted for the first time without the medium of the printed page. Small wonder the books themselves had begun to pall. And she kept herself warm with the thought that whatever had been done could not be changed or superseded; not till the morning at least.
Her father decided on his walk home to stop at Bea’s house, which was more or less in his path. At his age, he had need of certain practical remissions and could use in any case a small glass of something to speed him on his way. Eliza had told him that Lord Byron wished to keep his presence in London a secret, and that he wasn’t to breathe a word, etc. but he needn’t give his name away. And besides, he didn’t see how any harm could come of confiding in his elder daughter just the news of Eliza’s little triumph. Bea and Eliza offered him such distinct comforts. Eliza, whom he loved more, was cut from his own cloth. And just because of this, she never quite satisfied his desire for a sensible margin to his dreaming life, which his dead wife had given him.
At the same time, he always relished those occasions when he could prove to Beatrice that his own view of the world had its basis in plain ordinary facts. When he could show her that Eliza (and, by extension, her father) wasn’t entirely the fool of books. It was an old argument, almost comfortable from rehearsal. He would say, you see how well Liza gets on, and she would angrily retort, it was only her own practical interventions that had preserved that girl from the squalor of the schoolhouse, or the chill of the convent. And together they worked over and rubbed down the sharp edge of their fears for themselves and each other: that he was hopelessly impractical and she, worldly and loveless.
The captain was away from home, dining late at his club, when Mr Esmond arrived. This pleased him; it seemed a good omen. He felt awkward, large-footed, in the presence of his son-in-law: he guessed that he was the introduction of a wrong note, that he brought in, when their door opened for him, the cold weather of the family’s humble past. Well, Simons himself was no better; at least, he had only made himself so. Bea received him in her dressing room; it was late and she had let down her hair. A handful of fire burned in the grate, just enough to cast shadows. Bea was very partial to fires in all seasons, fond of the twin luxuries of heat and waste – she liked, in any case, to draw out her convalescence, the sympathies it inspired. As she’d said to her husband, complaining, she had only just risen from her death-bed, and he couldn’t deny her the comfort of a fire . . . In its light, with her long hair fallen to her shoulders, she looked almost like a creature of his own gothic imagination: astonishingly grand and beautiful. She had got all her colour back.
Mr Esmond had confessed to Eliza once that he was rather in awe of her sister, her high looks; and Eliza had said to him, nonsense, whenever she saw a pretty woman, all she could think of was the self-control and sheer graft that went into her appearance. Mrs Violet, for example, Lady Walmsley’s daughter-in-law, spent more time at her toilette than Eliza herself wasted on books, which was saying a great deal . . . And her father remembered this now, and smiled: grateful, as always for the sly nourishment of his daughters’ gossip, which fed his starved sense of the world, of women. He said, ‘I wonder if you’ll guess where, and with whom, I’ve spent this pleasant Sunday afternoon?’ He found himself, in Bea’s company, often adopting the teasing banter of a suitor. She, in turn, always answered him with what Eliza called her kindly out-of-patience tone. ‘I expect,’ she said, ‘since it is so late, that you’ve been walking Liza home; I expect you’ve spent the afternoon with her.’
‘Just so. With her, and her admirer.’
‘Oh?’ She turned swiftly in her chair now – she had been facing her own reflection in the mirror of her dressing table – and leaned forward, her small hands holding her small knees. ‘Tell me everything. I can’t bear Liza’s little mysteries.’ Her manner had changed towards him, grown more girlish and eager, more daughterly. And her father sat back and enjoyed the picture of her curiosity. Her wide blue eyes, like jewels too big for their rings, seemed to fill her face. ‘She begged me not to say,’ he said. ‘She positively made it a condition.’
‘Now you’re teasing me. That’s unkind, Papa. A condition of what? Confess: he’s horrible and small and she’s ashamed of him.’
Mr Esmond shook his wispy, childish head. Bea petulantly crossed her legs. ‘Well, if you won’t talk, you won’t and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t see why I should care. But you might as well grant me, at least, that he’s four feet tall and looks like a potato.’ And when her father only smiled, she crossly continued, ‘Admit it, he’s an oyster-monger and smells like a bucket of fish.’ But her gossiping joy broke though, and she began to enumerate, upon her fingers, the list of his possible occupations: a grave-digger, a ship’s cook, a shoe-blacker, until he broke in, to put her superior airs to shame, with, ‘He’s a gentleman, as it happens; a poet, rather; a lord.’ But she, blind with bottled laughter, whispered (it was all the wind she had left for her voice), ‘I don’t know why it amuses me so, the thought of a man taking an interest in Liza, in dear little Liza. I don’t see why they shouldn’t. I don’t see why they shouldn’t fall about her feet, in any numbers.’
Her father couldn’t help the infection of her humour, and tried, unsuccessfully, to sit up in the softness of her low settee. He rested his weight on his hands and said, ‘She tells me you danced with him, once. Years ago.’
‘Yes, she told me that,’ Bea said, recovering. ‘Now confess, it isn’t fair, to keep a secret of somebody one danced with oneself, now is it?’ And her father, perhaps acknowledging the justice of this, admitted, that the gentleman in question was a man in whom he had his own reasons for taking an interest – as a poet, as a man of letters. And then, with cruel self-irony, ‘as a brother of the pen’. He continued, more earnestly, ‘What a wonderful thing it was, the acquaintance of poets’ – a sentiment whose repetition seemed obscurely to comfort him. Bea, seeing the chance of a joke, a good thing (she was her father’s daughter, after all) interrupted, ‘I never dance with poets; they keep counting their feet’ – but before he could answer, and in an utterly changed tone, she sighed, ‘Oh, Liza, poor Liza.’ Her father recognized this tone, had lived in fear of it much of his married life. It was the tone her mother used to adopt whenever she stumbled across what she called another ‘one of his fancies’ – anything that revealed his hopeless ignorance of the world’s workings. And Beatrice had learned to treat Eliza in the same manner.
