Imposture, p.21
Imposture, page 21
What followed hurt more than she had ever guessed it would; though she was also surprised to note in herself, until the pain began, the surge of an appetite she couldn’t have imagined before, whose sincerity she couldn’t doubt or question. Polidori was amazed at the length of her back, which almost equalled his own; a feature he found particularly sensual. When they lay in bed together, their hips and faces touched. The noise of the orchestra had swelled into music below them, and she, throughout, remembered her green silk dress on the floor, and imagined the dances they would never dance. After he had finished, painfully it seemed to her, he held her, spooning; and she could sense his eyes twitching against the scratch of her hair. She still felt the ache in her sexual parts, a half-imagined pain, but it was tolerable; and she also felt that it gave her certain rights over him, over his powers of consolation. The pain seemed to her the price of her new happiness; she was terribly happy. They couldn’t catch her now. All that was over, her innocence; and what remained was the endless freedom to corrupt herself further. ‘What shall I call you,’ she said. ‘My lord? my love? I never know what to call you.’
‘Call me P,’ he said. ‘B’ or ‘P’ she couldn’t be sure.
Polidori sensed the beginnings of a headache. The glow of the champagne had worn off and left in parting an uncomfortable chill behind his eyes and along his temples, which contrasted sharply with the flushed heat of his cheeks and tongue. Perhaps he was running a fever. He remembered only then what he had half-resolved to tell her before, but it was Eliza in the end, who said she had ‘a confession to make – now that she was sure of him’. She giggled nervously in the pause that followed; he was relieved to hear her still capable of light-heartedness. ‘I was never at the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball. You danced with my sister,’ she said. ‘It was my sister who told me that night you were leaving at dawn, which is why I sneaked out to see you, to see if you were, if you would . . . Which is when I saw a young man I thought was you, and fell in love. But he ignored me. Everyone used to ignore me, until you took notice. And I went away.’
Polidori, almost without thinking, said, ‘The young man you saw was me.’
He felt her stiffen in his arms – that slight brittleness before the collapse of a world. ‘What do you mean?’ she said, but would not, though he tried to shift her, turn around. And he thought, hopefully, She must have prepared herself for this. One cannot so quickly recognize disillusion when it comes.
‘I am the man you saw, that morning, when you fell in love. Lord Byron was in the next room, being . . . consoled by his sister. I was his doctor. My name is Polidori; he used to call me Dory or Polly, which is what you may call me, if you like. Our resemblance has often been remarked upon; we might have been brothers. I had no intention of deceiving you, at first; but you seemed so happy to be deceived.’ And then, in a more plaintive tone, which staked some claim to the intimacy that had passed between them: ‘I thought you had guessed. I thought it was a game we played, that we played together.’
He did not know what to expect of her, and for a minute, as she kept her silence, he had the leisure to wonder what she would say or do – to hope, in the tender aftermath of what B used to call their ‘tooling’, that what mattered was something other than Lord Byron’s name. That they had fallen in love namelessly. But what she said, or rather shrieked, in the end, almost startled him to anger. Such petulance. She cried, ‘This is not what I wanted at all. This is not what I wanted at all.’ And when he tried to console her, with one hand tightening around her neck, and the other running through her hair, she almost screamed, ‘Will you let go of me now? Let go of me now.’ It seemed to him then what an ugly child she was, how brutally he had exposed her. She had brought her knees to her chest and begun to sob, giving way to disappointment as only children can – children dependent on the powers of others to make everything right again. Though he knew perfectly well by now that nobody could do that.
And, in fact, Eliza hadn’t guessed yet how deep her affliction ran. She had seen in the shabbiness of their adventure the necessary disguise of something tragic and beautiful. Now she realized that it was only the dressing-up of insignificance. Neither of them mattered at all, this was the worst of it. But, with her quick imagination, her healing powers, she had already recast her role: she was the innocent abused, a creature with a pedigree almost as long and honourable as lovers’. And so she shuddered and wept until she grew tired of even that, and relied more simply on her exhaustion to cover up a little longer what she couldn’t yet bear to look at plainly.
‘What do you mean, Eliza? It’s only me.’ She heard him insist on the line, like a fly buzzing away and settling for ever on the same spot: ‘It’s only me.’
‘But I don’t know you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know any Doctor Polidori.’
He was almost shouting now himself. ‘But you fell in love with me. With me! Standing in the balcony window, three years ago.’ She didn’t answer him, and he began at last to repeat himself with the quieter petulance of resignation, ‘You fell in love with me.’
Afterwards it amazed him, how long they lay there, in the old attitude, with everything changed. The orchestra had begun a waltz, and there was something comical in its three-legged beat, which he hoped might soften her into a more reasonable sense of their position. After all, he was perfectly willing to marry her. ‘What would you like me to do?’ he said. ‘Would you like me to marry you?’ He was confident that the trouble with both of them was only solitude and an excess of poetry – its promise of high living. Together they could settle into a happier, hum-drum, nameless sort of life. Polidori had always clung to whatever was being taken from him; and as he felt Eliza slipping away, he said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’
‘I would like you to leave me alone,’ she answered, like a child, dismissing out of hand what she hadn’t asked for. As she lay on the satin sheets (in spite of everything, enjoying their costliness, their coolness) she wanted terribly for her sister to scold her. Only Bea could put her back in her place, as she always did – until Eliza rebelled again. She had been prepared to give up her innocence for him, but that was all. She would not yet willingly surrender the grandeur of life. She felt the stickiness leaking between her legs, and it disgusted her; but she didn’t yet know there was a trace of blood in it.
Later, as he was dressing, he saw the smear of it, a few spots dabbling the white sheets. She lay on her hip and her bosom with her face in the pillow. He had an image, of her father and sister, of Lady Walmsley with her cloudy hair, coming too late to rescue Eliza, and finding her there, in her own blood, in the bed. He was the vampyre, he understood that for the first time; whatever he touched he corrupted. He had no life of his own. For years he had fed off the blood of everyone around him: Frances, Lord Byron, and now her. He was hardly alive at all. He emptied the contents of his purse between her feet and kept back ten pounds for himself, for his homeward journey. He knew what he was going to do, at last. She felt the flutter of the notes on her skin and guessed its cause; only then did the full misery of her position strike her, but by the time she sat up in bed, he was already gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
YEARS LATER, HIS FATHER MAINTAINED that when Polly came back from Brighton that Thursday morning, he was already very ill. His speech, both slow and abrupt, lacked coherence; and he complained of a headache and retired almost immediately to his old room. On Friday, when they discovered him, the glass by his bed was empty; and the doctor they summoned kindly omitted to examine the dregs within it. For the rest of his life, Gaetano could never hear his son’s name, John, without being startled into tears. The family, consequently, tended to avoid any mention of him.
They’d been surprised to see him that morning; he rarely visited. And he looked half-starved. His cheeks had a hollow in them you could fill with a fist. Then there was that slurring in his voice. At the time Gaetano wondered whether his son was merely drunk. Polly asked whether Frances was home – he wanted to sleep again in his old bed. He hadn’t, he said, slept in three days; he had only just come back from Brighton on a piece of business which went rather badly. ‘Should we wake you for dinner?’ his father asked, and Polly answered that he would wake himself.
Frances had taken her son to buy him new shoes. At first it annoyed her, on their return, to have to make do with the sitting room. William wanted his nap, and Esmé refused to leave the poor child alone. Frances tried to make her understand that the boy needed sleep; and the two sisters (so many years apart) made up together a bed on the settee. But once William had been laid upon it, Esmé offered to read to him – which, Frances learned, really meant asking him questions. Esmé had discovered the dictionary. She carried it with her wherever she went. Her conversation had declined, as Gaetano put it, into a series of interrogations, on meaning and spelling – the answers to which, if guilty of the least deviation, set off in Esmé shrieks of delighted scolding. To be fair, she took pity on her nephew William. He was three years old, and couldn’t, as she said, be expected to know the difference between vatic and vastative. So she condescended at last to read to him, as a soporific – a word Esmé had begun generously to employ. She continued in the Vs. By this time it was almost four o’clock. William was sorely in need of his nap; and Frances, irritably, suggested to Esmé that she should wake up their brother, asleep in her bed, and bother him with words. He was almost a poet himself, after all.
Polly, in spite of his exhaustion, had lain sleeplessly in his sister’s womanly scent, overlaid with William’s sweet powdery baby-smells, for almost an hour that morning. He needed to sleep a little; he needed a clear head for what he was going to do. Of all acts a man could undertake, he believed, this above all should be free of slurring, should be rendered perfectly distinct. His headache had almost spent itself, a relief or cessation of pain not unlike restfulness.
A few years ago, shortly after his return from Italy, a carriage he was travelling in had run over a fallen branch, and upset. He had been, for reasons of expense, riding on top; had turned over in his fall and landed violently on the back of his neck. The accident had considerably frightened him. But it left him with no visible injuries, and he had congratulated himself, at the time, on his good luck: on the propitious star, which, for once, had seemed to shine on him. It might, who knew, usher in a more general change in fortune. A month afterwards he began to be plagued by headaches unlike any he had known before. Their pain suggested to him most forcibly, by way of analogy, the dislocation of a star from its sphere – as if his brain, which had once rested, in the natural order of things, within his skull, had shifted slightly, and no amount of correction, no matter how nice, could ever restore it to its former and exact relation to his body.
There were occasions (although, as he lay in Frances’s smells, this was not one of them) when he blamed the decline of his hopes and prospects not on the fateful influence of Lord Byron, but on the simpler injury to his head. The effects he ascribed to each disaster were the same: the dislocation, as he poetically conceived it, of a star from its sphere. As if something, whether biological or psychological, necessary to a man’s relation to the world, had been damaged irreparably in him; as if nothing he could do or think would ever tally again with the deeds or thoughts of others; as if, like a vampyre, he was doomed to take nourishment not from what was healthy and natural in the intercourse of men, but from their blood; as if he could live only at the terrible cost of the lives around him. In which case (and the reasoning followed with consoling inevitability), there was still something left for him to do. But he wanted a clear head for it; he wanted to sleep.
The bed was still warm with Frances’s body; and he remembered, sometimes, when Lord Byron went riding after lunch, sneaking into the poet’s room to read whatever B had left on his writing table. There were books, opened at the spine; correspondences; fresh compositions. Lord Byron tended to scribble in the small hours, coming home, a little drunk, too restless for sleep. And part of the charm for Polly lay in the fact that Byron had often described, in his own vivid and discursive style, some part of the evening they had spent together, whether in the rambling hedge-rows of verse that formed Childe Harold, or the wilder uncut prose of his letters. It was, for Polidori, like discovering, after an orphaned childhood, that your father had been a king, that you were a king, now, too. That everything you did, every circumstance of your birth and life, had a wider range of significance, tremendous repercussions. That you were, in fact, the centre of a general interest. It was wonderful for him to see the way the world shifted around you when you lived at the heart of it. And sometimes, as he read, he sat on Lord Byron’s bed – and, since it was a cold wet Swiss summer – crawled under his covers, and breathed the air of his sleep. Almost hoping to be discovered at last, and scolded or seduced.
He slept, for an hour or so, until his father woke him with a knock at the door, to see if he wanted to dine with them. It was already two o’clock. Polidori, recognizing the little finalities that were beginning everywhere to crowd around him, made a point of thanking Gaetano with a particular tenderness as he declined; though whether it was afterwards remarked upon, he would never know. The reason, above every sentimental association, that led him to insist on being given his old bedroom, was that he stored his medical equipment there. And as he rose, somewhat refreshed, with his head perfectly clear, to fetch it from the dusty top of the wardrobe pushed into a corner against the chimney-breast, the sight of the black leather portmanteau roused in him memories of the other occasions he had had for using it. That poor boy who was chased under a horse, cracking a rib, for which Dr Taylor had summoned him all the way to Norwich, to assist in re-setting it. Also, to give him the message about Lord B, that he wanted a doctor. Polly remembered hearing, afterwards, about the riots that followed the news of the boy’s death. Then there was that terrible run of luck in Venice, when he had killed, in the space of a week, a banker, his son, and the Earl of Guilford, inspiring Lord Byron to quip, that Dr Polidori had no more patients, because his patients were no more. A good thing his lordship never tired of repeating, and which, even at this remove, cheered Polidori a little, by the recollection of the poet’s careless humour. Yes, he thought, that was the way to take life – a phrase that brought with it another little smile.
He was, in fact, far from cheerless, as he sat on his bed and dusted the black leather and began to assemble, with professional care, the necessary vials and powders. The end, at least, was in sight; he had it in his hands. And there was nobody, he had to admit, better placed to administer it. He almost heard, in Byron’s characteristic accent, both arch and tender, the poet tell him, smiling, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Yes, he would, and with the usual result. But he was conscious, too, of a deeper source of consolation, of pride, even. Here, at last, was something he had the mettle for; and it pleased him in the end to know that he was going one better than his lordship dared. Wasn’t this, after all, the final promise of all Lord Byron’s melancholy versifying, the ‘sad and sole relief’ he had so often sung about – that sweet venom which the Mind, like an encircled scorpion, reserved for itself? Polly had brought with him, to bed, a glass of water; and he now dropped into it a tablet of magnesium, which dwindled in sinking and emitted a stream of variable effervescence. The bubbles gathered at the rim of the glass and broke into air at the surface. They would hide some of the bitterness of the cyanide.
And he remembered, as he stirred the powder in, one night after a party at Coppet, returning arm in arm with Lord Byron along the shores of Lake Leman. De Staël, with that awful frank coquetry of an ugly woman, had been insisting that Lord Byron should attempt a reconciliation with his wife – if only for the sake of their daughter, Ada. Her choice of topic was awkwardly timed. Byron had only that afternoon received a letter from his sister, after a conspicuous silence. It was full of the strangest frights and alarms. In it Augusta seemed to suggest that she had, on the best advice – and he had no doubt whose – been persuaded to desist from communicating with him any further. The force of the arguments which had been made to her depended, it seemed, upon the legal consequences of a continued, etc. Byron guessed at once what the poor little Goose was afraid of: that those, who knew everything, had threatened to take her own children away – for the children’s sake. ‘My contagion,’ Lord Byron said, ‘can spread, it seems, yeah, even unto the generations, which are as leaves.’
A hot clear summer night, with the stars very low and crowded in the sky, and the waves persisting faintly in spite of the breathless air pressing upon the waters. ‘There is nothing,’ Byron cried out, ‘that paragon of womanhood won’t poison. Whatever was once noble and just in her, she has poisoned; whatever was loving in me, she has poisoned; but that her vile virtue could infect a creature as dear, as innocent, as my sister . . .’ And then, in a different tone: ‘The only thing, I confess, which keeps me from blowing my brains out is the thought that it would give pleasure to my mother-in-law.’ Polidori listened in silence; he heard, beneath the poet’s habitual vaunting, a colder and more forceful misery. So that when Byron bade him good-night at last, he insisted on following him up to bed; he removed the pistol his Lordship kept under the pillow. Byron saw him do it; and as he lay down, turned his eyes up at the young man, and asked, less plaintive than mocking, ‘Will you not let me sleep? will you not let me sleep at last?’ And, in fact, Polidori sat over him, stroking the curls around the poet’s ears, until he could.
