Imposture, p.6
Imposture, page 6
He had looked thinner than she’d remembered or imagined him; and yet that discrepancy fed only her appetite for giving sympathy. She began, in thought at least, to fatten him up. It was only restlessness, one could see it in his nervous hands, that kept him from eating; and she supposed herself, fearfully, happily, equal to the task of making him rest. His eyes, she saw them suddenly again, were so dark one could hardly believe any light passed into them; and, indeed, there was something blind about his face. It had the dignity of the blind: the staring indifference of someone who could not see himself. That was the real curse of sightlessness, that it took from one the possibility of seeing one’s clear reflection; and she imagined that fame, perversely, had a similar effect. Well, she hoped to teach him, lovingly, to see himself again as she could see him . . . Though as for that, her vision might prove rather sharp: he seemed to her handsome and helpless, too fine, almost, in feature and manner, for anything like the weight of ordinary happiness. She would never forget the sight of him, drenched, banging his fist on the door.
In sympathy, she rubbed her own fingers, and was pleased to note that the stain of ink from his hands was still on them – quite dry, thankfully. She wondered how long the mark would endure. And while Polly himself, at that moment, held his finger against Colburn’s neck, she sat on a child’s stool with her knees raised high against her chin and a book spread across them. She imagined his voice as she read from it: high and musical, with just (she smiled as she thought of them) those little precisions of a foreigner. His travels had not left him untouched.
It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale’s high note is heard;
It is the hour when lovers’ vows
Seem sweet in every whisper’d word . . .
Well, the hour was nearly tea-time, but it would have to serve.
In the days to come, she was almost wholly preoccupied by her ‘next move’. Of course, he couldn’t visit her at Lady Walmsley’s. In the first place, they were sure to see through any pretence of imposture he put on, and recognize him for what he was: the greatest, most beautiful, most scandalous poet of his age. Then the devourings would begin. Lady Walmsley, large-headed lioness, had a way of claiming all the pretty young men for herself. Mrs Violet had often remarked upon it, the sole subject on which she chose to confide in lowly Eliza. And whatever her ladyship left over, Mrs Violet herself was certain to consume. The poor governess, her station in life painfully exposed, would hardly warrant so much as a hello, hardly a kiss of the hand. He would see her for what she was, a drudge. Her only claim to romance was the hunger with which she regarded it. She was the child of books: the orphan of them, rather, for they made cold parents.
No, it would not do, she could not invite him to Lady Walmsley’s. And she hardly dared yet visit him in his rooms. A decisive step, it seemed to her, a declaration of intent: you can do what you like with me. The thought of how far his inclination might take them inspired in her shivers of delicious apprehension; but she was willing, still, to postpone the trial. If all else failed, of course, she could throw herself on his mercy; hoping that he might take up her offer in a warmer spirit. But these were early days, and among the milder thrills in prospect, the simple uncertainty of the weeks ahead would prove a wonderful occupation for her thoughts, the food of privacy.
In the end, the next step, a second meeting, almost fell into her lap; she had only to seize the occasion. What she wanted was to carry on an intrigue. What she needed was the privacy of crowds and an excuse for dressing up.
Lady Walmsley had invited the Simons to share their box at the theatre. Massinger’s Old Debts had lately been revived. And Beatrice had, just on the Friday morning, cried off. She was, as she said, absolutely swimming through the thick of a summer cold and didn’t mean to spoil the evening by coughing, sneezing, fainting and expiring. Besides, she felt so muzzle-headed, she could hardly hear a word anyone said: it was no good gossiping at her, and it would look bad if she pretended to listen to the play. So unlikely. Perhaps Eliza could make up her place in the party; what a fool she was for such nonsense in any case. And if she stopped in before at Binghamton Row, Beatrice could dress the poor creature herself. She would personally vouch for her respectability: Eliza wanted only a sister’s touch, after all, to look human.
Lady Walmsley called her in to the sitting room. She had breakfasted on buttered toast and the crumbs of it lay scattered across the slope of her bosoms. In spite of her grand manner, she had the air of a fine piece of statue left in the rain; the pigeons had got at her. The deep red of the Chinese wallpaper lent its colour to her cheeks, already sufficiently rouged. Eliza saw the powder-filled cracks in her skin, grotesquely magnified from time to time by the old woman’s wandering lorgnette. She had a habit of waving it uncertainly before her eyes, enlarging their washed-out blue. She addressed Eliza with kindly irony. ‘Beatrice has told us how clever and literary you are; quite the blue.’ Lady Walmsley looked forward for once to hearing a critical view. It was shameful, she said, but she always went to the theatre simply for pleasure. And then she added, just lowering her chin to signal a change in tone: Eliza was fortunate – a little cough – in her choice of sisters. ‘Beatrice speaks very highly of you. Very fortunate indeed.’ Then she subtly introduced the subject of a change in dress: perhaps if she wished to thank her before the theatre . . . Eliza was welcome to the gig.
Mrs Violet, who had been crocheting in the window, said, ‘You are a lucky girl, aren’t you, Eliza. Such a treat you have in store tonight. A real treat.’ Her pretty face, in the light, had the deep gleam of porcelain, a sealed glow. Widowhood had sharpened her, refined her beauty: one had the sense of a cast of features setting. A perfect glaze. (She obscurely resented Eliza. It was much wiser, she often told the young woman, never to marry; Eliza had hit upon the safest plan. One suffered so terribly for love, as she had found. She positively envied Eliza her spinsterhood . . . ) A play, she added, might be just the thing. She’d noticed – ‘hadn’t she only yesterday remarked upon it, Lady Walmsley?’ – what a sour-face poor Eliza had become. Stomping around the house, running into everything; quite distracted. She’d always been the fool of her imagination, but this was something worse, and beginning to upset the children. She was growing into a regular gorgon. Burying one’s nose in a book never did anyone’s looks any good. Not that it mattered any more . . .
‘Yes, thank you; a great treat,’ Eliza mumbled. And indeed, it struck her as just that. Her life wanted only a little dressing-up: her sister’s finery, a gossiping crowd, the heat of the stage. Lord B himself had at one time, she knew, presided over the board at Drury Lane. Perhaps she could just get off a note to him?
CHAPTER SIX
A WEEK HAD PASSED, and not a word from Colburn. Colburn’s thirty pounds, half of it gambled away, had nevertheless relieved Polidori of his most pressing debts, without offering any prospects for his future. He could eat again, a little. He sent his best set of clothes, Lord Byron’s cast-offs (worn daily after the demise of his everyday suit) to the tailors for mending. But he was beginning to grow anxious over Colburn’s silence; and to quiet his conjectures (how long should it take a busy man to read through two-hundred-odd pages of manuscript?), he began to write again. That is, he began to attempt to write. He had spent most of the week in his rooms, waiting for something to turn up, considering the disorder of his life – helpless before it, almost comforted by it. There seemed nothing he could do to escape it. He decided to record it, in its largest sense: the waste of his life.
Sometimes he counted over all the people he had killed. Lord Byron’s line ran through his head: Polidori’s patients could never want a better doctor. They were all dead. Well, he was used to corpses. At Edinburgh the students had paid anyone with a stomach for the digging a pound for each dozen cadavers. Most often the sextons themselves, hardened to the business and with casual access to the graveyard, took up the offers. But when his gambling debts first piled up, Polidori tried his hand at the work himself. He discovered, to his own surprise, how easily he could do without sentiment. Sentiment was the true obstacle; squeamishness was quickly overcome. One dead man looked much like another. People distinguished themselves in their gestures. Though indeed some of these survived, or appeared to survive, in spite of the rigor mortis.
His mentor Dr Taylor had once invited him to assist at a surgery. Polidori was staying with him in Norwich at the time, a few weeks before his sister’s wedding. The surgery involved a delicate procedure upon a boy of fifteen, who had fallen under a horse. The case itself had attracted a certain celebrity. Various local interests were at stake in his life. Men from the local wool-factory, it was alleged, had chased the young gentleman, the son of the factory owner, into the path of the horse – in protest at the introduction of mechanical looms. A weaver named Ben Wilson was being held responsible. He was, among other things, a radical dissenter, whose pamphleteering had long been a thorn in the side of the boy’s father. The Luddite riots in Manchester were still fresh in memory. Everyone had suffered in them, but the loom-breakers had suffered the most: they’d been hanged for it. Wilson claimed, with bitter irony, to having been ‘framed’ for the crime. The question of blame had set the town on its head, and the only satisfactory answer seemed to lie in the lad’s survival. A heavy hoof had pressed against a rib and broken it; the fractures threatened to puncture the child’s heart. Medically, socially, legally, it was a very neat tangle, as Dr Taylor put it, something of a radical himself.
It was the week in which Polidori had first heard the news of Lord Byron’s offer. Taylor had summoned Polly to Norwich to discuss ‘his future’. He saw no reason not to carry on that conversation in the middle of their little experiment on the boy’s life. There was money to be made, he said, from the company of greatness; it was only a question of appealing ‘to interested parties’. John Murray, for example, Byron’s publisher, might be expected to pay handsomely for a travelling journal. Meanwhile, they had cut a square of skin from the boy’s breast, and lifted it lightly aside. Wonderful, how quickly a surgeon’s ears grew deaf to screaming. There was, of course, a great pottage of blood and sinew. Polidori, probing with a knife, drew these aside, as one might heavy curtains. Occasionally, the tip of his blade scraped across the boy’s ribs, a rather delicious sensation, like the first touch of a freshly sharpened quill on parchment. At last, he uncovered the thickness of irregularity, a knuckle of fractured bone. He traced the rib’s slight descent, its clamping pressure; and, with a dirty swab, wiped away the blood that drained into and obscured the wound, a valley that filled almost as quickly as he could clear it.
He felt, beneath his finger, the soft expansion and swift retraction of the heart. He was conscious, almost painfully so, of being a young man himself; and the prospect of his journeys with Lord B, then imminent, inspired in him an awful sense of the stretch of life before him, the extent of his expectations. In this frame of mind, the boy’s vital organ, tenderly laid bare, struck him as an apt symbol for his own exposure to the fates. To have that power dependent in his hands! which he himself offered to the vicissitudes of the world! It was one of those rare thrills that justified him in adopting his father’s preference for a career. And he remembered the opening lines of Byron’s Corsair: ‘Come when it will – we snatch the life of life’. Indeed, just that lay breathing under his blade. He attempted to soften the pressure on the boy’s heart by lifting the bent rib slowly upwards in his iron grip – an easing-off rewarded at last, it almost seemed, by the gradual cessation of that organ which had protested so long and steadily against the forces acting upon it. The boy died beneath his hands; an unhappy omen. News leaked outside the surgery. Wilson was sentenced to hang, and the riots to free him began. But by that time Polidori had returned to London.
Other deaths followed.
He considered writing a story about a doctor mysteriously in thrall to all the people he had inadvertently killed. His dead patients, hardly angry, ask him to perform a number of small jobs in their names; they want him simply to act as their living agent. This occasionally involves his dressing up – to satisfy the illusions of the loved ones left alive. Under various impostures, he makes love to widows, or tea for mothers, and so on. Mostly, these understand the nature of the trick being played, and play along. Their mourning is happy to make do with even the shabbiest make-believe. Worn out, the doctor eventually kills himself; though Polidori could not decide if he suffers most for his own pretence or for the wilful delusions of the survivors. In the end, Polly settled on a third alternative. His doctor, love-struck, attempts to woo one of the beautiful widows in his own shape; she coldly turns him from her door.
He thought he might just stop by Colburn’s again – though not, he promised himself, to bring up the matter of the Byron memoirs. The silence of an editor, he supposed, was best left to take care of itself. Instead, he would try to interest him in this new story. As a sequel to The Vampyre, a comic inversion, to be called, The Physician: the tale of a living man who feeds off the dead. A much more common predicament . . . Perhaps they could leave the anonymity of it suggestively intact. Polidori felt the argument already warming on his tongue. Stepping out in his best suit, now respectably patched up, he discovered Eliza’s note in his box in the hall. He had almost forgotten her name. He tore it open on his way through Covent Garden.
My dear Lord B –
You haven’t been out of my thoughts three minutes together this past week, though I suppose you must be inured by now to the way you wander around people’s heads when they hardly know you; and we tend, no doubt, to expect a reciprocal intimacy as soon as we see you again. In that spirit, I am only writing to say, I shall be in Lady Walmsley’s box this evening, at the Theatre Royal . . .
Tearing it up, he dropped the shreds in the gutter; and, afterwards, twice bounced the bones of his hands together on the underside of the knuckles – a habitual gesture, at something done with, left behind. He found Colburn, as usual, dressing to go out for the evening. His coat coal-black, his collar almost painfully white, his face, as usual, a rough living brown, composed of blood and sunshine and drink unequally mixed. Colburn said, ‘Why don’t you dine out with me and we can talk?’
Polidori feared he meant to decline his journals of Byron. It amazed him sometimes, when he was brought to feel the difference between utter and imperfect hopelessness. In a flurry of nervous spirits, he suddenly answered, ‘I’m engaged to the theatre.’ He hardly knew why he said it; he hadn’t decided to go. But a little flirtation, perhaps, would cheer him up, even with a moon-eyed girl. And he worried Colburn was about to tell him no.
Instead, Colburn offered him his box; and before Polidori could think, acceptance of it had included the older man’s company. He could hardly say no to that himself; but it struck him already, with a sweaty flush, that Colburn might give the game away, such as it was. Polly would have to be on his toes. He’d be hard put, under such circumstances, to get much satisfaction out of the evening – out of the girl, that is. It had already occurred to him that she might serve for the relief of certain inevitable frustrations; he had seen, first-hand, the lengths to which Byron’s admirers, however innocent, would go. There was also a spice in the pretence. The necessary effort of his imagination, in playing the part, might add heat to his life. Like any exercise, lying warmed the blood. Well, if she had any sense, she couldn’t help but see through him. The real Lord Byron could hardly go undetected at the theatre. Even so, a sense of recklessness inspired him to make the attempt, from the same instinct that led him at cards to risk his hand and his money at once. He wanted to know the worst.
Nor would it be the only time Polly had played the impostor. He remembered, suddenly, his first taste of woman’s flesh: the night he spent in Dover with Lord Byron, on the eve of their setting forth for France. (Colburn, in his ear, was counting up sales. The Vampyre had almost sold out the first edition; a second was contemplated. The publisher took his young friend by the arm: ‘How happy he was, to have settled that business of the authorship’, etc.). Polidori, hardly listening, allowed himself to sink into one of his reveries. –
Hobhouse and he had kept each other awkward company on the road to Dover – Byron’s old friend openly resented having to chaperone the young doctor. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘that rascal Scrope is having a merrier journey.’ Hobhouse, in consequence, couldn’t resist the boastfulness of gossip, its flaunted intimacies. They dined, briefly, as the horses were being changed; to pass the time, Hobhouse launched into one of his anecdotes. ‘B had taken a box at the theatre to carry on his flirtation with one of the actresses. She used, between acts, to come up to his seat, and on her hands and knees . . . Byron bragged that he could still see the glisten on her lips when she resumed her part on stage. His Lordship had the devil’s own talent for seduction; and which was more remarkable still, no one’s minding. Until now,’ Hobhouse added, his plain handsome face falling dutifully solemn.
‘Until now?’ Polly echoed him. ‘I suppose you mean his sister, Goose.’ The carriage was ready again; but the ice, at least, had been broken. His own sister’s marriage still weighed heavily on his mind. Frances and he had always maintained the curious intimacy of the first-born; their friendship mirrored their parents’ own relations. They knew what the world was like before the rest of the family, that interrupted stream of brothers and sisters, arrived. Gaetano had taught them both Italian, too; he had wearied of the practice by the time a third was born. Besides, his professional duties occupied him more; and he retreated at length into the fatherly seclusion that follows the job of fertility done. Italian had become, for the oldest two, a private language. Frances had said to him when she first heard the news of Lord Byron’s offer, ‘Caro fratello, you never doubted, honestly, that great things lay ahead for you? You never doubted for a minute, did you?’ Yes, he had doubted; he told her as much. ‘I never have,’ she replied, kissing him on the chin. He put his thumb to the wet mark, distantly relieved. Then she added, more firmly, ‘We rely on you. All of us. Rely on you.’ She, too, had inherited the emigrant’s sense of unacknowledged merits. She trusted to him the glory of the family name.
