And picks up her black feathered hairpin and pushes it back into her soft, feathery hair.
And Valentine promptly puts his conscience upon the rack: How has he contrived to think so badly of this divine woman? The brutality of Tom’s death has infected his ability to enjoy innocence. No, his whole life has contaminated the way he has lived until now.
This moment is the turning point, this woman the pivot. He wants to renovate his life so that she fits inside it. He loves this life of his—it’s just that he now wants more than he has had before.
• 8 •
Analeptic Electuary
Take powder’d Chocolate 2 ounces; juice of ground Kermes strain’d half an ounce; Ambergris (ground with a little loaf Sugar) 8 grains; Oil of Cinnamon 1 drop; Oil of Nutmeg 2 drops; Syrup of Balsam 2 ounce; or as much as needs to give it a due consistency, mix.
It nourishes and strengthens, repairs the wasted Flesh, recruits lost Spirits, and brings assistance in pining Consumptions. But I have sometimes observ’d it sit too heavy upon weak Stomachs.
Let half an ounce be taken at 8 in the Morning, and at 4 in the Afternoon, drinking after it Asses’ Milk.
“Why do you leave me now?”
“I have promised my ward an outing”
“Your ward? What is this thing?”
“The daughter of my friend.”
“Why must you do this thing then?”
“She is the daughter of my friend. My friend who died.”
Mimosina Dolcezza looks chastened and holds his hand tight, murmuring endearments. “I had no conception,” she says again and again. After a while she looks up and asks, “But where is the mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the mother of this child? The wife of your best friend in the world?”
“He never said.”
She stares at him and he clearly reads her thoughts: Englishmen! Barbarians!
And who can blame her?
Yet nor can he bring himself to blame Tom, who had simply arrived one day with the babe in his arms. “Look what I got myself!” he said, and that was all his explanation. The red-haired baby looked like a jointed doll, dressed in an extravagant costume, and with Tom’s face so bemused as to be foolish, he himself looked like an overgrown child. He was trailed by a little Blackfriars nurse, but it was Tom who inserted the feeding horn when the child started fussing, first checking the tiny sponge at its tip and testing the temperature of the milk with an expert finger. The child drained the horn in a scant second and was soon squalling for more.
All Tom would say in explanation of the infant was that he had begot her in “Doctor” Graham’s Temple of Health and Hymen in Adelphi Terrace, and had done so indeed upon Graham’s Grand Magnetico-Electric Celestial Bed. At this Valentine had laughed heartily. Graham is a prince among quacks and his bed promises to guarantee both stupendous pleasure and fertility. Graham charges a five-shilling entrance fee merely to see the Celestial Bed, which measures twelve feet by nine feet and is surrounded by twenty-eight pillars of “crystal.” It is claimed that this masterpiece is modelled on the bed of the favorite Sultana in the Seraglio of the Grand Turk. According to handbills distributed by Graham, the bed’s “super-celestial dome” contains “oderiferous, balmy and aetherial spices, odors, and essences,” and is “coated on the underside with mirrors so disposed as to reflect the various charms and attitudes of the happy couple….” Their exertions bring forth music in a sympathetic rhythm and volume. The bed’s mattress is stuffed with the tails of English stallions (“renowned for their sexual vigour”) and below it are fifteen hundredweight of magnets “continually pouring forth in an ever-flowing circle powerful tides of the magnetic effluvium;” all this to stimulate the ovum in the act of generation.
Tom wasn’t saying any more, having obtained the belly-laugh he wanted. Valentine Greatrakes had refrained from further inquiries. There were no shortages of willing females with a soft spot for Tom.
Making hard love to ladies all over the place he was, and always saying, “It’s a mean mouse that has but one hole to go to.”
The romance that had generated the baby must have ended badly. Tom’s affairs often concluded in sore ways. While he had always to have a woman in mind, and at his disposal, Tom never desired a settled life. The women took it hard. Tom had no patience with tears and feminine laments. A weeping female inspired less compassion in him than an arthritic pickpocket. Valentine had several times occasion to reproach his friend with instances of heartlessness. Whatever had produced this child there was no doubt some of Tom’s usual devilment in it. Tom’s pleasures were inclined to cost someone else dearly.
But in the way of these things between them, Valentine refrained from asking more about the child, though Tom occasionally recounted, with a chuckle, precocious words reported by her nurse and later by the mistress of the highly respectable boarding school where he had placed her, and also, with guffaws, prodigious feats of appetite by the little girl. Tom never thought to ask the child to live with him, and his contact with her dwindled sharply as she grew portlier and less pretty. But the child was tenacious: Tom could not altogether shrug her off. He was summoned to the boarding school on various pretexts, always returning with a defiant expression, similar to the one he wore after a final confrontation with a staled mistress. It was clear that he wished he had never claimed the child; it was also clear that he did not hide this fact from her.
Another girl would have been crushed, but, far from shrinking, young Pevenche transformed her hurt into an outward display of supreme self-confidence. Just like her father, she learned to show no vulnerability, except tactically. On rare occasions Tom had brought little Pevenche—well, large Pevenche to tell the truth—to the depository, where she astounded all with her voluminous chatter and discomforted everyone with her shameless curiosity. Dizzom was plainly terrified by the huge child, who peered at him and repeatedly asked him to unscrew his back teeth and show her his treasures concealed in there. If he demurred there was a rare flash of temper from Tom, a side of him seldom displayed at the depository though it was sent out to work on the streets, of course, as necessary.
Once Pevenche tore the gauze top from ajar of living butterflies and stuffed one inside her mouth, biting it in half.
“Why did you do that, dear heart?” Valentine asked, shocked to his core.
“It’s so pretty,” she said, “but nasty, I’m afraid.”
She spat the rejected wing on the floor and demanded something quick and sweet to take the taste away. Tom joked, “What an esophagus! That girl will swallow anything. She’d eat a rat whole if it had cinnamon and sugar on it.” He tapped her large head, and not gently: “Few intellectual symptoms in our Baby P. But full of big-girl appetites. Gunning with them, too.” The girl flinched away from her father, but said nothing.
The blistering, shameful thought had even crossed Valentine’s mind that Tom had intended to raise the girl and set her up in a bawdy-house, that this motive lay dark and dormant beneath his taking up a female bastard, not a male one, to nurture. (He certainly must have had a choice of offspring.) Too often for comfort, Tom joked about moving the business of the depository in the direction of the Venus Sports, always stressing that the pleasurable company must be of known provenance and juvenility. Valentine had firmly discouraged Tom from such thoughts, but they continued to cross his own mind whenever he saw Pevenche, for Tom cruelly incited the child to dress with a vulgar ostentation that ill befitted her ungainly shape. The nastier the color combinations, the more lamentable Pevenche’s outfits, the more Tom applauded them. And the larger she grew, the more he encouraged her in a ridiculous pretence of juvenility. If “Baby P” saw that the joke was against her, she still chose to play it for laughs. It sometimes seemed to Valentine that it would have been better for Pevenche if her father had not snatched her away from a mother whose influence she sadly and demonstrably lacked, and who must have surely been heartsore all these years for
the loss of her baby.
Tom’s fathering was no way at all to put the manners on the girl.
Now Valentine says aloud to Mimosina Dolcezza, “We never knew where the child came from. My friend did not encourage us to inquire.”
“How strange are you English. So this ward is still just a child, then?”
“Yes,” says Valentine, and the actress appears to lose interest in this scrap.
It is not strictly true. Pevenche might more properly be called a young lady these days. She must be at least twelve, is it? He cannot remember and he cannot guess from looking at her. He has no talent for placing an age on a woman. Moreover, his experience of girls has never brought him in contact with one so well-nourished as Pevenche. But he does not wish to talk about her age with Mimosina Dolcezza. Pevenche’s maturity makes him feel old, and somewhat encumbered.
And he must admit to himself he likes it that the actress finds it hard to let him go, even when it is to see his ward. He enjoys her touching little repertoire of petulance and hurt: All these things show the force of her attachment. She performs all her pouts most charmingly, and he is never bored by this show of his indispensability.
But the next time he says that he must leave her for a day’s outing with Pevenche, the sky darkens around him as she glares and tells him that he need not bother to call on her tomorrow.
“Don’t be selfish, dear heart,” he says. “The child is an orphan. Surely you can spare some compassion for her.”
“For a very little girl she demands very greatly much.”
“Not nearly as much as you do,” he retorts, provoked by the froideur of her tone. “You are a cold one, aren’t you, not to feel for the girl?”
She recoils and hisses at him: “And you are no gentleman, to talk to me in this way.”
He hopes that this dismaying comment is lightly meant, that nothing lies beneath it. But he cannot be certain.
Until now he has been sure that Mimosina Dolcezza, an innocent in London, knows nothing of the rigidity of the British classes, and in no way comprehends his ambiguous position in the society she entertains. He is positive that to her his elegant clothes, his abundant resources, and his apparently endless leisure betoken just one thing: that he is that object prized for its very uselessness—a London gentleman. Her English lacks the discriminatory organ that might detect the little cracks in his accent, the south London vowels and the splashes of Irish that occasionally insinuate themselves into the loftiest sentence. All this time he has been congratulating himself that he has found a lover who can see only his nobility.
With this one sally—“you are no gentleman”—she has struck his self-assurance at its rickety foundation.
He stares at her, in one second as full of suspicion as he had previously been of love. And she herself narrows her eyes and stares back at him, with no mediating tenderness whatsoever in her glance. She turns aside and he notices suddenly that she’s been losing flesh.
It is not becoming for a woman of her age—whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve no idea—to wax stringy in the flank. It’s that ridiculous food she serves. With all that money she lays out on pampering the gut, none of it seems to stick.
He thinks about it with resentment. By night, all these days, he’s craved a slab of moist gammon ham, a prime loin of beef dressed in nothing but stout, something a body can ravage about cleanly to obtain swift satisfaction. Not these coy turrets of sauced morsels fringed with frivolous herbiage. He observes miserably that nothing on the actress’s table lies flat and meek upon the plate: everything is to be flirted with, assailed and conquered. Wearily he’s ascended lucent aspics that resemble jeweled high heels, and pushed his fork through savory architectural jellies studded with unknown high-colored meats. His gorge clamps rebelliously even at the smell.
And the desserts! What an insult to honest food! Why, there was last week a stag made out of marzipan that bled claret when, at her urging, he removed a miniature arrow from its creamy flank. And the next day it was a mousse in the shape of a hedgehog, fragrant with sorrel, nutmeg and saffron, and finished with a full bristling of slivered and blanched almonds. It is not merely ridiculous, this food, it is a mockery, and in it he is quick to sense a lack of respect for him that her present grumblings about his ward only serve to underline.
All the while he has mused on the food, she has been glaring at him. She is not about to let go the subject of Pevenche or his behavior in her regard. Her eyes are stiff as glass.
“I am learning about you Englishmen,” says she. “That you have, what it is called, a stricket” (he thinks she means a “streak”) “of mean, that is as deep as your canal”—and she points in the direction of the Thames with a Venetian’s unerring instinct for the location of water.
“All this because I criticized you,” wonders Valentine, aloud. Yet he’s breathing more easily with relief that it is not after all his wrongness of class she has derided but his waywardness of temper. He decides to keep his tone light and mocking, thinking that perhaps she will meet him halfway, because he hates this country they have entered, this cold and dangerous territory without softness and affection, a barbarous place where heartfelt wounds are exchanged in a moment.
But there’s no answering levity in her. She responds in a quiet, ironclad voice, “You are leaving me now.”
His lungs and bowels contract then dilate with fear and despair, as if she means it is forever, when surely she is merely staging a little and temporary theatrical scene: The only way she knows to carry the day. Her weapons are so poorly developed that he almost feels sorry for her, no, he does pity her, such a helpless little creature, who knows only how to mimic anger in a fetching way upon the stage, but has no depths of interior emotion to feel it. Her talent is for amiability, for sweetness, for yielding. She cannot denature herself to the point of actual rage.
She’d rather drop a tooth than an unkind word from that mouth.
If he leaves now, she will suffer terribly for his absence, and perhaps this is a necessary punishment. Although this little scene has been illuminating, he would not like to have it happen again.
He pulls on the minimal number of clothes. He strides out of the room without looking back, but he feels her lying motionless amid the spill of sheets, counting his steps. He dawdles down to the street door, stopping a second on each step, waiting for her imploring voice. He is aware that he has left certain items of clothing as hostages in her bedroom.
It is almost more than he can do, to stop himself from turning and running back up to her. What points his feet on their downward path is the thought of the worm that has now entered the apple of their mutual satisfaction. This single argument has unparadised them.
He is shot through with misery.
At the slam of the door upstairs there is a stinging in his nose, as if she has struck it. He feels unbearably excluded, even though he has brought this exile upon himself. He turns on his heel and hurtles back up the stairs. She is waiting for him just inside the door, and silently enfolds him in her arms, before leading him back to bed.
“Damn it,” he says aloud, still thinking about the quarrel, hours later, when, all forgiven—or at least bravely seeming so—they are taking a restorative promenade in the park and the figure of Dizzom can be seen approaching. The apologetic contortion of his silhouette informs them both that he bears another message from Pevenche.
Tom’s daughter has not been backward in realizing that her guardian is far more tender-hearted than her father. It is a shame, he reflects, that the girl cannot understand that he would happily do things for her out of simple affection.
She has to keep testing me, to make sure I’ll deliver on a continuous basis.
Her timing is impeccably bad just now. He thinks again, silently “Damn…”
The sutures are too fresh; the wound is not jet healed.
The actress knows his thoughts without further explanation, in that magical way of hers, and she responds aloud, “So it is a damning
thing then to love me? Suddenly? Because I ask for a little proof? I see my mistake. I was stupid. And perhaps you have already tired of me and found a new toy to play with? Va bene. So it is with women like me. We are used and thrown away. I understand. I shall not detain you further. I wish you every happiness, my dearest darling. And your poor little baby ward, of course.”
Her voice grows softer and softer, husky with poisonous sweetness. She gives him the full run of her tongue, and she finds deadly words in English that he could never have suspected in her vocabulary.
Dizzom has by now arrived and delivers his commission in the void between them, and leaves hastily. More words are spoken, and looks are exchanged, both with such a bitterness as to rive their love asunder again. This time, when they part, it is with the indelible imprint of stinging words that can never be erased and, worse, images of an ugliness between them that will not quickly fade.
He has called her self-absorbed, a cold fish. She has defamed him as obsessive and as the foolish gull of a little girl. She has accused him of lying to her, that he goes not to Pevenche but to a grown-up mistress, using his ward as a pretext. At this he flinches, because this reminds him of his half-involuntary lapse of honesty with his mistress, who, based on something he has said, thinks the girl a small child.
Who can bear to see themselves in such dim and nasty lights?
• 9 •
An Antiloimick Decoction
Take Roots of Scorzonera 2 ounces; Zedoary half an ounce; Contrayerva, Spanish Angelica, Shavings of Harts-horn and Ivory, each 2 drams; Cochineal whole 4 scruples; boil these in fine, clear Barley Water, from 2 pints and a half to 24 ounces; throwing into it, towards the last. Saffron 1 scruple: To the strain’d Liquor add Epidemial and Treacle Water, each 2 ounces; Syrup of Gilly-f lowers 4 ounces; Juice of Kermes strain’d half an ounce; Leaves of Gold 4; mix all together.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 10
