Everyone seemed to know about my long night on the terrace. The little princesses, in one smooth seemingly choreographed motion, put their hands over their mouths as I entered their day-room and sat at my easel. I pretended not to notice, but I, too, was pleasantly disturbed at the thought of seeing Byron again. It would clarify things, I told myself. He must have been spectral with exhaustion the previous night: that was why he had behaved so strangely with me. So I worked steadily, while my subjects chattered endlessly of his beauty, his drooping grey-blue eyes, his endearing limp, his delectably small ears and his delicate white hands.
One of those white hands I felt upon my own shoulder a few hours later. The night’s rain had delivered a clear morning which had now yielded to an unbearably hot afternoon. I was working on the nose of the Pasha’s youngest nipotina, trying to diminish it without losing the likeness. I bent over my easel, feathering the paint with my fingers. I feared for the consequences if I did not depict the Pasha’s granddaughter in a way that amply reflected her nonno’s proud love.
Without announcing himself, Byron undulated into the room, observed my work, and said, with his cold breath upon my neck, ‘They are beautiful little animals, these granddaughters of Ali Pasha. You don’t need to make them more delicate. When they are thrown on their backs in the caravanserai of their husbands, that sensual nose will only bring more children. Imagine it nuzzling under the arm of one of these great hairy brigands, or pushed into his groin.’
‘Come now, old man,’ protested Hobhouse, who had followed him into the room. ‘Leave her to work. What if the Pasha hears about what you have just said?’
‘He would confirm it. The old bastard is not above a bit of familial love, as we have heard. I would have liked to see that daughter-in-law. If not touch her. Worth fifteen members of the harem, it seems.’
It was as if I was not there. My little subject, meanwhile, was sitting open-mouthed and silent upon her miniature throne, struck dumb by both the sudden appearance of the English milord and a faint grasp of what he had said. The French taught to the young Albanian ladies did not stretch to Byron’s kind of vocabulary. I nodded kindly to her and she scuttled from the room. A single emerald earring spun on the floor.
Byron bent to pick it up. As he raised his head, he now looked at me for me for the first time. ‘Your own nose, I understand, is used to more civilised sensations. Yes, I can see it wrinkling up at the spussa of the canal?’
How had he learnt the Venetian dialect word we use to describe an evil smell? Of course, then I did not know that Byron was an addict of languages, and could not bear to be near a country without a taste of its language in his beautiful mouth. ‘I am a spice of everything,’ I heard him say, afterwards, several times. He used his voice as a musical instrument, and he could move from language to language without effort. But English, remember, was what he chose to write in – English, that narrow language of whispers and insinuations, the only one I know in which the feminine and the masculine are not expected to be in accord.
That beautiful mouth was near to mine as he polluted the tent with his deft and dirty language. Certainly, with Casanova, I had learnt a natural sensuality and it was difficult to shock me. But I was shocked by Byron’s words, not at the idea of sexual congress but the cold bestial picture he painted of it
Of course, I understood that he was flirting, in his way. It was nothing personal. This was only a debt he carelessly discharged to an attractive woman. It was as if we had not spent the whole night together, talking about the most private aspects of his past, as if we had not exchanged a look that had admitted an extraordinary intimacy between us.
He turned to me and said, ‘Madame Cecilia, you know that I am an artist too in my own way, being a poet?’
I bowed. ‘Indeed.’
‘What a charming accent! I love to hear French with an Italian intonation. God, yes, Cecilia. I voyage, I taste, I taste deeply. I tear my heart and put it on a plate for the idle to pick at. I ride really dangerous horses. Of course I am a poet, woman!’ He turned to look at my work, picked up a brush loaded with Cochineal and plunged it into the shell of poppy oil, where the red pigment clouded the yellow liquid. ‘So you love it, do you, Madame Cecilia, your own greasy trade?’
He looked at the painting quickly, and then more closely ‘My god, there is something alive in here. It is so good, this portrait, that I could almost kiss you.’
The mention of a kiss, at a moment like this, as carelessly as this, pricked me cruelly. By proposing this kind of kiss, a commercial species of kiss, a pat-upon-the-head kiss, he had ruined the kiss I was starting to envisage in my imagination.
I looked directly at him and said, ‘Until you spoke to me this afternoon, I could almost have thought you a gentleman.’
‘Ha! D’you hear that, Hobhouse! Spirited piece! What a prodigy of courage!’ Then he turned back to me.
‘I want you to paint my portrait,’ he said, looking not at me but at my easel. ‘You will not find it easy. I sit badly. But there is something about your work ... I like the little details.’ He pointed to the emerald earring I had already painted with a tiny reflection of the Pasha alive inside its lustre. We haggled a price, he with a surprising vehemence. I had not thought that the English milord would be so mean, but in those days I knew little or nothing about Scots. He was also well aware of his own price, by which I mean he seemed to know already what kind of celebrity he could soon add to my portfolio.
Our exchange was hurried because he was on his way to meet with Ali Pasha again.
Byron informed me proudly that the Pasha had told him to consider him as a father while he was in Tepelene. Indeed, he treated Byron like a favourite son, sending almonds, sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats to his apartments. Given the Pasha’s well-known depravities with young boys and girls, the palace was afire with rumours that the pretty English milord was about to become his catamite. I blushed as I thought about the ways Byron and the Pasha would discuss me. The story of Casanova would be first on the list. I knew the gossip of men.
Hobhouse stayed with me after Byron left. He was not wanted at the Pasha’s side that day. Hobhouse proved as amiable as he looked. With a little questioning it emerged that Hobhouse was, like myself, the child of a rich merchant. He had been born in another seafaring town, Bristol. He told me, as though I might understand it was important, that he was a ‘Nonconformist’ and a ‘Whig’ with an ‘h’. I did not ask what these things meant. He continued smoothly. He was also a scholar and classicist. He was interested in the origin and aim of sacrifices. Hobhouse also had an outsider’s taste for poetry, and for art.
He told me, as I cleaned my brushes, his entire history, particularly where it coincided with Byron’s. He gave detail, to the point of being boring, which is why I know so much now. Details about Hobhouse are crowded into the repository I tend inside me along with other precious information. Thanks to Hobhouse I can never forget that the Jannina retsina is the worst in the world and, worse, that there is no one in the whole place who can mend an umbrella.
From that day forth, Hobhouse haunted my easel. He seemed at a loss as to what to do with himself while Byron dallied with the Pasha. But he also seemed confused in his response to me. After watching me spar with Byron, he accorded me a gentlemanly respect. He no longer urged Byron to watch his language in front of me. I was accepted as one of them. But it was more than that. He seemed fascinated. I could draw him to me like a baby to a mother’s breast. He was a great big girl-boy anyway. I think he preferred boys, if anything. Whatever Hobhouse wanted from me, I hope he took it, because I certainly took from him, with both hands. I took information.
When I want to imagine Byron before I knew him, I have simply to conjure Hobhouse’s careful voice, and summon our conversations in my memory. As I have explained, my discourses with Byron seemed more like performances, during which I sat stupefied in the pit, while he strutted the stage. With Hobhouse, it was a dialogue. I dared to ask him things tha
t I could not put to Byron.
Now I asked him if Byron had been sad to leave England.
‘Sad? I don’t think so. Relieved, possibly. Things were becoming a little awkward for him.’
I asked if Byron did not miss his intimates, the women he loved? I knew he did not pine for his mother, but what of his sister Augusta and his friends?
Hobhouse told me ruefully that Byron often complained of an intense and picturesque loneliness, even in his own company. As for the women, Hobhouse explained, ‘Cecilia, Byron always says that for him the word “friend” is the antithesis of “lover”.’
I asked, ‘So do you think he himself is much missed?’
Before Hobhouse could answer, the voice of Byron himself rang out behind me. He had returned from the Pasha.
‘Well, by a certain group of them, those who attended my farewell party, I shall certainly not be forgotten.’
He looked significantly at Hobhouse, who abruptly rose to leave. Byron settled himself on a divan, stretched out like cat, and told what it had been like, that last party at Newstead.
Chapter 5
Bisogna annegarse nel mar grande.
Better to drown yourself in a big sea (i.e., Do it in style).
VENETIAN PROVERB
‘I gave my last party at Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of all the Byrons. Of that vast ruin, I had made just one or two parts habitable. The rest, including my garden, my lake and the fortresses, I left to rot. Nature, no doubt offended by the depredations of the Old Wicked Lord, had gripped her chance and strangled any sign of civilised life in my domain. The noble camel Alboufaki would have loved my garden. No graveyard ever stank as rife with the revengeful gases of decomposition. Molehills pustuled my old lawns. Lengths of wild vine rattled across my paths. Sometimes I used to go and scratch at the welts of lichen that disfigured the faces of my statues, whose thighs were chafed by nettles of primeval dimensions. When I inspected my flower beds, I noticed that the petals of the old Dutch roses had balled up in their buds and made no attempt to leave their carapaces. The roses knew: it was not safe out there.
‘You want to know what the party was like?
‘Imagine you are invited and you have travelled here to find me.
You arrive at the Abbey through its devastated forest, sweeping round a bend to see the magnificent ruin hooding the dark eye of its lake. The branches of my trees now meet over the drive. You probably have a somewhat nauseous sense of being swallowed into a long green alimentary canal. The empty arches of my ruined monastery send long shadows up to your feet. Four finials, strangled with vines, point up to a moist oysterish sky, for this is England, of course, not Italy.
‘At the steps to the entrance you find on the right a chained bear, and on the left a frothing wolfhound. You reel from the foul, hot breath of one into, it seems, the yellow teeth of the other. But your host has judged the length of their chains to a nicety. An inch from your throat, the animals are yanked back to their tethers with a sickening wheeze. They crouch, whimpering their private sorrows. You stumble up the stairs and into the house, where you find yourself under fire from a group of strangely attired but rather lovely young men discharging jewelled pistols beneath the vaulting. It’s practice time.
‘I am afraid that the new Wicked Lord Byron does not appear to welcome you. Ribald suggestions are no doubt made to explain his absence. Never mind, the other young men, beautiful of face and foul of mouth, take you in their arms and kiss you, lusciously. Your travel-stained clothes will be removed, one by one, like the wrappings of a gift. Costumes, as if from the ridotto, will be given to you and you dress while the young men watch and caress you. They will tell you how it is here at Newstead, what is expected of you. Then, when they have prinked you up, they will leave you and run off to the cellars, where they splash and wade in old porter, their laughter echoing behind them, and blood-like footprints upon the stairs.
‘There are the Abbey and its Gothic horrors to explore. There is, for example, the “Haunted Chamber”, the small room adjoining my bedroom on the uppermost floor, looking over the ruined church. In this room, rumoured to be visited on occasion by the phantom of a headless monk, sleeps the handsome young lad, Robert Rushton, my page. Indeed, as you enter the room, there he is, flung naked and sleeping on his rumpled little bed, his hair feathered with sweat and his tulip skin stained with scratches. He looks like an angel but he smells of ill-use. Nothing can wake the boy when he sleeps like that, so I am afraid that you must leave him.
‘Elsewhere in the house, you will learn that Paphian girls are reserved for the Lord’s private pleasure. You think you can hear their giggling in distant corridors and their light steps on hidden stairs but you do not see them. For the moment. You hunt them in the dusty corridors, half-afraid of what you will find. In the end, you tire of this insubstantial sport and indulge less energetic curiosities. You look for the Old Wicked Lord Byron’s murder weapon and his uniform. You might open dresser doors and drawers and find the latter full of the corpses of enormous black cockroaches.
‘This party is a spectacle. You are a guest but also a participant. It is necessary to rise very late in the mornings. At breakfast you compare feats of alcoholic ingestion, projectile vomiting and copulation, for last night I will have shared my harem with you, my dearest friends, whom I am shortly to leave. You may remember me roaming among you at your sports in the candlelight. I appear last of all, having drunk, vomited and fucked more than anyone. Until I arrive, I suspect that there is a certain lassitude, a certain tendency to drink tea with milk and sugar, and very white bread with soft butter.
‘Then I appear, in my stained nightshirt, brandishing my pistols. I might well shoot down a fragment of a ragged chandelier so that it drops into the salty oatmeal, where it will sink as if in quicksand. Everyone knows to applaud, and believe me some of the prettier young men also know how to curtsy. The maids come to clear the devastation from the table, and to be pinched. The day has officially begun!
‘You fence, practise with your guns, write (preferably satire and love letters), torment the bear and wolfhound until you fear they will break their chains. So you go to the lake to see ruined fortresses where the original Wicked Lord staged his naval battles. You listen to old Murray, for hours, feeding him whisky to bring forth his stories of the old master. You must hear him describe the murder of the neighbour, Chaworth – he does it in such gut-wrenching detail!
‘You dine, dressed in monks’ habits, between seven and eight, downing quantities of claret and champagne. I promise you that your very elbow will become tired with the toasts. The wine is strong; you look at the great hall as if through the wrong end of a telescope. The voices of your friends sound metallic. Hot wax drips on your arms but you feel nothing. Tonight you address me as “The Abbot” and tonight I play the ghost of myself, rising out of a stone coffin to blow out your candle. The lovely Robert Rushton, or his reincarnation, appears as an acolyte to the noble phantasm, in transparent robes that reveal exactly, in tender rose-coloured silhouette, what endears him to your noble host. Indeed the subsequent picturesque ceremonies oblige me to cup my hand there, frequently.
‘After the dead have risen and been admired, you pass around a human skull brimming with burgundy. It looks like black blood. You do not want to drink it.
‘“In estro, plunge your lips,” I command, implacably. This word “estro” – a corruption of in oestrum — I have adopted to describe all my own uncontrollable physical urges. So you bathe your tongue in the liquid and lap like a cat. Does the wine taste rusty? Is it hideously warm? Do you want to retch? Ha!
‘While you drink, I explain in lugubrious tones, “My friends, you swallow from the skull of a monk dug up in the garden of Newstead Abbey. He was murdered, all for love, or at least for the bastards he begat. Drink, for it is his blood that you drink. Then eat, because tomorrow you may find your skull in a shallow grave, too. Or hacked by the surgeon, and spliced back together in a tin coffin. Drink! Deat
h to the lip-lickers and the droplet-drinkers!”
‘The skull is my pride and joy. I had it mounted on metallic legs and polished to the colour of mottled tortoiseshell. To christen it, I have written a poem that is now inscribed on it. Turn it in your hand, to read my lines as I intone them:
… The worm hath fouler lips than thine.
Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy hood;
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods, than reptile’s food.
‘At “slimy hood” I make a certain obscene gesture and crush Rushton to my breast. The boy seems dazed, or drugged. I warn you, “Drink, damn you! The last person who refused me is still looking for his testicles.”
‘Again, you raise the goblet to your lips, where my lips just were. The skull seems to move in your fingers. You tell yourself it is your own hands shaking, how, after all, you have abused your body these days! The skull is warm. Rivulets of claret are clotting on the polished bone. In the candlelight, it looks as though the arteries and veins, like Nature in the garden, are starting to reclaim their place. You could swear that you see something glint in the empty eye-sockets. You drink on. There is no doubt now, the skull throbs in your hands. You sense the soul of the monk flinching under this desecration. From the corner of your eye, you see a sudden strange phosphorescence in the garden. You think, with terror, of the dark corridor to your bedroom. But you drink on. You have no choice. I have commanded it.’
Chapter 6
L’aqua de mare lava tuti i debiti.
The water of the sea washes away all debts.
VENETIAN PROVERB
After Byron delivered his monologue and left me without ceremony, I sat in silence for some time. ‘That is what the English call a party?’ I asked myself. ‘It is not much like our Carnevale. It seems an unhappy way to be happy.’
Carnevale Page 29
