Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I mean no disrespect,’ he said. ‘I believe I heard your mother mention that she is related to Lord Minto-I take him to be the same Minto who served so honourably in the previous administration?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I ask because I have met Lord Minto on several occasions. And I knew your father, as I mentioned. Though Jewish, he was from a noble and long-standing family. The family circumstances had become reduced, as sometimes happens with even the best family lines. But he was a true aristocrat.’ He smiled, and waved his left hand, a controlled and ambiguous gesture.

  ‘I don’t follow what you are saying, Count.’

  ‘My dear Miss Davis . . .’

  Acting on an unfamiliar impulse, she said: ‘Please call me Eleanor.’

  ‘Eleanor, then,’ he said smoothly. ‘I am saying merely that I appreciate the exigencies of this world. My own family is an ancient one. My ancestors led their people against the Romans. They rode at the right hand of Charlemagne. And yet here I stand before you, virtually impoverished, living in a tiny room in Mary-leBone.’ He shrugged. ‘Fate takes our money - takes it all away - from people such as you and me - and our only consolation is that money don’t define us. Whether we have the money or do not have the money cannot change who we are. Breeding is always breeding, no? Even if the scale of our living is reduced by poverty, breeding is still breeding.’

  There was something rather flattering, to Eleanor, in this oblique account of the Count’s own familial decline. She smiled.

  ‘The gentleman,’ the Count went on, fixing her gaze with his own, ‘the gentleman . . . the name is Burlington?’

  ‘Burton,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘No relation, then, to the Marquis of Burlington?’ asked von Leloffel, though patently he knew the answer to his own question. The absurdity of the conjunction made Eleanor giggle. She could not help herself. She placed her gloved hand before her lips. How charming this German was!

  ‘Burton, then,’ said von Leloffel, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘I understand he has a great deal of money. And he is surely a kind-hearted man. I have only met him this very afternoon, but he seems a decent fellow.’

  ‘A decent fellow.’

  ‘Money has such power in this world,’ said the Count, with a little mock sigh. ‘Breeding has so little, in comparison. Beauty pays its respects to money. How could it be otherwise? If only I had the money that Mr Burton possesses, then a beautiful woman such as yourself . . .’

  ‘Count! Fie!’ Eleanor almost hummed the word.

  ‘You’ll forgive my impudence, I hope,’ the Count continued easily. ‘When a man such as myself meets a woman as beautiful as you are, my dear Eleanor, he cannot control his expressions of admiration, even though they border on the improper.’

  ‘I am betrothed to another man,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘And, naturally, you owe your future husband certain ...’ said the Count, rolling his right hand over and over, drawing a circle in the air with his forefinger. ‘Certain forms. If I feel that you owe your own class something deeper, it is only because I am a wretched foreigner in England, and I don’t know any better. Nevertheless, I do assert that you owe your own class - you owe yourself - something that cannot be claimed by a man of such small breeding.’

  ‘But,’ she said, wanting to egg him on rather than contradict him, ‘I will be married. Is there not some small matter of a contract of marriage?’

  ‘True,’ he smiled. ‘But can a contract entered into by a woman of breeding and a man - forgive me - without breeding . . . can such a contract be anything other than what the Jesuits call a contractus turpis?’

  ‘Contractus turpis?’

  ‘An immoral bargain,’ said the Count. ‘As, for example, for murder or theft. Such a bargain need not be respected, since it is by its essence null. Do you not think so.’

  ‘How shocking you are, Count,’ she said, but her voice was soft.

  He smiled again, semi-satyr. ‘Permit me,’ he said, ‘one further indiscretion.’ And he bowed and kissed her gloved hand a second time. ‘It is this request, that I may be permitted to call on you after your marriage, and that I may kiss your hand once more. But I am detaining you,’ he concluded, stepping aside. ‘Forgive me.’

  Eleanor smiled at him and walked past. Her Mamma was still explaining the ins-and-outs of her own family to Burton. ‘. . . and her second cousin married Sir Jeremy Smiles, the baronet you know, who owns the tall house on Bond Street, you’ll know the one Mr Burton for it has a yellow roof . . .’

  ‘My dear,’ said Burton, greeting his fiancée with a broad smile.

  [5]

  Inexorably time moved, miniature second by miniature second accumulating without cessation into great blocky weeks and months, and it was the eve of the wedding itself. On the morrow, Eleanor would become a wife.

  The encounter with Count von Leloffel had stayed in Eleanor’s mind. She found herself spinning elaborate fantasies out of it. How unfortunate that the fellow was not wealthy. In various silver-fork alternate versions of reality, conjured by her imagination, he was a millionaire; or he inherited a million; or he was given an outright gift of a million by a grateful Prussian monarch - and then he called at Poland Street in a gold-leafed carriage to carry Eleanor directly to church and marriage and a fine life. In another little fantasy, he swept her away on horseback, though still poor, and the two of them ran off together, left the stifling confines of London life far behind them. But a more persistent fantasy, one that kept returning and returning to Eleanor’s mind, was much more disturbing, because it was much more plausible. In this fantasy Eleanor married Burton, and conducted a secret liaison with von Leloffel.

  She shocked herself. But it was exciting, too. And did not such things go on, in society, all the time? With Burton’s money, perhaps Eleanor would be able to engineer a double life, her husband squatting spider-like in his manufactory whilst she and the Count took a closed carriage around Hyde Park together.

  Was such a thing possible?

  The truth was that Eleanor remained uncertain as to the precise practical dynamic of married life. She had been brought up, as her class and breeding required, to respect the veil drawn over the nature of marriage. Novels ended with weddings; they did not reveal the secret life of husband and wife that followed. It was not that Eleanor was stupid, of course. She could imagine a great deal. And she wanted to be able to plan out, with the scientific rigour that played so large a part in her thoughts, how this arrangement could be finalised.

  It was evening. Burton had called round earlier in the day, with a man called James Silverthorne who was to stand with him at the church. The two men had stayed for twenty minutes, and then departed. After the visit Eleanor played cards with her Mamma, and the two of them drank most of a bottle of claret.

  ‘The big day is tomorrow,’ said Mamma, folding the cards together and putting them away. ‘Are you anxious, my darling? It is,’ she added, immediately, ‘most natural for a girl to be anxious on the eve of her wedding day.’

  ‘A little,’ Eleanor conceded.

  ‘It is most natural, indeed,’ she said again, ‘for a girl to be anxious on the eve of her wedding day.’

  Eleanor smiled. ‘Mamma, you seem more anxious than I.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t I be?’ Mamma shrilled. ‘My only daughter married on the morrow, my only support in this bitter world. Such pain I had in bringing her into this world, and there is so much pain in being a mother.’

  ‘You’re becoming maudlin, Mamma,’ said Eleanor, but not severely. ‘Perhaps it is time for us to go to our beds now?’

  ‘My darling,’ said her mother, as if she had not heard. ‘My darling. Do you know about tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow, Mamma? Tomorrow is my wedding day.’

  ‘Do you know?’

  Eleanor was a little puzzled. It struck her that Mamma might be once again expressing the emotion that had been captured in her slip of the tongue when she had said my darling guilt inst
ead of my darling girl. ‘I am reconciled to it Mamma,’ she said. ‘You need not be anxious on that account. Burton is no hero from romance it is true, but I feel our relationship will be,’ she found the word quickly, ‘practicable.’

  Her mother’s face looked drawn, almost haunted. She stared at her daughter. A silence stretched out between them, with Mamma’s weird expression penetrating Eleanor’s affectation of calm. ‘Mamma?’ she said. ‘Mamma, what is the matter?’

  ‘Do you know,’ repeated her mother in an uncharacteristically subdued tone of voice. ‘About tomorrow?’

  With a sort of tumbling realisation, Eleanor understood her mother’s meaning. There was a little interruption in the smooth functioning of her polite-demeanour mask, a little sagging of the edges of the lips, a tiredness that moved over her eyes. Then she breathed in, smiled more broadly, and said: ‘It is alright, Mamma. I do indeed know about these things.’

  Her mother seemed to shiver. ‘I know it is a distasteful topic, my darling,’ she said in a low tone. ‘Of course it is. But a mother has duties, you know, a duty to explain this sort of thing to her daughter. Somebody must explain this sort of thing, and it falls to the mother, you know. But I was thinking, perhaps,’ she added, with a hopeful expression, ‘that you have read of these things, in one or other of your books on science, you know.’

  ‘I have read about these things,’ said Eleanor.

  Relief rushed into Mamma’s face.

  Eleanor’s first intimation had come, obliquely enough, in Thomas Ryburn Buchanan’s Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, a botanical study that she had borrowed from the library some two years earlier. She had borrowed the volume with a vaguely sentimental apprehension that she thought orchids beautiful flowers, and an inchoate desire to know more about them from a scientific point of view. And the book had been extremely instructive, although the black-and-white engravings of the flowers had not at all captured the sensual, louche beauty of actual blooms (such as the Countess Blessington had a servant bring to her London house from her husband’s hothouses at Richmond). But it so happened that this was a book that had piqued her interest beyond what she had expected. She learnt that flowers required a third party (insects) to spread their male sex material to the receptive female parts of another plant. In this way, the author had discreetly observed, the plant shares the same aim as the whole botanical and zoological world, save only a few lowly self-budding organisms - that the male germinative principle be conveyed to a receptive female. She had thought how comical it was that plants should share the terminology of male and female when they were so patently and radically different from actual men and women. And then, a moment later, prompted by a description of the way certain orchids mimic the female sex-parts of certain insects, she had the epiphany that, though a more primitive form of life, these plants (on the one hand) and men and women (on the other might) carry in common the general, Platonic, ideal of fertility. It had struck her with the force of a revelation. She actually sat back in her chair, letting the book fall to her lap. It wasn’t her intimation of the human sex-act itself that shocked her; it was rather the sense of how foolish she had been, how blind not to have understood it before. Because that single trigger was enough to constellate a hundred little hints and clues that she had picked up during her young life, but which had never until that moment impinged fully on her mind. The male disseminates his spermatic material to the female. The man to the woman. This material is is combined in the female, nature to nature, and a seed, a child, is engendered. The acquaintances of whom her Mamma had boasted that ‘they had a child on the way now’ had acted out the human form of this same practice. A million people a year enacted the same ritual. King George himself had done the same, six times (the sense she got of sexual activity from Buchanan’s book was that it was invariably successful in producing new life). Even her own parents had done this thing, whatever it was, to produce her.

  This realisation that there was such an arena of human life, and that she had been too childishly short-sighted even to perceive that it existed - this realisation stung her. It offended her own pride in her scientific curiosity. She decided the proper scientific thing to do was to study the phenomenon more fully. But the library possessed no books on the subject - no books, that is, on human sexual life. Her reticence, bred carefully into her all her life, of course deterred her from actually asking the librarian outright. And the catalogue of books, a handwritten folio, listed no relevant titles. It was, of course, an indecent topic: the lack of books did not surprise her. But she did not give up the quest for knowledge. The best she could do was to read general works of instructive biology. She attended carefully to each of Dr Hartwig’s Popular Accounts of Natural History, beginning with The Tropical World, and going on to The Polar World, The Aerial World and The Sea and Its Living Wonders. Each book, with three hundred woodcuts and eight of the new-fangled coloured chromoxylographs, provided immense quantities of data, but only the tiniest proportion of this was concerned with reproduction. By poring over the volumes and comparing their different descriptions Eleanor came to the conclusion that all males of whatever species possessed sex organs, external to their bodies, attached to gonadic glands that produced sperm. She also learnt that the female’s sexual organs were receptive rather than active, that the sperm was deposited in the uterine cavity, and that the young grew in this place. She took out Herbert Howe Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, but it contained no mention of reproduction at all, and Eleanor felt that she had wasted her shilling. Then she chanced upon a small book, evidently designed as a practical manual for farmers (she wondered, indeed, how it had found its way into a London lending library): Pig Breeding, with additional remarks upon Swine Fever by George Tregelles. From this book she gleaned that the male organ in pigs is ‘considerably larger than in most Mammals when erect’; and from this last word she deduced that the male organ assumed an erect posture during mating as a necessary part of the process.

  She lay in bed and explored her own body. She had concluded, by a process of elimination, which were her own sexual organs. The various fragmentary allusions to the whole business, which had always been by necessity oblique and veiled, assembled themselves in her head. Somehow the man, becoming ‘erect ’, deposited sperm in the small cavity at the base and the front of her torso.

  She felt a disinclination to touch herself between her thighs, as if it were somehow wrong or shameful, and yet she could not remember ever having been specifically rebuked for doing so. Where had she learnt the interdiction? She remembered when her father had been alive, and she had been nine years old - the last months of his illness, in fact, when they were still living in the house in Greenwich. There had been many comings and goings, doctors with their servants, apothecaries and tradesmen of every description. One playful serving man, waiting in the kitchen for his master to come down from upstairs, had joked and jollied with Eleanor for an hour. She had been only a child, not yet old enough to be discouraged from loitering in the servants’ quarters, and this servant had been immensely attentive, asking her questions, stroking her hair, laughing. Then, suddenly, the cook had blustered in and shooed him away, afterwards rebuking Eleanor with severity for spending time with the fellow. At the time it had been that severity that stuck in her head, and the shame of the tears she had cried. But now, in bed, she remembered the cook’s actual words. A lady has to watch herself with men, she had said. Men want one thing, and they’ll try anything to get it, they want to put themselves in you and they’ll try anything to do that, and you mustn’t let them. Do you understand ? None of this had meant anything to the nine-year-old. But as a young woman, after her menses had started, after reading the books, Eleanor had a flashing sense of what the cook had been getting at. The male organ, which was (evidently) no thicker than a little finger, must be inserted in here. There seemed, to her exploratory fingers, very little room, but doubtless nature had arranged for that. She wondere
d how long the process should take - seconds, she supposed.

  It was strange. She felt she had solved that particular problem, and thereby added to her sum of knowledge. Therefore she could move on to other scientific learning. But the issue refused to leave her mind. She found herself wondering about the exact protocols of the procedure. She found that a delicate touch of her hand on those parts in her bed at night was pleasurable; and again she had the instinctive sense that this was shameful, that she must not speak of it to Mamma. Every time another piece of the jigsaw came her way she stored the information in her mind. Mrs Fox Talbot ’s serving maid was dismissed for getting herself with child. Mamma and Mrs Fox Talbot talked about the scandal of it in hushed tones, thinking Eleanor absorbed in her book. But Eleanor, listening, learned that the foolish little minx had fallen for a soldier. That he was already married, but the little trollop had pursued him anyway, declaring herself in love with him like a penny romance, and that the two had gone off to Shrewsbury together. She came back, of course, said Mrs Fox Talbot, in tears, though I guessed what she had been up to (Shocking, Mamma had whispered, nodding), and had cried and begged to be taken back. And I took her back, but her condition became only too clear in a few months. And Eleanor learned one further detail, for Mrs Fox Talbot related that her husband had wanted to find out the father’s identity and report the fact to his regiment, to his commanding officer, for punishment; but that Mrs Fox Talbot had persuaded him not to - after all, she said, it is the girl’s fault, not the man’s. Men can’t help themselves, of course.