Painting The Darkness - Retail

by Robert Goddard

‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You heard what Fiveash said.’ For all his drunken state, Hugo lowered his voice. ‘He told my father that he must not allow my mother to conceive for a second time. Yet she did, didn’t she?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  Suddenly, Hugo threw himself back in his chair, rubbed his eyes and sighed. ‘I don’t know. Has my mother said anything about this … this date Norton quoted?’

  ‘I’ve not yet heard from Baverstock.’

  ‘What do you know about it? Eighteen forty-six, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Nothing. It seems too far in the past to have any relevance—’

  ‘The past?’ Hugo took another drink and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Seems I’ve to thank the past for this whole damn mess.’ His red-rimmed eyes cast an accusing look at his cousin. ‘Well, you know more about the past than I do, Richard. So use it – to get me out.’

  Richard Davenall did not leave the club straight away, though he left Hugo, set, it seemed, on drinking away the afternoon. Richard conceded one point to his cousin’s mordant failings: the past did have a good deal to answer for. And, since this warren of a building, whose rooms varied from the gloomy to the garish, had something of a stake, including two club presidents, in the Davenalls’ past, he could not lightly leave it. Rather in the manner of a pilgrimage – for he had long allowed his own subscription to lapse – he ascended the wide staircase, lit by the mellow hues of a stained-glass window, to the cavernous and dust-laden library, where Hugo’s generation seldom strayed, but where older, more eminent members were celebrated by gilt-framed portraits lodged in shadowy grottoes amongst the neglected bookstacks.

  Not because it had been moved, but in confirmation of the length of his absence, Richard spent some time searching before he located the portrait he had in mind. The frame was heavier than he recalled, the oils darker: he had to light the lamp on the nearby table to make it out at all. But there it was, attested by the panel fixed to the base of the frame: Sir Lemuel Davenall, Bt (1779–1859), painted in the first year of his presidency, fifty years ago.

  Sir Lemuel resembled his brother Wolseley, Richard’s father, in the way a Bengal tiger resembles a domesticated English cat: the features were similar, but on an altogether grander scale. The face was lean – leaner than Wolseley’s, if anything, but fringed by defiant militaristic whiskers; the eyes had the same tinge of green, but they warmed his expression, where Wolseley’s soured his; he held himself proudly, chest puffed beneath the medals he had won at Waterloo, while the only pride his brother knew was an obsessive pursuit of an independent reputation. Whilst Lemuel fought for his country, Wolseley studied the law of tort. Whilst Lemuel rode to hounds, Wolseley ran down leases. Whilst Lemuel owned all he surveyed and indulged his generosity, Wolseley grudged his prodigality and cultivated his resentments. Whose son would Richard rather have been? He had no doubt as he surveyed the weatherbeaten countenance of a grand old baronet in this bastion of his joyful self-esteem.

  Richard’s earliest memories of his uncle were as a welcome interloper in the tedium of a Highgate childhood, a white-haired old man who would toss him an india-rubber ball in the garden and make faces behind his hand whilst his father discussed rental income over a dinner of reluctant mutton. Later, Richard remembered an idyllic summer passed at Cleave Court after his first year at Shrewsbury: Gervase was away in Ireland, by implication in some measure of disgrace, though the scandal of a duel sounded wonderfully glamorous to young Richard. That, in so far as he could fix the moment in time, is when he first contemplated how much happier he might be as Lemuel’s son than as his father’s. He even thought that it might make Sir Lemuel happier as well; for, though the old man talked much and laughed often, the pain he had been caused by an absentee wife and a disobedient son was clear to see.

  What was not clear to the superficial mind of the young Richard was how much pleasure his father derived from the contrast his own respectable marriage and respectful son presented with Sir Lemuel’s disorderly arrangements: a wife who loved her homeland more than her husband, an heir who had disgraced the reputation of his regiment. All this was only brought home to him when he stood at his father’s deathbed on a winter’s day in 1861.

  It was the first time Richard had ever seen his father surprised. Angry, yes, outraged often, severe always; but life had held, it seemed, no surprises for this far– if narrow-sighted man. Only death had the capacity to take him unawares. To die at seventy-seven, when his brother had lived, with infinitely less caution, to eighty, formed his final and least-expected grudge against the world.

  ‘How are you, sir?’ Richard said banally.

  ‘Dying,’ his father rasped. ‘It is typical of you not to notice the obvious.’

  ‘I hope—’

  ‘Don’t bother to. All my hopes for you came to nothing. Why should your own be any different?’

  ‘I am sorry, Father.’ (It represented a concession of a kind not to address him as ‘sir’.)

  ‘Sorrow is all I ever had from you.’

  Richard leaned closer. ‘Have I not lived some of it down? Any of it?’

  ‘None. I sent you to Cleave Court to show your uncle how a gentleman’s son should behave, what he should be. I trusted you. You betrayed me.’

  ‘But since then—’

  ‘Since then you have been a clerk like any other. All that matters is that you handed your uncle a victory over me … when I had been preparing his defeat for fifty years. Since then, you have been no son to me.’

  ‘In time, I thought I might earn your forgiveness.’

  ‘Impossible.’ The old man moved, as if trying to raise himself on the pillow. But it was not that. He only wished to be certain that Richard could see him clearly. ‘You have laboured in vain, boy – as I intended.’ Then he grinned, his teeth showing between the thin stretched lips, a grin more horrible than any grimace, a grin of contempt that was his final offering to an unloved son.

  ‘In vain.’ Richard looked up at the paint-crusted smile of Sir Lemuel and found himself agreeing. It had been very largely in vain, his life to date, his fifty years of seeking to do what was expected, of striving to maintain a standard from which he was held to have lapsed. What did it amount to but a suspicion long suppressed, a disguise of moral cowardice beneath the cloak of what was right and proper?

  July 1855 was a month of drought and heat at Cleave Court. Sir Lemuel seldom left the house, but sat reading and dozing in his ground-floor study, with the french windows open and the shades down. It was there that he summoned Richard on a mid-morning of windless brilliance for the last words that ever passed between them. There was a letter open on his lap, his magnifying glass resting on it; he had let his right hand fall beside his chair to scratch the muzzle of his faithful Labrador. When Richard entered the room, he thought Sir Lemuel might be asleep, but no: his immobility was the quietude of sadness.

  ‘I believe you wanted to see me, sir.’

  Sir Lemuel looked at him gravely. ‘Gervase is being invalided home. Not wounded, but ill. Not seriously, but sufficiently. I have this letter from his commanding officer. By its date, I judge he will arrive any day. You might have thought he would have written himself. Perhaps he wished to arrive unexpectedly.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘Can you not? Nor could I – until young Jamie blurted out what he had seen. The young fellow is not to be blamed. It is only what I might have seen myself – had I wished to.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘I mean that I have indulged my daughter-in-law’s sensitivity too long – and my liking for you too much. You must leave us, Richard, at once. I want you gone by the time Gervase returns.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if he has cause to suspect anything amiss I would fear for your life. And if you remain he will have cause. You must leave.’

  ‘If it is your wish, I have no choice.’

  ‘No choice?’ Sir Lemuel cast an eye
towards the haze-shimmered view of the terraced garden. ‘Of course you have a choice. You could disobey me – as my wife and my son have done often enough. But that would only compound the sadness. No, Richard. You are a better man than my son. That is why you must leave.’

  Richard Davenall walked slowly down the curving staircase. He had left Cleave Court that day, clutching at Sir Lemuel’s paltry tribute to warm the seeping chill of his shame. He had gone because his uncle had persuaded him that it was not too late to pull back from the brink of an irrevocable act. Now, as he emerged into the seemly grey light of Pall Mall and moved slowly eastwards, he began to question more than just the worth of a life led in constant propitiation of the tenets wished upon it by his mean-spirited father; he began to question the whole purpose of his flight from one summer’s tempting passion twenty-seven years ago. His father’s dying grin had done more than parody a lifelong denial of joy. It had opened a window on a world of lies.

  There, looming to his left, stood the Crimea monument. He turned towards it and smiled, welcoming the end he sensed this man who called himself James Davenall would make of all their lies. He thought of Hugo – baffled, drunken, sulking Hugo – and laughed aloud, then clapped his hand to his face as his eyes smarted with tears. To pull back from the brink? To think he ever believed it possible. With an effort of will, he composed himself, summoned his failing dignity and walked steadily forward.

  VII

  Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, alias the Count of Moncalieri, alias Citizen Jerome-Napoleon, was born in wandering exile to the sometime King of Westphalia (a younger brother of the great Napoleon) and never seemed content in any other state. A handsome youth of charm and intellect, possessed of a patrician build and a striking facial resemblance to his celebrated uncle, he contrived to squander his life in ill-tempered buffoonery, to waste his assets – be they dynastic or intellectual, to heap upon his proud head – as if by design – the derision of all who knew him.

  Such was the tall bare-headed figure who strode pensively along the Avenue des Champs Elysées in the failing light of a Parisian afternoon, haughty remnant of a lost Imperial cause, tolerated in his homeland only because so vastly ignored. Thirty-seven years before, he had been banished because the peasants had hailed him as the ‘new Napoleon’. Now he stepped idly into a wayside boulangerie, bought a pastry and ate it in the street, letting the crumbs fall down the front of his coat whilst he watched a girl on the other side of the road, pacing sensuously to and fro before the scrubbed frontage of a restaurant not yet open for business.

  A sweet tooth and a wandering eye. Often enough, he reflected they had been his downfall. Now he was sixty years old, stout, balding and troubled by flights of stairs. He smiled. The girl’s face reminded him of that minx in Stuttgart. She had been worth the thrashing he suffered at her father’s hands. Well, he had had his chances and wasted all of them: that he could not deny. He had common tastes but lacked the common touch: a fatal combination. In 1848, they had passed him over in favour of his scheming cousin, who had – against all odds – left a son behind him to sustain the Bonapartist cause in exile. Since then, being passed over had become commonplace: opportunity had only flattered to deceive.

  He finished his pastry, brushed off the remaining crumbs and walked on. It was Black Friday – suitably ill-omened for the step he was about to take into a seamy reach of his past. He knew it was a step better not taken, but his life had largely comprised imprudent acts and he was too old to change now. That man Norton – or Davenall, whoever he was – had pricked his conscience, or touched a nerve. Whichever it was, he could not leave it alone.

  There was number twenty-three, on the other side of the road, closed gates at the side bearing the name G. PILON (CARROSSIER). He crossed over and tugged at the first-floor flat-bell. A thin-faced maid answered. She flashed him a look of unsmiling recognition.

  ‘Quelle surprise,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Pour moi aussi, Eugénie.’

  The maid’s lip curled. ‘Comme si de rien n’était.’

  He ignored the jibe. ‘Votre maîtresse, est-elle à la maison?’

  ‘Pour vous, sans doute. Suivez-moi, s’il vous plaît.’

  She led him upstairs to a sitting-room and left him there. He looked around, admiring the faded lavishness of the decorations – flock wallpaper, purple upholstery, an ormolu clock, a gilt-framed mirror he fancied he might once have owned himself. There was evidence of decline in the fortunes of his one-time mistress, but it was not yet overwhelming. She would be forty now, even if her own estimate was to be believed, which it was not. He had lately heard her name linked with a wealthy American. Perhaps there was more money in parvenus than in princes these days. Perhaps there always had been.

  The door opened and she entered, smiling. Her face displayed with unmistakable starkness the eight years that had passed since their last meeting, though her hair was still dark and immaculately curled. He let his glance run over her body, wrapped in the clinging folds of a silk peignoir, and acknowledged that occasional privation had done her figure no harm at all.

  ‘Bonjour, Cora. How is my English pearl?’

  Cora, mistress of her native coolness, maintained her distance. ‘I am Cora still, but minus any pearls.’

  ‘You still have Eugénie.’

  ‘Only because her arrears are so considerable.’

  ‘Come, come. An apartment on the Champs Elysées? It cannot be that bad.’

  ‘How would you know? You have kept away for so long.’

  ‘We have both had our troubles, Cora. We were never … friends in need.’

  Cora smiled. ‘That is true. No rebukes, Plon-Plon. We are too old for them, are we not?’

  In the look they then exchanged there was the silent complicity of two who understood that bitterness at the changing times was pointless. The Second Empire had raised them both high – Prince Napoleon as the Emperor’s honour-laden cousin, Cora as an English courtesan trading on the loose morals of an immature aristocracy. Now all that was gone, they could consider themselves lucky to survive, however precariously.

  ‘How is your wife?’ said Cora neutrally.

  ‘As saintly as ever.’

  ‘And your sons?’

  ‘Surely you know, Cora? The Prince Imperial was good enough to die young but cunning enough to nominate my son Victor as his heir. I have been passed over once again.’

  ‘Is that why you have come? For consolation?’

  ‘Hah!’ The Prince laughed his bellowing gale-like laugh, crossed the room and smacked a kiss on Cora’s forehead. ‘No, Cora. I am past consoling.’ He ran one hand down over her shoulder towards the inviting curve of a silk-cradled breast, then broke away and crossed to a side-table, where he began to toy with a piece of china.

  ‘Then, why?’

  ‘Do you remember the Davenall family?’

  ‘How could I forget? Your friend Sir Gervase was so very … insistent.’

  ‘Dead now.’

  ‘So many of my clients are. What of it?’

  ‘He had a son – James.’

  ‘I remember. He brought him to Meudon more than once. And we met him in Somerset – that last time. The young man who killed himself.’

  ‘Supposedly. Now somebody has come forward claiming to be James Davenall, heir to the baronetcy. An impostor, we must assume – after the money.’

  ‘What is this to me – or to you?’

  ‘I agreed to help Sir Hugo in resisting the claim.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For friendship’s sake.’

  ‘You are incapable of friendship, Plon-Plon. I do not say it to hurt you. You have admitted it often enough.’

  He put down the piece of china. ‘C’est vrai. Well, Cora, since you ask, Sir Hugo agreed to make a substantial contribution to my campaign fund.’

  ‘Campaign? You still have—?’

  ‘I still have hopes. But not of Sir Hugo. The claimant knew too much about me for me t
o be of any use. It was quite … disarming.’

  ‘Perhaps he is not an impostor.’

  ‘He is certainly not a fool. He knew a great deal about how I first met Gervase Davenall. Tell me, did I ever … gossip to you about my first visit to the Davenalls … in 1846?’

  ‘Not that I remember. Your pillow talk usually revolved around how superior you were to the Emperor. Which you were, in all the ways that mattered.’

  ‘I might have said something – at some time.’

  ‘If you did, I have forgotten it.’

  ‘I would not blame you if you had sold the information.’

  ‘So that is it. No, Plon-Plon. I have not met this man. I have told him nothing.’

  ‘He uses the name Norton.’

  ‘Norton? Why didn’t you say so?’

  He swung round on her. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Norton? Yes. But he is not—’

  Suddenly, he was in front of her, grasping her shoulders with no hint of a caress. ‘Not who?’

  ‘I met a man named Norton earlier this year. Plon-Plon, you’re hurting me!’

  He released her. ‘Pardon. Tell me quickly, Cora. How did you meet him?’

  ‘I have good days and bad days. This is a good day. That was a bad day. It was February, with snow lying in the Bois de Boulogne. I had gone there for a drive with … an admirer. We were both drunk. There was a time when I would have been … more selective. He took a fancy to a girl in the Pré Catelan and threw me out of his carriage. Can you imagine? The famous Cora Pearl, raddled and drunk, alone in the snow, with no fur stole to warm her. I sat on a bench and cried. Perhaps you find it hard to imagine.’

  ‘No. I wish I did.’

  ‘A young Englishman took pity on me. He gave me his overcoat and brought me home. He bought me dinner on the way. He was handsome … and generous. He said his name was Norton.’

  ‘What was he doing in Paris?’

  ‘Visiting a doctor, he said, though he scarcely looked as if he needed to.’

  ‘Did he ask you about the Davenalls?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or me?’

  ‘No. He said we had met before but doubted I would remember. I didn’t believe him.’