Sir William

by David Stacton

  “Well, he says not there.”

  *

  Definitely not there.

  Like most humane men, Greville did definitely shrink from the human. To be human is to be smirched. To be humane, requires nothing more intimate than benevolence. The singular success of that bucolic pasticcio, Love in a Village (still performed) arose in large measure from its irreality. So Greville moved out toward the villages, where a cottage would be cheaper. He was determined, for he did not overestimate his own charms (he never overestimated anything), to keep Emily a virginal distance from town. He found what he wanted in a series of small two-storied builders’ huts run up for speculation on Edgware Row, way out in the country, the nearest excitement an occasional hanging at Tyburn Hill, with the town on the horizon and Hyde Park not too far away.

  It was a bargain. There would even be room for his mineral specimens. “Nature’s jewels,” as he would explain to Emily, and, to others who might notice the absence of busts after the antique, “Her sculpture, too.” But since Greville was art dealer for his uncle, in a good season there would be bustos enough, and what furniture was not worth the selling could be used here when he had gotten rid of the town house in Portman Square, for he planned to combine pleasure with economy—a thought that made the snow outside (he was returning from his solicitors’ in a carriage) sparkle to him like ermine in a pantomime.

  “Please, dear Greville, tell my poor, distraught mother that I am saved, and that I recommend her to my Benefactor,” Emily had written. He had done so, and far from finding her distraught, had found her a brisk, practical woman of that class. She would make an excellent housekeeper for little more than the household allowance and a share of Emily’s pin money. It did not occur to him to ask why, any more than it occurred to him to ask why she chose to call herself Mrs. Cadogan, when there was no evidence of a husband, and Emily called herself Lyon. He took such things for granted. It did not occur to her to tell him why, either. So did she.

  She had received him in the public room of a coaching inn, in dim light, would have preferred to have interviewed him in her own parlor, but at that moment had none. She was a good-humored woman, too experienced to be budged by the mere blandishments of vice, but respectability had, for her, the irresistible appeal of novelty. In her turn she was as impressed as he had been, and in much the same way. When it came to members of the upper orders, she had seen worse.

  “He is a fine gentleman,” she wrote to her daughter. “A fine gentleman. He likes everything proper and sedate, if you catch my meaning. It is a fine chance to improve yourself. The other gentleman was not. You have been very giddy, but I was a young girl once myself, and say nothing. However, now you have had your lesson, you must be a girl of spirit, and snatch the opportunity. He would prefer you have the child alone. My thoughts are with you, if my body is not. Do nothing indelicate.”

  Being a girl of spirit, Emily tore the letter up. As for the lesson, she had not had it yet; it would be at least another two months until she had it, and she could scarcely wait to get rid of it. She did not like to be seen at a disadvantage. Meanwhile she struck a bargain with herself. She had been a hoyden; now she would be a lady—in Portman Square in March, or not later at the most than April. She had tried the Profession and failed. She did not think she liked young men. They jounced you too much. From now on she would remain content with old ones, for Greville, at thirty-three, had certainly the patina of age, and she did hope that was not a surface, merely.

  *

  Greville stood in the drawing room of his unsuccessful mousetrap. He was feeling joyous, but moldy. The joy was caused by anticipation; the mold, by the failure of the mousetrap. It had been built to catch an heiress, but when it came to cases, the girls were nothing but intermediaries between their parents and their fortunes, and Greville did not like to deal with intermediaries. He had dealt with the parents direct, and they, in their turn, had dealt as directly with him.

  He was not discouraged. He still had confidence that in time he would discover the right parents. What he did not like, though he had no diffidence about taking commissions as a middleman for his uncle’s Italian antiques, was to be put to the indignity of selling his own excess furniture.

  Mrs. Cadogan saw what the house was for and that it had failed. She even saw why.

  “Oh, sir, you shouldn’t be fussing about furniture, that is what a housekeeper is for,” she said, and earned his gratitude; not his undying gratitude, for Greville’s gratitude was apt to perish unexpectedly from internal injuries, not differing in that respect from most other people’s gratitude, but still, it was a beginning.

  It had been planned to be. Mrs. Cadogan had early observed that most men in Mr. Greville’s station needed not one woman but two; that is, one to keep them running, and one to keep them on the run—or to be blunt, a housekeeper and a whore. Not that it would ever do to be blunt; you could tell that by the way the poor gentleman hemmed and hawed, with yards and yards of padding around an almost invisible meaning, like something too fragile to be jounced.

  Like Emily, she had expected to come here. But no, Greville said he had taken a cottage at Paddington. The air was salubrious there; it would be more suitable. A girl such as Emily, fresh, unspoiled (he winced), accustomed to the country, would naturally prefer country air and a quiet existence alone with him. We must assist our little flowers to unfold.

  Mrs. Cadogan understood perfectly. He could not afford to keep the house.

  “And will there be unsightly marks?” he asked.

  Mrs. Cadogan blinked. “Marks?”

  “It was my understanding that sometimes in these cases, because of the … ah, sudden change in … er, weight … I suppose you might say, that there were in that case, well … ah, marks.”

  Mrs. Cadogan had once been forced to seek employment of a quack in Mecklenberg Square, but a quack, if he knows nothing else, as indeed he doesn’t, at least knows his terminology.

  “You mean striae, sir,” she said. “Why no, I don’t expect so, for I told her not to move about too much. Besides, the birth was premature. It couldn’t have weighed that much.”

  “I should have thought it was the pregnancy that was premature,” said Greville with asperity, but only because he had caught sight of a scratch on a Sheraton chair. With his customary acumen in such matters, if in such matters only, he had been one of the first to buy from Mr. Sheraton’s workshop, while the price was cheap. How had it gotten there?

  To that Mrs. Cadogan had no reply. It had happened before her time.

  *

  Emily had voided the miserable object, but had had to give it suck, and though impatient, what with one thing and another, did not want to see it go. But neither, if she could not have it, did she ever want to see it again.

  The wet nurse, who had made a long journey to fetch it back to its grandmother—for at least they were sure who the grandmother was—paused in the doorway.

  “Now, miss, be sensible.”

  “I don’t want you to take it away.”

  “You hired me to take it away, and what would I do without the money? And you love your grandmother, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to deprive your grandmother of its board and keep, would you? The poor old lady has little enough as it is.”

  “But it’s mine.”

  “And more shame to you,” said the wet nurse heartily. “That’s what I say, and I’ve had ten o’ me own. Each one of them,” she went on, “a shame. For unless they die at once, the lambs, then I have to find a wet nurse for them, at very high rates, I assure you, and where it will all end I’m sure I don’t know. It’s worse than taking in each other’s wash, and with wash, you can wash it more than once and you needn’t be too particular about the dirt on it, neither.”

  “Let me keep it at least one more day.”

  “Indeed, I shall not. I am paid by the day, and, selfish creature, would you starve me? You think of nobody but yourself.”

  “But it’s my baby.”
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br />   “And it’s my livelihood you’re trying to rob me of, so you needn’t take that tone,” said the wet nurse, and waddled away with it toward the door.

  “Poor child, condemned never to know a woman’s love,” shrieked Emily, in a last thespian lurch.

  “Now there’s where you’re wrong,” said the wet nurse. “I should say it was the father it would never know.” The higher the fee the greater the immorality, as far as she could judge, and since in this case the fee had been minimal, she banged the door twice, for she had small patience with small sins. If one is going to sin at all, one may as well get it over with in a lump and devote one’s life to repentance; and Emily, she had seen at once, was a repeater.

  Emily wept for days, but beginning to feel lonely and bored, and having somewhere to go, decided to be about her business, which was to search out a father; though Greville was not a father, he might perhaps make a suitable uncle, given the right niece. She wanted to be soothed. Why has life no temperate zone, when the world has one on the other side of the Channel, so they say, but farther south, or in America, among the Indians?

  “I want,” cried Emily, “to be safe,” forgetting that, as Herr Goethe says, the dangers of life are infinite, and that safety is among them. But then, she had not read Herr Goethe yet and not had, so far, his splendid opportunities for no less splendid observation.

  *

  Though as much the victim as anybody else of the soul’s inflation, Mrs. Cadogan was cubically correct in her estimates, and so met Emily with exactly the right degree of ballon. Greville was shy (which for once stood to his advantage) as well as ruthless, and had gone out on a pretense errand to negotiate the sale of a Greek vase of ravishing shape and pornographic design, so that if the one excellence did not sell it, the other would, for art allows us to contemplate that which we would not countenance in life; it allows us to achieve heights of the spirit otherwise denied us, as he never tired of saying, and besides, he knew just the right buyer.

  It was April, and therefore spring, the season of gratitude. In such weather chilblains cease to itch and begin to heal; it is by such signs that we know it is spring. The snow was swept into thawing heaps, exposing here and there an area of green drugget, thinly worn, called grass. And though the fruit trees had come into bloom, the blossoms had the cloudy, frangible look of Murano glass, sedate but foreign. The air had the faintly puzzling but nostalgic odor of partially evaporated scent, too strong, too sweet, hoarded for too long, and dilute in a gust of wind. In Hyde Park, as Emily drove by, a single exploratory squirrel ran across the ground and spiraled up a tree; a white swan had warm breast feathers for the first time in months, and opened its heavy wings, like a pickpocket’s coat, to show how the trick was done. The road was muddy, despite some lingering frost, another harbinger.

  Emily had spent enough of her life defenseless and on foot, greatly to appreciate the superior elevation and extensive mobility of a carriage. It did feel grand to move along that way, with no more effort than was required to watch the coachman’s back and to prevent one’s own back from being sprained by an unexpected lurch. She sat there with the equanimity of a parcel, misdirected, but now on its way to the right address; it need do nothing but wait to be unwrapped. For the moment, its time is its own.

  The carriage reached Tyburn Hill and went on. To her right, at a distance, stood some houses, like a row of ivory dominoes, waiting to be added to; to her left, open countryside, inhabited by rooks, though while she watched, a cow sat down. The carriage was not moving rapidly. There was time for the cow to sit down. Then the coachman turned into Edgware Row and stopped.

  “My goodness, is this mine?”

  “If it’s not, it soon will be, I expect,” said the coachman, with a wink which clapped her back into the lower orders. It was her voice; though silent, she had felt a lady.

  He handed her down quite respectful-like, as though perhaps this was her first time at this sort of thing, which required gentleness, and the rudeness could wait until later, when the thing was done.

  The front door opened and Mrs. Cadogan came out onto the stoop, chunky and proper, so the coachman had to swallow his grin, hand the trunk down, and believe what he would have preferred to believe, given the chance. They were rich merchants, perhaps, in a small way.

  “Emily,” cried Mrs. Cadogan, with a glance at her daughter’s figure and then relieved smiles.

  “Oh, Ma,” said Emily, who really was most glad to see her, and ran to her, but was the taller of the two, so she did not snuggle well. It was an affecting scene.

  Properly affected, and moreover adequately tipped, the coachman tilted his cap and drove away. There being no neighbors with a curiosity to satisfy, the women went indoors.

  Emily was fond of her mother, for the two women had seen little of each other in their lifetimes, and so had not gotten stuck by that emotional taffy-pull between the generations which leaves each side with sticky fingers always—the solicitude of a mother seldom, if ever, being accompanied by anything but a total obliviousness to her children’s feelings. However, a discreet system of delegated authority (Emily had been reared by her Grandmother Kidd) had left Emily and Mrs. Cadogan free from bitterness. Indeed, so essential were they the one to the other, that they might have been, if not fellow conspirators, then animal and trainer.

  Mrs. Cadogan began training at once, by example, and showed her the house.

  Born to the lower classes, and her experience so far limited exclusively to the upper, Emily had never before been in one of those middle-class establishments where everything is new—like the world before the Fall—but God, Eve and Adam. It was like being in a shop in which everything has been bought for one already, so that there is no agony of choice. Not only was the house fresh as paint, but the paint was fresh as well, in colors of clotted cream, with a French scenic wallpaper in the dining room, the carpets untrod, the furniture polished to a sample sheen. In the library, however, the books looked used, though at least the bindings appeared to have been oiled recently.

  “Who’s Demosthenes?” asked Emily, staring at a set of the Orations in tooled calf.

  “Somebody valuable I expect,” said Mrs. Cadogan proudly. “Mr. Greville is particular.”

  “Oh dear,” said Emily, who had forgotten him for the moment, but felt some reverence for his possessions. “Is he like this, do you suppose?”

  “Well, I moved the furniture about a bit and added flowers. He’s been fussing. I suspect he’s as nervous as you are.”

  “I’m not nervous.”

  “Then pretend to be,” snapped Mrs. Cadogan. “These worldly gentlemen are always shy, you know. Soft words may butter no parsnips, but they do very well for a gentleman, so unless you want to eat parsnips again, use butter. That’s my advice to you. And never show your temper. Mr. Greville does not care for temper. Did you get any jewelry?”

  “Granny had to sell it.”

  “And good riddance. Jewelry is vulgar. He says so, so don’t ask for it. He is not rich, therefore he is apt to be fastidious. Drinking is frowned on, and so is cards. Cosmetics is fast, so don’t use ’em. And now you’d better see the arrangements upstairs.”

  There were four rooms upstairs, four rooms down. The four down were library, drawing room, sitting room, dining room. The four up were, on the left of the stairs, Greville’s bedroom, and behind it Mrs. Cadogan’s bedsitter, containing her few cherished possessions—a cracked Lowestoft plate bearing the arms of the Dukes of Bristol, her marriage lines to Mr. Cadogan (she had found them on a peddler’s barrow and taken a fancy to the name), a small trunk, much traveled and always locked, a china statuette of George II—and on the right of the stairs, Emily’s sitting room and bedroom. There being no attics, the cook and the parlormaid lived in the basement, behind the kitchen.

  The sitting room contained everything necessary to repose and leisure, namely a spinet, or inferior sort of harpsichord with an insufficiency of keys, a music rack, a chair for the as yet unhi
red music teacher, a chaise longue, a table for sirop glasses and bowls of sweets, a glassed bookcase containing the works of Madame de La Fayette in the original and of Mrs. Barbauld in English, a grammar, an embroidery frame, a box for silks, a large mirror in a severe gold frame, a table for playing patience on, and two chairs on either side of the fireplace, one for him and one for her.

  The bedroom, on the other hand, was a cheerful room containing a bed, a chair for breeches and dressing gowns, a small wardrobe (Greville thought of everything, or at any rate, planned to limit expenditure), and on the dressing table a mint copy of Hayley’s Triumphs of Temper, a work of educative merit superior to all those of Hannah More combined. It was to be her Book of Hours. It taught temper, and at the worst, at least its noble numbers were conducive to sleep.

  Across the bed lay, freshly starched, a somewhat peculiar garment, half village milkmaid out of Rousseau, half negligee out of Crèbillon fils.

  “He would like you to wear that. It is a morning costume,” explained Mrs. Cadogan, unpacking the remains of Emily’s finery. “And as I suspected, he would not like you to wear these. So off to the barrowboy they go.”

  “But those are my clothes!”

  “It is a new life, and therefore there will be new clothes,” said Mrs. Cadogan, herself wearing a striped dress, a crisp apron, and a mobcap in which she resembled nothing so much as an amiable toad. “If I can dress the part, you can. So off with your things, and then we’ll go downstairs to wait.”

  The only reassuring thing so far was that in the back garden there was a white lilac tree in early bloom, drowsy with bees, and heavy on the branch. It was an omen. But all the same, the wait seemed very long.

  *

  Greville had been detained. He had had no trouble with the vase. “It is a great art in life to know how to sell air,” says Gracián, subsection 267, or, since Greville could read Spanish, “Gran sutileza del vivar saber vender el aire.” But Greville did not know how to sell air. He merely knew how to displace it; in his case an inherited skill for which, nonetheless, he took great credit. The vase had sold itself, rather winningly.