*
Lady Paramont was building a chicken coop.
Sir William sat in a wicker chair on the lawn, a rug across his knees, steeped in that autumn tea called sun, and marveled. He was also faintly shocked, for of course one does nothing with one’s own hands. One orders it done. This reversion to type at the age of thirty-seven appalled him. She was a daughter of the people after all.
But Emma, with Mrs. Cadogan, was happy, oblivious and full of laughter. She was having a lark.
A white hen flew up into a tree, and Emma was after it, calling “Cupidy, Cupidy,” and shaking her skirts. It was certainly droll, he had to admit that. A cock stalked the gravel path. And when Emma and Mrs. Cadogan lined up along the canal and gravely took two mallards and three mandarin ducks out of squawking baskets—their orange feet folded up under them, held them out and dumped them in, whereupon they righted themselves self-righteously and paddled about, reassured if mystified, with the hauteur of animals recently picked up but now themselves again—he had to admit he was amused. He laughed outright. It is true: as we get old, we return to simple things and take comfort from the very shrubs; and if we are just waiting, it is pleasanter to sit on the lawn in the pale sun to wait, than to lurk indoors.
He wrote to Nelson that night, on a smooth-polished mahogany table, while the crickets cracked away outside in purely aural constellations,
We have now inhabited your Lordship’s premises some days & can now speak with some certainty. I have lived with our dear Emma several years. I know her merit, have a great opinion of the head & heart that God Almighty has been pleased to give her; but a seaman alone could have given a fine woman power to chuse & fit up a residence without seeing it himself … You have nothing but to come and enjoy immediately; you have a good mile of pleasant dry walk around your own farm [beyond lay the cow pastures]. Your plan as to stocking the Canal with fish is exactly mine. I will answer for that in a few months time you may command a good dish of fish at a moment’s notice.
When the purveyor arrived, he was as good as his word and even peered into the baskets while the man dumped the minnows into the canal, a slithery, silvery mass.
“Probably the child will be lodged at Merton, at least in the spring when she can have the benefit of our walks. It will make the poor mother happy I am sure,” said Nelson, and sent off for his father, who was still seeing that woman, to ask him to pay a visit. On October 23rd, he arrived himself, at dusk, the cold air pungent as the odor of apples in winter store, and paused outside the gate, as overwhelmed, as frightened and as delighted as a child at its first pantomime.
There was the house; there was the steeple; open them out, and there were the people; though he had requested privacy and not to be annoyed by visitors or strangers, for it was retirement with his friends he wished for.
A low autumnal mist hung over the river, and from the invisible garden came the smell of leafmold and compost heaps. Light from the windows shimmered on the mist; and then there he was, ringing at his own door like any beggar, for there being no carriage drive, he had walked up the path—as Sir William would have said, had the season been later and so appropriate to such a remark—to view the Presèpio.
It was Sir William, tall and gracious, who opened the door.
“My dear Nelson,” he said, like a father with a marriageable daughter, who quite approved the match but knew why the guest had called, “Emma will be down directly.” We need an intermediary to our joys. Sir William was a male confidant through whom it was possible to explain the offstage action and yet keep the unities intact.
It was a charade; and if it lacked an Italian opera-buffa passion, well, this was England, which was jollier. In England, we do the same things, in our own way, but we give them different names, for if the wasp is missing, so is the sting.
On the wall of the entryway, “The Ambassadress” held Romney’s dog in her lap. Things dragged about for years now stood on tables or hung from walls which did not creak in a high gale. The chandeliers did not sway. Everything had come to rest.
And when Sir William bowed himself upstairs at 10:30 and Emma, devoted as ever, followed him, Nelson had a final tipple at the port while listening to Sir William walk to the south wing, where his bedroom was, while Emma’s lighter tread returned to the north one.
Although he had no acquaintance among those of the upper gentry the next moral stage over—who were always careful to ask Y when Lady X came, and Z because otherwise Lord W. wouldn’t, and so did not recognize his feelings for what they were—his emotion on hearing the creaking in the corridors above was much the same as theirs. He had seen to everything. The weekend would go.
*
In the housekeeper’s room, Mrs. Cadogan, who had heard the same sounds, listened to Sir William mutter his way to bed, and thought that though no doubt some folk found it all very odd—and indeed she found it so herself—being snug and warm inside an anomalous situation was by no means as bad as the way it looked when you were outside looking in; in fact, once you had caught your breath, it was only natural. She also considered that Merton (and this snug little room with the Lowestoft plate, locked trunk, pottery bust of George II, and Sir William’s gift miniature in a velvet frame on the dresser) suited her. It was all very well for dear Emma to write of her in Palermo that “she has adopted a mode of living that is charming, lives with us, dines &c, &c, onely when she does not like it, for example, great dinners, she herself refuses & as allways a friend to dine with her & La Signora Madre dell’ Ambasciatrice is known all over Palermo,” but it was agreeable not to have to refuse great dinners and not to have to speak Eyetalian.
Tomorrow she was looking forward to that excellent lifetime game of keeping the tradespeople in their place, and “Of course in Cheshire we never heard the likes of that, well I never!”; and in other words (her Eyetalian was nothing much, but her French was fair) la vie commence demain.
*
In her room, Emma, who had had almost twenty years to learn that desires once satisfied do not have to be satisfied too often—though what do men get out of it, that makes them like it so?—was primped, primed and waiting, and so not at all surprised (though she affected it) to see the handle of her door turn.
But the next day was better. She was a little girl. She wore white.
*
They went for a tour of the grounds, both the mile of dry path and the streams which crossed the property.
“It is our Nile,” said Nelson to Emma.
“It is the Canal,” said Sir William, with familiar memories of Stowe.
It was in truth the Wandle, a minor tributary of the Thames. A wattled fence prevented the escape of the fish, but one of the royal swans had hopped over from the other side and now sailed about, to the vast annoyance of the ducks, who were commoners.
Brother William had arrived with his daughter Charlotte. He was always cordial to Emma. She could have no legal children, and for so long as Nelson lived with her, neither could Fanny. He was a loving brother.
When Sir William went fishing, Charlotte tagged along. She had taken a fancy to the old gentleman, even if he did bark at her when all she had done was to upset his creel, shout a bit, and throw rocks in the Wandle.
He has been very, very happy since he arrived, and Charlotte has been very attentive to him. Indeed we all make it our constant business to make him happy [wrote Emma to Mrs. William], Sir William is fonder than ever, and we manage very well in regard to our establishment, pay share and share alike, so it comes easy to both parties [of course when they were in town, Sir William paid the expenses. Twenty-three Piccadilly was his house] … Sir William and Charlotte caught 3 large pike. She helps him and Milord on with their great coats; so now I have nothing to do.”
“Child, I do not propose to stoop to the height of a dwarf at my age. You must let me mind my own coat,” said Sir William tautly, trying to grab it away from her. But the sly child was not only a great clack, she had hooks for hands, and if she fanci
ed herself injured, put up an enormous fuss.
“Dammit!” he snapped. “Give it back.”
So off she went, wailing, toward the kitchen quarters.
“But she likes you,” said Emma, bewildered.
“She is a self-centered, willful, murderous, cacophonous monomaniac,” said Sir William. “And, moreover, I am pleased to say, no relative of mine.”
“Her mother doesn’t know how to dress her, poor thing, that’s all; her armpits bind,” said Emma.
“Nonetheless, if she is not discouraged from screaming along the canal, I shall strike her with the next pike I strike,” said Sir William, and took himself upstairs.
“Charlotte,” said Emma, “I am afraid, child, that fishing is something men do.”
“Daddy doesn’t.”
“Daddy is not …” began Emma, and paused to consider. “Daddy is a clergyman,” she decided finally, but it had been a close thing.
Next day it was she who had to interrupt him. She had been gardening, for though women have no hobbies beyond meddling, marrying off and needlework, when they get past the childbearing age and begin to ape the Graiae, they turn either to gardening or public works. Gardens have no menopause; there is always the hope of something new; one can bully a bulb as well as a baby. As for public works, they are only a form of the higher meddling, and so gratifying in the extreme.
“William,” she said, “will you fetch Charlotte from her music lesson for me?”
“No,” said Sir William, who so far today had not caught a thing.
“But I can’t go. My hands are too dirty.”
“Indeed they are, my dear.”
“Now don’t make a scene,” she coaxed. “Someone has to fetch her; she can’t trill away all night.”
“Why not? There would then be hope that by the morrow she might trill no more,” snapped Sir William, but he fetched her.
However, even Charlotte went home in time, all eagerness and adenoids, and life flowed on, or would have had not Emma followed her usual custom of silting up the time with guests, to form some diversion in this backwater.
“The whole establishment and way of life are such as to make me angry as well as melancholy,” said Lord Minto after a visit. “The house is covered with nothing but pictures of her and him, and the love she makes to Nelson is not only ridiculous but disgusting. To make his own house a mere looking glass to view himself all day, is bad taste.”
“The complaint my dear son has felt,” said the Reverend Edmund, “is, I know, very painful. He must not venture without a thick covering, both head and feet, even to admire your parterres of snowdrops which now appear in all their splendor. The white robe which January wears, bespangled with ice, is handsome to look at, but we must not approach too near her.” He, too, had been brought around, though he had pangs about deserting Fanny.
“Let everything be buried in oblivion; it will pass away like a dream,” wrote that lady, making her final effort to overcome the inevitable.
But Nelson had found oblivion elsewhere.
Sir William had not. The chickens squawked. The rooster crowed. And Charlotte had come back for a visit.
“It is but reasonable,” he wrote to Greville, “after having fagged all my life, that my last days should pass off comfortably and quietly.” He was beginning to discover that a paying guest has no home. He minded the infidelity far less than the noise, the disturbance, the drinking, and Emma more Wild Polly of Portsmouth than still and perfect as a vase, unraveling her Attitudes at Portici.
Also, there were the almost quarrels.
“My man of business says you told him to tell me not to send you any more advice about seeing company,” wrote Nelson to Emma, having escaped to town.
“Nothing at present disturbs me but my debt and the nonsense I am obliged to submit to here to avoid coming to an explosion,” wrote Sir William to Greville, “which wou’d be attended with many disagreeable effects, and would totally destroy the comfort of the best man and the best friend I have in the world. However I am determined that my quiet shall not be disturbed, let the nonsensical world go on as it will.”
*
“Has she been working on you?”
“Working on me? What about?”
“About the will,” said Greville.
“No, of course not,” said Sir William, realizing he must look as ill as he felt, which would never do. But he managed to sound thoroughly shocked—convincingly, too, for of course she had been. Since they had done nothing to earn it, naturally his relatives would feel they had a right to his money. Not that there would be much.
Greville came neither to 23 Piccadilly nor to Merton these days. It would be indelicate of him to do so, he said, by which he meant that the situation there was too indelicate for him to stomach. “And as Vice-Chamberlain to His Majesty, I could not allow it even to be suggested—as my presence would suggest—that Their Majesties lent color to … ah … um … em … well, any irregularity.”
*
“But I am his wife. Why should Greville have everything?” demanded Emma. She was indignant.
“What signifies the dirty acres to you?” shouted Nelson right back. “You’ve not even seen them.”
“I haven’t seen the income either,” said Emma. “Nor has Sir William. And you yourself said Greville was a scoundrel.”
“Then there is no need to keep him company.”
“But I don’t like Greville!” wailed Emma. It was always so difficult to make men understand that a woman has so little to fight with, to protect her little all, that a scrupulous choice of implements is seldom in her power.
*
“My partiality to you, and the thorough confidence I have in you, despite of any attempts that have been made to disturb them, remains, and will, I am confident, to my last moment, in full force,” wrote Sir William to Greville. “My visit to Milford last year convinced me of the propriety of all your operations there, which may still operate in my favour during the short time I can expect to live, but must be attended with immense profit to my heirs hereafter….”
Emma was a Hamilton by marriage, not by character, and there is an entail of the heart as well as of land. There was, perhaps fortunately, only one of her. But there were many Hamiltons, and that they be provided for was no more than Roman piety. In each generation, the same couple play out the same inevitable drama—it is only the circumstantial details that change—and for this they will need the family costumes, props and properties.
“I admit she is sometimes difficult,” said Nelson.
“Always admit what cannot be denied,” agreed Sir William, “but only to yourself; never to others. That way you save both the appearance and the reality.”
He was not bitter. Nonetheless, he knew that an old man must never ask for anything he cannot pay for; so much for candles, so much for wine, and a lien against the estate in order to bribe a proper funeral and an affectionate regard.
Alone in the house at 23 Piccadilly, he found himself trying to remember when emotion in him had died. It was difficult to detect the exact moment, since he had been a dutiful son, an affectionate husband, a fond uncle, a passionate connoisseur of the antique, a kindly lover, an obliging husband the second time, a warm friend upon occasion; there was no chink anywhere, therefore it must have been at some other time—when he was a child perhaps. He had thus come equipped to maturity, for it is true, the absence of consideration allows us to be considerate; the death of loving, to be affectionate; the irrelevance of hope, to be cheerful; death by slow social strangulation, to be sociable; and if we can hold our liquor, so much the better—we shall be clubbable fellows to the end. So we become the fetches of ourselves, always beckoning, but no one comes, because we are not there. We are only an appearance. We have become realists.
Dear me, this won’t do at all, said Sir William to himself, rather hoping Mrs. Cadogan would appear with one of her loathsome cups of beef broth, but she was at Merton. It is my body is depressed, not I.
Though he had been sensible of its inevitability, even as a young man, Sir William had seldom pondered the decline itself. There are only two forms of decay available to us: either one dies surrounded by one’s loved ones, or else one goes off to the graveyard in a weary rage, like a bull elephant, all by oneself. Which is to say, the cleaning woman finds you the next morning dead, with a book fallen off the coverlet and the candle snuffer never used. All of which was unavoidable and therefore could be accepted. What he could not accept, and had never envisioned, was that one should sit dying surrounded by loved ones who not only paid you no heed whatsoever, but screamed their heads off besides.
The ancient Romans, when simulating that civilization to which they aspired but for which they would make no effort beyond the borrowing, were saved from the horrors of decay—if eminent enough—by the social discipline, legal benefits and imperial sanction of suicide. When they could not kill each other, they calmly (we are told calmly) killed themselves. But that was before Christianity imposed dalliance upon even the post-Augustan mind and went fishing for souls with the sky hook of salvation, jerking us ashore whether we wished to be landed or not.
The next best thing, I suppose, thought Sir William, since I am about to leave England for the last time, is to pay the obligatory round of courtesy calls and farewell visits. And indeed it will be agreeable to do so, for people are always at their pleasantest just before you leave. And since I do not like this house empty, back to Merton Place I suppose it must be.
*
Nelson had bought two cows, two calves, the back pasture and the duck close, too. He proposed a farm.
“Emma, do you like what you have become?” asked Sir William, thinking of Greville’s Paulus Potter and perhaps of his Honorable Emily Bertie, too.
“Become?” she asked, astonished. “Why, I am what I have always been.” She went on feeding the chickens.
Sir William Page 34
