The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  We fell about with laughter and into more flannel, but I knew between heaves of mirth that there was truth in what she was saying. I think we were ultimately both curiously happy to be free of our chains to men; we both knew what it had meant to be owned by a man, and what parts of us it had slowly killed. I had thought that what I wanted was to possess Din, and be possessed by him. But I know now that it would have destroyed our love. I did not want him for a husband, and for us to welter along with our marriage on the inevitable seas of resentment and quiet loathing. I did not want what I had had with Peter. What I thought I desired, would have been desire’s undoing.

  * * *

  But back to today. For we saw the brougham again this morning, at the other end of Ivy-street. It was a different one, but it hovered just the same, watching the children.

  ‘This ’as got to stop,’ Agatha Marrow said, and looked at me pointedly.

  ‘Indeed it has, Agatha,’ I said, and started to march off up the street towards the carriage.

  ‘No, Dora!’ Sylvia called after me. ‘It might not be safe!’

  I was about ten feet away from the carriage when I stopped, and started to gesticulate at it. I threw a look over my shoulder, and saw that the women were still watching me. I would put on a good show. I waved my arms some more at the carriage, all the while squinting to see if I could see who was within.

  ‘Sir Jocelyn?’ I eventually whispered. ‘Is that you?’

  And then a red glass ball flashed at me like the largest ruby in the world from the window of the carriage, and beneath it a shiny silver cane, and I had my proof.

  ‘I will meet you around the corner,’ I hissed, and waved my arms some more, for the benefit of my audience of mothers. ‘Go back onto Waterloo-road, then turn into Morpeth-place,’ I whispered to the driver, ‘I will meet you behind the Wesleyan church.’ Then I seized my skirts and marched back down Ivy-street, only turning once, to shout, ‘And don’t be going and bothering us again!’

  But I did not stop to receive the approbation from Sylvia, Agatha and the like. I walked past them, remarking breezily that I was off to market, and would Sylvia mind watching Lucinda for me, and with that I popped into the house, seized my shopping basket, and headed off the other way down Ivy-street, and soon was walking along the main road, which I crossed and turned into the little alley-way that was Morpeth-place, where the carriage was waiting for me. I checked that no one was watching me, and then I ambled round onto the pavement, where I was hidden by the carriage itself, and climbed in.

  ‘Dora,’ he said.

  ‘Sir Jocelyn,’ I replied.

  ‘Your courage never ceases to astound me. What would you be having with me?’

  ‘I might ask the same of you. Surely it is time you relinquished your attachment with the inhabitants of Ivy-street.’

  ‘When one’s flesh and blood live there?’

  ‘Sylvia?’ I asked.

  ‘Nathaniel.’

  ‘He – he – is yours?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘Forgive me. I was under the impression that you thought Sylvia had been unfaithful.’

  ‘Would that she had. It was bound to catch up on me when I attempted to sire my own.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  And then he pulled off his hat, and tugged at his hair, and it came off in his hand too, and again I saw that peculiar vision I had not comprehended that fateful night in Berkeley-square.

  ‘Must I spell it out to you, Dora?’ he said, almost plaintively. His scalp was speckled with dark tufts of close-shaven hair.

  And so he told me of his father, a French diplomat, named Yves Florent Chevalier, who married his mother, Elizabeth Talbot, a renowned English beauty, in Paris in the summer of 1825. Two years later Chevalier was posted to the French consulate in Algiers, as diplomatic relations were deteriorating between Algeria and France.

  ‘You have heard the story of the Dey and the flywhisk?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘The Dey, as Deys are renowned for so doing, was getting all hot and bothered by an invoice for some trifle, a bag or two of wheat or something like that, some thirty years overdue. My father was in the famous meeting where the agitated Dey got so consternated he frapped the consul with, of all things, a flywhisk.’

  ‘A flywhisk?’

  ‘An ornate bamboo flywhisk, such as a eunuch would hover with around a concubine.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Only that the King of France decided to come over insulted, ordered a naval blockade of the entire Algerian coast, and the rest is, as they say, history.’

  ‘Is this the same Dey that features in The Lustful Turk? Was that not set in Algiers?’

  Sir Jocelyn laughed and seized my hand in his.

  ‘I always hoped it were. What do we have as the likely first publication date of The Lustful Turk?’

  ‘1828.’

  ‘Exactly. But the Dey who flicked the flywhisk was called Khodja Hussein. And our fictional hero was called . . .’

  ‘Ali.’ The tale was still alarmingly clear in my head. ‘But forgive me, Sir Jocelyn. What does this have to do with your parents?’

  ‘Yves Chevalier was in the very room in the palace where this infamous and fateful meeting took place. My mother, alas, was elsewhere.’

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘They never told me the full story. I like to think that she was the first luscious lovely that the Dey met as he stormed out of the meeting-room, flywhisk still in hand, and that his lusts overtook him . . .’

  ‘Sir Jocelyn! How you speak about your mother!’

  ‘. . . but in truth, Dora, I believe she was found wandering the streets around the palace in a state of undress. I was born nine months later in Paris, after which she and I were returned to England in disgrace, she was thrown into a lunatic asylum, where she lived out her days, and I was sent to her sister, my Aunt Maude.’

  ‘I remember asking you if you had adopted your aunt’s surname, on your first visit to the bindery,’ I said.

  ‘You remember well. She was a reputable old girl; she had married well, and was widowed young, so under her influence I was able to become a person of reasonable standing.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Yves Chevalier was killed in Algiers in the battle of 1830. My real father is the stuff of my fantasies: you see now why I would rather my mother had been seduced by the Dey than violated by any old common or garden son of Ham who happened to be in the streets of the city that night.’

  ‘Are you telling me that you – you – are . . .’ I struggled for the words.

  ‘Half-caste. Mulatto. Yes.’

  ‘Hence the . . .’ I gestured down at the wig he was holding in his lap.

  ‘. . . hairpiece. Yes. My skin is blessedly pale, but the hair has always been a giveaway.’

  I sat silently for a while, trying to comprehend fully what I was hearing.

  ‘So now you know why I was unable to deliver you to the police for killing Charles. Or rather, you know one of the reasons why I would not have done so. We were bound each to the other that night. I witnessed your sin, you mine.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. Your sin, as in, your books?’

  ‘No, you fool. Have you not heard a word I have said? My heritage.’

  ‘Your heritage is not a sin, Sir Jocelyn, any more than mine is.’

  ‘That, Dora dearest, is debatable.’

  ‘But still, Sir Jocelyn, how could I possibly have used that knowledge against you? How could it have been an equal threat to the revelation of a murder?’

  ‘You might not have done, but Sylvia would have. It would have been sweet revenge, to ruin my name in society, and all I have fought against the odds for. I have built my very career on the subjugation of my own race, and time after time I have come to the painful conclusion that we are the inferior species.’

  ‘Only because you wish it to be so.’ I bit my lip. I had so many question
s that needed answering, but where to start? ‘You asked Diprose to dispose of me, Sir Jocelyn,’ I said solemnly, as an opening.

  ‘Dora, I would have disposed of Charles first if I could have done. You saved me the trouble.’

  ‘Did you know the chloroform would kill him?’

  ‘He duped me into teaching him how to administer it correctly. He said he wanted to relieve his sister of her pains in childbirth. I did not know he was going to use it on you. He deserved it.’

  ‘I always knew you were dangerous.’

  ‘Come now, it was the safest option for us all. I know not of a single surgeon who has been prosecuted for death by chloroform. “Chloroform syncope” I wrote on his death certificate, which was true, was it not? Then I donated his body to medical science.’

  ‘Tell me, why did you want to dispose of him?’

  ‘I was tiring of him. Only he persisted in trying to impress me. The more vulnerable he felt his position in my favour, the more he overreached himself.’

  ‘You did not want that hideous binding?’

  ‘Come, come, Dora. Every medical library of note has an anatomy bound in the hide stripped from a dissected corpse. A well-bound whore gives me no thrills.’

  ‘I was repulsed by it. I wanted revenge.’

  ‘You wanted my guts for garters.’

  I laughed, despite myself. ‘No. I wanted your scrotum for a nice, soft silky purse, to keep my pennies in.’

  ‘I will leave it to you in my will. No, Charles did not understand sentimentality when it came to choosing his victims,’ he said. ‘I could not finger your buttocks as I turned those pages. As exciting a prospect as it sounds, you are, nevertheless, preferable to me alive. And I never agreed to abusing my medical knowledge in order to threaten your daughter in such a way.’

  ‘I know you didn’t.’ I shifted myself closer to him, able to relax at last. Then I whispered, and he bowed his head towards mine to hear me better. ‘She would have you back, you know. Sylvia still loves you.’ My lips brushed his ears, and I felt him tense. ‘This – what you have revealed to me – wouldn’t matter now to her. She has left society behind her, and cares not for it any more.’

  But Sir Jocelyn would have none of it. He sat up straight again, and fingered the curtains. ‘Your attempt is well meaning but futile, Dora,’ he said sadly.

  ‘Please, Sir Jocelyn. You have a son together.’

  ‘It is too preposterous even to consider.’

  ‘She loves you, Sir Jocelyn. Or does your hatred for yourself inure you to that?’ For is it not, I was realising, a futile endeavour to consider love without love itself? Love viewed from a place of hatred is a painful sight, and only serves to harden the heart against it further. Love seen from a place of hatred, I mused: at last, a fair definition of the literature he had been asking me to bind.

  Sir Jocelyn interrupted my reveries. ‘There is nothing here for me any more. Did you not hear about the razzia? They seized and destroyed all my translations. I passed them through Holywell-street for one night only, and then they were gone. Even Pizzy is still in prison.’

  ‘Why haven’t you got him out?’

  ‘He was proving rather tedious too. You had shown us what a relief it was to put Diprose somewhere where even the Home Office could not reach him, and we wished the same for Bennett.’

  ‘And there was I thinking the British Empire stretched to most places.’

  He laughed, and continued with his previous train of thought. ‘No, sex is too dangerous these days. My devotion shall be to anthropological studies. I am off to Africa in a month, and I intend never to return.’

  ‘You said that four years ago.’

  But his silence spoke more than his words, and I knew that this would indeed be the last time I saw him. Why else would he be so candid with a secret he had kept for so long?

  ‘I am sorry about your tattoos,’ he said suddenly. ‘They were rather beautiful, though. The image of them is still firmly embedded in my mind’s eye.’

  ‘They’re not so bad now. Pansy learnt from a sailor, and has altered the insignia for me. It was not an image I wished to carry with me. She always was a fine needlesmith.’

  ‘You could always take your inspiration from Olive Oatman, or those sailors shipwrecked in the South Pacific, and claim you were abducted and forcibly tattooed by a savage tribe.’

  ‘Which wouldn’t be too far from the truth, Sir Jocelyn, if you think about it.’

  ‘I shall miss you, Dora Damage. You are the one I couldn’t have.’

  ‘I was not aware that you wanted me.’

  ‘Would it have made any difference?’

  ‘No.’

  Then he seized both my shoulders, pulled me towards him, and crushed my lips against his. He grabbed at my bonnet, and tore his fingers through my hair, then another hand went to my thigh, then my knee, and tugged at my skirts.

  ‘No, Sir Jocelyn! You may not do that!’ But I feared the inevitable. For all our intimate conversation, I was still just another serving-woman, about to be undone by just another aristocrat. I had read of enough of those.

  But to my surprise, he nodded and moved away from me. ‘My apologies, Mrs Damage. Forgive me.’

  We sat in silence for a while. I put my finger to my lips, and felt where he had been, and thought of Din, and Lucinda, and Sylvia and Nathaniel, and divorce, and possession, and the stirrings inside me, and eventually I repeated more gently, ‘You may not do that.’ Then I added, ‘But I will kiss you again. You may do this. Only a kiss, mind.’

  And I kissed him, and then his neck, and his ear, and across his cheek, then worked my way back to his lips, which were sweet, wet and golden, before pulling away. It was deliciously unsatisfying, and I flushed with my own audacity.

  ‘So, Mrs Damage,’ he said as he sank into my arms. ‘You do have a penchant for black men after all.’

  ‘No, Sir Jocelyn,’ I retorted. ‘I have a penchant for those who fight for freedom. Only you, I believe, are choosing to stay in your chains.’

  ‘There was a noose around my neck from the day I was born,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You chose not to remove it.’

  ‘I am a hybrid.’

  ‘You are not Caliban. It is not a calamity.’

  He was silent for a while, then lifted his head and spoke again. ‘How dare you accuse me of not fighting for freedom. It is all I have ever worked for.’

  ‘It is a peculiar freedom, Sir Jocelyn, which depends on the subjugation of others for its existence.’

  He laid his head on my bosom once more, and I stroked the dark, coarse stubs of his real hair. Then I kissed him again, only with an efficiency that betrayed its finality, took the hairpiece from him, and arranged it on his head.

  ‘I must leave you now,’ I said. ‘I believe we are finished here.’ I got up to leave. But before I opened the door of the carriage, I paused.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A thought, Sir Jocelyn. A favour, if I dare.’

  ‘Careful. It will bind you to me.’

  ‘Am I not already? You shall keep my secrets, I shall keep yours, to the grave.’

  ‘Proceed. How I wish I shall never see you again.’

  ‘It’s Jack. Jack Tapster. He’s been inside four-and-a-half years now. Might your Home Office savage be able to help, now his time is not spent repeatedly releasing Diprose?’

  He did not answer me, but rubbed his nose with his forefinger, and turned away from me as if to look out of the window, although it was draped with velvet.

  ‘Good day, Sir Jocelyn,’ I said. I picked up my basket from the floor of the carriage, and climbed out. I did not look back as I walked away, for my mind was already with Nathaniel, who really had nothing remarkable about his skin, not in Lambeth anyway, not so as one would notice, and it started to trouble me most deeply, that here we were, two generations later, and there was not so much as a trace of his Algerian grandfather in the boy, not a smudge of brown that distinguish
ed him from me or Nora or Agatha or Patience or Pansy. And let Nathaniel marry one of Jack’s red-headed baby sisters, and that will truly be the end of it. But then I wondered whether that was not the way of the world; what I carried forth into the world of my grandparents was negligible likewise.

  Or was it? Of course it wasn’t. My little Lucinda, dosed up on bromide; my grandfather Georgie Tanner, poisoned in his mental asylum. Three generations apart, same old condition. The blank book of life presented to us by St Bartholomew as we are born is a fantasy; our heritage is our destiny; and who are we to choose which bits of our mother dominate over which bits of our father in the moment of conception?

  Thus roamed my thoughts as I strode back towards Ivy-street, but as I crossed Waterloo-road I was aware of Sir Jocelyn’s brougham passing me, and rattling off northwards away from me, and I stopped briefly to watch it recede. And when I started to walk once more it was as if the narrow streets of the London map were no longer confining me, that there was something in my step, in the way the basket swung at my side, and in my smile, that felt curiously light and untrammelled, as if all that had hampered me were disappearing along with the carriage, as if it were taking with it a past that no longer served me.

  But then it stopped ahead of me, and I felt no need to avert my step, for there was no danger to be had any more. Sir Jocelyn’s head reappeared from the carriage.

  ‘Dora,’ he said as I neared.

  ‘Yes, Sir Jocelyn?’

  He smiled broadly, albeit somewhat sadly, tipped his hat at me by way of farewell, and said quietly, such that I could scarcely hear it over the rumble of traffic and trains: ‘Your arse may be a perfect octavo, but your spirit shall not be bound.’

  Epilogue

  When my mother’s publishers requested that I write a preface for the publication of the first edition, I found myself unable so to do. For her past is history, and I cannot preface it. I can only write an afterword, which I agreed to do, for the text is still somewhat incomplete.