The woman shot him a filthy glance.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” said Stevenson, piqued with himself for the thoughtless quip.
She eyed him skeptically.
“Truly I am.”
“Well, you’d best be,” said Mary, relaxing once again. “So, tell me about the lucky Mrs. S.,” she said at length.
“My mother?” he grinned.
“No, the other. Yer missus.”
“She’s a bit older, it’s true.”
“And you met her…?”
“In France. Through Bob. My cousin Bob Stevenson.”
“I remember Bob,” exclaimed Mary. “Lord, Lou, give me some credit.”
“I will. I do. It was at Fountainebleau, you know. The artists’ colony. Bob was living there and he invited me to visit. Fanny was a student.”
“Fanny? You’ve married a woman named Fanny?” Mary’s face reddened with mirth. Stevenson nodded. “Well, damme! You always loved a good fanny, didn’t you? So, are there any wee Stevensons then? Yours and your Fanny’s?”
“Fanny—Frances—has two children, by a previous marriage. A girl and a boy. Twenty-two and twelve. There was a third.”
“Was?”
“He died. Consumption.”
“How terrible. To lose a bairn.” She tilted her head in sympathy.
“It was shortly before I met her. She rarely speaks of it.”
“All the more sign of her grief.”
Stevenson nodded, snuffed his cigarette, and stared around the room. Baxter was still standing at the bar, with the other woman pressed up against him. She had her fingers on his watch chain and tugged at it playfully. “Baxter’s married as well,” he remarked, motioning towards his friend. “You know?”
“He doesn’t act it. Do you?” It was difficult to know if her glance were an inquiry or an invitation.
He looked away. “It’s the drink. Don’t you think?”
She shrugged and looked back towards the bar. “It commonly is. The whore’s best friend is drink. Ginny,” she called out to her colleague, “take your talons off our Charlie, now. We’re deadly parched over here, can’t you see?” Her compatriot thumbed her nose, but she backed away from Baxter and traipsed gaily back to the table of youths, plumping herself languorously into the lap of the most inebriated of the lot. Baxter returned with the glasses and raised his own.
“To happy memories, friends. And to jollity.”
“To jollity,” echoed Mary, clinking with Stevenson and downing the gin in a trice. She inhaled deeply and, pulling back her shoulders, looked the writer squarely in the face. “Speakin’ o’ drink and bairns too soon gone, you know about Ferrier?”
“I do,” replied Stevenson. “We do. Ferrier’s why I’ve come up from London.”
“I havena seen ’im in months. Word is, though…” She met his eye and nodded grimly.
“I know. I scarce know what to hope for.”
“Well, it’ll all be over soon, I ween.” She leaned closer, her eyes cool but searching. “You’ve not seen him then?”
“Not yet. Likely tomorrow,” answered Stevenson with a weary exhalation.
“It wilna be easy, I’m thinkin’. They say it’s his liver. From all the whisky. I seen it before.” She leaned back, reached into a sleeve, and pulled out a handkerchief to swipe at her nose. “They go all yellow. And bleed at the nose, often enough.”
“Many thanks, Mary,” interjected Baxter at volume. “We need a cheering up.”
“Go bugger yourself, you nasty prick. He was your friend, too.”
“Is, Mary,” replied the lawyer. “Is my friend. Dinna bury the lad whilst he’s still kickin’.”
Mary ignored the remark, turning in her seat to gaze at the fire. “A sweeter man there never was. Most times, leastwise. There were nights,” she chuckled, “when we’d hear singin’ from afar up the street, Virginia and me…unmistakable. You knew it was him comin’ along.”
“La ci darem la mano,” sang Stevenson. “Mozart.”
“I wouldn’t know. But he sung, he did, like his was the most beautiful soul ever created. The darkest December night turned summer gloamin’ with it. But then…” She sighed and shook her head.
“Then what?” asked Baxter. “Well, you know. There was other times—more of ’em later on in years—when he’d go all distant like. As though he didn’t know you… as though he was looking for someone else. Or somethin’ else.” She folded her hands and looked down on them, pursing her painted lips.
For a moment, the three of them sat there, silent, in the hot glow of the grate.
“His tastes could run…well, no. Enough o’ that!” She slapped her knee. “Least he wasn’t never one o’ them with a stick. Or a knife.”
“Or a knife?” queried Stevenson.
“Takin’ without payin’, you know. They’re all about these days, the bastards. Anyway, we’re none of us saints, are we? Least of all me.”
“Ach, you are a saint, Mary,” countered Baxter, reaching out for her shoulder and shaking it roughly. “An angel of mercy. So proven many a time.”
“Takes a lawyer to gild a common daisy,” said the whore as she slapped his hand away. “Now off with ye both. Home to your wives and mothers. I’ve not the least interest in ye.”
“But I may have some unfinished business here,” protested Baxter. He peered over towards the bar, this side of which the other woman lay back against one of the young men, giggling as she held his hand tightly against a breast.
“No you don’t,” said Mary. “Not tonight. Take him home, Louis. And spank him if you get a chance.”
“I fear he might relish a paddling,” laughed Stevenson. “And then where would I be?”
“Possessed of a driving notion for your next unlikely fable?” suggested Baxter.
“I’m not sure my public is ready, Johnson…for such an unseemly narrative.”
“Then you’ll have to bring ’em along with you,” offered Mary. “The public. Trust me, there’s a market in this world for more than you can imagine.”
Stevenson closed the front door of 17 Heriot Row as quietly as he could manage, one hand on the knob to keep the latch from clicking, the other pressed against both the door and the frame as the two met and settled firmly together.
He might have sobered some on the chilly walk from Old Town to the refined Georgian row where he had lived since he was seven. He pressed his cheek languidly against his fingers as they lingered on the wood, drinking in the cool of them, registering that strangeness when one part of the body is in a very different condition than another. Feeling more collected, he pulled back and turned his head to listen. No sound but his breathing broke the stillness of the entrance hall. He threw the deadbolt and slipped his key into his coat pocket. Stooping to remove his shoes, he went to place them quietly under the side table where, the last he knew, a pair of his childhood gloves still lay waiting for a winter that would never come again. No, he thought. Better not leave footwear down here to be found in the morning by parent or maid, mute testimony to the lateness and stealth of his return.
He shifted his shoes to his other hand, curling his fingers inside the still-warm heels, and slipped through the glass inner doors and across the wide flagstones to the staircase. Hand on the polished rail down which he had anciently slithered like a weasel, those times when no adult was present to see, he stepped up towards the moonlight that flooded in through the glazed cupola high above. He strove to tread weightlessly, fancying himself, for a daft moment, a Montgolfier balloon rising faster and faster until it burst in an apocalyptic clatter up through the skylight. Not a tread, in fact, creaked beneath his stockings, any more than they had creaked throughout his university years, when he had so often crept up past his parents’ bedroom in far worse physical and moral condition than at present. Somehow it had escaped his recollection that the staircase was made of stone. He realized he had been holding his breath.
Halfway up to his room, he paused again, half
expecting his parents to crash out through their bedroom door and ask if he had thought any further about the matter they had discussed that evening over a hasty tea. Instead, there issued from the room nothing but the cycling rasp of his father’s breathing. The old man would be lying, as always, flat on his back in the stately four-poster, the one that had passed down through generation upon generation of successful Stevensons—carved walnut haven for engineers spawned by other engineers as each, in turn, commenced and concluded his narrow but remunerative life journey.
Beset by a sudden tickle in his nose, he fought the instinct to sneeze, tightening his throat and tucking his chin. He tiptoed through the moonlight pooling there on the carpet runner and climbed on up to his room, closing the door behind him as carefully as he had done below. Safely inside, he relaxed.
Damn! He had dropped his shoes without thinking, and one of them had tumbled off the carpet and fetched up against the baseboard with a resonant clunk. He imagined a company of mice inside the wall skittering along on tiny pink feet, towing behind them their obscenely naked tails. They would have frozen at the sound, peeping anxiously from side to side, nostrils twitching, whiskers as well.
He shuffled wearily towards his bed, shrugging off his coat and pulling half-heartedly at his cravat. Had he meant to stay out this late? He looked at his watch. Quarter til two. “Merde!” he hissed. He was expected for breakfast.
Fanny, counter to his every expectation, was unrelenting in her insistence that he hang or fold his clothing every evening. He remembered, in contrast, their first nights together, when some shaky dam of propriety had finally ruptured and they’d torn off each other’s garments with the giddy abandon of children loosed on gifts at Christmas. They had awakened as in an arbor after a tornado, their copious fig leaves strewn hither and yon such that there was no disguising what they had done, no denial of what they had become; she the mother turned adulteress; he a wife-stealer, somehow evolved from the pious child who had so often lain awake, just here, trembling through the night’s bleakest hours over the fate of his eternal soul. On more than one of those post-coital mornings he had found a button missing from his shirt, once even from the fly of his trousers. As soon, however, as that inaugural, all-mastering passion had waned—when Fanny in fact next welcomed her monthly “visitor”—it was ever and always folding before fondling. He grinned to think of her there at the hotel in Bournemouth, most likely with Sam in her bed, and he tossed his coat and cravat onto a chair.
He dropped his trousers to the floor and stepped out of them, shaking his leg to free a foot as he shuffled over to the basin. A candle stood on the washstand, matches in a box just to the side. Once the taper was alight—its apostrophe of flame barely quivering in the still air—he looked at the face in the mirror.
Lit from below and from the side, it scarcely seemed his own. Exceedingly lean, but a little ruddy from drink and the cold. Faint crows’ feet, weren’t they, just sprouting from the corners of those strangely plan-gent eyes. The eyes of a frightened hare, he sometimes cringed to think.
Alas, that encrusted welt above the right brow! He had almost forgotten it, feeling not a twinge for hours, washed away in spirits. Damn! Only an irascible fool would have taken on so over a singularly unimaginative insult, out and about as he was, completely on his own, in one of the West End’s more questionable precincts. Tonight’s lad outside Dunbar’s had at least enjoyed the vigilance of a mate, sardonic as the other fellow had been. And while it was understandable that the prospect of an imminent meeting with Ferrier and his censorious mother had driven his own recklessness—the mindless folly of this goggling wraith in the mirror—it was fortunate there had been cool heads among the strangers at hand.
It taxed him to remember exactly how it had all transpired, but the rough outlines were still there. Some catty remark about his Edinburgh accent, thrown at him by a purse-mouthed Oxford type who brayed that Hadrian’s Wall was the best thing the Romans had ever done for England. How criminal it was, the fellow prattled, that “skirt-wearing savages” (it was “skirt-wearing savages,” was it not?) had ever been allowed to venture south of the borders alive. An attractive young serving maid with whom Stevenson had shocked himself to be flirting called the man out, and when the nit turned his sozzled invective on her, an irresistible combination of gallantry and rage compelled Stevenson to mount a spirited assault.
The writer’s sharp words had proved an unequal match for the man’s blunt fists, at least in terms of tangible evidence of blows landed. Again, most luckily, the bulk of the crowd had proven more well disposed towards northern visitors than did the voluble cad. They counseled Stevenson amiably but very firmly to leave, escorted him to the door, and left him to find his way back to the Savile and its solicitous night porter. The crucial charge, for the present moment, was to keep it all a total secret from Fanny.
A wraith in the mirror. Mirror-wraith. What was it that Carlyle had said about blasted boys—or blighted youths, was it? “Children that have been in hell?” Well, no. Sod the self-romanticizing. He leaned closer. How could a man’s eyes be set so far apart, eyes that were themselves too large, as though desperate to drink in the world while it was still there for the drinking? The lank hair parted over the right eye rendered him somewhat lopsided, as though his scalp had somehow slid off the strong median line of nose and moustache down towards his ear. How could Fanny want to kiss these lips? How could Old Town Mary have stood for this ferret face nuzzling under her skirts? How might today’s trim rider on the train have stood for the same?
He sighed and splashed water onto his face, patting it away with a towel. Was his toothbrush ready at hand? Had he even brought it? Sod it. He picked up the candle and padded over to his bed, setting the light softly on the nightstand and drawing back the counterpane. His shadow suddenly huge on the wall in front of him, he climbed into bed, pulling the covers up over his bony frame.
Head on the pillow, bedclothes tugged up to his chin, he lay there and eyed the room in the flickering light. So little had changed, really. Gone, to be sure, were nearly all the ephemera of boyhood, the coveted fruits of birthdays and Christmases, props to endless lonely hours of play at war and piracy and polar exploration. This bed, though, had been his boat on a multitude of stupendous voyages, waking or sleeping or in the delirium of fever, when the seas were uncommonly mountainous and left him drenched and gasping till his mother’s hand, or his nursemaid Cummy’s, bore in the cooling cloth and stilled the waters like Jesus. Why are you so afraid? Be still, my little smout. Morning’s on the way, and the sun. On the far side of the wardrobe, the black canvas of imagination still hung there tautly stretched, ready for the brush and the daub, ready to render whatever dread, half-founded or fully fanciful, might spring to mind.
Somewhere, within the sounding distance of a bell, Ferrier lay as well. Sleeping? Thinking? La ci darem la mano!
Stevenson blew out the candle and the night flooded in around him, swallowing him whole. What a comfort it would be to have Fanny curled up there next to him! He reached down and grasped his penis, stretching it out from its chilly, contracted state. He thought of the young governess standing over him, a riding crop now in her pale little hand. She faded uncooperatively into nothingness.
No matter. No life down there tonight. There was a touch of whirling in the room. He willed it away, smiling thinly, and slept.
3
All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.
—MR. RICHARD ENFIELD
“Oh my! Have I hurt you?” He bends again to help the little on
e to her feet, but now with a distinct knot in his gorge. Has he been seen? Are there laws against this kind of carelessness? This kind of callousness?
“Of course you haven’t hurt me,” she says in a broken voice, as he raises her up and begins to turn her around. “Nothing happens to me that I don’t want to happen. You of all people should know that.” Fully erect now, she turns to face him with a giggle. Her hair is matted and it crawls with shiny, black beetles. Her face is not her face. It is Walter Ferrier’s.
Stevenson shot up in bed, short of breath, feverishly reconstructing where he was. Edinburgh! In his own room. His temples throbbed. His mouth tasted like some vile sort of cheese. He groped for his watch on the bedside table.
“Damn!” he exclaimed. He had been expected for breakfast at eight; it was half-ten. He sprang from his bed, throwing on his trousers before he noticed that his bladder was full to bursting. He’d brought no robe. Was it worth the effort to dress more fully and walk down to the plumbed water closet his father had just had installed in the first-floor dressing room and bath? He gazed indecisively at the china pot under his bed and resolved to save the time. Holding the thing in one hand, he grasped himself in the other and loosed a torrent into the shiny container, nearly sending it steaming over the opposite rim. He surprised himself with vague recollections of some nursemaid or other, someone before Cummy, lavishly singing his praises when he managed to give adequate notice before something hot spurted out of one orifice or another. “Ach, but yui’re a braw laddie nou! Kennin’ about the pottie.” How curious that one’s sense of maturity and virtue should evolve so fundamentally from registering and then controlling the prime urges of the flesh. Surely there was a droll tale to be spun from that, or perhaps some gripping psychomachia of appetite and restraint. Then again, it might be that the more puritanical sects of Christianity had already exhausted the creative possibilities.
He washed his face and hands and then shaved, waking a little further with each splash, each clank of the razor against the laver. He pulled a fresh shirt from his bag and, studying himself in the mirror, buttoned it, fastened the collar with some difficulty, and tied his cravat. It was strangely pleasant to see Mary last night. Just as pleasant, finally, to have limited their intercourse to words. He sat down on the bed again and pulled on his stockings and shoes. He stood a bit too quickly; the blood rushed from his head, and he flailed for balance. He paused for a moment while his world steadied, then grabbed his coat, wriggled it on, and hastened into the hallway and down the stairs.
Seeking Hyde Page 4
