“No!” Fanny raised her hand to stop him. “I do. I do deserve that. It’s perfectly true that I have been married twice—and that I can’t conceive of a life without a man in it. A husband.”
Again, Stevenson started to rise.
“But,” she quickly added, fending him off yet again, “that is quite probably because I do have one thing in common with your far-too-highly-esteemed Jane Austen heroines.”
“And what would that be?”
She leaned forward, glancing mischievously to the side before she looked him straight in the eye. “A longing for balls!”
For a moment Stevenson was honestly stunned. Then an irresolute grin crept over his lips.
For all of her shrewd social calculation, Fanny’s occasional knack for indelicacy both appalled and delighted him. She would doubtless have guarded her matrimonial virtue in Virginia City, even while married to the philandering Samuel Osbourne, Sr. But some of her language and humor she could well have learned from Nevada’s most brazen ladies of pleasure—along with a few other things. Even after years of marriage, there were nights when her volatility in the bedroom literally took his breath away.
As he hovered between laughter, intimidation, and the first twinges of arousal, she abruptly changed the subject.
“Why don’t you take up the law again, Louis?” She lay back in her chair, crossing her legs primly at the ankles. “You always fancy yourself so damn logical and precise.”
“Or perhaps I should return to engineering?” said Stevenson, spun around by this chaste coda to what had come before.
“Perhaps.” Fanny snuffed her cigarette in the nearby ashtray, staring at him with a just-detectable smugness. “It would make your father happy.” She reached up and plucked a stray bit of tobacco from her lip and wiped it slowly on her sleeve, holding him fixed in her gaze while she inscribed a few languid circles in the air with her diminutive, shoeless foot.
“Mmmm,” cooed Stevenson. Their exchange had indeed brought up her blood, and she glowed in that mysterious way she had glowed when he had first met her in Grez—when she’d eyed him with a room-stilling intensity, as though she were sighting one of her oft-touted pistols. “So you long for balls,” he purred, sliding to the front of his chair.
“Louis!” giggled Fanny, sitting bolt upright and straightening her skirts. “Sammy might come back.” It was not the least of her tricks, this turning of the tables.
“Or Valentine,” he suggested, pulling softly at his moustache. “Then where would we be? Touts les trois ensemble?”
“You’re a lost soul,” tittered Fanny, shaking her head. “Your father was right about you, all those years ago.”
“And you, my dear,” winked Stevenson, “are far less my model for Princess Seraphina…than you are for the most dangerous…Countess… von Rosen.”
“You mean…?” She eyed him with giddy delight.
“Yes, my dear! For the jolly, elderly—how shall I say?—fucktress.”
With a tiny squeal, Fanny leapt from her seat. She skittered across the room and threw herself upon him, upsetting his chair and throwing them both to the floor, where they lay, giggling hysterically, amidst the carnage of the Gettysburg battlefield.
The walk from La Solitude to the center of town was not particularly arduous, the bulk of it being downhill. It took Stevenson, Fanny, and Sam through a maze of meandering streets, all of them lined with venerable old houses that crowded the cobbled pavement with their wrought-iron grillwork and their cracked plaster walls. Stevenson strolled arm-in-arm with his wife—tall with short, angular with blocky, as though a European mantis and an American ladybug had made common cause and set off together down the road of life. Sam trailed happily behind, scrabbling after the lightning-quick lizards that seemed to fleck every still-warm façade, peeking into dark doorways, lingering at enticing shop fronts before he scampered along to catch up.
It had not been a particularly good afternoon for Stevenson, and he was eager to tip back a glass or two of some engaging vintage. The day’s post had brought a letter from Blackwood’s Magazine declining to publish a story he had sent to them a month or so back. “The Travelling Companion” was, in the end, a scurvy little piece, dashed off in a bid to net some quick capital to help offset the costs of the move to France. It was the kind of thing, in fact, that Stevenson might have been tempted to send out under a pseudonym, had the budding name of its author not been its most saleable aspect. Yet the editor’s rationale, that the tale was “a work of genius and indecent,” had pitched Stevenson into a vortex of annoyance.
The subject was a youth of privilege embarked on the grand European tour, visiting palaces and galleries by day, low drinking places and houses of carnal pleasure by night. There was an ingenious disguise involved, one requiring the offices of an unscrupulous servant who assisted—nay, encouraged—the principal as each of his unseemly tastes dulled from usage and the need for novelty drove him on to diversions ever more vivid and depraved. In the end, the servant was revealed to have kept scrupulous records of each folly and crime, and he parlayed the damning information into a modest fortune in blackmail—which, at tale’s end, he was seen enjoying with a song on his unrepentant, and unpunished, lips.
The thing had shown some initial promise as a compelling treatment of a theme that, Fanny’s reservations notwithstanding, Stevenson had been of an increasing mind to explore: that unsettling sort of imminent, other self that threatens to destabilize, often at the least predictable times, the psychic status quo. The story’s principal might have been named Johnson or Thomson, or even more plausibly of late, Ferrier. The effort soon devolved, however, into irredeemably shoddy stuff—the low spawn of truant moments he had stolen from the more weighty projects he felt obliged to pursue. Even in the writing, Stevenson had been disappointed to watch the scheming servant become much the most interesting character, rendering the piece more a study in social exploitation than in psychological exploration. What galled him after the fact, however, was that an editor could recognize the story’s genius yet still decide not to publish. Fanny had simply rolled her eyes, advising him not to fritter away his days and talents on worthless diversions.
The afternoon had been exceptionally hot, and the evening remained warm. By the time the trio reached Le Désire, the tiny restaurant touted by an Anglican cleric who served the gaggle of Britons come south for their constitutions, Stevenson’s thirst was definitely elevated.
“Perhaps we should start with a drink,” he suggested once Fanny and Sam had seated themselves beneath the striped canvas awning shading the outdoor dining area. There were three other tables outside, two of them occupied. At one, a young and evidently English couple leaned towards each other over their small table with a rapt intensity that could only mean they were newlyweds. Fanny surveyed them with amusement and, as she looked back his way, Stevenson winked knowingly. At another table sat what must have been a local family, a stout father who had somehow failed to remove his flat cap, an equally stout but more florid mother, and two stout daughters who appeared to be twins, dressed in identical white pinafores. They were close to Sam’s age, and the boy eyed them uneasily, as though they might momentarily leap up, dash over to his table, and mount an inquisition in their strange tongue.
“Yes, please,” said the boy, turning back with relief to his immediate company. “I’m parched. But we probably can’t have water, can we?”
“No,” replied Fanny. “Unless they’ve boiled it.”
“Ginger ale?”
“Alas, they’re unlikely to have ginger ale here,” sighed Stevenson. “I am afraid les citoyens de Provence put scant stock in Temperance beverages.”
“Gosh,” sighed Sam. “Then I guess it’s wine again for me. Hic!”
“Or cider,” offered Fanny, frowning at the feigned inebriation. “You’ve liked the cider pretty well.”
“Sure. Except it gives me an awful headache.”
“Let’s try some wine,” suggested Steven
son, waving away the first of the evening’s marauding moths. “If you find you don’t like it, we can always order coffee.”
“Oh, Louis!” Fanny laid her hand on her husband’s arm. “Sam’s so sensitive to coffee. He’ll never get to sleep if he drinks coffee this late.”
“Then wine it is,” declared Stevenson with a smile. “The poor lad’s liver be damned!” He craned his neck to look around. “Hmmm.” Various kitchen noises echoed from inside, and a delicious mélange of scents wafted out on the light breeze: hot oil, garlic, onion, the maritime tang of seafood. “Has anyone taken note that we’re here, have you seen?”
“Well, those girls keep staring at me,” answered Sam. “The fat ones.” “I believe Louis meant someone who works at the restaurant,” said Fanny quietly. “And it’s not polite to call anyone fat.”
“Really?” asked Sam, looking squarely at his mother. “Then why does Louis call you ‘The Fat One’ in his letters? That and ‘Pig?’”
“Dearest!” exclaimed Stevenson, with a playful scowl at his wife. “Have our epistolary confidences been breached, then? Is my loving correspondence open for the world to see?”
Fanny blushed uncharacteristically. “Well!” She drew a handkerchief from her clutch and dabbed busily at temple and brow. “Sammy. You know I never left letters out for you to look at.”
“And you didn’t hide them very well, either. Did you?” Again the boy peered uneasily towards the French twins.
“I think I can say,” offered Stevenson, in a conciliatory tone, “first of all, that your mother is not fat.” He dipped his head towards Fanny, a gesture she returned in kind. “And, second of all, that these are terms of endearment. Like ‘butterball.’ Or ‘Dear Mother Hen.’”
“All of which he calls me when he is being especially sweet,” confessed Fanny. “And he calls himself, of course, ‘The Skinny One.’” She studied her son for his response.
The boy looked intensely at his stepfather. “Well…he is skinny! But very loveable. And he is my own and only Lulu.”
“Thank you, Sam,” said Stevenson, resuming his scan of the establishment. “Hello! Allo! Anyone home?”
The English pair looked up from their enraptured mutual contemplation and smiled amiably. “They are very slow,” observed the young man in a stage whisper. “But such delicious bouillabaisse.”
“So we’ve heard,” Stevenson whispered back, with a little wave. “Thank you.” He turned back to his tablemates. “Good enough, perhaps, to make this particular one slightly less skinny. If we are ever to be served.”
Girlish titters from across the way drew a headshake from Sam. The Stevenson trio sat on in silence as a trill of gay laughter burst from the young woman in the romantic couple. Stevenson looked at his watch and sighed.
“Louis! Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
“Let’s just—! You’re right. Of course.”
A mule-drawn cart rumbled by, laden with crude baskets overflowing with turnips and potatoes. Stevenson waved away the dust and coughed shallowly as a tall man in shirtsleeves finally emerged from the doorway and slouched over to their table.
“Monsieur.”
Stevenson stared at Fanny, and then back at the man. “Et madame?”
The waiter tossed his head in affirmation and pursed his lips.
“Bon soir,” said Stevenson.
The man simply nodded.
Stevenson inhaled deeply. “We…are very thirsty. We should like to start with some wine. Might you have some Bandol?”
“Bien sûr,” said the man, nodding phlegmatically.
“Then could you bring us a bottle, please? And three glasses?”
“Three?”
“Yes. Three.”
“Of course.” The man turned slowly to leave.
“Tout de suite,” added Stevenson with a rap on the table. “S’il vous plaît.”
The man turned back with a raised brow, huffed, and then trundled back into the building.
“Was that really necessary?” asked Fanny.
“The man was rude. But you’re right, dear heart. Apologies.” He looked at Sam and stuck out his tongue. Sam crossed his eyes and giggled. “Well, we know the bouillabaise is excellent. I believe they are known here for their fruits de mer—and veal as well.”
“I’m starving,” exclaimed Sam. He snatched his napkin from the table and tucked it in at his neck, spreading it out like a nun’s collar. Grinning at them both, he crossed himself ostentatiously. “Look. I’ve converted!” he exclaimed.
“Sam,” scolded Fanny. She pulled the cloth away and dropped it into her son’s lap. “Don’t be a Philistine.”
“I know all about Philistines,” chirped the boy. “That’s what you called the men in Antwerp who wouldn’t let you and Belle take art classes because you’re women.”
Fanny looked at Stevenson and shook her head. “Momma would have loved to crush them all. Just like Samson.” “Here’s to mannish women,” chuckled Stevenson, raising an imaginary glass.
“I think I’d rather be called fat,” muttered Fanny, laughing nonetheless.
The waiter emerged once again, making his way slowly back towards the table. He halted briefly, scuffed a cigarette stub off to the side, sniffed, and carried on.
“I expect he’s paid by the hour,” whispered Stevenson to Sam. Fanny kicked his shin under the table.
“Monsieur,” said the man, presenting the bottle for inspection. Stevenson had a quick look and nodded. Bandol ’75. The man retreated to a stand just inside the door and pulled a corkscrew from his apron. The ensuing pop set Stevenson’s mouth to watering.
“This should be pleasant. ’75 was an excellent year.” The writer leaned back in his chair and placed his hands on what passed for his belly. Sam shrugged while his mother looked contentedly about.
The man returned to the table and extended the bottle once again. Stevenson nodded, pushing his glass forward. The waiter poured a finger of wine and stood back with a look of almost complete disinterest.
Stevenson raised the glass to his nose, swirling it elegantly before he inhaled. He winked at Fanny, then took a sip.
“What’s this?” He lowered the glass briskly to the table, grimacing at the taste, and reached for his mouth. There—a small but distinct shard of cork. He turned to the man. “This wine is corked. We’ll have another.”
“Comment?” The waiter looked mildly perturbed.
“There is cork in the glass.” Stevenson held his finger under the man’s nose then grabbed the bottle from him. “And look!” He pointed down into the neck. “You can see it there as well, can’t you? The wine has gone off. Another bottle. S’il vous plaît.”
The man frowned but turned away, remembering only then to come back and remove Stevenson’s glass. He swept it away with an impertinent flourish.
“What’s wrong?” asked Sam.
“The wine is spoiled,” sneered Stevenson. “There’s cork in it.” He peered at Fanny. Her head was canted in the cautionary way he knew only too well.
“So?” responded Sam. “Isn’t cork how they keep the wine in the bottle in the first place?”
Fanny turned to her son. “If it falls apart,” she explained, “the air gets in. The wine goes bad, and the cork gets in the glass and all. It’s not right. It spoils the taste.” She looked intently back at her husband.
“Oh.” The boy resumed the challenging task of balancing his knife on his forefinger.
Stevenson could see just inside the door as the man placed the offending bottle back on the serving stand. He vanished for a moment, returning with a glass decanter. Picking up the bottle, he poured the wine carefully into the new container until the liquid rose up into the neck. He waited a moment, eyed the thing carefully, then stuck his finger down into the wine. Pulling it slowly back out, he peered intently at his fingertip before wiping it on his apron. He took another glass from the rack on the wall and shuffled back outside.
“Voilà,” he said, present
ing the decanter.
Stevenson looked at Fanny and rolled his eyes. “It’s the same wine,” he said softly, turning back to the man.
“Monsieur?”
“Look. It’s not even in a bottle. You poured the old wine in here, into the decanter, from the first one. I saw you.”
“Monsieur?”
“I saw you!”
“This is a nice Bandol. From the cask. Taste.” He looked over his shoulder towards the English couple and shrugged.
“I will not taste,” exclaimed Stevenson. “This is the very same god-damned wine that was corked…and now you’re trying to pass it off as something different.”
The occupants of the other tables stared over at their party as Fanny reached for Stevenson’s arm, keeping him from rising.
Stevenson cast her an angry glance and swept her hand away. He looked quickly at Sam, who peered at him with his eyes wide as saucers. Settling himself back into his chair, Stevenson breathed deeply and turned once again to the waiter.
“Why would you do this? You poured the first bottle into the decanter,” he said, with exaggerated slowness and enunciation. “Then you stuck your f—” He swallowed hard. “Then you stuck your finger into the neck of the damned thing and pulled the damn cork out.”
“Non, monsieur.”
“Yes, you did. I damn well saw you, and you know it perfectly well.” He glanced at his two companions, who were poised on the edge of their seats. “Just,” he said in a barely audible voice, “just bring me a new bottle of Bandol—please.”
“Monsieur,” said the man, pulling himself up to his full height. “It may be that you do not understand the wines of France. You come from—?”
“You miserable bastard!” yelled Stevenson, springing to his feet with such force that his chair tumbled over backward and spun off into the street. As the man reeled away from him, he grabbed the decanter and hurled it with all his might against the wall, where it smashed into a thousand pieces.
Silence ruled the eatery as the wine dripped slowly down the plaster onto the cobblestones. Stevenson looked at Fanny, who was reaching across to embrace her son. The boy’s eyes brimmed, and he started to sob. The young Englishman had risen to his feet and was only now beginning to sit down again, slowly and warily, across from his wife, who was pale with shock. The French man sat there with jaws agape, mirroring his wife and daughters. The waiter had dropped into a simian crouch and edged himself away, only half-erect, towards the door.
Seeking Hyde Page 10
