“Ever so grateful.”
Fanny resumed her seat and took up her knitting with a modicum of residual intensity. For a full minute the only thing breaking the silence in the room was the clack of her needles. “James is a sweet man,” she observed at length, “and an author of undoubted note. But how disappointing, that ‘trace the implications of things’ nonsense of his. What’s the point of being as wise as he is, and then just ‘tracing implications?’ If I had the public’s ear, the way he does, I wouldn’t waste it that way. Just being ‘interesting,’” she said with a sneer. “In fact, I don’t know many women who would.”
“Never fear,” Stevenson responded. “I expect he is already well on his way to revising his entire sense of literary purpose.” Fanny opened her mouth to speak, but he forged on. “Or perhaps he is crying his eyes out at the pub. Across from his sister’s madhouse.”
“Well there’s something, isn’t it?” Fanny sat up especially straight. “Did he bring poor Alice down here just to ‘trace the implications of things?’ Or is he trying to make a difference for her?”
“Perhaps you should have brought that up with himself.”
Fanny laid down her knitting and turned to face him squarely. “Really, Louis. Who put the damn burr under your saddle today? You’ve been fuming now for hours. What is it? Do you think I was rude?”
“Not to James.”
“What do you mean, ‘not to James?’”
Stevenson ran his finger along his lower lip and stepped closer to the window. Perhaps it wasn’t worth taking the plunge. Perhaps it was. He eyed a luminous bluebottle crashing intermittently against the glass.
“Well, then, was I rude to you?”
Stevenson took a deep breath and, spinning on his heel, stared directly at her. If anything, her grizzled hair had lost even more color in the months since they had come to Bournemouth. Why should life here be aging her so?
“No,” he murmured.
“Who else was there? I have no idea why you’re carrying on this way.”
He had kept the die pocketed up as long as he could manage. Willy-nilly, he cast it.
“You didn’t need to embarrass Valentine. Yet again.”
“What?” Fanny exclaimed. “Embarrass Valentine! What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”
“‘I hope she didn’t send you around to the kitchen door again, James,’” he intoned, in a slightly over-Southern American twang.
Fanny was silent for a moment, then burst into a girlish giggle. “You sound like Jefferson Davis,” she declared. She sprang up and skittered over to him, grabbing him around his ears and pulling his head towards her for a kiss. “Don’t you think you’re being overly protective? I didn’t see any sign she was offended.”
He wrested his head away from her, sharply reminded of his indignity as a boy whenever he was manhandled by doting aunts. “Valentine is a proud woman.”
“Well, if she is,” huffed Fanny as she returned to her chair and resumed her handiwork, “it doesn’t become her as a maid. Or as a cook. Besides,” she added, needles clacking once again, “it was all in fun.”
“Fun for you, perhaps. If I were Valentine, I would have been embarrassed by your dredging up—once again—what was a simple mistake.”
Stevenson could see his wife’s jaws working strongly as she knit on. Something ill-defined, but not at all unfamiliar, drove him forward. “And I believe James was embarrassed for her as well.”
“For God’s sake!” cried Fanny, making a show of throwing down her knitting. It landed unsatisfyingly back on her lap, and she flailed it away in a growing fury. “Now you have James taking sides with you against me. I won’t have it, Louis. Especially not for her.” She shot him a glance that made him miss a breath. It was suddenly as though he were staring into a mirror at his own most irascible self.
Stevenson paused as he groped for a calm he did not in the least feel. “Look at what she has given up for us,” he said quietly. “Hundreds of miles from her home. No family. No one to speak her language.”
“You speak her language with her all the time. I don’t know what you say, but you do. Parlez-vous this and that. Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
“You know perfectly well what we say. You’ve lived in France for almost as long as I.”
“It’s what you say to her when I’m not there to hear you that I worry about. Your proud French maid. All tall and slender and young.”
Stevenson was both stung and shamed by the insinuation. Throughout Valentine’s tenure, nothing remotely improprietous had passed between them. At the same time, it was undeniable that his daydreams, now and again, swept him enticingly into her orbit. He had sometimes imagined her being as available to him as he had often imagined the young domestics of Heriot Row to be. There was a certain poem he had written…
“You say, look at what she’s given up for us,” Fanny was near to shouting. “Well, look at what we’ve given up for her.” She held her small hands out wide, tears suddenly tumbling down her cheeks. “I don’t know, Louis. I don’t know how I can go on, worrying every day that you will die the next. Watching you struggle to write, dished up who knows what kind of nonsense by your damned brownies. And then struggling, tooth and nail, against every bit of good counsel I try to give you.” She wiped her tears away with clenched fists, whipping her head from side to side. “And now you take a friendly joke as some kind of attack on her—on our goddamned fucking cook.”
Stevenson’s sigh could have come from the marrow of his bones. “I don’t know how you do this to me, Fanny.”
“Do what?”
“I know how hard life with me has been for you.”
“No, you don’t.”
He took a deep breath. “How hard for you and Sam. And there is not a day that passes that I don’t marvel at the love and care that you have lavished on me, little as I might deserve it.”
“But all of those sacrifices don’t make up for the fact that something is wrong,” Fanny asserted. “Am I right? That I’m too old. Or too fat. That I don’t want to lose you to someone else.” Though her face was wet and reddened under her tangled mop of gray, she still managed to look like a helpless child. “What is it, Louis? What is it that I can’t give you?”
He had been about to say that suspiciousness was beneath her, that it might actually be the only thing she could indulge in that might indeed drive him away. As satisfying as that would have been in the moment, however, it compassed the possibility of a dismemberment that he knew he could never endure.
“I’m sorry, Pig,” he said at last. “You give me absolutely everything I need. And yearn for. I am a fool to doubt you.”
“You are a fool,” replied Fanny, wiping away the last of her tears. “That’s why you’d be lost without me.”
10
As he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! There would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding.
—THE NARRATOR
Dear Henley,
I wish I felt better about the Deacon. I am daily more certain, though, that we ain’t delivered ourselves of a real, knock-’em-dead treatment of that “other fellow,” you know—that lurking, bridling, recidivist self I’ve gone on about for these last hunnert years. You tried mightily, you did, but I fear I sadly missed the mark. Brodie is so damn calculating and controlled, don’t you know? “Goodness, Smith. See how we have ignored the cl
ock! I do say it is very much time to be out a-burgling.” What truly haunts us, if we’re honest about it, are urges that bust out of nowhere with no notice at all—that or those insidious whisperings, equally unannounced, that we can’t for the life of us resist. But merely burgling like the man? Copping coin to gamble away? Hardly the designings and the doings that are the real dark stuff! No, I truly hope we do well enough with the old dodger, but he ain’t the last word, not in the least he ain’t!
For now, I must tackle Kidnapped seriously, or be content to have no bread, which you would scarcely recommend.
Sorry for this.
Post.
R. L. S.
My dear Father,
Many thanks for a letter quite like yourself. I quite agree with you and had already planned a scene of religion in D. Balfour; the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge furnishes me with a catechist whom I shall try to make the man. I have another catechist, the blind, pistol-carrying highway robber, whom I have transferred from the Long Island to Mull. I find it a most picturesque period, and wonder Scott let it escape. The Covenant is lost on one of the Torrans, and David is cast on Earrid, where (being from inland) he is nearly starved before he finds out the island is tidal. Then he crosses Mull to Torosay, meeting the blind catechist on the way; then crosses Morven from Kinlochaline to Kingairloch, where he stays the night with the good catechist; that is where I am; next day he is to be put ashore in Appin, and be present at Colin Campbell’s death.
Today I rest, being a little run down. Strange how liable we are to brain fag in this scooty family. But as far as I have got, I think David is on his feet, and (to my mind) a far better story and sounder than Treasure Island.
I do trust Bath may do the trick for you; but I suspect the great thing is rest. Mind your allowance; stick to that; if you are too tired, go to bed; don’t call in the aid of the enemy, strong spirit, for as long as you are in this state, an enemy it is and a dangerous one. Believe me,
Ever your most affectionate son,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson sealed the second of the two envelopes, flipped it over, and inscribed the so-familiar address on the front side. Halfway through “Edinburgh,” the nib of the pen caught and snapped a tiny constellation of ink across the paper. “Damn!” Was it worth putting right? Had it been the letter to Henley, he would never have bothered. This was to his father, though, in a time when not much was going right for the old fellow. A stoic all his life, the old man had been persuaded to spend a fortnight in Bath taking the waters and seeing medical specialists of one sort or another. Why send him a “black spot” when Stevenson might easily avoid it?
He tore the envelope open, slipped the letter into another, addressed it without blemish, and slid the pair of missives into his coat pocket. Fanny was away, visiting Sam at school and then on to London to spend a few nights with Colvin’s Fanny, shopping for furniture to help make Skerryvore look, she said, a little less like a Hampshire Silverado. He told no one he was going out, expecting to be back by tea. Donning his hat and snatching his stick from the Chinese vase in the entrance hall, he bounded out the front door and down the front steps, as relieved to be escaping from his work as he was eager to take the fresh sea air.
He walked briskly down Alum Chine Road, past other houses of Skerryvore’s general stature and vintage, wondering offhandedly what intriguing tales each of their decorous façades might conceal. Was this one, august red brick with the rather secretive entrance, the bolthole of a pack of Fenian bombers? Was this one, looking vaguely Dutch with its narrow profile and scrolled pediment, a bordello catering to Church of England prelates on recuperative holiday? Was this one, with a froth of Japanese cedar gracing its stately walk, the secret lair of Mahdist villains, plotting to whisk Queen Victoria off to Sudan as the Sultan’s consummate concubine? And would he be prey to any of these mad fancies, he wondered, if he had stuck with the practice of law—or, even more dryly, to engineering?
He himself might have declared this day a day of rest, but his brownies had evidently not gotten the word, and they labored on inside his skull with unbridled lunacy. He voiced a mad cackle and threw a skip into his next stride—to the evident confusion of an aged couple hobbling past him with their liver-spotted spaniel. He ambled through a swelling crowd of fellow strollers into the town center, past the elegant new Mont Dore Hotel with its vaguely Parisian lineaments, and around to the Post Office, where he dispatched the letters to Henley and his father.
As he stepped back out into the pale sunlight, Stevenson’s eye caught the immense gray finger of St. Peter’s spire, and he turned his steps in that direction. A tiny voice inside his head suggested he might duck inside the expansive sanctuary and offer a prayer for his ailing father. Feeling sure, however, that his mother and especially Cummy had that particular matter well in hand, he contented himself with a walk around the outside of the building. Halfway through his circuit, he spied the low profile of Mary Shelley’s grave, a substantial gray sarcophagus capped with a massive, hipped stone lid. Frequently enough, on walks through town, he stopped for a moment to visit with the long-suffering author of Frankenstein.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, he read as he stood over the grave. Daughter of William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Widow of the Late Percy Bysshe Shelley. Born August 30th 1797, Died February 1st 1851. She had been only nineteen, half his age, when she had taken up the pen and written as profound and chilling a tale of misdirected aspiration and desire as he knew. He was particularly fond of the tale of Mary’s inspiration—of the tempestuous night near Geneva when she and her husband and Byron had each undertaken to write ghost stories, the core ideas of her own narrative coming to her afterwards in a dream.
She had never been specific, as far as he knew, about which images and motifs had been delivered to her whole. He would have laid his money on the poignant scene in which the Wretch seeks out his creator in the doctor’s bedroom, only to have the man recoil, revolted, from the very creature he had been so intent on bringing to life. It was, he believed, one of the most affecting scenes in all of fiction: the simple quest for understanding and love; the crushing disappointment of an ideal envisioned but not attained; and all of it vested in that arresting image of the curtains of a bed being drawn back and revealing to both actors, in the starkest and most brutal of ways, the impossibility of anything other than a tragic resolution.
Mary’s eminent parents lay there together, hard by their daughter. Where might he himself finally rest, Stevenson wondered? And in whose company? He had once been all but certain he would predecease his own father, but if that did not turn out to be the case, as recent developments suggested, would either he or those left behind to dispose of his willowy remains plant him in Thomas Stevenson’s vicinity? The thought of dissolving into the soil of Auld Reekie was, he smiled to acknowledge, substantially more appealing than the thought of living there.
He strolled on to a newsagent to purchase a copy of the Times and, rolling it tightly and tucking it under his arm, headed towards the Lower Gardens and its row upon row of shaded benches. Halfway there, he spied a gangly boy in a navy-blue jacket and breeches bursting from a confectioner’s shop with a bag of sweets clenched happily in his fist. The sudden thought of tart lemon drops sparked a strong reaction back at the base of his tongue and a yen he found impossible to resist. Walking into the tiny establishment, he was greeted by a pert young woman with old-fashioned blonde ringlets. Learning his pleasure, she pointed him to a glass jar charmingly labeled “Grandma’s Acids.”
“And Grandma has tasty acids, does she?” he asked, a mite flirtatiously.
“My little brother loves ’em.”
“Ah, but they would be for me.”
The girl blushed. “Oh. I’m sorry, sir.”
“No need,” replied Stevenson. “I fear I’ve never outgrown certain boyish cravings. A quarter of a pound, please.”
He paid the tariff and left the shop, turning south
towards the Lower Gardens, beyond which the long stretch of Poole Bay sparkled under a pewter sun. Four hundred yards on, he turned into Invalid’s Walk. The freshly raked gravel of the path crunched pleasingly beneath his boots. Hard upon his stop at St. Peter’s, the long rows of pine suggested the aisles of a vast, airy cathedral, and a breeze susurrating through the countless needles above might have passed for the whispered supplications of those unfortunate souls for whom the walk had been named. As it was, there were few of the infirm and suffering present to meet the eye. Dozens of well-dressed men and women walked at various paces along the sun-dappled track, quietly conversing or breathing deeply of the salutary, resinous air.
Stevenson was struck anew by the deadening uniformity of class in the town. Here were lawyers and their spouses, children of bankers, wives of civil servants, parents of doctors, all of them more than amply heeled by the salaries of the professions, seeking the favored new cures of modern medicine and, supplementing or failing those, the solace of being seen by others as arrived and respectable Britons. “Am I one of them?” he asked himself, cringing at the possible answer. Not so those early times in Edinburgh, and even later on in London, when he had donned the clothes of a rag-and-bone man and wandered about whichever city he was in, taking careful note of how he was—or was not—seen by the respectable folk he encountered along his way.
Stevenson sighed and took a seat on a vacant bench. Extracting the Times from under his arm, he unrolled it and smoothed it flat on his lap. “Salford Explosion Kills Hundreds,” read the first headline to take his eye; “Disaster at Clifton Colliery.” His initial instinct was to be glad it had not been an act of Fenian terrorism. Not that it would make an ounce of difference to the families of the lost men and boys. “Queen’s List Names John Everett Millais First Artist to Be Granted Baronetcy.” He smiled to think how his mother and father would feel if he were ever similarly honored. Small chance of that!
Seeking Hyde Page 17
