Again, I can well believe you are following the papers with the same anxious eyes as I. I will, however, be in immediate touch if anything comes to me by other channels. For the nonce, may you rest easily in the confidence that, in serving this city and country as bravely and admirably as you have done, you have also served
Your most affectionate and appreciative friend,
J. A. Symonds
“What will Janet say, I wonder?” asked Fanny as she set the letter down and resumed her handiwork. For days she had been knitting mufflers for the upcoming Atlantic crossing. She had just finished Sam’s, in his old school colors, and was starting Stevenson’s—in solid burgundy, in case, she teased him, a rough crossing led him to dribble more wine than usual.
“That likely depends on what Symonds tells her,” Stevenson replied, “and how he and Matthew behave in her company. Perhaps also on how much she wants—or is prepared—to know.”
“It’s hard for me to believe she has no inkling. Living with him all these years.”
“They are so often apart,” observed Stevenson. “Symonds travels constantly. I expect he is away from their home as often as he’s there.”
“Still, don’t you suppose they sleep together? Don’t you suppose she could tell if his heart wasn’t in it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps you should write to her and ask.”
Fanny seemed to cast about for an arch retort, but she held her tongue. Moments passed, her needles clicking rhythmically away, before she spoke again.
“You don’t have any dark secrets, do you, Louis? Like Symonds’s? Things I don’t already know about?”
Stevenson’s gut lifted a trifle and he glanced over at his wife. Fanny looked at him with a measure of concern.
“It seems late in our marriage to be asking such a trenchant question,” he responded with a grin. “Besides, aren’t you underestimating your formidable intuition? Surely, my weird woman knows and sees all.”
She paused in her knitting. “But you’re so endlessly inventive, Louis. I never know one day to the next what new passions or depravities you might be coming up with.”
“New passions and depravities, you say?” “Yes.” “Well, Pig. I think I can honestly say there are none.” “You think you can?” “There are none. Which is not to say that my various passions and depravities of long standing don’t remain hale and hearty.”
“Your addictions to the grape and tobacco leaf foremost among them,” she observed with a droll squint.
“I haven’t had a glass of claret since last evening—and not a single cigarette for the last half-hour. Moreover, rather than addictions, I much prefer to call these things intense and consuming tastes.”
“Consuming tastes,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Of course.” Fanny returned to her knitting for some time before she looked up again.
“Tell me this, Louis,” she said. “Honestly. How consuming a taste do you think you have for the transport of rage?”
The baldness of the question disarmed him. Stevenson felt his pulse quicken. “And this,” he said with an uneasy grin, “from someone of your temper?”
Fanny smiled fleetingly, then sobered once more. “I can’t stop thinking about what you did to Hallett.” She dropped her hands into her lap. “And Symonds’s little friend having to tell you to stop. Lord knows I’ve often enough seen you angry. But I’d never known you to club a man unconscious with a walking stick.”
“No.” Stevenson drew a deep breath. “No more than I. Generally I curse and throw things, do I not?”
Fanny stared hard, clearly determined to stay on the scent. “Please don’t take my questions as a criticism, dearest. There was hardly an option. He was strangling Symonds, for God’s sake. And he’d almost killed that other poor man.” She paused.
“But?”
“But nothing. I suppose I’m just curious how it feels to have done what you did. How it felt doing it. Maybe how it feels now.”
“Do you think that is something a wife ought to know?”
“Do you think it’s something a wife shouldn’t know?”
Stevenson paused for a moment, then shrugged in weary resignation. How uncannily could Fanny, time and again, bear in on a worry or a raw nerve.
“No,” he responded at last. “Fair questions.” He took in another great breath and let it out slowly. “To be honest, Pig, it was horrid. Frightening as well, bashing in another man’s head the way I seem to have done. Even a man like Hallett. I can still feel it in my hand. Fortunately, he didn’t bleed like Laughton. I must say, though, I felt completely justified thrashing the bastard. And it wasn’t anything Cummy ever taught me about, you know. Or father. The codes of law and respectability have wretched little to say about how much head-bashing a man is entitled to do on his own righteous initiative. Perhaps obliged to do. I had to find my own way up there.”
“You say righteous initiative.” Fanny’s brow arched inquisitorily. “There’s a certain pleasure to be had in righteousness, no?”
“So…?” “Was there pleasure to be had in clubbing the man, Louis?” Fanny’s gaze pierced him.
“Not exactly pleasure.” Was that completely honest? Perhaps it was. The fire of his arousal had been of an entirely different sort than lust or luxury, more something he imagined William Wallace might have felt at Stirling Bridge. “But just cause and a chance to enact it did make for a heady brew.”
“You make it sound intoxicating.” “Is there any surprise there? Given my predilections?” He grinned uneasily, adjusting himself in his chair. “Your phrase was apt, though. ‘The transport of rage.’”
Fanny’s brow knit with obvious concern. “It’s as though you turned into Hyde. Bludgeoning old Carew. How did you say it? ‘Tasting delight…?’”
“‘From every blow.’ I know. I can scarcely believe that I knew how to write that scene at the time I did. Before I joined the ranks of dedicated head-bashers.”
“But you did write it.” “I did.” “So it must always have been in you, mustn’t it?”
Stevenson rose and walked over to her. He bent and kissed her gently on the part of her hair. “I believe I might have said it to you back then. When my ill-fated draft was still burning on the grate. ‘We write what we know.’” Or had he said that to Coggie?
Fanny looked up at him, eyes wide. “Thank you, Louis.” “What for?” “For your candor.” “I admit it’s only what any husband owes to his wife. Nothing less.” Fanny nodded quietly. “Well,” she said after a moment. “I suppose this all leads us to an interesting realization.”
“That being?” “That for all of our talk about your taking inspiration from Ferrier, Jekyll is far less a version of Ferrier than he is of you.” She peered at her husband for his reaction.
“Walter was a sot, bless his tortured soul,” volunteered Stevenson after a moment. “But he was one of the gentlest souls I ever met.”
Fanny’s squint returned. “And you?” “You have me, Pig. Taken and bound. I may have figured Hyde as a raging young man when, in actual fact, he is the perfect embodiment of Old Man Virulent.” He looked at her squarely. “I’m almost surprised you’ve never charged me with that.”
“It may have occurred to me,” she admitted with a sigh. “But we had to get on.”
“We did. And we do.” “And you feel you’re getting on with yourself.” “I do. As I said.”
Fanny nodded slowly, her expression an amalgam of confirmation and lingering concern. How striking it was, thought Stevenson, that she had managed to convince him there was no place in respectable fiction for the side of his nature that had led him to Valentine’s bedside—yet that, as a consequence, Hyde had become the avatar of another part of himself, equally unregenerate but, for him at least, considerably more unsettling for him to recognize. Of course I can stop, he recalled thinking as he stood over Hallett’s body with Matthew’s gentle entreaty still echoing in his ears and his bloody stick still firmly in hand. Of course.
&nbs
p; “Well, Louis. What now?” “What now?” Stevenson reached out to squeeze her knee. “Don’t worry, Pig. I like to think it was all just a useful boiling up of my ancient Highland blood. Rob Roy come back to life in a moment of desperate need. Symonds is alive, no? If I had just stood there—”
“I know. I do.” “And I’m unlikely ever again to be in a similar fix.” “Of course.” “And if we are ever again served, perchance, a corked bottle of wine…I swear I won’t club the poor sommelier to death.”
“I sincerely hope not. That would truly make us social pariahs. Even in America.”
With a look of tolerable satisfaction, Fanny returned to her knit-ting—leaving Stevenson to ponder, once again, what he hoped were the unmistakable differences between Hallett and himself when it came to the pleasures of brutality.
In the weeks that followed, Fanny paid a visit to the doctor, convinced that the lump in her breast had increased in size. Doctor Barrett, who kept a surgery just their side of the town center, was an older man with a reputation for brilliant diagnoses, a reassuring bedside manner, and an unmatched taste for French vintages. Stevenson had in fact first met him in the shop of Bournemouth’s preeminent wine merchants, where they had engaged in a pleasant and informed conversation about the relative virtues of Pauillac and Margaux. After palpating Fanny’s lump, the doctor declared that it was almost certainly nothing but a small cyst. He cheerfully assembled a rather imposing hypodermic and, after asking Fanny to look the other way and relax as much as possible, skillfully jabbed the long needle right into the center of the thing. Fanny let out a deafening yowl, thereby pitching Stevenson, who was sitting anxiously just outside the door of the examination room, into a fit of sickening recollection. The fluid that the doctor aspirated, though, was consistent with his initial diagnosis, and the lump itself was scarcely detectable afterward. By the time Fanny had dressed and rejoined her husband in the waiting room, another imposing cloud had lifted from the family spirits.
Unfortunately, that very night, the brownies obliged the dreaming Stevenson to stand powerlessly by as the doctor sliced off both of Fanny’s breasts, laying them out on the table precisely the way he imagined the Kelly woman’s to have been. True, the managers of his midnight theater had never been in the habit of constructing moral fables, but Stevenson could not help but conclude that they were trying their hand at something simple but edifying, concerning how quickly she and others he loved might any day be taken from him.
In any case, he awoke to discover with profound relief that his feisty little American helpmeet lay there in bed beside him, very much alive, snoring, and whole.
Stevenson’s mother finally made her way to Bournemouth at the end of the month. After her first meal at Skerryvore, she announced that she had seldom dined more deliciously. When Margaret subsequently offered to pay for their travel to America provided Valentine accompied them, Fanny immediately booked passage for the entire household on the Ludgate Hill, a new steamer of 4,000 tonnes that offered surprisingly favorable rates on its next crossing—probably, Fanny surmised, because it was scheduled to sail for New York on Christmas Morning.
Sam was able to leave school a day earlier than expected, and he hoped to spend the night with a friend in London before traveling down to Bournemouth. Stevenson and Fanny seized the chance to travel up to the capital to say their farewells to Colvin and Fanny Sitwell, who would be out of town the week they sailed. The four of them shared a fine meal at Verey’s, with Stevenson and Colvin sparring comically for the honor of paying the bill. The latter, claiming seniority, eventually prevailed; Stevenson promised, in return, that he would do his best to lead an especially exciting life across the waters, so as to make Colvin’s proposed biography all the more gripping and profitable for its scribe. Fanny promised in turn to contribute to the adventures in any way she could, although she observed, with a wink at her husband, that the things a writer might actually do in life could surely never measure up to the things he might conjure up in his fiction.
At eleven the following morning, the couple stood waiting in the huge concourse of Waterloo Station. Fanny stared anxiously at the clock suspended over the platforms.
“We’re planning on the 11:20, aren’t we?” she asked, fiddling with the buttons on her overcoat.
“We are.” “Where do you suppose he is? Why is he late?” “Don’t fuss, Pig. I am certain he’ll be here. And if he’s delayed, we can always catch the next.”
“I suppose.” She peered nervously into her handbag and extracted a handkerchief. She was about to blow her nose when she spied her son coming through the main entrance, two huge bags in hand. “There he is!” she cried, scuttling towards him in a frenzy of anticipation. Stevenson bent to pick up her handkerchief and followed her over to the strapping young man, whom she held crushed in a prolonged embrace. He was blushing, but his complexion looked considerably improved.
“Goodness, Sam,” exclaimed Stevenson, wincing at the strength of the young man’s handgrip. “You’ve grown even more. I suppose we must now prepare to be eaten out of house and home.”
“I shall be perfectly happy with a side of beef a day,” Sam replied with a grin. “For breakfast. And, Louis,” he added, looking his stepfather straight in the eye with an assertiveness that was new to him. “I’d like to be called Lloyd from now on. If you would.”
“Lloyd!” replied Stevenson, trying it on for size. “Well—of course. Lloyd you shall be.”
“Samuel Osbourne’s the name of some fellow or other in America.” Stevenson laughed uncertainly. “But we’re going to America.” “True enough,” said the lad. “But I’m not going back there as his son, Lou. I’m going back as yours.”
“So, was it hard leaving school?” asked Fanny, once they had settled themselves on the train. There were only the three of them in the first-class compartment. Lloyd sat across from them, flanked by his over-stuffed bags.
“Not especially. I’ll miss Richard. And some of the others on my rugby side.”
“Of course,” said his mother. “Sports bring people together, don’t they? At least people who get to play sports. Men, that is.” She leered at the two of them in affected resentment.
“They do. I suppose it’s like Lou and me playing at war all those times.” He looked warmly at his stepfather.
“Sport and war,” observed Stevenson, suddenly wistful. “Purposeful violence. They say there’s nothing like sport and war for forging bands of brothers. ‘For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.’”
“We read that in school!” Lloyd exclaimed. “That’s Henry V speaking to his men before Agincourt. That speech gives me chills.”
Stevenson nodded. “It’s one of the best. A speech one might sell one’s soul to have written. My kingdom for lines such as those!”
“You males of the species,” scowled Fanny. “I swear you love each other more than you love us.”
“Some of the boys at school, anyway,” declared Lloyd with a snigger. “Oh?” replied Fanny. “You know. The prissy ones. The tennis players. The faggers. I surely won’t miss them at all.”
“Did they ever bother you?” asked Stevenson. “What do you mean? Did any of them ever send me notes or something like that? Or poems?” He laughed again, but less comfortably.
“Well, I don’t know,” replied Stevenson. “I suppose I just wondered if any of them ever did anything to make you feel uneasy.”
“Aside from just being the way they are?” “I suppose.” “Well, no. Not that they’d dare.” “I see,” said Stevenson.
For a few moments they sat there quietly, jostled softly from side to side by the undulations of the rails.
“Why did you ask me that, Lou?” said Lloyd at last. “Weren’t there boys like that at your schools?”
“Most definitely,” Stevenson replied. “Not that it was always easy to know.”
“No. It’s not,” agreed Lloyd. “There was a chap on our rugby side, in fact, who turned out to hav
e a crush on Richard. A bloody big bloke, too. One of the props.”
“Did Richard know it?” Fanny leapt in to ask. “He did. The fellow sent him a poem.” “What did Richard do?” asked his mother.
Lloyd laughed. “What?” Fanny persisted. “He talked to him one day out on the pitch after practice. He said it was an excellent poem but that he had a girlfriend back in London. Then the fellow claimed, of course, that Richard had misunderstood everything. But he hadn’t.”
“Goodness,” exclaimed Fanny. “I know. I couldn’t believe Richard told him it was a good poem. I probably would have bloodied the fellow’s nose, if I’d even let myself be alone with him.”
“Really?” asked Stevenson. “Well, wouldn’t you? I know you’re not exactly a pugilist,” the boy added with a restive grin, “but still.”
“I suppose many young men would feel the way you did, Sam,” conceded Stevenson. “Excuse me! Lloyd!” He smiled apologetically. “Perhaps I would have as well. At your age.”
“Would have? Would you feel any differently now?” “Quite differently, I think. Although it has been years since I had a tête-à-tête of any sort out on a rugby pitch.”
“Good old Lou,” laughed Lloyd. “How I’ve missed your wit.” “Well, I’m afraid you’re in for several months of it now.” “I’m more than ready.” “We are in for such a lively time,” declared Fanny, relaxing visibly. Stevenson leaned his head back against the upholstered bench, staring up at the ceiling of the compartment. “You mentioned our old war games a moment ago. Do you remember how you always insisted that they turn out in line with the historical facts?”
Seeking Hyde Page 36
