Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  'Come to Papa.' Walpole flung his arms open, but Tonton ran straight out of the door of the library to bark at the workmen. His master sighed like a lover. 'Well, at least there are no droves of visitors today to burst in upon us,' he told Anne. 'Such constant requests for tickets as I've had this winter! My toy castle is not my own. Margaret shows them round, as long as the daylight lasts; I hide in here and take the odd peep down at them through the balusters. Though it must be said that they give her a guinea apiece,' he added, watching the housekeeper carrying off the wet towels. 'She earns far more from the visitors than from me. I've a good mind to marry the woman myself,' he whispered, wriggling upright on his sofa so spasmodically that Anne thought he might dislocate something, 'to get back all the monies I've sacrificed to this silly house.'

  Anne looked round at the pierced and pointed arches filled with leather volumes, the oval portraits above them, the fantastical ceiling inset with scenes of Walpole's ancestors fighting the infidels and a repeated heraldic device of a Saracen's head. (He'd always amused Anne by claiming, on no evidence, to be descended from Crusaders.) The library was choice; there were only about 7000 volumes. Out of unrepentant snobbery, he kept all those written by royal or noble authors in a bookcase of their own. Her godfather was a magpie; he collected as easily as breathing. In a locked case in the corner he kept Pope's own copy of Homer, a Second Folio Shakespeare, some obscenities that Anne had never been allowed to look at and two rare works on the marking of swans' bills. The library was full of her own work: an early bust of the young Paris, and the terracotta models of her masks of Thames and Isis for the bridge at Henley, as well as one of Dick Cosway's sketches of her at work.

  'Speaking of monies,' she said, 'Richmond's having to spend very high on our theatre.'

  'Ah, yes, you never told me who else is involved in The Way to Keep Him, apart from Farren's unalterable Earl? Faithful as the east wind, Derby is, like his family motto.'

  Anne looked puzzled.

  'Sans changer, don't you know. You must study your heraldry,' he scolded.

  'As well as Derby, we have Dick Edgcumbe—'

  'Dear fellow,' cried Walpole, 'but an insect, like myself. You'll have to pad his calves.'

  'He plays Sir Brilliant Fashion; tries to force me in Act Four.'

  'Politely?'

  'Feebly.'

  Walpole nodded in approval.

  Fidelle shifted in her lap, coming undone like a sash; her tiny pointed paws chopped at the air. Anne released her and she jumped down. 'Major Arabin plays Sir Bashful Constant, who's pretending not to love his own wife, since it's out of fashion; he's a marvellous mimic of Garrick. We—Derby and I—would have loved to invite Fox to take a role, but we knew there was no point.'

  Walpole was wearing a lopsided smile. 'My dear, will you never give up your hero-worship? As a Minister in Pitt's Cabinet, Richmond has to put up with constant harrying from his slovenly rake of a nephew; he shouldn't have to suffer Fox in private too.'

  'Oh, come, you're not fair,' protested Anne. 'Slovenly, I'll grant you, but to my mind that's better than those gaudy costumes Fox used to sport in the '70s, with the high heels, velvet frills and blue wigs.'

  Walpole snorted reminiscently.

  'And he lives a very settled life with Mrs Armistead.'

  Walpole pursed his dry lips. 'Since when has devoting oneself to one very shop-soiled courtesan been a domestic virtue?'

  'My point is that he's hardly a rake at all these days.'

  'Less of a puddle still muddies one's boots. I'd imagine Fox has no time for private theatricals, anyway.' Walpole yawned. 'Probably too busy giving his creditors the slip!'

  Anne decided to change the subject. Fidelle was sniffing at Tonton's traces on the carpet. 'Come on to my lap,' Anne called. She didn't need to make a gesture; the dog leapt up her skirts.

  'What a clever creature,' remarked Walpole. 'Italian greyhounds aren't noted for their intelligence, but Fidelle understands English perfectly.'

  'Well, she knows lap, at least, and dinner:' Anne rubbed the narrow head with her thumb and cupped the pointed jaw.

  'The two essentials of a dog's life. Now, whom have we on the distaff side of the Richmond House cast?'

  'Mrs Hobart—'

  'Fat as ever?' asked Walpole.

  'Fatter. She keeps advising Miss Farren to eat more whey, the cheek of her! Oh, and she's got her own faro table these days, so she can fleece her friends without going out in the cold.'

  'Back in the knife drawer, Miss Sharp,' cried Walpole with a shiver of enjoyment.

  Anne grinned at him. 'Then there's Mrs Blouse and a Mrs Bruce—'

  'Who's that?'

  'You don't know her.'

  'I know everyone,' he said reprovingly.

  'A cousin of Lady Mary's,' Anne told him, 'from Wales.'

  'Oh, well. Wales.'

  'And I forgot Sir Harry Englefield.'

  'Many do,' said Walpole regretfully. 'I believe he's taken up astronomy.'

  'Has he really? Where did you hear that?'

  He extended one swollen-knuckled finger towards his mahogany bureau. 'I write twenty letters a day, or dictate them to Kirgate; I spin my web from Boston to St Petersburg.'

  'Very well, I bow to your authority,' said Anne.

  He shifted to move his right foot higher on its cushion.

  'Have you the gout very badly today?' she asked.

  'Of course not, my dear; the gout has me. Now let's drink some tea'—reaching for his silver bell. 'The Way to Keep Him's a hackneyed thing, don't you find?'

  'Oh, I don't know,' said Anne, who'd sat up late last night rereading it with a rapid pulse. 'Isn't Mrs Lovemore a rather splendid creature, the way she falls into melancholy and rage, and then refashions herself to win back her husband's love?'

  Walpole shrugged. 'How many plays do we need about the longueurs of marriage? The point is proven, surely! Oh, my dear, I'm as weak as small beer today'—with a yawn that split his face.

  THE SPRING Season was in full flow, now, and the tiny diamond that was Mayfair (tucked between Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Bond Street and Piccadilly) was criss-crossed every night with carriages lit up like fireflies, taking their occupants to routs, drums and assemblies, ridottos of 10,000 or musical evenings for a dozen. There were alfresco breakfasts (everyone still in their furs) and calls to pay from afternoon into evening. The World watched a balloon ascent in Hyde Park, and kept an eye out for the sumptuously dressed Prince of Wales and his pink-cheeked Mrs Fitzherbert dashing by in an open phaeton with a pair of bays. Mayfair residents roamed outside their preserve only for certain purposes: the gentlemen to debates at the Lords or Commons in Westminster Palace, or to gamble at their clubs on St James's, perhaps to buy a hat at Lock's, or wine at Berry's; the ladies to shop on the Strand or admire the crocuses at Kew. And, of course, everyone drove east to attend the Opera House and the two patent theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane.

  Every few days, now, the Richmond House Players (as they affected to call themselves) made their way south-east, on horseback, in sedan-chairs or carriages, from their Mayfair homes to the great house in Whitehall. Already they were experiencing that united delusion, that derangement of the senses known as theatre. On waking, or during the tedious hours it took for them to be dressed for dinner, they muttered their lines, sketched their gestures on the air. They'd never worked so hard in their lives, or felt so necessary.

  Today they were to rehearse in Richmond's library, where all the furniture was white and gold. Eliza found Mrs Damer standing at the window, looking remarkably handsome for nearly forty. Everything about the sculptor was pointed—a long chin and aristocratic nose, sharp cheekbones, precisely etched eyelids—which should have been off-putting, but wasn't; her vitality warmed and softened all her lines. Eliza looked past her, to the Privy Garden's constant traffic of Members of Parliament, clerks, messenger boys and lovers. A sort of stage on which all London struts and frets its hour.'

  M
rs Damer spun round, her brown eyes lively. 'Exactly. All so busy—and so aware of being looked at—'

  'But restless, as if they might forget their lines at any moment.' Eliza stared past the Banqueting House to where she could pick out the clean white spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A gentleman, Derby had once remarked, was a man with no visible means of support. In her mind's eye a little fellow deftly walked the high-wire between two spires, tiptoeing across the abyss as if to fall was inconceivable because he had invisible means of support: angels, perhaps, holding up his hands and feet. Eliza sometimes felt like that herself these days. Yesterday, for instance, when the Duke had men toned how lucky they were to have secured the aid of a lady of such genius, Eliza had felt the thin wire vibrate under her foot and wondered what tiny, unseen fingers were bearing her up.

  'Are you lost in admiration of the Medici Faun?'

  Eliza's head turned. 'Oh. Indeed,' she lied. That must be the statue standing in the window.

  'The one that moves me is the Apollo Belvedere,' said Mrs Damer, reaching out to touch the shoulder of a handsome curly-haired god shown from the waist up, gazing to one side.

  'What a quantity of lovely antiquities your brother-in-law has collected,' said Eliza, looking around the library.

  Only the tiny pause told her that she'd made a faux pas. 'Yes,' said Mrs Damer breezily, 'it was back in the days of his sculpture academy that Richmond commissioned these copies for students to work from.'

  'Oh, was that when you took up your art?' asked Eliza, a little hot-faced, but she didn't think it showed. Well, how could she have known? Richmond was certainly rich enough to buy a dozen old statues.

  'No, I was only a child at the time,' said Mrs Damer, 'this was back in the late '50s. The students were rather wild and, if the casts were plaster, they'd break off the fingers and toes, just for devilment.'

  Eliza produced one of her tinkling laughs.

  'That's why Richmond had to invest in marble copies. But when I took up carving myself, after I was widowed, I did find them very useful to study. That's from the David, of course,' Mrs Damer murmured, pointing to a large, graceful foot.

  Eliza thought it looked odd, standing there on a plinth as if it had been ripped from a giant's corpse, but she nodded respectfully.

  Here came Derby at last, hurrying into the library but without any unseemly scramble. That was the aristocratic walk that her colleague Jack Palmer caught so well when he was playing lords: a swan's glide. Today Derby was elegant in blue silk. 'My apologies,' he murmured and Eliza let him kiss her hand, but her cheeks flamed up a little again, because really he should have gone to Mrs Darner first, then to Mrs Bruce and so on down, distributing his politesse according to rank. She knew how to be with Derby in public and how to be with him in private (with her mother for a chaperone), but these rehearsals at Richmond House were something peculiarly in between.

  When he began his scene as Lovemore, the yawning rakish husband, Eliza stiffened a little, as usual, but actually he was remarkably good. Of course, Derby had a fine-toned voice and plenty of spirit, but what surprised her was that he took so naturally to the role of a callous husband. (She herself had never known him as anything but quietly, relentlessly gallant.) His looks gave an extra twist to the role, Eliza thought; it was quite sinister that this ugly little man should be so indifferent to a wife as tall and handsome as Mrs Damer.

  At the moment when Mrs Hobart bustled into the room, Derby was being ennuyé in an armchair. Ah, at last,' he said, breaking off his speech to rise.

  'What can you mean, at last?' asked Mrs Hobart, emerging from her vast wrappings. 'The streets are a morass of brown slush; I thought we'd never get through Piccadilly. Besides, it's very à la mode to be late, Derby, didn't you know?'

  Anne kissed the older woman on the cheek. She thought, No one past forty should wear rouge before dusk. She hadn't seen so much of Albinia Hobart since three summers ago, when they'd both campaigned on the hustings but on opposite sides. It had been a riotous and shrill spring, and Anne had almost wanted a vote herself, for the sheer pleasure of casting it in Fox's favour. She remembered one night at the Opera House, when Mrs Hobart and Lady Salisbury in their boxes had roared out Damn Fox, and Anne and the Duchess of Devonshire had shouted back Damn Pitt.

  Her involvement had caused some painful family discussions that she preferred not to remember. Mercifully, her father had retired from Parliament years ago, but Richmond, as a Cabinet Minister in Pitt's new government, had scolded his sister-in-law as if she were a child, for shaming him by campaigning for the Foxite Opposition. It was true that she and her friends had gone rather too far; the papers had rebuked them for their immodest and Amazonian behaviour, and caricatures had shown them carrying Fox piggyback; the Morning Post had even spread an absurd rumour that Georgiana (as everyone called the Duchess of Devonshire) was sprouting a beard. It had been a secret relief to Anne when the election had ended and they'd all remembered their manners.

  'Shall we get on with Scene Four?' asked Miss Farren musically.

  Mrs Bruce and Mrs Blouse scuttled back to their places. Dick Edgcumbe assumed the foppish pose of Sir Brilliant Fashion, one finger in his waistcoat, the other hand at his ear. Anne flicked through her bundle of sewn foolscap to find her place. It had taken her a week to get used to having only her cues, business and lines written out, without the rest of the play.

  'Besides, I knew I wouldn't be needed yet,' said Mrs Hobart in a tone of faint injury, 'as the Widow Bellmour doesn't come in till late.'

  'Count yourself lucky you don't have as many lines as I to learn,' remarked Anne, fanning herself with her thick script.

  Mrs Hobart gave her a hard smile and Anne regretted the quip.

  'The widow's such a witty character, though,' put in Miss Farren soothingly. 'I've often played her myself at Drury Lane.'

  'Yes, and really the story's as much about her as Mrs Lovemore,' Mrs Hobart remarked, brightening, 'since she's the one Lovemore's courting in disguise.'

  Sir Harry Englefield clapped his hands to his powdered curls. 'I've toiled over my part, in preparation for this répétition, but half the time I take my cue for my speech and my speech for my cue.'

  'It'll get easier,' the actress told him. 'And after all, you've only the one part, so you can't confuse it with any other.'

  'Yes,' Anne put in, 'we should pity Miss Farren and her fellows, who must permanently store dozens of roles in their heads, to be performed at a day's notice on the proprietor's whim.'

  Mrs Bruce let out a cry of horror.

  'Mm, it's quite a bedlam scene in my dressing room,' said Miss Farren, 'with myself, Mrs Siddons and Mrs Hopkins all standing around muttering our different lines.'

  'Oh, do you share with Siddons?' asked Sir Harry, star-struck.

  'Such a commodious brain you must have, in such a pretty little head,' offered Major Arabin.

  Miss Farren smiled back at him, but Anne, watching, thought she detected a steeliness. She's like me, his hackneyed flattery sets her teeth on edge. 'Shall we get on?'

  Sir Brilliant made his lewd proposition. Anne turned on her heel. 'Sir! This liberty, sir—'

  She stopped, because their manager was holding up one slim finger. 'Let me teach you all a helpful rule: never speak as you walk. It dissipates the force of the line.' Miss Farren looked at Dick Edgcumbe severely. 'Sir!' She swivelled and took three paces, then turned her head back. 'This liberty, sir—' She stopped, as if overcome, and averted her gaze again.

  They all clapped, which seemed to embarrass her somehow. Strange, Anne thought, since Miss Farren had spent so much of her life with the roar of applause in her ears.

  'Oh, tush,' the actress protested. 'Some of you must remember how the late great Garrick would have delivered a line like that, with at least a dozen exquisite changes of emotion.'

  'I always found the fellow rather twitchy,' said Major Arabin.

  'Yes, for my money I prefer young Mr Kemble,' Mrs Hobart declared.


  'So much more declamatory grandeur,' murmured Mrs Bruce.

  'What about his faddish pronunciations of Shakespeare—not my heart aches, but it aitches?' said Dick Edgcumbe.

  'But such a daring approach when he takes over a role,' said Sir Harry. 'Remember his Hamlet two years ago, when instead of "Did you not speak to it?" he said to Horatio, "Did you not speak to it?"'

  'Oh, but his sister Siddons is twice as original,' argued Anne. 'Wasn't she the first Lady Macbeth to put her candle down and wring her hands?'

  'For my money,' said Derby, 'there's too much long-faced pomposity at Drury Lane these days and Tragedy is elbowing Comedy into a corner. You're of the good old Garrick school, aren't you, Miss Farren?—you and Palmer, Tom King, the Bannisters. Quickness and delicacy, that's the key.'

  Miss Farren clapped sternly, her mouth hiding a smile. 'Gentlemen! Ladies! Are we here to argue about theatre or to create it?'

  The actress's mother was in the corner as usual, head down over her workbag. It was odd, Anne had thought at first, to have what looked like a fierce old housemaid planted on one of Mr Chippendale's yellow grosgrain chairs. But soon the Players^ paid Mrs Farren no more attention than if she'd been a fire screen or a hatstand, which seemed to be what she preferred.

  AFTER EACH rehearsal Eliza felt relief whenever Derby's carriage dropped the Farrens off at their respectable but unfashionable second-floor lodgings on Great Queen Street, just round the corner from Drury Lane. She was always tired out. She'd come this far by pleasing, but still she couldn't risk failing to please. She knew it was absurd to complain of the strain, given that her whole life since coming to London at fifteen had been aimed like an arrow at the ranks of the Beau Monde. 'They're strange beings, though, carriage folk,' she told her mother over a dish of ragout. Carriage folk was what her father used to call them, in caustic homage: people who had their own carriages.

  'But you're one of them, Betsy, or as near as makes no matter.'

  Eliza shook her head. 'I only borrow Lord Derby's carriage, I don't own it, and you and I still ride in hackneys on occasion. Besides, I'll never be one of them if you keep saddling me with Betsy.'