Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  *

  After the dinner in the Black Horse for the cast, with bumper upon bumper of congratulatory punch ladled out, and a bottle of veritable champagne produced, and Major Tomlinson swollen at Terpie’s shoulder like a proud tomato, and Flora forgetting to not smile at Smith, and many toasts exchanged – Smith and Septimus sat in the steam at William Street again, laughing quietly. But there was constraint between them as well as jubilation. Septimus was beginning to feel the fretful aftermath of his elation. Smith was wondering how much he might count on the friendship between them.

  ‘That feeling!’ said Septimus. ‘It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As if you held intimate converse with a whole crowd all together. As if you might stroke ’em, tweak ’em, tickle ’em, strike ’em, all as one beast …’

  ‘As if all shared one circulation of blood, yes.’

  ‘And you feel them, and they feel you; and yet the you they feel is not quite you – not, you know, you simple, you veritable – but a you whom they decide upon.’

  ‘The part did run mad away with you, tonight.’

  ‘I have never felt anything like it.’

  ‘You made me an entire speech, when first we met, about the power of seeming, and how it was not be relied on.’

  ‘Yes; I suppose; but that was seeming opposed to being; seeming with the real, animal life beneath. This is seeming striking inward into being. The artifice stronger than the animal. Not a lie, a change!’

  ‘Septimus—’

  ‘I wonder, will they let me put Sempronius off, tomorrow? Will they always be seeing him, a little, when they talk to me? Always hooting at him?’

  Smith could have assured him, conventionally, that a play was only a play. That a crowd filling a theatre in a city must be worldly enough to tell the difference between the actor and the role. But he had seen enough of the temper of this city, by now, not to be sure that this was definitely the case.

  ‘Septimus, the other night. – That light-heeled wraith who prigged my purse. If I understood you rightly—’

  Septimus sighed. ‘If you had understood me rightly, you would not be asking questions. You saw something you should not have done. I asked you to trust me. Can we not leave it there?’

  ‘The thing is’ – doggedly – ‘I have a particular reason for asking. It is not the money. There was a paper with it—’

  ‘No!’ cried Septimus, standing up, indignant, milk-white and bony. ‘I will not discuss this with you. It is not in your sphere. You must just trust me, when I say, that in this case what you do not know will not harm you. Lord knows you require enough trust in return.’

  Smith looked at him.

  ‘In any case,’ said Septimus more gently, ‘I must go. Achilles will be waiting for me. There are not many places we can go together, you know. We have to do all our celebrating in private. I will see you before Christmas. You will still be here then?’

  ‘I must be. For my bill.’

  ‘Of course. Well, I will be back by then. I must go up-river tomorrow, and try to mend matters as best I can with the regiments waiting there; but I will be back on the twenty-second or the twenty-third. Good night, my dear. That was sublime as well as silly, and I thank you for it.’

  A gleam of a porcelain smile, and he was gone, leaving Smith alone in the steam. He could be heard in the next room, dressing and latching his shoes; then doors opened and closed further away, and there was no further sound at all.

  Smith, melancholy, solitary, presumed he was the last customer in the bath-house. But he found he was in no hurry to exchange it for the colder solitude of the streets, or for the room at Mrs Lee’s, which had taken on few of the qualities of a home, or even of a very substantial refuge. Since his time in the gaol, it seemed the winter wind blew where it willed through every structure in New-York. He poured another dip of water onto the stove, from the barrel, and with a sputtering hiss it seethed instantaneously to vapour, descending from the planked ceiling in a thick grey mist that first burned and battered at Smith’s pores, dragging out new sweat in a sheet over his skin, then coiled and drifted more languorously, in luminous haze around the lantern, in slow hanging twists and tendrils. He could scarcely see a foot but he did not mind. He had playing before his mind’s eye, on his mind’s stage, his view from the store-room door as the audience shuffled out, bearing their chairs. Terpie had been scrubbing at his face with a vinegary rag, to take off the greasepaint, but over her shoulder, though the door-way, between the shapes of those departing, he had seen how Tabitha had stood hesitating; lingering, while her family around her impatiently tried to hustle her away; still looking at the empty stage with a baffled expression, as if she had discovered in herself something else that needed saying. Something surprising. She is a goblin, he reminded himself. There is something very wrong with her. But the imprinted picture persisted regardless. He shut his eyes and could still see it. The sweat trickled down. The hot stove popped and fizzed. Such was the power of the association of ideas, that when he heard footsteps, and a woman’s voice, and his eyes flew open again, startled, he almost expected it to be Tabitha standing there. But it was not: it was Terpie Tomlinson, only as high as his shoulder but as bare as Eve, leaning against the door-frame, and waiting to be admired.

  ‘I haven’t got to play the ingénue for a long time,’ she said. ‘I wanted to say, thankee.’ The voice beneath the elocution turned out to be not a flat Essex drawl, but a warm burr from somewhere in the West Country. Or perhaps that was just another voice left over from the stage: a friendly milkmaid, chosen to please.

  Mrs Tomlinson, naked and lightly steamed, was all rosy curves. All cream-smooth skin puckered and stippled and flustered and whipped up, by the heat, into mobile rashes and foxings of colour. Her noble bosom, uncovered and unsupported, spread wider than her ribs, and jostled out into heavy, rich, pendant udders, whose general blush concentred in fat raspberry-coloured nubbins thick as thumbs. Her wide hips, canted out to exaggerate a swell already near the limit of the probable, spread from her narrow waist like a lyre. Her belly dipped into a crease touched with brownish-pink at her navel, then swelled out again, descending, into a lesser hill, and a lower yet, valleyed and russet-lipped, tangled with springy hair where the steam collected and dripped. – How hard it is to describe a desirable woman without running into geography! Or the barnyard. Or the resources of the fruit-bowl. As if flesh itself, bare vulnerable flesh-of-our-flesh, were not enough, considered merely as itself, and we could not account for its power, without fetching away into similes. I do not want to write this part of the story, and am quibbling to hesitate. – The grave beauty of her face seemed to contradict the lush abundance of her body, yet both were true of her, and in truth contradicted each other as little as any two qualities whatsoever happening to be possessed by an individual: the contradiction existing only in the expectation of an onlooker who had presumed a whole woman would conform to a single impression. Who, finding she didn’t, might if sufficiently led by his loins, choose to interpret the double impression as an extra piquancy. And the effect of the years on Mistress Terpie? Let us be painterly. Let us say, it cannot be denied that the line of beauty had wavered, wandered, thickened in her, with time. Where before there had been the perfect serpentine bow of the river there was now the braided spread of a delta. But magnificence blurred is still magnificence.

  Smith, looking at what she showed him, looking at her confident smile, felt at first a kind of defeat. He had not contrived the situation. It was flat contrary to what he had, that moment, been wearily desiring. He saw at once vistas of disappointment and embarrassment, if he said no, and of complication and embroilment, if he said yes. And of course a betrayal. But a betrayal of what, really? There seemed, one scant second later, a perversity, a negligibility, a bare, thin, almost contemptible unlikelihood in what he had just now been contemplating, and wanting, and dreaming of, compared to the rich certainty of what was being offered by Te
rpie. As if, to continue faithful – even to consider continuing faithful – to his actual passion, would be to prefer a will-o’-the-wisp, a sour vacant mouthful of air, over a mouth to kiss, a willingly opened body in which to find at least the sensation of a home in the world. He liked to choose. He liked to choose. He was a man who chose for himself. When had he last been able to do that? He was sick of waiting on choices not his own. And as he stared, and moments passed – not many, by all external calculation, but enough to be felt, when no response is arriving to this kind of offer – he noticed, what he had been too dumb-struck to see before, that there was anxiety quivering around Terpie’s lapis eyes, despite her smile, and quivering more there by the second. Though he was sure she had many times laid calculated waste like this to men, it might he realised be some while since she had last dared it. She might be inwardly quite unconfident whether this coup-de-l’oeil still worked, at forty-six. Suddenly he saw in her boldness a kind of sluttish courage not a million miles removed from his own willed shamelessness in every New-York room he’d stepped in. She was blatant; so was he.

  Smith grinned. ‘“He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise”,’ he said.

  ‘You may stick that right up your arse, Master Smith,’ said Terpie, in the cool, pure little voice of Marcia.

  ‘Well, I think I’d rather—’

  ‘Maybe later, if you’re a good boy.’

  She swayed into the steam-room: a foot away, six inches away, into his reaching hands. He held her spectacular haunches. Her damp, flushed skin was warm, and very solid. He blew gently and experimentally on the corrugated dull-pink skin around one big nipple. It tightened and swelled. She shivered.

  ‘I don’t s’pose you’re staying?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Smith.

  ‘Only we could do good work together.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘A lot of things. Real theatre. None o’ this tableau nonsense.’

  ‘I really can’t.’

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Then there’s no reason to be careful, is there.’

  Mr Smith could think of many reasons to be careful, but only one he cared to mention.

  ‘What about the Major?’ he said.

  ‘What he don’t know, won’t hurt him.’ She ran her hands into Smith’s wet hair, and he—

  But why always Smith? Was it necessarily true, that because she seemed to him to be the ripe, round, straightforward antidote to the complications of his hopes, the scene looked as simple through her eyes? Was she not taking the greater risk here? Did she not have to set aside cautions, sorrows, hopes, fears, loyalties, to permit herself the role of the plump and ready siren in the steam-room? Have we not heard enough already of Mr Smith’s desire, and seen Mrs Tomlinson quite sufficiently as he did? Should we not, at least, pay a little attention to Terpie’s view of him, lounging like a freckly satyr on the wooden benches, grinning at her with a young man’s lazy sense of entitlement now the surprise of her gift had faded; grown almost all the way into his strength but still long-limbed, with the knots of bone at his knees and his elbows giving him the lingering gawkiness of a foal; with the film of sweat on his chest, and his curls thickened to dark emphatic coils with water drops at the end; with the last unremoved traces of the paint around his eyes rimming his gaze in black depravity; with his wide mouth laughing, and his cock lolling? No, not lolling any more. Stirring, as she filled her hands with him, to her pleasure and his.

  The reader may imagine the occasional mismatches of desire or of endurance caused by their different ages. By the differences, at times in what followed, between twenty-four-year-old impetuousness and forty-six-year-old patience; between twenty-four-year-old directness and forty-six-year-old guile; between twenty-four-year-old muscles and forty-six-year-old backache. The reader may imagine, as she knelt on the bench en levrette – a technical term Terpie had learnt from a French gentleman, meaning with your bum in the air – that the pleasure of a boyish lover’s deep wet rooting inside her did not entirely cancel the pinching of the skin of her knees between the wooden slats. And yet the two of them made for themselves, successfully, that little encompassing sphere of sensation which seems while it lasts to be, if not a home in the great world to be relied upon, at least a little world in itself, outside which not much matters, for a while. And yet, they arrived together, if not at rapture, then at those melting convulsions which come as close to it as you may, where gratitude and mutual greed are all you have to furnish the place of trust.

  She took him in the bath-house. Having crept with him, whispering, up Mrs Lee’s stairs to his bedroom, she took him again in his bed. She slept the night with him there. She woke first, in the grey snow-light of Tuesday morning. Finding that one of the costs of age was soreness after greed, but unwilling yet for the adventure to be over, and the reign of consequence and perhaps remorse to begin, she roused him with her mouth; and when he woke too, climbed comfortably atop him nose to tail, to work at her leisure on the young tree of flesh in her mouth, while he guzzled among sopping coral folds.

  It was unfortunately at this moment that Flora, who had mistaken one of the muffled sounds they were making for an invitation, stepped into the room with a letter in her hand that Tabitha had prevailed on her to carry. Confusion; astonishment; fascination; the dawning in her equable face of a kind of rancorous glee. She dropped the letter and fled.

  6

  A LETTER

  to Richard Smith, Esqr., Mrs Lee’s,

  The Broad Way

  Golden Hill, Monday night

  Smith – which seems tho curt the Name that designates You easiest in my Head – I am not accustomed to People being kind. A Cynic would say no Doubt that I make sure I get little Opportunity to get used to It, being so pre-emptingly nasty Myself. I find It hard, even to pay a close Attention, to any gentle or tender Signs of Intent, for my Mind runs on swift ahead into Abrasions and Contradictions. It is, for Me, like listening to a very faint Sound, to attend to Kindness. Yet you have repeated the quiet Sound, till even I take a Note of it. I have mock’d You, teas’d You, fleer’d at You, trick’d You, and done my best to trap You: and You have return’d, for all these sad Jibes, only a patient Suggestion that You wish me well. That You think me a Creature not reducible to my wanton Urge to Annoy. I do not know what to do with this Kindness – this unwarranted good Opinion – on your Part. I am not sure at All, since We are speaking Truth here, that I like It. It has for me the Savour of Danger. It seems to beckon me into empty Places, where I will likely find Nothing to sustain me. Nine portions out of Ten in me, or maybe Ninety-Nine, desire to Mock again; to defend Myself by stamping on It like a Bugg. Yet it seems an Honour due to You, for your Kindness, and perhaps an Action of Hope towards Myself, to ask what the Tenth part of me, or the Hundredth, wants. I saw You today acting Juba, and acting Him passing well, tho Addison is not Shakespeare, and You were therefore endeavouring I thought to stand tall under a low Ceiling: but no Matter, I am not setting up for a Critick. I thought to Myself, what a Fool is Marcia, to require such hearty Kicks from Circumstance to tell Her what She feels for Juba. A due Respect to her own Independency, a Willingness to take a Fraction of the Risks her Lover took, should surely have moved Her sooner, to interrogate her Heart. If I can learn Patience from You, Smith – if I can struggle and succeed and for an Hour lay aside my old Friend Spite – will you come again, and drink Tea with Me, and see what new Thing we may find Courage to make Room for? Your uncivil T

  7

  O Sapientia

  December 16th

  20 Geo. II

  1746

  I

  When a log that has lain half-burned in a winter fire is struck suddenly with the poker, a bright lace of communicative sparks wakes on the instant. The sullen coals shatter into peach and scarlet mosaic, with a thin high tinkling sound, and pulses of the changing shades pass over the surface in all directions with rapidity too great for the eye. So was it when the news of Smith’s disgraceful liais
on was suddenly released into the town.

  Within hours, the intelligence that the English actor had been caught in spectacular debauchery with the celebrated Mrs Tomlinson had run from ear to mouth to ear all the way from the Fort to Rutgers’ Farm, from the frozen East River to the black surge of the Hudson. That it spread so fast may be attributed to its easy translation into several varieties appealing to different minds, yet equally satisfying and destructive in all of ’em. Moralising: that one of the wicked creatures of the stage had been caught at it with another, a harlot old enough to be his mother, all natural prohibitions no doubt having been overthrown by their practice of godless imposture. National: that all England was a cauldron of filth, and one just arrived from thence would necessarily bring with him the taint of it. Artistic: that the passion displayed yesterday between Juba and Marcia had proved veritable, which was not a surprise to anyone of discernment who had been in the theatre, for indeed you could tell at the time that there was something in the air. Envious: that the little pup from London had had the crack at Terpie many a man wanted. Envious in a different style: that he was a pretty fellow, and right to see a lad might learn a thing or two from a friendly widow, or with discretion a wife, but that he must be lacking in the headpiece to settle for his education on such a trollop. Political: that the boy new-come with all the money, who’d seemed to veer elusively between the parties, had surely now just fumbl’d, or stumbl’d, or f——’d his way onto the side of the Assembly, by publicly cuckolding the Governor’s officer. Delicious approval; delicious disapproval; a fire of winter scandal blazing up delicious hot.