The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  Their last Exploit inflamed these Sons of Debauchery so far that they proposed, as a Conclusion of the Scene, that each Man should chuse his Posture, and go through what they had only seen imitated before. But this was a Step the Nymphs would not comply with, it being the Maxim of these Damsels, never to admit of the Embraces of the Men, for fear of spoiling their Trade. This very much surprised Camillo, who from their former Behavior, persuaded himself there could not be invented any Species of Wickedness with which they would not comply for the Sake of Money; and though before this Refusal, their abandoned Obscenity had quite stifled all thoughts of lying with them, yet now his Desires were as strong as if they had been modest Virgins, and he had seen nothing of their Wantonness; so that he became as earnest to oblige them to comply as any Man in the Company.

  This gives the general idea of what went on at Ma Terpsichore’s, though it omits a particular of difference: the girls of 1867, not so squeamish as those of 1749, were willingly auctioned off in a final tableau.

  However, Charles was not there to make a bid. The less obscene preambles he had quite enjoyed. He put on his much-traveled face, he had seen better things in Paris (or so he whispered to Sir Tom), he played the blase young know-all. But as the clothes fell, so did his drunkenness; he glanced at the lecherously parted mouths of the shadowed men beside him, he heard Sir Tom already indicating his pick to the bishop’s son. The white bodies embraced, contorted, mimicked; but it seemed to Charles that there was a despair behind the fixed suggestive smiles of the performers. One was a child who could only just have reached puberty; and there seemed in her assumption of demure innocence something genuinely virginal, still agonized, not fully hardened by her profession.

  Yet as he was revolted, so was he sexually irritated. He loathed the public circumstance of this exhibition; but he was enough of an animal to be privately disturbed and excited. Some time before the end he rose and quietly left the room, as if it were to relieve himself. In the anteroom outside the little danseuse who had served the champagne sat by a table with the gentlemen’s cloaks and canes. An artificial smile creased her painted face as she rose. Charles stared a moment at her elaborately disordered ringlets, her bare arms and almost bare bosom. He seemed about to speak, but then changed his mind and brusquely gestured for his things. He threw a half sovereign on the table beside the girl and blundered out.

  In the street at the alley’s end he found several expectant cabs waiting. He took the first, shouted up (such was the cautious Victorian convention) the name of a Kensington street near to the one where he lived, and then threw himself into the seat. He did not feel nobly decent; but as if he had swallowed an insult or funked a duel. His father had lived a life in which such evenings were a commonplace; that he could not stomach them proved he was unnatural. Where now was the traveled man of the world? Shrunk into a miserable coward. And Ernestina, his engagement vows? But to recall them was to be a prisoner waking from a dream that he was free and trying to stand, only to be jerked down by his chains back into the black reality of his cell.

  The hansom threaded its way slowly down a narrow street. It was crowded with other hansoms and carriages, for this was still very much in the area of sin. Under each light, in every doorway, stood prostitutes. From the darkness Charles watched them. He felt himself boiling, intolerable. If there had been a sharp spike in front of him he would, echoing Sarah before the thorn tree, have run his hand through it, so strong was his feeling for maceration, punishment, some action that would lance his bile.

  A quieter street. And they passed a gaslight under which stood a solitary girl. Perhaps because of the flagrant frequency of the women in the street they had left she seemed forlorn, too inexperienced to venture closer. Yet her profession was unmistakable. She wore a dingy pink cotton dress with imitation roses at the breast; a white shawl round her shoulders. A black hat in the new style, small and masculine, perched over a large netted chignon of auburn hair. She stared at the passing hansom; and something about the shade of the hair, the alert dark-shadowed eyes, the vaguely wistful stance, made Charles crane forward and keep her in view through the oval side-window as the hansom passed. He had an intolerable moment, then he seized his stick and knocked hard with it on the roof above him. The driver stopped at once. There were hurried footsteps; and then the face appeared, slightly below him, beside the open front of the hansom.

  She was not really like Sarah. He saw the hair was too red to be natural; and there was a commonness about her, an artificial boldness in her steady eyes and red-lipped smile; too red, like a gash of blood. But just a tinge—something in the firm eyebrows, perhaps, or the mouth.

  “You have a room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell him where to go.”

  She disappeared from his sight a moment and said something to the driver behind. Then she stepped up, making the hansom rock, and got in beside him, filling the narrow space with cheap perfume. He felt the light cloth of her sleeve and skirt brush him, but they did not touch. The hansom moved on. There was a silence for a hundred yards or more.

  “Is it for all night, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “I asks ‘cause I adds the price of the fare back if it ain’t.”

  He nodded, and stared into the darkness ahead of him. They passed another clopping hundred yards in silence. He felt her relax a little, the smallest pressure against his arm.

  “Terrible cold for the time of year.”

  “Yes.” He glanced at her. “You must notice such things.”

  “I don’t do no work when it snows. Some does. But I don’t.”

  More silence. This time Charles spoke.

  “You have been long… ?”

  “Since I was eighteen, sir. Two years come May.”

  “Ah.”

  He stole another look at her during the next silence. A horrid mathematics gnawed at Charles’s mind: three hundred and sixty-five, say three hundred “working,” multiply by two… it was six hundred to one that she did not have some disease. Was there some delicate way he could ask? There was not. He glanced at her again in an advantageous moment of outside light. Her complexion seemed unblemished. But he was a fool; as regards syphilis he knew he would have been ten times safer at a luxury establishment like the one he had left. To pick up a mere Cockney streetwalker… but his fate was sealed. He wished it so. They were heading north, towards the Tottenham Court Road.

  “Do you wish me to pay you now?”

  “I ain’t partickler, sir. Just as you fancy.”

  “Very well. How much?”

  She hesitated. Then: “Normal, sir?”

  He flashed a look at her; nodded.

  “All night I usual charges…” and her tiny hesitation was pathetically dishonest, “… a sovereign.”

  He felt inside his frock coat and passed her the coin.

  “Thank you, sir.” She put it discreetly away in her reticule. And then she managed an oblique answer to his secret fear. “I only go with gentlemen, sir. You don’t need no worries like that.”

  In his turn he said, “Thank you.”

  40

  To the lips, ah, of others,

  Those lips have been prest,

  And others, ere I was,

  Were clasped to that breast…

  Matthew Arnold, Parting (1853)

  The hansom drew up at a house in a narrow side street east of the Tottenham Court Road. Stepping quickly out of the vehicle, the girl went straight up some steps to a door and let herself in. The hansom driver was an old, old man, so long encased in his many-caped driving coat and his deep-banded top hat that it was hard to imagine they had not grown onto his body. Setting his whip in the stand beside his seat and taking his cutty out of his mouth, he held his grimed hand down, cupped, for the money. Meanwhile he stared straight ahead to the end of the dark street, as if he could not bear to set eyes on Charles again. Charles was glad not to be looked at; and yet felt quite as unspeakable as this ancient cab driver seeme
d determined to make him feel. He had a moment of doubt. He could spring back in, for the girl had disappeared… but then a black obstinacy made him pay.

  Charles found the prostitute waiting in a poorly lit hallway, her back to him. She did not look round, but moved up the stairs as soon as she heard him close the door. There was a smell of cooking, obscure voices from the back of the house.

  They went up two stale flights of stairs. She opened a door and held it for him to pass through; and when he had done so, slid a bolt across. Then she went and turned up the gaslights over the fire. She poked that to life and put some more coal on it. Charles looked round. Everything in the room except the bed was shabby, but spotlessly clean. The bed was of iron and brass, the latter so well polished it seemed like gold. In the corner facing it there was a screen behind which he glimpsed a washstand. A few cheap ornaments, some cheap prints on the walls. The frayed moreen curtains were drawn. Nothing in the room suggested the luxurious purpose for which it was used.

  “Pardon me, sir. If you’d make yourself at ‘ome. I shan’t be a minute.”

  She went through another door into a room at the back of the house. It was in darkness, and he noticed that she closed the door after her very gently. He went and stood with his back to the fire. Through the closed door he heard the faint mutter of an awakened child, a shushing, a few low words. The door opened again and the prostitute reappeared. She had taken off her shawl and her hat. She smiled nervously at him.

  “It’s my little gel, sir. She won’t make no noise. She’s good as gold.” Sensing his disapproval, she hurried on. “There’s a chophouse just a step away, sir, if you’re ‘ungry.”

  Charles was not; but nor did he now feel sexually hungry, either. He found it hard to look at her.

  “Pray order for yourself what you want. I don’t… that is… some wine, perhaps, if it can be got.”

  “French or German, sir?”

  “A glass of hock—you like that?”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll send the lad out.”

  And again she disappeared. He heard her call sharply, much less genteel, down the hall.

  “’Arry!”

  The murmur of voices, the front door slammed. When she came back he asked if he should not have given her some money. But it seemed this service was included.

  “Won’t you take the chair, sir?”

  And she held out her hands for his hat and stick, which he still held. He handed them over, then parted the tails of his frock coat and sat by the fire. The coal she had put on seemed slow to burn. She knelt before it, and before him, and busied herself again with the poker.

  “They’re best quality, they didn’t ought to be so slow catchin’. It’s the cellar. Damp as old ‘ouses.”

  He watched her profile in the red light from the fire. It was not a pretty face, but sturdy, placid, unthinking. Her bust was well developed; her wrists and hands surprisingly delicate, almost fragile. They, and her abundant hair, momentarily sparked off his desire. He almost put out his hand to touch her, but changed his mind. He would feel better when he had more wine. They remained so for a minute or more. At last she looked at him, and he smiled. For the first time that day he had a fleeting sense of peace.

  She turned her eyes back to the fire then and murmured, “’E won’t be more’n a minute. It’s only two steps.”

  And so they stayed in silence again. But such moments as these were very strange to a Victorian man; even between husband and wife the intimacy was largely governed by the iron laws of convention. Yet here Charles was, sitting at the fire of this woman he had not known existed an hour before, like…

  “The father of your little girl… ?”

  “’E’s a sojjer, sir.”

  “A soldier?”

  She stared at the fire: memories.

  “’E’s out in Hindia now.”

  “Would he not marry you?”

  She smiled at his innocence, then shook her head. “’E gave me money for when I was brought to bed.” By which she seemed to suggest that he had done all one could decently expect.

  “And could you not find any other means of livelihood?”

  “There’s work. But it’s all day work. And then when I paid to look after little Mary…” she shrugged. “Once you been done wrong to, you been done wrong to. Can’t be mended, so you ‘ave to make out as best you can.”

  “And you believe this the best way?”

  “I don’t know no other no more, sir.”

  But she spoke without much sign of shame or regret. Her fate was determined, and she lacked the imagination to see it.

  There were feet on the stairs. She rose and went to the door and opened it before the knock. Charles glimpsed a boy of thirteen or so outside, who had evidently been trained not to stare, since his eyes remained down while she herself carried the tray to a table by the window and then returned to the door with her purse. There was the chink of small coins, and the door softly closed. She poured him a glass of wine and brought it to him, setting the half-bottle on a trivet in the hearth beside him, as if all wine should be warmed. Then she sat and removed the cloth from the plate on the tray. Out of the corner of his eye Charles saw a small pie, potatoes, a tumbler of what was evidently gin and water, for she would hardly have had water alone brought up. His hock tasted acid, but he drank it in the hope that his senses would be dulled.

  The small crackle from the now burning fire, the quiet hiss of the gas jets, the chink of cutlery: he could not see how they should ever pass to the real purpose of his presence. He drank another glass of the vinegary wine.

  But she soon finished her repast. The tray was taken outside. Then she went back into the darkened bedroom where the little girl slept. A minute passed. She reappeared. Now she wore a white peignoir, which she held closed. Her hair was loosened and fell down her back; and her hand held the edges of the robe together sufficiently tightly to show she was naked beneath it. Charles rose.

  “No ‘aste, sir. Finish your wine.”

  He stared down at the bottle beside him, as if he had not noticed it before; then nodded and sat down again, and poured himself another glass. She moved in front of him and reached, her other hand still holding the peignoir together, to turn down the gas to two small green points. Firelight bathed her, softened her young features; and then again she knelt at his feet facing the fire. After a moment she reached out both hands to it and the robe fell a little open. He saw a white breast, shadowed, and not fully bared.

  She spoke into the fire. “Would you like me to sit on your knees, sir?”

  “Yes… please do.”

  He tossed off his wine. Clutching her robe together again she stood, then sat easily back across his braced legs, her right arm round his shoulders. His left arm he put round her waist, while his right lay, with an absurd unnaturalness, along the low arm of the chair. For a moment her left hand clasped the fabric of her gown, but then she reached it out and caressed his cheek. A moment; she kissed his other cheek. Their eyes met. She glanced down at his mouth, as if shyly, but she went about her business without shyness.

  “You’re a very ‘andsome gentleman.”

  “You’re a pretty girl.”

  “You like us wicked girls?”

  He noted she had dropped the “sir.” He tightened his left arm a little.

  She reached then and took his recalcitrant right hand and led it under her robe to her bare breast. He felt the stiff point of flesh in the center of his palm. Her hand drew his head to hers, and they kissed, as his hand, now recalling forbidden female flesh, silken and swollen contours, a poem forgotten, sized and approved the breast then slid deeper and lower inside her robe to the incurve of her waist. She was naked, and her mouth tasted faintly of onions.

  Perhaps it was that which gave him his first wave of nausea. He concealed it, becoming two people: one who had drunk too much and one who was now sexually excited. The robe fell shamelessly open over the girl’s slight belly, the dark well of pubic hair, the
white thighs that seduced him both by sight and pressure. His hand did not wander lower than her waist; but it wandered above, touching those open breasts, the neck, the shoulders. She made no advances after that first leading of his hand; she was his passive victim, her head resting on his shoulder, marble made warmth, an Etty nude, the Pygmalion myth brought to a happy end. Another wave of nausea came over him. She sensed it, but misinterpreted.

  “I’m too ‘eavy for you?”

  “No… that is…”

  “It’s a nice bed. Soft.”

  She stood away from him, went to it and folded back the bedclothes carefully, then turned to look at him. She let the robe slip from her shoulders. She was well-formed, with shapely buttocks. A moment, then she sat and swung her legs under the bedclothes and lay back with her eyes closed, in what she transparently thought was a position both discreet and abandoned. A coal began to flicker brightly, casting intense but quavering shadows; a cage, the end-rails of the bed, danced on the wall behind her. Charles stood, fighting the battle in his stomach. It was the hock—he had been insane to drink it. He saw her eyes open and look at him. She hesitated, then reached out those delicate white arms. He made a gesture towards his frock coat.