‘The play I attended most recently was by Shakespeare, sir. Last evening.’
‘And that absolves you?’
‘Shakespeare was a Christian, sir, to the best of my knowledge.’
‘And Satan was one of the angels.’
Mr Meates reverses from the room like Methuselah on a trolley, a vision of admonition in bicycle clips. The other clerks are staring. Glumly they return to their work. Stoker gathers a thick packet of legal files sent up from the provinces and resumes noting the verdicts and sentences. Every fine and imprisonment, each pitiable committal: all must be recorded and processed. Failures, thieveries, libels, late rents, personations, arsons, evictions. A hungry girl in Sligo smashed her hand through a window to steal a loaf of bread. The woman at the table reached for a hatchet and chopped off the girl’s hand in one blow, thinking ‘she had cholera’.
Sometimes he wonders why the flames of suffering and struggle contained in these documents don’t fan themselves into his stories, but for some reason they never do. The demands of putting together the reference book he must write are immense, the promised deadline is coming, and then there is the work on the census. The secret of Empire is that everything is written down.
At lunchtime he goes to the riverbank and sits beneath the sycamores, watches the longboats, listens to the calls of the stevedores. The sour smell of hops arises from the brewery. Slum children gather to watch the barrels of Guinness being barged to the world they will never see. Scenes and pictures from last night’s play continue to flicker at him like after-images of something looked at in sunlight. He waits almost an hour but his Florence doesn’t come. On his walk back to the Castle, he happens into her maid buying fish on Usher’s Quay. ‘Miss is unwell today, sir. One of her headaches.’
Returned to the office, he is himself assailed by a headache, but there’s nothing to be done, he must get on. The post-boy brings a sack of the afternoon mail, hundreds of envelopes containing census returns. The casement clock in the corner placks its stolid beat. From the distance, the siren in the gasworks sounds its shrieking wail. As he begins sorting the returns, whole handfuls of documents, all requiring transcription, he notices something odd.
The envelope is different, smaller, expensive looking, like the hand-rolled mourning paper they sell in Paris. Grey with a black border, watermarked with an upside-down cross in a circle. The cursive is elegant copperplate, graceful as a line of swans.
Personal
Mr Bram Stoker
Theatre critic
As he opens it and reads, beads of sweat form on his face.
His first thought is that the letter is a trick, a practical joke got up by a colleague, a typical bit of Dublin snide cruelty masquerading as good humour. But when he turns, nobody is watching him, gauging his reaction. Every head is bent towards its desk.
He will remember this moment for the rest of his life. Bent heads, the clock, a letter.
Seven o’clock that evening finds him in St Stephen’s Green, smoking, pacing by the lake. His second-hand suit feels tight and he could find no clean collar, and, since payday will not come for another ten days, he doesn’t have the wherewithal to buy one. The shirt he is wearing is turned inside out, its cuffs a little yellowed and frayed. In his mind, he has rehearsed what he wants to say, like an actor awaiting the scene.
The time will be short. Important not to forget anything. Vital to swallow down this crippling nervousness. Perhaps a gin for Dutch courage? Wiser not to. How terrible it would be to slur. Glancing up, he sees that oddball Yeats strolling over the little arched bridge, a silverback gorilla in a monocle.
Don’t come in, says the Shelbourne Hotel. You do not belong here. You’ll only embarrass yourself, Fool. Run along.
As he moves through the revolving doors, across the hundred-mile-long lobby, past the porter’s leathered alcove, up the vast marble staircases, women on their knees are brushing the purple carpets and white-gloved maids polish porcelain doorknobs and a waiter pushes a trolley of glinting silver salvers, chivvied by the portly maître d’. The rich like silence. Everyone is whispering. He can hear the thump of blood in his temples.
From somewhere arises the sound of a woman’s quiet laughter as he enters the gloomy corridor. The gas lamps are hissing. He walks along the long passageway, counting down the rooms, odd numbers on the right, even numbers on the left, until he comes to the door of Room 13.
He knocks. No answer. Knocks again. Stillness. Now he notices that the door is ever so slightly ajar. He pushes and it creaks open.
Inside the large room, heavy brocade drapes are closed. A fire spits and gusts in the grate. Red and orange light plays on the gloss of the dark wallpaper, on the droplets of the chandeliers, the crystal goblets and decanter, on the silverware that has been set in two places on the small mahogany table. Heads of deer stare glassily from their mounted shields. A single black candle is weeping its wax down the pillar of its alabaster candlestick.
‘Good evening?’ he tries.
Shadows, the crackle of the fire.
Now he perceives that the room is part of a suite, that there is a heavy-looking door with an iron-hoop handle in the oak-panelled wall to the right of the fireplace.
What to do? Should he approach? Or leave and start again?
‘Someone there?’ calls the voice from behind him.
Startled, he turns.
The firelight shudders.
In a doorway he had not noticed near the entrance to the suite, pale yellow candlelight is cast from a narrow passageway, towards which he crosses quietly.
In the parlour at the end of the passageway, Irving is seated on a chaise longue in dark grey evening dress. Three black candles placed on copper saucers burn on a bookshelf, a Turkish cigarette in a black onyx ashtray. He doesn’t raise his glance to the visitor but continues staring at a pack of playing cards fanned out on an ottoman before him.
‘You are in shadow,’ he says quietly.
‘Sir?’
‘My eyesight is poor. Step back half a pace, will you.’
Stoker does as commanded. Irving looks up, his irises shining like new minted coins, his black hair sleek as sealskin.
‘The wizard of kind words,’ he says.
‘I – didn’t know whether or not to accept your invitation. I didn’t want to trouble you.’
‘Oh, I knew you would accept. I saw it in the tarot. You had no choice in the matter, it was all ordained. Look.’
He twirls the fingers of his left hand and produces the Hanged Man card from the air. Snaps them and it disappears. His buttery smile. ‘Little conjuring trick, Stoker. It’s a skill I admire. You shall find an autographed photograph of me on the table inside. My thanks for your sensitive notice of my Hamlet last evening. Your writing casts quite the spell. Good night.’
‘I have taken the liberty, if I may, of bringing you a file of some ghost stories I have written and published. I should value your estimation. Should you feel any of them have possibilities as a piece for theatre. They have been published in little magazines. Tales of the imagination. But my greatest heart’s hope is to write a piece for the stage.’
‘A theatre critic with imagination. You don’t find that gets in the way? Like a pianist having three hands but not knowing what to do with any of them.’
‘I feel that life without imagination would be an unending hell.’
‘Is it not that anyway?’
‘I did not come to trade clevernesses.’
The actor yawns and bends his head to the cards again. ‘I have seen nothing in your writing that led me to believe you are an artist, Stoker. If you have come to me for affirmation, you shall be disappointed. Your criticism has sensitivity but you are not a creator. For which you should be grateful. The road of the artist is arduous. Loneliness is his lantern through the world.’
‘Perhaps – if you looked over the stories?’
‘You have audacity, I see.’
‘Might I leave them on the ta
ble in the other room as I go? Or perhaps I might read one of them to you?’
‘There is another come with you, Stoker. He is standing between us. I have the gift of sensing spirits, he wishes you not to be here. He begs you, for the sake of his soul’s rest, to depart this room.’
‘I—’
‘You are wondering, I think, why I have not invited you to sit with me. I never invite anyone. An old shibboleth among those of my sect. You must choose to step into the scene or remain in the wings. We theatre people have a weakness for superstition.’
‘If you are certain that I wouldn’t be interrupting, I should think it a tremendous honour to sit with you a brief while.’
‘Then, do,’ he says quietly. ‘I don’t bite.’
— IV —
In which a couple, perhaps to avoid a quarrel, become engaged, and the voice of an old lady is heard
Born in his cage, he has never once left it, so the great orang-utan believes life in the cage is freedom, that it is those unfortunates beyond the bars who are imprisoned. How gloomy they appear. They gaze in at him longingly, find diversion in their offerings of thrown nuts and grapes. It bores him to accept their tribute but slavery is what they’re for. I could kill them with one blow. Why bother? Their forlorn, glassy eyes. Those rags they must put on. To think they are my cousins. They’re almost apelike.
Not far from the Monkey House in the Royal Zoological Society Gardens, pallid Stoker and a young woman who has been described as the most radiant in Dublin have paused by the cast-iron drinking fountain in the rose arbour. Florence Balcombe’s skin is pale as Carrara church-marble, her auburn eyes large, when she speaks out of deep feeling she moves her hands, like an Italian. She is moving her hands a lot at the moment.
The orang-utan sometimes thinks them an unlikely couple. Indeed, they have sometimes thought this of themselves. It has been one of those loves that does not announce itself with satin valentines but happens in spite of expectations.
They resume their walk now, wending down the lane by the flamingo lake, then the Lizard House and back around Anteater Hill. Nothing is said for some time. Which is a way of saying much. The little tacit entr’acte has its purpose. They know enough about one another to be aware that a brief cooling-off is required if the appointment is not to end in a quarrel.
Nannies push children and children push hoops. A fez-wearing elephant is swayingly led along the white sawdust road by a boy in a loincloth but proper Irish wellingtons. Great ecstasies of squawking parrots gabble at the lions.
‘On a holiday, do you mean?’ the young woman asks coolly.
‘Not on a holiday.’
‘This character you have never met before, about whom you know almost nothing – nothing of the slightest true importance at any rate – invites you to drop your life like a hot fork and scuttle off to London?’
‘As his secretary, Flo, at his new playhouse.’
‘As his part-time secretary. On a part-timer’s salary.’
‘It would be a new start in literary life. Who knows where it could lead? Perhaps to my writing a decent play.’
‘You can’t write a decent play in Dublin?’
‘I don’t know that I can’t. I know that I haven’t.’
‘Bram—’
‘Neither has anyone else.’
‘He has investment capital for this theatre of his? An actor? Helming a business? Who ever heard of such a nonsense? Like one of these chimpanzees managing a kindergarten.’
‘Everything is in place, he has shown me the plans. It’s the old Lyceum near the Strand, a wonderful location. He has investors, influential supporters – his bankers are Coutts – a first-rate programme already subscribing. Shakespeare, the Greeks, the classic tales of all Europe. His idea is to make theatre respectable.’
‘Ambitious indeed.’
‘But admirable.’
‘My difficulty, Bram, is that I don’t understand. It seems so sudden, so unexpected. You hardly know the man.’
‘I feel I’ve known him all my life.’
‘When you come out with these absurdities, it mystifies me.’
‘I see him on the stage and I somehow feel I know him. Everyone does, that’s his greatness.’
‘If that is greatness, which I doubt, it sounds a little widely spread to me, and a little counterfeit, too. Who can be truly great to more than a few people?’
‘You know what I mean. It’s no different from what an audience hears in a great symphony or sees in a great painting.’
‘You’re not running off to London to be with a painting.’
‘I am not “running off” anywhere, Flo, it would be a temporary move. I merely thought we might talk it over, you and I.’
‘You sound as though you’re a little in love with him, this walking symphony of yours. My rival.’
‘You will never have a rival, Dull, don’t be silly. It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, do you not find it hot here?’
He leads her towards the gloomy coldness of the Penguin and Puffin House but the weird echoes and the rank odour of dead fish settle in like a fog and the forlorn clumsiness of the creatures out of water seems a sort of reproof and a cruelty, and he finds himself longing for sunlight. Emerged from the municipal imagining of Antarctica, they find a bench beneath a weeping willow and watch the peacock for a while. But chilliness has followed them out.
‘You have a life here in Dublin, Bram. A pensionable position. It doesn’t pay much at the moment, I know, but it is permanent and will lead to better things. You have friends—’
‘I haven’t.’
‘You have some.’
He says nothing.
‘You could have more,’ she continues, ‘if only you tried. If only you weren’t so serious and private. Everything is laid out before you like a suit on a bed. Why turn your back on it? You don’t even like London.’
‘It isn’t that I don’t like it. I have never felt at home there, that’s all. The sky seems so big and Londoners so knowing, as though one’s in a pantomime one doesn’t quite understand. But in another way London is my dream. It must be, for any writer who wishes to be more than a footnote. I feel this chance won’t come again, Flo.’
‘And you and I?’
‘What about you and I?’
‘Isn’t our knocking about together also a chance?’
‘Of course it is very much more than that.’
‘You don’t sound overpoweringly certain.’
‘I am.’
‘So, let me be clear that I understand my own minor role in the deliciously heroic drama devised and proposed by yourself and the Grand Pooh-Bah Mr Irving. I am to trot down to the pier at Kingstown and wave you adieu with my tiny lace handkerchief like an obedient little puppy of a nicely behaved girl. Is that it? For you to commence your exciting London life. Before toddling home to my embroidery and bible study over cocoa.’
‘Flo, please—’
Her eyes fill. ‘Rot me, you seem remarkably certain of my patience, old thing.’
He takes her hand. ‘London is not far, pet. I would visit every other weekend. And the longest I should want to stay there is six months.’
‘Be still, my beating heart.’
‘My thoughtlessness has upset you. I am sorry. Let us discuss the matter another time. Come, let’s not spoil our day.’
‘No doubt the girl is not supposed to say a thing straightforwardly. Which is a matter of tremendous convenience to the man, of course, and the reason why the world is in the state it’s in. You are my lover. I am yours. I had hoped that we might be married. I imagine you must have known that. Anyhow. There it is.’
‘But I have hoped for the same, Flo. We’re at crossed purposes, I assure you. I long to be at your side. I always have.’
She looks sad as she touches his face. ‘If you could see my dreams, Bram.’
He leans in to embrace her. She kisses him fiercely.
‘Bram?’
> ‘Pet?’
‘What’s that mark on your neck?’
‘Nothing, love. Cut myself shaving.’
THE VOICE OF ELLEN TERRY
Recorded in 1906 on phonographic cylinder by the costume designer and writer Alice Comyns Carr as preparatory material for a series of articles in The Spectator.
Why he did it? One doesn’t know … You’d have to ask him directly … To throw over one’s life, go tearing off to London on a sudden. We never spoke of it, he and I. Hard to credit, I know. Don’t you ever feel it’s the most obvious questions that never get asked?
Perhaps you could ask his wife. No, I never knew her well. Bright woman, a lot of book learning. She intimidated me a little.
All I can tell you is that Harry – by which I mean the Chief – had a sort of mesmeric effect on one. Speaking in no sort of metaphorical way but almost the literal truth. Ask anyone, he’ll tell you. He or she. The same.
You’d meet him having prepared a soliloquy about why you wouldn’t do something he wanted and you’d leave ten minutes later agreeing to. That sort. Splendid way of making you think what he wanted was your own idea. Like a male novelist’s idea of a wife.
One of those chaps able to make you think the rustling leaves are causing the wind. One adored him, of course. Devious cur.
… And there’s that early bit in Bram’s book, you know. Where he’s going on about London. One always sensed that was how he himself felt. Have you a copy there? I say, you’re well prepared. It’s this bit, at the start. The old bloodsucker is a tremendous fellow for English literature, hadn’t you noticed? Oh yes. He’s practically got a ticket for Boots Book-lovers’ Library. Anyhow. Let me see. Just my spectacles. Ah yes. Then, this is from Dracula, page 24.
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