Читать книгу A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only] - Brian Thompson, Brian Thompson - Страница 9

The road is dusty, the coach unbearably stuffy. The landscape has very soon palled. One valley is much like another, one ridge reveals the next. She is sweating in her stays, her waist nipped in painful imitation of adult fashion, her legs in stockings, her feet crammed into dirty white silk shoes. Not a button is to be loosened from her bodice, not a hem raised of her skirts. Clothes, like the empty conversation, the conventional diet, are to be endured. She belongs to the kind of family where all the children are considered as miniature and largely ungrateful adults for whom the future has already been mapped out. Her brothers will never work, in the sense that engineers or doctors work. They will probably become soldiers. Though it might be privately comical to imagine these lumpy and unimaginative boys as standing in the breach at some future clash of arms, it is not so funny at all to consider her own position. Though hardly more than a child, her future has been even more ruthlessly dictated. What she sees in the mirror is what she is. She is a commodity. What she wants can have nothing in it that doesn’t correspond to what her parents want. Even before she has truly entered the world – as expressed by the mystery of other people – she is preparing to leave it.

Time moves as slowly and maddeningly as the coach in which she sits, but even so in five or six years time, what little freedom of action she possesses now will have disappeared. Part of her commodity value is obedience to a man. It was her father, and all too soon it will be her husband. The sweat thickens in her hair and gathers behind her knees. The road unravels. At the end of it (in the child’s fantasy) might be a prince, a castle and rolling acres. The person not likely to be waiting is a poet or a dreamer, nor anyone who lives in a garret. Though there is much in the world – as for example the young Austrian officer who leans in through the carriage window to inspect the passports, or the distinguished-looking German scholar on his way to Rome, or any of a hundred interesting examples met along the way – most of the observable world is nothing more than idle scenery. About England, where she is going, she knows next to nothing: she knows the names of shops but not the names of cities. Victoria, whose star she felt she was to follow, has turned out to be distressingly family-minded and moralistic, besotted with her prim little husband. As for her own talents, her father speaks at least as good Italian as she, her voice is untrained, her reading patchy and inconsequential. She is already a little on the dumpy side. And she is sweating.

It happened that Wilkie Collins and Dickens were travelling to Florence at exactly the same time as the Thomases set off in the opposite direction, and a letter by Collins to a friend has left us a snapshot picture of travel by diligence along those dangerous roads of northern Italy. He explains how strings were tied to the trunks and luggage riding on the roof and each passenger sat with the loose end in his hand. The intention – no matter that the coach was in motion – was to prevent theft. ‘It was like sitting in a shower bath and waiting to pull the string – or rather, like fishing in the sea, when one waits to feel a bite by the tug of the line round one’s finger.’

The tedium of the journey, the bad inns and low cunning of the peasants met along the way, the occasional interrogations by unpleasantly brusque Austrian patrols, all conspired to produce in Morgan the conviction that he was at last leaving the shadows and coming back into the light. Let others take what they could from Italy: he was free of it. He was not as rich as he would like and he was no longer young. However, Louisa’s inheritance was clear of entail at last: he could throw out the agriculturals who were now in disgraceful occupation of Gate House and set about making himself a landed proprietor. That had a ring to it. He had enough money to send both his sons to Eton, and sprawling next to Louisa as the coach rattled along, its canvas window coverings clattering, sat the petulant girl on which the last, and he hoped, best phase of his life depended. Somewhere, perhaps even on this very road, returning home to some noble house in a carriage emblazoned with arms, was the man to marry Georgina and by so doing, elevate the whole family.

The politician and diarist Charles Greville, writing in 1843, summed up the potential rewards of an advantageous marriage as follows:

This year is distinguished by many marriages in the great world, the last, and the one exciting the greatest sensation being that of March to my niece. A wonderful elevation for a girl without beauty, talents, accomplishments or charm of any kind, an enormous prize to draw in the lottery of life. All the mothers in London consider it a robbery as each loses her chance of such a prize.

Morgan understood well enough that his stake in this market was slender. But he also knew, or thought he knew, that nobody got what they wanted by chance. There was a campaign to be fought. That was how it had been in his own day and that was how he imagined it to be now. His first-hand knowledge of English society was nearly fifteen years out of date yet he supposed that what went in the days of his youth, went on still. It had better, for he knew of nothing else.

He was to be proved wrong. Even leaving aside his wife’s eccentric taste in clothes – her high colour and preference for red shawls led Georgina once to describe her mother as looking like a macaw – there was something fusty and old-fashioned about the whole family. Though they were English to the people they met along the way, there was an ignorance in them that surprised their fellow countrymen. A significant example of this was found whenever Louisa mentioned her daughter’s wonderfully clear soprano voice. Anyone who asked out of courtesy to whom they had sent her in Florence for lessons – to Signor Uberti perhaps? – was met with a studied silence. She had received no lessons. The same was true of the art and literature of the day. Morgan knew that his bête noire Watts was back in England but not that he was recently engaged on enormous historical and allegorical paintings in which his social conscience wrestled with the ills of society. (They were sometimes called muffin paintings, after Thackeray’s satirisation of a ‘George Rumbold’ painting in which Rumbold – his name for Watts – had painted such a huge canvas that a mere muffin had a diameter of two feet three inches.) Meanwhile, what was this absurd thing called the March of Intellect – from whence to where? The Great Exhibition had been and gone – what had been the attraction of looking at a lot of farm machinery and the like, displayed in a building made of glass by a man who was gardener to the Duke of Devonshire?

For Georgina, going home was the adventure of her young life. She was about to rejoin what was the greatest nation on earth at its most prosperous. Everyone knew that Britain was best. Even her father believed that. Surreptitious study of fashion plates showed her that a ball gown was now worn off both shoulders, and that hair was curled only at the back to fall lightly on the neck. In calling on others, it was de rigueur to wear a long fringed shawl over a demure dress, the whole set off by a beaded reticule, dangled, it would seem, by the middle fingers of the left hand. There was much to ponder here, but the imaginative leap was to picture the man who would capture her.

The year that Morgan left England, Thackeray wrote the potboiling FitzBoodle Papers. Its story begins farcically with the remark by his hero, ‘I have always been considered the third-best whist player in Europe …’ FitzBoodle, we discover, is the second son to a title stretching back to Henry II: his absurd opinions and brief adventures first entertained the readers of Frazer’s Magazine. To the modern taste the empty vanities of FitzBoodle and his redoubtable stepmother Lady Flintskinner are too easy a target. In the early Thackeray there is cleverness, but also a faintly studied quality. FitzBoodle and the other works like it were slight, not because they were too cruel, but too cautious. There were plenty of readers ready to discover in Thackeray a kind of social anxiety, an insecurity. They saw, or thought they saw, in his own phrase, the flunkey that hid behind the gentleman. But, unlike Morgan Thomas, Thackeray grew up with the new age and learned from it. His vision deepened and darkened. In a letter written when his eldest daughter was in the same situation as Georgina, young and beautiful and eligible, he strikes a much more sombre note. Speaking of a society to which he was now himself an adornment, he wrote:

They never feel love, but directly it’s born they throttle it and fling it under the sewer as poor girls do their unlawful children – they make up money marriages and are content – then the father goes to the House of Commons or the Counting House, the mother to her balls and visits – the children lurk upstairs with their governess, and when their turn comes are bought and sold, as respectable and heartless as their parents before them.

This was new and beyond the comprehension of a man like Morgan. Even more to the point, it was not a thing Georgina herself could understand. At the time she left Florence, an American girl her own age had come to Europe with the sole intention of being heard by Rossini. Genevieve Ward, young though she was, knew what she wanted and headed straight to Florence to get it. She had been told she had a good voice and was determined to make herself famous. Rossini was encouraging. He found her distinguished local teachers (one of whom was Uberti) and two years later she opened at La Scala. That kind of dedication was way beyond anything Georgina possessed, then or ever. She had the voice, but not the vision.

Morgan was in no great hurry to face up to London. He wished the journey home to be a way of applying a little finish to his daughter. They broke their return first by the shores of Lake Constance, where his younger brother George was living in style with an invalid wife, the Baronne de Hildprant. For a sixteen-year-old girl with hardly any understanding of the wider world this was interesting enough. At Schloss Hard Georgina found the kind of company she had been warned against at the Villa Capponi: indolent, not in the slightest way intellectual, gossipy – and amorous. True to his character, Morgan did not like his brother any more than he did his Florence enemies. On the other hand, his daughter could not be sheltered from the importunities of other people forever. The days at Schloss Hard turned into weeks, the weeks into months while he watched Georgina try out her new freedoms.

Her looks and personality were of great interest. In appearance she was judged to be perhaps a little too much on the short side, a little too full of figure to be the ideal of beauty. Her conversation was startingly direct and in one respect her aunt and uncle must have studied her with special doubt in their minds. She was already – and particularly among men of mature years – an accomplished sexual tease. Many of the scrapes she got into later in life came from this inability to treat men in a realistic way. She was arch in their company and sometimes irritatingly so. Weak men, or vain ones, might find her little-girl act provocative, but wiser heads found something missing in her, perhaps a commonsensical understanding of the limited choices life could afford, not just to her, but to anybody. She was not, in the way the French apply the word, a serious person. Even this early in her life it was easy to see that she had great energies, but many fewer talents than she supposed. She talked far too freely, scoffed and wheedled. She wrote on 21 June, at the end of a day of sunshine and persiflage: ‘I first experienced what Mama told me some time ago about young men making themselves agreeable to me.’

Young though she was, she had discovered the power sex could wield. This amorousness needed some explaining later on in life and she had a ready answer. She was scientifically amative: ‘I loved everyone who loved me and there were endless outcomes – lamentations, reproaches, tears on all sides. But there we are! I am a loving person. Phrenologists tell me that my bumps of love and friendship cover my entire head! One is not mistress of one’s temperament and of one’s skull, not at all.’

Even this early, her bumps dictated events in an unfortunate way. Among the party lounging and sketching, going out onto the lake in boats and exclaiming about the wonders of nature was a familiar family legend, the source of many an outrageous story. He was the fiery and voluble vicar of Llanelli, a man called Ebenezer Morris, whose living had been presented to him by Georgina’s grandfather. The Reverend Mr Morris was sixty-three and decidedly eccentric. His preaching was considered so entertaining that on one occasion the gallery of the church threatened to collapse from the press of people gathered to hear him. He was also a man of colossal and unforgiving temper, perfectly able to knock down a parishioner for some imagined insult. In his battles with neighbouring clergy, he composed scathingly brutal and quite scandalous letters and pamphlets. In Llanelli he was a notorious and much discussed figure.

As well as flirting with the young men who ran after her and deriding the enthusiasm her uncle held for romantic scenery, Georgina romanced the Reverend Mr Morris, whom she dubbed Canonicus. She was successful enough to have him embrace her a little too freely and kiss her without the innocence usually employed towards a child. Emboldened, he wrote her a love letter. One can think of half a dozen reasons why he might instantly regret what he had done. This was the first test of her capacity to behave more like a young lady than a hoyden. Could the situation be defused by tact and commonsense? Was this the kind of letter that anyone else would have torn in a hundred pieces or hidden in the trunk of a tree? Was it an occasion for the young to moralise the old and bring the reckless philanderer to the error of his ways, as happened in fiction?

She chose differently. She gave the letter to her mother. Louisa gave it to her husband. For all Morris’s long friendship with the family (which included being a lifelong drinking crony of his patron, Rees Goring Thomas) Morgan did not hesitate. The poor man was confronted with the evidence, humiliated, and shown the door. Georgina had done the right thing and learned a useful lesson: she might not be the cleverest girl in the world but she was certainly able to stir up passion in the opposite sex. Moreover, she had found a new way to make her father angry. Shortly after the incident, the Thomas family left Schloss Hard, still postponing London and heading towards Brussels.

In the winter of 1853 they took a house in the Rue de Luxembourg. Morgan bought a carriage with a form of armorial bearing painted on the doors. ‘We went about in our carriage, and all our ancient admirers, on foot, stared at us as if we were risen from the grave,’ Georgina commented. Her father had managed to secure a letter of introduction to the Ambassador: he was positioning himself for the campaign that lay ahead. If he had gone abroad like a loser, he intended to come back with a different story to tell.

Brussels, like Florence, sustained a large British colony, and for the same reason. It was cheap to live there and titled European families were ten a penny. A man might fill his mantelpiece with crested invitations and cartes de visite. Perhaps the very best people were in Paris, but there was enough going on in Brussels to replicate that older, frowstier form of society that was to Morgan’s taste. So, interspersed with the names of Dal’s fellow Etonians who came to stare and wonder, we find the Baron de Pfuel, Limmander de Nieuvehoven and – Louisa’s finest social acquisition – the Baronne de Goethals. There was war in the air and everyone was talking about Constantinople. Some of the insouciant young Englishmen Georgina saw lounging about at balls and parties she would never see again. One of her beaux was William Scarlett, whose uncle was to command the Heavy Brigade at Sebastopol.

Brussels was intended by her parents to be a kind of finishing school. They stayed a season and Georgina sang before an audience for the first time at the British Embassy. The recital – which may not have been more than one song – was well received. For the first time in her life it was exciting to be a Thomas. Though she was by her own description ‘wild’, she was also also ‘irresistible’. Her triumphs came entirely as a consequence of her own efforts – to her surprise people liked this turbulent and impulsive girl from Florence. Now that the family was out in the world a little more, her father’s peculiarities became more obvious. It was the first chance she had to compare him with other fathers and she began to form the opinion expressed so forcibly in the years ahead.

My father, who as a consequence of his proud and violent character had always been more or less mad at last became so, despite being gifted with rare and valuable qualities. His mother’s favourite, he had been spoiled as a child, and he reaped what all spoiled children reap. He inspired hate and terror in everybody. As for me, I never addressed a word to him in my life, and he only spoke to us to call us to table and to tell us we were damn fools. If my mother had only a little common sense or principle, she would not have endured such a hell, neither for herself nor for her children, and I blame her much more than my father for all that has happened.

There is a characteristic element of exaggeration in this. At the time, darting about Brussels, discovering clothes, learning to waltz and reaping compliments wherever she went, life had taken an unexpected twist. It was fun. Evidently, some young women made their effect by hiding shyly behind their mothers’ skirts. That was not Georgina’s way. She was bold, careless even. A lifelong habit of bathing in cold water had been set in Florence. Now, much further north and in the depths of winter, she bounced from the bath pink and eager, hungry for breakfast and the chance to meet new people and shine in their company. Wherever she went she demonstrated a similar animal exuberance. She was happy.

While retaining the lease on the house in the Rue de Luxembourg, Morgan finally took his family back to England in 1854. Dal was at Eton, but the other children had never seen England and only Georgina had been born there. It was exciting to be home, but it was also daunting. The country was more interested in cholera and the imminence of war than the arrival of the Thomas family. Georgina’s flirtatious experiments followed her across the Channel – no sooner had they set foot in England than Morgan intercepted a love letter to his daughter from a mysterious G. V. – presumably by stealing it or reading it surreptitiously. His reaction was illuminating. He summoned the butler Antonio and had him take it round to the bemused local police. Meanwhile, Gate House in Mayfield was prepared for the family as its permanent seat and Georgina’s first scattered impressions of her native country were gathered driving about Brighton and East Sussex to be introduced to the local gentry. She was not impressed. That vague sense of superiority so lavishly rekindled in Brussels was not to be squandered on mutton-eating squires and their sullen children.

At first, England disappointed Georgina. Life at the Villa Capponi had been dull, but wonderful things had happened to her since. Though her father watched her like a hawk, she had already received two declarations of love and turned any number of heads. Neither of her sisters was of an age to be seen in a romantic light: she was the centre of attention in whatever drawing-room she found herself. She confirmed the earlier suspicion that she was far more forward and direct than her English contemporaries. In an age that placed so much importance on the niceties of address, how to behave with self-effacing quiet was something it was already too late for her to learn. Her father had been right about one thing; once you described yourself as of good family, the number of friends and acquaintances you might make in life was small indeed, at any rate in the Sussex hinterland. However, farming had never been so prosperous in living memory and Morgan and his family had come back to a golden decade for corn prices. The best of the country gentlemen had ‘no enemies but time and gout’ as one admiring foreign observer put it. That did not necessarily make them entrancing company.

If Sussex was dull, London was a different matter. Though Morgan might find as much to deprecate there as anything he had found in Florence, his opinion counted for nothing. The London he came home to had almost doubled in size compared with the one he had left. Its sophistication and complexity was quite beyond him. There was more ‘dash’ to affairs than he remembered and a great deal more irreverence. Whole new classes had sprung up and with them manners which were beneath Morgan’s dignity to interest himself in. He was safe for as long as he stayed in the West End and kept himself away from anything approaching talent. The truth was that Morgan could not and never would find a niche in society. His time had passed.

For Georgina, London was a city bathed in dangerous adventure. Rotten Row, of which she had heard much as a child, had been recently widened to accommodate the Sunday carriage rides of the rich and titled. She duly made her baptismal appearance there, stared at in what she considered an insolent way by any number of young men on horseback. She found them all distressingly tall. It was no use attempting a conversational finesse by comparing the scene disfavourably with the Cascine Gardens – this was the real thing. The carriage row in Hyde Park was a showcase of the aristocracy. The Prince Consort rode out there. As the elegant carriages ambled their way back and forth along the mile-and-a-half route round the edge of Hyde Park, on fine days – just out of sight but not out of earshot – as many as 12,000 bathers swam in the Serpentine. The scale of London and the juxtaposition of its classes was beyond anything she had ever seen. Like her father, she discovered much that she must learn. The greatest part of it was where and how to fit in. To be fashionable was to know far more – perhaps to discount far more – than the elementary education she had received in Florence.

In 1855, Georgina went back to Brussels with her mother for Carnival, and on 17 February attended a ball at la Baronne de Goethal’s. It was the scene of one of the great moments in her life. Among the company was a Portuguese Baron called Pedro de Moncorvo. He was twenty-seven years old, the son of a former Ambassador to the Court of St James. Georgina was dressed in the costume of a Parisian grisette and the evening passed in a delirium of romantic enchantment. Here, with all the force of a novel, was the perfect situation – a beautiful girl heated by the dance, pursued by a dark and handsome stranger. Writing fifty years later Georgina claimed to have loved him with all her heart and when she was sixty-six she went all the way to Bemfica to visit his grave. Moncorvo was probably the first man to see her for what she was and not attempt to change her. They met no more than ten times, during which he alternately scolded and cajoled her. For the first but not the last time in her life she was, so to speak, living to the tune and lyrics of the best kind of song. Four days after her eighteenth birthday, her father intervened and she was banished from Brussels and sent into exile at Boulogne.

On 18 June, racked by love, playing the piano with tragic abandon, she opened the door of her lodgings to find Moncorvo on the doorstep. Unchaperoned, they walked on the cliffs overlooking the town.

He asked me if I had deceived myself in allowing that perhaps I loved him. I answered, ‘If I loved you, what would be the use?’ ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘If you loved me we could be married in that church,’ and he pointed to the church of Boulogne. I made no reply, his lips almost touched my cheek. I drew back gently. He did not kiss me. He departed that same afternoon – and I have never seen him since.

It is a perfect vignette. As she grew older, she realised he may have loved her with a seriousness her youth and ignorance did not allow for on the day. For the rest of her life she wondered what might have happened if she had done as he asked and married him against the wishes of her parents. And though a year later he married a Portuguese comtessa, he continued to write her affectionate letters, enough for her to make that long sea journey when he died. What makes the story so poignant, in light of what was to come, is that the girl on the cliffs was still the girl from Florence, the wayward boy in the body of a woman, the original and untempered Georgina Thomas. She lost him out of inexperience.

It is sad to see her later embroider the story, explaining that she could not marry him because of a devotion to a higher thing, her art. She was an eighteen-year-old girl who had for the first time in her life been faced with a real decision, touching real feelings. Moncorvo was asking a lot of her – he was very much older, he was poor and he was Catholic. But the truth was that – too early in her life for her to understand and profit from the experience – a man was prepared to take her exactly as she was. In this brief and shimmering image of them on the cliffs, we are watching a man who has seen something of the world and a girl who has not. Moncorvo was not saying, ‘Take me back to England so that I can sponge off your father.’ He was inviting her to come with him to Portugal.

When he pointed with a sweep of his arm to ‘the church at Boulogne’, the gesture also took in the villa where Dickens and Wilkie Collins stayed with their families, and the place where Thackeray and his daughters had rested in the past. Perfectly visible was the massive embarkation camp from which the French Imperial Army had set sail to the Crimea. Even while they spoke, many of those who had marched down to the quays garlanded with flowers were being blown to pieces at the Malakov Redoubt.

Georgina knew nothing of such things. Moncorvo was the first to lay bare her ignorance of the real world. She may have had practical misgivings and certainly the peculiar urgency and danger of his visit must have weighed with her. Watching the hazy sea, trying not to look into his eyes, she learned from Moncorvo that afternoon what love was, rather than what a well-arranged English marriage could confer. She chose the wrong option.