Читать книгу The Mulberry Empire - Philip Hensher - Страница 25

ALEXANDER BURNES DID NOT COME the day after Lady Woodcourt’s party – or the next day – or the day after that. And on the fourth day, just when Bella and her sister had gone to the Park – just, in fact, at the hour when they might have been expected to be in the Park – he left his card and a set of his Bokharan travels.

Bella made no gesture when she saw the bit of pasteboard, showed no feeling beyond an agitated fumbling with her bonnet’s ribbons. But, walking upstairs as upright as she could manage, as slowly as she could, she felt cheated of something, as if she had been promised the most thrilling-sounding of M. Mirabolant’s puddings, and, in the event, she had been presented not even with the customary confection of meringue and cream, but, four days after she had expected it, an engraving of the promised delight on a card three inches by two. Walking slowly up the stairs, she ran her fingers over the card, three inches by two, as if it held for her the slightest promise, as if it had anything in common with her uselessly unshared hopes. Bella was twenty-four. She expected nothing.

So it was that, when Burnes was announced, a full week after Lady Woodcourt’s famous party, and shown into the drawing room where Bella was sitting, alone with her work, she stared at him as if she had never seen a man in her life.

The Garraways lived in Hanover Square, in a house so exactly what one would have expected that, Bella thought, none of her family or her family’s friends could ever be said to have set eyes upon it. It had precisely the right amount of old furniture to be respectable; it had precisely the right number of new objects to be fashionable. There was a pianoforte and a harp; there were sofas and curtains and a wilderness of walnut, just as other people had; there were portraits by Lely of dear great-great-grandmama, stout in a blue silk gown with her hand resting on a silver globe and pointing to the heavens. There was an ugly one, too, of poor Harry which he had ordered the week after arriving in India, in which his head was inexplicably round as a football (‘A native artist,’ Colonel Garraway was apt to say in mitigation, showing the curious visitor the label, ‘Executed in the Year 1826 by the Humble Servant of the Brush T. S. Lal, Student and Pupil of the great English Master, Sir Tilly Kettle’). All quite as everyone else had things; all so perfectly appropriate to the Garraways’ station in life that one could have predicted the house’s exact appearance, and certainly had no need to look at it. It was true that the Garraways, in their dining room, had what, through the gloom, could be perceived to be a lamentable mythology by Hogarth where others might have had a doubtful Claude, but what of that? The Garraways were so completely respectable that they could pass off a small lapse like that as an interesting curiosity, and nobody doubted, since they said so, that an interesting curiosity is what it was. They were respectable to the point of dullness.

It was four in the afternoon, and Colonel Garraway was in his study, taking his second dose of opium of the day. He had unlocked the miniature walnut tantalus, and carefully measured out the drops into a glass. After twenty years establishing a good understanding with the ruby witch, each of his three daily doses was large enough to kill a neophyte. He mixed it with water from the decanter, raised it to the light and gazed at it sternly. This moment of calm contemplation, which never varied or altered, was an essential part of the Colonel’s thrice-daily renewing of his acquaintance with opium; it was his idea of a necessary self-restraint. Presently the world returned to normal. The room deliciously sagged around him, the armchair softened, rose up in an embrace, and all was well again. He never recalled, or noticed, the moment of swallowing; it passed. The Colonel smiled to himself. No, not to himself; to his books. There they were, all his little books. There they were; now, which was his favourite? There, the one with nice gold lettering, there on the spine; Dryden Dramatic Works Vol. III. That was his favourite, wasn’t it, because the I, I, I on the spine was so like three nice gold pillars. Perhaps the green stock, for this evening’s tenue, for Lady Woodcourt’s. The Regent would surely approve. But then he remembered, as a dull double knock sounded through the house and the armchair softened under him like warm toffy, that Lady Woodcourt’s had taken place a week before, he had no green stock to wear, and the Regent, now, was King – no – was dead. He settled back. The ruby witch! he thought. The ruby witch!

Elizabeth Garraway was in her room, attempting to ignore the clink and knock from her father’s study next door. It was the familiar sound of him unlocking the tantalus, taking out the miniature decanter, and settling into oblivion. She was not sure, but she rather thought what she most disapproved of in her father’s opium habit was his having had made these appurtenances, acknowledging that there was no hope or desire in him to abandon the habit. Her hair was as smooth as if it had been lacquered onto her head; her velvet dress was as rich and dark as the heart of a poppy. She continued writing her letter.

‘… I feel, however, that the weaker sex, so justly named at present, only occupies so subservient a position due to the manifest inadequacies of feminine education.’

She sighed, and thought for a moment. She was writing to her correspondent in Germany. She had had great hopes of Goethe until he died, but Herr R—, although no more effusive in his replies than one would expect of the greatest and most famous novelist in Europe, had been most encouraging. She continued.

‘If the conventional female “accomplishments” stretched to trigonometry and Greek at the expense of the watercolour sketch and the covering of screens, what changes in the helpless position of the sex in society could we hope to see!’

She looked at her sentence, quite satisfied. She wondered for a moment whether Herr R—would know what was meant by screen-covering, if that were not a usual practice of German virgins, but decided to leave it. What an honour to educate the great R—, even in so small a matter! She was brought from her thoughts by the sound of the double knock. Bella, however, was in the drawing room, she thought, and could best be left. She, turning back to her elevated correspondence, was decidedly not at home.