Golden Hill (26 page)

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.

Golden Hill, Monday night

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 liaison 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.

At least, for those who were not privily concerned in it. Terpie felt the burn first. Disengaging without tenderness the moment the door slammed behind Flora, she dressed at speed with her face set, swearing under her breath. Her only farewell to Smith was a grimace, and a kind of savage, suppressing pat at the air in the direction where he lay groaning with his head under the pillow. Then she was hurrying through the snowy streets to the watch-room in Fort St George where Major Tomlinson would be sleeping off the port of the night before. She had read Flora’s face, and she was grimly confident that she had a disaster to out-run, and must wake her husband, and confess the news to him herself before anyone else could tell it him with laughter in their voice; and must abide
his
anger and humiliation, and try if she could see the way to call on him for the understanding he had promised her, toward the irregular ways of the stage, when he had been wooing her at the stage-door in Covent Garden as her
last play failed. But that had been years ago; and they had followed his posting to America; and the promise had gathered dust unused, lapsing into a mere ghostly hypothesis of an indulgence, fading away to both their contentment. She had liked him, and his companionable ways, and his indifference to there being no prospect of children. A little shiver from men’s eyes on her, that had been enough. Until the boy, the damn’d boy, turned up. She took a deep breath when she reached the Fort, and did what she must.

Smith, meanwhile, decided to conduct his wretchedness in private, still under the illusion that he had no more to contend with than having driven off Tabitha again for sure just when she dared to reach for him.

He hid in his bed till a writhing dislike of his own nakedness drove him out of it. Then he found the letter. Then, putting together the contents of the letter, and particularly its praise of his patience, with a vivid viewing upon his inner eye of what Flora must have seen as he lay voluptuously smothered, he began helplessly to laugh, and presently to weep, and then to laugh and weep together. He washed his face, and dressed. But when he stood ready for the world, the very thought of having to rebuild a front of charm, and to carry it through an icy town containing the Lovells, made him feel abruptly too tired to keep his sore eyes open. He lay back down and pressed his cheek into the pillow as if it might open and admit him. He fell into sleep as into a cold river, full of glassy slow-twining currents. He shivered as he lay in the tangled sheets, and clutched his hands into his armpits, but clung to unconsciousness for as long as he could make it last, rolling himself back in, and under, sleep’s thick surface whenever the currents threatened to strand him on the brink of waking,
and consequences. It was not until the winter dusk that he found himself irretrievably awake, and crept out, and drawn by an urge for refuge crept along Broad Way to Trinity for the evening service. He joined in wanly with the General Confession, but the words seemed remote to him and of no conceivable application, and when the choir sang the antiphon of the day, in praise of the divine wisdom ‘sweetly ordering all things’, he felt welling up again the earlier combination of laughter and tears, and must bite his sleeve till it went away: so that, altogether, his recourse to the comforts of religion could not be called successful. The Rector looked sharply at him as he departed, but he had his head down and did not mark it. Mrs Lee had her mouth open to speak to him when he returned to the house, but he swept obliviously past, and did not mark it.

He was not even immediately disabused in the Merchants at breakfast-time the next morning. The emptying-out of the city entailed a wider separation in the coffee-house between the remaining regulars, as they came in puffing and stamping and calling for refreshment. Though they may have glanced at Smith, and Quentin regarded him with cocked head and a bright speculative eye, none yet crossed the gulfs of empty table and chairs to speak; Smith, made imperceptive by unhappiness, ordered his usual rolls and coffee, and even made a spasmodic essay or two at the old game of bowling languages at Quentin to see if he could field ’em. Then Septimus came in, pale, swift and intent.

‘There you are; you idiot,’ he said.

‘I thought you’d gone!’ cried out Smith delightedly.

‘I nearly had. I was virtually on horseback, when I was called back to a staff meeting.’

‘Well, I am very glad to see you—’

‘Are you? I am not very glad to see you, because the meeting was convened on your account. There is something maddeningly predictable about the way you procure disaster, Richard. It is like someone winding a clock, as methodical as that, only this time instead of a key into clockwork, you stuck your cock into Terpie.’

‘Oh. You know about that.’

‘
Everyone
knows about that.’

‘I am afraid I have made a fool of myself,’ Smith said, with that species of self-condemnation which imminently expects to be comforted by a friend’s disagreement.

‘Do you think so? – I must say, I thought your tastes were subtler, your appetites less gross. For that matter, I thought your heart was given elsewhere.’

‘Don’t; that is the worst of it. That just when I was resigned to all that coming to nothing, and was, you know, indulging myself, thinking it did not matter—’

‘If you tell me your heart is broken on this particular morning, Richard, I will just say: what, again? Perhaps you should be more careful with it.’

‘She was very … pressing. Terpie, I mean.’

‘You poor dear. You poor defenceless darling.’

‘No; very well; no. She was
there
. And she seemed to be offering satisfaction without complication. And she was very tempting. Come on, Septimus. She
is
very tempting, if you are at all that way inclined.’

‘No she isn’t. She is like a caricature of a temptation, drawn with such mad hyperbole that anyone with any sense would know better than to act on it.’

‘Perhaps we are out of your domain of expertise,’ said Smith, puzzled yet picking up some heat by friction.

‘Well, I certainly don’t want to be having this conversation. Lord knows I would rather be picking my way through a frozen forest with an icicle depending from my nose. I would
infinitely
rather be safe on my way up the valley, with only wolves and wild Indians and delicate diplomacy to contend with, than be here talking to you about Terpie’s tits. I wish to God I had never listened to you and included her in the play.’

‘Septimus—’

‘But out of my expertise? Let us see: hmm,
no
. Because to be caught in flagrante with Terpie is not a strictly private problem. You have made a scandal, you idiot, to keep tongues wagging on the entire island till the spring thaw.’

‘You’ll excuse me if by now I don’t care very much for the flutterings of these people.’

‘
These people
are my occupation. And my neighbours. I rise and fall in their judgement. I live in their gaze. I don’t know how many times I have to explain this to you. You are not in London.
You are not in London
.’

Septimus was hissing at him across the table, a Toby-jug with a pressure of steam inside it.

‘You have explained quite sufficiently; I need no more explanations from you,’ Smith said, drawing back.

‘I will spell it out for you anyway. You have put horns on the head of Major Tomlinson. Therefore you have put ’em by implication on the head of the Governor and the whole administration of the colony. Everyone is laughing.’

‘I am not.’

‘Of no consequence – whether you are, or not. Of no consequence – what you meant by it. You have dishonoured us. You have made us ridiculous. You have given us a slight that must
be answered. The Major cannot challenge you, or he would lose what little’s left him of his dignity, but the meeting was clear: you must be challenged.’

‘Well, I thank you for the warning,’ Smith said stiffly.

‘You misunderstand me. This is not a warning. This
is
the challenge.’ And Septimus reached across the table and slapped him hard across the face. The table lurched and the coffee-pot capsized, sending the dregs in black streams into his lap.

‘You will meet me tomorrow, early, on the Common, for a
rencontre d’honneur
,’ said Septimus ringingly, for the benefit of the whole room, ‘or stand convicted in all men’s eyes of a contemptible cowardice, as well as a contemptible incontinence, not worthy of the name of a gentleman.’

Smith gaped.

‘You should secure a second, and have him deliver a note of your reply, in writing, to the Fort.’

‘Who would I ask?’

‘Anyone who is laughing,’ cried Septimus. ‘You have pleased as many people as you have wounded. – Gods, you have me looking after you, even now; you have a hideous knack for it. Stop. Solve your own difficulties.’

To prepare for any duel is a melancholy business. Far from concentrating the mind – as it was observed, at about this time, that the expectation of being hanged on the morrow may do – it caused Mr Smith’s thoughts to skitter, without purchase on the grave matters at hand, like a kitten on a pane of glass; or, which would be more appropriate to the place and season, like a man flailing his arms as he endeavours not to fall, on an ice-slide. He could neither forget, for a single instant, what was coming, nor
attend to it properly. He acquired a second for the duel, by the mere process of remaining dumb-struck in the Merchants once Septimus had swirled out. This was a gentleman attached in some way to the Assembly’s cause. In what way, was explained to him, yet he did not retain it, or even the gentleman’s name, although some time passed in the coffee-shop in notional conversation with him, during which it became clear that his supporter was hoping for payment in the coin of lubricious detail, of bedroom gossip. Smith did not provide it. At least, he thought he did not. At least, after a time, the gentleman was gone. In the same way, he began another letter to his father, to be opened in the event of this new New-York death, and discarded it scarcely begun, incapable of the fixity of purpose required to carry through an explanation. He discarded, without beginning at all, projects for letters of apology to Major Tomlinson – to Terpie – to Septimus. For a letter to Tabitha of persuasive reasoning on the subject of the poor synchronisation of hearts. No, for a letter of abject pleading. No, one of angry defiance. No. Skittering still, fizzing with inward anxiety, he made his way back to Broad Way, where he was thrown out of his lodging by Mrs Lee without particularly noticing it, she very probably making some choice remarks about respectable houses and those who abused them, he (of a certainty) making little response except a vague and distracted smile. He carried his trunk to a far more expensive and more grandiose room at the Black Horse, which he told himself the extra premium on his bill he had negotiated with Lovell would easily cover – unless he were dead tomorrow with the bill unpaid – this provoking a new skittering spiral of thoughts he could not complete, upon the subject of his errand, and his responsibilities, and the promises he might have broken by a contemptible
incontinence. And whether he deserved the name of a gentleman. And whether he desired it. And what else he might call himself. And how afraid he was. And his father; and Tabitha; and Septimus. On and on, reeling dizzily through his head, in a whirl of fragmentary self-reproach, and worry, and disbelief, and annoyance, and renewed self-reproach. There may be persons in whom the possibility or certainty of approaching death induces a firm and vivacious grip on every remaining second as it passes. But Mr Smith was not one of these. For him, even the prospect that at a certain minute after dawn the next day he might cease to be, leaving the morning to go on without him, seemed to infect every passing instant in advance of the event, as if he were already part-dead, and hence already part-dislodged from the calendar. He was far less resigned than he had been in prison. Perhaps he had used his store of resignation up. Between the burgundy velvet curtains of his new bed he turned, and turned, and fretfully turned again. He might be killed, he might be injured, he might conceivably be able to defend himself to the point where Septimus judged that public opinion was satisfied. No terms had yet been mentioned for the duel: whether it would be to first blood, or
à l’outrance
. (Another technical term from the French, meaning
till you turn up your toes
.) He did not even consider the possibility that he might win. He had no desire to hurt Septimus. But it was more than that. He had, once upon a time, received some part of a gentleman’s training at sword-play, but it had never been used in earnest, and had been overlaid since by its flashing theatrical equivalent, good only for winning applause. He only really knew stage-fighting.