Sir William (11 page)

“In Germany,” he said, for he had been a success in Stuttgart,
“rouladen
is a kind of rolled meat, but here it is the following.” And he showed her how. He was the jollier of the two, a man of the most impeccable dishonesty. Millico was apt to be dour, for he had sciatica.

“You are an English miss, in which case I suppose it must be Handel,” said Aprile, “but in Italian,
please.
No, not that way. It is an aristocratic work. Sex is the entertainment of the poor, but it is the recreation of the rich, so toy with it.”

“It is,” added Millico, “considered vulgar to show abandonment or pleasure.”

“Simulate, but never feel. It is the only way to achieve a pure tone,” said Aprile.

“My child,” said Millico, his eyes glistening with tears, “you are a very beautiful woman. And besides, you do not sing so very bad. Almost as good as Monticelli,” he added, naming the singer he hated most.

“That on the wall?” asked Aprile. “It is a Caravaggio. And no, I cannot tell you which sex it is. Indeed, which sex it is would be difficult to determine.”

“I only asked to know.”

“Dear lady, we can never know. In this life, nothing is certain.”

Since she had no curiosity, nothing ever impressed her as being odd. By and large, she took it as it was, because
it was there. But all the same, they were funny gentlemen; they cheered her up.

*

So did the painters.

Though by no means a snob, in fact, not a snob at all, Sir William, far from holding the mirror up to nature, held Nature up to the Mirror, to see what it was like. So painters were in spate. Sir William Beechey drew her, very badly. Cousin Gavin, whose forte was ancient Romans, made the attempt and failed. Marchant cut her head in cameo, for a finger ring. One man worked in wax, another in clay. The King’s tame Germans did their level best, with somewhat flat results. A Mr. Hudson painted her for the lid of a snuffbox. There were so many of them that a room was set aside for their use. Emma sat on a dais, both to watch and to pose. It was exhilarating to see herself set forth in so many forms, but she missed George.

If all other entertainment failed, there was always the King, the Queen, the Opera and Vesuvius, each with a separate establishment. Sir William was interested in all four of these diversions: the King, professionally; the Queen, if needs be; the Opera, when unavoidable; and Vesuvius for recreation.

Vesuvius was in eruption, a sight not to be missed. They went by carriage to Portici; from there they would proceed by ass.

The carriage rolled along the waterfront where there was a crowd in the midst of which a tall, sulky, big-nosed, pasty-faced, dribbly lipped man was keening away like an auctioneer.

“Whatever is he doing?” asked Emma.

“It is the King,” said Sir William, and waved. “He is selling fish. It is his hobby to sell fish. It is quite harmless, for he always gives them their money back afterward.”

The crowd roared, and obligingly the King tossed it a fish.

“And what does the Queen do?”

“The Queen,” said Sir William, “is more difficult, if less fatiguing. She plots.”

The carriage rolled on. Sir William was nervous, for he had not shared his volcano with a woman before. Vesuvius was his hobby, and a hobby is a spiritual exercise, a selfless activity. Vesuvius was his answer to himself. Whenever he climbed it, he felt justified, even if he did need a guide to help him over the rough spots. That did not bother him; if we are really intelligent in this life, we always need a guide, for the guide is a limited being, so we make use of what he knows, intensively, to extend our own general sense of well-being. There is a purely physical wisdom in this world which the wise have not, for wisdom is disembodied, and so, if they are wise, they hire it.

None of which he could explain to Emma, but from Emma he wanted only a beauteous enthusiasm. He had long ago discovered the giddy freedom of saying witty things to a pretty woman who cannot understand them; at most they catch the shimmer and the hook, but never the joy of trawling in the void, so you may be as philosophical as you wish, with impunity.

At Portici they left the carriage and clambered aboard the donkeys—gray velvet creatures all rubbed the wrong way—while two miles off, the lava steamed like the world on the last day. Emma, who had once, as a child, worked with pit ponies, was reminded of that, but did not say so. They began to climb.

The night came on, cool from the sea, but warm from the volcano. Out to sea the islands seemed to move about as the air shifted in temperature, and the lights of fishing boats flared up like hissing embers. The lava flow, which had been all steam, was now all light.

At a hermitage halfway up the mountain they stopped to drink the local wine, ashy, resinous and bitter as the best Burgundy. The hermitage had a terrace from which one could admire a cascade of fire falling down a precipice, like a basilisk fleeing up a chimney, incandescent in its element. As the hot stuff fell it set fire to trees and
brushwood, every one a burning bush, every one an Isaac.

Emma was properly enraptured. “I could stay all night,” she said. “I shall never be in charity with the moon again, for it looks so pale and sickly; and it is the lava that lights up the moon, for the moon is nothing to the lava.”

Sir William was touched. He had come merely to show off an enthusiasm; he had not hoped to share it.

The lava parted around a hermit’s hut and usurped a chapel, icons or no. It was most Protestant lava, for there are no religious preservatives against the fury of nature; the fury of nature is in itself the preservative. A badly painted madonna bobbled on the surface, hissed, bubbled, cracked, burst into flame and was sucked under.

Emma, in white and with her hair unbound, flitted gracefully on the balcony. “If I had a tambourine, I would dance!” she cried.

The hired help was touched. He was a Milord. She was, if not Milady, something less solemn and more vulnerable, the favorite of the hour.

“Why must we go so soon?” asked Emma. “Sir William, you must bring me again.”

Sir William was moved. His wife had been a mousy creature, but now she was a dead mouse, and one must not speak ill of the dead. But she had never liked Vesuvius in this way, and never looked so intangible by moonlight as did Emma, dancing.

On the way down they met a company which had not dared to climb so far as they. The silly cowards. It made her laugh.

*

Sir William had his oddities. That could not be denied. She did not care for some of them.

Standing in one of the drawing rooms was an upright open chest. It sparkled in the candlelight, for it was rimmed with gold, though its interior was black as pitch.

“It is from Pompeii,” said Sir William, and sent the
servants away. This was a moment he had arranged for himself.

“Stand in it, my dear.”

She did not want to. She was afraid to face the dark. She backed into it, and it fitted her exactly. The wood was old and smelled of earth, potato bugs and the root cellar.

He opened a casket and took out a necklace and a pair of earrings and told her to put them on. She put them on. He told her to raise her right hand to her throat. She raised her right hand to her throat. Lifting up a candelabrum, he held it over his head so that the light played over her. Since the windows were open, the light flickered. She closed her eyes.

“That was how they found her,” he said.

“Found who?”

“Fulvia Octavia Porsena,” he said. “It was an old Etruscan family. When the air touched her, she fell to dust.” He moved around to the other side, the flames of the candles darting after their wicks in the sudden draft. “That is her jewelry. It was found with her. She, too, was beautiful.”

“Sir William,” she said. “I feel cold.”

“You may keep the jewels. They suit you to perfection.” Seeing she was frightened, he hesitated, and then added, “Emma …”

“Yes?”

“In privacy it does not matter. Say ‘William,’ if you will,” he said. And with the sad smile of someone who cannot quite touch anything but is moved all the same, he added, “Thank you, my dear. Since you are yourself so beautiful, you must allow me the beauty of my whims.”

He then went off to arrange a treaty so that in exchange for hides, beef, tin, lead, copper and textiles—of which she had plenty—England might receive figs, licorice, goatskins, sulphur, salt, marble, almonds, currants and raisins, which she would not know what to do with, though the salt would be useful to preserve the
beef, and no pudding was ever the poorer for a raisin or two.

She wrote him love letters, in her new, worldly style, while he was away. “I am a pretty woman, and one can’t be everything else, but now I have my wisdom teeth, I will try to be ansome and reasonable.”

But wisdom teeth ache like the devil coming in.

Mrs. Cadogan was amiable. “A gentleman of his age, you cannot expect the world for breakfast.”

“I shall get it served again in the evening, hotted up, if I don’t eat it now,” said Emma.

“To think my Emma would want diversion.”

“Well, the more interesting the world is, the more bored you get,” said Emma, who was learning. “Which language do we study next?”

It was quite remarkable, her aptitude for languages. A philologist might have been slowed down by interest, but not she. Words were like money—a series of counters with which you got what you wanted—and varied from country to country, like the coinage. These were blue, these were yellow, these were transparent, like beads. You strung them into sentences and with them bartered for company, conversation, a new shawl, the gossip of the day. Italian, French, a smattering of German—it was all the same to her.

*

“Sir William’s mistress is an interesting woman, is she not?” asked the Queen.

“Interesting to look at,” said the Spanish Ambassadress.

“It is all, I assure you, that I wish to do. Tell the Ambassador I shall call on him. If I am curious about her, think how infinitely more curious she must be about me.” And with some complacency, Maria Carolina displayed her skirt.

*

“Sir William was up early this morning,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“He did the necessary and then he left.”

But Emma was in an excellent mood. Things were coming on.

*

Sir William took her to the opera. “There they are,” he said, pointing to the Royal Box.

Emma was disappointed. The King looked like a Nesselrode pudding well enforced with lady-finger fat, his cherry slipped down to make his mouth, his face a mass of imperfectly whipped cream. Maria Carolina, made maternal less by childbearing than by some glandular imbalance, was a regal, overdressed, portable shriek. The sons had the waiting look of heirs; the daughters the desperate one of unmatched heiresses. The Queen belonged to the age of intermarriage, not diplomatic relations, and regarded her subjects stolidly. Ferdinand smiled, waved, and did other things.

“‘He gropes his breeches with a monarch’s air,’” said Sir William. “That’s Johnson. We shall watch the stage instead. It will be more seemly.”

Sir William, who was fond of music and so did not much care for opera, confronted the stage. Virtuosity did not appeal to him; he preferred his own flute and someone to play
continuo.
If we are to rise above ourselves, someone must play
continuo
, though now it seemed to be he who played it, for Emma was beginning to find vanity in art, though thank God she was not yet swollen to the proportions of signora Brigida Bandi, the eminent contralto. Hers was still a modest drawing-room vanity, and may it remain that way.

The orchestra was drowned out by a volley of trumpets. A gentleman suddenly galloped down out of the wings on a white barb fourteen hands high, the plumes on his helmet three feet tall. He drew rein beside the soprano, also, alas, beside the chandelier. The plumes caught fire and burned down to his helmet, but he was a professional. The show must go on; he ignored the conflagration.
“Mia
speranza,
io
pur
vorrei,”
he sang, though his visor had stuck.

“But I thought the opera was
Romulus,”
said Emma.

“So it is, but that’s Marchesi. Both the horse and the
aria are written into his contract, otherwise he will not sing.”

With an angry glance at the chandelier, Marchesi cast his helmet aside, and taking out his snuffbox, walked to the footlights. He was wearing oxtongue shoes with paste buckles, flowered stockings, green knee britches and a cuirass. At the rear of the stage, the soprano crossed to her mother, who was seated there, to use a gargle and a looking glass. The swill was deposited in a tumbler.

“Fire the cannon‚” said Marchesi, and disappeared. The cannon were fired. The auditorium filled with smoke. The King looked apprehensive.

From backstage came sounds of celebration, and on marched the chorus, pulling a chariot, preceded by lictors and followed by the people. The supers carried ancestral portraits, each looking like Marchesi. In the chariot, Marchesi, with a new set of plumes, his hands and feet shackled and chained, raised his arms with a rattle and burst passionately forth into a paean of joy.

“But I thought this was the triumph of Romulus?”

“And so it is, my dear.”

“Why then the chains? Is it perversion or vice?”

“It is neither. These people love a mad scene, a sacrifice or a scene in chains. They have not the polish to deal with ordinary things, so they put drama where drama is not. Hence the chains.”

Marchesi clanked and rattled away and went on as maddeningly as a water closet with an interminable run. You wanted to jiggle him.

“As you see,” said Sir William, “Opera has much to teach.”

*

At Posilipo there was a late evening party with torches in the shrubbery, garlands on the herms, and a regatta. The King went by in a barge, as tall as Caligula, accompanied by a solemn music—or at any rate, Neapolitan boat songs—but he was much too fat to recline properly. He was not too fat to chase a woman. With a painful alacrity, he turned his torso and ogled her
with his vast yellow bloodshot eyes. The passage of his barge set their own wherry awash.