The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (43 page)

The first House they entered
was a noted Bagnio, where they met with a Covey of Town Partridges, which
Camillo liked better than all he had ever drawn a Net over in the Country,
and amongst them Miss M., the famous Posture Girl, whose Presence put our
Company of Ramblers upon the Crochet of shewing their new Associate a Scene,
of which he had never so much as dreamed before.

They were showed a large
Room, Wine was brought in, the Drawer dismissed, and after a Bumper the
Ladies were ordered to prepare. They immediately stripped stark naked,
and mounted themselves on the middle of the Table. Camillo was greatly
surprised at this Apparatus, and not less puzzled in guessing for what
Purpose the Girls had posted themselves on that Eminence. They were clean
limbed, fresh complec- tioned, and had Skins as white as the driven Snow,
which was heightened by the jet-black Color of their Hair. They had very
good Faces, and the natural Blush which glowed on their Cheeks rendered
them in Camillo's Mind, finished Beauties, and fit to rival Venus herself.
From viewing their Faces, he bashfully cast his Eyes on the Altar of Love,
which he had never had so fair a View of as this present Time... The Parts
of the celebrated Posture Girl had something about them which attracted
his Attention more than any things he had either felt or seen. The Throne
of Love was thickly covered with jet-black Hair, at least a quarter of
a Yard long, which she artfully spread asunder, to display the Entrance
into the Magic Grotto. The uncommon Figure of this bushy spot afforded
a very odd sort of Amusement to Camillo, which was more heightened by the
Rest of the Ceremony which these Wantons went through. They each filled
a Glass of Wine, and laying themselves in an extended Posture placed their
Glasses on the Mount of Venus, every Man in the Company drinking off the
Bumper, as it stood on that tempting Protuberance, while the Wenches were
not wanting in their lascivious Motions to heighten the Diversion. Then
they went thro' the several Postures and Tricks made use of to raise debilitated
Lust when cloyed with natural Enjoyment, and afterwards obliged poor Camillo
to shoot the Bridge, and pass under the warm Cataracts, which discomposed
him more than if he had been overset in a Gravesend Wherry. However, tho'
it raised the Laugh of the whole Company, he bore this Frolick with a good
deal of patience, as he was told it was necessary for all new Members to
be thus initiated into the Mysteries of their Society. Camillo began now
to be disgusted at the prodigious Impudence of the Women; he found in himself
no more of that uneasy Emotion he felt at their first setting out, and
was desirous of the Company's dismissing them; but his Companions would
not part with them, till they had gone through with the whole of their
Exercise; the Nymphs, who raised a fresh Contribution on every new Discovery
of their impudent Inventions, required no Entreaties to gratify the young
Rakes, but proceeded, without the least Sense of Shame, to shew them how
far Human Nature could debase itself.

Their last Exploit inflamed
these Sons of Debauchery so far that they proposed, as a Conclusion of
the Scene, that each Man should chuse his Posture, and go through what
they had only seen imitated before. But this was a Step the Nymphs would
not comply with, it being the Maxim of these Damsels, never to admit of
the Embraces of the Men, for fear of spoiling their Trade. This very much
surprised Camillo, who from their former Behavior, persuaded himself there
could not be invented any Species of Wickedness with which they would not
comply for the Sake of Money; and though before this Refusal, their abandoned
Obscenity had quite stifled all thoughts of lying with them, yet now his
Desires were as strong as if they had been modest Virgins, and he had seen
nothing of their Wantonness; so that he became as earnest to oblige them
to comply as any Man in the Company.

This gives the general idea
of what went on at Ma Terpsichore's, though it omits a particular of difference:
the girls of 1867, not so squeamish as those of 1749, were willingly auctioned
off in a final tableau.

However, Charles was not
there to make a bid. The less obscene preambles he had quite enjoyed. He
put on his much-traveled face, he had seen better things in Paris (or so
he whispered to Sir Tom), he played the blase young know-all. But as the
clothes fell, so did his drunkenness; he glanced at the lecherously parted
mouths of the shadowed men beside him, he heard Sir Tom already indicating
his pick to the bishop's son. The white bodies embraced, contorted, mimicked;
but it seemed to Charles that there was a despair behind the fixed suggestive
smiles of the performers. One was a child who could only just have reached
puberty; and there seemed in her assumption of demure innocence something
genuinely virginal, still agonized, not fully hardened by her profession.

Yet as he was revolted, so
was he sexually irritated. He loathed the public circumstance of this exhibition;
but he was enough of an animal to be privately disturbed and excited. Some
time before the end he rose and quietly left the room, as if it were to
relieve himself. In the anteroom outside the little danseuse who had served
the champagne sat by a table with the gentlemen's cloaks and canes. An
artificial smile creased her painted face as she rose. Charles stared a
moment at her elaborately disordered ringlets, her bare arms and almost
bare bosom. He seemed about to speak, but then changed his mind and brusquely
gestured for his things. He threw a half sovereign on the table beside
the girl and blundered out. In the street at the alley's end he found several
expectant cabs waiting. He took the first, shouted up (such was the cautious
Victorian convention) the name of a Kensington street near to the one where
he lived, and then threw himself into the seat. He did not feel nobly decent;
but as if he had swallowed an insult or funked a duel. His father had lived
a life in which such evenings were a commonplace; that he could not stomach
them proved he was unnatural. Where now was the traveled man of the world?
Shrunk into a miserable coward. And Ernestina, his engagement vows? But
to recall them was to be a prisoner waking from a dream that he was free
and trying to stand, only to be jerked down by his chains back into the
black reality of his cell.

The hansom threaded its way
slowly down a narrow street. It was crowded with other hansoms and carriages,
for this was still very much in the area of sin. Under each light, in every
doorway, stood prostitutes. From the darkness Charles watched them. He
felt himself boiling, intolerable. If there had been a sharp spike in front
of him he would, echoing Sarah before the thorn tree, have run his hand
through it, so strong was his feeling for maceration, punishment, some
action that would lance his bile. A quieter street. And they passed a gaslight
under which stood a solitary girl. Perhaps because of the flagrant frequency
of the women in the street they had left she seemed forlorn, too inexperienced
to venture closer. Yet her profession was unmistakable. She wore a dingy
pink cotton dress with imitation roses at the breast; a white shawl round
her shoulders. A black hat in the new style, small and masculine, perched
over a large netted chignon of auburn hair. She stared at the passing hansom;
and something about the shade of the hair, the alert dark-shadowed eyes,
the vaguely wistful stance, made Charles crane forward and keep her in
view through the oval side-window as the hansom passed. He had an intolerable
moment, then he seized his stick and knocked hard with it on the roof above
him. The driver stopped at once. There were hurried footsteps; and then
the face appeared, slightly below him, beside the open front of the hansom.

She was not really like Sarah.
He saw the hair was too red to be natural; and there was a commonness about
her, an artificial boldness in her steady eyes and red-lipped smile; too
red, like a gash of blood. But just a tinge--something in the firm eyebrows,
perhaps, or the mouth.

"You have a room?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell him where to go."

She disappeared from his
sight a moment and said something to the driver behind. Then she stepped
up, making the hansom rock, and got in beside him, filling the narrow space
with cheap perfume. He felt the light cloth of her sleeve and skirt brush
him, but they did not touch. The hansom moved on. There was a silence for
a hundred yards or more.

"Is it for all night, sir?"

"Yes."

"I asks 'cause I adds the
price of the fare back if it ain't."

He nodded, and stared into
the darkness ahead of him. They passed another clopping hundred yards in
silence. He felt her relax a little, the smallest pressure against his
arm.

"Terrible cold for the time
of year."

"Yes." He glanced at her.
"You must notice such things."

"I don't do no work when
it snows. Some does. But I don't."

More silence. This time Charles
spoke.

"You have been long... ?"

"Since I was eighteen, sir.
Two years come May."

"Ah."

He stole another look at
her during the next silence. A horrid mathematics gnawed at Charles's mind:
three hundred and sixty-five, say three hundred "working," multiply by
two ... it was six hundred to one that she did not have some disease. Was
there some delicate way he could ask? There was not. He glanced at her
again in an advantageous moment of outside light. Her complexion seemed
unblemished. But he was a fool; as regards syphilis he knew he would have
been ten times safer at a luxury establishment like the one he had left.
To pick up a mere Cockney streetwalker ... but his fate was sealed. He
wished it so. They were heading north, towards the Tottenham Court Road.

"Do you wish me to pay you
now?"

"I ain't partickler, sir.
Just as you fancy."

"Very well. How much?"

She hesitated. Then: "Normal,
sir?"

He flashed a look at her;
nodded.

"All night I usual charges
..." and her tiny hesitation was pathetically dishonest, "... a sovereign."

He felt inside his frock
coat and passed her the coin.

"Thank you, sir." She put
it discreetly away in her reticule. And then she managed an oblique answer
to his secret fear. "I only go with gentlemen, sir. You don't need no worries
like that."

In his turn he said, "Thank
you."
 
 

To the lips, ah,
of others,
  Those lips have been
prest,
And others, ere I was,
  Were clasped to that
breast . . .
--
Matthew Arnold, "Parting"
(1853)

Charles found the prostitute
waiting in a poorly lit hallway, her back to him. She did not look round,
but moved up the stairs as soon as she heard him close the door. There
was a smell of cooking, obscure voices from the back of the house.

They went up two stale flights
of stairs. She opened a door and held it for him to pass through; and when
he had done so, slid a bolt across. Then she went and turned up the gaslights
over the fire. She poked that to life and put some more coal on it. Charles
looked round. Everything in the room except the bed was shabby, but spotlessly
clean. The bed was of iron and brass, the latter so well polished it seemed
like gold. In the corner facing it there was a screen behind which he glimpsed
a washstand. A few cheap ornaments, some cheap prints on the walls. The
frayed moreen curtains were drawn. Nothing in the room suggested the luxurious
purpose for which it was used.

"Pardon me, sir. If you'd
make yourself at 'ome. I shan't be a minute."

She went through another
door into a room at the back of the house. It was in darkness, and he noticed
that she closed the door after her very gently. He went and stood with
his back to the fire. Through the closed door he heard the faint mutter
of an awakened child, a shushing, a few low words. The door opened again
and the prostitute reappeared. She had taken off her shawl and her hat.
She smiled nervously at him.