The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (21 page)

From time to time, he whispers. And once, he points.

So at least I have some pleasure. To see the girl hazard more than she could earn in a year. To see her handle it – the heft and clink of it in her palm, the gathering feel of the metal rims as they slither into a column between finger and thumb, which she then sets down on the baize. The hand withdrawn. So careful.

I can see a vein flutter on her neck.

I know money. I know the value of, for example, three hundred pounds – how a maid could live a lifetime on such a sum, how my father could live a month, how my mother might have raised her children on it for more than a year. I burned a note, once, that belonged to Mr Bennett. A fifty. I said to him, as I did it, ‘This afternoon, I think I’ll love you for free.’

These are the things I could tell the maid as she makes a timorous throw into the centre of the table, and then flinches when one of the coins begins to roll. I could tell her, as she loses, hand after hand, a modest dowry – which is to say, a life; a husband, a child she might keep – that money is the least of it, my dear.

And my goodness, she does lose. It takes a little over an hour. It takes a minute at a time. Whytehead leans over her shoulder, his superior mind in a welter of calculation, and is no use to her. Stewart, who bets promissory notes on his future salary, takes her money too. He reaches over and pulls it across the baize: once, twice. He takes it five times or more. The solid fact of it goes into his pocket when the
game
is done. Which it is done when the maid has nothing left to lose.

‘I have the best of it, tonight, it seems,’ says Stewart, all good humour – as though she might get it back from him, another time. Then he makes his way to the decanter, with ponderous regret. But his hand trembles, as he pours.

My dear friend smiles, and excuses himself to smoke outside. No one follows him. Perhaps because they were not asked. But still – Stewart, who eats cigars, who has a passion for them, runs a finger over the cut of the crystal in his glass. Whytehead, who sticks so religiously to my husband’s side, has, it seems, finally become unglued. And it amazes me again, how we make way for other people’s desire.

Even I am unmanned by it, until I say,

‘You may go.’

She picks herself up and she walks, not towards the stateroom where my clothes need laying out for the night, but into the open air.

He is not my husband. Of course he is not. I must train my turn of phrase. The man who is not my husband comes back fifteen minutes later – I have counted it by the clock. His cigar is still lit, though now it is a stub that he chucks, unceremoniously, out the porthole window on the far side of the room.

‘And why is it’, I ask, ‘that a man must come inside to fire the butt of his cigar through a window, when he has the whole vast river to throw it into, over the rail?’ I say that he must have the satisfaction of the porthole, because men must always be throwing things; but more than that, they must be aiming them too – and the smaller the target, or in this case the hole, the better.

Everyone laughs. My friend looks at me with a new admiration. And I quite frankly meet his eye. It is as though
we
have done this thing together. And this makes me feel lonely and quite giddy, both at the same time.

Later, Francine comes to unlace me in the dark. I have fallen asleep in a chair, because to lie down seems to strangle the child, or strangle me, one or the other. So she whispers quite close to me and heaves me a little forward to get at the hooks and then the stays.

I groan a little. And, in my sleep-weakened state, all I can think of is the closeness of her belly to me and the hope that there is not a child in her too. I can smell him off her, and this makes me gag a little. Because in the bargain, whatever it was, there was nothing agreed about smell.

And then she has me undressed and under the bedclothes, free of my corset, and happy as a boiled egg, all peeled.

In the middle of the night, I stir and find he is not yet come to bed. It is some time before I remember why this might be, and when I do I am awake and raging. He must not sleep with her. These hours, I think, are meant to punish. And, if so, he will be punished in return. Because he has started the wrong game here. He has started a small game and I am hugely, wildly bored by the small game. I was not sure I wanted to play, but if needs must, then I will play big.

Such is my ambition, in the middle of the night.

I hear the darkness breathe and stir; an animal close to my ear. I never sleep alone. I had Francine crawl in with me in Paris, when there was no man in the bed (I can hardly call for her, now). Because there was always my sister and, when my sister bolted, there was any number of girls at Mme Hubert’s. The first, the only, nights I spent alone were in that inn, when Mr Bennett brought me to Paris.

Or did not bring me to Paris. He was sick with something like grief – stiff with it, in the corner of the post we took. It
was
as though his back would not bend into the angle of the seat. He looked at me while I gazed out the window or played with the cards I had in a little walnut box; clever things – three children playing with their kites made up the three of hearts, I remember; though all the ones I turned were spades, with women weeping, and skeletons.

‘Your fate,’ I said, flicking them into Mr Bennett’s poor lap – mostly to amuse the man who shared the post with us, a fat fellow with a glazed eye. Mr Bennett was, by that time, so maddened by the presence of men around me that it turned the ends of his fingers blue, and I hoped he would not die before we got to Paris, which is to say, before my fortune was made. I was fourteen. We passed though Orléans and I could smell Paris on the road. I could see the smoke of it ahead of us; there was a smudge of Paris on the clear blue sky.

We stopped a night in Artenay, and Mr Bennett, out of jealousy, I thought, locked me in my room. I do not know when he left. He may have stayed to take some supper. The innkeeper had instructions for me to stay where I was – the bill was already paid.

This I found out in the morning, after a night of horror. Then another. And a third. They left me like that, as you might lock up a dog; the better it will love the man who sets it free. I think about it still. I had money – quite a lot of money – in my trunk and variously hidden in my clothes. I was not, after the first night, locked in. And still I craved the rescuing knock. And then it came.

It was the fat man who took the post with us. His name was M. Raspail.

The baby turns. If it is a girl, I will drown it, that is all.

Not that there is anything so terrible about Raspail. He was protracted, endlessly so, in his pleasures, and very private – he would never, for example, let me witness the spasm, if there was one, which I sometimes doubt. But he
was
clever, and always turned my strength against me. And I am disgusted still, by the thought of his hands.

So, if it is a girl, I will drown it.

I do not believe in the baby any more. Stuck in me now like a ship in a bottle: it is too big. It will kill me on the way out. Either way, I do not think that I can love it, which is all to the good. My poor mother suffered from excessive love of her babies, so when she lost them her health went too. ‘Wait,’ she seems to say to me now. ‘Do not love it when it is small. Do not love it when it suckles. Do not suckle it. Do not allow it by you until it is weaned, and then not for any length of time. You may start to love it when it toddles over to your skirts. You may love it a little more when it starts to talk. But you must not actually love it, until it walks away from you, into the wide world. Safe. Arrived. Alive.’ Poor Mama. Poor Adelaide Schnock. So blonde and Saxon-stupid, offering
tisane
in her little china cups to the unbelieving rakes of Mallow.

In the morning, I hear my dear friend try the door. There is a long silence when he finds that is locked. I wait for the sound of his receding footsteps or a shot fired on the lock; an axe through the walnut or the sound of running men. I wait for his pleading, or the sound of his body abjectly sliding down the wood. I feel his silence. I test it and match it with a silence of my own; longer, more indifferent.

I slide a stiletto blade through the keyhole. All the way through.

I will always sleep alone, now. I will fend off my ghosts how I may. And in this way he will never be able to walk away from me, he will only be able to approach my door.

I pull back the knife. He knocks. I open up the door and smile.

Later, I go out to my
hamaca
, and the maid appears in
order
to wrestle me into the net. I do not even bother to check her face.

I heard a woman say once that birth was like falling asleep – being just as simple and mysterious. Who could tell you what it is like to fall asleep? So when my baby draws his first breath I will know what some insomniac angel knows when it wakes for the first time. ‘So that is what it is all about. So that is what we crave.’

I lie in my tent and lift the thin curtain and say, ‘Miltón,’ and he runs to my side.

‘Miltón, I hear him shouting. Will you see what your Master wants?’ The boy gives me a steady look and spits as he walks away. The whole world insults me, I think, and then I close my eyes and think no more.

Coffee

1869, Paraguay

THE CARRIAGE WAS
an old-fashioned Spanish affair, high and closed, and the blackest thing you ever saw. Black as obsidian. It was the black of ten coats of lacquer, maybe more, and though a black coach wasn’t in itself remarkable, this one unsettled the eye by being unrelieved by any other glint or colour – leathers, harness, bit, all so deep a black you might fall into it. The wheels, it was said, were made of iron, and you would swear the glass in the windows was black, if such a thing were possible – it looked as though she rode behind a widow’s veil, as though coal dust had been mixed in with the glass. Perhaps it was the ordinary difficulty of seeing inside a place so lambently dark: the seats gleaming, the dangling fringes of jet, the cushions of black silk embroidered on black. It was some kind of witticism; one that no one but Eliza could understand. ‘I wanted it
black
,’ she said, and laughed.

The horses were so black they would run in your dreams. Though there was a flowering of pink where sores had erupted, veined and flyblown from the thickness of their hides. They pulled a heavy load. The trunks were packed with jewels and gold plate – there was no doubt about that. There were diamonds slipped into the stuffing of the seats,
the
cushions might rattle if you shook them, and under Eliza’s own crinoline was a curved, fireproof box filled to the lid with American mining shares. Or so they said.

Sometimes they thought of the heat in there. Eliza rode with her mistress of the robes, the widow of General Díaz. The Little Colonel, Pancho, sat up beside the coachman, and strapped himself upright in case he should fall asleep, or loosed his ties in case of attack.

And, with a guard in front of it and an assorted rabble behind, the carriage proceeded north and east. They were going where the light was thin: soldiers and prisoners, travelling shopkeepers, some mad people, girls with babies in their arms; they followed the high, bow-sprung box, as it lurched and bobbed over tree roots and stones. They carried it over streams, levered it out of swamps, coaxed and rolled and rescued each sharp iron wheel of it, pressing their cheeks, as they did so, into ten coats of lacquer. And not once did she open the door.

Sometimes they forgot there was anyone inside. When night fell and camp was set, she would step out, and she looked just like herself: but during the day the changing landscape played changing tricks on their minds, so as they moved from rock to high grass, as they reached a ridge, or rounded a spur, a man might think that he had been in this place before – perhaps as recently as yesterday – or he might think that his life had slipped forward somehow, that he had moved into another day, or another week, and no one to tell him where the lost time had gone.

One evening she stepped out of the carriage with a newborn baby, and it might have been her child or the child of the widow Díaz for all the sound they had heard. Whatever woman gave birth in there did so in silence, like a Guaraní woman, who knows better than to shout. The father made up for it. When Eliza held it up to him, López took the child and, holding the naked thing over his head,
he
galloped down the straggling line, hullooing and making the horse veer and swerve. So the child was his, then, they smiled to say – though that still did not answer the question of who the mother might be.

Stewart had not attended this birth either, but he was called upon to pass a nurse for the baby, which obliged him to check the breasts and teeth of three clamouring women – together with their clamouring babies who seemed to know it was their birthright that was being bargained away. As it happened, the teeth were bad and their milk too little and too thin, so he set the lot of them on a cart at the end of the cortège, passing the infant from one dug to the next, until a girl wandered out of the trees with a dead baby in her arms, and dripping. When he saw her standing there in the dappled light, Stewart felt a spreading stain on his own chest, as though he had been shot – but when he looked down, there was nothing there.

He was always being shot, these days. He was following his own hearse through the hills for the longest funeral a man had ever known. It had started indecently early, before his corpse had even a chance to climb into the coffin, and it was getting away from him now, the mourners, the horses, his own death. At other times he was following a London cab, and might hail it, if he had half an English crown. And once, it looked like a hat, Stewart thought, an enormous hat, worn by some tiny man, who sang and waggled his head, as he pranced ahead of them down the endless grass road.

After the coach, came the carts. The first cart was for her clothes: it was stacked with leather boxes, twenty of them or more, and all with some sad blue growth creeping out of the seams. The next cart was for her piano which was roped down in its upright, playing position and covered again with a red toile; a vast sheet of careless shepherds and pretty shepherdesses on their swings – also a small dog,
endlessly
rampant and yapping, and all of them repeated and folding into themselves from one end of the shroud to the other. After this, a cart for servants and younger sons, then food. Finally, a closed wagon for the mother and two sisters of López – which looked like a cage, since the awning had rotted from its wicker arch. The López women sat on sacks of manioc flour and beans as they lurched along. ‘I am pissing in your soup,’ Il Mariscal’s mad mother was reported to have cried. ‘I am pissing in the soup of every man here.’