The Remedy (14 page)
And he must admit to himself he likes it that the actress finds it hard to let him go, even when it is to see his ward. He enjoys her touching little repertoire of petulance and hurt: All these things show the force of her attachment. She performs all her pouts most charmingly, and he is never bored by this show of his indispensability.
But the next time he says that he must leave her for a day’s outing with Pevenche, the sky darkens around him as she glares and tells him that he need not bother to call on her tomorrow.
“Don’t be selfish, dear heart,” he says. “The child is an orphan. Surely you can spare some compassion for her.”
“For a very little girl she demands very greatly much.”
“Not nearly as much as you do,” he retorts, provoked by the
froideur
of her tone. “You are a cold one, aren’t you, not to feel for the girl?”
She recoils and hisses at him: “And you are no gentleman, to talk to me in this way.”
He hopes that this dismaying comment is lightly meant, that nothing lies beneath it. But he cannot be certain.
Until now he has been sure that Mimosina Dolcezza, an innocent in London, knows nothing of the rigidity of the British classes, and in no way comprehends his ambiguous position in the society she entertains. He is positive that to her his elegant clothes, his abundant resources, and his apparently endless leisure betoken just one thing: that he is that object prized for its very
uselessness—a London gentleman. Her English lacks the discriminatory organ that might detect the little cracks in his accent, the south London vowels and the splashes of Irish that occasionally insinuate themselves into the loftiest sentence. All this time he has been congratulating himself that he has found a lover who can see only his nobility.
With this one sally—“you are no gentleman”—she has struck his self-assurance at its rickety foundation.
He stares at her, in one second as full of suspicion as he had previously been of love. And she herself narrows her eyes and stares back at him, with no mediating tenderness whatsoever in her glance. She turns aside and he notices suddenly that she’s been losing flesh.
It is not becoming for a woman of her age
—
whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve no idea
—
to wax stringy in the flank. It’s that ridiculous food she serves. With all that money she lays out on pampering the gut, none of it seems to stick.
He thinks about it with resentment. By night, all these days, he’s craved a slab of moist gammon ham, a prime loin of beef dressed in nothing but stout, something a body can ravage about cleanly to obtain swift satisfaction. Not these coy turrets of sauced morsels fringed with frivolous herbiage. He observes miserably that nothing on the actress’s table lies flat and meek upon the plate: everything is to be flirted with, assailed and conquered. Wearily he’s ascended lucent aspics that resemble jeweled high heels, and pushed his fork through savory architectural jellies studded with unknown high-colored meats. His gorge clamps rebelliously even at the smell.
And the desserts! What an insult to honest food! Why, there was last week a stag made out of marzipan that bled claret when, at her urging, he removed a miniature arrow from its creamy flank. And the next day it was a mousse in the shape of a hedgehog, fragrant with sorrel, nutmeg and saffron, and finished with a full bristling of slivered and blanched almonds. It is not merely ridiculous, this food, it is a mockery, and in it he is quick to sense a lack of respect for him that her present grumblings about his ward only serve to underline.
All the while he has mused on the food, she has been glaring at him. She is not about to let go the subject of Pevenche or his behavior in her regard. Her eyes are stiff as glass.
“I am learning about you Englishmen,” says she. “That you have, what it is called, a stricket” (he thinks she means a “streak”) “of mean, that is as deep as your canal”—and she points in the direction of the Thames with a Venetian’s unerring instinct for the location of water.
“All this because I criticized you,” wonders Valentine, aloud. Yet he’s breathing more easily with relief that it is not after all his wrongness of class she has derided but his waywardness of temper. He decides to keep his tone light and mocking, thinking that perhaps she will meet him halfway, because he hates this country they have entered, this cold and dangerous territory without softness and affection, a barbarous place where heartfelt wounds are exchanged in a moment.
But there’s no answering levity in her. She responds in a quiet, ironclad voice, “You are leaving me now.”
His lungs and bowels contract then dilate with fear and despair, as if she means it is forever, when surely she is merely staging a little and temporary theatrical scene: The only way she knows to carry the day. Her weapons are so poorly developed that he almost feels sorry for her, no, he does pity her, such a helpless little creature, who knows only how to mimic anger in a fetching way upon the stage, but has no depths of interior emotion to feel it. Her talent is for amiability, for sweetness, for yielding. She cannot denature herself to the point of actual rage.
She’d rather drop a tooth than an unkind word from that mouth.
If he leaves now, she will suffer terribly for his absence, and perhaps this is a necessary punishment. Although this little scene has been illuminating, he would not like to have it happen again.
He pulls on the minimal number of clothes. He strides out of the room without looking back, but he feels her lying motionless amid the spill of sheets, counting his steps. He dawdles down to the street door, stopping a second on each step, waiting for her imploring voice. He is aware that he has left certain items of clothing as hostages in her bedroom.
It is almost more than he can do, to stop himself from turning and running back up to her. What points his feet on their downward path is the thought of the worm that has now entered the apple of their mutual satisfaction. This single argument has unparadised them.
He is shot through with misery.
At the slam of the door upstairs there is a stinging in his nose, as if she has struck it. He feels unbearably excluded, even though he has brought this exile upon himself. He turns on his heel and hurtles back up the stairs. She is waiting for him just inside the door, and silently enfolds him in her arms, before leading him back to bed.
“Damn it,” he says aloud, still thinking about the quarrel, hours later, when, all forgiven—or at least bravely seeming so—they are taking a restorative promenade in the park and the figure of Dizzom can be seen approaching. The apologetic contortion of his silhouette informs them both that he bears another message from Pevenche.
Tom’s daughter has not been backward in realizing that her guardian is far more tender-hearted than her father. It is a shame, he reflects, that the girl cannot understand that he would happily do things for her out of simple affection.
She has to keep testing me, to make sure I’ll deliver on a continuous basis.
Her timing is impeccably bad just now. He thinks again, silently “Damn…”
The sutures are too fresh; the wound is not jet healed.
The actress knows his thoughts without further explanation, in that magical way of hers, and she responds aloud, “So it is a damning thing then to love me? Suddenly? Because I ask for a little proof? I see my mistake. I was stupid. And perhaps you have already tired of me and found a new toy to play with?
Va bene.
So it is with women like me. We are used and thrown away. I understand. I shall not detain you further. I wish you every happiness, my dearest darling. And your poor little baby ward, of course.”
Her voice grows softer and softer, husky with poisonous sweetness. She gives him the full run of her tongue, and she finds deadly
words in English that he could never have suspected in her vocabulary.
Dizzom has by now arrived and delivers his commission in the void between them, and leaves hastily. More words are spoken, and looks are exchanged, both with such a bitterness as to rive their love asunder again. This time, when they part, it is with the indelible imprint of stinging words that can never be erased and, worse, images of an ugliness between them that will not quickly fade.
He has called her self-absorbed, a cold fish. She has defamed him as obsessive and as the foolish gull of a little girl. She has accused him of lying to her, that he goes not to Pevenche but to a grown-up mistress, using his ward as a pretext. At this he flinches, because this reminds him of his half-involuntary lapse of honesty with his mistress, who, based on something he has said, thinks the girl a small child.
Who can bear to see themselves in such dim and nasty lights?
Take Roots of Scorzonera 2 ounces; Zedoary half an ounce; Contrayerva, Spanish Angelica, Shavings of Harts-horn and Ivory, each 2 drams; Cochineal whole 4 scruples; boil these in fine, clear Barley Water, from 2 pints and a half to 24 ounces; throwing into it, towards the last. Saffron 1 scruple: To the strain’d Liquor add Epidemial and Treacle Water, each 2 ounces; Syrup of Gilly-f lowers 4 ounces; Juice of Kermes strain’d half an ounce; Leaves of Gold 4; mix all together.
When the Venom of a Malignant Fever assaulting the Spirits, Stupefies, and almost strikes them Dead; these generous Alexipharmacks (timely and frequently exhibited) inspire new Vigour, shake off the deleterious Copula, and so sometimes snatch the Sick out of the very Jaws of Death.
Now he has all the time he wants to spend with his red-headed ward.
He takes Pevenche to see Mrs Salmon’s Waxworks in Fleet Street, but she grows peckish before viewing half the figures there. At Don Saltero’s Coffee House in Cheyne Walk, while she consumes hot chocolates and egg-flips, he finds his eyes prefer to wander the room and its many curiosities. Don Saltero’s boasts two hundred and ninety-three unusual exhibits, ranging from a nun’s penitential whip to a whale’s mummified pizzle. His ward is mercifully silent at the important act of consumption. Then he hears her drain her final glass with audible satisfaction and ask to be taken to the Chelsea Bun House in Jew’s Row “just for a taste.”
Three buns later, his ear bruised with her prattle, he invites her to see the beasts in the zoo at Tower Bridge, where she shows little
interest in the tigers, wolves, eagles, and Indian cats, but demands to remain until the four lions devour a dog who until the very moment of his dispatch sits serenely in the cage with them, exchanging pleasantries. This grisly spectacle appears to give Pevenche a prodigious appetite for lamb cutlets. He is disconcerted when she asks him to cut them up for her.
“Baby P. don’t dare touch sharp knives,” she informs him in a lisping whisper. “And the cutlets are so very large for her little mouth.”
That mouth, slicked with grease, works fast and furious over the cutlets, paring them to Hansel-like bones in short order. And then she is ready for a pudding of apple and blackberry with sweetened cream.
Tom always laughed about her feeding so enormously. He encouraged her to great feats of consumption: He could make anecdotes of them later. The girl concurred, it seemed, partly to win her father’s brief attention, but also because of a natural inclination to gluttony. While she was cunning, she did not seem to understand the trap into which she had fallen. If she refused the mountains and valleys of food, if she shed some of her bulk to become less of a grotesque—why, then she might even have been appealing. But Tom had cruelly, thoughtlessly decided on her course, and there was Tom’s temper, hung on its hair-trigger, to be faced if she disappointed him. She did not have to be a coward to be passive.
Sickened by the death of the dog, Valentine touches nothing on his plate. He wonders if the actress has been to see the zoo. He thinks of how he would have covered her eyes with his own hands if she had witnessed the poor hound’s demise. At the thought of her translucent eyelids he closes his own and departs mentally into memories of intense pleasure.
Pevenche is tugging his sleeve. “Where are we goin’ now, Uncle Valentine?”
They see the dwarf Count Boruwlaski performing his diminutive prodigies at Carlisle House and the midget Corsican fairy in Cockspur Street. Later they stroll in Vauxhall Gardens for a study of the grand ladies’ dresses but she’s soon urging his elbow in the
direction of the Ham Room for a slice of meat so airy that one can read a newspaper through it. It’s said that the master carver is so skilled that he could cover the whole garden with the tenuous shavings from a single joint. Pevenche consumes enough of them to line a large carriage. He takes her to the more exclusive Ranelagh Rotunda where she is not at all interested in the gilded porticoes and rainbowed ceiling but only in the regale of bread and butter, and afterwards persuades him to divert to Knightsbridge so that she may yet again sample the sweet Asses’ Milk purveyed by Madame Cornelys, the Venetian society hostess now fallen upon hard times. Valentine looks with interest upon the vivacious but withered hostess, wonders if she is personally known to Mimosina Dolcezza. The lady herself has eyes only for Pevenche, who has consumed a quart of the sweet white froth and claims, as usual, that it has utterly renovated her appetite. The professional wits of Valentine Greatrakes try to configure what strange powders have gone into thickening the brew, and how sick it will make his ward.
But Pevenche appears to have a cast-iron belly to go with her steely will.
For some reason he cannot rejoice in this sturdy constitution and finds himself wishing, shamefully, that Pevenche might be taken ill and put to bed for a good long time, and not just because it would thereby excuse his attendance upon her.
And in the meantime, he could perhaps send some of his quacks to her, and do something about that appalling carrot hair.
The next time he sees the actress it is on the arm of Gervase Gordon, Lord Stintleigh, the Member for Hearthford. The man is rumored to be tangential to the circle closest to ultimate power. He’s already served as Foreign Secretary and it is said that in his current nameless position his portfolio has been, if anything, enhanced.
