The Remedy (22 page)
He answered simply, “I do not understand it. It is as if you have possession of my eyes now. You have commanded tears, and so they come.”
This was so satisfactory a response that I sang the same song again but, as I sang, I found myself despising the brittle words. I wished I had chosen a sweeter song. This Valentine Greatrakes was worthy of better. He was worthy of kindness. I liked this idea. I saw more than convenient lust on his face, and I own that I was pleased to see it. I was more than pleased, and not in my habitual way, for in my professional seductions such a sign of weakness meant profitable information. I liked his enthusiasm because—strangely—it met my own,
On his face I saw speculation, and anticipation, and I saw something rarer: hope. I felt it myself: At least that is how I identified the liquefying of all my calculations as I looked at him. Yes, I wanted to put myself outside him, get a bellyful of him. But I wanted more. The wine seemed to be headier than usual. That was the only way I could account for my tooth-numbing, eye-widening sense of anticipation.
I excused myself briefly and in the corridor I seized my pocket sprunking glass and checked the freshening effect of singing upon my complexion. I dropped into my mouth another
pastillo di bocca
, a perfumed lozenge to sweeten my breath, I loosened my clothes with practiced speed. I did not wish to be seamed with their imprints when he saw me naked. I wanted to look new as a child. A part of me longed not to part with my clothes at all, though I wanted above all things to be intimate with him. But a greater part was not yet ready for the naked confession of the secrets of my person with
thus
man, those same secrets that I bartered so cheaply for information with men selected for me by my employers.
For the first time, I did not arrange the three Inquisitional chairs at the foot of my bed.
Something about this English nobleman had contrived to do what I had thought impossible. There was about him a quality of humanity that served to rub the rust off my heart.
Take conserve of stinking Orrach 4 ounce; Oil of Amber
48
drops; mix. The Dose is the quantity of a Chestnut.
Every 6 or 8 hours, according as the Case shall require.
The overtures being played out swiftly, we were united. And I was lost.
I knew this because I was sad; a tender elegiac melancholy evoked in me the sensation of slow music. Instead of the usual hard bud of professional triumph or the acrid tingle of mere animal satisfaction, I felt a melting sense of renunciation. From a woman who had no heart, I had been transformed into one who had found hers and lost it in the same moment.
I felt certain that he actually loved me too. His stammers and his silence declared his sincerity. Mechanically, I filtered his behavior through my specially adapted wits, monitoring flattering symptoms in his mode of address or the lingering of his eyes. Not in his gifts. All men offer gifts. And he was not to know that I have never cared for the cold glare of diamonds, not since a trifling incident in my adolescence.
Initially, I had exalted his drinks with certain ready-bought English preparations, to calm him and dispose him for seduction, but I soon desisted, for I found that I wanted to spend time with the whole man, not just a shadowy edition of him. I was no longer capable of stage managing an operatic romance; I myself was the music being played.
Sometimes I regretted dimly that to transmit my honest rapture I had only the ways of an actress, the face and hands of an actress. The motions were the same as those I had gone through
so many times. Now they were the truth, and yet I did not know how to renovate them, how to uncounterfeit myself.
From time to time I roused myself from my abstracted state and gloated over my unexpected good fortune. Here, finger-tame in my hand, was a man who would be desired not just for his position and wealth but for his innate attractiveness. I felt a twitch of anger at the unfairness of my work, that in the course of my duties it had never sent me any man half as appetizing as this one. I had been given to dozens of men. Yet for myself I had to find—and illicitly too—the only one who truly pleased
me.
It was of little matter to me that he could easily afford the cost of my entire maintenance. In my whole life I had never met anyone who was actually poor, except the despised
converge
nuns at San Zaccaria. I had grown up in a luxurious palazzo and my adult work had been among powerful voluptuaries. If they were possessed with the gambling vice or desired women as expensive as myself, these men could afford it all, from the deeps of their ancestral coffers. Money was nothing to such men as they never earned it, and yet Valentine Greatrakes—for all his wealth—seemed to intuit my lack of it, unlike any man before. My new lover automatically seized any little bills of account that he saw upon my bureau, and instantly paid off a number of trifling sums that had been bothering me. This meant that I had a little ready money at my disposal for once, and I squirrelled it away in my glove case. Until now my way of accumulating cash was to save on the normal articles of femininity such as perfume. Instead I had used my craft and
acted
the part of a perfumed woman to great effect.
Every word he spoke of himself was a cordial to me. He talked with the utmost naturalness of his “manor,” which I took to be his country house in Ireland; his horses, which I understood to be thoroughbreds; and his stables, which I assumed to be situated in the parks of his ancestral home.
Yes, I liked him extremely. I liked his looks, his style, even his careless accent, something affected—so I had been told—by many English aristocrats. I liked his luxurious rooms in Bond Street. I liked the untouched copies of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
scattered carelessly on the table, even old issues. I liked the fact that he had so much time to give me, and thought with gratitude on how many fashionable assemblies at fine London houses he must have renounced in order to stay sequestered with me. I was exceedingly sensible of the fact that a man such as he must daily receive crisp snowstorms of invitations to other nobles’ houses, and I appreciated the delicacy with which he kept them discreetly tucked away so I should not even have to see them.
One simply couldn’t help liking him. In fact, I soon developed an unrestrainable greed for his company. I loved talking with him. He had a by no means contemptible supply of brains. And yet it was easy to frighten him. That ridiculous incident with my hair feather that he thought was a bat! Even that episode nourished my tenderness for him, however, and my anxiety.
It is so very easy to put a man off his pursuit. The tiniest thing can make the sex falter.
At first it seemed that I was playing on velvet with my new lover, that I could do nothing wrong in his eyes, nor he in mine.
Then came a surprising irritant from an unexpected quarter. At first I thought it a trivial interruption to our happiness, but in that I was most grievously mistaken. A poisoned pinprick can make a nasty wound.
The problem was with his ward, the daughter of a close friend and employee who had recently died in circumstances he did not properly explain to me. I gathered that a business rivalry had gone fatally wrong, but I saw that the subject gave him pain so I did not press him on the details.
I never saw the daughter, but I assumed that she resembled her parent enough to keep the sentimental dolor liquid in his heart whenever my lover beheld her.
And that chit of a girl kept him wrapped around her small finger, no doubt perfectly aware that he suffered under a delusion of responsibility for the death of her father. About this cunning little she-goat, my lover was fawning and stupid with indulgence, and I did not like to see him so debased.
Young as she was—it seemed from what he said that the child’s years most likely numbered about eight—she appeared to
think that she had an inalienable right to be cared for by my lover; it was all one to her whether he performed his duties with pleasure or pain, so long as she received what she wanted. I could not but draw bitter comparisons. Since my parents had consigned me to San Zaccaria, I had never enjoyed that luxury. I had always needed to earn any favors I was given, often in ways that were expensive to my self-respect.
From visits to his ward he always returned miserably tense. What a job of work she gave me, to soothe and comfort him! What distresses I smoothed out; what dark unspoken fears I assuaged. It was exhausting. I soon grew to hate the little girl, the more so for the allowances he infallibly made for her.
A sore punishment it clearly was for him to be in her company.
For I felt that he did not like her, despite her parentage. She did not seem to give him any pleasure in return for all his efforts.
I heard him instructing his gray little butler Dizzom (for whom, with characteristic simplicity, he dispensed with livery): “And she has told me that she dislikes her French teacher. The woman has reprimanded her in front of others for something or other. That teacher is to be dismissed, understand?—not just from teaching Pevenche but from the school.”
“And another thing. It seems that they are feeding her some articles she does not care for. I’ve written down this list of things she has dictated and they are to be kept out of the kitchen. And replaced with these.”
Other ragged lists were brought forth from his pocket, and once a snippet of some ribbon that another girl owned and she grieved not to have. Dizzom was to find it and have three yards cut and delivered in the instant.
What a monster, this Pevenche!
I thought, listening to her demands. Aloud, I inquired tenderly, “And in what subjects do they instruct the poor girl in this school of hers?”
Inwardly I was thinking:
I observe that she had learned some useful lesson already In how to get what she wants.
He did not even know the answer to my question, poor man. Pevenche’s education plainly failed to interest the girl herself, so
it was not a subject on which she permitted discussion, apparently. He dared not ask more, and nor did he truly preoccupy himself with the matter. The grim determination with which he satisfied her whims showed me not that he loved her but that he had given up on making a sweeter person out of her. He merely chose the easier path of denying her nothing. Giving her what she wanted, immediately, also obviated the need for prolonged contact, and I suspected that having discovered this advantage, he subconsciously acted upon it.
Other times he returned from visits to his ward looking furtive, and I wondered,
What did she sell him this time? What piece of finesse did he suffer today?
And when he did not see her on an almost daily basis, he was obliged to submit to letters from her in laborious, large handwriting with a superfluity of capital letters and misspellings in even very simple words. These missives were usually signed “Baby P.,” no doubt her father’s pet name for her. Obviously the girl had seen the utility in prolonging her infancy, and certainly it was the notes signed in this way, which received the most feverish attention from her guardian.
He always answered them, never mind other commitments or pleasures that called him. “I am sure you are taking the right course.” Or “I admire the way you handle such obstacles. You are definitely in the right.” And once, “Yes, the other girl is a species of pig, you are quite justified in this course of action.” When I interrupted him at such work, he slid the letter under his sleeve, even at the expense of the resultant black blots on his cuffs. Then I thought it a good thing that he was embarrassed, because at least it proved that he was not an utter imbecile in her regard. At least he
knew
that he was making a fool of himself.
The thing he wrote most often was, “Of course, dear Pevenche. Have the account sent to me.”
She had one further talent. I observed the sequence played out several times. (I always glanced at those severely misspelled letters when my lover was out of the room.) In one note she requested, for example, a “cheap” pair of gloves made from pink kidskin. Of course my lover was instantly stumbling in his haste
to have them located and supplied to her. But the very next day a noble little letter arrived, reeking of self-sacrifice, saying that of course the gloves didn’t matter and that she could very well live without them if they presented even the slightest problem. She had some old black ones that would do just as well once she had contrived to mend them, which she could surely do as soon as she was feeling a little better. Valentine Greatrakes was soon scribbling back to her, begging her not to reduce herself to such circumstances, that ten pairs of the pink gloves would soon be found. She replied begging him not to trouble himself, really, she was absolutely suited to her old black gloves. Anyway, she never went anywhere elegant—why had she need of such fashionable trifles? Reading this note, he grew agitated: There seemed to be a real possibility that she would deny him the possibility of performing this service for her. Of course it always ended with the girl receiving multiples of her original request and yet also retaining the appearance of martyrdom.
In a moment of weakness he told me that when Pevenche did not get what she wanted, she would go to a corner of the room, pick up her ukulele and pluck the strings, making an abominable noise and mewing little snatches of self-pity distantly out of tune with her dreadful chords.
“When I hear her do that, my heart goes out to her,” he confesses. “Her father gave her that ukulele. She makes such a horrible noise with it, and she looks so pathetic, that it reminds me of her orphaned state. She is not so—mentally developed—as to realise its effect on me.”
Do not depend upon It
, I riposted, but silently.
If she made a noise like that I would turn up her posteriors) and flog her with rods.
