by John Pearson
But the night was not yet over for Richard. Juliette was at a late-night party at the Café des Artistes, and when he went to fetch her he found that, despite all the Ambassador’s congratulations, he was not in the best of humours. Even when Monsieur Zola tried to joke with him, he sat scowling at his table, refusing to join in the singing which he normally enjoyed.
“What is it, Richard, trouble with women? You should be grateful—excellent material to write about. Don’t brood on it—write about it. Put it all in that novel of yours, then let me have a look at it.”
Richard politely thanked the fussy little man with the pince-nez and short black beard. But what could anyone like Zola ever know about his troubles? How could he ever understand?
Juliette was drinking beer and with her round pink face suddenly appeared quite blowzy. The neck, the tops of the arms—those tide-marks of all women past a certain age—were showing the encroaching marks of time. When Monsieur Degas painted her it scarcely mattered, but tonight, and after the vision he had had of Marjorie … When they were back in bed Richard couldn’t bring himself to make love to her. She was offended but he was too tired to care; he slept restlessly and dreamed—of Marjorie and her Duke, an obscene dream with d’Amboise as a gross Priapus and Marjorie enjoying his embraces. He had to watch as they made love. Cartwright was there as well, his hoary locks crowned with vine leaves, and with each fresh contortion of the lovers he would congratulate Richard. And Lady Southwold was there, to join in the congratulations, and Réjane and the President of France.
“Well done, well done, Bellamy, well done!” they chanted, and their shouts urged on the lovers.
It was not all that easy for Richard to obtain a meeting with the Duke, particularly as he had to insist on secrecy and d’Amboise not unnaturally wanted to know why. But Richard knew d’Argenson, the chef de protocole, and finally obtained an audience late the following afternoon. The Duke was dressing. As Richard entered, a good-looking footman was helping him into his pale-grey britches and Richard caught a glimpse of the huge hams and of blue-veined flesh.
“Just cinq minutes, Monsieur Bellamy,” d’Amboise muttered. “At seven I must meet Monsieur le Président at the élysée, and after that I shall be seeing my fiancée. Whatever you have to tell me, please to be swift.”
Richard was suddenly aware of the man’s shrewd black eyes buried in the midst of so much flesh. D’Amboise was a self-indulgent man, and possibly a wicked one, but certainly not stupid. One of the skills that Richard had acquired as a diplomat was the ability to tell a story rapidly and to the point. It didn’t take him long to spell out the gist of what Lord Cartwright and others had told him of the scandal created by Lady Southwold, Lady FitzAlban and the Prince of Wales. To his relief, the Duke did not laugh, and when he spoke the affected, high-pitched drawl had gone. It was a sharp Parisian voice that said, “And so, Monsieur Bellamy, to be precise, you’re telling me that as a result of this His Royal Highness le Prince de Galles has totally excluded, not merely Lady Southwold but the entire famille Southwold, from polite society?”
Richard nodded. “I suggest your grace should make his own inquiries. I think they will confirm that the situation is as I describe it.”
The Duke stood up, breathed in, and waited as the footman laced his corsets. Finally, in a strained and slightly worried voice he said, “What you have told us seems most disturbing, Monsieur Bellamy. If it turns out to be as you have said, we shall not be ungrateful to you.”
It took less than twenty-four hours for Richard’s tiny germ of gossip to incubate into the full-scale fever of scandal that he wanted. Just before midday of the following morning Hunter, the chief clerk of chancery, told him that something must have happened to the Duke d’Amboise. He had apparently been taken ill and so would not be at the President’s reception that same evening, where his engagement was to be announced.
“Sounds just a wee bit fishy to me,” said Hunter with a wink. Richard said nothing and went off to lunch. He had scarcely returned when the Ambassador summoned him. It was the only time Richard had ever seen him looking slightly ruffled.
“What’s this about the Duke d’Amboise, Richard? We were all set to have the engagement announced at tonight’s presidential reception. Now Hunter tells me he has suddenly left town. It’s quite unheard-of, Richard—most extraordinary behaviour. Lord only knows how Lady Southwold’s going to take it: and then there’s poor, poor Marjorie. Really no way to treat a woman. Most extraordinary!” Grumbling to himself and shaking his distinguished head, the great man walked off.
By that evening speculation over what had happened had turned into a fureur, the sort of scandal in a champagne glass that Paris loves. And Lady Southwold, naturally, made it all infinitely worse, once she heard the news that d’Amboise had defected. Richard had the misfortune to be there and for a moment thought the lady would explode. When she had calmed a little she shouted out that she was going to horsewhip the Duke and demanded a carriage and a pair of footmen straight away to help her teach “that French swine” the lesson of his lifetime. “No filthy frog is going to treat a gel of mine like that and get away with it.”
And more, much more in the same vein. Red wig awry, face taut and mottled with rage, she stood there in the courtyard shouting for the Ambassador, who, of course, never came. But it was the sort of scene that servants, and especially Parisian servants, thoroughly enjoy. Throughout this little tableau they stood there like deaf-mutes cast in wax: but by that evening the whole story was round Paris. And rather to Richard’s horror and alarm, it was the whole story.
That night at a café one of the Goncourts collared him, an eager smile on his intelligent consumptive face that Richard recognised as evidence that Edmond was in hot pursuit of a first-class piece of social gossip for his famous journal.
“A friend tells me, cher Richard, that the precipitate flight of le gros lard wasn’t coincidence or a case of bashfulness by an intending bridegroom. He tells me that the story is far more romantic than it seems.”
“Really, Edmond, what extraordinary fantasies the two of you get hold of. That imagination of your brother’s will be landing you in far more trouble than you bargained for.”
“And that cold, diplomatic English face of yours conceals a romantic heart that will get you into still more trouble, mon copain. But it’s a heart-warming story. We applaud it thoroughly. It does you great credit as a man of sensibility if not of sense. Beauty saved from that very beastly beast, and you as St. George and Don Juan in one. You’ll find yourself the most romantic jeune homme in Paris if you don’t look out.”
And so it was. Richard, despite himself, soon found that he had inadvertently achieved a fame, a sudden notoriety such as most men would envy and none but the luckiest attain. By next morning hostesses were clamouring to give him dinner, courtesans were courting him, and the moustached and smiling figure of Monsieur Degas nodded towards him in the Bois. Normally all this would have delighted him, but nothing was normal now. Now that success had come to Richard Bellamy, he had no chance to make the most of it.
His excellency was soon summoning him again—but this time there was no champagne, no Martinique cheroot, no sympathy. Instead there was the man of steel and marble who had made Metternich and Europe tremble.
“Your behaviour, Bellamy, is not merely inexcusable. Many things are that. But it was irrational, and that is something that I can’t allow. If we permit our hearts to rule us in this way …” He raised his hands in a gesture of such eloquent contempt that lesser men than Richard might have followed it with suicide.
“There is no point in lecturing you now. You’re old enough to know the penalties. If it were left to me there might be something we could do, but I’m afraid it’s not. Her ladyship has been in touch already with the Foreign Minister, and he has demanded your dismissal from the Service. That’s all there is that can be said. I’m sorry. And I’m very disappointed.”
For Richard Bellamy, dismissal from the Di
plomatic Service came as a real disaster. He had no private means, no other possible profession. All his education and his training had been towards diplomacy. His friends, hopes, life itself had been bound up with this one career he loved: now, thanks to one ridiculous error of the heart, he’d thrown it away. And all, as he kept saying to himself, for nothing. If he had won the girl it would have been more bearable, but there had been no chance of that. The very night the scandal broke Marjorie had been bustled out of Paris and back to the virgin shores of England. She would probably have been better off wedded to d’Amboise—and Richard would still have had his chance of one day becoming another Lord Cartwright.
Remorse, regret, those old men’s vices—Richard was to feel their bitter touch early on in life. He trudged the quais and brooded on his future. It was bleak.
May was coming and a morning mist was rising from the river. Paris, beloved city, had never been lovelier. The chestnut trees were coming into bloom, a barge was floating on the lilac river. The bridges were deserted. Youth was going. So was Paris. For him this was the bitterest loss of all. How could he possibly stay on without career or private income? True, there was the novel he was writing, but Zola had not been too encouraging and the thought of starving in a garret in the cause of art was not for Richard Bellamy. There was no possible alternative to England, but Lord, those fogs, that food, those dreadful women! Still, if one had to go, one went in style, and Richard did.
That afternoon a great deal of champagne arrived with compliments of the Duke d’Amboise. (Not quite such good champagne as Cartwright’s, but more than good enough for Richard and his friends.) And that night there was such a party as the little street off the Rue Jacob had not witnessed since the Revolution. In later years Richard was never absolutely sure who turned up and who did not: Zola, Goncourt, Degas certainly. They would go anywhere these days for free champagne. But whether Verlaine and Saint-Saëns came remains uncertain. They were living nearby so they may have done. Not that it really matters, for by the early hours Richard had drunk so much that he could hardly have distinguished Rimbaud from Racine, and he never did discover how Degas and Juliette got him aboard the early train to London.
1884
3. A Mésalliance in the Family
Richard still had a hangover as his train steamed painfully through Clapham Junction (already, as he told himself, with a limp attempt at pride, the largest and most complex junction in the world) and he prepared to face the future. It seemed as grey and as depressing as the view from his carriage window—acre on slate-grey acre of identical small dwellings recently built across the once green fields of Balham, fog in the nostrils, soot which had even penetrated the third-class carriage where he sat.
What hope had anyone in such a country, especially without friends or influence and after a disgrace like his? How could he even face his family? It was as well his father was no more. His mother would be easier to placate, for in every mother there is something that secretly applauds a son’s failure if it brings him back weak and in need of maternal comfort. And so it proved with Richard.
Since his father’s death the family had left the rectory where he had spent his boyhood, and his mother was living in a small cottage opposite the church. Every day the trim, straight-backed widow in bonnet and black shawl would make her way up past the church and through the churchyard to visit the simple tombstone of her husband. Richard, who went with her his first afternoon at home, found this touching but also saddening. His father wouldn’t have wanted such a cult of mourning, and in the past his mother had always been down-to-earth and self-reliant.
She had been the one who urged him on through college, who read him passages from Samuel Smiles, and who always told him that in life’s jungle it was the tough and self-reliant who survived. (Mrs. Bellamy had always been a great reader and in those days had been impressed by the recently published works of Mr. Darwin. After Mr. Smiles he was her favourite author.)
So it had been from her that Richard had originally picked up his keen sense of ambition.
But now all his mother’s energy and toughness seemed to have left her. In spirit she already seemed to have joined her husband in the churchyard. Richard’s disgrace and failure scarcely seemed to concern her.
The first evening of his return he sat with her over their frugal meal, the candlelight making her once lovely face appear ethereal and infinitely old. He talked of Paris. In the past she would have wanted to know everything about the city—the great men he had met, its politics, its scandals, even the meals he had eaten. In the old days not a single detail of her favourite son’s career had been too small for this ambitious mother. But no longer.
“I feel that this is God’s will,” she said softly.
“God’s will, Mother? How on earth?”
“Yes, His will. There you were in that sinful city, beset by temptation on every side, but He was not content to leave you in corruption.”
“Corruption, Mother?”
His mother smiled a knowing but forgiving smile.
“Come, Richard,” she said gently. “I know you better than you realise. I know that there are pleasures in this life that appeal to you more than to most men. But the Lord does not tempt His creatures more than their power to resist. My boy, I must tell you something.”
She paused and once again there was that strange, sad smile. “Before he died, your father spoke of you. He was not happy with the path your life was taking.”
“He never told me this,” Richard said roughly.
“Of course not. That was not his way. But he said that the Lord would bring you back to us—and so He has. He also said his dearest wish was that one day you, his favourite son, would follow him into the ministry, even continuing his work here in this parish. It would be a wonderful thing, Richard, if it could happen. And since the Lord has brought you back like this I feel your duty is quite clear. Walk in your father’s footsteps, Richard. Become a clergyman like him. There is no better way for any man to spend his life than that.”
At first the idea of following his mother’s wishes struck Richard as absurd, impossible. A country clergyman indeed! After the life he had led in Paris, the glittering prizes that had been all but within his grasp, how could he possibly retire at twenty-nine and let the remainder of his life moulder away in a country parish? The boredom, the interminable round of preaching, parish visiting, and village fêtes! Besides, there was the question of one’s faith. Richard was a believer—of a sort. “Pious without enthusiasm” was the celebrated epitaph placed on the tomb of one distinguished eighteenth-century divine. It could have been applied to Richard too. He had none of his parents’ fervent belief. At Oxford, when asked to describe his form of Christianity, he had flippantly replied, “An Indifferentist,” and this was more or less the state of his belief today.
But on the other hand there really was something to be said for entering the Church, especially for somebody in Richard’s somewhat hopeless, penitential state of mind. He who had played the world’s game and had lost might just as well withdraw in dignity, living the remainder of his life in absolute obscurity, doing some good for those who needed help. If he could not become another Cartwright, he could at least attempt to follow the example of his father. If he could not have Lady Marjorie …! This, of course, was really at the bottom of his thinking, although he would never have acknowledged it. It was too degrading, too ridiculous to admit the truth—that he had sacrificed career, ambitions, wealth for love, then had that love totally ignored. For since Lady Marjorie’s precipitate departure from France he had heard nothing—not a note of thanks, a whisper of her sympathy for what had happened—nothing!
He was not bitter but deeply hurt, and the idea of burying himself in Norfolk for the remainder of his days appealed to his craving for a romantic answer to that haughty lady.
Besides, the slow balm of the gentle Norfolk countryside had now begun to heal his wounded spirit. He had forgotten how much he loved the village he was b
orn in, how much at home he felt among its slow-speaking, taciturn inhabitants, and how he responded to the strange flat landscape rendered immortal by the painter Crome of Norwich. With his degree from Oxford and his distinguished academic record it would not be difficult for Richard to take holy orders; he would then try for preferment to his father’s living; since his death it had been held by a succession of temporary incumbents.
Gradually, without committing himself entirely (as a true Libran, Richard was congenitally one for carefully weighing one course of action against another: his behaviour in Paris had been quite out of character), he began to make inquiries, visiting old Bishop Gough in Norwich (a close friend of his father’s), talking to rural deans, and generally discovering how the ecclesiastical landscape lay. The results were quite encouraging. Men of his calibre were wanted by the Church. It would take a little time, but Richard got the firm impression that if his sights were set on God, God would be willing to provide the target.
Southwold that spring was at its most spectacular, excessive best. From afar one saw the great tower built in 1201 by Guy de Southwolde—banker, rebellious baron who became Chancellor to King John and lived to set his family in their place of firm pre-eminence here in this fertile stretch of Wiltshire. His portrait by an anonymous French painter of the period was hung in the long gallery and showed a thin ruthless face, pale eyes and that extraordinary nose which in succeeding generations was to prove as much of a genetic trade-mark to the Southwolds as the prognathous chin was to the Habsburgs.