Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Their landlord at Poland Street was a man called George Newsome, a paunchy man of diminutive stature with a fox-like fuzz of ginger for hair and pale, mournful eyes. He was barely a gentleman, though always quiet and polite in Eleanor’s company. But he would call at the apartment once a month, or sometimes more frequently, to collect the rent from Mamma, and discuss any subject that related to the rooms. On those occasions Mamma would shoo Eleanor from the front room, send her to her own room, or out to the shops with the strict maternal command not to disturb her conference with Mr Newsome. ‘Mr Newsome has no desire,’ she would snap, ‘to be bothered with the prattlings of a girl like you. He and I must discuss the ground-rent’ (or the pipes, or the roof, or the yard, or whatever it chanced to be), ‘and we are not to be disturbed.’ Of course Eleanor accepted this on face value. Why should she not? She curtsied to Mr Newsome, who bowed shallowly in return, and then she went out into the open air.

  It was a sunny day, a June day, and Eleanor - knowing her mother’s preference in the matter - had volunteered to walk out to sit in Soho Square and read for the duration of Mr Newsome’s visit. She had tripped down the stairs, feeling light in her heart and happy, and had reached the end of Poland Street before realising that she had brought the wrong book. She had meant to bring the first volume of Mrs Markham’s History of France, from the Conquest by the Gauls; but she had actually picked up a volume of Lisette’s Venture, by the Author of ‘Thomasina’, which was of a similar size and had similar-coloured binding. Had her mother’s novel been a little more interesting to her, or had she not become quite caught up in the narrative of early French history, she might have simply sat and read Lisette’s Venture in the sunshine, and that would have been that. But she wanted her own book. So she came back up the street, up the stairs, and let herself into the apartment. She told herself that she might ease the door to the front room open, slip inside, retrieve her book and depart without interrupting her mother’s conversation with Mr Newsome. And so she turned the knob with that tentative, controlled touch we use when we want to operate a door-handle without it squeaking. She exerted the slightest pressure on the door and inserted her body a little way through the opening she had made.

  The scene inside was nothing she had seen before, but it did not bewilder her. She knew straight away what was occurring, what it must be, and at first the fact registered in her brain without shock. The curtains were drawn across the windows. Her mother was lying face-down over the chaise, her skirts thrown forward over her body with the crenulated hem lying across her shoulders. Her legs were bare all the way up to her waist, and those two pale shapes’ rising Λ were what first caught the eye. Then Eleanor took in her mother’s whole posture, and then she saw Mr Newsome’s relationship to the whole. He too was naked from the waist down, his own legs darker and thinner than Mamma’s, his bottom squarely saggy. At the moment that Eleanor opened the door he was in the act of stepping backwards, at an angle to her point of view. His male generative organ (the first that Eleanor had ever seen) waggled a little, forming an angle of no more than fifteen degrees from his stomach. It was of considerable size, or so it seemed to Eleanor. It was darker than Newsome’s sallow legs and hands. In the shadowy room it seemed almost black. Newsome spoke a single phrase, ‘Lie still Madam’, to which Mamma replied only with a little half-sigh. And then Newsome stepped over towards the chaise and took his male generative organ in his left hand. He positioned it between Mamma’s legs and inserted. Immediately he began swaying his hips forward and backwards, making little grunting noises.

  Mamma lay absolutely motionless.

  Eleanor extracted herself from the room as silently as she could, and drew the door closed behind her. The latch caught with a loud click.

  It might have been a gunshot for the effect it had on Eleanor’s nerves.

  It was that click that was, for her, the most terrible aspect of the entire encounter. Without it the thing she had seen might have remained a sort of waking dream, a glitch in the ordinary parade of magic-lantern scenes that made up the sights of a day. But the click sealed the occasion.

  Eleanor fled the apartment.

  Mamma, and Mr Newsome, must have heard the door clicking shut, and would know therefore that they had been observed. It seemed to Eleanor, pacing the streets in a sort of frenzy of anxiety, that they must know it had been her. The latch of the door had sounded a sort of death-knell. Everything must tumble now. In her mind she recited the ways in which she was going to have to justify her spying, reciting over and over the innocence of her intention to retrieve the book, only that and nothing more, and adding, in her own head - with ferocious emphasis - that she had seen nothing, that there had been nothing to see. Hours passed and passed. She wore the pavements down with walking round and round, all the length of Oxford Street and back several times. She loitered in Marylebone Park.

  Finally, she could put off the return no longer. She crept up the stairs, her heart palpitating like a death-rattle in her breast, and opened the door. Sally greeted her in the hallway. As if stepping up to face headsman, block and axe, she went through into the front room and greeted her Mamma.

  She was sat, in the same chaise over which Eleanor had observed her prone earlier, with the newspaper in her hands. The curtain was drawn back from the window and the evening sky was bright through the glass. As Eleanor came into the rooms he looked up and said: ‘Hello my dear. You were gone for ever such a long time.’ The words seemed free of accusation. There was no cloud over her mother’s face, and no savour of accusation in her manner.

  ‘I went for a walk, Mamma,’ Eleanor returned in as blithe a voice as she could muster.

  Mamma’s attention went back to the newspaper. ‘The weather has been very pleasant today,’ she said.

  And so life went on, exactly as it had done before. For about a week Eleanor fretted and worried, when lying in her bed at night, over whether her mother knew that Eleanor had observed her with Mr Newsome. She might, it was possible to imagine, have thought the door opened by Sally (although Sally never entered a room without being first summoned). Or perhaps she had thought the wind had moved the door, or that it had been a different door in the apartment, or that the click had been some other noise. Eleanor fretted and fretted, but even she knew, in some small place inside her mind, that she was shifting her anxiety from the act itself onto this associated worry of having been detected. Agonising over the clicking of the latch blocked out any too vivid mental picture of her mother prone and Mr Newsome half-naked. That was what she could not allow herself to picture.

  Yet the image kept entering her mind. Unconnected items in the world seemed to trigger the involuntary memory: a chair seen at an angle so that its legs seemed to make the shape of an A. The hind quarters of a horse in harness with the cabman snapping his long whip down. Sally, observed from behind as she reached forward to un-snib the latch to the window. Eleanor would see these things, and the image of the darkened room, and Mamma’s posture, and Newsome’s thin, dark legs, and the vine-stick protuberance of his male organ, would illuminate itself inside her head again.

  Subsidiary questions sometimes occurred to her, unbidden - why would her Mamma submit to such a treatment? Had it happened to her before? What of the other gentlemen with whom Mamma occasionally had private conversations? -what of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, for instance? Or Professor Ludwig Urlichs in Mayfair ? But these questions had to be forcefully eliminated from her mind, overlaid with thoughts of mathematical theorems, or The Steam Engine and Miniature Steam Engine, or The Naturalist in Nicaragua, a Narrative of a Residence at the Gold Mines of Chontales, with Observations on Animals and Plants, or Half-Hours with the Stars: A Plain and Easy Guide to the Knowledge of the Constellations, or whichever book she happened to have taken from the library for that week. She attempted to plunge into the books like a diver into a freezing sea, so that nothing but the astringent nature of the element could impinge on her consciousness. That was the way to avoid the insidiou
s imagining of Professor Urlichs - enormous, pastry-fleshy Urlichs with his dewlaps big as goitres and his bulging eyeballs - imagining Professor Urlichs naked and Mamma naked and the two of them arranging together for the male spermatic material to be disseminated into the female after the fashion that Eleanor had herself now witnessed. Rather than think of that, Eleanor was content to devote the most minute attention to her reading. How it was that Mamma did not become pregnant was beyond her, but Eleanor did not want to think about that. Perhaps Mamma was past the age at which pregnancy was possible, but Eleanor didn’t want to think of it.

  Several weeks afterwards they took out the clarence and trotted along to Hyde Park to watch the soldiers form and march and wheel and reform. For the first time Eleanor found the experience actively upsetting. There was an avidity in her mother’s perusal of the officers on their horses that she found repulsive. A veil had fallen. She pictured the naked male forms beneath their uniforms; imagined their male organs of generation growing erect, sizeable as a swine’s, and in her imagination her Mamma was watching and thinking precisely the same thing.

  Eleanor pressed her gloved hand to her lips. Her mother asked if she was ill, but she could press her teeth very fiercely together, and she could insist that she was well, she was fine, she was in perfect health, and so she did.

  No mention was ever made of the clicking of the latch.

  Slowly the idea grew in Eleanor’s mind that perhaps Mamma had not heard that sound. Perhaps it had not been as loud as she had, at the time, feared. Maybe Mamma had been distracted. But without the latch to focus upon she found it harder to block out flickers of memory relating to the scene itself. A month later Newsome called again, and Eleanor had a sort of hysteric attack, almost fainting in the hallway, supporting herself against the wall. She raised herself, drawing on all her willpower to put her brave face on, to smile away expressions of concern. She hurried out of the apartment as soon as was polite. She hurried through the streets as if pursued by a djinn from the Arabian Nights, and found herself on Charing Cross Road. There, though a single lady alone, she went into a coffee shop and took coffee, ignoring the glances of the other clientele.

  Thoughts in her head, of whatever sort they might be, seemed always related to the male generative organ. She fretted over the matter of how it became hardened - for she knew that this organ was not hard all the time, but rather that it alternated between a flaccid and a hard state (although why Nature had decreed such a circumstance necessary was beyond her). Did a bone, or cartilaginous protrusion, insert itself? She could not think how else it might happen. She thought of it jabbing, dagger-like. She daydreamed it as a gormandising, a gluttonous and devouring act. The male devoured the female, chewing and masticating and crushing utterly the softer female flesh. Was the male organ equipped, perhaps, with a little mouth, with little teeth? It was clear to her why women, or women of a high enough class, were kept in the dark on this topic. Lie still Madam, Newsome had said to Mamma, in the quiet of that room; and normally he was so softly spoken and polite. There had been menace in those words. Why was Mamma required to lie still? Was she wriggling with pain, with discomfort perhaps? And Newsome was at the apartment now - was Mamma repeating the encounter now, at this very minute?

  It took deliberate effort to hold back tears. Eventually, walking back, her disgust and anxiety boiled into a kind of hatred of her mother for submitting to it. How could any self-respecting woman submit to it? She could see no justification.

  And on the evening before her own wedding, here was her mother attempting - unsolicited - attempting to raise this grisly, gristly matter again. Her anger fizzled upwards, and she had to crush her teeth together again. She hated her mother, briefly, for mentioning it. She did not need to bring up such a matter. She ought not to talk on such a topic. Not that Eleanor was wholly blind: she knew, in a half-unacknowledged part of her mind, that her Mamma had been, in her foolish and incoherent way, passing on this task, this woman’s work, to her daughter. It was evidently how Mamma viewed her duty. Eleanor, from tomorrow, would have to share the bed of Burton, and by doing so would have earned the right to his money, to enough money to support both herself and her mother, as her mother had done before. This was her labour. This was where the coins were generated.

  But on the evening itself, however, the eve of her own marriage to Burton, Eleanor did not and could not see it in those terms. As Mamma stumbled and mumbled over her explanation of what Eleanor might expect on her wedding night, she felt the coldest sort of revulsion inside her. ‘It is quite alright, Mamma,’ she interrupted. ‘I fancy I have a good sense of what to expect.’

  Mamma looked at the fire for a while. Then she said with a pitiful meekness: ‘Might I offer one piece of advice, dear daughter?’

  Eleanor did not want to hear the advice. She wanted her mother to say nothing at all about this topic. But there was no way to shut her up.

  ‘Mamma?’ she said.

  ‘The trick all womankind learns, sooner or later,’ Mamma said, still looking at the fire. ‘To submit. Do you see what I say? It goes easiest if you merely—’

  ‘I understand,’ barked Eleanor, her voice louder than she had meant it to be.

  There was a silence.

  ‘I was only going to say,’ Mamma continued, in an even lower tone, ‘to grant the man his way. It goes easiest, then.’ Mamma was crying now, in the firelight, the tears sticky and adhering to her face - the surface-tension potential of fluids such as salt water, Eleanor knew, rendering it most likely that a film or sheen of the substance will attach itself to smooth surfaces, although this cohesive force - the same that the tiny insects called water-boatmen use to support themselves on the surfaces of ponds - may be disrupted by the application of certain detergents.

  [6]

  The morning of her wedding came. Eleanor woke early. She had experienced bad dreams, and had slept poorly - but naturally, she told herself, naturally I am apprehensive. It would be peculiar if I were not apprehensive. Today is my wedding day. Nevertheless the bad dream stayed with her. It stained her waking thoughts too.

  In the dream she had been with Burton in the Poland Street apartment, although it did not resemble the apartment. It was a much bigger room, with fantastical and expensive red silk drapes on every wall, and three tall narrow windows in the Gothic style. Yet she had known that it was her apartment, so much so that she had wondered where her mother was. Burton was standing in front of her, and he said: ‘It is imperative that a commanding officer be a real Tartar with his men, for how else,’ he added, seating himself on a black chaise longue, ‘how else is our Continental war to be won?’ She had replied something conventional, in agreement, when Burton had stretched himself on the chaise longue, in an utterly uncharacteristic manner. His voice was that of the German Count’s. ‘Do you understand the meaning of the phrase “in exactly the same manner”?’ he asked. Dream-Eleanor had wondered if perhaps he had wanted the phrase translated, and was about to reply that her German was not adequate to the task when Burton pulled open the front of his trowsers. The trowsers, indeed, seemed to dissolve and vanish, and there were Burton’s legs, thin and stick-like (in the dream), and at the apex of leg and leg, instead of the usual male organ, stood a Lilliputian man, a tiny six-inch man in a toy red uniform, standing straight up with a tooth-filled grin on his face.

  Eleanor woke feeling ashamed of herself. But she couldn’t rid herself of the image.

  Burton had, taking Mamma’s detailed advice, bought two dresses for Eleanor to wear. The first was a cream silk wedding dress with lace trimmings and a twelve-foot train. It was more gorgeous than any Eleanor had owned before, but was far outshone by the magnificence of the second dress, which was for formal wear on honeymoon. This was a petticoat of green silk entirely covered with Brussels point, and a loose drapery of lilac silk, covered also with lace, and drawn up in festoons with large bouquets of fashioned mother-of-pearl, each bouquet consisting of one large rosette from which rose bend
ing sprigs depended in imitation of snowdrops. The dressmaker had fitted Eleanor only with the underdress for both patterns; she did not see the finished products until the morning of her wedding. And when the dressmaker called at the apartment that morning, even she - with her studied bluestocking manner of scientific detachment - even she could not restrain little cries of delight. The dresses were so beautiful! Mamma burst into loud tears at once, and could not have put on a more formidable show of weeping had it been her daughter’s funeral rather than her wedding.

  They took a covered carriage - not the clarence, but a carriage Burton had hired specially for the occasion - the four hundred yards down Oxford Street to Saint Giles Church, where the groom was waiting with Silverthorne. Mamma had talked animatedly for weeks about how Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, was to be Maid of Honour, but in the event she did not come - her inducement, unkind gossips said, was insufficient (or perhaps Mamma had felt uncomfortable about approaching Burton for money to do so dubious a thing as bribe a Lady to attend). But Misses Moore and Rogers attended, smiling and lively and almost pretty, though the one was obese and the other - the wits said, cruelly - skinny and shaped like an alligator.