Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  She looked down at Burton’s snoring body. His member looked as innocuous now as a worm. Her papa, she thought, had been the strongest man she had ever known; valiant-for-truth, an inspiring model of rectitude. Death had levelled him, of course. We all carry death within us, of course, and eventually it must emerge, howsoever we struggle to hold it within.

  In the small hours Burton awoke with a jerk, mumbled ‘So, so,’ turned and fell asleep again.

  In the morning, Eleanor bundled the stained bedclothes into a drawer. She rang the bell for the room-servant, and when he arrived, bringing a tray, sent him out to fetch an English paper. Whilst her husband still slumbered, she sat in bed eating breakfast from the tray and reading about the latest events. British forces were about to go into action at Versailles. There was little doubt that Christmas would see the flag of St George flying over Paris. The Belgian government had reaffirmed its alliance with the King - the burghers of the country alarmed, Eleanor thought to herself cynically, at the prospect of royal troops and sapient cavalry marching into Brussels.

  When Burton finally awoke, he moaned like a dying man. Eleanor, brisk and distant, went for a morning stroll through the new Arcade, and spent forty pounds of Burton’s money on pointless fripperies. When she returned, Burton had washed and changed and looked a little better; but he looked sheepish too, as if deeply ashamed. As, she thought fiercely to herself, he ought. As he ought.

  They departed the city after luncheon, staying in a hotel on the coast. The following day they returned to London.

  [7]

  Once before, when Burton had come wooing to the apartment in Poland Street, Eleanor had experienced an epiphany of hatred. The urge to throttle the man, to beat him and stab him, had rushed through her with maenad intensity, although she had maintained her external poise. The lust for his death had passed quickly, but now that they were married she found little stabs of anger bursting through her composure all the time. Her experience of him had been compounded of the clumsy violence of their honeymoon and his subsequent fawning, his abject feebleness of manner - the latter, she now saw, the most prominent mode of Burton’s existence. She hated him more fiercely than she had before.

  They moved into the house in Gower Street, and Eleanor adjusted to the new manner of living: a head butler, a housekeeper, three under-butlers, six maidservants, cooks and gardeners and various menials, all waiting on the three of them. Mamma had a little suite of rooms at the rear of the ground floor. Although Burton had urged her to dismiss Sally, even offering the girl a generous payment in severance, Mamma, growing increasingly sentimental, had insisted on keeping her. Eleanor found the presence of so many people in one house, even a large house, such as hers now was, disconcerting. Wasteful. It seemed, obscurely, another thing with which to rebuke her husband.

  But her rebukes were now silent, expressed through the media of bodily movement and facial expression. She exchanged hardly a word with Burton. They slept in the same room, but in separate beds, and her husband was too cowed to approach her in any amorous sense. They took breakfast together, and dined together in the evening, but conversation was sparse and functional. Otherwise the most that husband would say to wife was ‘I see an interesting book is now published, by Padre Secchi of Rome, containing the latest astronomical observations of the moon’; or ‘Mr Dammell has published a tract on Electro-Plating, my dear, which I may purchase.’ Eleanor understood that these comments were covert appeals to what Burton regarded as common ground between them, attempts to draw out her interest. She resisted them, sometimes despite herself. She wanted to punish him yet awhile; to blockade, as it were, any of the finer emotions that might otherwise be traded between them. She was not sure how long this punishment ought to last. In her milder moments she thought, perhaps, a year. But then Burton would do something clumsy, something crude, and her hatred for him would bubble up inside her again, and she would resolve never to permit him intimacy on any terms.

  He stayed, increasingly, late at work. She noticed that he was drinking far more. One afternoon she called at the manufactory, to be met by the grinning Mr Pannell. ‘I’ll announce you, Madam,’ he said, his face a rictus. ‘He’ll be delighted to see you, I’m sure. He’s been a new man since the wedding. A new man.’

  But Burton was not there. ‘I don’t understand,’ Pannell told her, the concern in his voice at odds with the grin he maintained on his face. ‘He must have travelled out on business, I think. Or so I suppose, Madam.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Eleanor, gathering her skirts around her and stepping down the dirty steps from the main entrance. ‘Tell him that I called.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Mr Pannell,’ she said, turning on the bottom step. ‘Did my husband drink before the marriage?’

  This question was peculiar enough, and personal enough, to flatten the smile from Pannell’s lips. ‘Drink, Ma’am?’

  ‘Drink liquor. Drink alcohol.’

  ‘Why,’ said Pannell. ‘No, I don’t believe he did. I don’t believe he did.’

  Eleanor made her way back to the carriage and allowed herself to be helped in by the footman. She felt a quickening in her belly, a wicked sense of satisfaction - not a pure or gleeful emotion, perhaps, but one mixed with enough dark joy to make it more pleasant than unpleasant. It was the knowledge that her husband was miserable. Which could only mean that, in some oblique way, she was having her revenge. For what else could it mean?

  But her personal unhappiness polluted this joy. There was no escaping her moods. And then there was Mother. After the move her mother had been gleeful as a child for three days, flitting from room to room in the large house, ordering the servants. But, as the novelty faded, she grew morose. She drank more than ever before.

  And another night passed, with Mamma too intoxicated even to play cards, and Eleanor staring at the fire, a book open on her lap. ‘Where is Jonathan?’ Mamma asked, querulous, from her chair. ‘At the manufactory, Mamma,’ Eleanor replied, ‘as he often is. It can hardly be called,’ she added, angrily, ‘a politeness that he so markedly avoids our company. Can it, Mamma?’

  But her mother was snoring.

  One afternoon, von Leloffel called to pay his respects, accompanied by a gentleman called D’Ammassa, from Rome. Mamma was not pleased to see him, but the four of them took tea in the front room. ‘I must congratulate you, Mrs Burton,’ Von Leloffel said smoothly, ‘on your marriage. And you, Mrs Davis, also, on your daughter’s connection.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mamma, chilly.

  ‘A jewel requires the proper setting, if its lustre is to be properly appreciated,’ the Count drawled. ‘Even a beauty as striking as yours, Mrs Burton, gains sparkle from the proper environment.’ He looked about him, smiling.

  They talked for half an hour, the Count making a series of elegant and witty observations, and D’Ammassa interjecting curtly from time to time; then they took their leave. Afterwards, Mamma was in a bad mood. ‘They’ll be back, I’ll wager you,’ she said. ‘They’ll be like ants to honey, they will. Like ants to honey.’

  ‘Whatever can you mean, Mamma?’ replied Eleanor, half-deliberately imitating the Count’s elegantly drawling manner of speech.

  ‘To borrow money, of course!’ cried Mamma. ‘He’s poor as a Spaniard, that Count, for all that he puts on fine airs. Money, such as we now have, carries its own responsibilities you know.’

  But Eleanor did not gain much solace from having money. All through the thirty minutes of conversation with the Count she had found herself thinking how much more presentable he was than her own husband. Such thought was reprehensible, she knew, and yet her glance traced out the line of his jaw, his slim figure, his startlingly blue eyes. There would be no clumsiness with him, she told herself; he would know how to act in every situation. He, or somebody like him, would have been the proper consort to her life.

  And - the thought occurred to Eleanor frequently now - were her husband to die, to have a heart seizure or to fall in
front of a train, then his money would become hers. If she had money, she might make the Count her own. She could live life as she wished. Such a possibility was so perfect, so well shaped, that the obstacle to it seemed to shrink in her mind. Even the bulk of a man so large as Burton became gossamer to her fantasising mind. The thread that tied her to this miserable life was, after all, no thicker than the vital thread of Burton himself; and that was no thicker than any man’s, a delicate red line of a pulsing artery. And this red line was thinner than some, for Burton was not a young man.

  Her daydreaming got no further than this vaguely wished-for vanishing of her husband, however. She made no concrete plans for his departure. How could she? Such thoughts were not civilised. Such thoughts were not womanly.

  Mamma was playing patience, and Eleanor reading. ‘My dear,’ Mamma said, without looking up from her cards. ‘The room directly above this? With the Di Fiore windows?’

  ‘Yes, Mamma?’

  ‘That would be the best room for a child, I think.’

  ‘A child?’

  Her mother looked up at her. There were moss-branch traceries of red in the corners of her eyes. ‘Of course, my darling. When you and Jonathan are blessed with children. A son or daughter, you know, must have an appropriate room. I must think of these things. I would want only the best for my grandchild, you know.’

  It had simply not occurred to her that children might follow her marriage. But of course, it was expected. She felt foolish for not thinking of it before. Without further congress between husband and wife a child was unlikely, she knew; and yet how could she guarantee that? Burton, drunken and enraged, had pressed himself upon her before. He could do so again. And what of that first time? Less than a month ago: how could she know that she did not already carry a child?

  After Mamma had retired, Eleanor sat up for several hours, revolving and revolving the possibilities in her head. Was there a tiny person inside her now? It was intolerable. To be Burton’s wife was bad enough, to bear his children was too much. She decided, the thought locking inside her head with its sense of rightness, that she would wait no longer. The marriage was a sham. She would confront Burton that very night, and tear down the facsimile behind which they were both living. Better to do so now, before it was too late.

  Burton’s day had not gone well.

  The morning had been spent with a Mr Haughton, a fiduciary. Two contracts for the military had been cancelled. Burton had no idea why this had happened, and Major Phillips (with whom he usually discussed such procurements over dinner) was not in the country at the moment. But the loss of the work, combined with the various expenses associated with his marriage, placed the company in a slightly awkward financial position. Haughton thought matters reparable with new contracts, and fortunately Burton had received a letter from a Mister Bates enquiring after work that might well lead to a contract for ten, perhaps twelve, thousand pounds. ‘This would be most advantageous,’ Haughton had sniffed, ‘this sum. Most advantageous for the financial health of the company.’

  Burton had never before heard of this Mr Bates, which was perhaps unusual given the size of the proposed contract. But he assured Haughton that the deal was more or less assured. ‘Mr Bates is visiting the premises this very day,’ he said.

  ‘I will be able to write to you by the evening post, I believe, and confirm the contract.’

  ‘I hope so, sir,’ said Haughton, standing. ‘For your sake, your company’s sake, I hope so.’

  After he had gone, Burton read through Bates’s letter again. He tried to tell himself that it would solve his problems, but by ten he was drinking deeply from the bottle of brandy that he kept in his office. The fluid, golden in the morning light, burned pleasantly in the mouth. As molten, though cold, as the fluid metal bubbling in the vats on the manufactory floor. The drink, as ever, unhooked some latch in his brain. The financial difficulties seemed to recede. The dozen thousand pounds from Bates’s employment would make all right again.

  The sunlight burned a little brighter on his desk.

  Burton’s good moods were fleeting, however. He toured the factory. A crane bolt was close to shearing, the foreman told him. That was eighty pounds to mend if it was a farthing: a scaffold must needs be built to support the superstructure whilst the old bolt was cut away and a new one fitted. It would take a day and a night, and precious little real work could be managed during that time. Moreover, the foreman said, one of the Blefuscans was dead. That was an expense in itself running into many guineas. But it seemed that this Blefuscan was an aristocrat. A count, a prince, a king - who could fathom their mysterious little hierarchies. ‘The workers are unhappy, sir,’ said the foreman.

  ‘Unhappy,’ Burton sighed. ‘They are forever unhappy.’

  ‘This time, sir,’ said the foreman, ‘it is more acute than normal.’

  The foreman was a good fellow. Called Marcus Antonius, or somesuch Antique Roman affectation as is common in the West Indies, he was known to everybody with whom he worked as Mark. His promotion had been rapid, and Burton depended upon him more than on any other worker. Above all he knew the Pacificans, knew their ways. ‘If you say there is real concern here, Mark, I shall believe you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’

  ‘How did the creature die? Do we know?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘They’re fragile, sir,’ he observed.

  ‘True, true. But no sign of ... depredation?’

  ‘No rats, sir. No cats. I’ve spoke to the representative, and he says only that the Prince has died, and that they must have three days for proper funeral.’

  ‘Three days,’ tutted Burton. ‘Impossible, of course.’

  ‘I’ll tell ’em so,’ said Mark.

  As he went away Burton almost yielded to the impulse to call him back, to have him give the Blefuscans their funeral time. A day, at least; a half-day. But the moment passed. They did not rule the factory, after all. He did. Three-day holiday? Doubtless the dead Blefuscan was no prince at all, merely some miniature equivalent to tramp or servant, and the Pacificans were merely hoping for three days’ idleness. They were, all of them, the most idle of creatures.

  Burton returned to his office, with a sunken sensation in his stomach. He had a premonition that the little folk were going to disrupt production that day, and for days after, on this trumped-up account. He reached for the brandy to pour himself another glass, and found the bottle empty.

  He could not send an underling out to buy another. His drinking, much more pronounced now than it had ever been before his marriage, was not a matter to which employees should be privy. Discreetly, and obscurely angry, he fitted himself into his overcoat and slipped out of the manufactory.

  He strode briskly up to the Strand, and across up to Agar Street, to the grog shop he had taken to frequenting. The old woman behind the counter beamed at him as he came in. The fact that she recognised him made him more annoyed.

  ‘French,’ he said brusquely. ‘None of your cheap stuff.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the old lady, with a wheedling and faintly rebuking inflection. She went into a back room and returned with a boxed bottle, opening the lid to display its contents to her customer. The straw packing the box looked mouldy, but Burton was in no mood to complain.

  ‘Ten shilling and fivepence exactually,’ said the old woman.

  Burton paid, and hurried away.

  He crossed the Strand again, noticing as if for the first time how many couples there seemed to be, how many contented men and women walking arm-in-arm. In his sour mood it struck him almost as a sort of mockery. A thought ground its way out of the machine in his brain: how had his marriage gone so wrong in so short a time?

  Burton prided himself on his honesty. Some, he supposed, called it brusqueness, but Burton could not see it as a fault if such directness was merely a function of truthfulness. Truth was great, and would prevail, for all the hypocrisies of politer society. Yet it was hard to be honest with one’s self. Eleanor was beautiful, yes;
and Eleanor was intelligent, yes; but she was unhappy. He had made her unhappy. He was unhappy himself. Perhaps his unhappiness had, somehow, infected her, like rust spreading from a rotten girder to a sound. Were it so, how could he forgive himself? To have caused suffering to a creature superior to him in every regard?