‘We walked on,’ Isabella continued, ‘and again seated ourselves in a glade of surpassing beauty. The sun shone warmly down upon us, the fern, yellow and brown, was stretched away beneath us, fine old trees in groups adorned the near ground, and far away gleamed the blue hills. I gave myself up to enjoyment. I leaned back against some firm dry heather bushes, and laughed and remarked as I rarely did in that presence.’ As she reclined with pleasure on the shrubby ground, the natural world seemed to conspire with her: the sun warmed her skin, the trees and the hills decorated her view, the heather yielded to her body.
And then something extraordinary happened: the fantasies that Isabella had nurtured in her diary crossed into life. ‘All at once,’ she wrote, ‘just as I was joking my companion on his want of memory, he leaned over me, and exclaimed “If you say that again I will kiss you.” You may believe I made no opposition, for had I not dreamed of him and of this full many a time before?’ With the doctor’s kiss, the suspense and the teasing fell away, and Isabella entered a rapturous daze. She had passed into a world in which dreams had become facts, and the facts correspondingly dreamlike. ‘What followed I hardly remember – passionate kisses, whispered words, confessions of the past. Oh, God! I had never hoped to see this hour, or to have my part of love returned. But so it was. He was nervous, and confused, and eager as myself.
‘At last we roused ourselves,’ she wrote, ‘and walked on happy, fearful, almost silent. We sauntered not heeding where, to a grove of pines, and there looked over another view beautiful as that on this side, but wilder.’
As they descended into the park they caught sight of the Brown sisters, acquaintances from Edinburgh who were staying at the house. Isabella and Edward ‘thought it necessary slowly to join them. They had observed nothing – we were safe. Constraining ourselves to converse, we succeeded in disarming all suspicion, and reached the house together, but late for dinner.’
Isabella went to her room to ready herself for the meal. She was ‘flushed and excited’ on going down to the dining room, she said, ‘and neither I nor Dr L, fairly met one another’s eyes or spoke’. To her relief, a fellow patient – ‘Mr S’ – sat and talked to her at the table, and afterwards she and the children, along with Edward and Mary Lane, accompanied him in a carriage to the railway station. She hugged her secret to her. ‘We were a little crowded in going, but a sense of hidden happiness and satisfaction was glowing at my heart. We chatted in returning, but of indifferent matters, and dear little innocent Mrs L— sat behind with her fine baby asleep and laid under her cloak.’
In the afternoon Isabella found herself in the stable yard with Mary Lane and Otway, and soon afterwards ‘lost sight of everyone’ except Stanley, whose nurse was out. Her youngest son ran about her room till dusk. She then ‘lay down and dozed, quite overpowered with remembrance and memories’. She was brought a candle to dress for the evening meal, for which she chose a gown of pale blue silk. ‘I looked well’, she wrote. ‘I met his glance as I came (at the sound of the gong) to the dining room, and I knew that I was watched.’
After tea, ‘some time passed in a desultory manner’. Most of the guests had gone up to the drawing room on the first floor, but Isabella hung back. ‘I walked with Alfred in the hall, unwilling to go upstairs lest I might see him no more alone.’ Eventually Lady Drysdale invited her into the library, where Edward found her when he came in to the house from the stable yard. He was ‘cold, shivering, nervous, ill’, said Isabella. Alfred headed upstairs to listen to one of the Misses Brown read a ghost story. Edward and Isabella went into his study.
The doctor’s study was a corner room, adjacent to the dining room, with windows that looked out to the river on one side and to Sir William Temple’s sundial on another. In the evening, with the shutters and doors closed and a fire burning in the hearth, it was snug and warm. The walls and doors were covered with horizontal panels of red, rich-grained wood, so smooth and continuous that the doors when shut seemed to disappear, their presence betrayed only by the thin grooves cut into the panels and the rubbed shine of the doorknobs. A couple of feet behind each half-hidden door lay another door, the space between them a narrow chamber the size of a cupboard. This sealed off the study from the sounds of the house, and the house from the sounds of the study.
Edward and Isabella drew near the fire. ‘How the evening passed I know not,’ wrote Isabella, as if she had lost all sense of time and self. ‘It was full of passionate excitement, long and clinging kisses, and nervous sensations, not unaccompanied with dread of intrusion. Yet bliss predominated.’ Edward, she wrote, ‘was particularly gentle, soothing my agitation, and never for an instant forgetting the gentleman and the kindly friend.’ At one point Alfred knocked at the study door, interrupting their love-making. He told the doctor that one of his sons had asked if he would go to see him in bed. Edward went upstairs – ‘reluctantly’, said Isabella. When he came back down she had fallen into a languid swoon. He ‘softly kissed my closed eyes’, she wrote. ‘I tried to raise my drooping head, but in vain.’ He became anxious: ‘at last,’ she wrote, ‘absolute dread of anyone breaking in, he advised me to go. I smoothed my tumbled hair and in a few moments found myself in the drawing room, at half past nine. Fortunately, only a few of the guests were there. No one had a right to question my absence or appearance.’
In the drawing room, Isabella busied herself by examining a book of autographs and chatting with a fellow guest. Edward and Mary came in together, and Lady Drysdale followed soon after. ‘What an escape I had had! What a calm appearance I could now make! General conversation followed. I turned to listen, and Dr Lane reported to Miss B— some of the finest odes of Byron. When they went I rose too, and was gliding away, when Dr L— gave me a warm shake, so warm that it crushed my fingers with the rings, so that I felt it for an hour.’ Edward pressed the rings into her flesh as if to awaken her to the force of his desire, the reality of their new compact. She was overcharged again by the memory of what had happened, her euphoria touched with fear.
‘Alas!’ ended the entry of 7 October. ‘I slept little that night, waking, rising, dreaming – and slowly came the morn.’
The next morning, Isabella was exhausted. From her bedroom, she overheard Edward talking to his wife. Later he came in to her apartment to show her a long letter he had written to a prospective patient in Edinburgh. ‘It was a nicely written letter,’ she noted. She went back to bed. ‘I lay down, wearied, exhausted, nervous. He tapped at half past twelve, and bade me come down and walk: but I refused, and dozed on.’ Soon afterwards Mary came up to see her, and she decided to dress.
Isabella ‘slowly went out’ to join Edward. They met at the foot of the stairs, and then ‘sauntered out together, walking all round the grounds and by the water, yet saying little to one another, for both were weary and feeble. I named my not having slept; he said he was in pain, and could hardly get on at all. Both were agitated, confused, and nervous, and I asked him how it was he acted as he did on Sunday.’ Isabella suggested that they climb out of the still, close valley. ‘I proposed leaving the grounds (as the air was hot and moist) and getting a breeze on the hill. We climbed it slowly, and I rested among the dry fern. I shall not state what followed.’
In declining to describe her most intimate moments, Isabella was adhering to a well-worn literary convention. The newly betrothed heroine of Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (1778) protests: ‘I cannot write the scene that followed, though every word is engraved in my heart.’ The formula implied that there were acts and feelings too sacred – or indelicate – to be committed to paper; it elided sensuality and propriety, performing a kind of trick whereby the coy heroine was enabled by silence to be at once passionate and polite – jealous of her own and her lover’s privacy, respectful of her reader’s finer feelings.
Isabella and Edward ‘rose soon more composed and cheerful’, and went back to the house ‘quickly, fearful of being too late’. Over dinner, Isabella again avoided conversation with Edward
: ‘I talked all I could to Lady Drysdale, for there were few persons present, and turned from him, leaving him to talk to Miss T—.’ Afterwards, she took ‘a nice long ride’ with Edward in a carriage to the abandoned abbey at Waverley, the Brown sisters both sitting behind.
Two days later – on Wednesday 10 October 1854, Edward Lane’s thirty-first birthday – Isabella was due to depart. She and Edward walked around the grounds. The doctor stopped to talk to another patient, and then joined Isabella and her eldest son ‘near the bounding fence’. They set out for the wood, ‘taking the usual circuit, walking through paths that I had never seen before of the greatest beauty, reaching the outer pine wood, and finally returning by Swift’s cottage, and lower walk’. The building known as Swift’s cottage was the former home of his inamorata Esther, which lay on the main path between Moor Park and Waverley Abbey. By 1854, the cottage was surrounded by rose trees and covered with moss, clematis and Virginia creeper; a sign outside read ‘Ginger beer for sale’.
‘We talked with the utmost confidence, but somewhat more calmly,’ wrote Isabella. ‘I entreated him to believe that since my marriage I had never before once in the smallest degree transgressed. He consoled me for what I had done now, and conjured me to forgive myself. He said he had always liked me, and had thought with pity of my being thrown away, as my husband was evidently unsuited to me, and was, as he could plainly see, violent tempered and unamiable.’
Edward reminded Isabella of the vulnerability of his own position: ‘we spoke of his early age, thirty-one, the sweet unsuspicious character of his wife, rather than pain whom he would cut off his right hand.’ They were moving on to the subject of Isabella’s unhappiness – ‘my often bitter misery and wish for death’ – when Lady Drysdale and Mary Lane appeared. They had come to ask Isabella if she wanted them to book a fly to take her to the railway station. The doctor’s wife and mother-in-law were as warm and trusting as ever: ‘they kindly received my determination to go away about 7, and went off again without one cold or displeased look, and yet we were walking arm-in-arm through those lonely woods and talking how earnestly’.
At seven o’clock that evening, Isabella set out with Edward for Ash station in a covered cab drawn by a single horse: she and Edward sat inside the narrow carriage, and Alfred perched with the driver on top. Her younger boys were not with them – they may have gone ahead with their nurse.
‘I never spent so blessed an hour as the one that followed,’ wrote Isabella, ‘full of such bliss that I could willingly have died not to wake out of it again. I shall not relate ALL that passed, suffice it to say I leaned back at last in silent joy in those arms I had so often dreamed of and kissed the curls and smooth face, so radiant with beauty, that had dazzled my outward and inward vision since the first interview, November 15, 1850.’ Edward seemed as he kissed her to melt into a dazzle of soft curls and skin, the flesh-and-blood man merging with the idol of her dreams.
Between kisses, they confided in one another. ‘All former times were adverted to and explained,’ Isabella wrote. Edward told her that he had hidden his true feelings, ‘from prudential motives’, and that the suppression had caused him ‘much pain’. Isabella reminded him of some lines from the French novel Paul and Virginia that she had read out to the guests at Moor Park, and confessed to having chosen them as a message to him. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel of 1787 described a great love between a girl and boy brought up together on the island of Mauritius, one of whom dies of grief at the death of the other.
Edward ‘had always known I had liked him,’ continued Isabella, ‘but not the full extent of the feeling, and owned it had never been indelicately expressed. This relieved me. Heaven itself could not be more blessed than those moments. While life itself shall endure their remembrance shall not pass away from a memory charged with much suffering and little bliss; how gentle, how gentlemanly he was – how little selfish!’
Though Isabella painted a romantic, tender scene, the setting was distinctly louche. The late-eighteenth-century guide to prostitution Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Or a Man of Pleasure’s Kalender for the Year recommended coaches for illicit trysts: ‘the undulating motion of the coach, with the pretty little occasional jolts, contribute greatly to enhance the pleasure of the critical moment, if all matters are rightly placed’. By 1838, reported the Crim Con Gazette, the London hackney cab commissioners were so disturbed by the immorality conducted in their vehicles that they proposed to curtail both the pleasure and the privacy by banning coach blinds and coach cushions altogether. Isabella’s conduct in the carriage was especially shameless: a child, her son, was sitting on the roof while she and Edward Lane whispered and touched inside.
As Isabella sat demurely writing up these scenes in her diary, perhaps in plain view of her children or her husband, none could guess at the images swarming through her head and the journal’s pages. By recording her encounters in her secret book, she recreated the thrill of transgression, of pleasures sharpened by the danger of discovery.
See Notes on Chapter 5
6
THE FUTURE HORRIBLE
Boulogne & Moor Park, 1854–56
In late October 1854, within weeks of her trysts with Edward Lane, Isabella and her family left England for the French fishing port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where they had rented a house for the winter. At Boulogne harbour, the passengers from the steam ferry were hustled into the customs house to have their passports checked, and then greeted on the quay by a surge of noisy agents from the hotels and boarding houses: ‘Hôtel de l’Europe! Hôtel des Bains! Hôtel du Londres!’ Just past them on the wooden jetty, the fishermen sorted their fish and wove their nets.
Isabella took up residence with Henry, their sons and their servants in a three-storey house at 21 rue du Jeu de Paume. The building formed part of a steep terrace along the northern side of the Tintelleries gardens, an elegant hillside park in which fashionable English expatriates promenaded, in silk and satin, each afternoon. ‘We have established ourselves in a very pleasant square in Boulogne for the winter,’ Isabella wrote to George Combe, ‘& the boys go to school regularly in the principal College of the town.’ Alfred and Otway had briefly attended a day school in Berkshire after John Thom’s dismissal. Now they joined a sizeable band of British boys at the town’s Municipal College, a liberal establishment, where their parents intended that they would become proficient in French.
More than 7,000 British people lived in Boulogne, a quarter of the total population, and another 100,000 crossed from Folkestone on visits each year. By comparison with other towns in northern France, Boulogne was lively, even cosmopolitan, and the cost of living on the Continent was lower than it was in England. The height of the season was the autumn, when the sky seemed bluer on this side of the Channel. There were two English chapels in Boulogne, two English clubs (with billiard and card tables and British newspapers) and two English reading rooms and circulating libraries. Some of the British visitors were raffish types, intent on escaping debt or scandal; some came to recuperate from illness. By moving his family here while the new house in Berkshire was completed, Henry Robinson could hope to see an improvement in his wife’s wellbeing, his sons’ education and his own finances.
Charles Dickens was staying in Boulogne in the month before the Robinsons arrived. He explained the resort’s appeal in his magazine Household Words in November. ‘It is a bright, airy, pleasant cheerful town; and if you were to walk down either of its three well-paved main streets, towards five o’clock in the afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery fill the air, and its hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses of long tables set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the aid of napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.’ On the esplanade, visitors peered through telescopes at the chalky English cliffs across the water. When the weather was fine, they were wheeled out to sea from the beach in wooden bathing machines. Dickens was cha
rmed by Boulogne’s fishing quarter, ‘hung with great brown nets across the narrow up-hill streets’. Seagulls cried on the rooftops and the smell of fish gusted up the lanes.
The Robinsons’ street climbed to the old, walled town on the hilltop, which Dickens compared to a fairytale castle, the surrounding houses rooted in the deep streets like beanstalks. The place seemed full of children, he observed: ‘English children, with governesses reading novels as they walk down the shady lanes of trees, or nursemaids interchanging gossip on the seats; French children with their smiling bonnes in snow-white caps.’ Alfred, Otway and Stanley joined their ranks.
That November a series of storms battered the coast of northern France, marking the start of a bitter winter. Henry returned to England, where he spent most of the next few months supervising the business in London and the construction of the house in Caversham. The weather was even crueller on that side of the Channel: the Thames froze over, and the frosts in Berkshire slowed progress on the house. When Henry visited Boulogne for a few days in February 1855, he told his wife that their new home would not be ready to move into until June.
Isabella may have hoped to escape in Boulogne from the petty restrictions of Berkshire society, but she felt horribly isolated. Edward rarely wrote to her, and in her diary she bemoaned her ‘unhappy turn of mind in clinging to shadows and delusions’. In her letters to George Combe, she attributed her low spirits to spiritual despair. With no belief in God to sustain her, she told him, she did not know where to find comfort or meaning – she had ‘nothing bright, glorious, or consolatory’ to put in place of a hope of Heaven. There was a hint of rebuke in her plea: by following Combe’s rational principles, she had found only emptiness. Those such as he, who achieved great things, could ‘console themselves with the feeling of not having lived in vain’, she wrote, but she and countless other women, ‘who merely exist quietly, who bring up families (it may be), to tread in the purposeless steps of those who went before them – what motive – what hope may be found strong enough to enable them to bear up against trials, separations, old age & death itself?’ She did not specify the immediate causes of her distress, but the ‘trials’ and ‘separations’ of which she wrote were veiled references to her parting from Edward. She added: ‘Better, it seems to me, never to have lived at all than to advance through ignorance & perplexities to the land of annihilation.’
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 9