Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  ‘Hard pressed, old man? Let me see …’ He took out his pocket book and produced two five-pound notes, which he handed to me with aristocratic vagueness.

  ‘Thank you so much.’ I tried not to grovel.

  ‘Come on Thursday at about the same time and we’ll discuss the manufactory of the box. I have to dress for dinner at the duchess’s.’

  I have the impression that William rarely sees an untitled patient now. No doubt the diseases of duchesses are more fascinating than ours. As I left the house in Hanover Square I distinctly heard my father turn in his grave at this thought. A very solid grave - he asked to be well weighted down, for who knew better than him the dangerous life corpses lead?

  My father’s voice came to me vividly. I had the sun very strong in my eyes, for I had helped myself liberally to William’s decanter. Get yourself a good education, Charlie, and remember where you came from. When you’re a doctor help the poor. The rich can look after themselves. And mind you look after poor Sam, as can’t.

  Conversations with the dead are apt to be disturbing. My lips moved in self-justification: I used to see the poor for free, but now I haven’t the time, I have to provide for my son as you provided for us. I thought Sam would be well looked after in that private asylum. I’m sorry, Pa. Cholera, they said. I …

  I stood in the raging torrent of Oxford Street, surrounded by horrible reminders of what happens to those who fail in life. After Hare was released from prison in Edinburgh he drifted down to London where the mob threw him into a limepit. They say he earns a living still as a blind beggar in Oxford Street. I always look out for him. If I found him I would buy him a meal, for he was not so much worse than the rest of us. But how to recognize one deformed human wreck among so many?

  When sober I rush across Oxford Street, that stinking polluted river of accursed life. But yesterday evening my legs had no strength in them. I tried to squeeze between an omnibus and a hackney cab, but the cab’s horse reared and nearly kicked me. Unable to move, dizzy, I reached out to balance myself on a heap of old sacking. My fingers clung to it as a swimmer clutches a rock when he feels the force of the cold treacherous current sweep him away.

  But the rock moved beneath my hand. The heap of sacking stood up and became a man, a sort of man, a boozy wretch dressed in military rags. As his foul breath assaulted my nostrils I wondered if my own stank, too. His filthy grey claws gripped my arm.

  ‘God bless you, kind sir. Will you give a copper to a poor old Peninsular officer, wounded at Barossa under the Duke?’

  I gave him sixpence and shook him away. As if the flash of silver were a lighthouse, other human wrecks came sailing up and surrounded me. A destitute Polish refugee with long mustachios and a melodramatic cloak handed me a greasy letter telling me of his miraculous escape from a Russian prison and claiming to be a count of the Holy Roman Empire. Before I could read it he was pushed out of the way by a toothless old gypsy horoscopist who dribbled prophecies of my great future and demanded to see my palm, which I withdrew sharply from her stinking hand. I heard singing and turned to find myself being serenaded by an entire mendicant family. The mother was dark and pretty, the two children good-looking with dark curls and sweet voices. ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’, Bella’s favourite song. The four of them were like a ghastly caricature of the family we once were. I reeled away from them, all of them, but my way to the road was blocked by an old man in seedy evening dress who stood pad, a ticket at his breast on which a piteous tale was written: ‘Kind friends and Christian brethren! I stand before you ruined, victim of the breaking of six of the most respectable banking houses in New York …’

  Had I broken one of William’s fivers and distributed coppers to all of them it would never have been enough. Desperate to escape, I muttered, ‘I am an officer of the Mendicity Society.’

  To my astonishment they believed me and melted away into the pandemonium of shoppers. An old horse had fallen on the slippery road and was being soundly thrashed by an angry cabby. I could hardly cross through the traffic lock of spinning hackneys, ponderous omnibuses, jingling cabs, costermongers, newspaper sellers and bookies’ runners.

  Even when I had finally crossed Oxford Street and reached the calm prosperity of Cavendish Square I feared the beggars would follow me home. They are all distantly related to Professor Benvoglio, so why should they not seek bread and shelter at his house?

  How sweet to stand at my own front door. To have a front door. James came to answer the bell, surly as he has been these last few wageless months. As I handed him my hat I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I was not being pursued by an army of mendicants. The empty street and the solidity of the hall reassured me. I was master again, with enough money in my pocket to pay James if I chose. But I did not.

  ‘Charles!’ Henrietta stood on the stairs, her face a burlesque of her sister’s. ‘How weary you look. I am afraid you have missed prayers again. You give too much of yourself to these paupers.’

  When I go to see William I tell her I am going to help in the free dispensary in the St Giles rookery. I did go there once a few years ago but did not return as I was afraid of catching some infection and passing it on to my family. Now cholera rages in those courts and alleys, and I would not go near them, for as soon as cholera is a disease it is death. However, it is good I meant to do and still intend to do some day. I have no objection if Henrietta wishes to praise me for it.

  They are very dismal, these tête-à-tête dinners with Henrietta. Hers is the wrong head, and her air of sacrifice depresses me. She is like a lamb that insists on lying on an altar, offering her throat to a vegetarian priest.

  The lascivious thoughts that had besieged me in William’s library returned after dessert. The prospect of spending the rest of the evening in the silent drawing-room, enlivened only by the ticking clock and the click of Henrietta’s crochet hook, was quite unbearable.

  ‘I have left a poor young girl in labour with only her mother in attendance. I must go back to her.’

  ‘You are really quite heroic, Charles. Would you like me to go with you? I have considerable experience of visiting the poor.’

  ‘No. Thank you, but I must plough my lonely furrow.’

  I hurried out into the November fog. Apart from a few carriages delivering guests to smart parties to which I had not been invited, Harley Street was deserted.

  How different London is at night. Hurly-burly and beggars metamorphose into a girl-market, and how I longed to shop there. My testicles ached with disuse, my engine of desire was engorged with the most fatal passion that ever issued from Pandora’s box. How long ago was it, that last passionate grapple with Nina on our sofa? Four months, at least. Night after night I have lain alone, longing to feel her again, remembering her warm soft tits and furry quim. To think that we two will never Say Goodnight again. Tenderness mingled with rage as I remembered her wanton mouth, the mouth of a joy-girl, not a young matron. I struggled for months, counselling myself as I would a patient against self-abuse: insanity, degeneracy, epilepsy, spermatorrhoea, consumption, premature senility and death; these are the wages of masturbation. But whereas women are, or ought to be, above carnal desire, we men must ejaculate to be healthy.

  That was the last gasp of Reason, a dreary old crone who expired in the night. In Oxford Street there were women everywhere. Not crones but young and pretty, at least as seen by gaslight through the fog. I did not want some screamer or a diseased whore. I stared into the face of a shabbily dressed young woman, no doubt walking home from the shop where she had been working all day. She looked sweet and intelligent, and I wondered if she would keep me company for the night. I longed to speak to her. But what if she were respectable and called a policeman? Besides, I had nowhere to take her.

  She passed, but there were hundreds more, outside every public house and on the corner of every alley. I remembered hearing at my club about the bedrooms to let by the hour above the shops in the Burlington Arcade. Would an expensive whore above a
n expensive shop be less likely to give me the clap? I stood like an idiot, paralysed with lust, longing for pagan pleasures but too damned cowardly to seize them.

  On Bond Street carriages swooped down to bear elegant couples off to fashionable dinners and balls. I passed a beautiful young lady about to step into her brougham. I was so near to her that I could smell her perfume, hear the rustle of her silk and see the lovely curve of her cheek as it turned away from me. Such women are and have always been far beyond me. Yet in my lustful fever I imagined tearing her crinoline from her shoulders, stripping away her elaborate layers of lace and satin to reveal a body like any other.

  In the Haymarket, that blazing sink of iniquity, rouged and whitewashed whores clutched at my sleeve as I walked past. One of them was very young, not more than thirteen, with a cloud of fair curls and soft blue eyes staring at me out of a dirty face. A little flower of the gutter, I knew that to go home with her was to court disease, yet I longed to fondle her small breasts where they pressed against her ragged finery.

  I forced myself to turn from her and walked priapically away, hardly conscious of where I was going. Frantic with desire, I found myself outside the Argyll Rooms on Windmill Street. Like a hungry child lurking outside a pastry shop, I stood outside and watched the crowds being sucked in through the brilliantly lit doors. How I longed to be sucked - each painted mouth tempted me so that I could hardly walk. All the women here were prostitutes, not the repulsive harlot slaves of the Haymarket but their more prosperous sisters, respectably dressed with the bloom of youth still upon them. Like ripe peaches they flaunted their succulent flesh, and men followed them. I hardly saw the men.

  A pretty girl smiled at me as she swept through the doors. It was the starting pistol, and I needed no more encouragement to pursue her. Gladly I paid my shilling entrance fee and let her draw me through the crowded casino to the ballroom, a large, luxurious room, well lit with huge mirrors, where a delicious pastiche of a genteel social event was enacted. To be sure, there was music and dancing and chandeliers and men and women in evening dress, but there were no dowagers or chaperones, and the embraces that began on the dance floor continued far into the night.

  The girl I had been following, who was dressed expensively and quietly, turned around. I saw with a throb of surprise that she had large deep-blue eyes and a mass of dark curls. Perhaps Nina’s is the only face I can ever love, even for a night. We danced and talked, and after the polka we shared a sherry cobbler with a single straw. I felt the heat of Sarah’s fresh young mouth on the paper tip as she spoke of her life in a low sweet voice without affectation. This facsimile of my fallen angel was twenty-three, the daughter of a clergyman. They all are, I heard William’s cynical comment.

  ‘My mama died when I was six, and Papa was very strict with me. We lived as poor and shabby as church mice in a parsonage in Gloucestershire. I had no brothers or sisters and knew no more of the world outside our parish calendar than a fledgeling knows of the ground beneath its nest. It was not long before a tomcat came prowling. His name was … well, never mind, I dare say you dined with him last night. He was the youngest son of the squire who owned my father’s living and all the land round about, so I thought him a great man and never doubted he was a kind one. When I was sixteen our warm glances in church turned into stolen meetings, and when he left our village to go up to Oxford we exchanged passionate letters. I have his still. I shall treasure them always and still adore the boy who wrote them to that foolish girl.

  ‘The Christmas I was seventeen we met at parties in the village and then in secret. On New Year’s Day he begged me to go to London with him so that we could be married. He said he would set me up in rooms where he could visit me until he had his degree. Willingly, wilfully, I agreed. We had a week of paradise in an hotel in the Strand before his father stopped his allowance and mine sent me a letter disowning me. Since that day I have never heard from my lover or my father, and so I have learned to shift for myself.’

  I have no idea if this story of hers was true - it was hardly new - but she was so pretty and I was so intoxicated by lust and sherry cobblers that I was deeply moved.

  At five to twelve the Argyll Rooms closed, and Sarah and I flowed out on to the pavement with the other flotsam and jetsam of the demi-monde. We had a light but very expensive supper at Scott’s Supper Rooms in the Haymarket, and then she asked with admirable frankness, ‘Will you give me a guinea to come home with me?’

  We set off arm in arm, the best of friends. I asked her a great many questions, for I was very curious about her life. She told me she paid eight shillings for her room in Dean Street and lived alone because she did not want a bully boy stealing her earnings. I was naturally very glad to think I would not be robbed, for I trusted Sarah. The black streets, where I would never have ventured alone, seethed with howls, laughter, singing and the rhythmic thump of drunken violence. Sarah’s cool hand drew me through the invisible inferno. She could have been leading me to my death, but my senses were so inflamed that I would have followed her anywhere.

  Sarah stopped in a doorway and pressed herself against me in the dark. I kissed her on the lips and pushed my tongue deep into her hot, moist mouth. Inside that place where Nina had lured me, that place she should not have known. Sarah knew it well, and I almost lost control and had her in the doorway where we stood.

  ‘Come upstairs,’ she said, opening the door with a key and pulling me up some dark rotting stairs.

  ‘Give me the money now,’ she said when we reached the landing at the top of the house. Her voice had changed, the clergyman’s daughter had fallen among the fleshpots. I was happy to press my guinea into her hand as we entered a tiny room at the top of the stairs. Sarah lit a candle, examined my guinea and put it in a hatbox under her bed. The bed was so dirty and malodorous that all pretence at gentility evaporated. It was not gentility I wanted.

  Sarah took me inside her gladly, and for a few hours she was the best little bedfellow a chap could desire. After the wildest venereal transports we fell asleep together, and when I awoke her squalid room was grey. An inch away her large, sad eyes watched me.

  ‘Stay here with me all night.’

  In a few hours my first patients would arrive. There would be people about in these disgraceful streets. I might be recognized and my professional reputation might be compromised.

  ‘Please don’t go. When will you visit me again?’

  I extricated myself from the tangle of our limbs and ignored her whining. Sarah got up, lit a candle and offered me a bowl of swamplike water to wash in. I could not bear to touch her foetid offering, although my body was sticky and love-soiled. This is not love, I reminded myself as I hurried into my clothes.

  ‘When will you come again? Kiss me before you go.’

  Desire was cold as suet. I refused to look at her as I muttered goodbye and escaped down the stairs. I know my weakness for such women who enjoy the sensual arts frankly without cant or squeamishness. They remind me of the first girls I ever debauched with, when I was fourteen, in the brothel next to my father’s house. My taste for them is as shameful as eating peas with my knife, and I must overcome it.

  As soon as I stood in the dark street I became aware of the dangers around me. A pestiferous miasma of sickness and death rose from the muddy pavement like steam from a hot bath. In my fear I must have taken a wrong turning, for I found myself or, rather, lost myself in a labyrinth of foul alleys where scarcely human creatures lay sleeping in doorways or sprawling drunkenly in filthy gutters. The dawn that was refreshing the rest of the city could not penetrate this vile maze. The air was thick with sewage. I retched and thought I would choke. A villainous-looking fellow lurched towards me, glaring at me with ginsozzled eyes. I turned and fled, running blindly until I came to a wide street where there was a pavement and a sky. I felt like Orpheus rising from the underworld, with the difference that I had gladly abandoned my Eurydice to the darkness.

  I leaned against a wall and regained my
breath, watching shabby men and women set out on foot for work. I joined the high tide of respectable poverty and let it sweep me to the elegant splendour of Regent Street, where morning gilded the roofs and the sky was as blue as an expensive bonnet. In the Quadrant a young girl took my arm and begged me to take her home with me. I shook myself free and glared at her, having no more need of her.

  Striding down respectable streets, my streets, in the golden light of the rising sun, I experienced a moment of pure optimism. There are so many Sarahs for sale, I need never again be racked by desire. In time, as my enterprise with William bears more fruit, I may set up a love nest with a jolly little bird whom I can visit at will. I cannot divorce Nina, but her absence need not be a tragedy or even an inconvenience. Henrietta will organize my household admirably. Tommy will grow up to be a gentleman, and my practice will flourish. As I approached Cavendish Square I felt that each solid building stepped forward to embrace me.

  My epiphany was short-lived. I greeted the nightwatchman with a hearty good morning and a wholly unnecessary tale of an all-night deathbed scene in a slum to explain my dishevelled and unwashed appearance. I felt as if I carried the story of my night with Sarah on my back, like a sandwich man, to be read by curious neighbours and patients. In fact, Harley Street was slumbering, and I was at my front door when I remembered that I had no key. Lucy or James have always opened the door, but they were still asleep. I stared down through the railings at the area, wondering if any of the servants slept in the kitchen and would hear me if I rapped on the window. I could not face my patients until I had bathed and changed.

  As I stood there anxiously the door opened as if by magic. My improbable good fairy was Henrietta, wearing a nocturnal garment so hideous that I assumed it must have some penitential significance. Her nose was inflamed, always a sign of emotional turmoil, and her bloodshot eyes warned me that she had been weeping. I braced myself for some saga of domestic woe.