‘Well, I suppose if she must, she must,’ she said. ‘But I cannot pretend to understand. Look. Look there.’
The violet parasol pointed like an angry spear. Godfrey and Elizabeth looked. There on the far side of the ride were two girls on horseback, sisters perhaps they looked so alike. And it was plain to Godfrey why Lady Augusta had so abruptly pointed them out. They were a sort of perfection, the perfection of English girlhood, so right indeed that he would never have dared paint them for fear of producing something altogether too like an over-idealised imaginary concept. They sat their horses with complete assurance, backs straight yet supple, heads well carried on slim necks, white tulle riding-skirts sweeping gracefully down the side of their mounts under clouds of muslin. And their complexions: they were apple blossom, pure nature, too much itself for art, arrived at and simply there.
‘That is what I would like a protégée of mine to be,’ Lady Augusta said. ‘It’s what my girls were like. And they married superbly, both of them.’
She turned from the apple-blooming equestriennes and looked at Elizabeth.
‘And you could be like that,’ she said. ‘Well, no, perhaps you have not all those natural advantages. But you’re handsome enough. And, if you had consented to go to a good dressmaker, we would have made something of you. A great deal of you. Yet it is not to be, I suppose.’
‘Aunt Augusta, you know it could not be.’
‘And instead you are going to live surrounded by nasty smelly bandages. It’s too ridiculous.’
‘Well, Aunt, there will not be any smelly bandages. I’m not to be allowed to practise over here. I have made every inquiry and there’s no hope.’
‘Well, then—But, no, you’ll find something equally impossible.’
‘I think I have. There’s an immense amount to be done in sanitary reform. I can be of real use there.’
‘Sanitation. One hears of nothing else these days. When I was a girl there was no such thing.’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, with a touch of sharpness to equal Lady Augusta’s. ‘There was no such thing, and people died because of it.’
And so, sitting in the green-leather upholstered carriage in the sunshine by the Serpentine with the band playing its bouncy music, it was agreed that Elizabeth should attend shortly the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Sanitary Visiting Among the London Poor and that in due course she would take up whatever work she found in that field.
‘But you needn’t think I shall go with you to your meeting,’ Lady Augusta concluded, with a resumption of her old sharpness. ‘You will have to go with Josie. An occasion like that should suit her.’
‘Josie?’ Elizabeth inquired.
Godfrey took it on himself to reply.
‘Miss Josephine Marcham, a cousin of Lady Augusta’s, somewhat elderly. I have the honour to know her.’
‘And the gentlemanliness not to say she is a wretched fool,’ Lady Augusta put in.
‘Oh come.’
‘Oh come yourself, young man. Josie never once goes out of doors from the first of October to the first of June. She says she fears raw air.’
‘And she is to accompany me?’ Elizabeth said, consciously strengthening, Godfrey thought, her American intonation. ‘I could not go alone?’
‘Certainly not. A young girl like you.’
‘A qualified medical practitioner,’ Elizabeth said, as smartly.
‘Yes,’ Lady Augusta replied, with a scorn which it was impossible to fix as real or assumed. ‘In America.’
Mercifully at that moment there came the sound of a coach horn and all round them heads turned to look for the coming of the drive of the Four-in-Hand Club. They waited for a little in silence, a somewhat constrained silence, and then the leading coach appeared.
‘It is the Duke of Beaufort with the ribbons,’ Lady Augusta announced.
And they knew that it was more than mere information she was giving them.
Certainly the oncoming coach made a fine sight. Godfrey recalled Lady Augusta’s words from the letter in his inside pocket, ‘the pride, the wealth’ and what was it? ‘the blood of Old England’.
He looked at the wonderfully wide-chested horses, four glossy bays, their harness gleaming brilliantly as their coats, its brass jingling above the trotting of the sixteen sharp hooves. He looked at the Duke, in the brown uniform of the club, his gilt buttons catching the sun and glinting dazzlingly, holding the long reins with nonchalant confidence. He looked at the party on the top of the brightly-painted spotless coach. They radiated assurance, tall men and elegant women. Behind them stood the grooms, iron pillars of trust. The wheels of the gay rockingly sprung vehicle twirled easily in the sunshine.
Well, it was a triumph. That was beyond denial. Perhaps nowhere else on earth could such a turnout be contrived, so rich, so confident, so easily powerful and—damn it—so beautiful.
Nevertheless he did not feel obliged to surrender to the appeal that Lady Augusta was making through the sight.
‘And there is the coach of the Royal Horse Guards,’ she was saying. ‘Captain Baxter, a fine soldier, so they tell me.’
Nor was his holding-back because all this strong yet elegant display did not match his own notions of the Beautiful. You could perhaps paint this, he saw, and say something through it as well as you could say something in painting an imaginary Torquato Tasso leaving an imaginary city of Ferrara. And this painting would say what Lady Augusta so obviously felt.
‘Though of course,’ her cracked voice broke in on him again, ‘his private life is wholly deplorable.’
Was that it? That Lady Augusta did not in the end absolutely feel what she saw herself as obliged to put before this American niece of hers? Was this why the Drive of the Four-in-Hand Club in Hyde Park could not finally replace Torquato Tasso Leaving the City of Ferrara?
He felt obscurely that he still had not got there. The former picture seemed inadequate, but not through any comparison with the latter.
He sighed. The rest of the coaches in the drive went by, brilliant yellows, blues, reds, greens.
‘Well, thank you, Aunt’ Elizabeth said at last. ‘I’m truly glad to have seen that.’
‘And truly glad, no doubt, that you will never be one of those taking part?’ Lady Augusta asked wryly.
‘Well, yes. Yes. I cannot disguise that.’
‘Then go next week and take part in your Sanitary Meeting, my dear. I’m sure it will not be as elegant.’
Then, as Lady Augusta told the coachman to move off, the little silver and snow-white toy trap driven by the dashing Mrs Gilmore who was kept by Lord Whoever-it-was, came spanking by, a vehicle not a whit less well turned out than the Four-in-Hand coaches. And Godfrey experienced one brief vision of himself on the lacework counterpane of the bed in the house off Coventry Street. He resolutely pushed it from his mind.
Chapter Five
So a week after the drive of the Four-in-Hand Club Elizabeth, accompanied by Miss Josephine Marcham, fifty or fifty-fivish, stout, inclined to tremble, enormously wrapped in a number of shawls although the weather was imperturbably fine, wearing green-lensed spectacles, arrived in one of the Bosworth carriages at the St James’s Hall to attend the first meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Sanitary Visiting Among the London Poor. Godfrey was waiting, by arrangement, to meet them.
He had not originally thought of going, though he had hoped from the very moment of that blending of sympathies between himself and Elizabeth when she had declared to him, standing beside the carriage, her determination to do the work she had fitted herself for that he would see her often. But before they had parted that day she had extracted from him a promise to be present at this meeting.
‘You owe it to me,’ she had said.
‘Owe it to you?’
‘I went and saw your picture.’
‘And the meeting, of course, means as much to you as my painting, of which you so much disapprove, means to me.’
She had loo
ked him full in the face at that.
‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘You seem always to see such things.’
And so he had agreed to be there. ‘And, besides,’ Elizabeth had added while Lady Augusta’s attention was elsewhere, ‘I shall need someone to relieve me of the necessity of looking after Miss Marcham.’
Godfrey saw the force of this as soon as he greeted them. Miss Marcham, once the carriage door was open, expressed doubts about crossing the pavement.
‘It would appear to be quite a windy day,’ she said.
‘No, no, I assure you,’ Godfrey countered firmly. ‘Not a breath of air stirring.’
Miss Marcham came down on to the carriage steps.
‘Good gracious me, Mr Mann, there is an odour.’
There was, of course. A great many horses had drawn up outside the narrow-fronted hall and the roadway was well coated with trodden dung. And then the arrival of so many charitably disposed persons had attracted an unusually large number of beggars. From time to time a policeman had moved them on, but they had always returned. And it would seem their smell was something no guardian of the law could disperse. It hung distinctly on the warm unmoving air.
‘It is a great deal better inside,’ Godfrey offered.
‘Well, no. No, I fear not. Elizabeth, my dear—such a sweet girl—do you not think it would be very much better, very much safer, to go straight back to Brook Street?’
‘But, Miss Marcham, the meeting. It’s very important.’
‘Oh, yes, my dear, I know that. But one’s health is important too. One must look to that first. Scripture teaches us so.’
However, eventually, with the aid of a cambric handkerchief richly soaked in lavender water, Miss Marcham made her dangerous way across the pavement and in at one of the two tall entrance passages. But the dash to safety was not without incident. In her agitation she put a foot firmly into some mess left by the dog accompanying a blind beggar who had been chased away not much earlier. Godfrey, who alone saw what had happened, decided to say nothing even when, seated at last in the places reserved for them in the front row, it became obvious that some of the odour of the unpleasant world outside now accompanied them.
Up on the platform the Bishop of Stanmore, pink-faced and benign yet a figure of plain authority, chairman of the meeting because some of his flock were among the poor to be visited, to give them ‘a few words of introduction’. The audience below, mostly female, a shifting sea of light-coloured summer fabrics with here and there splashes of more vivid Prussian blue, magenta and salmon pink, listened decorously. Murmured agreement rose up at almost every phrase. At last the Bishop presented to them ‘in the happy expectation that their work would be begun on a firmly scientific basis, Mr Arthur Balneal, the celebrated investigator’. There was long and steady applause.
Miss Marcham turned to Godfrey.
‘You will notice that I do not clap,’ she said. ‘But please do not think it is because of any lack of proper enthusiasm. It is that I am afraid of the effect of undue warmth in my hands.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. A most wise precaution.’
Elizabeth, on his other side, leant a little towards him. He saw that her eyes were shining with a sword-like brilliance. Was this the effect of the Bishop’s words, anodyne though they had seemed to him?
‘What do you think of that?’ she demanded with an anger so evident that it disabused him in an instant of any notion that she had been receiving inspiration. ‘What was it? “Our lecturer whom I am sure we can rely upon not to trespass on that ignorance of vice that is the mark of the lady”? Wasn’t that it?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think so. The very words.’
‘If the Society is going to be conducted on those lines, they might as well none of them have come here.’
Godfrey shrugged a little.
‘A bishop has to uphold the proprieties,’ he suggested. ‘You mustn’t be disheartened before anything has begun.’
‘No,’ Elizabeth countered so sharply that her voice was easily distinguishable over the continuing applause. ‘No, you should not make excuses for him. If he really interests himself in the work, then he ought to believe that bringing dirt and disease fully to the light is the only way of ridding ourselves of them.’
The clapping had died away. Godfrey gave one last look at those shining grey eyes and turned to the platform.
Mr Arthur Balneal, the celebrated investigator, was a tall stooping man of perhaps thirty-five, pale-faced, with a very large nose and a pair of very large spectacles. He spoke at length. He did not hesitate to quote statistics. London, ‘the empress city’, had one quarter more people than Pekin, two-thirds more than Paris, twice as many as Constantinople, five times as many as Vienna, New York or Madrid. Figures poured out, numbers, ages, occupations. The celebrated investigator was tireless.
Before long Godfrey entirely lost the thread. Instead private thoughts began to drift through his mind. Elizabeth, what about her? Should he actually be thinking of her as the person he would one day make his wife? Never before had he given any real consideration to marriage. He had been perhaps married already: to his easel. But now …?
‘… the atmosphere rendered altogether unpleasant for the whole length of that court.’ He caught on for a moment or two to Balneal’s description. But soon—‘children and even, I regret to say, females hardly of tender years in an almost totally pre-lapsarian state’—the fluent syllables again ceased to make any impact and his personal preoccupations came to the fore.
Was it right on such short acquaintance to feel about her as he thought he felt? Did he really feel this? Was this the state of being in love? Surely he had felt about Elizabeth on that very first meeting at Lady Augusta’s ball no more than he felt about her now? Or did he feel more? And he had never, to be totally honest, experienced in her presence the least inkling of physical desire.
And he had proved himself capable of that. But that was a moment—A moment? It was a night, almost a whole night— that was to be expunged from his memory.
‘… whole buildings resting on nothing more than pools of a substance that could benefit only the market gardener …’
He looked up at Balneal. That pale face and those earnest spectacles, had they really explored so thoroughly the tumbledown night-black areas he was describing? Presumably they had. The Bishop of Stanmore had vouched for him. Perhaps, then, on some occasion when he himself had gone a-hunting off the Ratcliffe Highway or somewhere of that sort the two of them had been within a few yards of each other. That would have been an embarrassing enough encounter. But it would not happen now. That kind of expedition of his, mysteriously disturbing to the pulses, curiously exciting even though nothing tangible had ever happened, that was an ended thing.
‘… upwards of two hundred persons in this locality had the services of a single cabinet.’
How odd the French word sounded, pronounced by Balneal with a special lilting delicacy. No matter. Elizabeth, that was what he ought to be thinking of. He must decide exactly what his feelings about her were. Not desire. And yet … Well, wasn’t it true that in bed three nights ago, finding sleep hard to come by, it had been the thought of her, or of her imagined sea-ploughing bosom, that had been responsible for a certain effect.
But ought Elizabeth and that habit, that deplorable and even dangerous habit, to be connected at all? How difficult it was.
Perhaps after all he ought to pay attention to Balneal. Elizabeth would undoubtedly want to discuss his lecture afterwards.
He listened.
And was dismayed to find that the celebrated investigator’s smooth-flowing words were echoing distantly the train of his own thoughts. They were reciting statistics on the incidence of what Balneal delicately called ‘behaviour at variance with the Second and Third of Victoria Cap. 42’. Which was presumably prostitution. Lisa’s living.
‘In the district that I have referred to as Blank Court of the females above the age of twelve some eighty-four per cent could
fairly be described as Children of Night. In the district we have spoken of as White Alley the figure for these soiled doves reaches almost to ninety per cent. And, I may add, that I did not consider it proper to make inquiries where the subject was below the age of consent.’
Godfrey took a quick glance at Elizabeth. She was leaning intently forward, her eyes luminous as lamps on a fog-swirling night. Yes, she would be following this with the keenest interest. This was surely a product of that squalor she had dedicated herself to combat.
And on Balneal flowed. Sanitation, hygiene, ‘the intermingling of those whom God has decreed apart’. On it went.
Miss Marcham began, very gently and softly, to snore. Godfrey stole a glance at Elizabeth to share the joke. But he found her still totally intent, leaning forward as if she were a ship with the tide running beneath her.
At last with some rousing words about ‘the need, the imperative need thoroughly to ascertain the whole condition of the poor’ the celebrated investigator brought his lecture to an end. His audience, as if perhaps determined to make up for any momentary failures of attention, applauded him at even greater length than they had applauded the Bishop. Above the noise Elizabeth spoke sharply.
‘Listen, you must know how an affair of this sort is conducted? Will it be over now? Can I go up on to the platform?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is over. But, Miss Hills, you surely aren’t thinking …’
‘I most certainly am.’
The Yankee accent was almost knife-like now.
‘But why? I’m sure the best way for you to propose your contribution would be to write to the Bishop and say—’
‘No. It’s not that. I want to tell them how wrong they have been. Right now.’
‘But how wrong? Why?’
Godfrey felt a certain alarmed embarrassment.
‘How wrong? Did you not hear? Every word that man spoke was designed to hide something. Investigator. He did nothing but draw veil after veil over whatever he touched on.’
‘But surely,’ Godfrey said, rather wishing she would speak less loudly. ‘Surely he really revealed quite a lot about insanitary conditions. What was it? Two hundred people with the services of a single—a single …’
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