His heart bounded.
And then, not many days later, he received an invitation from Sir Charles and Lady Augusta to join them at the opera and learnt that evening from Elizabeth that she too had been asked. She had even deferred replying until she knew whether he was to be of the party.
With a deep-buried song of triumph beginning to sound somewhere within him, he suggested to Elizabeth that a break in their unvarying patterns of work would be an excellent thing. And he resolved that on that night he would find the right circumstances in which to ask Elizabeth to be his wife.
Godfrey arrived at the Opera with Elizabeth, Lady Augusta and Sir Charles in the Bosworth barouche. He arrived hugging to himself the knowledge that he had planned before they left Brook Street to have a confidential quarter of an hour with Sir Charles and ask him, as Elizabeth’s nearest relation, for her hand and that he had done just what he had planned.
‘My boy, Augusta told me long ago that this was in the wind. Indeed, damn me if I don’t think she put it in the wind, so to speak. But I can’t tell you how glad I am. Elizabeth’s a diffic—Well, you know, there was that medical business and everything. And then all this non— All this business with the—What the devil is it? The London Society for Sanitation and the Poor? Something like that. Well, I felt responsible for the child. Well, not a child. Not a child at all in many ways. No, what I mean is, my dear fellow, that you’ll make the best possible husband for her. No need to ask you any questions, keeping her and all that. Known all about you since you were in frocks. My boy, I’m delighted. Delighted.’
And later tonight he would order circumstances equally firmly in creating the opportunity to ask Elizabeth the question he felt certain hardly needed to be put.
Ahead of them, as they sat in the carriage in the dark, stretched the long slow line of other arrivals.
‘It reminds me of the Park,’ Elizabeth contrived to say to Godfrey at a time when neither Sir Charles nor Lady Augusta would hear.
Godfrey gave her a grin.
‘And that is no indication of intense delight?’
‘Well, do you know,’ Elizabeth answered in the same quiet tone, ‘my aunt said to me earlier that the Italian opera in London is the best and highest paid in Europe, and I do not doubt it. But all the same I would give a lot at this moment to be quietly at my own fireside with a Select Committee Report on my reading-stand.’
Godfrey, full of sheer pride in what he had asked Sir Charles not an hour before, laughed at her.
‘No,’ he said, ‘this once you must enjoy yourself. And Lady Augusta is right, the opera is something noble in its way, a flower of our civilisation.’
‘Well then,’ Elizabeth said, smiling at him, ‘not because it is a flower of a civilisation that I know well to be built on mud, but because you are ready to enjoy it I will.’
The barouche came to a halt outside the high portico of the massive theatre. The two tall Bosworth footmen leapt from their places behind and stood on either side of the door, and they descended to join the rapidly thickening crowd of operagoers. All around the men, every one in swallow-tailed evening coat with high white choker at the neck and high crushable hat on the head, seemed tall and magnificent. And the women, with their bare shoulders covered at present with opera cloaks, wraps and shawls, each striving to outdo the others in brilliance of colour, with their long dresses, their jewels, their fans and their bouquets—Godfrey glimpsed Lady Emmeline Otway, busy with a bouquet holder incorporating a little mirror so that she could see who was approaching her from behind—all really seemed too gorgeously fine to be mere human creatures.
Inside, as they made their way to their box, the crush was yet denser. The air was heavy with rich mingling perfumes, loud with talk and laughter.
‘Come,’ Godfrey whispered to Elizabeth as they followed Sir Charles and Lady Augusta up the thickly carpeted staircases, ‘admit that this is a spectacle worth the seeing? Worth the sharing even?’
Elizabeth’s grey eyes were shining with an excited sparkle he thought he had never yet seen in them.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I sink my principles for tonight and agree this is truly fine.’
She gave him a suddenly impish smile.
‘Though that it’s finer than the opera in New York I will not say,’ she added. ‘Especially since I was never there.’
From their box among the many tiers of boxes all round the great theatre they looked down at the stalls, now very nearly filled, a pattern almost of alternate black and colour, men and women, with the pinky-white bare shoulders of the latter making a consistent irregular thread all along each row.
‘Elizabeth, my dear,’ said Lady Augusta, ‘take these glasses. After all, when one comes to the theatre to see people and be seen by them, one might as well see properly.’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘What, Aunt Augusta, you’re not here to listen to the music?’
‘I would like to say that I am not, child. But, to tell the truth, I find the music takes me up into regions I really almost prefer not to go to. So I warn you, no chatter after the maestro raises his baton.’
Sir Charles leant forward, his skull under the hair brushed across it pink-fleshed already from the heat.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘that she even likes this terrible Verdi fellow we’re to hear. Now, if it’s Meyerbeer and his what-do-you-call-it, Robert the Devil, then I’m perfectly ready to be carried away myself. But all these brassy roarings, all the tink-lings and cymballings … Oh, dear, oh dear.’
‘Well, I know nothing of Balio in Maschera,’ Godfrey replied, glancing at the programme.
‘Oh,’ said Sir Charles, ‘it’s the greatest nonsense of them all. Though Elizabeth should like it: it purports to take place in America.’
‘I don’t recall America as being particularly rich in masked balls,’ Elizabeth said.
And in a flash, while Sir Charles explained the curious history of Verdi’s opera to Elizabeth, how it had originally been the story of the assassination of King Gustav of Sweden but how after Orsini’s attempt on Napoleon III the authorities in Rome had forbidden the subject of the mortality of kings and so the whole intrigue had been bodily removed to Boston where only an English governor’s life was at stake, Godfrey was transported, simply by hearing the words of the title said in English, to a vivid remembrance of the masked balls he himself had once visited.
The balls, at places like the Holborn Casino, the Grecian Saloon, Vauxhall and Drury Lane, had exercised on him a powerful attraction in the period between his coming back to England from Germany and his first meeting Elizabeth. At such popular entertainments it was wonderfully easy to step across into the world on the other side. A trifling sum for admission and one was there. A moment before a passer-by in the street going about one’s lawful business: a moment afterwards a participant in the life that goes on underneath, cut off completely from the edifice of morality and order generally presented as the way the world runs. In a realm ruleless, rank, rich.
Not that, on the five or six occasions that he had availed himself of this freedom, he had ever taken full advantage of the possibilities that so plainly lay there. Something had deterred him, a fear hard to define. But each time he had danced with some dozen different girls in the course of a couple of hours, had smelt the cheap scent some of them wore and their breaths whiffy with beer or gin, had felt their sweaty hands holding tight on to his, had found answers of a sort to their gay loud talk. And had felt that he was there, touching that other world.
And—it was this that had given such occasions in retrospect a deeper-stringed power to tug at the furthest places in his mind—when Lisa had mentioned that it was at masked balls among other resorts that she had learnt her trade he had attached to those surface experiences that one night he had spent with her, that night which, for all that he tried to swathe it in oblivion, kept its niche in his memory, encased and indestructible. So one casual mention of the English of the title of the opera t
hey were about to hear had set off in his head such a rout of confused memories and intimations that he had for some few minutes been unable to realise at all what was going on around him.
But now he pulled himself sharply together. What nonsense was it he had let invade his head? He was here at the opera with Elizabeth, whom he intended to make his wife, and with Sir Charles and Lady Augusta who stood towards her as parents. He was here to listen to a piece of high-reaching music, to take part in a civilised entertainment, at the end of which he had promised himself he would ask a question whose answer would affect the whole of the rest of his life. He had no business to be thinking of anything else but this present moment and its pledged aftermath.
He wrested his attention back to the scene in front of him. Soon the overture began and for a little he was able to hold his mind to it. But, though he had hoped it would be music that carried him away on its airy wings, as music often had done for him in the opera houses of Germany, he found before long that this piece was not holding him.
He stole a look at Elizabeth. Was the music working for her? She certainly seemed rapt enough, eyes fixed on the lighted oblong of the orchestra pit below them. Lady Augusta, he saw with a flick of amusement, was being as good as her word. Plainly the abrupt heights and depths of this music touched something inside that tubby but magnificent exterior and bore her off to far unimagined regions. Sir Charles, on the other hand, was sitting bolt upright with the look of someone swallowing a medicinal draught.
The curtain rose and the curious drama began to unfold with its story—surely more or less taken from history?—of the benevolent despot King Gustav plotted against by high-principled anti-liberals, or, following its enforced change of setting, its tale of the unlikely Ricardo, Count of Warwick, Governor of Boston, and of the improbable conspirator negroes, Samuele and Tomaso, with the addition for reasons no doubt chiefly musical of the tights-and-doublet page Oscar, undeniably feminine as to the hips and an agile soprano. It did not compel his attention.
Nor was he held by the subsequent antics at the hut of Ulrica the sorceress, the dodgings behind a convenient curtain, the overheard conversations bawled out at the singers’ full stretch of lung. What possible relation did all this bear to real life? Very well, it provided excuses for some extremely dramatic music. But surely this was not enough? Was this Signor Giuseppi Verdi in Italy really doing in his art something parallel to what he himself believed he was attempting in paint? It did not seem that these unlikely cavortings could hold any similar relation to any truth as his own version of Torquato Tasso leaving Ferrara did to the idea of casting aside the complexities of the world to seek a higher way. Or to the conception of Elizabeth as Venus Verticordia, turner of—
And then suddenly, through the clumsy illusion down on the stage of a pair of deep-toned basses made up to look like a couple of Christy Minstrels, of the heroine arriving from a ride through the wild night countryside immaculate in pearls and white satin, suddenly there came a lightning flash of insight. The dark and this supposedly tumbledown hut, what were they but that dark side of life that had come so insistently into his mind with the thought of the Holborn Casino, the Grecian Saloon and the like? And plainly this darkness—were they not even now singing themselves a rendezvous for the midnight gallows?—had its attraction for Giuseppe Verdi, every bit as powerful as the attraction he himself had felt for the dark streets and darker places of London.
So in the next act, at the gallows, though the events there were if anything even more ridiculous and unlikely, he found himself almost wholly absorbed. For all his occasional desire to giggle, when bouquets pattered down at the foot of the gibbet in tribute to the diva, when her supposed husband entirely failed to recognise her because she had lightly flung a black scarf over the lower half of her face, when the conspirators, all in black cloaks, masks and black gloves for secrecy, brandished their poniards with a recklessness worthy of so many hucksters in a street-market and sang like billy-oh all the while, he still moved in the dark world. For all the rest of that improbable act he lived in that world he had watched in fascination, had dipped his wings over as if it were black scum-water with a sense of breathless pleasure.
The tale of the good King Gustav, or good Governor Ricardo Warwick, entered its final act, the masked ball itself. And, though clearly for the singers this was simply an opportunity to display the most sumptuous costumes they could persuade the management to provide, yet the presence of all those tiny masks over the eyes, a little mocking note running through all the finery, enflamed him to an altogether new pitch. Masks, the extraordinary anonymity they conferred. Masks, little slips of passports out of the land of rules and regulations, order and hierarchies, into the land of disorder, darkness and new rules that were no rules.
As the heavy curtains swung together for the last time, amid the frenzied applause and yet more showered bouquets, amid the bowings and smiles, amid ‘Bravo’ and ‘Encore’, he leant over to Lady Augusta.
‘I’m sorry to say that I’m not feeling well,’ he mouthed to her above the noise. ‘With your permission I shall slip away to bed. Don’t let Elizabeth worry. I shall be better again in the morning.’
Chapter Eight
Godfrey ran out of the theatre while they were still applauding the singers and while the great ornate staircases, the crush bar and the foyer were empty of all but a few liveried footmen. Outside in the sudden darkness and chill of the March night he slipped through the waiting rank of carriages and found a hansom.
‘The Casino de Venise, Holborn,’ he shouted to the driver and hoisted himself all in a tumble into the seat.
Why, why did I do it, he asked himself. Why? Why? Why? I ought at this moment to be escorting Elizabeth out of that cursed theatre, helping her into the Bosworths’ barouche, going back to Brook Street with her, finding myself adroitly left alone with her and asking her to marry me.
He swung forward on the well-padded seat of the cab and buried his face in his hands.
He almost turned to the hatch in the roof above him, opened it and called to the driver to go after all to Brook Street.
But he had persuaded Lady Augusta, and with diabolical cunning, that he was feeling unwell. And in any case he did not mean to go back to Brook Street. He meant to go to the masked ball in Holborn and plunge into its delights. He meant to follow whatever thread he got his hands on to there to the end, no matter how deep it took him.
He would do it. He would not let another hour of his life go by without tasting that world he had dipped and dipped at like a swallow. He needed to know it. He needed that first of all, and afterwards there could come the deluge and he would snatch from it what he could.
The cab drew up outside the garish front of the Casino de Venise, great glowing gas-globes proclaiming it to the world. He paid off the driver, leapt down, braved the small knot of costermongers lounging there and entertaining themselves by shouting coarse witticisms and entered.
At the ticket-window he proffered his shilling as eagerly as if it were a handful of golden sovereigns that was to buy him the rarest of pleasures. He obtained too, for the sum of four-pence, a mask, but after a moment’s hesitation rejected any further disguise because even the short time needed to don it would keep him away too long from the moment of plunging.
Perhaps with the payment of his shilling the die had been cast. Even perhaps it had been cast with his falsehood to Lady Augusta. But he felt that until he had entered the huge ballroom itself, had confronted other masked figures, it would not be done. And he wished passionately to be past the point of return.
Almost at a run he went through the ornate arch leading into the ballroom. And then there it was. He was in it. The ruleless black world had closed in above his head. The masked opposites confronted him and were there for the joining.
It was a scene in its way to rival the splendours of the Opera, less tasteful, more garish, almost as opulent. The huge room, rich in marble and gilt, blazed and glittered with light. T
here must have been as many as a full hundred chandeliers hanging from the high painted ceiling. At the far end a big band with fifty musicians at least, outnumbering the Opera orchestra, pooped and ta-rah-ed with noisy gusto. Tables round the walls were white-clothed and thick with wineglasses, tumblers of bitter beer, soda-water bottles. And in the middle was the dancing.
A quadrille was in progress. The dancers, varying wildly in costume, were moving in and out of the figures with noisy stamping enjoyment. A splendid statuesque brunette led them, dressed as a shepherdess but with a bodice cut lower far than any shepherdess would ever have worn and adorned too with scintillating jewels that, if they did nothing to enhance her authenticity, gave her an eye-catching brilliance and sparkle.
And the dancers, the masked dancers, how good to see they were. How lively. How free. Shepherdesses, flower-girls, haymakers and the sailors who, though in trousers and masked, left no doubt of their femininity. And, linking arms with them, approaching and parting, the men, a more motley lot, how vigorous and carefree they were, the fantasy masks, the snouted pigs, the monster noses, the huge false moustaches, and the characters, the Henry VIIIs by the score, the Charles IIs and Cardinal Wolseys in dozens, the Highlanders, monks and Australian diggers. To and fro in the dance they went, snatching hugs, seizing kisses, shouting, laughing, losing their place and the time, reeling out of the figures, barging back in.
Godfrey stood there long enough to take it all in. How different, how utterly different this was to the last night of dancing he had had, the sedate and decorous parade of Lady Augusta’s ball.
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