“Goodness,” whispered Stevenson. “My goodness,” he said a bit louder. “I am sorry. So sorry. But you see—”
“Come, Louis,” said Fanny, gathering her things and helping Sam to his feet. The boy’s cheeks were tracked with tears, and he stared up at his stepfather with a mixture of incredulity and fear. “Let’s just go home.”
“Home,” repeated Stevenson vacantly. He reached down to pick up his chair and slid it back under the table. “Yes. We should. Certainly.”
“Pay the man, and let’s go home.”
Stevenson took a handful of coins from his purse and walked over to the cringing waiter. “Here,” he said softly. “This is more than I owe you.” The man stared at him blankly, a fist held up to his lips. “It is more than I owe. Take it.”
The man opened his hand cautiously, and Stevenson dropped the coins into his palm, remembering suddenly and rather unaccountably the little girl he had trampled at King’s Cross.
“With a little pourboire for your trouble.” He turned to the others present. “I am so sorry. It was beastly of me. I know. I was upset, you see.”
The Englishman nodded weakly. “Of course.”
“Of course,” echoed his wife.
“I’m sorry,” said Stevenson once more as he edged away. “Je suis désolé.” He turned, then, to follow his distraught little family back to La Solitude, catching up with them well before he had any notion of what he might say.
Fanny found Stevenson on the narrow first-floor balcony overlooking the street. He was facing away, gazing out towards the distant water, on which the lights of a few ships glimmered intermittently like foundering stars. One of his hands rested on the wooden rail. The other, cocked tightly next to his right shoulder, held a cigarette.
She stepped quietly up beside him. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”
He looked at her, expressionless, then turned back outward. “I needed something to settle myself.”
“You certainly did.” Silence reigned for a moment, broken only by the click and whir of invisible insects. “Sam is finally asleep.”
“That’s good,” sighed Stevenson. He expelled a jet of smoke into the still night air and cleared his throat.
“He was extremely upset.”
“His first real sighting of Old Man Virulent, I suppose.”
“Yes. And don’t be flip.”
“I am devastated. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I certainly don’t, either. Ever. And I don’t like it one bit.”
“You think I do?” asked Stevenson, louder than was called for. He took another long draught on his cigarette, the flaring glow of the tip illuminating his somber features.
“I’m not saying that, Louis. I am saying Sam was extremely upset. So was I.”
“I shall do my best to make it up to him.”
“More playing at war?” She said it pointedly. “Teaching your stepson to be violent too?”
“Do I deserve that?” He looked himself like an injured boy.
“I’m sorry.” She paused. “Moderately.”
Stevenson sighed, then shook his head and sniffed. “We both love our play at soldiers. Those hours together, I expect he feels as close to me as I feel to him. I hope so. It reminds me of my childhood. With all of my cousins. Stevensons. Balfours. Boys and girls. A palliative for loneliness.” He took a deep breath. “They are such gifts to me, Fanny. Sam and his sense of fun.”
His wife made to say something, then simply nodded in the darkness beside him. When she put her arm around his waist, he took his hand off the rail and covered hers, leaning closer to her as he squeezed.
“Well,” sighed Fanny. “At least we know it wasn’t the alcohol.”
“No,” laughed Stevenson, “not this time. I hadn’t managed to down a single drop.” Again he cleared his throat. “But then that became the problem, no? Not too much, but too little.”
He turned to look at her. In this light, the gray in her hair was all but invisible. She could have been her own daughter Belle, so young did she look. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders, and she pressed her cheek and ear down onto one of them.
“You could always leave me,” he said.
“I have left one husband already. A far worse husband than you. I don’t mean to leave another.”
“I’m reassured,” he said, with a melancholy grin. “You won’t re-embark for California even if I abandon this wretched Prince Otto I seem to be chained to?”
“Do we have to go through that again?” Fanny stepped back into a vaguely confrontational stance. Just how sincere it was meant to be Stevenson found it difficult to judge. “Finish the book,” she said. “I know you don’t believe in it, but just finish it. And then you can go on to something that’s more to your liking.”
“You are to my liking,” cooed Stevenson as he reached out to stroke her cheek.
“So it’s Young Master Playful now, is it? Rearing his ugly head?”
“Ugly?”
“Unruly, then.”
“Perhaps.”
“My God, you’re changeable! I sometimes think you could be a woman, the way you change.”
“Perhaps you’d like that,” he remarked with a grin.
She shook her head and turned back out towards the sea. “I won’t be distracted, Louis. If you were half as devoted to your work as you are to reliving martial glories of the past with Sam, we wouldn’t be living hand-to-mouth.”
“I would have thought we were living quite well,” observed Stevenson. “Here on the very skirts of paradise.” He gestured to the prospect in front of them.
“You owe it to me to be serious. Especially after tonight.”
“I’ve always been given to rages, Fanny.” The weariness in his voice was unmistakable. “Someone once said that my emotions are my reasons.”
“Who would that have been? Your father?”
“That would be the height of irony,” huffed Stevenson. “If Old Man Virulent comes from anywhere, he comes from Old Tom Stevenson. Talk to my mother one day about father’s explosions. Or talk to Baxter.” He waved at a mosquito buzzing tinnily at his ear. “He makes himself out to be the paragon of rationality, but foil him one too many times, and he is a holy terror.”
“Well, he’s a man,” quipped Fanny, turning back to face him. “I hardly know a man who doesn’t have a holy terror in him.”
“You sound like Ferrier. And women don’t have the same?”
Fanny eyed him warily. “They may. But they rarely get away with expressing it.”
“Oh, you have your ways,” countered Stevenson, suddenly keen to see how she would respond.
Fanny glowered for a moment, then her face relaxed into a tolerant smile. “I was saying earlier a woman has to be able to seize the reins. But the ones who survive are the ones that do it subtly. Men, you know,” and she gazed out again at the water, “men can just rage away and everyone just says, ‘Mind you, he’s a bit irascible. But he has strong convictions, you know, and he is such an energetic fellow.’ It’s not survival of the fittest with men. It’s survival of the feistiest.”
“Does my father know you have been reading Herbert Spencer?” joked Stevenson. “Because, until now, he has been very fond of you.”
Fanny slapped his arm and, for a long moment, they stared in silence at the twinkling horizon.
“I am truly sorry about tonight,” offered Stevenson in good time. He could feel Fanny squeeze his arm. “I think if I were not so thoroughly enervated by Otto, so utterly stymied—”
“Finish and move on,” Fanny whispered insistently in his ear.
“Once…” confessed Stevenson dreamily. “Once I so desperately wanted to write a big, three-decker novel.” He tilted his face up towards the stars. “Some Walter Scott sort of thing, you know. Something massive about the Covenanters. Or about ancient chieftains splitting each other’s skulls on top of Hadrian’s Wall.”
“More of that, is it?”
Steve
nson shook his head. “Now, here I am in the thick of something pitched at the epic scale, the grand scale, and—I haven’t kept it a secret, have I?—it feels so labored and false! So utterly calculated. God, Fanny! Let me just throw off everything that’s old and ponderous and windy and spin a tight little yarn about something visceral.”
“Visceral like the Blackwood’s piece?”
Stevenson snorted into the dark. For minutes they were still, listening to the sounds of the night, then Stevenson spoke again.
“I don’t mean to excuse myself, but I expect the Blackwood’s affair played a role in this evening’s eruption.”
“It didn’t seem to leave you feeling very chipper.”
Stevenson chuckled softly. “There’s another irony for you. The fate of a story of duplicity setting the scene for my own unruly ‘other fellow’ crashing out onto the stage.”
“I’ll admit it occurred to me.”
“What peeved me the most, I think, was the man’s choice of conjunctions,” Stevenson continued. ‘A work of genius and indecent.’ Not ‘but,’ but ‘and!’”
“And that peeved you because…?”
“Because it suggests that he acknowledges some kind of tie, some link, between genius and indecency, no? The amoral. What your Mr. Spencer would call the ‘natural.’”
“My Mr. Spencer?” responded Fanny. “Honestly, Louis. I think Spencer and those other ones are more intoxicating for you than alcohol.”
Stevenson laughed. “I know. But I am honestly coming to think, Fanny, that one of a writer’s most needful charges is to portray the very same primitive urges and responses that this damn thing, respectability, this damn universal demigod, does everything it can to stamp out. To portray them and exercise them in the reader.”
“That’s a bit radical, don’t you think? You want us to read novels so we learn how to throttle highwaymen?”
“It could just be, my arch little skeptic, that we do in fact grow in strength and resourcefulness when we run up against the rough and arousing—even the ‘indecent’—in the things we read.”
Fanny shook her head, but she smiled all the same.
“At the very least,” Stevenson forged on, “it tests our moral mettle.”
“I know what your father would say. And I know what the Blackwood’s man did say.” Fanny’s expression sobered. “We depend on you, Louis. Sammy and I. I can’t encourage you to fly in the face of propriety just because you have some kind of primordial taste for the wild and wooly.”
Stevenson chuckled indulgently. “For all of my love for Jane Austen, dear heart, I may increasingly need convincing it’s more salutary to read about characters negotiating social niceties over a teacup than about buccaneers fighting for their lives over a bottle of rum.”
“Buccaneers are amusing, Louis. They aren’t the stuff of real art.”
“Better pride and prissiness then? This from the woman who just said she so admires Seraphina and the Fucktress?”
“I just think it’s better to write things that can be published than things that can’t.”
Stevenson sighed loudly, turning back out to the sea. He suddenly stiffened and rose excitedly on his toes. In the middle distance, from the terraced garden that was one of the little chalet’s most paradisiacal features, a liquid, chirruping trill rolled out into the still evening.
“That’s a nightingale!” he exclaimed.
“I think so. What else could it be?”
“Charming!” He took a deep breath of the cool, scented air. “You know, Pig, perhaps I am meant for a new Keats. Instead of scribbling decadent trash in a vain bid to toss off the stultifying bonds of respectability. I want my own annus mirabilis. Instead of this annus terribilis you have me muddling through.”
“So I suppose, then, you want to die young just like him? And leave me a grieving and penniless widow?”
“You would cut such a fine, romantic figure, dear heart. You and your darling son. Begging for a ride to the poorhouse. Ouch!” Fanny had grabbed his right forefinger and was bending it over backwards. “Ouch! What a demon you are.”
“I am,” hissed Fanny, leaning close to his ear. “Tell me now what will make you a rich and famous writer or I’ll dismantle you limb by limb.”
“I shall write a new Coleridgean rime. About a castrating hag who aspires to become the first female pope.”
Fanny pulled back further.
“Oww! I shall write a new Commedia. I shall lavish the bulk of my efforts on a grim depiction of the Circle of Mannish Women. I shall—” He suddenly felt Fanny’s hand shoot down the front of his trousers. She gripped the whole of him and squeezed threateningly.
“Tell me what you will write,” she whispered, taking his earlobe in her teeth.
“Goodness,” replied Stevenson, struggling for breath. “Perhaps something about the things we do when no one is looking.”
“But I am always looking,” whispered Fanny. “Come to my bed and I shall show you.”
6
Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house… In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the color grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.
—THE NARRATOR
Stevenson sat alone at the dark trestle table that dominated the dining end of the main room at La Solitude. He had crossed his slipper-clad feet on the table top, next to his breakfast dishes, and he slouched in the straight-backed chair with a bowl of café au lait cradled in his hands. He was only moderately comfortable—a state that nicely tempered the vexing self-indulgence he seemed to be giving way to at the moment.
He was conducting a scientific experiment. Perhaps an essay in augury. Perhaps even in destiny. If the sunlight that was just touching the wick of the candle at the center of the table were to descend and hit the candlestick itself before it moved off the taper altogether, he would spend the day writing. If it did not, today would be the day for the family to bottle the barrel of Grenache he had just purchased in his bid to economize without compromising the quality of their evenings’ wine. He hoped the sun left the candle soon, as he was lately finding it much easier to tipple than to create.
A light breeze wafted through the open casement, heavy with floral and earthen scents from the garden. A black redstart must have been perched nearby, for a familiar tweet and chuck kept pace with the morn-ing’s crescendo of cicadas. He knew redstarts migrated from the British Isles. Had this one followed them from Bournemouth?
He heard the creak of a stair tread and turned to see Valentine coming up from the kitchen below.
“Will there be something more?” She wiped her hands on a cotton cloth as she stepped nearer with a polite smile.
“I don’t believe so. The eggs were excellent.”
“Merci, monsieur.” The woman gave a small curtsy, more appropriate somehow for a dancer than for a cook. It was another of her charming foibles. “I take these?”
“Of course.” Stevenson made to remove his feet from the table but, before he could manage, she had snatched up the dishes and stood back.
“Non! Restez! Stay. Please.”
“As you wish,” chuckled the writer, settling back into his calculated semi-comfort.
“Not as I wish. I am here only to be useful.”
He gazed at her in mild amusement. Somehow she always managed to affirm her domestic subservience in a way that bordered on self-assertion. “Well, that you are, Valentine. Useful. Très utile. Mrs. Stevenson and I are very happy to have secured your services. And Master Sam as well.”
“Merci, monsieur. Is there anything more?”
“Nothing short of luncheon, Valentine. Unless we bottle wine today.” He glanced at the can
dle. Their fate was still at issue. “In which case I shall let you know.”
“Très bien, monsieur. Merci.” She curtsied again and turned to descend the stairs.
Life here was indeed gratifying, thought Stevenson as he watched her trim white cap drop from sight. It would be totally so, if only he could scratch out something worthwhile by way of real work. How different from his and Fanny’s first days together as husband and wife, roughing it in the arid old mining camp at Silverado—mounding up straw for mattresses, hanging blankets for doors, boiling potatoes for supper on a tiny alcohol stove or over a smoky fire. Now there was the faux-Swiss but comfortable La Solitude, its effulgent garden, and Valentine’s cornucopial cuisine—blessings almost beyond measure. It was curious how accustomed he had once been to having servants. In Edinburgh, it had seemed a birthright. Actually, it had not seemed like anything, as he had never known anything else. From his earliest memories onward, a maid had been like an arm or a leg. One had one, or two, or four—to carry one about, to hand one things.
He studied the candle once again. It was going to be a near thing. If he were meant to write this day, would it suffice to pen a jocular verse about a maid who was his right arm? Who made his bed? Who rubbed his temples? Who wiped his bum? Diverting alternatives all of them, and progressively inappropriate, to be sure. A bed-making-maid poem might turn either on innocent nostalgia or on something subtly erotic—along the lines of Robert Herrick, perhaps. Rabelais had really already done the bum-wiping. Surely he could find something new. A maid who peeled grapes for him as he bathed in the fountains of Versailles? Bather and fruiterer both naked, perchance? A maid who walked him about the garden on a leash, airily chastising her chien mauvais écossais.
He shook his head and giggled. Would he even be dallying with such mores-testing fantasies if it were not for last night’s dream?
Seeking Hyde Page 11