Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  “Yes, I believe it will,” agreed my husband blandly.

  Madame Rullier plucked at my skirt, rolling the fabric between her thumb and fingers and making clucking, disparaging noises with her tongue. She then lapsed into silence for a few seconds and finally burst out, “Oh, I will say it—how can you bear to dress like such a grubby little sparrow?”

  I swallowed a sharp retort. I saw my husband repress a smile as he leaned back into the sofa and thrust out his legs with the aplomb of an eighteenth-century rake preparing to make his selection of bedmates for the night. That he should appear so at ease and amused routed all my resolutions to endure passively whatever indignities were in store for me.

  “My husband takes a great interest in natural history,” I told Madame Rullier sweetly. “And, out of deference to him, I dress in accordance with nature’s ways. As you know, the male of the species is generally the more flamboyant— the peacock of any pair.”

  My husband laughed.

  “Hmmmph,” said Madame Rullier. “Your husband is hardly a peacock. And he is certainly not flamboyant. However, I will not deny that he has exacting tastes and excellent judgment.”

  “Perhaps in such trivial matters as dress,” agreed my husband modestly. “But in matters of greater consequence, I fear I am too easily swayed by what is alluringly packaged.”

  “Well, anyone can see that is not how you chose your wife!” said the irrepressible Madame, mistaking his meaning entirely. “And you,” she went on, turning to me, “since you have chosen nature for your teacher, I would advise you to take your lessons from the flower garden. There the sexes strive equally to charm each other with their beauty. They make a far more commendable model than the one you have chosen.”

  My husband now appeared to grow somewhat impatient. He shifted his position and began softly to tap one handsomely shod foot against the carpet.

  “Oh, roses and daffodils may charm the world,” I demurred. “They do have a wonderful effect upon bees and butterflies—and poets, of course—but I am sure they are quite indifferent to each other.”

  “Ah,” said Madame with a dismissive flick of her hand. “Bees or poets—it’s all to the same end, you know. And now,” she declared dramatically, “I shall dress you to charm your husband.”

  She flung open the door of a spacious closet, revealing a rainbow of jewellike colors. After rummaging therein, she emerged with a malachite green skirt and jacket and a blouse of aubergine silk striped in gold. She draped these over one arm, turned to me, and clapped her hands briskly.

  “Whatever are you waiting for?” she asked.

  I stared at her.

  “Hurry and get out of that ugly dress,” she commanded.

  My husband had fallen back into his lounging attitude upon the sofa and was gazing moodily at the carpet with his chin on his hand. Now he lifted his head.

  “Lady Camwell is accustomed to dressing and undressing with the help of a maid,” he said. “Perhaps you could send for Hélène.”

  “Oh no!” I cried instantly.

  “Well then?” he said, and extended his hand toward me in a small, imperious gesture that told me to do as Madame had ordered. And so I did.

  Madame Rullier embarked upon her mission to transform me into a charming blossom by energetically tightening the laces of my white corset. Vanity prevented me from protesting—it piqued me to think my waist was not small enough to suit the fashionable Madame Rullier. In the end, feeling extremely weak and ill used, for I had had no breakfast and very little lunch and was now to be deprived even of the sustenance of air, I could not quite repress a pathetic little sob as she gave the strings one final vigorous jerk before preparing to knot them.

  “For God’s sake, Aurore, don’t hurt her!” exclaimed my husband sharply, starting to rise.

  Madame Rullier bridled, dropped the laces, and turned to him with an exasperated sigh.

  “You told me the effect you wanted,” she reproved him.

  I took a huge, thirsty breath as the whalebone released my rib cage.

  “Yes, but that is hardly any reason to bind her so cruelly,” said my husband, leaning back. His voice was placid now, and yet I sensed that he was still highly displeased. “Her waist is already smaller than I like them, and her back is very straight. You might as well dispense with the corset altogether.”

  “Shall I, then?” said Madame, as if she regarded this as a most interesting commission.

  “Certainly not,” I interposed quickly. “Only do be good enough to leave me a little room to breathe.”

  Madame Rullier, however, was not about to take her instructions from me. She looked to my husband; he nodded.

  She tied the laces then, without yanking on them any further. Next she produced a tape from the sewing box at her feet and began to measure me.

  “Your estimates were nearly perfect,” she told my husband approvingly when at last she had finished. “I shall have to make only the smallest alterations.”

  He must have had my measurements from the maker of my riding habits, but nevertheless his expression suggested that he was rather pleased with himself.

  “That’s a man of science for you,” I said. “He has an eye like a caliper.”

  My husband fixed that cold eye on me.

  “I fear I waited rather too long to take your measure,” he said.

  Madame looked with disapproval from one of us to the other. I had an uneasy premonition that she was about to take us both to task for our charmlessness.

  “Let me see her in that coat and skirt,” said my husband hastily, and thereby deflected the incipient scolding.

  As Madame Rullier was completing her alterations to my new wardrobe, my husband inquired about some other items he had ordered and which he hoped were now ready.

  “Hélène will show them to you,” said Madame Rullier out of one side of her mouth—the other was full of pins.

  My husband rose and left us. As soon as he was away, Madame Rullier’s manner toward me grew curt.

  “Voilà,” she said with no enthusiasm as she cut the last thread and turned me toward one of the mirrors I had been studiously avoiding.

  “Well, have you nothing to say?” she demanded, after taking the pins from her mouth. If I had been expecting her to tell me how magnificent I looked, I would have been sorely disappointed. If she had been waiting for me to express my gratitude for the miracle she had wrought, she must have been equally so.

  “You do not like me,” I heard myself say, although I had never intended to voice this conviction.

  “And what of it? I am only a poor dressmaker.” I thought her humility extremely specious. “And”—she gestured toward the looking glass—“as you can see, I do not allow my prejudices to interfere with my work. Had I loved you with all my heart,” she concluded with another burst of the appalling candor she seemed to find so difficult to curb, “I could not have dressed you more beautifully.”

  “But you like my husband,” I persisted, to my own astonishment.

  She tilted her head and our eyes met in the glass. Hers were narrowed. She pressed her lips together.

  Finally she said in a most unrevealing tone, “What kind of woman would not?”

  I shifted my gaze.

  Madame bent and began returning her needle packet, her pincushion, and her spools of thread to her meticulously arranged sewing basket.

  At this moment my husband returned. The trace of a sparkle lingered in his eye, as if he had witnessed something delightful.

  “Were you pleased with what Hélène showed you?” inquired Madame Rullier eagerly, lavishing upon him all the warmth she had withheld from me.

  “Oh very,” he assured her.

  But then he cast a critical gaze in my direction, and his expression grew frosty.

  “Do you not like it?” asked Madame.

  “I like it very well,” said my husband. “It is most becoming. Perhaps not quite as dazzling as some of the others, but I think that may make the tr
ansition from drabness a little less trying for her.”

  I was wearing a mustard-colored jacket and skirt, made of blended silk and mohair; they were trimmed with black braid and cut with almost brutal simplicity. It was, in fact, precisely the severity of the cut which made this costume, as well as all the others, so striking. They were perfectly unobjectionable and the very height of fashion, and yet I felt almost queasy with self-consciousness at the thought of going anywhere in them.

  The garments I now wore could certainly be numbered among the more subdued of my new habiliments. Most of the others were even more spectacular: suits and dresses of indigo, magenta, myrtle, cerise, and marigold; blouses of goldenrod, quince, mignonette, peach, and rose. Even the most brilliant tones could not be faulted; they could have been achieved only by means of the very richest vegetable dyes, for they had none of the gaudiness of aniline.

  I started to remove the jacket.

  “Leave it on,” said my husband.

  I eased it back over my shoulders obediently as he continued with a laugh, “Surely you were not about to insult Madame Rullier by exchanging her splendid creation for this!”

  With his back to me, he picked up my ancient dress from the chair where it had been lying. For a second I thought I saw his reflected image press it to his lips, but in the next instant he had turned and was holding it out at arm’s length.

  “Shall I have that wrapped with the others?” asked Madame Rullier in a mocking tone.

  “You may burn it, for all I care,” said my husband, letting it fall.

  I felt a pang. It was, after all, my dress. It had shaped itself to my very flesh and—as I had not used perfume for years—was faintly imbued with my natural scent. No one could defend it as pretty, but it was sturdy and had served me well.

  “No,” I said. I bent to retrieve the forsaken gown from the floor. “It is mine and I am fond of it, even if you are not.”

  My husband shrugged.

  “Have it wrapped with the others then,” he told Madame Rullier.

  She wrinkled her nose at the feel of the fabric as she took it from my hands.

  “What is the thing made of—haircloth?” she muttered to herself.

  “If it were,” remarked my husband in barely audible tones when we were alone, “I’d make you wear it. Day—and night.”

  Rather than dwelling on the curious little frisson triggered by this unpleasant suggestion, I merely let my face express how disagreeable I found it. Then I looked unhappily at my image in the looking glass. I might have been wearing haircloth already: I could hardly bear to think how conspicuous I would feel the instant I left the fitting room.

  I had never disliked attracting attention and admiration as Frederick’s wife. Despite my air of reserve, I had enjoyed it. But now I shrank from the interest of strangers. Surely any eyes I might draw would easily discern both from my mien and from the obvious constraint between me and my husband that not for love had I become Lady Camwell. To dress boldly and expensively, I considered, would be to flaunt my price tag like a banner.

  Oh, how my grandmother would have loved my new costumes, I reflected suddenly with bitterness. Yes, that was what I hated about them: they were so relentlessly a la mode. They made me look like a prized and haughty courtisane, so well kept and so well appointed as to outshine respectable ladies in tastefulness as well as splendor.

  “Shall we go,” said my husband, making a statement of it, not a question.

  But I did not obey. Overcome by exhaustion, I sank into the armchair where my old, scorned gown had lately lain. Even as I rested my burning forehead on my palm, a glimpse into one of the mirrors told me that my handsome apparel had given my attitude more panache than pathos. I could expect little sympathy from my husband.

  “Well?” he prodded me.

  I lifted my head.

  “You do look rather faint,” he said. “Perhaps you need air. No—don’t try to stand.”

  He opened a window; it gave out upon a pretty walled garden that lay under an overcast sky. The damp, cool breeze that drifted in carried on it that rich odor so redolent of spring, the scent of moist and fecund earth that proclaims the thaw, the end of winter, the promise of new life. A greenfinch caroled joyfully among the bud-tipped branches of a fruit tree.

  “I am better now,” I said, getting to my feet after a moment or two. “It’s only that—” I stopped. I was famished now, but I disliked expressing to my husband even the simplest physical need.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  As I hesitated, my stomach decided that it could wait no longer for my reluctant lips to voice its desires. It issued its own unmistakable complaint.

  My husband began to laugh.

  “It does seem that it is now your fate to have your appetites declare themselves however much you try to deny them,” he said. “Let us hope this state of affairs will continue.”

  I glared at him hatefully.

  “Come,” he said, offering me his arm. “There is a very pleasant tearoom not far from here.”

  I left the fitting room with mingled feelings. I was grateful for his arm and for the prospect of nourishment, furious at the implication of his remark about my appetites, and both puzzled and faintly alarmed at how well the new tenor of our relationship seemed to agree with him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As we were about to depart from Madame Rullier’s establishment, Hélène scampered up with a large parcel and breathlessly inquired of my husband what he wished her to do with it. She was unnervingly pretty.

  “Why, have it sent along with the others, of course,” my husband told her, shaking his head with a smile. “Just as I told you earlier.”

  Hélène blushed and twinkled.

  In the tearoom, when I was certain that no one could overhear us and once the edge of my hunger had been dulled, I asked, “So. Was that one of your mistresses?”

  “Who?” my husband responded in a disbelieving tone, “Madame Rullier?” And then, more softly and with a smile, “Or her lovely niece? And why on earth do you want to know?”

  “It was an idle question,” I said. “It’s nothing to me where you go crawling.”

  He gave me a hard stare, then leaned toward me and said very softly, “I hope that I would never be so unkind to a lover as to require her to attend upon my high-minded wife. I will tell you, however, that I cannot promise the opposite.”

  I considered the scenario that these words suggested and pushed my plate, with its remnants of cucumber and watercress sandwiches, away. The afternoon had not been entirely unpleasant, but my husband’s last remark served to replenish all my ill will.

  I spent another uneasy night in my impersonal London bedroom. Again my husband did not leave his bed to come to mine. I almost wished he would. The slight, alarming tang of his words in the tearoom, the suggestion that he might be tempted to try to humble me by asserting his desires in perverse and curious ways—a persistent image of the glowing Hélène reclining smugly among lace-trimmed, perfume-scented pillows in my own bed while, at my husband’s direction and under his critical eye, I poured chocolate for the obnoxious minx and arranged her golden curls to his satisfaction—all made the joyless but conventional conjugal act seem blissfully innocuous.

  The following day was devoted to the acquisition of gloves and parasols, hats and shoes.

  None of this, of course, was undertaken in a spirit of affection or generosity; my husband, however, clearly seemed to enjoy turning me out in a style that at last satisfied his exacting standards.

  That evening he took me to hear Alexander Mackenzie conduct the London Philharmonic. I wore one of Madame Rullier’s more restrained creations, a superbly simple white dress trimmed with tiny pearls, and over it, a cloak of rose-colored velvet. I barely knew what was played—only that I must sit sedately beside my icy, unbending husband, under a sweeping deluge of music that nearly drove me mad with an objectless longing.

  When we returned to Grosvenor Square, Marie, the Fr
ench lady’s maid my husband had engaged for me upon our marriage, was waiting for me. But to my embarrassment, my husband, who had followed me into my bedroom, dismissed her.

  “Take off your dress,” he said softly when she had left us.

  My heart began to hammer violently. I longed to be back under what I now regarded as the protective eye of Madame Rullier, disrobing in those far less dangerous surroundings.

  “If you cannot bring yourself to do as I ask, I will do it for you,” said my husband, now in a harder voice, “but that would not be how we agreed to conduct our relations, would it?”

  This prompted me to act. My chest felt hot and tight, my fingers huge and graceless, but finally the gown was off. I laid it carefully upon my bed in the hope that its occupation of that terrain might deter other activities from taking place there.

  “Now go into the other room,” my husband directed, pointing toward a door I had hoped would never be opened.

  “There is nothing that proclaims a woman’s virtue quite so depressingly as white underclothing,” he observed once we had passed into his bedroom and he had closed the door behind us. “It doesn’t suit you at all. I hope I never see it on you again.”

  “Well, you must, I think, if you insist upon holding me to this wretched bargain, for I have nothing else,” I told him angrily.

  “Then nothing is what will have to take its place. So you may as well remove all your prim little rags.”

  “Oh, what is your object!” I cried, almost beside myself.

  He stepped toward me and placed his forefinger lightly under my chin, lifting it.

  “You,” he said, “are on the verge of obtaining everything your cold heart desires. But before that day comes, I intend to have some pleasure from you, for I have never had any yet.”

  I was not quite so heavily defended as usual: I wore only a white corset, a long gored petticoat with a narrow ribbon of yellowing lace at the hem, plain white stockings, and sturdy, clinging lisle drawers. I could hardly fault my husband for regarding this get-up as uninspiring—that was precisely the effect it was intended to achieve.