‘Perhaps,’ Stokes says, smiling, maddeningly, like a teacher praising a moderately bright pupil. ‘I admire your spirit, Mr Burnes – I who have never travelled so far as to see the ocean.’
Burnes bows, deeply, coldly; he is oddly irritated by the conversation.
7.
One of the chessmen comes smoothly into the room, and stops just short of Lady Woodcourt. She breaks off her animated conversation with the latest of the guests, and turns to the footman. The guest bows to her back, and makes his escape into the room. What information the footman bears must be thrilling, for in an instant Lady Woodcourt clasps her hands to her brown wrinkled bosom, as if to stop a pet white mouse escaping from between her dugs, and skips girlishly into the centre of the room. The chatter in the room stops raggedly, and the guests all turn to her, shining with her announcement. She calls out, not raising her voice, and everyone graciously inclines in her direction, like a grove of willows in the breeze.
‘… in honour of our most favoured guest, the hero, I may say, may I not, of Bokhara, M. Mirabolant has graciously consented …’
Burnes, who has sat down again, is nodding and smiling; he has had plenty of time to grow used to this announcement.
‘… M. Mirabolant has created a new, a marvellous dish, in honour of his adventures, his great heroism – dear friends, one moment, only …’
And the doors are swung open, and, there is M. Mirabolant, the great chef de cuisine on whom all London dotes – what all great London used to call a Cook. The great M. Mirabolant, universally agreed to be the greatest Frenchman in existence since – since – since Napoleon, since Voltaire, since time began. And before him is borne a large white china dish, piled high with some white stuff into the approximate semblance of a snowy mountain. M. Mirabolant is all geniality, his broad red face greeting the room without, precisely, greeting anyone. There is a little murmur and patter of applause, as the ladies’ hands, soft as the flapping of doves into the sky, acclaim the dish, and the room turns from Mirabolant to the plump hero of the hour, who smilingly discounts any sense that he is worthy of Mirabolant’s marvellous pudding.
‘M. Mirabolant,’ Lady Woodcourt insists, ‘tell me, do not all dishes have a name?’
M. Mirabolant, all geniality, agrees that they do.
‘Pray, M. Mirabolant,’ the Duchesse de Neaud joins in, ‘charming, quite charming – do tell us, what are we to call this dish?’
M. Mirabolant draws himself up, pulls on the left outer extremity of his marvellous black moustache, gazes in deep thought at the glossy mountain of cream on the shoulders of two trembling footmen. Perhaps no inspiration will come, and the room trembles before M. Mirabolant’s genius. But they need not worry; for a light falls on the great Frenchman’s face, and genius prepares to speak.
‘It calls itself,’ he growls, his eyes fixed, as if in a trance, on the dish, and not at all on the attending multitudes, ‘une coupe Bokhara.’
And now a rapture of applause breaks out in the room, and Mirabolant turns and sweeps out, leaving his adoring public, his ecstatic mistress, quite as if he had hired them for the evening, and not the other way round. Leaves, too, a confection made up entirely of iced cream and crushed meringue, the whole sprinkled with white rose petals.
‘Tell me, Mr Burnes,’ Bella finds herself saying. ‘Is this a customary dish of the natives of Bokhara?’
‘To the best of my recollection, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes responds gravely, ‘they dine on it nightly. Meringue is their staple diet.’
‘I was certain of it,’ Bella says. ‘You must have had more dishes named in your honour than anyone now living.’
Burnes laughs heartily, immediately smothering the noise. ‘Perhaps I am a little ungrateful,’ he says. ‘But it seems to me that, like the Dutchman’s daughter, the dish has been christened twenty times, and still remains no better than it was at the first.’
‘Is it always coupe Bokhara, Mr Burnes?’ Bella says. ‘I do hope not – what a melancholy prospect that would be. Not only to have to eat iced cream and meringue every night, but not even to have the solace of variety offered by an occasional change of name.’
A cousin of Lady Woodcourt has gone to the piano, and has started up a strange crooning and crackle, which passes for a selection of Welsh airs; a young man stands by to turn the pages, his eyes wandering about the room, his fervour all directed towards finding some means of escape from his sentry duty.
‘No, not always, indeed, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes says. ‘I think it is only coupe Bokhara when M. Mirabolant takes the helm.’
‘Twice weekly?’ Bella says.
‘Quite that,’ Burnes agrees. ‘Other than that, it may be anything at all; blanquette à l’ Afghanienne, rôti de porc à la mode de Kabul, or coupe Bokhara. Yes, perhaps you are right; it is mostly coupe Bokhara.’
‘And is it always iced cream and meringue with white rose petals on top?’
‘Always. No – I do Mirabolant an injustice – perhaps once the rose petals were pink.’
The macabre daughters in their matching grave-gowns, taking a turn about the room, now come to where Burnes sits with Bella. They bow, sourly; Burnes responds, Bella makes a tiny incline, her shoulders trembling with withheld laughter, and they pass on.
‘I think your brother was in India, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes says when they are gone.
‘Yes, Harry,’ Bella says quickly. ‘Yes, that is right. How did you come to know such a thing?’
‘I think it was the first thing I knew about you,’ Burnes says. Bella blushes and lowers her head, pretending to smooth her gown. ‘I heard of him in Calcutta. It was a sad end. He was spoken of well by everyone.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Bella says. ‘My father would be comforted to hear you say that. We hoped India would be the making of him.’
‘I am sure it would have been,’ Burnes says. ‘I would not wish to intrude on your father in such festive – I mean – I would not be the one to bring melancholy thoughts to mind among happy friends.’
Bella smiles, seeing where all this talk is leading. All this chatter about poor useless Harry, sent out to India to save his name and put an end to his card debts, dead in three months in an unmentionable duel over an officer’s wife or, in official despatches, of the terrible Calcutta cholera. Poor Harry, indeed; but now, at least, he seemed to be serving some kind of useful purpose.
‘I wonder if you would permit me to call,’ Burnes says. ‘To offer some small solace to your poor father.’
‘I am sure he would take great pleasure in your conversation, Mr Burnes,’ Bella says, smiling warmly. ‘You are welcome to call at any time.’ And rests, for one moment, her little white hand on Burnes’s; it is cool and pale, his hand, and as she touches him, he does not start, or move, but merely stares, gazes, at the two-second miracle of her hand in his.
‘Thank you,’ Burnes says, helplessly. ‘And I shall bring my book, if you would permit me.’
‘We should be delighted,’ Bella smiles, and her smile is big and white and open. Her little square teeth, her clean pink mouth, her perfect lips. The smile, it makes him pause, and look, and around him, the room is silent, as if a great glass bell has dropped over them, and they move in a slower, bigger atmosphere. She smiles, and she shows her teeth, and glitters at him; there is no modesty in her, but only delight. He thanked her, and she is, for no reason, delighted.
At the other side of the room, Colonel Garraway snaps back into consciousness, his back upright and clean. It is like a window opening in the room. There before him is a girl, sour in the face and wrapped in black, looking at him inquiringly. He has no idea who she is, or what she has just said. At the other end of the room, there is a girl sitting on a sofa with a man. She is his daughter, his daughter Bella. He stands upright, and sees exactly where he is, at Lady Woodcourt’s. He bows, for no reason, at the girl in black, by his side, and then sees that behind him is a window, and outside the window is the street, and in the street ten or tw
enty boys, urchins, are leaping up and down, trying to see into the house, to look in and see Colonel Garraway looking out, just as he is looking out trying to see them looking in. A brilliant thought occurs to him now; the world is full of windows, and some are inside the head, and some are not. He must go home and write that down. He bows again to the girl by his side, whose name is Miss Gilbert. He will go and fetch his girl, Bella, who is looking damned fine, and then they will go home, and he will write down his brilliant thought, whatever it was.
Burnes stays for half an hour after the departure of Bella and her father. He is the guest of honour, but he is allowed to be tired. And tomorrow, he has something to do. He leaves the fluttering gracious crowd, feeling no gratitude to be treated in this luxuriant way, but only relief to be free and once again in the street, in the open air. And tomorrow, he has something to do. He walks out of the door, and there is his carriage, waiting for him. But he does not step into it. He stands on the steps, and, if his feet are in the mud, his eyes are on the night sky, and what he thinks about is something not there, but only in his thoughts. Her teeth, eyes, hands.
FOUR
1.
ALEXANDER BURNES DID NOT COME the day after Lady Woodcourt’s party – or the next day – or the day after that. And on the fourth day, just when Bella and her sister had gone to the Park – just, in fact, at the hour when they might have been expected to be in the Park – he left his card and a set of his Bokharan travels.
Bella made no gesture when she saw the bit of pasteboard, showed no feeling beyond an agitated fumbling with her bonnet’s ribbons. But, walking upstairs as upright as she could manage, as slowly as she could, she felt cheated of something, as if she had been promised the most thrilling-sounding of M. Mirabolant’s puddings, and, in the event, she had been presented not even with the customary confection of meringue and cream, but, four days after she had expected it, an engraving of the promised delight on a card three inches by two. Walking slowly up the stairs, she ran her fingers over the card, three inches by two, as if it held for her the slightest promise, as if it had anything in common with her uselessly unshared hopes. Bella was twenty-four. She expected nothing.
So it was that, when Burnes was announced, a full week after Lady Woodcourt’s famous party, and shown into the drawing room where Bella was sitting, alone with her work, she stared at him as if she had never seen a man in her life.
The Garraways lived in Hanover Square, in a house so exactly what one would have expected that, Bella thought, none of her family or her family’s friends could ever be said to have set eyes upon it. It had precisely the right amount of old furniture to be respectable; it had precisely the right number of new objects to be fashionable. There was a pianoforte and a harp; there were sofas and curtains and a wilderness of walnut, just as other people had; there were portraits by Lely of dear great-great-grandmama, stout in a blue silk gown with her hand resting on a silver globe and pointing to the heavens. There was an ugly one, too, of poor Harry which he had ordered the week after arriving in India, in which his head was inexplicably round as a football (‘A native artist,’ Colonel Garraway was apt to say in mitigation, showing the curious visitor the label, ‘Executed in the Year 1826 by the Humble Servant of the Brush T. S. Lal, Student and Pupil of the great English Master, Sir Tilly Kettle’). All quite as everyone else had things; all so perfectly appropriate to the Garraways’ station in life that one could have predicted the house’s exact appearance, and certainly had no need to look at it. It was true that the Garraways, in their dining room, had what, through the gloom, could be perceived to be a lamentable mythology by Hogarth where others might have had a doubtful Claude, but what of that? The Garraways were so completely respectable that they could pass off a small lapse like that as an interesting curiosity, and nobody doubted, since they said so, that an interesting curiosity is what it was. They were respectable to the point of dullness.
It was four in the afternoon, and Colonel Garraway was in his study, taking his second dose of opium of the day. He had unlocked the miniature walnut tantalus, and carefully measured out the drops into a glass. After twenty years establishing a good understanding with the ruby witch, each of his three daily doses was large enough to kill a neophyte. He mixed it with water from the decanter, raised it to the light and gazed at it sternly. This moment of calm contemplation, which never varied or altered, was an essential part of the Colonel’s thrice-daily renewing of his acquaintance with opium; it was his idea of a necessary self-restraint. Presently the world returned to normal. The room deliciously sagged around him, the armchair softened, rose up in an embrace, and all was well again. He never recalled, or noticed, the moment of swallowing; it passed. The Colonel smiled to himself. No, not to himself; to his books. There they were, all his little books. There they were; now, which was his favourite? There, the one with nice gold lettering, there on the spine; Dryden Dramatic Works Vol. III. That was his favourite, wasn’t it, because the I, I, I on the spine was so like three nice gold pillars. Perhaps the green stock, for this evening’s tenue, for Lady Woodcourt’s. The Regent would surely approve. But then he remembered, as a dull double knock sounded through the house and the armchair softened under him like warm toffy, that Lady Woodcourt’s had taken place a week before, he had no green stock to wear, and the Regent, now, was King – no – was dead. He settled back. The ruby witch! he thought. The ruby witch!
Elizabeth Garraway was in her room, attempting to ignore the clink and knock from her father’s study next door. It was the familiar sound of him unlocking the tantalus, taking out the miniature decanter, and settling into oblivion. She was not sure, but she rather thought what she most disapproved of in her father’s opium habit was his having had made these appurtenances, acknowledging that there was no hope or desire in him to abandon the habit. Her hair was as smooth as if it had been lacquered onto her head; her velvet dress was as rich and dark as the heart of a poppy. She continued writing her letter.
‘… I feel, however, that the weaker sex, so justly named at present, only occupies so subservient a position due to the manifest inadequacies of feminine education.’
She sighed, and thought for a moment. She was writing to her correspondent in Germany. She had had great hopes of Goethe until he died, but Herr R—, although no more effusive in his replies than one would expect of the greatest and most famous novelist in Europe, had been most encouraging. She continued.
‘If the conventional female “accomplishments” stretched to trigonometry and Greek at the expense of the watercolour sketch and the covering of screens, what changes in the helpless position of the sex in society could we hope to see!’
She looked at her sentence, quite satisfied. She wondered for a moment whether Herr R—would know what was meant by screen-covering, if that were not a usual practice of German virgins, but decided to leave it. What an honour to educate the great R—, even in so small a matter! She was brought from her thoughts by the sound of the double knock. Bella, however, was in the drawing room, she thought, and could best be left. She, turning back to her elevated correspondence, was decidedly not at home.
2.
Bella, indeed, was downstairs in the drawing room, her mind quite empty. When the double knock came at the door of the house, she was staring abstractedly at a house fly working its way across the walnut table. Her work was in her lap. The fly seemed lost, cautious, bewildered. Its huge jewelled eyes blank, it seemed to be finding its way over the polished table by touch. It leant on its feelers like an old man on a pair of sticks, as if exhausted; then, suddenly, it reached back and swiftly groomed its wings, back, head with three sleek gestures, and with a single snap, flew off on its own purposes. Bella blinked. In front of her was a young man, pink and ginger as a cake. His hat was apologetically in his hand. She did not recognize him.
‘Miss Garraway?’ the young man said. ‘I startled you. I—’
‘Mr Burnes,’ she said crisply, smiling; and, indeed, Emily had a standing ins
truction to admit Burnes without question, when she was not at home to all others. She had expected, however, some announcement. ‘How pleasant. Do sit down.’
‘I did call,’ he said. ‘I was unable directly to call after the evening at – at—’
‘At Lady Woodcourt’s,’ Bella said, smiling. There were, it was true, an appalling gaggle of hostesses in London, all rather like Fanny Woodcourt; Bella had spent the previous week accompanying her father to a selection of them, in the unfulfilled hope of seeing Burnes. ‘A memorable evening for you, was it, Mr Burnes?’
‘Much resembling a great many other evenings it has been my pleasure to attend in the last few months,’ Burnes said. ‘Indeed, I think I could hardly distinguish it at this distance from a dozen others this last month.’
‘What uninterrupted bliss your life must be,’ Bella said. ‘For a poor female like me, there could be no higher pleasure than a succession of evenings identical to Lady Woodcourt’s. Or perhaps you are weary of them, Mr Burnes? Surely not. Do not disappoint my youthful hopes.’
‘I confess,’ Burnes said, leaning forward in his chair as if she had a lapel to seize, ‘if I thought my life likely to consist of such evenings, I should return to Kabul and never leave again.’
‘No pleasures, then?’ Bella said. ‘None, sir?’
‘One,’ Burnes said, and the drop in his manner into a feeling seriousness was as marked as if he had fixed his gaze with hers. She leant forward, unaccountably disconcerted, and rang for tea.
‘Have you seen your friend, Mr Stokes?’ Bella said, smoothing her dress down as she settled back.
‘Mr Stokes?’ Burnes said, perplexed. He picked up a gold snuffbox, and examined it. ‘Was that the gentleman’s name?’
‘You seemed to be holding an energetic conversation with him at Lady Woodcourt’s,’ she said. ‘A bald gentleman. A writer, I believe. No – I remember now – he is the editor of a periodical. Great things were expected of him, and he wrote a novel – or did he merely promise to write a novel? It is so difficult to remember. Do you plan to write a novel, now, Mr Burnes? You are certainly promising enough to threaten one.’
The Mulberry Empire Page 7