Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  The look that came over his face was very like embarrassment. He glanced at Eliza, then back at Anne. 'Well, there's reason to hope. Our Party has all the best speech makers—and Fox attracts the pick of the new MPs, youngsters you wouldn't know, like Charles Grey.'

  Anne pressed the point. 'But our chances of toppling Pitt?'

  'Under the present King?' Derby's voice automatically lowered, even though they were outdoors, Anne noticed. 'Nil. To be candid—when Fox got into office five years ago he was toppled by a royal plot.' He sounded gruff with rage. 'Old George let it be known that he'd consider any MP who supported reform in India as his personal enemy—so the Bill was lost, the government fell and the King's new pet Pitt seized the reins.'

  'What an outrage!' said Eliza.

  Anne, watching her, thought with a private thrill, She's changing, maturing. She's coming to care about the things that really matter. 'Oh, royal influence can make a farce of politics. Old George squats in the way of progress, like a warty toad.'

  'He's not fifty yet,' said Eliza, 'so why does he seem so old?'

  'I suppose because he's ruled us for nearly thirty years already,' said Derby. 'And God knows how long he'll drag on! Unfortunately for Prinny and our Party, there's no chance of the King being carried off by a binge at a banquet, in the royal tradition,' he added satirically. 'He's so very clean-living—gruel and lemonade, early nights and no game more exciting than backgammon. He and Pitt are the true father and son: two skinny, abstemious, heartless icicles!'

  When their laughter had died away a silence hung on the air. Anne tilted back her parasol to look up at the sun, wondering if the September afternoon would ever lose its burning sheen. Fidelle stirred in her arms, so she put her down on the grass.

  'But enough nasty politics,' said Derby, pulling a folded paper out of his pocket, 'here's something that will amuse you both. It's a long and execrable verse in your honour, Miss Farren, from this month's Town and Country. Here's the very worst rhyme, I believe.

  In Teazle, the springs of mild elegance move her,

  But the sightless sweet Emmeline, that's her chef d'oeuvre.'

  The women shrieked. 'Wait, wait, here's another gem of erudition.

  To copy her frame, where divinity's seal is,

  Would beggar the talents of famed Praxiteles'

  'Oh, dear,' said Anne, hand to her mouth, 'it's a warning to me; I was thinking only yesterday of attempting to capture our friend's beauty in marble.'

  'Nonsense,' Derby told her. 'It would clearly be easier than trying to capture it in verse!'

  'Pliny tells a good story about Praxiteles,' she remarked to Eliza. 'His mistress wanted to find out which of his works he valued most highly, so she ran up to him and told him that his house was burning down. "Save the Satyr and the Cupid," said Praxiteles.'

  'But why did she need to trick him?' Eliza wondered. 'Why not just ask?'

  'Oh, he might have been unwilling to praise his own work,' Anne told her.

  'Yes,' said Derby, 'artists are queer folk.'

  'What would you save?' asked Eliza, turning to Anne with her gauzy blue eyes.

  'Fidelle and my tools,' Anne answered, before she'd time to think. 'I carve almost all my sculptures as gifts for friends, so they wouldn't be in my burning house. If I could go back in again, I'd—'

  'No going back,' said Eliza. 'Derby?'

  'If I may ask, which of my three houses is hypothetically on fire?'

  'Oh, dear,' mocked Anne, 'the complexities of wealth!'

  'Derby House,' Eliza told him. 'London's so combustible.'

  Ah, but at least there, the Sun Fire Insurance Company would rush round with their pumps and their hoses,' Derby told her. 'Whereas if the ancestral pile of the Smith-Stanleys were to burst into flames it would be Farewell Knowsley.'

  'Very well, what would you save if Knowsley were on fire?' Anne asked.

  He screwed up his face. 'Sir Peter Teazle—my prize breeding birds—and young Edward, Charlotte and Elizabeth, I suppose.'

  'Oh, you shocking man, to list your children last!' Anne went to smack him with her fan, but he dodged it. 'What are they like?' she asked.

  'My children?'

  She glanced at Eliza, who was looking up into the canopy of an oak tree. I'd lay a bet she's never asked about them; she never mentions Knowsley, or his past, or anything that even touches on his marriage. 'Yes,' she said lightly, 'what sort of temperaments have they?'

  'Rather too early to tell, I'd have thought.'

  'Oh, nonsense! Lady Melbourne says hers pop out of the womb with characters fully formed.'

  Derby made a helpless grimace. 'Perhaps I haven't spent enough time with my lot. Edward's a bright fellow, bookish—a trifle earnest. Charlotte—she's named for her godmother, the Queen—well, she's quite the proper lady at eleven. And Elizabeth, well, she's just as pretty as the others, but with fairer hair and skin.' He was looking hard at the horizon, as if he'd spotted a rider. 'To be perfectly frank—if I may—I doubt she's mine.'

  'Ah,' said Anne. She was aware of Eliza beside her, listening hard.

  'Not just the colouring, but the timing of her birth.'

  He must mean that the Duke of Dorset had put a cuckoo in the nest before running off with Lady Derby.

  The long silence was becoming awkward. Anne had an idea. 'Come with me,' she said, leading her friends between the trees. 'This way.' Fidelle raced after them. Round a corner what looked like the mouth of a cave opened in the ground. The walls were white and smoothly rounded; the floor squeaked underfoot. 'Solid chalk,' she told them.

  'Is it safe for Miss Farren?' said Derby.

  'Oh, yes,' said Anne impatiently.

  'It's so cool,' Eliza marvelled. 'What luck to find a cave in the woods.'

  'Luck had nothing to do with it,' Anne told her. 'Father had it dug out one summer, to provide labour for idle workmen.'

  A lantern stood on a ledge near the entrance, with a tinderbox beside it. She lit the flame. 'Fidelle,' she called and listened for the pattering paws. 'I think she's gone on ahead. She knows the way well. Here'—touching Eliza's humid hand—'mind your footing.'

  They followed the passage as it sloped down. Derby, she noticed, had taken Eliza's other hand, muttering something about not wanting her to slip. They were like dancers in some strange figure for three. Soon the lantern swinging from Anne's hand was the only splash of light in this artificial night. Their shadows rocked against the shining walls. The little greyhound came back and leapt round them, barking to make an echo; her eyes glittered. Trying to see all this through Eliza's eyes, Anne thought, We gentry are a strange breed, to play at work like children—shipping giant stones from one country to another, boring through hillsides. This tunnel was like a pure white mine, a mine as imagined by someone who'd never seen miners come back from work at the end of the day, blackened and gasping.

  The passage ran for several hundred yards. Eliza shivered slightly in the chill. 'Are you all right?' said Anne and Derby at the same time and laughed.

  'It's wonderful,' said Eliza.

  Then the air began to brighten and Anne could see daylight. She blew out her lantern. They emerged into the dazzling light; the sun sparkled in her eyelashes, touched her neck. Derby was blinking; Eliza was shading her eyes. They were standing at the lip of a bowl of infinite green.

  III. Life Mask

  An image made by taking a plaster mould of the

  face of a living human subject.

  READERS of this publication will have noticed that a certain Family, whose chief residence is not a thousand miles from Windsor, is becoming notorious for its internal discord. Old George Hunover, or Farmer George, the paterfamilias, is the epitome of a Miser. Lotty, his fair wife, has given him no less than fifteen progeny, thirteen still living and now aged between twenty-six and five: seven boys, namely Georgy, Freddy, Willy, Neddy, Erny, Gussy and Dolphy, and six girls, to wit Little Lotty, Aggy, Lizzy, Sophy, Meely and Mary. But instead of being grateful to
his tireless helpmeet, Old George complains of the Expense of the family and grudges her snuff (the poor woman's only indulgence). Since the children can't marry without the father's permission, they hang miserably around the farm, where formality, dullness and ennui reign eternal, and the corridors are the coldest in England.

  The eldest son and heir to the Property is known from his girth as Georgy Porgy, the Prince of Whales, or the Great Whale. Two greater opposites could not be imagined than this tight-pursed father, whose favourite dish is milk gruel, and this prodigal (but unrepentant) son, who has no less than twenty dishes to every dinner. As well as extravagance and irreligion, he is a lecher of unparalleled energy and is also believed to have entered into an illicit Marriage—which adds filial defiance to the list of charges.

  To his credit, it must be noted that the Whale is an energetic promoter of art, sport, cuisine, literature and architecture—all foreign words to Farmer George—and that his outlay on fashion would keep a hundred tailors from penury, if only he'd pay his bills. Until last year the Whale's dearest friend and tutor in libertinage was none other than a filthy, bushy-tailed Fox, but now he clings more nearly to a bottle of Irish Sherry, rumoured to be poisonous...

  —BEAU MONDE INQUIRER, October 1788

  THREE DAYS AFTER ANNE'S RETURN FROM FRANCE, ELIZA SAT for her in the workshop at Grosvenor Square. Anne was slapping wet handfuls of reddish clay on to a wooden armature to make an egg-shaped head. She narrowed her eyes at Eliza, as she used both hands to shape two rudimentary ears. 'I can't believe we've been friends almost two years and I'm only now attempting to immortalise you. Your proportions are mathematically perfect,' she muttered, 'but I can tell you're going to be the most difficult of models.'

  'Oh, dear. Have I been moving already?' asked Eliza, barely parting her lips.

  'Not at all, it's just that your beauty has a sort of live, unpindownable quality.'

  'No flattery.' she scolded.

  'It's nothing of the sort,' the sculptor defended herself. 'When gentlemen pour out their homage, you may accuse them of flattering, but from a member of your own sex, with the cold eye of an artist, you must accept it as the truth.'

  'Well,' said Eliza, 'I'm relieved to hear I'm sitting still at least.'

  'Oh, your experience of the stage gives you a marvellous freedom from self-consciousness.'

  Eliza frowned. 'But it seems to me that I'm always conscious of myself.'

  Anne's hands kept scraping away at the jaw. 'I suppose I mean awkwardness, then. Some of my models are so dreadfully aware of my looking at them, they're always flinching; even Lady Melbourne lost her insouciance when she sat for me.'

  'Practice,' said Eliza with a little shrug, then froze in position again. 'Since childhood I've held so many poses on so many stages—with managers and authors and dressers viewing and poking and discussing me from every angle—that I've grown accustomed to considering myself as a sort of puppet. A movable statue, perhaps.'

  'Didn't you once play Hermione in The Winter's Tale?'

  'Years ago, when I was far too young for it,' said Eliza, smiling at the memory. 'That scene in which I had to pretend to be a statue and listen to my husband lament—how the audience wept!'

  'I know I did.'

  'Ah, you were there?'

  'I don't think I've missed more than one or two of your roles over the years,' said Anne.

  Eliza was a little disconcerted; she hadn't realised that she had any viewer as faithful as Derby. 'I rehearse stage business in the mirror, you know.'

  'Do you really?'

  'I watch myself form every expression, every gesture, every movement; I inherited most of my roles from Mrs Abington, but I've tinkered with the business of them over time. After so many years in front of the mirror, you can imagine that my looks hold no surprises for me.' She watched Anne's fingers digging to form the left eye socket. 'Except for the little lines that say twenty-six.'

  The sculptor looked up with a smile. Eliza wondered why she'd revealed her age, when popular report called her several years younger than that. 'There are no lines, except in your imagination,' Anne told her.

  'I must be realistic; I live by my face.'

  'And when you're as old as I am it will still be dazzling 2000 people a night, because true beauty is a weapon that strikes everyone and doesn't rust! Unless, of course,' Mrs Damer added in a rush, as if she'd been tactless, 'fate has provided another sphere for you to shine in.'

  Eliza changed the subject. 'Such a pity Richmond's decided against mounting any more theatricals.'

  'Oh, don't remind me, I'm quite put out with him for his meanness! That's one reason I needed this trip to Paris to lift my spirits. I do love to escape from England at least once a year, I have a sailor's soul. I wish you could try the same cure, my dearest; you still seem weakened by last year's fever.'

  'I'd feel perfectly well,' Eliza told her, 'if you and Derby didn't keep harping on my delicate constitution.'

  Anne grinned at the rebuke. 'Of course, I don't have the entrée to glittering circles any more—not like my honeymoon visit when I was received so charmingly by Marie Antoinette,' she reminisced. 'She's so unpopular these days, they call her Madame Deficit and accuse her of drunken orgies, though I know for a fact she drinks nothing stronger than mineral water!'

  'Well, my mother and I voyaged as far as York,' said Eliza, 'so I could play in my sister Peggy's Ben and see her married to an actor. I missed the great excitement of the Season so far, when some villain in a crowd came at Fox with a knife!'

  'I believe it was a black who ran between them?'

  'Yes, and got a shocking cut on the head; Mrs Sheridan's getting up a collection to reward him.'

  'Further proof that nobility exists in all races.' Anne sighed, rolling some clay between her fingers. 'D'you know, Georgiana wants a black footman like my Sam, but Devonshire forbids it out of sheer prejudice! I've been agonising over whether to give up sugar; the anti-saccharite campaign does seem a powerful blow to the slave-holding planters.'

  'Oh, I know.' Eliza sighed. 'Rum I never touch, but to gulp down sugarless tea and coffee and chocolate, that's hard—'

  'And then what would one serve for desserts, apart from oranges and walnuts?'

  They lapsed into guilty silence. 'Tell me,' asked Eliza, 'how does the work go?' The clay head still looked to her much like the ostrich egg Derby kept in his cabinet of curiosities.

  'Very badly,' said Anne, 'my fingers are talentless today.' She seized a damp cloth and threw it over the armature.

  'Are we finished?' Eliza was disappointed.

  'Unless ... I wonder, my dear, might I try a different technique? I've never done it before, except on my own hand. If I could take a mask of your face—'

  'As with a corpse?' Eliza stared at her.

  'Oh, don't be alarmed. Not a death mask but a life mask.'

  'You mean to cover me with clay?'

  'No, no,' said Anne, laughing, 'plaster of Paris; much lighter, finer stuff. It sets fast, too; it should only feel a little disconcerting.'

  Eliza was nervous, but felt it would be feeble to refuse. Anne began by tying the hair back from Eliza's face with one of her own broad scarves. Then she mixed up a little bowl of oil and applied it with a sable paintbrush, so the plaster wouldn't stick to her skin.

  'Oh, it tickles—I can't bear it.' Eliza laughed, twitching away from the brush as it touched the corner of her mouth.

  'Then I'll use my fingers, if I may.' The sculptor stroked the oil on with firm fingertips, reaching every little crevice.

  Eliza held still, absorbing the peculiar sensation. 'I must look like a glazed ham.'

  'Not strikingly.' Anne turned away to grind up a block of Paris plaster. She mixed the dust with water in a basin, testing the texture with her fingers; it flowed like cream. She scooped some up in her fingers and began to apply it to Eliza's cheeks. 'Now don't be alarmed, I'll leave a space round your nostrils so you'll be able to breathe. I can leave out your eyes
too, if you like—though I would have liked to capture the angle of your upper lid...'

  Eliza shut her eyes tight. 'Don't let my timidity stand in the way of art,' she said with an odd merriment. Her eyes watered a little; she hoped it wouldn't ruin the plaster.

  'Thank you, that's wonderful.'

  Eyes pasted shut, Eliza found herself thinking of the Gospel passage she'd heard last Sunday in the Derby pew at the Grosvenor Chapel—the one about Christ putting mud on the blind man's eyes to cure him. How long was this going to take? A flutter of panic, an urge to open her eyes, but she told herself not to be silly.

  A finger, soft on her lip. 'If you were to let me cover your mouth too, I'd be able to record one of your finest features—the deep cleft in the middle of your upper lip. But perhaps it would be too frightening?'

  'Go on,' muttered Eliza through leaden cheeks.

  'You're breathing through your nose perfectly well?'

  She made a little inarticulate sound.

  Anne sounded guiltily delighted. 'I'll work fast. If you don't like it, just reach out with your hand and I'll make a hole for your lips.'

  Eliza inhaled slowly as the sculptor covered her mouth in cold, heavy paste. She felt the plaster hardening rapidly, stiffening on her forehead, now her eyelids. She felt something itch in her cheek, but she forced herself to stay still. She thought of that time she'd been playing Lady Teazle, hidden behind the screen, when some crawling insect had bitten her on the knee and she hadn't let herself cry out, or scratch it, or move a muscle.

  'I've finished now; I'll let it sit,' said Anne, very close to her ear. 'Are you feeling quite comfortable? Well, hardly. But you're not scared.' She held Eliza's hand in her own sticky fingers and stroked it. 'I'll consider this an early birthday present.'