Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  That night she lay down on her bed fully dressed and curled round the tiny dog. She stayed very still. She didn't expect to sleep, but fatigue caught up with her and pulled her down into the dark.

  A little before dawn the screeching cocks woke her and Fidelle was cold.

  Anne didn't cry. She swaddled the corpse in her best Kashmir shawl and considered what to do. She couldn't bear the idea that the dog's grave would be here in Portugal, where Anne might never come again. She knew the words for fire and burn; she consulted her dictionary for ashes.

  Against the fierce morning light of the cabinet's doorway a dark bear. Anne jumped with fright.

  'Have I the right house for Mrs Damer?'

  It was the voice that brought him back to her—a rough, amused tone from long ago. 'O'Hara!'

  'The very man.' The General stepped in, stooping a little so as not to hit his head on the door frame.

  She sprang up. 'My dear old friend. What on earth are you doing here?'

  'I've been three years posted at the fortress of Gibraltar,' he said, 'just been made colonel of the 74th Regiment of Foot, quite a promising bunch—but now I'm on my way home for a spell of leave. The ship was passing Lisbon and I'd heard from your father that you planned to be here till February, so I gave the captain a barrel of brandy to stop in for half a day.'

  'I can't imagine a better surprise.' Anne seized his hands in hers; the skin was warm, scored leather. General O'Hara had to be fifty by now, but he was looking well. 'It's been years. How many years?'

  He grinned. His teeth were as startlingly white as ever, or was it only that his face was bronzed? 'I've been knocking around the world so long I can't keep track. And you, you're here for your health?'

  'Oh, the southern sun has done me good already,' she said, waving him to a chair. 'I'm an idle tourist, really.'

  'I can't believe that the Muse of Sculpture is ever idle. Have you your scrapers and gougers with you?'

  'Always,' she said, smiling back at him.

  'And little Fidelle, I assume. Where is she, have I scared her under the table?'

  Anne put up her hand but not in time to catch the tears.

  'My dear Mrs Damer.' His hand touched her sleeve.

  'I do beg your pardon. She ... she happened to die this very morning, I don't know of what, there was no one to consult and it happened so fast.'

  'Oh, gad, I'm fearfully sorry.'

  'That's quite all right,' she said, wiping her face with her handkerchief. 'I mean to have her cremated and put her ashes in a little japanned box to take home with me.'

  'Splendid notion,' said O'Hara.

  Anne cleared her throat and tried to remember how to play the hostess. 'Shall we have some wine on the terrace, with the local marzipan cakes?'

  Under the shady trees he told her about being Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar, a tiny and chaotic peninsula that was home to 4000 people. Though Charles O'Hara was a natural son of Lord Tyrawley (or so Anne's father had always said), there was nothing of the aristocrat about the man and somehow Anne liked him better for it. He'd served in Germany, Portugal, Africa and India; underneath that military uniform, just above his heart, she knew he carried the pitted scar of an American bullet from Yorktown. She was remembering what she liked best about O'Hara: he never made her feel as if her femininity was a distracting mosquito—not even when she burst into tears. Walpole had the same knack, it struck her now, and Derby too—though her favourite men were all so different as to seem as if they belonged to distinct species.

  'Is there much art to look at here?'

  Anne made a little face. 'More architecture. The best pictures were swallowed up in the earthquake, or stolen or sold off long ago. At the home of a marquis I was shown a Raphael, but it'd been wretchedly painted over. I gained much credit for finding this out and cleaning off the overpainting—and I a mere woman,' she added ironically. She was about to pour herself some more wine, when she remembered her English manners and let O'Hara do it.

  'So you've made friends among the Portuguese gentry?'

  'Oh, I wouldn't claim that; it's difficult for foreigners. Such strange tribes! The ladies are round as barrels by twenty-five, and live strictly separate from the gentlemen among herds of servants, foundlings and dwarfs. They aren't supposed to talk to their own brothers, even.'

  'So your hosts will think you scandalous for entertaining me tête-à-tête?' he asked, jerking his head towards the inn.

  'We English are known for eccentricity,' Anne said with a shrug, 'and at least we're outdoors, not shut up in my cabinet together! Oh, and a girl must never so much as look at her futur—her intended,' she glossed. 'I heard a story about a young man who'd courted his cousin with all due form at a respectful distance. One evening she looked him in the eye and asked him how he did, from which the distraught suitor knew that the match had been broken off!'

  'Imagine how that would go down in Mayfair, where both sexes casually discuss the latest adulterous intrigues,' he said with a guffaw. 'It just proves that all rules of behaviour are arbitrary conventions, whether ours or the Redskins'.'

  'Oh, don't you think you go rather too far there?' Anne asked, uneasy. 'Surely the values of civilisation—'

  'Yes, but which civilisation? The Hindu one is far more ancient than ours and they'd be shocked to see me butcher a cow! I tell you frankly, Mrs Damer, the more I see of different nations, the less sure I feel about the pre-eminence of my own.'

  'Well,' she said, rather overwhelmed, 'why else travel, I suppose? If our journeys aren't going to change us we might as well stay at home.'

  'You understand me,' said the General, draining his wine.

  The pause was oddly intimate. 'Speaking of other nations,' said Anne briskly, 'Walpole's sent me Burke's remarkable Reflections on the Revolution in France.'

  'I must be the only Englishman or woman who hasn't read it yet.' O'Hara laughed. 'But didn't your father tell me you were quite the democrat?'

  She flinched from the word. 'Oh, General, not a democrat. But as a Whig, my sympathies are naturally with the cause of liberty and I wish the French well. I must admit, though, that Burke's eloquence has shaken me somewhat. He goes too far—he has these exaggerated fears of a tide of revolution sweeping across Christendom, even to our own shores!—but his catalogue of the mistakes and crimes of the French leaders is rather damning.'

  She waited for O'Hara to reveal his own views, but he only nodded and said, 'You must have a great deal of correspondence to keep you busy, too.'

  'Oh, yes, my parents, of course, and Walpole—and a newer friend, a Miss Berry.'

  'Which one?'

  She blinked at him.

  'The sketcher, or the beauty? I met them in Italy many years ago when I was travelling with your father, as it happens—unless there are other Berrys in the world?'

  'The beauty,' she told him, disconcerted. Conway had mentioned something about encountering the Berrys long before Walpole had discovered them, now she came to think of it. 'Though Miss Berry would rather be known for her intellect.'

  He grinned and she was suddenly afraid. In all his travels, in rough company, could the rumours of her dreadful subject have reached O'Hara? 'I'd no idea you were acquainted with that family.'

  'Oh, the girls may not remember me; one brute of a soldier among many,' he said with a roar of laughter.

  But looking into his sparkling eyes, Anne doubted that the Berrys could have forgotten him.

  MARCH 1791

  At Elvas she crossed the Spanish frontier and presented a letter of introduction to the governor from his brother (an old friend of her father's), so her baggage would be let through. He mortified her by insisting that the Honourable Miladi Damer should be received with full honours of war, including an escort of thirty horsemen, drums, trumpets, cannons firing and a vast banquet to follow. Anne made a private vow that from now on she wouldn't use her letters, she'd take her chances as an ordinary traveller. Lying awake with heartburn that night, she r
ealised how much she'd changed with the years; as a newlywed of nineteen, she'd been delighted by ostentation and all-night balls. Now she'd much rather be lodging in one of the quiet villages that looked to have been crumbling into the landscape since before Columbus set sail.

  From now on Anne spent fifteen hours a day in the carriage. She bumped along through sandy plains, pine woods, craggy gorges riddled with streams, spring flowers, cork trees and ilex groves. For shame, sir, the Iberian peninsula is more than 'backward, governments & primitive economies, she wrote to Walpole, the potholes making her words jerk along the paper. Spain is indeed wild—no route for mere tourists—but sublimely picturesque & I have complete trust that my calessiere (who combines Spanish dexterity with almost English caution) & his seven skinny mules will bring me safe through the mountains.

  The carriage was a little world of its own; it smelt of food and musty clothes. Anne and Bet relieved themselves in the pot, averting their gaze. For breakfast they dipped their stale rolls in oil, tostadas con aceite, or had a cold egg tortilla from the hamper. When they stopped for dinner Anne never could tell what was in the paella, but sometimes suspected it was rabbit, she preferred the fishy zarzuela. She couldn't help but notice that Bet and Sam seemed on more intimate terms these days. The footman sat up top with the driver, and he and the maid never touched each other in front of their mistress, but their eyes rested on each other during meals and the two of them tended to wander off during the long midday siesta, while Anne sat under a tree and read Don Quixote to brush up her Spanish. The private lives of servants are a mystery, she wrote to Mary. And Bet had seemed such a sensible, stolid girl. Anne eventually decided that, unless this affair produced some disaster such as a mulatto baby, she'd pretend she hadn't noticed.

  For a country steeped in ancient tradition, untouched by what Walpole called the French infection, Spain had an oddly democratic spirit. Everybody Anne encountered, high or low, haid an air of languid dignity and seemed to expect to be spoken to, rather than being satisfied with a mere nod. Condeos, the labourers resting among their stony terraces blessed her as she was driven by and Anne, who would have been shocked at such cheek in her native Berkshire, called back, Condeos, Condeos! This always made them grin, though whether out of a sense of being honoured or in derision of her accent she couldn't tell.

  At inns—or what passed by that name—Bet always smoked the room with thyme to chase out the fleas. Anne slept on the straw pallet from her own carriage, wrapped up in the vast cloak she'd bought in Lisbon, or shared a bed with a female stranger, exchanging no more than a few civil words. The sagging bed might be the only piece of furniture in the room. There were always small yipping dogs that were nothing like Fidelle but reminded her painfully of the box of ashes at the bottom of her dressing case.

  I am somewhat of a freak to these people, she told Mary,

  an English Miladi with no husband or family, often forgetting to wear her mantilla, driving through the wilderness for no good reason at all! I feel young all over again. I'm surprised to find that I can put up with more discomfort than I'd ever bear at home in Mayfair, & gratified to think of the two of us travelling simultaneously, tho' through different parts of the Continent—both at the mercy of the next angry storm or pestilent, damp-sheeted inn. It's almost like being together.

  Once settled in Seville, I mean to begin the small self-portrait in terracotta you ashed for in your last. Why should you call it a favour, my dear M., with the original at your entire disposal?

  The last stretch across the Santa Morena was so rough that Anne thought the carriage might crack apart. Bet and Sam chose to stay inside and take their chances, but Anne put on her veil and trudged alongside the gasping mules. To distract herself from the grit in her boots she kept her eyes on the mountaintops. She spoke to Mary in her head, preparing that night's letter.

  It's here, drinking in Nature's most grand & awful draughts, that I breathe more freely than lever have. Painful recollections fall away & the World is nothing to me; the things & persons I love, everything.

  She was worn to the bone, but by twilight there was the silver Guadalquivir and Seville, with its Gothic buttresses, twelve-sided citadel and minaret, standing up against the purple sky.

  APRIL 1791

  Anne sensed the difference as soon as she crossed the Pyrenees: France had become a country where travellers had to justify their presence. In Bayonne she was called on by a ridiculous frog-voiced mayor who wanted to present her with a tricolour cockade. She pinned it on her hat promptly; she needed to please him to get French money, a passeport, fresh horses and permission to leave town. He apologised for not having any ponche, the English favourite; she assured him she never drank punch and would be glad of some tea instead.

  In Paris, glittering in a superbly hot spring, the blue, white and red rosette was everywhere—on buildings, in gentlemen's lapels, on ladies' bonnets; even the Queen's Easter gown, ordered from Madame Bertin as always, was garnished with tricolour ribbon. Fashionable women were wearing the most extraordinary costume: a thin chemise gown of a startling simplicity, in white muslin, worn without stays: long unadorned sleeves, a drawstring neck without ruffles, a high waist just under the bosom and a skirt hanging straight down with no padding at all. Why, even Anne's nightgowns were of a more complicated design! The delicate, almost transparent drapery was a kind of legitimated nakedness. It was if Grecian statues had come to life and were drifting through the streets of Paris. Some ladies wore their hair caught back in loose, unpowdered waves, and others had taken the boldest step of all and cut it short, letting it curl round their faces. Anne had never seen women with cropped hair before, but the effect enchanted her; they looked like playful boys.

  The Champs-Elysées were full of strolling couples; the Bois de Boulogne was thronged with horse riders taking their exercise à l'Anglaise. There were no less than twelve theatres open every evening. Anne went to a rather silly piece about a nobleman who'd spent the Revolution in a coma; now convalescent, he was shocked to find his servants out of livery, addressing him as plain Monsieur and his creditors banging on the door with presumptuous demands for him to pay his debts. He reached the nadir of gloom when he discovered that a bourgeois was trying to marry his daughter, and that he could no longer procure a royal lettre de cachet to imprison the upstart in the Bastille; that was a very amusing scene. But the lord-turned-citizen was finally educated and enlightened, of course, and it all ended happily. The audience seemed very merry and between the acts they clapped and sang 'Ça ira'; Anne thought one of the lines referred to hanging aristocrats, but she assumed it wasn't to be taken literally.

  She'd come prepared to pay her obligatory calls, but the Parisian manservant she'd hired returned to say that almost everyone she'd known was gone, many of them to London, where little colonies of émigrés were forming in Richmond and Belgravia. There were lots of English visitors in Paris, including Romney, the once-fashionable painter, and the notorious William Beckford. Anne did call on Madame de Staël, who was at her toilette with a host of visitors and her delightful baby. Everything was perfectly quiet at present, the salonnière assured her English friend, 'except for some demonstrations and effigy burnings, and we've learned not to mind them. How do you like our new fashions?'

  'Very much,' Anne told her. 'So simple and natural!'

  'Yes.' Madame de Staël laughed. 'Though ruinously expensive. We have to send our muslins back to Santa Domingo to be laundered, you see; that dazzling whiteness can only be restored by the tropical sun. Now I must carry you to the Assembly tomorrow, ma chère, as I know you're a political animal; you'll find it most stimulating. Shabby coats, but great flourishes. Though you've missed your chance to hear our great Comte de Mirabeau,' she said, her face sobering; Tie's just died of a putrid fever.'

  Anne was shocked by that bit of news. That afternoon at the Louvre, the best thing she saw was a vast canvas by the celebrated Monsieur David, representing three young brothers of Ancient Rome pledging
their lives in combat. It was of a pristine simplicity, almost brutal in its effect. The men swore on their bunched swords, the womenfolk and children sank down in grief, and behind were only two primitive columns and a yawning space, representing the abyss of history into which the Horatii meant to throw their lives. It was like marble sculpture, but on a canvas.

  The next morning she was still in her dressing gown, having her hair put in loose curls in the Antique style—since she couldn't bring herself to cut it—when she heard vociferous voices and bustle in the ante-room. Bet came in, red in the face, and said it was a mob of women and she couldn't understand them, except that they were insisting on seeing Miladi Damer, whether she was dressed or not.

  'What kind of women?' asked Anne.

  'I'm sure I don't know, a low sort,' said Bet, looking over her shoulder as if the strangers might understand her English.

  'Ce sont les Poissardes,' murmured Anne's hairdresser into his collar.

  Sure enough, the miscellaneous reek when they swarmed in confirmed to Anne that these were half a dozen of the famous fishwives and street traders of Paris, the ones who'd forced the royal family to march back from Versailles with them. A few had marvellous features that Anne would have liked to model—broad cheekbones, strong jaws. One of them marched up and presented her with a bouquet of white lilac. The exquisite scent startled Anne. What had she done, what did her name mean to these women that they should bring her flowers?

  They stared back at her, as if waiting for something. Ah, they wanted more than thanks. In a murmur, Anne consulted the hairdresser, who suggested she should offer some francs, as nobody cared for the new worthless assignats.

  'Merci, merci, jolie Citoyenne' they chorused.

  Citizeness, she translated mentally; what an odd form of address! Of course, all tides had been abolished, she kept forgetting.