Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  Over the breakfast table she listened to the sound of toast crunching in their jaws. Across the parlour the impossibly perfect face of Thalia watched over them; Eliza avoided its blank eyes. Mrs Farren suddenly said something about a crudité.

  Eliza stared. 'I beg your pardon?'

  'A coup d'état, they call it,' her mother pronounced awkwardly.

  'In France, don't you know.'

  'Oh.'

  'Some moderates have upped and toppled the awful rulers—executed Robespierre and all—and they're letting the prisoners out.'

  Eliza put down her piece of toast. The bite in her mouth tasted like wood, she could feel its hard, tooth-marked edges. She chewed twice and forced it down. She didn't care about the good news from France, that was the strange thing; today it really made no difference to her one way or another.

  Mrs Farren carried on in the same cool, conversational tone. 'You should go and speak to her.'

  'Her?'

  A jerk of the head in the vague direction of Grosvenor Square. Like pointing at something filthy.

  Mother "won't say her name, Eliza realised. 'I ... I hardly know what to tell her.'

  Mrs Farren leaned across the table. 'Oh, I think you do.'

  Eliza felt trapped. There was a hair on her mother's chin she'd never noticed before. 'I'm sure she's as distraught as I am, after last night.'

  The older woman's arms folded up like penknives. 'That's neither here nor there. Madam can wall herself up like an empress if she pleases. You're the one whose prospects hang by a thread.'

  Eliza could hardly breathe. Did her mother mean her career, or Derby, or both? Last night's crowd hissed in her ears like a vast kettle. 'But Anne's done nothing—'

  'It's not what she's done, is it? It's what she is.'

  Wordless, Eliza lurched up from the table.

  She sat in her room for hours, preparing. It was like the time Dora Jordan had gone into early labour and Eliza had had to learn the part of Claramintha in a single day to replace her.

  When she came down the stairs her mother was standing in the hall. Had she been there all morning, like a statue of Cerberus? 'His Lordship's carriage isn't out there,' Mrs Farren remarked accusingly. Eliza ignored that. She let her mother help her on with her summer cloak. 'Put this on.' It was a narrow hat with a thick veil.

  Eliza flinched, but she knew it was a good idea; there might be journalists lurking about. Mrs Farren had always had the knack of rising to a crisis; that was what came of being married to a drunkard.

  It was only a matter of walking round the corner to no. 8 Grosvenor Square. How closely she and Anne lived; it made her shake. She wondered how many passers-by could recognise her through her veil. She was too tall, too slim to be anyone else. Suddenly celebrity seemed a frightening thing.

  In Anne's parlour Eliza paused with her hand on the back of a chair. 'Can you trust your servants?'

  Anne cleared her throat. 'I believe so.'

  Eliza opened the door again to check no one was listening, then shut it and sat, without waiting to be asked. She began her speech. 'I've no intention of discussing the events of yesterday evening.'

  'My dear, such a nightmare! How persecution swoops on the innocent like an eagle on young lambs!' Anne produced a miserable half-smile. 'Have you heard from Derby yet? He didn't answer my note. I've been longing to write to you—to come to you—'

  Eliza shook her head.

  'Mine is perhaps the only heart in England that can understand what mortification yours is suffering.'

  This was too much. 'Your understanding helps me not at all,' said Eliza through her teeth. 'What I require is an explanation of the facts.'

  'Oh, yes. Have you seen this thing called The Whig Club?' Anne shuffled through her pocketbook and held up a small pamphlet.

  'No.' Eliza's stomach sank at the sight. Not just the buzzing gossip of a theatre audience, then, but cold print.

  'Well, I'll lend it to you and then we can plan our campaign,' said Anne, pressing it into her hand. 'Without going into horrid detail—'

  'I don't want details, I want an answer,' Eliza interrupted, as she stuffed the thing into her cotton reticule without looking. 'What is it about you?'

  'Wait one moment—'

  'I've waited five years already.'

  Anne stared at her, suddenly every inch the Honourable Mrs Damer.

  She's not my better, said Eliza in her head. I'm entitled to an answer. She tried to speak slowly and clearly, like a lady. 'Why does this particular rumour, out of all possible slurs, keep resurfacing and clinging to your skirts?'

  'I've no idea.' The tone was cool.

  'Oh, come on,' Eliza roared. 'People don't make these things up for no reason at all. I've repeatedly given you the benefit of the doubt, but I'm beginning to wonder. Is it true you've turned down several good proposals?'

  'Where did you hear that?' Anne's eyes were blazing. 'And what if I have? I've been married once already, unlike you; I've nothing to prove.'

  'But it's not me who attracts these rumours,' snarled Eliza. 'I'm only smeared when I associate with you. Something must have happened long ago, before ever you met me; something must have set off this whole foul mudslide.'

  She noticed a tiny change in the angular features. She leaned closer. 'What? What is it?'

  'Nothing.'

  'Don't lie to me. Faces are my trade.'

  Anne took a ragged breath. 'I admit I was once foolish,' she said, very low, 'but I've never been criminal.'

  Yes. 'Tell me.'

  'I was in Italy, in mourning for my husband. It was such a small thing—so random, so unlikely. I met this girl,' said Anne, barely audible.

  'An Italian girl?'

  A nod. The words came out like a sigh. 'There was a kiss.'

  At last. Eliza felt a surge of something like relief. 'Where?'

  'In Italy, as I said. Under a lemon tree.'

  'No, where was the kiss? On the lips?'

  Anne gave her a peculiarly disdainful look. Eliza flushed at the vulgarity of her own question, but she needed to know. A kiss on the cheek was not a kiss on the lips; a touching of the mouth to the back of the fingers was not the same as a kiss pressed to the throat. Female friends kissed each other all the time, but Anne's tone had suggested that this kiss was something more. Longer, more passionate, more lingering? Eliza needed to weigh up the evidence. This woman was accused of wanting terrible things. Well, how could desires be weighed but by the actions they led to?

  'It was just a kiss.'

  'Were you kissed? Or did you kiss?'

  'I can't recall. I've spent so long trying to forget it ever happened. It's ludicrous, the skinny little root of all my troubles. A terrible accident of timing.'

  'It doesn't sound like an accident,' said Eliza.

  'Not the kiss, perhaps, but the fact that it happened to be glimpsed by an English party. I knew none of them and I thought they knew nothing of me, but the English abroad club together so; they must have gossiped until they discovered that I was that young sculptress whose husband had shot himself in a tavern. Well, such a combination of notorious circumstances must have been irresistible,' she added scornfully, 'and the story raced its way back to Grub Street.'

  Eliza sat back as far as her chair would allow her. 'So,' she said almost cheerfully, 'it's true.'

  Anne's eyes were burning.

  'After all your professions of innocence, of bewilderment, it turns out the scribblers had you in a nutshell!'

  'Eliza—'

  Her name sounded like an indecent endearment. 'If you weren't a Sapphist—a filthy Tommy—whyever would you have kissed this Italian, or let her kiss you?'

  'I don't know,' said Anne desperately. 'It happened in a blink, it was over and it's shadowed my life ever since.'

  Eliza wanted to shake the truth out of her. 'You and she must have recognised some hidden bias in each other somehow. Kisses don't just happen.'

  'But they do.' Her eyes were as warm and bewil
dered as a dog's.

  'Not to me,' said Eliza, fierce. 'Not like that. I've spent a lifetime in the theatre—the most decadent of professions, they say—and kisses don't happen to me.'

  'It was only a moment,' Anne pleaded. 'I was confused—the girl was confused—'

  'Yes, but what confused you?'

  'Oh, it's not as simple as that,' said Anne impatiently. 'Not so black and white. There are strange moments in life.'

  Eliza's arms were folded tightly. 'Not in mine.'

  Anne let out a yelp of laughter. It sounded incongruously loud in the little parlour. 'Your whole life is strange.'

  'What on earth do you mean?'

  'Well, you've kept a good man waiting thirteen years so far.' The older woman was on the attack now. 'You walk through the corridors of Drury Lane like a nun in a bordello; you're as hard and chill as marble. You please all and satisfy none; you like to be looked at and desired, but never ever touched—wouldn't you call that strange?'

  'Denial is a habit,' said Eliza furiously, 'and a necessary one in my case. I've always had men fawning around me; I know how to deal with their crude overtures and yes, I'll die a virgin if I must, at least it has a certain dignity.' Her lips were wet; she wiped her hand across her mouth. 'But a fawning, secretly lascivious woman—now that's peculiar.'

  Anne's face was white and red, as if she'd been slapped.

  'What did I ever do or say or seem, to make you single me out?'

  'How dare you?'

  'You've been hanging around me for so long,' Eliza reminded her. 'I tried to push you away five years ago, I thought I'd successfully ended the friendship—then you came back from Spain, swore blind the scandal was buried and Derby told me not to be afraid of you—so I was stupid enough to take you up again.'

  'You must have had your reasons,' snarled Anne. 'I've never forced my friendship on anyone.'

  'I can't remember why I risked it. I'm not like you,' Eliza told her, 'there's nothing in me that resonates with your peculiarities. I couldn't be a Sapphist if I lived to be five hundred.'

  'Who asked you?'

  'I'm not like you, I tell you. One kiss wouldn't change my life.' And Eliza seized Anne by the throat and kissed her, held her in a kiss that was long enough so that when they moved apart they staggered a little. She tasted rouge. 'So,' she said, for something to say.

  The other woman had two patches of hectic red high on her cheekbones. She sucked in her lips as if to hide them. 'I never asked for that.'

  Eliza managed to laugh. 'I was just giving you proof.'

  'Proof of what?'

  'Proof that you leave me cold.' And blindly she made for the door.

  THE TORPOR of late July had settled over Grosvenor Square. Most of the houses were empty by now. Anne stayed indoors, out of sight, brooding over what she should have said to the actress, what she might have done. There was still no message from Derby, which could only mean that he, too, blamed Anne for the catastrophe.

  An answer finally arrived from Mary in Yorkshire.

  My dearest!

  Without telling my family what the matter is I can't set off at once, but I've obtained leave to meet you at Park Place at the end of the month. Till then, don't give way to despair. Haven't you often told me that things can't be as bad as they seem?

  Anne couldn't remember ever saying that, or what she'd thought she meant by it. Mary's words read like a faded message from a distant world. Anne would read the rest of it later. She lay face down on her bed and the brocaded counterpane pressed her eyes shut

  Her mind was working oddly. She supposed it was the broken sleep and the laudanum; she couldn't stomach most of what her cook sent up. The servants sometimes seemed to look at her strangely; she hardly ever rang for them and she flinched when one of them knocked. She found it hard to endure Bet coming in to dress her every morning and undress her every night; she kept her eyes shut and shrank from the warm, humid hands. She wasn't working, was barely reading, read no letters and wrote none, didn't wash.

  Her calves ached, and her shoulders. It was probably the lack of exercise; she hadn't had her daily ride in a week. She'd sent to the stables for her horse, once, on the third morning after Eliza's visit, and managed to get into the saddle and turned its head towards Hyde Park as always—but then the thought of being pointed out by strangers made her start to shake all over. Her foot had jammed in the stirrup; she'd needed the groom's help to get down.

  Doctor Fordyce had turned up at Mrs Moll's behest—was it yesterday, or the day before?—and tapped on her bedroom door, but Anne had held her breath and pretended not to be there. What was wrong with her was not something that Fordyce could cure with his powders, liniments or bleedings. Before he left he spoke through the door, urging her to take some nourishment at least. The maids put trays outside her door at intervals, she could smell their sickening trail. Did Clarissa eat, she wanted to ask the doctor? Did any woman ever eat after she'd been ruined?

  Mrs Moll could read and Sam as well, Anne knew; they probably studied the newspapers. Rumour passed like an infection from servant to servant, house to house. She imagined the staff down there in the housekeeper's room, right now, drinking her tea. There was always something queer about madam, wasn't there?

  That's right, vastly peculiar in her habits, and such strong hands, for a woman.

  She tried to read a newspaper herself, to fill up her brain's yawning vacancy, but once she'd skipped all the doom and gloom about war and sedition, the first item she came across was about betrayal. The Prince of Wales had finally succumbed to Pitt's offer of a higher income if he'd break with Mrs Fitzherbert and marry a princess. Her hold on him had already been weakened by that fascinating serpent, Lady Jersey. Apparently Mrs Fitzherbert—his wife of nine years—had received, with no warning, a note from Prinny made up of three words: Tout est fini. Did he think it sounded more graceful in French?

  Mad thoughts came to Anne in the hot afternoons. Sometimes she looked out of the window through a crack in the blinds, watching the empty street. Once she saw the carriage with the Derby crest go by and thought she counted two heads. Perhaps she'd misjudged Eliza Farren all these years by giving her the benefit of the doubt, she thought viciously. That kiss the woman had pressed on Anne's lips had been so lewd, so violent. Could the whole World have been taken in by the actress's performance of chastity?

  Eliza and Derby lived just round the corner from each other, after all, and she used his carriage; what could be easier for the couple than to enjoy themselves in secret and laugh behind their masks? Niminy-Piminy and her Noble Dwarf romping behind their screen of platonic love; Miss Tittup and Lord Doodle, skirts up and breeches down, bouncing together in a well-sprung coach under the watchful leer of the old procuress who called herself a mother. Perhaps the actress had been the Earl's mistress all these years and dropped several pups while pretending to be on tour, and all in magnificent hypocrisy!

  Anne pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead. She didn't know what to believe. Life was a whirl of impossibilities and there was a foul slug stuck to the back of every flower. Honest men proved traitors and liberty meant heads in a bucket of blood; virgins played whores on stage, whores played virgins off stage, and French ships might land in London any day. Her brain was addled, her cheeks were so hot that it felt as if they were peeling off. She had no skin anymore; if she stepped out of her house she'd be exposed to the burning gaze of the World.

  MARY, ANNE THOUGHT, one afternoon, to force herself out of bed; Mary wrote that she'd meet me at Park Place. She caught a glimpse of a grey face in the glass, but looked away. She rang for Bet and asked for her dark-brown travelling costume. Her voice came out faint and mumbling. 'I'll need a trunk packed. And tell Sam to fetch the coachman with the carriage.'

  'Where are you off to, madam?'

  It's none of your business, Anne would have liked to say, seizing the girl by the ruffle round her neck. 'Park Place.'

  'Very good,' said Bet, dropping a casua
l curtsy.

  When Anne got to her childhood home at the end of the long day's drive, her parents treated her as if she'd been ill: gently and asking no questions. They must have heard from Walpole about the resurrection of her old trouble. (As if it were gout, or lunacy.) They let her sit in the garden for hours, a book motionless in her lap. They said of course they'd be delighted to have dear Miss Berry visit, she could stay as long as she liked. The wafting scent of the lavender harvest stuck in Anne's throat.

  One twilight there was a knock on her bedroom door and she thought it must be Mary, though there'd been no letter announcing her arrival. But it was only the footman with a tightly folded note, sealed with messy black wax. There was no salutation at the top.

  I've been sent a copy of a paragraph from a newspaper, in which my name is linked to yours in a manner I need not describe. You'll understand that this changes everything. I'm sorry but I can't come to you now.

  M.B.

  Anne felt the most peculiar sensation, like a heavy blow cleaving her ribs in two. This changes everything. The servant came back to announce supper, but she didn't go down. Tout est fini. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched the dark thicken on the Berkshire hills. Praxiteles, Anne thought, Praxiteles help me now. I smell burning. My house is on fire and what can I save?

  VIII. Armature

  An internal skeleton, usually of wood or metal,

  in a sculpture of clay, plaster, or wax. The armature

  bears the weight during hardening and

  adds strength to the finished work.

  IT IS now grown common to suspect Impossibilities (as some call them) whenever two Ladies live too much together. The late Queen of France was so accused and so was Raucourt, the famed Actress on the Paris stage. In our own Metropolis it is now a joke to say that such-a-one takes Tea with Mrs D—r. We wish to inform our Correspondents that this horrid practice—though veiled in silence in British Law—is nothing new; do we not sniff it out in Martial's epigrams and in Ovid's Epistle in which Sappho the poet renounces her guilty love for the maidens of Lesbos?