'What?' said Anne, unlacing and pulling back her hood so it fell loosely on her shoulders.
'It looks like hot milk,' roared Mary.
Anne started to laugh. She seized her friend's hand. 'Come, let's walk down the pier.'
'But won't it be slick?'
'We'll take care.'
Their gloved fingers interlaced, they made their way down the very centre of the pier. The summer night was darkened with clouds; Anne felt a hint of rain speckle her cheek. The wind sprang up about them; it seemed to push them along the pier. 'Are you cold?' she said in Mary's ear.
'Not a bit.'
'Nor am I. Strange, I felt the chill more in our lodgings. Oh, smugglers!' she remarked.
'Where?'
She pointed to the light wavering on the coast. 'Well, it could be. How else does Lady Jersey get her French wine?'
Halfway along the pier a wave that was higher than the others slapped the side, sending up a spray as white as snow, and water sloshed across the stones, touching their shoes.
'Oh!'
'Would you rather go back?' asked Anne.
'Not yet,' Mary told her. Her face was pink as if with embarrassment; her smile was broad.
'You must say, whenever you want to.'
They linked arms tightly. The wind had a grip on their heavy skirts. Ten yards from the end of the pier there was a great stone bollard with a rope round it and the two women sat down without a word. All around them the sea boiled, like the foam on black coffee. The waves were arching higher every minute. The wind roared. It was raining in earnest now and Anne had hardly noticed.
'You're not afraid?' she mouthed at Mary.
A shake of the head. Shining eyes.
They never saw the great wave building; the first they knew was when with a terrible boom it broke on the end of the pier and shattered, pluming in the sky above them like a vast angel, and the women shrieked. As the silver needles of spray fell, the two of them squeezed their eyes shut and clung to the bollard and to each other. Afterwards they gasped, wet-cheeked, as the carpet of dark water rolled off the pier.
'I thought we were going to die,' Anne told Mary, wiping her eyelids with the inside of her furred hood.
Her friend nodded.
Anne licked her lips. 'Taste.'
'Very salty,' said Mary, copying her. 'Promise me—'
'What?' Anne felt ready to promise anything. This was her old Mary, her ever-young Mary, rather.
'Promise me we'll never tell Walpole.'
They both screamed with laughter. 'Never!'
'Never never never!'
'It would snuff him out entirely,' said Anne more soberly.
'Think of the letters he'd write upon the subject,' said Mary.
'Such eloquence, such pathos, such agony!'
'We must carry our secret to the grave.'
And at that word they fell silent. Anne felt her wet cloak grow heavy on her shoulders. Another wave, as big as the last, cracked apart on the stones in front of them and splintered like a firework, like the rays of a white sun, and this time the women screamed less in fear than in delight.
'A BATTLE ROYAL,' Derby explained, 'is a very rare event, because of the degree of wastage. Now Rex, for instance—' He indicated the black-breasted red bird in his handler's arms.
'Oh, do you name them, like dogs?' Fox, sitting beside him in the front row of the Preston Cockpit, was clearly trying to take an interest in the details.
'Not usually,' said Derby, a little sheepish, 'but this one's a champion, perhaps the pluckiest I've ever bred; I believe he's unbeatable. Last Michaelmas at the Royal Cockpit I matched him against Old Q.'s Grey and won 100 guineas.'
Fox whistled. 'Did your Rex kill the other bird?'
'No, no, only robbed him of a few feathers; that was a very genteel match, won on technicalities. Since then he's triumphed twice more by wounding and he's had the whole summer resting up at Knowsley.'
'Hang on,' said Fox, his forehead wrinkled, 'you mean to say your four-year-old cock has never killed?'
Derby shrugged. 'He hasn't needed to.'
'Yet you're putting him for a Battle Royal today—eight birds in the pit and only one to come out alive?'
'Oh, but killing comes instinctively to a cock with bottom. And speaking of birds, can't you speak to Grey about this foolish motion to do away with the Game Laws?'
'Mm, I warned him you wouldn't like it,' said Fox. 'But we're only talking about the odd hare for the pot of some hungry family—'
Derby's jaw was set. 'If anyone could march into Knowsley and shoot a deer, in what sense would it be my land any more? And if it weren't my land, passed down by my grandsires' grandsires, why should I feel responsible for it and everyone who lives on it, why should I feel it my duty to represent them in the Lords?' He knew he was beginning to harangue. 'Grey and Sherry make me feel like some stern old Tory sometimes,' he added ruefully. 'We quarrelled half the night at Brooks's last month, and Sherry pushed his point till he was claiming that men of birth, of ancient lineage, are no better qualified to govern their country than shoemakers or hairdressers!'
'Well,' said Fox, hedging, 'individual merit is the thing of course, but I've always thought of the aristocracy as Parliament's backbone—'
'We lords speak for the country because we care for it—because we own most of it,' said Derby pragmatically. 'Why, Sherry even disputed my right to have put my son into a safe seat in Preston this summer—claimed all boroughs should be free, and young Edward should have had to fight it out on the hustings with every Tom, Dick and Harry!'
Fox's grin was uneasy. He seemed relieved when the Master started making the announcements in a hoarse roar.
'Gentlemen, quieten down, if you'd be so kind. Today we have a Battle Royal, five matchable cocks and three outsize Shakebags, to fight with fair spurs, sickles, launcels and penknife spurs. Places, please.'
'Which birds are kept in there?' asked Fox, pointing out a large hanging cage.
Derby sniggered. 'That's for any man who makes a wager and can't pay.'
'I mustn't bet a shilling, then!' The cocks were on the sods and feathers were starting to fly. 'Where's your Rex?'
'There, on the far left. He's downed three already,' said Derby pleasurably. Rex was doing superbly; his heels arced down with no warning. There was blood on his clipped wattles, but Derby didn't think it was his own. The only other real contender was Mr Jones's Dun. Several men in the front row had blood spattered across their faces.
'Isn't it a mite ... barbaric?' murmured Fox.
Rex had got the Dun in a hard grip. 'At least it's fast. A Welsh Main—where they fight it out in rounds—can go on all day.' Derby looked back at the pit, but he'd missed it, the crucial blow. Damnation! Mr Jones's bird lay in a mess of bloody feathers. That was it, Rex was the only bird moving.
Derby jumped to his feet, and received bows and congratulations. He leaned into the pit to accept the heavy purse from the Master's hand. Sitting down again he murmured to Fox, 'I'm afraid this will confirm my feeder, Busley, in his superstition. He smuggled a bit of consecrated bread home from church under his tongue and fed it to Rex this morning!'
Fox's expression was half amused, half horrified.
Derby watched Rex stagger sideways, avoiding the handler's grasp. He looked more closely. Stabbed in the left thigh, he reckoned; the bird would never be fit to fight again. Derby felt misery come over his head like a dark wave.
'I'M SHOWING my age,' said Anne, looking at herself in the small tarnished mirror in their bedroom at Bognor.
'Rubbish,' said Mary, 'your hair's as brown as ever.'
'It's the skin that gives it away.'
'Where?' asked Mary, coming closer.
Anne pointed to various soft faint lines on her face and places where her neck looked stretched.
'That's only your ... what's the word? What does one say of statues when they've gained in charm over the years?'
'Patina?' said Anne, amused.
'Like the yellowing of ivory.'
'Exactly,' said Mary. 'Who wants their masterpiece to look new?'
Anne turned and looked at Mary, whose face had new lines of its own and shadows under the eyes. 'You're not quite repaired yet.'
The smile was a little bitter. 'I assure you, dear nurse, I'm mending as fast as I can. Men have an advantage in this respect; a man can gallop and drive and game away till he's forgotten everything, while a poor helpless woman nourishes her passion like a monster in her bosom.'
Anne was stern. 'You're not a poor helpless woman.'
'Well. Rich in friendship, at least.'
'And you're unjust to the opposite sex,' Anne pointed out. 'What about Walpole? He's a martyr to sensibility if ever anyone was. Men can suffer as long and hard as we can.' She found herself thinking of the actress and her unalterable Earl: Galloping and driving and gaming had done nothing to free Derby from his long devotion. Was it a weakness, she wondered, or his greatest strength? He'd loved the actress enough to take his old friendship for Anne, for instance, and break it like a twig.
The September day was Italian; at six in the evening the white sands of Bognor still glinted like mica under the weight of the sun. Mary, eyes shut, settled her shoulder blades against the rented chair and rotated her parasol. They'd dined early and lightly, then gone out for more air.
'I'm almost too hot,' said Anne wonderingly.
'Mm.'
Anne pulled out her watch. 'According to our landlady, ladies may bathe on the far side of those rocks before eight and after six.'
Mary's eyes fluttered open. 'You don't propose—'
'I do,' said Anne. 'It's healthy water; Fordyce recommends it.'
'You'd go in alone?'
'Need I?'
'Oh, but I don't bathe, you know,' said Mary, struggling to sit up.
'What, thirty-three years old and never had a bath?'
Mary blushed faintly. 'The things that fall from your tongue!'
'I was only remarking, in the six years and one month since first we met—'
'Only six years?' marvelled Mary.
'I'll take that in a complimentary spirit,' said Anne, rueful. 'I was saying, you've always seemed to me a perfectly clean creature, considering what you now confess.'
'Oh, stop it. All I meant was I've never been in the sea.'
'Then it's high time. Come along,' said Anne, levering herself out of her chair.
'But we've no costumes—' protested Mary.
'One hires them from the attendants in the huts.'
'—and I don't know that I want to make the experiment at this time of life.'
'This time of life,' scoffed Anne. She narrowed her eyes at her friend and held out a hand to pull her out of her chair. 'This time of life can be a very good time of life.' She had been going to say our time of life, but there were fourteen years between them, as there always would be. Odd, how the difference between forty-one and twenty-seven had stretched so yawningly when they'd first met, but forty-seven and thirty-three had quite a different ring. They were both in their middle years now, she supposed.
Mary followed her over the sands mutely.
There were a few bathing machines, but Anne didn't like them; it seemed ridiculously elaborate to be towed out to sea in such an apparatus. She and Mary changed in a hut. When they emerged they were cumbrous in calico: bloomers, skirts, boned bodices all salt-stiff and sharp against their hot skin. The huge cap containing Mary's hair was tilting at an odd angle. Mary stared down at herself, then scanned the rocks.
'What are you looking for—prying gentlemen?'
'I suppose,' Mary said with a little laugh. 'I've never been out in such a mad ensemble. What do they wear—the men?'
'Nothing at all,' Anne told her.
'No!'
'That's why we're banned from here between eight and six.' Anne was halfway down the beach by now, in the path of the sinking sun. She called over her shoulder, 'The water should be delightfully warmed by now.'
There were a couple of other female figures immersed in the shining water, or coming out in their heavy draperies. No one they knew. The sand was hot and gritty under Anne's soles.
Mary caught up with her. 'I'm trying to remember the last time I walked barefoot. Not since I was very small, I think, in my grandmother's garden in Yorkshire.'
Anne strode into the water, up to her knees.
'I really don't—I think, on the whole—'
Anne went back and held out her hand. Mary grasped it and took one step on to the wet brown sand. Another, and another, and then a wave ran in and seized her by the ankles. 'Oh, the cold!' Her voice was high with shock. The wave slid back.
'It's a strange feeling, isn't it?'
'As if the ground is sucking me in. It is!' she added, looking at her half-buried feet.
'Don't be alarmed.' Anne tugged gently and Mary took a few more steps. 'Isn't it delicious?'
'You said the sun would have warmed it.'
'It has,' Anne assured her. 'I bathed at Brighton one April morning when I was a girl; now that was cold.'
Mary clung to Anne's hand and lurched on. The water was like a knife against Anne's thighs, a silvery pain, inch after inch. The reddening sun dazzled her eyes.
'Halfway in. You won't fall, it shelves very gently.' Anne squeezed her fingers.
Mary talked fast, as if to distract herself. 'Oh, it's as if I'm being cut in two. I can't feel my legs,' she said, as much in wonder as reproach. 'It's like a burning hoop round my waist.'
' Those friends thou hast,' Anne quoted merrily,'and their adoption tried...'
'...grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel' finished Mary, breathless. 'Oh!' The water had her by the ribs now, Anne could see the dark line. Because she was so much shorter than Anne it had almost reached her narrow shoulders. It lapped at her corset, outlining the curves that were still as firm as a girl's. 'I don't believe—' she gasped.
'Oh, you can, you can,' Anne assured her, letting herself sink. 'We're there,' she said, her head tilted up to the dying sun, the water sweet against her throat.
'Don't let go of my hand.'
'I won't.'
Mary stood very still. Then she subsided into the water and it reached her white chin.
'Think how much good this is doing you,' Anne told her. 'All that medicinal salt is refreshing your skin and stimulating your organs.'
Mary didn't answer. Was she fighting the temptation to let go of her friend's hand and stagger back to shore?
'The Greeks, of course, considered water holy,' Anne told her. 'They had their sacred springs and pools. What was it Homer said of water? Clean, light, precious, most desirable.'
A wave wet Mary's mouth. 'Oh!'
'Kick your legs.'
Mary jerked out of the water like a seal. She'd dropped Anne's hand. She bounded up and down, waving her arms as if trying to put out a fire. 'It's—it's so—I can't bear—'
Anne joined in the wild laughter. Two mature ladies, wearing grotesque calico sacks, leaping about like sprats in a net! She plunged down for a long moment to let the water possess her entirely: her hot cheeks, the small chambers of her ears. It lifted her sack of hair and parted every strand at the root. She emerged with a shriek of pleasure, her eyes stinging.
Mary was splashing like a dog. 'I thought you were drowning!'
'Just take a big breath and hold it,' Anne told her. Her cap had come loose, and was hanging on her shoulder like bladderwrack; she tugged at it.
Mary gulped the air, then went down. When she rebounded her eyes were huge. 'What an extraordinary sensation.'
'Isn't it? I'll bet you're not cold any more, are you?'
'No,' said Mary. 'No, not any more.'
Between waves Anne took a mouthful of the water. The salt made her shudder. 'Powerful stuff,' she said when she could speak. 'Fordyce says if I could get down a glass of it every morning I'd never know a day's indisposition.'
Mary tried a sip, but her face puckered
up like a baby's. 'It's abominable!'
'Oh, I'd pick it over that foul, sulphurous Spa water any time.' Anne took another long gulp of it, then wiped her mouth.
'Can you swim?' said Mary.
'No, I make sure never to go beyond my depth. But there is one thing I know how to do—if you'll help—' She found Mary's hand in the water and placed it against the small of her own back. 'Bear me up, just here, and I'll try to float.' Anne heaved herself backwards and felt the silvery water infiltrate her ears. Somehow it worked, the magic trick of buoyancy. Her costume trailed weightily, but Mary's firm hand was under her.
'Splendid,' cried Mary. 'Let me.'
Reluctantly Anne found her feet again with a great splash, and put out her hand. 'Lie back all at once,' she said, 'arch like a cat. Don't be scared.'
Mary smiled as she floated; her arms were spread like an angel's. Her cap had floated off; her dark curls relaxed on the water. No, not an angel but the statue of an angel, or something like it; the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which Anne went to see whenever she was in Paris. The calico clung to Mary's narrow limbs like carved drapery. She was a Sybil in white marble, a gleaming monument. Like someone who'd leapt from a cliff and now floated, free of her despair. Her eyes opened, and she and Anne were looking at each other.
When they came out of the water it was into a different world, or rather, it was they who'd changed, Anne thought, and they walked through the streets of Bognor like strangers. It was as if the waters had gone over their heads and worked a metamorphosis.
At midnight, when they should have been asleep, Anne was lying so close to Mary that tendrils of nape hair—still damp—touched her lips. Her breath was hot between them. Mary turned over, like a fish, and their faces were touching. 'Anne?'
'Yes,' she said and the word was a great falling.
'You must teach me,' Mary whispered.
A long silence, how long, ten beats of a sure and terror-struck heart? 'I can't.'
Mary moved as if to turn away, but Anne took her by the shoulder with her free hand. 'Don't mistake me,' she said, very low, 'please don't mistake me. I only mean I know no more than you.'
Life Mask Page 61