They mark him as he moves amongst them – he feels the twitching of their small eyes – but they cannot make sense of him. Is he a tradesman come stumbling in at the wrong door? A persistent drunk yearning after one of the acolytes of Venus? Or indeed, an angry father come to haul his daughter back to niceness? They cannot guess; they will not approach him, and they turn back into their conversations.
‘Did ’oo imagine,’ one drawls, ‘that such a fing would come of it?’
‘Hie could ey hev?’ replies his friend. ‘Ey never titched the girl before.’
Of course if Mr Hancock finds their speech peculiar it is only for his own lack of cultivation: if he cannot recognise their baby-talk and garbled vowels as the signallers of good breeding that they are, the loss is all his. Since he has spent two score years outside the society of genteel Whigs, he must be forgiven for hearing their speech as a cacophony of pantomime sneezes; they pronounce the first syllable with great energy, and trail off into a drawl as if between a word’s first letter and its last they have lost all conviction in what they are saying. He is aware – and ashamed of – his dislike for them; he is a Tory through and through, as his father was before him. It is the logical, the patriotic, the honest choice. He has never until this moment felt in any means awkward about it.
At the far end of the room a crowd has gathered around another pair of double doors, and as he watches this crowd loosens and pulls back a step or two as a couple emerge, pink-faced and giddy.
‘What is it like?’ he hears the waiting people cry, but the gabble of the couple is inaudible at this distance: he only hears the girl’s breathless giggle and sees her raise her fists to either side of her face in mimicry of the mermaid’s rigor. Some of the young men and women try to peep through the gap in the door.
‘Oh, ho, no, you must wait your turn!’ and in goes a trio of girls with their arms knotted around one another. Once within they let up a-shrieking, and barrel back out at once, clamouring their surprise and horror.
‘All these people,’ says Angelica Neal, ‘come to see your mermaid. Come on your account.’ She drags him through the crowd breathlessly, chattering over her shoulder. ‘The girls are enthralled by it; they relish being so frightened. I believe you must have many extraordinary tales.’
Her eyes flick briefly to his mouth before she turns back to the door and raps her fist against it. ‘Hurry up in there! We are more important than you!’ She turns her back to the door so she can look up at him. ‘I wonder does it reassure the men,’ she says, ‘the way Bel scorns the situation of women? They can feel easy that she has chose this life herself.’
Again he has nothing to add, save for a meek ‘I daresay’.
‘I chose it,’ she says softly. She draws closer to him, a warm cloud of starch and flowers and her own ripe skin-scent. ‘Do you know why?’
He shakes his head.
‘Because I am never happier than in a man’s embrace. There is no pleasure in the world that I like better.’ Their bodies are very close; she presses her palms flat against the door on either side of her hips so that she is turned to face him square on. He tries not to gaze upon her bosom but it is always in his vision as he looks bashfully at her throat, her chin, her lips: it rises pale and soft as she breathes deeply, and the velvet flowers heave.
When the doors open behind her she falls flat on her back.
Three young navymen in plush indigo jackets and white breeches are coming out, and when she tumbles nearly straight into them they cannot disentangle their consternation from their mirth.
‘’Pon my soul,’ says one, his black hair all awry, while the others – merry with wine – clutch their sides until tears squeeze from their eyes. ‘’Pon my soul, you dizzy maid, what were you about?’
Mr Hancock stands all dismayed; the collapse of his companion is one thing, but he has always felt wistful at the sight of young men in blue jackets; since his youth he cherished the ambition that a son of his would go to the navy, and it may yet be that young Henry carouses now on some foreign shore, a midshipman with ruffled curls just as these he sees before him.
When Mr Hancock makes no move to help her, the dark-haired lieutenant reaches down to take Angelica’s hand. ‘Do not trouble yourself,’ she snaps, ruffled as a cat who has fallen off a fence.
‘Forgive me,’ says Mr Hancock, leaping belatedly to her assistance, but what with her great heavy skirts and her stays which prevent the necessary bending, she flounders there, and rises not at all. The men stand in a semicircle watching, one giggling helplessly, while she slumps on the floor, the merchant heaving on her arm with much perspiration.
After some minutes of this the lieutenant steps in again – ‘You must permit me’ – and he taking one of Angelica’s arms and Mr Hancock the other, they hoist her to her feet in a moment.
‘She is launched!’ cries one of the men.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ says another, and they rollick away with a great huzzah.
‘Are you hurt?’ says Mr Hancock, but Angelica, shaking out her skirts and fluffing out her hair, is only rageful.
‘Close the door, for pity’s sake,’ she snaps. ‘Do not make me any more of a spectacle.’
‘Am I to stay?’ he ventures, but she is too busy patting herself down to answer, grumbling.
‘And who invited them, after all, such horrid tars? This vulgar sort of revelry would never have been tolerated in this establishment ten years back; the company is not what it was –’ and at this moment she shoots him a look of such particular venom that he supposes he ought to leave her alone. Then again he is afraid to be out in that thronged room unescorted. Choosing to take his chances on a ruffled woman over a supercilious crowd, he shuts the door – bolts it for good measure – and they are alone in the mermaid’s grotto.
In fact, it is very well done. Mrs Chappell has somehow contrived to bring in an array of great glass fish tanks, with gilt chasing, full of green water and pearly fish. There are green and blue shades on all the candles, so what little light there is has a queer underwater coolness to it, and the walls are swagged and draped with raw silk and strings of pearls. The mermaid itself is raised up on a plinth, surrounded by branches of red and white coral, and the flickering candlelight gives the impression of movement, as if the coral were fluttering and the infant mermaid squirming. Somewhere in the room, a little fountain is splashing.
And then there is the singing.
He sees no girls in the room but their voices weave around him in a high wordless melody, as if all the sirens had banded together to lure him to their shores. The noises of the party without melt into oblivion.
‘Oh,’ says Angelica. She has composed herself, and her eyes are upon the crooked little mermaid. ‘So this is what they look like.’ In the shifting light she is soft around the edges.
When she becomes aware of his gaze, she smiles as if she has never been put out in the first place. ‘Do you like it?’ she asks.
‘I do,’ he says, and she advances upon him across the room, her silks sighing.
‘Come,’ she says, ‘I wish to look more closely,’ and taking his hand leads him to stand before the creature. Although he affects a face of grave study, he has looked upon the mermaid far too many times to apprehend anything new about it, and his eyes rest upon it without seeing it at all. He cannot think, with her so close to him – and leaning in ever closer – of anything besides her. Every single nerve in his fingers aches and sings as she caresses them; she is so close that her arm presses against his, and the warmth of her body, the suggestion of her skin, is a shock to him. The invisible singing rises gently, and he thinks, this is not the music of mermaids but of angels. She puts her face up to his, very serious, so pretty that he wishes to press his lips to the little crease between her brows. But he does not move. Her lips are just parted; her eyes seek his.
With her body so near to him, he already feels he is about to die, but then she makes a little wriggle and her stays slip down her bosom. E
ither she is very expert in what she does, or there is an ingenuity to her clothes that is lacking in other women’s, for she does it in a single swift movement and all the while looking perfectly at him. She only exposes another inch of herself, but her breasts strain against the band of chenille flowers, and the smell of vanilla and roses rises into the room, along with another smell, what he thinks must be that of her own body, something like that sharp and flowery scent that rises off the skin of orchard fruit – plums or peaches – a sun-warmed fragrance, a kind of promise. There is no slackness to what he sees of her breasts; they are full and pale, seamed with one or two pearly lines, quivering just fractionally in time with her pulse.
‘Here,’ she whispers and, lifting his hand, places it squarely upon her bosom. For a moment, his bare skin upon hers, he is lost. Her breasts are pressed together by her stays, faintly damp with her sweat, and they yield with a little spring to his fingertips. If he were bolder he would run hands over them, and press and squeeze and fill his palms with them, but he is quite simply petrified.
He stands stock-still, as if a small boy caught in the act of misdemeanour, but he cannot remove his hand from her body. She is as soft as – well, what is there to compare it to? She is not soft like velvet or silk, nor like lambswool. She is soft as human flesh, that is all, fair warm skin blanketed over a vale of womanly fat, and somewhere deep underneath it all are her tendons and muscles, her hot blood, her pumping heart.
‘My soul!’ he whispers, and there is a little falter in the singing, comparable to a giggle.
In the swimming green light she looks up into his face with a peculiar expression: mischief or adoration.
‘What I wish you to do to me …’ she whispers, and it is all he can do to control himself.
They press together a little longer. Her hair drifts around both their faces in the upgust from the candles. The mermaid hunches darkly under its glass dome, but neither one of them is thinking of it.
‘But the night is very young,’ Angelica is murmuring, interspersing her words with little wet kisses on his lips and his face. Her kisses are firm and delicate, like her mouth: he can feel the particular arch of her upper lip even as she presses it against him. ‘We have already spent too long locked up together, when others are hammering to take their place in here.’ She takes his hand again. ‘Will you rejoin the party with me?’
He wants to pull her back to him: he puts his hands on her waist and cannot help then but to run them down her back and over her hips, up to her breasts; there is something compelling about the shape of her body, its symmetry, its dimensions, the very glide of her, that he thinks he could spend all day touching and never tire of.
‘Come along,’ she says again, tugging him towards her. He is hard as a yardstick.
‘May I not …?’ he asks. ‘Here, where it is private. I could be quick.’
‘I daresay you could,’ and there is a little flicker of he-knows-not-what in her eyes. Perhaps he has mis-spoke, but he has always had the impression they are grateful when a gentleman is quick. She pulls away, as if it is easy for her. ‘Outside there is a party all for your sake. Mrs Chappell has laid on many splendid things that you have not yet seen – and I wish to dance.’ She is unbolting the door but before she throws it wide she looks up at him one more time with those wide eyes of hers, and says, ‘When you take your pleasure with me, sir, I mean to take my time about it.’
He sees a flash of white teeth upon her lower lip. Then she is all sunny mischief. ‘Come!’ she says. ‘The entertainment begins.’
FOURTEEN
The first thing he notices as they return to the great chamber is that every member of the little orchestra has turned his face to the wall. They play on with their backs to the proceedings, their chins lowered, and even their leader has his toes a mere inch from the skirting, so that when he becomes too inspired in his conducting he raps his knuckles against the panelling.
‘What is afoot?’ asks Mr Hancock, his hand in Angelica’s. All the party have moved off the floor, standing three or four men deep in a circle. Some lounge on couches, some even having their hair and lapels fondled by girls, but even they are strangely watchful, craning their necks to regard the room.
‘The entertainment is about to begin,’ says Angelica, and at that moment there is a little rustling of excitement, and Mrs Chappell, strident as a schoolmistress, announces:
‘A dance! The sirens and the sailors.’
The footmen open the doors wide and first there enter eight boisterous young men, naked to the waist, wearing neckerchiefs and white broadcloth trousers that flap above their ankles. As the orchestra strikes up they execute a swift hornpipe, their neckerchiefs flying and their feet stamping. A little shine of sweat breaks out in the hollows of their backs, and above the stamping can be heard the careful rhythm of their breathing. They have scrubbed young faces, their jaws barely fuzzed, and their bodies are smooth and hairless.
‘Those boys never went to sea!’ scoffs Mr Hancock as the crowd applauds, but Angelica nudges him in the ribs.
The boys are still for a moment, their feet wide apart and their chests rising and falling in the glister of the chandeliers. Now the doors are opened again and the sound of high, liquid female singing floods the room. The crowd murmurs: the room seems to Mr Hancock to rise a degree or two in temperature, and is suddenly filled with eyes, all the men blinking and peering about, looking sharply here and there for what is coming. The light sits in many tiny stars on their moist lower lids.
Thus enter, singing, eight beautiful girls, the finest from Mrs Chappell’s stables. Each holds a comb and a mirror, her hair falling over her shoulders and back, and each is as good as naked. They wear seed pearls around their necks, and their hair is sprigged with coral and laced with ropes of pearls, but they make no attempt to cover their breasts or their bellies. Skeins of sea-green chiffon hang from their wrists and float behind them, and around their waists they wear ingenious girdles of mother-of-pearl, a very many crescents strung together to suggest a row of scales, shimmering and clinking as the mermaids move their hips. A few slivers fall down fore and aft, rather in coyness than in true modesty, for he sees clear as day that all the hair upon their mounds of pleasure has, by some cunningness, been turned as green as the moss that fringes a seaside rock-pool.
‘Ah! They are well done!’ cries Angelica, breaking out into applause.
‘If they set out to give themselves arsenic poisoning,’ says Mr Hancock, but not so that it may be heard by anybody but himself. More loudly he adds, ‘I never saw such a thing,’ which is more diplomatic but no less sincere, for indeed he is nearly as astounded by these mermaids as he was by his own genuine article. He is also as little delighted. He recognises among the girls those he has seen before – the dusky one from downstairs, her nipples dark as raisins, her eyes closed as she begins a languid dance – and it does not feel quite easy to be looking upon those little misses, whom he still half-thinks of as errant housemaids or runaway daughters. He sees that their bodies are beautiful but he feels nothing but avuncular concern: to lay hand on such a child, at his age, seems both unseemly and distasteful.
‘And yet who am I to say,’ he reprimands himself. ‘I do not make the tastes. That is for the great men in the room.’
The girls form themselves into a line, facing at two yards’ distance the line of sailors, and as the musicians play on they sing a new song.
‘Now the seduction begins,’ whispers Angelica, and truly as the girls sing and beckon, the sailors begin slowly to advance upon them. The girls are coquettish behind their mirrors, stretching thick locks of their hair out from their heads with the combs, and letting the curls fall back over their shoulders all in perfect unison.
It is at this moment that Mr Hancock perceives that the sailors’ enthusiasm for the sirens is not an act. In each of their broadcloth trousers there is an unmistakable heaving, which only grows more noticeable with each flick of the girls’ hair, each lovely sway of
their naked hips.
‘What is happening?’ he asks sharply. The mood in the room – that watchful eagerness he noticed even before the girls’ entrance – has not dissipated. In fact it is building. The men are more alert than ever, and there is a steam of sweat amongst them, a strange tight breathlessness. Somebody lets out a small groan. The girls are dancing like true river-nymphs from an ancient fresco, their bosoms quivering upon their ribcages, sliding and yielding with their stretching muscles. And every man but Mr Hancock has his hand in his breeches.
‘What is this?’ he whispers. The man at his side is engaged in noisy wet kissing with one of the young ladies, and she is fumbling urgently at his belt buckle. The others watch the dance with terrible keenness, their wrists working vigorously, as the mermaids wilt into the arms of the sailors. And as the eight sailors’ hands slide up the flanks of their eight mermaids in perfect unison, and eight bright nipples are rolled between eight sets of finger-and-thumb, these old men begin to disrobe themselves, shaking off their jackets and loosening their cravats. The mermaids seem almost to swim against their lovers, their bodies nudging and undulating in a way that is so perfectly, strictly dance-like but which is not a dance any longer.
The sailor partnered with the mulatto girl is the first to unbuckle his trousers, but the other seven follow in quick choreographed succession.
‘I think they do not mean to stop,’ says Mr Hancock.
Angelica is watching intently and critically, like a woman at a new play. ‘Stop?’ she says. ‘Why, no. They are only just begun.’
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 12