The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  Everywhere around the room, just at waist height, is a-flutter with movement. Men pleasure themselves as if in private, with their shirts falling open over their hairy bellies. Mr Hancock knows now how best each of eleven Members of Parliament likes to be touched. Some stand to watch the proceedings unfold; others have already retreated to couches, loosing the tapes of their ladies’ white gowns so they fall away from their bodies like sea foam, and these lovely nymphs knead and flatter their flaccid lovers into enthusiasm.

  The sailors drop their trousers. Their bowsprits are extended.

  ‘Sheath up!’ booms Mrs Chappell. ‘If you did not purchase protection on the way in, you must avail yourself of it now. If I see any man going into the breach without armour, you may be sure he will never make another sally.’ A maid, artfully draped, scuttles in with a vast marble dish of milk, in which the cundums have been soaked to perfect tenderness. Mrs Chappell shakes one dry and holds it aloft for the crowd to see. ‘No excuses!’

  The sailors grasp the mermaids’ hips, the assembled worthies in the front row bring out their members to air, and Mr Hancock blunders for the door. He pushes through the men, crouched and lewd as baboons, without looking at them: he is even more anxious not to touch them, and he struggles through with his arms raised up to guard his face, using his forearms and elbows to force his path.

  Angelica is pursuing him. ‘Where are you going?’ she asks, when she catches him up on the landing. He is sucking in deep breaths of the air, as a swimmer surfacing.

  ‘I am leaving,’ he says.

  ‘Will you not …?’ She places a hand on his arm. ‘Why not stay?’ She is all honey and cherries. ‘If this is not to your taste, we can take ourselves off. There are private rooms upstairs,’ she adds in a sugared murmur.

  ‘No. No, no.’ He has no appetite for her now. Everything about her is sullied – her beauty too effusive, all there for any body to look upon. Nothing about her is secret or private: he sees that she is a bauble for old men’s pleasure, nothing more. Her mouth is crestfallen, and the little crease has taken up its place between her brows, but he cannot trouble himself with her expressions. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he says briefly.

  ‘Come,’ she coaxes in a high soft voice. ‘Come sit down with me.’

  ‘This is not a place for a man of my sort.’

  ‘Come have a glass of something nice.’

  ‘I must away.’

  Before she can entreat him any further, he pulls his arm from her grasp and takes to the stairs. She watches him from the banister, as the footmen fetch him his hat and greatcoat. She leans over.

  ‘My dear heart,’ she calls, but he does not so much as look up; the only answer she receives is the hurried clatter of his footsteps on the marble as the top of his head passes beneath her and out of the door.

  FIFTEEN

  It may very well be that Angelica believes what she has said: that she finds no greater pleasure than in the arms of men. However, her believing it does not make it true. Angelica has endured many encounters that were not to her liking: some too brief, some too extended; some brutal, some tentative; some bizarre, some tedious. She has given pleasure to men made noisome by foul and boozy breath or foetid underarms or gallons of rancid eau de cologne, and she has indulged them to spend themselves all over – variously – her bosom, her belly, her feet, her bedsheets, her hair, and the small of her back, as well as inside nearly any orifice that pleases them. She has donned an admiral’s tricorn, affected schoolgirl innocence, and she has nipped down the back stairs in her dishabille in search of a likely switch or whisk or carpet-beater when an evening demanded particular aggression of her. She has suffered deviants whose skill did not match their pride to work at her privates with their lips and tongues (and – God save her! – their teeth) for hours at a time, and she has applied her own mouth to things she would not independently have chose to.

  Her career in coitus has not, in short, been a perfect round of pleasure on her part. But mark you, whatever small disappointment or boredom or terror she might experience during the act is more than eclipsed by all the attendant enjoyments of her profession. Whoredom appeals to Angelica’s character in a great host of ways: she likes to live closely with other women and share her secrets with them; she likes to sing and drink and dance; she likes to be cosseted; she likes to be looked at.

  What she likes best of all is to be desired.

  It tickles her to see men grown stupid when they gaze upon her, all soft-eyed and slow in the head. In fact it inflames her. To find that her eyes and body and manner drive them out of their wits; to feel the humidity of their palms when they remove their gloves, or watch the involuntary twitch of their members when she moves close towards them; to discover that secret otherworld of commerce in which she is at least as powerful as they: all of this provokes in her the most exquisite excitement, and she goads them into ever greater passions of fever and fury. She likes to be pursued, but she does not feel she is ever captured, for it is only by her own decision that they lay hands on her.

  And so she is perturbed. This eventuality had not occurred to her; she had no other plan for the evening, for how could this one go awry?

  And he a wretched merchant, she thinks as she flounces back into the great and now orgiastic chamber. I should have had him in an instant; he has no idea what he has given up, for in no other circumstances in the world will he ever be near me again.

  What should she do now? The shine has been taken off the proceedings, although there are a great many men here who might be ripe for cultivation, she having been dangled before them for three years, docile in the corner of the duke’s country parlour with lace veiling her bosom and her hair unadorned. What red-blooded man does not desire his friend’s mistress, after all, and what enterprising man does not step into the breach once this friend is no longer able to defend her? Now would be her moment to step back into the firmament; to flirt and charm and negotiate, for amongst these men who watched her for so long there must be a likely protector.

  But she finds the will is no longer in her. What so repelled Hancock that he could walk away so easily? Was it merely the scene, or was the fault in me? Is there something wanting in my manner or my countenance?

  Am I too old?

  And she keeps to the shadows, and only smiles when hallooed by priapic admirers. She happens idly to think of the dark-haired naval officer: young, handsome; perhaps impressionable. Certainly the look that passed between them when he helped her up was not an ordinary one. There was no mistaking it; a communication passed between them at that moment, part greeting and part question. He must have felt it too.

  But no, no. She will not look for him. If a paunchy cit has no time for her allures, a young rake must certainly laugh in her face.

  She traipses instead to the private chambers upstairs, where the housemaids burst from the jib door with armfuls of linen, and Mrs Chappell hustles them about with breathless discretion: ‘And the blue room occupied too? Well then, there is nothing for it, nothing for it. You will have to throw my own chamber open to use.’

  Polly, her fish-scales rattling, her green dye smeared, is dancing on the spot with anxiety. ‘And where am I to take the Admiral,’ she demands, ‘if she –’ a glare at the equally smeared Elinor – ‘removes to your chamber?’

  ‘Christ! We are full to the gunwales.’ Mrs Chappell presses her fists against her eyes for a moment, and then smooths down her gauzy apron with calm decision. ‘Very well. Lucy and Clarinda, you will have to make up the servants’ rooms for entertaining. The bedsprings are wanting and the stairs are steep, so do not take old men there, for once up there will be no getting them down again.’

  ‘If only it were so!’ snorts one of the girls, but Mrs Chappell waves her quip away as she rattles on:

  ‘Then bring the couch from my room onto the landing, and that will serve for another meeting-place. As for you –’ she turns to Angelica – ‘if you come in search of a bed, Mr Hancock must be
disappointed for the time being. There is not a corner of this house that is not given over to vice.’

  ‘You need fear nothing from me.’

  ‘Then what are you doing up here under my feet? Is anything amiss? Are you keeping the gentleman amused?’

  ‘Oh yes – yes. Of course.’

  ‘Because he must want for nothing. I shan’t have you abandoning him, miss, this is his party and I wish him pleased. We need our mermaid.’

  ‘He is mightily satisfied.’

  Mrs Chappell narrows her eyes. ‘Where is he?’

  Angelica hesitates. But at this very moment the girls stagger out with the couch, and in their blind exertion topple a Japanese screen; the air is rent with a terrible crack and one lacquered panel shears in two. ‘God’s wounds!’ exclaims Mrs Chappell. ‘What have you done now, you fools?’ The girls are white-faced; one begins immediately to weep. ‘Get away,’ Mrs Chappell snaps to Angelica. ‘Whatever you wandered here for, I do not have the time for it. Make yourself useful; call them all to dinner. The old men have exerted themselves enough, I daresay; they are only cluttering the place up now in the hope of being fed. We may yet send them home by midnight.’

  ‘And then the real party may begin,’ says Elinor cheerfully, for she is parched for a glass of something strong, and may not indulge until her duties are done.

  Casting one more glance around for the naval officer, Angelica trots back down the stairs and strikes the Chinese gong on the first-floor landing. ‘Refreshments,’ she announces to the great chamber, where some are straightening their garments and blinking about themselves. ‘Downstairs, at your pleasure.’

  A long table has been magicked into the vast ground-floor atrium, laid for fifty and spread with pies and tarts, roast fowl and jellies and ices. Mrs Fortescue alone is already seated. Her plate is empty but she has filled her glass generously.

  ‘Ah,’ says Angelica, taking a seat beside her as the guests drift down in various gradations of nakedness, ‘the ghost at the feast.’

  Bel’s eyes move heavily over the scene. ‘What happened to the mermaid man?’ she asks.

  ‘Gone.’ There is a fortuitous tower of sweetmeats on the table, and Angelica pops one into her mouth. Its sugary crunch gives way to gushing syrup. She takes another and licks her fingers. ‘He did not appreciate the lewdness,’ she adds, her aplomb some way restored.

  ‘No surprise.’

  ‘I am sure I do not care.’ Angelica speaks indistinctly, for her tongue is engaged in peeling the slick paste of a marron glacé from the roof of her mouth. ‘I can do better than a stuffy old shopkeeper in a singed wig –’ she swallows – ‘and I mean to, tonight.’

  Bel Fortescue is grave even in her gossip. ‘Has someone caught your eye?’ she whispers. ‘Point him out.’

  Up go their fans. Thus screened they survey the room. ‘By the piano,’ says Angelica, smiling so that, from a distance, she might appear to be exchanging some pleasantry. ‘The navy man with the dark hair.’

  ‘Talking to Mr Winstanley?’ says Mrs Fortescue, looking amiably in the other direction. ‘I know that man.’

  Angelica is possessed by a little gust of excitement, but Mrs Fortescue straightens out her face and shakes her head infinitesimally. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No money.’

  ‘Well, that don’t signify. I deserve some fun.’

  ‘You are greedy and you have no self-control,’ Mrs Fortescue admonishes her. ‘Always snatching at the fattest bun on the plate. Dear, your situation—’

  ‘Oh, my situation! Always my situation! And I must exercise good judgement, try to make prudent decisions for my future preservation. You sound just like Eliza, do you know that?’ Her eyes are on the sweets again, seeking out a pretty lavender comfit. Her saliva is already running in anticipation: to feel it crumble and melt softly on her tongue. ‘I want some fun, Bel. Do you remember fun? Pleasure – dissipation – I’ll not be this young tomorrow.’ She glances at the officer. ‘What’s his name?’

  Bel sighs and raises her solemn eyes to heaven. ‘Rockingham. George Rockingham.’

  ‘Ah. A good family.’

  ‘Much good as it does him; he is of a very sickly branch of it. I know his uncle, who is his guardian, and I assure you he is kept on a very straitened allowance, and he has no access to the rest of his fortune until he is twenty-five.’ She leans to whisper in her friend’s ear: ‘He is younger than you.’

  ‘Better than older,’ snorts Angelica. ‘I have not enjoyed a man of real vigour for far too long.’ Seizing the opportunity of their intimacy in such a crowd, she says, ‘Bel, will you not miss it?’

  ‘Miss what? Vigour?’

  ‘No, no. Everything. All of this. You are sacrificing a great deal in getting married, I think.’

  Mrs Fortescue continues to watch the room. It is hard to tell from her sad, reflective little face what she might really be feeling: she is soulful even when she is rinsing out her stockings. ‘I am quite done here,’ she says.

  ‘I see not how,’ says Angelica, but Mrs Fortescue’s words sink to the pit of her stomach like lead. She thinks of the earnest exertions of the little girls, and feels very weary.

  ‘Do you not? I look at it all and I think –’ she spreads her hands and widens her eyes as if in appeal – ‘what a farce. Such empty mummings as I took part in for ten years, and thought myself free.’

  ‘You were wrong to make a scene tonight,’ says Angelica.

  Mrs Fortescue laughs. ‘Why? How can I smile these things away?’

  ‘But you ought. Some of us are happy here.’

  ‘Who? Name me one person.’

  ‘Oh, ’tis all a glamour to you.’ Angelica knows when to end a conversation. ‘I am as free as I would like to be, and freer than any wife.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘I am! For now I depart to make my own free choice of what man to take my pleasure with, something no wife may do …’

  ‘… although some have.’

  ‘Without consequence? I think not. I am free as a bird.’ She rises from her seat and it topples behind her, for her skirt is large and her sobriety compromised.

  ‘Will there be no consequences for you?’ Bel asks quietly, but her friend is already darting away.

  Bright with excitement, Angelica glances once back. ‘See how I go,’ she says.

  SIXTEEN

  Virtuous people will not know that very particular pleasure two strangers feel when, without touching or speaking, they are agreed that they will end the night together. There is no pursuit, for Angelica and her George. They simply find one another. When Angelica bounces over and takes her seat amongst the group, they exchange salutation with their eyes but have no more to do with one another; she takes her time in clasping the hand of her old friend Lucy Chadwick, one-time lover of three princes of the realm, and honouring a few of the younger navy men with some light flirtation. Rockingham is similarly engaged with young Billingsgate Kitty, who will shortly be led away to her chaste bed, being not ripe enough for her own official debauchery although her time will soon come. He persists in the face of her dutiful muteness with what strikes Angelica as wondrous patience; she detects, she thinks, a glint of humour in his brown eyes but she does not seek to meet them. There will be time for all this yet. The group have just drawn out a die, an item of contraband since Mrs Chappell will have no gambling in her establishment.

  ‘But surely even she would not object to an innocent game of hi-jinks,’ urges one of the navy men. ‘He who rolls lowest takes a drink,’ and as the die is passed from hand to hand around the circle, and skitters dizzily across the tabletop, while the players hold their breath or shriek with mirth, Angelica and Rockingham are always aware of one another. When she laughs, his mouth opens in a grin without his bidding it, and when he claps his hands at their sport she might be observed to be clasping her own together. Put a die in these people’s fists and of course they will be inclined irresistibly to make bets. They seize up morsels from the
half-cleared table:

  ‘I wager this walnut that Mrs Chadwick casts lowest.’

  ‘A bunch of cherries on Carter rolling a four.’

  They slap their palms on the table and slop liquor into one another’s glasses with no regard for whether it matches what was there before. All social gatherings have a riptide moving through them – some revellers joining the party as others melt away, some retiring to a quiet room, others emerging refreshed – and it is this unseen, unsought tide that nudges Angelica and the lieutenant closer and closer together without their even trying. Little Kitty is swept away protesting; Lucy Chadwick judges herself to have graced the party with her presence long enough, and besides has two little children snuggled in the Hampstead countryside who will in a very few hours want her at breakfast, and so she makes for her carriage. She is replaced in short order by the erstwhile mermaids Elinor Bewlay and Polly Campbell, their hair freshly dressed and their modesty restored by matching silk wraps, giggling to embark on a night of outrage and intemperance now that Mrs Chappell is safely a-bed in clean sheets. Angelica is first five chairs away from Rockingham, then three, until when the clock chimes for a quarter after four, they find themselves side by side in the midst of the depleted group.

  ‘Is it too late,’ she says, ‘to revise your first impression of me?’

  His face splits into the most amiable of grins. ‘But why? I liked it. A woman never fell at my feet before.’

  ‘Be assured I never shall again,’ she says.

  ‘Rockingham,’ he says, and he puts her hand briefly to his lips.

  ‘Lieutenant Rockingham,’ she nods, surveying his uniform.

  ‘What, this?’ he laughs, glances down at himself. ‘No! I only wore it to come in here – a mermaid party, you know. I was in the navy once, only they would not tolerate my high spirits.’ He rubs his hair roguishly and turns upon her the smile of a cherub. ‘I am a student of law, for now.’

  ‘Oh! So you shall be a lawyer, by and by,’ but he looks at her so quizzically she fears for a moment that she has slipped unknowing into some low provincial dialect, as she was wont to as a girl, to her own mortification and her patrons’ amusement.