by Nina Allan
The next time she saw him he had washed and shaved. His friend the doorman, he explained, had let him use the theater cloakroom after hours. Nelly brought him goulash from the street kiosk on Parmenterallee, more cigarettes. She stayed and talked with him for half an hour, breathing in the smell of the cigarettes and thinking how much she liked his voice, not just the sound but the way he spoke. He had grown more forthright since the last time, more confident. Mason would have said mind your step, he’s after something, his type always are.
This man has lost everything, Nelly thought. Why should he not be after something? She remembered some words Adrian had said, about how robbing the poor even of their desires is the first step in robbing them of their humanity.
She felt sorrow for all Harry had suffered, great waves of it that threatened to choke her, yet it was more than that, she knew already. Had it begun when she asked him his name, when she bought him the pastry, when she dropped the coin into his plate? Or had it been earlier than that, much earlier, when she told herself she had stopped believing in love after Adrian died?
Not that it mattered. Things were as they were. Love, as Cecily had once said, was a disease. Once contracted, it is more or less impossible to shake off.
* * *
—
A month after their first meeting, Nelly signed the lease on a ground floor studio in the theater district. A modest apartment – two rooms, with a stove and washing facilities – but it was dry and pleasantly furnished. It was a place to be.
“I can’t accept this,” Harry said. “Not when I don’t have any means of paying you back. I don’t want your pity.”
“You think this is pity?” she stormed, stung to the heart. She told him she didn’t care in the least about money, though he could repay the loan in his own good time, if it mattered so much to him. What she wanted was for him to return to his studies at the university. “You can achieve everything you ever wanted to,” she insisted. “More – because we are together and that makes us stronger.”
She spoke the words earnestly, even though she and Harry had not so much as kissed yet. How could they, out in the open, with no place to be? Once Harry had relented and moved into the apartment, Nelly stayed away for three days. She told herself she was giving him time to settle in, to grow accustomed to his new situation. In reality she was terrified of the turn her life was about to take. Everything she had done for Harry so far could, if the need arose, be explained away as charity. One more step and she was done for. Had this really been what she intended, when she began?
Would she feel the same about this stranger, now that the impossible was suddenly a reality? Would Harry’s injury – his disability – repel her? Could he still be a man?
When on the fourth day she arrived at the apartment it was to find Harry seated at the scrubbed-down table, a saucer of cigarette ash at his elbow and sketching furiously in a ring-bound exercise pad. His crutches were propped close to hand against the back of his chair.
His expression, as he turned to face her, lay somewhere between stoical indifference and incredulous joy.
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” he said, simply.
Her stole slid to the floor, slipping from about her shoulders in a liquid glide.
“I was,” Nelly began, but never completed the sentence or even the thought. She was overcome by the strength of her emotions, the sense, simultaneously, that she had known him all her life, that here was her life, beginning at last. Very soon they made love, the fur stole pooled beneath their bodies like a shed skin.
How did this not happen sooner? Nelly thought, in wonderment. She could not have imagined his body to be more beautiful.
* * *
—
The following week she purchased for him one of the new wheeled chairs, an “invalid carriage” that would allow him free movement about the studio, to direct himself along the street, to sit undisturbed in the park where he liked to study.
A moving castle of silver tubing and polished leather, the chair provided the very latest in assisted mobility.
“Invalid carriage,” said Harry doubtfully, when he first laid eyes on it.
“This is not an invalid carriage,” Nelly assured him. “This is a miracle of engineering. This is freedom.”
Later, when it was dark, Nelly wheeled the battered wooden cart out into the street. She left it by the side of the road a couple of streets away from the apartment. By mid-morning of the following day it had disappeared. She hoped someone had found a use for it, if only for firewood.
* * *
—
“Your Nikolaus Schilling was something of a renegade,” Cecily said. She had cut her hair. It sat close to her head, like a skull cap. Nelly’s first reaction had been shock. The more she thought about it, the more she found such a reaction ridiculous. Why should the socially permitted length of a person’s hair be determined by their gender? Besides, the new style suited Cecily – it suited her well. Nelly decided she liked it. “He was drawn to transgressive subjects,” Cecily was saying. “Siamese twins and royal eunuchs, demons consorting with children, that kind of thing. He was elected to join the Academy on account of his technical skill, then thrown out again three years later when a scandal erupted over a painting of his called The Magdalene. It showed Christ cavorting naked with prostitutes, apparently. Schilling made a lot of enemies, mainly because he really was a good painter. The older Academicians loathed him. They became determined to ruin his reputation and for the most part they succeeded.”
“How come he isn’t more famous now, though? If he was so good, I mean.”
“A large number of his most important paintings were destroyed in a fire. There were rumors that it was arson, but that was never proved. Anyway, Schilling went abroad after that, disappeared from view. He has his fans, of course, and those paintings that did survive tend to get snapped up quickly when they come on the market. The painting you bought is actually quite valuable.”
“You were able to track it down, then?”
“It wasn’t that difficult, once I got started. The woman was a minor aristocrat, Duchess Sophie of Marienbad, born in 1603. Her husband the duke was well thought of, if something of a recluse – he lost his older brother in the Thirty Years’ War and never got over it. He was older than Sophie, but not disastrously so and their marriage seemed amicable, or at least it did at first. But as time wore on and there were no children, rumors began to circulate that the duke was underperforming in the bedroom department, that the marriage hadn’t been consummated even. At some point, Sophie became friendly with the duke’s chief treasurer, Nyall Lysander.”
“Lysander was the dwarf?”
Cecily nodded. “Though he was never what you would call a court dwarf in the traditional sense. He was a brilliant man, by all accounts, and fun to be with. Unlike many in his position he held considerable power, not to mention being a favorite of the duke. Sophie clearly needed more excitement in her life and what started as a friendship quickly evolved into a passionate love affair. For a long time they were able to hide the true nature of their relationship because no one believed that a duchess would be willing to risk everything – her marriage, her position in society, her fortune – all for the sake of what many would have considered a circus freak. They were found out in the end, though. Sophie became pregnant, and hatched a hare-brained scheme to murder the duke and make it seem like an accident. Things didn’t end well.”
“What happened?”
“Lysander was hanged, and Sophie was made the subject of what might be termed a cruel and unusual punishment: her left eye was put out, with a fire iron. The duke’s advisers persuaded him it would make the duchess less attractive to future rivals, though they clearly saw Sophie as a political force to be reckoned with and wanted her diminished. Nikolaus Schilling made up the double portrait of Sophie and Lysander from contemporary source
s as a satirical commentary on a society affair that was causing ructions at the time. It was exactly the kind of sensational subject matter Schilling had been criticized for in the past. The painting didn’t do him any favors with the Academy, but I’m sure he didn’t have a problem finding a buyer for it, and you wouldn’t either. I can make some inquiries, if you like.”
“I don’t want to sell it,” Nelly said quietly. The story had shaken her. She was trying not to imagine what it had been like for Sophie, knowing her lover was to be executed, being subjected to a senseless and wanton disfigurement too gruesome to contemplate. What had become of her, finally? Cecily would be able to tell her, no doubt, but maybe it was better not to know.
History swept on remorselessly, dragging everyone in its wake. Schilling’s painting was all that remained.
“You’re very quiet, all of a sudden,” Cecily said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“I think I’m in love,” Nelly said. The words rose from her spontaneously, unbidden, though if she had planned to tell anyone at all it would of course have been Cecily.
“You’re not serious?”
Nelly stared at her hands. She was sitting where she always sat when she visited Cecily: in the armchair under the window, her feet drawn up beneath the plaid rug that she always drew over her knees, regardless of the weather. She had always felt safe in Cecily’s rooms, yet she had stopped feeling entirely safe anywhere now, she realized, even here.
“He’s an engineer,” she said softly. “I met him – he saw me in The Duchess of Malfi and things started from there.”
It was a reasonable enough story and more than half true. The round reality of the thing – Harry’s injury, the apartment she was paying for – seemed too complicated all of a sudden.
Nelly hadn’t slept properly in days. A week even. Two.
“What are you going to do?” Cecily said. “Are you planning to tell Mason?”
Was there an edge of triumph in Cecily’s voice, a hint of I-told-you-so? Nelly thought not, though she didn’t believe that she would blame her if there was. Cecily was only human, after all.
“I can’t. Not yet, anyway. I don’t know what he might do.”
“You’re frightened of him.”
“Of course not.” She laughed. “I need time to think, that’s all.”
“This – man. Does he know about Mason?”
“He knows I’m married.” Which again was true, though she and Harry had not spoken of Mason directly, all this time. It was almost as if they believed that to say his name was to utter a curse, that not speaking it would hold him at bay, like an evil spirit.
“Are you happy, Nell? At least tell me you’re happy.”
Happier than I’ve ever been, she thought. Happier than I believed was possible. Sick with terror. Nelly had come to believe that every performance she had starred in until then had been a species of fraud – acting from above the waist, as her old mentor, Katerina Spitz, had been fond of putting it. Her love for Harry had illuminated the poetry of Ibsen, of Shakespeare, in new and terrifying ways. Had she believed, before Harry, in the calamity of love, its vicious aftermath? She did not think so.
She thought she had been so clever, marrying Mason. Instead, she had been a fool. She had forced herself into a trap of her own devising.
“I wish I’d listened to you, that’s all,” she said at last.
“Don’t be ridiculous. None of us can see the future. And I’m the last person you should be taking advice from when it comes to romance.” They both smiled. Cecily had been involved in an agonized correspondence with a married artist for the best part of a decade, with no discernible resolution, forwards or backwards. Nelly had always privately thought Cecily preferred things that way – all the drama, without the practical inconveniences of a life together. But as the last few weeks had proved, what did she know?
“I will sort things out,” Nelly said. “Thanks for finding out about my picture.”
She left soon afterwards. She had intended to go home before heading off to the theater but she had left it too late. She lay on the couch in her dressing room instead, the lights off to avoid interruptions and the conversation with Cecily coursing through her brain like a repeating sine wave.
Tell Mason, Cecily had said. Or: are you going to tell Mason?
Telling Mason would be like ripping away the backcloths from a theater set: the dusty darkness beyond, the bare hanging wires. She could lose everything, and worse. She had seen how vindictive Mason could be when it came to his business rivals. She hated to think what steps he might take to jeopardize her future if he discovered her treachery.
How would they manage then, she and Harry? It did not bear thinking about. “If only he were dead,” she said to Harry a month or so later. The feeling had been growing in her, as the evenings lengthened and the darkness deepened, as the first freezing flurries of snow made it more difficult for her to flit about the city on a whim, that the only solution to the problem of Mason lay in Mason’s demise. So far at least it had been an abstract idea, a wish rather than a plan, although it was not difficult, Nelly soon discovered, to find justification for such a wish in the real world. The way Mason bullied his driver, Johan, for example, the way he eyed the buttocks of Minna the housemaid as she knelt to lay the fire. The way he railed with increasing vehemence against the so-called degenerates who clogged the doss-houses, the filthy foreigners and starving farm-workers begging in the streets.
One evening he came home tight-lipped with anger after being forced to sack a man he had previously earmarked for promotion.
“Turns out he’s a faggot,” Mason said. “I can’t have animals like that in my office. There should be a law against these people.”
There is, Nelly thought. There are many.
More and more, if he was in a foul enough mood, Mason had begun fulminating against the decline of moral standards amongst her theater colleagues, insisting Nelly should steer clear of them socially, that he didn’t want her inviting them back to the house when he wasn’t there.
Parasitic riff-raff, he called them. Nelly had been married to Mason for two years. He still told her he loved her, frequently, still liked to treat her to expensive dinners, surprise her with overnight stays at luxury hotels.
She still allowed him to have sex with her, because what else could she do? His body seemed crude, excessively heavy, a blunt instrument. His lovemaking still excited and repulsed her in equal measure.
How long, how long, how long? How much longer could she stand it?
Harry looked at her sharply. “He doesn’t need to be dead. Just leave him. Fetch your things and walk out. We can get by.”
Harry had returned to his studies. He was now able to manipulate the wheelchair with confidence, able to access lectures, to move about the city independently and with a new light in his eyes. He was thinking about the future and seeing a life for them both in it. He had made a friend at the university, Jonas Arp. He chatted about Jonas constantly, wanted Nelly to meet him. The idea of stepping outside their accustomed parameters – the idea of being seen – made Nelly deeply anxious, even though being seen was what she did for a living.
She kept making excuses.
“You’re ashamed of me,” Harry said.
“Never,” Nelly replied.
“It’s him, then. Mason.” His name at last.
Nelly nodded. “If someone should see us. And tell him.”
“So what? He can’t keep you prisoner. I don’t give a damn what he does.”
You would, though, Nelly thought. You have no idea how dangerous he is. Men like Mason will eat the world, if you let them. I’ve seen it happen.
She thought of the duchess, Sophie, in Schilling’s painting. She had seen it happen, too. Before they took her eye.
“Just let me think,” she said to Harry. “I’ll find a way out
of this, I promise.”
The critics had noted a new maturity in her Duchess of Malfi. It is as if Toye truly lives the part, one wrote, remarking on the duchess’s famous speech in Act 1V.
Rarely has a work of classic drama seemed to speak so acutely and so bitterly to contemporary concerns, observed another, drawing attention to the play’s embedded power structures, Webster’s commentary upon the disadvantaged position of women within a patriarchal society.
A goddess of war, ran the headline of a third.
When Nelly was on stage, all things seemed possible. Above all, she could say what she felt. There was talk of her going to Berlin to star in a film, a spy thriller in which she would play a double agent codenamed the Scorpion, who dispatched her victims with a stiletto.
“A stiletto?” Nelly smiled. “Why not a gun?” She was having lunch with the movie’s casting agent, in a restaurant close to the theater.
“Because a gun always makes a noise, and because Rita – that’s your character – is an expert swordswoman. She slides the stiletto in between the ribs and punctures the heart. The victim is dead before he knows it, and there’s virtually no blood. We want the film to have a period feel, and the stiletto is part of that. The scriptwriter was directly inspired by seventeenth-century revenge dramas. Like The Duchess of Malfi.”
“It sounds exciting,” Nelly said. She had dreamed of being in movies ever since she and Adrian had queued around the block to see Tatiana Tcherepnin in Lubitsch’s Demons during one of Adrian’s furloughs. This was the break she had been waiting for, that she had secretly expected, but now that it was here all she could think about was the obstacles it presented. She dreaded to imagine what Mason would say – he loathed Berlin – and she could not consider relocating there anyway, not without Harry.