‘Harry, there is nothing we can do to protect them from marauding gangs or anyone else. There is not much we can do to protect ourselves, come to that. You, I understand, have offered to take Eloise with us on our travels but she refuses; they want to stay here and fight – they have told us so themselves. What more can we do? Look, there is no time for prolonged courtship in wartime, so why not seize the moment and indulge in a little physical refreshment with them now? ‘Twill give us all fresh vigour for our respective fights ahead. Besides which…’ He pulled his customary cowface, which for once did not amuse me, ‘…this could be the last sheet-shaking we ever do on this earth.’ Adding, inevitably: ‘Or in your case, the first and last.’
I gave my by-now-customary contemptuous snort to this childish reference, and then, after thinking about what he’d said, blew out the candles and lanterns, and followed him quaking to the foot of the stairs.
‘Here we go then, mate,’ whispered Dick, placing his hand on the banister and lurching upwards. ‘Good hunting, and we’ll compare notes in the morning.’
17
Eloise’s Room
Heart pounding, feeling like a Shakespearian assassin, I followed Dick up the creaking stairs. Half-way up we passed a small window, through which waning moonlight shone. Distractedly pausing to peer out, I was drawn up short by a very strange sight: Elzevir standing at the well, throwing what looked like items of clothing down it. I reached out my hand with the intention of drawing Dick’s attention to this phenomenon, but he was gone, his loins having propelled him forward in a very fast and stealthy manner. I nevertheless continued to observe Elzevir’s antics until my curiosity was satisfied, which it was when Elzevir drew out his tallywhacker and began pissing into the well, his stream a silver arc in the moonlight. Then, realizing I was alone and could tiptoe downstairs again without Dick knowing, I debated the pros and cons of bottling it, and spending the night on the dining room floor. But as, in sum, the fears downstairs (Elzevir, broken glass, roaming Irish kerns) outweighed the fears upstairs (rejection, sexual failure), I decided against this cowardly course of action. Thus was I prodded on to the landing, where I turned and put my ear to each door in turn. From the first came heavy snoring; from the second low male and female giggling; and from the third, around the edge of a partly-open door, came candlelight. On this door, quivering, I knocked discreetly.
‘Come in, Harry – ‘tis open.’
My heart leaped; she was expecting me! Realizing the hunt was as good as over already, I sidled in and found myself in a sort of artist’s grotto, full of bottles, brushes and canvasses, and pungent with the smell of pine and paint. Books on a shelf basked in the moonlight, while an open window let in the sigh of a breeze which gently but repeatedly kissed a candle flame on the bedside table. The scene was so magical to me that my eyes darted all over the room, lapping it up, until at last they fixed upon Eloise, and never moved again. For she was sitting on the bed in nightclothes that revealed arms naked up to her elbows and legs naked up to her knees – temptations that were enough on their own to paralyze me with lust and fear. But that was not all…
‘Look Harry – I’ve got them out for you!’
She had as well, and I stared with dry-mouthed wonderment at the two pearly meringues bursting plumply out of the top of her bodice. I licked my lips involuntarily.
‘I mean my paintings,’ she said curtly, following my gaze and quickly covering up her fruits with deft drapings of her gown.
‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, turning with awkward quickness to the canvasses propped up against the walls. ‘Oh yes. Oh yes!’ I gushed, overcompensating. ‘They are marvellous, marvellous.’ I ran towards them with feigned rapture. ‘These are what I had come to see.’
I was quickly down on my hands and knees, staring deep into the paintings one by one, gesticulating astonishment at such genius. Secretly, however, I was trying to hide my embarrassment and make out what the gloomy shapes represented.
‘The ones you have been looking at so far,’ said Eloise, as I worked my way round the room, ‘are not finished. In fact they are hardly started – just blue background washes really. Here, though, are my finished efforts, which I hope to sell one day in Philadelphia.’
‘Why, they are beautiful,’ I said, having no other choice. They were of farm landscapes at either sunrise or sunset, all plastered in thick red paint at the top, as if she had created them in a temper. ‘These are the ones you did this morning, are they? Of the fire?’
‘Oh no, long before.’ Then, sensing my doubt: ‘The sky really was that colour, you know.’
‘Yes, I am sure,’ I said, wondering if there was something wrong with her eyesight.
‘And here,’ she said, flickering a candle over the last two canvasses, ‘are portraits I did of Papa and Clara.’
They were so flat and childlike that I could barely prevent myself from laughing out loud. I had seen more depth in the Cerne Abbas Giant.
‘Dick is with Clara now, is he?’ she said.
Reluctantly, I admitted he was, not really at ease talking about midnight meanderings.
‘It upset me, you know, what she said about me at dinner.’
I got up and sat next to her on the bed, relieved that we were on to new topics. ‘Twas also comforting when the heel of my boot hit what felt like a full chamber pot under the bed; she was just a human being after all.
‘I’m not really prudish, Harry, though everybody seems to think that I am. I just try to be good, that’s all. I just try and do my best and not hurt anyone.’
I wondered if she was setting me up again, tempting me to put my arm around her so that she could rebuff me with a vindictive reminder of our loving-friendship pact. But her distress seemed genuine enough, and I still had memories of her caressing foot to embolden me. I was about to succumb to temptation when I saw gleaming in the candlelight the breech of a flintlock propped up in the corner of the room. Grateful at last for the opportunity to handle something I knew about, I rose and went to it, expressing admiration and surprise.
‘Left by a passing spy, I suppose,’ I said thoughtlessly, realizing too late that I had just cast aspersions on Eloise’s self-professed goodness. She did not, however, take it other than in the jocular manner intended.
‘Oh no, Harry. Clara and I have had our own guns since we were children. We started off with pistols and built our way up to muskets, one of which you are holding now.’ Then, she added sadly: ‘Some girls have dolls.’
I picked it up, a keen aficionado of the beasts, and examined it. ‘Twas a French Charleville musket that I had heard so much about.
‘Have you ever used it?’
‘Never, Harry. I could not kill anything. Clara has shot a few salesmen in her time though.’
‘Dead?’
‘Winged ‘em.’
I smiled, wondering if Dick knew what he had let himself in for. Then I hoisted the weighty piece horizontal and aimed it out of the window at a dark distant tree, pretending I was back on the parade ground. This, perhaps my first unconscious act in Eloise’s presence, obviously stirred something deep and womanly in her, for her hands were soon roving all over my chest, and she was squashing and squirming her dumplings against my back. Clearly I had inadvertently hit upon the magical combination that unlocked Eloise’s lovebox – politesse and violence.
‘Oh, Harry – you are not effete after all,’ she breathed hotly into my right ear.
My quarterpounder burst into lurid life. Hurriedly, I returned the gun to its corner and turned to face my melting lover. A few seconds of deep soulgazing, and we were off, frantically bussing and groping for all we were worth. Panting, I tried fumblingly to get her clothes off before I exploded, but she wriggled free and dived under the bedclothes coquettishly. I dived in after her, and there followed a confused period of squirming, tugging, unfastening and unclipping until eventually we were free of all encumbrances, and in position. The prize securely mine now, I to
ok a satisfied breather and prepared for the push to the summit. I felt good and strong and indescribably potent, and I was about to begin my final ascent to Heaven when, to my amazement, Eloise pushed me off and rolled onto her side.
‘Sweetie, what is it?’ I enquired, horrified and disbelieving, uncomfortably aware that my ball had, in a manner of speaking, left the barrel.
‘Oh Harry, I cannot, I cannot!’
‘Why not?’
I rutted involuntarily on the spot that Eloise had just vacated.
‘I have the painters in!’
I was completely baffled by this remark, but I did not want to appear ignorant.
‘Ahhhh!’ I groaned, coming on the Damned Bed with bitter disappointment. ‘The painters.’
‘Yes, I know. A problem, is it not?’
It might have been, if I had known what she was talking about.
‘Otherwise I would, Harry, I truly would.’
My head clearing now, it suddenly struck me what she was referring to. Indeed, I could understand how it might be offputting, having even bad representations of your father and sister staring at you as you swived.
‘Stack them outside the door then. Here, I will do it.’
I made to leap up, eager to try again.
‘Not – not the paintings – the painters.’
Perhaps this was another new American phrase. I struggled to translate.
‘What then? You did not paint the pictures yourself? You got someone else to do them for you – is that what you are trying to say?’ The anguished headshaking into her pillow convinced me that I was on the right lines. There had been some plagiarism going on, I felt sure, so I put my hand on her shoulder to reassure her, artist to artist. ‘’Tis nothing to worry about, Eloise – I could tell they were not really your works; someone like you could never paint so atrociously.’
‘Oh!!’ she gasped, turning to me with a look of fury in her eyes. ‘You stupid English fool! I’VE GOT THE PAINTERS IN!! How much more description do you want?’
Considerably more. Who did she think I was, Isaac Newton? Abashed, hurt, baffled, I collapsed onto the bed and fell to pondering, my sticky-mouthed little cannon down and out. By a slow process of elimination, I deduced eventually that the painters were a sexual problem of some sort; though of what sort exactly I did not like to speculate too deeply. The more I thought about it, however, the angrier I was with Eloise’s behaviour. I levered myself up onto my left elbow and put it to her straight.
‘If the painters are in now, Eloise, then they were presumably in over dinner, when you chose to excite me by continued application of your foot to my privy parts. Why do this, why encourage me and let me go this far if you had no intention of satisfying my natural masculine propensities? Explain yourself, Madam!’
‘I did no such thing!’ the brazen hussy turned to me and ejaculated.
‘What!’ I spluttered, astounded at this shameless denial. ‘What! Oh yes you did, by George! How can you deny that you enticed me up to your room?’
‘Yes, I invited you up here to see my paintings – which are not, by the way, atrocious – but nothing else. I did not intend for us to end up in bed together. If you had not forced the issue I would never have gone this far. I was just trying to avoid hurting your feelings. And as for my foot and your private parts – why, I think you have quite taken leave of your senses. I did not, repeat did not, and never would, stoop to such a thing.’
‘Then who would?’ I said, astonished.
As if on cue the answer came through the wall. While we had been bickering, Dick and Clara had obviously been using the time to build up a good head of steam, and were now able to let us in audibly on their delights. From the rhythmic grunts, wild yelping and creaking bed, it sounded like Dick was trying to murder her with a blunt instrument. I sincerely hoped it did not feel as good as it sounded, for I knew now, with sickening certainty, that it had been Clara’s foot that had been pleasuring me, and I had chosen wrong yet again.
But obviously I was not the only one suffering great emotional anguish. Eloise too, judging by the way her eyes glittered at the ceiling, appeared fretful.
‘This always happens,’ she said. ‘Listen to her, just listen.’
I listened. Indeed, I could not help listening, for the moaning and groaning and sobbing were hellish and surely uncalled for. Nothing could be that good.
‘How can I ever hope to compete with that?’ said Eloise, lying back on the bed and communicating with me via the ceiling. ‘If I slept with a different man every night for the rest of my life I could never be as experienced as her now!’
‘There is more to life than sex, Eloise,’ I comforted, though secretly gloomy with doubt. ‘Believe me.’
Perhaps rightly, Eloise snorted like an infidel at this remark.
‘I know,’ I said eagerly, an idea suddenly occurring to me. ‘Why don’t we try to do what they are doing? We could start quiet and build up to a few sighs, and then we could….’
‘No, we could not, Harry. ‘Tis all too disgusting. ‘Tis all too late.’
She buried her head in her pillows and tried to shut out the noise. Obviously not succeeding, she snatched my pillows and threw them at the wailing wall.
‘Quiet, you damned whore!’ she screeched, very haglike.
The continual reminder of what I was missing next door, and the unexpected sulky petulance of Eloise, put me in a vile mood, and I did – I must admit – feel like playing the Hessian with her. I lifted the blanket and peered at her bare flanks, wondering whether to or not. But I was deterred by Eloise’s demand that I stop looking at her, and the belated realization that I was a little English gentleman, and had better start behaving like one. So I dropped the blanket and lay down on my back, grimacing as the cold sodden bed squelched beneath me. Then I simply stared at the ceiling until Clara’s final scream rent the New Jersey night, and all went quiet.
Eloise, I sensed, was still awake and fretting next to me, but I was not going to touch her again. I would leave it to her to break the ice if she wanted to, when I would be perfectly amenable to whatever she suggested. But I had not bargained for the vicious counterattack she now launched on my artistic sensibilities.
‘Do you have any of your own poems with you?’ she said with surprising sweetness.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They are in my pocket.’
Objective gained, the sweetness veil was pulled aside, and an insulted, vengeful artist was revealed.
‘Good,’ she snarled, jumping up and dressing minimally before heading towards the chair where my clothes lay crumpled, ‘Then let us see if they are as bad as my paintings.’
‘Twas vindictive stuff, and I was not happy with the development. Somehow I sensed she would not like them, but I did not attempt to stop her, knowing that the growth of a hard shell was essential if I was to survive the heartless barbs of the English critics, if and when I got back home. Wincing, I drew the blanket over my head and quivered like a jelly in fearful anticipation.
Within seconds there was an ‘Aha!’ which made me peek out of my soft shell in curiosity. Eloise’s formerly sweet features were twisted in malice as she greedily unwrapped a rumpled ball of paper, and took it with a candle to the windowseat. She read silently for a while with intense concentration and then – not entirely unexpected – she threw back her head with what I considered to be very forced laughter, having evidently found what she had been looking for. ‘My God!’ she exclaimed as she shook her head in disbelief, eyes and mouth wide with horror. ‘This is absolutely appalling! Absolute drivel! Why, even Elzevir could write better than this.’ Then, with apparent contempt but – I was sure – deep delight, she read out the words in very mocking tones:
Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man’s erring judgement, and misguide the mind,
What the weak hand with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
She gives in large recruits of needless pride;
For as in bodies, thus in souls we find
What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind;
Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
‘Apart from the utter banality of its content,’ Eloise mocked, ‘isn’t rhyming find with wind taking poetic licence a little too far? Is it not pathetic in a man of your age, to want to cram in words merely because they look similar?’
I did not answer, realizing that I was under scornful rhetorical attack. However, apart from the admittedly crooked rhyme, I thought it sounded rather good and authoritative. Indeed, I was going to ask her to read it again, to savour once more my genius, when I realized she was reading from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, which I had written out in New York to solace me on my adventures. What luck she had chosen that pocket to rummage in! Had she chosen the other one she would have unearthed the latest page of my Night Thoughts, and ripped that apart with equal vehemence.
All this was a great lesson to me, very salutary, both in the realm of romance and of poetry. First, it reminded me for the thousandth time that women (and indeed men) were not always what they first appeared; and secondly, that the public censure of critics was often motivated by private malice.
‘Good God!’ she was exclaiming, reading on, ‘Absolute tripe!’
With great joy now, I encouraged her to continue, shamefully finding vindictive joy myself in hearing the great Pope taken apart. For had not I, of late, been coming round to the view that Pope was greatly overrated, and too remote from the messiness of life to be all that credible.
‘What about that second line though?’ I queried with mock sensitivity, as if begging to be hit and hit hard, ‘The word misguide, for example. Don’t you think that at least fits beautifully?’
Infernal Revolutions Page 23