She leaps up, scattering crumbs and shouts with joy, ‘James! You’re blushing!’
For the first time in thirty years, I surprise myself.
‘Come and live with me, Alice.’
I hadn’t planned to say it, but it was what I wanted now, more than all the riches in the world. She doesn’t take any time to consider my proposition. She merely reflects for a moment, staring intently into my face, reading whatever thirty years has written there. She must recognise what she sees, because her smile is the same smile that I had learned to love in David Erskine’s haybarn, down by the river where the flies buzz wearily in the August sun, out in the woods where her arms and legs glimmer brown under her stained white apron as she hunts for mushrooms. It is the same smile that I catch for a moment, glancing up, as she sits counting her pleasures and her coins. It is the smile her audience howled to glimpse appearing under her wide hat and plumes. It is the smile I have remembered for over thirty years.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘I will.’
The trouble started a few days later when I informed her that she could not, under any circumstances, bring everything with her.
* * *
I courted Alice Jones, formally, for the look of the thing. I called on her daily at the correct hour. I put up with the tribe of sycophants, arselickers and toads which trooped past her door and up her staircase. I found that one or two of the playwrights, if you were foolish enough to flatter their entertainments with the description ‘plays’, were independent, witty people. They sometimes prevailed upon her to sing to us. Her voice is not as strong as it once was, but her delivery and freshness proved to be as moving as they had ever been.
We quarrelled violently over her table – rapping séances, as I was disposed to describe them. I remained adamant on this point. I stipulated that when she found the right moment and chose to remove herself to my house to enjoy a genteel and loving companionship in her retirement, she must let it be generally known that her services as a professional medium were no longer available. Alice sulked. I insisted. Her public begged. Stalemate.
I persuaded her to moderate her desires concerning the interior decoration of my drawing room, and was forced, in return, to purchase another piano. Her black dinosaur would never have passed through the first-floor windows without extensive demolition of the structural wall. She refused to auction off the rapist tapestries. I faced the prospect of them hanging in baronial folds all down the staircase. Her bed she must have, a four-poster mock-medieval edifice with thick velvet curtains edged in gold brocade and trimmed with fleurs-de-lys. This means that the entire third floor of the house must be hers, boudoir, dressing room, front room with three windows and the small bay alcove with the low seats, all of which she has had to have re-covered with a slimy satin finish and matching cushions. The old painter once kept all his canvases in these huge spaces. Alice must have posed for him here, in this room, which now has a fresh green view of the trees’ blooming. I had been anxious that she would find the house disturbing, but I need not have worried. Alice is quite free from sentimental angst about the past.
‘Back at last!’ she announced, stepping briskly over the threshold on her first official visit. ‘I must say, I’m glad that the neighbourhood has improved. Do you remember those children who threw stones at the windows and rubbish down the steps?’
There was talk, of course. I was invited to become a member of the Garrick, given my intimate connections with the theatrical world, as the case was tactfully put. Naturally, I refused. One or two of my old colonial acquaintances called upon me. The gentlemen were suitably impressed. Alice’s name, especially among the older generation, still has a magical quality, which awakens an erotic nostalgia for the past. Some of the women were dying to meet her. Others firmly declined, even before they were invited to do so. We spent our time in the company of men.
There were many portraits of her at large in society, including a very provocative one in which she is dressed as the saucy soldier in Will She? Won’t She?, which hangs in the Garrick. I have never seen the original, although I have inspected many engravings. It is barely decent. Alice had, and still has, the most marvellous legs, long, slender and shapely. It appears that they have been widely appreciated.
I helped with her packing, sorting out endless boxes of play-bills and souvenirs. London must be filled with her lovers if the insinuating billet-doux, all of which she has kept, are anything to go by. I read many of them carefully and must confess to one or two jealous spasms. The men seemed to think that any actress was fair game. If she was available on stage, then she must be so immediately afterwards, in the green room. The wealthy and the well-connected often left printed cards with discreet initials and locations on the back. Some of these proposed assignations were half a century old.
‘Why on earth do you keep all this compromising offensiveness, Alice?’ I banged down the box, with its decades of dusty lust, carefully recorded.
‘Useful if I want to blackmail someone. Anyway, how can I be compromised? Actresses don’t have reputations to lose, James. They just have reputations. Deserved or otherwise. Here, come and help me sort out the hatboxes.’
I was submerged, shortly thereafter, in a sea of hats, soft velvet, starched linen, straw and feathers. We spent the rest of the morning trying them on. She could not be persuaded to throw any of them out, even though it was abundantly clear that she would never wear any of them again. But the packing was a useful thing to do. I spent days rummaging in Alice’s past lives. She never appeared to hold back any secrets from me. And I – I fell in love with her extraordinary courage all over again.
We were drinking sweet wine one night in her dressing room, having given up on her jewellery, half of which I had immediately despatched to a strongbox in my bank, when our shared past erupted into the present in an unexpected way. Alice’s private rooms smelled overpoweringly of musk and attar of roses. All her furnishings were too heavy and overcrowded, even for the fashion of the times. I often felt that I was already interred in a pyramid, surrounded by treasures in decorated urns and mummified slaves. Then Alice began, somewhat nervous and offhand, which was very unlike her.
‘I say, James, I know it’s going back a bit, but do you remember the spring before your uncle died?’
‘How could I forget? It was the first time I proposed to you. Why?’
‘Well, in February, when he had his first attack and before you came up to town, we were alone in the house. I’d sent for your mother and the doctor, of course, but the old boy got desperate. There was something he had to tell you. He didn’t make sense when he talked. It was all slurred. And so he wrote you a note. He couldn’t dictate it to me and he was too weak to write more than a line or two. But he said it was very urgent. And he made me seal it up and promise before God to give it to you.’
Alice coloured slightly. She held out a yellowed, crushed slice of paper with the red wax seal crumbling away.
‘Well, here it is. It’s from James Barry.’
I stared at the dead man’s message, which fluttered across almost fifty years.
‘I should have given it to you. But you were behaving like a dictator. I certainly wasn’t speaking to you. And then, to be honest, I forgot. I found it yesterday when I was packing up.’
I took the letter from her fingers. It was still sealed. I looked at the yellow paper and the tiny unsteady hand. My name. Not one letter faded, smudged or illegible.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In an old jewellery box.’
‘Was that the box you stole from my uncle’s house when you ran away?’
‘Stole?’ Alice’s hackles went up, all down her back. ‘That’s a bit strong. And anyway I’ve told you this. I remember telling you. I took the box in lieu of one half-year’s wages and modelling fees. I needed the money to buy costumes. Your uncle was a skinflint, James. If I’d asked for my wages and he’d got wind of the fact that I wanted to run off and be a heroine on stage, h
e’d have told me to go to the devil. I took what he owed me.’
‘Alice, that box was worth three years’ wages. At least. Never mind what was in it.’
‘So? I was very well paid.’
‘You said you’d sold the box.’
‘Well, so? I lied, didn’t I?’
We sat glaring at each other. I was the first to realise that none of this mattered. Not a damn. I fingered the folded note. The seal looked genuine. And unbroken. Alice watched me angrily.
‘You’ve never read it?’ I asked, incredulous. Alice was perfectly capable of forging Barry’s seal. She was even capable of prising the signet ring from his dead hand.
‘No, I didn’t read it. Why should I? It was addressed to you.’ Alice exploded in a burst of righteousness. She was still sensitive, after all these years, about the theft of the box.
Suddenly, she relented.
‘Oh, what does it matter, James? I sold all the stones. Some of them weren’t polished, but they were worth quite enough. I never sold the box. James Barry must have known I’d put the letter in the box, but to be honest, I’d forgotten all about the note. The old bugger left you everything anyway. So he can’t have had anything significant to say. Well, go on. Open it.’
I sat still, silent.
She sat down with a resentful thump on the cushioned stool in front of her dressing table, and all the pots rattled. I broke open the seal. It dropped off the paper. The ink had faded a little and the writing was crooked and unstable. James Barry was dying. He could hardly hold the pen. I peered at his words.
‘Well, what does he say? Go on. Any last minute revelations?’
Alice was anxious.
I read the letter aloud, one word at a time.
My Dearest Boy I fear you may not come home to me in time I have so much to tell you I have not the strength go to your aunt Louisa Erskine tell her I wished you to know everything and that I loved you and your mother forgive me I am so proud of you.
The letter was neither dated nor signed. I handed the note silently to Alice, whose near-sightedness made the re-deciphering of the note a painful process. She wanted to read it herself to check that I had not left anything out.
‘So much for that,’ I said. ‘I lost touch with Louisa years ago. She must be dead by now.’
‘Oh no, she isn’t,’ said Alice, lighting up like a gas lamp. ‘The old hag is fit and well. Quite blind and nearly ninety. She lives in a house on the park with a dozen servants. I know exactly where she lives, because I called on her last year.’
‘You spoke to her?’ I demanded incredulously.
‘No,’ Alice bristled, ‘she wouldn’t see me. The woman’s a snob.’ Alice mimicked Louisa’s scalpel precision. ‘ “Miss Erskine begs to inform Mrs Jones that she is not and never will be at home to receive her.” What a bitch!’
I laughed.
‘Well, Alice, Louisa clearly still thinks of you as the scullery maid. Bad luck.’
I got up and put my arms around her.
‘Don’t worry. We’ll go together. Let’s see if Louisa Erskine will refuse to receive a combination of Dr James Miranda Barry and Mrs Alice Jones.’
* * *
Louisa’s house must have been elegant once. It was not one I remembered. The style was old-fashioned and ponderous. The wrought-iron frames for torches, held aloft by a brace of muscular stone gods, now useless in gaslight, were still there nevertheless, one either side of the front steps, naked and blackened in the early spring light. There were yellow and purple crocuses carpeting the park, but the wind was cruel. We arrived at eleven o’clock and encountered her doctor, just going away. Miss Erskine was as comfortable as could be expected, if not in the best of tempers. She no longer receives visitors. I doubt that she will be able to see you. Psyche was intimidated by the huge front hall, chilly in the corners and filled with gloomy portraits. A hideous umbrella stand made out of an elephant’s foot lurked behind the coal scuttle. We huddled together in front of the fire. Alice was immaculate, but overdressed. She had put on her most beautiful and expensive coat, with lavish fur trimmings and matching muffler. I was not concerned. If Louisa was completely blind it was unlikely that she would notice this exaggerated affluence. In order to appreciate Alice’s grandeur she would have to finger the layers, one by one. Psyche growled at the dissected elephant. There was nowhere to sit.
The maid descended the staircase.
‘Miss Erskine will see Dr James Barry’ was all she said, clearly very embarrassed.
But Alice understood the message. She swung round on her heel and swept out, slamming the front door behind her, leaving me to confront the domestic astonishment. Alice was always good at exits. I hesitated. Her carriage was waiting. I was a little surprised. Usually, Alice was extraordinarily phlegmatic whenever she was snubbed and ignored. She once told me that being cut dead in society was a different form of being ignored from that which she had endured during her life as a scullery maid. Now she knew that she was visible, and threatening. As one of the servant class, she explained, you just don’t exist. But if you were a public scandal, then behold, no matter how vehemently you were ignored, the more you increased in size. I wanted to speak to Louisa. I wanted her memories. Here, against all the odds, was someone else who remembered me, who remembered our shared past. And so I left Alice to deal with her anger and strode up the staircase.
Louisa’s rooms were stifling. A huge fire burned in the grate and the world was shut out by screens, curtains, shutters and bolsters. There sat Louisa, tiny, crooked and antique, in the midst of this grim, overcrowded airlessness. I took off my jacket as well as my coat and gave them both to the maid. I bent to kiss the old woman in a state of undress I would never normally permit in company. But this woman had known me as a child. She knew more about me, perhaps, than I would ever know myself. Her cheek was the texture of a wrinkled apple, left to ripen for too long in the barn. She wielded a large hearing trumpet and wore a plain white bonnet, so that her skull, which I suspected of being nearly bald, was no longer visible. She gazed sightlessly in my direction. Her eyes were milky, but still fierce. She reached for my cold hands. Our conversation was conducted in a sequence of high-pitched shouts.
‘James? Is that you?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘You haven’t brought that grasping harpy with you, have you?’
‘If you mean Alice, no, she’s gone.’
A noise somewhere between a snort and a cackle emerged from the old woman’s throat. She then demanded her tea. This was served in a baby’s dispenser with yellow flowers painted on the porcelain, so that Miss Erskine did not douse herself regularly in Darjeeling.
‘I have the papers read aloud to me. Including the advertisements and the gossip columns. I know that you’re carrying on with her. Sometimes, James Barry, I think that you’re as bad as your mother.’
Suddenly she laughed. An unearthly cracked howl from the last century broke out from her sagging throat.
‘Welcome home, James,’ she croaked.
I said nothing.
‘You thought I was dead, didn’t you?’
‘Well, yes, I’m afraid I did.’
‘Not unreasonable. Everybody else is.’
There was a long pause. I studied the furniture. I didn’t immediately recognise any of the pieces. Her desk, yes, that had been in the old house. And perhaps one or two of the paintings, animals in landscapes. But here was over a hundred years of unsorted clutter and all the books she could no longer read. Louisa had been something of a bluestocking when she was young. She had even known Fanny Burney. Why had she never married? She had been beautiful once. The kitchen gossip had been one long story of rebuffed suitors turning tail before her serpent tongue and retreating back to London. Psyche sniffed at the footstools. I could smell the age of the old woman’s body, a musty, acrid smell.
‘Don’t let that creature shit in here,’ shrieked Louisa, jabbing at Psyche with her stick. My poodle retreated, timid and ale
rt, into my arms. I sat staring at Louisa’s black layers and the pearl brooch that was pinned on upside down.
‘Why have you come?’ she demanded.
‘To see you. And to uncover the past.’
‘Well, that’s honest.’
I told her about James Barry’s letter.
There was another long pause. I noticed the rubbed corners of the chairs, their ancient shabbiness. Moth and rust had begun their inevitable process of corruption. Louisa mumbled and spat into her yellowed handkerchief.
Then she snapped, ‘What do expect, James?’ That I should justify your mother’s life to you?’
‘Does it need justifying?’ I asked neutrally. Louisa’s tone was unnecessarily aggressive. But she relaxed back into her chair, casting the child’s cup aside. She folded her hands on her lap and turned her sightless eyes upon me.
‘Yes, my dear. I think it does need justifying. Mary Ann wasn’t given to self-explanations. When did she die? Wasn’t it in 1823? It doesn’t seem so long ago, but it’s nearly forty years since Francisco’s letter came with the news. She must have killed herself, James. She had a constitution like mine. She could have lived to be a hundred. I always thought that we would both bury the rest of you.’
Even at this great distance from my mother’s death I find that hearing that obvious fact stated, that she took her own life, makes me catch my breath. Was it so? Was it true? Why did she choose the sea, rather than the arms of a man who loved her?
Louisa appears to guess my thoughts.
‘We’ll never know why for certain, James. But she wasn’t a happy woman, not in herself. She was never married to Francisco, you know. He could have cast her off at any time.’
‘He never would have done.’
‘Well, so you say. And he may well have given you that impression. But I don’t suppose he ever told you about his wife and children in Venezuela. That’s why he never married her. He wasn’t about to disinherit his sons. To whom do you think he went home on all those endless journeys to the other side of the globe? I’m told his wife was beautiful, cultivated, from a famous, wealthy family. Why do you think he didn’t leave you his fortune?’
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