‘Any money going? Was that it?’ Alice demands, in character.
‘Oh no, nothing like that. She wanted to talk about the past. She wanted to give me a list of my mother’s lovers.’
‘Oh, the lovers!’ Alice loses interest a little, but takes up battle stations on the hearth rug anyway.
‘And could she tell you which one was your father? We always speculated about that in the kitchen. Cook practically had the odds worked out on a slate. But you had us confused. You contrived to look like all three of them.’
‘Did I? All three of them?’
‘You still do. You’re a red-headed dwarf like Barry. Yet you stand up straight with your chin in the air like the General, and you’ve inherited all his mannerisms of command. But then, you have David Erskine’s gentle mouth and smile. Your best features! Both still quite charming.’
I have no answer to the past.
She comes over and kisses me, long and hard. I smell cinammon and alcohol on her breath.
‘And am I forgiven for staying on with Louisa? Even when she wouldn’t receive you?’
Alice nods.
‘Have you been drinking?’
She nods again, shameless, smiling.
‘How many glasses?’
Two fingers shoot up.
‘Just two? Port wine? My best? And you had it mulled! Alice, you’re a criminal. I keep second-rate port for mulling.’
She laughs out loud and jingles the household keys on her belt, just as Mary Ann used to do.
‘Listen, James, I know just what the old witch will have said. And whoever gives a damn who their father was. As long as you get the financial backing. Which you did, James. You had enough fathers to keep you happy for a lifetime. And a very pretty mother, who left you her French accent and her surgeon’s hands.’
* * *
Louisa died peacefully a year later. I visited her regularly until her demise and I followed her coffin to the grave, along with the younger generation of Erskines, who regarded me as much a relic from the past century as their great-aunt. Louisa left me a handsome bequest, with a specific message that not a penny was to be passed to the ‘grasping harpy’. Alice rejoiced in the money and I suppressed the message. Visiting Louisa had been more problematic than I had imagined, for Alice sulked whenever I made ready to depart. Her equanimity over the old aristocrat’s refusal to receive the servant who had made good was never quite restored. Louisa had once combed the lice out of Alice’s hair while they sat on the back steps, years ago, in the house where we had grown up together, and Alice felt that this memory should take precedence over everything else. She was family, after all. Louisa didn’t see it in exactly that light. She refused to hear Alice’s name mentioned in her presence and gave Alice as the principal reason why she had ceased going to the theatre. I resisted Alice’s attempts to have herself reinstated, on the grounds that an old lady of nearly ninety-four must be left to die with her prejudices intact. Alice never accepted this and we quarrelled from time to time, always going over the same ground, and never achieving a resolution.
In fact, I was surprised how often we did quarrel. If I had expected a tranquil and harmonious life with Alice Jones, I would have been mightily disappointed. Alice would not accept the role of peaceful old lady. She loved scandal and intrigue. She kept up with all her theatrical cronies and gave frequent raucous dinners, after which I often found several of the guests, stained and snoring, asleep on the couches downstairs, and once, peacefully laid out on cushions, behind an armchair in the breakfast room. Jesse had laid the table carefully without waking him, stepping over his boots as she cleared away the debris of the previous night. The now comfortable dinner guest looked like a dead soldier in the battle for pleasure, laid to rest where he had fallen.
Alice was very apologetic. But it happened again and again.
I was used to spending a great deal of time on my own and could not accustom myself to much company. Yet I had no public duties to occupy my days and therefore, I imagine, my unease and restlessness increased. My public and professional life was over. I was left living inside the shell of the man I had once been. I read. I studied. I visited exhibitions. I went to public lectures. I kept up with the new developments in medicine. Yet it seemed that there was no reason to do so, and no purpose to give direction to my days. I had been a servant of the Crown. I was not a scholar, neither by nature nor by acquired inclination, and apart from my life-long love of Shakespeare and the English poets I was only an occasional evening reader of the new novels and magazines. I rarely attended the opera or the theatre. Tastes had changed radically in my absence. Often I found that I had passed an evening of utter boredom in uncongenial company. I disappointed Alice, who flung herself into the pursuit of pleasure, night after night, with undignified abandon.
Things came to a head in the spring two years after Louisa’s death. I discovered that Alice had continued, all her life, to send money back to her family in the country, and now her youngest niece was to be married. She decided to go home for the wedding. And I decided to go with her.
The journey was quite different from what it had once been. We travelled all the way to Shrewsbury by train, in our own compartment. Alice adored watching the landscape bouncing past, interspersed with great puffs of steam. She loved watching the rain streaming diagonally across the glass. She liked the varnished elegance of the interior and the ubiquitous smell of soot. She wolfed her dinner in the dining car, drank wine in public, autographed the waiter’s menus, and strolled along the platform whenever we stopped for any length of time, twirling her umbrella. She was on the lookout for what she described as ‘improvements’. Some country people found the advent of the railways a disturbing phenomenon. Alice loved change for its own sake. She was born into the right century.
Two of her nephews and her youngest brother were waiting for us, armed with hired carriages, umbrellas and cushions. Every conceivable development in the weather had been envisaged and alternative plans carefully laid. The family had improved its state during my long years in the tropics. The girls were no longer in service, but in the dressmaking industry, and the boys worked in the Coalbrookdale porcelain factory and out at Jackfield, making decorated ceramic tiles. There was more money to be spent. Everyone now wore shoes and owned a dinner service. Alice’s elder brother, a retired Nonconformist patriarch with foaming whiskers, had purchased an old ironmaster’s house, with a proper conservatory and two parlours, one of which was reserved for Alice. And there she sat, enthroned.
As soon as I could disengage myself from the collective domestic excitement, I borrowed a horse and rode out to the old estate, despite the fact that it was late in the afternoon.
The chestnut trees in the park were just escaping from winter and I saw each bud, lurid and green, barely unfolding from the soft fledgling down of the paler underleaf. The grass still wore its winter brown and the air was sharp. I was glad that I had left Psyche by the fire with Alice. My horse snorted like the locomotive, giving out thick gentle puffs, as we trotted down the gravel ways, looking out to the hills on the Welsh borders. The timber was well tended, but the house itself looked empty and sad as I approached. All the shutters were put up on the second floor. The front garden was not as opulent as it had once been. But the huge sweep of daffodils, brilliant doubled trumpets, still flowed over the rough lawns, a great gust of colour in the pallid light. The window sills needed re-painting, but it was all much the same as it had always been. A stranger answered the door.
The family were absent, said the housekeeper, and the main rooms covered in dust sheets and darkness. But I was welcome to wander in the park and gardens for as long as the light held. I left her my card and tied up my horse in the stables. There was no one there. The kitchen yard was unchanged, but deserted. The laundry door was ajar. There were no animals nesting in the outhouses. The dovecot was empty and none of the dogs came to greet me. Here was the locked house, married to time. Upstairs, in one of the small windows, I
saw a faint light. There was fresh straw laid in one of the stalls, and a pitchfork balanced across an empty wheelbarrow. Two wooden buckets stood stacked one inside the other. My footsteps chimed hollow on the brick path as I set off towards the fountains in the eastern gardens.
Here, nothing had changed. All the flower beds were neatly turned and the roses were properly mulched. But the fountain at the foot of the stone steps was thick with moss, and the brackish water slaked with dead leaves. Hermes sat disconsolate on top of the greening stone. The cupids drooped, waterless, astride the dolphins. The sundial was still there, but that too had acquired a sinister tint of fresh green. The alley way of rhododendrons had been cleared, giving that side of the gardens a naked, unprotected flank. The wooden Chinese pergolas had been replaced and a row of stone statues, the old stone gods, unappealing and aggressive, marked the entrance to the maze. They were men’s gods: Mars, Zeus, Hercules, Vulcan and Apollo. The women’s gods were hidden within. I entered the maze.
The yew hedges were lower than I remembered, but well trimmed, and the old stone seats which had punctuated the labyrinth were still there, cold slabs perched on stone balls. The maze no longer seemed to be an endless threatening prison. Now it was simply a dated garden curiosity, a harmless amusement of hexagonals which would baffle no one for very long. I reached the core. The fountain’s goddess of love, modestly hiding her breasts, the huntress poised for flight, her dogs beneath her and Zeus’s only begotten daughter, the owl perched on her shoulder, were all gone. No trace remained. Instead, there was an unmarked paved square in the last box, at the heart of the puzzle. I looked round at the unyielding banks of yew. The scene was blank. In the fading light of a spring day, two reflecting empty squares of hedge and stone had nothing to reveal to each other or to me. The sound of the fountain had always led us to the core of the maze. Now, for those who had achieved the centre, there were no clues and no rewards. There was nothing to see.
I stood alone at the heart of the labyrinth and listened to the rooks calling in the early dusk.
* * *
When we returned to London I told Alice what I intended to do. She leaped to her feet and began shouting.
‘James! Are you out of your senses? Do you think that your pension would be paid to some nameless Irish woman who’d hoodwinked the army all her life? They’d probably say you couldn’t possibly have been a real doctor either – if you’d been a woman all along!’
Alice spat out the word ‘woman’ with perilous contempt.
‘Anyway, what on earth do you mean? Imposture? Masquerade? Your real identity? What is your real identity? You’re James Miranda Barry, near relative to David Steuart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan. You even attended your Aunt Louisa’s funeral. You’ve got aristocratic connections that you’re proposing to deny? I don’t want to live with a public scandal. Think what they’d say about me. They’d say that I knew all along and was some sort of Sapphist. Adolphus would turn in his grave. Just when we’re received almost everywhere together. What were you intending to do? Disappear? How can you even think of it?
‘And what is genuine? This genuine inner soul you say you want to discover? Nothing’s absolutely genuine! You aren’t the same person with everyone you know. You act out different roles. I’ve acted every minute of my life. I’m always on stage. We all are. It’s all a performance. Does your inner soul call for the hot water every morning and then dismiss the maid so that you can start washing? Or is that someone else you’ve always pretended to be? What I know and what you seem to forget is that we’ve only got one play in which to act. And you make up the lines and the plot as you go on. Did you need Shakespeare to tell you that? There’s no rehearsal and no second night in which to do better. We’re on stage now. This is it. And you got the breeches part, James. Oh, you’re such an idiot. You’ve played that part with verve and gusto. You’ve been marvellous. You’ve done it. Now, do you want to speak the epilogue – where you turn up in skirts to point the moral before being booed off the stage? You’re mad!’
She paced the room with a handkerchief pressed to her face. Two fine red spots of rage gleamed on her cheeks. For once, despite all her disclaimers, Alice wasn’t acting. She was very angry indeed.
‘What do you want to do? Go around saying you’re a woman? Wear my clothes? What do you think will happen? Do you think that they’ll try to cure you or make drawings of your anatomy? Or sell you to a circus? For Heaven’s sake, James . . .’
She reached the hearthrug and picked at one of her appalling china shepherds on the mantelpiece. Then she actually stamped her foot.
‘You’d be spitting on people who’ve moved heaven and earth to make your life adventurous and interesting. You’ve got money. You’ve done well for yourself. Plenty of people look up to you. Are you going to turn on them too and say, look, I didn’t mean any of it? It’s all been a mistake? Because that’s what you’d be saying.
‘Damn you, James! How dare you? Why have doubts at this stage? Why have doubts at all about who you are?’
She stood biting her lip.
‘Who is Alice Jones? I’m a great English actress. There are paintings and play bills and God knows how many ecstatic notices to prove it. No one bothers with where I came from. Well, very few people, anyway. It’s not where you come from, it’s where you get to that counts. And are you really telling me that you want to undo it all?’
She turned on me.
‘James Barry, you listen to me.’ Now she was standing on the toes of my boots, glowering, and I could feel her anger in my fingertips.
‘You are who the world says you are. And the world says you’re a man.
‘I’ll hear no more about it. Not one word.’
She flung herself down beside me.
‘Alice,’ I said quietly, ‘I haven’t said a word. You’ve done all the talking.’
Alice burst into tears, the huge indignant howl of a child who has just been told that playtime is over, and now it’s time for bed. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it gently. When the first storm of tears was past and she was sniffing crossly, I began again.
‘Alice, I’ve spent my life in disguise. I don’t know who else I could have been.’
She cut me off.
‘But you loved dressing up. Don’t you remember your first uniform? And how you danced for me in a swirl of red? You looked wonderful. I was so jealous. You loved the power, James. You did, you did. You loved ordering people about and shooting at Zulus –’
‘Alice! To my certain knowledge I never shot anybody who hadn’t agreed to be shot at.’
‘Duelling! You fought duels, James. You took mad risks. You courted discovery.’
I was silent. I remembered that heady rush of fear as I walked away from my opponent, knowing that, were I even to be wounded, my career would be over. Yes, that had been part of the glimmering, unspoken motive. Alice was right. I had courted discovery.
‘You didn’t exactly make yourself invisible either, did you? You quarrelled with everyone you had anything to do with. Your staff adored you and your masters all shuddered when they saw you coming. You provoked trouble. You did it on purpose. You were talked about, James. You had a public life.’
‘Exactly,’ I shouted, suddenly as angry as she was, ‘I had a public life. But what else did I have? I had no one there at the end of the day. I didn’t have you.’
For a second she is silenced. But I’ve never known Alice let someone else have the last word and she didn’t now. She pulled me round to face her.
‘You’ve got me now. I love you, James, and if I’d ever once felt that I could have lived my life with you I would have done. But you’d never have been upstaged by any other woman. There was only room at the top for you. You’d never have let me tour on my own. I had to. I wanted to get on. You’d have ended my career as surely as I would have supported yours. You knew too much about me. I needed besotted, darling idiots like Adolphus, God bless him, not a man who asked questions like you did.
Of course I loved you, James, but I wanted my life too. I didn’t want to be dragged off to the tropics to die.’
‘I would never have let you go there,’ I snapped, alarmed.
‘You see. I’d never even have got to dance at the plantation balls. James, you’re too used to giving orders and having them obeyed. I can’t bear arguing and you love it.’
‘But you like having your own way, Alice.’
‘So do you.’
We hissed at each other like scrapping cats. She tugged at one lock of my greying red curls, then leaned over and kissed my cheek. She tried a wheedling, begging tone.
‘Oh James, we’re so happy now, please don’t spoil it.’
Then something terrible occurred to her.
‘Don’t tell me that you aren’t happy. That you want something different? Something else? Oh, please don’t tell me that.’
These were real tears.
She had conquered once more. What could I do but reassure her? For in the course of our quarrel something had become clear to me. I was no longer in any danger of being discovered. And it was the danger of the disguise that I had loved. I had been obsessively preoccupied, for so long, with the fact of my loneliness, with the secrets of my hidden being, locked away from the world, that I was unable to understand the change. I was no longer a solitary man. James Miranda Barry was at last reunited with the only person left in the world in whom he had a complete and absolute trust and whom he had always loved.
James Miranda Barry Page 39