The Skull and the Nightingale (34 page)

“Fear not. The unfathomable Mr. Ogden has undertaken to create new worlds for my guests to inhabit. Formal invitations will be dispatched tomorrow and will declare a theme—Flesh and Spirit. I flatter myself that I am well provided in both categories.”

“But will not all the ladies appear as angels and the gentlemen as satyrs?”

“The invitation will be so phrased as to discourage such simplicities. And who knows: in Ogden’s strange domain a satyr may be sanctified or an angel debauched.”

“You have great faith in that gentleman’s powers.”

“I have come to think him a remarkable fellow. You would have seen him working here now but for an unexpected professional engagement. He’s as dull a man as you could meet, but he has strange pictures in his head. There could be alchemy at work.”

That evening I pored over the masquerade catalogs again, in doubt whether to aspire to the spiritual or to champion the flesh. At length I decided to become Hermes, the emissary of the gods, a licensed traveler between the upper and the nether worlds. The costume as illustrated seemed to promise both anonymity and freedom. Apart from winged sandals and winged hat, my sole visible garment would be a loose white tunic. To confirm my identity it seemed that I would have to carry the Mercurial caduceus or wand, no doubt a tiresome accoutrement, but I was conveniently required to wear a short but dense black beard. Between that and my broad-brimmed hat, little of my face would be available to the eye.

O
gden’s absence in Worcestershire allowed me less than a week in which to contrive another meeting with Sarah. Having no plausible excuse for visiting her house, I was once more reduced to haunting St. James’s Park. The weather was unpropitious—cool and intermittently wet. I visited the park on successive days, to find it all but deserted. On the third morning, coming away despondent, I wandered toward Margaret Street with no clear plan in mind. As I neared Mrs. Kinsey’s house I glanced up to see Sarah approaching.

I had four or five seconds to devise a sufficiently innocuous greeting.

“A welcome encounter, Mrs. Ogden. I come from the park, where I was recollecting our last conversation there.”

“And that remembrance turned your feet in this direction?”

“Apparently so.”

“You might have seen me in the park with my aunt, but unfortunately she is indisposed. I come from her house and am on my way home.”

“Then you have no particular engagement?”

“No.”

Her eye caught mine, and there was the slightest of pauses. I knew at once, and with a surge of hope, that we were united in wishing to prolong our conversation. But how to do so? Affecting easiness, I found my voice a little unsteady:

“I would welcome an opportunity to talk with you . . .”

“Here in the street?” (This with a slight smile.)

“No.”

“Then where?”

I apprehended, of course, the unspoken words:
The servants would talk if you came to the house again.
But did not that shared understanding immediately define us as conspirators? I took a risk:

“Having learned of your aunt’s indisposition, might I not call upon her this afternoon with some small gift?”

Sarah considered the suggestion and inclined her head: “You might indeed—she was always fond of you. And might I not happen to be there and offer you tea?”

In this way the matter was speedily resolved. I went on my way with a fast-beating heart, exhilarated by this ready collusion. Three hours later, having sent up some fruit and established that Mrs. Kinsey’s ailment was nothing worse than a chill, I was seated in her drawing room with Sarah.

“We can resume our conversation,” she said. “Pray what do you wish to talk about?”

Her mood had changed since the morning: she was quickened, keen-eyed, slightly flushed, as though ready for argument. I tried to sound easy and affable.

“Anything at all. I want to learn about your doings. We have known one another extremely well, but lately there have been gaps in that knowledge.”

“Indeed there have,” said Sarah, smiling but sharp. “The great gap opened after you left for France and ceased to answer my letters.”

Here was direct engagement. I found it encouraging rather than otherwise.

“I plead guilty to that charge. My only defense is a feeble one. I have an ingrained weakness that you may recall. It seems that, more than most people, I live in the moment, with only a diminished recollection of those not present to me.”

“You are right—it is a pitiful defense. Absorbed in foreign pleasures, you forgot me.”

“At least I am properly remorseful. And such
meager
pleasures as I enjoyed abroad are correspondingly forgotten now that I have returned.”

“If they are forgotten you are in no position to claim that they were meager. Nothing you say can be trusted.”

Sarah spoke teasingly but looked triumphant. Unsure of the balance between banter and reproach in her words, I tried to regain the initiative:

“Meanwhile, however, you were marrying well.”

“Marrying
very
well. In at least two respects.”

“Money being one of them?”

“Most certainly. I had never dreamed of such wealth. I was transformed: suddenly I could speak with authority. Do you not detect it? Are you not a little in awe of me?”

“A little.”

“You never were before. This is the effect of wealth. Formerly you had money and I had not. Now you fear I may hit you on the head with a bag of guineas.”

“Surely you would do nothing so violent?”

“Not if I am treated with proper respect.”

The remark could have been a pleasantry or a warning, but was probably both. Although I smiled, my hopes were fading.

“You spoke of two great gains from your marriage. What was the other?”

“How can I express it? The experience of energy. Mr. Ogden is a man of great force. You have seen that he is careless of convention. He cannot pretend. What he does not find interesting he ignores. If he wants something, he will set out to get it.”

“So you have told me before—instancing yourself as the thing wanted.”

I tried to speak lightly but probably did not succeed. Sarah made no reply. At a loss, I sought for an observation neither jealous nor sneering:

“Are you allowed to participate in these forceful pursuits?”

“Almost never.”

“How do you entertain yourself when Mr. Ogden is away? Do you pay calls?”

“Very few.”

“Is this not a somewhat—lonely life?”

“It is the life I have chosen. What of your own life, Mr. Fenwick? Does it never grow wearisome to be a professional man of pleasure?”

I smiled before I had thought of anything to smile about: my last remaining hope was that I might somehow spin us into a lighter mode of discourse.

“You are hard on me, Sarah Ogden. Here we are, two old friends, all but quarreling. You have squeezed our conversation into a tight corset, but I will cut the strings. The truth is that we are similarly placed, you and I. If your husband is a man of force, so is my godfather. I pursue my life of pleasure at his command, so that it has become a duty. Let me tell you, it is no easy matter to enjoy oneself to order. I cannot write to him and say: ‘I have duly tasted this or that pleasure, but to no effect.’ He is paying me to communicate sensations.”

Sarah was thawed sufficiently to be laughing at me in her old way.

“Poor Master Richard, I quite thought you would have found such duties congenial. How grievously you must have suffered. Have your sensations been altogether numbed?”

“I would not go quite so far.”

“It is a relief to hear you say so. I have credited you with strong susceptibilities.”

I maintained the light tone. “Strong, perhaps, but also refined. You surely perceived the refinement?”

“I cannot recall doing so. But I accept your account of the matter. What I still do not understand is why your godfather should indulge you in this way.”

“I myself hardly know. Perhaps in an attempt to make sense of the world. He wishes to be better informed about experiences that he has missed.”

“Has he not left his inquiry rather late?”

“I think he has.”

She paused, and then struck out again:

“Where will this experiment end? When he is satiated with your pleasures, what will happen? Will you be withdrawn to the country to take charge of his estate?”

“I cannot say. I wish I could.”

“Then you do not know what you will be doing five years from now?”

“I do not know what I will be doing one year from now.”

“Then perhaps your situation is as strange as my own.”

She smiled, as though to herself, and the smile gave way to laughter. A little puzzled, I found myself laughing with her, if only from fellow feeling.

“But how is your life strange?” I asked.

“That is something I am not at liberty to tell you. But strange it is.”

“You tantalize me.”

“So be it. Will you be attending Mr. Crocker’s masquerade?”

I welcomed the change of direction: “Certainly. I take it that you will be there?”

“Oh, yes. This will be the first masquerade I have seen. I like the idea that for an evening people can cease to be their customary selves.”

“I will be interested to see your unaccustomed self—if I can penetrate your disguise.”

“I shall expect to see
you,
Mr. Fenwick, in the guise of a brigand or a pirate.”

“That is cruelly said, Mrs. Ogden. I am a gentle spirit.”

“You are no such thing, as I well know. My friend Miss Martin told me that when she was but fifteen you forced your kisses upon her.”

“Can you believe me capable of such barbarism?”

“Readily. You were always a lawless fellow—as Mr. Gilbert must have suspected.”

We continued in this easy vein, and I returned home with soaring hopes. If Sarah left her husband’s side at the masquerade, I could surely venture an advance of some sort.

But again I reminded myself that Kitty would also be present. Might it be that my two carefully separated narratives would close upon me like scissor blades? Surely not, if I could retain my grip on the handles.

My dear Richard,

You show a proper sympathy for Mrs. Quentin. I shall enable her to remain in her present residence if that is the course she prefers.

Your own story quickens in ways agreeable to my curiosity. You are steering a course toward the heart of that complication in human affairs which most strongly engages my interest. The lady in the case is but lately married. You are drawn to her, it would appear, for several distinct reasons. It seems likely that her motives, also, must be mixed. Desire and Morality, Illusion and Passion are poised in a nice state of antagonism, and the outcome will not, as in a novel, be predetermined in favor of Virtue. It will be what it will.

We would all wish to be virtuous and rational: we are constantly urged to be so in prose and in verse. It has become clear to me, however, that these didactic works are riddled with contradictions, because the problems they pose are insoluble. In Mr. Richardson’s Clarissa the heroine is presented as a paragon—yet she is fatally attracted to a notorious rake. This Lovelace, later to degenerate into a rapist, is the dominant figure throughout, the source of wit and energy. Hickman, the one wholly virtuous male character in the novel, is a timid booby, dismissed as a “male-virgin” by Lovelace. Even his future wife, Anna Howe, calls him “a dangler.” She repeatedly humiliates him, mocking his face, dress, and manner. Indeed she praises Lovelace at Hickman’s expense, arguing that “turbulence must keep a woman’s passion alive.” The author inadvertently discloses a belief fatal to his project: that Vice is exciting and arouses desire, while Virtue is dull and destroys it. Pious admirers of his novel, both male and female, have their interest maintained by the “turbulence” of Lovelace, and laugh at the pitiable Hickman. I am reminded of Hunter’s couplet:

Lust stands condemned, yet potency is prized;

Virtue is lauded, but the prig despised.

I must wonder whether your feelings for Mrs. Ogden will be altered if she submits to you. As we have agreed, there is something in us which seeks to elevate physical desire by idealizing the object of pursuit. To listen uncritically to that inner voice is to be self-deluded. Lovelace himself admits, after raping Clarissa: “There is no difference to be found between the skull of King Philip and that of another man”—which is to say that in respect of the private parts, one woman is hardly to be distinguished from another. To put the case crudely: in the very last resort what will Mrs. Ogden have to offer that Mrs. Hurlock did not?

Yet you are right to suggest that to lack the idealizing impulse is perhaps to be less than human. I myself, as a younger man, inclined too far in this direction. But I was a child of a divided age. It preached the virtues of the intellect, of clarity, of seeing the world as it is—yet in social life it feared physical facts. “But to the girdle do the gods inherit”: as though mindful of Lear’s warning, we buried the lower half of the female body beneath layer upon layer of fabric. The satirical Anna Howe hints that, for all poor Hickman knows, she may have three feet hidden beneath her skirts.

A woman’s hair may be squashed beneath a wig, the face painted, the eyes chemically brightened, the breath artificially sweetened. Seen in this light, Dr. Swift’s imaginings appear less hyperbolic. We seem to assume that the unadorned female form would fall far short of our ideals: it must be disguised and beautified to make good its deficiencies. Perhaps we similarly call in aid Jealousy, Vanity, or Revenge as strong sauces to an insipid repast.

These ideas, or something like them, were in my mind recently during the visit of Mr. and Mrs. Jennings. You will perhaps hardly credit that many years ago I was strongly attracted to Arabella Thorpe, as she then was. In justice to her and to myself, it should be said that she was then a beautiful and sprightly young woman. Perhaps too easily I submitted to what seemed her preference for Ben Jennings, a hearty buck. It was a strange business to see them again, half a lifetime later. Here was poor Ben, now an amiable buffoon. As for the lady, I found her lively enough; but if formerly I was tempted to picture what her dress concealed, I now felt no such curiosity. Yet so to my dilemma. Half my brain told me that I had done well to abstain from competing for so poor a prize, but the other half said that I had absurdly situated myself outside the natural range of human feeling.