Golden Hill (25 page)

When the time came for Sempronius and Juba to fight, Septimus and Smith circled in a series of flamboyantly clashing parries, and clinches sword to sword, nose to nose. Septimus had declined, in rehearsal, to fall in with Smith's suggestion that he should at one point jump into the air, while Smith's wooden foil swept under his feet. Ridiculous, he had said; much too likely to go wrong. But now, caught up in the pleasures of villainy, he overacted his share of the combat fearsomely, and managed to flick a candle with his sword-point into the front row, where it was fortunately caught. Puncturing the bladder of pig's blood under his costume, he died in a gush of crimson; then rose to his elbow, gave a death speech of owlish excess with his painted eyebrows raised, and did it again. Cheers.

It was a tribute to Terpie's skill that, discovering his body dressed as Juba a moment later, and mistaking it for Juba's, she was able to wrench the mood back to seriousness. Having, from the opening of the play, glided rather than walked, and moved her arms like marble come to life – now she jerked, trembled, widened her eyes, bit her fingers. The audience quietened, stared, pitied her. ‘O, he was all made up of love and charms,' she mourned, and she seemed like great Cleopatra herself bewailing Antony, not like Addison's faint, efficient copy of that queen. The pity of love squandered, mislaid, overlooked, ill-fated, was made present, trembling, in the room. Then Juba himself entered, and all was righted. ‘O fortunate mistake! O happy Marcia!' More cheers, of a more benevolent sort; cheers of willing belief and relief. The same willingness to enter in seriously marked the response to the final act, with its sombre tableaux, first of Cato's elder son
displayed to his father in another heroic welter of blood, then of Cato himself, nobly extinguishing himself as the last light of Roman freedom guttered out. Deep hush. Sighs. Sobs! Leaning from the store-room door, Smith was surprised to see a generous, general weeping grip the room. Damp eyes everywhere. The butcher at the back cramming his big fist into his mouth, a pair of visiting gentlemen from Virginia blowing their noses, De Lancey himself wiping one eye with his finger. When the cast lined up for their curtain call
sans
curtain, the clapping was thunderous and long-sustained, with particular peaks for Cato, for Juba, for Marcia, and (with hooting) for Sempronius. They were a hit.

After the dinner in the Black Horse for the cast, with bumper upon bumper of congratulatory punch ladled out, and a bottle of veritable champagne produced, and Major Tomlinson swollen at Terpie's shoulder like a proud tomato, and Flora forgetting to not smile at Smith, and many toasts exchanged – Smith and Septimus sat in the steam at William Street again, laughing quietly. But there was constraint between them as well as jubilation. Septimus was beginning to feel the fretful aftermath of his elation. Smith was wondering how much he might count on the friendship between them.

‘That feeling!' said Septimus. ‘It's extraordinary, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘As if you held intimate converse with a whole crowd all together. As if you might stroke 'em, tweak 'em, tickle 'em, strike 'em, all as one beast …'

‘As if all shared one circulation of blood, yes.'

‘And you feel them, and they feel you; and yet the you they feel is not quite you – not, you know, you simple, you veritable – but a
you whom they decide upon.'

‘The part did run mad away with you, tonight.'

‘I have never felt anything like it.'

‘You made me an entire speech, when first we met, about the power of seeming, and how it was not be relied on.'

‘Yes; I suppose; but that was seeming
opposed
to being; seeming with the real, animal life beneath. This is seeming striking inward into being. The artifice stronger than the animal. Not a lie, a change!'

‘Septimus—'

‘I wonder, will they let me put Sempronius off, tomorrow? Will they always be seeing him, a little, when they talk to me? Always hooting at him?'

Smith could have assured him, conventionally, that a play was only a play. That a crowd filling a theatre in a city must be worldly enough to tell the difference between the actor and the role. But he had seen enough of the temper of this city, by now, not to be sure that this was definitely the case.

‘Septimus, the other night. – That light-heeled wraith who prigged my purse. If I understood you rightly—'

Septimus sighed. ‘If you had understood me rightly, you would not be asking questions. You saw something you should not have done. I asked you to trust me. Can we not leave it there?'

‘The thing is' – doggedly – ‘I have a particular reason for asking. It is not the money. There was a paper with it—'

‘No!' cried Septimus, standing up, indignant, milk-white and bony. ‘I will
not
discuss this with you. It is not in your sphere. You must just trust me, when I say, that in this case what you do not know will not harm you. Lord knows you require enough trust in return.'

Smith looked at him.

‘In any case,' said Septimus more gently, ‘I must go. Achilles will be waiting for me. There are not many places we can go together, you know. We have to do all
our
celebrating in private. I will see you before Christmas. You will still be here then?'

‘I must be. For my bill.'

‘Of course. Well, I will be back by then. I must go up-river tomorrow, and try to mend matters as best I can with the regiments waiting there; but I will be back on the twenty-second or the twenty-third. Good night, my dear. That was sublime as well as silly, and I thank you for it.'

A gleam of a porcelain smile, and he was gone, leaving Smith alone in the steam. He could be heard in the next room, dressing and latching his shoes; then doors opened and closed further away, and there was no further sound at all.

Smith, melancholy, solitary, presumed he was the last customer in the bath-house. But he found he was in no hurry to exchange it for the colder solitude of the streets, or for the room at Mrs Lee's, which had taken on few of the qualities of a home, or even of a very substantial refuge. Since his time in the gaol, it seemed the winter wind blew where it willed through every structure in New-York. He poured another dip of water onto the stove, from the barrel, and with a sputtering hiss it seethed instantaneously to vapour, descending from the planked ceiling in a thick grey mist that first burned and battered at Smith's pores, dragging out new sweat in a sheet over his skin, then coiled and drifted more languorously, in luminous haze around the lantern, in slow hanging twists and tendrils. He could scarcely see a foot but he did not mind. He had playing before his mind's eye, on his mind's stage, his view from the store-room door as the audience shuffled out,
bearing their chairs. Terpie had been scrubbing at his face with a vinegary rag, to take off the greasepaint, but over her shoulder, though the door-way, between the shapes of those departing, he had seen how Tabitha had stood hesitating; lingering, while her family around her impatiently tried to hustle her away; still looking at the empty stage with a baffled expression, as if she had discovered in herself something else that needed saying. Something surprising. She is a goblin, he reminded himself. There is something very wrong with her. But the imprinted picture persisted regardless. He shut his eyes and could still see it. The sweat trickled down. The hot stove popped and fizzed. Such was the power of the association of ideas, that when he heard footsteps, and a woman's voice, and his eyes flew open again, startled, he almost expected it to be Tabitha standing there. But it was not: it was Terpie Tomlinson, only as high as his shoulder but as bare as Eve, leaning against the door-frame, and waiting to be admired.

‘I haven't got to play the
ingénue
for a long time,' she said. ‘I wanted to say, thankee.' The voice beneath the elocution turned out to be not a flat Essex drawl, but a warm burr from somewhere in the West Country. Or perhaps that was just another voice left over from the stage: a friendly milkmaid, chosen to please.

Mrs Tomlinson, naked and lightly steamed, was all rosy curves. All cream-smooth skin puckered and stippled and flustered and whipped up, by the heat, into mobile rashes and foxings of colour. Her noble bosom, uncovered and unsupported, spread wider than her ribs, and jostled out into heavy, rich, pendant udders, whose general blush concentred in fat raspberry-coloured nubbins thick as thumbs. Her wide hips, canted out to exaggerate a swell already near the limit of the probable, spread from her narrow waist like a lyre. Her belly dipped into a crease touched
with brownish-pink at her navel, then swelled out again, descending, into a lesser hill, and a lower yet, valleyed and russet-lipped, tangled with springy hair where the steam collected and dripped. – How hard it is to describe a desirable woman without running into geography! Or the barnyard. Or the resources of the fruit-bowl. As if flesh itself, bare vulnerable flesh-of-our-flesh, were not enough, considered merely as itself, and we could not account for its power, without fetching away into similes. I do not want to write this part of the story, and am quibbling to hesitate. – The grave beauty of her face seemed to contradict the lush abundance of her body, yet both were true of her, and in truth contradicted each other as little as any two qualities whatsoever happening to be possessed by an individual: the contradiction existing only in the expectation of an onlooker who had presumed a whole woman would conform to a single impression. Who, finding she didn't, might if sufficiently led by his loins, choose to interpret the double impression as an extra piquancy. And the effect of the years on Mistress Terpie? Let us be painterly. Let us say, it cannot be denied that the line of beauty had wavered, wandered, thickened in her, with time. Where before there had been the perfect serpentine bow of the river there was now the braided spread of a delta. But magnificence blurred is still magnificence.

Smith, looking at what she showed him, looking at her confident smile, felt at first a kind of defeat. He had not contrived the situation. It was flat contrary to what he had, that moment, been wearily desiring. He saw at once vistas of disappointment and embarrassment, if he said no, and of complication and embroilment, if he said yes. And of course a betrayal. But a betrayal of what, really? There seemed, one scant second later, a perversity, a negligibility, a bare, thin, almost contemptible unlikelihood
in what he had just now been contemplating, and wanting, and dreaming of, compared to the rich certainty of what was being offered by Terpie. As if, to continue faithful – even to consider continuing faithful – to his actual passion, would be to prefer a will-o'-the-wisp, a sour vacant mouthful of air, over a mouth to kiss, a willingly opened body in which to find at least the sensation of a home in the world. He liked to choose. He liked to choose. He was a man who chose for himself. When had he last been able to do that? He was sick of waiting on choices not his own. And as he stared, and moments passed – not many, by all external calculation, but enough to be felt, when no response is arriving to this kind of offer – he noticed, what he had been too dumb-struck to see before, that there was anxiety quivering around Terpie's lapis eyes, despite her smile, and quivering more there by the second. Though he was sure she had many times laid calculated waste like this to men, it might he realised be some while since she had last dared it. She might be inwardly quite unconfident whether this coup-de-l'oeil still worked, at forty-six. Suddenly he saw in her boldness a kind of sluttish courage not a million miles removed from his own willed shamelessness in every New-York room he'd stepped in. She was blatant; so was he.

Smith grinned. ‘“He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise”,' he said.

‘You may stick that right up your arse, Master Smith,' said Terpie, in the cool, pure little voice of Marcia.

‘Well, I think I'd rather—'

‘Maybe later, if you're a good boy.'

She swayed into the steam-room: a foot away, six inches away, into his reaching hands. He held her spectacular haunches. Her damp, flushed skin was warm, and very solid. He blew gently and
experimentally on the corrugated dull-pink skin around one big nipple. It tightened and swelled. She shivered.

‘I don't s'pose you're staying?' she said.

‘No,' said Smith.

‘Only we could do good work together.'

‘I can't.'

‘A lot of things. Real theatre. None o' this tableau nonsense.'

‘I really can't.'

‘Oh well,' she said. ‘Then there's no reason to be careful, is there.'

Mr Smith could think of many reasons to be careful, but only one he cared to mention.

‘What about the Major?' he said.

‘What he don't know, won't hurt him.' She ran her hands into Smith's wet hair, and he—

But why always Smith? Was it necessarily true, that because she seemed to
him
to be the ripe, round, straightforward antidote to the complications of his hopes, the scene looked as simple through her eyes? Was she not taking the greater risk here? Did she not have to set aside cautions, sorrows, hopes, fears, loyalties, to permit herself the role of the plump and ready siren in the steam-room? Have we not heard enough already of Mr Smith's desire, and seen Mrs Tomlinson quite sufficiently as he did? Should we not, at least, pay a little attention to Terpie's view of him, lounging like a freckly satyr on the wooden benches, grinning at her with a young man's lazy sense of entitlement now the surprise of her gift had faded; grown almost all the way into his strength but still long-limbed, with the knots of bone at his knees and his elbows giving him the lingering gawkiness of a foal; with the film of sweat on his chest, and his curls thickened to
dark emphatic coils with water drops at the end; with the last unremoved traces of the paint around his eyes rimming his gaze in black depravity; with his wide mouth laughing, and his cock lolling? No, not lolling any more. Stirring, as she filled her hands with him, to her pleasure and his.