Life Mask (75 page)

Your soothing care & affectionate solicitude for the dear inimitable, places you, my dear Mrs D., in the inmost chamber of my heart—where the dear Mary, seated
en souveraine,
courts you to remain with her for ever. There, folded in her arms, her throbbing breast pressed to yours will mutely thank you for us both.

The image unsettled Anne. There was something papist about it: the Virgin on her throne.
Courts you to remain with her for ever.
Was that an invitation? Had O'Hara guessed that Anne wanted to come to Gibraltar and make her home with them? Or was this letter simply a showy bit of rhetoric?

Mary was edgy; the secrecy was weighing on her. Because the war was disrupting shipping, some crucial letters appeared to have got lost en route. This seemed a tumultuous, uncomfortable courtship—but then, what did Anne know of love matches? The couple seemed unable to resolve either practical questions, such as what would be their income, or ineffable ones, such as how O'Hara could make it up to Mary for all the loved ones she'd be leaving behind.

When one day on the Mall Anne finally allowed herself to hint that she would consider moving to Gibraltar, Mary went into a flood of tears. 'Oh, but—it's the most marvellous, most extraordinary idea,' she said, mopping at her eyes. 'Would you really be willing to give up everything—your house, your mother's company, your friends here in England—and come with us, all for the sake of friendship?'

Would she? Without a glance behind. Lady Mary would simply have to take in their mother; Anne could say Fordyce had insisted her health required the move. 'In my experience of friendship,' she said, 'it's as sacred a tie as all those other duties and connections.' It was starting to drizzle again; Anne put up her umbrella over them and tucked her arm into Mary's, though not without the usual prickling feeling that they might be being watched. 'What I feel for you—and for O'Hara,' she said, smooth as milk, 'seems to me to outweigh everything else. But you mustn't tell him yet,' she warned.

'Why not?' Mary smiled up at her. 'It would relieve so much of his anxiety about my future happiness.'

'Oh, the General has enough on his mind, preparing a home for
one
lady. Besides, I wouldn't dream of coming till you two are comfortably established. I wouldn't intrude on newlyweds,' she added with a sharp little laugh.

'Must there be an interval, really?' Mary's mouth turned down and she held Anne's arm tightly as the rain fell more heavily. 'My spirits are chafing at all this delay. Let's take the first ship in the morning!'

Anne laughed with her. There was nothing she would rather do. In ten days, given fair winds, she could be at work on the marble version of her self-portrait under the yellow Spanish sun. She would have left England, with all its damps and chills, its sneering newspapers and starving mobs, far behind her.

M
ARCH
1796

Derby sat in an armchair in Eliza's dressing room, examining the mud stains on his creamy leather boots. 'The new tax on inheritance means that when Edward succeeds me he'll have to pay the government £1 in every £50. That's 2 per cent of the entire Derby fortune!'

Mrs Farren, eyes on her needle, made a dutifully shocked hiss.

Eliza didn't see that it was such a terrible thing for a little cream to be skimmed off the top, but of course she wasn't tactless enough to say so. She was preoccupied with her paint; the shadows on her eyelids were too dark for the lovable prattler she was to play, even if it was a turgid melodrama. 'Perhaps by then there'll be a Whig administration and the tax will be repealed.'

'There's less chance of that than of a thaw in Siberia.'

She smiled at that, though it was nothing to smile at, and scrubbed at her cheeks with a sponge.

'By the time Prinny's little Princess Charlotte has learned to walk this government will have become absolute and we'll be forced on to our knees to worship Pitt as the new Caesar. Oh,' said Derby, brightening, 'on a different subject, have you seen our latest brush with fame?' He opened his watered silk pocketbook and drew out an engraving.

She assumed by
our
he meant the Foxites'. But the print showed Derby and herself sitting in a theatre box in old-fashioned clothes, with
Derby and Joan
written over their heads. The play they were watching was identified as
The Constant Couple.

'Surprisingly mild,' said Eliza, examining it for any crude details she'd missed.

'Isn't it?' said Derby with a grin. 'I think we may have outlived our critics.'

Eliza pulled out her watch. 'I hate to push you out, Derby, but it'll soon be first call—'

'Yes, My Lord,' said Mrs Farren, scolding him like a mother, 'it's time you were in your box.'

'Of course,' he said, hopping up. He was still rather sprightly for a man with a gouty foot. 'Sherry says he's paid Colman through the nose to adapt this
Iron Chest
from
Caleb Williams
, because it's a sure hit.'

'Huh!' Eliza knew he was playing for time, unwilling to leave her dressing room; it was rather endearing. 'The play's well named, for my money; it's going to sink like a lead coffin. Colman's gutted the story of all its radical politics and set it in the early 1600s, so the Lord Chamberlain can't interpret it as a commentary on our unjust society and ban the thing! And everything that could go wrong has. This foul weather gave our brilliant young composer a cold—you know Storace?—but he insisted on crawling up from his sickbed for rehearsal, where he passed it on to Kemble. Who refuses to give up this plum role to Palmer, but insists on playing the morbid Mortimer with a cough like a cat with hairballs,' she added satirically. 'And Colman caught the cold next, so no one's made the necessary cuts and rehearsals have been a complete shambles.'

'I'm sure you exaggerate,' said Derby. 'Besides, your brilliance will pull it all together.'

She sighed. 'If I were you, My Lord, I'd spend the evening tucked up by the fire at your club.'

He laughed and kissed Eliza's cold hand, before he headed off to the boxes corridor.

William Powell, the careworn prompter, put his head in the door. 'Be patient with the musicians tonight, Miss Farren, they don't have a conductor. Storace's dead of his cold.'

'No!'

'A boy just came with a note from the widow.'

He was thirty-three, like me,
remembered Eliza.
Poor wretch.
'Mr Powell,' she said, standing up with sudden decisiveness, 'you know as well as I do that
The Iron Chest
won't play. It's running at almost four hours.'

'Then you'll all have to speak faster,' he said, straight-faced.

'Tell Sheridan he must give out
Much Ado
instead.'

'Kemble says it'll play,' said Powell grimly.

'But he's half delirious from those opium pills he's dosing himself with.'

A tired shrug. 'Oh, we've had to transpose the first two scenes in Act Two,' Powell said over his shoulder, at the door, 'because the carpenters say they need ten minutes to replace the Abbey scene with the Library.'

Eliza put her hand over her face, then remembered her paint and lifted it carefully away.

The wings were crowded; the cast numbered eighteen men and five women. Eliza saw Mrs Jordan among them, pasty-faced after her latest miscarriage. (She'd accepted the role Eliza had passed up in the forthcoming
Vortigern,
the early tragedy of Shakespeare's that Sheridan was sure was going to make his fortune. Eliza didn't know if
Vortigern
was a forgery, but she could tell it was a stinker.)

They all spoke of the brilliant Stephen Storace, in whispers; there'd have to be a benefit for his widow and children. Annamaria Crouch, who'd been the composer's favourite soprano, kept thumbing stray tears off her cheeks. Then
The Iron Chest
began, and they stood in the shadows like passers-by watching carriages smash and pile up in the Strand.

Kemble sleepwalked his way through the first few scenes. The guilt-racked Mortimer's lines came out in the solemn sing-song of a country rector. Then Kemble paused and let out a series of coughs loud enough to be heard in the street.

'Well, at least that woke the crowd up,' groaned Palmer in Eliza's ear.

Her face was tight with shame. Kemble was not only dull tonight, but he dragged all the other players down too. Dodd, usually so funny, was as slow as treacle. 'Get on with it!' roared a heckler.

Young Bannister, playing the hero Wilford, came off with his teeth clamped together. 'Couldn't you liven it up a bit?' Palmer asked.

'You try playing shuttlecock with a zombie,' hissed Bannister.

It was more like swimming while tied to a corpse, Eliza thought after her first two scenes. As the innocent Helen, it was her job to imbue Mortimer with all the thrilling qualities of a Romeo. 7
dreamed last night of the fire he saved me from; and I saw him, all fresh, in manly bloom, bearing me through the flames...'
On the last phrase Eliza let her head fall backwards, as if swooning reminiscently. But what good were all her eloquent gestures when Kemble walked on like some arthritic gravedigger who'd lost his
manly bloom
some time in the reign of the last king?

The first act appeared to be lasting all night. 'Powell says we're twenty minutes over time already,' muttered Palmer.

'Oh, good God.'

'That's your cue coming up, isn't it, Eliza? Go on!'

Eliza jerked and spun round. She hadn't missed a cue in years; she was behaving like some green girl. She rushed on stage—and arrived a line too early.

Instead of glaring at her Kemble kept his stupefied gaze on the boards.

'What could'st thou do to laugh away my sickness?'
he asked leadenly and exploded into a cough; Eliza felt a mist of spit on her face.

A chorus of hacking rose from the pit. The wits were imitating him now.
'I'll mimic the physician—wise and all
—' Eliza cried out, throwing herself into a comical mime,

—with cane at nose, and nod emphatical,
portentous in my silence; feel your pulse,
with an owl's face...

And she took the opportunity to seize Kemble's wrist and give him a sharp dig with her thumbnail to rouse him. He'd have a bruise tomorrow, but she didn't care. He jumped and pulled away from her. A roar of laughter went up from the crowd and harsh catcalls. Eliza was once again trapped on a huge stage trying to please more than 3000 strangers. It struck her like a slap in the face:
This is no life for a grown woman.

At her left, Kemble was speechifying gloomily.
'It should seem I was not meant to live long.'

'Nor this play neither!' roared someone from the pit and the whole painted dome rang with mirth.

T
ONTON HAD
died after lunch, in his master's lap. When Anne reached Strawberry Hill she found Walpole with mud under his long nails. 'I've had him buried behind the chapel, with the other animals. It's for the best.' He sobbed. 'I was rather afraid of his surviving me, as he survived Madame du Deffand; it seemed scarce possible he'd meet with a third owner so devoted. No, I shall miss him sorely, but I mustn't have another dog, I'd just be breeding it up to be unhappy after I'm gone. My only pets now will be marble ones—those kittens you carved for me, my dear, I shall talk to them and caress them, while I can,' he said, seizing Anne's hand.

The image was so pathetic that she had to turn her head away.

'Still, I hope the best readiness for death is to live well,' Walpole rebuked himself. 'Sitting with one's arms folded to think about mortality is a very lazy form of preparation.'

'You're not going to die,' said Anne, muffled.

'That's a rather unscientific opinion.'

'I mean, not soon. You're only seventy-eight,' she said. 'Didn't the Earl of Sandgate live to be a hundred and three?'

This wrung a dry laugh from him. 'What an exhausting prospect.' He folded his papery hands in his lap.

In the silence that followed she asked, 'Have you written much in your
Miscellany
recently?'

'Oh, I abandoned that some time ago.'

'But why?'

'There seemed nothing new to say.'

Anne took a deep breath to steady herself. Now, more than ever before, he needed her kindness. 'My dear cousin,' she said, 'how long will you continue to brood over Mary's engagement?'

His pale eyes were wide. 'You misunderstand me,' he said. 'I have surrendered all resentment. I see now that it was impertinent—absurd—of me to attempt to make a young lady more than forty years my junior pander to my senile dependency. My eyes are opened and I condemn myself.'

Anne's throat was sore. 'No one's asking you to—'

'I've no right to enquire into Miss Berry's plans, views, designs, or, least of all, feelings. I won't question her about the date of her departure; I fear I'm too weak to stand any further shocks or disappointments. Pray forgive me if I am, as a consequence, tedious company.'

Her eyes swam with violent tears. She pitied him, but he was a brilliant strategist of war. Clearly he meant to punish her as much as Mary; he would never forgive them for what he called the
conspiracy
of the secret they'd kept all winter.

'What puzzles me', Walpole went on, examining a yellow, cracked thumbnail, 'is that you remain so philosophical. How can you bear the imminent prospect of being bereft of her company, which seems to have become almost as necessary to you as it has been, God knows, to me? Perhaps your extensive readings in the works of the Stoics have borne fruit.'

Anne made no answer.

'Or could it be that you have hopes—impossible for me—that the separation will not be absolute? After all, you've always liked a sultry climate.'

Her head shot up. How could he know Anne's private plans to go to Gibraltar? Had Mary let something slip, or was Walpole simply shrewd to the point of mind-reading? And then it came to her:
He knows what he wouldfeel, what he would do, if he were me.