Mortal Love (10 page)

“It's from a story. ‘King Orfeo.'”

“Don't know it. Orfeo, like Orpheus?”

“I suppose.” She was staring at the picture with a sad, puzzled expression. “People come up with strange things to explain what they don't comprehend.”

“Like ... ?”

“Like the dead,” she said. “I can never understand how it works. You yearn for them, you miss them, they're gone, and no matter how long you look, you can never find them again. But you desire them. You grieve. It's very beautiful.” She turned away, her long hair falling across her face as she stepped back through the door into the hallway. “And this—”

She lifted her hand to a window, twisting her hand back and forth so that light filtered between her fingers, turning them from white to black, white to black. “Shadows. Chiaroscuro. It's so beautiful! But confusing.”

Daniel stared at her blankly, then followed her down the hall. “Well, I guess I won't argue with that.”

Abruptly she turned to face him. “Are you hungry? Because I'm famished.”

“Oh. Well. Gee.” He tallied two columns in his head:

“Um, well, I . . .”

“There's a brasserie near here. The food's brilliant.”

She smiled, and he found himself staring right into those green-glass eyes, wondering what it would be like to touch her cheek, there, and if the strange periwinkle shimmer stopped with her face or—

“Sure! I mean, yes, I'm hungry.” He cocked his thumb at the door. “Thanks for showing me the painting by Jack the Ripper.”

Larkin laughed. “Cobus Candell. As far as I know, he wasn't anywhere as prolific as Jack the Ripper. But you never can tell.”

“You never can tell,” Daniel agreed, grinning, and followed her back downstairs.

They walked to
the restaurant. There was no sign of the girl who'd been in the courtyard. The rain had stopped. High above them pale sky gleamed, and a chill breeze stirred puddles in the street.

“Boy, I'd never be able to find my way back from here,” Daniel said, pulling his leather jacket tight around him. “I bet your restaurant isn't in
TimeOut.”

“You lose,” said Larkin, disappearing behind a corner.

“Hey, wait—!”

He stumbled after her, trying to grasp her arm. She only laughed, shaking her head so that hair blurred into shadow and her face seemed to float before him. “I'm fine, really. But it's a good thing we're early. They get packed at lunchtime.”

She turned and swept through the door. Her hair whipped back into his face, smelling sweetly of green apples. He reached for her collar, felt her hand pressing his. Then she was gone ahead of him, inside.

Daniel blinked as he tried to adjust to the darkness. The dining tables were stainless steel; what he could glimpse of the kitchen seemed as floodlit as a hospital operating room. The overall effect was of dining in an underground abattoir. Still, it smelled great—roasting garlic, fresh bread, anisette. And the clientele looked expensive, thin men and thinner women in black, waving mobile phones and cigarettes.

They sat. A waiter appeared to hand them menus. “I'll have the sweetbreads,” Larkin announced without looking at hers. “And wine—do you want wine, Daniel?”

“Wine? It's barely eleven.”

He almost said,
And you're not supposed to drink.
Instead he did a quick survey and yes, in front of every diner there was either a wine bottle or a cocktail glass.
There'll always be an England,
thought Daniel.

For a moment he considered his responsibilities. The right thing would be
not
to drink, for her sake. And since when did he drink at lunchtime anyway? Not since he used to hang out with Nick, twenty years ago. . . .

Bad idea,
he decided as the waiter handed him the wine list. Still, when in Londinium . . .

He ordered a bottle of claret and garlic steak. When the wine arrived, he toasted Larkin, who had settled contentedly back into her chair. “Now will you please tell me the name of this temple of fine dining?”

“Café Chouette. It's a very louche place,” Larkin said. “That's why I thought you'd enjoy it.”

“It seems very louche indeed,” he said, flattered. “Do they serve absinthe? I've never tried it.”

“After lunch. Look, here's our food.”

Larkin glanced at the platter of sweetbreads steaming before her, then watched expectantly until Daniel lifted knife and fork. She looked like a cat waiting to be fed. He smiled, making a show of cutting his meat and tasting it.

“Mmmm-mmm, good.”

Only then did she attend to her own food.

“So,” said Daniel, “how did you get a key to that place?”

“Paynim House? Someone gave it to me.”

“People seem to give you things a lot.”

“They do, don't they?” She took a sip of wine. “I'm fascinated by how it works. Art. Making things. I want to understand it, become—”

“Become part of the process?” Daniel shook his head. “Uh-uh. I think a work of art is what the artist intended it to be. Period. You and me, we contribute nothing to the process.”

“We contribute
something.
If you're looking at a nude by Lucian Freud, you'll see a different painting than I will, because you're a man. And we both might see a different painting if we knew that the nude woman was not just a model but his lover. His muse. Like all those Rossettis where Lizzie Siddal was the model, and Jane Morris—”

“That's not being part of the process. That's getting a vicarious kick out of knowing the painter was sleeping with his models.”

“It's more than that,” said Larkin. “I think the muse brings something real to the work. Something numinous.”

Daniel snorted. “That's ridiculous. What about Picasso? He slept with thousands of women—were they all numinous?”

“Picasso is sui generis. Someone like that doesn't need to derive power.”

“Interesting theory: the muse as alternate energy source.” Daniel turned his attention back to his plate. “Anyway, Nick's right, those Pre-Raphaelites, even the best ones—they're all second-tier artists. If that.”

“I'm not interested in how important they are. It's their energy—where does that come from? I don't understand it at all.”

Daniel reached to touch her wrist. “Larkin, I can help you here. There is nothing,
nothing
to understand. It's a job, just like my going home and writing a column is a job, just like anything's a job. There is no mystery to it at all.”

“There is to me.”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry, Larkin, but I just don't buy it. All that White Goddess stuff—” He stopped.

“What?” said Larkin.

“Nothing. I suddenly remembered—last night, I was fooling around with one of Nick's books, flipping through it at random. There was a poem by him. Graves.”

“Which one?”

“I don't remember. Something about blowing on ashes.”

“Divination by books.”

“Hey, I'm a critic, it's what I do. But I'll tell you, since you're talking about muses—
The White Goddess
? Half of it Graves made up, and the other half he got from crackpots who'd made it up before him. He's been totally discredited.”

“Just because someone makes something up doesn't mean it's not real.”

Leave now,
Daniel thought, but didn't move. Larkin pushed her plate aside, her face thoughtful.

“Do you know Radborne Comstock's work?”

“Sure. When I was in college, every girl I ever slept with had a Radborne Comstock poster above her bed. That or a Maxfield Parrish girl in a swing.”

“He did a Tristan painting, too. He had his first commissions here in London.”

A waiter took their plates and the empty wine bottle. Daniel briefly considered ordering another, but before he could, Larkin cocked a finger at another waiter.

“Hugh,” she said. “Could we please have
l'absinthe
?”

“Of course,” he said.

Larkin smiled at Daniel. “You Americans. So innocent. Imagine, never having tasted absinthe.”

“I thought it was illegal. Or poisonous.”

“Americans think everything is illegal or poisonous.”

“Then how come all those guys got so messed up by it? Verlaine and the rest?”

“The grape crop failed in France, and everyone who was used to drinking wine started drinking absinthe instead. Only it was about seventy percent alcohol, instead of fifteen, and they were still drinking it from the same-size glasses. Now, if you wanted to, Daniel, you could order a cocktail here identical to one drunk back at Café du Rat Mort. La Momisette, ‘the little mummy'—absinthe and orgeat on ice.”

“Orgeat?”

“Almonds and orange-flower water. Don't they drink that in your newsroom?”

“Not often enough.” He leaned across the table. “So. Are you married? Or . . . ?”

She stared at her empty wineglass.

“I was,” she said at last. “I suppose that's what you'd call it. A long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “I don't really recall it that well. I think we quarreled.”

“Over what?”

She looked at him, confused. “I don't remember. I can never remember. Is it important?”

Daniel shook his head. “Not at all,” he said softly.

The waiter returned, bearing a tray with two tall glasses filled with ice, a silver sugar bowl and tongs, a perforated silver trowel. Last of all he set down a bottle of green liquid so brilliant it appeared radioactive.

“
La fée verte,”
he said with a flourish. “Shall I do the honors?”

Larkin smiled. “Thank you, I'll take care of it.”

She placed one of the glasses before Daniel, laid the silver trowel on top, then arranged sugar cubes into a pyramid on the trowel. Daniel watched, mesmerized.

“That's amazing. Can you bend spoons, too?”

“Now, watch—”

She picked up the decanter and poured a ribbon of green liquid over the sugar. The pyramid dissolved like a sand castle beneath a wave. The absinthe dripped through the perforated trowel into the glass. When it struck the ice, all seemed to explode into a cloud of green and white.

“Wow.” Daniel watched wide-eyed as she did the same thing to her own glass. “That's the difference between American and English public schools. I chugged beer, and you learned how to do
that.”

Larkin lifted her glass. “To the Old World.”

Daniel picked up his absinthe, inhaling the sharp anise scent and an unfamiliar bitter smell: wormwood.

“To the Old World,” he said, and drew the glass to his lips. “Here goes nothing.”

“Here goes nothing,” agreed Larkin, and they both drank.

CHAPTER FOUR

Chill October

Radborne Comstock, 1883

H
e was twenty-three, tall and
already stooped from hunching over his sketchbook, with the stunned and slightly wearying expression of an American visiting Europe for the very first time. His father's death the previous spring had left him with a small inheritance: the house where he had grown up in Elmira, New York, which he had promptly sold to a young banker eager to install indoor plumbing and brand-new electroliers in the ramshackle structure. Augmented by what he had saved from his position at Garrison Asylum, there was enough money for a summer's lease on two rooms in a Mulberry Street tenement in Manhattan, painting lessons from the supercilious but brilliant Wilhelm van der Ven at his studio near Central Park, and, after a boyhood spent dreaming over the smudged etchings in the Elmira Library's tattered copies of
Punch,
enough cash to pay for passage to Bristol and thence by train to the city that had haunted him day and night, like one of the spidery figures in his own drawings.

London.

The city seemed far more dangerous than New York. Just a few days after he arrived, the
Evening News
headline declared

The single cramped room Radborne had taken in the Grey Owl rooming house in Mint Street seemed itself quite suitable for habitation by an anarchist, albeit one with high tolerance for dirt, noise, and the smell of the black cigarillos smoked by Mrs. Beale, his widowed landlady. Mrs. Beale, a russet-haired subscriber to the Fellowship of the New Life with a penchant for gin punch, had lent him a copy of a pamphlet by Mr. G. B. Shaw titled
The Difficulties of Anarchism.
But when Radborne found himself contemplating the widow's frankly inviting assessment of himself over the breakfast table, he declined her invitation to attend the Fabians' next meeting.

“Oh, that
is
a shame!” Mrs. Beale offered him more tea, which Radborne also declined. He had seen her drying last evening's leaves over the spirit lamp, to find their way back into the pot this morning. “We are to discuss Aspects of Spiritualism. And so this morning you will be . . . ?”

“I think I'll visit Kew Gardens.” He ran a hand through his hair, which had gotten far too long and embarrassingly unkempt. At Mrs. Beale's admiring smile, he dropped his hand hastily back onto the table. “I would like to sketch some of the rare plants there.”

“How pleasant, to be an artist! ‘As happy as a bright sunflower!' But of course, you will be
drawing
the sunflowers,” she added. “And not
being
one. Yours is not a vegetable love, I fear.”

Radborne stared at her blankly. Mrs. Beale put a finger to her cheek in a frightening imitation of coquetry, then stood and swept up the platter holding the remains of breakfast. As she made her way back to the kitchen, she began to sing in a clear, girlish voice.

Radborne smiled wanly. “
Patience,”
he said, and sighed. In the week since he'd arrived, Mrs. Beale had insisted twenty or more times that he must see the play, at the newly opened Savoy.

“Electricity,” she had confided. “It makes all the difference. You cannot imagine the miracle of seeing them perform by a thousand electric lights! It is magical, Mr. Comstock!
Magical.”

Mrs. Beale had a friend who was a Savoyard, a young woman in the chorus who could almost certainly make special arrangements for Radborne to accompany Mrs. Beale to the stalls one evening. Afterward they could have a late supper, whiskey punch and oysters at Raoul's. But when Radborne inquired after the young friend, it quickly became apparent that this was the wrong line of questioning to pursue. The invitation was not repeated, though selections from the opera continued to pour from Mrs. Beale's throat.

He was initially embarrassed, and then secretly pleased, to realize that his landlady had taken him to be one of the very aesthetes that
Patience
parodied. His unruly hair, the result of poverty and not fashion; his unrefined American wardrobe; his sketchbook, of course—all impressed upon Mrs. Beale that he must be a genuine artist, not a “Chancery Lane young man,” oh, no!

He was handsome enough that women winked at him in the street. He had his mother's pale Irish skin and rather fierce features: thick black hair sweeping across a high forehead, hazel eyes beneath black brows, jutting chin, high ruddy cheekbones (this from having to walk everywhere in the damnable cold), an angry set to his full mouth that kept it from prettiness. Since he'd come to London, his voice had grown hoarser, deeper than it had been at home. Here, breathing was like swallowing mouthfuls of sand; some nights he could actually feel the grit on his lips left by coal smoke and the dirt thrown up by passing coaches.

What disturbed him more was that twice he had been followed in the streets. Each time he was walking to Blackfriars Bridge when, from the corner of his eye, he saw a tall figure striding behind him. At first he ignored it, but his unease grew until he finally whirled, fist raised and mouth opened to shout.

But the figure was gone, lost behind heaps of rubble where a block of tenements was being torn down. Radborne had a fleeting impression of a tall, almost emaciated form, a sharp white face with long, uptilted eyes.

“Tinkers,” Mrs. Beale pronounced when he mentioned his encounter. “Gypsies, street arabs. They're everywhere. Give 'im a penny. Or hit 'im with a rock.”

Radborne wondered how this fit with Mrs. Beale's sympathies for the Fellowship of the New Life. “He was too quick,” he said. “A half-starved wretch, too, that's what surprised me—that he was so quick.”

“Hit 'im,” Mrs. Beale repeated with a nod. “
That'll
slow 'im down.”

Radborne said nothing. He recalled his Irish mother's warning him about tinkers—traveling people who stole children and cursed those who were not kind to them, people who shared peculiar gifts with those whom she called the Good Neighbors. He took to carrying a few extra pence when he went walking. He did not see the figure again.

Still, a vague disquiet accompanied him everywhere. He blamed the bad food and terrible air and general strangeness that surrounded him. And yet the unease was broken by surges of joy and exhilaration such as he had never known. He found himself laughing out loud at the wheeling of crows across the sky, laughing so hard that he had to lean against a lamppost to steady himself, until a bobby began to take notice and Radborne moved on, wiping the tears from his face. Another day the sound of a drunken man singing from a rooftop froze him in the street below.

Radborne had looked up and seen a ragged silhouette waltzing behind a broken balustrade. Suddenly the man stopped, arms outstretched, and stared down at Radborne. His voice became a shout.

As Radborne gazed at him, an odd pulse began to pound behind his eyes. The wind made the man's faded blue work coat ripple up and down his arms; it seemed to have too many sleeves. He was like an insect pinned against the sky. When once again he opened his mouth to sing, vapor poured from it, and tiny black things. Radborne turned and fled, filled with a horror he could not explain or obviate.

He was neither young nor naive enough to believe that a great and terrible city would welcome him, a lanky young American with no connections and no money. But he had thought that, after all these years, he himself would embrace the city, recognize it, love it as he had never loved anything save the images he drew.

Instead London ravaged him. This morning, sitting alone at the breakfast table as Mrs. Beale trilled her last lines from
Patience
and began shouting orders at Kathleen in the kitchen, he could feel the day coming down on him like a fever. This wasn't entirely his fault: the Grey Owl stank of scorched ironing and gin and damp cocoa-matting carpet that never really dried. The furnishings were cheap attempts at luxury—rosewood chairs that creaked when he sat in them, a parlor carpet with a “House of Lords” pattern, piss-yellow on a dark-blue ground; the ubiquitous piano strewn with broadsides and sheet music. The dark curtains were drawn so that the Axminster carpets would not fade, and Radborne had to share the dank backyard washing house and water closet with the other renters.

But the Grey Owl cost only twenty shillings a week, including maid service. If Radborne paid for a month in advance (he did), this would be reduced to eighteen shillings. And Mrs. Beale had a covert arrangement with the cook at the nearby White Horse, another Mint Street rooming house that proudly advertised a library of over five hundred volumes. For an additional one penny a week, the White Horse's cook would let Radborne in through the scullery door to avail himself of such treats as the brand-new magazines,
Tit-Bits
and
People,
as well as popular novels and newspapers.

None of this really made him feel at home. He had not been expecting electric streetlights, which had come to Manhattan only the year before, but he had difficulty hiding the nausea he felt, assaulted by the stench of horse dung, of thousands of years of humanity squatting in the alleys to defecate, the sulfurous reek of the gas lamps, and the more malign odors that rose from ancient churchyards in the poorer quarters, where only a few years earlier the dead were still thrown into shallow graves and the air was colored a faint glowing green on damp afternoons. The open sewers had been cleaned nearly twenty years before, but in some places near the Thames—and Mint Street was one of them—the night-soil man could still be seen on his morning rounds, a sad-eyed draft horse dragging his reeking cart, while around them the crumbling brick buildings released ammonia fumes when it rained.

And it always seemed to rain.

Like now. In the kitchen Radborne could hear Mrs. Beale arguing with Kathleen, followed by an ominous silence, and then the even more ominous sound of his landlady returning to the dining table, humming “Quite Too Utterly Utter.” Before she could capture him, he shoved his plate aside and hurried to the front door.

“Damn again.”

Outside, all was swabbed in shades of taupe and pewter. Rain pelted down; the narrow cobblestone street was already ankle deep in mud and pus-colored water. Radborne stared out with a kind of desperation, as though plotting an escape such as his more ambitious charges at Garrison used to do. He had left his wooden color box beside the umbrella stand. If he went out, at least the color box would stay dry: he had taken the precaution of waterproofing it before he left New York.

But his raincoat had disappeared on the train from Bristol. It had been raining then, too, and a Gypsyish-looking boy had poked his head into Radborne's compartment several times, pretending to search for his sister. It was only after the train arrived in Paddington that Radborne had found his coat missing.

“Mr. Comstock. You're not going out again like that.” He turned to see Mrs. Beale frowning at him. “Your last adventure . . .”

She wagged her finger at him coyly. A week earlier he had ventured to the Tate and returned in a downpour. “That is why my carpet never dries,” she went on, stamping at an offending curl of cocoa matting and then looking at him sideways. “But see now! Mr. Balcombe has gone up to Cheltenham for three days, and
he
has left his overcoat!”

She pursed her mouth and crossed to the coat stand. “Now, he would not mind, I don't think, if a very nice young American made use of this. I don't think he would mind at all,” she said, removing a black oilcloth ulster and holding it out with a flourish.

“Oh, no,” Radborne said weakly, backing away. “Honest, I couldn't—”

“No honor among thieves!” warbled Mrs. Beale, winking. Radborne tried to determine if this was a joke, but she was already tugging the oilcloth over his shoulders and patting his cheek. “Looks very nice, very nice. ‘And ev'ryone will say, As you walk your mystic way, Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth this kind of youth must be!'”

Radborne gave her a wan smile. “Well. I must hurry if I'm to catch my train.”

He shoved his arms through the sleeves. A good three inches of wrist showed; when he glanced at himself in the mottled mirror across the hall, his reflection seemed more cottager than cultivated. But he only nodded and turned to go.

“Thank you.” He ran a hand across the top of his head in lieu of doffing a hat. “I'll do my best to walk in a mystic way.”

“Oh, you can't help it,” bridled Mrs. Beale. “Such an attentive young man! Mind you come back to us! Oh, but wait—”

It seemed Mr. Balcombe had forgotten a tortoiseshell-handled umbrella, too. Mrs. Beale handed it to Radborne, who cast her one last sheepish grin and ducked through the door.