Sir William (9 page)

Forlornly, she took the child away from the beach, through the late, low sun. There had not been any letter from Greville as yet.

Once she had gone, the sandpipers rushed their invisible prayer rug up the beach, and just as incontinently, rushed it back down again. It was the hour of muezzin.

In bed that night, Emma heard no familiar sound, whereas in Edgware Row there was at least the bell-ringer who gathered people together at late hours, in order to conduct them through Hyde Park at sixpence the head, so they might not encounter footpads, shrub-lurkers and common highwaymen. That we should sleep young and alone is so shameful a waste of a perfectly good body, that despite all resolution—in the absence of any cuddly animal—she took the child to bed with her.

“Would you think it, Greville,” she wrote in the morning, “Emma—the wild, unthinking Emma—is a grave, thoughtful phylosopher. For endead, I have thought so much of your amiable goodness, when you have been tried to the utmost, that I will, endead I will, manege myself and try to be …”

Greville always skipped those bits.

“And how is she?”

“Abergale is too expensive, two and a half guineas a week; Hoylake has but three houses, not one of them fit for a Christian; they are now at Parkgate, fed by a lady whose husband is at sea, for a guinea, ten and six a week,” said Greville.

Sir William had inquired after her emotional condition, but then, Charles would not know that.

“She adds, ‘Give my dear kind love and compliments to Pliney and tell him I put you under his care and he must be answerable for you to me wen I see him. I hope he has not fell in love with any raw boned Scotch whoman.’”

Sir William smiled. “Yes,” he said. “She would add that.”

*

“I have had no letter from you yett, which makes me unhappy … My dear Greville, dont be angry but I gave my Granmother 5 guines, but Emma shall pay you,” wrote Emma. And again went out to confront the empty sea.

Mrs. Cadogan had struck up a raillery with the winklewoman, condescension in every line, but Emma preferred not. She was too disconsolate. She watched the child. She did not think she had ever been in so large and bleak and lonely a place before. Even the slight surf was surreptitious here, as though not to disturb the silence, and nowhere could she glimpse so much as the green sign of a tree. The beach was a dirty gray receding plane across which the child crawled like a white grub. In all that desolation, only the winklewoman turned around and around.

Oh God, abandoned, thought Emma. He has abandoned me.

This was unfair to Greville. Though he had thought of doing so, he had taken no action yet. Whether it was a matter of screwing his courage up, or his emotions down, Greville was always slow to act.

“If you are in bad case, you must marry; or if not marry, stand for Parliament; or failing that, do both,”
said Sir William. “In any event, you must do something. You have been eligible too long. Why, at your age I had already married this.” With a wave of his hand, he indicated three flooded collieries, the family farms, Milford Haven and £5,000 a year, all he had left of a kind and loving wife’s tender solicitude, but no doubt in time it could be made to pay better.

He felt sad. Life’s larger emotions are so destructive that it is better to restrict oneself to the smaller ones. With a little effort and discipline this can be done, and they are far pleasanter. It may be submitted, however, that those restricted to the reticences of mere feeling perhaps ache the longer for it. And Sir William ached. He was tired of going home to an empty hall, and though a kept woman does well enough, she seldom knows how to keep house.

“I must say, your young woman keeps an excellent house,” he said.

“It’s the mother does that.”

“I see.”

“They are inseparable. That’s why I shall ask them to return before we do, to get the house in order.”

Sir William turned on him a look of blinding benevolence, slightly more searching than the Eddystone Light. “Charles, you plan.”

After all, I am his favorite nephew, thought Greville, gratified. He wished to manage his uncle’s estates, but how to ask?

Sir William, it appeared, was willing to hand over some, if not all. In the matter of ready cash, however, though doting, he was no fool, and would do no more than to go surety for a loan—enough to disinherit him, should he be unable to repay it promptly, but still, a loan.

“It is the best I can do. Marry, Charles. At least we know it will not be a runaway match, unless the hostler has learned how to harness a snail; but marry, do. My father married twice, and the family is none the poorer for it.”

“I would have to be unencumbered.” Athene, the goddess of wisdom, was, as we know, born full-grown
from the forehead of Jove, but being a dutiful daughter, may be presumed to fly back home again when needed. Greville had just been visited by an idea.

His uncle did not appear to have heard him.

“I have always believed that Milford will rival Portsmouth and Plymouth in its time,” said Sir William, contemplating with affection two stranded dories—one with a staved-in bottom, a bit of broken rope twisted in a rusted ring—tidal ooze in the estuary, two broken-down tenements, a grogshop, half a barn, and a horse whose Creator, though an excellent colorist, had clearly had no knowledge of anatomy.

“It would be necessary to suborn the Members for Pembroke,” said Greville. Just as a painter keeps certain works by him, so was he most unwilling to part with Emma. She was not merely the best, she was also the only thing he had ever done. Nonetheless, with a little prodding here and there, the idea had been born.

He decided to be kind. He wrote to her.

*

She was holding her elbows in warm salt water to cure a rash she got when she was nervous. The letter was kindly and asked after the child. Greville’s prose was based upon the absence of concrete nouns, but by repeatedly avoiding his subject, he did in time succeed in making his meaning plain. Whatever he did not say was what he was talking about.

Emma, who had hoped to take the child back to Edgware Row, answered at once. No one, he had said, must know that it existed. But he would pay for it, all the same.

You dont know, my Dearest Greville, what a pleasure I have to think that poor Emma will be comfortable & happy. Now Emma will never expect what she never had, so I hope she will be very good, mild & attentive & we may have a deal of comfort. All my happiness is now Greville & to think that he loves me makes a recompense for all …

*

Emma prepared to leave, if sadly. It was better to give the child up.

And yet … and yet….

*

“A very proper sentiment, too,” said Greville, putting the letter aside.

“As for the
form
of this surety,” said Sir William, who was not only a shrewd Scots bargainer, but also at times a tease. “It shall consist of a lien against my estates, collectable only after my decease. So unless you wish to feel the pinch, manage the properties well.”

*

At Parkgate it was the end of the season, so the weather had at last turned fine. But the beach, voided of its happy families, now contained no one but the winklewoman, with here and there the soft, sudsy suspiration of a living winkle—for she was not so sharp-sighted as she used to be—and in the distance one dirty vagrant King Charles spaniel, joyously on the prowl.

*

Emma, though sprung from the people, did not happen to be trapped in the cages of their philosophy. There is something to be done, not nothing, so one need not put up with it. Nothing will turn out for the best unless we give it a good shove in the right direction. Though things will turn out for the best in time, it would be much better if they did their turning now. And though clouds may contain a silver lining, that is not where a silver lining belongs; a silver lining belongs in an opera bag.

At Cavendish Square she watched the Duchess of Argyll, with a cramp in one elbow and a strained, painted look, descend to her waiting carriage, and then herself ran up the steps.

“I’m back, George,” she cried. “
I
’
m
back!
”

George came out of the shadows and took a look at her. There was nothing to see but beauty. She was a resilient girl. The rash on her elbows had disappeared.

“I missed you,” he said, and sounded as though he had, which made her look serious, for so far he was the only person in her life who ever did.

“The Duchess of Argyll has a most inconstant nose,”
he said, feeling happy. “No matter where you put it, it is always either too high or too low.”

“I saw her leaving. You gave her a cramp, George, in the arm.”

“I also gave her a pleasant expression, which she did not have before. Have you time to pose? If so, whom shall you be?”

Yes, she had time to pose. To read, to sing, to pose for Romney were her only recreation. “Helen,” she said, “brought home again.”

“Cheshire is not Troy. No, today you shall be Miranda.” Humming, he set a fresh canvas up, for it had been one of his Caliban days, and Prospero was not one to prefer Ariel to his own daughter.

Greville was writing to Sir William: “Emma is very grateful for your remembrances. Her picture shall be sent by the first ship. I wish Romney yet to mend the dog.” He hoped negotiations would not be protracted.

But they were.

Sir William’s existence had been made agreeable by two excellent decisions: one within his control, the other not. He had married a woman afflicted by both fortune and delicate health. He had been made ambassador to the unimportant Court of the Two Sicilies by George III, who understood him to be a connoisseur, so no doubt he would be happier in
virtuland.

He was, and had been now for twenty years. One thing that kept him there was a most un-English aptitude for eating fruit; not the woodchuck delights of apples, medlars and those austere Kentish cherries with the texture of nipples and the taste of warm blood sausage, but enormous mounds of melons, oceans of oranges, pyramids of Sicilian lemons stuffed with sherbet and then chilled, and the Arabic intensity of coarse green limes. Another was the climate. And most important was that only there could he afford to live as a Hamilton, if only
a collateral Hamilton, should.

So he had managed to retain his post, by what means was unknown. Sir William preferred the strings he pulled to be invisible, an illusion at which he was vastly skilled, since the only thing he had brought with him from childhood—a condition from which he had escaped as quickly as possible—was the art of being the puppet-master of himself. He was of course unmistakably an Englishman of the better sort, which is to say, a Scotsman. He never forgot that. But still, every time he returned to Naples he felt as though a curtain had gone up. The stage was bathed in light, the figures ranted on, the music was agreeable.

He was delighted with the Romney. It would match the Reynolds he had already, and true, she was a Greek statue to the life, but he did not particularly care for sculpture in the round. He preferred his art restricted, like his life, to two dimensions, and those to be seen from in front. In these emotional matters, it cannot be denied, distance brings relief.

But neither could it be denied that he was lonely, and the mother both knew her place and how to cook a decent meal in it.

But why hurry?

*

Now everything was as it was before. Emma had gotten over her scare and was content. Sometimes Greville was there. Sometimes he was not. When she was bored, she could visit George.

But Mrs. Cadogan smelled something in the wind, and stuck her little nose up, like a groundhog at its burrow, and listened for reverberations and watched shadows. She did not like what she saw.

“Lazy girl, you have had two offers of marriage and one to be set up, on more liberal terms than here, from Greville’s friends already,” she grumbled.

“They are not friends. They come to gawk.” She would not leave Greville. It was useless to argue.

“But why? He does not even sleep with you any more.”

“Ah I know,” said Emma, snuggling farther down into
the enormous bed, incurably virginal. “He is considerate even in that.”

“But have you no desire to better yourself?”

“Myself, yes; my position, no,” said Emma, and after her mother had gone, jumped up to examine herself in the mirror—all that lovely flesh, and every inch of it untouched by anyone since goodness only could remember when. She wondered what she could wear today that would please dear Greville. Something old, she supposed, for there was very little that was new.

*

“I cannot endure the poor creature. She is always there,” said Greville.

“Ah, then your uncle did take a fancy to her,” said Towneley.

“I must marry or burn, he says.”

“If I may venture to add a textual commentary, what he means is that if you marry your debts will be burned. It looks similar, but it is by no means the same thing. I know this, and yet, as you can see, I am by no means a Bible man.”

“There is the younger daughter of Lord Middleton,” mused Greville. “But I shall need thirty thousand pounds at least.”

“If you take the advice of an experienced man, you will ask for more and settle for less. It is amazing, on the whole, what you can acquire in that way, and the other way round is seldom possible.”