The Mulberry Empire

Above, by the light of a candle which stank of tallow, and burned the walls black and smoked out the room, Burnes, oblivious, wrote on, setting down the Afghans, making sure of what they were and what he knew. For now, this would do. In the end, however, he came to examine his feelings, his sensations; and came to contemplate the particular hollow beating, between dread and excitement, which settled in the stomach at especial moments. Especial moments; standing there, in the hall of the Bala Hissar, waiting to be shown into the presence of the Amir. It was a feeling like that of standing there before a woman who waited only for him to seize her. A feeling like sitting, even, at his desk, taking up a sheaf of paper and beginning to write, to set down what he had seen. Each time the same feeling, each time, a feeling not to be argued with, or explained away. So strong it was, and it remained, that he concluded, in the end, when his life had become what it would become, that it was not, after all, what it so resembled, the awareness of the physical manifestation of sex, nor of the possibility of sex, but merely that of possibility. For him, the excitement which hollowed out his stomach and made his heart beat would always be produced not by what might happen, but what would not, despite all appearances, occur, and it was for the empty promises of chance that his heart beat, and his eyes grew big, and his stomach hollowed, and he stood, and stared at what was there to be stared at. Just that. And, each day, before he began to write, the proverb of the poet came to mind, the proverb carved deep on the tomb of the Emperor Babur, and he spoke it to himself, in his sincere deep rumbling Persian. Drink wine in the city of Kabul, and send round the cup without stopping; for Kabul is a mountain, a sea, a town, a desert.

THREE

1.

LONDON, IN MAY.

At any other place in the world, late May would customarily be termed spring, and call forth the songs of birds, and the gambolling of infant mammals, and their attendant poets to sing their praises in the approved manner. Here, in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, there are no birds, or only ones so very brown and grey and drooping it is as if their native colours are all washed out with the incessant rinsing which falls from the London skies, birds which make no noise but an occasional croak to clear their throats of dirt. There are no lambs for the poets to celebrate, but only the usual London dogs, lying, their limbs curled up, at every street corner, too dejected to do anything but raise their heads in mild supplication at every passing boy’s kick, too far gone in hopelessness to make any noise but a quiet moan, like the wind in a loose pane. You may be sure that the month makes no difference to them, or only in that the earth they find themselves licking ceaselessly off their pelts is dry like dust, or wet like mud. There are poets, it is true, here in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, and they write, it is true, about spring and lambs and birds. But to do so, I suppose, they are obliged to shut their eyes against the city they live in, and make something up.

London knows no seasons; knows nothing of spring or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which London is proud to call a street, no one pretends any longer to know. Anything dropped in the street is instantly swallowed by London and its mud, and is never seen again; a prayer-book, a ring, a hammer, a cloak; all fall to the ground and are forever lost, deep in the mud and slime and filth of the London street. Once a poor musician let his bassoon fall, not far from Seven Dials; the mud deprived him of his livelihood, and the family, tragically bassoonless, now must beg for their merest sufficiencies, there, outside Mrs Lirriper’s drapery shop. Once, as mothers tell their naughtier sons, a small boy let go of his mother’s hand while crossing the great swamp of Piccadilly, and, untethered, sank to the bottom of the mud, never to be seen again. Soon, it is to be hoped, the weather will improve, and Mud be succeeded by Dust, though it seems unlikely that any poet will want to sing the praises of that modern season. When that happens, everything changes; the sounds of the city alter from the obscene sucking and splash and brown drain-gurgle of one half the year, to the dry crackle and quiet thudding of the other half. Those who cannot leave the city will start to complain, not of the wet and chill ceaselessly rising around their ankles, but the dry choking heat which gets into the throat, and strangles the Londoner all day and all night.

But if it is true that London knows no seasons, that, perhaps, is because it knows only one Season. It is here, in May, that we find ourselves; here, standing with the linkboys and the cutpurses and the crossing-sweepers, each unpromising youth with the tools of his unpromising trade, standing and gawping at the slow procession unfurling before them, at this hour of early dusk in late spring. It is the height of the Season, and also, nearly, the end of it – a paradox more often stated than relished. The linkboys and cutpurses and crossing-sweepers stand just where Piccadilly turns into Park Lane, and watch the procession before them, silently or raucously calling out, according to their temperament. Up Piccadilly comes a succession of carriages, each a closed black box on wheels, shiny and locked, drawn, mostly, by two black horses, for all the world as if the cashboxes of Threadneedle Street had, with one voice, cried, ‘Enough of the City!’ and, equipped each with a pair of plate-faced footmen and a set of wheels, set off to see if what they had always heard of the West End and its Court could possibly be the case. Up Piccadilly come the melancholy cashboxes, and, at the corner, you can see, as they turn, the whinnying wheels and hooves pulling free of the mud, that each, too, contains a treasure.

The linkboys cry out, with ridicule or amazement, at what they see. At this corner, the inhabitants of each carriage lean forward, and look out. Because here, you see, at this corner, lives the Duke, the old victor of Waterloo, and everyone is curious about the Duke’s habits, and will, on passing from Piccadilly into the Park, lean forward in the hope of a brief glimpse of the great man. It is a hope which is often gratified; the Duke is a man who likes to show himself, and strolls, daily, in the Park to accept the homage of strangers. But tonight, there is nothing to be seen. If the inhabitants of the carriages sink back with a minor disappointment, their evenings indefinably clouded now in some way, we have not been disappointed; because now, with the linkboys and the cutpurses, we have caught a marvellous glimpse of a lady or two. Out of the funereal darkness of the inside of a carriage, for all the world like the glitter of a black cashbox being flung open, a glistening white face appears, bathed and almost certainly scented, a white face which allows you to dream of the white flesh, the dream of white lace and silk almost certainly hidden underneath the dark cloak, and, most marvellous of all – something which forces even the wiser cynics of the observing mob into an awed silence – the unmistakable deep glitter of diamonds, brought from the far East for no reason but to decorate these cool, lovely, clean faces. Everywhere else in the city – everywhere else in the great world, as far as the linkboys know – is mud and filth, and these white faces with their bright white light of diamonds shine like unaccustomed, unimaginable virtue.

They flash in the gaze of the street observers for one second, these costly faces, and then move on in their stately way. Where are they all going, all in the same direction? Why, they are going out, naturally, because this is the Season, and in the Season it does not do, if you are of a certain level in society, to stay at home. It is required of you to put on your least comfortable clothes, ones fitted neither for a London cold nor a London heat, and go and sit for a few hours with people you know nothing of and care nothing for, drawing what satisfaction you may from the fact that when you leave to go home, outside there may be poor people who may be prepared to gawp, who, you hope, are eaten up with envy of you; because if no one in London envies you in your party-going plight, it is hard to see why you should continue the exercise.

2.

The carriage now rounding the corner extracts itself with such unpredictable lurchings from the mud beneath the wheels that the cockaded footman on top almost drops his reins. Inside, a startled face lunges towards the window, to the rich appreciation of the street onlookers; they like a nice-looking girl. The nice-looking girl smooths her dress, braces herself as if with cold, and draws back into her seat. By her is an old man, his skin so taut and leathery, his eyes so yellow and unobserving, and the whole effect so quickly angular as he sits there in the clothes for his immaculate evening that you almost expect a forked tongue to dart out, to catch a fly or two. His blood is cold, his movements quick and stiff. He is not in the first flush of fashion, nor of youth; his clothes, though immaculate, have a distinct first-gentleman-of-Europe air, as if remembering on his behalf what he has now forgotten, his high season, so long ago. The fashion of thirty years before, too, accounts for his air; not inattentive, exactly, but strongly attentive to something not in the carriage, something Bella cannot see and does not wish to share. The ruby witch, she once heard him call it; the opium he has been taking, daily, for decades. In recent years, noticing, perhaps, that the young did not care for it and often disapproved of it, he has stopped mentioning it with his customary glee, even to what remains of his family. Bella would not mention it, but has grown used to the idea that when her father hands her into the carriage on their evening round, his touch will not be firm, his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere beyond her. The jerk of the carriage into or out of the mud jolted him into seeing; now his eyes are glazing over again, into their customary blank bliss. His daughter looks at him; she knows the expression very well, and blushes for him.

‘I see the Duke is still in town,’ she says.

‘The Duke would never leave town before – before—’ her father says, as his look moves back inside the carriage. ‘I remember, once, many years ago, before you were born or not long after. In the Park we were, and I greeted the Duke. Old acquaintances we were, and he stopped and pinched y’brother’s cheek. “Fine child, that, Colonel,” he said. And Harry took one look at him, with his great beak and his great ramrod shoulders and started to howl. Never saw the Duke again, not to speak to.’

‘Poor Harry,’ Bella Garraway murmurs. Her father has been galvanized by his own anecdote, which Bella has heard many times before; everyone in London has one story about the Duke of Wellington, and – Bella sometimes thinks – each is told and retold until every story has been heard by every man, woman and child in London, and then they die, stories melting into silence, and oblivion. Her father’s story always moves her, strangely, even though it hardly amounts to a story, so ruefully does it reflect on poor Harry and his hopes. She has no response for his story, but it hardly matters, because now Colonel Garraway is sinking back into his sharp-elbowed opiate haze.

The line of wheeled cashboxes moves on, stately as an oriental caravan through the trackless wastes of Piccadilly and Park Lane, all with one end, it seems, in view. At this time of the year, at this time of the afternoon, it is always thus; the upper few thousand, scrubbed and whited like so many peripatetic sepulchres, squeeze themselves into their least comfortable clothes, and set off for the evening’s entertainment. To dinner, to a rout, to a dance, to the opera; the upper few thousand, encased in whatever it has been decreed they should wear, limber stiffly through their doors, and into their carriages, to set off to see whatever people they have been seeing every week, all through the Season. Stiffened by their unyielding but undeniably fashionable raiment, you would recognize a member of the upper few thousand even unclad, fresh from the bath, or at the loose-robed gates of heaven; their gait is jointed and unnatural as a puppet’s is, and an old dowager walks as smartly as an upright old soldier. You would recognize them naked, but they are held up by their clothes and, stripped of their acquired carapace, they would surely fall, bonelessly, to the ground. As they manoeuvre their much corseted old bodies in or out of the carriage, it is difficult not to fancy that they creak in the exercise. But fashion dictates the stiff brocades and tight corseting, and fashion, here and now, is obeyed as promptly as an admiral.

Of course, everyone who now is making their slow path up Park Lane knows everything that is to be known of their fellow pilgrims. They are a very few, few thousand, and only rarely do they admit a new postulant at the crepuscular shrines of the fashionable London evening. Rarely, and usually by virtue merely of being born, is a new member of Society admitted. Money may admit you as a curiosity; or genius, particularly if displayed by a foreigner about whose origins it is possible to be rather vague, such as that excitingly-coiffeured Signor Paganini who was everywhere with his recitals two years ago. Adventure, too, or heroism committed by a suitably handsome young man in the East may serve very well to supply the fashionable two-legged curiosity of the Season. A young man with a good tale to tell, possessed of the fortune which accrues so readily in India and the deserts which lie beyond the Bosphorus, may be admitted to have a splendid Season, listened to by every ear from Park to Park, and carry into the country at the end the memory of adoring listening faces, turned up to his, white fans clasped by plump white hands, fluttering off like Cabbage Whites as the marvellously retold anecdote reaches its terrifying climax and the brave young man saves the little Rani from the jaws of the man-eating tiger. He may, also, carry the certainty of hundreds of new friends, many brave Seasons to come, if the hero of the day is foolish; if he is wise, however, he will pack his bags and go back to the scene of his great triumphs after one Season. Next year, as everyone knows, the great world will supply some new excitement, and the great tiger-beating hero will be cut in the Park by all his old friends, now so fascinated by a seven-foot American funambulist, a Russian poetess or eight-year-old watercolourist that his old stories start to seem very old hat indeed. He will be well advised to retire where he can, and draw what solace he can from his thousands, the vast and grateful emerald the Maharajah awarded him, the rapidly-acquired fat sensible wife.

3.

For the moment, the hero of the hour suspects none of this. Burnes is dressing, in as leisurely a fashion as he can manage. Here, in the dressing room of the house he has taken for the Season, he would not think that his time in the stage lights is drawing to a close. If he thinks anything, he probably considers that he is entering on the first stages of a vertiginous ascent. By now, he is intimate with people he barely dared to notice a few months ago; he finds, with a regret that does him credit, that he no longer has much time for those who introduced him to all those salons, before Christmas; he finds, with a malicious pleasure which quite surprises him, that the Montrose neighbours who snubbed his father twenty years ago now queue to drop their cards in the silver filigree bowl in the hall; they, those Montrose neighbours, have been turned in his eyes into what everyone laughs at, a set of nabob Scotch with raw-skinned ambitious wives. Burnes is decent to everyone, because that is his way. He has started to be noticed by the great – by Dukes – by Royalty, even, once; and, surely, the time will come when the brief notice, the honour graciously conferred in crowded rooms, turns into intimacy, and he finds himself a welcome visitor at every house in town. Perhaps not this year, because the Season is drawing to its brilliant close; but next year. Yes, perhaps next year.

His fingers have slowed, stopped. He stretches out his hand, and Charles hands him the next item in the ritual, in silent deference. For one moment, as he ties the elaborate knot, it occurs to him that he and his valet must be the same age. He looks, critically, in the glass at the final result. He has dined out twenty-one times already this month, and told his story twenty-one times. He looks, critically, at himself in the glass and prepares to go out, to tell it once more. What he sees in the glass is what you expect to see, of the hero of the minute, or more or less so. Not so brown as he was, not so thin as he was. He has been taken in from the heat and dust and wind, and left to pale and fatten on an unaccustomed diet; a diet of drawing rooms, and lobsters and champagne; of morning walks in the Park with no exercise more strenuous than the three-inch raising of the hat; of the ceaseless attentions of the most accomplished young ladies the metropolis can supply wholesale. That the accomplishments of the young ladies run no further than the performance of half a dozen Irish airs on harp or pianoforte hardly troubles Burnes. If he wants other, bolder accomplishments than the ones fashionable London permits of its women, he knows by now where to find them. Under the softening regime, he is quite altered from the man of six months ago; no longer dark and lined and meatless as a piece of old leather that has lain out in the tropical sun for years on end, but pale and soft. He looks at his own veal-face, there in the glass. Only his hard hands betray the fact that he has led quite a different life from his eager listeners; only the bright light in his dark eyes shows that he has seen things they will never see, or wish to.

Charles pauses in his ministrations, looks inquiringly at Burnes in the glass. Burnes becomes aware that the valet said something.

‘Yes, Charles?’ he says.

‘My lady Woodcourt’s, sir?’ Charles repeats.

‘Yes,’ Burnes says. ‘Yes, alas.’

‘Lady Woodcourt,’ Charles says, managing to sound both approving of Burnes’s destination this evening and, shaking his head, disapproving of his master’s irreverent tone. Burnes hardly minds; by now, he can afford, he believes, to appear unconcerned by even the most alarming invitation. And who is Lady Woodcourt, after all? A wicked old woman who has lifted her skirts for two kings and who knows how many prime ministers, whose whoring days ought to be over by now. Lady Woodcourt, indeed; a woman he knew nothing of six months ago. Charles takes the brushes and applies them to Burnes’s head, the dressing now almost complete. ‘May I ask—’ he continues.

‘No,’ Burnes says. ‘No, this will be all. I shan’t be needing you again tonight, thank you.’ He has always been good with his men, and, as Charles takes the clothes brush to wipe away the flakes of scurf on the waistcoat, he grins at him. Charles nods, demurely, and finally helps Burnes on with his immaculately shining black coat.

4.

Half a mile away, the wicked old woman is descending, very carefully, a staircase. All that perfumes and silk and preservatives can do for her charms has been done, which is not much. Footmen stand around, upright as chessmen on the black and white marble floor, and she comes down the stairs, their bent little old mistress. As usual, the first arrivals have preceded her, and are now kicking their heels in the anteroom. Lady Woodcourt does not hurry on their account, nor does it occur to her to acknowledge them. She moves, a slow bent little old woman, down the stairs as if she would like an arm or a stick to keep her upright. Here, in her house, she seems a nervous little bird in a brilliant gold cage; everything so baby-blue and gold, every wall so hung with looking glasses to entertain its denizen with contemplation of herself. And, between the mirrors, still more representations of Lady Woodcourt. Three or four portraits of her at her peak. In one, she is a girl in her father’s grounds. The painter, long ago, saw something in her mind, and has her holding a whip and snaffle. Another is an embarrassing and improbable portrait of her in mythological guise, as – as – as (even Lady Woodcourt, guiding her guests round, has sometimes to pause and think and dredge her old mind) Minerva, the foolish-looking owl just escaping from her limp pale fingers. The third is her wedding portrait, and unwary callers have been known to inquire of each other who the little gentleman in brown could possibly be. That useful and patient Sir Bramley is still to be seen over the fire in his wife’s London house, clinging to her arm in fear and disbelief. What happened to him in life, no one quite knows. A very young man ventured once that he had been washed, and dissolved, being nothing, in the end, but varnish and ornament. Certainly it is difficult to believe in Sir Bramley as anything more substantial than his painted past self, but the remark got back, and the very young man was seen no more at Lady Woodcourt’s. In reality, it is thought, Sir Bramley lives in Italy for the sake of his health, and leaves Lady Woodcourt to the exercise of her influence and her many protectors.

No smooth-skinned oil-fresh Minerva now, she comes forward into the room and staggers into a chair. Almost at once, the blue-coated chessman at the door gives a start and calls out the names of the first skulking guests.

‘Colonel and Miss Garraway,’ he calls, blushing and gulping like the boy he is. In through the door pop the old Colonel and his pretty daughter. He, behind some perfect translucent ruby glaze, is a hopeless and declining old beau of hers, a useful stopgap who does no harm to anyone but himself; next to him, his daughter seems alarmingly alert and clean and young. Lady Woodcourt greets them without rising, her hand resting on a bijou gewgaw, a knobbled warty Chinese bronze pig. The girl, she is pleased to see, is as pretty as everyone says, as she follows her father’s abstracted bow with a gracefully embarrassed bob, scrutinizing with intense juvenile interest the finer details of the Aubusson, murmuring something which might have been ‘My lady’. A great improvement, all in all, on the Colonel’s late wife, who came into a room and waited for the company to rise and say how-de-do, as if she deserved nothing less. This girl, at least, would not laugh in your face and call you her dear Fanny.

Bella Garraway comes into the room, and her feet in their thin slippers are glad not to be kept waiting on marble any longer. It is her first time at the famous, the fascinating Lady Woodcourt’s; her papa has taken care not to alarm her, but all the same, she is wearing what diamonds Mama’s case has yielded up. Lady Woodcourt sits, smiling vaguely; a woman shrivelled and brown as an old apple, her filmy old eyes drifting perpetually away from the mark. Bella advances, and submits to Lady Woodcourt’s grip, a fierce clutch like the clasp of a purse. She just drinks her in; her thin body, her brown wrinkled flesh drifting loosely within the hard carapace of her boned gown like a boat at its moorings. Bella has no idea, in reality, who Fanny Woodcourt is. But Bella, as her sister and governesses always privately remark, is quick on the uptake, and her eyes run quickly over the room, assessing each gift, each bibelot with the commercial eye of an auctioneer. Each object, indeed, has its magnificent provenance, since Lady Woodcourt buys nothing for herself, and takes only from the grandest of her admirers. Anything Bella’s father ever gave her is surely in Lady Woodcourt’s dressing room by now, if not passed on to the housekeeper. Bella drops her eyes in modesty, but if she will not meet Lady Woodcourt’s gaze, she is at least curious enough to inspect her voluble possessions. Whether each porcelain treasure, each glittering glass is the gift of his Grace, Excellency, Majesty hardly matters. Bella looks around, assessing, and sees what Fanny Woodcourt has been.