Captain Harnett had promptly declared, without evident ill-will, that if Godfrey were ‘not interested in the strumpet, then I’m damned if I don’t have her myself’. And he had gone resolutely striding away down the street in the direction of the girl who was, or who might not be, Lisa. Godfrey had turned in the other direction towards a night cab stand, plunging his thoughts into the idea of Elizabeth as if he were holding his shrinking flesh to a cauterising iron.
There was a single empty four-wheeler at the stand, its horse occasionally stamping its feet in the cold and champing at its feed-bag. Godfrey went up to the vehicle and tapped smartly at the closed sash.
‘’Ullo,’ a sleep-thick voice answered from within. ‘Is it a job?’
The dark figure of the cabbie, shrouded in a heavy old coat, his round hat jammed on his head even in slumber, began to rise up on the far side of the glass. And at that precise moment there clanged forth into Godfrey’s mind with the majestic unexpectedness of the sun breaking goldenly through an unending sullen cloud curtain the idea of just how he would paint Elizabeth.
It was the thought of what Elizabeth had done for him just a few moments earlier that gave it to him, complete and entire except for one irritating lacuna in his factual knowledge.
And that, he realised, might be remedied at once. He swung away from the cab and actually ran along the street back towards the club, hearing faintly in the moonlight the cabbie’s curses of bleak rage. Inside the club, he brushed aside the servant who wanted to take his coat and bounded up the stairs two at a time, hat still on his head, to the library.
At this hour that room, never much used in this establishment, was deserted except for a solitary elderly member soundly dozing under a single wall gaslight in front of a dully dying fire.
Godfrey paused at the door for a moment. Surely he had seen at some time Lemprière’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology somewhere on the shelves. But where? He thought hard and then decided he knew. He hurried over. But in the dim light he could not read a single title. He strode across to the writing-table, seized a sheet of paper, folded it into a spill and went to light it at the gas.
The dozing old member stirred. ‘Waiter,’ he mumbled. ‘Potash-water.’ And then he fell asleep again.
Godfrey carefully carried his flaming spill back to the shelves where he had thought that the worthy Channel Island clergyman’s compilation might be. And in the last flicker of his improvised torch he saw it. He hurried with it back to the light.
Venus, Venus. Ah, here she was. Venus also surnamed Cytheraea. No. Venus Exopolis, so named because her statue was without the city of Athens. Venus Phallommeda named from her affection for the phallus. Good heavens, no. And, ah, yes, here.
Venus Verticordia, named thus because she could turn the hearts of men to cultivate chastity.
And was this not Elizabeth? Was this not what she had done for him, turned him from vice. Was this not an extension of her battle to bring light into dark places, this bringing of purity to all that was foul? She should be Venus Verticordia. She was Venus Verticordia. And now he could paint her.
Even the weather entered into his scheme of things in the joyous rush of the days and weeks that followed. There came a spell of a fortnight and more when day after day the sky was clear. If ever there was good light in winter, it was now. And Godfrey made the very fullest use of it.
There had been first that marvellous next morning when he had gone to see Elizabeth, locating with difficulty some tumbledown houses called Perkins Rents in a rookery crouching under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey, coming suddenly from grey tranquillity into close-packed airlessness and seeing Elizabeth teaching a tattered hare-lipped girl of ten or so to use a scrubbing brush. For a little he had stood and watched her in the entrance of the court, with his coat-tails held up round his waist to prevent them dipping into a broken basket of stinking herrings which a man crouching in the slight shelter of the entrance archway was trying feebly to sell. At last he had felt he could fairly interrupt the scrubbing lesson and he had approached.
And then, pacing with care beside her up and down the cramped space of that icy-puddled unpaved court, he had explained just how it was that at last he wanted to paint her. And she had at once been infected with his enthusiasm and had agreed. She had even abandoned her intention of attending a meeting that afternoon so that she could pose for the preliminary study.
That had gone well, too. She had evoked such an excess of clumsy admiration from young Billy as he had shown her up to the studio that he had wondered whether he would ever get a coherent word out of him again. And in the studio she had turned this way and that to the light, had moved her head up and down, had put her arms here and there with wonderful patience. She had even draped a sheet over her dress for him to get some idea of how the draperies would fall, and far from complaining she had been eager to do any more he thought necessary. At the end of two hours he had sketched the whole outline of the picture on to the large sheet of brown paper that he always used at this stage. Already he could see the finished work as he hoped it would be, an intense vision if vague of detail and, he was convinced, bound to be as far superior to the Torquato Tasso as that had been to any of his earlier trial pieces.
In the weeks that followed he lived oblivious of anything but the work. And this not because he had much less time than he would have liked before the Academy but because of the passion that filled him. When each afternoon the light began to fail and he had to send home the professional model he used at this stage he would continue to stand in front of his easel staring at the chalk-marked brown paper until the very shapes on it disappeared in the gloom. And eating or sitting or taking himself bemusedly off to bed he did nothing but ponder the vision that hung like a bright cloud in the centre of his mind.
His only other activity was to visit Elizabeth, though it would be long before he would need her again for the picture. But he felt now on a sure footing in Gower Street and he knew that in every moment he spent there he was absorbing his inspiration into his system.
They were back in their relations where they had been before she had left to go down to Wiltshire. There could be no question of that. Even the enthusiasm of Miss Watkyn over the proposed work—she had demanded to know all about it, and Godfrey despite his instinct never to discuss an unpainted picture had had to make some concessions to her fervid interest—could not hamper the way the two of them grew, meeting by meeting, closer together.
The days went spinningly by. Each one was marked for him by a minute or two of extra light to work by. And each week was marked by a distinct progress in the task on the easel. The figure drawn from the model being finished, the background progressing stage by stage, the moving on from chalk to oil colours, the transfer painstakingly of the work on paper to the carefully squared-off canvas.
And how secure he felt. For the first time he tolerated the presence in the studio of a model without the least qualm. When he had been working on the Torquato Tasso and various girls had at various times been there for long periods, though he had never stepped beyond the most formal politeness with them, he had always experienced an intense disturbance, a fear not only of the effects of their possible promiscuity but, more, of the world he suspected some of them at least inhabited, the world that both attracted and repelled. But now, armoured in Elizabeth’s radiance, the particular girl he employed, a statuesque but vain and incredibly talkative creature, might for all the effect she had on him have been a plaster cast.
Even when one day, despite his wearied requests for less chatter, she had told him with the utmost relish that she had been to a party ‘with ever such a lot of artists—just like you—well, with quite a dozen’ where the entire company had taken off all their clothes still he had been able to regard her completely in the light of some talking doll, irritating but unconnected in any way with the reality of life.
And soon he came to spend each evening with Elizabeth, leaving Gillingham Place when the light went and staying in the comfort, warmth and orderliness of Gower Street until it was time to go back to bed. Often they would sit hardly talking at all. Miss Watkyn would, with frequent deep sighs, read to herself from some volume of verse, Elizabeth would have on her reading-stand a fat Blue Book and he himself would sit idling over the newspaper and taking long looks at his muse when he thought he was unobserved.
It was on one such quiet evening, shortly after they had heard that Sir Charles and Lady Augusta were back in Brook Street for the spring, that he was able to register that his relations with Elizabeth had taken a marked step forward. It was a registration made on the acutely sensitive barometer of Miss Watkyn’s feelings. And it blew up like a sudden squall too, one that set the indicator swinging in a moment from ‘Set Fair’ to ‘Stormy’.
All that precipitated it was a quiet remark from Elizabeth.
‘I had no idea that Blue Books and Statistical Tables grew quite so prolifically,’ she said, as she laid down a thick unbound volume she had just finished. ‘When I leave here I shall have to have a room with library shelves.’
Godfrey might not even have noticed the implications had Miss Watkyn not started out of her chair as if a spectre had appeared greenish and dripping in the middle of the neatly warm room.
‘Leave?’ she exclaimed. ‘Leave here? Leave me? No, no. You cannot.’
And she had fallen heavily back in her chair.
Naturally there had been a certain amount of to-do. Smelling-salts, always by Miss Watkyn’s side, had had to be applied, a gushing fit of tears had had to be ignored by Godfrey and treated with a touch of sharpness by Elizabeth and finally Miss Watkyn had had to be assisted up to her darkened room.
Then, while he waited for Elizabeth to return—and Miss Watkyn of course kept her a considerable time—he began thinking about what had caused all the furore. And he saw quickly enough that Miss Watkyn had been right, in a way, to display such feeling. Because what Elizabeth had been doing was to imply that in some within-sight future she would be in her own home. Or rather in a home shared with a husband. She had been seeing herself as married to him and had un-consciously referred to their future state.
His heart bounded.
And then, not many days later, he received an invitation from Sir Charles and Lady Augusta to join them at the opera and learnt that evening from Elizabeth that she too had been asked. She had even deferred replying until she knew whether he was to be of the party.
With a deep-buried song of triumph beginning to sound somewhere within him, he suggested to Elizabeth that a break in their unvarying patterns of work would be an excellent thing. And he resolved that on that night he would find the right circumstances in which to ask Elizabeth to be his wife.
Godfrey arrived at the Opera with Elizabeth, Lady Augusta and Sir Charles in the Bosworth barouche. He arrived hugging to himself the knowledge that he had planned before they left Brook Street to have a confidential quarter of an hour with Sir Charles and ask him, as Elizabeth’s nearest relation, for her hand and that he had done just what he had planned.
‘My boy, Augusta told me long ago that this was in the wind. Indeed, damn me if I don’t think she put it in the wind, so to speak. But I can’t tell you how glad I am. Elizabeth’s a diffic—Well, you know, there was that medical business and everything. And then all this non— All this business with the—What the devil is it? The London Society for Sanitation and the Poor? Something like that. Well, I felt responsible for the child. Well, not a child. Not a child at all in many ways. No, what I mean is, my dear fellow, that you’ll make the best possible husband for her. No need to ask you any questions, keeping her and all that. Known all about you since you were in frocks. My boy, I’m delighted. Delighted.’
And later tonight he would order circumstances equally firmly in creating the opportunity to ask Elizabeth the question he felt certain hardly needed to be put.
Ahead of them, as they sat in the carriage in the dark, stretched the long slow line of other arrivals.
‘It reminds me of the Park,’ Elizabeth contrived to say to Godfrey at a time when neither Sir Charles nor Lady Augusta would hear.
Godfrey gave her a grin.
‘And that is no indication of intense delight?’
‘Well, do you know,’ Elizabeth answered in the same quiet tone, ‘my aunt said to me earlier that the Italian opera in London is the best and highest paid in Europe, and I do not doubt it. But all the same I would give a lot at this moment to be quietly at my own fireside with a Select Committee Report on my reading-stand.’
Godfrey, full of sheer pride in what he had asked Sir Charles not an hour before, laughed at her.
‘No,’ he said, ‘this once you must enjoy yourself. And Lady Augusta is right, the opera is something noble in its way, a flower of our civilisation.’
‘Well then,’ Elizabeth said, smiling at him, ‘not because it is a flower of a civilisation that I know well to be built on mud, but because you are ready to enjoy it I will.’
The barouche came to a halt outside the high portico of the massive theatre. The two tall Bosworth footmen leapt from their places behind and stood on either side of the door, and they descended to join the rapidly thickening crowd of operagoers. All around the men, every one in swallow-tailed evening coat with high white choker at the neck and high crushable hat on the head, seemed tall and magnificent. And the women, with their bare shoulders covered at present with opera cloaks, wraps and shawls, each striving to outdo the others in brilliance of colour, with their long dresses, their jewels, their fans and their bouquets—Godfrey glimpsed Lady Emmeline Otway, busy with a bouquet holder incorporating a little mirror so that she could see who was approaching her from behind—all really seemed too gorgeously fine to be mere human creatures.
Inside, as they made their way to their box, the crush was yet denser. The air was heavy with rich mingling perfumes, loud with talk and laughter.
‘Come,’ Godfrey whispered to Elizabeth as they followed Sir Charles and Lady Augusta up the thickly carpeted staircases, ‘admit that this is a spectacle worth the seeing? Worth the sharing even?’
Elizabeth’s grey eyes were shining with an excited sparkle he thought he had never yet seen in them.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I sink my principles for tonight and agree this is truly fine.’
She gave him a suddenly impish smile.
‘Though that it’s finer than the opera in New York I will not say,’ she added. ‘Especially since I was never there.’
From their box among the many tiers of boxes all round the great theatre they looked down at the stalls, now very nearly filled, a pattern almost of alternate black and colour, men and women, with the pinky-white bare shoulders of the latter making a consistent irregular thread all along each row.
‘Elizabeth, my dear,’ said Lady Augusta, ‘take these glasses. After all, when one comes to the theatre to see people and be seen by them, one might as well see properly.’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘What, Aunt Augusta, you’re not here to listen to the music?’
‘I would like to say that I am not, child. But, to tell the truth, I find the music takes me up into regions I really almost prefer not to go to. So I warn you, no chatter after the maestro raises his baton.’
Sir Charles leant forward, his skull under the hair brushed across it pink-fleshed already from the heat.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘that she even likes this terrible Verdi fellow we’re to hear. Now, if it’s Meyerbeer and his what-do-you-call-it, Robert the Devil, then I’m perfectly ready to be carried away myself. But all these brassy roarings, all the tink-lings and cymballings … Oh, dear, oh dear.’
‘Well, I know nothing of Balio in Maschera,’ Godfrey replied, glancing at the programme.
‘Oh,’ said Sir Charles, ‘it’s the greatest nonsense of them all. Though Elizabeth should like it: it purports to take place in America.’
‘I don’t recall America as being particularly rich in masked balls,’ Elizabeth said.
And in a flash, while Sir Charles explained the curious history of Verdi’s opera to Elizabeth, how it had originally been the story of the assassination of King Gustav of Sweden but how after Orsini’s attempt on Napoleon III the authorities in Rome had forbidden the subject of the mortality of kings and so the whole intrigue had been bodily removed to Boston where only an English governor’s life was at stake, Godfrey was transported, simply by hearing the words of the title said in English, to a vivid remembrance of the masked balls he himself had once visited.
The balls, at places like the Holborn Casino, the Grecian Saloon, Vauxhall and Drury Lane, had exercised on him a powerful attraction in the period between his coming back to England from Germany and his first meeting Elizabeth. At such popular entertainments it was wonderfully easy to step across into the world on the other side. A trifling sum for admission and one was there. A moment before a passer-by in the street going about one’s lawful business: a moment afterwards a participant in the life that goes on underneath, cut off completely from the edifice of morality and order generally presented as the way the world runs. In a realm ruleless, rank, rich.
Not that, on the five or six occasions that he had availed himself of this freedom, he had ever taken full advantage of the possibilities that so plainly lay there. Something had deterred him, a fear hard to define. But each time he had danced with some dozen different girls in the course of a couple of hours, had smelt the cheap scent some of them wore and their breaths whiffy with beer or gin, had felt their sweaty hands holding tight on to his, had found answers of a sort to their gay loud talk. And had felt that he was there, touching that other world.
And—it was this that had given such occasions in retrospect a deeper-stringed power to tug at the furthest places in his mind—when Lisa had mentioned that it was at masked balls among other resorts that she had learnt her trade he had attached to those surface experiences that one night he had spent with her, that night which, for all that he tried to swathe it in oblivion, kept its niche in his memory, encased and indestructible. So one casual mention of the English of the title of the opera they were about to hear had set off in his head such a rout of confused memories and intimations that he had for some few minutes been unable to realise at all what was going on around him.
But now he pulled himself sharply together. What nonsense was it he had let invade his head? He was here at the opera with Elizabeth, whom he intended to make his wife, and with Sir Charles and Lady Augusta who stood towards her as parents. He was here to listen to a piece of high-reaching music, to take part in a civilised entertainment, at the end of which he had promised himself he would ask a question whose answer would affect the whole of the rest of his life. He had no business to be thinking of anything else but this present moment and its pledged aftermath.
He wrested his attention back to the scene in front of him. Soon the overture began and for a little he was able to hold his mind to it. But, though he had hoped it would be music that carried him away on its airy wings, as music often had done for him in the opera houses of Germany, he found before long that this piece was not holding him.
He stole a look at Elizabeth. Was the music working for her? She certainly seemed rapt enough, eyes fixed on the lighted oblong of the orchestra pit below them. Lady Augusta, he saw with a flick of amusement, was being as good as her word. Plainly the abrupt heights and depths of this music touched something inside that tubby but magnificent exterior and bore her off to far unimagined regions. Sir Charles, on the other hand, was sitting bolt upright with the look of someone swallowing a medicinal draught.
The curtain rose and the curious drama began to unfold with its story—surely more or less taken from history?—of the benevolent despot King Gustav plotted against by high-principled anti-liberals, or, following its enforced change of setting, its tale of the unlikely Ricardo, Count of Warwick, Governor of Boston, and of the improbable conspirator negroes, Samuele and Tomaso, with the addition for reasons no doubt chiefly musical of the tights-and-doublet page Oscar, undeniably feminine as to the hips and an agile soprano. It did not compel his attention.
Nor was he held by the subsequent antics at the hut of Ulrica the sorceress, the dodgings behind a convenient curtain, the overheard conversations bawled out at the singers’ full stretch of lung. What possible relation did all this bear to real life? Very well, it provided excuses for some extremely dramatic music. But surely this was not enough? Was this Signor Giuseppi Verdi in Italy really doing in his art something parallel to what he himself believed he was attempting in paint? It did not seem that these unlikely cavortings could hold any similar relation to any truth as his own version of Torquato Tasso leaving Ferrara did to the idea of casting aside the complexities of the world to seek a higher way. Or to the conception of Elizabeth as Venus Verticordia, turner of—
And then suddenly, through the clumsy illusion down on the stage of a pair of deep-toned basses made up to look like a couple of Christy Minstrels, of the heroine arriving from a ride through the wild night countryside immaculate in pearls and white satin, suddenly there came a lightning flash of insight. The dark and this supposedly tumbledown hut, what were they but that dark side of life that had come so insistently into his mind with the thought of the Holborn Casino, the Grecian Saloon and the like? And plainly this darkness—were they not even now singing themselves a rendezvous for the midnight gallows?—had its attraction for Giuseppe Verdi, every bit as powerful as the attraction he himself had felt for the dark streets and darker places of London.
So in the next act, at the gallows, though the events there were if anything even more ridiculous and unlikely, he found himself almost wholly absorbed. For all his occasional desire to giggle, when bouquets pattered down at the foot of the gibbet in tribute to the diva, when her supposed husband entirely failed to recognise her because she had lightly flung a black scarf over the lower half of her face, when the conspirators, all in black cloaks, masks and black gloves for secrecy, brandished their poniards with a recklessness worthy of so many hucksters in a street-market and sang like billy-oh all the while, he still moved in the dark world. For all the rest of that improbable act he lived in that world he had watched in fascination, had dipped his wings over as if it were black scum-water with a sense of breathless pleasure.
The tale of the good King Gustav, or good Governor Ricardo Warwick, entered its final act, the masked ball itself. And, though clearly for the singers this was simply an opportunity to display the most sumptuous costumes they could persuade the management to provide, yet the presence of all those tiny masks over the eyes, a little mocking note running through all the finery, enflamed him to an altogether new pitch. Masks, the extraordinary anonymity they conferred. Masks, little slips of passports out of the land of rules and regulations, order and hierarchies, into the land of disorder, darkness and new rules that were no rules.
As the heavy curtains swung together for the last time, amid the frenzied applause and yet more showered bouquets, amid the bowings and smiles, amid ‘Bravo’ and ‘Encore’, he leant over to Lady Augusta.
‘I’m sorry to say that I’m not feeling well,’ he mouthed to her above the noise. ‘With your permission I shall slip away to bed. Don’t let Elizabeth worry. I shall be better again in the morning.’