John White’s head bumps against something hard and he jolts awake. Where the hell is he? It takes him a moment to realize he’s slumped on the top step of his rented house on the Embankment and his head has hit the iron balustrade by the front door.
He wipes the drool from his chin and crawls to his feet. In the moonlight he squints at his pocket watch. Midnight. Earlier than usual. He has no memory of how he got home. But his aching skull and the shouting from the revellers on the river force him to remember the bowl of rum punch he drank. And the money he lost at the gaming-tables and the notes of promise he signed.
If he can sneak into his house without his wife hearing him, all will be well. With trembling fingers, he takes the latch-key from his pocket-book. The door opens with the squeak his wife never gets around to oiling. All is quiet inside. The dining-room door on his left is ajar, and he sees the maidservant asleep, her head on the table. He tiptoes past her. Let her sleep. She is not a slave, but she works hard for her pittance.
He fumbles up the staircase, pitching forward on the top step. The door of the first bedchamber on his right is slightly ajar. He peeks in, expecting to see Marianne’s head on the pillow, her mouth open in a soft snore. But the bed is empty, the coverlet still in place, and the bolsters undisturbed. He stumbles into the room and takes the lid off the pisspot. Nothing in it. So she hasn’t been in her room all evening?
Maybe one of the children is ill . . . ? He goes down the hall into the nursery, the carpet cushioning the sound of his footsteps. All is quiet there, too. Ellen asleep in the big bed, Charles dreaming peacefully in the trundle bed beside it, and baby William in a pullout drawer in the walnut chest, so quiet that he puts his hand on the tiny back just to feel the gentle exhalation of breath.
But no Marianne. Where on earth . . . ? He suddenly feels completely sober. He lights a candle and stands at the top of the staircase listening to the clocks sounding the half hour. Then he hears a soft tap on the front door, the servant’s footsteps, and the familiar squeak of the hinges. A whispered greeting, then the click of his wife’s dress pumps on the staircase. He moves forward, candle in hand.
“Marianne, what the devil—”
“John, my God, I thought . . .”
“Thought I wouldn’t be home so soon? Is that it? Where have you been?”
In the shadows, her face seems ashen beneath the white powder that covers it, her lips, a scarlet gash. Her hand trembles as she pulls at the heart-shaped patch that covers the smallpox scar on her forehead.
“Look at you!” He gestures at her breasts bulging from the tight corset which encircles the tiny waist he once encompassed with lustful fingers. “Where have you been?”
“Brother and I, we went to the theatre. But we didn’t spend money there. Only tuppence to the orange girl. It was Macbeth and I wanted to see the murder. But Haymarket doesn’t charge if you only stay for the first act, so we walked out and—”
“If you walked out after the first act, woman, where have you been?” He grabs her wrist and twists it. She whimpers.
He can hear the servant girl at the bottom of the staircase. “Ma’am? Ma’am?”
He pushes his wife into her bedchamber and slams the door. “Where? Where?”
“We went to supper in Drury Lane. Oh, it was lovely. And it didn’t cost you a penny. Brother paid. Sucking-pig and gooseberry pasty.” A smile creases the white mask of her face. And now, as he leans over her, he can smell the opium and brandy on her breath, the stench of that vile laudanum she buys at the greengrocer’s on the next block. For her toothache, she has told him, though it’s a lie. Her perfect teeth shine through the rouged lips that grimace up at him.
He pushes her onto the bed and raises his fist. She starts to cry, and he moves away, appalled by the hot rush of blood that has pounded into his cheeks and forehead. Leaving her snuffling against the bolster, he runs into his own bedchamber and douses his face with cold water from the washbasin opposite his bed.
To hit a woman was the most contemptible of acts. And he came so close to it. If he has now sunk so low, what will come next? Marianne is intolerable: he cannot be sure anything she says is true. Knowing her brother’s stinginess, he can scarcely believe the man paid for supper. But what of his own actions, the boozing and gaming that consume him nightly? He has not a penny in his pocket at the moment to pay the rent. I am as bad as she is, truth be told.
Throwing his wig onto the chiffonier, he climbs into bed where he stares at the canopy long into the night.
By next morning, when the servant girl pulls back the bed curtains and lays his tea on the table beside him, he knows what he must do. He’ll have to throw himself on his brother-in-law’s goodwill once more.