The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher
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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;