A Marriage of Convenience (6 page)

Only when he had left the room did the staircase remind Clinton of the girl. He brought the scrap of lace from his pocket and went in again.

‘A young lady gave me this,’ he said, dropping the child’s cuff on Esmond’s knee.

‘That wasn’t quite what I heard,’ Esmond replied mildly. ‘Her name’s Louise … my mistress’s child.’

‘You a father?’ laughed Clinton, genuinely astonished.

‘Her mother was married. She’s a widow.’

‘You lucky dog,’ sighed Clinton, pleased by the lines of irritation on Esmond’s brow. ‘I like older women too.’

‘If I shared that taste, my mistresses would be old enough to be grandmothers. Men of my age find women of thirty delightfully youthful.’

Clinton smiled.

‘Calculation and sensuality; that’s what I like about women that age. They enjoy the present but always keep something back for the future. Young girls offer the whole dish at once. Lechery’s fed better in careful spoonfuls.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’ Esmond twisted his lips disdainfully. ‘You never had much time for love, did you, Clinton?’

Clinton leant nonchalantly against the mantelpiece.

‘Maybe once or twice a century.’ He picked up a head of Pailas Athene and kissed her marble lips. ‘In the meantime vanity must have its little conquests and boredom its diet of excitement.’

‘I wonder if you’re really as cynical as you pretend.’

Clinton’s hand shook slightly as he replaced the head on the mantelpiece.

‘I’m afraid one has to have one’s capital intact for romantic passions; wouldn’t you say mine’s dribbled away in the small change of flirtation?’ He took a step towards Esmond. ‘Men who marry for money can’t be expected to babble on about sentimental attachments.’

‘I meant no offence.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t.’ Clinton looked at him quizzically. ‘I suppose you’re going to make her an honest woman … being a man of principle.’

‘I intend to marry her if that’s what you mean.’

Clinton smiled ingenuously.

‘It’s a most remarkable thing … I’ve known about a dozen men who intended to marry their mistresses; but somehow, God knows why, they never seemed to find the right moment.’

Esmond looked at him steadily.

‘I’m not a liar or a hypocrite, Clinton. I’ve already asked her. I’m waiting for her answer.’

‘Sounds a clever woman. If she grabbed you straight away, you’d think she was after your money and nothing else.’

‘You think I should kick her out so she comes crawling back?’

‘Might be an idea.’

‘Then let me tell you this: she’s turned down richer men than I am and she’s not a banker’s widow either, in case you’re thinking of
making any more funny remarks. She’s an actress. Does that amuse you?’

‘Not in the least. I’m quite partial to them myself from time to time. What sort of parts does she play?’

‘I’ve said all I mean to. I wouldn’t have told you anything unless I’d thought you’d find out anyway sooner or later.’ Esmond moved across to the fireplace and rang the bell. ‘Will you dine with me.’

‘Perhaps another evening. If I’m accepted by the girl I’ll have to come back to talk about the marriage settlement. Any contribution I make is going to have to come from the trust.’

Esmond smiled when they had shaken hands.

‘I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever see each other again when the trust’s wound up.’

‘You’ll have me in tears,’ said Clinton, picking up his cane and crossing to the door. About to open it, he looked back. ‘You had a long wait before seeing me bow to the majesty of financial facts. Was it as enjoyable as you expected?’

Esmond stood stiffly with folded arms; a slight tightening of his lips the only sign of his annoyance.

‘There’s an old saying, Clinton—in important matters, it’s very rare for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.’

‘They believe
that
in the city?’ laughed Clinton, pushing open the door. He paused a moment on the landing, and then, rapping the buttocks of a marble Aphrodite with his cane, started lightly down the stairs. Not caring to wait while a servant fetched a hansom, he set out on foot.

The rain had stopped and evening sunlight was gleaming on wet pavements and on the stuccoed façades of the house, as he left the scene of his defeat. With every step, he felt his anger returning and keen regret for the many things he had left unsaid. His efforts to seem light-hearted and insouciant now struck him as worthless affectation. The only result of them had been to let Esmond off lightly. Esmond stood to get his trust money at once, if the marriage with Sophie went ahead. Otherwise he would have to wait a further three years. Clinton could not understand or forgive his own failure to make pointed use of the financial advantage Esmond had secured for himself by refusing any sort of help. Clinton’s conviction that Esmond had no real need of the money, made him regret his silence still more. But at the time, his principal concern had been to hide the full extent of his anger and depression.

For years, Clinton’s most vivid boyhood memories of Esmond had centred on his sardonic disparagement of the pursuits he liked best: hunting, steeplechasing, and the other interests he had shared
with his father. Later, Esmond had become more subtle, praising the army whenever they met and belittling his own commercial activities, simply to give added force to apparently casual remarks about the China War being fought solely to protect the interests of British merchants. Esmond’s claim to have been envious of cavalry officers had been his standard way of ridiculing a society which despised trade and yet derived from it much of the wealth which made such snobberies possible. Until recent years, the difference in their ages had inevitably placed Clinton at a disadvantage in these exchanges; nor had the undoubted fact that Esmond had been wronged made matters easier.

In the past Esmond had seemed especially fond of representing Clinton as a charming and carefree idealist, while he bemoaned the loss of his own joys and illusions in the wicked city. It was this recollection which now made Clinton angriest. Esmond would have found it deliciously ironic that he, the world-weary broker, should intend to marry for love, when the young idealist was on the verge of a cynically profitable union. The ingenuity Esmond had shown in reversing these old roles, while talking about his virtuous actress, grated harshly on Clinton’s nerves. And what he had heard about the woman herself annoyed him almost as much as Esmond’s attitude.

Here was an actress—possibly unsuccessful—in her thirties with a daughter to support from what she could earn in the most precarious of all professions. When offered riches and security by a devoted cultivated man, had she gone down on her knees and thanked God? Not she. It stung Clinton personally, as Esmond had probably known it would, that this unknown woman, with reasons for marrying quite as persuasive as those which had crushed his own resistance, had stood firm. By what right had she valued herself so highly? Or did he actually believe a word of it?

At the ornamental gates which separated the square from the public highway, Clinton stopped abruptly, and then started back purposefully in the direction of the mews which ran behind Esmond’s house. A few shillings would be enough to elicit from a groom or stable-boy the name of Esmond’s actress and the theatre where she worked. Clinton did not intend to damage his brother’s chances with her, but what better medicine could there be for his bitterness than to find the woman a calculating bitch instead of an angel? And really there was nothing unlikely about an actress making a fool of Esmond, while casting around for an even bigger fish.

With several days to kill before leaving for the country on his marital mission, Clinton would in any case have been curious to see
the woman capable of melting Esmond’s self-contained heart; now he had additional incentive. When the time came to propose to Sophie Lucas, it would be particularly consoling to reflect that if Esmond’s marriage ever happened, it would be, on the girl’s part, no more a mutual love-match than his own.

Early the following evening, Clinton sat drinking brandy and water in the smoking room of the Cavalry Club, idly listening to snatches of conversation about the relative merits of cutting and pointing swords.

‘Experts be damned,’ an elderly general was saying, ‘Give a big strong fellow a sabre as sharp as you like … but can he make any impression at all on a leg of mutton covered in sacking and leather straps? That’s my point.’

‘You mean your edge, sir,’ laughed a younger officer.

‘In the Mutiny,’ said another, ‘the 9th Lancers had a short spike set in the hilts of their swords; in mêlées it was better than any kind of blade. A blow in the face with the hilt and that was that.’

From there, the conversation passed on to whether the lance was an outmoded weapon. Looking around the room, from face to face, Clinton supposed that few if any of these officers would consider it reprehensible to marry for money. Most would undoubtedly label objections to such a time-honoured practice as sour grapes or humbug. As a rule, Clinton himself was largely immune to serious doubts about the accepted code of behaviour his class lived by—his faith in part due to social habit, in part to a cast-iron assurance of his position in society. If this certainty made him arrogant, it also left him almost entirely free of the ambitions and jealousies which drove the majority to try to outstrip each other. Esmond of course described this aristocratic virtue as complacency. Not for the first time since their meeting, Clinton cursed his brother. Nobody else on earth was better at forcing him up against his own inconsistencies and the questionable moral assumptions he shared with most of his friends.

Rarely had he known the strange detachment he felt now, sitting in a room where he had previously been so much at home. What did he really feel about these men he had seen on scores of occasions over dinner and cards?

Lord Hampden, one of a group of men playing whist by the window, was known to have debauched his bride in the guard’s van
on the way back to his ancestral home after his London wedding. The story had much amused Clinton, not least because the girl had been the exceptionally virtuous daughter of an earl. Now, two years later, Hampden kept two mistresses, and even so found time to visit Kate Hamilton’s assignation house. In the present company, Clinton doubted whether there was a single married man who was faithful to his wife. Yet all of them would cry shame on the husband who paid his wife’s dressmaker’s bill himself, instead of giving her a large enough allowance to cover it. Captain Malcolm, another of the card players, had deliberately compromised an heiress, so that she had been forced to marry him, and had not been shunned for it. But Malcolm now expected her to be faithful and would furiously demand an apology for any slur on her reputation. Sir Richard Benham, asleep in an armchair by the door, had a wife who had carried on a series of intrigues after she had given her husband three sons, and because she was discreet and Benham feigned complete ignorance, life went on as before. But were any man to cross the room and say to his face that Lady Benham was an adulteress, he would leave no stone unturned in the law courts to clear his wife’s name. Should he fail, in spite of his own affairs, he would undoubtedly cast her out without compunction.

Ridiculous though Clinton thought this, he could no more stop himself finding a sexually abstemious man a prig, than he could help feeling sympathy for unfaithful wives whose husbands bored them. It seemed obvious to him that disappointed women would gravitate to men of greater energy and confidence. If he himself were ever to bring about the social ostracism of a married woman, Clinton knew that the same code, which would compel the husband to disown her, would also oblige him to take her up and support her for as long as she needed his protection. He would expect to be forced out of his regiment and would think it perfectly natural that none of his married friends should ever again receive him in their homes. But where in this strange pattern of honour and deceit would his own marriage find its place? Would he behave just as Hampden and Benham had done? In company he often smiled over axioms which he found privately distasteful; probably every man he knew did the same. To display tenderness of conscience was to be an ass.

A man had duties, undoubtedly, especially if he were an officer, but when women spoke of their duties or moral scruples these things were trifles—just so many fortified positions which they loved to have stormed by determined men. Treat them like fools and they’ll worship you, had been an important part of Clinton’s father’s advice to him. It would have been remarkable if Clinton had learned to respect women as well as love them.

He had dined early in order to be in time for the theatre, and was leaving the club when he met Richard Hawtrey on the stairs. Hawtrey, a handsome cynical man with white regular teeth and a small carefully trimmed moustache, had been a subaltern with Clinton in the 15th Hussars before exchanging into the Royal Scots Greys. Clinton knew the man disliked him.

‘Met Dicky Folliat at Tattersall’s yesterday,’ drawled Hawtrey. ‘He’s out for your blood and no mistake.’

‘Can’t imagine why,’ replied Clinton curtly.

‘Cutting him out with that Lucas girl. Keep an apple dangling and it attracts more than a single wasp.’

‘Who told him I had any interest?’

Hawtrey grinned and jingled his watch seals.

‘Told him herself—good as said it was my Lord Ardmore or nobody.’ He lolled against the banister with one hand thrust into a pocket of his peg-top trousers. ‘Just as well these heiresses are vain enough to think up more reasons than money for their attraction.’

Clinton stepped forward menacingly.

‘Are you speaking of Miss Lucas?’

‘I spoke generally, my lord,’ replied Hawtrey with mocking deference.

‘That’s fortunate, Mr Hawtrey. In future anything said touching her will be my personal concern. You may tell Captain Folliat that.’ With a slight nod to Hawtrey, Clinton turned on his heel.

What point pretending after that? he asked himself, as the hall porter opened the door for him. He was no freer than any of the others and he might as well accept it. The code allowed no exemptions even to the proudest, since pride itself was its
cornerstone.

*

From a box in the second tier, Clinton looked down at the assembling audience. Not a regular visitor to the respectable theatre, he was surprised to see that the old pit benches had been pushed back under the balcony to make way for expensive orchestra stalls. Preferring popular melodramas, burlesques and extravaganzas to polite sentimental comedy, the composition of the audience at the Princess’s Theatre did not please him. Many of the men were in dress coats and the women wearing tulle, velvet and silk evening dresses; clothes which Clinton considered appropriate for the opera but not in an ordinary playhouse. Used to the mixture of classes at the Surrey and the Standard, where the pit and gallery were always filled to bursting by a boisterously enthusiastic orange sucking crowd of mechanics, dock labourers and costermongers in greasy
fustian and corduroy, Clinton found the refined impassivity of predominantly middle class audiences as lifeless as the plays they watched—purged of sexual suggestion, politics and low comedy. The plays of Congreve and Vanbrugh, which he had often enjoyed with his father, were now rarely performed except in bowdlerised versions.

But with his special reason for being there, Clinton was perfectly content to admire the decorative improvements made during Charles Kean’s long management: the gold leaf framing the boxes, the sparkling chandeliers and the blue empyrean above, where painted gods floated in clouds. Helped on by a bottle of Clos Vougeot and a cigar, he was soon caught up in the pleasantly expectant mood which filled the house with the first squawky dissonant chords of the orchestra tuning up. Within minutes the heavy curtain rollers began to turn with a faint creaking and the richly swagged draperies lifted to reveal a romantic painted drop with a blue lake, bosky trees and a distant eighteenth century house. Clinton was now impatient for the orchestra to finish their brief introductory piece, after which their role would be limited to musical backing at moments of high emotional crisis.

The play,
Masks
and
Faces,
by the spectacularly successful team of Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, had been frequently revived since its first performance ten years earlier. And though an artificial sentimentalization of theatrical life in the previous century, it had a strange effect on Clinton almost from the beginning. Very loosely based on the life of Peg Woffington, who had started life as a Dublin watercress seller to find later fame acting with Garrick at Covent Garden, the action was inevitably more concerned with Peg’s goodness of heart than her violent temper and numerous affairs. The theme of a woman with a doubtful reputation and a heart of gold was anything but new, and yet for other reasons Clinton became quickly involved.

Theresa Simmonds, in real life an actress living with a rich man, was playing the part of an actress facing the dilemma of whether to do just that. After several scenes of indecision, Peg high-mindedly rejects wealthy Sir Charles Pomander, instead falling for a simple country gentleman, who later turns out to be married to a sweet young wife. Angry and wounded though she is, Peg heroically sacrifices her own feelings, and after some gentle ridicule of her deceitful swain, brings about a reunion between him and his wife. All of which had about as much to do with the real Peg Woffington as milk has to do with brandy. But the play had plenty of witty lines, and once or twice a sense of pathos coming close to genuine tragedy.

Theresa’s first entrance had disappointed Clinton. Some actresses
mysteriously seemed to fill the stage and command it. But though she lacked this elusive quality, Theresa undeniably had others: a mocking laugh which could quickly turn to gravity, well-timed ironic turns of the head, alertness of eye and grace of movement. She could also convey invisible struggles with conflicting emotions. But her vivacity, clear voice, and the delicious sting, which she gave to her wittiest lines, seemed wrong for a woman evidently intended by the authors to be the epitome of mellow sensuousness and warmth. Theresa’s demure pose, concealing subdued mischief,
expressed
by arched eyebrows and watchful eyes, would have made her ideal for numerous roles in Restoration Comedy. She could seduce with her eyes and lips, but attempting Peg’s more blatant coquetry the effect was false. But the audience that night was a bad one—a particular disaster in comedy of any kind when response is
everything
.

All the time Clinton wished that her face was not masked by a layer of white make-up in the eighteenth century manner, and further disguised by period dabs of colour on her cheeks and a prominent beauty spot. Her powdered wig made it still harder for him to judge what she would look like off the stage. At least her figure was not concealed by the tight fit of her low cut scarlet bodice which plumped up her breasts pleasingly.

Clinton was not impressed by her until comparatively late in the play, and had till then been principally held by the theme of marriage, money and fidelity. But her reaction to the revelation that her country gentleman was married showed what she might be capable of if better cast: a subtle blend of anger, dignity and
self-mockery
, shot through with a sorrow that was neither maudlin nor pathetic.

The passion in her voice both pleased and puzzled Clinton, the sentiment of the speech being so much at variance with her prevaricating behaviour to Esmond. He frowned, and thought for a little; then he smiled to himself and summoned the box attendant
and asked for pen and paper. It took him very little time to dash off a note and hand it to the waiting attendant for delivery.

*

It had rained during the performance and the gas globes over the stage door were reflected, elongated and iridescent, in the black mirror of the pavement. Clinton pushed his way through a group of waiting men, his eye caught by fur-collared coats, grey whiskers and glinting monocles. Across the road a street walker was hovering, and several urchins watched the men warily, doubtless waiting for the best opportunity to attempt to pick their pockets. Clinton announced his fictitious name to the doorman, and, to the fury of those who had been denied entrance, was immediately admitted.

Backstage the air was stuffy and overheated, savouring of ammonia and the glue used in the scenery; up a flight of badly lit stairs, Clinton heard the noise of wash-basins and people laughing and calling to each other. Here in the dressing room corridors, the musky scent of make-up mingled with the pungency of hair warmed by curling tongs and the odour of damp powder.

An old crone of a dresser with thin yellowy hair opened Theresa’s dressing room door and reluctantly let Clinton in. In front of a dressing-table covered by a grease-stained cloth and dotted with bottles and jars, the actress sat sponging her face, while the dresser unpinned her wig. Without moving, Theresa scrutinised Clinton in the mirror. She had made no preparations for the arrival of a strange man, and was wearing a dirty waist-length cotton chemise to protect the dress she had worn in the play.