The Act of Love (22 page)

His was, it’s true, a fairly peremptory idea of what constituted aesthetic discourse – ‘Now that,’ he told me, pausing in front of Lady Blessington, ‘is what you call a bosom’ – but some fathers don’t even get that far with their sons’ education.

Lady Blessington was on Marisa’s mind in the period following her eyeballing Marius in the cheese shop because, in her capacity as a volunteer guide and occasional lecturer, she had agreed to give a short talk about the portrait; and Lady Blessington was on my mind because, in my capacity as procurer for my wife, I thought Marius would get something out of hearing Marisa delivering it.

It wasn’t to be a major PowerPoint presentation in one of the gallery’s grand lecture theatres, just a gentle disquisition in front of the painting itself. Part of a series entitled
Meet the Ladies of the Collection
which the gallery was running.
Ladies
of the collection as in the aristocratic subjects
of the portraits – Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, Lady Hamilton, etc. – but also, by implication, allowing that women are not called ladies any more, as in Marisa and her fellow female volunteers. That was what the flyer advertising the series of talks showed: the six women lecturers standing in front of the six painted ladies – someone at the gallery, I fancied, hoping for a television series.

It wasn’t one of Marisa’s favourite portraits, perhaps because the Countess of Blessington wasn’t one of her favourite subjects. Marisa, remember, was not a cleavage kind of person, whereas the countess was famous throughout Europe for the deep voluptuousness of hers. Nonetheless, she admired Thomas Lawrence’s execution well enough.

I, on the other hand, though not a cleavage kind of person either, won’t hear a word against the lady. That she makes the most of her famously esteemed chest (Lamb and Hazlitt, as well as my father, were among its admirers) in a gown which uplifts and accentuates it, and by adopting a pose in which she would appear to be showing how little it is subject to gravity – as though in her all flesh becomes as air – I’d see no reason to deride her even if she hadn’t been a woman of unpromising origins who had to make the most of what Nature had bestowed on her. As the ugly duckling of a none-too-particular Irish landowning family she was married off at an indecently early age to a drunken army officer who beat and imprisoned her. After three months of hellish marriage she contrived to run away. I don’t hold with beating women, but I see this experience as important to the history of the woman she became: childless, prolific in her literary invention (no good writer was ever not beaten or otherwise maltreated first), and somewhat cold, not to say authoritative in her amours.

She was still not twenty when another officer took her, as they say, under his protection, transporting her from Tipperary to Hampshire, where she read long, studied hard, and we must suppose fulfilled, in private and in public, every expectation of a mistress since she soon became the object of a further transaction, passing from the captain’s hands to those of Lord Mountjoy, later the Earl of Blessington, for the
sum – more than princely by the measure of 1815 or thereabouts – of £10,000.

One has, as I recall saying to Marisa in the course of an argument about Lady Blessington, to be grown up about all this. We wouldn’t barter a woman today, but we did once. Myself, I have this to say: if a lady with so much to recommend her, consented to be treated like an object that could be bought and sold, it must be fair to surmise that she had her eye on many of the attendant benefits, to wit the adoration of an influential man, as much jewellery as she could wear, a title she could call her own, entry into educated society, the opportunity to be listened to and read, and the freedom ultimately to enter the sexual commodities market herself, this time as a buyer not a seller.

However you view the compromises into which she was forced, Margaret, Countess of Blessington, having been several times a mistress, became at last what can only be called a master. Confident in her powers, she took up with a dandified French count some thirteen years her junior, and this in full public glare and while still married to the Earl of Blessington who, by all accounts, didn’t seem to mind. To me it is obvious that the earl, a man renowned for his munificence, did not only ‘not mind’ but was active in his encouragement of the count. He loved his wife, therefore it stood to reason that he must love her no less when other men loved her, too, and she loved them in return. No doubt he was present when the countess put the little Frenchman over her knee and did to him what had too many times been done to her.

‘You wish!’ Marisa said.

In fact I didn’t wish. Whatever worked for the Earl of Blessington would never have worked for me. It didn’t excite me to think of Marisa touching fingers in the ballroom with a perfumed dandy. I’d already seen her touching fingers with a perfumed dandy over lunch and I was still alive to tell the tale. Nothing less than the devil taking her would do me now.

Read her as you will, the ‘most gorgeous Lady Blessington’, armed with husband and effeminised lover, continued to entrance the world of literature
and fashion. ‘She looked superb,’ the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote of her in 1835 when, by the standards of the day, she was to be accounted middle-aged. ‘Her beautiful complexion engoldened by the luxurious light of an amorous sleepy lamp, her whole air melting, voluptuous, intellectual and overwhelming.’

To my mind, it is hard to conceive a more complete compliment being paid to a woman of any age, let alone one of forty-five, or, if you measure as Marius measured, rapidly approaching four o’clock, her day not yet spent, the wheels of her evening beginning to turn. She died of a heart attack in her fifty-ninth year, an age Marius found impossible to contemplate in the woman he had once loved to distraction. The count, however, was inconsolable. So not all young or younger men recoil from a wrinkle as though it is the plague.

Whatever our disagreements about Lady Blessington, I had no doubt Marisa would speak wonderfully about the portrait, both as it brought alive an extraordinary woman and as it related to other society paintings in the collection. I’d already heard her, for example, on the Henry Bone enamel miniature of Lady Hamilton as a bacchante on the opposite wall. The enamel had been done from an original – which it would have been a kindness to leave alone, Marisa said – by Vigée-Lebrun. So what is it you don’t like about it again, I’d ask her, for the pure pleasure of hearing her say, ‘Well, she ’s plump, soft, hairy and stupid, for starters. And as for that gauze nightgown, which leaves as little of her podgy flesh to the imagination as Lord Nelson presumably would have desired, I can’t imagine where she found it given that Ann Summers hadn’t yet opened up a shop in 1803.’

The one thing Marisa, as a woman, couldn’t be expected to understand was the erotic appeal of gaucherie in a woman with a title. A society woman making such a bad job of being a bacchante finds its way into the excruciation system of a man, where getting it sexually wrong is transformed into getting it sexually right. Which is not to say one would want to frolic with Lady Hamilton looking like that for long. In the end – and I didn’t doubt Marius was of my party in this – the intelligence in a woman’s
eyes is more provocative than any other part of her no matter what her state of undress. No woman could be seductive who wasn’t clever – that, I was sure, was where we both stood.

So the sooner Marius got to hear Marisa in full aesthetic flow the better.

I had a word with Andrew, Marius’s old college acquaintance, about persuading Marius to come along to Marisa’s talk. They had the occasional drink together, I gathered, though Marius rarely stayed out longer than half an hour, leaving without a word the minute Andrew went to the bathroom or otherwise gave him an opportunity to escape. I made up some cock and bull story about my worrying whether Marisa would get a fair crowd for her talk. It was Andrew who’d told me about Marius’s passion for Baudelaire, and since Baudelaire had written about the artificial in art, and woman’s airs, and dandies, it was possible he ’d be interested in what Marisa had to say on those subjects as they bore on the life of Lady Blessington. Could he suggest it to him? Not to say who Marisa was or anything. I didn’t want to be seen begging my wife an audience. Just a discreet nudge. Not important. But I’d be grateful. And never of course to mention a word of this to Marisa whenever he next met her.

I gave him the flyer which had Marisa’s photograph on it. If Marius bothered to look he would surely recognise her face and that would be that.

Perhaps Andrew did as I asked, perhaps he didn’t. I think my interest in Marius piqued him a little. You never know where jealousy will surface. Perhaps Marius saw the flyer, perhaps he didn’t. What I suspect got him to the lecture was more providential than planned: a tableau, as I saw it, of inevitable connection – Marius cooling his heels in Manchester Square, deciding whether or not he was yet ready, after Elspeth, to look at paintings again, and seeing Marisa going in and out of the gallery, sharper put together than your usual gallery-goer, everything about her equivocal, severe and yet seductive all at once, her leather music case gripped under
her arm because she disliked the femininity of a handbag, but her earrings saying something else, her heels picking at the paving as though it were ice beneath her feet, or as though she owed the stones some injury, angry – he must have thought – much as he was angry around art, a woman who looked at a painting more in the way he looked at a painting, grudgingly, not gushingly, whatever the pleasure, like someone startled out of a pleasant reverie, resenting the painter or the paint for pulling so importunately at that something in the heart that wishes to be left alone . . . and in that instant seeing (just as I had seen) his fate. Remembering her from the fromagerie – you don’t forget a woman you’ve looked over as comprehensively as Marius had looked over Marisa – he must have wondered what frequent business took her to the Wallace Collection, and found in that wondering his opportunity to enter a gallery again, to look at paintings again, and in the process discover who she was and what she did. The consequence of which was his appearing at the back of Marisa’s audience, drinking in her words.

I too was standing at the rear but changed my position when I saw him enter. It felt like a changing of the watch. He stepped forward, I stepped back. A woman in front of me turned round to see what the commotion was, so loudly was my heart beating.

Marisa’s talk was a success. That air she had of being somewhere else worked well when she spoke in public. She didn’t try to please. She gave the impression of a person looking deep into a subject which both was and wasn’t in the room with her. The right way, I have always thought, to address art. As something that is and isn’t of one’s time.

People went up to her afterwards to talk about this and that. I hung back, as I always did. Not a husband’s business to be nosing into his wife ’s public triumphs. But I had more reason to stay out of the way this time because Marius, too, was waiting to say something to her. He let others go before him. I recognised the tactic. He wanted to be last. When he did have her to himself he ventured an observation he hoped she wouldn’t find too personal.

‘A very impressive act of concealment,’ he said, touching his moustaches nervously.

She wondered what he meant.

‘I feel I have been listening to someone speaking fondly of an enemy rather than a friend,’ he went on.

‘I don’t think of Lady Blessington as my enemy. Why should I? She is past doing me any harm.’

He smiled a slow sad knowing smile. ‘A person can harm you from the grave,’ he said.

She looked up at him. She wasn’t used to looking up at men. ‘And what harm, even from the grave, is it that you think I fear? Not the harm of a comparison, I hope. I’m not competing with her for fortune, or for looks.’

His eyes went from her to the painting and back again. His expression suggested she had nothing to fear from any such comparison. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘I think you bear a striking resemblance to her, or she to you if you prefer it that way.’

‘Well I wouldn’t say no to her figure,’ she laughed. Marisa had never needed me to teach her how to her flirt.

She coloured a little. So did he.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if the similarity isn’t precisely the reason for your hostility towards her, if that isn’t to put it too extremely. There ’s something in her eyes that might remind you of yourself. Something that would be direct and yet isn’t. Not a pleading, exactly, but a half-sadness, and with it a sort of expectation of sympathy she isn’t certain she deserves or even wants.’

Rather than look at Marius, who was becoming guilty of something very close to impertinence, Marisa looked at the portrait. He was right. Lady Blessington leans a little forward in her scarlet chair, lightly clasping her hands – a gesture of nervous ownership, of composure not quite attained. And yes, she didn’t like the look. Though it had not occurred to her that she didn’t like it because it reminded her of herself
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