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‘… most interesting – most interesting young man – remarkable book …’ she was saying, before spooling back wildly to the outset of her conversation. ‘You see, sir, it simply is no good to stay as we are, to be satisfied with our Indian possessions as they are.’
‘I promise you, Duchesse—’ Palmerston began.
‘What if other hands than ours were to be tempted – yes, tempted, I said, yes, I agree, very fine form, never purer in her top register – tempted by the idea of these virgin lands?’
‘India, madam?’ Lord Palmerston had no idea how he was allowing himself to be drawn into such a conversation.
‘No, sir, the kingdoms of Kabul and Bokhara and – and – if you look at Mr Burnes’s maps, it becomes perfectly apparent that there are others who have as clear an interest in it as we—’
‘That interest being none, I suppose, Duchesse, eh?’ the old Duc called from the back of the box.
‘No, monsieur, no, no – I mean Russia, Lord Palmerston.’
‘Russia, madam?’ Lord Palmerston said, hoping by a display of incredulity to bring an end to a conversation he was being subjected to at all hours of the day and night by the most improbable people. The Duchesse, however, was not so easily cowed.
‘And once Russia has established itself in Bokhara, moving on from its Crimean possessions—’
‘Madam, I hardly think—’
‘Crimean possessions – very true, very possible, not at all – imagine, sir, a Russian empire stretching to Kabul – do you suppose for one instant that they would be satisfied with that? No, sir, it would be onward to the kingdom of the Sikhs, and then, I assure you, our Indian possessions begin to look very vulnerable indeed. I doubt we could defend them against such an onslaught.’
‘I assure you, Mme la Duchesse,’ Lord Palmerston said, now entirely giving up on the opera, ‘that these are all most remote possibilities which I am confident the Governor General would meet appropriately. But, really, madam—’
‘Not remote – not possibilities – not for one moment remote,’ the Duchesse went on, her words spilling out of her snuff-coloured silk. She clutched at ribbons in her enthusiasm. ‘Have you read Mr Burnes’s travels, sir? The most efficacious manner, I assure you, of meeting the Russian threat – yes, threat, sir – is to move at this exact moment into Kabul, to Bokhara – these vast and peaceful countries, new markets, sir, and labouring under the yoke of an oppressive superstition – sir, do you not think it our plain duty as Christians and Europeans to bring enlightenment to these benighted people and save them – rescue them – from the – the threat of a fate worse, worse, I say,’ the Duchesse’s voice rising as she lost her own thread, ‘than their own?’
Behind her, Chapman and the pink silk heiress were taking refuge behind her fan, which trembled alarmingly. Lord Palmerston gave up.
‘I think, Duchesse,’ he said wearily, ‘you make a point which I know many people will agree with.’
There was something so final in his tone that even the Duchesse had to sit back in her chair, assuring herself that she, at least, had succeeded in bringing these very important matters to the attention of somebody who would attend to the situation. She turned her attention to the opera, but the act seemed to be over now. Malibran, in a most unbecoming braided blonde wig, was bowing beneath a vast weight of flowers, behaving, at least, as if she were receiving the acclaim of a grateful multitude. The Duchesse, triumphant, prepared to rise and retell her conversation a hundred times.
6.
In the Duchesse de Neaud, the infection represented by Burnes’s book had found a fertile carrier; truly a carrier, one might say, since she passed on the main features of the contagion without proving profoundly susceptible to the virus itself. Like those wealthy invalids who complain bitterly of an influenza while all the time suffering far less than those to whom they will pass on the illness, she made a great deal of noise for a season on the subject of the central Asian principalities, and, having stirred up a great deal of pained opposition and concern, was satisfied to forget the subject and never again mention Burnes, Kabul or Bokhara with her former fervent tones.
The weather in London changed, quite abruptly. The streets dried into dust which settled like a veil over everything; fruit from the market seemed to have been stored for centuries in the dungeons of some belle au bois dormant, so thick did the dust of the streets disguise the bloom of the fruit. The Season began, all at once, to come to an end. There were a few landmarks by which the Season might be considered concluded, but it felt like a rapid collapse of business, and not a cleanly marked boundary. There was no doubt that after the Court had withdrawn, after the last Drawing-Room, after the old Duke’s Summer Ball, there was no Season but a hastily convened retreat, as every house from Park to Park resounded with the beating of carpets, the single occupation of dustsheeting furniture and the sealing-up of trunks, in so much grim-faced hurry that a stranger might have concluded that a marauding army was hammering at the gates of the city, and not merely the unimagined, unexperienced phenomenon of an August in London. But at a certain moment in the year, it was clear that the Season had lost what purpose it had. Perhaps – Bella thought – it ended as soon as an acquaintance remarked, however casually, that he was leaving town early this year. The next day, in fact. The thought presented itself with an attendant melancholy which was quite unfamiliar to her. Never before had the simple fact of having to leave London struck her as so sad a loss, so devastating a revelation of what she must always have known, that the round of parties and Park and dinner was, in truth, at best wearisome and at worst a stale and unprofitable waste of existence. It made no sense to her, to feel like this, and yet that was how she felt. She could only understand it by thinking that, after the last steamy night at the opera, after the last agonizing Drawing-Room, some wardrobe-faced courtier prodding you in the back and your ostrich feathers shedding by the minute, there would be no more Burnes. She understood that very well. He was this year’s novelty, and next year there would be another.
The idea of a different state presented itself to her; the idea of an August where Bella and Burnes together could walk the empty London streets, their happiness observed only by costermongers.
For Bella, now, in this year of Grace, the idea of her departure from London with so much unsaid – even granted that she did not know what she would say, even if she could say it – brought to mind images of collapse. Soft yielding sand, collapsing inwards in an hourglass; a bathful of water sliding unstoppably into the drains; Bella alone, in the drawing room at Hanover Square, hearing only the clink and knock of the opium tantalus in the sounding empty house, waiting for departure, and nothing else.
In these last days, there was so much to be done, and the preparations for the months in Gloucestershire were as detailed and solid as for a siege. Gloucestershire was all very well, but there was much which could not be acquired there at any price. For the long siege of dullness, dictated by the fashion which would separate Bella so irresistibly from Burnes, food was needed. The current books, French novels for upstairs, English for the drawing room, old Italian poetry for the library; these things would represent a brave assault on the grim boredom of a Gloucestershire afternoon. New clothes, naturally; it was astonishing how much time could be stolen from the long day by bathing and dressing, but the trick only worked if there were new bonnets, new dresses to hand. Other than that, there remained the resort of driving about the countryside, calling on families; even a country curate’s wife, however crass or absurd, would serve to alleviate the ache of ennui as swiftly as her father’s unvarying solution. Other amusements were now closed to Bella. Fishing with worms, digging for treasure in the rose garden, dropping grandpapa’s folios from the battlements into the moat with a still memorable, pleasing, deep-sounding plop! – these were things, not newly forbidden to Bella, since they had always been clandestine activities, but since she had grown up and begun to blush, some inner sense, not of decorum but of absurdity, forbade her these previously delightful entertainments. So it was that, to beguile the long August days, purchases had to be made, and Bella and Elizabeth found their last weeks in Hanover Square taken up with visits to the drapers, to the booksellers, in search of some prospective amusement.
7.
The bookseller’s shop was full, and Bella and Elizabeth had to pick their way through a forest of acquaintances, all despatched on the same desperate errand, to fetch the season’s novelties to while away the long country summer. In a street off Piccadilly, the brown little shop was enduring its busiest week of the year, and the gentleman proprietor was wringing his hands as he tried to satisfy each lady with an interesting novelty; and Bella could see, as she quietly picked over the loose-bound piles, that the task of reconciling an individual recommendation with the sort of book which, fashion dictated, all London would be raving over by November, would indeed drive anyone to wring his hands in despair. Just now, Mr Sandoe was attempting to pacify a substantial marchioness, whose bulk and wide-mouthed face made her, without reason, appear actually to be hungry for a few volumes. Bella, waiting patiently for his attention, picked up an unbound volume; a limp volume of poems about rivers, lakes, mountains, trees – she turned the pages, but no human being was there, only the poet and his trembling emotions laid out for the admiring reader like the last stages of a dissection. There was enough of that, Bella felt, in the country already, and she wanted no slim volume of tremulous awareness, silently deploring her own infallible sense of desolation when she looked at an unpeopled mountain. Bella, who always thought that the one thing the view of an empty meadow wanted to complete it was a picnic of fifteen or twenty well-dressed gentlefolk artistically arranged, set down the exquisitely self-satisfied volume with an uncharacteristic burst of dislike.
‘Miss Garraway,’ a voice broke in. ‘And Miss Elizabeth Garraway – charmed, how pleasant to meet old friends when out on an errand – so tiring, so enervating, so refreshing to meet, merely, with two such—’
‘How do you do, ma’am,’ Bella said, bobbing to the Duchesse de Neaud, who was accompanied by one of the sour-faced Gilbert girls. ‘You are, I perceive, on the same errand as we are—’ then, recollecting herself, ‘—though you, ma’am, will have the benefit of a great library to while away your days.’
The Duchesse, indeed, was going to Windsor with the Court, as she acknowledged with a profound and unspeaking nod of the head. She was a great favourite of the King, who had known her in his sisters’ nurseries for half a century, and was an intimate, she felt able to imply in conversation, of the Queen.
‘I long for the day – quite long, my dear – when I am able to spend a moment in a chair with a book at Windsor – quite impossible. HM, you know …’ (this in a confidential whisper) ‘… remarkable little body, great energy, of course – entirely unable to set down, to lose oneself – quite exhausting, although—’ the Duchesse seemed suddenly terrified, as if another pair of listening ears might retell this comparative lack of enthusiasm and cast the Duchesse from her blissful social position into the outer darkness, ‘—nothing but pleasure in the duty, you know, nothing but, so simple, so easy, so pleased with every small service. And Windsor, you know, where every prospect pleases …’
The Duchesse looked around her a trifle wildly, perhaps recalling, far too late, how the second half of the line went. The Gilbert girl took the opportunity to force a simper and bob at Bella and Elizabeth.
‘When do you leave town, ma’am?’ Bella asked.
‘Yes, indeed – Tuesday next, I believe – thank you Miss Garraway – or so I believe, quite, entirely, happily dependent on the wishes of others—’
‘I hope M. le Duc is well?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Thank you, yes, quite well, quite mad with uncertainty, constantly requiring his trunks to be unpacked for some favourite jewel, naturally, though happy, as I say, to be – I expect, Miss Garraway, you have read this – most entertaining, most instructive—’
This, naturally, was Burnes’s book, which the Duchesse seized with both hands from a pile on the bookseller’s table. Bella had the presence of mind not to blush, and, though Miss Gilbert was smirking to a painful extent, she could assure herself that the Duchesse probably meant nothing by it. Elizabeth had wandered off, thankfully, affecting to be engaged by some other book.
‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Bella said collectedly. ‘Mr Burnes and I, you know, are quite friends.’
That did the trick, and Miss Gilbert went off to squeeze Elizabeth for gossip.
‘Most timely, his book, I must say,’ the Duchesse went on, apparently not much caring whether Bella was friends with Burnes or not. ‘Lord Palmerston – at the opera, you know – only last Wednesday – no, Thursday – most concerned, most intrigued. You see my dear, as Burnes says very truly, nature abhors a vacuum – abhors – and where we refuse to step in, others may. You mark my words—’ and a black, glittering and sombre eye now engaged Bella’s own, ‘—others may. Thank heaven for Burnes – excellent, splendid, most timely warning, Palmerston was saying so to me—’ again that tactful drop in volume, to impress Bella that it was only the significance of what the Duchesse was saying that led her to invoke Lord Palmerston, and not a desire to display her glittering connections to a crowded bookseller’s shop, ‘—he and I were talking about it – Malibran, in The Sleepwalkerine, most enchanting, ringing top notes, last Thursday – no, Wednesday – and we agreed, he and I—’ now speaking again at normal levels, ‘—that we must go to the rescue of these poor people. Helpless, quite helpless, in need, if anyone is, of our assistance – and, as I was saying—’ sotto voce, ‘—to him: if we do not, others may. The Russian Bear, my dear, the ravening hungry Russian Bear. Thank heaven for Burnes.’
The Duchesse, now finished, fixed Bella again with her gaze, and then, astonishingly, gave a great ursine growl. Bella jumped back, having no response whatever to make to this; she could hardly growl back, as if she were in the nursery with this small brown wrinkled duchess – a mental picture of the Duchesse in her infant frocks, clutching a rusk, shrunken but entirely the same, and growling, shot across Bella’s mind. Nor, in all conscience, could she respond in any way to what the Duchesse had said; she understood nothing of what she was referring to.
Elizabeth returned, and Bella felt able to escape. As they left, the Duchesse, still deep in her own thoughts, cried, ‘A word to the wise, my dear—’ and then, as Bella nodded her goodbyes, she made her astonishing bear’s growl once more. The surprising fact was that no one else in the bookseller’s shop – not even Elizabeth – seemed remotely troubled or interested by the remarkable performance. Bella stepped into the pillbox carriage waiting for them with a persistent and worrying sense that it was she, and not the extravagant old woman, who had made a spectacle of herself.
8.
She felt able to plead fatigue, and John took them back to Hanover Square, their errands almost complete. Elizabeth, inexhaustible, let Bella off at Hanover Square before asking John to take her on, wanting to make her farewells to a friend in Green Street.
It was three in the afternoon, and Burnes had been waiting, ‘no more than five minutes, I assure you’.
‘How did you know I – we should return soon?’
Burnes smiled. ‘I did not. I had set a limit on my patient waiting.’
‘And how long was that, Burnes?’ Bella said, long ago having passed to this intimate, military form of address. She began to unpick her bonnet as they sat down. ‘I would like to know what value you place on my company, and the length of time you would wait for my return seems as accurate a measure as any. For some truly important person – let us say for the Governor General, the King, or my sister’s friend Goethe—’
‘I believe Herr Goethe is dead, Bella.’
‘No matter – for these, let us say they would merit a whole afternoon’s waiting, hat in hand, jumping to your feet every time the maid enters to feed the fire. On the other hand, let us say, for our friend Stokes—’
‘I was truly asking myself whom you were planning to alight on, but Mr Stokes is a very fair choice.’
‘Thank you. For Mr Stokes, I do not suppose you would wait at all; a mere drop of the card in the bowl, and off you would fly like an afrit riding the West Wind. Am I correct?’
‘Quite so.’
‘And yet you waited for me – how long I do not know – and you would, I believe, have waited a minute or two longer. How long the limit you had privately determined is for me to establish, and that, I presume, will inform me what value you place on the conversation of a silly little girl. I wonder with what ingenuity I can discover the true facts of the case.’
‘No ingenuity is required,’ Burnes said, laughing at Bella, scratching her head like a regular urchin. ‘I will tell you – I had decided to wait for fifteen minutes. In any case, I knew you had gone to your bookseller’s two hours before, since Emily was so kind as to tell me, and I knew a bookseller could not detain you much longer than that.’
‘Very well,’ Bella said. ‘Fifteen minutes. Now I call that a very valuable contribution to knowledge, though, like the higher mathematics, I hardly know as yet what use I shall put it to.’
‘I dread your uses, Bella,’ Burnes said, helping himself to tea and, greedily, to sugar. ‘But how long would you wait for me?’
Bella was silenced, and Burnes, too, in a moment stopped laughing. There was no answer to that; in them both was the unspoken knowledge that the ‘six weeks’, so lightly spoken, so long ago, had shrunk now to one week, that then, he was gone, that after, there was nothing that either could see. In Burnes’s pained anxious face was some knowledge that he had not been fair to Bella, and it would have been better not to have come at all; in Bella’s face was nothing but a forgiveness for anything Burnes might do, be doing, have done. Bella’s forgiveness had no tense, had no aspect, and Burnes dropped his eyes from hers, from her sad, her shining eyes.
‘In the interests of coquetry,’ Bella said, collecting herself, ‘no woman would ever wait for a man as long as he would wait for her. If I were a flirt, five minutes; if I were a woman of normal self-regard …’
But she saw in Burnes’s face that he had no heart any longer for their normal banter, that their conversation, like the afternoon, like their lives, had turned in an unexpected direction, and now there was no retrieving it.
‘Perhaps ten minutes?’ she said, and faltered, her eyes, now, big and swimming and full of ache. She looked at her lap.
‘Bella,’ Burnes said again. ‘How long would you wait for me?’
She could not think, and she hardly trusted her voice to speak.
‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. He could not look at her, perhaps in shame, and he drew back a little in his chair.
‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘must be your brother.’
For a second she did not know what he meant, and then she saw he was talking about the portrait above the chimney breast. He was right to move away from these dangerous and unstable territories. There could be nothing much gained by talking each other into ultimately painful declarations. She rallied herself.
‘Yes, indeed, Harry, my poor brother,’ she said briskly. ‘Not a good likeness, but – forgive me, I was about to say something uncharitable.’
‘I should forgive you,’ Burnes said, smiling.
‘Very well, then; I was about to say that few people would have wanted a good likeness of Harry in a drawing room. He was so very – so very …’
‘Do go on, Bella,’ Burnes said. ‘I think I understand.’
‘No,’ Bella said. ‘He was so very much not at home in a drawing room. He was not quite – not quite tamed, I think one might say. He had a knack, a habit, of arriving anywhere early, and then progressing swiftly to the furthest wall. And then he would stand there – I mean, at a rout, if there was any promise of a crowd, of fresh blood and new flesh.’
‘You make him sound quite the vampyr,’ Burnes said, looking at the faintly extraordinary portrait with the perfectly round head, the legs crossed at the knees and the hand resting, extravagantly, on a tiger.
‘Perhaps so,’ Bella said seriously. ‘If you had seen him against the wall, watching as people came in, assessing himself, preparing himself to spring on his victim – and yet, of course, he could be excellent company and he was my brother. He had to go to India – there was a between-maid, and then another, and debts, cards, and then – you know, Burnes, I feel it shows very bad judgement to attempt to elope with the mother of your principal creditor.’
Burnes, despite himself, laughed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But yes, not a highly judicious act. May I ask—’
‘Really, Burnes, she is still with us. You could hardly expect me to say Emma Franklin, could you? It was decided, then – Harry decided, and we decided, and London gave a great sigh of relief – that he should go to India and make his fortune. Not an unfamiliar story, you must admit, though Harry’s petits péchés were somewhat more ambitious than the common run. Packed off – dead within months. You heard of him, I recall, in Calcutta.’
‘Hardly,’ Burnes said. He had forgotten, by now, how he came first to speak to Bella; it was so very many weeks ago. ‘As I remember, I heard of him first in London – I heard that you had a brother who went to India and died. Only that.’
‘Ah,’ she said, taken by surprise, and all at once, he recalled his ordinary lie, and crimsoned gorgeously from the neck upwards. She was amused. ‘A very ordinary death; we heard that it was cholera, and cholera does, you know, carry off very many new arrivals in India. A year or so later, the portrait arrived, brought by some fellow Company officer – wallah, he called himself. They’d all put up a subscription and paid for the portrait to be finished. I heard the true story from him. Another very ordinary death – another officer’s wife behaved like an ass, and they were surprised. Did you know duelling was so much the fashion in Calcutta? Pew’aps it ain’t, as Harry would have said – Harry would have driven almost anyone to defend his honour with pistols.’
She had finished. He saw in her smile and anecdotal glitter how brave she was, and could be again. For herself, she saw only concern in a good man’s face.
‘You miss him, don’t you,’ he said finally. The room was dark, and quiet; she heard the heavy ticking of his watch in the empty house.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. Now, don’t betray me—’
‘I would never betray you, Bella,’ he said, and it was as if there were no other sentence in the world, there to be spoken. She shook her head, not able to look at him, and he understood very well that she meant Nor I you. He took her hand, and she moved, suddenly, her body moving in response to his touch like iron to a magnet. ‘Come with me,’ he said, rising and advancing to the door. He paused there, and turned, and smiled at her, and, deprived of all will, she rose herself, and followed him.
Out into the street they went, Bella entranced, without a wrap, without a bonnet, and they walked silently southwards through the London streets. No one saw them go; no one paid them any attention as they walked, and through London unfashionable and fashionable they went in silence. She followed him, and it was as if he were drawn by something; what it was, she could not guess, though she could feel that something was pulling him, and it was forty minutes before the streets opened and emptied and there they were, together, at the edge of the river.
Watching the river: watching a perfect chaos of boatmen unloading their goods and passengers onto the wharves. So much to be seen. They stood in bewitched amusement and watched as one lady, stout as a grub in a tight coat, between little shrieks of alarm, allowed herself to be handed into the safe arms of her brass-buttoned husband, waiting with flushed embarrassment on the wharf. Bella and Burnes were interested and uncaring as if the brass-buttoned gentleman had been awaiting a delivery of bales of cotton into his arms, and not merely a wife. By them stood the eager crowd of boys, some ragged, some Sunday-best, which always materializes from nowhere if there is ever the chance that a lady of respectable middle years may fall, shrieking, into a river. The two of them watched, attentively, and would not for the world have admitted that their motives were no more noble than those of the boys. The spectacle came to a disappointing end, safely, and the puerile onlookers almost sighed, waiting for the next entertainment the river’s ordinary traffic might afford them.
‘I would give ten pounds,’ Burnes said after a while, ‘to know the precise contents of every bale, every chest, every warehouse we can see.’ She had not expected him to say anything romantic, and he had not; he had said something better, something interesting. ‘To come down here – I feel rather like a novelist must in a crowded room in an inn. To feel that if all the unspeaking secrets contained in it were opened up – then, I should be master of the world, and know everything.’
‘What would you discover?’
Burnes picked up a stone and sent it skimming into the river.
‘Nothing, perhaps,’ he said. ‘You could ask people about their passions. That is the way to discover something. No – they would only lie to you.’
‘Sometimes,’ Bella said. ‘Would we discover a great deal by your exercise? Even if we did go down to the wharf and pay the boatman five shillings to allow us to inspect his load, what do you suppose we should find? A boatload of cotton, or coal, or tea, I expect; nothing more interesting or romantic than that.’
‘Bella, you disappoint me,’ Burnes said, rubbing his hands together, although it was not cold in the slightest degree. Bella turned and stared at her companion, as if he had gone mad. ‘Not interesting? Not romantic? The docks of London?’
‘Romantic?’ Bella said. ‘Come now, Burnes, be less paradoxical with me. I am too dull for this.’
‘No paradox whatever,’ Burnes said. ‘Merely think – cotton, and coal, and tea – commonplace dull things. Think where they have come from, Bella; think of the journey they have undertaken, through what wastes and deserts, think what hands they have passed through, what fortunes, what hopes rest on these ordinary things. There are men thousands of miles beyond India, whose inner eyes are bent, this very moment, on that exact load of rice, there—’
‘You exaggerate, sir.’
‘Not a whit. Men considering whether, now, their little fortune has reached England safely or is at this moment lying at the bottom of the sea; men wondering whether some shift in weather will double the value of what they sent us, so many months ago, when it comes to sale, or whether it will realize half the poor farmer’s expectations. Riches or poverty, competing furiously in a man’s mind; a family made or destroyed, there in that bale. Look on that, Bella. Look in front of you. The whole world is here, this afternoon, now. In those cases, being thrown down, coffee and silks and spices, wool and diamonds, all docketed and ticked, all as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable that the great world should pass through London, like a great haystack passing through the eye of a single needle. Import and export; sending England out to the world, taking the world into England. Cotton, silk, spice, coffee, gold, silver. The world, Bella, the world. Do you not feel it, Bella? Do you not see that I am showing you what I can, showing you the world? You could never find out what people want by going into a room and asking them. But by God, if you could stop this day now, at this moment, and spend as long as you liked examining every bale, every load, every sack of goods you can see, finding out what everything was worth, who sent it, who is about to buy it, by God, you would begin to understand the world. You would begin to understand what the world dreams of.’
9.
The river continued its placid brown life, unmoved by Burnes’s enthusiasm. As Burnes had talked, they had started to walk again, and they now found themselves in the shadow of the great bridge. A boatman clung on to the rope hanging on the nearest pier, the boat under his lurching feet being pushed away by the current. It swung from one side of the great pier to the other. With his left hand, he nonchalantly ate a bit of bread and an onion. The river was low, its stench so strong and heavy that it could be tasted in the mouth. A flock of coal-lighters was secured for the next few hours in the treacle-rich ooze of the river’s mud, a stuff almost valuable in itself. On the far bank, boys, almost naked, were plunging into this thick mass of mud, occasionally surfacing with cries to show that some small treasure, some penny had been found. Here surfaced a boy, black and dripping, his hand upstretched with a treasure, and trying to hail a little green tug with his shrieking gull-cry. The traffic of the river continued its furious pace uninterrupted, in the middle stream, like water-insects, handling each other out of the path with busy prodding prongs, hooks, ropes, businesslike and abrupt, not pausing for pleasantry, or apology; the purposeful dancing of a rude public ball. Long and intricate levels of wooden stairs and causeways, eroded and slippery smooth, clung to the river’s edge, and each boat, loading, unloading, mooring for a few short hours, seemed like an efficient drab bird which had alighted on one branch rather than another for no particular reason. In a moment it would set off again in a new direction, impelled by nothing more than its own furious energy. As each boat sat there, it seemed as if it cost it more energy to stay still than to move.
Bella said nothing. To her, it had always seemed the river, brown-black, crowded, noisy and stinking; it had never seemed to matter greatly where her tea came from, what produced the stuff for her linen. She could not suppose that the originators of the stuff worked explicitly to supply her with tribute, like the worshippers of a pagan god. Money and trade; filth and lucre. And yet she did feel it, she did; she felt that here, with Burnes, she was being shown a world; whether it was the great world Burnes descanted on, or the great opening mind of a man she suddenly, incomprehensibly, loved and would give herself to, she did not know.
‘It frightens you, the world?’ Burnes said suddenly. His eyes were fixed on Bella’s face; they were dark and swarming with appraisal. They wavered in their orbs as if searching for some secret that Bella’s face held.
‘Perhaps it does,’ Bella said carefully. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand what – quite what the greater part of it has to do with me. You will despise me for that.’
‘Never,’ Burnes said, his eyes fiery, fixed on hers, and in one unspoken agreement, they turned, and began to pick their way through London, to return to the place they came from.
The house, still, was empty as they entered, and in the dark hall, Burnes turned to her. She looked with bewilderment upon his face, but he was not preparing to leave her: on the contrary, he was keeping her, and in his expression was a new certainty, as if he knew all at once where to go and what to do. Still with her hand in his, she, all bewildered, submitted to be led forward a pace or two. He hesitated for a moment: it appeared that now he had forgotten what opportunity he had perceived in the course of the journey from the river to this sad empty house; forgotten why he was standing here, why he had taken Bella’s hand. But it was, after all, easier than that. She looked at him. His head was cocked like a foxhound’s. He was listening for the sound of any other person in the house.
‘Very well, then, Burnes,’ she said, and she had spoken her decision, her right hand in his. What they had understood with the burden of those so few days bearing down upon them, neither would express: she felt that. He led her, then, saying nothing, and she submitted to be led; and together, in the empty house, they walked upstairs.
FIVE (#ulink_b9e5fe21-b693-5832-969c-f74efb3a5b7c)
1.
