Imposture Read online

  ‘Well, I won’t give you away.’

  I left the school at the end of that year, as it happens; that final week encompassed the period of our friendship. A chance had come up for me to live cheaply in England and write; which is what I had wanted to do, and I took it. I had made warm friendships among my various colleagues, and stayed in touch with several of them; though I can’t say that Pattieson’s is one of the connections I kept up. He wasn’t the corresponding kind. When I heard of his death (from an overdose of arthritis medication), many years later, the regret I felt had more to do, if I must be honest, with the prospects of friendship now finally resigned, than the life wilfully lost. I had assumed at the time that his was the sort of privacy which included, among its secrets, several intimate lovers and friends; but none that I heard of ever emerged at the funeral, and I myself was too far away, too much preoccupied with a new life, to make the journey. A few weeks later, I came home to find a post office slip on the entrance mat. ‘THIS DELIVERY ARRIVED WHILE YOU WERE OUT,’ it said in block letters. A note in the contents box read ‘from the estate of’ followed by an illegible scrawl. I thought of Peter at once; and the next thing I felt was the guilt of my neglect; but the package had been too large to fit through the letter-slot, and I remember indulging a little the annoyance I suffered at having to walk, twenty minutes each way, to the post office depot to pick it up.

  His real name, of course, wasn’t Pattieson; the covering letter from the lawyer who handled his estate began with that admission. It was Sullivan. The glamour of imposture, which is what I had credited him with, couldn’t survive the dry legal tone of correction. It seemed but a sad deception – for a grown man to resort to such games; and now that he’s dead I don’t mind giving him away. Pattieson, as I had finally recalled, was none other than Walter Scott’s modest, imaginary schoolmaster, the supposed writer, as far as the joke went, of the Waverley novels, whose name supplied the gap left by Scott’s anonymity. It struck me as just the kind of fiction a lonely old schoolteacher would indulge in, to cheer up his insignificance. I remember, afterwards, doing the maths. He was sixty-three when he died, which meant he was fifty-five when I knew him; at that point he’d been teaching at the school for about fifteen years. At forty, then, or thereabouts, the lure of deception, however pointless and private, had proved too great for him; the game presumably began when he applied for the job. I had a sudden sense of the overwhelming force, which most of us hardly keep at bay, of the desire to tell lies. No doubt his were part of a more general retreat – which included, it occurred to me, his refusal to speak a single word to his colleagues. Which included in the end, I suppose, his death. English masters, of course, often want to be writers. It seems a cruel sort of punishment that they spend their lives teaching the works of the great men who were.

  Well, Pattieson, or Sullivan – I don’t know which name to go by; Peter, I think, is the simplest and best – was a writer, too, in his way. The package, which formed the sum of my inheritance, contained a number of manuscripts, both finished and not, at the heart of which lay a succession of novels on the life of Lord Byron – written largely in what you might call the style of the times: of Byron’s times, that is. Whether he sent them to me because I had found him out; or whether, as I think more likely, he had seen my reviews occasionally in the pages of various journals, and supposed me capable of putting his work forward, I’ll never know. I have been reliably informed, in either case, that the gift of them entailed the right of publishing them; which is what I eventually set out to do. This, then, is the history behind the following tale, as they used to call them; which is doubly relevant, in that the story itself builds on the lecture he gave on The Vampyre, which I was lucky enough, years ago now, to have heard. He has taken liberties, of course, with the facts, as no doubt he is entitled to do. One would hardly, given his history, expect from him the simplest veracity; and there’s a joke, a little one, he couldn’t refrain from making, about the extent of Byron’s influence – I mean, paternity. I don’t suppose, at this late date, that the Rossettis will mind accepting into their genealogy a drop of the Vampyre’s blood.

  A word on the text. Friends of mine have remarked on what an odd thing it seems for a high-school English teacher from New York to write a story in a style nearly two hundred years old. Apart from everything else, there’s the danger of anachronism, over each particular; not to mention the general danger (to take the word literally) involved in writing against time. Well, I suppose we all write against time; and for my part, I have never been so wedded to the age I live in to think of any deviation from its tone as a serious infidelity. But that Peter himself must have been conscious of this charge, one of our remembered conversations makes clear. At lunch one day, towards the end of that endless week that precedes the breaking-up of class, we went for a walk together through the neighbourhood of the school, as we both used, singly, to do. Among the grey gabled homes of Riverdale – I’ve always thought it a shame that the ugliness of American gothic is so often the language of wealth and glamour in Connecticut and New York – we discussed Keats’s two Hyperions. In particular, his last triumphant stab at immortality, the second, allegorical fragment known as The Fall of Hyperion, which he eventually abandoned – from the fear, he once wrote, of its being too old-fashioned, too Miltonic, that is. Peter told the story (I let him tell it, though I had heard it before), of Hunt and Shelley’s conversation about the poem. Hunt had wondered how a little Cockney apothecary who didn’t speak a word of ancient Greek could make an epic of their mythology. I can still hear Peter mumbling the famous reply – through the soft mass of his beard, which was both the emblem and the instrument of his general reluctance to expose his face to the world. ‘And Shelley, whom envy never touched,’ Peter had said, ‘gave as a reason, that Keats was a Greek.’ I think on that note I can finally let him tell his own story.

  BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

  London, 2006

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE OPENING AND CLOSING of Henry Colburn, Esq.’s, large, red front door had produced in the course of the morning, as if by force of suction, a bright eddy of human traffic. The brass plate of his name, mounted on the brickwork beside it, had felt the concentrated stare of dozens of passers-by. BOOKSELLER, the plaque additionally declared – a word that seemed to inspire an unusual number of people to stop, and, summoning courage, to enter, if only to hold in their hands what had become the ‘issue’ of the day. Lord Byron, rumour had it, after a three years’ exile, had returned with a ghost story, ‘The Vampyre’. Colburn had published it with suggestive anonymity, blazoning the title across the cover of his New Monthly Magazine, which had just gone on sale. His store-room could hardly satisfy the crowds of the curious who wandered in and out of his shop, hoping, perhaps, to stumble on the poet himself. Some of them even bought a copy of the magazine.

  By lunchtime, however, the buzz of publication had mostly died away. The poet, it seemed clear enough, was unlikely to make an appearance. The strange rumour suggesting that he might had been answered by its echo, whose source was equally vague, that he wouldn’t. And the swell of customers, distinguished by their busy interest, had begun to subside, through their indifference, into the current of Great Marlborough Street. The little disturbance outside Colburn’s door eased again into a more continuous flow. It was only towards the quiet end of the afternoon, when the publisher himself had gone out, and the door was locked, that the gentleman whom our tale concerns approached the shop – in spite of his youth, with the support of a walking stick. His free hand held a copy of the New Monthly, as if he had only come to return what was no longer wanted. Even so, he continued to read from it, with a kind of reluctant satisfaction, given away by the murmur in his lips. As he reached Colburn’s door, he attempted to fold the magazine into the hand that held his walking stick – awkwardly enough. The paper was dropped and picked up again; afterwards, he stood for a minute frozen, as if to gather his thoughts, while staring at the name on the brass plate.

  He wore his dark hair in curls, which fell loosely across his forehead in such a way as to hide the recession of his hairline. His features, on the whole, were very fine: eyes, black and large; a cleft of stubbornness in the chin; a sensual protrusion of his lips. His strong, straight nose and small, womanish ears suggested internal contradictions. In fact, he was somewhat womanish all round, in figure and pose; his boyhood seemed never to have escaped into manhood. Even the sharp broad lines of his jaw implied a certain delicacy: a precision that could not bear rough handling. When he was angry and puffed up, as now, they comically took on the appearance of a full mouth – an effect brought into clear relief by his high stiff white collar and coal-black coat.

  It was the dress of a dandy; but the costly tailoring seemed to have slackened over time, and spoke less of the exactions of taste, than of the compromises a man is forced to make with his own bad luck: the clinging to, the keeping up. In any case, the fashion had changed. He looked at least five years out of date – a prodigal returning only to find that his threadbare suit, carefully, proudly preserved, has long since fallen out of style. He was the sort of young man who inspires wherever he goes a vision of his untidy bedroom. One supposed he hadn’t any money for a coal fire; one imagined the draughts. The walking stick favoured his left ankle; an old injury, perhaps, which, from the perversity of blood, had become inflamed in the spring chill.

  The London sky had been thickening all day; clouds had piled up over Soho. Their shadow fell over Great Marlborough Street and under cover of it, the first rain fell, fat drops still rare enough to be counted. As if rehearsing a speech, he began to mutter at the red front door: ‘You had no business publishing that story. It was written for the pleasure o
f friends. It had a private significance I don’t want publicly guessed at.’ But a sense of foolishness seemed to quiet him, or prick him to courage – all the more urgently, as he was beginning to get wet. He leant his stick against the door-jamb; then, with one hand, spread the magazine above his head. With the other, he knocked. Gently, at first, and then with a growing and rhythmic insistence, whose music, after a minute, seemed to become its real function, and a source of relief.

  ‘Is no one in? I want to see him, too . . . You will ruin the paper.’ A woman, leaning suggestively under her umbrella, appeared at his elbow. She was looking at the plaque on the door – Henry Colburn, Bookseller. The brass glowed sullenly in the dark afternoon.

  He said without thinking, ‘I don’t mind ruining it; I wrote it.’

  She paused a moment and gave him an underlook. ‘My Lord, I hardly knew you.’ She tilted her umbrella back behind her head to let the light come through to his face. ‘You’ve grown so dark and thin.’

  He examined her in turn. A pinched, pretty countenance, sharp-nosed, and somewhat pale, the colour of ash-wood – rather brown than white. Her bottom lip pushed out stubbornly, pinkly. One wanted to take it in hand and pull; a chastisement which, one might suppose, had its sensual undertone. A worn wet bonnet was as faded as her hair. There was a terrible gentility of crow’s feet around her eyes: she seemed the kind of young woman who equated decency with worrying. But she had a fine figure, if small-hipped – and then, the indescribable, threadbare youth of her stopped one’s heart. She couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen (light kindling burns quickest) and her face already wore the screwed-up look of concentrated loneliness, its brave front.

  ‘We met,’ she said, after another pause, in a low tone, ‘at the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball. Many years ago now. You wore green tails and yellow boots; and were much admired. I . . . I was in a spangled dress; we danced one waltz and . . . sat out another together.’ Then, blushing at the recollection, she added, conspiratorially, ‘I had understood . . . I had understood you were abroad.’ She touched a hand to her throat. ‘Miss Esmond – I mean, Eliza. I’m staying for the season at Lady Walmsley’s.’

  For a moment, he didn’t answer, and then with a smile of inward humour, he bent intimately towards her. ‘I was, of course, very much; but, as you see . . . Returning on the quiet, for several reasons. I hope you’ll do me the honour of – keeping my silence. I can’t think where it would be more prettily kept.’

  ‘Of course,’ she murmured, ‘of course.’ She stood in the dry shadow of her umbrella, unhappily apart, as if untouched by a common affliction. The rain fell simpering around her, and made up, a little, for the silence that grew between them.

  Her discovery seemed to have unsettled her. She couldn’t move, and the young man managed to get rid of her at last only by offering his own copy of the magazine, such as it was: the ink had begun to run, and stained her fingers as she took it, with the gentleness of reverence, from his hand. She promised, of course, to return it; which brought out, inevitably, the secret of his address, in Lincoln’s Inn. Finally satisfied, she walked away, though as she turned the corner onto Regent Street, she cast her gaze back on him once more. He was, by this time, thoroughly drenched. His hair hung flatly and darkly over his temples. Even his coat dripped from the hems into the puddle in which his shoes stood. She could hear him, too, with his fist raised, banging steadily and hopelessly against the large red door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE HAD NEVER BEEN to the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball; but it seemed, for an instant, only natural that he should have: such pleasures, such admiration, were clearly only his real deserts. Such a fine young man he was. He had a sudden, giddy sense that the world is what you make of it, the way you tell it. Then one of his inspirations . . . well, that was mischievous. But it cheered him briefly, not only from the success of his imposture, but the fact that it was just the kind of prank he used to play in his hot youth – before, that is, the settling in of his circumstances that marked the end of it. He consoled his conscience: he hadn’t set out to deceive Miss Esmond, especially as she seemed to him somewhat fleshless prey. Still, her nervous, vibrant hesitations appealed to him.

  Even so, he was glad at last to be rid of her. There was something awful about the pretence. The tax it made upon his face, the muscles of his smile, the subtler strain it put upon his own self-image. He watched her stepping in and out of the rain-shadow of the house fronts, her umbrella set at an angle against the wind; and doubted he should see her again. Probably for the best; though he imagined, as she walked, taking her waist in hand between his thumb and forefinger. Soon he was blind from the rain in his eyes, and before she reached the corner of Regent Street, he had turned again to begin his assault on the door. For a minute, the only thing he felt was the banging in his hand and heart.

  Well, there was no use getting completely drenched; Colburn wasn’t in, or wasn’t answering. This was just the kind of inconsequent reversal that he tended to treat as final. He was apt to ‘stick’ when nothing good could come of ‘sticking’; and liable to give in, just when something might. But the girl had somehow heartened him, her silly delusion. A coffee-house across the road had a view of the door. He hadn’t any money, but when he saw a young man in a knee-length coat slip out of the seat in the bay, he ducked in to take his place. The room was thick with the stench of wet wool; the low continuous echoes of conversation seemed equally oppressive. But no one noticed him; the lukewarm dregs of a cup of coffee remained, and he could cradle his hands around the mug. A mash of coal fire was just hot enough to warm the soaking clothes against his skin. He shivered whenever these touched his leg, and began to drink. The coffee had a spike of rum in it; as it ran through his blood, he reflected on the succession of good luck and bad that had brought him, cold and dripping, to haunt Colburn’s door.

  It was only three years ago that Lord Byron had engaged him as his travelling physician. The poet, when they met, himself remarked on the similarity between them. Byron had palmed his cheek gently and said, ‘I like to admire myself . . . in a youthful mirror.’ He put his own hand to his face. No wonder the poor girl was taken in; and as his trousers began to stiffen in the heat from the fire, he repeated the line to himself. It offered surprising comfort, suggesting as it did larger connotations to a life that had become cramped with insignificance. A strange phrase, though. It seemed, like a smoothing hand, to rub away his features and replace them with a reflective sheen – in which Lord Byron, dimly, appeared. All that it left of himself was the impressionability of glass, the rosiness of youth.

  John Polidori had just turned nineteen when he first came down to London from Edinburgh. He was the youngest medical student ever to take his degree. Grand and inevitable good fortune awaited him. That was his faith, his consolation, as he began to kick his heels at home. He was just ‘looking out for a position’ – a line which, as he soon discovered, he had every opportunity to repeat. After one month, he sometimes added, ‘It was only a question of finding something suitable; one didn’t want to snatch at first chances.’ After two, he professed himself, with a charming modesty, ‘Ready for anything’. After three, he used to explain, in a degree of detail that he himself suspected of becoming tedious, the difficulties a young doctor could expect to face, in setting up a practice. After four, he kept silent; he had started to smell of disappointment.

  His father’s nose, in fact, used to wrinkle with distaste every time his son descended late to breakfast, or went up early for his afternoon nap. It didn’t help that his favourite sister, Frances, was getting married; Polidori couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving home before him. As the oldest son, he was desperate to ‘make good an escape’ – that was the phrase Frances had used for her own. She was about to marry a man named Rossetti, another émigré. Rossetti was handsome enough and well-connected, perhaps; at least, he had just been appointed consul in Milan. Yet he seemed to Polidori a little flighty, or rather, gifted with a grace that suggested if not inconstancy then the lightness of touch that produces it. He was the wrong husband for her. What Frances wanted . . . well, the prospect of her marriage had astonished Polidori into a sense of his own loneliness.