Childish Loves Read online

  Shelley has left his old friend with one more entanglement: Edward Trelawny. Trelawny was a sort of professional adventurer, who fancied himself the real Byronic hero – the kind of man Byron could only write about. Trelawny eventually published a memoir of his acquaintance with the two poets. Its purpose was to glorify Shelley (also at Byron’s expense), and it went some way towards creating the image later made famous by Matthew Arnold: of the ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. Byron comes across as both self-absorbed and unsure of himself; easily deflected from his purpose.

  This was one of the books I spent the week looking over – Peter had obviously referred to it while writing ‘A Soldier’s Grave.’ But what I wanted to check the notebooks for was a date. Lee had said that Peter came to see him about five years ago, which must have been only months before his death. It had occurred to me that the two were related, that the reason Peter wrote the end of his book before the middle had something to do with his visit to Lee Feldman.

  I stayed in Gerschon’s office till about ten o’clock. There wasn’t any window or natural light. Libraries, like casinos, are designed to make you lose track of time – to forget there’s a world outside. I started with the letters and notes, the old receipts, before moving on to the manuscript itself, running my finger sentence by sentence across the pages. Peter’s handwriting was always bad. It looked like frustration made visible, and probably to relieve it he used to scribble patterns in the margins. There were doodles of boats and suns. Trees and flowers. The zodiac. I had the sense that I was saying goodbye to him, in the air-conditioned quiet of the Houghton library. Surrounded by old books. That this was the reason I was skipping dinner (everyone else had gone home). But I didn’t find any dates or anything more suggestive than a complicated little sketch, all gables and dormers, of a rambling old house thinly lined by clapboard.

  A Soldier’s Grave

  I am almost ashamed to admit it, but it was Trelawny who gave me, if not the first idea then the final push, which amounts to the same thing. Trelawny, whom I hold in no very high regard, though he is tall and handsome enough and wants only clean hands and trousers to give him the appearance of a gentleman. But he was a friend of Shelley and is valuable to me on that account. Besides, it flatters my vanity to see the hero of Conrad, Lara, Manfred, et al. parading before me in the flesh, though he insists rather too violently on the resemblance and somewhat to the detriment of my own. He had come to the Casa Saluzzo on some business about a boat, which I had ordered to be built and subsequently tired of (my taste for that particular form of amusement considerably abated by Shelley’s drowning). I was at this point, for various reasons, in a process of retrenchment; Trelawny offered to see it put up for the winter.

  For several weeks he stayed with us but was not much in the way as he spent most of his days at Casa Negroto, where the Hunts were living with their brood of Hottentots – and Mary. I had foolishly given Shelley my word and consigned several innocent poems (and some not so innocent) to Leigh Hunt for a new publication, to be named the Liberal, as he meant to be liberal in it with other people’s poems, and purses. Shelley’s death left him totally dependent, and Trelawny made himself useful, as a messenger if nothing else, for Mr Hunt is either impudent or obsequious, and nothing between, and I had much rather give him my moneys than my time. Mary was displeased with me because she was displeased with everything, but I did what I could for her, which was very little, as she would not accept it. I was at work on Don Juan and gave her the manuscript pages to copy. For this I paid her a little money, which she did accept. Once a day, if the weather was fine, I walked in the garden with Teresa; her brother Pietro and their father Count Gamba had the apartment below my own, and kept her company when I would not.

  ‘This is an odd Cicisbeo sort of existence,’ Trelawny remarked to me one day at breakfast. It was my custom to take tea in the garden a little before noon, and sometimes he joined me. There was a fig tree that cast a pleasant shade, and even in October the sun was bright enough to make a few feet of shade desirable. ‘I wonder you can stand it. Do you know what Mary says about you? That you are hen-pecked to your heart’s content.’

  ‘Teresa has a great affection for Mary. I am sorry to find it unreciprocated.’ When he said nothing, I went on: ‘But Italians feel everything more strongly. Do you know, that if her husband were to die (I mean the Count Guiccioli), Teresa would dress herself in mourning from head to toe and maybe even feel a little sorry for herself. Though he is a savage officious old man, who tore her from the convent at seventeen; and since the Pope will not grant them a divorce, his death would be a great practical relief to us.’

  Trelawny can never sit still, unless he is eating; and as there was nothing left to eat, he stood up and looked over the wall, to see who was passing. After a few moments he sat down again and said: ‘You tolerate what no other Englishman of spirit could. It is one thing for an Italian to surround himself like this, with women and brothers. But I believe you are not very pleased with yourself, and Shelley might have forced you into a consciousness of it. If you will forgive me for saying so, I think you feel his absence as much as anyone.’

  ‘You are wrong to think us so very attached to each other. Our friendship began after the age of reason; I have never loved anyone sensibly. But you are right to say that I am restless. I mean in the spring to buy an island, in Greece; or a principality, in Peru, and set myself up on a large scale.’

  We were presently confined to Genoa, where the government ignored us, but I had a fancy of playing at governments myself. After a few weeks, when he saw no sign of it, Trelawny accepted an invitation to go hunting in the Maremma, and borrowed a horse, and left us. And so we passed the winter, and I wrote four more cantos of Don Juan, and saw no one but Teresa, and her brother, and their father. And the Hunts, when I could not avoid it, and Mary, when she could not avoid me. She always looked at me as if I had only to open the door, to let Shelley in; as if it was perfectly wilful of me, not to open the door.

  *

  In March, we had a notable addition to our society. Lady Blessington arrived in Genoa and, claiming a mutual acquaintance in Lady Hardy, I called on her the next day. Besides, I had heard of her portrait by Lawrence, which made a sensation at the Royal Exhibition; she was supposed to be a great beauty – and I found her, at least, beautiful enough. We talked for an hour in the gardens of the Albergo della Villa, and the next morning, riding by the Corso Romano, which was only a little out of my way, I met her as she was returning from a ride herself. We stood in the lane at the foot of the Albergo, under the slope of an old Italian wall, with a vine growing up it. There were loose stones in the road, which the horses shifted on.

  ‘You have been a great disappointment to me,’ she said, as soon as I had dismounted. ‘There is none of that scorn, that hatred of human-kind, which I had half feared on making your acquaintance; but which I had partly looked forward to. Do you know, I really believe you are the least unhappy of men.’

  ‘I should hesitate to say as much for myself,’ I replied. ‘But then, I know a little more of the general condition of men, of this country or any other, than you perhaps have had the opportunity to observe. Besides, I defy anyone to be very miserable in your presence.’

  She is a tall striking female, pale in the throat and rosy in the cheek, with fine brown large sympathetic eyes. If she were ten years younger, or if I were – what I was, there might have been some mischief; but she was reasonable enough not to mind much not being made love to. Her husband is no fool, though he sometimes appears it; and they maintain, besides the usual appurtenances of an Englishman’s retinue, what Lady Blessington calls ‘their voluntary Frenchman’, a young count with the name of d’Orsay and the air of a Cupidon déchaîné. Her disappointment in me had this advantage, that it gave us a great deal to talk about; and from that day we instituted a regular habit of riding out together when the weather was fine, as far as Sestri.

  These ride
s made Teresa very jealous, as she is no horse–woman and speaks abominable English, so that she always suspects me of a flirtation when I practise my native tongue. (Although it is the least conducive, of any of the languages at my disposal, for that purpose.) We had two small scenes together and one large one, and I managed to console her at last by assuring her that I had much rather fall into the sea than in love any day of the week. Lady Blessington met her once at Lady Hardy’s, but Teresa does not show to advantage in English society, as it brings out her airs, which are quite ridiculous in a girl of some twenty years, and encourages her to treat me coolly, which she conceives to be the English manner (she is not far wrong), so that even her affection for me, which is genuine enough, appears in a very clouded light. All of which embarrassed me considerably, though their meeting had at least this good effect – it persuaded Teresa that she had nothing to fear from a woman so old and creased-looking. Lady Blessington is thirty-four. The next afternoon, when we met as usual for one of our rides, I tried to explain myself to her.

  ‘I am sincerely attached to Madame Guiccioli,’ I began. (This is the name by which the custom of Italian society, which cares much more about the word than about the thing, requires me to call my Amante.) ‘But the truth is my habits are not those requisite to form the happiness of any woman.’ We were riding along the Moro, with the sea very dark and troubled-looking though the heavens were clear enough. When we wanted to talk, we stopped; we had stopped now and sat resting on our horses’ necks. ‘I am worn out in feelings, for though only thirty-five, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women, but above all Italian women, require. I like solitude, which has become absolutely necessary to me.’

  ‘And yet every day when it is not raining you ride out with me to the Villa Lomellina, talking all the way.’

  ‘Oh, I only go out to get a fresh appetite for being alone.’

  ‘Are you so very much alone? It is an odd kind of solitude, which has room in it for a lover, and her brother, and their father.’

  We arrived afterwards at a little square, with a fountain in its middle; there was a boy to take our horses from us and a few tables and chairs beside it, where we sat down.

  ‘This is one of the virtues of the Italian system,’ I said at last. ‘They have a natural respect for adultery, and adulterers – and welcome us into the family. But unless I request their company, they leave me alone. Madame Guiccioli is in the habit of seeing me only once or twice a day; and in the night, according to requirements.’

  ‘I never know when you are in earnest,’ she said. ‘You have the oddest way of attracting sympathy, and as soon as you get it, shocking it away again.’

  ‘Are you very much shocked? I believe the wife of Lord Blessington, and the friend of Count d’Orsay, will find very little to shock her.’ She said nothing, only smiling, and after a while I continued. ‘There are only two principles to which I am entirely consistent: a love of liberty and a hatred of cant, which amounts to the same thing, as there is no liberty dearer to me than the freedom of mind. But I intend to make something of myself before I die. I don’t mean more scribbling, which I am perfectly aware makes me nothing at all. I have half a mind to go to Greece – and play at governments, like Washington. I have a presentiment I shall die in Greece. Now is not this the sort of thing you hoped to hear from the poet of Childe Harold?’

  But whether she hoped it or not, it mattered little, for a few days later she informed me that her husband meant to ‘carry them both’ (she meant herself and d’Orsay) on to Naples at the end of May. We were sitting in the gardens at the Albergo, which had a fine view of the terraces beneath us, all grey in the spring sunshine, with the green of the vineyards and the blue of the bay beyond them. ‘Now I have offended you,’ she said. ‘For you look very gloomily at me.’

  ‘I am perfectly prepared to be abandoned. It is exactly what I expect.’

  ‘There can be no question of abandonment. We have stayed much longer than we intended – mostly on your account.’

  ‘Only, it does me good sometimes to speak a little English.’

  ‘Oh, if it is only on that account,’ she said.

  ‘And where will you go after Naples? One cannot be always living in hotels.’

  ‘I do not know where his lordship means to take us, and do not much mind, so long as he returns me in the end to number 10 St James’s Square.’

  ‘St James’s Square,’ I repeated. ‘It sounds to me now as mythical as Marathon used to.’

  ‘I assure you it is not in the least mythical. It may even be visited, without the aid of Bruton’s and a Greek grammar.’

  ‘There are obstacles still more formidable.’

  ‘You mean Madame Guiccioli.’

  Eventually, I said: ‘She had influence enough to prevent my return a few years ago and she may not be less successful now.’

  ‘This is a most unaccountable life you lead!’ she declared. ‘I wonder you can stand it.’

  We sat for a minute awkwardly in silence, but before I took my leave, she expressed more gently a wish to have ‘something of mine as a remembrancer’.

  ‘In that case,’ I told her, still a little put out, ‘I should like to sell you my boat.’

  It rather surprised me when she agreed, and falling in line with the proposal myself, which was by no means a bad one, I offered her this inducement. ‘I will ask my friend Trelawny to take you around, as he handles entirely that side of my affairs. I think you will not be sorry to meet him – perhaps he will live up to your idea of Childe Harold.’

  ‘That is exactly what I would like,’ she said. ‘For you know, it was to see Childe Harold, as you call it, that we came to Genoa.’

  *

  Trelawny came, and Lady Blessington went, but Trelawny did not go. One day, while we were at breakfast, Fletcher announced that there were two gentlemen to see me. ‘At least, one of them is an Englishman,’ Fletcher said and gave me his card: Captain Edward Blaquiere. The other gentleman was a Greek named Luriottis. They had both come from London, where they had met with Hobhouse. Blaquiere seemed good-natured enough, if enthusiastic; Luriottis was something better. Hobhouse had lately joined the London Greek Committee, and Luriottis had been sent from the new government in the Morea to enlist their aid. Hobhouse had told them to apply to me. Fletcher returned with a pot of coffee and a plate of fruits; and then Pietro followed him, heavy with sleep, for we had gone to a party at Lady Hardy’s the night before, and there had been dancing. Teresa’s brother is a small, handsome, large-headed young man, and as brown as a Turk. Sometimes, to tease him, I call him the onion-eater, a term of abuse he taught me himself and native to Ravenna. It means peasant.

  Pietro was delighted with Luriottis and practised his Greek upon him, which he reads a little of and speaks not at all. All of this put me unaccountably in very good spirits. It was a fine spring morning, the sky perfectly blue and the sun not very hot, unless you sat in it directly. I had broken a little biscuit and thrown it underfoot, and the sparrows pecked at it. Blaquiere wanted me to come with him to the Morea. Nothing could be nobler than their intentions, but somehow the Greeks had got themselves into a habit of disagreement under the Turks, which they could not break. What they wanted was someone or something to unite them; I had only to ‘show myself, and they would ‘rise up of their own accord’.

  ‘Now what do you think of this, Trelawny?’ I said. ‘This would be something better than scribbling verses.’

  ‘It would indeed, my lord.’

  ‘And yet you take it all very coolly.’ ‘I don’t for a minute suppose you will go.’ ‘Perhaps I may, if only on that account.’ ‘You could do nothing that would please me better.’ ‘Well, I have sold my boat, but I suppose we can buy another.’

  He really is very provoking and sat there eating one after another the chocolates Blaquiere had brought me from Gunters in Berkeley Square. He said, ‘If Madame Guiccioli will permit you.’

&n
bsp; ‘What do you think, Pietro,’ I said. ‘Will your sister let us go?’

  ‘Do you really think of going? But we cannot go as we are – to fight. We must have a new set of clothes. I will go to Giacomo Aspe and tell him what we need. We will certainly need helmets, if there is to be any fighting.’

  We parted all on very good terms and saw them again in the evening, though I told the captain not to a mention a word of any of this, as we were dining with Teresa. And a few days later they left us – Blaquiere for London, to make the arrangements with the Committee, and Luriottis for Cephalonia, where Colocotroni was then stationed. He is one of the wildest and bravest of all the tribal chiefs, and wants taming. Teresa at least suspected nothing and we could continue as before. Trelawny, who has an unpleasant way of doing nothing but eat, sleep and drink, as if it was a great imposition to himself and a favour to everyone else, eventually betook himself to Rome, where he had an invitation from the Williamses. He meant, he said, to put a stone on Shelley’s grave. But I wrote to Kinnaird in London and asked him to clear two thousand pounds for immediate release and prepare the way for more; and to Charles Barry, my banker in Genoa, to arrange the purchase of a ship. On the recommendation of Dr Alexander, I hired a young Italian to accompany us – a man named Bruno, who reminded me of poor Polidori on account of his youth, but seemed otherwise sensible enough, in the Italian fashion. At twenty-one he believes to have seen a little of everything. I ordered him to procure sufficient medical stores for a thousand men, for two years. And every day I wait for news, of one thing or another, and feel for the first time in many months – I do not know what I feel.

  *

  Aspe’s helmets have arrived; they are very fine. Pietro’s is made of brass and black leather and green cloth, with a figure of Athene on the front. For Trelawny and myself I ordered two, on a grander scale, with plumes as high as the ceiling of the sitting room at the Casa Saluzzo; beneath which, on my own, I have had inscribed my coat of arms and the motto ‘Crede Byron’. But Trelawny has not yet arrived. He is still in Rome, though I have sent for him. The boat arranged by Barry floats in the harbour, where it is being repainted from stem to stern and re-christened, too: the Hercules.