Imposture Read online

  John and Frances were the first- and second-born in a gaggle of eight. They used to play at mother and father together – used to kiss, as they had seen their parents kiss, chastely, before going up to sleep. Polidori remembered the blinding of her curls against his face. She was two years his junior, but now he felt that Frances had outgrown him; she was playing mother to him, too. He sometimes heard her singing on the stairs outside his room, as if unconsciously; though he guessed it was only to rouse him out of bed in the morning, whenever he was lying in. Still, he found the sound of her almost unbearably moving, her fine arch Italian voice, and stayed in bed only to keep her singing:

  Sleep is a reconciling,

  A rest that peace begets.

  Doth not the sun rise smiling

  When fair at even he sets?

  When he did rise up, it was not without tears: his childhood was over, she was singing the funeral dirge. (They had seemed to him then the first tears of manhood; but as he stared now at Colburn’s door, through the steam gathering on the glass, they struck him rather as the last of his youth.)

  Finally, a ‘break in the weather’ came. That’s how he put it to himself, as if the sense of failure he had been enduring were only the darkness of a rainy season. He had received a summons from his mentor, Dr Taylor, a leading figure in Norwich’s radical societies. Polidori was ready to jump at any excuse for a diversion. Norwich, at least, offered a respite from his own idleness; and he returned from his eventful visit as late as he could, only a week before the wedding. He was bursting with ‘news’. Yes, something had finally happened, as he’d known it would. Sweaty with sleeplessness from his coach-ride, he sought out his father, Gaetano, straight away. The house, as Mother phrased it, ‘had been thrown up and down’ by the confusion of ‘last minutes’; and the old man used to take what he called ‘a cold, quiet bath’ before breakfasting en famille.

  Dr Taylor had passed on to his protégé a remarkable offer. Lord Byron, it seemed, wanted a physician; and a mutual friend had asked Taylor for a recommendation. Polidori, who was not without literary aspirations, had followed the story in the papers; his mentor had indulged his own sweet tooth for more private scandal. The poet’s wife, in bidding for a separation, had hoped to prove him mad. There was gossip, of course; though so far the name of Byron’s sister had escaped the smear of press-ink. And stories of his lordship’s Harrow and Cambridge days had been successfully hushed up. Then there were the more distant rumours of what Byron himself supposedly dismissed as his ‘genial gift for adaptation’ – a necessary facility for any traveller – the spirit to take a place, and its people, as they come – which he had indulged freely, especially in Turkey. In any case, he was looking to go abroad again and wanted a young man, a doctor, to accompany him.

  Some of this Polidori communicated, while averting his eyes from his naked father; he was faintly dispirited already by the contrast in their cleanliness. The old man’s skin had taken on a blue shadow under the shock of the cold, and his hair lay in sleek lines down his neck. His temples were fair and bald, and his jowls hung silkily with the smooth additions of age. When he rose out of the water at last, a steady drip depended from his shrunken member; the wet percussion of it was a constant reminder of where not to look. ‘I have been blessed by many sisters,’ Polidori thought, involuntarily. A habitual complaint, a part of the family idiom: poor, put-upon, cosseted Polly (as the family called him) and all his girls.

  There was Frances, of course, with her dirty Italian complexion, her brother’s cleft chin, and a hooked, boyish nose. Tremulous thin lips were the only outward evidence of her soft heart. When she was ten, he had teased her into following him up the large awkward arms of an oak tree, which overlooked one of the ponds of Hampstead. She had followed him anywhere then. But her hands, in the end, proved too small to grip around the branches, and she had fallen, lightly, suddenly, onto a root below – unharmed, as it happened, except for a little cut stretching out the corner of her eye, from the tip of a leafy twig, as she fell past it. It bled heavily into her vision. She screamed and screamed. He had never known such shame and heartbreak. Now all that remained of the scar was a hot red line that came out whenever she was happy or angry. But she had long ceased to follow him anywhere; and more and more he himself felt the pull of her comings and goings.

  But there were others, too, three sisters more. The youngest of these, Esmé, with a fat blunt face like the palm of a hand, had herself reached the ‘following’ age. Red curls fell to her shoulder; freckles thick as clover surrounded her eyes. She had greeted Polidori clamorously on his return from Norwich, and now trailed him downstairs. She was greedy for him and wanted always to know what he thought, what he carried in his hand; what pleased him; how he planned to fill the time. Her satisfaction, his restlessness – stuck at home, at his age! – played curiously off each other. If only he found such comfort in his person as Esmé did. What did he offer the little girl that he denied himself? She slapped her naked soles on the broad wet stones, crying ‘Tell me, tell me’ from time to time, and splashing whenever she could. Polidori felt the burden of his age. As the eldest child, great things were expected of him. But his recent idleness had disappointed his father; and consequently perhaps, Polly still trusted too thoroughly in him. He wanted to please.

  Gaetano looked squarely at his son. ‘I am not sure,’ he began, not in the tone of uncertainty, but rather, with the false hesitation of someone softening bad news. His accent had retained the sourness, the refinement of his native Tuscany, the musty thinness of cognac. ‘I am not sure . . . his Lordship would prove a . . . beneficial example to you. You are’ – and here he looked down himself, ashamed either of his doubts or the intensity of the sentiment – ‘a wonderful boy, of great natural talents, but easily led astray. Easily seduced . . . by enthusiasm. Lord Byron has not impressed in me a confidence in the stability of his character.’ (The arrogance of this plain old man!) ‘His influence would be pernicious.’

  Somehow Polly had been expecting this; in spite of his father’s love, and such indisputable good luck, somehow . . . He began to make his case, but Esmé was tired of being ignored. ‘Ding dong bell,’ she cried out, ‘ding dong bell’, touching her father’s little piece this way and that with her pink hand. Her laughter was like the sudden stopping of a horse on loose stones. Polly picked his sister up in his arms, where she wriggled abominably; his father gave him a look over her wild head. As if to say, better she were yours, at your age, than mine, at mine. His thin lips flattened to a line. Polly said only, ‘But you must see – you must see – the great honour –’ and stopped short. His father stepped heavily out of his bath.

  The wonder of it was that Gaetano, of all people, should have understood the allure of Lord Byron’s companionship. He had served, in his own youth, as a secretary to the great Italian dramatist Conte Vittorio Alfieri. Gaetano always spoke the name with the relish of an emigrant tasting, after a long absence, the bread of his home again. Other, even grander, names inevitably followed it. Alfieri’s mistress had been the Countess of Albany; a title that brought out, in Gaetano’s pronunciation, the worst of his English snobbery. And she herself had been the widow of ‘no less august a personage, than Charles Stuart, the Young Pretender’. It was on the strength of these connections that Gaetano had retired to London and set up a profitable business, as a translator and Italian instructor. Alfieri’s influence had been the making of him.

  In fact, Polly’s news did put Gaetano in mind ‘of those youthful associations’. And he recounted over breakfast, ‘for its instructional value’, the story of his eventual dismissal. Polly had heard it before and Frances shot her brother an amused look, which Gaetano saw and pointedly ignored. He was the kind of father unembarrassed by repetition; repetition, in fact, was the gavel of his authority. ‘The Count,’ he said, filling his mouth with a slippery forkful of fried onions, ‘recovering from an illness and consequently low-spirited, begged me to keep them company in the evenings. At one point, the Countess (from what private quarrel who can guess?) asked Alfieri why my youthful thighs were rounded while his own were flat. “Stuff and nonsense,” Alfieri replied, wrinkling his nose, resentful of that illness – age – from which none recover. They passed on to some indifferent talk. But from that time I no more had the honour of being one of the exalted party.’ ‘I no more had the honour, etc,’ his children, who had heard the line before, began to echo him. But Gaetano persisted, adding more sharply now, to press home his point, ‘Neither could I complain of this. I myself felt that the question had been unseemly – more in character for a drab than for a discreet and modest lady.’

  Gaetano wore his prudishness, in the broadest sense, as a kind of distinction. The world was better left untouched; it stained one so. And he had, in general, refused to handle it – aside from his tireless fertility, from the dirty business of making and raising eight children. He hadn’t entirely renounced the world, only that part of it lying outside his own powers to chastise and create. Nor could he suppress the pleasure he took in this little triumph over the great man, though it was only the inevitable, and ordinary, triumph of youth over age: of plump legs over bony. Lord Byron’s offer to his oldest boy had reminded Gaetano of the company he had forfeited in his own youth. And Polly, in fact, read into the old man’s disapproval only the ordinary, and inevitable, envy a father feels for his son.

  After all, Gaetano had always wanted him to write, to preserve the name of Polidori in the aspic of literature. To go, as he said, one better than himself, an honourable translator. He had pushed his son to take up medicine precisely because it seemed a useful career for a man of letters, on several counts. And Polidori had consented. Yet here was a chance to further both ambitions: the greatest poet of his age wanted a physician. But Gaetano still urged him to decline the offer. In the weeks to come, their argument persisted: a quiet war, whose isolated shots grew occasionally into skirmishes.

  Polly, for once, stood up to his father. He accepted the poet’s invitation to tea and arrived at Piccadilly Terrace as nervous as a schoolgirl. It was Lord Byron’s sister, Augusta, who greeted him first: a lively woman, plump and ungainly with the imminence of childbirth. Her mobility of expression largely concealed the dullness of her sleeping face. There was something about her nose, flattened at the tip, that suggested the bullying hand of stupidity pressed against her, unless it was only the fleshy accretions of her pregnancy. Stroking the hair off Polidori’s forehead, she examined the two young men, side by side. ‘You might almost be brothers,’ she said, teasing the pair of them with the motherly, sensual touch of her warm palms. They smelt of cloves. Byron’s stomach had been upset by nerves, and ‘Goose’ (as he called her) had been brewing a concoction to quiet them.

  His apartments at Piccadilly Terrace were cluttered already with the preparations for departure. Polly, in fact, sat down on a box of animal feed, as he guessed by the stable odours rising from it. The couches were covered suggestively in his Lordship’s clothes. Byron said, ‘What do you think of him, Goose?’ lying back amidst his own tangled accoutrements. And she looked at Polidori with a look not so much cunning as having the joy of cunning in it. ‘I think he’ll do, at a pinch.’ She seemed happier, easier, than either of the men. The duns, as Byron said, ‘like crows, were always clamouring at dusk.’ One felt their presence; a crowding in, that gave to the air in the room a decided pressure. Something must shortly erupt. But his lordship’s manner, in the shadow of farewells, seemed almost painfully sweet. Taking Polly’s cheek in his hand, Lord Byron agreed with his sister. ‘I like to admire myself . . . in a youthful mirror,’ he said, as the young man bent his head to kiss the poet’s fingers. It was a kind of parting gift, an act of persuasion: who could resist him?

  Polidori turned home that night in high spirits. He had left the brother and sister entwined upon a low couch. The image of them, of their quiet freedoms, stuck in his thoughts and acquired over time the slow, bright heat of contained fire. His father was waiting for him in the study. He attempted, in the strongest terms, to dissuade his son from going. The tenderness of his paternal concern had soured into anger, almost into indifference. ‘Lord Byron will be the end of you,’ he predicted coldly. ‘A fresh pot fired too quickly cracks at once. You will not survive the heat of his amour propre.’ Polidori, still standing, refused to be abashed. ‘His Lordship has treated me,’ he said to Gaetano, ‘more than generously, as his equal, his friend.’ He mentioned Augusta’s flattering remark, not without qualification: hoping to appeal to his father’s family pride. ‘Of course, my youth lends more colour to my countenance. To my hair: curls and lustre. And besides all that, I am perhaps as much as a tiptoe taller.’ He blushed as he spoke but managed to keep back the tears; it cost him a great deal to defy his father. Rebellion made him childish again.

  And then, on the eve of Frances’s wedding, Polly almost relented. (He remembered it now, with the bitterness of the coffee on his tongue: the chance, not taken, to yield to an ordinary life.) Father and son decided to leave the house to the women. They sauntered arm in arm through the streets of Piccadilly, both somewhat chastened by the thought of losing Frances to that smooth-skinned man. Polly recounted one of the games the two of them had played as children. He would offer Frances his hand, and she would pretend to bite it: just closing her lips and teeth across his knuckles, until he abruptly withdrew, his fingers wet from the touch of her mouth. Then they repeated the act. And each time, looking up at him black-eyed, she bit down harder and harder on his flesh; until her teeth reached bone and he cried out and spent on her the fruits of his bad temper. ‘This, too,’ he said, ‘was a part of the game: my anger afterwards.’

  Gaetano, as they made the rounds of St James’s Square, elaborated on the true reason for his reluctance. He said that he understood something of the burden great men thrust upon their companions; something of the patience, the simplicity of character and the easy confidence one needed to carry the weight of their arrogance. He himself had suffered, terribly, in his youth, at Alfieri’s hands, at the unanswerable claims of the poet’s self-love. Those evenings he spent with the Count and Contessa offered, of course, wonderful compensations, but he felt, in their presence, the blood drain from him, his life-blood thinning away. ‘Fui terzo tra cotanto senno,’ he declared, in a voice he specially reserved for quoting Dante: ‘I was third, amid such company.’

  And he feared his son possessed something of his own sensitivities; indeed, to a still more painful degree. That he might not survive the contact of ‘so fiery a comet’ as Lord Byron. That just those qualities for which a proud father entertained such hopes – Polly’s honour, his fine-feeling, his appetite for life – would expose him to the full force of impossible comparisons. This was his phrase: ‘impossible comparisons’. ‘Fui terzo tra cotanto senno,’ he repeated; even at his most vulnerable, a pompous bully.

  Polly promised him, as they crossed into Piccadilly on a mild night just muffled in the light cotton of a spring haze, that he would write to Lord Byron at once and decline the offer. His father embraced him quaintly. His full-sailed belly pressed against his son, as he held one hand against his own heart, while the other reached to touch the young man’s shoulder. But by the next evening, Polly had changed his mind. He had seen, at the ceremony, the wince of his sister’s scar grow red with happiness. He had watched Rossetti stretch his pale hand towards Frances for a ring. He had wondered, addressing his sister in his thoughts, and smiling a little, ‘Why do you not bite him? Why do you not bite him?’ – rather unhappily, too. On Monday morning he set off for Lord Byron’s apartment, hoping to intercept the post. He found his lordship at home, writing letters. ‘You’ve changed your mind again, I suppose?’ the poet said looking up, not unkindly. Polly enjoyed the feeling that his lordship had taken the measure of him already. He nodded, smiling too, to save his voice.

  Within a week, he had made his preparations. Byron was leaving in the morning for Dover. They were taking two carriages. One was a rather grand contrivance, fashioned after Napoleon’s model. It would carry Byron and his friend Scrope Davies, a small, thin-faced man, dressed in unhappy perfection. To fool the bailiffs, Polidori and Hobhouse – another friend, fatter and more serious and sillier at once – would set off first, in Scrope’s calèche. His lordship asked the young doctor to appear at dawn; he wanted to make a good start. It was a fine thin April morning. Polly arrived while the poet was in bed. His sister answered the door in her rounded négligé; she said that Byron complained of a headache, he had only just come in from dancing. There were biscuits and soda-water in the drawing room, in case Mr Polidori had not yet breakfasted. ‘Goose’ returned to Byron’s room. He heard his laughter, a low, sweet sound that suggested the kindness of melancholy, forced good spirits. Somewhere Frances lay in that young man’s arms.

  Polly broke a biscuit and tried to eat it. It was too dry, it would not go down. He was all dust and nerves. The room lay in the disrepair of departure. A Harrison clock ticked audibly, like a throat that will not swallow. There were several cases, of clothes and books. A broken vase lay shivered on the marble hearthstone; yellow tulips scattered confusedly, rumpled here and there by the weight of the shards. The slick of wet had spread already to the floor and stained it. French doors gave onto a balcony and he stepped out. The watery blue of sky was just deepening with day. A sheet of sunshine, like cotton drying on a line, lay fluttering on the paving stones. The world was all before him: he turned to look up the street, but took little in. Only a girl, her back to a wall, shivering in the young dawn. Her cheeks hollowed by shadows; her aspect pinched. The greed or hunger in her glance made him look away. His prospects seemed too wide for the view at hand: the narrow corridor of buildings, the growing rumours of traffic from Piccadilly. The wind blew unevenly, of sweet and sour mixed; the stench of sewage just rising from the gutter, and the fresher tonic of the spring. He held his hair out of his eyes then turned inside again, to contemplate his new life on a grander, imagined scale.