Life Mask (4 page)

Today they were to rehearse in Richmond's library, where all the furniture was white and gold. Eliza found Mrs Damer standing at the window, looking remarkably handsome for nearly forty. Everything about the sculptor was pointed—a long chin and aristocratic nose, sharp cheekbones, precisely etched eyelids—which should have been off-putting, but wasn't; her vitality warmed and softened all her lines. Eliza looked past her, to the Privy Garden's constant traffic of Members of Parliament, clerks, messenger boys and lovers. A sort of stage on which all London struts and frets its hour.'

Mrs Damer spun round, her brown eyes lively. 'Exactly. All so busy—and so aware of being looked at—'

'But restless, as if they might forget their lines at any moment.' Eliza stared past the Banqueting House to where she could pick out the clean white spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A gentleman, Derby had once remarked, was a man with no visible means of support. In her mind's eye a little fellow deftly walked the high-wire between two spires, tiptoeing across the abyss as if to fall was inconceivable because he had invisible means of support: angels, perhaps, holding up his hands and feet. Eliza sometimes felt like that herself these days. Yesterday, for instance, when the Duke had men toned how lucky they were to have secured the aid of
a lady of such genius,
Eliza had felt the thin wire vibrate under her foot and wondered what tiny, unseen fingers were bearing her up.

'Are you lost in admiration of the Medici Faun?'

Eliza's head turned. 'Oh. Indeed,' she lied. That must be the statue standing in the window.

'The one that moves me is the Apollo Belvedere,' said Mrs Damer, reaching out to touch the shoulder of a handsome curly-haired god shown from the waist up, gazing to one side.

'What a quantity of lovely antiquities your brother-in-law has collected,' said Eliza, looking around the library.

Only the tiny pause told her that she'd made a faux pas. 'Yes,' said Mrs Damer breezily, 'it was back in the days of his sculpture academy that Richmond commissioned these copies for students to work from.'

'Oh, was that when you took up your art?' asked Eliza, a little hot-faced, but she didn't think it showed. Well, how could she have known? Richmond was certainly rich enough to buy a dozen old statues.

'No, I was only a child at the time,' said Mrs Damer, 'this was back in the late '50s. The students were rather wild and, if the casts were plaster, they'd break off the fingers and toes, just for devilment.'

Eliza produced one of her tinkling laughs.

'That's why Richmond had to invest in marble copies. But when I took up carving myself, after I was widowed, I did find them very useful to study. That's from the
David,
of course,' Mrs Damer murmured, pointing to a large, graceful foot.

Eliza thought it looked odd, standing there on a plinth as if it had been ripped from a giant's corpse, but she nodded respectfully.

Here came Derby at last, hurrying into the library but without any unseemly scramble. That was the aristocratic walk that her colleague Jack Palmer caught so well when he was playing lords: a swan's glide. Today Derby was elegant in blue silk. 'My apologies,' he murmured and Eliza let him kiss her hand, but her cheeks flamed up a little again, because really he should have gone to Mrs Darner first, then to Mrs Bruce and so on down, distributing his
politesse
according to rank. She knew how to be with Derby in public and how to be with him in private (with her mother for a chaperone), but these rehearsals at Richmond House were something peculiarly in between.

When he began his scene as Lovemore, the yawning rakish husband, Eliza stiffened a little, as usual, but actually he was remarkably good. Of course, Derby had a fine-toned voice and plenty of spirit, but what surprised her was that he took so naturally to the role of a callous husband. (She herself had never known him as anything but quietly, relentlessly gallant.) His looks gave an extra twist to the role, Eliza thought; it was quite sinister that this ugly little man should be so indifferent to a wife as tall and handsome as Mrs Damer.

At the moment when Mrs Hobart bustled into the room, Derby was being
ennuyé
in an armchair. Ah, at last,' he said, breaking off his speech to rise.

'What can you mean,
at last?'
asked Mrs Hobart, emerging from her vast wrappings. 'The streets are a morass of brown slush; I thought we'd never get through Piccadilly. Besides, it's very à la mode to be late, Derby, didn't you know?'

Anne kissed the older woman on the cheek. She thought,
No one past forty should wear rouge before dusk.
She hadn't seen so much of Albinia Hobart since three summers ago, when they'd both campaigned on the hustings but on opposite sides. It had been a riotous and shrill spring, and Anne had almost wanted a vote herself, for the sheer pleasure of casting it in Fox's favour. She remembered one night at the Opera House, when Mrs Hobart and Lady Salisbury in their boxes had roared out
Damn Fox,
and Anne and the Duchess of Devonshire had shouted back
Damn Pitt.

Her involvement had caused some painful family discussions that she preferred not to remember. Mercifully, her father had retired from Parliament years ago, but Richmond, as a Cabinet Minister in Pitt's new government, had scolded his sister-in-law as if she were a child, for shaming him by campaigning for the Foxite Opposition. It was true that she and her friends had gone rather too far; the papers had rebuked them for their
immodest and Amazonian behaviour,
and caricatures had shown them carrying Fox piggyback; the
Morning Post
had even spread an absurd rumour that Georgiana (as everyone called the Duchess of Devonshire) was sprouting a beard. It had been a secret relief to Anne when the election had ended and they'd all remembered their manners.

'Shall we get on with Scene Four?' asked Miss Farren musically.

Mrs Bruce and Mrs Blouse scuttled back to their places. Dick Edgcumbe assumed the foppish pose of Sir Brilliant Fashion, one finger in his waistcoat, the other hand at his ear. Anne flicked through her bundle of sewn foolscap to find her place. It had taken her a week to get used to having only her cues, business and lines written out, without the rest of the play.

'Besides, I knew I wouldn't be needed yet,' said Mrs Hobart in a tone of faint injury, 'as the Widow Bellmour doesn't come in till late.'

'Count yourself lucky you don't have as many lines as I to learn,' remarked Anne, fanning herself with her thick script.

Mrs Hobart gave her a hard smile and Anne regretted the quip.

'The widow's such a witty character, though,' put in Miss Farren soothingly. 'I've often played her myself at Drury Lane.'

'Yes, and really the story's as much about her as Mrs Lovemore,' Mrs Hobart remarked, brightening, 'since she's the one Lovemore's courting in disguise.'

Sir Harry Englefield clapped his hands to his powdered curls. 'I've toiled over my part, in preparation for this
répétition,
but half the time I take my cue for my speech and my speech for my cue.'

'It'll get easier,' the actress told him. 'And after all, you've only the one part, so you can't confuse it with any other.'

'Yes,' Anne put in, 'we should pity Miss Farren and her fellows, who must permanently store dozens of roles in their heads, to be performed at a day's notice on the proprietor's whim.'

Mrs Bruce let out a cry of horror.

'Mm, it's quite a bedlam scene in my dressing room,' said Miss Farren, 'with myself, Mrs Siddons and Mrs Hopkins all standing around muttering our different lines.'

'Oh, do you share with Siddons?' asked Sir Harry, star-struck.

'Such a commodious brain you must have, in such a pretty little head,' offered Major Arabin.

Miss Farren smiled back at him, but Anne, watching, thought she detected a steeliness.
She's like me, his hackneyed flattery sets her teeth on edge.
'Shall we get on?'

Sir Brilliant made his lewd proposition. Anne turned on her heel.
'Sir! This liberty, sir—'

She stopped, because their manager was holding up one slim finger. 'Let me teach you all a helpful rule: never speak as you walk. It dissipates the force of the line.' Miss Farren looked at Dick Edgcumbe severely.
'Sir!'
She swivelled and took three paces, then turned her head back.
'This liberty, sir
—' She stopped, as if overcome, and averted her gaze again.

They all clapped, which seemed to embarrass her somehow. Strange, Anne thought, since Miss Farren had spent so much of her life with the roar of applause in her ears.

'Oh, tush,' the actress protested. 'Some of you must remember how the late great Garrick would have delivered a line like that, with at least a dozen exquisite changes of emotion.'

'I always found the fellow rather twitchy,' said Major Arabin.

'Yes, for my money I prefer young Mr Kemble,' Mrs Hobart declared.

'So much more declamatory grandeur,' murmured Mrs Bruce.

'What about his faddish pronunciations of Shakespeare—not
my heart aches,
but
it aitches
?' said Dick Edgcumbe.

'But such a daring approach when he takes over a role,' said Sir Harry. 'Remember his Hamlet two years ago, when instead of "
Did you not
speak
to it?
" he said to Horatio, "
Did
you
not speak to it?"'

'Oh, but his sister Siddons is twice as original,' argued Anne. 'Wasn't she the first Lady Macbeth to put her candle down and wring her hands?'

'For my money,' said Derby, 'there's too much long-faced pomposity at Drury Lane these days and Tragedy is elbowing Comedy into a corner. You're of the good old Garrick school, aren't you, Miss Farren?—you and Palmer, Tom King, the Bannisters. Quickness and delicacy, that's the key.'

Miss Farren clapped sternly, her mouth hiding a smile. 'Gentlemen! Ladies! Are we here to argue about theatre or to create it?'

The actress's mother was in the corner as usual, head down over her workbag. It was odd, Anne had thought at first, to have what looked like a fierce old housemaid planted on one of Mr Chippendale's yellow grosgrain chairs. But soon the Players^ paid Mrs Farren no more attention than if she'd been a fire screen or a hatstand, which seemed to be what she preferred.

A
FTER EACH
rehearsal Eliza felt relief whenever Derby's carriage dropped the Farrens off at their respectable but unfashionable second-floor lodgings on Great Queen Street, just round the corner from Drury Lane. She was always tired out. She'd come this far by pleasing, but still she couldn't risk failing to please. She knew it was absurd to complain of the strain, given that her whole life since coming to London at fifteen had been aimed like an arrow at the ranks of the Beau Monde. 'They're strange beings, though, carriage folk,' she told her mother over a dish of ragout.
Carriage folk
was what her father used to call them, in caustic homage: people who had their own carriages.

'But you're one of them, Betsy, or as near as makes no matter.'

Eliza shook her head. 'I only borrow Lord Derby's carriage, I don't own it, and you and I still ride in hackneys on occasion. Besides, I'll never be
one of them
if you keep saddling me with
Betsy.'

'Eliza,' Mrs Farren corrected herself. 'I do try, really; I never call you the old name in company at least.'

'Thank heaven for that!
Betsy Farren
sounds like the kind of jolly hoyden Mrs Jordan might play, who pops into breeches for Act Three to play a trick on her lover; I don't know how I bore it so long.'

'I rather favour what we christened you: Elizabeth; you can't go wrong with a good old saint's name.'

Eliza's mouth set; she thought she'd won this skirmish years ago. 'Eliza's vastly more elegant. Your chin, Mother—'

Mrs Farren snatched up her napkin to wipe away a trace of ragout.

Eliza did feel slightly guilty for her impatience with her mother. After all, should she—as a public figure—not be considered a sort of business, a joint enterprise in which Mrs Margaret Farren, no less than her eldest daughter, had sunk all her energies and resources? Hadn't the woman invested in Eliza's rise all the pragmatic cunning gained in a long hard career as an untalented actress in a barnstorming troupe and wife to its drunkard manager—and now this new business was so flourishing, wasn't she even to be consulted about the name under which it traded? The two partners might disagree on small points, but they had a common goal: the fame and lasting fortune of Miss Farren of Drury Lane.

'Don't you like em, then, the tides and Honourables at Richmond House?' asked her mother, mopping her plate with a crust.

Eliza hesitated. 'The Richmonds are very kind and Mrs Darner's delightfully enthusiastic; she's the only one who's learned most of her lines. But all in all ... I don't know, Mother, it's like a tasty dish that's hard on the stomach.'

'Ah.' Mrs Farren nodded in sympathy.

'And how tiring! These
soi-disant
Players know nothing, they can't tell Prompt Side from Opposite Side and Sir Harry's mispronounced the opening line of the play a dozen times now. They've never done a day's work in their lives—well, except for Mrs Damer, I think she's learned discipline from her sculpting. But the fact remains I can't click my fingers or lose my temper with them as if they were apprentices at Drury Lane; I have to hint and request and
if it wouldn't be too much trouble, sir and madam, might I suggest?
And Mrs Hobart's always asking for "a brief respite", and then Dick Edgcumbe suggests she might feel the better for "some restorative cordial", meaning port all round at two in the afternoon!'

'They're charming people, though,' said Mrs Farren with a foolish smile. 'How they dress and deport themselves, and how they converse...'

'And how they drink and gluttonise, and gamble their fortunes away,' added Eliza, grinning despite herself. 'But seriously, I admit all the charms of the well-born. Isn't it odd, though, with what relish they take the lowest roles?'