Life Mask (6 page)

No, to be sure:—if you wanted authority over me, you should have adopted me, and not married me: I am sure you were old enough.

Derby let out an enormous laugh and Eliza glanced up at him with a flick of the eyelashes that made his heart thump.

Lady Teazle, with her flower-filled rooms and new hats, her quick repartee and giddy goodwill, was really the most charming of the woman-of-fashion roles that were Eliza Farren's forte. (No wonder Georgiana had been flattered when Sheridan had based the role on her.) Derby could easily imagine being Sir Peter, who tried to hide how much he doted on his bride:'
With what a charming air she contradicts everything I say?
He realised he was falling into a fantasy of being married to Eliza; he shook himself. If he didn't pay attention he'd miss the best jokes.
'She has a charming fresh colour;'
remarked Mrs Candour.
'Yes,'
replied Lady Teazle, letting the pause stretch, making the crowd wait for it...'
when it is fresh put on!'

Between the second and third acts there was an entr'acte, with a comic dance; Derby had his footman fetch some bowls of lemon ice. 'There's no one like Miss Farren,' said Mrs Damer. 'How she sparkles and glints, and mints every line anew! Isn't it strange, though, how different one feels about someone's performance when one knows her, even a little?'

Walpole was considering her with a slight squint. 'You mean you enjoy it more?'

'Not quite,' she said, wrinkling her high forehead. 'The pleasure's no longer unmixed with anxiety.'

'But she's never given a bad performance,' Derby couldn't help saying.

Walpole looked him in the eye with a sort of compassion. Everyone in this hot, crammed building knew Derby's position; sometimes he felt his heart was being sliced open for public exhibition under the white lights.

In Act Three came one of Derby's favourite scenes, in which the Teazles behaved very sweetly to each other, and then fell into a quarrel about who had begun their previous quarrel and ended by demanding a divorce. But some of the sharpest dialogue was spoiled by the yowl of a fellow in the pit, when one of the chandeliers spilt hot wax into his collar. Had Derby a less famous face, he would sometimes have liked to go incognita and sit on a bench in the pit, as Sir Harry Englefield was boasting of doing the other day. That way he'd be able to catch his beloved's every subtle intonation and expression.

'Isn't the volume of chit-chat shocking?' said Mrs Damer, in the interval.

'Mm,' Walpole agreed, 'poor King's quite drowned out at times.'

'My friend Bunbury once quipped,' said Derby, 'that he preferred the theatre to the opera, because there they sing so loud that one can't hear oneself talk.'

The cousins laughed. Below, there was a surge of bodies into the auditorium, which meant that the unsold tickets had been knocked down for half price. 'Now, you youngsters won't remember this,' said Walpole, 'but back in '63 Garrick tried to abolish half-price tickets; he thought it was an insult to the play to come in for the last two acts only. Well, my dears, the crowd ran amok. Tore up the benches, ripped the fronts off our boxes, smashed the harpsichord...'

'What an appalling scene,' said Mrs Damer, her eyes shining.

'Sheridan always says never trust an audience,' Derby put in. 'They'll clap politely for nine years and then riot like lunatics in the tenth.'

When the curtain rose again Derby enjoyed the picture auction, but really he was waiting in taut anticipation for the famous screen scene. Thrown into a panic by the arrival of her husband at Joseph Surface's house, Lady Teazle couldn't bear to be found in a tête-à-tête, so she hid behind a screen in the library.
'I'm ruined,'
she stage-whispered. '
I'm quite undone!'

Joseph's bluff brother, convinced there was some minx of a milliner hidden in the library, toppled the screen—and there stood Lady Teazle, exposed to her husband and the world. At this moment the audience, though they knew just what was coming, always let out a howl of shocked delight. It wasn't simply the fun of seeing a married lady shamed by discovery, Derby realised now; it was about the ripping of all veils, the exposure of all forms of sleight and craft. Eliza stood frozen into a statue, like Job's wife, pinned rigid by the crowd's mocking gaze.

Walpole was whispering in his ear. 'Fanny Abington used to play it for laughs. She'd wring her hands and clutch at her skirts.'

Derby shook his head. That was the difference between talent and genius. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Mrs Damer was motionless, gripping the edge of the box.

At the end of the comedy, while Eliza was taking her bows and the crowd roared and whistled, she looked up at the Derby box and gave the three of them a smiling nod.

'Derby, you must be—' Mrs Damer broke off. 'I'm sure we all feel so proud of her.'

Walpole sighed pleasurably. 'The man's a rascal, but he can write.'

'Such rudeness!' Mrs Damer threatened to smack Walpole's knuckles with her folded fan.

Derby grinned; he would have liked to explain that his friendship with Sheridan was an unsentimental one and that he'd heard him called much worse than
rascal.

Mrs Damer was consulting the smeared print of her programme. 'The crowds are still pushing in for the ballooning piece.'

Walpole trembled to his feet. 'While I'd very much like to experience aerial locomotion before I die, I've no wish to watch it mimed on stage and it's near midnight. Fairies, let's away.'

Derby's footman went ahead to clear them a passage through the packed corridors.

L
ADY
M
ARY
was all blithe humour and never meddled with the preparations for the theatricals at Richmond House, Eliza noticed, but she never let them put her out either. One night, when the dining room was full of props and scenery, she went down to the steward's room quietly and ate her supper there. Eliza was studying the Duchess's serene self-containment; there was a trick Lady Mary had, of smiling beatifically as she said something critical, which Eliza was memorising to use on stage.

Mrs Damer couldn't have been more different from her sister. Well, they had different fathers, after all; Anne Damer was said to take after hers, the veteran soldier and politician Field Marshal Conway. She could be tactful, but also startlingly frank. The sculptor struck Eliza as a natural for tragedy, with her tireless vitality, her bony hands and long diamond-cut face. Unfortunately,
The Way to Keep Him
was a comedy.

'Say the line for me, would you, Miss Farren?' asked Mrs Damer.

Eliza hadn't got enough sleep after her Ben and her head was aching. There were still all the comic servant scenes to run through; Sir Harry and Mrs Bruce hadn't spoken a line yet today. She sat down at Mrs Lovemore's imaginary tea table, in the corner of the pink saloon, and began with a careless shrug.
'This trash of tea! I don't know why I drink so much of it. Heigho!'
Major Arabin clapped; Eliza ignored him.

'Oh, I see,' said Mrs Damer. 'I never knew quite how to do the
Heigho.'

Behind them, Dick Edgcumbe failed to suppress a yawn; Mrs Hobart was lecturing Mrs Blouse on hairstyles in a whisper.

'Lighter, simpler, that's what you must remember,' said Eliza. 'From the top—'

This time Mrs Damer began merrily enough with the tea line, but then sank into lugubriousness on
'Surely never was an unhappy woman treated with such cruel indifference.'

'The audience must pity you, but don't give way to self-pity,' Eliza told her, 'and for sorrow, by the way, one touches the right hand to one's heart, not the left.'

Mrs Damer switched hands, frowning in concentration.
'I care not what they say. I am tired of the World, and the World may be tired of me, if it will.'
Her tone was guarded, almost bitter.

Eliza nodded. When this woman got it right, she could act the rest of the Richmond House Players off the stage. 'Now let's try your transformation scene.'

The others leafed through their parts, but Mrs Damer simply closed her eyes for a moment to summon up the lines, then took up position down front.
'Adieu to melancholy, and welcome pleasure, wit and gaiety,'she.
pronounced, sardonic. She marched from side to side of the saloon, singing
'La, la, la.
The effect was oddly intimidating.

Eliza took a breath. 'Might I ask you to stroll rather more slowly and more flirtatiously?'

'With whom should I flirt?'

'With no one in particular; with the air. And you could seem more gay.'

'But Mrs Lovemore's not really gay,' said Mrs Damer, confused.

'Of course not, but we assume that, being an intelligent woman, she does a good job of acting it.'

Mrs Damer hesitated. 'I don't know that intelligence is enough. I'm sure she tries, but with her heart so full of rage and shame—'

'Shame?' asked Eliza. She realised that the background gossip had stopped; the other Players were watching, like a silent chorus.

'Yes,' said Mrs Damer, 'mortification that she must pose as a shallow lady of the town to win back the love of Mr Lovemore, who doesn't deserve her! That she must contradict her true sensibility, act a mad pantomime, all for a man who'll never be content, never think she's amusing enough, easy enough—'

'But we know he does love her by the end of the comedy,' objected Derby.

Mrs Damer shrugged. 'I don't believe it.' 'But that's what happens, my dear Mrs D.,' chipped in Major Arabin, 'and your
douces charmes
offer motive enough!'

Mrs Damer had two red spots on her cheekbones. 'I know that's what Mr Murphy wrote, but it rings false to me. How could a sensitive woman ever be happy with a husband like that?'

Several of the Players were looking at Eliza as if they expected her to intervene, but she didn't understand. At Drury Lane it was never like this, there wasn't enough time in the day. The very idea of arguing over whether a play was true or false to the human heart!

Derby broke the strained silence. 'That's enough toing and froing over this scene, surely,' he said. 'Should we have another go at the business in Act Three?'

Mrs Hobart sidled up to Mrs Damer. 'If something's amiss, if you're unhappy with your part, I could be prevailed upon—for your sake—to exchange it with the Widow Bellmour's—'

'Nonsense,' said Eliza, too sharply, 'Mrs Damer plays our heroine very well. Nothing's wrong. Is there?'

Mrs Damer put her hand over her mouth. Then she said, 'Do please be good enough to excuse me' and ran from the room.

Eliza's heart was thudding. What kind of manager was she, to make her leading actress flee the scene? She put her hand against her mouth, instinctively learning Mrs Darner's gesture: the pressure on her upper lip, the hot breath on her fingers. 'Well,' she said in as light a voice as she could manage, 'she must have remembered another engagement.'

'Remembered her past, you mean,' said Mrs Hobart with dark relish, flopping down in a pink-and-gilt chair.

In the silence Eliza felt a hammer knocking against her temples. She looked over at her mother, whose needle was motionless in the air.

'You could have had no idea, of course, Miss Farren,' said Derby, pulling up a chair for Eliza, 'as it was all over before you came to town.' His small eyes were dark with apology.

'What was?' she asked, too shrill. 'I know Mrs Darner's husband died young—'

Mrs Hobart let out a snort. 'They were unhappy from the start. It'd seemed a good match at the time—'

'Well, yes,' contributed Mrs Blouse, 'since she was the Countess of Ailesbury's daughter, and John Damer had £30,000 a year and the Earl of Dorchester for a father.'

Sir Harry Englefield shook his head. 'He was a wild young buck, though. After the first few years they lived apart.'

'Like in our play!' said Mrs Blouse with a squeal of insight. 'Poor Mrs D. couldn't seem to win his love back, no matter what she did.'

'I'm not sure it was ever a question of love in the first place,' put in Dick Edgcumbe.

'Or that she tried very hard to win him back,' added Mrs Hobart with a sniff.

Eliza's cheeks were scalding. What a disaster. How had she got herself tangled up in the secrets of these people? They were a little School for Scandal of their own. What did they think of her peculiar relation to Lord Derby; did they consider her a flirt with her eye on a countess's coronet? What did they say about her as soon as she went home?

'The fact of the matter is,' Derby told Eliza grimly, 'that the fellow got into such deep debt, together with his brothers, the Damers were going to have to flee to France—but instead he shot himself in a tavern.'

'No!' Eliza looked round at the lit faces; they seemed to her like pedigree hawks. She was reminded once again of how long they'd all known each other and how little she knew them.

'It was the Bedford Arms in Covent Garden,' put in Major Arabin. 'But oh, dear, now you'll shudder whenever you have to pass it, a woman of sensibility like yourself.' He laid a sympathetic paw on her shoulder.

'People were most unkind to Mrs Damer afterwards,' murmured Mrs Hobart. 'Really, it was quite extraordinary, the things that were said!'

'No need to repeat them,' said Derby.

'I've no intention of doing so,' she snapped.

Eliza had managed to edge away from Major Arabin's hand. 'So you see, in today's rehearsal,' murmured Mrs Bruce in her ear, 'to oblige our friend to explain her feelings on the subject of a cold-hearted husband and a shamed wife ... well, you couldn't have known, of course.'

Eliza bit her Hp hard.

'Don't distress yourself, my dear,' said Derby.

She stiffened at the phrase and averted her head. He knew he was never to use endearments in public.

'Might this be a suitable interval for tea?' The Duchess of Richmond stood in the door of the saloon, blithe as always.

They all shot up. Had she heard them talking about her sister? If she had you wouldn't know it. The members of the World had such self-mastery, Eliza thought. But then, so had she, once she'd got over her mortification. 'Perfectly suitable, Your Ladyship,' she carolled, leading the group to the door.