Life Mask (81 page)

Walpole let out a gasp of mirth. 'Clearly the crimpers have been recruiting the wrong sort of Britons.'

'So the invaders surrendered on Friday,' Derby told him, 'all 1400 of them. They're to be jailed on the Isle of Man. Now there are outbreaks of panic all round the country whenever someone spots an innocent merchantman or fishing vessel on the horizon. It does seem as if only luck has protected us from invasion so far—luck and weather.'

'Of course, you and your radical friends might welcome such visitors.'

The sly line came out so faintly that Derby took a few seconds to recognise it for a quip; Walpole's famous delivery had deserted him. 'Aha,' said Derby, erring on the side of flippancy, 'but no one's safe in a revolution. Sheridan was just saying the other day that if the French landed in numbers, Pitt would declare martial law and start hanging all troublemakers—the remains of our Party included. And on the other hand, if General Bonaparte added these islands to his string of conquests, I suspect I'd be among the first aristos to face the Guillotine.'

'What a peculiar position you find yourself in,' commented Walpole pleasantly.

'Oh, but it'll never happen,' Derby said, as he always did. Despite the bad fright he'd had when the mob had attacked the royal carriage last winter, he'd clung to his Foxite principles; he couldn't afford to change his mind at this stage. As Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire he steadfastly refused to supply the Home Office with details of
seditious activities
in the area. 'Pitt's new hobby-horse is a Loyalty Loan, as he calls it. There was a very persuasive story going round Brooks's that any man of property who didn't volunteer to lend the government vast amounts would find the same sum demanded in the form of a tax—so we all lined up to subscribe to the Loan on its opening day.'

Walpole chuckled feebly.

'And speaking of money, sir, have you heard that all our gold has turned to paper?'

'Whatever can you mean?'

'Well, cash has been running short and after the news from Pembrokeshire there was a frenzied run on the Bank of England. So the Cabinet decided—in the absence of a visit from King Midas—that the only solution was to suspend payments in gold. Anything above
20
shillings will now come in the form of paper. There've been shrieks of protest, of course, and some hoarding...'

'Gad, it's as bad as the French and their worthless
assignats,'
wheezed the old man. 'What, you mean that were I to have myself carried into the Bank to withdraw £3 of my own gold they'd refuse me?'

'They'd give you a banknote, which is worth the same.'

Walpole snorted disapprovingly. 'It doesn't feel like the same thing. Not at all as heavy in the pockets.'

'Well, then, you'd save on your tailor's bill,' Derby told him.

The old man let out a terrible cackle of mirth. 'Young man, I haven't had a new suit since 1779!' He coughed and struggled to catch his breath. Opening his mouth, he let out a long, strange sound; Derby thought it was a cry of pain, but it turned out to be a yawn. 'I'd best hurry up and die. All my gold is turned to paper, as it were. Being so bereft of all my forces and decayed in spirits and understanding, I naturally dread being a burden.'

'I'm sure no one thinks of you as one.'

'Things become apparent', whispered the old man, 'when one lies on one's back in the dark waiting for pains to approach or re-cede. My best friends are all dead; I cling to young people who try to shake me off. My servants think more of their own comfort than mine. I'm become a nuisance and a bore.'

'Mr Walpole!' Derby protested. 'Never a bore.'

'You're kind. Perhaps that could be my epitaph:
Never a bore,'
murmured Walpole with a sort of pleasure.

Standing in the hall, waiting for the footman to bring his greatcoat and hat, Derby heard light footsteps on the stairs. He turned.

She was looking very handsome in a simple blue wrapping gown; she seemed just as shocked as he was. 'Lord Derby.'

'Mrs Damer.'

'Are you here to—' She saw the servant come up with his things. 'Ah, your visit is over.'

'I arrived an hour ago,' said Derby, absurdly defensive.

'How good of you.' She sounded as if she meant it. 'He'll have appreciated it.'

Derby knew he should bow and leave. Considering how abruptly and coldly he had ended their friendship, almost three years ago, he had no right to expect a civil conversation. 'What's wrong with him?'

'Age,' said Anne Damer, 'simply the weakness of age. It's not the gout, not in itself, though that adds to his pain. He's losing strength all the time and his pulse is at eighty. He coughs and vomits violently, doesn't eat, and he has inflamed abscesses in both legs.'

Derby winced.

'You chose a lucky day,' she added, 'yesterday he had no voice at all and was suffering from delusions.'

'What kind of delusions?'

'He gets it into his head that we've all abandoned him,' she said, her face blank, 'myself, Miss Berry, all his intimates. We're here every day, but he speaks as if we've gone abroad. He complains that we never write.'

'B
UT HOW
did it feel, to meet the Earl again by accident?' In the parlour at Berkeley Square Mary examined her fingertips.

Anne shrugged. 'It doesn't matter any more.'

She was tired; they were both tired from staying up at night with Walpole and taking shifts in his dark bedroom all day. There were so many papers to go over; Mary (behind the cover of her father's name) was to be the literary executrix, and Anne and her uncle Lord Frederick Campbell were joint executors of the estate.

'All you can think of is Walpole. I know, I'm the same,' said Mary. 'It's a curious numbness. A suspension.'

'I want Walpole to survive this illness, I do,' insisted Anne, 'and he still may; if ever there was a man likely to defy his doctors and live out a whole century it's he. But in another way I suppose I'm ... waiting.'

'For it to be over,' said Mary, almost whispering.

'It's not the pain; I'm used to seeing him in pain. It's the confusion.' Walpole's or hers? she wondered. 'I can't stand his bitter reflections, the accusations of conspiracy. He looks me in the eye and tells me I've deserted him in his hour of greatest need.'

'Oh, my darling.' Mary's hand was warm on the nape of Anne's neck. 'He doesn't mean it; it's just his sickness talking, or the drugs.'

'I'm not so sure. I think he's beyond politeness. He knows about us,' Anne said, finally letting it out.

'How can he?'

'Not everything, perhaps—not the details—but he knows there's been some sort of contest and he's lost it. Lost you.'

She thought Mary would deny it, but the answer surprised her. 'And you, if it comes to that.'

Anne stared at her.

'It's true,' said Mary. 'You were his favourite long before I came on the scene.'

'There's no comparison,' she began irritably. 'The minute he met you—all you Berrys, come to that—he was besotted.'

'But Agnes and I are like children to him,' said Mary, 'whereas you're Walpole's peer, not in age but in other ways. I think he counted on you to stay unattached, the great artist, by his side.'

'Perhaps a little, but it's—'

Mary had put her face in her hands. 'Are we really arguing about whom a dying man has loved more?'

A dying man.
The phrase froze Anne. How ridiculous of her to resent Walpole's preference. After all, wouldn't she choose Mary over Walpole? Hadn't she already? Love did that. It cut through everything else; it was the chisel that carved people into its own preferred shape. 'Come to that,' she said ruefully, 'we've only been the preoccupations of his later years. He loved and lost other friends before either of us was born.'

'T
HESE LAST
few weeks,' remarked Walpole,
'I
believe
I
may have mislaid my sense of humour. I do apologise.'

Anne looked up from her book, startled. Soon he was dozing again. She watched the hard wrinkles of his monkey face relax.

That morning Mary brought in Mr Lawrence, the King's painter, who wanted to take a sketch of the old man. Walpole slept right through it. The painter looked like any other busy gentleman in a navy-blue frock coat these days; so unlike the sulky boy who'd painted that remarkable portrait of Eliza Farren in her furs. 'What are you working on now, Mr Lawrence?'

'A vast canvas,' he told her shortly, 'Satan Calling up his Legions!'

'Where has all our gaiety gone?' she wondered.

Lawrence gave a small shrug and returned to his drawing.

After the painter had left, Walpole woke and murmured, 'I miss my treasure house.'

'As soon as the weather warms a little,' Mary said, 'we'll wrap you up and drive you down to Twickenham.'

He gave her a wry look, as if to say he knew she didn't believe her own words. 'I thought I heard booming, last night, unless it was some fancy or vagrant memory?'

'No,' Anne told him, 'the Tower guns were firing to celebrate Sir John Jervis having beaten the Spanish fleet at St Vincent.'

She thought this news might cheer him, but his face was neutral. 'I sometimes think I've lived a dozen lives,' he murmured. 'I knew James II's mistress, and the courtiers who served under King William and then Queen Anne. I've witnessed half a dozen wars, the Jacobite Rising and the loss of America. I spent thirteen months at Florence, seven months at Paris, twenty-five years in Parliament. As a child I was carried to the first opera performed in England and I kissed the hand of George I, and now I groan over the frolics of his great-great-grandson ... No, this can't all have happened in one life! All this and yet I'm not one fifth as old as Methuselah.'

'Not a dozen lives but one, lived fully,' Anne told him, watching Mary carry his untouched tray out of the room.

'Well, I've had to keep myself busy. I've been little loved,' he said suddenly.

'Walpole!'

'It's true, my dear, regrettably true. I've been the World's favourite acquaintance. A great fellow for rounding out a dinner.'

'But you've had so many priceless friendships—' she protested.

'Oh, I've loved, yes; I have a gift for it. Loved often and hard and long. But in return ... well, I've been liked, shall we say. Men and women have been vastly
fond
of me,' he said, 'but I'm not so easily fooled.'

She didn't know what to say. If that was how his life had seemed to Walpole then no arguing would change his mind. And after all, what evidence could she offer? No one had ever
cleaved
to him, as the Scriptures put it.

'Mind you, I've sometimes appreciated the pretence,' he went on, almost whispering. 'Everybody wears a mask. Hadn't you noticed? We put them on for one very good reason: we dislike our own faces.'

Anne stared at him, troubled.

'It's not hypocrisy so much as aspiration. We wear them to persuade ourselves as much as others.' A long noisy breath, taken in and released. 'Friendship, fairness, loyalty, dignity—what are they but lovely masks, which we wear till they begin to pinch and then let fall?'

An hour after that there was a long episode of coughing. When Philip the valet came in, Anne said she could deal with it herself, which seemed to annoy him. Walpole vomited into his basin, producing little but clear mucous. He was very weak. 'What a great deal of killing I'm taking. It's not so easy to die as it's commonly imagined.' Somehow he got to talking about his soul. 'To be perfectly honest, my dear, I have my doubts about its exact destination.'

'You can't fear ... descent,' said Anne, resorting to a flippant euphemism.

'I suppose not,' he murmured, 'but nor am I entirely confident of exaltation. And I wouldn't fancy harps and sofas made of cloud. In fact, though I have a great respect for Christian ethics, I must tell you in confidence that the more supernatural doctrines of the Church have always left me sceptical.'

'Oh,' she said, helpless.

'But I've always hoped that there might be ... somewhere, in some ineffable sense, perhaps, you know, somewhere that we all might meet again,' said Walpole. 'Well, not quite
all
of us, obviously, or it would be such a scrum. Worse than one of Georgiana's routs in the old days.'

Anne laughed weakly.

'A select company, a happy few, with our animals, of course; Fidelle chasing her tail by the door, Tonton asleep on the rug.'

'Oh, dear, do you suppose the celestial rugs already bear the marks of Tonton's little accidents?'

'No, no,' he assured her, 'all that will have been swabbed away by angels. I declare, it doesn't frighten me, when I think of those who've gone before me. They're all dead, you know, all my dear fellows,' he murmured, shutting his papery eyelids. The names came out one at a time, as if pulled up from a well. 'Gray, yes ... and Bentley, and Chute, who helped me build my fairy castle, and Littleton too ... and Montagu. West. Ashton. Lord Lincoln, who was famed for the biggest member in London.'

Anne blinked. Had she misheard the whispered words? Did Walpole know he was speaking aloud, did he even remember she was there, know who she was? Or was he casting off propriety at last?

'Harry, my dearest Harry Conway, gone before me,' he murmured. All the men are dead; there are only women left now. How can I still be here when the men are all gone?'

Anne wanted to weep.

'He was very sweet this morning,' she told Mary much later, when they passed in the corridor, 'we spoke of heaven and old friends.'

Mary was carrying a covered basin and her face was drawn. 'He's delirious again now.'

'Oh, no.' She'd hoped he'd emerged from 'that dark maze. Sometimes she thought souls were lazy, or befuddled; they didn't seem to know their way out. 'I'll go to him.'

'It's all right, my love,' said Mary, 'you need your rest.' A maid passed by just then and Mary handed over the basin.

Anne walked back with her. The room was fetid with sickness. 'It's Anne,' she said, stooping over him.

Walpole's crusted eyes looked back at her balefully. 'She's in Gibraltar.'