Life Mask Read online

  'It doesn't matter.'

  The sculptor spread her bony fingers in front of her. 'Even when they're clean, how they age me! Chicken claws, Mr Darner used to call them.'

  'Did he?' asked Eliza, a little fierce. 'They may not be smooth, or plump, but they're most expressive.'

  'Oh, excuse me while I moisten my osprey.' Mrs Damer stepped over to the clay model and dabbed it with a sponge from a bucket. 'My work's been so interrupted by our rehearsals—not that I'm complaining.'

  Eliza recognised a change of subject. 'I've never seen a statue of a bird before,' she said, walking round it.

  'Oh, hardly a statue yet,' the sculptor answered ruefully. 'It's a fishing eagle I'm modelling in terracotta for my cousin Walpole, to go with his ancient Roman one. Terracotta's not as noble as marble, of course, but he dotes on the stuff. It has a quickness and verisimilitude about it that's hard to match in stone.'

  Eliza drew closer, inhaling the cool earthiness of the clay. 'Do you always work with your fingers?'

  'And with anything that comes to hand. Knives, spoons, gouges and wires ... This, for instance,' said Mrs Damer, holding up what looked like a thin embroidery hook. 'I filched from my mother.'

  'Lady Ailesbury's famed for her needlework, isn't she?' Eliza was fumbling for details.

  Mrs Damer made a little face. 'Pictures in worsted. She enjoys it vastly. But our work has little in common; my mother makes copies of Van Dycks and Rubenses, while I try to create an original image which will live longer than the creature that inspired it. Actum ne agas, as Terence puts it.'

  Eliza nodded as if she'd caught the allusion and looked the bird in its roughly formed eye. 'You must have studied an eagle close to.'

  Mrs Damer stood beside her, arms crossed. 'It was before Christmas, at my friend Lady Melbourne's seat in Hertfordshire. The gamekeeper was a fool; almost cut the magnificent creature's wing off as he netted it and pulled it down.'

  'Was it in pain, then?'

  'Yes, but I don't want to focus on its helplessness,' Mrs Damer told her, a line of concentration appearing between her eyebrows. 'What I'm trying to capture is rage, I suppose. Or outrage.'

  'It's not a bit like your carvings of women, which are so very smooth and Grecian,' said Eliza. She felt the need to prove her knowledge of Mrs Darner's work.

  'Ah, yes, I aim for the true ancient style when I sculpt the human face, a beauty that will stand for all time. But animals'—Mrs Damer smiled at the rough clay bird as if it were a pet of hers—'they seem to demand a more everyday look. When I model my dog Fidelle, for instance—Fidelle? Where've you gone?—I often find her curled up like a hedgehog; Italian greyhounds are great nesters, especially the bitches.' She walked through the workshop and pulled aside some sacking. 'Aha! Fidelle, come out and make your obeisance to the Queen of Comedy.' The miniature dog streaked out and ran in circles, chasing her own tail, barking shrilly. 'She's just nervous of strangers.'

  'What a little beauty,' said Eliza, watching the loop of smooth silvery flesh and hoping it wouldn't attack her shoes.

  'What dogs have you, Miss Farren?'

  'None.'

  The brown eyes went wide. 'Are your cats afraid of them?'

  'I've no cats either, I must confess.'

  'Aren't you fond of the brute creation, then?'

  Eliza decided to be frank. 'I can appreciate their beauty—in a case like your darling Fidelle's,' she said, aiming her sweetest smile at the dog who was now on two legs, scraping at Eliza's skirts and whimpering. 'But I confess I'm perfectly indifferent to them as beings.'

  'Stop that,' scolded Mrs Damer, scooping the greyhound up in her arms and rubbing its head.

  'I imagine pet keeping is a taste one must acquire in childhood.'

  'You surprise me; I'd always assumed it came naturally.'

  Perhaps you've never known anyone who didn't grow up with lap dogs, thought Eliza sardonically. 'No, I won't even have a canary in my dressing room at Drury Lane. Lord Derby despairs of this lack of sensibility, he says I have a very hard heart.'

  Mrs Damer gave her a peculiar smile.

  Why had she brought that up? Eliza wondered. Of course, Derby had other good reasons for thinking her cold; didn't the nastier papers call her an icy prude? She turned towards the clay eagle, now, to hide her face. 'This bird has nothing in common with a tiny greyhound; you must have a great talent for entering into their different natures.'

  Mrs Damer smiled at the compliment. 'The ancients would have shown the osprey at his noble best, of course—wings spread, eyes on the horizon.' She spoke as if her visitor only needed reminding. 'But this one is captured, with a smashed wing. I want to seize him in the moment—to make the moment of his fury last for ever. I've shaped his beak very hooked, see? I've taken for my inspiration Giambologna's marvellous turkey-cock in the Grand Duke's Uffizi Gallery—like a shaken bag of feathers—you must know it.'

  Eliza nodded vaguely, not wanting to admit that she'd never been any further from England than a visit to her father's relatives in Cork. An odd pause came between them and Eliza couldn't think how to fill it. Mrs Damer picked up a large damp cloth and draped it over the bird. Eliza wondered whether she should take her leave.

  'Have a seat, Miss Farren,' said the sculptor, pulling a shabby chair away from the wall and dusting it off. 'I'll be perfectly frank with you, as if I've known you ten years instead of a few weeks. Shall I?'

  Eliza had a slightly giddy sensation, as if she was high on a ladder. 'Please do,' she said, sitting down.

  'I fled the rehearsal today because I was in danger of laughter.'

  'Laughter?' It came out almost as a squeak.

  'Yes,' said Mrs Damer, her mouth twisted. 'I wasn't sad when I was talking about unworthy husbands and how little good it does to waste all one's womanly wiles on them, but caught up in angry memories. Then, when I saw the ring of concerned faces around me, all thinking I was grieving for John Damer, I felt bubbling up in my throat a sort of dreadful giggle.'

  'Oh.' Eliza felt very naïve.

  'That's why I had to clap my hand over my mouth and make a run for it,' Mrs Damer told her. 'Though people think me eccentric already, they'd be far more shocked if I were to burst out laughing at the memory of my dear departed. Even to admit I had the impulse sounds shocking, though we're in private here and you've such a sympathetic eye. You aren't shocked?'—and Mrs Damer glanced sideways at her guest.

  'No.' The dog had tucked herself between Eliza's hip pad and the edge of the chair; she wasn't so much of a nuisance when she'd quietened down. Eliza added, more as a statement than a question, 'You don't miss him, then.'

  'Not for a moment,' said Mrs Damer and went on picking some dried mud off her sculpting hook.

  Eliza felt oddly comfortable in the workshop, despite the draughts and dirt. She put one hand on Fidelle's warm neck. 'Tell me more, if you don't mind? Your parents made the match?'

  'Well, yes, but that's only to be expected among people of birth. You, Miss Farren, for instance, would be so much freer to pick and choose.' A pause. 'You're not offended by the observation?'

  'No, no,' said Eliza. She never forgot her low origins, of course, but these days it was rare for anyone to remind her of them so baldly.

  'Your life is your own, that's all I mean. Whether and whom to marry is no one's decision but yours.'

  Eliza felt doubtful on this point. 'I consult my mother on all important points. And it sometimes seems to me as if I have two thousand parents.'

  'Your audience.'

  Mrs Damer was quick, thought Eliza. 'Two thousand fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters...'

  'Lovers.'

  'Well, suitors, perhaps,' said Eliza. 'All interested in my actions, all concerned about my reputation, all waiting to see what I'll do next.'

  'I never thought of it that way/ said Mrs Darner. 'I suppose we do make a claim on you, when we sit there in our boxes night after night, raising our spyglasses ... But at least you have intelligence and expe
rience, to chart your own course,' she added, suddenly sweeping the leftover scraps of clay into a bucket and turning a winch to lower the work table the eagle stood on. 'At eighteen I had neither. Perhaps I'd read too much Rousseau; I was more interested in tenderness and sensibility than in per cent per annum. And, unfortunately, whereas my elder sister got Richmond, with all his sterling qualities, the boy my mother chose for me proved a dunderhead, a wastrel and a philistine.'

  Eliza pressed her fingers against her smiling mouth. What outrageous words to describe a dead husband.

  'In Florence,' Mrs Damer groaned, 'we visited the Uffizi with one of John's brothers. I was enraptured by the statues, I felt as if I'd been lifted to Olympus to consort with the gods. But the East Gallery is so vastly long, John and his brother decided they were weary of art, and laid 50 guineas on the result of a hopping race. They nearly toppled a fourth-century Venus Pudica,' she said through her teeth. 'I couldn't tell what I saw after that—the art was hidden in a mist of shame for me—because all I could hear was the crash, crash, crash of two earl's sons pounding like gigantic one-legged hares down the gallery.'

  Eliza released a giggle. 'Who won?'

  'I didn't look.'

  'The winner must have boasted. The loser must have cried foul.'

  'Oh, I'm sure, but it's one of many details I've managed to forget. I was married for the best part of ten years, Miss Farren, but my memories probably amount to three months. It's rather terrible,' she added, 'to wish away one's prime years.'

  'But they weren't.'

  'Well, the twenties—aren't they meant to be one's best? But you're right,' she said with a smile. 'I think perhaps these are my prime years, now, past thirty-five!'

  Just then a maid came in to say that Mrs Moll was ready to serve the tea. 'I should go,' said Eliza, glancing at the window, where a crust of snow had built up. She tried to collect her skirts without disturbing the dog, but Fidelle exploded off the chair and ran into a corner. 'You've been very kind.'

  'Have you another engagement, or are you needed at Drury Lane?'

  'Well, no, but—'

  'Then you must stay for a dish of tea. Tell Mrs Moll we'll have it in the library,' said Mrs Damer to the maid. 'I'll join you, my dear, as soon as I've made myself respectable'—pulling off her makeshift turban as she spoke and releasing a shock of unpowdered brown curls—'and we can wait out this snowstorm together.'

  'OH, THIS is so much better,' said Mrs Damer, moving round the circular ante-room in the Earl's opulent mansion on Grosvenor Square. 'Aren't we favoured, Derby, to have our own private rehearsal with Miss Farren? Is your dear mother not to join us today?' she asked, turning to the actress.

  Eliza gave her a slightly wry smile, seeing through the pretence. 'I left her at Great Queen Street overseeing a thorough spring-cleaning. Let's begin with the scene of the Lovemores meeting by accident at Lady Constant's,' she suggested.

  Derby leapt into action. When his wife asked him for the second time that day to come home for dinner, he turned his face away sharply and sneered, 'The question is entertaining, but as it was settled this morning, I think it has lost the graces of novelty.'

  What pleasure he took in such refined spite, thought Eliza. She was seeing a face of the Earl's that she'd never glimpsed before. Did Derby have a secret envy of the rogues and rakes he knew from Brooks's Club, who never wasted an hour thinking of an unattainable beauty, but broke hearts every month and laughed into their brandy glasses?

  She was enjoying this rehearsal a trois far more than the big ones at Richmond House. Next they tried the dinner scene, in which Mrs Lovemore talked so earnestly that her husband fell asleep in his chair. 'No, 110 injured looks, not yet,' Eliza instructed Mrs Damer, 'don't throw away the joke.'

  'But wouldn't Mrs Lovemore feel hurt to have her husband snoozing over the soup?'

  'In real life, yes,' said Eliza, 'but it's more painful and funnier if she doesn't notice yet. At the very end of the scene you turn to him—freeze at the sight—he lets out a gentle snore'—Eliza clicked her fingers and Derby snored—'and you pull yourself up and roar, "Unfeeling man!"'

  The other two burst out laughing.

  'But mightn't Mrs Lovemore seem obtuse?' asked Mrs Damer.

  'No, no, just wrapped up in her own woes,' Derby put in. 'That's the very meat of a marriage gone bad, I suppose: the two of them might as well be speaking different languages.'

  Eliza blinked and looked away. Given his situation, she thought it tasteless of him to speechify about marital breakdown.

  'Derby,' Mrs Damer asked when the ladies were putting on their cloaks at the end of the morning, 'I wonder will you be at the Commons on Tuesday for Sheridan's first sally against Hastings?'

  'Mm, d'you need a ticket? I'd he delighted to escort you, if you can be up before seven,' he told her.

  'How kind, that's exactly what I was hoping—and I never rise after six, I'll have you know! Miss Farren?'

  Eliza looked up from buttoning her satin glove, startled. 'I wasn't planning to go; I get enough of Sheridan at Drury Lane.'

  'Oh, but if Hastings of the East India Company is impeached for his bribe taking and warmongering, by means of Foxite eloquence,' said Mrs Damer, 'it'll be a wonderful blow against corruption in high places.'

  'I must confess I've little head for politics,' said Eliza.

  'That's right,'joked Derby, 'when I rabbit on about by-elections and Third Readings and divisions, her eyes fog over.'

  'Miss Farren,' said Mrs Damer as the ladies came down the steps of Derby House, 'this won't do.'

  Eliza half laughed at the grave tone.

  Mrs Damer put her hand on Eliza's elbow. 'You may think I've no right to say this, but ... no one with intelligence and a feeling heart can remain aloof from politics today. Least of all a woman, since our sex is too often confined to ignorance and triviality. Why, my dear, the stakes haven't been as high in a century! Is Britain to languish on under the corrupt and stagnant rule of Old George and his puppet Pitt, or will our Foxite friends seize their chance and drag the country—the Empire—into an era of liberal modernity?' Her eyes were shiny with enthusiasm.

  Eliza, at a loss, found herself saying, 'Perhaps I will come with you to the Hastings impeachment, then, if I may.'

  'Splendid. By the way, on a sillier matter,' said Mrs Damer, leafing through the papers in her leather pocketbook, 'my sister came across this in last week's Chronicle. Did you ever see such tosh?'

  Eliza read the limp cutting.

  Some say a certain hippophile Earl must be at least half in love with Mrs D—r, to play his part so well at the R-ch—d House Theatre. If she can bring cold Marble to life, perhaps she can win his heart from her Thespian Rival, Miss F—n.

  'Oh, they'll never leave off their inventing, will they?' said Eliza, aiming for as light a tone as Mrs Damer's.

  'Sometimes I suspect they throw all our names into a bowl—'

  '—pluck out two or three, and compose a fiction accordingly!'

  From the Derby carriage Eliza waved goodbye. Mrs Damer wanted to be the one to show it to me, she was thinking. It was her way of saying I've nothing to fear from her.

  IN THEORY, ladies were banned from St Stephen's Chapel, where the Commons sat, as too distracting a presence, but the doorkeepers of the End Gallery turned a blind eye as long as they got a few shillings from each visitor. Today the building was packed like a barrel of cod by eleven in the morning. The Members were squeezed on to their green benches and into the Side Galleries that were supported on slim white pillars, and the End Gallery was thick with visitors a good hour before Richard Brinsley Sheridan was scheduled to speak on the barbarous treatment of the Begums of Oudh (a phrase everyone in the World had by now learned to pronounce).

  'I've never seen the House like this,' Mrs Damer marvelled to Eliza. 'Usually there's not a soul in here till two in the afternoon, and less than 200 out of the 558 Members show up at all.'

  'I haven't been here in years. How carele
ssly they're dressed, considering they're running the country,' murmured Eliza. Most of the MPs were in the standard gentleman's uniform of dark coat and breeches with white shirt and stockings, but she saw riding coats, boots, the odd wide-crowned black hat or old-fashioned tricorne, and some of them had even brought in their young sons.

  'Speaker Cornwall looks awake, for once,' remarked Derby, pointing out a man in an enormous wig, hat and cloak. 'He's a shocking dozer; he always has a pot of porter on the arm of the Chair.'

  The Chair was more like a pulpit, Eliza thought. The many-branched chandeliers overhead blazed with wax candles; already it was uncomfortably hot and the air whirred with the sound of ladies fanning themselves. The building was ridiculously small, it couldn't be more than sixty feet long. 'I'd refuse to act in a theatre as cramped as this,' she remarked and Derby laughed.

  'Excuse me, ladies,' said a Norfolk accent behind them, 'but might I beg favour of you to remove your hats? Only that I've ridden through the night to see this show, but the headgear this year is so ridiculous high—'

  Derby bristled, but Eliza put her gloved hand on his arm. Mrs Damer had already lifted off her hat; it sat in her lap like a wedding cake. 'We beg your pardon, sir,' said Eliza.

  'No, no, I beg yours'—and the stranger sank back on to his bench.

  Even bareheaded, she and Mrs Damer towered above the Earl sitting between them. 'We couldn't have you defending our honour in such a scrum,' Eliza whispered in his ear.

  Derby's lower lip twitched in amusement. 'Oh, here's the PM, as cool as ever.'

  William Pitt sat down on the front government bench, his long ungainly legs crossed before him like kindling, his pointed chin as hairless as a boy's.

  'Hard to believe he's been running the country for three years and he's still only twenty-seven,' murmured Mrs Damer resentfully. 'Has any nation ever been tyrannised over by one so young?'

  It would have been comical, thought Eliza, if Pitt hadn't been such a very serious character. 'How old-fashioned he dresses,' she murmured, 'embroidered silks and lace ruffles!'