I am swinging in my hamaca, talking to Francine about the first time I set eyes on this man. And the fact we all know -except perhaps the wagon-headed Whytehead – the fact that is generally available to everyone who sails on this boat, is that Francisco Lopez, my dear friend, would like to have a certain amount of time, privately, with my maid Francine. And this fix he has makes us back away from them, as though he held a gun and she was a bird. And indeed, her eye is very like a bird's eye, as she does not watch him and yet does watch him, from out of the side of her head.
I want to slap her for a hussy, but I do not.
I say, 'We must bring some needlework out here, and sew where the light is good.' The girl looks at me; knowing I would rather pick hemp than stitch silk; my fingers so swollen now I can not feel the needle. But go she does, which gives me a moment to breathe.
My dear friend closes in, and bows, Whytehead raises his stovepipe, and they turn to walk the starboard side. We understand each other perfectly, it seems.
When Francine arrives back with the basket, her face is flushed, as though the thing were already effected in the brief time it took for her to fetch it and return. There is a giddiness in her that reminds me – like a blow – of the times I came back from that room to the school in Bordeaux. Miss Miller opening the door. Mme Hubert standing in the hall. I look at her with the same level eyes. Half-hate, half-hopelessness. And it amazes me, the power men have. How we make way for their desire.
And now we sit and sew. Or I swing and pretend to sew, while Francine stitches neatly at my side, and the negotiations begin.
But before they do, there are a few things I want, urgently, to say.
I want to say that I love my husband. I want to shout it out as though I were in some courtroom dock. But he is not my husband, and such love is not mine to declare. Such love is not even mine to have. Which is all to the good, because such love holds for me no fascination.
But it is nice, sometimes, to pretend. To heave a sigh and say,
'When did it begin?'
And a knock on the door is as good a place to start as any. My dear friend walked into my drawing room on the rue St-Sulpice and my life changed utterly. It might have been as banal an entrance as any other – there was no way to tell; so many beginnings are false or aborted. A pair of warm eyes is held a moment too long, and in that moment you think, I could fall, I could spend a long time falling, into that man's arms. Or he stays for one night, maybe three. Or he leaves. Or you do not like him, after all.
No, Francisco Solano Lopez played cards with me and I said, 'If I win, you will not like me.' And he put down his cards, because he wanted to like me too, before he had me. And with such an ordinary civility – a sort of weariness you might call it – was my future decided. A tenderness, a consideration, from a man who is neither tender, nor considerate, as a rule. But how was I to know that? I had entered on to my future. It could have been a short future, or a lousy one. But then, also, we were so very happy in bed. And that's not fate: it is a question of the nose. Or so my tutor in these matters, M. Raspail, once said. It is a question of how they smell.
So you were led here by the nose, said Francine, and we both laugh.
I was led here by the nose. To lie, and swing, and dream of dresses on sticks, and of insects with their legs missing. To lie and caress the son of the man who walks the deck in a careful frenzy while I talk to my maid – almost, by now, a ladies companion – who has become the object of that acquisitive lust that men so often enjoy between themselves. Stewart, Whytehead, Lopez. Who is to have her, if not The Buck?
It could be worse.
He knocked, and Francine opened the door. It seems he brought a future for her too. Not a bad one, either. If she has him – who is to say? It might lead to marriage – a settlement of sorts, perhaps even with Whytehead, as I was once settled on Quatrefages. Because dreadful things, I want to whisper (she is so much younger than me), are never the end. They are just the way through.
But tonight, for all my equanimity, I bite his shoulder until it bleeds and beat him about the head. He clouts me, too, across the neck and then, ringingly, an ear, and neither of us makes a sound. There is nothing for anyone to hear except a scrabbling, or the sound of cushions plumped up, or laboured breath, as Lopez keeps my face at arm's length with the flat of his hand: feints, once, twice, then catches one and then the other of my hands. He holds them by the wrist, dragging them strongly down so my face is leaning into his. We are very close. He looks me in the eye, and there is a word he wants to say, or hiss, into my face.
I wait for it to be said. It is in the air, this word. I want it manifest. But he does not utter it. Instead, he squeezes my wrists, and looks at me, while the child in my belly turns and, lazily, turns again.
Truffles
1865, Asuncion
Stewart called on Whytehead to tend to an injury that he did not want to share with whatever doctors – Fox or Skinner – he had to dinner. Or so Stewart assumed as he made his way to Whytehead's quintaalong the gentle cut in the hillside the locals called Tapé taú nde yurú, 'The path where my kisses eat your mouth'. It looked the same as any other path, except perhaps a little more beautiful. He wondered did Whytehead know where he lived.
Apart from Fox and Skinner, Whytehead had Cochelet to dinner. Also Captain Thompson. Sometimes a lady came to dinner at Whytehead's and left thinner than she had arrived, stunned by the mutton and by the dessert of spun sugar in the shape of some recently opened suspension bridge. Whytehead had perfect dinners, where the talk was all of cannon bore and the world stage and whether pelargoniums would mildew in the heat. A six-course, living death. Or would be, thought Stewart, if he were ever invited, as he made his way up Whytehead's driveway. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Gravel. Imagine that. A sound to make your very boots weep.
Great Britain inside the door in the shape of Eames, an actual manservant from actual Yorkshire. Great Britain ticking gently in the hall. Great Britain in the drawing room and the way Whytehead sat in the upholstered chair, gazing into the middle distance from behind his florid, solid moustache. The flock, the horsehair, and the incredible curtains of plush: the room was a remarkable achievement. Stewart looked around and saw the Mile End Road, swimming in a mirage of heat.
The injury, said Whytehead, was to his hand – the kind of thing his barber might have attended to, Stewart thought, unless the Chief State Engineer had something more to say to the Surgeon General than 'It hurts'. And indeed, there was enough to talk about. There was the war, after all. There was any number of conspiracies to be entered upon, or unmasked. There was money to be rescued, or even made. What his aunt would call 'tradesman's talk'. What Lopez might call 'treachery'.