Matthew Plampin - Illumination

‘They are ludicrous. A gang of reptiles.’

Her brother, unfailingly decent, could not let this pass. ‘I say, Han, that’s hardly fair. A couple of them are pretty remarkable, in their way. There was this one little chap with the most gigantic head, a poet he said he was, who claimed to have—’

‘I suppose she is apologising for me?’ Hannah broke in. ‘Begging our host’s forgiveness?’

Clement tossed away his cigarette. ‘Actually, when I left she was laughing it off – telling them that she had no idea that her daughter had grown so conventional, and asking for suggestions as to how it might be corrected.’

Hannah made a disgusted sound and walked off towards Westminster.

‘Come now, Han,’ pleaded Clement, trotting behind her, ‘hold here for a minute more. You’ve got to look at it from her side. Every one of those fine gentlemen in there knows what she was, how famous and rich and so on. And every one of them knows where she is now. It’s a terrible humiliation for her, really it is.’

This was his regular line of reasoning and it had worked on many occasions. Elizabeth’s slide from glory, after all, had defined their lives. It had determined their transition to ever smaller houses, in less and less fashionable areas; the slow diminishment of their stock of valuables; the whittling of their domestic staff to a single elderly Irishwoman who washed the linen every other Wednesday. That evening, however, was different. Hannah felt it with unsettling clarity. Her brother’s appeals were not going to win her around.

‘I have been waiting for so very long for something to happen, Clem.’ The words came out heavily, slowing her to a stop. ‘She calls herself my best and closest ally. She loves to talk it up as a great cause – a battle waged for the whole of womankind.’ A hot tear collected against her nose. ‘And yet all she does are things like this.’

Clement put a hand gently on her shoulder. He did his best, telling her that she must not lose heart and that her persistence was bound to bring rewards, but he couldn’t begin to understand. He had no wind driving him – no desired destination in life. Clem was content merely to coast through a seemingly random series of projects that were often adopted and abandoned within the same week. His present fascination, for instance, was with the electric telegraph, leading to obscure experiments with currents and lengths of wire. This mechanical inclination was unprecedented among the Pardys. Knowing nothing of such matters, Elizabeth had left her son more or less alone – a lack of attention that had shaped his character as profoundly as her interference had shaped Hannah’s.

‘You must come back, Han, at any rate,’ he concluded, ‘to reclaim your cloak and hat.’

Hannah shook her head, wiping her eye on the cuff of her gown. Even this was unthinkable. Returning to her mother’s side was a certain return to disappointment, to antagonism and dispute. It was reducing her, wearing her thin. She could not go on with it; she refused to. In her bookcase, between Mrs Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and Mrs Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art , was an envelope containing nearly fifteen pounds, scraped together over the past few years. The purpose of this sum, only half-perceived before that evening, came to her with sudden force. Hannah looked along the river, away from London and everyone in it. She had to act.

The platform was packed with people, well dressed and wealthy for the most part, jostling for places on a train that was about to leave for the provinces. They yelled and shoved, hitting at one another with fists, canes and umbrellas. Banknotes, bribes for the attendants, were being waved in the air like a thousand tiny flags. To Clem, fresh from the Calais express with a valise in each hand, the scene was positively apocalyptic. He stopped and tried to get his bearings.

‘Head left,’ Elizabeth shouted in his ear, pushing him forward. ‘We want the rue Lafayette.’

The cab smelled of rice powder and a sickly citrus perfume. Clem heaved the bags up on the luggage rack and flopped into a corner, reaching inside his pocket for a cigarette. Opposite him, his mother had arrayed herself in her customary fashion: perched in the exact centre of the seat so that she had a clear view from both windows, with a notebook in her lap to record her observations. She began to write, lips slightly pursed, the pencil scurrying from one side of the page to the other and then darting back. Clem pulled open the window next to him and lit his cigarette. His ribs were sore, bruised most likely; he’d been elbowed a good few times as he struggled across the seething concourse.

‘Deuced keen to get off, weren’t they? One would think the city was already burning.’

‘Those who grew fat under the Empire,’ declared Elizabeth, ‘who benefited the most from all that corruption and carelessness, are scattering like geese now that something is being asked of them in return.’

‘Well,’ said Clem, ‘that’s certainly one way of looking at it.’

A vast military camp had been established in the streets around the Gare du Nord. Once-elegant avenues were choked with tents and huts, their trees stripped bare to fuel the fires that dotted the promenades, blackening the stonework with smoke. Soldiers sat in their hundreds along the pavements; peering down at them, Clem saw teenaged farmhands in ill-fitting blue tunics, their grubby faces vacant, rifles propped against their shoulders.

‘Lord above,’ he murmured, ‘there must be an entire division out here.’

Elizabeth glanced at the mass of infantry for a couple of seconds and then resumed her note-taking. ‘Efficiency must be our watchword,’ she said as she wrote. ‘We’ll meet with Mr Inglis, we’ll go to Montmartre to find her, and then we’ll bring her straight home. Do you hear me, Clement? The three of us will escape this city together.’

‘How much does your Mr Inglis know?’

‘Simply that I have some urgent business to attend to before this situation with the Prussians comes to a head.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘He isn’t someone I would necessarily choose to place my trust in, but the streets of Paris have been quite transformed since I last numbered among its residents. I doubt I could even find my way from the Madeleine to Notre Dame after Louis Napoleon’s barbaric interferences.’ She finished a page and flipped it over, the flow of words barely interrupted. ‘Mr Inglis, however, has lived on the rue Joubert for longer than anyone cares to remember. His assistance can only speed things along.’

The cab turned a corner, wheeling from sunlight into shadow; a detachment of field artillery clattered past, the crews shouting to each other from their positions on the mud-encrusted guns.

Clem had lost the taste for his cigarette. ‘Whatever’s best for Han,’ he said, leaning forward to drop it out of the window.

They carried on into the heart of fashionable Paris. Clem marvelled at the crisp geometry of the streets, the monumental ranks of six-storey buildings, the endless rows of tall, identical windows; to one used to the crumbling muddle of London, the effect really was staggering. A neat enamelled sign, its white letters set against a peacock blue ground, informed him that they had reached the boulevard des Capucines, generally considered to be among the most splendid of the emperor’s recent redevelopments. It had been kept free of soldiers, but in their place was an atmosphere of singular desolation. The magnificent shops had their shutters down and their awnings rolled; the gutters were clogged with mud and litter; the strolling, stylish crowds had long since fled. Hardly anyone at all could be seen, in fact, and Clem searched about in vain for a porter when they alighted before the Grand Hotel. Elizabeth went inside directly, pushing apart the heavy glass doors, leaving him to pay their driver and carry the bags.