Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

Elizabeth was refusing to sit down, the better to clasp her hands and strike minor attitudes against the chimney breast. It was all very well, but Burnes, hat in hand, was beginning to look somewhat awkward standing there, like a footman awaiting his mistress’s pleasure. Bella merely looked amused.

‘To be frank,’ Burnes said, ‘so few of your Eastern princes have anything of interest to say.’

‘That cannot be true, Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. ‘Why, your book is full of interesting and extraordinary remarks passed by the princes you met. I do not believe you could write such an interesting book filled with the remarks of the ladies of London society.’

‘To be sure,’ Burnes said, subsiding with relief as Elizabeth finally sat down at the pianoforte, ‘their conversation seems extraordinary and full of fascination to us, who have only an imperfect knowledge of their culture, just as the meanest building put up in the Orient seems wonderful to us, as our eyes are not accustomed to what is commonplace.’

‘The meanest building of the Orient – the garden huts of Bokhara – a tremendous notion, sir,’ Bella said as Elizabeth started on one of Field’s nocturnes, not at all softly.

‘There are exceptions to what I say,’ Burnes said over the intensely genteel din. ‘As I was saying before Miss Elizabeth Garraway came in—’ gracious nod ‘—I found Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul, to be a remarkable man.’

‘I have not quite – reached as far as – him in my – perusal of your – book,’ Elizabeth said, in little gasps between Field’s trickier ornamental flourishes; both she and the music seemed to hiccough.

‘How did he immediately strike you, Mr Burnes?’ Bella said.

‘He has very bad teeth,’ Burnes said, smiling warmly and incidentally displaying his own very good ones, the fruits of a Scottish childhood eating nothing but roots and thistles. ‘His conversation is curiously intelligent and penetrating when he asks about us – I felt often that, after my visit, he must surely know far more about the British than this Briton, at least, had succeeded in discovering about him. But in the main, it is a curious, intangible, indefinable quality he has which makes him so remarkable. Do you know what I mean by charm?’

‘Of course,’ Bella said. ‘I am surprised to hear a Scotsman refer to it. I had thought it a strange and infrequent visitor to your nation. I know from the immortal Kant that properties and qualities may flourish without being named, but this is the first I have heard of the word being used without anything to attach it to. But I forgot, Mr Burnes, you have spent long in London, and Kabul, where they know, no doubt, all there is to be known of charm.’

Even Bella feared this raillery might have gone too far, but Burnes seemed to take it in good part, merely replying, ‘I would never have thought from your appearance, Miss Garraway, that you had read the immortal Kant.’

‘Naturally not,’ Bella said. ‘I hear most of it from my sister, who is the great reader among us, and that seems to suffice for the normal demands of a lady’s conversation.’

Elizabeth came to the end of her nocturne with a gulpingly hammered series of chords, and rose to the sincere thanks of Burnes, before excusing herself to the necessity of her correspondence. Burnes got up to take his leave, but before he could speak, Elizabeth had shot through the door and was halfway up the stairs; it was her ostentatiously tactful manner, which never failed to embarrass Bella and make her unable to say anything. She stood there, with Burnes, smiling. Elizabeth had gone, he was alone with her sister; and yet nothing so very terrible seemed to have happened.

‘Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. It sounded facetious, mocking, said like that, and though she had nothing she wanted to say to him, it would be foolish now to sit down again. She recollected herself. ‘I am so pleased you came. There must be so many calls on your time, I know.’

‘I am so sorry I was unable to call before today,’ he said softly, and that was not quite what she meant.

‘We—’ Bella stopped. ‘I am pleased you came at all. Do come again, any time. Truly, any time you can spare from your valuable six weeks.’

He bowed, and since his lovely eyes would not quite meet hers, she felt assured that she had now said too much. She could see their next meeting now, in her head; they would be in a crowded room, he surrounded by duchesses, ministers, talking – he had now acquired an emblematical significance – to Stokes the writer and all that shining entourage. And a chill would have fallen between the two of them like a curtain, as he bowed with all the unfeeling profundity at his disposal.

She was so lost in her thoughts that when Burnes, looking mildly puzzled, took his leave and went, she hardly noticed that she was quite alone in the drawing room.

‘Truly, I like him,’ she said later, to Elizabeth, upstairs, after dinner.

Elizabeth left off brushing Bella’s hair, and turned to her own. It was an unspoken annoyance to Bella that her sister, who was apt to embarrass when strangers were present, and spouted nonsense by the square yard when in correspondence with German philosophers, was perfectly rational and sympathetic alone, after dinner, with no servants listening.

‘He seems admirable,’ she said. ‘But you say he leaves in six weeks.’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘And when does he return?’

‘He hasn’t named a date. I doubt he knows. But truly, I like him.’

Elizabeth pulled at her hair, dragging it in front of her face like a veil, and through it made a vulgar noise with her tongue and lips. Bella shrieked, falling back onto her bed in giggles. ‘Truly,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I like him.’

‘I do .’

‘Well, when he returns, perhaps you will still like him. Fancy – Bella Garraway to wait ten years for her betrothed, and he comes back, unable to remember the name of this suddenly old woman, or in a box, a sad early death, dead of the cholera – remember, Bella, George Hathersage, dead after five weeks in Calcutta, dead at twenty-four. Or – fancy, picture, you at the docks, waiting, expectancy bright in your wrinkled old face, and off steps Mr Burnes, the hero of the age, his left arm firmly linked to a Maharajah’s daughter and his right clinging to a case of her family’s diamonds.’

‘If it comes to that,’ Bella said. ‘We have diamonds, too.’

‘But Bella, it may be years – do think.’

‘It doesn’t signify, Elizabeth. I am quite sure he will not call again. Don’t ask me how I can be so sure, but I am sure.’

But he did call; the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He came and he sat, and he submitted to being teased and quizzed until Bella was blue in the face. Always they laughed together – it was a strange sound, in that house, so very genteel – and always they were at ease with each other. The second time Burnes came, he was admitted at once to the empty drawing room, and asked to wait while Miss Bella was sent for. He thought Miss Bella was at home, the footman did – couldn’t answer, he was sure, for the remainder of the family. Burnes nodded, satisfied. He looked around him, at the dark quiet room which could be anyone’s, and, bearing no trace of her, was Bella’s. He wondered where in this abandoned corner of Hanover Square she had left her mark, and the ticking of his watch was loud against the back of his hand. There was a rude rumpus from upstairs; it made him jump. He could have sworn it was the noise of a girl jumping down the stairs, two at a time, and accompanying herself by singing, the sort of unobserved raucous singing he would never have imagined her capable of. The tune was ‘Men of Harlech’, but Burnes, hat and gloves in hand, grew pale as he heard the words Bella, unobserved, as she clearly thought, was applying to the familiar regimental favourite.