Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

The weather in London changed, quite abruptly. The streets dried into dust which settled like a veil over everything; fruit from the market seemed to have been stored for centuries in the dungeons of some belle au bois dormant , so thick did the dust of the streets disguise the bloom of the fruit. The Season began, all at once, to come to an end. There were a few landmarks by which the Season might be considered concluded, but it felt like a rapid collapse of business, and not a cleanly marked boundary. There was no doubt that after the Court had withdrawn, after the last Drawing-Room, after the old Duke’s Summer Ball, there was no Season but a hastily convened retreat, as every house from Park to Park resounded with the beating of carpets, the single occupation of dustsheeting furniture and the sealing-up of trunks, in so much grim-faced hurry that a stranger might have concluded that a marauding army was hammering at the gates of the city, and not merely the unimagined, unexperienced phenomenon of an August in London. But at a certain moment in the year, it was clear that the Season had lost what purpose it had. Perhaps – Bella thought – it ended as soon as an acquaintance remarked, however casually, that he was leaving town early this year. The next day, in fact. The thought presented itself with an attendant melancholy which was quite unfamiliar to her. Never before had the simple fact of having to leave London struck her as so sad a loss, so devastating a revelation of what she must always have known, that the round of parties and Park and dinner was, in truth, at best wearisome and at worst a stale and unprofitable waste of existence. It made no sense to her, to feel like this, and yet that was how she felt. She could only understand it by thinking that, after the last steamy night at the opera, after the last agonizing Drawing-Room, some wardrobe-faced courtier prodding you in the back and your ostrich feathers shedding by the minute, there would be no more Burnes. She understood that very well. He was this year’s novelty, and next year there would be another.

The idea of a different state presented itself to her; the idea of an August where Bella and Burnes together could walk the empty London streets, their happiness observed only by costermongers.

For Bella, now, in this year of Grace, the idea of her departure from London with so much unsaid – even granted that she did not know what she would say, even if she could say it – brought to mind images of collapse. Soft yielding sand, collapsing inwards in an hourglass; a bathful of water sliding unstoppably into the drains; Bella alone, in the drawing room at Hanover Square, hearing only the clink and knock of the opium tantalus in the sounding empty house, waiting for departure, and nothing else.

In these last days, there was so much to be done, and the preparations for the months in Gloucestershire were as detailed and solid as for a siege. Gloucestershire was all very well, but there was much which could not be acquired there at any price. For the long siege of dullness, dictated by the fashion which would separate Bella so irresistibly from Burnes, food was needed. The current books, French novels for upstairs, English for the drawing room, old Italian poetry for the library; these things would represent a brave assault on the grim boredom of a Gloucestershire afternoon. New clothes, naturally; it was astonishing how much time could be stolen from the long day by bathing and dressing, but the trick only worked if there were new bonnets, new dresses to hand. Other than that, there remained the resort of driving about the countryside, calling on families; even a country curate’s wife, however crass or absurd, would serve to alleviate the ache of ennui as swiftly as her father’s unvarying solution. Other amusements were now closed to Bella. Fishing with worms, digging for treasure in the rose garden, dropping grandpapa’s folios from the battlements into the moat with a still memorable, pleasing, deep-sounding plop! – these were things, not newly forbidden to Bella, since they had always been clandestine activities, but since she had grown up and begun to blush, some inner sense, not of decorum but of absurdity, forbade her these previously delightful entertainments. So it was that, to beguile the long August days, purchases had to be made, and Bella and Elizabeth found their last weeks in Hanover Square taken up with visits to the drapers, to the booksellers, in search of some prospective amusement.

The bookseller’s shop was full, and Bella and Elizabeth had to pick their way through a forest of acquaintances, all despatched on the same desperate errand, to fetch the season’s novelties to while away the long country summer. In a street off Piccadilly, the brown little shop was enduring its busiest week of the year, and the gentleman proprietor was wringing his hands as he tried to satisfy each lady with an interesting novelty; and Bella could see, as she quietly picked over the loose-bound piles, that the task of reconciling an individual recommendation with the sort of book which, fashion dictated, all London would be raving over by November, would indeed drive anyone to wring his hands in despair. Just now, Mr Sandoe was attempting to pacify a substantial marchioness, whose bulk and wide-mouthed face made her, without reason, appear actually to be hungry for a few volumes. Bella, waiting patiently for his attention, picked up an unbound volume; a limp volume of poems about rivers, lakes, mountains, trees – she turned the pages, but no human being was there, only the poet and his trembling emotions laid out for the admiring reader like the last stages of a dissection. There was enough of that, Bella felt, in the country already, and she wanted no slim volume of tremulous awareness, silently deploring her own infallible sense of desolation when she looked at an unpeopled mountain. Bella, who always thought that the one thing the view of an empty meadow wanted to complete it was a picnic of fifteen or twenty well-dressed gentlefolk artistically arranged, set down the exquisitely self-satisfied volume with an uncharacteristic burst of dislike.

‘Miss Garraway,’ a voice broke in. ‘And Miss Elizabeth Garraway – charmed, how pleasant to meet old friends when out on an errand – so tiring, so enervating, so refreshing to meet, merely, with two such—’

‘How do you do, ma’am,’ Bella said, bobbing to the Duchesse de Neaud, who was accompanied by one of the sour-faced Gilbert girls. ‘You are, I perceive, on the same errand as we are—’ then, recollecting herself, ‘—though you, ma’am, will have the benefit of a great library to while away your days.’

The Duchesse, indeed, was going to Windsor with the Court, as she acknowledged with a profound and unspeaking nod of the head. She was a great favourite of the King, who had known her in his sisters’ nurseries for half a century, and was an intimate, she felt able to imply in conversation, of the Queen.

‘I long for the day – quite long, my dear – when I am able to spend a moment in a chair with a book at Windsor – quite impossible. HM, you know …’ (this in a confidential whisper) ‘… remarkable little body, great energy, of course – entirely unable to set down, to lose oneself – quite exhausting, although—’ the Duchesse seemed suddenly terrified, as if another pair of listening ears might retell this comparative lack of enthusiasm and cast the Duchesse from her blissful social position into the outer darkness, ‘—nothing but pleasure in the duty, you know, nothing but, so simple, so easy, so pleased with every small service. And Windsor, you know, where every prospect pleases …’

The Duchesse looked around her a trifle wildly, perhaps recalling, far too late, how the second half of the line went. The Gilbert girl took the opportunity to force a simper and bob at Bella and Elizabeth.