Rosie Thomas - The Illusionists

The young couple walked southwards through the park. Suspended behind bare trees the pale orange sun held little warmth, and the insistence of the wind obliged them to keep up a steady pace. Jasper Button would have preferred to stroll and perhaps to have taken hold of Eliza’s arm, but he was compensated for the lack of this opportunity by the way brisk exercise in the chill air brought colour to her cheeks and made her eyes sparkle. He thought how pretty she looked in her neat bonnet and brown coat, and this demure exterior coupled with his awareness of where she was heading only increased his pleasure. She was not just a beauty. She both was and was entirely not what she seemed. He had never met anyone whose contradictions fascinated him so entirely. His admiration made him a little awkward in her company, but he was a determined man who did not lack self-confidence. He would win her in the end, Jasper assured himself. Eliza Dunlop would be his wife, and they would have a handsome family together. Aspects of this plan brought a flush to his cheeks to match Eliza’s own.

Between the trees ahead there was a flash of gold. Laughing, Eliza pointed to a Gothic spire and a canopy topped with pinnacles that spiked the fading sky.

‘The Memorial looks just like the Philosophers’ cabinet,’ she said.

‘Or rather, Devil constructed his cabinet to resemble the Memorial,’ Jasper replied. ‘In either case, they are both monstrosities.’

The sun was setting now and the gilt bronze of the Prince Consort’s statue glimmered so harshly in the horizontal rays that Jasper lifted his hand and pretended to shield his eyes. They skirted the west side of the structure and stopped to examine the modern frieze and sculptures. Jasper seized the opportunity to link Eliza’s arm in his. Her gloved hand rested on his forearm, neither yielding nor resisting. Her chin was tipped upwards as she gazed at the enthroned Albert.

‘I am half expecting his head to rotate and Carlo’s voice to utter a dire warning, aren’t you?’ In a mournful voice she quoted, ‘“I curse you to eternity and beyond.”’

‘Carlo isn’t of a size for it. It would take a giant to work a trick inside that vast thing.’

‘You are right. They would have to recruit a suitable one. Then it would be Boldoni, Wix and Cyclops, and that doesn’t sound nearly so good.’

Eliza laughed again and withdrew her arm. She turned her back on the Memorial and began to walk so fast that Jasper had to scurry to keep up with her. He was thinking, Does Boldoni and Wix sound good to her? Why is that?

‘I am afraid I shall be late,’ she said.

‘You have plenty of time.’

They passed through the traffic in front of the imposing dome of the Royal Albert Hall and set off through the streets of South Kensington. The evening was closing in, and yellow lights shone in comfortable rooms where the curtains had not yet been closed. Jasper admired the handsome stucco residences with their solid front doors surmounting flights of stone steps.

‘I would like to live in one of these houses some day,’ he said. There was no reason not to be ambitious.

‘They’re very large.’

‘A suitable size for a family.’

She turned her head and their eyes met. ‘Is that really what you want, Jasper?’

Her directness unnerved him a little but he answered with complete conviction, ‘Yes. Of course it is. A wife, a family, a comfortable home and security for all of us. What man wouldn’t wish for the same?’

‘Quite a number, I believe,’ she said in her composed manner.

Jasper persisted, ‘And what do you want, Eliza?’

They walked under a street lamp and as the light swept over her face he noticed the sudden bright eagerness of her expression. She looked almost avid, he thought.

‘Ah. I want to know the world, and myself.’

Jasper smiled. He sometimes forgot it, but she was very young. Barely twenty years old. He felt the opposite weight of his own cynical maturity, forged by the years in Stanmore as much as by those that had followed. Eliza was quick to follow his thoughts.

‘You think that sounds jejune? Believe me, I have considered my future with proper seriousness, even though you think I am hardly old enough to have learned my alphabet.’

‘Not in the least. I think you are amazingly aware.’

Eliza almost tossed her head. ‘For one so young and so female , do you mean to say?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I do not want to be like my poor mother. Nor do I even want to be like my sister Faith.’

Jasper knew that Faith and Eliza were the daughters of a moderately prosperous greengrocer. Their mother had been a dutiful wife who had devoted herself to the care of her husband and daughters, always putting aside her own quiet interests in choral music and landscape painting, and then had died of a consumption before Faith turned fifteen. Until Faith’s marriage to Matthew Shaw an aunt had lived in the Dunlop household, but once that union was accomplished the aunt had grown tired of her role and returned to her own home, leaving Eliza in the care of her father. Mr Dunlop had soon remarried, but Eliza did not hold a high level of regard for her mother’s replacement. She had lived next with Faith and Matty, but when their first child was born a nursemaid arrived to help the new mother and the small house had been distinctly too small for all of them. By this time Eliza had declared that she would study art, her determination to do so only increased by John Dunlop’s opinion that this would be a waste of her time and his money.

‘Nevertheless, it is what I shall do,’ Eliza said.

She had a tiny amount of capital of her own, left to her by her mother, and this she used to establish herself in a room in a ladies’ lodging house in Bayswater. From here she had only to walk across the park to the Rawlinson School of Art.

‘A life model?’ her stepmother had gasped, her eyes two circles in her circular face.

‘Yes. It is a perfectly respectable job, and I need employment. Would you and my father prefer it if I went into service?’

John Dunlop had plenty of other pressing concerns, and there would soon be a new addition to his family.

‘Eliza reads books. She has educated herself out of our understanding, my dear. We must allow her to make her own mistakes,’ he said.

So Eliza had got her own way, which was the usual course of events.

Jasper asked too quickly, ‘Why don’t you want to be like your sister? Matty is a good man, they have healthy children, Faith appears – to me, at least – to be very contented.’

‘I hope so. But why do you assume that what makes my sister content would have the same result for me?’

He longed to tell her, Because I want to make you happy. Our happiness together will be my life’s ambition.

They had reached the steps of the school. Preposterously, Jasper found himself scanning the area for a spot where he might sink to his knees and propose to her. He didn’t manage to do this, or anything except gape at her like a village idiot.

A dark thought quivered at the margin of his consciousness, but out of long practice he suppressed it.

Eliza skipped up the steps and paused with her gloved hand on the massive doorknob.

‘You know, Jasper, there are so many places and things I would like to see. There is so much to learn.’

‘Yes,’ Jasper agreed, sounding even in his own ears the essence of dullness.

‘Thank you for walking me here.’

‘I’ll come back after the class and see you home again.’

‘No, please don’t do that. I can look after myself.’

Here was the nub of it, he understood. He wanted to protect her, but to place herself under a man’s protection went against what Eliza imagined to be her independent principles. He would have to be patient.