Forrest Leo - The Gentleman

‘Yes, yes, but do you recognise them?’ I demand.

‘Ought I to?’

‘I had rather hoped so. Could they be Morris?’ I am grasping at straws. They are clearly not Morris.

‘You know they couldn’t be.’ There is disappointment in his voice — he sounds as I did a moment ago answering Lizzie’s absurd questions.

‘Arnold?’ I ask him. It is even more ridiculous. What am I saying?

‘I rather think not,’ he says, offended by the very thought.

‘Swinburne?’ I wish I could stop myself, but I cannot. If I accept the reality of the situation it may break me.

‘Really, sir!’ he says, now terribly disappointed and a little hurt by the depths of my stupidity. I am desperate.

‘Then WHO, damn it?’ I cry.

‘Someone new, sir,’ he replies.

Lizzie, who has been observing the exchange with the breathless excitement of a gambling man watching a tennis match, begins to ask a question I would rather not consider. ‘Could it—’

‘No,’ I say in a tone that brooks no argument.

‘But—’ protests my tone-deaf sister.

‘NO.’

‘This is Mrs Savage’s handwriting,’ says Simmons. Damn him. I should sack him on the spot for even suggesting such a thing.

‘I know that,’ I reply acidly.

‘Though I hesitate to suggest the obvious explanation, sir,’ carries on my soon-to-be-former butler, ‘I cannot in the name of reason and logic let it lie. When one eliminates the impossible, what is left, no matter how improbable—’

I cut him off. I know . I do not want to hear it. ‘Give them back,’ I say petulantly. He hands me a few pages, but keeps a few for himself. We both read Vivien’s poetry for a moment. I will not comment on its quality any further than I have already done. I cannot. It is painful.

‘These are quite good, sir,’ he says. I glower. They are. Though something is the matter with their structure. They are written in no metre I have ever encountered; in fact, they look rather like vers libre, and it is an affront to me that anyone living beneath my roof would dare compose in vers libre .

‘If you think about it, Nellie,’ says Lizzie, ‘the situation is really very funny.’

‘NO IT’S NOT,’ I say hotly. I am feeling the level ground upon which I once thought I stood sliding out from under me. Too many things are happening at once. I do not like it. I am not an adventurous soul, I am an Englishman. I desire things to remain quite the way they have always been; but suddenly everything is changing. It is awful.

I have dabbled in madness,* but what is wonderful about madness is that there is no ground to shake beneath your feet. When there is nothing that is level, then there can be nothing that is not level. (If that is complicated to you, I suggest you walk into a very dark room and shut the door. Look around. There is nothing. Close your eyes. There is no difference. Stand on your head — the world is not upside down; it remains only black. Spin in circles until you fall over. Still the world is black. Do everything you can manage to disorient yourself — try as you might, you will not be able to for the world is still black .)* I am not at present in Bedlam, however.* I am in my study, and am standing on what I had presumed to be level ground, but it is abruptly shifting beneath my feet. It is intolerable. I cannot live like this.

Lizzie notices my night’s work on the desk. ‘What’s this?’ she asks.

‘Nothing,’ I say. I am not eager for her to read it, in light of the things just revealed.

‘Let me see it,’ she says.

‘No.’

‘Please?’

‘No!’

While I have been guarding it from Lizzie, Simmons has come behind me and plucked it off the desk. By the time I notice, he is reading it and looking unwell.

‘Damn it, Simmons,’ I cry, ‘give it back!’ After a long moment he does. He doesn’t say anything. If there’s anything worse than Simmons passing judgment on my work, it’s Simmons remaining silent. He simply stands there, looking aggrieved and a little affronted. Finally I say, ‘Well?’

‘It’s not your best, sir,’ he says.

‘I know that, damn it!’ I wish he had not read it. I wish I had not asked his opinion. I wish this day had not happened. I suddenly feel that yesterday afternoon I was not so miserable as I am now. If I could go back in time and simply be unhappily married I would leap at the chance. It is funny how every time one thinks things can get no worse, they do. I think it is a metaphor for life. Or perhaps it’s not a metaphor at all and simply is life. I marvel that I used to be considered a happy person. You would not think it reading this, but it is true. I was once untroubled and light of heart.*

Lizzie asks what is, at the moment, the single least useful question she could ask: ‘Where’s your wife?’

‘I DON’T KNOW!’

Lizzie and Simmons are silent, taken aback by my volume. They look at me in what seems a most accusatory manner, though that is perhaps only a projection of my own guilty and unstable mind. I did not mean to yell at them. I never used to yell.

‘I might know,’ I amend.

Expectant silence.

‘This is going to sound much worse than it really is.’ I consider the best way to put it. ‘Yesterday evening before you arrived,’ I try, ‘I was walking home and I met a priest—’

‘Who had tripped over a cobblestone and was cursing the Devil and you said without the Devil we’d both be out of a job, yes, you told us.’ Lizzie may be growing stupider, but even if she cannot tell what is and is not written by a Rossetti her mind is still quicker than most.

‘Yes. Well. You remember the gentleman last night you met coming out of my study?’

‘What’s he have to do with anything?’

I hesitate. ‘Well. He said that he came to thank me for the kind word.’

‘I don’t understand,’ says Lizzie. She is thick. I can hear the gears turning in Simmons’s head. Perhaps he is made of clockwork. This would explain his inhuman correctness in things.

I take a breath and it all comes tumbling out. ‘And then I complained about my wife and told him I couldn’t write and gave him a book and he said everything would be alright.’

Lizzie’s face is still blank, but Simmons has apprehended. ‘Oh sir,’ he says.

‘What?’ demands Lizzie.

Simmons almost looks like he is going to laugh, but I suppose that must be nervous tension. ‘Sir, really ?’

‘Shut up, Simmons,’ I snap.

‘What’s going on?’ says soft-witted Lizzie.

‘He believes he gave Mistress Vivien to the Devil,’ says Simmons. Lizzie’s eyes widen, and I can see that she is about to say awful things to me. I rush to cut her off.

‘I may have given— Actually, no, no, wait, there was no giving involved. The Devil may have taken her. Possibly.’ I am running backward desperately. I do feel I have given Vivien away, though as I think of it that seems unfair to myself. I certainly never asked the Gentleman to take her. At least not directly.

‘Oh, Nellie,’ says Lizzie in a tone of voice that makes me want to find a hole and crawl into it and die. ‘You really are an awful person.’

‘I would have thought, given the situation, that the two of you might show a trifle more understanding,’ I say bitterly.

They just stare at me. I cannot bear it. I try to find the silver lining, try to make them see it, try to regain some of my former stature in their eyes. ( Had I any stature? Perhaps not, not in recent days or weeks or months. I had once, I am certain. For Simmons maybe not in a long while.)

‘Don’t you see?’ I exclaim. ‘This is a good thing! I’m free! I can write again! I wrote all night.’