Angelica rattles on. ‘Oh, she has ever talked this way, “indentured servitude” and “legal prostitution” and la-la-la – one wonders how she got to be where she is, for she is not so very beautiful …?’ Inflecting this last phrase as a question, she looks back at him over her shoulder with her wide clear eyes. Her powdered cheek is apricot-soft, but his tongue is fat in his mouth, his mind too slow; he cannot say the words he wishes he could, and which she is waiting for: ‘Not as beautiful as you.’
Whenever Mr Hancock feels overpowered by his situation, he turns his mercantile eye upon it. And so, on entering Mrs Chappell’s great salon, he does not note the shards of rainbow-tipped light that bounce across the walls, but the rock-crystal pendants of the chandelier that scattered them, and he does not see the bare throats and bosoms of the girls but rather the gauzy muslin they are swathed in. He sees barley-sugar glass sconces and says to himself, Murano; he sees the pretty pink-and-green-painted porcelain vases and thinks, Bow; the fine silk upholstery … he sniffs. French, without question. Smuggled. Now, is that not the measure of the woman? In his mind he strips the place down into its many precious parts – the swagged silk at the windows; the decanters of sack and port and shrub; the leopard-spotted heartwood tables – names them carefully and prices them up, as if by understanding the machinery he might also understand its effect. He marks the people, of course, but both sexes are a bafflement to him. They are not his sort, although perhaps I must now try to be theirs, he thinks to himself. Each of the women is dazzlingly turned out in fashions quite new to him, and he endeavours to commit to memory the particular ways they dress their hair and wear their gowns, so that he might describe it to Sukie later. She is always hungry to know the fashions of the city, but he has no eye for them: ‘No, but what kind of train?’ she demands, or, ‘And you did not note whether she carried a fan?’ and so he finds he has let her down once more.
‘Mark that,’ says Angelica, ‘Parliament is in session here if not yet in the House.’
He looks, and yes, indeed, these men now filing in are all great men, their faces so well known to him that it feels as if he has stepped through flat paper into a moving version of the pamphlets passed around his coffee-house. He has furthermore seen some of them in person on occasion, when business sends him to the westerly end of Oxford Street or the fine leafy squares to its north, and sometimes in the reeking bellowing crowd at cockfights or exhibitions, but they are of a different water, he knows that, not to be touched or spoken to however close they pass him by.
‘Are they all – are they here for me?’ he asks weakly. ‘For my mermaid?’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘It’s the talk of the town.’
‘All their important doings,’ he says, ‘and they set them by to come here?’
‘To see your mermaid.’
He cannot credit it. Members of Parliament, titled men, with the most sharpened intellect and loftiest ambition, have been drawn to something he, Mr Hancock, brought before them. ‘I had never expected such a thing,’ he says, and she squeezes his hand as if he were a little child brought as a treat to the menagerie.
‘You may expect this sort of thing now,’ she says.
All this being said, to him they do not appear splendid. Their blue-and-buff costumes are too much of a muchness for him to tell one from another, although some of them are young and tall and others bent old men, or corpulent in their middle age. Furthermore they are neither clean nor tidy; they look as if they have not slept at all, and from their stained shirts and unfurled stocks comes the acrid smell of bodies so soused in liquor that it now emanates from their pores. He rasps his hand across his jaw; it is smoother, probably, than some of theirs, which straggle with three days’ growth or more.
They mark him as he moves amongst them – he feels the twitching of their small eyes – but they cannot make sense of him. Is he a tradesman come stumbling in at the wrong door? A persistent drunk yearning after one of the acolytes of Venus? Or indeed, an angry father come to haul his daughter back to niceness? They cannot guess; they will not approach him, and they turn back into their conversations.
‘Did ’oo imagine,’ one drawls, ‘that such a fing would come of it?’
‘Hie could ey hev?’ replies his friend. ‘Ey never titched the girl before.’
Of course if Mr Hancock finds their speech peculiar it is only for his own lack of cultivation: if he cannot recognise their baby-talk and garbled vowels as the signallers of good breeding that they are, the loss is all his. Since he has spent two score years outside the society of genteel Whigs, he must be forgiven for hearing their speech as a cacophony of pantomime sneezes; they pronounce the first syllable with great energy, and trail off into a drawl as if between a word’s first letter and its last they have lost all conviction in what they are saying. He is aware – and ashamed of – his dislike for them; he is a Tory through and through, as his father was before him. It is the logical, the patriotic, the honest choice. He has never until this moment felt in any means awkward about it.
At the far end of the room a crowd has gathered around another pair of double doors, and as he watches this crowd loosens and pulls back a step or two as a couple emerge, pink-faced and giddy.
‘What is it like?’ he hears the waiting people cry, but the gabble of the couple is inaudible at this distance: he only hears the girl’s breathless giggle and sees her raise her fists to either side of her face in mimicry of the mermaid’s rigor. Some of the young men and women try to peep through the gap in the door.
‘Oh, ho, no, you must wait your turn!’ and in goes a trio of girls with their arms knotted around one another. Once within they let up a-shrieking, and barrel back out at once, clamouring their surprise and horror.
‘All these people,’ says Angelica Neal, ‘come to see your mermaid. Come on your account.’ She drags him through the crowd breathlessly, chattering over her shoulder. ‘The girls are enthralled by it; they relish being so frightened. I believe you must have many extraordinary tales.’
Her eyes flick briefly to his mouth before she turns back to the door and raps her fist against it. ‘Hurry up in there! We are more important than you!’ She turns her back to the door so she can look up at him. ‘I wonder does it reassure the men,’ she says, ‘the way Bel scorns the situation of women? They can feel easy that she has chose this life herself.’
Again he has nothing to add, save for a meek ‘I daresay’.
‘I chose it,’ she says softly. She draws closer to him, a warm cloud of starch and flowers and her own ripe skin-scent. ‘Do you know why?’
He shakes his head.
‘Because I am never happier than in a man’s embrace. There is no pleasure in the world that I like better.’ Their bodies are very close; she presses her palms flat against the door on either side of her hips so that she is turned to face him square on. He tries not to gaze upon her bosom but it is always in his vision as he looks bashfully at her throat, her chin, her lips: it rises pale and soft as she breathes deeply, and the velvet flowers heave.
When the doors open behind her she falls flat on her back.
Three young navymen in plush indigo jackets and white breeches are coming out, and when she tumbles nearly straight into them they cannot disentangle their consternation from their mirth.
‘’Pon my soul,’ says one, his black hair all awry, while the others – merry with wine – clutch their sides until tears squeeze from their eyes. ‘’Pon my soul, you dizzy maid, what were you about?’
Mr Hancock stands all dismayed; the collapse of his companion is one thing, but he has always felt wistful at the sight of young men in blue jackets; since his youth he cherished the ambition that a son of his would go to the navy, and it may yet be that young Henry carouses now on some foreign shore, a midshipman with ruffled curls just as these he sees before him.