False Colors (14 page)

There was no sight, John thought, better than that of HMS
Albion
coming down the slipway with the rush and splash and sudden majestic lift of a descending swan. Sir Eustace Foulkes, ashamed perhaps of the way things turned out, had put in a good word for him, and when John, tail between his legs, had stepped off the returning merchant ship, onto the docks at Portsmouth, he had discovered the
Albion
waiting for him. A newly commissioned fifth rate, he was to serve only as the third lieutenant, but after four months of existing on half pay, it was deliverance.

Gibraltar had been purgatory. Friends, met on the docks, had to be told that he had blown his chance at captaincy and had his ship taken away. He had gone hoarse regaling horrified listeners with the tale of his dealings with the Dey. Though each time the listener nodded sagely at the end and said, “in your position, old boy, I’d have done exactly the same,” he could not avoid the thought that he was now marked down in the Admiralty’s books as an over-emotional fanatic, not to be left in charge of the big guns.

The charge of fanaticism occupied his nights also. When another day of lingering fruitlessly in the white paneled reception rooms of the Embassy was over and his meager supper eaten, he would retire to his room to pray. His worn copy of the Bible had become something of a scourge, and he returned to it in morbid compulsion, his thoughts see-sawing between self rebuke and craving.

Frightening Alfie away had not helped. He just haunted John’s nights, filling his dreams with the explicit lust and jealousy he fought off during the day. Finally Admiral Turner, tripping over John’s ankle as he came in to the waiting room in the early dawn, had looked him in the face and said, “The climate here doesn’t suit you, boy. You might have more luck at home.”

So John closed the door on the room he had shared with Alfie; closed the weeks of fruitless prayer inside it, and returned to England. Throwing himself into balls and masquerades, he did his best to charm the ladies; an aim he succeeded in rather too well for his own liking. Now he had several of them chasing him, and he had begun to understand that what he had thought his inherent virtue was in fact a lack of capacity.

“You must be so proud!” exclaimed his escort, Mrs. Lavinia Deane, clutching his arm tightly and “accidentally” brushing it with her overflowing bosom.

“I am,” he said, smiling as he supposed he ought to smile; inwardly quailing at the realization that his slight discomfort was not normal. Not virtuous at all—quite the opposite, in fact. If he were a normal man he should feel a little spark of desire at the contact. He should be courteously controlling it, not simply lacking in the feeling at all.

He turned his gaze back to the
Albion
, and at once all his doubts fled, enthusiasm dragging him forward a step. “She is beautiful! But really this is Captain Gillingham’s day. He oversaw her building from the plans upwards and brooded over her like a chicken on an egg. In a way, she’s his child. I’m just a hired servant.”

“You’re not ‘just’ anything.” Mrs. Deane pressed his arm again, leading him to have uncharitable thoughts about the notorious lustfulness of widows. But it was hardly her fault that he had used her to prove something to himself. Smiling again, he felt grimy with guilt when she beamed back.

A beautiful woman, with her glossy black hair curled to the height of fashion and her robin’s egg blue eyes startling in their frame of black lashes. Her complexion was all milk and roses and her figure upright but full. He knew from the reactions of other men that she was infinitely desirable, that he was infinitely to be envied. But it was becoming increasingly clear to him that he couldn’t do this. He couldn’t flatter, or wonder, or worship her as she deserved. He hated himself for it, but she spoke to nothing in him at all—and the weary, persistent gallantry prevented him from even becoming her friend.

Dishonesty, all of it. Yet another unavoidable sin. “Let me take you on board,” he said, eager to explore the new ship—to get to know her; wander through her curved recesses, stand alone in the great cavern of her empty hold and breathe in. Never yet inhabited, she was sweet-smelling still, scented of pitch and oak, sharp and clean and bracing as a strong cup of tea.
“Most of my gentlemen would prefer to spend their time on other sports,” said Mrs. Deane, and laughed aloud at the expression on his face. Letting go of his arm, she tapped him sharply with her closed fan. “Oh, Lieutenant, you think yourself so inscrutable! But I assure you I have your measure.”
“You do?” Confounded, he looked at her properly, perhaps for the first time, seeing the wisdom in her experienced eyes. “If so, madam, you have the advantage of me.”
“You are so sweet.” Her smile brought out dimples in both cheeks. “I do believe you’re speaking the truth. Come, then, let me crawl around this damp hulk for your amusement and we’ll talk.”
Unsettled, John escorted her down into one of the small jollyboats which plied to and fro across the harbor. She sat composedly in its bows, though she grew pale by the time he had rowed her across the turbulence of the
Albion
’s launch and to her side. There were, fortunately, carpenters and sailors aboard who could lower a rope for him to tie about her to haul her aboard, for she would never have got up the side in all those petticoats.
“As you were,” he said to the men. “We’re just sightseeing.” And he noted with a lurch of regret how much more respect they seemed to have for him after seeing him with such a fine woman.
Mrs. Deane tore him strangely between two worlds. The sea, the ship, the tars and the ropes about him, they were his reality. She was something different, and it seemed she herself was not unconscious of the fact.
“Well, it is spacious, at least,” she said, going straight to the captain’s cabin and sitting down on a locker beneath the stern window. He wondered if she had deliberately chosen the place for effect, because the watery sunlight outside surrounded her in a tissue of fine gold, rubbing out such lines on her face as her careful make-up had failed to conceal. “Sit down here by me.”
He perched beside her, feeling like a wild bird she brought to her hand with seed, poised to fly. Had he been completely underestimating her all this time? Missing out on a sharp mind because he was too closely concerned with his own concerns? “Have I been a very great idiot?”
She smiled again—the one with the dimples. “Only a small one. You see, I know your father.”
John straightened as if he’d been kicked. “You didn’t mention that.”
“No need to pull that acid face with me!” Mrs. Deane opened her fan slowly with her left hand and gazed at him over the top. “I didn’t like him at all!”
“It possibly shows an ungrateful spirit in me,” John laughed, “but I’m glad to hear it. I should have been very embarrassed indeed if I knew you were one of his set.”
“Dreadful people,” she agreed. “They think one enjoys oneself by an endless procession of new vices. For myself I prefer to have one or two vices, properly matured.” Raising an impeccably curved eyebrow, she challenged him to react to that. But beyond smirking in amusement and dropping his head in an attempt to hide it, he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Your father attempted to add me to his collection of trophies. This was at the time I was married to dear Deane, of course. Though I wouldn’t have considered the man even if I had been free.”
“You…have been taking your revenge?” John hazarded, still all at sea. It seemed that while he had been trying to prove something with her, she had been having her own game with him. It made him feel, truth be told, a great deal happier.
She laughed. “Oh, you
can
be sharp? I wondered if you were simply a little dense. But true, it’s a pleasant thought to know that rumor of my bearing you company—voluntarily—will be a well deserved thorn in Cavendish’s pride. But also, you know, I was curious. He painted you as such a prude!”
“I think…” John opened one of the windows in an effort to cool a conversation which had suddenly become very warm. It was telling, he supposed, that he had never enjoyed her company more than he was doing now, when all pretence of attraction had been dropped. “I think that certainly I have been a prude, in the past. What I am now, I don’t…I don’t really know. I haven’t finished becoming it.”
“Lord! A philosopher!” she mocked, not unkindly. “Well, I own myself defeated. What you were to me was a curiosity and a challenge. Only the second challenge, I may say, at which I have ever failed. And the first…” She dropped her fan, and when he handed it back put her fingers on his and gave him a mischievous look. “Well, his desires ran in an entirely different channel.”
“You are the wickedest woman I’ve ever met!” he exclaimed, laughing. Half shocked and half delighted by the outrageous innuendo, he was at first simply diverted. A heartbeat later, however, the irreverence made him think of Alfie. Her joy in life made him think of Alfie, and his smile faltered as he thought that her laughing tolerance was so much more generous, so much more like the loving kindness of God, than his own condemnation. “But I wish we had spoken like this earlier. We could have been such friends!”
She patted his hand in a motherly fashion—though John’s mother would have been horrified to be seen in such a low-cut dress, or with her face painted like a Jezebel. “We were both playing for higher stakes, I believe,” she said. “But in the end one or both of us had to acknowledge that the game was not worth the candle. You are a delightful boy—considering your family—and a pretty one. This interlude has been most productive for me. Do you know you’ve garnered me a set of pearls, a Wedgewood teaservice, two new carriage horses and a liveried page to go with them? Not to mention the highly satisfactory insecurity engendered in my other suitors. I set it down to your good nature that you did not try this experiment with a girl who could have been truly hurt by it.”
John had not deliberately thought of it like that, but it was true that of all the young girls who had been smitten by his personal beauty, he had taken care not to encourage those for whom it obviously meant a great deal. “I know what it is for a man’s… self exploration, to ruin a woman’s happiness. If you know my parents then I need say no more. I hope that whatever I am I shall never be so deliberately cruel.”
“Only inadvertently cruel,” she said, smiling.
“Inadvertently cruel, yes. Of that, I admit, I am more than capable.”
Mrs. Deane looked at him. For a moment the life left her eyes and she seemed all of her forty-five years—a woman who had buried one life, seen her grown children move away, and been left to fill her remaining years in whatever way she pleased. Less free than merely superfluous. Then she smiled, and by effort of will the desert was once more full of flowers. She drew her fan across her eyes as if to wipe away melancholy. “But we still can be friends,” she said. “I presume you know how to write, yes? Just because you’re sailing next week doesn’t mean you can’t write me long, passionate letters about your next
inamorato.
I am not above living through other people’s interesting lives, you know.”
Setting her hand in his, she rose to her feet. Impulsively, he kissed her fingers, and she gave him a sidelong look of reproach, as if to say it was a bit late for that now. “But if you write me sermons, they will go straight on the fire.”
Taking her back to the dock, they parted with more fondness than he had thought possible. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and then envelop his face between her two silk gloved hands, looking at it carefully. “Such a waste!”
“You have a woman’s heart,” he said, a little stung. “There are other things in life than love.”
“But none so important.” Clutching her bonnet against the evening breeze she looked at him warningly. “Say you won’t try to be some sort of saint of the wilderness. I’d hate to think of you withering away, untasted.”
“Madam.” Relief though it was to talk to a woman who seemed to understand, he felt her tolerance went too far. “There is no other choice I can make with honor.”
“Forget honor.”
Honesty, it seemed, did not solve all problems, even if it clarified what the problems were. “I hope I shall never do that.”
“Then do write, John. Write to me. You will need a friend.”
He stood watching as she got into her waiting carriage, waved, and waited until she was gone. Then he returned to the
Albion
and, taking a lantern, descended to the hold. Deep down, in the darkness by her keel, he walked the length of her, surrounded by ribs. It was like being in the belly of the whale. He wondered if he would ever be vomited up again, as Jonah had been; returned to the bright world and to life. But it was of no real account, was it? Because Mrs Deane saw things through a woman’s eyes, and love
wasn’t
everything. He
could
live life celibate and dutiful, like one of the old saints. It had not done them any harm.
Three weeks out from Portsmouth, and again descending into the hold with a lantern, John remembered his determination with a kind of despairing hilarity. It had seemed so simple. It had, after all, always been so simple before to curb his thoughts, to lose himself in mathematics or music, and emerge feeling purified. The mere knowledge of his desires should not make them ungovernable. Yet now it was as if his eyes had been opened. Blind, he hadn’t seen the beauty that surrounded him, but Alfie had given him sight.
On the first day afloat he had come out on deck and stopped dead, ravished by the turn of Lt. Oxford’s throat. Looking away, flushing, he saw the men of the lower deck with their shirts off in this mild weather, hauling on the ropes, their muscles limned in gleaming sweat.
Oh God no!
he’d thought.
God, no, please!
But God, if he was watching, must have been laughing up his sleeve, because the sudden awareness had only grown.
For his new captain and his mess mates, he managed to go through all the familiar routine of the navy, performing his duties exactly as he used, as though nothing had changed. The naval routine around him was familiar as the rhythm of his breathing. But he began to dimly discern another world within it; jealousies too sharp for friendship, smiles too radiant.
Now, setting foot on the latticework of the cable tier, his ear picked up the sound of men arguing, the new sense in him hearing too deep a bitterness. He drew closer—it was his duty to do so, after all—and listened.
“Don’t you dare touch him, he’s
mine
!”
“Calm down! I was just—”
“I know what you were ‘just,’ you slut! I’m gonna...”
John didn’t want anything to do with it. Wanted, in fact, to turn and walk away, to not have been there in the first place; not to have to make yet another decision to ignore his plain duty. But what could he do? He raised his lantern and edged around the coiled anchor cable.
“Sweet Christ, Billy, shut up! The Lieutenant—”
Who was more appalled—the love triangle or himself—it would be hard to say. He could imagine how he seemed to them, all innocent curiosity and gold braid in the dark. Authority coming upon them, unexpected and terrible, aglimmer, like the scythe of death. The third man, quicker than they, or smaller, squirmed through a loop of cable and was gone. He heard the fleeing footsteps bound up the companionway beyond. But Billy Wier and his tie-mate shrank together, clutching at each other for reassurance, and turned to face him. Even as he recoiled in understanding, the terror in their eyes struck him. Their linked hands sheltered one other, as though they huddled together over a candle-flame his breath might put out.
For a long moment he stood undecided, while the dark of the hold became his room at evening, their eyes on him like Alfie’s—crushed, betrayed. He had done the right thing, expressed a correct repugnance for this mockery of love; he had hurt and condemned. Perhaps it was an appropriate punishment that he now found himself envying them.
Billy drew breath to plead, and John screwed his eyes shut against the memories. “I don’t know what you men are up to down here, but get back to work.”
When he opened them again, both sailors were transformed with relief, reprieved. “Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t let me catch you again.”
“I won’t, sir. Thank you, sir.”
As he watched them run up to the upper deck, he had the feeling he had acquired at least one devoted follower. But it was little comfort. His shoulders tensed and ached everywhere that Alfie had touched them, and he was overcome with yearning as he understood that it would never happen again. Never again to be touched with loving hands. Never, even once, to be kissed.
Mrs. Deane had been right. Who should know better than a widow what it was like to have once known the comfort of a beloved body, once to have been enfolded, flesh and soul alike in intimate affection, and to have lost it. He could wish fervently that his appetites had not been woken, that he could return to the innocent, childish world from which Alfie had prized him, but it seemed it was not going to happen.
Carrying on with his inspection, he tried to ignore the pulse of blood in his veins. Tried to distract himself from the pictures of Billy Wier and his friend lying down among the tangled ropes and fucking slowly, but his mind was full of perversity and his prick was hard, and his chest seemed as full of darkness as the belly of the ship. He didn’t know what to do; how much he was supposed to endure before God intervened and made it all go away. Why was the Lord not doing so already? Why was John left to hold on with bleeding hands to this thin cable of determination, feeling it unraveling and parting between his fingertips, dropping him into the pit?
If you want me to stop, help me to stop. I don’t want to disobey you, but please! You know what I need, what I can endure. You made me what I am. Help me. Give me the strength to resist this.
But he knew that tonight, like last night, like almost every night for the past three months, he would sin in his imagination, and in flesh avoid the sin of Sodom only by committing the sin of Onan.