Fanny and Stella (10 page)

But Fanny was fascinated and dazzled by the gaudy peacock colours of these women, by their blowsy ease and raucous laughter, by their painted faces and their billowing, untidy hair, by the smell of sweat and cheap scent which seemed to cling about them, and by other, strangely compulsive smells, which she would have thought she shouldn’t like, but she did. And the whores were, by and large, nice to her. They would call her ‘Dearie’ or ‘Margery’ or ‘Mary-Ann’ or ‘Miss Nancy’, and most of the time it was not in a nasty way. Sometimes she would talk to them, and she found – to her surprise – that she was drawn to them and liked them more than she thought she would. They did not judge her like the others. They did not look down upon her. They would curse and cuss her in a friendly way, and then she would answer back with a haughty toss of her head and they would laugh uproariously.

That it was all wrong in the eyes of God, Fanny of course knew. Between those endless prayers and Bible readings at home and the droning, drowsy sermons in church on a Sunday, Fanny had come to understand the meaning of Sodom and Gomorrah. Harry had told her she was a sodomite (or she would be when the deed was accomplished). Fanny did not altogether care for the word. Sticks and stones, she said to herself, may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.

That it was all wrong under the laws of the land, she quickly discovered, and then wished that she had not. She was eleven or twelve when Harry first got into trouble with the police. The angry conversations went on for days behind the closed mahogany doors of 35 Wimpole Street. But Fanny heard enough about the wretched Italian boy, and Harry filled in the rest, swearing her to secrecy. Harry had been foolish and had fallen in love with a boy who abused his trust. Money was demanded and when no more was forthcoming, the boy carried out his threat. Harry was arrested and taken before the magistrate. It was all a pack of lies, he claimed, his handsome, honest face shining bright with righteous indignation. Fortunately his handsome, honest face carried the day and the case was dismissed.

And then, two or three years later, when Fanny was fifteen or sixteen – she could not properly recall – Harry was arrested in Weymouth Mews in the middle of the night and there was a great to-do and much weeping and wailing and talk of prisons and hard labour. It was a great and terrible scandal, made even worse by the fact that Papa was a very distinguished judge. Harry had shamed himself, shamed his family and shamed his Papa.

Harry was to go away, to disappear, and no one was supposed to know anything about it. And no one was ever to see him again, save for Papa, and perhaps Lucy (and Mary Batson, of course, as she was so old and it was thought that a permanent separation from her darling Harry would hasten her demise).

But as the months and years passed, Papa relented a little, and Harry the prodigal son would sometimes return from exile in Scotland to the bosom of his family, and the blood of fatted calves would be spilt. But only at the small villa in Isleworth, and never, ever in Wimpole Street, for fear of discovery. And through all the long years, despite the separation, the bond between herself and Harry was unbroken, and even strengthened.

What was to become of her? There were two, and only two, professions for the Parks: soldiering and the law. But the idea of Fanny going for a soldier was patently ludicrous. Even Papa had smiled at the idea. So law was the only option. Papa had decided that the best and most profitable – by which he meant morally profitable – course was for Fanny to be articled to a solicitor. He had a gentleman in mind, Mr Gepp of Chelmsford. A steady, slow, solid gentleman with a steady, slow, solid county-town practice.

Judge Alexander Park fervently hoped and prayed that a few steady, slow and solid years under the watchful eye of Mr Gepp would rub off on Frederick, that his enthusiasms would be curbed, that his manner would become graver and more manly, that he would grow some sense – and perhaps even some whiskers.

But the months and years passed and Frederick did not seem to be growing any sense at all. Quite the reverse. The older he got, the less manly, the more effeminate, the more extreme he became. There he would stand, a cigarette in his gloved left hand, his right leg bent slightly forwards, his hips tilted like a woman of the street. His hair would be teased and shined and curled, and he would reek of strong perfume. His face in repose was disdainful, but his eyes were like a lizard’s, dark and glittering and restless. He did not have to speak. He did not have to act. His very being, his very presence proclaimed and declared to all the world the sodomite that he was.

It was a strange thing, but it was hard to imagine where Frederick had come from, or who he took after. Rack his brains as hard as he could, Judge Park could not recollect any family member on either side who bore even the remotest resemblance to Frederick. It was as if his son were undergoing a species of transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to brilliant, gaudy butterfly, and there were times when he found himself half-believing Mary Batson’s nonsense about changelings and fairy folk.

Frederick was now a gabbling, good-natured, prattling, gossiping, charming young man who seemed older – much older – and more worldly than his nineteen years, who caused heads to turn for all the wrong reasons whenever he entered a room. He was loud and lewd, and laughed uproariously at his own jokes. Ladies adored him, and he invariably had them in fits of hysterics. Men were either bewildered by him, or made uneasy or hostile by his otherness, by his difference (though a few, surprisingly, were flattered by his violent flirtatiousness).

‘Theatrical’ was the word, perhaps the only word (or at least the only decent word), to describe the young man that Frederick had turned into. He lived for the theatre. The theatre was his day and his night; his sun and moon and stars; his darkening storms and sunlit passages. There was little or no division between the dressing up and make-believe of the theatre and the dressing up and make-believe of his daily life. They were one and the same. All the world was his stage, and Frederick seemed to ricochet between melodrama, tragedy and comedy – especially comedy of the low and vulgar variety.

There were times when Judge Park had to pinch himself to make sure that he was not dreaming, that he had not strayed into a fairy realm, or fallen down a rabbit hole and found himself in Wonderland, like the young heroine of Mr Lewis Carroll’s story. Frederick’s world – or that small portion of Frederick’s world of which he had caught glimpses – struck him as decidedly odd. It was a grotesquerie where the men were more like women and the women, though seemingly rarer than unicorns, behaved like men. Nothing was straightforward. Nothing was serious. All was surface. Nothing was substance. It was amorphous, ephemeral and inconsequential and yet, for its denizens, at least, it seemed compelling and all-absorbing.

Of those denizens, from the few that he had met, Judge Park had formed a low opinion, a very low opinion. There was Mr Charles Pavitt, a plump miller’s son from Chelmsford who was some sort of professional actor. Then there was the fat and florid Mr Martin Luther Cumming who giggled constantly. Mr Cumming was an Oxford man, supposedly, though he had yet to hear an intelligent remark from him. There was Mr Amos Westropp Gibbings, with a girlish lisp and more money than sense. And finally there was Mr Ernest Boulton, a delicately beautiful young man with sad eyes and a startlingly lovely soprano voice. Mr Boulton was apparently Frederick’s best friend and boon companion and they spent hours closeted together, though how they had first met was a mystery that had never been satisfactorily unravelled. There were others, too, who came and went and went and came so often that they seemed to blur into one long, lingering shriek of effeminacy.

Frederick’s passion for burlesque had led him into the deplorable habit, in Judge Park’s view, of dressing up in women’s attire and acting the parts of women. But even Judge Park had to concede that sometimes he did this with consummate skill, having a natural bent for playing domineering duchesses and dowagers of a certain age with great flair and an eye for comic detail that made his audiences laugh out loud.

What could he hope for, what hope was there, for this strange hybrid child, for his changeling son? He was under no illusions. His elder son Harry was tainted with sodomy. There could be no doubt about that and, however much Harry’s version of the incident in Weymouth Mews differed from that of Police Constable George White, it was clear to everyone that sodomy was at the very heart of the transaction. And if Harry was so tainted, so stained with sodomy, then Judge Park feared that there could be very little doubt that Frederick was equally tainted, equally stained with the sins of the Cities of the Plain.

Judge Alexander Park was a devout Christian, ‘sound in principles, firmly and zealously attached to the sound orthodox doctrines of the Church of England, and pure and correct in his morals’. But devout though he was, devout as his dear departed wife had been, neither of them were Christians of the hellfire and brimstone variety. With half of those children born to him already dead and buried, Judge Park loved and valued those still left to him. He sorrowed and grieved and prayed for Frederick, just as he sorrowed and grieved and prayed for Harry. He could not but despise and loathe the sin, but he could not help loving the sinners. How could he not love his sinful sons? They were the flesh of his flesh, the fruit of his loins. And if that fruit was rotten, then he must shoulder some of the blame and some of the burden and he must do whatever he had to do, whatever could be done, to help and protect them.

What could he hope for – what hope was there – for his errant sons? He could not bear to see them punished. The gravest penalty for sodomy had only been abolished a year or two ago, but ten years to life with hard labour was equally a sentence of certain death. Such a sentence would crush and break them within weeks, and their decline and death would be agonising and inevitable, and every night as he lay sleepless in bed he trembled at the prospect of the terrible fates that might befall his two sodomitic sons.

8

A Tale of Two Sisters

A SISTER’S LOVE : There is no holier feeling than a sister’s love – no affection purer and more enduring than hers.

The Family Treasury
, 1854

W 
hat could she say about Fanny? That she was a formidable actress? That she was funny? That she was courageous? That she was loyal? That she drank too much, spoke too much and laughed too loudly? That she was wise beyond her years? That she looked older than her years? (And Stella was sure that she was not being unkind when she said this, as it was universally agreed that Fanny, with what might be called her ‘sterner features’, certainly did look older, very much older, than her years.) That she knew everything there was to know about Mary-Anns (as well as knowing every Mary-Ann on the pad in London)? That she was steeped, not to say pickled, in the ancient mysteries and rituals of drag? That she was generous, more than generous – generous to a fault, in fact – with her favours? That despite the disadvantages of person she laboured under, Fanny had, more often than not, snatched erotic victory from the jaws of defeat by a combination of charm, determination, guile and utter ruthlessness? That she was a true friend? That she was a loyal sister, if not by ties of consanguinity then by the most secret and the most sacred bonds of sorority and of sodomy?

Miss Fanny Winifred Park was one of those young ladies who had blossomed into womanhood early. By the age of sixteen, when most well brought-up girls had but a dim apprehension of distant marriage and motherhood, Miss Fanny Winifred Park was already well schooled in the dark arts of seduction and sodomy. She was certainly no stranger to those thronged thoroughfares around Coventry Street and the Haymarket where the gay ladies of London plied their trade so vigorously. Indeed, Miss Fanny Winifred Park had made her professional debut, so to speak, on this particular West End stage, not far short of her seventeenth birthday, and by dint of assiduous application and hard practice had risen rapidly through the ranks of her chosen profession.

It was a curious thing, but she soon discovered that she was considerably more successful in selling herself when she was in drag than when she was out of drag. While it was certainly true that there were some men to whom a painted and effeminate youth strongly appealed, there were a great many more who were interested in her when she was dressed as a woman.

Miss Fanny Winifred Park was nothing if not a realist. Nature had not endowed her with an abundance of personal advantages. In matters of face, figure, complexion, teeth and hair, Nature had been less than generous (if not downright stingy), and she was only too well aware that in the hierarchy of painted effeminate youths working the streets, she barely reached the middle rank. Though there were some who had left their youth far behind them and now relied on paint slapped on like stucco, equally there were plenty of other, prettier boys who skimmed off the choicest punters and steamers. Not that she was complaining. After all, they were all God’s creatures.

Fanny, however, when she was dressed in silk and suitably padded with a bustle and false bubbies, bewigged and with a generous application of paint, was transformed into what was generally termed a handsome woman. Not beautiful, certainly, but then not plain. Nor was there any of the blushing virgin nonsense about her. She was, she liked to think, very much a ‘Girl of the Period’, as the
Saturday Review
had so memorably phrased it: a fast girl, a girl who lived her life to the full, who drank and smoked, who went about and abroad and was curious about the world. A girl not trepidatious about life; a girl not startled by her own shadow; a girl not hidebound by convention and propriety and all those other suffocating corsets of the mind.