Fanny and Stella (9 page)

Some of the coarse young men from the uncharted erotic swamp of nameless streets and alleyways, the working men, the soldiers and sailors and dark-skinned foreign men, just wanted to fuck her again and again until she could hardly bear the pain. She would leave drenched in the smell of their sweat and their seed and she would feel different. She would feel replete. And again and again she found herself drawn back to these men, drawn back by their feral bodies and their feral smells and, through the strange alchemy of lust, find rest and repose.

Stella loved them all. She knew that she could saunter on to the streets – in drag or out of drag, as Stella, Star of the Strand, or as plain Ernest Boulton – and that sooner or later a man, or several men, would proposition her. She drew notice. She compelled notice. They told her she was beautiful and that they desired her. They wanted her, they needed her. And Stella knew that it was within her power to make them happy.

In her mind, Stella compared going with men – for love or for money – with her life as a great actress. Were the two things
really
so very different? She was kind to men, she gave pleasure to men, to many men, to lonely and unhappy men. She brought joy to their lives, and they returned the favour with pretty gifts. She gave everything she had. She gave herself, body and soul. She performed – consummately – for each and every one. Each encounter was magical and memorable, and until the time came when she would find fame and fortune and marry the younger son of a Duke, she lived in a rosy hue of love and adulation. 

7

Becoming Fanny

And all that’s madly wild, or oddly gay,

We call it only pretty Fanny’s way.

Thomas Parnell,
‘An Elegy, to an Old Beauty’, 1773

N 
umber 35 Wimpole Street was a house of sorrow, and the early years and youth of Master Frederick William Park, or Miss Fanny Winifred Park as she invariably thought of herself, were tinged and tainted with grief.

Sometimes Fanny would sit quietly in the drawing room and solemnly turn the stiff, gilded leaves of the album of family photographs, and she would feel a lump in her throat and tears pricking at her eyes when she came to the photographs of those three of her brothers and two of her sisters who had died in their infancy. As the youngest of twelve children, she had not known these early departed brothers and sisters and she would often wonder how they would have been had they lived.

But Fanny had known her brother Atherton for all her short life. She was seven when the news of his death was received, and she could still recall how 35 Wimpole Street was plunged into a dark and terrible passage of grief, and how her Papa turned suddenly into a frail old man. Lieutenant Atherton Allan Park, so handsome in the full dress uniform of the 24th Bombay Native Infantry, so proud to serve his Queen and country, so cruelly cut down – hacked to death – at Jhansi under the burning Indian sun. Fanny shivered and shuddered at the thought.

Her tears would flow even more strongly when she looked at those precious few photographs of her poor Mamma, taken from them when Fanny was not yet three. Fanny herself could only remember her Mamma in fragments and feelings, as if from a half-waking dream. But Lucy, Sissy and Atherton (until he was so cruelly taken), and Alexander and Georgina – even Harry (though he was only seven at the time) – could all remember Mamma and could all tell Fanny about her and the way she was.

And then there was Mary Batson, who had nursed all twelve of them and had been her Mamma’s nurse when
she
was a little girl. Mary Batson was still with them after all these years, and Mary knew everything there was to know about Mamma. Fanny would sit and listen to Mary’s stories about the old days, about life in Merton Grove, when Wimbledon was a charming small village, about the balls, the parties and the love affairs, and about the time Papa and Mamma got married.

Everybody, from Mary Batson to Papa, to Lucy and Sissy and Georgina, agreed that her Mamma had been sweet-tempered and kind, with never a harsh word to say about anybody or anything.

She was also very devout, and it was she, Mary Batson said, who had introduced morning and evening prayers into the house. Even after Mamma’s early departure from this world, the tradition had continued, though now only in the mornings, and for as long as she could remember Fanny had knelt in the crowded drawing room for what seemed like an age as Papa led the household in prayers of exhortation and supplication. (Not that any of it had done much good, Fanny reflected, given the catalogue of griefs and sorrows that had been inflicted upon them.)

Number 35 Wimpole Street was a house of women. Counting the servants, there were no fewer than thirteen women to three men and two boys. When he was at home, Papa was usually in his study. Atherton was away with the Army in India, and Alexander, who was eleven years older than Fanny, was away at school. Which left only herself and Harry in a houseful of women.

Lucy, who was nineteen when Mamma departed this life, had brought up the two boys, with the assistance of Mary Batson and the kindly interference of two elderly aunts. As the baby of the family, Fanny was showered with love and attention and was frankly a little spoilt. Indeed, both boys were spoilt. Harry was tall and handsome. He could charm the birds from the trees, a talent he used to talk his way out of hot water, in which commodity he frequently found himself immersed. Trouble followed Harry like a shadow, and Papa used to despair of him.

Frederick William, or Fanny Winifred, was altogether a different kettle of fish. He – or she – was quite unlike any of his siblings in looks or personality or demeanour. Mary Batson would nod and shake her head sagely over Freddy. It would often turn out this way, she was fond of saying, when the twelfth child was the last child and a boy-child. A changeling. A child of the fairy folk. And, indeed, for those with eyes to see there was something Puckish, something very sprite-like about Fanny, whose mischievous, joyous and playful nature made him into a regular Robin Goodfellow.

It was hard to be angry with Freddy for very long. He was an appealing if curious child, with large, fluid eyes, a mouth that seemed too big for his face, and an abundance of protruding teeth. He was slight and pale, altogether sickly-looking, and was disinclined to sports or exercise – other than walking the streets and promenading in Regent’s Park – and he looked as if he needed a good dose of sunshine and fresh country air.

Most of all, Freddy liked to sing and to act and to dance. He liked to dress up as a soldier or a sailor or, better still, a lady, and would caper about the house as a Duchess or a drab and make jokes until the servants’ sides ached with laughter. Or he and Harry would write plays and perform them for Lucy and for Papa and Mary Batson. Harry made a dashingly handsome hero, while Freddy would play the imperilled and lovesick heroine, and play her with such conviction and such verve that Lucy and Papa and Mary Batson would sometimes forget for more than a moment that Freddy was a little boy.

Quite when it was that Freddy became Fanny, she could not recollect. Suffice it to say that
she
had not changed. There had been no great or sudden revelation on the road to Damascus for
her
(always a favourite parable of Papa’s). The Temple curtain was not rent asunder and nor had the scales fallen suddenly from
her
eyes. No. Becoming Fanny was a process of realisation, rather than revelation. For as long as she could remember, from before she had words to express it or explain it – before she had words at all – she had always been Fanny in her heart, she had always sensed she was different from other boys – but thankfully not from Harry. Never from Harry.

Fanny could not even remember when Harry stopped calling her Fred or Freddy and started to call her Fanny or Fan. It seemed just to happen, and once or twice Harry forgot himself and let it slip before Lucy, who frowned, and Papa who would turn pale and angry. And all the time Mary Batson would chuckle to herself and shake her head and talk nonsensically of changelings and fairy folk.

B 
ecoming Fanny was a slow and painful process, and as she grew older, she became more and more aware that the world as currently constituted did not always look kindly upon those who were different, upon those who did not conform.

To this uncomprehending and uncaring world she was, she realised, an effeminate youth – an effeminate youth unrelieved by any conventional saving graces of beauty. Her head was too big for her body and her teeth were too big for her mouth; her skin was blotchy and inclined to pustules; her hair was wild and wiry; her eyes rather too close-set; her brows too dark; her nose decidedly too emphatic.

Fanny could not help it. She had tried and tried and tried to change, to become more manly, to be more like Atherton and Alexander. But however hard she tried, she always failed. She was never in step with the merry dance of manliness. It was like chasing her own shadow. It eluded her. It evaded her. However hard she sought it, she was destined and doomed never to find it – in this life at least – and there were many nights and many days over many months and many years when Fanny would weep with frustration, shame and misery, and wonder why it was that she had ever been born.

Why could she not be more like Harry, Fanny would often wonder in angry and bitter retrospects. They were cut from the same cloth, coined from the same mint. They were the same, but different. Harry passed. Nobody noticed and nobody guessed. He was just Harry, charming, handsome Harry, who fitted into the jigsaw of his life perfectly. Well, almost perfectly.

But when it came to herself, everybody noticed, everybody guessed. Fanny could never pass, could never deceive, could never fit in. She was the odd one out, the ugly duckling, the cuckoo in the nest that nobody really wanted or knew what to do with. Nobody except Harry. And then she would weep afresh, with gratitude and love for Harry, and with sorrow that her Mamma was dead.

When the time came, Papa decided not to send Fanny to school. He insisted that she should be a scholar-at-home, taught by Lucy and by Miss Isabella Norris, the governess who had taught all the girls, and though Fanny could not at first fully understand why Papa did not send her away to board at school like Alexander, or be a day boy at a school like Harry, she began to apprehend that her Papa’s decision was a strange amalgam of the best and worst of motives: best because he sought to spare her from the taunts and jibes of cruel boys who could not and would not understand her; and worst, because he wanted to hide her away from the world, to save himself and his family from owning to the shame of having Fanny as his child.

It was a dark day when Fanny finally realised that she was an affront to the world, that her very being offended the world in ways small and large. She was not entirely a man and not entirely a woman. To be sure, she had the body of a man. Harry, who seemed to know everything about the bodies of men, had assured her she was a man. There was no doubt about it, he said. But Fanny craved the company of women and she liked womanish things, like dresses and dances and beaux. She could sew, she could knit, and she was at her happiest at home with her sisters, sitting quietly together, or down in the basement with Mary Batson, listening to the reassuring drone of the servants’ chitter-chatter.

There were times, however, when Fanny was obliged to venture beyond the grand portico of 35 Wimpole Street and go into the world that she so affronted. It was hard. Eyebrows would be raised, gazes averted, backs abruptly turned. Sometimes she would be stared out of countenance, stared at like an exhibit in a museum, or like shoddy goods in a shop window. Glared at with looks of such hatred that she trembled and felt fearful. There would be muttered comments, whispered threats and imprecations. Sometimes she was unceremoniously pushed or shoved aside, spat upon. Or stones were thrown at her. Urchins would hurl abuse, and furious red-faced gentlemen would come up to her and deliver foul-mouthed volleys about who she was and what she was and the terrible fate that would soon befall her – from the noose to the fires of Hell. And she would turn pale and tremble but stand her ground.

Thank goodness for Harry. It was Harry, of course, who so patiently explained everything to her, though where and how he found it all out, God only knew. If she was being truthful, it was not so much of a shock, or even a surprise. Harry’s disclosures only served to confirm what she already more than halfway knew. Fanny knew that she liked men in ways that other boys could not conceive of, and she knew that her feelings were like those of her sisters. And she knew that Harry was the same.

Harry’s disclosures made her feel she might, after all, have some purpose in life, that she might eventually meet and fall in love with a gentleman and live happily ever after. But in the meantime, Harry told her, there were any number of men in London – and not all of them gentlemen – who would want to go with her. He would take her. He would show her. Fanny listened with bright eyes. She felt a shiver of excitement and anticipation at the prospect.

Even though she and Harry both loved and desired men, Harry was different. He had never evinced the least inclination to dress up as a lady or a serving wench or a fallen woman of the streets (and you did not have to venture very far from the front door of 35 Wimpole Street before stumbling across whores by the dozen plying their trade). Lucy, who had inherited her Mamma’s compassion, called them sad creatures, though even she was discomfited by the more brazen types. The elderly spinster aunts merely stuck their noses in the air and hurried past as if to avoid a noxious emission.