Levels of Life (5 page)

‘Last year,’ he began, ‘I made an ascent from the Crystal Palace with Mr Lucy and Captain Colvile. The wind was moving between southerly and westerly and back again. We were above the cloud, and our guess was that we were probably crossing the estuary of the Thames. The sun was full above us, and as the captain correctly observed, it was confoundedly hot. So I took off my coat and hung it on one of the spikes of the anchor, and replied to him that there was at least one comfort in being above the clouds. Namely, that a gentleman could sit in public in his shirtsleeves.’

He paused and laughed, expecting laughter in return, as in London, but she had a small smile on her face, and a quizzing look. Alarmed by her silence, he pressed on.

‘But then, you see, as we were sitting there, with so little wind that we felt almost becalmed, we dropped our eyes – well, one of us did, and then alerted the others – downwards. Imagine the scene. There was a broad expanse of fleecy cloud beneath us, preventing our view of the land, or the estuary, below, and then, there, we saw an amazing sight. The sun’ – he held up a hand to indicate its position – ‘was casting on to this flat surface of cloud the very shape and shadow of our balloon. We could see the gasbag, the ropes, the cradle and, strangest of all, our three heads clearly outlined. It was as if we were looking at a colossal photograph of ourselves, of our expedition.’

‘Larger than life.’

‘Indeed.’ But Fred was aware that he had rather garbled his story. The strength of her attention had panicked him. He felt deflated.

‘As we both are. I am larger than life on the stage, as you yourself remarked. And you are larger than life in your very being.’

Fred sensed a pull and lift in his heart. He had deserved censure and received praise. He enjoyed flattery as much as the next man – but again, her words struck him as mere straightforwardness. And here was the paradox of their situation. They were each, by the standards of conventional life, exotic beings, and yet when they were together he discerned no play, no acting, no costume. Even though he was in the walking-out dress of the Blues, and she had only just cast aside furs and a hat which appeared to have a dead owl roosting in it. He was, he admitted, half confused and probably three-quarters in love.

‘If ever I take a balloon flight,’ she said, with a slight, faraway smile, ‘I shall think of you. I promise you that. And I always keep my promises.’

‘Always?’

‘Always if I intend to. Of course there are promises I do not intend to keep when I make them. But those are hardly promises, are they?’

‘Then perhaps you might honour me by promising to make an ascent with me one day?’

She paused. Had he gone too far? But what was the use of straightforwardness, if not saying what you mean, what you feel?

‘But Capitaine Fred, might it not be a little difficult to balance the vessel?’

This was a good practical point: he weighed at least twice as much as she did. They would have to put most of the ballast on her side, but if he then had to cross the basket in order to release it … He was imagining the playlet as if it were real, and only later began to wonder if she was talking of other things. But then, metaphor often confused him.

No, he wasn’t three-quarters in love.

‘Hook, line and sinker,’ he said to his uniformed reflection in the cheval glass of his hotel bedroom. The dull gold of its frame yielded to the brighter lace edgings of his stable jacket. ‘Hook, line and sinker, Captain Fred.’

He had often imagined this moment, tried to see how it would compare with those previous times when he had been only half in love – with a pair of eyes, a smile, the shimmer of a dress. On those occasions he had always been able to picture the next few days – and sometimes those next few days had turned out exactly as he had predicted. But then, the imagination and the actuality had stopped; the dream and the desire had been fulfilled. Now, though the desire had, in one sense, been fulfilled sooner and more giddyingly than he could possibly have dreamed, it merely aroused greater desire. The small time he had spent with her aroused the desire for greater time, for all time. The small distance they had travelled from the theatre to the rue Fortuny aroused a desire to travel greater distances: to all those countries whose inhabitants she had portrayed onstage – and then to all the remaining countries in the world. To go everywhere with her. Someone had remarked to him upon her Slav beauty. And so he imagined travelling east with her, comparing her features with those around them until she blended entirely into the physiognomical scenery, and there was nothing left but a sea of Slavs and Captain Fred. He imagined her tiny, lithe figure at his side, on a horse she would mount not woman-fashion but astride, in another trouser role. He saw them sharing a horse, he behind, she in front, enclosed by his arms as he held the reins.

He saw them as a couple, putting things together, assembling a life. He always imagined them in motion. He was – they were – soaring.

Though bohemian, and worldly, Fred Burnaby was not sophisticated in the manner of those who came backstage each night and sought ever more refined ways to applaud. But he was intelligent, and had travelled widely. So, after a week or two, awareness came of how others might view his situation; and he spoke their words aloud to himself.

‘She is a woman. She is French. She is an actress. Is she on the level?’

He knew what his friends and fellow officers would say. How they would smirk even as he articulated the question. But their minds would be filled with generality, reputation, rumour. They themselves were perfectly happy chasing Circassian girls and pretty Kirghiz widows for a while, secure in the knowledge that they would return home and marry Englishwomen of good family for whom the practicalities of the heart were no more complicated and mysterious than the practicalities of the kitchen garden. Late at night, over a brandy and soda, they might briefly succumb to nostalgia for a different kind of smile, a darker complexion, and some whispered words in a half-understood language. But then, having done so, they would dutifully go back to the family hearth, squiffily convinced that they had ordered their lives properly.

Fred Burnaby was not like this. And neither was Madame Sarah. She had not used flirtatiousness with him. Or rather, her flirtatiousness was not a fraud, not a tactic, but a promise. Her eyes and her smile had been a proposal, an offer which he had accepted. The fact that Mme Guérard had subsequently mentioned a pair of earrings to which Madame Sarah had taken a fancy, that he had bought them for her, and that she had expressed gratitude but no surprise: this too was straightforwardness. And to his mocking fellow officers he would reply: but did you not equally buy presents for your virginal rose-cheeked English fiancées, and did they not accept them with such a pretty affectation of astonishment that you were quite deceived? Whereas Madame Sarah had always – even though ‘always’ meant only a few weeks – been straight with him.

She did not have a suspicious family with whom he had to ingratiate himself. There was Mme Guérard: vanguard, rearguard and
état-major
all combined. He recognised and appreciated loyalty. She and Captain Fred understood one another; and when events spurred him to generosity, she took his money with a calm gravity. Otherwise, there was only Madame Sarah’s son, a friendly lad who might successfully be taught sports and games. The Continentals still needed such an education in these matters. In Spain they were proud to shoot a sitting partridge. At Pau he had once been invited to join the local hunt. They had used a bagged fox doused in aniseed to make it easier for the dull-nosed hounds to follow; his horse was so abbreviated that his heels dragged the ground as it carried him; and the whole sport was over in a mere twenty minutes.

He would happily quit England. He had known good fellowship there, but his soul was drawn to heat and dust. And though his blood might be pure English all the way back to Edward Longshanks, he was aware that it did not always show. He knew what some privately thought, because in drink they nearly said it to his face. When he was a young subaltern, there had been a joke in the mess that he looked like an Italian baritone. ‘Sing us a song, Burnaby,’ the fellows would chant. And so, every time, until they tired of it, he would stand and sing them neither operetta nor bawdy, but some plain, lilting song of the English shires.

And there had been that supercilious young lieutenant called Dyer, always suggesting he might be a Jew. Not in so many words, of course, just the broadest hints. ‘Money? Let’s ask Burnaby about that.’ Not so subtle. After a few such remarks, he had taken Lieutenant Dyer aside and spoken as if they were not wearing uniform. And that had been the end of it. But Burnaby did remember.

So the fact that Madame Sarah had been born a Jewess was not of great concern to him. Born a Jewess, converted to Catholicism. Burnaby did not absolve himself of strong feelings when it came to preferring one race over another, but he did believe that in the matter of the Jews, he looked on them more benignly than did most Frenchmen he had met. So, in a way, he took such prejudice upon himself, and Dyer might consider them both false Jews if he wanted to. Which made him feel closer to Madame Sarah.

And so, as the weeks passed, he imagined their future more precisely. He would resign his commission. He would quit England, and she would quit Paris. Of course, she would continue to amaze the world, but her genius must not be squandered day after day, night after night. She would play a season here, a season there, and in between they would travel to places where she was as yet unknown. From their shared bohemianism, a new pattern would emerge. Love would change her, as it was changing him. How, he did not exactly know.

So that was all clear in his mind, and he must bring the subject up. Not now, of course, not between dinner and bed. It was a matter for the morning. High-hearted, he addressed himself to the ballotine of duck.

‘Capitaine Fred,’ she began, and he thought that his definition of bliss would be to hear those two words, in that voice, in that French accent, for the rest of his days. ‘Capitaine Fred, what do you imagine to be the future of flight? Of human flight, human beings, men and women, up in the atmosphere together?’

He answered the question he heard.

‘Aerial navigation is a mere question of lightness and force,’ he replied. ‘Attempts – my own included – to propel and steer balloons have failed. And probably will continue to do so. There is no doubt that heavier-than-air flight is the future.’

‘I see. I have not yet ascended in a balloon, but I think that a pity.’

He cleared his throat.

‘May I ask why, my dear?’

‘Of course, Capitaine Fred. Ballooning is freedom, is it not?’

‘Indeed.’

‘It is being blown whichever way by nature’s whims. It is dangerous too.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Whereas, if we are to imagine a heavier-than-air machine, it would be equipped with some kind of engine. It would have controls by which it might be steered, which would order its ascent and descent. And it would be less dangerous.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Do you not see what I am saying?’

Burnaby reflected. Was it because she was a woman, because she was French, or because she was an actress, that he did not understand?

‘I fear I am still in the clouds, Madame Sarah.’

She smiled again, and not an actress’s smile – unless, he suddenly realised, an actress would, as a normal part of her skills, have a non-actress’s smile at her disposal.

‘I do not say that war is preferable to peace. I do not say that. But danger is preferable to safety.’

Now he thought he might be on to her meaning, and did not like the sound of it.

‘I believe in danger as much as you. That will never leave me. I shall always go where danger and adventure call. I shall always seek a skirmish. If my country needs me, I shall always answer.’

‘I am happy to know that.’

‘But …’

‘But?’

‘Madame Sarah, the future lies with heavier-than-air machines. However much we balloonatics might prefer it not to.’

‘Have we not discussed this and agreed?’

‘Yes. But that is not what I intended.’

He paused. She waited. He knew that she knew where he was going. He began again.

‘We are both bohemians. Both travellers, footloose. We live against the common run of things. We do not take orders easily.’

He paused, she waited.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Madame Sarah. You know what I am going to say. I cannot bandy metaphor any longer. I am not the first man who has fallen in love with you on sight, nor, I fear, will I be the last. But I am in love with you as I have never been before. We are kindred spirits, this I know.’

He gazed at her. She looked back at him with what he took to be perfect tranquillity. But did that mean she agreed with him, or was unmoved by what he said? He went on.

‘We are both grown up. We know the world. I am not some parlour soldier. You are not an ingénue. Marry me. Marry me. I lay my sword at your feet as well as my heart. I cannot say it more straightforwardly than that.’

He waited for her response. He thought her eyes glistened. She put her hand on his arm.

‘
Mon cher
Capitaine Fred,’ she replied – but her tone made him feel more like a schoolboy than an officer of the Blues. ‘I have never taken you for a parlour soldier. I do you the honour of taking you seriously. And I am very flattered.’

‘But … ?’

‘But. Yes, that is a word life forces upon us more often than we want, more often than we imagine. But – I do you the honour of answering your straightforwardness with mine. But – I am not made for happiness.’

‘You cannot say, after these last weeks and months …’

‘Oh, but I can say. And I do. I am made for sensation, for pleasure, for the moment. I am constantly in search of new sensations, new emotions. That is how I shall be until my life is worn away. My heart desires more excitement than anyone – any one person – can give.’

He looked away from her. This was more than a man could bear.