The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

What is it about soft things that makes us want to weep? I stroked, once, the foot of a statue, its marble underside so cold and tender it made my eyes shut. But my hands were not soft enough to stroke this silk, which was such a shade of blue. My hands were too numb and rough: I must feel it with my cheek, with my lips, almost, and be rendered by it disbelieving. I tell you, it was the difference between soft and impossibly so, as if there were a degree of fineness beyond which the world melts.

And I knew, at that moment, what money was for. It was so you could have things that were impossible. And around me there appeared a whole country of things that have crossed this line into the wonderful. Things hard to believe, that are for so long hidden, until that time when you spot the first. After which, they all beckon and clamour and call you by name. The most beautiful cloth for blue; the most beautiful shape to be wrought from a gold stitch on a pink field; the most beautiful black marble to set against the white. All absolute. All at a price.

I stood under that dress and it was like lowering my life down over my head. And the soft blue skin of it was armour to me, and transcendence. I swear I did not so much walk in it as float. I looked in the mirror and knew there is something about beauty that can never be touched, that can never be bad, no matter what the price.

I think he knew when he walked into the room: when he gave his little bow and looked up from under it with glittering eyes, I think he knew he was looking at something quite other. Though the look he allowed me was the look a man might afford not a work of art so much as a good dinner before he eats it – the happy thing being that with Francisco Solano Lopez the eating is never done; there is always another course, and then another, which is why I have so many dresses, is it not? – so that the pleasure of removing them will never be repeated, but always new.

I am so nostalgic for him – even though he is here on the boat; even though he is but sixteen or twenty feet away – that I call Francine to sit beside me like some sweet and dutiful daughter, while I talk and sigh.

I ask if she had any intimation, when she opened the door to him that evening, of the journey we were about to embark upon – because it is her journey too. And she says that, No. How could she tell him from any of the others?

Which is pure impudence, of course.

Oh, but now she considers, yes, there was that look he had about him, of a man who will not be thwarted.

I say that when he walked into my room first, I cannot deny it, I wanted him to be taller and perhaps a little more pale; but she was right about the look he had -it made you feel all squirming, but pleasantly so. And she said,

'Yes.'

I say I enjoyed him at cards, because he played properly, and for high stakes. He looked at me over his hand and tried to seem indifferent, not because he wanted to bed me, but because he had two aces and a king. And I won. I would have carried on winning (it was, after all, my deck) but I stopped and said, 'If I win, you will not like me.' It was important, of course, not to drive him away. But also, you know, I wanted him to like me – this man who played a serious game. And I wanted to keep playing, too. And so we were locked into it; whatever amorous battle we are still fighting now.

And he put his cards down.

'Do you remember?' I say, but Francine does not like this break in form. She is a servant. She did not pretend to be in the room at the time, so how can she pretend to remember? To agree would be indiscreet of her, and she wants me to stop talking, now.

And I want to stop talking too, because I realise, as I ramble on, that my dear friend wants to have Francine and that I am bruising her a little, as you might bruise veal, the more tender to have it when the time comes to throw it on the pan.

He bows, and walks on for another round of the deck. Or trots. He is never still. There is always shouting and planning. There is always a huddle in a corner, a call across the room or the deck, a different gathering of men in another cabin for more or different conversation. He gets them one-to-one, and the talk is low and hard, it is all of railway sleepers and branch lines, of wagons and mines and supplies of saltpetre.

I look at him as he recedes. He disappears around the stern and the boat is still. Then he comes back. He is talking to Whytehead, as usual, about the melting temperature of -is it charcoal? – the bulk of it anyway, and wagons. I keep hearing the English word 'wagons'. They are, apparently, the key.

I am swinging in my hamaca, talking to Francine about the first time I set eyes on this man. And the fact we all know -except perhaps the wagon-headed Whytehead – the fact that is generally available to everyone who sails on this boat, is that Francisco Lopez, my dear friend, would like to have a certain amount of time, privately, with my maid Francine. And this fix he has makes us back away from them, as though he held a gun and she was a bird. And indeed, her eye is very like a bird's eye, as she does not watch him and yet does watch him, from out of the side of her head.

I want to slap her for a hussy, but I do not.

I say, 'We must bring some needlework out here, and sew where the light is good.' The girl looks at me; knowing I would rather pick hemp than stitch silk; my fingers so swollen now I can not feel the needle. But go she does, which gives me a moment to breathe.

My dear friend closes in, and bows, Whytehead raises his stovepipe, and they turn to walk the starboard side. We understand each other perfectly, it seems.

When Francine arrives back with the basket, her face is flushed, as though the thing were already effected in the brief time it took for her to fetch it and return. There is a giddiness in her that reminds me – like a blow – of the times I came back from that room to the school in Bordeaux. Miss Miller opening the door. Mme Hubert standing in the hall. I look at her with the same level eyes. Half-hate, half-hopelessness. And it amazes me, the power men have. How we make way for their desire.

And now we sit and sew. Or I swing and pretend to sew, while Francine stitches neatly at my side, and the negotiations begin.

But before they do, there are a few things I want, urgently, to say.

I want to say that I love my husband. I want to shout it out as though I were in some courtroom dock. But he is not my husband, and such love is not mine to declare. Such love is not even mine to have. Which is all to the good, because such love holds for me no fascination.

But it is nice, sometimes, to pretend. To heave a sigh and say,

'When did it begin?'

And a knock on the door is as good a place to start as any. My dear friend walked into my drawing room on the rue St-Sulpice and my life changed utterly. It might have been as banal an entrance as any other – there was no way to tell; so many beginnings are false or aborted. A pair of warm eyes is held a moment too long, and in that moment you think, I could fall, I could spend a long time falling, into that man's arms. Or he stays for one night, maybe three. Or he leaves. Or you do not like him, after all.

No, Francisco Solano Lopez played cards with me and I said, 'If I win, you will not like me.' And he put down his cards, because he wanted to like me too, before he had me. And with such an ordinary civility – a sort of weariness you might call it – was my future decided. A tenderness, a consideration, from a man who is neither tender, nor considerate, as a rule. But how was I to know that? I had entered on to my future. It could have been a short future, or a lousy one. But then, also, we were so very happy in bed. And that's not fate: it is a question of the nose. Or so my tutor in these matters, M. Raspail, once said. It is a question of how they smell.

So you were led here by the nose, said Francine, and we both laugh.

I was led here by the nose. To lie, and swing, and dream of dresses on sticks, and of insects with their legs missing. To lie and caress the son of the man who walks the deck in a careful frenzy while I talk to my maid – almost, by now, a ladies companion – who has become the object of that acquisitive lust that men so often enjoy between themselves. Stewart, Whytehead, Lopez. Who is to have her, if not The Buck?