Life Mask

  'You're a born collector,' she teased him. They sounded like pert little horrors to her. It was the story of those milkmaid poetesses all over again; would the Berrys' talents earn so much praise if the girls weren't so poor? 'Tell me,' she went on slyly, 'if Miss Berry—the elder—is so very beautiful, how is she still unmarried past twenty-five?'

  Walpole's little eyes blinked. 'Why, my dear, she's devoted to her family.'

  'Mightn't she have served them better by finding a rich husband who could offer them all a home?'

  'I—now you ask, I hardly know how to answer you. I don't know whether she's had proposals; they live very quietly. Perhaps her brilliance intimidates young men,' he suggested uneasily.

  Stop it, Anne told herself. Poor Miss Berry was probably a harmless country spinster with a mole on her nose. Anne was behaving like some jealous widow. All this gushing on Walpole's part was reminding her of the era when every letter of his had contained some high-pitched reference to his goddaughter's extraordinary talents and luminous graces. But she could hardly expect to be anybody's protégée any more; she was past forty.

  His trembling fingers were shuffling through his watered silk pocketbook. 'Here's one of her verses in response to mine, I had Kirgate print it up on the press at Strawberry Hill.'

  Anne accepted the paper.

  Far in a wood, not much exposed to view,

  With other forest fruit two Berries grew...

  Her eyes skipped down the lines. Here came a wandering sage— Walpole, of course—who tasted the fruit and sang its glories.

  The Berries, conscious all this sudden Name

  Proved not their value, but their Patron's fame—

  Conscious they only could aspire to please

  Some simple Palates satisfied with ease...

  'Isn't that charming, the final couplet?' asked Walpole, tapping the paper with a knob-knuckled finger.

  ...No greater honours anxious to obtain,

  But still your favourite Berries to remain.

  'Charming,' she echoed, but privately she thought coy stuff. He struck. 'So may I introduce them, when you come at the end of the month?'

  'Am I coming at the end of the month?'

  'Evidently, my dear, since that's when you're to meet the Berrys.'

  Anne laughed in capitulation.

  THE HOUSEKEEPER at Strawberry Hill, Margaret Young, led her through the star chamber to the long gallery, wheezing a little. Anne hadn't been in the gallery for some time; the crimson damask walls, mirrored recesses and tables of ancient busts made her smile. Faustina, Julia Maesa, Zenocrates, Domitilla, Antonia Claudii Mater ... These inscriptions had been her nursery rhymes.

  'We spied your carriage through the windows,' cried Walpole, beckoning her over to his chaise to be kissed. 'Oh, splendid, you've brought Fidelle; Tonton's been so looking forward to playing with her.'

  'Hunting her like a rabbit, you mean,' she said, keeping the little greyhound safe in her arms as the black spaniel ran and yapped at Anne's silk skirts.

  Walpole let out a titter and the middle-aged man beside him joined in. The girls were wearing white chemise gowns with broad matching hats and blue ribbons; they were clearly aiming for a rural look, with no pretensions to elegance, Anne thought during the introductions and handshakes.

  'I was just explaining about the ceiling,' said Walpole, craning up so his Adam's apple bulged in the folds of his throat. 'It's an exact copy of the fan vaulting from Henry VII's chapel, Miss Agnes, except not in heavy stone or plaster, but in papier mâché—to my mind the most marvellous of modern discoveries.'

  'What about electricity, or balloon flight,' Anne teased him, 'or false teeth?'

  'The first two are mere games,' he scoffed, 'and a man who cleans his teeth will never lose them'—baring his own in a grin.

  Miss Agnes mentioned that she should like to draw the vaulting. 'My sister is learning perspective,' Miss Berry told Anne. She was a little bird of a thing, with dark eyes and a surprisingly deep voice with a trace of Yorkshire in it.

  'And a marvellous thing too,' cried Walpole, 'since young ladies can never have too many inner resources.'

  'They're more necessary to our sex than weapons to yours,' said Miss Berry.

  'But so many of our ranks seem to get by on cards and scandal,' Anne remarked lightly.

  'Two things my sister and I despise.'

  Anne felt rather rebuffed. She hoped the Misses Berry wouldn't prove to be stern Evangelicals, like that ghastly Hannah More; Walpole's taste for female company was sometimes really too broad.

  Mrs Young came in with a footman staggering under the weight of a great tea kettle and she lit the spirit lamp. While they were waiting for the water to boil, Anne decided that the father was a mute, round-faced puppet. He'd been trained to the law but never practised it, she learned, and she could see why. Agnes Berry had a sensible, composed face and dainty movements, but less conversation than her sister.

  After tea they went walking in the grounds, which were looking. rather overgrown and shabby, but still charming; Walpole had a passion for trees and let them spread wherever they liked. Wild strawberries poked up through the grass. Anne went in pursuit of Fidelle, through the avenue of lime trees by the Thames. She heard steps behind her and the elder girl caught her up. 'You must loathe us, Mrs Damer,' she said rather breathlessly.

  Anne stared.

  The little creature wasn't scared off. 'Mr Walpole has been kind enough to praise us so excessively—both to our faces and, I know, in his correspondence—that you must wonder what he sees in a very ordinary family.'

  'Fidelle,' cried Anne, clapping her hands, playing for time. 'Are you fishing for a compliment, Miss Berry?'

  'Not at all.' The fine brown eyes met Anne's.

  The same colour as mine, but several shades darker. A much neater face; symmetry, that's the first principle of beauty. Pallor; has she a bronchial constitution? It undercuts the sweetness of the features, makes them more interesting. 'Wouldn't you agree, then,' she went on, deadpan, 'that as my cousin devotes the greatest part of his praises to your beauty in particular, and your brilliance, that most of my putative loathing for your family should be yours too?'

  'I suppose it should.'

  Anne dissolved into a soft laugh. 'I'm glad we've settled that.' The tiny dog raced out of a bush, yipping with excitement, and stood on two legs to claw at Miss Berry's white skirts. 'Fidelle, stop it—' Oh, no, the dog had attached herself to the girl's shin and was humping it unmistakably. Anne ran over. 'Miss Berry, I'm truly mortified. She almost never—Fidelle!'

  The girl had already bent and wrapped the dog up in her arms. 'No need to apologise. They crave affection; don't we all?'

  Well, not so Evangelical after all. 'You're very kind,' said Anne foolishly.

  The dog twisted and whimpered with pleasure. 'What a lean little dancer! She's all muscle, isn't she,' said Miss Berry, her cheek against Fidelle's coat, 'and such an elegant, cool little nose. I've never seen an Italian greyhound this silvery colour. Is that a break in her tail, where it curls up?'

  Observant, too. 'Yes, they're often damaged during birth. Fidelle's usually shy with strangers, but she's taken to you at once.'

  'We used to have a dog,' said Mary Berry, her voice painful.

  They were walking side by side now, along the river bank. 'Are you interested in horticulture?'

  'I expect I would be, if I'd ever had a settled home,' said the young woman, setting Fidelle down and picking up a fat acorn. 'Some of the houses we've rented have had gardens, but it hardly seems worthwhile planting a tree if you don't expect to taste its fruit.'

  'Well put,' said Anne. 'I grow some vegetables at the back of my house in Grosvenor Square, but I don't take any trouble with flowers.'

  'You have your art,' the girl reminded her. 'Why cultivate a transient bloom when you can carve an immortal one?'

  Anne's mouth twisted with amusement. 'I'm not sure I've ever carved a flower, now I come to think of
it. Some laurel wreaths, that's all. You'd be surprised to learn what a filthy, tiring pastime sculpture is.'

  'More than a pastime, surely?'

  'Well, yes, I think of it as my profession, but I'm not sure the members of the Royal Academy would agree. My status there is Honorary Exhibitor,:'

  'I should have thought what mattered was your status not in their eyes but in posterity's,' said Mary Berry.

  Anne smiled again. 'The young are always so idealistic.'

  'Rather, I've so little opinion of this life that I take a longer view, trusting to posterity to make up some losses,' said the girl darkly. Anne looked at her sideways. 'I've never felt young. I consider this existence—what's Hobbes's phrase?—nasty, brutish and short. Are you appalled?'

  'Intrigued, rather,' Anne told her. 'My cousin Walpole said nothing about your saturnine philosophy.'

  'I don't believe I've ever shared it with him.'

  Anne was aware of a small surge of pleasure. 'Why not?'

  The girl shrugged. 'It's not a matter of hypocrisy, but of adapting the conversation to the listener. Mr Walpole likes me to sparkle, so I do my best; he says glumness is only suited to old curmudgeons. Whereas you, Mrs Damer—'

  'Yes, what of me? As you don't know me yet, how can you guess how you should please me?'

  'I know you've suffered.'

  Anne narrowed her eyes at her. How could the girl have any idea—

  'Being widowed so young.'

  'Ah, yes.' She ducked under a low branch and turned to hold it up for Miss Berry. 'Candid. That's how you should be with me.'

  The young woman nodded, as if making a note of it.

  'And what's your chief pastime, as we've discussed mine already?'

  'I have none. None that are meant to pass the time, that is; the time passes too quickly already,' said Miss Berry. 'Self-education is all that interests me. I'm still trying, at the advanced age of twenty-seven, to fill the dreadful gaps in knowledge left by my sporadic schooling.'

  She seemed younger than that, thought Anne; there was a clean, unworldly air about her. But also wiser than her years. 'An admirable aim. So it wasn't at a tutor's knee that you read Hobbes?'

  'No, it was in your cousin's library, not a fortnight ago.'

  Anne laughed. 'Strawberry Hill's a treasure chest, isn't it?'

  'A small but perfect paradise!'

  'I'm delighted that you and your sister have the run of the place, now poor Horry is so often confined to his chair.'

  'Horry?'

  'My father and Mr Walpole were always great friends, they used to call each other not Horace and Henry, but Horry and Harry.'

  'Were great friends?' Miss Berry had a penetrating way of repeating a word, as if nothing could slip past her. 'But I believe your father's still alive.'

  'Well, you know what advancing age does.'

  'You think all friendships fade, Mrs Damer?'

  The blunt question was unsettling. Could the girl read her mind? That was exactly what she'd been wondering this summer, every time she'd woken up and remembered the friend she'd so inexplicably lost; every time she'd driven past the Bow Window House on Green Street. Could affection last, could it bear one's weight, or was one better off relying entirely on one's own strength? 'In my experience,' she said a little hoarsely, 'many intimacies shrivel like daisies because of some inherent weakness, rather than the passage of time. But in the case of my father and Walpole, I'd call it a strong devotion that has lost some of its brightness. They rarely meet, these days, you see, and meeting is the lifeblood of friendship.'

  'What about correspondence?' asked the girl. 'Can't two people become almost closer through a frank exchange of letters than in the shallowness of social intercourse?'

  Anne looked at her hard. 'I suppose so. But my father and Walpole don't write to each other much either; I think their friendship lives on in their heads like a memory of youth. Sometimes I feel they've carried on their great intimacy through me.'

  'Quite a responsibility,' said Miss Berry, nodding. 'For my poor father I think sometimes I'm my mother come back to life, to soothe and organise him. Each generation is the page on which the last one writes.'

  'Whom are you quoting now?'

  'No one,' said the girl, a little pink.

  When the Berrys had gone home, Anne stayed on by an evening fire in the library. 'Now you understand,' said Walpole triumphantly.

  'Oh, I do, I do,' said Anne. 'I renounce all my prejudice. I should have let you introduce me the day after you'd met them.'

  'My dear,' he said, seizing her hands in his. 'It's like discovering a mutual taste for some obscure branch of art.'

  'Miniature still lives, on ivory,' she suggested.

  'Yes, something with fruit in it!'

  'Is Miss Berry—Miss Mary Berry—your favourite?' she asked, sure she knew the answer.

  'Oh, I have no favourite,' he protested with a fey expression. 'The girls are equally meritorious.'

  Walpole was deluding himself, Anne thought, but that was a common activity of humankind.

  He leaned forward. 'I sometimes address them as my daughters, or even my Rachel and Leah. I'd hate to be suspected, at my age, of the affectation of playing the gallant.' He tittered. 'But I believe I'm safe from that charge, since I divide my devotion so evenly between the two. I assure you, if there were but one Berry girl I should be ashamed to be so strongly attached, but being quite in love with both my little wives I glory in my passion!'

  Anne smiled, unsettled. She'd known his feelings for the Berrys were warm, but not that they were so flirtatious. It seemed rather bizarre, in a septuagenarian gentleman, to fix on two impoverished girls in such a besotted way. Something else was troubling her: she'd never thought of her cousin as a woman's man exactly. Womanish in some ways, yes, with his fussy habits and shrill laugh, and a great friend to women, of course. But hadn't the finest feelings of his heart been expended on friends of his own sex? Gray, the poet, for one, in their youth; and of course Anne's father. There'd never been any question of marriage for Walpole, or none that she knew of. Surely he wasn't thinking of it now, with his jokes about little wives? The other day he'd seemed troubled at the idea of Miss Berry having suitors; could it possibly be jealousy? Had Walpole's heart, so long wrapped up in cotton wool in his miniature castle, been won by a woman at last?

  'You know,' she remarked, looking up at the painted crusaders on the ceiling, 'when I was very small and came here for summers while my parents were abroad I used to think you were my father.'

  He yelped with laughter. 'Nothing is certain in this life—except that I've never begotten a child.'

  'Well, I felt more yours than theirs. I had the impression that you'd given me to them to raise—'

  'What lurid storybooks had you been reading?'

  '—and it was a secret between us all. Every now and then you'd wink at me, or put your finger to your lips, and I'd know!

  Making her way to the red bedchamber that night, through the succession of narrow rooms crammed with objets de virtu, Anne thought that in some ways this was her true home—far dearer to her from her earliest childhood, far more magical, than Park Place. She tried to imagine Strawberry Hill run by a mistress, a young Mrs Walpole with brown eyes. Surely her cousin wouldn't be so defiant of the World, so reckless of propriety, as to try to marry his Elderberry? The thought choked her, somehow.

  SEPTEMBER 1790

  26 North Audley Street

  Being eager to leave our names at your door, Mrs Darner, I took the liberty of asking Mr Walpole where you lived. This card will tell you where you may find the undersigned, your humble servts,

  Miss Berry

  Miss Agnes Berry

  Robert Berry, Esq.

  Every few days, now, Anne had herself driven or rowed up the Thames to Strawberry Hill. Walpole remarked teasingly that he hadn't seen so much of her since she was three years old.

  Though the Berrys had moved back to town at the end of the summer, when
Miss Berry found them some lodgings on North Audley Street, Anne preferred to see them in the countryside where they were all more at ease. At Strawberry, Mr Berry seemed less intimidated by the Honourable Mrs Damer and Miss Agnes didn't risk being frightened into silence by a swooping visit from the Duchess of Richmond. They all spent many afternoons together strolling in the meadows that sloped down from the terrace to the river, or (if the skies darkened) looking through Walpole's collections of prints, drawings and curiosities. Anne kept a covert eye on her cousin, wondering how this new hobby of his twilight years would play itself out. Her initial alarm had calmed; she was fairly sure now that he wouldn't joke about Miss Mary being his amour or his rib if he had any serious intentions.

  Anne hadn't yet had what she'd call a conversation with Mr Berry, but she didn't take it personally. He preferred to sit on the edge of the group, buried in Gothic novels from a circulating library, looking up occasionally to nod at a joke he hadn't quite heard. In private, Anne and Walpole laughed over the fellow's tastes; a more harmless connoisseur of the morbid and macabre could not be imagined. His tragic history of disinheritance and widowerhood didn't seem to have subdued his spirits at all, but there was a certain smiling fatalism about him that suggested he was incapable of being the real head of the family.

  Miss Agnes didn't speak very much either, but what she did say was intelligent enough; she deferred to her sister Mary on any knotty point. Anne encouraged her in her sketching and offered some small suggestions about the framing of a composition, which Agnes accepted immediately.

  'If it came to it,' Miss Berry told Anne one day when they were alone in the orchard, 'my sister could go to work for an engraver, colouring in prints.'

  Anne was startled. 'If it came to what, may I ask?'

  'A visit by the bailiffs to carry away the sofa and writing desk and beds. All we have is our £800 a year,' the girl said bluntly.

  'Couldn't Mr Berry...' Her voice trailed off.