Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

completely shaken off a summer flu even as the couple complete their three-week trip by visiting Rimini and Ravenna, where they spend a pre-dawn hour at Dante’s tomb. The tour gives Elizabeth yet more Italy to fall in love with: ‘the exquisite, almost visionary scenery of the Apennines, the wonderful variety of shape & colour, the sudden transitions, & vital individuality of those mountains .. the chesnut forests dropping by their own weight into the deep ravines’. Flush enjoys himself too, especially in towns: ‘He looked east, he looked west .. you would conclude that he was taking notes or preparing them. His eagerness to get into the carriage first used to amuse the Italians.’ But Robert remains under par. Back home he develops a severe throat infection. For three weeks he has a high fever and, as pain keeps him awake and it becomes increasingly painful to take anything by mouth, gradually loses strength; yet he refuses to see a doctor. So it seems like sheer luck when, in the third week of September, a literary bachelor friend, the Revd Fr Francis Sylvester Mahony, calls unexpectedly. Seeing the state Robert’s in, Mahony forces him to drink an improvised concoction of egg yolks and heated port wine, that, in helping the feverish patient to sleep, is key to his cure.

At least, this is the story according to Mahony, who styles himself ‘Father Prout’ and encourages the belief that ‘he is one of [the Jesuit order’s] most active members & in constant employment, .. holding high trusts’, but who has actually been working as the Rome correspondent of the Daily News since 1846. In fact, Elizabeth records of Mahony’s famous hot drink merely that her husband ‘was the better’ for sleeping after it. Robert’s actual recovery from what his symptoms suggest is a quinsy comes when this abscess behind the tonsils bursts: ‘Relief came at last by the breaking of something in the throat, & by nearly a wineglass full of matter coming up.’ No matter. The talkative and energetic, but also vulgar and cynical, ‘Revd Father’ now invites himself to the Palazzo Guidi drawing room to smoke ‘everyday […], sometimes twice a day, & generally for two hours at a time […] walking up & down in the room & performing an alternation of expectorations now in the fireplace & now on […] our new carpet.’

This would be revolting at the best of times. But Robert is breathing the smoke through an infected throat, and a pregnant Elizabeth is nauseated, ‘catastrophe as nearly occurring as possible […] through an ascend<ing>of the personal incommodity’:

he plants himself close to my sofa, smokes at leisure two or three cigars, takes one of our Raffael-basins for a spitting convenience, & last night, not for the first time by any means, both Robert & I were fairly sick. […] When he had gone .. between ten & eleve<n> [we opened] windows & doors & relieved ourselves by swearing gently.

By 22 November, after two months of this performance every night but one, Mahony’s ‘disagreeableness is beginning to pass his agreebleness’. He calls Elizabeth ‘a regular child .. a bambino, my dear’. She is his ‘ “Little dear” in his first visit, and “Dearest” on the second, so that, as I told Robert, I fully expected to be kissed on the third—[…] I shant be asked […] whether I allow it or not—’. He hijacks the intimate nickname ‘Ba’, and mocks his hostess for having shyly pulled down her travelling veil when he intercepted the couple as they first arrived in Livorno. The evenings are spent in conversation primarily between the men, and there’s an undercurrent of misogyny to this dismissal of someone who is increasingly being seen as Britain’s greatest living woman poet; a sense, almost, of trying to recruit Robert back to a bachelor cause.

Mahony is just two years older than Elizabeth, and lives precisely the kind of literary life from which gender excludes her. Since the 1830s he’s been a prolific columnist, for example in Fraser’s Magazine. There he hobnobbed with le tout monde, including surviving second-generation Romantics Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Thomas Medwin. Another ‘Fraserian’ is Robert’s mentor William Makepeace Thackeray, whose masterpiece Vanity Fair, ‘Very clever, very effective, but cruel to human nature–’, has just recently finished lengthy serialisation in Punch. It will be apparent to everyone at Palazzo Guidi that, if there is a ‘Vanity Fair’ of the literary world, Mahony belongs there.

But does Robert belong there too? Elizabeth’s writing life has been disproportionately inner, as her occasional sententiousness reveals. She’s sheltered and high-minded; in fact this is just what she represents to Robert. ‘I want to be a Poet […] dear angel of my life’, as he wrote to her towards the culmination of their courtship, when he was finding ‘the dullness […] mortal’ at the kind of literary soirée he’d hitherto enjoyed. ‘I am far from my ordinary self […] oh, to be with you, Ba’. Onlookers, Mahony possibly among them, will assume this difference is a fault line in the marriage. But the couple aren’t young ingénues. They understand each other. And perhaps they recognise how each can help the other experience a fuller writing life, as Elizabeth, formerly so shy, now falls easily into literary socialising – ‘Society by flashes is the brightest way of having it’ – and Robert picks up her poetic techniques.

Still, Mahony’s arrival at Palazzo Guidi is a signal of some kind. It’s the fourth in what would be a quite remarkable chain of coincidences:

[Robert] laughed a little as he told me that in crossing Poland Street with our passport, just at that crisis, he met .. Father Prout—[…] I said, ‘Curious’, & the conversation changed. On our landing at Leghorn, at nine oclock in the morning, our boat which was rowed from the steamer to the shore, passed close to a bare jutting piece of rock on which stood a man wrapt in a cloak, he also having just landed […] Robert