Chapter 9
The Essay’s Sting
The paper smelled of ink and something sharper beneath it.
Turpentine, perhaps, or the faint chemical bite of the printer’s shop on Ship Street where the latest issue of The Brighton Observer had been procured before dawn and delivered to Alistair’s study on a silver tray that now sat ignored on the corner of his desk.
He had not slept well. Again.
The essay occupied the entire front page, which was unusual.
The Observer typically ran two or three shorter pieces per issue, but this week the anonymous writer had taken more column inches than the editor had ever granted before.
Alistair had read it twice already. He was reading it a third time, his coffee cooling in its porcelain cup, the morning light slanting through the east windows and catching the dust that hung suspended in the still air of the study.
On the Peculiar Habits of the Brighton Host.
He knew, within the first three sentences, exactly which gathering the essay described.
The phrasing was careful. No names. No dates.
No location more specific than “a residence of considerable pretension on the eastern reaches of the Marine Parade.” But the details were unmistakable.
The ice sculpture of Neptune that had melted into a puddle by midnight, soaking the hem of Lady Margaret Harrow’s gown and prompting her to declare, loudly, that the host had “the aesthetic sensibilities of a fishmonger.” The string quartet positioned so close to the card room that the cellist had been struck by a flying elbow during a particularly heated round of whist. The salmon mousse that had been served, inexplicably, in the shape of a swan.
His salmon mousse. His swan.
Alistair set the paper down on the desk and pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose.
A flicker of irritation moved through him.
It was not the critique itself that stung.
He had hosted the gathering at his mother’s insistence, a tedious affair designed to showcase the Grand Ballrooms’ new chandeliers and to remind Brighton society that the family’s influence remained undiminished.
He had found the evening as insipid as the essayist clearly had.
What stung was the accuracy. The precision of the observation.
The way the writer had noticed not merely the obvious absurdities—the melting Neptune, the unfortunate cellist—but the subtler architecture of the evening.
The way the guests had arranged themselves into predictable clusters.
The way the conversation had followed the same tired channels it always did.
The way the host himself had stood at the periphery, a glass of claret in his hand, watching the proceedings with an expression the essayist described as “the particular weariness of a man who has discovered that the view from the centre of the room is indistinguishable from the view from the edge.”
He had thought no one had been watching him.
He picked up the paper again.
We attend these affairs as though attendance were a virtue in itself, the essayist wrote.
We dress ourselves in silks and smiles and speak in the approved cadences, and we call this society, when in truth it is merely a collection of people who have agreed to pretend, for the duration of an evening, that they are not desperately bored with one another.
The host circulates with the air of a man who has misplaced something important but cannot remember what it was.
The guests consume his wine and critique his salmon mousse and depart with the satisfied exhaustion of actors who have completed a long and not particularly inspired run.
Alistair laughed. It was a short sound, surprised out of him before he could suppress it.
The salmon mousse had been dreadful. He had told the cook as much the following morning, and the cook had taken offence and threatened to seek employment with the Hargraves, and Alistair had been forced to apologise and promise to send a note of commendation to the cook’s mother in Eastbourne, who was apparently unwell and in need of cheering.
None of that had made it into the essay. The writer had not needed it. The writer had seen the swan-shaped mousse and understood, immediately, that it was the culinary equivalent of the new chandeliers: expensive, ostentatious, and utterly beside the point.
He read the passage again. The host circulates with the air of a man who has misplaced something important but cannot remember what it was.
The words sat uncomfortably in his chest.
He had been that man. He was still that man.
He had been standing in his own ballroom, surrounded by two hundred of Brighton’s most illustrious citizens, and he had felt—what?
Absent. Removed. As though the evening were happening to someone else, and he was merely an observer in the corner, taking mental notes for a conversation he would never have.
The essayist had seen it. Had seen him.
He turned the page. The essay continued on the reverse, and there, in the final paragraph, the writer’s tone shifted. The satire softened. The blade withdrew, just slightly, and something else emerged.
One wonders, the essayist wrote, whether the host of such an affair is not, in his own way, as trapped as the guests he entertains.
The obligations of rank and property demand that he open his doors to people he does not like, serve food he does not eat, and perform a version of hospitality that has been hollowed of all genuine welcome.
He is not permitted to say what he thinks.
He is not permitted to leave his own party.
He is permitted only to stand at the edge of the room and wait for the evening to end, and to hope that someone, somewhere, might notice that his smile does not reach his eyes.
Alistair stopped reading.
The study was very quiet. The clock on the mantel ticked. Outside, a gull cried over the Channel, and the sound carried through the half-open window, thin and plaintive.
He thought of Sophia Ainsworth.
The thought arrived without preamble, without logical progression.
One moment he was staring at the newsprint, the ink still faintly tacky under his thumb.
The next moment he was seeing her face as it had been in the gallery the day before.
The way she had looked at the Turner seascape.
The way she had said, This is going to be interesting, as though she were issuing a challenge to the universe and waiting to see if the universe would answer.
He had been thinking of her, on and off, since the Hargraves’ ball.
Since the seaside encounter. Since the moment she had laughed at one of his remarks—genuinely laughed, not the practised titter of the debutante—and he had felt something shift in his chest, a tectonic movement he had not been prepared for.
He had been thinking of her, and now he was thinking of the Observer, and the two thoughts were beginning to converge in a way that made him deeply uneasy.
The wit. The precision of observation. The willingness to say what others would not. The particular weariness with societal expectation that ran beneath the satire like a dark current. All of it pointed in a direction he did not want to examine too closely.
He set the paper down again and stood. His coffee was cold. He drank it anyway, the bitterness coating his tongue, and walked to the window.
The Channel was slate-coloured this morning, flat and unreflective under a sky that had not decided whether to rain. A fishing boat laboured against the tide. The Marine Parade was quiet, the fashionable hour for promenading still several hours distant.
If Sophia Ainsworth were the Brighton Observer—and the thought was absurd, impossible, dangerous—then she had been in his house.
She had attended his gathering. She had stood in his ballroom and watched him with those sharp, intelligent eyes and seen, with unnerving clarity, the precise shape of his discontent.
She had not been on the guest list. He was certain of that.
His mother had compiled the list herself, and Lady Beatrice Cavendish would sooner invite a rat into her drawing room than an Ainsworth.
But the essayist had been there. The essayist had described the chandeliers, the Neptune, the salmon mousse with the specificity of an eyewitness.
Unless the essayist had spoken to someone who had been there.
Unless the details had been relayed secondhand, filtered through gossip and embellishment.
That was possible. It was even likely. The Observer had demonstrated, in previous essays, an encyclopedic knowledge of events the writer could not possibly have attended in person.
The debutante balls. The Pump Room conversations.
The private dinners. The writer had sources. The writer had informants.
But the final paragraph. The observation about the host. The weariness. The smile that did not reach the eyes.
That was not secondhand. That was not gossip. That was someone who had been standing close enough to see his face.
Alistair turned from the window. The study felt smaller than it had a moment ago, the walls pressing in, the bookshelves looming.
He had spent years cultivating this room as a refuge from the demands of the house beyond it.
Leather-bound volumes. A fireplace that drew well.
A desk positioned to catch the morning light.
It was the one space in Number Twelve where he was not required to perform.
And now the Observer had reached into it, had reached into him, and pulled something into the light that he had not intended to show anyone.
He walked back to the desk. The newspaper lay where he had left it, the essay facing up. He read the final lines one more time.
He is permitted only to stand at the edge of the room and wait for the evening to end, and to hope that someone, somewhere, might notice that his smile does not reach his eyes.
Someone had noticed.