Yeah, I’d been around beautiful women before, such as passes for beauty in these cold northern places. My mother could probably have been accounted as an exemplar of the type. As I recall it, she had long loosely curling red-gold hair, a smooth porcelain complexion, a long swan-like neck and dainty, regal features—a small button nose set between the carefully filigree of her patrician mouth and a pair of arresting black eyes. I don’t remember those days well, but when I think back on them I think mostly of them eyes, how cold and dark they were—like some bottomless, wet, dark bog hole out on a cold winter moor. You’d spend weeks getting over the chillblains if you stumbled into’em.
But no. No two ways about it. Inez’s much more beautiful. In fact, it seems entirely wrong to use the same word to describe them both—“beauty”. “Beauty” should be warm, kindly, gentle, loving—that sort of word shouldn’t be tossed around recklessly. It shouldn’t be cast off as a second-hand stopgap when you don’t have the wits to recognize the merely artful, tastefully composed or well-put-together.
Inez was beautiful in the truest sense of the word. I remember when she was first introduced to the troupe. Caught us completely offsides. Mr. Irving burst into the green room like a 20-lb grapeshot. “Allright you bloody apes, shut yers gobs and listen up!” His displeasure could be the difference between dry gaffs and warm meal for a month on one hand and slogging it out in the cold slurry of Whitechapel, so it normally didn’t take much for him to get our lot’s full attention, but he seemed to feel the need to drive his point home more physically. So as I happened to be nearest the open side of the door as he entered, he gave me a cuff to the lip for good measure.
“Allright, listen up. There’s going to be some changes here to the programme. I’m in the middle of negotiating a new house lease, and there’ve been some concerns voiced in the council about the tone and tenor of our little production here.”
Irving paused a spell at this point. While you could feel a palpable apprehension tighten around us, and eyes darted frantically looking for an acceptable target (especially Frank’s eyes, that f*cking c*nt). No one was daft enough to speak up.
“Right.” Mr. Irving dropped his register to a lower, more measured cadence. “So you see exigencies of the situation before us.” He drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and continued. “Therefore and to wit I have made the necessary alterations to our programme of entertainments. Henceforth we shall build our reputation primarily on our long-standing tradition of bringing the Classics before the denizens of this metropolis—Shakespeare, Jonson and the like. That will entail some personnel changes.”
I felt a warm ripple of blood wash through my face. I couldn’t help it. I was probably, what one of only three, four or five of us who could read in the whole f*ckin’ troupe, let alone had any acquaintance with them gentlemen. That gorilla Frank would be a memory in a month or so. But I couldn’t let Frank or any of the others see me grinning like an eejit, least of all Irving. So I turned me head to the wall.
And as I did I caught the first glimpse of Inez that ever I did, standing a yard or so behind Irving in the gallery. At first just the shock of the gallant electric-blue silk dress she wore. But soon I caught a frisson off her delicate lilac perfume. The blood started to surge again to the back of my skull, and my heart began to beat wildly as if its vibrations would draw a tune from the very floorboards.
I can’t recall Mr. Irving’s precise words of introduction beyond that, but suffice it to say that he was putting us on notice; there was to be a New Programme in the Lyceum henceforth, and This Gentlelady would be our Featured Attraction. We would be challenged to Find Our Way on Board or we would Find Our Way Out. She was an accomplished interpreter of . . . But when Ms. Inez Delgado stepped forth from behind that door, all talk on that account became superfluous, really. She took notice of me immediately (must have been my split lip), stooped down with a sigh and embraced my head with a loving, merciful caress. I melted into the butter of her soul completely.
