Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

EMMA   I’m a post office, and living upstairs in your house like a lodger, which is all we can afford to be—there is no further humiliation I could suffer. But I’m glad to do it for my George. He was unrecognisable when I came from Paris. He was suffering more than I. If you can’t make him happy—or cure him—give him back. He’ll come back anyway. This is not love, it’s exaltation.

Emma’s baby starts crying. She picks it up and paces.

NATALIE   You haven’t understood anything. All my actions spring from the divine spirit of love, which I feel for all creation. Your logical way of looking at things just shows that you have grown apart from Nature. George is not the way you talk about him. He understands. He loves you. He loves Alexander. He loves your children and mine. Together, our love will be strong enough for all of us.

George enters, in travelling clothes. He takes one look at his wife, baby and pregnant mistress, and turns about.

NATALIE   George!

EMMA   George!

Natalie, with a glad cry, runs after him, followed by Emma.

NOVEMBER   1850

A newborn baby starts squalling inside the house. Bouquets of flowers arrive, by messenger and butler (Rocca). Herzen and George appear from indoors in smoking jackets, with cigars and glasses of champagne.

HERZEN   (toasts) To Natalie and baby Olga.

GEORGE   To Natalie and Olga.

HERZEN   Where’s Emma?

George looks around.

GEORGE   There.

DECEMBER 1850

The same place. A nurse (MARIA FOMM) wheels a smart pram. Emma is holding her crying eighteen-month-old child and close to hysteria. Herzen is writing what turns out to be a cheque and an IOU. When the baby raises its voice, Emma continues louder, so the decibel level threatens sometimes to become ludicrous.

EMMA   On our honeymoon in Italy, George didn’t like the cologne they had there, so I sent to Paris for his special cologne, and when it arrived in Rome we were in Naples, and when it reached Naples we were back in Rome, and so it went on until the cologne followed us back to Paris. The carriage charges were enormous. That’s how I’ve always been with George. Nothing was too good or too much. Daddy used to be rich, he supplied all the silk furnishings to the Prussian court, but somehow the revolution made him quite poor, and he resents George, it’s so unfair. I’ve borrowed and sold everything I can so that George isn’t troubled, and now I don’t know where else to turn.

Natalie, no longer pregnant, wearing white, is seen being painted in Mediterranean sunshine.

EMMA   (cont.) I felt you would be sympathetic because Natalie and I have such a close bond in George. He hardly wrote to me in all the months I was left behind in Paris. Natalie is the one who wrote, to tell me how wonderful and kind and sensitive George is, how good with your children, how adorable he is … She has such a broad loving heart, there’s room for everybody in it, it seems …

HERZEN   (giving her the cheque) Ten thousand francs for two years.

She signs the receipt, takes the cheque and leaves, with her crying baby.

JANUARY   1851

Natalie, with the painting she posed for, comes to show it to Herzen.

HERZEN   Oh yes … Where will we put it?

NATALIE   Oh … but it’s a present for George for the New Year.

HERZEN   How silly of me.

NATALIE   Do you like it?

HERZEN   Very much. If Herwegh will permit it, I’ll order a copy made for myself.

NATALIE   You’re angry.

HERZEN   What should I have to be angry about?

NATALIE   Take it for yourself, then.

HERZEN   Nothing would induce me.

Natalie becomes tearful and confused.

NATALIE   George is like my child. He becomes distressed—destroyed—or elated—by the smallest things. You’re a grown man among men, you don’t understand the yearning for love of a sensitive being for a different kind of love—

HERZEN   Please speak plainly.

NATALIE   He worships you, he lives for your approval, spare him this—