A Desirable Husband (24 page)

‘Such a lovely doglet,' Anatole heard Finola say to Jemima, the new six-month-old black labrador. ‘So beautiful. But so dirty, yes. Who will have to have a bath when we get home? And who is the world's biggest nuisance with cars? Who, then?'

It rather annoyed him to hear his daughter talking to the dog like a born Parnell. He and Finola had been to visit Isabella's grave in the churchyard, and they had said nothing about it while they were there. Now they were walking back along the lane to Combe Chalcot. Conversation was difficult because every time a car came by, Anatole and Finola had to take hold of the dog and drag her with them into the ditch until it had passed: Jemima's instinct was to sit in the middle of the road and watch till she was run over, or till someone took her out of the way. Anatole believed that he had known plenty of people behave like Jemima.

‘Fin, I am too old for these antics,' said Anatole, as the fourth car hooted on its way and they struggled away from the hedge. ‘Surely we can get off the road?'

‘Only another hundred yards, there's a track across the field. I'm sorry, I didn't know she was such an idiot about traffic.'

Finola swallowed, as she thought how insulting it was to Isabella's memory that the return from her grave should be so full of earthy complications which she had never known, and which distracted their minds from her. It was a year and three weeks since her death.

‘I suppose, Jemima is instead of another baby?' said Anatole when they had reached the farm-track, and were walking up towards the Manor. Anatole could say this without sounding at all insensitive, but no one else could, Finola thought.

‘I suppose so,' said Finola, looking down at her galoshes. ‘I'm too much of a coward to try again, Anatole, and it
would
be trying to put someone in her place.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘A woman I knew in France had a child who died, then another, and always she used to think, when the second was naughty, “René would never have done that”. The child knew very well, though she said nothing, she was not such a fool as that. It's always a danger, however people try.'

‘Yes, that's it, though Gerard thinks it wouldn't be like that.'

‘He presses you?'

‘No. No, really he doesn't.'

‘I have never understood him,' said Anatole, looking down and poking at the zig-zags of dried mud with his stick. It was a warm and yellow-lit October evening, but a quick wind was blowing up the hill.

‘I don't suppose you do,' said Finola, smiling as she looked across to the Manor chimneys.

She and Gerard no longer talked about Isabella except with tender regret. They would smile too, as they remembered little mannerisms of hers, a few of which Finola knew they had made up. With Anatole, Finola could talk painfully about it as she and Gerard had agreed not to do any more. A few light tears satisfied her when Gerard had his arms round her, but when Anatole was with her, she wanted to dig at the wound and cry in resentment. She could do so, because she did not live with him.

‘It still hurts terribly, you know,' she said. ‘I suppose you think I'm resigned, like Gerard, but I'm not.'

‘I think that most of the time you are. You cannot die of grief, Fin.'

‘No. No.' It was not going to work. She could only
repeat herself, by asking ‘why' again and again. The unanswerable question was the only source of great pain now: the memory of the child herself was a pleasure. That was what made Gerard say that her short life had been a blessing, for all the misery involved.

‘I wish she hadn't been born at all, if she had to be taken away like that,' she said loudly. ‘I do. I can't say that to Gerard, but it's true.'

Anatole nodded. ‘I agree with you. I'm a realistic person as you are, not a sentimentalist and religious fool. How can there be a God if children like Isabella can die?' It was as obvious as that.

‘Gerard may actually be right about all that,' said Finola sharply. ‘I wish I could think like him, sometimes, at least.'

‘Do you? I would not have thought you could be capable of such foolishness.'

They frowned at each other and with their eyebrows pulled down, they looked very much alike. ‘Gerard knows nothing of life,' said Anatole, turning away and limping quickly ahead. ‘He's protected by a great deal of his own nonsense. And good fortune. Great good fortune.'

‘So you don't like him?' Finola called against the wind: ‘Jemima! Come here.'

‘I like him well enough, as Alice would say. I don't think he has made the best of you. He's done nothing to encourage your talents.' Anatole slowed down and stopped, and his white hair blew up like Struwelpeter's. ‘Here you are, set down in Dorset, and what are you going to do for the rest of your life? I was obliged to travel all over Europe as a young man, and you have
once
been out of England!'

‘Well, I never wanted to be a talented person!' said Finola when he had finished. She hurried on. ‘Or a great
lover
, or a
career
woman,
or anything else you and Alice could think of, and why
should
I be if I don't want to? It's quite enough work having talented parents!'

He paused, looking at her. She had never said such a thing before; it was most independent. ‘Come Fin, we have
never
had a quarrel, you and I, and we shan't start now. You can quarrel with Gerard if you feel like it.' He took her arm, patted it, and leant on it for support: the walk of two miles was beginning to hurt his crooked leg. ‘I love you too much. Tell me who is coming to drinks tomorrow – people we have met before?'

*

Alice's portrait of Gerard and Finola was a bright and fluid pastiche of Gainsborogh's
Mr
and
Mrs
Andrews.
Finola, dressed in jersey and pearls and a long, full tweed skirt, was seated on a bench under one of the cedar trees. Gerard stood behind her on her right, leaning against the trunk in a slightly uneasy way, and stroking Trumpy's ear with one hand. The dog was painted jumping up, dirtying Gerard's mackintosh with his paws. Gerard wore a tweed cap and gum-boots, and Finola was hatless.

‘Well, d'you like it?' said Alice, who had just brought the painting in from outdoors. She had spent the day finishing the landscape behind the figures, and she had adapted Combe Chalcot to suit her convenience. In the picture, the house, surrounded by its open wall, was poised two feet to the north-east of Gerard's left shoulder, though in real life the particular tree Alice had painted grew at the back of the kitchen garden and not in front of the house.

‘It's very good of Finola,' said Gerard. Alice had rather exaggerated his wife's untidy hair which, because it waved naturally and was very soft, Gerard had always found charming. Then there was the contrast between her full red mouth and her little pointed chin, her broody eyes and sharp nose, which Alice had not softened. ‘She looks rather – sad, though, I must say.'

‘Well, I did start it only in March. She was very sad then, wasn't she, worse than now. There was nothing I could say to her which would – mean anything, but I thought –' Alice looked at the picture. ‘I hope she didn't think I was unsympathetic. I didn't want to upset her, by trying to talk about it.'

Gerard tried to interrupt her: the children were present,
but Alice did not seem to think these things should be properly hidden from them.

‘Grandalice!' said Eleanor. ‘Why aren't I in the picture?'

‘I'll paint another picture of you, but not with chocolate biscuit round your mouth. You're getting fat, Eleanor.'

‘No, I'm not,' said Eleanor, wiping her dirty mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I'm
not
.'

‘All right then, you're not. Do you like the picture?'

‘Trumpy's quite good,' said Eleanor, and walked out of the room.

‘What about you, Richard?' Richard was fiddling with Alice's dirty box of paints, wondering at the unnecessarily complicated names of the colours: ultramarine, viridian, crimson lake. ‘What do you think?'

Anatole and Finola came tramping into the gun-room, and they blinked to see the other three, and the big canvas on its easel in the middle of the floor. ‘Oh, hullo,' Finola said.

‘I thought it would be all right to do a bit of work in here, Fin, there's a good light, and I can't damage the lino,' said Alice. ‘Hullo, Jemima! Don't you walk all over my palette, you bad dog.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Daddy looks awfully
stern
,' said Richard, who felt very much older than he had done a year ago, now that Nanny had gone for good, and he was a weekly boarder at a prep school in Somerset. Gerard laughed. ‘I think you should have put Bella's grave in, Grandalice.'

‘Well, I didn't,' said Alice, after a very short silence. ‘Give me that rag will you, no, not that one, the turps one –'

‘Goodness, Alice, you certainly painted me on a plain day!' said Finola. ‘Oh, you are unkind, my nose isn't as bad as that. I look just like a witch.'

Alice smiled, as she began vigorously to clean one of her brushes.

‘Darling, it's very good!' said Gerard. He did not like his own portrait, though no artist could truthfully make him look plain; or like a film-star, which was what he had chiefly
dreaded when Alice began. He did look stern, though he thought he rarely was so.

‘It's just like
you,
I must say,' said Finola to Gerard. She thought her mother had caught very well the shy quality of his good looks, which were not noticeable at a distance as some men's were: the thin features and dark eyebrows, light eyes, pale lips and pale hair. ‘Gerard in a thoughtful mood, and rather embarrassed by being painted at all.'

He rubbed the back of her neck for a moment, smiling. They were thinking of Isabella.

‘I told Alice she ought not to paint the house, it's too much,' said Anatole, standing on tiptoe to hang up the mackintosh which he had borrowed. He sat down to get his breath back, and Jemima leapt on him.

‘What do you think, Gerard?' said Alice.

‘No, leave it,' he said.

He stood back to view the whole: Alice used a bold, naïve style, and he preferred something a little softer on the whole. He did like this painting, when he saw it from a little distance over Finola's shoulder. There was an air of permanence about it, and yet it was clear that in a moment Trumpy would jump down and they would all go into the house. ‘I can't say I think the house
matters,
but it's good of the house, of course, and there's only that watercolour of my great-grandmother's which shows it.' No good painter had ever depicted the Cedar House, though Devis had painted the Manor as background. ‘Leave it, Alice, it sets the tone – after all you are making fun of us, aren't you, in quite a nice way?' He could not be offended.

‘Oh no,' said Alice, laying down her brush. The painting was already dated, and signed, ‘Alice Molloy'.