Dark Angel (15 page)

She could hardly plead on her lover’s behalf, although she tried from time to time to emphasize his strengths. She gave Acland copies of Shawcross’s books—and then suffered in silence when Acland remorselessly explained why he thought them bad. She tried—in the first year or so—to throw them together; and then she gave up. It occurred to her that Acland
knew,
that he was not deceived, as the rest of the family were, about the true nature of her relationship. Then Gwen became truly afraid. Acland did not just judge the world in general, she saw; he judged her, his mother, judged her and—presumably—found her wanting.

I have lost a son,
Gwen would think sometimes, close to tears, and she would yearn to throw her arms around Acland, to tell him everything, to
explain.
Fearing him, she never did so. Acland, she knew, might be brought back to her, but there would be a price, and that price would be Shawcross. To regain her son’s confidence and respect, her lover would have to be sacrificed—and this Gwen, for all her occasional unhappiness over Acland, cannot bring herself to do. She loves Shawcross; she cannot give him up, and this her son would never understand. Acland, Gwen tells herself, is too contained; passion does not exist in Acland’s universe.

In this judgment Gwen is quite wrong, for Acland himself is in love. In the past year a universe has been unlocked by this love, yet he does not speak of it to his mother or to anyone. Acland protects the love from the gaze of others behind a barrier of sarcasm and nonchalance.

Meanwhile, all that hidden away, Acland poses for Boy’s photograph. He swings the mallet, rests it, holds still (although he hates to be still, and Boy’s endless photographs make him impatient). A glowering Freddie, an inattentive Acland.

“Keep
still,
” Boy commands, and the camera whirs.

“Such a day! Such a day! Such a day!” Acland shouts when at last the exposure is over, and he throws himself down full-length upon the grass.

Freddie and Boy regard him, face lifted to the sky, arms outstretched, expression rapturous.

Freddie grins. Boy, dismantling his tripod, gives Acland a prim glance. Acland’s moods are too precipitate, in Boy’s opinion. They veer from heaven to hell, from the black to the sublime, too easily. Boy finds these moods pretentious.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Acland,” he says, and tucks his tripod under his arm. “Do you have to be so extravagant?”

“Wrong,” Acland replies, and does not even glance in Boy’s direction. “Wrong, wrong, wrong! I am not extravagant. I am …
steadfast.
”

He proclaims the word, perhaps to his brothers, perhaps to the sky, perhaps to himself.

Freddie’s response is an amiable kick; Boy’s response is to leave. He proceeds across the lawn and, at the edge, looks back. Acland still has not moved. He lies on his back and stares up at the sun, but his expression has changed, and his face—as pale and precise as a marble monument—is serious.

Shall we move on? Boy took a great many other photographs that day—that key day—and some of them are helpful.

Here is one of the houseguests, Mrs. Heyward-West, formerly the King’s mistress. She is descending from a motorcar, wearing furs, a huge hat, and a motoring veil, which she has just lifted. Nearby, another houseguest, Jane Conyngham—plain Jane Conyngham as she was unkindly known, and one of the great heiresses of her day. Jane, whose long-widowed father owns adjoining estates in Wiltshire, has known the Cavendish family from earliest childhood. She has been invited this weekend for a special reason: Lord Callendar plans to marry her off to his eldest son, Boy; a proposal is imminent.

We shall come to Jane in due course. Meanwhile, dressed in an unflattering walking suit, she stands next to Acland, and her gaze is fixed upon him. Jane has an intelligent face. We would not call her plain now, perhaps, for our standards in beauty have changed. She stands next to Acland, absorbed, and Acland—predictably—is looking the other way.

Next, a group of servants, lined up outside the servants’ hall in serried ranks, as if for a school photograph. How patient Boy must have been! Toward the back, at the end of a line, is a girl called Jenna Curtis.

She is then aged sixteen and has been in service at Winterscombe for two years; both her parents, now dead, worked there before her. Jenna has been steadily promoted over the past two years and is by this time a between-stairs maid. For this party of Gwen’s, however, she has a new role: Jane Conyngham’s personal maid has fallen ill; Jenna has been pressed into service. Today, it is she who will unpack Jane’s dresses and iron them and lay them out. It is she who will help Jane Conyngham dress her hair for the great dinner, and she will do so with such tact, skill, and patience that Jane (shy herself, and easily intimidated by smarter maids) will actually remember her and will—a few years later—promote her marriage. A mistake.

The sixteen-year-old Jenna is pretty. By modern standards she is plump. She looks rounded, soft as a dove; her eyes are wide and dark and calm. A lovely girl, even though her uniform is drab and her cap is unbecoming.

My Jenna, I thought, when I first found this photograph. She was unrecognizable as the Jenna I remembered. But then, the Jenna I found in the notebooks was different too. Words and pictures: I placed them side by side, and I considered.

One last photograph. Come with me; we are indoors now. Boy has abandoned people for interiors; he has had trouble lighting this.

Boy, it seems, has a project of his own, not yet revealed to anyone. It involves photographing each of the rooms at Winterscombe, mounting the pictures in an album, and then presenting it to his father, Denton. The gift may bring his father ’round, Boy thinks; Denton may see that there is a use to the Videx after all, for Denton is immensely proud of his house.

Above all, he is proud of this room in which Boy now stands. Unblushingly, Denton refers to this room as “the King’s bedroom.” All the other bedrooms have names too: There is the Blue room, the Red room, the Chinese room, the Honeysuckle room … but those names are rarely conjured by his father. The King’s bedroom, however, he mentions at every opportunity, especially to guests new to Winterscombe.

It is one way of reminding them (should they not know) that Denton’s house has received royal visitors. It provides Denton, a patriot, a monarchist, and a snob, with the lead-in he seeks. He can then launch himself on the anecdotes his family have come to dread: how King Edward graciously complimented him on the excellence of his shoot, his claret, his view, his architect, his plumbing, above all his perspicacity in marrying such a beauty as Gwen.

Denton will mention the King’s remarkable good humor while at Winterscombe (the King’s temper being notoriously unreliable); he will attribute it to the excellence of the Winterscombe air, unequaled (Denton believes) in any other part of England. Denton will mention the King’s cordial invitation to shoot with him at Sandringham; he will neglect to mention that this visit never materialized.

Then, ignoring Gwen’s frowns (Gwen, being American, finds all this glorification of the monarch tedious), Denton will occasionally take his guests upstairs so that they can view for themselves the room where the King slept.

He will pace about a room which is swaddled and stuffed. He will punch the ballooning pregnancies of the red velvet chairs, smooth the bulges of the crimson curtains, caress the curvatures of the four-poster bed. The whole room was redecorated for the King’s impending visit, and in the bathroom beyond, the wonders of German plumbing were installed at vast expense, but it is the bed, which Denton himself designed, which remains his pride and his delight.

It is so large it had to be erected by the estate carpenters in the room itself. Steps are required to mount it. At its head is a canopy embroidered with the royal arms; at its foot, two cherubs disport themselves suggestively. The mattress, hand-stuffed with horsehair and finest wool, is eighteen inches thick; Denton, to demonstrate its luxury and resilience, will—occasionally—bounce on it. However, he does so with a certain reverence, for to Denton this bedroom is a shrine, a hallowed place. Sometimes Denton allows himself to speculate on the mysteries this bedroom may have seen. (When the King visited, the Queen was indisposed, but his current mistress was of the house party.) He speculates, but he maintains respect. And for this reason, the King’s bedroom has not been used in five years. Until this weekend.

This weekend its sanctity will be broken—Gwen has insisted upon it. With so many guests for her comet party, and only eighteen bedrooms at her disposal, Gwen finds herself short of accommodation. For once, and with a hostess’s authority, she has insisted, and Denton—furious—has been overruled. The King’s bedroom shall be occupied. Gwen has decreed that Eddie Shawcross shall sleep in it.

Her lover has in fact been nagging her for months to let him use this room. Shawcross has a lively sexual imagination, and Gwen knows that he must have particular plans for this room—though he will not tell her what they are, for he is secretive. The unspecified plans have inflamed her own imagination; for months, temptation and timidity fought a fierce battle. Finally she took the risk and, to her own astonishment, found Denton could be vanquished.

After her victory, it is true, Gwen felt some anxiety. She would look at her husband, wonder if he suspected, ask herself if she had gone too far. But in the past few days these anxieties have receded. Denton’s temper is bad, but there is nothing unusual in that, and (Gwen thinks, is almost sure) her husband still does not suspect. This is partly because she and Shawcross have been commendably discreet; partly because Denton is unimaginative; mainly (she tells herself) because Denton is not interested.

Since the birth of Steenie, Denton has stayed away from her; the punctual weekly peremptory visits to her room have ceased. Instead, Denton makes punctual weekly visits up to London, where—Gwen assumes—he keeps some woman. True, he does not like Shawcross and does not bother to disguise his dislike, but this is just snobbishness on his part, Gwen thinks. Denton dislikes Shawcross because of his class, because of the school he went to, because he is a writer—a profession for which Denton has the most profound contempt. But this snobbishness is, in a way, helpful; it would not occur to Denton that a man such as Shawcross could be his rival.

So, on the whole, Gwen feels safe. Because she feels safe she is gradually becoming less cautious. She has begun to chafe at her marriage to Denton; she has begun to resent his churlishness. She is thirty-eight; Denton is sixty-five. When she finally nerved herself to make the announcement that Eddie would sleep in the King’s bedroom this weekend, when her husband’s face purpled with rage, she found herself asking a new question: Must she remain tied to Denton for the rest of her life?

This question she keeps to herself. She does not dare to hint of it to her lover. For what is the alternative? Divorce? That would be out of the question. She would lose her children, lose her place in society; she would be without money and she would be ostracized. Such a route to freedom is unthinkable, and, Gwen suspects, Eddie Shawcross would not welcome it. His only source of income is his writing; he finds it hard even to support Constance and often complains of that. And besides, he is not a man renowned for his fidelity. When Gwen first met Shawcross he already had a considerable reputation as a ladies’ man, with a particular penchant for women of the aristocracy; Shawcross, it was said, did not like to bed lower than the wife of an earl, and his men friends made unsavory jokes about his methods of rising in society.

In the circumstances it is a continuing source of wonder to Gwen that she attracted Shawcross at all, and that, having attracted him, she has held on to him. Their affair has endured four years; Gwen does not like to ask but she thinks that, for Shawcross, this is a record. However, he has never in all that time admitted to loving her, and with him Gwen never feels secure. Divorce? Separation? No, she would not dare to mention such ideas to Eddie; the least suggestion of pressure, and he might leave her.

Instead, just of late another idea has come to her; it came to her, in fact, for the first time when she insisted Eddie should sleep in this room, when Denton’s face purpled, when he shouted and slammed out of the room. There it was, curling into her mind like smoke:
What if her husband were to die
?

Gwen is ashamed of this thought, but once admitted, it will not go away. If her husband were to die she would be rich—very rich indeed—and that fact might alter Eddie’s attitude considerably. Gwen, shying away from this speculation, tells herself that she is only being sensible. After all, Denton is much older than she. He eats too much. He drinks too much. He is overweight; he has gout; he has that choleric temper about which his doctors often warn him. He
could
die; he
might
die … He could have a seizure, an apoplexy….

Gwen does not want Denton to die. Indeed, the very thought of his death causes her distress, for despite his irascibility Denton is in many ways a good husband and Gwen is protective toward him. Providing he is humored, Denton is easy enough to live with. He loves his sons and is fiercely proud of them; he can be gallant to Gwen, even considerate. She and her husband are, for the most part, comfortable together; Gwen is wise enough to know that this easy marital steadiness suits her and should not lightly be thrown away.

On the other hand, there is Eddie. On the other hand, she would like to be free…. Except what does it mean exactly, that word
free
? Free to be with her lover, free to give herself up to him? This freedom she enjoys already. But free to be with Eddie permanently? Free to marry him? No. Gwen shies away from that thought. Eddie is a lover; she is not always sure she would like him as a husband.

Meanwhile, she has the best of both worlds. Denton does not know; Shawcross does not complain, and the demands he makes on her (such demands! Gwen glories in them), though intense, are limited.
Don’t rock the boat, Gwen,
he said to her once, and though she was hurt by the remark and found it somewhat coarse, she later accepted that what he said was sensible. The great thing is, they are safe.