Dark Angel (75 page)

Montague Stern, who did not—and who was the one figure at this gathering who remained, cautiously, on its margins—was the person (Steenie later claimed) who started this rush. Arriving punctually, he reserved three paintings at once; where Stern led, others followed.

Constance, seeking her husband out some half an hour later, gave him a kiss.

“That was kind of you, Montague. I know they are not to your taste.”

“I like Steenie. Perhaps his paintings will grow on me.”

“I doubt that.”

“He seems to be enjoying it all anyway.” Stern watched Steenie sweep down on a new guest. “He looks happier than he has in weeks.”

“Ah.” Constance gave her husband a sidelong glance. “That is partly my work. He has been worrying about Boy, as you know. He finally explained. And I was able to tell him something that set his mind at rest.” She paused. “It is something I must tell you, too—and I will later. When we escape. I should have told you before—I see that now. When this is over, may we go home and just sit quietly together, like an old married couple, and talk?”

“I should like nothing better, my dear. But for the moment, you should circulate. It might be an idea, perhaps, to rescue Lady Cunard from that parlor pink.”

Constance was not anxious to tackle this man, a famous sculptor. (The last time she had done so, he had lectured her first on Marx, then on free love. Constance thought free love a contradiction in terms.) However, he was becoming louder, and possibly more drunk; Lady Cunard was beginning to look trapped by his arguments and his bulk. Constance did her duty.

Lady Cunard moved off fast; the sculptor lurched.

“Constance!” He gave her a scratchy kiss. “My muse. Where have you been hiding yourself? How was the honeymoon?”

Constance recoiled sharply. Before she could stop herself, out came the phrase, the same one she had used to Steenie: “Oh,” she said. “My honeymoon. Well, it began with a death.”

That honeymoon. Stern and Constance had finally arrived at Denton’s shooting lodge late in the afternoon, after a long and arduous drive, the nearest station and town being some eighty miles away.
Lodge
is a misleading term: The house in which she and Stern were to begin married life (a house that Stern was later to purchase) was a huge mock-baronial castle, an extravagant but bogus piece of architecture built by Denton’s father. The road to it, narrow and rutted, wound up through a pass in the surrounding mountains, then cut down through outcrops of rock and heather toward the coast and an invisible sea. The house itself, at the neck of a remote glen, was constructed out of blood-red sandstone.

They saw it first, the view opening out before them, as they came through the pass. Stern asked the driver to halt; he climbed down from the car and stood for a few moments facing into the wind. Constance refused to leave the car; she shivered and clutched the traveling rugs around her. They faced west. The sun was setting; beyond the red bulk of the house the sky was a conflagration; the clouds bled. Constance averted her eyes. She had visited this house before, but only in the summer months; bleak magnificence, in winter, made her afraid. Was this the extremity she had sought? You could see the hand of God in this landscape. Even the trees were poor and stunted things, shrinking from the violence of the elements. The mountains were sharp as teeth against the sky; the bones of rocks broke from the ground all around her. A wild, desolate, and deathly beauty. Constance thought, shivering again,
Oh, why did I agree to come here?

When they entered the house they were greeted by the steward, and by a telegram. Constance, who had not mentioned to Stern the note Boy had given her, knew what that telegram was likely to say. She sank down into one of the enormous chairs in the huge and vaulted hall. Her eyes rested on the vastness of the room, on windows some twenty feet tall, on a massive fireplace that burned eight-foot tree trunks. Her small feet rested upon a tiger skin; the beady eyes of dead stags looked down at her from the walls. She clutched her little handbag very tight. She felt that her husband, who saw everything, saw through the leather of the bag, saw through the vellum envelope, and read the contents of Boy’s last letter inside it. Stern gave no sign of anxiety as he opened the telegram; as he read it his expression did not alter. Looking up, he said with perfect calmness: “Boy is dead. A shooting accident. I will telephone Winterscombe.”

It took time to make the connection; once it had been made, Stern dealt with the situation with his customary imperturbability. He expressed shock, regret, condolences; a perfect readiness, if it would help, to curtail this honeymoon and return to Wiltshire. In view of the lateness of the hour, he suggested the decision be made the following morning.

“I don’t think that it was … an accident,” Constance said in a small voice, once they were alone.

“I imagine not. In the circumstances,” Stern replied.

He said nothing more. The question of suicide was not discussed; there was no examination of his own culpability or his wife’s; no reference to the photograph shown to Boy in the Corinthian Club. Constance found his composure alarming; in an odd and furtive way, she also found it thrilling.
Schadenfreude:
as she had on the train north, she found all instances of her husband’s ruthlessness thrilling.
A secret man
—
death is his familiar,
she thought. She felt a quick nervous excitement. What would this husband of hers do next, when they were upstairs in the bedroom?

What he did was disappointing. With a cold politeness Stern escorted her to her room, summoned her maid, informed her that he understood she must be both exhausted and shocked, and then left her to rest and to recover.

Constance did not want to rest. She spent a sleepless night. The wind howled outside. It rattled the great doors and windows. The next morning Stern came into her room and drew back the curtains. The light was bright and unnaturally white.

“It has snowed during the night,” he said. “Heavily. I’m afraid there is no question of returning to Winterscombe, Constance.” He turned back, his face expressionless. “We are cut off,” he added, and then he left her.

Cut off indeed: they were marooned, Constance discovered. Snowfall had made the one road to the house impassable. No one could reach the house, and no one could leave it. The telephone lines were down. It seemed to Constance that her husband was pleased by this; he exulted in this enforced isolation.

Constance did not. Despite the vast fires burning day and night, she was always cold. The rooms and the corridors echoed. The view from the windows was of loneliness.

“What can you see, Constance?” Stern said to her some five days later, when the snow remained but the storm had abated. They sat in the great hall, Stern by the fire, Constance curled up on a window seat.

She pressed her face to the glass. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands. For five nights she had slept alone; for five nights her marriage had remained unconsummated. No explanation.

“What can I see, Montague?” she replied. “Why, twelve thousand acres of white. The same view, from every window.”

The next day, Stern gave instructions to the steward. His wife, he said, found the house confining. Estate workers were dispatched to dig a path through the snow. When the work was complete, Stern drew Constance to the doorway. Smiling, he displayed to her this path, cut for her benefit. A glittering pathway, just wide enough for two people to walk side by side, it led straight from the door to a balustrade. This balustrade marked the boundary of Gwen’s unsuccessful attempt at a garden. Below it, the ground fell away to a viewpoint overlooking a Highland wilderness. Constance looked at this path, at the bright sky without clouds, at the high sun. The air was icily fresh, with a tang of salt in it. The glitter of the air tempted her; Stern smiled.

“You see?” he said. “Freedom.”

Every day for the next three days, morning and afternoon, Constance and Stern took the air. They would walk along this path, arm in arm and side by side: a slow progress, from the house to the wilderness, from the wilderness to the house.

“A little like exercising in a prison yard, don’t you find?” Stern said once as they paced back and forth. He glanced at Constance as he said this, as if the remark amused him, as if it held a meaning he would like her to understand.

“A little,” Constance replied, clasping his hand. Gloved fingers; a slight and reassuring pressure; she decided the remark had no edge.

“Shall we walk to the wilderness?” Stern would say in the same tone of amused irony, and walk to the wilderness they would. One hundred paces each way; sometimes Constance would say to herself that when they had taken fifty, or a hundred, when they reached the balustrade, she would speak. It shouldn’t be so hard, after all, to turn to him and ask why he left her still to sleep alone, her husband.

One day, two days, three days. She never did. The words would stick in her throat, the way thanks did when she was a child.

By the afternoon of the third day, she had decided: No matter what, the words would be said. No more hesitation. She would pronounce them the very second they reached the balustrade. One hundred paces, Stern accommodating his longer strides to her smaller steps. She clenched her gloved hands tight, rested them against the stone of the balustrade, opened her lips to speak, looked at the view, and was silenced.

Such a majestic view and, to human beings, so diminishing. All color was bleached out: The peat bogs, the heather, the outcrops of rock—all these were invisible beneath the snow. Snow upon snow, in the distance the white bones of mountains and then, below them, ringed by them, the flat black water of the sea-loch.

This loch had a deathly and forbidding air. The sun rarely reached its waters; protected from the prevailing wind by its flanking mountains, its surface was without ripples. In the distance, some three miles away but clearly visible in this crystalline air, she could discern the point where the waters of the loch flowed out into the open sea. Two black sheer rock faces fronted this boundary, making a narrow channel through which, at high and low tide, the water sucked and hurtled. A dangerous stretch of water this, notorious for its currents. Constance, who could not swim and was afraid of water, had always hated it.

“How deep is it?” she had asked Acland once when she was still a child. Acland, indifferent, had shrugged.

“God knows. Very deep. One hundred—two hundred fathoms.”

No, she could not speak. The loch would not allow her. It trapped the words on her tongue. With a sense of fear and despair Constance looked up at her husband.

He had not spoken for some while. Now, as he gazed out across that landscape, she saw it again on her husband’s face, that expression of exultation.

Stern, she saw, did not shrink from this place, as she did. He gloried in it. For a moment, watching him, she thought he was engaged in a silent battle of will with the savagery and desolation of this landscape; it was as if he matched himself against it, as if he challenged its dangerous beauty. He seemed oblivious to her presence; locked in that private struggle of his own. Constance was humbled by this. It was on that occasion, in profile to her, his face fixed and pale, etched against the sky, that she saw for the first time how little she had understood her husband. Stern the Machiavelli, Stern the power broker, exercising his influence in clubrooms, corridors, drawing rooms—that was how she had thought of him, and she had been wrong.
Today, I saw Montague’s soul,
she was to write in her notebook.
It was in that terrible, beautiful place, in that loch, in those mountains.

After a little while, when Stern still did not speak and seemed to have forgotten her presence, she stole out her hand and laid it upon his arm. She would have liked to tell him what she had seen in his face, but the words would not come out correctly. She said only that his liking for this place surprised her; she would not have expected it. Had she been asked to describe a location that matched his character, she would have selected the very opposite of this place.

“A classical house, and a classical park—I should have chosen that,” she said. “Somewhere a little austere, a place men had tamed for generations.”

“I can like such things,” Stern answered in an absent way, his eyes still fixed on the horizon. “But I prefer this. I never came to Scotland before.”

There was a silence. Stern continued to look out over the snow. His eyes traced the line of the crags against the sky. In the far distance a bird—an eagle or a buzzard, great wings outstretched—soared upon the thermals.

“Shall we have this?” Stern turned to Constance suddenly, startling her. He gripped her hand. She saw his face unmasked, freed from all his customary restraint, naked to her gaze for the first time, his eyes lit with a dark excitement.

“Shall we?” His grip on her hand tightened. He gestured toward the landscape before them. A wide arc of the arm: rocks, mountains, water, sea.

“We could, Constance, if you wished. We could have all this. It could be ours. We could … claim it.”

“This place?”

Constance was drawn to him. Stern offered her all this, and more. Such recklessness! For a moment the air sang in her lungs; she, too, was lifted up on those invisible thermals. There the world lay before their feet; one word and it was theirs. No, not even a word, for her husband bent toward her now; all she had to do was kiss his mouth.

She looked into his eyes; she reached up for his kiss; his arm tightened around her waist. At the very last moment, one tiny second of time, she shivered. She was afraid. She shrank back.

She gave a small and hopeless gesture of the hands; tiny kid gloves against the elements. She looked at the ring of mountains, the water of the loch beneath. Did she think of her father? Perhaps, perhaps.

Too far north, after all,
she said to herself. Too cold, too extreme. She turned away with a hateful little shrug, a pout of distaste she despised but could not suppress.

“This place? It’s well enough in August—if you like to kill animals. But in winter?”