Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (21 page)

“All that was long, long ago …, and Luc died in a camp before the liberation, just before. No one of us could ask for peace for years and years to come. No one of us could rest, or make a root. The ghosts would not be gentle like Anne perhaps ever again, not in my lifetime anyway. And as for purity …,” she shrugged her shoulders. “We were stained to the marrow with something far more degrading and more terrible than love affairs!”

The fire was dying down and the sun, which had momentarily lit up the daffodils, had slipped down behind the rocks. Jenny noticed that the shadow had flowed into Mrs. Stevens’ face too, hollowing out the delicate bone structure and giving her for a second the look of a death’s head.

“Peter,” she murmured. “It’s getting awfully late.”

He looked at his watch. “Heavens, Mrs. Stevens, it’s after six. We are tiring you.”

“Yes,” Hilary rubbed a hand across her forehead, “I am tired.” But instead of breaking off, she sat down quite deliberately. “But the night will come soon enough. Stay half an hour, if you can …, if you are not caught here by the ancient mariner!”

“You’re incredibly generous. You know it,” Jenny answered.

“Not generous. Interested. I said to myself when I got Mr. Selversen’s letter that this interview might be a chance to clear a path, to find out where I stand. It’s you who have been generous. I’ve told you things I did not even know I knew!” She lifted the bottle of Scotch. “Well, there’s just about one drink apiece left. Shall we finish the bottle in style?” When she had carefully poured out what was left with mathematical precision (that sense of order, Peter thought to himself!) she leaned back in her chair and smiled rather thoughtfully at Jenny. “Miss Hare, would you say offhand that anything had happened here? To you, I mean, as well as to me? Of course,” she added with a laugh, “nearly everything seems to have happened to me!”

“Why do you ask me?” Jenny countered.

“Because I should like to imagine that I have been of some use to you, that this exchange has not been entirely one-sided in its possible value. Oh, I am not thinking of what will be published eventually!” And she shrugged her shoulders, as if that hardly concerned her now. “But after all, Miss Hare, wild-eyed or not, you are a woman and a writer, yourself—so—.”

“Of course it’s been helpful,” Jenny answered, “but I’ll have to think it all over,” and she gave Peter a slightly nervous look. “I mean, there is so much to think about,” she floundered. “May I ask one thing, just for me? Not for the interview.”

“To Hell with the interview!
We
are important!”

“Do you really think it is impossible for a woman and a writer to lead a normal life as a woman?” But before Hilary could answer, Jenny clasped her hands tightly, for they were shaking she discovered to her dismay, and asked another question, “and must the Muse be feminine? It seems so strange to me because.…”

“Because?” The tone was gentle but the old eyes flashed.

“Well,” and Jenny felt with dismay the blush rising her throat to her eyes, “You see, I’m in love with a man. I hope to marry him.”

“So I gathered sometime ago. My dear child, please remember that I have spoken only for myself. Marry your young man!” she commanded, flushing herself. “After all,
I
married!”

“I’m not afraid, but I think he is,” Jenny said, looking down at her clasped hands, afraid of meeting Peter’s glance. “Isn’t he, Peter?” she asked.

Was there a faint amusement visible in the way Mrs. Stevens turned to Peter and repeated the question, using his first name herself, “Is he—Peter?”

“Listen,” Peter parried, obviously embarrassed, “This is none of my business. You two carry on.”

“Well, I’ll answer,” Mrs. Stevens said with a smile. “No doubt he is afraid.”

“Oh dear,” Jenny said. “I suppose he is. But I don’t
want
to be a monster, Mrs. Stevens!—I suppose you think I’m an idiot, but how do I know that I have enough talent, for instance, to take on the full ‘motherhood, the full monsterhood’ as you put it sometime ago?”

“I don’t suppose one ever knows about one’s talent.…” She paused and closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were still narrowed like someone looking at a painting, bringing it into focus. “No, the crucial question seems to me to be this: what is the
source
of creativity in the woman who wants to be an artist? After all, admit it, a woman is meant to create children not works of art—that’s what she has been engined to do, so to speak. A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It’s the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant.”

Jenny swallowed this autocratic statement in silence, but she was frowning.

“Well, Miss Hare?”

“I just don’t see,” Jenny blurted out. “It seems to me you make art a neurotic symptom, at least for a woman.…”

“Oh no,” the answer shot back. “Just the opposite. For the aberrant woman art is health, the only health! It is,” she waved aside Peter’s attempt to interrupt, “as I see it, the constant attempt to rejoin something broken off or lost, to make whole again. It is always integrating, don’t you know? That’s the whole point. Do you think I am crazy?” she asked Peter suddenly.

“Of course not—but may I suggest that the troubling word is ‘aberrant.’ What do you mean exactly by ‘aberrant’? Who wants Marianne Moore to be a grandmother?” he added with a mischievous smile.

“Well, I don’t, of course,” she sniffed. “I am too delighted when I browse among her creations. Nevertheless,” she turned to Peter quite sternly, “we do all feel, I think, that we have to
expiate
for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.…” She paused, frowned, waited a moment, rubbing her forehead with one hand in a rather nervous way. “No,” she murmured half to herself, “that’s too easy. I’ve got to
think!
” she said. “Give me a moment.… Maybe it’s this: the woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the
expense
of herself as a woman.” Suddenly she relaxed, sat up and laughed, “So round and round the mulberry bush we go! I don’t make myself clear. I’ve been too busy doing what I had to do to think a great deal about this. The interview—you two
éminences grises
about to invade my privacy—stirred it all up, and I must confess that in the last few days I have suffered from rather acute anxiety.”

“What made you so anxious?” Peter asked gently.

“Well, I had the curious feeling that I was about to be found out, or rather that I was going to be forced to find out something I didn’t want to know.” She smiled a shadowy smile. “That was the attraction, of course. That was what magnetized, that sleeping anxiety which your coming brought to the surface, not to mention Miss Hare’s preoccupations, which come back like the angel to trouble the waters. Why do you want to write, for instance?” She shot at Jenny. “Do you know?”

“I get filled up. I feel I’m going to burst.”

Hilary Stevens laughed. “Exactly! She knows,” she said to Peter.

“It’s something I
am
, not something I
do,”
Jenny went on.

“Well marry your young man with all that you
are
, and see what happens!” Mrs. Stevens uttered, not so much as a challenge as with a gesture of a person opening a door.

“I’m going to have a try—if I can unscare him!”

The darkness had really invaded the room now. They could hardly see each other’s faces. For a moment they rested, as if they had arrived at a temporary resolution.

“We have reached
The Silences,”
Peter said then.

“Oh that book!” Mrs. Stevens pulled herself up. “Let’s have some light on the subject!” She rose and crossed the room to light the lamp on the big table, then one beside her chair. She herself remained standing, leaning one arm on the wing. “The book of this house, the intoxication of solitude. I wish it were better,” she said. “It should have been better, and perhaps if I live another ten years, I’ll be ready to have another try. But you see, just before I came here, my mother died.…” Her eyes were bright. If she’ had looked tired a half hour before, she was alive again. Feeling flowed through her in a visible stream. And in this curious creature, Jenny saw, feeling acted like light, as if every finest blood vessel which had been opaque, was now lit from within. “Yes,” she said, “let us end this dialogue with the beginning. I have sometimes imagined that my last book might be about my mother; it is time to die when one has come to terms with everything. My mother still remains the great devouring enigma, ah!” She came round the chair and sat down, looking at them with triumph, “the Muse, you see.…”

“ ‘Whom I desired above all things to know. Sister of the mirage and echo’?” Peter asked.

“Wait,” Mrs. Stevens said. “Let me consider this. Let me try to get there very gently, will you? It is bound to be painful. When my mother died I experienced desolation, and at the same time (this is odd!) a freedom which had suddenly become pointless. Free for what? She was in a queer way
the
antagonist, you see, the one who still had to be persuaded. Of course she had capitulated now and then, to my worst efforts, the novel and the
Dialogues
, those rhetorical arid works. I suppose they did not threaten her. In the ethos where I was brought up, feeling was always the threat,” she said drily. “Even art, when in the family, could be threatening.”

“You suggest a very repressed atmosphere,” Peter said.

“Yes, but,” she interrupted herself. “How hard to make you see her as she was! She should have been an actress.…” Now Hilary turned to Jenny, “
She
was the woman meant to be an artist who tried to do the right thing!”

“You felt her power?”

“Felt it? Before I was eight it had devastated me, or marked me for a poet. Shall I ever forget that voice reading Arnold’s
Forsaken Merman
—‘Children dear, was it yesterday?” and the anguish of that cry ‘Margaret, Margaret!’ I still wake sometimes to that lament, to what I heard in my mother’s voice of longing and starvation, wake in tears.… Oh well! You see, the hard thing was that the wound she had herself opened was not acceptable.”

“How not acceptable?” Peter asked.

“You suggest that your mother
was
susceptible to poetry, to the arts.”

“To the finished product, perhaps, but totally allergic to the chaotic suffering, the elements in life itself which make the poetry—totally allergic! Horrified by me as a person after I grew up! No, I had to fight my parents every inch of the way, from the beginning.”

“Don’t we all?” Jenny asked. “It’s the human condition.”

“But I loved them; that, too, is the human condition, isn’t it? Desperately wanted their approval—so hard to get.” Then she added half to herself, “The price of parents! All that guilt!”

“That is not a word you use very often,” Peter said.

“I don’t use it lightly as it is often used these days,” she said sharply. “For me it was a matter of years of arid struggle. After my mother died I did not go to pieces,” she said as if she might have. “I didn’t because I came and rooted myself here. I see now that as long as she lived I kept fleeing to Europe, and in this sense her death was a liberation. At last I was able to come home and rest my eyes on the sea. Solitude was, for a time, an intoxication; I had been cracked open, and the source was there again. I imagined,” and she laughed her light laugh, “for some years I imagined that solitude would be the Muse, that no human being would ever again come to break the mould, but that is another story,” she added. “I suppose what I had to accept when my mother died was the hardest thing: you quoted the Graves lines ‘Whom I desired above all things to know.’ The other side of the coin, I suppose, is the longing to
be known
, to be accepted as one is. Up to the very end, I waited for the miracle, for that epiphany which would open a final door between myself and my mother. Day after day I went to the hospital. Sometimes she wanted to talk, and we did talk, but near the end she asked me whether I did not think of marrying again, and I knew she understood nothing, or pretended not to understand, that she would never, never find me acceptable as I am.

The words lay on the air in a frozen chill of desolation. And no one said anything for a while.

“Is there some connection, would you say, between the constant, recurrent image of the ocean in
The Silences
and some of what you have been saying?”

She frowned, thinking over Peter’s question, turning it over in her mind as she turned a cigarette absent-mindedly in her hands before she lit it “I don’t know …, do you?”

“Only it’s such an obvious symbol, as you use it, for the mother.”

Mrs. Stevens sat up straight, quite pink. “Well, you’ve hit it! You’ve hit it of course. You’re absolutely right! It never occurred to me that that was what I was doing; and the other image in that book is the house—the house and the sea; I could not speak of her as
herself
(that is what I still have to do before I die), but now I begin to understand what this house is, has been, what it is that gives it for me a particular resonance, why always the silence has been so alive here. It is not that it contains ghosts, but it is in a way, I suppose, a transposed presence itself—how very odd!”

“The Muse, in fact, has any mansions,” Peter said with a smile. “We have not talked about the last book, the new one, the one which has brought us and the critics to sit at your feet. But I at least begin to understand what has gone into its making. So perhaps I begin to understand what you mean about ‘women’s work’ too. At least I
think
I do.…” He paused and rubbed his forehead with one hand while he glanced back through his notes. “They have to write from the whole of themselves, so the feminine genius is the genius of self-creation. The outer world will never be as crucial for its flowering as the inner world, am I right?”