Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (6 page)

“There, now we can invite a duchess to tea!”

Hilary had always longed for someone who would tease her, and love her, and accept her as she was. She could lie in the crook of Adrian’s arm and stare at the ceiling, and feel absolutely sheltered and safe. He was as limpid as a Mozart Sonata, as unassuming and deep. When she had tantrums, he just looked at her with delight, told her how pretty she looked when she was angry, and hauled her out to walk it off along the river, taking her whole arm and holding it close to his side, so clearly confident of his own power, that she believed it, believed that he was the answer to all doubt, that she was moored at last. It was immensely real on the level on which it existed, their marriage, rooted in the endearing physical world—riding (Adrian had taught her to jump, and how patient and gentle he was when she panicked!), dancing, laughing, making love. Those three precious years had been like a long summer holiday, a rest, the only one she would ever have, from obsession, anxiety, and work. Once Adrian had found her sitting at the little chinoiserie desk (it had no resemblance to a work table), her chin on her hand, and had asked,

“A penny for your thoughts!”

“They’re not worth a penny,” she had said, because she could not bear to hurt him, and because also she wanted to pretend even to herself that her life with him was all she needed or wanted. How could she say to this total being, “I am still sometimes haunted by demons. I want to write poems. I want to feel the pull of the impossible again.… I want to be myself.”

“Aren’t you yourself with me?” he would have asked, smiling in the pleasure of himself, in the pleasure of her, his wife. He would have asserted their union by lifting her right off her chair and taking her to bed where the particulars of selfhood were submerged in the great primal darkness, where their union was deep and complete enough to transcend the personal, and Hilary felt carried out of herself on a tide of urgency and renewal. Why then did she sometimes wake the next morning with depression hanging over her like a fog? Would it have been different if they had created the child they each wanted so much? It was troubling to feel sometimes so empty, emptied out of herself.

Adrian, on the other hand, was driven by an inexhaustible urge for life, and life for him meant using his physical being to the limit of his strength, and beyond. He refused to pay any attention to his old wounds (shrapnel had had to be extracted from four different places), though he sometimes felt sick after riding too hard, but laughed it off, took some medicine, and a half an hour later was off to play tennis. After all, he had survived the trenches. What could touch him now? And if he took to drinking rather a lot, so did everyone else in their world. They were surrounded by ghosts; all of them like Adrian had lost all but two or three of the friends they had known at Eton and Oxford. The gay parties, where women always outnumbered men, had their poignance. You could be wild, funny, eccentric, but you must not weep or ever, ever look back; war was the one taboo subject, but it was always there at the feast, looking out of a drunken eye, or making a loud laugh suddenly harsh and bitter.

Sometimes lying in the dark, hearing Adrian’s heart beat against her temple as she lay in the crook of his arm, Hilary felt his mystery, the mystery of all those who had come back and could not talk about it. Somewhere inside that warm, life-giving body, there was a great black cavern; there was more death than could be stomached. She ran a finger along his cheek, and down his neck, and across his great shield of a breast, touched the bone under her palm, and came to the crisscross thread of the wound, as if she were exploring a sacred object; she felt reverence, but no real understanding. What could their life be like as it went on? What are we rooted in? she wondered in those panics of early dawn. Adrian’s job was a made job in an insurance company of which an uncle was member of the board. It meant little or nothing except as a painless way of paying bills until he came into his inheritance. She, on the other hand, was famous or infamous as the writer of a first novel which had had a succès de scandale … the last thing she had wanted or expected, not realizing that honest probing of matters generally discussed with lifted eyebrows at dinner tables could shock. And, in fact, her marriage had proved a refuge from anonymous letters and a kind of notoriety which induced such distaste in its subject that Hilary thought for a time that she would never again commit herself to print. She married Adrian in a total revulsion from one part of herself, yet whether she ever published a word again or not she could not stop being the person she was. There was the rub! She was young, witty, on the defensive, and more than once at a dinner party, she had let herself go, had talked from her own center, honestly, had enjoyed feeling her powers in action, until she had caught Adrian’s look across the table, a troubled look, a slightly hostile look. Afterwards she had an attack of self-doubt. “I talked too much, didn’t I?” she asked while they drank cocoa before going to bed.

“You were brilliant.”

“Oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s evidently wrong to be brilliant. You didn’t like it, did you?”

“Well,” Adrian said warily, for by now he. had learned to be wary, “You are rather intense, you know. You take everything so hard, Hilary … it isn’t quite.…”

“Done?” And she could hear the rising shrillness in her voice, feel the tiger she tried so hard to keep out of sight, begin to pace and lash its tail. “Sometimes I feel I can never be my real self here. I’m an American, after all.”

“Yes, darling, I know,” he said gently. “But could you be your real self at home, if by that you mean being more naked and more honest than most people ever dare to be?”

The tiger began to pace up and down, rather incongruous in her short, low-waisted evening dress, with a cup of cocoa in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Hilary, please don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t pace about as if you were caged.”

“I am caged! I don’t fit in, and I never will. You are so right. It’s not being American—it’s being myself. I’m a writer, Adrian!”

“Well, what if you are? You’re a
succès fou
.”

“I hate that book!”

“Then write another you like better,” he said rather crossly.

“I want a baby, not a book!” She silenced him, but it was an evasion, and she knew it. She had surreptitiously been making notes for a new novel, but what she had in mind was ironic, and it would surely hurt Adrian. She
was
caged, caged by being in love with, and married to, a man whose life pattern seemed to her both trivial and confining. She was caged also by the demands of housekeeping, by the late hours they kept, so she never woke up really fresh with the extra psychic energy at her command necessary for writing a single sentence. Housekeeping terrified and absorbed her, and she felt challenged to a kind of perfectionism which gave her no leeway as far as time went. In this mood of emptiness and frustration, she went down to Kent alone to spend a weekend with Adrian’s parents. Whatever ambivalence Hilary might experience in her relation to the society in which she found herself, her response to the cherished, tender, rich countryside was absolute. Her love of the shaped, the orderly (she had never wholly responded to the unpruned, thick, second growth of New England) could bask in this landscape created slowly over the centuries until it had now a kind of perfection. It made her feel drunk with pleasure to walk, as she did that weekend, with Adrian’s mother, through great open groves of trees, across patches of bluebells that sometimes in certain lights gave the illusion of water, so blue and thick they were. To Hilary it seemed a kind of magic not to have to struggle through underbrush as one so often did in New England—it was like certain wonderful dreams where one did not walk so much as float a few inches above the ground.

“Heaven!” she murmured.

She had sensed in Margaret Stevens from the beginning the same passionate response. She, who was in every other way so reserved, so delicately poised, became a different person out of doors, as if she shed a skin when she knelt by a border in one of those big straw hats tied under her chin with a chiffon scarf, and weeded fiercely. Now she walked with long free strides beside her daughter-in-law.

“Isn’t it. amazing that one never remembers what spring will be? I had forgotten about the beech leaves—”

“You must come down more often, Hilary.”

“Adrian wants to, but we get so involved in parties and things.”

They walked companionably along while that last sentence hung in the air between them. Margaret Stevens was an exceedingly shy person who hid her shyness under perfect manners, and wore it with grace, partly because she was such a delightfully pretty woman; she had Adrian’s clear blue eyes, but just a shade darker and a shade more gentle; she always smelled of lavender and refused to follow the fashion for short frocks, so now Hilary thought she looked just right in a plain rather long blue linen skirt, and a frilly white blouse under a soft pink sweater. (With what extraordinary vividness the scene came back to her, even to the sunlight catching in the diamond on Margaret Stevens’ delicate brown hand.) Finally she had spoken.

“I’m a little anxious about Adrian … are you?” She instinctively included Hilary, not to seem critical. “I do rather dislike this fashion of so many cocktails. It seems a little … a little out of character. Or am I being outrageously old-fashioned?” And she gave Hilary one of her dazzling smiles, meant to dazzle, and so, to hide in, Hilary guessed.

“We’re dancing on the graves, and no one really forgets it ever. So Adrian drinks too much—we all do.”

“Does he enjoy his work?”

“He never talks about it.” One is not a daughter-in-law for nothing, Hilary thought, as the magic ease of the morning began to flow away and she must make the effort to be again her married self, not her
self
.

“You are very much in love.” Was it a question? A judgment? What was it?

“Yes, we are.”

“And you are very different.” Hilary waited for what would come next. What did come next was not at all what she had expected. “I suppose you are hard at work yourself on another book?”

“I make notes. There never seems to be any real time …, and I’m so awkward, such a novice about running the flat still. Maybe writing is irrelevant really.…”

“Oh no!” The response was immediate and firm. “Your writing must be for you what horses are for Adrian,” and she laughed. “It does sound a bit odd, but you must feel only really and fully alive when you are doing it, as Adrian does when he is hunting.”

“Yes,” Hilary answered, feeling like a starving person who has just been given a piece of bread, “Yes, it is like that. It’s monstrous, but nothing seems real to me unless I can say it. This morning, for instance, this walk, all the time I am trying to find a word for that green of the beech leaves. Why not just
see
them? It’s idiotic!”

“Women are so much more conscious than men …, even when they are not writers, you know.”

“Do you think so? Really?”.

“Conscious or self-conscious,” and again she laughed, as if to soften perspicacity behind the screen of the feminine. It was what women were supposed to do, and what Hilary found so hard to do herself.

“What I really want is to write poems,” Hilary uttered on the wave of intimacy. She would never have admitted this to Adrian. She felt, perhaps wrongly, that he would have been terrified; that it would erect a barrier between them, as if an old friend had announced that he was taking Holy Orders.

“Oh, I’m happy about that,” Margaret said, bending down to look a wood anemone in the face, lifting it on its stalk. “I think perhaps you are on the right track. Perhaps the novel was not your thing, really. Brilliant as it was.”

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person, and Hilary did not answer.

“I’m being outrageously frank with you.” Hilary felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I hope you take it as a compliment. But you are such an honest person yourself. And that is a responsibility.”

“Yes,” Hilary uttered, full of pain. “It is.”

“Why did you fall in love with Adrian, I wonder? You know so much more than he does … believe me, dear Hilary, I am grateful, grateful that you did.”

They walked on in silence while Hilary wrestled with her answer. Could she be honest now? Could she take the risk?

“You are right about the novel. I didn’t know what I was doing. I am dismayed by the success it has had. Don’t you see, Adrian appeared in the middle of all that brouhaha. He seemed like good bread after too much champagne. Margaret …,” it was the first time Hilary had called her mother-in-law by her first name. “It is hard to be a woman and a writer. Lately I have begun to think it impossible. I want to feel sane and whole. I want what Adrian is, that absolute entity. The safety of it, the peace.” But she couldn’t leave it at that. It sounded so smug. “It seems fantastic that such a person can love me. It seems like a miracle. It is a miracle.”

“Adrian is my son,” Margaret said. “I want him to be happy. He has married out of his sphere, someone with a touch of genius.… I have grown fond of you, Hilary. I want you two to be happy. But life with Adrian.…” She paused and gave Hilary a quizzical look, “Life with Adrian is going to ask all your tenderness, all your womanliness.…”

“I know,” Hilary breathed. “He’s an angel.”

“Hardly!” Margaret was quick to detect a false note. They exchanged a look of amusement, a look in which Hilary admitted that she had been caught out.

“Oh well,” she amended, laughing, “not an angel maybe, but an angel compared to me!”

“It is a somewhat irritating thing about men that they are so often good … good because they don’t know the half of it, or because,” and Margaret smiled her delicious dazzling smile, “they only know the half of it.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I settled for being a woman. I wonder whether you can,” and quickly she went on, as if to cover or put a dressing on a wound. “I have been blessed with a husband who, if I was unhappy, never knew it, and if he had known it would not have understood why.” She added, “There are enormous comforts in the kind of life I lead.”