Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (7 page)

“Such as the garden?”

“Such as the garden …,” and Margaret left it at that.

“What are you really asking of me?” Hilary stopped and lifted her head to the great beeches not thinking it odd that, having asked the crucial question, she was also saying over a series of adjectives which might possibly define that particular translucent green over head.

“I can’t ask you to be less than yourself. But I do wish your life were a little less hectic, Hilary, for Adrian’s sake as well as yours. His job, I quite see, isn’t a real root. But your poems, if you could settle in to write them—your poems might be a kind of root—women seem to be stronger than men, these days.”

“The men have been mortally wounded,” Hilary said.

“Yes.”

And Hilary had tried, for Margaret’s sake, as well as for her own. But it was very queer. She was sometimes moved to tears just seeing Adrian walk into the room, like some hero without a purpose, smiling his great warm smile, but what ever she felt for him, it had nothing to do with writing poetry.

Standing there looking at her two selves reflected in the Venetian mirror, Hilary wondered what would have become of them if Adrian had not died.… Would the tiger in her finally have turned to rend? The starved, growing, fierce tiger of the imagination who was unappeased? As it was, Adrian had died his own death, wrapped in his own kind of violence, falling over a jump and breaking his neck. It was so sudden, so final, that Hilary went to pieces; she cried a great deal, aware that this also was something “not done”; and she cried perhaps not so much out of grief, as out of some indefinable sense of being now cut off from everything, and most of all from herself. She had a wild hope for a month that she might be pregnant, but that hope proved false. She knew then that never again in her life would she find comfort, the perfect simple comfort of being held in the arms of Adrian. That phase of her life was over for good. So intense was her feeling about it that one day in Kent when she saw the old cat lying stretched out in the sun, perfectly relaxed, she burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Why? It had become in an instant the image of deprivation. But she could not explain this even to herself, only accept Margaret’s tender care, accept the trays that found their way to her room, sometimes with a single rose in a little glass by her cup, or a book of poems. They had hovered on the verge of intimacy for those weeks, but the thread of communication between them depended too much on someone who was not there, of whom Margaret could not speak. Hilary fled as soon as she decently could, got herself a job in London in a publishing house, and began to try to come to terms with her tiger. How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm! It occurred to her, standing in the brilliant morning light, forty years later—and surrounded by her own life, her life alone—that among the letters she had unbundled last night there had been a touching one from Adrian’s father, the ink almost faded, thanking her for having given Adrian “those brief years of happiness.” Tears sprang to her eyes, because she could not remember the old man’s face.…

Hilary wished she could stop the shuttle which for the last week had been so inexorably weaving the past and the present together.… She walked quickly down the big room to the French windows. No Mar. Perhaps after all he had been put off by her nervousness. But he shouldn’t make me so anxious, she thought, it’s not fair! And on an impulse, simply to get back firmly into the present, she went to the telephone and called Mary back.

“It’s me, Hilary. I’m sorry I was cross, Mary, but I feel so badgered these days! Besides, you know very well I am not fit for society. I get overexcited and say the wrong thing.… You know, I do! … Besides, this afternoon two young people are coming to interview me about my whole
oeuvre
.… That’s what they said,
oeuvre
.… I feel like a hen who has laid a monstrous number of eggs or something. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.… Terrified.… I’ve been reading old letters and things to try to get some perspective, a frightful mistake. It has made me dreadfully depressed and confused.… Of course it’s flattering—of course I shall enjoy it! You are so literal, darling …, well—as long as you still love me.… Goodbye!”

Sirenica had come to wrap herself around Hilary’s legs, rubbing her nose against Hilary’s sneakers with passion, and purring ecstatically. But when Hilary bent down to scratch behind the delicate white ears, the cat dashed off, holding her tail high. Wyatt’s poem welled up out of this little scene and Hilary was borne out into the garden on the wave of joy, as she found she could recite it still by heart—at least one thing memory had yielded up for keeps.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking within my chamber:

Once I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild, and do not once remember

That sometime they have put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking in continual change
.

“And that’s for you, my pussy,” Hilary said, as Sirenica leapt into the air, paws outstretched, but missed the butterfly she was after, pretended it was all a gambol, and sat down decorously, tucking her paws in, under a rose bush.

Hilary whistled a self-made tune as she went to the woodshed and got out her basket of gardening tools. On her way back, she heard the oriole give its piercing four notes from somewhere among the apple trees, and dropped the basket to climb swiftly over the stone wall, hoping to catch a glimpse of that orange flame. Elusive bird! Hilary leaned back under each tree, but no luck. She stood quite still and listened, the perplexities and anxieties of the morning gone, as if she had been released from a spell and allowed back into the world of Now. Even Mar was forgotten, while she noted, as she slowly returned, that the rose, Nevada, needed spraying, and she simply must weed the small border along the wall, or it would become a jungle.

“After all, Sirenica, we have the whole morning. No work today.…”

Any day when Hilary did not sit at her desk was automatically a holiday, even if there were interviewers lying in wait at the end of it. Soon her fingers were deftly pulling out tufts of grass and violets from around the bleeding heart; nothing like weeding to unknot the mind, nothing except the same thing in another sphere, pruning the fat out of a poem, cutting, shaping, give it space to breathe in.

“Ow!” Her fingers had struck a rock. Gardening in New England has its peculiar frustrations, she thought. But there the rock was, and it must be dug out. She sat down in the grass to spare her back, but as usual, the rock turned out to be a lot bigger than she had imagined when she bruised a finger against one corner of it. It would be a fine thing if Mar did turn up now to haul it out for her with the crowbar. Hilary looked hopefully around. Not a sign of the rascal! “Very well then,” she said, and began to scratch around it with her trowel; it would have been wise to go and fetch the crowbar herself, but difficulty roused passion; she was too impatient to make that effort. Instead, she hauled away with her two hands, pitting her whole strength against one stone as if her life depended on the outcome. Finally it gave, sucked out like some huge tooth. Hilary sat back, and felt for the cigarettes in her pocket. But the first puff induced an alarming sensation in her head, as if all the juice were being drawn away, and dizziness set in. “It’s such a nuisance,” said young Hilary to old Hilary. But old Hilary was frightened, frightened of death. “Lie down, you fool,” said old Hilary, and for once she was obeyed. “You can’t die yet, you’ve got too much to do,” said young Hilary. And in the center of the vertigo, she experienced the thrust of expectancy and of hope. All the living, all the caring, all the anxiety had only been a prelude to that not impossible poem, the thing that would justify it all, and stop forever the whirling of the past with all its images, make the whole world stand still!

Lying there, waiting, still unable to focus, she threw the cigarette into the grass with a gesture of impatience. She wanted now above all to get to her desk—to see if she could quietly, by stealth, pounce on the final stanza of a poem which had been nagging at her to get itself finished for almost a year; she had unearthed it again the day before while hunting for something else. Oh dear … but impatient young Hilary waited. It would not do to try to heave her ancient twin upright, only to have her keel over.

At least when she opened her eyes now, the awful rushing blurr had gone. She looked straight up into apple blossom and noticed a robin’s nest she had not known was there. As always after one of these bouts, the sweetness of life flowed back in, so that she would have liked to thank someone, to pray. The bliss of solitude, when it did not matter a hoot if one lay down on the grass like an old donkey, having been ridiculous enough to strain one’s heart!

But where is Mar? She sat bolt upright in the deafening silence. Would there ever come a time when one was not waiting for
someone?

Hilary shivered. A cloud had gone over the sun. Mar was not the sort to do himself violence, but anxiety could not be stilled, for human life was always, it seemed, in peril. Lately the boy had appeared to be so much better, but she realized that she had been troubled by the look on his face early that morning; and it haunted her now in her state of depletion. He had looked ravaged, but in an unattractive way, dissipation rather than grief, shame. What was it she had read in that brief glimpse before he turned and ran?

She got up and went indoors, driven by the cold and anxiety to her desk, the one place where, during the hours she sat there, neither death nor taxes nor any present trouble could come near. Her desk was set perpendicular to a dormer window; so she sat with the sea on her left, and on her right a solid wall of books. Files of all shapes and sizes were scattered about; she used one as added desk space. On this, she noted with dismay, was a sheaf of old letters, part of her last night’s orgy. Stupid of her to have left them there, like wide open eyes she did not want to meet. Her life, which only a few moments before, had swung safely in the divine present of the May morning, now threatened to overpower her. She had come upstairs to work, not to relive what had better be left like the compost heap, to its own slow burning and self-renewal.

What had been so disturbing during the night had been to endure the wake of the great wave of memories on which she had been transported, opening up all those boxes … the appalling complex of people who had entered deeply into her life, who had influenced, and changed, and enriched her. And it was absolutely untrue, she had discovered, to believe that age would diminish her power both to attract and to be attracted, to rush in to the collision with a new consciousness, to feel herself opening up like a sea anemone in the rich flood of feeling for a new person. Old, young, male, female—her capacity to be touched, to be involved, to
care
was, she realized, that still of a young girl. How did one keep growing otherwise? What was life all about otherwise? What separates us from animals except just this—that we can be moved by each other, and not primarily for sexual purposes? Granted, of course, that any deep collision, any relationship which profoundly affects one comes from the whole person, and can almost instantaneously shift from one phase to another, so that sex is never wholly absent and may come into play. Yes, that was the rub …, for then there is conflict. Someone gets hurt. And it was no use remembering that often she had been the hurt one: the fact remained that she had inevitably hurt others. “But I regret nothing,” she said aloud and firmly. For it hurts to be alive, and that’s a fact, but who can regret being alive and being for others, life-enhancing? We shall be dead a long time. Quite deliberately Hilary stuffed the letters into a drawer and bent her head toward the much-crossed-out worksheet of the poem she thought she might just possibly take by surprise and bring to an end on this morning of superior tension.

After a time, and when she had murmured some lines aloud, she shot a sheet of paper onto the typewriter and tapped out with one finger what she had in her mind, tore it out, and began to scribble changes and queries into the margins. She became wholly absorbed, was not aware of the crick in her shoulder, nor of the French clock chiming eleven and then twelve. At twelve she laid the sheets aside. It had been a wild hope that she could solve the puzzle in two hours. Still, she had made a start. There was now one really good line, an armature for the whole poem.… Yes.

“Good Heavens! The mail!” For once, because she was orbiting outside her usual routine, she had forgotten this daily blessing and curse. Usually she was standing at the mailbox when the postman drove up. Sometimes Mr. Willoughby was the only human being she spoke to during a whole day, and sometimes he brought a piece of fish with him for Sirenica, the shameless flirt, who had laid a spell on him with her blue eyes. But today of course he had long since come and gone; Sirenica was sitting beside the mailbox washing her face. Hilary reached in and found the usual packet of journals and letters. The very sight of it exhausted her, yet there was (she could not deny) always the same stab of expectation and of hope.… What surprise, what unexpected joy might be lurking among all the bills and requests for attention? And of course there was
The New York Times
.

As always, when Hilary came out from the burrow of her work room, she saw everything with a rinsed eye. Now she sat down in the rocker in the kitchen and was dazzled by the beauty of a long slanting slab of sunlight on the white plaster wall. One might, she supposed, sit and take it in for half an hour, but say it? Next to impossible. These moments of vision when quite simple things became extraordinary were what she always meant to “get down,” but the impulse wavered, or got pushed aside. Hilary had always imagined that one of the blessings of old age would be that one might live by and for these essentials … the light on a wall. Instead one dragged around this great complex hive of sensation and feeling. “Bother!” she uttered, eagerly unfolding the
Times
to the obituaries.