Summer Will Show (10 page)

If I were a man, she thought, I would plunge into dissipation.

What dissipation is to a man, religion is to a woman. Would it be possible to become a Roman Catholic and go into a convent? No, never for her! — of the two alternatives dissipation seemed the more feasible. For though she could not imagine how it might be contrived, since both to wine and the love of man she opposed an immovably good head, yet, could a suitable dissipation be devised, she might find in herself a will for it; but under no circumstances could she yield herself to devotion. There was gaming, she remembered; that was possible to women. And for a moment she paused to consider herself contracted into an anguished ecstasy that the croupier’s rake could thrust or gather. Gaming might do; yet in its very fever it was cold, and if she were to survive, she must be warmed — she so frigid to wine and the love of man. There was ambition. That should fit her, with her long-breathed resolution, her clear head and love of dominance. But how should a woman satisfy ambition unless acting upon and through a man? — and how control a man by resolution or reason, when any pretty face or leaning bosom could deflect him?

Far off stood the shade of Papa, speaking of philosophy and the calm joys of an elevated mind. True, Papa spoke also of the inconvenience of blue-stockings, pointing to his own mother as a model of all a daughter should be — Grandmamma, thick, dumpy, and perfumed, her creaking stomacher rising and falling under her gloved and folded hands, saying, “Come, little Sophia. You must not run about in the sun. Fetch your needlework, and sit by me.” Yet, avoiding blue-stockings, one might yet find some succour from Papa and intellectual pursuits — take up chemistry or archaeology, study languages, travel. A woman cannot travel alone, but two women may travel together; and Sophia for a moment beheld herself standing upon a bridge, a blue river beneath her, a romantic gabled golden town and purple mountains behind, and at her side, large-eyed and delighted and clutching a box of watercolour paints, Mrs. Hervey.

O foolish vision! Even were not Mrs. Hervey stoutly wedded to her apothecary, how could one long endure such a wavering mixture of impulse and impertinence, sensibility and false refinement?

It is because she was kind to me, she thought, that my mind turns to her. She is young, silly, and can do nothing, yet she came to me in kindness, offering to my aridity a refreshment not germane at all to what she really is, but a dew of being young and impulsive. Caspar is such another, if he were here I should cling to him, listen to his music, solace myself with his unconscious grace of being young, and malleable, and alive. Should I adopt him, bring him here in the stead of my children? A black heir to Blandamer? Impossible! Though I have will enough to enforce it, the resentment of those I force would hound him out, all but his actual black body. And indeed, could I long endure to have this pretty soft wagging black spaniel in the place of my children?

Most of the time it seemed to her inevitable that both children should die. Then, more irrational than the conviction of their doom, would come a conviction of their recovery. Hope would twitch her to her feet, set her running towards the night nursery where she should hear from Mrs. Kerridge indubitable symptoms of a turn for the better. And halfway there fear would stay her, bidding her sit down again, continue what occupation she had, taste, as long as it might linger, the hope so exactly fellowed to the previous hopes which enquiry had demolished.

Damian, Mrs. Kerridge and the doctor said, was making the better fight. Yet it was Damian who died first, collapsing suddenly, and dying with a little gasp like a breaking bubble. Two hours later Frederick entered the house. Sophia expected him, yet when the carriage came to the door she ran out by the long window, spying from behind a tree at the intruder, come so inopportunely upon her misery. Whoever it is, she thought, not recognising her own horses, I will not see him. I will hide.

A foreigner, her mind said, in the instant before recognition. He ran up the steps and stood talking to Johnson, who had opened the door. She advanced, slowly mounting the steps behind him, knowing herself unseen by him. She seemed to be stalking a prey, and on Johnson’s countenance she read with how much surmise and excitement her household awaited this meeting.

Why doesn’t he turn round, she thought. I cannot touch him, and I don’t want to speak, lest my voice should break, and deliver me over to him.

“Here is Mrs. Willoughby, sir.”

As though I were the coffee, she thought; and her lips were moving into a smile when he turned to her.

“Sophia!”

His voice had altered. There was a new note in it, he had lost his drawl. She said,

“Damian is dead. Do you know? I can’t remember if he died before the carriage started for you.”

He bowed his head.

“Johnson has told me.”

She saw that the horses were sweating. They must go to the stables, life must continue.

“You will be tired with your journey. Come in.”

Now which chair will you take, she thought — your old one?

But he remained on his feet, walking up and down the room, as though, again under that roof, the habit of his former listless pacing piped its old tune to him. To the window, and turning, to portrait of Grandpapa Aspen, and back to the window again, his advance and retreat surveyed by that quiet old gentleman, who, as Gainsborough had painted him, seemed with his gun and supple wet-nosed retriever to be watching through the endless bronze dusk of an autumnal evening, paused on the brink of his spinney and listening with contemplative pleasure to the footsteps of the poacher within.
Benjamin Aspen Esq. J.P
. stated the gold letters below. It had sometimes occurred to Sophia that it were as though Frederick, uneasily treading the Aspen estate, were the tribute of yet another poacher offered up to the implacable effigy. But now the poacher walked with a freer gait, a liberated air; and it was in this new manner, and in his subtly altered tone of voice, that Frederick halted by her chair and said,

“I will not make speeches, Sophia. But you must let me say how grateful I am to you for sending for me, how much I grieve that it is for this reason that you have had to break your resolution.”

The moment for a reconciliation, she thought, with the more bitterness and annoyance since her sense acknowledged that never before had Frederick’s demeanour expressed so patently, not merely an acceptance of their irreconcilability, but a will to it that might be equal to hers. She stared at his dusty boots, and said sourly,

“There wasn’t much hope, Frederick, nor is there for Augusta. They neither have much stamina. The Willoughby constitution, I suppose.”

To speak so was abominable, was the last thing she had wished to do. Nothing could retrieve the words, even had she not been too weary for an attempt. And feeling the blood labouring to her cheeks she sat unmoving, scorning to avert her shamed face, and fighting against a flood of self-pity.

“The devil of a disease.” He spoke as though thinking aloud, voicing a train of thought which her words had not pierced. “Vaccination or not, it will get you if it has a mind to. And if you creep through it, it may leave a life not worth living.” He went on to speak, as a traveller might, of the women in Paris who earned a livelihood as mattress-pickers, women whom smallpox had blinded. “They come from the Quinze-Vingts,” he said. “A child leads them to the door, and fetches them again at the end of the day. One morning, one spring morning, I came across two of these women sitting on the floor of an empty bedroom in my hotel. The door was open, and I watched them for a little, thinking how quickly they separated the tufts of wool, and wondering that they should work so silently, for as you know it’s queer to find two Parisians at work and not chattering. Their backs were towards me, but when I said good-day they turned. Then I saw their faces, so scarred that it would not have been possible to say if they were old women or girls of nineteen, and instead of eyes, hollow sockets and sores. Death is better than that, Sophia.”

How deeply changed he is, she thought. It is as though a stranger were speaking. That woman’s influence, I suppose. But, disciplined by the recollection of her last, abominable speech, she thrust down the thought of Minna Lemuel, and enquired as a hostess, speaking of food and refreshment.

“May I see Augusta?”

Of the two children Augusta had always been his favourite. More of an Aspen in character than the boy, it had been as though in her he wooed his last hope of her mother. An embarrassment of honour made Sophia turn away and talk to Mrs. Kerridge while Frederick stood by the sick child’s bed. He had entered the room, she noticed, with a little parcel in his hand; and now, glancing over her shoulder, she saw that he had unpacked from it a white rose, very delicately contrived from feathers, light as thistledown and sleek as spun glass. The small hand, so roughened and polluted, opened vaguely at the contact, clutched the toy and crumpled it, and let it fall.

“Speak to her, Frederick. She can’t see you, but she may recognise your voice.”

“
Ma fleur
,” he said. The small hand stirred on the coverlet, closed as though closing on the words, and presently fell open again.

After he had gone back to Paris and she was left alone with the leisure of the childless, those words, and the tone in which they were spoken, haunted her memory — according to her mood, an enigma, a nettle-sting, a caress. It was as though, at that moment, not Frederick but some one unknown to her had stood by the bed of her dying child and said,
Ma fleur
. That it was said with feeling, yes. Frederick had always been sincerely sentimental, had in the early days of their marriage melted his voice even to her. That it was said gravely, yes again. To have lost one child and know the other past keeping would darken any voice into gravity. But beyond this, and beyond anything her mind could unquarry, there remained a quality, part innocence, part a deep sophistication in sorrow, that must still fascinate and still elude her. The voice of one acquainted with grief. Not, as Frederick had been, suddenly swept into its shadow, but one long acknowledging it, a voice tuned for a lifetime, and for centuries of inherited lifetimes, to that particular note, falling since the beginning of the world in that melancholy acquiescent cadence, falling as wave after wave brings its sigh, long-swelled, and silently carried, and at last spoken and quenched on the shore.

Modelled on that Minna’s Jewish contralto, she told herself, angrily stopping her ears against those two grave harp-notes. Accomplished mountebank, no doubt she could manage her voice to any appropriate timbre; and Frederick, who was always a copy-cat, a weathercock to any breeze that tickled him, had heard the right intonation, and unwittingly reproduced it.

To judge by Frederick, Minna must be a model of decorum. Throughout the difficult visit, he was amiable, tactful, unobtrusive. If it were not the Jewess’s good effect, she said to herself, she had at last the answer to her old wonder: why Frederick, displeasing as a husband, should be so much in demand as a guest, should be summoned to Lincolnshire and London, Suffolk and Aix-les-Bains. For undoubtedly he was at Blandamer as a guest.

She had dreaded the intimacy which bereavement might engender; but he, avoiding the thistly touch-me-not which encumbered her behaviour, had exactly preserved the distance that must be between them. She had sickened, foreseeing the easy flow of his grief; it had flowed, but not to splash her. She had quailed, forecasting the social awkwardness which the funeral, the visits of condolence, the assemblage of Aspens and Willoughbies concurring to stamp down the turves over the death of a next generation, must entail. Weariness of body and mind, the apathy, half-relief, half-despair, that follows on bereavement, had partly muffled her; but even so, she had been conscious how well Frederick was managing, how deftly he had walked his slack rope between the head of the house and the outcast whose bag was ready packed, the tragedy once played out, for departure.

Correct as a mute, she told herself; faultless as some town tragedian supplying at a moment’s notice the place of a disabled actor in a company of barn-stormers; polished and affable as the Prodigal may have been, returning to shame with his shamefully acquired graces the angry rustic integrity of the stay-at-home. A French polish!

His accent had improved, too.
Ma fleur
. The Frederick of their honeymoon, the heavy English dandy, sheltering behind her flounces with his, Damn it, Sophia, you must do the parley-vooing, had suppled his tongue as well as his wits. Were she to meet Minna, she must say, Madam, I congratulate you upon the progress in your pupil. But no doubt, with such a vast, such a cosmopolitan experience, you could scarcely fail with any sow’s ear.

Thus, sooner or later, her thoughts brought her face to face with that woman, there to discharge her rage. Everything she saw, heard, did, in her solitary existence, and the solitariness of that existence itself, must remind her of the children she had lost. And remembering that loss, she must remember Frederick, and remembering, her candour must oblige her to remember how well he had behaved, detached, unobtrusive, unfailing. How when Mrs. Kerridge, resorting more and more to her professional secret gin, had oversipped the mark and come raging downstairs, declaiming in a tipsy fury against that slut of a kitchen-maid who had again, and as a personal affront, forgotten the nutmeg, he had intercepted and silenced her, sluiced her into sobriety, and sent her trembling back to her duties again. How, at the postfuneral luncheon, he had kept talk going, by some legerdemain removing the conversation to Central Europe, and even while speaking of the liberation of Poland, managing to keep them all in a good temper. How, with that account of the blinded mattress-pickers, he had patched over the afterwards of her atrocious speech, and yet had avoided seeming to change the subject. In the midst of such recollections, swelling under them and exploding through them, her bitterness against him would break out, and all his good behaviour, his detachment, his unobtrusiveness, his readiness, would seem a lackey’s virtues and no more.