The Drowning People (7 page)

I nodded.

“But I’ll tell it to you, if you like.”

“I should like that very much.”

She looked at me searchingly, apparently assessing my sincerity. I must have passed her test, for once we were reestablished by the Serpentine, ice creams in hand, she began her story; and as she talked she convinced me, as perhaps no one else could have done, that Ella Harcourt was unlike anyone I had ever met. If, in my daydreams, I thought I might have magnified her beauty, her image taught me that I was wrong. But Ella’s charm went deeper than that; and a certain similarity in gesture and manner between the cousins served only to emphasize, for me, the superiority of one in subtle respects which I tried silently to define as I listened to the other. The regal, slightly stiff set of Sarah’s angular shoulders reminded me, I thought, of the natural grace of Ella’s; the detached ice of Sarah’s blue eyes made me think of her cousin’s, green and sparkling in my memory; the absence of hand movement in Sarah’s conversation recalled the occasional but effective use that Ella made of her hands. Yet Sarah was not without a certain compelling air of her own, though her methods were subtly authoritarian and Ella’s were not.

“My grandfather,” she said, “was a very poor man with an illustrious name. And my grandmother was a very rich woman with no name at all, to speak of. She was also American.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“Oh it’s a simple one, really. My grandmother’s father felt that a title for his daughter was just the thing to ensure the respectability of his money; and his future son-in-law had an ancient, weather-beaten house with a leaking roof and no electricity to run.” Sarah looked at me, assessing my reception of her anecdote. I smiled. “So a match was arranged,” she went on. “A bargain was struck. Each side got what they wanted: titled grandchildren for my great-grandfather; central heating for my grandfather. The only person they neglected to consult was my grandmother, Blanche, who arrived in England at the age of eighteen, was married at nineteen, and had conceived a complete and not entirely irrational aversion to her husband by the time she was twenty.”

I nodded.

“That didn’t stop her from producing four healthy children for him, though,” Sarah continued. “An heir and three spares, if you like. She understood that that was her end of the bargain.” Ella’s cousin paused. “But she was one of those compelling women who need people and life about them. The decaying house, a castle in fact, was in Cornwall. And her father wouldn’t finance a house in London that befitted the status of the new couple, so in Cornwall she languished, painted once by Sargent, but otherwise left undisturbed by the fashionable world.”

“And what did she do with her time?” I found myself surprisingly interested by this forbidding young Englishwoman eating ice cream at my side, and found further to my surprise that my interest was independent of her similarity to her cousin.

“Well, she wrote letters; she redesigned the garden; she saw to the upbringing and education of her children. She ran the house smoothly, presiding over the small army that was needed to keep the place going; she got in the way, as much as she could, of her husband’s philandering.”

“I see.”

“But her mind needed more of an outlet than such activities could provide.” Sarah smiled at me. “Blanche, you see, was not at heart a domesticated woman. That was the thing. And she was highly gifted, which made things worse.”

“So what happened to her in the end? What did she find to do?”

“She didn’t really find anything at all. That was her tragedy. And there’s only so much solitude, by which I mean so much isolation from her equals, that a woman of that kind can bear.”

“What happened to her?”

Blanche’s granddaughter was quiet for a moment, looking silently out over the cheerful, boat-filled lake. “She killed herself eventually,” she said at last. “Jumped out of a window onto the terrace. Caused a huge scandal at the time, as you can imagine.”

I could imagine. “How awful,” I said quietly.

“Isn’t it? I think it affected her children profoundly.”

“It must have done.”

There was a pause.

“And there,” she said briskly, looking directly at me once more, “you have the story of how I come to have an American grandmother. I hope I didn’t tell you more than you care to know.”

“No, not at all. I found it fascinating. And tragic.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “It certainly has both of those qualities.” She turned to me, confidential suddenly. “I have an idea, you know, of writing Blanche’s biography one day. She was a woman who gave to everything she did the kind of glamour one usually finds only in fiction. I think hers would be an excellent story to tell. And I think, too, that she would have wanted it to be told.”

“She certainly chose a very public way of ending her life.”

“Yes she did. She was also, of course, in an interesting position historically.”

I nodded.

“One of the emancipated young women from America sent to prop up the ailing feudal system with democratic gold.” Sarah smiled. “It’s funny to think, isn’t it,” she went on, warming to her theme, “that young women like Blanche helped to sustain all from which the Pilgrim Fathers had fled so far?”

“Very.”

There was silence, though this time it was not an uncomfortable one.

“Well,” I said at last, “I’m sure it would make a very interesting book.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, rising. “But I’ve kept you from your reading for far too long.” I nodded towards the deck chair and the novel lying on it. “What is it?”

“It’s
The Buccaneers.
By Edith Wharton. A friend of my grandmother’s incidentally.”

“And of Henry James,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“Well good-bye,” I said.

“Good-bye.” She held out her hand.

“You couldn’t pass on a message to Ella, could you?”

The same flicker of irritation which I thought I had observed earlier reappeared and was, as earlier, modified at once to a polite smile. “Of course,” she said, “though I’m not sure when I’ll next see her. We don’t see very much of each other.”

“And why is that?”

“Frankly, we don’t get on. Oh you needn’t be embarrassed,” she continued after a moment, sensing my discomfort. “It’s an open secret. I find her rather crass; she, I daresay, finds me too English and reserved. But doubtless she’ll tell you her criticisms of me herself when next you see her.”

“I doubt that,” I said, doubting too whether I would ever see Ella again. Obviously an acquaintance with Sarah was going to bring me no nearer my goal.

“Oh she will, I’m sure. Very sweetly but very deftly. That’s her way. But do you want to give me a message for her anyway, just in case I run into her before you do?”

“Tell her you saw James Farrell,” I said, realizing that until now I had not offered my name to Sarah and she had not asked for it. “Tell her that you saw James Farrell and that he wondered how life on her island was suiting her.”

“Is that all?” Sarah eyed me quizzically.

“That’s all. She’ll understand.”

“I hope so.”

“Well, good-bye again.”

“Good-bye.”

And with that I left her and walked once more over the bridge and down the carriage track. I felt Sarah’s cold blue eyes on me as I went and I turned on the far side of the bridge to wave. But she was seated, her nose in her book once more. If she saw me, she gave no indication of having done so.

CHAPTER 5

A
S IT HAPPENED, NONE OF THE
H
ARCOURTS
gave any sign of acknowledging my existence in the days which followed my meeting with Sarah, days which I spent practicing my violin and thinking of Ella. I found to my delight that I was able to transform the bittersweet frustration which hopeless love produces into the energy which serious work requires, and even my parents were impressed by the resulting ardor of my diligence. Throughout that hot August I was never far from the air-less room at the top of the house where my violin was kept; and as I practiced I played to an imaginary audience of one, hoping as I did so that the sheer dexterity of this or that scale would impress her, or that this or that sonata would make her smile. I played a good deal of Brahms at that time, I remember; and I remember finding in the drama of the music a fitting accompaniment to my own secret dreams of rescue and of valor.

Youth is foolish and youth in frenzied love is worse. Even now I smile to think of those heady days in that stuffy room; I smile but am glad to have lived through them, hot and dusty though they were, young and foolish though I was.

But Ella, the unwitting object of all my thoughts, remained nowhere to be found or seen. She was never at home to my telephone calls; she never gave any sign of having received a message from me; the forbidding Georgian portals of the house in Chester Square never yielded up her slim frame when I happened to be passing, as I frequently was. But the effortless way in which she had entered my mind; the strange, unlooked-for meeting with her cousin; the occasional photographs of her and Charles which appeared in the magazines I read while having my hair cut; all fanned the flames of my interest in her. I continued to play and dream and be disappointed.

But even the interest of an unusually impressionable boy begins to wane. With no encouragement from the unknowing object of my devotion, without so much as a note or a look from her—either of which might have conquered me forever, I felt—the intensity of my enthusiasm could not be maintained indefinitely. And it might, I suppose, have faded and finally died, consigned to history as a last memory of fiery adolescence, had Fate—if indeed such a force exists—not decreed otherwise.

The instrument that Fate selected to bring Ella and me together once again was chosen with exquisite taste: it was Camilla Boardman; and she telephoned just as I was deciding that there was nothing to be done, and that if Ella wished to waste herself on Charles Stanhope she was welcome to do so.

“
Daaarling!
” cooed the voice I had not heard since it had given me Ella’s telephone number many weeks before.

“Camilla. How are you?”

“How are
you
? That’s
far
more to the point.”

“I’m well, thank you.”

“So why have you been hiding away? Positively
ignoring
all your friends.”

I knew Camilla well enough to be suspicious of her tone of mock injury. Cautiously I replied that I had not been hiding away, but that I had been practicing hard in preparation for the Guildhall.

“Oh I forget you’re off to be a famous musician,” she said. “You’ll still remember me when you’ve made it,
won’t
you darling? Even with all those terribly glamorous women throwing themselves at you.”

I sensed that a compliment was appropriate. Hesitatingly, I attempted one. “They couldn’t possibly be more glamorous than you, Camilla … darling.”

“Oh Jamie, you’re
so
sweet.
So
lovely. You
always
are.” The frequency of Camilla’s emphases prepared me for her inevitable climax. “In fact that’s
just
why I’ve called you. Ed Saunders has left me
completely
in the lurch, like he always does.”

Ed Saunders was Camilla’s current man, I gathered, and I pretended to recognize his name. “Oh Ed,” I said.

“Yes, the
toad.
” A petulant Camilla was even more alarming than usual. “And Ella Harcourt’s engagement party starts in an hour, would you believe?”

“Ella Harcourt, did you say?” I caught my breath, hoping against hope.

“Yes, her parents are giving a lunch for her and Charlie.
Everyone’s
going to be there. Pamela—that’s Ella’s stepmother—is a
fabulous
entertainer. And that
toad
Ed has just rung me up and told me he’s got laryngitis and can’t possibly come.
Laryngitis.
Honestly!” said Camilla, as though it numbered amongst the rarest of tropical diseases. “In August! And
so,
” her voice changed tone, “I wondered whether you might
possibly
be free. I couldn’t
bear
the thought of going alone. And,” realizing that this probably sounded selfish, “I haven’t seen you for
ages
and I remembered how well you and Ella got on at my party.”

I wondered privately how many people she had called before trying me. Aloud I said, “I’m not sure, Camilla. Of course I’d love to see you, but it’s very short notice.”

Camilla respected few people as much as she did those with multiple engagements.

“I
know,
darling,” she said. “And if his laryngitis doesn’t kill Ed you may be sure that I will. But I would
so
like to see you. And if it’s any consolation, I’m sure it’ll be a very brilliant affair. Wonderful food.” Camilla was tenacious in pursuit of her social goals. “And there’re bound to be
lots
of Oxford people there,” she went on. “And …” She considered what further inducements she could offer. “Ella’s cousin will be there, of course. She’s
very
pretty. An odd fish, by all accounts,” for Camilla was a strictly truthful person, “but
very
pretty.”

“I know,” I said, thinking of Sarah’s cold beauty.

“So you’ll take me then?”

An hour later I found myself on the steps of the house in Chester Square, past whose black door I had so often walked in the hope of meeting Ella. Camilla, beside me, squeezed my hand with relief and smiled a practiced and perfectly formed smile of red lips and white teeth, expensively arranged. “Darling you’re a
savior,
” she whispered in my ear as I rang the bell.

We were late, for it was part of Camilla’s creed always to be missed, and we entered the drawing room just as the other guests were beginning to shuffle hungrily and glance at their watches. There were perhaps thirty of us in all: a dowdy but respectable pair in tweeds whom I took, correctly, to be the Stanhopes; several people my own age, amongst whom I recognized the girl with the villa in Biarritz; and the Harcourts themselves, tall and stately, precisely as I had imagined them, talking to Sarah by one of the long windows which gave onto the square. Neither Ella nor Charles was anywhere to be seen.