The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (11 page)

Charles did not know it,
but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous
evening silence broken only by the waves' quiet wash, the whole Victorian
Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.
 
 

With the form conforming
duly,
Senseless what it meaneth
truly,
Go to church--the world
require you,
  To balls--the world
require you too,
And marry--papa and mama
desire you,
  And your sisters
and schoolfellows do.
--
A. H. Clough, "Duty" (1841)

"
Oh! no, what he!"
she cried in scorn,
"
I woulden gi'e a penny
vor'n;
The best ov him's outzide
in view;
His cwoat is gay enough,
'tis true,
But then the wold vo'k didden
bring
En up to know a single thing..."
--
William Barnes, Poems
in the Dorset Dialect (1869)

It had been a very did-not
sort of day for the poor girl, who had had only Aunt Tranter to show her
displeasure to. There had been Charles's daffodils and jonquils, whose
perfume she now inhaled, but even they had vexed her at first. Aunt Tranter's
house was small, and she had heard Sam knock on the front door downstairs;
she had heard the wicked and irreverent Mary open it--a murmur of voices
and then a distinct, suppressed gurgle of laughter from the maid, a slammed
door. The odious and abominable suspicion crossed her mind that Charles
had been down there, flirting; and this touched on one of her deepest fears
about him.

She knew he had lived in
Paris, in Lisbon, and traveled much; she knew he was eleven years older
than herself; she knew he was attractive to women. His answers to her discreetly
playful interrogations about his past conquests were always discreetly
playful in return; and that was the rub. She felt he must be hiding something--a
tragic French countess, a passionate Portuguese marquesa. Her mind did
not allow itself to run to a Parisian grisette or an almond-eyed inn-girl
at Cintra, which would have been rather nearer the truth. But in a way
the matter of whether he had slept with other women worried her less than
it might a modern girl. Of course Ernestina uttered her autocratic "I must
not" just as soon as any such sinful speculation crossed her mind; but
it was really Charles's heart of which she was jealous. That, she could
not bear to think of having to share, either historically or presently.
Occam's useful razor was unknown to her. Thus the simple fact that he had
never really been in love became clear proof to Ernestina, on her darker
days, that he had once been passionately so. His calm exterior she took
for the terrible silence of a recent battlefield, Waterloo a month after;
instead of for what it really was--a place without history.

When the front door closed,
Ernestina allowed dignity to control her for precisely one and a half minutes,
whereupon her fragile little hand reached out and peremptorily pulled the
gilt handle beside her bed. A pleasantly insistent tinkle filtered up from
the basement kitchen; and soon afterwards, there were footsteps, a knock,
and the door opened to reveal Mary bearing a vase with a positive fountain
of spring flowers. The girl came and stood by the bed, her face half hidden
by the blossoms, smiling, impossible for a man to have been angry with--and
therefore quite the reverse to Ernestina, who frowned sourly and reproachfully
at this unwelcome vision of Flora.

Of the three young women
who pass through these pages Mary was, in my opinion, by far the prettiest.
She had infinitely the most life, and infinitely the least selfishness;
and physical charms to match ... an exquisitely pure, if pink complexion,
corn-colored hair and delectably wide gray-blue eyes, eyes that invited
male provocation and returned it as gaily as it was given. They bubbled
as the best champagne bubbles, irrepressibly; and without causing flatulence.
Not even the sad Victorian clothes she had so often to wear could hide
the trim, plump promise of her figure--indeed, "plump" is unkind. I brought
up Ronsard's name just now; and her figure required a word from his vocabulary,
one for which we have no equivalent in English: rondelet--all that is seductive
in plumpness without losing all that is nice in slimness.

Mary's great-great-granddaughter,
who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much resembles her ancestor;
and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more
celebrated younger English film actresses.

But it was not, I am afraid,
the face for 1867. It had not, for instance, been at all the face for Mrs.
Poulteney, to whom it had become familiar some three years previously.
Mary was the niece of a cousin of Mrs. Fairley, who had wheedled Mrs. Poulteney
into taking the novice into the unkind kitchen. But Marlborough House and
Mary had suited each other as well as a tomb would a goldfinch; and when
one day Mrs. Poulteney was somberly surveying her domain and saw from her
upstairs window the disgusting sight of her stableboy soliciting a kiss,
and not being very successfully resisted, the goldfinch was given an instant
liberty; whereupon it flew to Mrs. Tranter's, in spite of Mrs. Poulteney's
solemn warnings to that lady as to the foolhardiness of harboring such
proven dissoluteness.

In Broad Street Mary was
happy. Mrs. Tranter liked pretty girls; and pretty, laughing girls even
better. Of course, Ernestina was her niece, and she worried for her more;
but Ernestina she saw only once or twice a year, and Mary she saw every
day. Below her mobile, flirtatious surface the girl had a gentle affectionateness;
and she did not stint, she returned the warmth that was given. Ernestina
did not know a dreadful secret of that house in Broad Street; there were
times, if cook had a day off, when Mrs. Tranter sat and ate with Mary alone
in the downstairs kitchen; and they were not the unhappiest hours in either
of their lives.

Mary was not faultless; and
one of her faults was a certain envy of Ernestina. It was not only that
she ceased abruptly to be the tacit favorite of the household when the
young lady from London arrived; but the young lady from London came also
with trunkfuls of the latest London and Paris fashions, not the best recommendation
to a servant with only three dresses to her name--and not one of which
she really liked, even though the best of them she could really dislike
only because it had been handed down by the young princess from the capital.
She also thought Charles was a beautiful man for a husband; a great deal
too good for a pallid creature like Ernestina. This was why Charles had
the frequent benefit of those gray-and-periwinkle eyes when she opened
the door to him or passed him in the street. In wicked fact the creature
picked her exits and entrances to coincide with Charles's; and each time
he raised his hat to her in the street she mentally cocked her nose at
Ernestina; for she knew very well why Mrs. Tranter's niece went upstairs
so abruptly after Charles's departures. Like all soubrettes, she dared
to think things her young mistress did not; and knew it.

Having duly and maliciously
allowed her health and cheerfulness to register on the invalid, Mary placed
the flowers on the bedside commode.

"From Mr. Charles, Miss Tina.
With 'er complimums." Mary spoke in a dialect notorious for its contempt
of pronouns and suffixes.

"Place them on my dressing
table. I do not like them so close."

Mary obediently removed them
there and disobediently began to rearrange them a little before turning
to smile at the suspicious Ernestina.

"Did he bring them himself?"

"No, miss."

"Where is Mr. Charles?"

"Doan know, miss. I didn'
ask'un." But her mouth was pressed too tightly together, as if she wanted
to giggle.

"But I heard you speak with
the man."

"Yes, miss."

"What about?"

"'Twas just the time o' day,
miss."

"Is that what made you laugh?"

"Yes, miss. 'Tis the way
'e speaks, miss."

The Sam who had presented
himself at the door had in fact borne very little resemblance to the mournful
and indignant young man who had stropped the razor. He had thrust the handsome
bouquet into the mischievous Mary's arms. "For the bootiful young lady
hupstairs." Then dexterously he had placed his foot where the door had
been about to shut and as dexterously produced from behind his back, in
his other hand, while his now free one swept off his a la mode near-brimless
topper, a little posy of crocuses.

"And for the heven more lovely
one down." Mary had blushed a deep pink; the pressure of the door on Sam's
foot had mysteriously lightened. He watched her smell the yellow flowers;
not politely, but genuinely, so that a tiny orange smudge of saffron appeared
on the charming, impertinent nose.

"That there bag o' soot will
be delivered as bordered." She bit her lips, and waited. "Hon one condition.
No tick. Hit must be a-paid for at once."

"'Ow much would'er cost then?"

The forward fellow eyed his
victim, as if calculating a fair price; then laid a finger on his mouth
and gave a profoundly unambiguous wink. It was this that had provoked that
smothered laugh; and the slammed door.

Ernestina gave her a look
that would have not disgraced Mrs. Poulteney. "You will kindly remember
that he comes from London."

"Yes, miss."

"Mr. Smithson has already
spoken to me of him. The man fancies himself a Don Juan."

"What's that then, Miss Tina?"

There was a certain eager
anxiety for further information in Mary's face that displeased Ernestina
very much.

"Never mind now. But if he
makes advances I wish to be told at once. Now bring me some barley water.
And be more discreet in
future."

There passed a tiny light
in Mary's eyes, something singularly like a flash of defiance. But she
cast down her eyes and her flat little lace cap, bobbing a token curtsy,
and left the room. Three flights down, and three flights up, as Ernestina,
who had not the least desire for Aunt Tranter's wholesome but uninteresting
barley water, consoled herself by remembering.

But Mary had in a sense won
the exchange, for it reminded Ernestina, not by nature a domestic tyrant
but simply a horrid spoiled child, that soon she would have to stop playing
at mistress, and be one in real earnest. The idea brought pleasures, of
course; to have one's own house, to be free of parents . . . but servants
were such a problem, as everyone said. Were no longer what they were, as
everyone said. Were tiresome, in a word. Perhaps Ernestina's puzzlement
and distress were not far removed from those of Charles, as he had sweated
and stumbled his way along the shore. Life was the correct apparatus; it
was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne,
here and now.

It was to banish such gloomy
forebodings, still with her in the afternoon, that Ernestina fetched her
diary, propped herself up in bed and once more turned to the page with
the sprig of jasmine.

In London the beginnings
of a plutocratic stratification of society had, by the mid-century, begun.
Nothing of course took the place of good blood; but it had become generally
accepted that good money and good brains could produce artificially a passable
enough facsimile of acceptable social standing. Disraeli was the type,
not the exception, of his times. Ernestina's grandfather may have been
no more than a well-to-do draper in Stoke Newington when he was young;
but he died a very rich draper--much more than that, since he had moved
commercially into central London, founded one of the West End's great stores
and extended his business into many departments besides drapery. Her father,
indeed, had given her only what he had himself received: the best education
that money could buy. In all except his origins he was impeccably a gentleman;
and he had married discreetly above him, a daughter of one of
the City's most successful
solicitors, who could number an Attorney-General, no less, among his not-too-distant
ancestors. Ernestina's qualms about her social status were therefore rather
farfetched, even by Victorian standards; and they had never in the least
troubled Charles.