The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (4 page)

"
My dear madam, your feet
are on the Rock. The Creator is all-seeing and all-wise. It is not for
us to doubt His mercy--or His justice."

"
But supposing He should
ask me if my conscience is clear?"

The vicar smiled. "You will
reply that it is troubled. And with His infinite compassion He will--"

"
But supposing He did not?"

"
My dear Mrs. Poulteney,
if you speak like this I shall have to reprimand you. We are not to dispute
His understanding."

There was a silence. With
the vicar Mrs. Poulteney felt herself with two people. One was her social
inferior, and an inferior who depended on her for many of the pleasures
of his table, for a substantial fraction of the running costs of his church
and also for the happy performance of his nonliturgical duties among the
poor; and the other was the representative of God, before whom she had
metaphorically to kneel. So her manner with him took often a bizarre and
inconsequential course. It was
de haut en bos
one
moment,
de has en haut
the
next; and sometimes she contrived both positions all in one sentence.

"
If only poor Frederick had
not died. He would have advised me."

"
Doubtless. And his advice
would have resembled mine. You may rest assured of that. I know he was
a Christian. And what I say is sound Christian doctrine."

"
It was a warning. A punishment."

The vicar gave her a solemn
look. "Beware, my dear lady, beware. One does not trespass lightly on Our
Maker's prerogative."

She shifted her ground. Not
all the vicars in creation could have justified her husband's early death
to her. It remained between her and God; a mystery like a black opal, that
sometimes shone as a solemn omen and sometimes stood as a kind of sum already
paid off against the amount of penance she might still owe.

"
I have given. But I have
not done good deeds."

"
To give is a most excellent
deed."

"
I am not like Lady Cotton."

This abruptly secular descent
did not surprise the vicar. He was well aware, from previous references,
that Mrs. Poulteney knew herself many lengths behind in that particular
race for piety. Lady Cotton, who lived some miles behind Lyme, was famous
for her fanatically eleemosynary life. She visited, she presided over a
missionary society, she had set up a home for fallen women--true, it was
of such repentant severity that most of the beneficiaries of her Magdalen
Society scrambled back down to the pit of iniquity as soon as they could--but
Mrs. Poulteney was as ignorant of that as she was of Tragedy's more vulgar
nickname.

The vicar coughed. "Lady
Cotton is an example to us all." This was oil on the flames--as he was
perhaps not unaware.

"
I should visit."

"
That would be excellent."

"
It is that visiting always
so distresses me." The vicar was unhelpful. "I know it is wicked of me."

"
Come come."

"
Yes. Very wicked."

A long silence followed,
in which the vicar meditated on his dinner, still an hour away, and Mrs.
Poulteney on her wickedness. She then came out, with an unaccustomed timidity,
with a compromise solution to her dilemma.

"
If you knew of some lady,
some refined person who has come upon adverse circumstances ..."

"
I am not quite clear what
you intend."

"
I wish to take a companion.
I have difficulty in writing now. And Mrs. Fairley reads so poorly. I should
be happy to provide a home for such a person."

"
Very well. If you so wish
it. I will make inquiries." Mrs. Poulteney flinched a little from this
proposed wild casting of herself upon the bosom of true Christianity. "She
must be of irreproachable moral character. I have my servants to consider."

"
My dear lady, of course,
of course." The vicar stood. "And preferably without relations. The relations
of one's dependents can become so very tiresome."

"
Rest assured that I shall
not present anyone unsuitable." He pressed her hand and moved towards the
door. "And Mr. Forsythe, not too young a person." He bowed and left the
room. But halfway down the stairs to the ground floor, he stopped. He remembered.
He reflected. And perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with malice,
a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy--or at least a not always
complete frankness--at Mrs. Poulteney's bombazined side, at any rate an
impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room. He stood in the
doorway.

"
An eligible has occurred
to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff."
 
 

O me, what profits
it to put
  An idle case? If
Death were seen
  At first as Death,
Love had not been,
Or been in narrowest working
shut,

Mere fellowship of sluggish
moods,
  Or in his coarsest
Satyr-shape
  Had bruised the herb
and crush'd the grape,
And bask'd and batten'd
in the woods.
--
Tennyson, In Memoriam
(1850)

The young people
were all wild to see Lyme.
--
Jane Austen, Persuasion

Ernestina had exactly
the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a
violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators
of the time--in Phiz's work, in John Leech's. Her gray eyes and the paleness
of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first meetings she
could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any
gentleman dare to address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner
of her eyelids, and a corresponding tilt at the corner of her lips--to
extend the same comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets--
that denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance
to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted
that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a man like Charles she
proved irresistible. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets,
the Georginas, Victorias, Abertinas, Matildas and the rest who sat in their
closely guarded dozens at every ball; yet not quite.

When Charles departed from
Aunt Tranter's house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces or so down
to his hotel, there gravely--are not all declared lovers the world's fool?--to
mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in
the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and went to her room. She wanted
to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed through the lace curtains; and
she also wanted to be in the only room in her aunt's house that she could
really tolerate.

Having duly admired the way
he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top hat to Aunt
Tranter's maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and hated him for
doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset peasant eyes and a provokingly
pink complexion, and Charles had been strictly forbidden ever to look again
at any woman under the age of sixty--a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully
escaped by just one year--Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been
furnished for her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy
then as the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt
Tranter's house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style of
a quarter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in the first
fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful, and to which
the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV, could be attached.

Nobody could dislike Aunt
Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and
talking-- especially talking--face was absurd. She had the profound optimism
of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence.
Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best of things for herself, and ended
by making the best of them for the rest of the world as well.

However, Ernestina did her
best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner at five;
on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the other rooms; on
the subject of her aunt's oversolicitude for her fair name (she would not
believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might wish to sit alone, and
walk out alone); and above all on the subject of Ernestina's being in Lyme
at all.

The poor girl had had to
suffer the agony of every only child since time began--that is, a crushing
and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her slightest cough
would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim summoned decorators
and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown caused her mama and papa
secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this was all very well when it
came to new dresses and new wall hangings, but there was one matter upon
which all her bouderies and complaints made no impression. And that was
her health. Her mother and father were convinced she was consumptive. They
had only to smell damp in a basement to move house, only to have two days'
rain on a holiday to change districts. Half Harley Street had examined
her, and found nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life;
she had none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition.
She could have--or could have if she had ever been allowed to--danced all
night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all the
next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting parents' fixed
idea than a baby to pull down a mountain. Had they but been able to see
into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all her generation. She was
born in 1846. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland.

An indispensable part of
her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her mother's
sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season; this year
she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No doubt the Channel
breezes did her some good, but she always descended in the carriage to
Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in Siberia. The society of the
place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter's lumbering mahogany furniture;
and as for the entertainment, to a young lady familiar with the best that
London can offer it was worse than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter
was much more that of a high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her
flat-footed nurse, than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed,
if Romeo had not mercifully appeared on the scene that previous winter,
and promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at least,
she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had certainly a
much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had ever allowed for--and
more than the age allowed for. But fortunately she had a very proper respect
for convention; and she shared with

Charles--it had not been
the least part of the first attraction between them--a sense of self-irony.
Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a horrid spoiled
child; and it was surely the fact that she did often so apostrophize herself
("You horrid spoiled child") that redeemed her.

In her room that afternoon
she unbuttoned her dress and stood before her mirror in her chemise and
petticoats. For a few moments she became lost in a highly narcissistic
self-contemplation. Her neck and shoulders did her face justice; she was
really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove
it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely
sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter's night.
She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked--a dancer,
an actress. And then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something
very curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in
profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And she
hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.

For what had crossed her
mind--a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch her
eye in the mirror--was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of dimly
glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her profound ignorance
of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain
and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny
all that gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that
so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple;
the violence haunted her mind.

Thus she had evolved a kind
of private commandment-- those inaudible words were simply "I must not"--whenever
the physical female implications of her body, sexual, menstrual, parturitional,
tried to force an entry into her consciousness. But though one may keep
the wolves from one's door, they still howl out there in the darkness.
Ernestina wanted a husband, wanted Charles to be that husband, wanted children;
but the payment she vaguely divined she would have to make for them seemed
excessive. She sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a bestial
version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing. Most women of her period
felt the same; so did most men; and it is no wonder that duty has become
such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian age--or for that
matter, such a wet blanket in our own.*
[* The stanzas from In
Metnoriam I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter are very relevant
here. Surely the oddest of all the odd arguments in that celebrated anthology
of after-life anxiety is stated in this poem (xxxv). To claim that love
can only be satyr-shaped if there is no immortality of the soul is clearly
a panic flight from Freud. Heaven for the Victorians was very largely heaven
because the body was left behind--along with the Id.]