The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (62 page)

"She is ... ?"

"I think they talk. That
is all."

"They" were apparently her
charges: the children.

"Then take him up, my dear.
Sir."

With a little bow he disappeared
as abruptly as he had appeared. The girl indicated that Charles should
follow her. He was left to close the door for himself. As she began to
mount the stairs he had time to glance at the crowded paintings and drawings.
He was sufficiently knowledgeable about modern art to recognize the school
to which most of them belonged; and indeed, the celebrated, the notorious
artist whose monogram was to be seen on several of them. The furore he
had caused some twenty years before had now died down; what had then been
seen as fit only for burning now commanded a price. The gentleman with
the pen was a collector of art; of somewhat suspect art; but he was no
less evidently a man of some wealth.

Charles followed the girl's
slender back up a flight of stairs; still more paintings, and still with
a predominance of the suspect school. But he was by now too anxious to
give them any attention. As they embarked on a second flight of stairs
he ventured a question.

"Mrs. Roughwood is employed
here as governess?"

The girl stopped in midstair
and looked back: an amused surprise. Then her eyes fell.

"She is no longer a governess."

Her eyes came up to his for
a moment. Then she moved on her way. They came to a second landing. His
sibylline guide turned at a door.

"Kindly wait here."

She entered the room, leaving
the door ajar. From outside Charles had a glimpse of an open window, a
lace curtain blowing back lightly in the summer air, a shimmer, through
intervening leaves, of the river beyond. There was a low murmur of voices.
He shifted his position, to see better into the room. Now he saw two men,
two gentlemen. They were standing before a painting on an easel, which
was set obliquely to the window, to benefit from its light. The taller
of the two bent to examine some detail, thereby revealing the other who
stood behind him. By chance he looked straight through the door and into
Charles's eyes. He made the faintest inclination, then glanced at someone
on the hidden other side of the room.

Charles stood stunned.

For this was a face he knew;
a face he had even once listened to for an hour or more, with Ernestina
beside him. It was impossible, yet ... and the man downstairs! Those paintings
and drawings! He turned hastily away and looked, a man woken into, not
out of, a nightmare, through a tall window at the rear end of the landing
to a green back-garden below. He saw nothing; but only the folly of his
own assumption that fallen women must continue falling--for had he not
come to arrest the law of gravity? He was as shaken as a man who suddenly
finds the world around him standing on its head.

A sound.

He flashed a look round.
She stood there against the door she had just closed, her hand on its brass
knob, in the abrupt loss of sunlight, difficult to see clearly.

And her dress! It was so
different that he thought for a moment she was someone else. He had always
seen her in his mind in the former clothes, a haunted face rising from
a widowed darkness. But this was someone in the full uniform of the New
Woman, flagrantly rejecting all formal contemporary notions of female fashion.
Her skirt was of a rich dark blue and held at the waist by a crimson belt
with a gilt star clasp; which also enclosed the pink-and white striped
silk blouse, long-sleeved, flowing, with a delicate small collar of white
lace, to which a small cameo acted as tie. The hair was bound loosely back
by a red ribbon.

This electric and bohemian
apparition evoked two immediate responses in Charles; one was that instead
of looking two years older, she looked two years younger; and the other,
that in some incomprehensible way he had not returned to England but done
a round voyage back to America. For just so did many of the smart young
women over there dress during the day. They saw the sense of such clothes--their
simplicity and attractiveness after the wretched bustles, stays and crinolines.
In the United States Charles had found the style, with its sly and paradoxically
coquettish hints at emancipation in other ways, very charming; now, and
under so many other new suspicions, his cheeks took a color not far removed
from the dianthus pink of the stripes on her shirt.

But against this shock--what
was she now, what had she become!--there rushed a surge of relief. Those
eyes, that mouth, that always implicit air of defiance ... it was all still
there. She was the remarkable creature of his happier memories--but blossomed,
realized, winged from the black pupa.

For ten long moments nothing
was spoken. Then she clutched her hands nervously in front of the gilt
clasp and looked down.

"How came you here, Mr. Smithson?"

She had not sent the address.
She was not grateful. He did not remember that her inquiry was identical
to one he had once asked her when she came on him unexpectedly; but he
sensed that now their positions were strangely reversed. He was now the
suppliant, she the reluctant listener.

"My solicitor was told you
live here. I do not know by whom."

"Your solicitor?"

"Did you not know I broke
my engagement to Miss Freeman?"

Now she was the one who was
shocked. Her eyes probed his a long moment, then looked down. She had not
known. He drew a step closer and spoke in a low voice.

"I have searched every corner
of this city. Every month I have advertised in the hope of ..."

Now they both stared at the
ground between them; at the handsome Turkey carpet that ran the length
of the landing. He tried to normalize his voice.

"I see you are ..." he lacked
words; but he meant, altogether changed.

She said, "Life has been
kind to me."

"That gentleman in there--is
he not... ?"

She nodded in answer to the
name in his still incredulous eyes.

"And this house belongs to
..."

She took a small breath then,
so accusing had become his tone. There lurked in his mind idly heard gossip.
Not of the man he had seen in the room; but of the one he had seen downstairs.
Without warning Sarah moved to the stairs that went yet higher in the house.
Charles stood rooted. She gave him a hesitant glance down.

"Please come."

He followed her up the stairs,
to find she had entered a room that faced north, over the large gardens
below. It was an artist's studio. On a table near the door lay a litter
of drawings; on an easel a barely begun oil, the mere ground-lines, a hint
of a young woman looking sadly down, foliage sketched faint
behind her head; other turned
canvases by the wall; by another wall, a row of hooks, from which hung
a multi-colored array of female dresses, scarves, shawls; a large pottery
jar; tables of impedimenta--tubes, brushes, color-pots. A bas relief, small
sculptures, an urn with bulrushes. There seemed hardly a square foot without
its object.

Sarah stood at a window,
her back to him.

"I am his amanuensis. His
assistant."

"You serve as his model?"

"I see."

"Sometimes."

But he saw nothing; or rather,
he saw in the corner of his eye one of the sketches on the table by the
door. It was of a female nude, nude that is from the waist up, and holding
an amphora at her hip. The face did not seem to be Sarah's; but the angle
was such that he could not be sure.

"You have lived here since
you left Exeter?"

"I have lived here this last
year."

If only he could ask her
how; how had they met? On what terms did they live? He hesitated, then
laid his hat, stick and gloves on a seat by the door. Her hair was now
to be seen in all its richness, reaching almost down to her waist. She
seemed smaller than he remembered; more slight. A pigeon fluttered to alight
on the sill in front of her; took fright, and slipped away. Downstairs
a door opened and closed. There was a faint sound of men's voices as they
made their way below. The room divided them. All divided them. The silence
became unbearable.

He had come to raise her
from penury, from some crabbed post in a crabbed house. In full armor,
ready to slay the dragon--and now the damsel had broken all the rules.
No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands. He was the man who appears at
a formal soiree under the impression it was to be a fancy dress ball. "He
knows you are not married?"

"I pass as a widow."

His next question was clumsy;
but he had lost all tact.

"I believe his wife is dead?"

"She is dead. But not in
his heart."

"He has not remarried?"

"He shares this house with
his brother." Then she added the name of another person who lived there,
as if to imply that Charles's scarcely concealed fears were, under this
evidence of population, groundless. But the name she added was the one
most calculated to make any respectable Victorian of the late 1860s stiffen
with disapproval. The horror evoked by his poetry had been publicly expressed
by John Morley, one of those worthies born to be spokesmen (i.e., empty
facades) for their age. Charles remembered the quintessential phrase of
his condemnation: "the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." And the
master of the house himself! Had he not heard that he took opium? A vision
of some orgiastic menage a quatre--a cinq if one counted the girl who had
shown him up--rose in his mind. But there was nothing orgiastic about Sarah's
appearance; to advance the poet as a reference even argued a certain innocence;
and what should the famous lecturer and critic glimpsed through the door,
a man of somewhat exaggerated ideas, certainly, but widely respected and
admired, be doing in such a den of iniquity? I am overemphasizing the worse,
that is the time-serving, Morleyish half of Charles's mind; his better
self, that self that once before had enabled him to see immediately through
the malice of Lyme to her real nature, fought hard to dismiss his suspicions.

He began to explain himself
in a quiet voice; with another voice in his mind that cursed his formality,
that barrier in him that could not tell of the countless lonely days, lonely
nights, her spirit beside him, over him, before him ... tears, and he did
not know how to say tears. He told her of what had happened that night
in Exeter. Of his decision; of Sam's gross betrayal.

He had hoped she might turn.
But she remained staring, her face hidden from him, down into the greenery
below. Somewhere there, children played. He fell silent, then moved close
behind her. "What I say means nothing to you?"

"It means very much to me.
So much I..."

He said gently, "I beg you
to continue."

"I am at a loss for words."

And she moved away, as if
she could not look at him when close. Only when she was beside the easel
did she venture to do so.

She murmured, "I do not know
what to say."

Yet she said it without emotion,
without any of the dawning gratitude he so desperately sought; with no
more, in cruel truth, than a baffled simplicity.

"You told me you loved me.
You gave me the greatest proof a woman can that ... that what possessed
us was no ordinary degree of mutual sympathy and attraction."

"I do not deny that."

There was a flash of hurt
resentment in his eyes. She looked down before them. Silence flowed back
into the room, and now Charles turned to the window.

"But you have found newer
and more pressing affections."

"I did not think ever to
see you again."

"That does not answer my
question."

"I have forbidden myself
to regret the impossible."

"That still does not--"

"Mr. Smithson, I am not his
mistress. If you knew him, if you knew the tragedy of his private life
... you could not for a moment be so ..." But she fell silent. He had gone
too far; and now he stood with rapped knuckles and red cheeks. Silence
again; and then she said evenly, "I have found new affections. But they
are not of the kind you suggest."

"Then I don't know how I
am to interpret your very evident embarrassment at seeing you again." She
said nothing.