The Honeymoon (12 page)

But how could Charles bear the thought of Cara intimate with someone else? And did he have someone for himself?

She found herself watching Cara and Charles in a new way, trying to understand. How could they love each other
if they were taking other people as lovers? How could they not be jealous of each other? Why would they be married if not because they’d committed themselves wholly to each other?

She sensed there was significance in Charles’s telling her about his and Cara’s “arrangement.” But could it really be that he was saying he wanted her? Not possible. He wasn’t attracted to her at all, except that he loved to talk to her.

A week later, it was a stiflingly hot day, the height of the summer heat in July, the intense heat that came only once or twice each year. Her father was resting in his room at Bird Grove and Marian made her way through the fields to Rosehill, the meadows dry, the grass golden brown, the insects buzzing around her.

As she rang the bell of the house, it seemed unusually quiet. The maid said that Mrs. Bray had gone to Bishops Teignton to see Mr. Noel, and the servants had retired to their quarters, driven in by the heat. Mr. Bray was in his study.

She knocked on the study door and from within came his answering call. As she entered, the room was dark, the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun. He was sitting in the shadows behind his desk. There was a green velvet divan on which he took his afternoon rest, an oriental rug thrown over it, and great, soft pillows piled upon it. His books were stacked untidily on the shelves and newspapers piled on the floor around him. Behind the desk, a great, stuffed owl was mounted on a pedestal, and there was a marble bust of a Greek maiden, the tip of her nose broken
off, her neck long and graceful, her hair curling in tendrils about her face.

“Ah — there she is!” cried Charles, rising to greet her. “My soul mate. Do you know, I believe I have an affinity with you unlike any I have ever had with another person.”

She felt a sudden danger in the rush of his words, in his naked declaration in the isolation of the room, at this new closeness to him. “Thank you,” she said warily. It was true that it sometimes seemed, in the excitement of their mutual understanding and in the intensity of their conversation, as if there were no boundaries between them.

She stood across the room from him, dwarfed by the high ceiling. He came closer. They were several feet apart. He studied her, taking her in from head to foot in a way he never had before. Then he came forward, reached out suddenly, took her in his arms, embraced her, and kissed her.

His full lips were on hers, his body against hers, and she felt a fierce sensation shoot up through her from her legs to her breast.

She tried to extricate herself, but he said, “No,” and kissed her again.

At first when he made love to her, it hurt, and she cried out and he withdrew. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you.” But she let him enter her again.

What happened next occurred so quickly that there was no thought involved, only urgency. It was her first taste of this pleasure, and once that taste had been taken and that boundary crossed, there was no going back.

Afterward she cried with shame at what she’d done, and he held her. “It’s your first time,” he said, and she nodded through her tears. “Thank you,” he said, “for that gift.”

As he pulled on his clothes, she asked, “But what will we tell Cara? She and I, we’re so close. I love Cara. She’s like my sister.”

He sat down beside her on the divan and put his arm around her shoulder. “You don’t have to tell Cara. She already knows.”

“But how could she know? This is the first —”

“Cara sees everything. And you know that I have her permission. It’s the same for her with Edward.”

Cara was scheduled to return that evening from Bishops Teignton. The next day and the day after, Marian didn’t go to Rosehill.

Then a note came to Bird Grove from Cara.
“I miss you, dear friend. Where have you been? Why have you deserted us? We are having a party with music on Saturday and we want you to play the piano.”
Cara missed her! She was inviting her to play the piano. Marian was afraid to face her, but by not going she would be bringing out into the open what had happened.

On Saturday, she walked slowly through the summer evening to Rosehill. She walked along the canal, across the bridge, the night sounds of frogs and crickets vivid around her. She could see the house ahead of her all lit up. From the open windows came voices and music and the tinkling of glass. As she entered the drawing room amidst the other arriving guests, Cara caught sight of her and looked at her for a long moment. Then she smiled and moved to greet her. Standing before Marian, she looked into her face. Cara’s eyes were the warmest, deepest blue, so full of wisdom and kindness. In them was a look of reassurance and acceptance, a pledge not to censure her, a promise communicated that their own love couldn’t be broken.

Perhaps Cara countenanced her new ties to Charles because it gave her permission to love Edward Noel. Now that Cara knew about herself and Charles, she could continue with Edward without doubt, without guilt.

Cara reached out her arms, embraced Marian, and held her. She could feel Cara’s tiny body warm against her, her curls brushing her face.

And so the darkened study with its soft privacy, the green velvet divan, the door quietly latched against the servants, became the place where she and Charles met, discreetly, when Cara was out, as if to observe the formalities, the appearances, so as not to challenge too obviously the rules of others. And Cara was still her beloved “sister,” and Charles was now her lover, and she and Cara never spoke of it.

Charles was tender and kind, but afterward the guilt and shame overwhelmed her. Still, she always came back. No matter how often she resolved not to, she couldn’t give him up, the affection that came from him, this new pleasure that expanded and grew each time.

And Charles, though loving toward her, was still the husband of Cara. He loved Cara, he said, with all his heart, though he loved her, Marian, as well. And, she wondered again, did he have others? And who could they be? Was he still intimate with Cara? As these questions arose in her mind, she banished them.

She knew that he could never be hers alone. No man would ever give himself entirely to her, neither Charles Bray nor Charles Hennell, who had been so sweetly grateful to her for her appreciation of his book, but who loved only Rufa Brabant. She must take what was given.

In July Charles and Cara invited her to go on holiday with them to Tenby in Wales. Charles Hennell and Rufa Brabant were to come. Rufa’s father, Dr. Brabant, no longer opposed their marriage. Rufa had inherited a small sum and Charles Hennell had found a job as manager of an iron company. Perhaps Dr. Brabant realized he couldn’t stop them. Marian asked her father’s permission to go with them; she would be carefully chaperoned, she pointed out. He grumpily assented.

In Tenby, they took long walks to Moonstone Point and bathed in the bathing machines, wooden carts with canvas awnings that rolled into the sea and enabled ladies, especially, to change and bathe modestly in the water without being seen. At low tide in the evening, they walked out to St. Catherine’s Island and explored the caves, stirring the tidal pools into phosphorescence with pieces of driftwood. Charles and Cara had separate bedrooms, and Charles came to Marian’s room at night. No one spoke of it. It was as if no one knew about it, or, if they did, they accepted the arrangement. She tried not to think about it, the possibility that Charles and Cara might still be together too. Charles belonged to everyone, in his warmth, his outgoingness, but she had no sense that he was with anyone but her, Marian.

As they played and laughed together, she came to like the vivacious Rufa Brabant. Pale, ethereal Charles Hennell loved Rufa, but Marian had her own lover to hold her now at night.

The party traveled on to Swansea. Rufa’s father, Dr. Brabant, joined them. He was a small, ebullient figure with a
corona of white hair around his well-shaped head, clean shaven, with muttonchop sideburns, high cheekbones, thin-lipped. He had watchful light blue eyes, taking everything in, observing everything, and when he looked at you it was as if he had a special relationship, a secret, with you.

On one of their rambles on the beach, he walked alongside Marian apart from the rest of the group, and he told her about his friendship with Coleridge, who’d just died. He and Coleridge were quite close, he said, with a modest smile, and Coleridge had sent him an excerpt of his revised
Biographia Literaria
, asking for his opinion. Coleridge had also confided to him, he said, his awful struggles with opium. He’d tried to help him but had failed and the great man had died, profoundly depressed, his life in ruins.

Dr. Brabant was no longer practicing medicine, he said, but was writing a book on theology. It would be a very long work, he said. He was friends with the theologian David Friedrich Strauss. His book would be on the same lines as Strauss and his future son-in-law Charles Hennell’s work, questioning the facts of Jesus’s life as presented in the Gospels. “I think it will be epoch-making,” he said, “the final destroyer of all theological dogma.” She’d read some Strauss herself, she told him, as her German was quite good now. She was looking forward very much to reading his work.

A few weeks after they returned from Tenby, one autumn morning, when the first frost covered the ground, she arrived at Rosehill to find Charles looking unusually serious. “I’ve got some news, Marian,” he said. He drew her into his study and shut the door behind them.

He stood there, his hair hanging roughly over his forehead, his face florid with excitement.

“Cara and I are going to have a child,” he said.

She was dumbfounded. All along — what she hardly dared to imagine — he and Cara had still been intimate.

“We’re going to adopt a baby girl.” So it wasn’t what it seemed.

“But … how wonderful,” she said. “I’m so happy for you.”

He didn’t smile, but continued watching her face, as if collecting himself before he delivered the next words. “The child is mine,” he said. He was silent, pausing for her response.

“Yours?” So there
were
others. That possibility had remained unspoken between them, something she wanted to ignore because of her need for him, the gaiety he brought to her life, the distraction, the kindness.

“Yes, mine,” he said.

Her voice faltered. “But who is its mother?”

“Hannah is the mother. Hannah Steane.”

Her face burned with anger. Hannah, the cook, full-breasted, round-bodied Hannah, with her high color and dimpled wrists, who smiled sweetly and brought them their meals and lived with her mother and sister nearby on Radford Road. But right under her nose? And she hadn’t noticed it. She thought back. Hannah had grown plumper recently, her eyes were somehow deeper and shining. And, she realized, she hadn’t seen her at Rosehill for several weeks.

“You knew,” Charles said, warning her as if to forestall her anger. “You knew that we’d agreed, Cara and I. I told you from the beginning. We had an agreement.”

“But somehow I thought that I —”

“Marian, I never told you you were the only one,” he said flatly.

She felt tears threatening to burst through her. He was right. And she had chosen to ignore it. She couldn’t answer.

“Oh, Marian. I was honest with you. I made it a point of honor.” He came around and sat beside her on the green velvet divan, the place where it had all begun. He drew her to him and kissed the top of her head. “You knew that Cara and I have given each other the freedom to love other people …”

Her head was swirling. All this time she’d so needed his love and affection that she’d chosen not to think about the fact that he could still share a bed with Cara, and … with others.

“Cara and I are going to adopt Hannah’s baby. We’ll have a little girl of our own, Marian. We’re rejoicing.”

“But Hannah will give up her baby?”

“No. Hannah’s agreed to come and live with us as her nursemaid.”

“I see.” She tried to control her anger, to have some pride.

“She’s a precious thing, Marian. She looks just like me. Cara has seen her and has fallen in love with her. We’ve named her Elinor. We’ll call her Nelly for short.”

He was watching her, waiting for an answer. “Well,” he said, “what do you think? Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I’m going home,” she said. “Papa’s waiting for me.”

He went to take her in his arms. But she pushed him away.

“Please, don’t go away from us,” he said. “Will you still come? We both love you, Cara loves you, I love you.”

She left the house. An icy rain had begun, little spikes of cold on her skin. She pulled her scarf tight around her. A
fog lay over Coventry, obscuring the low-lying areas, the timber-faced workers’ houses. Halfway down the hill, her face suddenly crumpled, like a struck child’s.