The House in Paris (10 page)

On the left shore, a steeple pricked up out of a knoll, of trees, above a snuggle of gothic villas; then there was the sad stare of what looked like an orphanage. A holy bell rang and a girl at a corner mounted her bicycle and rode out of sight. The river kept washing salt off the ship's prow. Then, to the right, the tree-dark hill of Tivoli began to go up, steep, with pallid stucco houses appearing to balance on the tops of trees. Palladian columns, gazeboes, glass-houses, terraces showed on the background misted with spring green, at the tops of shafts or on toppling brackets of rock, all stuck to the hill, all slipping past the ship. Yes, this looked like a hill in Italy faded; it stood in that flat clear light in which you think of the past and did not look like a country subject to racking change.

Smells of wood-smoke from cottages on the waterfront overhung the spongy smell of the tide; the smoke went melting up white against the woods.

The river still narrowing, townish terraces of tall pink houses under a cliff drew in. In one fanlight stood a white plaster horse; clothes were spread out to dry on a briar bush. Someone watching the ship twitched back a curtain; a woman leaned out signalling with a mirror: several travellers must be expected home. A car with handkerchiefs fluttering drove alongside the ship. On the city side, a tree-planted promenade gave place to boxy warehouses; a smoky built-over hill appeared beyond Tivoli. But Cork consumes its own sound: the haze remained quite silent.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say 'Oh look!' Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

Passengers were beginning to crowd on deck with their baggage; the docks, where Uncle Bill Bent would not fail to be, were in sight. Karen's heart sank at the thought of being met. She was startled to find how unwilling she was to arrive: she had thought of the journey as, simply, going away. But you never get quite away. Rushbrook had sounded airy because she did not know it, but that would be spoilt soon. There would be a good deal of talking and explanation; she was afraid they might press her to have breakfast again. She wished Uncle Bill were not certain to be punctual. He and her Aunt Violet had not been long married; the most that was known of him was that he was never late. In this and other ways he was unlike one's idea of an Irish landowner; he looked despondent and peaky, and lacked gusto. Karen had met him once at a family party, where he had lifted unhappy eyes from his teacup only to glance mistrustfully at the clock. Would he know her again? Or suppose she walked straight through him, as though she had lost her memory in the night?

Going to meet a stranger or semi-stranger, can you help asking yourself what
they
are coming to meet? The sun, melting through the white film, struck the water, and Karen felt reflections playing over her face make bright liquid curves, a smile not her own. Her own smile was not complex. But leaning over the rail, giving her face to the trickery of sunny water, she felt this mysterious smile cast on her cheeks. What pleased her was not mysterious, and she could smile only when she was pleased. Her character was in her look (she had learnt before she was twelve). She looked at people at once vaguely and boldly; for years she had learnt from other eyes what hers did. This makes any lover or friend a narcissus pool; you do not want anyone else once you have learnt what you are; there is no more to learn.

But she had a more outside knowledge of what Uncle Bill would see. When she had no other model, she propped up her board by a looking-glass to work at a self-portrait, intently dispassionate. As a model's, the face was not bad. The eyebrows were lightly marked but their structure was definite; the eyelids straight, lifting warily, as she worked, from the board to the looking-glass. The nose was her mother's nose. The mouth was the clear-cut mouth in her own portrait at twelve; the same arbitrary calmness, but the lips fuller now. The chin, cleft a little — and so on. Effect of the whole face: breadth and delicate planes. But her pencil had always lacked something, not quickness or energy, simply power, perhaps. Her impatience with it always stamped itself on the portrait, which kept, like so many self-portraits, a fixed, challenging look. She was fair, not blonde.

The boat was late this morning. When Karen came to know Uncle Bill's habits better she could guess how distractedly he must have paced the quay. She would know he would have been there an hour early, having driven in breakneck from Rushbrook along the estuary, casting frantic backward glances at the water for fear the boat should be overtaking him. He had never been late, ever. But dreams of unpunctuality woke him, sweating, quite often, Aunt Violet said: your poor Uncle Bill. Tearing up to find the quay deserted, what should he think but that the boat had slipped in, then out, unseen? Common sense did nothing for him. His mind raised whole crops of irrational fears, his anxious love for his wife at the root of all. When signs of life on the quay brought no signs of the boat, he thought of unexplained tragedies at sea. They had all gone down. Or worse still, Karen was overboard and the captain had not the nerve to come in without her. It would be like fate to single out Violet's niece. Anything not only might happen but almost certainly would: was not
The Times
simply a catalogue of calamities? How should he break this to Violet? ... Only towards the end of her stay at Rushbrook did Karen begin to realize all Uncle Bill went through.

When the boat did come in and she did step down the gangway, Colonel Bent's beaky nose under the flat check cap bobbed anxiously among the crowd at the barrier; he was not tall. He looked through her; she waved resignedly, whereupon he eyed her with some alarm. Snatching her suitcase suspiciously from the porter, he spoke in a muted voice, as though her nerves could not bear much, and when she failed to hear him went unhappily pink. Ladies of his generation did not expect to travel well, they crushed like chrysanthemums and took days to revive. So that Uncle Bill seemed uncertain whether he ought to talk, but to be silent with her made him still more shy. He tucked her into his car as though she were made of glass, then started the car with a jolt that would have shattered anything. They drove cautiously towards Rushbrook along the Tivoli bank, Uncle Bill sounding the horn with a note of entreaty when anything seemed likely to come their way. Karen saw it would be friendlier to be tired: she looked up at the gardens, which smelt gummy and sweet. Her uncle did not expect her to show character: if I had burnt my head off and put on a black pot instead like the child in the story, it would not matter, she thought. Her family were amusing, though not unkind, about Uncle Bill: it was not easy to see why Aunt Violet, who had got on so happily as a widow living outside Florence, becoming each year more like an ageless primitive angel, should have married this hysterical little person who had not even a place: his house, Montebello, had been burnt in the troubles.

But the Bents went on sounding happy; this was the most they could do, for the family had only met them together once. With the compensation money for Montebello they had bought a small house at Rushbrook, overlooking the harbour of Queenstown, now called Cobh. Its avenue ran uphill and its garden was too steep, but Aunt Violet liked seeing some of the sea, not all of it, and he liked watching the shipping through a telescope mounted at the edge of the tennis court. Ghastly black staring photographs of the ruins of Montebello hung at Mount Iris outside the bathroom door; downstairs was a photograph of the house as it used to be, in winter, a grey façade of light-reflecting windows, flanked each side by groves of skeleton trees. It could never have been gay or homely. But Rushbrook is full of Protestant gentry, living down misfortunes they once had. None of them, as a matter of fact, had done too badly, or they would not be here, for most of the big villas are miniature 'places' that need some keeping up. The nineteenth-century calm hanging over the colony makes the rest of Ireland a frantic or lonely dream. The bay is sheltered, the gardens full of exotic shrubs that grow nowhere else. Quiet roads run uphill, with lamps clamped to the corners of garden walls. From the harbour, Rushbrook looks like a steep show of doll's-houses; some gothic, some with glass porches, some widely bow-windowed and all bland. Yet this unstrange place was never to lose for Karen a troubling strangeness, a disturbing repose. Marshes threaded with water, pale tufts of pampas, grey bridges, a broken tower lie for some flat miles between here and Cork.

It was hard for Aunt Violet's family to see why the Bents could not have chosen to settle — for instance — in Devonshire. Perhaps Uncle Bill clung to the edges of his own soil; and it was like Aunt Violet to set, so unconsciously, a premium on her company by living across the sea. Florence had seemed less distant; the Michaelis connection all knew Florence well. 'Abroad' was inside their compass. But the idea of Aunt Violet in Ireland made them uncomfortable; it seemed insecure and pointless, as though she had chosen to settle on a raft. It would have distressed her to know they felt this. But she had always done as she wished, mildly: she was a tranquil woman, obtuse and sweet.

2

When Uncle Bill drove Karen up the avenue, Aunt Violet's bedroom curtains were still drawn. However, hearing the car, she came down to meet them in her blue dressing-gown, her hair hanging over her shoulders in two fair faded plaits: she kissed Karen on the stairs. Rightly concluding that it was too late for breakfast (it was now half-past ten) she said nothing about it; she did not speak of Karen's engagement, either — she may have felt it was too early for that — but, having kissed her niece, looked at her happily. Karen could not have found a more grateful incuriosity on the Subject of love than these two elderly lovers'.

An American liner was due at the mouth of the harbour that morning; the tender would about now be starting to meet it, so Uncle Bill went out to adjust the telescope. Aunt Violet went back to her room to dress. The house, like all houses whose mistresses come down late, was silent downstairs and still inanimate. Now and then, the hum of a motor came up from the Gobh road as Karen walked through the rooms. She did not so much ask herself why she was here as why she was ever anywhere. She supposed that is partly why women marry — to keep up the fiction of being the hub of things.

It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart. By having come, you already begin to store up the pains of going away. From what you see, there is to be no escape. Untrodden rocky canyons or virgin forests cannot be more entrapping than the inside of a house, which shows you what life is. To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself ... Through looped white muslin curtains the unsunny sea daylight fell on French blue or sage-green wallpapers with paler scrolls on them, and water-colours of places that never were. The rooms smelt of Indian rugs, spirit-lamps, hyacinths. In the drawing-room, Aunt Violet's music was stacked on the rosewood piano; a fringed shawl embroidered with Indian flowers was folded across the foot of the couch; the writing-table was crowded with brass things. In a pan-shaped basket by the sofa were balls of white knitting wool. Aunt Violet seemed to have lived here always. The fire was laid but not lit. Each room vibrated with a metallic titter, for Uncle Bill kept going a number of small clocks. Out of these high-up windows you saw nothing but sky. The rooms looked not so much empty as at a sacred standstill; Karen could almost hear Uncle Bill saying: 'I have touched nothing since my dear wife's death.'

That evening, Aunt Violet remembered to ask about Ray; she had somehow got the idea he was in the army and supposed this must be because he had gone away. They went to bed early, as on all other evenings. After that, the days here began to slip by faster and faster, not touching anything as they passed. Some afternoons, Karen walked inland behind Rushbrook, into bare open country near the mountains — which are dark and rocky, though no higher than hills. But the dry whistling upland grass and lines of windbent beeches along the ridges, the dipping spaces of pale distance and air, said no more to her than Aunt Violet's bric-à-brac. She either felt nothing or felt, wherever she was, the same something approaching, like steps in the distance making you stand still. Her passivity made the hills, like the indoors of Mount Iris or the view of the harbour, seem to be behind glass. This was more than having no human fears. She felt hungry all day and slept deeply at nights.

Then one day had character. Ray's first letter to Rushbrook came, on the ship's notepaper, asking Karen to say if she truly
wanted
to marry him, or had only been rushed into saying she would. He said he had somehow got an impression, which worried him, that she had not given the question her whole mind. Perhaps he was wrong, perhaps being idle at sea made him think too much, perhaps being apart from her simply did not agree with him; or this might be a touch of liver brought on by the sea air. But loving her made him want her to have a fair break. He only wished to be clear how they
did
stand.

Karen had thought this was all perfectly clear. His letter came as a shock and was, naturally, upsetting. It would have been more of a shock if she had not already detected in Ray what she liked least: a liking for going over things carefully twice. He liked to tot everything up, and this seemed to her a wretched way to treat feeling. She was angry with him and wrote back with a good deal of impatience that she could not say more than that she
did
want to marry him. What more did he want? What did he mean by her whole mind? No, she did not wish him to answer. Only one thing, she said, seemed more futile than these months of waiting about: his question, any one of the things he had just asked. Had he forgotten that evening before he sailed? Had she been halfhearted then? Well ...? She wrote all this very fast, in uneasy anger. Then she stopped. Could he be attracted by somebody on the ship? Could this be an uncertainty inside himself? She saw the unkind white height of the ship she had seen him off on, and saw it forging ahead, directly away from her. She saw Ray's wish for her attenuated by distance, like those hot glass ropes you see spun at Murano, that, stretching, thin, then cool, go brittle and snap. That made her miss him so much that it seemed startling she had not missed him more. Going out to pace the garden she found herself in a fever; the calm of Rushbrook became a blanket she wanted desperately to throw off. She went back to stamp her letter, then hurried down to the pillar-box: dropping in the letter she thought: What more can I do? ... I cannot stay here, she thought, letting this go on going wrong. Uncle Bill and Aunt Violet filled her with impatience as she stared into the grin of the pillar-box. She wanted to be with some gaunt, contemptuous person who twisted life his own way ...