The Scent of Water (14 page)

“No, dear, thank you,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite, and tried to turn away, for Julie was standing in a flood of sunlight that illumined to perfection her flawless skin, the perfect curve of her breasts and the long sculptured line from hip to knee. But it was an effort to look away and she felt blindly for the handle of the drawing-room door, loathing her clumsiness. Inside she stood listening, for she could not be certain if Julie had gone. One could never be certain. She moved like a sunbeam, weightlessly. Mrs. Hepplewhite, as she sat down in the armchair by the window, felt all weight.

She tried to relax and admire the garden and the beauty of the room where she sat. She always tried hard to appreciate it all, for she realized her good fortune. Her lines had fallen to her in very comfortable and pleasant places but her inward misery was like a glass wall between her and the good things about her. She could see them but when she put out her hands to them she met that cold wall. And then again she sometimes wondered if the country really appealed to her. Or the old house either. When she was alone it frightened her with its spookiness and oppressive silence and she had to rush about and be on committees and things to get away from it. But Frederick liked it. Being the squire appealed to him. Of course there were things she liked, her lovely clothes for instance, and the power to do good and be kind to others. She loved being kind and Frederick was generous about the amount of money he allowed her for clothes and charities. He was always kind to her. Why could she not adjust herself to a common situation? Other women did, many of them with graceful humor. Why must she hanker after the impossible? It was she who was abnormal, not he, for she loved him now as she had loved him at the beginning. To love this man was her life. She had to love him.

Why? You needn’t. Why suffer when you needn’t? Only a fool suffers unnecessarily.

It was the first time the idea had ever occurred to her and its impact was so strong that it was like a voice speaking.

Be like the other women, laugh and be indifferent. Or have a row and then divorce him. Indifference. Anger. The poison or the knife. It doesn’t matter which you use. Either is equally lethal. Love dies. Then you can enjoy things again. You’re not old yet. You’ve got time.

But if I ceased to love him I should be dead inside, she answered, for it is I who love him, I myself, Dolly Barnes, I am not anything but loving Frederick.

You fool, said the voice, you fool.

She was aware of conflict, strange and deep, and then it seemed to cease and she thought she had decided. Angry with Frederick she could not be but she would be indifferent. She would not care any more. Let Dolly die. She’d always been a fool anyhow. Life held a great deal for Mrs. Hepplewhite.

She slumped back in her chair with a sigh of relief, but just as she was relaxing into a blissful state of utter blankness the door flew open and Elise, her Swiss girl, burst in. Elise, though extremely efficient in her work, was as noisy as Julie was soundless; sometimes Mrs. Hepplewhite thought she was noisy on purpose, just to be different from Julie whom she loathed. She came across the room now scattering console tables in her wake, then picked one of them up and placed a little tray of tea beside Mrs. Hepplewhite, whom she loved, and on whose side she invariably was.

“Hot and strong as you like it,” she said. “You like it better than sherry. You don’t really like sherry. Drink up, Mrs. Hepplewhite. That Julie! That bitch! She tells on you to me! Tells me you were crying. How dare she. She’s a bitch!”

Elise’s enchanting broken English somehow robbed her language of offense while taking nothing from its incisiveness. In the blankness of Mrs. Hepplewhite’s state, emotion stirred again, profound relief that Elise had spoken it out loud for her. In gratitude to Elise she looked up in her round face and saw it flushed with rage, the brown eyes snapping, the untidy curly dark hair standing up on end. Elise was a darling. There was no indifference about Elise. Anger, yes, but not anger like a knife. Anger like a sunburst, she was alive to her fingertips.

Will you separate yourself from Elise?

While she mechanically poured herself out a cup of tea, and added a lump of sugar, she realized that it had begun again, strange and deep. It was not over after all. She had not decided. This was another voice and she was being given another chance. If she became indifferent she would be like Julie, who did not care in the least what suffering she caused.

You’ve only given yourself one lump of sugar. Dolly took three.

Mrs. Hepplewhite discovered that her slumped position in the armchair had caused her corsets to dig in most uncomfortably. She sat up, braced herself to accept their discipline once more, and helped herself to two more lumps of sugar. She turned to Elise and smiled. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “I am more grateful to you than you know.”

After Elise had taken Jeremy home Mr. Hepplewhite was again alone in the library. For once they had no guests this weekend and he’d be having the evening meal alone with Hermione. No need to hurry. It was dusk now and though the manor house thrush was still singing the owls were calling down in the wood. He liked the owls. This morning he had stood at his window at the first light and there had been a lark singing in a sky that still held the shining of the moon, and the owls had been calling as the lark sang. Odd how he’d come to love the country. He supposed it was his mother in him. Through the open window the air blew fresh and cool, like well water. There had been a well behind his grandfather’s cottage, the gamekeeper’s cottage in the woods where he had stayed once with his mother, and the water, welling up from a deep spring, had been the purest and coldest he’d ever known. He’d liked to hang over the edge of the well and breathe in the cool scent of the water. He could see that boy leaning over the well, his dark hair standing up stiffly on the crown of his head. He could see him as clearly as he’d seen young Jeremy at the window a short while ago. The two boys seemed one. Mr. Hepplewhite no longer felt tossed about, pitched into another dimension, though that moment and this one were as united as the two boys. He had been shaken then but now it seemed that he was gently persuaded. The scent of water. He had forgotten there was such a thing. Perhaps only children were aware of it. He couldn’t ever remember feeling so tired. He stretched out his hand and rang the bell.

When Julie appeared he said, “Those two letters. I’ve changed my mind. Bring them back and I’ll destroy them.”

“They’re posted,” said Julie. “I imagined you would want them to arrive on Monday morning first thing.”

“You posted them? But I’ve told you time and again not to post letters until I tell you.” He glared at her, then relaxed. “You little fool! There’s no Sunday post out from the village after three o’clock.”

She smiled at him sweetly. “I sent Archer into Westwater to post them.” There was a trace of mockery in her smile and the sight of her, so utterly a part of the world of his attainment, restored him to what he was accustomed to regard as sanity. The two boys vanished like dew in the sun and if he had been capable of blushing he would have blushed.

“All right,” he said. “You took a lot upon yourself but in this case you were right. The thing needed clinching. But don’t use your imagination again, Julie. There’s no place for it in business. Imagination and overfatigue. Avoid them like the devil.”

Mary was tired after the children had left and after supper she took the diary upstairs with her. In bed with the oil lamp burning beside her she listened for a few moments to the owls calling, and then she wondered about the singing that Edith had heard. She, listening then, had heard only silence, but in a child’s life and mind there are no empty spaces. Stillness, silence, are quickened for them either by Keats’s world of the imagination or by heaven or, and she smiled, by mischief. Where had that child Jeremy got to? When she had taken Edith and Rose home his mother had been unperturbed by his disappearance. Jeremy, she said, always turned up. What had stirred Joanna with relief and joy had been their mutual decision that Edith should leave school and start lessons with Mary in a week’s time.

She turned a fresh page of the diary. Between her first reading and this one the entries had been chiefly concerned with getting settled in the house. The old Vicar, whose name was Benedict Carroway and who still wore a white stock and a top hat to go about the parish, had lent her his carriage in which to go shopping. Driving in it to Westwater, she and Jenny had found there stuffs for curtains, damask hangings for her bed, a carpet to match, and a mossy green carpet for the parlor. She described these purchases with delight and Mary could picture the Westwater of those days, the gentle traffic of carriages and governess carts up and down the winding streets, the leisurely shoppers in their long skirts, and enchanting hats poised on high-piled hair. And she described the squire, Sir Charles Royston, and his little wife who still wore her hair in ringlets with a white lace cap on top. In contrast to the Vicar, whose rosy face was clean-shaven apart from white side whiskers, Sir Charles was hirsute. A long gray beard flowed down over his chest and his hair curled upon the collar of his black velvet smoking jacket. He sat all day in his library writing a history of Greece that never got finished and left the running of the estate to his son, referred to by everyone at Appleshaw as Mr. Ambrose, a vague and kindly man who never looked himself except dressed in tweeds and accompanied by a cloud of dogs. Dressed for dinner he looked like someone else, someone whom he very much disliked. Sir Charles’s grandfather had built the Georgian manor house with money brought to him by his heiress wife, and reading about them Mary remembered the two portraits. The much older manor house had been burned down some years before and the Roystons had lived in a farmhouse in the beech woods until the heiress restored them to their own again. Cousin Mary’s descriptions captured her diary entirely through the remaining weeks of October and the first half of November, when they abruptly broke off. They did not begin again until after Christmas. Mary found herself at New Year’s Eve when she turned the page.

I was indoors for a month before Christmas. I got very tired, settling in, and though there are not many people here I had to get to know the few there are. But they are so different, these few, from Mother’s friends. I think they would all be called rather odd people. When Lady Royston came to see me after I was better and said, “Was it liver, dear?” and I answered truthfully, for I’m always going to speak the truth here, “It’s my mind. I get very afraid,” she only said, “Camomile tea the last thing at night,” and did not seem to think me peculiar. She came again next day with a small box which she put into my hands. Inside was a minute blue glass tea set, too small for dolls, about the right size for fairies. “I’ve loved it a long time,” she said. “I thought you might like it too.” And then she went away before I had time to thank her properly. And two days ago Sir Charles came to see me and brought me a Christmas present of red and white carved chessmen, and taught me how to play. “Send for me when you want me,” he said. “There’s nothing like chess when you feel low.” And so now they all know about me and I don’t mind because this is a place close-knit in family affection. When you pass through the lime avenue you come to a world within a world, a place enclosed. The enclosure has nothing to do with enchantment, for it’s not a fairy world. It has to do with obedience. That was one of the things I found out when I was ill.

It’s odd, but this time what I went through was a double thing, two strands twisted together of black and gold. There was the bad thing, fear and darkness pressing in, and there was the glad singing of love, the “Yes, I will,” that is my song. I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God’s help you can command your will when you can’t command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn’t appear to agree with us.

What else did I learn? I found out what the dark walls are and why, like Job, I must repent in dust and ashes.

It was a dream I had, a little while before Christmas. It had been my worst day, after a sleepless night, and one of the worst things about it was that I had stopped being aware of the double thing. I did manage to say, “Yes, I will,” but I think I only said it three times and each time saying it was like lifting a mountain, so reluctant was I. It had been a cold dark day. There had been a light sprinkling of snow but with no sun to make it sparkle it had seemed not beautiful but bitter and sad. It was dark so soon that at four o’clock Jenny drew my bedroom curtains. For I was in bed, where I’d been for a fortnight. Bed did not help my insomnia at all but it seemed to make it all easier to bear and Jenny didn’t worry me to get up. She brought me some tea and I drank it, and then I asked her to leave me alone and she did. I heard the clock strike five and I thought, Soon it will be Christmas and I shan’t be able to enjoy my first Christmas in my own home. I was very sorry for myself. I thought, I can’t bear it. I was lying on stones and the walls were moving in. And then, and that was the third time, I said, “Yes, I will.” But it didn’t help. The walls moved in nearer and as they closed right around, trapping me, I screamed.

I don’t suppose I really screamed. What had happened was that I had fallen asleep at last and drifted into nightmare. I was imprisoned in stone. I knew then what men suffered who are walled up alive. But I was able to think, and I thought, Shall I scream and beat against the wall or shall I keep my mouth shut and be still? I wanted to scream because it would have been the easier thing. But I didn’t. And when I had been still for a little while I found myself slowly edging forward. There was a crack in the stone. The hardness pressed against me upon each side in a horrible way, as though trying to crush me, but I could edge forward through the crack. I went on scraping through and at last there was a glimmer of light. It came to my feet like a sword and I knew it had made the crack, a sword of fire splitting the stone. And then the walls drew back slightly on each side of me, as though the light pushed them. I had a sense of conflict, as though the darkness reeled and staggered, resisting the light in an anguish of evil strength. It had a fearful power. But the light, that seemed such a small beam in comparison with that infinity of blackness, kept the channel open and I fled down it. There was room now to run. I ran and ran and came out into the light.