Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  Maud (always precipitate) telephoned Stern’s chambers in Albany. There was no reply. She waited fifteen minutes, then telephoned again. Still no reply. It was incomprehensible!

  Maud was fond, her imagination vigorous. She saw a street accident; she saw her lover set upon by thugs. She called again, and again. At two in the morning, Stern answered.

  He sounded curt. He sounded displeased to be telephoned, even more displeased when Maud embarked on a rush of worries. The matter of the loan to her brother was not pressing, he said. There were other things on his mind.

  “But where have you been, Monty?” Maud began.

  “Walking the streets.”

  “At this hour? Monty, why?”

  “I wanted to think. There was a matter I needed to resolve.”

  “What matter? Monty—are you anxious?”

  “Not in the least. That matter is resolved.”

  “You’ve come to a decision?”

  “Yes. I’ve come to a decision.”

  “Monty—”

  “It’s late. Goodnight, Maud.”

  That same morning, Acland was returning to France. He saw his family only briefly.

  Both Freddie and Steenie had overslept. His mother had risen early to bid him goodbye; so had his father. These farewells took some time; the others were more perfunctory.

  Freddie emerged, looking guilty, rubbing his eyes, with half an hour to spare. Steenie arrived some five minutes later, in a distinctly foppish suit. He ate his breakfast standing up, humming “La donna e mobile.” Constance did not appear until they were all gathered in the hall.

  She came running down the stairs, her hair loose and unbrushed, her cuffs unfastened, complaining that Jenna grew forgetful. She had failed to sew on missing buttons. It was time for Acland to depart. He stood in an irresolute way by the door, dressed in uniform, his bags at his feet, his cap under his arm. Outside, his father’s Rolls waited.

  A gruff handshake from his father; a less gruff handshake from Freddie. A hug from Steenie; a long and tearful embrace from his mother. Constance hung back. Only at the last moment did she kiss him goodbye: two quick and distracted kisses, one for each cheek.

  She did not remind him of his promise again. This first hurt Acland, then made him resentful.

  Constance followed him out onto the steps.

  “I’m sorry you shall miss my ball,” she called out to him as he climbed into the back of the car.

  She waved her hand, one quick careless gesture.

  “Oh, I hate goodbyes,” she said with sudden intensity, and ran indoors.

  The Rolls drew away from the curb. Its great engine whispered. Its silvery and ghostly hood pointed the way to the station, to the troop ship, to the trenches.

  Acland leaned back in the seat; he watched the streets pass.

  It was in this way, angry with Constance—and suspecting she had meant him to be angered—that Acland returned to France.

  III

  ENGAGEMENTS

  From the journals

  Winterscombe,

  June 12, 1916

  THERE WAS A WAR in me—not a great war, like the war in Europe, just a small one—and it is over now. I am better. This is because of:

  my rabbit

  my dog

  my Acland

  myself

  Because I am better, I shall write down the secret thing. I shall do it now, before I go downstairs to my ball. I want the paper to have it. I don’t want it in my mind anymore. Listen, paper: you can remember. I can forget.

  Once upon a time, when I was five years old, I made my father very angry. It was nighttime, and he came to my room. The nurse had left. No more wages, he said—but he missed her, I think.

  He had wine with him, and while he drank the wine, he told me the story of his new book. He had never done that before! I listened very carefully. I felt so proud, and grown-up. The hero was very fine—he was Papa, I could tell that! I thought he would be pleased I had seen this—but when I told him, he became very angry. He picked up his wineglass and threw it at the wall. There was wine, glass, everywhere. All the room was red with it.

  He said I was stupid, and he meant to chastise me. He said I was wicked, and he would beat all the wickedness out of me.

  He put me across his lap. He pulled my nightgown up. He bared me, and then he hit me.

  I’m not sure how many times. It might have been five. It might have been twenty. Something happened, then, when he was hitting me. He stopped. He stroked me.

  Then he did a wicked thing. I knew it was a wicked thing. The nurse told me. You shouldn’t touch down there, or look down there—but Papa did. He said, Look, I can open you up, like a little purse. You see how small you are? There is a little place there, such a tiny place; he held up one of his white fingers, and he said—Watch. This will go in.

  It hurt. I cried. Papa held me very close. He said we were close, and he loved me so very much, and because he loved me, he would show me a secret.

  He unbuttoned himself. He said, Look. There, coiled up between his thighs, was this strange thing, like a sweaty white snake. I was afraid to touch it, but Papa laughed. He said he would show me some magic. He put my hand on it, and it pulsed. It was alive. Stroke it—Papa said. Stroke it, and you’ll see, Constance, you can make it grow.

  Pretend it’s a kitten, he said. Smooth the fur very gently. So I did—and it grew bigger, just as he said. It uncoiled. It sprang up at me. I said—Look, Papa, you have grown a new bone—and when I said that, he laughed again and then he kissed me.

  Usually, Papa did not like mouth kisses, because of germs, but that night was different. He kissed me, then he told me there was something he wanted very much. I could give it to him. He held his new bone in his hand. He spat on it. He said he could—

  Stuff it up me. Push it up me. That big thing. I knew it would never fit—and it wouldn’t. It made me bleed—but Papa was not angry. He washed me. He washed me clean. Then he sat me on his lap. He gave me a glass with some wine in it. The glass was like a thimble. The wine was like my blood.

  Don’t cry, Papa said. Don’t worry. This is our secret. We can try again.

  The first time he did it, it was a Sunday. I knew it was a Sunday—I could hear the church bells ring. There was a church at the end of our street, Saint Michael and All Angels. If you leaned out the window a long way you could almost see it. All those angels.

  He used an ointment that time. I had to rub it on till he was slippery. Then it went in all the way and Papa gave a great shout. It hurt me, and I thought it hurt him too, because he shook and I could see his eyes hated me. He closed his eyes and when it was over he wouldn’t look at me.

  Always on a Sunday after that. Sometimes he said—Touch my snake. Sometimes he said—Stroke the kitten, Constance. Sometimes he said the bad words, all the short ones. Once he sat me on his lap and put it in that way. Once he said I was his own little girl. Once he did another thing—I don’t want to write down the other thing. It made me sick. When I was sick, his eyes hated me. He always said he loved me, but his eyes always hated me.

  After he met Gwen, which was the next year, this stopped. I was glad and I was sad. After it stopped, he never said he loved me. After it stopped, he called me the albatross, which he never did before, and then he’d laugh at me. I said—Please, Papa, don’t call me that, not when other people can hear. And he promised me to stop—but he didn’t. He said it again, the very next day.

  Little albatross. It made me very lonely.

  There. That is how it was. There it is, the most secret thing of all. I have given it to the paper, and the paper can decide if he loved me, or if he lied.

  I shall close that book now, and begin a new one.

  I shall close that Constance.

  I shall close that life.

  I shall go and dance. I am ready to dance now. I am wearing my new white dress. I am going to choose a husband. From now on, I’ll be very very careful.
I wouldn’t want to be an albatross again—not to anyone.

  So Constance went down the staircase at Winterscombe to dance. There she is, at the top of these stairs; the music begins; it drifts upward on the air. She is wearing her ball gown, which is white, decorated with sequins.

  Little rings are crammed on her small fingers. Her hair is up for the first time. Her eyes slant upward at the corners. There are pearls around her throat, pearls that Maud has given her. Full fathom five thy father lies (Constance thinks); Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  She stands very still. The words perfume her mind. The music drifts. Her mouth turns down at the corners, her waif face, her sad little clown face. She gathers her will. There is an ink stain on one finger. Constance waits to feel cured. She waits to feel free.

  Full fathom five is a long way down, yes—but in Constance’s case, would it have been deep enough?

  Actually, a fathom isn’t so very much: it’s six feet. So, full fathom five, which sounds such a long way down, is only thirty feet. I think Constance could have consigned her father much, much deeper than that—thirty fathoms, forty, it would have made no difference: Shawcross couldn’t be drowned, or not in his daughter’s subconscious anyway. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, he’d rise up.

  Constance, who had never heard of the subconscious mind, thought she could contain her father in a book. She thought she could net him with words, drown him in paragraphs, hammer down the hatches, close that book and close that life. She couldn’t, of course; memory does not work like that. None of us controls memory—it controls us.

  We cannot forget. We are the stuff of memory: all those images, all those details, sequences, episodes, which we all carry around with us in our heads and which we call the past—that is what we are. We may try to control it—as Constance did, and I had done too—selecting an image here, an event there, turning our own pasts into ordered, linear, comprehensible narratives. We are all novelists, I think, when it comes to our own lives—but the past resists this kind of tweaking. I’m sure it does. It has a life all its own, sometimes benign, sometimes virulent. It is as tough as a microbe, as adaptive as a virus, and just when we think we’ve composed it in a pattern that suits us just fine, it re-forms; it transmutes; it assumes a very different shape. And if we ignore this, turn a blind eye—or, if you like, suppress—what does it do? It sends up a subversive little message: Up comes an image, an event, we thought had been safely forgotten. Hey, says the memory (which refuses to lie down), what about this? Don’t you remember that?

  This had happened to me. I had spent eight years trying to forget happiness. That had been hard enough, and one of the things I’d discovered at Winterscombe was that I had not succeeded. How much harder for Constance then, who was trying to forget abuse.

  When I’d read that particular entry in her journal, I did not want to go on. Like her, I closed the book. I walked around Winterscombe, from room to room. I went into the ballroom, where Constance began the next stage of her life. I went to the foot of the stairs and looked up.

  It was just a ballroom. They were just stairs. There was no twang from the past. That seemed wrong. I felt that the vitality and the violence of past events ought to have left some discernible imprint; the quality of the air here ought to have been different, so that even someone who knew nothing of the house or its history could have stood here and sensed … what? A chill in the air, a concentration of molecules—all those sensations that people describe when they try to define a haunting? Even I, knowing what I knew, could sense nothing. The ballroom remained a room; the stairs remained stairs. They were stubbornly inanimate.

  I went back to the journals, which were not. I went back to the photographs of Constance, taken that night. I thought of her standing at the top of those stairs. I pitied her, and I also feared for her—because, to some extent, I knew what happened next.

  I knew that Constance did choose a husband, the night of her coming-out ball; I knew who that husband was, and I knew something of subsequent events. In fact, many of the things I thought I knew at that point were wrong; Constance’s marriage, like her childhood, was full of secrets. Then, I looked at Constance at the top of those stairs, and I thought: She is about to make her worst mistake.

  I thought Constance had tried, pathetically hard, to free herself of her father—and I was certain she had failed. Shawcross the escapologist was out of that notebook, off its pages, before Constance even left her room. Shawcross was not even dead. In Constance’s memory he lived on. He stood there with her at the top of the stairs; he went down with her to the ballroom, and out with her into her future life.

  Constance might have been certain that she selected her husband of her own volition, her own free will, but I didn’t agree. I didn’t believe that at all. Constance’s choice of a husband caused mayhem. It was a choice that had her father’s fingerprints all over it.

  A husband it had to be. After all, what were the alternatives? Constance was—she saw this—a prisoner of her time and her society. Women of her adopted class did not work; women of her own class did—and depressing work it was, too. Constance had no intention of dwindling away her days as a governess or a companion. To become a secretary, some menial species of clerk? Never. Nursing? Constance rejected that at once. It was the war alone that made nursing a socially acceptable profession, and even this war could not last.

  No, marriage it must be—marriage, which would release her from the confines of the Cavendish family and their charity. Marriage, which Constance, who was still very young, associated with freedom. Marriage—but to whom?

  As she went down the stairs, Constance had in her mind a clear but abstract idea of the man she needed. She had made one of her lists. He must be rich, obviously; well connected, preferably; titled, possibly; single—for simplicity.

  The right man, she had decided, must be already established. Constance was too impatient for life to make do with a man still climbing the ladder. He need not be handsome—Constance had observed that handsome men were often vain; she found that tedious. She thought she might prefer him to be clever; whether his nature was kindly was immaterial. Of course, if she could select a man who had looks and wit, fortune and position, the marriage might be more agreeable. Constance might be decided upon a husband, but she did not relish being bored.

  When she drew up this list for herself, Constance thought of Acland. He fitted each category, after all, as snugly as a well-made glove shaped itself to fingers.

  This idea she rejected almost at once. Constance had Acland locked away in a separate compartment of her mind. She respected him too much to classify him as husband material. A husband was a means to an end; Acland was … himself. She preferred to think of Acland as a temptation that must always be out of reach. In that way, his uniqueness was preserved.

  So Constance put Acland, with his bright hair, in a little lacquered mind-box. She locked the box. She threw away the key (until some years later, when she decided to retrieve it again). Inside that box, with him, was impossibility, excess, music, and gunshots—the chaos of life. Inside the box, Acland was safe. He could never be ordinary. So, Acland was ruled out. Constance had to select another candidate.

  She told herself, when she reached the foot of the stairs, that her mind was open, that in no way did she lean more toward one man than another.

  In her heart, I suspect, she knew that was not entirely true. There was already a bias there, but Constance would not acknowledge it. It might be anyone, she said to herself. The possibilities made her giddy.

  She was arrogant, of course. I don’t think that it occurred to her for one moment that the man, once selected, might fail to respond. But then, beauty gives confidence, and Constance was very beautiful that night.

  Anyway, there she is, at the foot of the stairs, with the music drifting. Lifting the hem of her white dress in her white-gloved hand, she walks toward the ballroom where, some twenty years later, I will dance with Franz-Jacob, in his brown b
oots, and not understand that when he stops dancing, it is because he fears for a sister in Germany, for a telephone ringing in another part of the house.

  She approaches the ballroom. Its pink curtains are not tattered, the orchestra plays in its box, the chandeliers are lit, and the air is brilliant.

  She is wearing new dancing slippers; the heels are a little too thin, so she finds balancing difficult. She looks like a woman, but she walks like a child.

  She is greeted by Gwen, who kisses her. By Sir Montague Stern, who bows over her hand in his odd foreign way. By Maud, who tells her how lovely she looks, and who draws her forward with pride in her protégée. As convention demands, she dances the first dance with a slow and gouty Denton. She dances the next, in an inattentive way, with Freddie.

  By the end of this dance, her spirits are soaring. As he leads her from the floor, she stops, turns to him, clasps his arms.

  “Oh, Freddie,” she says, “the future. I want it so much. And I can hear it now. I can. It’s there—listen …” She breaks off, tilts her head. Freddie finds himself blinded by the loveliness of her face. He stammers some reply, but Constance interrupts.

  “Oh, Freddie, will you forgive me for all I did, all I was? I know I hurt you—and I swear to you, I shall never hurt anyone, ever again. I feel so very happy tonight. I can’t bear for you to look sad. You and Francis and Acland and Steenie—you’re the best brothers in the world. I love you all so much. I love you to death. I shall make you be happy. Look, I’m going to put some luck in your hand, now, quickly, in your palm. Close your fingers over it and hold it tight. There! All the past has gone away and we need never think of it again. You see what I’ve given you? Tomorrow. Just like that, in the palm of your hand. Now, go and dance, Freddie.” She smiled. “With someone else.”

  Freddie did as she asked. He danced a polka, then a foxtrot, then a waltz. He enjoyed these dances, up to a point. He was curing himself of Constance, he told himself, though he knew he was not cured quite yet.