by May Sarton
Violet would have liked to lie in bed all morning thinking of these things, but the curtains had been pulled back and the brilliant daylight poured in on her, dazzling her eyes, making its imperative demands. Personal life which had always been intense in this house (so Violet guessed) partly by reason of its isolation, personal life must be framed in a ritual, a discipline. By nature she had always known this; here in the house what she knew instinctively was borne out concretely in every detail. Emotion must be concentrated or it would just vanish into the high empty spaces. This was not a room designed for daydreaming, a cosy boudoir. It took on its beauty by candlelight, and its greatness when the shutters were opened, the candles snuffed, and the small currents of wind and the great still spaces of the night free to take possession.
So Violet pushed the tray away and got up and went to close the windows, and to look out. That was the first part of the ritual—one must look out and discover the day. Now the grass was still wet with dew under the oak grove and the greenness seemed to shine. She met the blue sky full on with a shock of pleasure, for here a blue sky was always diaphanous, never flat, but radiant as if light poured through it. She had not at first noticed Charles but now he emerged from the plantation of trees at the top of the hill, hands in his pockets, Pennyfeather walking at a little distance behind him. Violet could tell by Charles’s stance that he was being authoritative and that he was not pleased, and she smiled. Then as he glanced down at the house, she leaned out to wave, and he waved back and she could sense his smile of pleasure in the air between them and the thread of their union pulled taut. A person always would give this landscape a peculiar poignance, she thought. A person looked so small, yet gave the spacious scene its necessary focus. How lonely, it must have felt here, she thought, all these years.
There was so much to be done, so much, that Violet hardly stopped at the dressing table, but dressed with nervous impatience, finding her brogues at the bottom of the shoebag and a heathery tweed skirt and sweater, then at the door turned back and put on her pearl earrings and a pearl necklace. She could not meet this day when the rituals would be established less than formally.
First she had a long talk with Annie in the kitchen while Maire did the upstairs. It began as a serious talk about meals, expenses, what they might count on from the farm, how often meat was delivered and so on. Violet had been prepared for the fact that Annie would know best, would as a last resort call up the shades of parents and grandparents to defend the boiled potato or vegetable marrow as the almost unique vegetable. Some things would have to be accomplished gradually and only by the use of tact amounting to genius. And Violet was prepared to take her time, so she agreed with almost all of Annie’s suggestions and plans, especially as they were both eager to get business out of the way.
“Now you’ll have a cup of tea,” Annie said firmly, and that meant, Violet knew, a heart to heart talk.
“The dear kitchen, Annie—the smell of it…” she sighed. It was the smell of onions and mint and tea, and a general spicy smell which came from the little spice cupboard to the left of the stove; this mixed with wood burning and the sharp dank taste of coal in your mouth, and of damp dishcloths drying out on a rack.
“I don’t know as we’ll ever get the laundry free of the damp,” Annie was saying. “The walls were mildewed. And what with all the rest, I’ve hardly had time to dry it out.”
“You’ve done wonders, Annie. I don’t know how—”
“Well, it was high time you came back, Miss Violet, I’ll say that. I’m telling you I was all of a tremble when I put the key in the lock the first time—the emptiness of it, Miss Violet! It was enough to scare the heart out of you.” Annie shook her head, then looked across at Violet and smiled her rare smile. “But in no time, what with the fires and the open windows it began to feel like itself.”
“It’s strange isn’t it, Annie, how it never changes … only we’ve changed. The house is the same,” Violet said in her musical voice, for she was Irish enough to enjoy the melancholy of this.
“You always did talk nonsense in such a way that the angels themselves would imagine you spoke the truth,” Annie said roughly. And Violet laughed, “Oh Annie it’s good to be home!”
“That’s more like it.” Then as Violet got up to go Annie threw in casually, “I wouldn’t be surprised now if Miss Barbie took it into her head to come over one of these days—”
“I’d be very much surprised,” Violet said quietly and turned away. She did not want to think of Barbie just now, just yet.
No, this first day must be carefully designed. Later, supported by the design, she could afford to remember the difficult, the painful things. Not now, not yet.
So she slowly climbed up the back stairs, without hurrying, and out into the brilliant sunshine that flooded the hall and showed up rather cruelly the faded wallpaper, torn strips hanging down at the far end … Charles must see to that, Violet noted.
She stood with the long table between her and the portrait-covered wall and looked for a moment at the gathered Denes, one by one. They were all there except her father and mother, dressed in brocade and satin, looking down at her without surprise, without condemnation, accepting her as she accepted them—even Great-Aunt Sarah St. Leger, the one exaltée of the lot, for she had been so altered in mind by the horrors of the Famine that she had devoted the rest of her life to good works. The Dene attitude toward this aunt could be summed up in something Violet had heard her gentle unworldly father say with a sigh, “Yes, Sarah,” he had said, “no doubt she hoped that someday one of us would follow in her footsteps. But I fear she was the exception that proves the rule.”
“What’s the rule, Father?” Barbie had asked. They were standing just where Violet stood there and, she remembered, it was raining and the plan to pick mushrooms had had to be abandoned for fear Barbie would catch a cold.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, playing with the ring on his little finger as he did when he was faintly embarrassed, “something about a pattern of life carried on through the generations. Sarah St. Leger was outside the pattern. Possibly she had greatness so the pattern constricted her. But to some of us,” he added half to himself, “it has meant a kind of freedom. For the matter of that, we’re all eccentrics,” he said, patting Barbie’s little dark head.
“Violet isn’t,” Barbie said with scorn. “She just wants to be liked.”
And he had laughed, “Yes, I doubt if Great-Aunt Sarah would approve of Violet.”
But Violet knew by the way her father looked at her that he did approve, so it didn’t matter about that old Aunt.
Did it matter now, since this scene so long ago had come back so vividly to her mind? Or had it after all mattered then, mattered so much that she had buried it and never thought of it again?
No, said Violet, looking up at the small aloof erect head on the wall, dark hair falling in ringlets and deep red evening dress (for this portrait had been painted before Great-Aunt Sarah’s devotion to the poor and sick had been unlocked). No, Violet said to herself, our life, Charles’s and mine, has not been meaningless. If she thinks so, she’s quite wrong. Nor for that matter, had their father’s—unlucky, impractical though it was. Dene’s Court had lost some of its grandeur in the days of her father, but what did that count beside his gentleness, his quiet wisdom, his patient botanical studies? His entire lack of business acumen—what did that matter beside what he was as a person?
And now, Violet thought, as if she had been interrupted unkindly, I really must get out and find Cammaert. Leaving the house, going out into the cool fair June day, she felt her heart lift with almost aching delight. It came over her in waves that she was really going to live here, that they would not have to leave it again, that she would for the first time in her life see every season in the house, in the woods, across the rough flung carpet of the lawn. The rising up of the rooks in battalion in September would not be the sign that they too must rise and go.
Cammaert was busy w
ith the petunias in the parterres in front, but he was only too glad to lead her through the familiar green tunnel, past the stables overgrown with nettles, along by the brook and finally along the high brick wall to the gate of the big garden. Violet was accompanied every step of the way by memories of her mother who had done this every fair morning when she was well enough, always stopping to listen to the brook, always eager with anticipation, walking too fast for the little girls behind her and then swooping down upon them with a smell of verveine which she got from Floris in London, a white Chinese shawl flung round her shoulders and the long fringe getting caught in the barrettes of the little girls’ hair. They had reached the gate long before Violet had finished with all that flowed down the brook to her, and now she stood hesitating, while the vision of the glorious rather stiff set pieces her mother spent hours arranging came before her eyes, and she was conscious, holding the flat basket her mother had carried, that she was about to pick up and continue a musical phrase. Where it had all stopped, it would begin again, and the empty basket be filled. Cammaert was holding the gate open for her—would it all be changed?
The paths needed scraping; there were, she noticed, breaks in the wall in two places (the work of hard frost no doubt); the little arbor where her mother often sat embroidering, sheltered here from the wind, had quite fallen in. But the three benches surrounding the sundial, rusty and in need of paint, were still there. And above all, the smell was still there—Violet ran to press rose geranium and lemon verbena between her fingers. And then she felt ready to face Cammaert and to go with him slowly from rose to rose, listening to the pent-up tales of the years, of the awful drought which had killed some of the espaliered peach trees against the south wall, of rainy summers which had brought blight and mildew, of frosts which had cracked the wall open and ruined one parterre of what Cammaert called “newfangled roses.” While he talked Violet listened and condoned and above all looked around, shading her eyes from the sun, regretting that she had not worn a hat. The garden had always looked as it did now, half-finished, a little ragged, with the parterres of picking flowers at one end and the vegetables and the rows of sweet peas fencing this part off from the center round the sundial where an attempt had been made at a formal French garden, though the box had died years ago so the edges looked crumbly. It had always been a place of struggle, full of dreams of things which never got done—Her grandfather had wanted a fountain. Her mother spent days in bed making lists, surrounded with catalogues. It had always had an unfinished look, yet in those days there had been three gardeners. Violet realized for the first time what it had meant to work here alone, the long often hopeless battle.
“We’ll never be able to thank you, Cammaert,” she said, laying a hand gently on his unyielding stiff old arm. “But it looks beautiful,” she shouted, wondering how much he heard, “I’ll start picking tomorrow.” But he had turned away with a grunt, and was busily cleaning aphis off a rose.
His love for the gardens was, she thought, like an illness, a despairing love, never satisfied, intensely self-critical, with apparently no joy in it. But it had instead a kind of greatness. It was selfless. It did not even need her praise, or only as she was part of a whole which was by no means altogether composed of human beings.
“I wonder, Charles,” she said, as they sat in the library drinking martinis before lunch, grateful for the coolness here after the hot sun, “can we ever give them the support they have given us—Annie, Cammaert—can we ever serve in the way they have served?”
“Pennyfeather’s been lining his own pockets, I can tell you,” Charles said cutting through her tone deliberately.
“Oh well, he’s not one of us. It’s business with him”—Violet was scornful of this manager imported from England—“What did you expect?”
“The accounts are in the most awful mess. I’ll have my hands full,” Charles said cheerfully. He liked nothing better than a challenge of this sort. He swelled like a pigeon with pleasure.
“You’ll do very well as a country squire, darling,” Violet said demurely.
But Charles did not rise to this barb. He was wholly absorbed in his morning’s discoveries. He walked up and down talking of the need for new plantations (“that rascal has been cutting and selling, I’ll wager”), lamenting their lack of capital (“the farm needs new stock badly but we’ll have to wait”) while Violet, half listening, drank her martini and breathed in the peace.
“These chairs really do need recovering,” she said aloud.
“You’re not listening,” Charles said crossly.
“I’m sorry—what was it, darling?”
“Never mind.” Then they laughed. It was such a familiar pattern. “Have you had a good morning?” Charles asked and it meant, “I love you, even though you never listen to what I say.”
The clock on the stairs struck one as if to frame the moment. After Violet’s answer, they sat silent, looking at the fire.
After lunch Violet rested for an hour, glad to be alone in the bedroom, not closing the shutters so that she felt bathed in sunlight and in silence, half-awake with the sense of layers and layers of summers, generations of summers coming alive just by the fact of one person being here, one person holding the so slight, so perilous thread of the past in her consciousness. But after me, Violet thought, after Annie and Cammaert—what then? And because it was a dying splendor they could still keep alive for a few years, it seemed even more vivid and dear, requiring more of them than of other Denes who had taken for granted, perhaps, what they would consciously hold and sustain against the uncertain changeable future. Violet felt deeply excited.
After tea, at Annie’s suggestion, Charles drove her down to the village to see Mrs. O’Connell and the clerk at the post office and the grocer, but everyone they met spoke to them and welcomed them.
“I feel like the Prince Consort,” Charles said on the way back. “But won’t the Vicar be offended?” he teased. “We forgot to call on him.”
“I expect he will.” Violet was dismayed. “Oh dear…”
Charles had meant it as a joke and told her not to take herself too seriously, but Violet only felt and was absorbed in the intense pleasure of coming back to the house for the first time.
Charles did not want to dress for dinner, but to Violet this was a matter of crucial importance. It was the final piece of the pattern which she had been creating all day. When she came down the great staircase in her smoky grey velvet dress, a rose pinned at the throat (she had bought this dress in London and kept it on purpose to wear this first evening) and found Charles, all black and white, standing in front of the fire in the library, she felt like a captain bringing his ship in to a perilous landing.
“Wherever did you get that dress, darling? You look absolutely marvelous…”
“And the house, Charles,” Violet said quickly, looking at the firelight reflected in the glass doors of the bookcase across the room, and out through the long windows at the intensely green twilight through the leaves, at the rather quaint fat bunch of pink roses on the table facing the fire, the brown velvet sofa standing back to it, and then finally at the portrait of her father in the corner to the left, “Doesn’t the house look different too at night?”
“Hadn’t noticed,” Charles said, for he was looking at her, “but now that you mention it, yes, the house has an air about it at night—I see what you mean about dressing for dinner. It sort of asks for it, doesn’t it?”
“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” It was the question Violet had held back all day, feeling that it would be tempting fate to ask it, at least until the circle of this first day was closed and they were safe.
“Rather—” Charles was very busy about something at the little table where the drinks and glasses were kept. Now there was a loud pop followed by Violet’s astonished cry.
“Champagne! Really, darling, can we afford it?”
“Of course we can’t afford it. Here,” and he held out to her one of the Venetian champag
ne glasses her grandfather had brought back from his Grand Tour. “It’s not really cold enough, I’m afraid…”
“Oh Charles, do you remember, we had champagne for our engagement?”
“Of course I remember. You aren’t the only one who has a past bound up in this house. On that occasion your father said, ‘Bring her back someday, Charles.’”
The first week was a honeymoon. Both Charles and Violet felt the relief of not being guests any more and of making their way back into their own life. Every afternoon now after tea they went for a walk or took the car and went exploring or to the town some fifteen miles away to shop. They paid a few calls, though this house was so isolated that there were no “dropping-in” neighbors; in the evenings they took up their old habit of playing chess or Charles read aloud, for he laughed so much as he reread The Pickwick Papers that Violet begged him to share the joke. There were long comfortable silences when the clock on the landing ticked loudly and the fire stirred, or outside an owl cried. Violet who had feared that they would feel too isolated was surprised to discover that she had no desire to invite people, that in fact the silences were what she had been hungry for—time to think and feel and put down roots. One did not feel so much the passing of time as a kind of timelessness, the warm sun in the enclosed garden in the morning, the hum of bees, and the long slow twilights, the waking every morning to the weather, and the adjustment of the day to this chiefest presence.