by May Sarton
It was at the same time a period of intense activity. Charles tramped for miles, marking trees to be cut or places which needed replanting, going out even when it rained, gradually coming to know far better than Violet herself did, every corner of the demesne, and the farm. He took over the offices which Violet’s grandfather had had built in the new wing at the back of the house, cleaned out the piles of old papers and settled in there, ordering books on agriculture and forestry from London. Charles began to think that a change of profession was not at all a bad thing for a man of fifty. He felt ten years younger already he told Violet, and Violet who had always feared that if they were alone together, they would irritate each other, or that Charles would be bored, began slowly to relax.
Only, being a woman, she had moments of anxiety as she looked forward. Would it last? Wasn’t so much quiet happiness something to be feared, a little gift to help them start along the new ways, but sure to be dissipated by—for instance—a long spell of bad weather, or the inevitable lag that would come when Charles saw his fine plans delayed by the human character of those he had to work with? What of the winter, Violet sometimes asked herself at the low ebb of the day when she was lying on the chaise longue? Cold would drive them inward and cut down the spaciousness of life. They would have eventually to put in central heating—and perhaps this first winter move to Dublin for a couple of months. It would be all right, she told herself, drowsily looking at the slanting light across the faded wallpaper, because…
Because, love. In Burma they had had the habit of reading in bed, under the white tent of mosquito netting; here, any light attracted moths (which Violet hated above anything) and even birds, so when they went to bed, they lay in the dark, windows wide open to the night, and this—or was it some powerful atmosphere belonging to the room itself?—bore them through the first week on a high tide of passionate response to each other. They were, through these first days, above all lovers. And every moment of the day rose toward the next night, and the next—I wonder if other middle-aged people have this experience, Violet thought. It seemed almost like a miracle, the proof of some deep renewal in themselves. Violet forgot to notice the fine lines round her eyes, to question her face each morning as if to read there the inexorable grain by grain passing of time; she read in Charles’s eyes all she needed to know.
Yet there was a vital difference in this experience for her and for him. He did not constantly bump into the past, or edge away from memories which threatened or demanded. He did not have to catch his breath as he opened a door, or pause lost in thought on the landing as the blue mountains showed themselves on a fine day. He was not the center as she was of a fine but tightly drawn web of faces and feelings, and Violet sometimes felt she was living several lives at once. In her dreams they interwove themselves so she often woke confused, wondering who she was, surprised to find Charles beside her, surprised not to be woken by Miss Goddard’s crisp “Time to get up, lazybones!”
Charles on the other hand was fascinated to know more of the history of the house. It was not the immediate past that held him but the early days. He hunted about in old drawers and cupboards while Violet rested, to try to find architect’s plans of the house. He didn’t find them, but he found other things, records of the Irish Volunteers to which an eighteenth century Oliver Dene had belonged, a rather dull journal which recounted visitors galore and games of cards and outings. The Denes had never it seemed been given to literary introspection.
“They were too busy living,” Violet said, “and besides personal life didn’t seem so all-important in those days—what people felt—”
“They took such things for granted you mean? Yes, I daresay they did, at that. But they read. There’s a Montaigne in the library with old Colonel Dene’s name in it.”
Violet was quite amazed at how much Charles was able to reconstruct, how observant he was. Things she had always taken for granted and never questioned, bothered him. It was he who pointed out that her grandfather’s authoritarian hand was visible all over the place—it was he surely who had invested in the solid Victorian furniture in the damp dining room, now unused in the closed part of the house. It was surely he who had built in the glass-doored box that kept drafts out from the hall, an architectural calamity but so necessary for comfort that it really couldn’t be changed. It was he who had built the offices at the back, he the only practical Dene for three generations.
“You see,” Violet explained, “he died when I was seven. Then for years it was grandmother who reigned here. Oh, Charles, you would have loved her. She used to ride all over the place in a pony cart, pointing out weeds with her whip handle and making George get down and pull them up there and then. She was very small and light on her feet, given to sudden tempers when her little round face would go quite pink. Barbie was terrified of her and had to be dragged to say good morning and turned her face away when Grandmother bent down to kiss her—but I loved her because she always treated me as a grown-up person.”
Charles listened and pieced the past together. He had himself been brought up in India and then sent away to school. He had never known this sort of life, easy-going, planted on ancestral land. He found himself considering it objectively, weighing its purpose, its responsibilities, wondering about it.
“Why wasn’t this house burned?” he asked one day. “I gather the Anglo-Irish had a bad time of it.”
“Well,” Violet had never asked herself this question. “Maybe it was too isolated—I think father said it was attacked once and barricaded just in time, but no one was hurt. Whoever it was who threatened us went away after firing a few shots.”
“Darling, how wonderfully vague you are!” Charles chuckled.
“Well, we just lived here, don’t you see? Nobody told us the story as if it were a story, the way you look at it,” Violet was nettled.
“It has,” Charles said thoughtfully, smoking his pipe, “a monumental indifference to everything outside the demesne, and I expect that saved it, in the long run.”
“You’ll never understand, Charles. You’re so British. None of this history is reasonable.” Violet was quite cross now. She never called Charles British, setting herself apart as Anglo-Irish unless she was very cross. The years in Burma had diminished this racial difference which she had felt strongly at first. Now, coming back, the Irish in her was coming to the surface.
But Charles let it pass and went back to their chess game, which this conversation had interrupted. Only he took a certain pleasure in checkmating her more quickly and cruelly than usual.
“That for the Anglo-Irish,” he said, teasing her and smiling broadly in his triumph.
But Violet’s mood had changed. She lit a cigarette and puffed a few minutes in silence while Charles put more coal on the fire.
“It is a queer thing to be,” she said, “neither one thing nor the other—very few of us ever bridge the gap. Maybe my great-great-aunt Sarah St. Leger did because in a way she gave up being herself, went and lived in a cottage (I showed it to you the other day)—”
“Yes,” Charles said, “I remember. She was the one who devoted herself to the poor people during the Famine.”
“She was a saint, I suppose, and saints can do it, though they make everyone uncomfortable in the process.”
“I take it she wasn’t popular with the Denes.”
“Well, ‘enthusiasm’ wasn’t very popular with us at any time,” Violet said unconscious of the we and all it implied.
Charles stood back to the fire, smoking his pipe, thoughtfully. “Still,” he said after thinking this over, “there is a streak of it, isn’t there? Your grandfather—he had a streak of it applied to business and the estate itself. He treated it all rather like a God-given task, is my guess.” Charles chuckled. “My image of him is giving orders about pigs and corn rather like an Old Testament Prophet. To disagree with him was to disagree with the Law, the Bible, God—or so he imagined.”
Violet smiled. “Yes, all that’s why we never felt
him quite as one of us like Grannie. He was too efficient.”
“Yet without him the estate would have gone to pieces and your father could never have devoted his life to botany. The enthusiasts as you call them included Sarah St. Leger and possibly the Dene who built the house, a little more grandly designed than he had money to carry out. It’s one of the threads woven through the steady cumulative discipline of what you call ‘just living’—isn’t it?”
“And now,” Violet said demurely, “there’s you.”
“Goodness, I’m not an enthusiast.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course not,” Charles said crossly, and Violet smiled with pleasure in him. Charles had such a capacity for throwing himself whole into whatever he was doing. In Burma he had learned the language at once, had worked hard at Hindustani, could speak Malay and Chinese after two years. He knew more about village customs in the hill villages where he went to recruit labor than many Burmese themselves did. And now in just two weeks he was at home among the Denes as if he had lived here long ago. He had a speculative mind which nourished itself on information as others might nourish themselves on poetry. And Violet, looking at him now with admiration, thought that this quality in him, active yet thoughtful, was perfectly rendered by his rather square head, close-cropped grey hair that revealed an open brow, by his straight short nose and firm mouth. The years had refined this Roman head which might have grown heavy, if he had put on weight. Instead the fine lines round the eyes (deep-set, dark blue) and the tension of the cheekbone gave his face an air of achieved balance. He had always worn authority with aspecial human grace and this had not diminished. He was, she thought, with a tremor of excitement caused by their earlier tiff, a fearfully attractive being.
“I wonder,” he said a little later, “if Barbie has any grandchildren if they will want to come back.”
The current of emotion which was always present in the house now assailed Violet like a draft and she shivered and got up, breaking the moment of desperate nostalgia (for it was never less than painful to face their own lack of children) by saying,
“I bet they’re enthusiasts.” She could not keep the edge of bitterness out of her voice, and later she found she was wide awake. For the first time since their return the emptiness of the house, the stillness of the demesne, for there was hardly a breath of wind, attacked her, frightened her and was only dissipated by her extreme fatigue as the dawn came, and she slept a troubled sleep.
The next day it rained and the next and though the sky lightened a few times and the clouds rolled off to the tops of the mountains, they were blown back and the rain misted down for almost a week. Even Charles began to be irritable, to find excuses to get off to town. (To buy rubber boots, wool socks, so he said, but Violet knew that it was to get away into some small cosy pub and talk with the men. She could hardly blame him.) Violet felt panic rising in her and took refuge two or three times a day in the kitchen to drink a cup of tea with Annie, and the silent Maire in whose eyes she read the growing devotion which could alone give her back a sense of identity. The kitchen—she had always felt this even as a little girl—was the root of the house. All branched up and outward from it, and if the fire went out there could be no hope at all. But Annie saw to it that the fire never went out and that there was always a kettle at the boil and she knew the way to cheer up Miss Violet was to talk about the old days and people the empty rooms with the laughter and parties and people.
Then there was the post which the young postman’s boy brought up on a bicycle a little after eleven. This was the signal for Violet to get up and settle in the library to read her letters by the fire, and to answer them until lunch (for she had always been a lavish correspondent. One had to be to maintain relationships from such a distance as Burma or from this almost equally isolated world). On rainy days this rite replaced the other, of gathering and arranging flowers.
It was queer how she never saw a letter from America without trembling. So strong was the bond with her sister, a bond which all the years had neither pulled tighter into a real intimacy, or ever loosened even a fraction from its painful tension. She sat with the letter in her hands, aware that it was longer than usual, wondering what news it might bring.
When she had read it through, she lit a cigarette and went over to stand at her grandfather’s desk looking out at the wet leaves of the oaks, at the long sweep of rough grass, misted over by the fine rain. She was so startled that she had no thoughts, only rather violent and disconnected feelings. For Barbie had asked her point-blank to take her daughter Sally in for the summer, had intimated that the sooner Violet answered the better, and that a cable would be welcome. It seemed that Sally was at all costs to be removed from an emotional situation which Barbie and her husband did not wish to precipitate any further: she had fallen in love with an actor, a nice enough boy, Barbie said, with a Texas oil fortune in the background, but simply not to be trusted, much too sophisticated for Sally and, she was convinced, not serious. Whereas Sally, it appeared, was not only serious but determined to marry him at once; was behaving very much as her mother had behaved thirty years before (though Barbie had forgotten this, perhaps), was defiant, tearful, said she hated her parents and meanwhile was doing very badly at college. “I can’t pretend that I am asking an easy thing of you, Violet,” the letter had ended. “Sally will not want to come and I have never talked to her much about the house, but if you and Charles could bear to have her for a month or two, it might make all the difference to her future happiness.”
Violet’s first reaction had been “No, we’re hardly settled; we’ve got to have time; we can’t be expected to take on another problem right now.” Only her thoughts were not reasoned in this way, they were more violent. It looked like an invasion—an American girl, too, that seemed the last straw. And Barbie’s daughter, obviously difficult, emotional, God knew what. No, thought Violet, looking out at the drifting clouds which now seemed really to be blowing over…
Then she thought, after all, it will fill the empty spaces. Here’s a child we’re being asked to take in. Also, Charles … Always it made things easier rather than more difficult if there were other people about in their marriage. Violet knew that they each in his own way, responded to a third person.
And finally she knew that whatever other reasons there might be, she would have to say yes to Barbie. There was too much guilt to make her ever again able to take a stand where Barbie was concerned.
She’ll have my room, Violet thought, already filling it in her mind’s eye with roses, already opening her heart to this niece she had never seen. She went upstairs to try to find snapshots in a trunk she had not yet unpacked. There Charles found her, sitting on the floor with papers and letters strewn all around her, and in her hand the photograph of a little dark girl in boy’s clothes looking down from an apple tree like a mischievous elf.
“Whatever are you doing, Violet?” Charles was cross. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Didn’t you hear me call?”
“Put out the light, Charles, before you open the shutters—there must be swarms of moths waiting to get in already…”
Charles never would remember, she thought irritably. But at last all was done, the closed room opened to the moonlight outside, for at last the weather had turned, and now outside the air was milky white, and as Violet and Charles lay in bed and got accustomed to the dark, it seemed to grow brighter and brighter; they could see the wide path across the foot of the bed and against the sharp white of the closed door. A light cool wind stirred the curtains. All seemed so clear and wide-open, so spacious and exciting after the long nights of enclosing rain that they were drawn irresistibly to the windows to look out, to look down on the side of the real lawn, at the still flower beds, at the roses gone black in the moonlight and the blue-white petunias. On the road, the moonlight fell like snow. They did not say a word, but stood close together, Charles’s arm resting lightly on Violet’s shoulders, tasting the peace, the assurance th
at all was well, given back to them quite simply by the clearing sky.
Violet gave a little breathless scream and brushed the air to try to catch the moth which she had felt, horribly soft against her cheek, beating its wings. She fled back to bed. But Charles stood on at the window.
“What really happened about Barbie, Violet?”
It was his need to know the facts, now that they had come to their decision and sent the cable. Charles had not seemed at all disturbed at the prospect at first, but later in the evening Violet felt his slight stiffening at the idea of an American, and noticed that he was looking at the house with a newly critical eye, wishing they could repaper here or recover chairs there, as if it suddenly mattered. It seemed extraordinary that in all these years she had never told him the story. Perhaps until now it had not seemed relevant.
“Come back to bed, darling,” she said. “It’s a long story.”
It was not, she found, an easy story to tell. It took too many words and she felt strangely that none of the words told the truth. What was the truth? Barbie was the younger sister of a beauty, that was the first, the crucial fact.
“Yes, I expect you put her in the shade,” Charles said, rather smugly, running a finger down her nose and mouth and chin with possessive pride.
“No, Charles, don’t.” Violet wanted to be able to think clearly. It was not only that even as a little girl Violet had been quite aware that she could get what she wanted by being charming and even as a small child enjoyed her power over people, and wanted praise so much that it was easy for her to conform. It was also that Barbie, who saw her sister winning easily what she had to struggle to achieve, had a violent nonconformist temperament. “She was,” Violet said, “the most ardent person I’ve ever known.” If Barbie ran a race she stumbled and fell out of the fierce longing to win; she wanted things too much and frightened people by her intensity.