by May Sarton
“In a queer way,” Violet said, “she had no luck.” And she explained this: their father had been too gentle, too oblique to understand Barbie’s fierce temperament. He was a little afraid of her. Their mother, who did understand and could tame the passionate child, was so often away (for she had always been threatened with tuberculosis and spent years at various times in sanatoriums) and when she was at home, so frail, to be cherished and not disturbed, that she moved at a little distance from the center of their life, it seemed. And Violet could not help, however desperately she wanted to, because of Barbie’s always ambivalent attitude toward her, and jealousy. “She would have been far happier sent away to school, but we could not afford that—so she wore us all out. There was never any peace for long. She would run away on the day of a birthday party, for instance, or burst into tears when we had guests, and she did have an awful temper. She was always being punished—”
“Were you so frightfully good yourself?” Charles asked, his sympathy for the moment with Barbie.
“Of course not, but I was more subtle—and then of course I was older.” That meant that Barbie wore Violet’s cast-off clothes, was not allowed to do things Violet could do, had to go to bed earlier, was perpetually being thwarted, so it seemed. These were the childhood days. Violet spoke of them quite lightly and objectively. But then she was silent. When Charles turned to see if she had fallen asleep in the middle of her story, he realized that she was finding it difficult to go on. Why open these old wounds now? So he gently suggested.
“Old wounds, Charles?” She sat up in bed, her arms clasped round her knees. “All these years I’ve never stopped somewhere down deep being conscious of Barbie, being anxious. It’s never been over, Charles. Isn’t it queer?”
Often and often Violet had lain awake turning over in her mind the question, was being beautiful always tied to a burden of guilt? For beauty such as she had been given, as in the old fairy tales, was both a charm and a curse. Too often what life had given her had been taken from someone else; she felt the responsibility now. As a young girl she had been only self-intoxicated, needing to feel her power, flirting unconsciously and consciously every moment of the day, expecting homage as a princess expects it, taking it as her due. Though she never thought it was taking anything from Barbie—Barbie, the wild child, long-legged, awkward, who hated party dresses and parties, who grew up so slowly and had only contempt for Violet’s young men, took out her feelings by beating them at tennis, but then when tea was served more likely than not disappeared. In those days girls of twelve and thirteen didn’t ask to wear lipstick; Barbie had still had braids down her back at fifteen and wept angrily when she had to put them up the next year. It had all happened suddenly—overnight in fact—when that queer young man Philip Oliver turned up with his parents.
He looked like a small rather awkward robin, for he was short for his age, with a thatch of dark hair and very bright brown eyes, as bold and glancing as a bird’s. He was eighteen but looked younger. Violet recognized him at once as a person like herself with a secret charm for whom doors would open wide. He was bubbling over with enthusiasm, couldn’t wait to get out every morning, to run races with Barbie, or play croquet, or above all, to hunt down crickets. He had been reading Chinese poetry and history and wanted to see if he could manage to catch crickets of different tones and so have a private cricket orchestra. This was just the sort of thing Barbie loved and pretty soon they went off together on picnics, the pretext to find crickets far afield, crickets of another valley whose voices might by a happy chance be a half-tone shriller than those of the demesne. At last Barbie had a friend! The whole family sighed with relief, and there was much speculating among the parents. They would all have been pleased at the match, though of course the children were both far too young at present—eighteen exactly. Philip’s birthday was to take place while he was with them. The Olivers were persuaded to stay on another week to celebrate it with a dance.
Violet saw as if it were yesterday the clouded look that came over Barbie’s face. “Why a dance?” she said brusquely. “Dances bore Philip—and after all it’s his birthday.”
Violet saw Philip’s bright glancing eyes and his amused response. “Why not a dance? I think it’s a charming idea, Mrs. Dene,” and he waltzed solemnly alone across the hall holding an imaginary partner in his arms. Barbie got up and left the room.
Did he then have any idea of the intensity of Barbie’s feelings, so that this dismissal of her plea seemed like a betrayal, the first crack in a solidarity she had taken for granted?
When Violet made an excuse to go out and find her sister, Barbie was cold with anger, sitting on the bench on the landing looking out into the night. “Go away,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
“It’ll be fun, Barbie, you can wear your new red dress. You’ll look like a flame dancing…” and then as there was no response Violet added, “Besides you and Philip can escape into the garden. No one will notice.”
But Barbie had withdrawn into a citadel of unhappiness and would not come out. Philip himself was bewildered by the change in her, and did nothing to make things better by playing croquet with Violet the next morning, since Barbie was nowhere to be found.
Then they were all caught up in the preparations. The silence was broken by an irruption of waltzes and polkas, which Mrs. Dene would break off suddenly as she remembered something she should still do. There would be claret cup, not champagne after all—it was really too expensive. The Olivers and the Denes made innumerable secret trips into town in the Olivers’ Bentley, coming back exhausted, laden with packages and dramatic stories of flat tires. There were endless talks between the women about what each should wear. Barbie meanwhile took refuge in the kitchen—her contribution was to go out alone and gather mushrooms for Annie.
On the night of the dance itself Violet and her mother walked one last time through the rooms, giving a final touch to the flowers, sliding tentatively on the freshly waxed floors from which all the rugs had been taken up. It was a perfect July evening, the outer green dark reflected in the long mirrors, with points of candle flame like lights coming up through water flaring through them, and roses transformed into subaqueous flowers. Violet remembered her tremor of intoxicating stage fright like an actress surveying the stage where she would make her entrance—it looked so empty now, the grand piano pulled off into the far end where the orchestra (two violins, a ’cello and the piano player) would sit. And then she had run out to find Barbie, to help Barbie dress and to be sure she did her hair properly. Wouldn’t Barbie, couldn’t she just this once, because of Philip, rise to the occasion? If she could have a great success, how wonderful it would be! Then Violet could feel wholly free to be her own most charming and adorable self, could drink in the admiring glances without a shadow of guilt, could choose from all the faces the one she would make hers for the evening.
What could she have done that she didn’t do if she had guessed whose this face would be tonight? Was it her fault, when Barbie vanished after the first five dances, that Philip came to her, his eyes shining, stammering with excitement.
“I s-say. It’s my birthday, you know. Do you think I might have one dance?”
He looked quite different in his evening clothes, taller, though not quite tall enough to look down at Violet. Their eyes met on the level, a single startled look of recognition which neither of them risked again during that dance.
“Where’s Barbie?” Violet asked as if nothing had happened, when he let her go after the waltz and they stood for a moment in the window, breathing in the delicious warm night air. “Hadn’t you better try to find her? Bring her back?”
Philip looked embarrassed. “She’s in some queer mood,” he said, “I don’t think she wants to be followed about.”
“Didn’t she look lovely, though? Why does she hate dances?” Violet asked, longing for help, longing for Philip to break off, release her from the queer insistent weight she felt around her heart.
&
nbsp; “Come out”—Philip’s cheeks burned with his daring—“let’s look for her together!”
“Oh no, that would never do.” Violet was mercifully interrupted to dance the next waltz with her father.
“What a nice boy he is,” her father said. “I was hoping Barbie would emerge from her cocoon tonight, but she seems to have vanished,” and Mr. Dene sighed. There were twenty invited guests but Violet felt as if the Denes were dancing alone, as if no one else existed on this night when everything, her mother’s unusually brilliant look, seemed lifted up to a pitch of unreal intensity. “I wish we could help Barbie…” she could hear her father’s gentle voice, troubled, over the sweet insistent violins that cried, “Dance, dance, don’t think—just feel—”
Finally she was twirling, twirling alone with Philip, the red rose she had pinned to her pale blue dress breaking apart so a petal fell here and another there and still they danced until the sound of repeated “good nights” in the hall woke Violet from her trance and she saw Barbie standing in the doorway.
“Darling,” she ran across the floor as if she could run away from all that had happened, “where have you been?”
“Out,” Barbie said shortly. And then without looking at Violet she turned to Philip with a queer pleading look and said, “I think I’ve found a cricket for you with a new note.”
How could Barbie know that Philip had suffered a metamorphosis and that hereafter a cricket with a new note would mean next to nothing to him? Barbie too had grown up over night. Without any of the preliminaries, the flirtations, the withdrawals, the experiments which were usual in girls of her age, she had just exploded in one brilliant shower of fire and tears, had moved over into womanhood. She was deeply and entirely in love at the precise instant when Philip was turning his back on her, thinking of her as part of a child world which he had suddenly outgrown. From the night of the ball on through almost two years Barbie and Violet entered a tunnel of strain and misery. It was as if the dance had been a final carefree time, never to happen again. The unusual brilliance of their mother that evening had been partly due to a fever and she had to spend the next year in Switzerland. Their father, harassed by unforeseen expenses, going over to see his wife every month, seemed hardly to know what was happening, and Miss Goddard, who came back to chaperone if not teach her former charges, still treated Barbie as if she were a child.
“I couldn’t undo what I’d done,” Violet said bitterly, “though I asked Philip almost at once to stop writing to me.” It had not even been a great sacrifice (which might have made Violet feel less guilty) for she had not of course been in love with Philip. It had just been an evening of delight and recognition; he had not even kissed her. For Barbie it had been a tragedy, a tragedy which she cherished, which she refused to accept and be sensible about, and which focused in a brilliant hard light all her repressed resentment of her older sister. Violet began by being sympathetic but ended by being impatient and scornful. The rift between them in a year had become so wide that they had never since been able to cross it.
“I should have thought that all that would have seemed pretty childish to Barbie herself by the time she married,” Charles said. The moonlight was still there, just as calm and bright as before, all around them, but even Charles was aware that to Violet this rather simple story had some symbolic significance far out of proportion with its actual facts. She was actually trembling.
“Oh by then the harm was done. By then we had become enemies.” And she added, “By then I had come to hate myself, which was far worse.”
“I don’t understand…” Charles said kindly, but he could not quite conceal a yawn.
“Poor darling, you’ve been as patient as Job. Go to sleep.”
“What about closing the shutters? We’ll never go to sleep in this moonlight.” And Charles, eager to do something, got up and padded barefoot across the cold floor. A powerful scent of earth and grass came up to him from the garden below. This all seemed so sane beside the intense and, to him, exaggerated feelings of his wife in the bed behind him that he was glad to look out, and indeed suddenly didn’t want to close the shutters, to close them in.
“Don’t,” came the voice from the bed. “It’s so lovely…” so he left them open, fumbling on the dresser for a cigarette, and bringing one and an ashtray to Violet.
“So Barbie never wanted to come back once she had left—it was the place of intensest feeling.”
“And yet you did want to come back,” Charles said. Violet’s point of view about things never failed to interest him, even when it seemed quite mad.
“Oh, I was afraid, of course—I haven’t gone into Barbie’s room yet, you know. But the house is so much more than all that, that one episode, devastating as it was. There are times here when one’s personal feelings seem irrelevant.”
“I wonder what Sally will think…” The question lay on the moonlit air, and had its own reverberations in Violet’s mind through the night. A great deal would depend of course on whether the life she and Charles were precariously creating here was powerful enough to combat an idée fixe. It would in any case, she foresaw, be a battle, and she could not deny that she dreaded it.
The day finally came, the day about which there had been so much speculation, argument, and excitement, the day when Charles was to go off to Shannon and fetch Sally. It was a soft brilliant morning, Charles had been glad to see. And now as he ate his breakfast the sun lit up the wall of portraits just across the table from him. Some were so dim, that of Colonel Dene, the Cromwell Dene, especially, that it took this morning light to make his features visible. Charles amused himself this morning by marshalling them one by one, by name, and wondering which of all these, if any would be repeated in the youngest Dene he was about to bring home. Would Sally have a fanatic streak like old Colonel Dene and Sarah St. Leger—the enthusiasts? Would she be practical and managing like her great grandfather Jonas Oliver? Or turn into a selfish, intelligent eccentric old maid like Tomasine who liked horses so much better than people and had been painted in riding habit with a hunting dog at her feet? Or would she be rather dim and sweet and keep herself a secret like one or two of the women staring out smugly, telling nothing of themselves? Charles felt quite pleasantly excited at the idea of an unknown Dene coming toward them now out of the future (in a plane at 600 miles an hour) instead of out of the past, as all these others had loomed up and taken on definite character in his mind.
It was a relief too that the suspense would soon be over. And as Charles ran up the stairs two at a time (though he was annoyed to find that he was quite breathless at the first landing), he felt that after all it was a very good thing indeed that their first weeks of settling in should have this climax.
Hours later Violet looked up at the house behind her, unsoftened by the evening light, then turned her back to it, and a solitary figure on the terrace, peered shortsightedly down the drive, at the familiar curve of the hill before her, at the grove of oaks, very dark now as the late afternoon sun made the grass shine all around them. This distant view was healing as if the landscape softened and distilled anxiety as it softened and sheltered the great house, standing aloof in its hollow. She stood there for some time, smoking a cigarette, more nervous than she admitted to herself, before she heard the gate clang at last and the purr of the car. Then she ran back a moment into the house to look at herself in the glass door, peering anxiously at her face which some trick of reflection turned all crooked, knotted the pale blue chiffon scarf more firmly under her chin, and walked back onto the terrace like an actress making an entrance, smiling into the air, lifting her chin slightly—and knowing she was being absurd.
“Well, here we are!”
Violet knew at once by Charles’s busyness, his efficiency, that they must have stopped several times on the way. A small dark head had stooped to pick up her handbag which had dropped on the bottom step. Now two dark eyes looked straight up into Violet’s eyes.
“Are we here? I don’t know whe
re I am, but you must be Aunt Violet. Hi, Aunt Violet,” said the girl and promptly fell down, instead, as she no doubt meant to, of running up the steps.
“Good gracious, child, did you hurt yourself?” Violet took in the bright eyes, the flushed face.
“I don’t know, but I can’t possibly get up. Everything’s going round and round.” She was laughing helplessly, apparently unaware that her knee was bleeding through the torn stocking. And this casual incompetence was so entirely like Barbie that Violet felt the old exasperated tenderness mounting; I would really like to shake her, Violet thought. It was a bit much to arrive drunk.
“Silly little fool, give me your hand,” Charles was saying firmly. And then to Violet, “Tell Annie to make some strong coffee and get a bandage for heaven’s sake. Don’t just stand there looking like an angel of mercy and doing nothing.”
By the time Violet came back with the bandage, Sally was installed on the big sofa in the library, softened in some way by the firelight, by the great bunch of zinnias and roses behind her, so small and helpless-looking in the vast proportions of the room that she gave the impression of a bright-eyed, frightened fledgeling.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said while Violet stooped down to bandage the knee with deft quick fingers. “But I feel so strange, such a rough flight and—well…” She did not finish, for how could she say what she felt, which was that when she had looked up at the high bleak stone face of the house, it had seemed a prison? It had frightened her. She was ignorance itself, had never seen a picture of the house, thought of Ireland as little white thatched cottages, donkey carts.