by May Sarton
“There,” Violet said, giving the knee a gentle pat, “by tomorrow you’ll be all right.”
“Fit as a fiddle,” Charles added for good measure.
But what would she do when she felt fit, Sally asked herself with something like despair? Whatever would she do here? It might as well have been the moon, so far, so cut off from everything familiar did she feel. And this was what caused her dizziness, not the two small whiskeys she had had with Charles on the way (he seemed like a hero in a British film, so clipped and sure of himself, and, she suspected, finding her funny for reasons she could not know). When she had fallen she had still felt in command, a person in her own right, but ever since it was as if her power to be herself were leaking away, as if she were diminished, smaller than when she arrived. Was it only this very high room which made even Charles look insignificant standing by the fire, pushing the tobacco down in his pipe, saying to Violet, “We’ll take her for a drive tomorrow”?
She was afraid she would begin to cry when a maid, blushing profusely, came in with the coffee. They called her Maire. She looked about fifteen, was terribly shy, shyer even than Sally herself felt. She had very red hands and was clumsy about arranging things. This endeared her at once to Sally, who no longer felt like crying.
The coffee was unbelievably weak and watery, but it was hot and she drank two cups, and then took out a cigarette. It was time to make an effort at politeness.
“Mother has told me so much about the house, but I couldn’t imagine it.” She looked up at the long windows through which the late afternoon light was streaming, and she felt the silence, inside this high room filled with books, and outside where there was nothing to see but trees and meadows and hills. “I should think it would be lonely in winter,” she added.
“We only came here in the holidays, you know,” Violet said half-apologetically, “we never really lived here.”
“It’s so funny to think of mother here,” Sally said. “What was she like?” For the first time she dared to look at her aunt. She did not look like a famous beauty at all. She looked rather tired and sad, and much older than Sally’s mother, as well as different in every way, so Sally thought, waiting for some gesture, some look to which she could attach herself, which would mean, Yes, this is my family, this is my blood.
“What was Barbie like?” Violet asked herself, stretching out her thin heavily ringed hands to the fire. “Not a bit like you,” she said. “No, not a bit like you,” she repeated and laughed a laugh so musical and clear that in its sound Sally read what it was to have been a beauty, the slightly staged charm of the laugh. “Your mother was the most absent-minded, dreamy, careless maddening little girl whose shoelaces were always coming undone, who had a passion for climbing trees, and who was never to be found when wanted.”
“Was she?” Sally opened her eyes wide. “I never could imagine,” for her mother seemed solidity and safety itself, sitting at a little desk by the window, writing letters, always with a list in her pocketbook, organizing everything. “But that’s rather like me.” She understood suddenly why Aunt Violet had laughed, and blushed.
“Well,” Charles interrupted, “if we’ve finished our coffee, I suggest that Sally be helped upstairs on her uncle’s arm and have a chance to wash and unpack.” He looked at his watch. “It’s seven. Dinner’s at eight. We might have a cocktail at a quarter to, so you haven’t much time.”
“Don’t bother to change,” Violet said quickly. After all, Sally hardly needed the kindly arms, as they proceeded up the wide staircase three abreast, across the landing, and then through a door into a dark narrow corridor where Violet went ahead, leading the way up a steep staircase, up and up and finally out into a low-ceilinged enormous room which Sally was told, had been the ballroom. They crossed it to a far door at the right, her door.
“You’ll find hot water in the jug,” Aunt Violet was saying. The suitcases were already open on their stands. Then suddenly Sally was alone.
She looked around the room with the wary look of a prisoner as the door clicks behind him in his cell. The jug in the washstand was swathed in towels. Perhaps, Sally thought, if I washed—but it seemed almost insuperably difficult to find what she needed in the open suitcases. She fumbled about, flinging shoes to the floor, taking out nightgowns and underwear and throwing them on the bed, so that within a few minutes the disorder was frightening and she felt overcome with impotence and fatigue. At this moment, without having washed, she lay down on the bed crosswise on top of the chaos of garments, and closed her eyes. Then painfully, as she had fumbled among her real belongings, she began to try to find her way back across all the hours of flight to something she was carrying with her, which seemed her one real possession, and this was her feeling for Ian. As long as she could find this and hang on to it, whatever happened, she knew that she could remain herself. For what had been frightening was the sense, ever since she had fallen on the terrace steps, that herself was slowly being dispersed or flowing away. Ian, she murmured half aloud. But the queer thing was that she couldn’t focus on him; she couldn’t see him. She realized with panic that his image was blurred.
This roused her at once. She got up, found the silver frame in the bottom of her small blue bag, and set it down beside the bowl of roses. Now she had his face again, the theatrical smile, the very black hair and fine cheekbones, the languorous laughing eyes. (Oh how beautiful he is, she thought, the sensation of her love sharply there like a stab just under her heart—and it was this sensation she needed to feel herself, as a drug addict must have his piqûre.) Now she became efficient. She lifted the heavy jug, poured out water in the basin and washed. Then she put on a clean white blouse and her little red jacket. Finally she went to the mirror, powdered, and drew a line of lipstick firmly across her mouth.
Quite unconsciously she had ignored the room. She had not examined it. She had not even looked out of the windows. In no way must she yield to these surroundings if she was to keep hold of her real self. If the idea was that a summer in Ireland would make her forget, they would find out. When she looked around the mess she had made, she felt queerly satisfied. It was her first victory.
But when she found herself outside her own door, she realized again the extraordinary palpitating silence, and hesitated to break it by venturing out onto the great open spaces of the ballroom floor as if a footstep might crash instead of creaking. Finally she tiptoed across to the safety of the back stairs.
This was the time of day Violet liked best. She wore black velvet, a high choker of pearls, and had a moment always of narcissistic pleasure when she was putting perfume behind her ears, for the high candles on the dressing table softened the lines, and just before dinner each evening she knew again that she had been beautiful. She heard Sally stumble on the landing and went out to meet her.
“How is your knee, Sally? Does it hurt?” she asked solicitously, putting a tentative hand on the stiff rather soldierly shoulder in its red jacket.
“I haven’t thought”—Sally turned, frowning. “It does hurt, I guess,” she added vaguely. She had not stumbled because her knee hurt, but because emerging into this wide landing had startled her after the dark staircase.
“You must stay in bed tomorrow morning and have a long good rest. Only Charles goes down for breakfast.”
“Oh, I always get up,” Sally said definitely, the rebuff intentional. With this they arrived at the library through the back door.
“Darling, how lovely to have a drink!” Violet curled up in the armchair, looking up at her husband with a radiant smile. Sally observed this. She did not want to be loved by these people, nor to love them, but the knowledge that she must not made her feel queerly sad.
“Well, funny little face”—Charles turned from the table in the corner where he was mixing drinks—“What are you allowed to have? A martini?”
“Yes, please, Uncle Charles.”
In spite of herself, Sally was aware that her Aunt Violet looked rather beautiful, in a distur
bing slightly elderly way which suggested a knowledge of life and a security which she envied. Would Ian think she was beautiful, she wondered? Or would he say, as she had heard him once about a fashionable woman who sent him an orchid, “That old bag!”
“A penny for your thoughts,” Charles said teasingly as he handed her a glass.
“Ian,” she said simply. “It’s always Ian when someone want to know my thoughts.”
Charles and Violet exchanged a look. Should they ignore this or press it Further? It was Violet who said quietly,
“Your Ian must be a great charmer.”
“Women fall for him, of course,” Sally said with possessive contempt. “In a way, it’s part of his job.”
“Yes, I see,” said Violet. “That must be rather a bore for you sometimes.”
“Oh no.” The candor was disarming. “They’re his trophies, like silver cups if he were an athlete. He brings them all to me.”
“But after all,” Charles was unaware that what he felt was jealousy, “this fellow’s nothing but an actor, what? You’re not serious, Sally?”
“Charles—” Violet warned, but it was too late.
“You sound like my mother, Uncle Charles,” Sally was carefully condescending. She drank her martini down at one gulp. She was dead sober now, watchful as a mother cat protecting her kittens. She was going to win the first round, she must. “I suppose”—she turned now to her aunt—“that Mother told you we are engaged.”
“Yes,” Violet lied, “I think she said something of the sort.” Actually what Barbie had written was that Sally would tell them she was engaged, but that Ian had no intention of marrying her and had told Barbie so himself. For a second Violet wondered if her sister were telling the truth. “But you’ll finish college before you get married, surely?”
“I suppose so. That’s the bargain I’ve made with Mother. Daddy has washed his hands of the whole business, thank God,” Sally said and laughed a short, not very happy laugh. “By the way, I don’t suppose there were any letters for me?”
“You’ve only been gone twenty-four hours, you know,” Charles teased.
“It seems like a year.” With this, said very quietly, Sally looked once around the room, at the great shelves of books mounting to the ceiling, at the closed cabinet along one side with its fine bindings, at the long windows and the firelight flaming through them. She shivered.
Violet saw the shiver. “You must be very tired.” Sally felt the net of tenderness falling down over her like a spell. From the moment she had fallen down on the front steps, she had known there was a spell here, and she would have to fight like mad not to be caught in it.
“Mostly,” she said with something like violence, “I’m mad.”
Charles chuckled. Violet informed him that in America “mad” means “angry.” Then he chuckled even more.
“A little angry thing has come to stay,” he said happily. “A little mad thing too, perhaps?”
But Sally said nothing. She would not look at them. She would remain intact.
“Does the little mad thing play golf?” he persisted. It seemed, as they went in to dinner, that she did. But Sally felt so diminished sitting beneath the high wall entirely filled with family portraits, that she ate the whole meal in silence. Charles and Violet, having by tacit agreement given up trying to draw her out, flirted across the long table. Sally observed this. It was quite unlike the behavior of her own parents who took each other for granted. She found that she was becoming curious, perhaps even slightly entranced by this marriage she was to contemplate for two months, by this pair between whom she sat, not quite a stranger.
The next morning she did not, after all, play golf. Her knee was rather stiff. Instead she got Radio-Luxembourg on the powerful portable radio she had brought with her, and played jazz all morning. Downstairs Violet thought the house rejected this so violently that the very walls sent it back, echoing. She fled into the walled garden and weeded with passion, but even there strange wails and barbaric yawps reached her. The occupation, she thought with a grim smile, has begun.
When Maire came finally to do the room, Sally went down to the library and sat at the huge desk where her grandfather had studied his briefs. There she composed a careful letter to Ian. It was so careful that she copied it out twice.
O Ian, I am so far away and it is all so queer here. This morning I got La Vie en Rose from somewhere in Europe. This made it all seem stranger for a while, and now I am sitting at a very big desk in the library thinking about us. I have to keep thinking about us or I would die here, in this prison. My Uncle Charles teases me and does not understand anything, which is a great relief. He is still terribly in love with Aunt Violet. I wonder if you would think her lovely. She is trying to get at me, but I shan’t let her. You see, it’s the only way I can keep us safe from harm, from all harm, my darling, until we meet again. The worst of all is your kisses. Sally.
Her feeling was so intense that Sally could never write otherwise to Ian. She was reduced to what she considered an idiotic simplicity where he was concerned. Anything else seemed like lies and literature, the sort of letter she used to write to her English teacher at school, full of quotations from Keats and Shelley. The level on which she communicated with Ian was so different from any spoken language that she sometimes felt it useless to write and hardly read his letters except to see how he signed. They were always about himself, but sometimes they began “Darling,” and sometimes they did not end with just “love, Ian,” but dear things like “Keep hoping, love” or “You’re my best girl.”
She had forgotten where she was when Uncle Charles came in from behind and put two earth-smelling hands over her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, then quickly, not to yield to him even her surprise, “Of course, it’s you, Uncle Charles.”
“Not of course. It might be a strange young man fresh from Oxford.” Charles was feeling cheerful. The foreign occupation was putting them on their mettle. Even Cammaert had grumbled about the roses with new interest.
“A few days like this,” he said, squinting up at the luminous haze which suggested the presence of sunlight somewhere, if not precisely here, “and we might get some late bloom. Damn damp country,” he added as if he had gone too far.
Sally did not comment on her uncle’s fantasy about a young man who did not interest her even as a figure of the imagination.
“I shall have to get some stamps, Uncle Charles.”
“Leave it on the hall table,” he said casually. “The postman will see to that,” he said, as if, Sally thought, they had a special privilege of free stamps. Did the postman keep an account? But Uncle Charles interrupted her revery, the letter in her hand, “Come out and take a look at the day!”
“When does the postman come?” she asked. She would have liked to stand guard over her letter herself and lay it carefully in the postman’s hand. But she was afraid of Charles’s teasing, so she followed him slowly into the hall and laid the frail little envelope carefully on top of a small pile in Violet’s pronounced hand.
Charles noticed her backward glance as he held the glass door open for her to go through. This Victorian addition bothered his sense of style. Charles did not as yet love the house, but he respected it, as he respected good boots and well-cut old clothes. Sloppiness, lack of form bothered him. Sally’s blue jeans, too tight he thought, with an absurd boy’s checked shirt with the tails out over them, bothered him very much.
“You do look rather queer,” he said not unkindly. “Is that the usual thing?”
“Yes.” As a matter of fact, she had felt uncouth, standing by the great bed reflected in the oval mirror in the dressing table in her room. But she had put on these things deliberately. She was going to remain wholly and defiantly American.
They stood for a moment on the terrace while Charles lit his pipe, and asked with it between his teeth, “Do you think your knee would bear a walk up the hill? From there you really see the house, how it lies in the hollow.”<
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Sally stood there, her hands in her pockets, androgynous, remote as a sulky schoolboy. During the night she seemed to have changed or else he had first seen her in the rosy light of arrival, of drinks, and the solicitude caused by her fall. He did not, at the moment, find her attractive.
They plodded up the hill on the uneven ground where the frost had made bumps and the coarse grass crunched under their feet, and did not talk. It was high time O’Neil brought the sheep over, Charles was thinking. Sally, whose knee hurt rather a lot, was absorbed in the effort of the walk. She did not, he noticed, look back once at the house. Charles turned this indifference of hers over in his mind. The vagaries of women interested him. He imagined that he knew a good deal about them. Violet, who found this convenient, had never disabused him of the idea. Still, it was strange that Sally showed so little curiosity. After all, her grandfather had lived here. Her mother had spent her first seventeen summers here. He was puzzled.
They had now almost reached the rather straggly forest that circled the top of the bowl.
“There—” he laid his hands on Sally’s passive shoulders and forced them to turn round—“there’s Dene’s Court.”
To Sally it looked as ugly and unyielding as the prison she had found it at first glance. It was so complete in itself, planted flat against the trees, that even the beds of flowers and lawn to the right did nothing to soften it, and themselves looked only slightly out of proportion. She stared at it, fascinated in spite of herself, as if she and it were pivoted against each other. She could not have said that it was not alive. It was very much alive. For just a second she had one of those moments of illumination when time falls away, felt she was already nothing, melted into air, that in fact it had already won. To dissipate this vision which she could not accept, she took out a cigarette and tried to think of something rude but true to say. What she achieved was rather petty, after all.