by May Sarton
At this moment the sun burst through the clouds and inundated the whole huge empty space with warm light. Sally could have had no idea how brilliant it made her in her yellow dress, how present.
“You bring a new world—fresh air—” Charles heard himself saying, too late. The bright mocking eyes lifted and met his.
“It makes you feel romantic, but it makes me feel sad—and—scared,” Sally shivered.
Then they turned the corner, went through a closed door and into a room which seemed devoured by the darkness of the leaves screening every window, a room painted a dull mauve, a horrible room with a dusty round table in the middle and a hideous mantel over the fireplace.
“Too bad,” Angus Desmond was saying. He looked really grieved.
“Of course there’s no money to do anything about it now,” Violet sighed. “Come along, we’ll catch cold here. It’s so damp. All the leaves.”
She led the way and as she came to Sally, slipped an arm through hers, and drew her back through the empty spaces of the drawing room which was now all air and light it seemed, the walls having mysteriously withdrawn, as the two Denes walked arm in arm, silently back into the familiar furnished places.
Charles took the Desmonds up to the ballroom for a few moments while Violet settled down behind the tea table, her back to the long windows of the library. Sally sat down beside her, saying nothing. She did not know how to put her question. But it was as if all the Denes now were taking possession of her, as if she were being sucked back into the past, into something she would be but would have no choice about being, the trick of a mouth or nose, some deep insecurity or slip of character which suggested that she was, and had always been, in peril.
“Aunt Violet,” she asked, clasping her hands tight over her knees, trying to frame the question, “are the Denes queer in some way?”
“Whatever do you mean, darling? Of course not. We’re just an average Anglo-Irish family, you know, nothing special…”
“What did Mr. Desmond mean then about eccentric?”
Aunt Violet pondered this, “We’ve gone our own way, I suppose, not been quite as much a part of the country as the Desmonds, for instance. There have been a couple of painters; your great-aunt Arabella ran away with an Italian Count—the usual sort of thing. You needn’t look so anxious.”
“Really? That’s all?” Sally asked, half disappointed now, so strong had her sense of something hidden become, just now, on the threshold of the empty drawing room.
“Yes, why?”
“Has it ever been a happy house, Aunt Violet?”
The question took Violet completely by surprise. For her the very perfume of happiness rose from the house—security, childhood, love, protection—it was everything good and dear. Sally saw the tears of surprise, the hurt in the clear blue eyes, and suffered. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said it,” she murmured. She wanted very much to take the hand that lay, so abandoned in her aunt’s lap, to take it and kiss it, as Uncle Charles had so easily, it seemed, kissed hers. But it was impossible to make this gesture.
“No reason, Sally, why you shouldn’t say it. I know you’re not happy here. That has been clear enough,” she added drily.
They heard the voices on the stairs, and there was no time to mend what seemed now a real wound.
Even a day ago such a remark from her aunt would have been a triumph, would have proved that she was resisting successfully, that she had succeeded in remaining a prisoner here, not a member of the family. Now the wound (but she did not know where it was) ached. She felt miserable, an outcast. She had brought tears to those magical blue eyes—this gave her a queer kind of satisfaction. But now she was interrupted in all her thoughts. She must pass the muffins and the jam and the plates and napkins. Tea was a formidable meal. At intervals Maire appeared, her red hands trembling a little, with another plate of sandwiches, more bread and butter, finally the cake. The Desmonds ate with quiet competence, passing their cups for more tea, settling down with an air of belonging which Sally envied. She found herself looking at the two girls speculatively—how did they live? What did they do? When she had passed things for what seemed hours, she sat down beside the prettier, the elder sister whose name was Daphne. “Do you ride a lot?” she asked. In the corner opposite, Uncle Charles and Mr. Desmond were deep in some technical matter about the last meet. Violet seemed stranded among the teapots, wearing a faint absent-minded smile.
“Oh yes, every day.” Daphne smiled a quick, shy smile. “You must come over. I’m sure your uncle will bring you.”
“I suppose you jump too?”
This seemed to amuse Mary, the younger sister. She giggled. “Well, you see,” Daphne explained kindly, “you can’t hunt without jumping, very well.”
“And in the winter do you go to school or college?” For Sally realized that she could never hold up her end in a conversation about horses.
The two sisters exchanged a look. “Only frightfully clever girls go to college,” Daphne explained. “I did go to a boarding school in England for three years. It was awful.”
“I refused to go,” Mary said. “What’s the use of stuffing yourself with a lot of knowledge?”
Daphne looked at her sister with an amused look. “Even our governess gave Mary up two years ago. She was always looking out of the window or worrying that her caterpillars needed fresh leaves. But she has a very good French accent (our governess was French), haven’t you, Mary?”
“You’ve been to Paris then?” Sally asked, hoping at last to find some point of contact, for she had been taken to Paris when she was sixteen.
“Oh no,” and Mary giggled again. “I’ve forgotten all my French anyway.”
By every standard which Sally possessed except charm these two bland, amused, contented girls failed miserably. They seemed to her absurdly young and unsophisticated, with their rather rough hands and heavy outdoor shoes. Had they either of them ever been in love, she wondered? And if so, with whom?
“I suppose there are balls in the winter?” she couldn’t help asking, though perhaps it was rude to ask so many questions. The thing was that if she didn’t, they looked down at their hands, incapable, it seemed, of curiosity about her in return, or too shy to show it.
“Oh yes, in the Hols—Daphne’s engaged to be married,” Mary confided suddenly. “Her young man’s at Cambridge. He’s studying boilers.” This was evidently a family joke as the girls exchanged a look of extreme amusement.
“He’s going to be an engineer,” Daphne explained. What she had, Sally decided, was the dignity of a person who knows exactly what she is about. It was impressive.
“I’m engaged too,” Sally heard herself saying, as if this would place her. But she caught their surprised look as they glanced at her hand and did not discover a ring.
“What’s your young man?” Mary asked. This was a subject which did interest her, at last.
“He’s an actor, not a famous one, but he’s very talented.” It sounded absolutely impossible. Sally was quite aware of this and the implication of Daphne’s “Oh.” “I suppose,” Sally said, lifting her chin in a family gesture of which she was entirely unconscious, “that I’m one of the eccentric Denes.”
This paralysed the two girls completely. Luckily Aunt Violet had caught the last remark and Sally’s defiant air.
“So you’re a Dene, are you?” she teased. “I thought you were a dyed-in-the-wool Philadelphia Calvert.”
“An eccentric Dene what’s more,” Charles chimed in. He had been hoping for some time to extricate himself from Mr. Desmond on the subtleties of various horses he owned or had owned or had seen recently. Also he had been watching Sally’s noble efforts at conversation with amused appreciation. It seemed to Charles that the three girls who sat now rather primly, embarrassed by the intervention of grownups into their conversation, looked absurdly, unbelievably young. Sally was blushing which enhanced her air of innocence. It hurt him in a queer way that they should be so young. At this moment his wi
fe’s beauty, which he had always taken for granted, appeared to him as fragile and precious as a cherry tree in full flower which would begin to fall at any moment, which was falling, the petals turning faintly brown—he wished suddenly that the Desmonds would leave. It was an irrational sense that time was passing, and that he could not afford to waste a second of it.
“She’s got the Dene air,” Mr. Desmond said with satisfaction. “Of course it’s a new generation…” he added vaguely, with less enthusiasm. And then for the first time he looked at Sally as if she were a person and not a portrait on a wall. “I expect now that Mrs. Gordon is back your family will be coming over for the summers again?” he asked. “Is your mother well? I remember her,” he said, tapping his temple again. “She was a lovely girl, not a great beauty like her sister,” he said with a gallant nod of his head and a smile at Violet, “but full of life. I can see her now, running across the avenue, laughing at something or other, followed by two or three young men. By the way, Mr. Gordon”—for this had reminded him of something—”will you be getting the tennis courts back into shape?”
“If I can get the farm on its feet and do something about lumber we might be able to afford that—all in due time…” Charles said in a businesslike way. Sally had had no time to answer about her mother and now they were off on the problems of the estate. She could relax. Her moment of fearful self-exposure was over. She was safe again.
They had all three been disturbed during the Desmonds’ visit. This intrusion of strangers had torn open feelings which had perhaps been emerging but not recognized. Violet felt it quite absurd to have allowed what Sally said about the house to hurt her so much, but she had allowed it and now she watched her niece warily, this niece who had the power to make tears start in her eyes (Violet never cried, or almost never) just because she was not happy here. Sally was sitting on the arm of a chair swinging her foot and frowning. She would have liked to apologize for what she had said, but something in her withstood this capitulation—Ian, perhaps. She kept forcibly placing Ian between her aunt and herself, as a protection against the waves of emotion. Whatever is happening to me? Sally thought and suddenly got up and walked out of the room, without a word.
“Where are you off to, Sally? I was just going to mix a cocktail…” There was distress in Charles’s voice and Violet caught it at once. She sensed in herself, in Sally, now in Charles a precipitation of the atmosphere and wished to ward it off.
“Let her go,” she said quietly. “You’ll make her feel like a prisoner. She did her duty very valiantly by the Desmonds, but she has to escape, you know, she’s so afraid of being caught,” and Violet laughed a gentle slightly superior laugh.
“Well, then”—Charles turned away—“I suppose we might as well dress before we have a drink.”
Just then it thundered, and exactly as if someone had opened a sluice in the sky, a great sheet of rain poured down.
On their way upstairs Violet and Charles stopped on the landing. It was quite dark.
“Wherever did the storm come from?” Charles asked. “It was perfectly serene an hour ago.” This change without warning was upsetting, unsettling. It made him feel as if he didn’t know where he was.
Violet shivered. “It would be too bad if we were in for a spell of rain.”
“Nonsense. It’s a just a thunderstorm.” He turned up the stairs, but Violet sat down a minute on the window seat and peered out. The mountains were completely hidden; sitting there neither downstairs nor upstairs, alone, she felt marooned, isolated, in a kind of panic. What if Charles—Violet pushed away the dream-image of Charles and Sally locked in each other’s arms in the meadow, and fled.
But Sally was not thinking of Charles. She was walking up and down in her room (Violet sitting at her dressing table heard the footsteps, back and forth, back and forth and dropped the stopper of a perfume bottle). Sally was wondering how she would ever face Violet again, how she could possibly bring herself to go down to dinner at all. She had taken out her best sweater, black cashmere embroidered with pearls and silver thread. She tried buttoning it up to her throat over the yellow dress and then she tried it open, all the time seeing herself through Violet’s eyes, then as she suddenly admitted this to herself, she tore the sweater off. That was when she began to walk up and down, hugging her arms, as if she were in pain. I cannot let this happen, she thought, it is too queer and upsetting. She took the photograph of Ian brusquely from the dresser and stared at it as if she were looking at a stranger. For months the whole world of sensation had been bound up in his face; everything she saw which moved her at all was related to his image, so she had only to murmur his name to feel his touch on her arm. Here in this place which she had regarded as a prison, he was her freedom, her escape, her identity and—she saw now—her safety too. And what was happening that she could hold his picture in her hands, and feel nothing? If only we’d been lovers, she thought, I’d be all right. I’d be safe. It was her fault that they hadn’t, that they had only reached a point of exaggerated devouring tenderness, meeting in public places, stealing each other’s caresses as if they were criminals, in taxis, or in Central Park early in the morning, when the sky was suddenly bright green, just before sunrise. Sally was waiting for a final gift on his part, and he had not made it. He had not asked her to marry him. He had talked of it as something possible in the distant future—Oh Ian, why? she whispered. But all she felt was what it had been like to walk through the empty drawing room in the sunlight with Violet’s arm through hers, the perfect pure intense bliss it had been. She could see the images of her life with Ian—Central Park—but she could not feel them any more. It was as if they lay behind a pane of glass, and only what was here now touched her skin like sunlight or rain.
But I do love him, she told herself grimly. He’s all I have. Against everyone, against everything, he’s what I am, even if it’s wrong, a waste, nothing those Desmond girls could ever understand. She could not see why the idea of the Desmond girls came to her. Whatever did it matter what they thought? Or their father, or Uncle Charles, old-fashioned, simple, romantic people, all of them.
Was she in some way set apart then from all that was normal, good, simple, possible? For all she wanted was to bury herself in Violet, to shut out the whole world, and to be enclosed accepted once and for all, to love and to be passionately loved by Violet. This fact was so overwhelming that she sat down on her bed, quite unable to go down and to face the reality. She just waited until Charles’s loud clanging on the gong forced her to face them again.
“We’re celebrating,” Charles said. He seemed rather excited.
“What?” Sally asked bluntly. She was grateful to Charles for being there, now that she couldn’t lift her eyes to Violet’s face, now that she was so utterly constricted and frozen by the strength of her feelings.
“The relief it is to be together again, the relief that the invaders have come and gone, examined us, given us an A for conduct, approved, eaten a huge tea and left us to ourselves…” Charles was laughing. Sally had never seen him like this, so gay and excited. “Here’s your drink,” he said, touching her hair lightly as he gave it to her. “We’ve had one. You did take a long time to put on a sweater. You didn’t knit it, did you? You didn’t sew on all those little pearls between tea and dinner?”
Sally laughed in spite of herself. One couldn’t resist Charles in such a mood and the last thing she wanted was to resist him. Anything which would stop for a moment the awfully deep thump of her heart, the insistent stifled beat as if it wanted to leap out of her chest, anything was a relief. She threw herself into his mood and soon they were laughing as they had never laughed before, daring each other to further nonsense. Violet withdrew from their game and watched it, and watched the rain pouring down outside.
Only when they had gone in to dinner did Sally finally dare to look at Violet, sitting so remote and composed across the table, framed in the candles. She caught that considering, judging, unsmiling glance and in a second
all her excitement fell. It was the same look which had thrown her as she was crossing the brook, the look of an antagonist, but Sally did not recognize it as that. She thought it was because of what she had said about the house. She felt the blush creeping up her neck and quickly, quickly to hide it, blurted out what she had been holding inside her all the evening,
“Forgive me, Aunt Violet,” she said, her fingers crumbling the bread beside her plate.
“Whatever for, Sally dear?” For Violet was utterly at sea.
“Well,” Sally stammered, “I mean—about—what I said about the house. It’s just…” but she couldn’t go on. It would take a year to explain all she meant.
“You don’t need to explain,” Violet said kindly and turned to Charles to ask him to ring for Maire.
“What’s all this?” Charles asked, sensing the tension.
“Nothing, darling.” And then with unconscious cruelty she turned back to Sally, “What do you hear from Ian these days?”
As Sally talked about Ian, about his plans, a summer play which had fallen through, she felt as if she were building a house of cards, so unreal did it all sound even to her. “He doesn’t write very good letters,” she ended, “that’s what’s so awful. None of the real things can be said it seems to me,” but Sally was not thinking of Ian now. “I hate words. They’re barriers. They never tell the truth.”
It was said with a kind of violence. Sally felt herself that the tone was exaggerated. It was as if now she couldn’t do the simplest things naturally. And she wished Charles and Violet would leave her alone and play one of their own games, one of their teasing self-absorbed conversations which included her as the necessary audience, but asked nothing of her. As it was, she felt exposed by Charles’s attentions, by Violet’s silences. It seemed as if everything had subtly changed between them in the last few hours and Sally didn’t know how to cope with it. After dinner she made a lame excuse about a headache and went to bed.