by May Sarton
“Why is it a curse to be so beautiful? Why isn’t it a blessing?” Sally asked. “Hasn’t Aunt Violet herself been happy?” she asked, for she felt Annie knew everything she wanted to find out and would tell her now.
Annie stirred her tea and drank two sips loudly. “No children,” she said, “for one thing.”
“But that isn’t because she’s beautiful—is it?—I mean…” Sally glanced over at Maire and felt shy. She wondered what Maire was thinking. It was nice for once to be sitting at table with her, she seemed so much less shy here.
“Well, there are women meant to bear children—your mother was one—and women not meant to,” Annie said mysteriously. “It’s all a mystery, but the trouble for your Aunt Violet was that she was the cause of misery, and yet could do nothing about it.”
“Did she use to come down and cry too?” Sally asked mischievously.
“That she did,” Annie said with satisfaction. “That she did.”
“It’s nice they’ve come back, isn’t it?” Sally said warmly.
“It’s the will of God,” Annie said solemnly and Maire nodded her head in solemn agreement. “The Denes come back to the old house. However far they go and how long they stay, they always come back. For the house is the blood in their veins and without it they wither away.”
“Mother hasn’t withered away,” Sally said, withdrawing instinctively from this old wives’ tale, and from the tone.
“No,” Annie said, not at all put out by the blunt statement, “she had to go over the ocean to find her way, and there’s always a Dene that does that, just as there’s always a Dene to come back.”
“I wonder which I am,” Sally said thoughtfully. It had never entered her head that she might be drawn into some inevitable current, some tide of the past, that coming here was like a fate and not just a punishment. “You know I was sent here to get me away from Ian, the boy I’m going to marry. He’s an actor,” she said simply, wondering what Annie’s reaction would be.
“An actor, is he?” Annie said, her eyes lighting up with surprise or delight. “Miss Violet never told me he was an actor,” she said as if this were a serious omission, and she had not been quite given her due. “And does he make a living at it, if I may ask?”
“Well”—Sally thought this over—“I don’t know really. You see, he has money of his own. He’s quite rich, as a matter of fact, not that it matters.”
“Well, if he’s so rich and can do as he pleases, then what’s the harm?” Annie said practically. “And handsome he must be if he’s an actor.”
“He’s beautiful,” Sally said, but even as she said it, she felt a qualm. It was a long time since she had really felt him as a presence. If she said beautiful, she thought of Aunt Violet, not of Ian. “But oh Annie, he’s so far away, I feel I’m beginning to forget him. It’s awful,” she said passionately.
“Well, it won’t be forever, doatie, you’ll go back and find him if he’s your true love.”
True love, Sally said the words over to herself. What did they mean? They sounded like some old poem, not quite real, or was it that Ian was no longer quite real? She looked around the kitchen again as if to test something against it, or find something. And she remembered what Aunt Violet had said about her uncle.
“I don’t believe there is such a thing, Annie,” she said bitterly. “People are just beasts.”
Annie who had no way of knowing about what Sally was thinking was taken aback.
“Yes,” Maire said to everyone’s surprise, “that’s what I think, Miss. That’s just what I think.”
“You don’t think at all,” Annie said contemptuously.
But Maire was looking at Sally with wide-open intense eyes as if she had at long last met someone who knew what life was all about.
“Even Aunt Violet and Uncle Charles aren’t true loves, not really,” she said quietly.
“They’re not perfect,” Annie said crossly, “who would wish them to be? Two such beautiful people, surely that’s enough—and what more would you be asking for, Miss Sally, if I may be so bold?”
“Nothing, Annie—only…”
“Life’s a cruel business, full of shame and temptation,” Annie said, shaking her head, “but you and Maire are too young still and you want what cannot be, and so you’ll be suffering,” she said with a sudden warm smile, “my poor doaties.” In this kitchen Sally realized suddenly everything was a drama and so everything was bearable, because usually one felt one was exaggerating and being foolish, but Annie would meet one halfway, glorying in approaching disaster like a general in an approaching battle. It was very restful.
Sally came up from the dark kitchen stairs into the house, empty, still, and flooded with sunlight. Charles and Violet had gone out of course; Violet would be in the walled garden examining the ruins of the roses with Cammaert. With something like relief, with a tremor of fear, Sally thought, I’m all alone here. She stood on the threshold of the library as if waiting for some decision which would take her inside, to her grandfather’s desk. Far-off on the hill a sheep coughed.
The house now seemed the exact concrete equivalent of her state of mind. She felt empty, tired but also flooded with peace. For a few moments more she could stand like this, suspended outside of life, and catch her breath. In the last hours a whole part of herself had crumbled away, innocence, childhood, she imagined, like a shell, and she was standing grown-up, but completely exposed. The loneliness was acute, but also exhilarating. She knew she was free, free of the terrible hunger which had bound her to Violet and to Charles. She saw now that their life was not her life, and her wish to crash through into it by force of love was only an evasion of her own life, the desire to take something already created, to hide from reality in a world of imagination where everything could be heightened because untrue. Her feeling about Violet and Charles would become true perhaps if she could come to look at them without wishing either to possess or to be possessed by what they had. I have got to know where I stand, Sally thought, making her decision. She felt backed up by Annie’s sense of drama, by the ease with which Annie confronted, at least in conversation, impossible situations. Somewhere across this loneliness, across this sunlight, this emptiness which was already invaded by his presence, was Ian. Sally crossed the library as if she were crossing an ocean, went to the desk and took a sheet of paper out of the top drawer. When Violet came in an hour later, she was sealing the envelope.
“Sally darling, what are you doing indoors? It’s too lovely out—”
“I’ve been thinking,” Sally said, laying the letter down on the desk and turning in her chair to face her aunt, with an absence of personal emotion which almost frightened her. Standing in the doorway, tentative, kind, her aunt seemed diminished and Sally, standing felt immensely tall and strong; so much so that she shrank before the shock she was about to administer. She had not until this second thought of her decision in terms of Violet. So she spoke quickly, to get it over. “Ian wants to fly over for the weekend. I’ve just written to tell him to come.”
“Come here?” Violet looked at the letter on the desk as if it were a bomb. Then she sat down, rather slowly, to give herself time. Sally saw the flush of anger or dismay creeping up her throat. “But Sally dear,” she said in the reasonable voice of someone determined to be controlled, “I think you should have asked me first.”
“I know. Please don’t be cross,” Sally warded off what she felt was sure to come. “It’s just that it all has become impossible. After our walk, I mean. I feel now that I must be sure about Ian. I have to know.” Saying this aloud, Sally felt doubts and fears all around her waiting to pounce.
“But how can he come? Fly the Atlantic for a weekend?” This was a world of which Violet knew nothing, this American world where people moved about with frightening rapidity, where journeys which normal people would plan for a year were undertaken at a moment’s whim.
“Oh, he has plenty of money, and very little time,” Sally answered, on the defen
sive now too. “It would only be for a few days, after all.”
“But, Sally,” Violet said coldly, for she was beginning to realize all the implications. Sally’s tone was quite implacably sure of itself. “your mother sent you here just so that you would not see Ian for a time. How can I have him as a guest in this house? Don’t you see?”
Violet’s icy reasonableness had its effect. Sally’s newfound maturity and self-reliance wavered before it. She was terrified of losing Violet’s regard, imagined with intense clarity what suffering it would mean to be shut out now by Violet. Searching Violet’s clear blue gaze and abashed before it, the words were flung out like anger, only they were love. “It’s just that I need to have him, so I’ll know something. Oh, I feel so confused and empty—” She commanded herself to stay calm, not to cry. “I’m upset,” she said. “Can’t you understand? Charles—”
“I was terribly wrong to say what I did,” Violet answered in the same cold dry voice. She was so angry, so inexplicably angry that she could have gladly shaken Sally.
And this anger reached Sally like a blow. “No—no…” she murmured and ran to where her aunt was sitting, and knelt by the chair. “Only don’t you see? I’m nothing. I’m lost. I’ve got to try to be myself. It’s all been too much, these last days, the rain, everything pressing down. I’ve felt so queer, you don’t know.” Sally fought for words and then gave up. “It was the best I could do,” and finding the way that was not words now, she lifted Violet’s hand and pressed it to her breast in a gesture so intense that Violet felt tears rising in her own eyes. “I think,” Sally added, “that I have been a little in love with you.”
Then she ran from the room.
Violet went to the sideboard and poured herself a drink. All their lives she and Barbie had avoided ever coming to the point of antagonism and realized love that she and Sally had just passed. Violet was humbled by it, humbled and in some way armed. She had made her decision. If Ian came, she would not tell her sister. She knew now that her first loyalty was not to Barbie, not even to Charles, but to Sally because such innocence calls out our first loyalty and in its presence there can be no other.
Charles, unaware of anything that had happened, was full of well-being now that the sun had come out. He had plans to take Sally with him to see the farm, to drive up among the hills; he preferred to think of this as a journey with her alone. After all, Violet hated to be wrenched out of her habits and customs and really liked being in the house and garden better than moving about. Charles whistled happily as he strode about in one of the far plantations, marking trees to be cut. He did not think further than this plan to take Sally out. Nothing, in his own mind, could have been more innocent. It was a useful good idea to get her mind off that bounder, in any case. A minor flirtation would be the best thing in the world for Sally. She was a queer little thing, Charles thought, for he was not going to admit how powerfully attractive she had become in the last few days, and she seemed to be avoiding him. Probably more went on in her dark head than anyone knew. Possibly she was more attracted to him than she herself could admit. This idea startled Charles. He snapped the knife shut with which he had been marking trees and held it tightly in one hand. Then he told himself severely that he was an old fool. Then he laughed out loud and stamped noisily out of the underbrush and down the hill to the house. He felt younger than he had for a year, in a mood for practical jokes, for teasing Violet who hated above all be to teased. Life, he said to himself, is good.
He said it again aloud to Violet when he finally found her picking sweet peas in the walled garden. He stood just behind her and told her that life was good.
“Yes, dear,” Violet said patiently.
“Don’t be so priggish, Violet—it’s good, I tell you.”
“I’m not priggish, I’m just agreeing with you. What’s priggish about that?”
Violet was evidently in one of her perverse moods. She was paying great attention to each flower, rearranging the bunch in her hands, and not looking at him. Charles picked a bright pink sweet pea, came round behind her and tickled her neck with the crisp teasing flower.
“Darling, must you? I really want to get this done.”
“You and Queen Victoria,” he muttered darkly and then he laughed such a gay and simple laugh that Violet found herself laughing too. “You’re a perfect wretch, Charles.”
“You see,” he said in triumph, “you are amused. You can’t help being amused, because it’s such a lovely day. Let’s have a drink before lunch and sit out as if we were the rich and idle, on the terrace…”
Violet, hemmed in by two dangerous kinds of innocence, felt beaten. Why not enjoy the day and all that it held? Why worry and be responsible? After all, if Ian did come it might solve everything. She pressed her nose into the cool perfumed faces of the sweet peas.
“How can we be so old and beautiful?” Charles was saying in his caressing happy voice.
“How can we be so old?” Violet echoed, laughing at him now. “You are a very old frisky lamb, darling,” she said, taking his arm and turning down the path towards the creaking gate in the wall.
“A ram—a ram—a ram—” he said loudly. “But really, Violet, look at the wall. It’s in a terrible way, isn’t it? And I must do something about the gate.”
“Does it feel like a real life, Charles?” Violet turned to him gravely, as they closed the gate behind them.
“You sound like Sally.”
“She keeps asking what it all means, doesn’t she? I begin to ask myself…” In the shadow of the wall after the brilliant sunlight, it felt cold. She would have liked to lean her head on Charles’s shoulder, to be supported and enclosed and cherished. But she saw another light altogether in his eyes and saw that he was not at that second thinking of her at all, though he was looking straight at her.
“Of course it’s a real life,” he said briskly. “Come along. Let’s find the child and have a drink.”
“Sally thinks we’re useless, battening on the poor,” Violet said, grasping at an argument as one way of getting Charles’s attention.
“That’s what college does to women, fills their heads up with half-baked notions, sociology, what? Economics, what? She’d learn more by living on a farm for a year. I really must do something about the nettles,” he interrupted himself as they passed the neglected stables. “One of these days I’m going to take Sally around, give her a few lessons in practical economics right here.”
“Yes, dear,” Violet said patiently. But this time he let her tone pass in silence. He was running ahead, up the steps of the terrace, and Violet stopped to watch him, and found that she minded a good deal his blaze of energy, his unconsciousness, his self-enclosure. Sometimes she looked forward to their old age, to the peace of it. We’ll read she thought. The danger will be past. But she could not really imagine such a time, nor really wish for it. The house, she thought, looking up at it, is a challenge. It was not built in a safe time for safety, nor for any kind of peaceful dying. It was built to maintain, to endure, built in danger and on belief. Thinking of it thus, she felt an old courage in her. She felt armed.
“Where have you been?” Sally asked, finding them settled in deck chairs. “I looked all over. I’ve got news,” she said, carefully unfolding a cablegram. “Ian’s flying over for a few days next Friday—he’s really coming. I can’t believe it. Oh Aunt Violet, I’m scared,” she said, curling up suddenly at Violet’s feet, hugging her knees.
“What’s this?” Charles asked so angrily that Violet looked up and tried to warn him with a glance.
“Ian’s coming. Do you mind?” Sally said coldly.
“I don’t understand. Did you invite him, Violet?” Charles was standing now, glaring down at them like some god disturbed in his lair, Violet thought.
“Not exactly,” she said, laying a hand on Sally’s head as if to reassure her before the storm, for it was to be a storm. Charles had been taken by surprise, a thing he hated above all, and he had been left out
, a thing he resented. “Sally told me she had asked him to fly over and by then it seemed too late to refuse.”
“And does Sally’s mother know this?” Charles asked.
“I’m not going to tell Barbie,” Violet said, looking him straight in the eye.
“Violet, I presume you consider this my house as well as yours?”
“Of course.”
“Why didn’t you at least ask me, then?” Charles didn’t know why he was so angry, but he knew that anger had taken possession of him like a temporary illness. Obscure humiliations out of the past, the fact that Violet’s family was a distinguished one in a sense that his had never been, that this was her estate and that the people on it looked to her rather than to him, her way of treating him sometimes as if he were a child, all these buried angers focused now on this given situation and burned inside him.
“I suppose I didn’t tell you because of the way you are behaving now. I thought Ian might not come and there was no point in making an issue of it. I’m sorry, Charles”—she shrugged her shoulders, a gesture which negated the apology—“I should have told you, of course.”
Sally felt as if she had been transported into the middle of a storm. Because she was sitting on the step, close to Aunt Violet’s knees, and Charles was standing over them, both he and her aunt loomed very large and quite terrifying. This fierce grating of their natures hurt her as a dog is hurt by music and she would have liked, like a dog, to howl. She didn’t at the moment care at all whether Ian came or not, but only that this frightfully painful scene should stop. If only, she thought, I could just vanish. But there she was between them, with no escape possible, short of making a scene herself.
“You are always taking decisions out of my hands, Violet, and in this case it’s inexcusable. I suppose we can cable and tell him not to come? You may feel you can do this behind your sister’s back but I cannot. After all, she trusts us.”