by May Sarton
“Well?” Violet asked Charles.
“Well?” Charles asked Violet.
“It’s not quite what we expected, is it? Such a flawless young man,” Violet said thoughtfully. She was puzzled.
“He’s read up on Ireland all right,” Charles chuckled, “asked me questions. Put on quite a show as a matter of fact.”
“How is he with Sally?”
“How should I know? Sally sat in the back seat and hardly said a word.”
“One doesn’t know,” Violet said teasing him, “one senses.”
“My senses were rather busy driving and talking,” Charles said, piqued.
What Violet’s sense had been, she did not say. It was too soon. But she was slightly troubled. She had caught Ian’s appraising, almost conspiratorial glance. And she had wondered just what it meant.
Alone in her room for a few minutes while Ian shaved across the ballroom in the opposite corner of the house, Sally lay down on the bed. She felt wildly nervous. She had forgotten what it was like to be with him, always with other people, always under the strain of trying to communicate across something—as if shouting in a high wind. That was why touch was so important and, she realized with dismay, he had hardly touched her except for that rather formal kiss at the airport. Of course he had been sitting in the front seat—but still—for days she had been wound up tight to this moment of his arrival as if it would inevitably be a moment of release. Now she realized that it was only the beginning of three days of even greater strain. How do people live all their lives among personal relations? she thought. How do they ever do it?
She bounced up and went to the window, looked at her watch, saw that this eternity of waiting had only been one minute and a half, and then looked out. At least, she reminded herself, her worst fears had not been realized. Uncle Charles had been darling with Ian and so had Aunt Violet and Ian himself was behaving beautifully—except (here Sally sat down again on the bed, her chin in her hands)—there was something wrong with the way he talked to Annie, in fact the visit to the kitchen had not been a success. Queer, because this had been the one thing of which she was not afraid—Annie would understand. Annie would know. But Annie had been treated so formally. Ian hadn’t even shaken hands with her. He had been embarrassed, she felt, and after a few minutes she had rescued him by taking him upstairs. And now perhaps Annie’s feelings had been hurt.
I shall never live through this, she thought. It is too complicated. She turned on the radio for the first time in ten days. There was a French crooner. Then she lay down on the bed again and just waited for Ian to come. Slowly, very slowly, she felt the vice of tension, which held her, loosen a little. It would be all right if he would just come in and kiss her a great deal and tell her that he loved her.
It was almost an hour later and she was still lying on her bed, entirely given over to sensation, her love prickling at the tips of her fingers and toes and up and down her spine, when the knock came.
“Come on out, Sally!”
“Oh come in,” she said running to the door, and then standing there on the sill, not moving, just waiting. “Oh Ian,” she said from somewhere deep down inside her, in a new grave voice, a little husky.
But he didn’t kiss her. “Glad to see me?” he asked, standing there, smiling into her eyes, as if she were one of any number of people, but not just herself.
Sally nodded. Then he walked in and looked around, went to the windows, looked down at the driveway curving out and up among the trees, and seemed for the moment to have forgotten her.
“Your aunt’s quite devastating, isn’t she?” His back was still turned.
Sally did not like the way he said this, the slightly ironical tone of his voice, as if her aunt were a curiosity like a Sheraton table to be examined dispassionately and granted a passing compliment by a connoisseur. She felt suddenly that her room had been invaded and changed. It was no longer the room where she had lain so warm and flowing a few moments before.
“I suppose she’s what the English call ‘a lovely,’ isn’t she?” Ian turned, quite unconscious apparently of what he was doing. Sally stayed in the doorway. “Every gesture is conscious, and that wonderful Edwardian laugh.”
“Good God, Ian, you sound as if she were ninety.”
Ian sat on the window sill, swinging his legs carelessly, looking down into the garden. “She might as well be. Her kind is pretty well extinct.”
“You’re being mean on purpose. Stop it,” Sally commanded. Ian, amused by her vehemence, stopped swinging his leg and got up. “I’m fascinated, you silly. I’m absolutely fascinated,” he assured her. “Can’t make the uncle out,” he added as if the only thing in the world that could possibly interest him was the Gordons.
“Uncle Charles is a very distinguished man,” Sally said coldly.
“What does he do with himself all day?”
“He’s trying to get the place on its feet—they’ve been away for years. He has to see to the estate, the farm, the woods, all that. He’s very busy, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, it’s an amazing old place, I must say,” Ian granted. “Pretty Chekhovian”—Sally winced remembering that she had once used this very word and with almost his contempt—“pretty dilapidated.”
Sally looked quickly around the room as if to defend it, but she said nothing. With every word Ian said, he was receding. She was afraid of attacking him now. She sat down on the bed, but Ian was already on the move,
“I’d like to see it all—will you take me on a grand tour?”
She remembered now how often he irritated her and then with one sentence like this, some grace in his bearing, the caressing tone of his voice, all the irritation vanished. She had never known why she loved him (she often found him unbearable) but she did. Sitting on the bed, she followed him with her eyes, but did not move. She had reached the end of her tether. She had to know.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
Ian stopped by the bed, looked at her quizzically, lifted her chin and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “People don’t fly three thousand miles for no reason,” he said, but broke away as she let her head fall against him. “Come on, let’s explore!”
Had it always been like this? Sally asked herself miserably, as she explained about the ballroom and showed him the dark narrow stairway down and the one W.C. in the house.
“They call it the Lou,” she said.
“I must remember that.” But had it always been like this? Did it take a while for two people to find each other again? Had he changed? She couldn’t have dreamt those kisses on which she had lived all these weeks. Why couldn’t they talk? Why must she be so wary? For she felt hemmed in, prevented by some inner warning from forcing him into a corner.
Violet and Charles were nowhere to be seen. She and Ian stood in the hall and stared up at the portraits in silence.
“The gentry,” he said, after a moment, ironically.
Then she led him into the unused part of the house, the empty drawing room. The sun was pouring in through the uncurtained high windows. A book lay open on the sofa, and an ashtray filled with cigarette stubs had been left on the floor beside it.
“I’m the only person who ever comes in here,” Sally explained. “So Maire forgets the ashtray. It’s my secret place. Just lately,” she explained.
But Ian had walked right on through and now as he turned the corner he gave a low whistle as if he had met a ghost.
“Oh, that’s the old dining room. Victorian. Gloomy, isn’t it?”
“This house is like Rome,” Ian said, “layers and layers of periods laid on top of each other.” He was excited now. “Where’s all the furniture?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Where was the furniture? She had never thought to ask. Actually she had grown to like its emptiness.
“This room is really splendid, you know,” Ian said, dancing and watching himself dance a slow waltz in the mirror. “But it certainly could do with some paint, paper…” He st
opped and made Sally a low bow.
“It’s not like America,” Sally said, unresponsive. “There just isn’t any money here.”
“It must be depressing,” he said calmly. After all, it was no concern of his, Sally reminded herself.
“No,” she withdrew into the recess of the window, “not if you live here.”
“Why not? I think it’s depressing that the Victorians did have the money.” Ian sat down on the sofa, and somehow she minded his sitting there, lighting a cigarette so casually and flicking the match onto the floor, as if he were backstage somewhere and didn’t care. “That’s what would depress me if I lived here—seeing it go to pieces, living in the past.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Sally said thoughtfully. “But after a while if you live here you don’t see all those things, you forget about them. You just feel part of it. You do what you can, you keep it alive—and that seems important, like Annie downstairs. It’s her whole life. She loves the house. We all do,” Sally ended, but she had not been convincing. She had not found the words. It was hard against Ian’s detachment, to find them.
“Maybe, but there’s no future in it.” Ian sounded so glib that Sally was silenced. What future has a New York skyscraper? she wanted to say. “I thought you weren’t going to like it here,” he added crossly.
Sally caught her breath. Was he jealous of the house, of all this, even of her aunt and uncle? Was that it? She wanted now desperately to get out of this spiral of arguing.
“You haven’t told me anything,” she said, sitting down beside him almost meekly, putting a tentative hand on his sleeve and then, as there was no response, withdrawing it.
“Oh,” he said with a false casualness, “I think I may have a contract with MGM. In fact, it’s pretty well settled, so I’ll be going West in September and that’s why I thought I’d better come over and see you. It may be a while…” He didn’t look at her and pretended not to know what he was saying.
“How long?” Sally felt as if the whole world was blowing away. “Oh Ian—” she said and she meant, please, please look at me.
“It’s the chance of a lifetime, Sally. If I should really get a break—Heavens, there’s nothing I couldn’t do. Come back to New York and choose my own plays…” He turned to her now, brilliant with anticipation, as if all this had no connection with “them,” as if she must share his enthusiasm.
“Oh, how I hate being a woman,” Sally said fiercely.
“I don’t get it.” Ian offered her a cigarette as if it was the only thing he could think of at the moment.
“No thanks.” She sat staring out. “Women have to wait around and see what men will do first. They can never act on their own,” she said bitterly.
“You’ll be at college, won’t you? It isn’t as if…” but he didn’t finish the sentence. They sat there in the big empty room, with the sunlight dazzling their eyes, in a vacuum of feeling. Irritation, tears, love would have to rush in in a moment, Sally felt; anything would be better than this emptiness all around and inside her.
But Ian looked at his watch. “Almost noon. Didn’t your uncle say something about cocktails on the terrace? I’ll go see…”
It was a deliberate evasion, a cruel one, depriving the moment of its climax, of its release. Sally felt madly frustrated. She could hear him talking to Uncle Charles in the hall, the clink of bottles and glasses, the glass door being opened and closed. Men are cowards, she thought. They won’t face things. And then, Why had he come? It was finally a relief to go out on the terrace and to know that she could give up trying for a while. She lay down on the next to bottom step with a pillow under her head, smoking—their voices, like voices in a dream came to her, Violet laughing suddenly at something Charles said, Ian being fearfully polite and careful to say the right thing (faintly and from far away she was amused).
“Isn’t the little mad thing drinking?” Uncle Charles stood above her, shutting out the sky. She closed her eyes and then sat up.
“Of course I am.”
They were making plans for the afternoon. “Tweed,” Ian was saying. He was saying “Irish whiskey.” They were drinking up fast out of nervousness. Suddenly it felt hot. There wasn’t a breath of wind in the radiant still air. Light sprang up at them from everywhere, reflected back even from the stone of the house. There was a sense of being becalmed, of having arrived nowhere in particular but being forced to stay there.
“We’ve heard so little about you.” Violet took out her petit point as if preparing to listen to a long story. “Do tell us something—anything—I feel totally ignorant.”
“He’s going to Hollywood,” Sally said. And because she was feeling a little drunk with anxiety, despair, the sun, the martini, she said, “He’s going to be a movie star. He’ll never come back.”
“It’s a wonderful contract, Mrs. Gordon,” Ian ignored Sally. He was sitting cross-legged on a cushion at Violet’s feet and now swung round, his back to the others as if he were pleading his case, “and of course the whole point is to get back to Broadway. It’ll only be a year or two…”
Violet, who had suspected after one glance at Sally’s attitude of definite withdrawal that things were not going very well, now glanced over at her anxiously. “Two years sounds like an awfully long time,” she said gently.
Sally got up, went over to a chair beside Charles, and sat down. She did not want to hear about all the glorious plans. She deliberately shut her attention off.
“Oh Charles,” she said.
Charles was flattered by the intimacy of this spoken sigh.
“You’re looking very beautiful today, did you know it?” he said rather shyly, not looking at her. What struck Sally was the goodness of this smiling middle-aged man, fumbling for the consoling thing to say as if he were looking for a shiny dime to lay in her hand. For I am a beggar, she thought, yes, I am a beggar. And I have been mean to Charles. It is Violet’s fault, she thought. She should never have told me what she did. She should have let me find out, if it was necessary to find out.
“It’s nice to be told one’s beautiful even if one isn’t—especially if one isn’t. Violet, I should think, would get rather tired of it.”
Charles chuckled. “You might think so, but she never does,” he whispered, feeling rather superior.
“It’s like a reflection. She sees herself through other peoples’ eyes.” Sally had just invented this and she was surprised at its truth, for as she glanced over at Violet and Ian, she saw that this was happening right before her. Violet had become animated, though she sat so quietly listening. It was as if a light had been turned on. Then, as if the two such a short distance away, yet so far, had sensed the weight of eyes upon them, Ian turned in the middle of a sentence and Violet looked up.
“Ian’s been telling me about Texas, about his father…” she said to answer their question.
But, Sally thought, that is not really it. He has been really telling you that you are beautiful and so you are beautiful again. But what, she asked herself, have you been telling him, that is not in the words? For, Ian, she thought, is full of glitter and no woman could resist him when he is like this. It was as if they were alone in the blazing sunlight and she and Charles were forced into shadow by their brilliance. They are the beloved, she thought, and Charles and I are the lovers—yes, even if Charles is unfaithful to her, still…
It was clear to Sally suddenly that Ian and Violet who must always call out the feeling of others, did it not because they needed love as she did so desperately, but because they needed to be given back themselves, an entirely other thing. It was like a new hat or a new necktie that they could wear. She wondered how long they had been sitting there staring, how long the pause had taken before Maire came out to say that lunch was ready. Such enormous things happen in a few seconds. By the way Charles took her arm, she knew that he and she were allies now, that the whole kaleidoscope of relationships had shifted. There was a new pattern forming. And Sally was astonished to realize that
she did not feel so much hurt as curious.
But though the kaleidoscope of feeling was being rather violently shaken up, the rites and forms of life in the house did not alter. Violet had insisted that she must be allowed to do the flowers in peace before they started out on their long drive to town and to the mountains the next morning. And now she was standing before the piles of snapdragons, their heads heavy with rain, before the few tall spires of larkspur she had been able to save, and the careful faces of the zinnias (rain did not crumple them!) spread out on damp newspapers, covering almost the whole of the table in the study. At her feet she threw the withered stalks from the bunch which had stood there gradually disintegrating for the last two days. Sometimes the fugitive nature of this work into which she put so much thought and care depressed Violet. This was one of those days. They fade so fast, she was thinking. But what a rest it was to be arranging these passive stalks and stems, what a refuge from life with people who never would stay put, who developed resentments and jealousies, or began to make demands just when one thought everything was settled. She had not slept very well. Charles had been peculiarly difficult, worrying the whole affair of Ian like a dog with a bone, growling at the bone of Ian, then burying it firmly, only to unbury it again ten minutes later. It was exasperating because she had no answers for Charles’s questions. It was clear that Ian had not come on the tide of love, as they supposed. Why then had he come? What was the point of such a journey? And the queer thing was, she had thought, that here they were, four people thrown together in this house, and yet suddenly no two of us can communicate at all. The evening had seemed interminable. Charles, Ian and Sally played bridge and she did her petit point. The evening had been full of glances and pushes and prods, until they were all four as nervous as porcupines with all their quills on end, though nothing had been said, nothing had happened.