A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

by Margaret Drabble

  I became obsessed by Burgo Elliot. Had I dreamed him up? Even his name seemed false. Burgo – surely a name for a novel, not for real life. A name for a rogue and a villain?

  Let me make this plain. Until I went to Kellynch I had no interest in what is called family. My own family – well, I have said they were lower middle class, but by the time I was born they were middle middle class. My father worked for an insurance company in Newcastle, my mother was a schoolteacher. He reads Trollope, she reads Jane Austen. They are sensible, hard-working people, but they have no connections and are proud of it. Nevertheless, my mother can never resist a temptation to tell the story of her meeting with the Duchess of Northumberland. It is a pointless story but she will tell it. My ex-husband, with more reason but as little excuse, likes to let it be known that his maternal grandmother was a Dalrymple. He reveals this fact in order to mock it. But nevertheless he reveals it. And am I not now letting you know that I married into the Dalrymples?

  The Elliots and the Bridgewaters were much more interesting to me than the Dalrymples. How could I find out more about Burgo? I was too ashamed of my curiosity to ask anybody, and it was a happy moment when I remembered the books in my own back parlour. They were a deeply unattractive assortment of old bound volumes of Blackwoods and Punch and the Spectator, redolent of Sunday afternoons of ancient boredom, foxed and mildewed and spotted with birdlime – jackdaws often came down the chimneys and one of my occupations was to chase them away. I had never thought of browsing in this dull library, but now was its moment – and yes, indeed, there was exactly what I was looking for. There was the Baronetage, a heavy purplish folio volume with gold lettering on the spine.

  I lugged it onto the kitchen table. I was not the first to consult it. The pages fell open, as I might have predicted, upon the Elliots of Kellynch Hall. It was clear that the entry had been much perused. There were two whole pages of Elliot this and that, but I could soon see that they were only of historical interest, for the last entry, added to the Gothic print in fine copperplate hand, read ‘Heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq., great grandson of the second Sir Walter.’ We were back in 1810. This was no use to me. I needed something more modern.

  I dug around, and at length found a 1952 volume of Burke’s Peerage, which also fell open upon Elliots. And here they were, my very own Elliots. There was Sir Thomas, there was his son and heir William Francis Elliot and his daughter Henrietta. I read the names again and again, hoping to wrest some occult significance from the very words. There was no mention of Burgo Bridgewater Elliot. I could not find him anywhere. I needed a sequel, published after Sir Thomas’s death.

  In the morning I rang an old friend who I thought might help, and to whom I did not mind revealing my interest. He is himself a baronet, though he does not like this to be mentioned as he is also an actor and he hopes (so far in vain) not to be typecast. He was currently appearing in Lady Windermere’s Fan. James seemed pleased to hear from me and delighted by the nature of my query. The Shropshire Elliots, I wanted? Well, first of all I must forget about the Shropshire bit. People do not come from where they say they come from. Does the Duke of Devonshire live in Devonshire, the Norfolks in Norfolk, the Bristols in Bristol? Certainly not. Now I am James Winch of Filleigh, he said, but I don’t even know where Filleigh is, I think it is the home of some cricket team where grandfather once got a hat trick while touring with the Myrmidons …

  I checked his flow and asked him to look up the Shropshire Elliots, to see if they had any money left. ‘Why, thinking of marrying one, darling?’ he said, and went off to consult his reference library. He came back in triumph, I knew he would have the right books. People like that always do, however much they dissimulate.

  Yes, he said, here were the Elliots of Kellynch. William Francis, m. Penelope Hargreaves, 2 d., marriage dissolved 1978. And the heir was kinsman Burgo Bridgewater Elliot, of the Shropshire branch. He looked up Burgo, and told me that he was a company director of Felsham Metal Frame Windows. A very good prospect, said James. I should marry him if I were you, and not that other fellow. Or would you like to marry me and take a turn as Lady Filleigh?

  I thanked him for his gallant proposal and rang off. I was shaking slightly and almost poured myself a vodka. I was shocked by my own curiosity. I could not shock you more than I shock myself.

  Burgo reappeared in the spring. I had wintered in London, avoiding the dark nights and obliging my agent by doing some work. But in March I was back at the Dower House with the primroses, to find a postcard from Bill that had been waiting for me for weeks upon the red tiles. Rain had flowed over it, intruding cats had stepped inkily upon it, and its message was hardly decipherable, but I think it said ‘With love to my fair tenant. Have you yet heard the nightingales?’

  On my first evening the phone rang. It was Burgo. This was not much of a coincidence, it seemed, as he said he had been ringing me all winter. Where had I been? In London, I said. Ah, so have I, he said. But now he was in Somerset. Could he call and take me out to dinner at the Castle Hotel in Taunton?

  And so it was that Burgo Bridgewater Elliot reopened negotiations. And, over his subsequent campaign, I remained as much in the dark as ever about his nature and his intentions. Never have I known so opaque an admirer. Never did he touch me, save in the way of courtesy – a hand at greeting, a hand to help me into the car or over a stile or to disentangle me from a bramble. Yet he was in his way translucent. He was worn thin with a lonely pain. One felt one could see through him and beyond. Like one of those elegant thoroughbred dogs that appear to have no space for normal bodily organs, he seemed to have nowhere within him to live a natural animal or emotional life. He was all stretched tenuous surface. Bill, in comparison, had been a solid man.

  Perhaps, I sometimes thought, it was the place that Burgo came to see. It had cast its spell upon him, as it had upon me.

  Was I falling in love with Burgo? I could not tell. I had nobody else to love, and at this moment in the history of my heart a second attachment, and to so eligible a gentleman, might have seemed a natural sequel to a somewhat unfortunate first choice. (Not that I entirely regret the cad. He had his points.) Did I want to fall in love with Burgo? Again, I could not tell.

  It was impossible to reject his attentions. My vanity would not have permitted it. He was the perfect escort, who increased my consequence in my own eyes even when there were no others to watch, and he escorted me gallantly through all weathers. I dragged him up hill and down dale that spring, that summer, curious to see how far I could lead him. One day I decided to take him to Lyme.

  I wanted to look for fossils. Bill had sent me a postcard of a dinosaur’s egg from the Rockies, and I determined to try to find some small dull long dead creature of my own to add to the Elliot collection. I informed Burgo of my plans, and we fixed a date for our excursion. I had bought a little hammer, and I told Burgo to bring his boots. I was becoming imperious with him, but he seemed to like it.

  The weather did not look promising, and we wondered whether to cancel our trip, but out of stubbornness I would not. Burgo did not disobey. It rained as we set off. I insisted on going in my car. I said it would clear but it did not. We drove along twisting lanes, the windscreen wipers working, the windows misting, and on the high ground as we moved into Dorset there was fog and I had to put on the headlights. Burgo sat there without a murmur of complaint. What was he thinking of my folly and my obstinacy? I spoke to him of the Black Ven Marls and the Blue Lias and the Green Ammonite Beds. I could not even tell if he was listening. I did not know what I was talking about. I wondered if he knew I did not know. Maybe, with Bill, he had searched those beaches as a child, had been there many times before. Why was he so docile towards me?

  Lyme is a steep little town, not friendly to the motor car. Various signs ushered us towards parking places, and we ended up at the bottom, down by the Cobb. The rain had settled into a steady downpour, but despite this there were a few bedraggled persistent holidaymakers huddl
ing their way along the streets. There was a smell of vinegar, fish, harsh false sugar and fried onions. There was even a pair of lovers embracing on the end of the Cobb. There is always a pair of lovers embracing upon the end of the Cobb. I made poor Burgo march along the Cobb, and we stood there and looked at the boiling water beneath us dashing against the rocks. It was very slippery underfoot. My trousers were soaked. Burgo, still looking every inch the gentleman, was wet through.

  Even then I would not relent. I dragged the poor man off to the fossil cliffs – and you can guess the rest. We survived the Cobb, but the Black Venn Marls got us.

  It was my fault. I was a bloody fool. But Burgo by this time was not behaving very sensibly either. There is something dementing about that landscape. The dark raw caked sliced earth, the ribbed ledges, the steaming fissures, the stunted trees sticking out of recent landslips, the dreary trickling of small black waterfalls, the dreary pounding of wave after wave upon the wet curve of the beach – I had never seen anywhere so desolate. As we walked along the beach, a great chunk of cliff the size of a packing case dislodged itself and fell with a mournful thud behind us. We should have turned back, but we went on. We both went on.

  It was Burgo that saw the devil’s toenail. His eyes are sharper than mine. He should never have pointed it out to me, but I should never have scrambled after it. I had not realized the black stuff was so friable. In short, just as I grabbed hold of the fossil, I slipped, and in slipping I dislodged a small avalanche, and thus it was that I did whatever I did to my leg.

  I could not believe it. I am tough as well as stubborn. But I could not walk. There was nobody else in sight. Burgo would have to carry me back. I was covered in black mud, I was in pain, and I thought the tide was coming in. It was not a good surface for walking on at the best of times, and with the burden of a muddy lady Burgo must have found it agonizing. I kept apologizing. And still Burgo did not lose his temper.

  I ended up in Weymouth General Hospital with my leg in traction. I was there for two and a half weeks. I had plenty of time to think. At the end of the first week Burgo asked me to marry him. I asked him why. He said it seemed to have been intended, and who were we to struggle against our destiny? If we found we didn’t like it, he said, we could always get divorced. I was bold enough to ask him why he hadn’t got married before, and he said that the black blood of the Bridge-waters had made it seem unwise, but maybe I wouldn’t mind taking the risk? I seemed quite robust, he added.

  I was quite pleased with myself, as you can imagine. Everything was going according to plan.

  I told Burgo I needed time to make up my mind. He was far too much of a gentleman to retract his offer, I thought. I still did not know whether he wanted to marry me, thought he wanted to marry me, thought he ought to marry me, thought I wanted to marry him, or was in such despair that he didn’t much care what happened. Or maybe he was up to some other game altogether?

  My game by now is, I imagine, quite clear. I want the Dower House. I want it more than I have ever wanted anything. As I sit here, flying over the Rockies on my way to negotiate with Bill Elliot, I feel faint with desire at the thought of it. It is in my reach. Burgo says he will buy it for me, if Bill will let us have it. We shall see. If Bill won’t let me have it, maybe I will marry Bill instead of Burgo. I feel such a sense of my own power as I sit here above the clouds. I can move mountains. A very small south coast avalanche was enough to bring Burgo to his knees. The Rockies look more formidable, but I cannot believe that they or Bill Elliot are impervious to my intentions. Bill has been waiting for me for eight long years. He will have something to say, surely, when we meet on the shores of Lake Louise.

  Love of person, love of property. It is not as simple as that. What if I were to substitute the romantic word place for that cold Augustan word property? Would you then think so harshly of me? For the Dower House is worthless, as property. It is its own history. It is Bill and Burgo and Henrietta eating rabbit in the garden. It is the hawk and the Chicken-of-the-Woods and the red rain. It is the dead jackdaw in the bookcase, it is the avenue of oaks, it is the smiling woman with her primroses. She approves of my determination. So, too, incidentally, does Henrietta – she and Binkie and I get on very well. She thinks I should probably marry Burgo, but on the other hand she thinks it is time Bill came home, and I should try to get him back to the old country if I can.

  I do not know what will happen. Emma Watson’s story had no ending. Who knows what awaits me, down there on earth?

  (1993)

  12

  The Caves of God

  Biography, as the philosopher said, has added a new terror to death. It was in the spring of 1985 that Hannah Elsevir recognized that this aphorism, with which she had long been acquainted, might have an application to herself. The occasion of her fear was the posthumous publication of the diary of the father of an old friend of her ex-husband. Lord Reader had been a semi-eminent politician, on the periphery of public life for decades, but it was not the gossip about Cabinet and colleagues that alarmed Hannah Elsevir. It was his off-hand remarks about his son and her ex-husband.

  This was the first: ‘Giles has invited Peter Elsevir for the weekend. What a pretentious little prat. The boys talked of nothing but Burroughs and buggery. Is this the reward for an expensive education?’ And again, three years later, a quick flip through the index revealed: ‘Giles seems to have scraped a degree, God knows how, and so has that bit of bad news Elsevir’, followed by ‘Giles married today; speech by Elsevir as best man pretty offensive but not I suppose actionable.’ Hannah Elsevir felt a hot chill prickle through her wrists and neck as she surreptitiously read these words in Waterstone’s, and began to dread that everybody in the bookshop would turn to stare at her. How much more of this was there? The index offered several more references: how damning would they be?

  She felt obliged to purchase the book, although it was not the kind of work she would wish to be seen reading, and she carried it off concealed in a plastic bag to the privacy of her own home by the canal. There she waited until seven o’clock, poured herself a stiff gin and tonic and addressed the volume. Her alarm was justified. The footnotes were ominous. Their precocious and summary dismissal of the undead Peter Elsevir was calculated to give pain: ‘Elsevir, Peter, b. 1941, educated Borrowburn and Gladwyn College, Oxford. Achieved a brief notoriety in the 1970s with his organized “happenings” at the Boxed Garden in Fulham. Married in 1968 to the geneticist Hannah (Blow) Elsevir, divorced 1976. Now lives in California.’

  Hannah stared at this brief life with dismay. At least there was no qv attached to her name; that was a mercy. But the implications of these few lines were unpleasant. She had not seen Peter for years, and had herself remarried and once more separated since their divorce. She felt no ill will towards Peter, or so she at first bravely told herself, and was not wholly surprised to see his name bob up. But if it bobbed up here, so tangentially, so insignificantly, where else might it appear? And what else from her past might emerge to claim her? Even now a network of letters and diaries and biographies was closing in upon her. Peter himself had seemed a long-forgotten threat, safely exported to another country; his own memories were surely lost in the amnesia of alcohol, but other recorders were nearer, more alert, more coherent. She must watch out.

  She finished her drink and poured herself another. Then she sat down to think. She found herself obliged to confront the uncomfortable knowledge that it was possible, indeed likely, that one day somebody would want to write about her life. She would not be allowed to rest in the decent obscurity of a footnote. There were people out there (she gazed, nervously, across the black dimpled water at the lighted houses opposite) who would spy on her. This prospect she found both implausible and unpleasant, but she knew she had to face it. What had seemed like a natural modesty had persuaded her, since her rackety years with the drunken Peter, to lead a discreet, an almost hidden, existence, but her work had necessarily brought with it a certain kind of fame. One cannot
win a Nobel Prize and remain utterly unknown. Particularly if one is a woman. Not many women have won a Nobel. Biographies of female achievers are hot properties.

  Women and fame have a peculiar relationship. Women believe themselves undervalued and ignored and powerless, and indeed most of them are, but a consequence of this, reflected Hannah, is that those who achieve eminence are more visible than men of the same rank, and are subjected to a more prurient curiosity. Hannah’s first husband, Peter, whose all too memorable and elegant name she had so unfortunately if understandably adopted in her career, had been a self-publicist of the most blatant sort, unhappy unless his name was in print and on lips. Hannah had reacted against this cheap glitter and had lived a life of quiet industry and secret sex. Her second husband she had suppressed from her curriculum vitae; he had been a mistake made on the rebound. But even he, unknown though he was, had connections. Even he could be used against her. He too had stories to tell.

  Hannah Elsevir had received her Nobel with discreet dignity. She had been photographed and interviewed, and had even appeared on television, but she had given little away. She had been a disappointment to journalists, who had been hoping for something a little more sensational from the woman who had discovered what they dubbed ‘the Vanity Gene’. Surely the scientist who had added so much to our understanding of peacocks and paradise birds, of gender and display, ought to be willing to display herself a little more? But Hannah, quiet brown peahen, had kept her feathers well tucked in.