Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.
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Contents
Edith Olivier
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Edith Olivier
Love Child
Edith Olivier (1872–1948) was born in the Rectory at Wilton, Wiltshire, in the late 1870s. Her father was Rector there and later Canon of Salisbury. She came from an old Huguenot family which had been living in England for several generations, and was one of a family of ten children. She was educated at home until she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her first novel, The Love Child, was published in 1927 and there followed four works of fiction: As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s (1928), The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf’s Blood (1930) and The Seraphim Room (1932). Her works of non-fiction were The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934), Mary Magdalen (1934), Country Moods and Tenses (1941), Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (1945), Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1945), her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (1938) and, posthumously published, Wiltshire (1951).
Chapter One
Agatha Bodenham had unconsciously moved a pace or two from the others, and she stood, isolated, near the head of her mother’s grave while the clergyman finished the service. She was wearing a dress of the shape, and the tone of black which her dressmaker thought suitable for mourning orders, and her hat was quite without character. She did not cry, though her veil fluttered a little, as if her breath came uncertainly, and it was wet where a sudden gasp had drawn it into her mouth. Her face was expressionless—with a lack of expression so complete as to suggest more surely than the most speaking countenance an utter and irremediable loneliness—a loneliness that could not be broken, because it meant that she simply hadn’t got the power of getting into touch with her fellow-creatures. Perhaps Agatha felt nothing. Certainly she could never tell what she felt, nor ask and receive sympathy.
Cousin Louisa was a kind woman. She watched Agatha standing there, and she felt it was impossible to go back to London that afternoon with the various other distant relatives with whom she had travelled down to attend Mrs. Bodenham’s funeral. That forlorn figure appealed to her.
So when they were back at the house, she came to Agatha and said:
“I want you to let me stay with you for a night or two, dear. We can’t leave you quite alone.”
Agatha was faintly surprised, and mostly because Cousin Louisa called her “dear.” She had only seen her once before, and that was a long time ago.
But her face, which had expressed no grief, now expressed neither surprise, pleasure, nor annoyance. She concluded that this was what happened at funerals, and she ordered a bedroom to be prepared.
Cousin Louisa stayed two days—two strange, unnatural, gloomy days, and she felt it was no use staying longer.
She knew there was much to be done: Mrs. Bodenham’s clothes and personal belongings to be sorted and disposed of; business papers to be dealt with; letters to be answered. But Agatha began none of these things. It seemed to be unfitting to do any of them in the presence of a stranger, and she refused all of her cousin’s offers of help.
Cousin Louisa’s presence did not make her less desolate: it merely added to her desolation a sense of discomfort. She was not used to having guests, and she did not know how to cope with them; nor did she know whether the servants were annoyed at her having one in the house. The two women sat awkwardly together, searching for things to say; they took short walks together—objectless walks on roads leading nowhere in particular: they parted at night with relief, after sitting face to face for an hour after dinner, furtively watching the hands of the clock moving minute by minute towards the bedtime hour of ten; and when they finally parted for good, each breathed more freely.
Yet as Agatha sat in the drawing-room that evening after dinner, she realized that though she was glad to be without Cousin Louisa, she did feel terribly lonely. It was her first night alone.
Strange that she should feel it so, for she had always been solitary—a solitary child, a solitary girl, and now, at thirty-two, a still more solitary woman.
She and her mother were women of peculiarly reserved natures, finding it hard to make friends, and holding their country neighbours at a distance. So reserved, too, that they had been barely intimate with each other, living through their days side by side without real mingling of experiences or sharing of confidences. Indeed, they had neither experiences nor confidences to share.
The truth was that the Bodenhams were dull. The neighbours found them so, and by degrees people had come less and less to the house; and they found each other so, although perhaps unconsciously. Yet even a dull woman can be lonely, and this was what Agatha felt as she sat by the fire that night.
Now that Cousin Louisa had gone, the house seemed very empty. She missed the sound of Mrs. Bodenham’s footsteps, the clatter of her knife and fork at dinner, and the click of her knitting needles in the evening.
She was always slow to formulate her thoughts, which generally slid shapelessly about in the background of her mind, never expecting to find themselves clothed in words. Now, sitting among the half-tones of her musings, Agatha slowly became aware that once before she had felt this same sense of loneliness. Her life, which seemed never to have had anything in it, had yet already, at some time or another, been emptied as it was to-day, and emptied of companionship. She dumbly searched the past.
A name shot across her consciousness, like something suddenly alive——
Clarissa!
Yes: it was Clarissa—forgotten for many years, and now coming back to mind as a memory, not of a possession, but of a loss.
It was so very long ago, and had been nothing but a childish fancy.
Like many other only children, when Agatha was a little girl she had created for herself an imaginary companion, who shared everything with her. Clarissa had been as real as a brother or sister of flesh and blood—and far more amenable—and because of her Agatha had never felt her childhood to be a lonely one. But when she was fourteen years old, her governess had found out about Clarissa, and the caustic drops of Miss Marks’ common sense fell like a weed killer upon the one blossom of Agatha’s imagination. Clarissa wilted—perished: or rather she was put away out of sight, like other outgrown toys, on the top shelf of the nursery cupboard, “too good” to be given away to the children of the poor.
And now, after eighteen years, Agatha felt once more the same desolation. She felt more moved than she had been at her mother’s funeral. There arose in her a spirit of rebellion, a sense of injustice. How dared Miss Marks play the part of a Moloch, and demand from her the sacrifice of her own child? For Clarissa had been alive—more alive to Agatha than any of the real people who had moved about, around her. The creation of Clarissa was the fruit of the one active movement of Agatha’s mind. Clarissa had taken shape. She had possessed not only a name, but a personality o
f her own. She had responded to Agatha’s cry for companionship with what had seemed to be a real living voice, and when she had been shamefacedly huddled away, to escape from the satire of Miss Marks, Agatha’s mind had become misty and vague, and had grown more so year by year. And as the old memory came back, it seemed to Agatha that in losing Clarissa, she had not only lost a real playmate, but she had also lost the only being who had ever awoken her own personality, and made it responsive—she had lost something without which she had grown as futile as a racket idly striking the air, against no ball.
“I talked to Clarissa,” she said to herself, “and I have never really talked to anyone else. She made me think of things to say, and know how to say them. She woke me up; and Miss Marks stopped all that when she wouldn’t allow me to “talk to myself” as she called it. But I really did say things to Clarissa—things that I wanted to say. I knew she understood.”
Agatha sat forward in her chair. There was colour in her cheeks. She almost looked animated, amused. Why should she not play with Clarissa again? There was no one now to forbid her talking to herself.
She tried to recapture the old trick. It eluded her. She had lost it. She couldn’t the least remember how it was done; and yet it was there, on the threshold of her mind, on the doorstep, so real, and yet just out of reach. She tried to speak to Clarissa, but she couldn’t think what to say, or how to say it. No words would come—only the name Clarissa—a little thin streak of moving light that trembled in her dumb darkness. And when she said even the one word “Clarissa” aloud, the sound of her own voice broke the spell woven by her silent thoughts, and shattered the image she was catching at.
Yet she knew that Clarissa could only live—had only lived—in her own power of talking with her.
She got up and walked about, saying the name over and over again, first of all in a whisper, then a little louder, and then louder again. She tried to remind herself of the games she had played with Clarissa.… “ Do you remember this? … Have you forgotten that? … What fun we had in the garden on my birthday! … And O, Clarissa, how naughty you were when you wouldn’t go to church on Easter Sunday!”
Muttering, she began to feel as if it were beginning to come back. She remembered little turns in the game, little secrets she had shared with Clarissa. She heard herself laugh—naturally, clearly, almost loudly.
“Clarissa!” she said again.
The door opened. Helen, the parlour-maid, came into the room carrying the bedroom candlestick—one solitary candlestick now. The sight of it ought to have brought home to Agatha the fact of her own loneliness; it would have done so an hour ago. But now, instead, she only realized that Helen must have heard her talking to herself.
She walked to the window, drew back the curtain, and stared out into the night. She could see nothing at all, but she didn’t want to see anything.
Helen looked at her back with respectful sympathy. Miss Bodenham was acting just as she should. She had been interrupted in a paroxysm of sorrow, which she was trying to conceal by averting her face.
“Try and go on to bed, Miss,” she said. “ I know what you must be feeling, but you mustn’t give way. Time will cure. Shall I make you a nice cup of tea?”
“Thank you, Helen,” Agatha answered in a dull, empty voice, and without turning round. “Yes, I will go upstairs, and it would be nice to have a cup of tea in bed. Very kind of you.”
Tears were in her eyes, and her voice broke in its deadness. Helen had spoilt everything. Clarissa had been coming back to life, and so had she herself; but now a door had shut heavily, and she was back again in the half life she had lived for so long, where all voices were muffled, and where no one ever got through to another.
She went upstairs to bed, feeling as if she had caught at a dancing flame, only to find that it had no substance, but had left a burn behind.
Chapter Two
Clarissa came back in the night.
She moved through Agatha’s dreams with all her old individuality, and Agatha dreamt that she was playing with her just as she had done when she was ten years old. But in the morning the mood had passed, and she didn’t even want to recall it. Clarissa had the absurdity which often belongs to the remembered dreams that have seemed the most natural when one was asleep. And she would not admit to herself that she had begun trying to play with Clarissa before she even went to bed at all: that memory made her think she must have been a little mad.
She was busy. Now that Cousin Louisa had left her, she set to work on the business which had been awaiting her: she wrote to her lawyer about Probate; she answered letters of condolence; she sorted bundles of Mrs. Bodenham’s papers.
Agatha did all this with a kind of second-rate efficiency, uninspired. She seemed to be living in a world of shadows from which had vanished the figures which had thrown those blurred but still moving reflections: in a world of echoes, too faint and remote to convey any of the meaning once expressed by the voices which had called them out of silence, in a world of dying scents, dimly suggesting some memory of a past once alive. But when she tried to connect the vanished presence, the silenced voice, the dying memory, with the figure of her mother, as she thought she ought to do, it seemed to her that Mrs. Bodenham had always been as far away as she was to-day. Hers was not the living personality she missed.
It was last night. It was Clarissa.
She felt guilty and ashamed, and she buried herself among dusty papers. Clarissa receded, and Agatha felt herself again becoming the Miss Bodenham her maids expected her to be.
She worked steadily for several hours. She ate her meals when they came. She walked in the garden to benefit her digestion.
Her life seemed coated with dust like the papers she handled—the dust of years. It had lain there always, certainly ever since the days of Miss Marks; but now she saw it suddenly, for the first time, lying there thick and grey, giving a dreary sameness to all that it lay upon. It was as if a shaft of light had shot into a darkened room, revealing a cloud of motes, and she knew that Clarissa’s name was the ray which had struck across her dusty life.
But Agatha did not again yield to the temptation of talking aloud to Clarissa, indeed, she did not feel it all that day. Life among dusty papers was far more normal.
Nevertheless, she found herself looking forward to bedtime as if something wonderful was going to happen, something which she did not even try to define to herself, for her mind was back in its usual condition, vague and confused. Yet behind all her occupations, her walk and her dinner, a little glow-worm glimmered on her horizon: she did not think about it, but she knew it was there.
And then in the night, as she lay in that half-sleeping state when the spirit wakes because the mind is weary, when impossibilities seem possible, and when dreams come true—then, all of a sudden, she found that she was playing with Clarissa, quite simply and naturally. She had forgotten what fun it was till she did it again, and did it quite easily too, without any of that painful searching and groping about which had teased and distressed her the evening before.
Clarissa hadn’t grown a day older, and Agatha found that she could play with her with all the zest and spirit of her own childhood, and yet there was something added. Between her and Clarissa there stood the memory of eighteen middle-aged years, for she knew she had never been young since she lost Clarissa. She felt as if she was playing with a baby, and she knew that the baby was her own.
But in the morning it had all gone, and again she thought it absurd, or she told herself that she thought so. Really she knew that she was only seeking for some way of satisfying herself that it was not absurd at all, but was only natural and normal that now she was alone she should go back in memory to the days of her childhood.
So the next week or two passed. Agatha worked steadily all day, and all night she played with Clarissa. She ceased, in her own mind, to be ashamed of it. She justified it to her common sense by considering that, as other women found their recreation in Society, or in novel reading, o
r in gossip, so she, who had never been amused by these things, found hers in this creation of her own imagination. But Agatha was glad she was alone in the house; she knew that her explanation would not have satisfied Miss Marks, or Mrs. Bodenham, or even Cousin Louisa.
For by degrees Clarissa became a part of the day, too. Agatha had got completely back into the trick, and just as in the old days, it was again the natural thing to accompany all her doings by an undercurrent of talk with Clarissa. They shared everything together.
Walking in the garden one day, picking a flower now and then and carrying on an intermittent conversation with Clarissa, who insisted on running on to the flower beds and dirtying her red shoes, Agatha was suddenly startled by hearing a little footstep quite close behind her, literally on her heels. She turned round quickly. No one was there. She realized that she had so vividly imagined the little figure leaping around her, that her ear had taken part in the play. And then the garden, all at once, seemed full of little footsteps, and Agatha could hardly believe that it was mere fancy which discovered the print of a tiny foot here and there among the loose soil. But that, of course, was the kind of thing which anyone might imagine anywhere. Still, Agatha again had a frightened suspicion that she was going mad. She pushed the thought away, assuring herself that she was well and sanely aware that Clarissa was only a game: she was in no way an obsession.
Those walks in the garden were the times when Clarissa was most real. Little movements which might have been the scuffling of a squirrel in the branches overhead, or the pit-pat of a bird’s hopping feet, or even the stir of a worm in the earth—all these became sound which might well be Clarissa. She ran lightly about the garden; her starched summer dress crackled; she rustled through the bushes; she broke off twigs from the shrubs. Agatha found herself constantly looking sharply round, thinking there was someone behind her.
Love Child Page 1