A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  I unfold them. They have a stale, very faintly sulphurous smell. Vera and Eden invariably wrote to my father alone, not to my father and mother. Here, for example, is Vera thanking him for a wedding present, though it was certainly my mother who had chosen and bought and packed the damask tablecloth and the dozen napkins initialled VH. But Vera disapproved of my mother because she was not English and therefore for a long while felt it legitimate to behave as if no such person as her brother's wife existed. Two more letters from India come next, then, of greater significance, the one that announces Vera's intention to remain in England to ‘make a home for’ Eden at Laurel Cottage. Yet it is a mystery why he decided to keep some and discard others until I recall a factor that seems absurd in its arbitrariness today. Vera wrote often, at least once a month, and these letters my father would invariably read aloud to us at the breakfast table, thereby causing my mother intense irritation. The current letter, replaced in its envelope, would be stuck on the mantelpiece for a week, after which, if it was winter, it would be thrown in the fire, if summer, stuffed into a drawer by my mother or crumpled up in my father's pocket. Therefore letters written between May and October tended to be kept and letters written between October and May burnt – it was as simple as that.

  Here, then, is Vera writing in June:

  Dear John, I am very glad you see things as I do and feel that instead of selling the house and dividing the proceeds we should keep it, at least for a while, as a home for Eden. While she is still at school it would be upsetting for her to remove her from Sindon. Of course it has been very hard for her to lose both parents so young. She is wonderfully sensible and old for her age – I am not talking about her school work, though this is quite good enough in my humble opinion – I mean her outlook on life and nice ways and manners. She is delighted that I am going to stay in England and that we shall both live in this house which has always been her home and where she was born…

  The first letter of Eden's that I look at gives me a jolt. I had seen it before (though it had never been read aloud), forgotten it over the years, recalling how long it had stayed rankling in my mind. I had been remiss and I deserved a reprimand, but quite like this? ‘Dear John’, she wrote when she was seventeen and I eleven,

  I have to write and tell you that I think you might teach your child better manners. I have not had a word of thanks from her for the postal order I sent her for her birthday. Surely by the time someone is ten she ought to know it is the right thing to write a thank-you letter. Mother dinned this into me from the time I could hold a pencil and she must have done the same with you. It is not fair on Faith, apart from the rudeness to people who give her presents, to allow her…

  Why had he kept this one? Because at heart he approved of it? Because at heart, as my mother accused him, if he did not hold his sisters in greater affection than his wife and daughter, at any rate he admired them more? Or is it here in this collection only because it came in May when there was no fire burning?

  As I pick up the envelope and put away the letters, Eden's beautiful face appears, arising from a neckline that stands up and curves outwards like an arum lily. She is in her wedding-dress, her huge billowing veil tumbling as if it were made of some less substantial stuff than gauze, like a cascade of foam. She is as she was that morning when Francis held her in his arms and led her to the altar and Chad devoured with his eyes. These are the pictures my father tore from their frames, Vera and Gerald newly married, outside a late Victorian Gothic church with Gilbert Scott steeple, a banyan tree and a dome in the background, Vera and the infant Francis, my father's blood on her hair. And here is the photograph Stewart will surely want for his frontispiece. Eden's bright hair falls in the way the film star Veronica Lake made famous but she has modified the look and her eye is not covered by the fall of hair. Here are shown to advantage the high cheekbones, the ever so slightly aquiline nose, the short upper lip, round chin, well-defined angled jaw, that Eden had in common with Francis so that the two of them looked more like brother and sister than aunt and nephew. She wears a light-coloured dress with a draped crossover neckline and in the vee a pearl necklace. The soulful, not-quite-of-this-world look that was so typically Eden's is in her rather too wide open eyes and the parted lips which the photographer has told her to lick and thus catch a highlight on the fashionable dark coating of lipstick.

  But I hardly suppose it is for me to give permission for the use of this picture. The copyright may belong to Tony – or to the photographer who took it? On the back is the name of a studio in Londonderry and that fits the hairstyle, the probable date, even the remote, mysterious, secretive look in Eden's eyes.

  At the bottom of the pile is a snapshot taken for no purpose one can imagine unless to record how on a certain hot day in a certain summer a crowd of relations gathered together in a particular garden. I am in this picture, my mousy pigtail hanging over one shoulder, wearing the voile dress that was someone's cast-off, standing between Francis and Patricia. Behind us are Eden in what the magazines called a ‘tub frock’, Vera with her hair newly permed, my father and Helen and a bunch of Hubbard cousins. The General must have taken it or Andrew. If he existed, Jamie would have been in the picture, so he was not yet born and the date must be before 1944. I had my hair cut short in 1943. Perhaps it is as early as 1940 and Andrew has not yet gone to fight the Battle of Britain or Eden joined the WRNS.

  I replace the lid on the box and sit there looking at it. I find that I am crying. The tears are running down my face, a curious thing, for it was all so long ago and I had loved none of these people except my father and mother. Oh, and Chad of course, but that was something different.

  When I was young, to be fair-haired was to be beautiful. This statement is a slight exaggeration but broadly it is true. Gentlemen – and ladies and everyone – preferred blondes. Eden was so fair, such a dazzling golden blonde, that she would have been accounted lovely even without the bonus of her features. The first time I went to Great Sindon on my own Vera met me on that station platform at Colchester and, having lightly stung my cheek with her lips, held me at arm's length and pronounced:

  ‘What a pity your hair has got so dark!’

  The tone was accusing, the implication that I had carelessly allowed this darkening process, if not actually helped it along. I said nothing because I could think of no answer, a frequent reaction to remarks of Vera's. I smiled. I tried to seem polite while with a corner of my handkerchief trying to rub off the lipstick I knew Vera's mouth must have deposited on my cheek. Make-up for women in those years was powder on the nose and lipstick on the mouth, bright red lipstick and loose powder from a Coty orange and gold box patterned all over with powder puffs. Vera wouldn't have put head outside her front door without lipstick on.

  ‘I wouldn't have bothered to kiss you,’ she now said, ‘if I' I'd known you were going to make such a fuss about it.’

  I had not been surreptitious enough. I put the handkerchief away and we walked to the bus stop. No one that I knew had a car – well, no one among my family and friends. The parents of one or two girls at school did and there was one father, said to own a company and to be rich, who not only had a car but a white car, a daring departure from convention. I had expected to go to Great Sindon by bus and by bus we went, Vera humping my suitcase along and complaining about its weight.

  ‘I can carry it,’ I said.

  Vera's response was to hang on to the case all the tighter, transferring it from her right hand to her left so that it wasn't between us.

  ‘I don't know why you wanted to bring so many things. You must have brought your entire wardrobe. You're lucky to have so many clothes. Do you know that when Eden goes away, she plans what she's going to need so carefully that she can get it all into a small attaché case.’

  This conversation must have affected me quite deeply, it and other homilies on the subject of suitcases and packing and prudence and preparedness which were delivered in the weeks to come, for even to this day I fee
l guilty if I take too much luggage with me on holiday. But then, for the life of me, I couldn't see how a smaller or less full case would have done. I was to be here indefinitely, autumn was coming and I would need both summer and winter clothes. However, Vera must be right. She was a grown-up and my father's sister, often held up to me along with Eden as examples of what women should be. The size and weight of the suitcase troubled me while we were on the bus and I asked myself why I had brought this or that and what was there I could have left out. Vera's reproach had started me off on the wrong foot, making me feel both feckless and given over to a shameful frivolity.

  It was September 1939. Everyone was afraid of bombs. A few years before I had listened to the wireless with my parents and heard of the bombing of Nanking. It frightened me so much I couldn't go on listening but went away and hid in the downstairs lavatory where that voice couldn't penetrate. But at the start of this war, it was my parents who were afraid, not I. Nothing happened, it was the same as if war had not been declared a fortnight before. There were no plans to evacuate my school which was fourteen miles outside the centre of London. Term had begun and things went on as usual. My father panicked and sent me to Vera. I was nearly eleven; I had taken the examination which would admit me to the Grammar School and passed it, so with that hurdle behind me he probably thought missing a term's schooling would do me no harm.

  The weather was warm, summer still. Vera wore a cotton frock with a turned-down collar and cuffs on the short puff sleeves, a belt of the same white material patterned with mauve and yellow pansies, a fashion which returned without undergoing much change a few years ago. Her hair was the colour of newly cleaned brass, not in the least yellow and not ‘brassy’. It was rather tightly permed and set into deep, narrow waves and small round curls. Down grew on her upper lip, pale as thistleseed and only visible at certain angles, and her arms and bare legs bore a somewhat coarser growth that showed as a fair, gleaming sheen. A complexion so pale that time and the Indian sun had reddened it, especially about the nose. Vera's eyes, like mine and my father's, Eden's and Francis's, were the intense, glowing blue of the Wedgwood Ivanhoe plates Grandmother Longley had collected and which now hung on the dining-room walls at Laurel Cottage.

  The bus took us through that countryside that somehow should be dull, unmemorable, without mountains or hills or rushing streams, moorland or lake or particular vegetation, yet is not dull at all but has its own quiet, deep beauty. The loveliest houses in England are there, churches big as cathedrals, meadows that Constable painted and which then had changed very little since that day, before they pulled the hedges up and made a prairie of the fields.

  Daniel Stewart makes Laurel Cottage sound small and ugly. Perhaps it was. It is almost impossible to be objective about a house one knew when one was young. In our suburb, a long way from the centre of London, we inhabited a house that my father had had built to an architect's design, a ‘suntrap’ startlingly, daringly modern. It was art deco and might have been lifted out of the environs of Los Angeles, a cream-coloured box with a green stripe painted senselessly round it like a ribbon tying up a parcel, windows of curved glass, a flat roof and a front door whose inset panel was a setting sun with rays of orange, yellow and amber stained glass. My father was reacting against the villa on the road to Myland where he was born and the terrace on the ‘wrong’ side of Wanstead Flats where he and my mother lived when first they were married. I was reacting against the suntrap, whose roof leaked because it was not designed for a rainy country and down whose Hollywood walls the water had run in grey rivulets.

  I loved an old house, in such a one I thought I should have liked to live. Laurel Cottage was not, of course, old enough for me. I asked Vera why she thought my grandparents hadn't bought one of the thatched cottages of which there were many. Her reply was no doubt prudent and accurate – the fire insurance was much higher on thatched cottages and the upkeep of ancient houses costly – but it seemed to me unromantic. Each time I had come to this house with my parents, or more often just my father, I had looked up at the earthenware plaque set between the upper bays and reading the date 1862 had wished it older, if only by fifty years.

  Vera was a scrupulous housekeeper. Laurel Cottage had its own smell, a mingling I suppose of various soaps and polishes, the same smell in Vera's as in my grandmother's day. House smells must be passed on through the female line, for when Eden came to have a home of her own, hers smelt just the same, though ours never did. My mother was rather slapdash, pooh-poohing an excessive attention to cleaning as unintelligent. But I liked the clean, fresh scent of Vera's house, the windows whose panes were never spotted, the waxed floors, the shining, unmarked surfaces, and the flowered chintz curtains I remember as always fluttering faintly in the breeze.

  Francis had gone back to school. Eden, who was still at her day school and in the sixth form, would be home at four-thirty. An enormous spread of tea had been prepared in my honour. There was as yet no shortage of food and I was never to see in that house a lack of the kind of constituents that go to make cakes and pies and biscuits. Vera had no refrigerator. Few people did in 1939. Her Victoria sponge and gingerbread, lemon-curd tarts, Banbury cakes, drop scones and almond slices were on the kitchen table covered with clean, ironed teacloths to keep off the flies. Vera stayed always thin as a rail, though eating her fair share of that rich, sweet stuff. As we carried the cakes in, arranging them on the dining-table, laying the plates on a cloth embroidered by Eden in lazy-daisy and stem stitch, Vera (having adjured me not to drop anything, she hoped I wasn't a ‘butterfingers’) apologized for the poor quality of the tea and the lack of variety.

  ‘I expect your mother would have an iced cake as well. Grandma used to insist on two big cakes always and at least two kinds of biscuits.’

  I assured her that my mother would have provided no such thing. Tea would probably have been sandwiches and digestives or custard creams.

  ‘Shop-bought biscuits?’ Vera said, both shocked and pleased.

  In my innocence I told her I didn't know any other kind existed. The effect on her was electric. Vera, even then, used to become disproportionately excited over trivial things. The point was that to her they were not trivial.

  ‘What, and you've had tea in this house a dozen times to my knowledge! You didn't know the biscuits were home-made? My goodness, but Grandma would turn in her grave! I can see we were wasting our time making biscuits for you. Might as well have gone down to the grocer's and bought any old packet of Maries. I wonder what Eden would say to that. I don't suppose she's tasted a shop-bought biscuit in all her life. Well, I hope our humble, home-made stuff will suit you, I'm sure I do. We're not up to these sophisticated London ways and I can't see us changing now.’

  It was a way she had of stunning me. I was silenced by it and made to feel guilty while obscurely knowing the onslaught was unfair. The technique was to seize upon an innocent remark of mine, attribute to me certain sentiments which might derive from it (though I had not felt or uttered them) and then castigate me for the expressions she had put into my mouth. She would do the same, or attempt to do the same, with Francis, but he was having none of it and would give her back as good as or better than he got. But when I was a child, I knew no way of handling it but to accept and be silent. And Vera, of course, desired no reply. She expected and wanted no defence. She was simply giving vent to the strong feelings she had about many things and looking for a peg to hang her violent expressions and beliefs on. Deeply conservative, she harked back to the old ways and customs and no doubt she truly believed that to buy a packet of biscuits was to set foot on the slippery slope to decadence. Only Eden was immune from these attacks. But Eden was immune from every violent, unreasonable assault of Vera's. When she had made this one on me, repeating herself a good many times, and embroidering on her theme, she was satisfied. I said nothing but went on helping to lay the table. But I think I was scarcely there for her as a person at that point. That her victim's feelings might be hurt, that
one might have a sense of injury or outrage at being told that one's mother was hardly doing one a kindness by encouraging such tastes, that one was wrong to inflict one's refined London palate on country cousins and that one's ideas had better undergo some sharp revisions, never occurred to her.

  The table laid, the teacloths once more shrouding all the plates, Vera's manner changed again and became kindly and interested. I was congratulated on my scholarship results, complimented on the whiteness of my teeth, the colour of my eyes (the Longley blue which I could in no way have been accounted responsible for, any more than I could for my mother's purchase of biscuits), and the fact that I had no spots on my face. I must come to the window with her and watch out for Eden. Eden would get off the bus in the village street and we should see her when she turned the corner. Great Sindon is a pretty village, was prettier then before there were new buildings, traffic signs, cars parked all along the roads. It was sleepy and quiet. You could not believe there was a war on and, of course, there scarcely was yet. Someone came down the hill on horseback, strolling down if a horse can stroll. The swallows were gathering on the electric wires. I knelt on the window seat, Vera behind me craning her neck.

  I was conscious of the tension that emanated from her body. It was as if her body could not contain so much, such compression, such screwing up, so that the stress overflowed into the air around her. Can I really remember that? Probably I am projecting what certainly later I knew and felt on to that time. But it is true that always with Vera there could be no relaxing, of herself or those with her because they were with her. Eden came round the corner suddenly – how could it be otherwise, how but suddenly? – and Vera cried out:

  ‘There she is!’

  My arm was not actually lifted by Vera to be waved but it would have been if I had been three or four years younger. I was merely told to wave at Eden and I obliged, though feeling that a smile alone would have come more naturally to me. I got down from the window seat and prepared to meet her.