A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Francis,’ I said. ‘It would be something Francis had done.’

  ‘I suppose so. He wasn't home much in the summer holidays. He was away nearly all the time.’

  In Eden's bedroom that night I noticed signs of her recent occupancy. She had been home on leave. The contents of the dressing-table drawers had changed. One had been cleared of cosmetics and filled instead with fine silk underwear, slips and french knickers, mostly in apricot, oyster, powder blue, silk stockings in envelopes of thin paper. In another, along with the Tokalon Biocel Skinfood and the mercolized wax was a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume. I had seen pictures of this perfume before but never the thing itself. I gazed at it, tried it out on my wrist, sniffed it – rather like some poor primitive, I suppose, in possession for the first time of an ichor of civilization.

  That was the last time I ever looked into any private caches of Eden's. I was fifteen, after all, and my conscience now troubled me too insistently to be ignored. I closed the drawers and, lying in bed in the icy room – no one heated bedrooms in 1943 – contemplated the Madonna-like photograph of Eden that Vera had given us, wondering if I would ever attain to such beauty and hoping desperately it might be so.

  We were to return home after lunch next day. Where was Francis? Vera said she didn't expect him till teatime. I thought it rather odd to come home for your half-term on a Sunday afternoon. Why not the Friday? Francis's disappearances were always mystifying.

  My father seemed pleased when Chad Hamner turned up on Sunday morning. He was young still, my father, not yet thirty-eight, very young to be my father, but he was as old-fashioned in his ideas and ideals as a sixty-year-old. His life had been sheltered and narrow, he had been strictly and carefully brought up, and he had married at twenty-one. Nothing Eden had said on that visit to us had affected his belief – planted there originally by me – that Chad was Eden's accredited suitor. In his personal Utopia, women, especially his sisters and his daughter, would each have one lover all their lives, an adorer to whom they became at last engaged, then married, then lived with ever after, happily or not as the case might be, but he would take happiness in those prescribed circumstances for granted. Chad, in my father's eyes, was that suitor and Eden's haughty denial of that fact he took for modesty, a coyness he honoured. So when Chad arrived, he was gratified to meet him, seeming to find nothing odd in the man he regarded as Eden's lover dropping in while Eden herself was hundreds of miles away in Northern Ireland.

  To this he alluded at once. After, that is, Vera had told Chad how pleased he ought to be to meet her brother at last.

  ‘We're poor substitutes for my sister Eden, I'm afraid.’

  ‘Oh, Chad saw Eden when she was home a fortnight ago,’ Vera said. ‘I expect he had more than enough of her.’ It was the first time I had ever heard her refer with even the mildest disparagement to Eden and I was astonished. If the world didn't exactly turn over, it tilted for a moment to one side. ‘Of course I don't mean that. It was lovely having her, only we have to carry on with our humdrum lives regardless of all this excitement from the outside world.’

  It was a remark worthy of Vera at her most obscure. I recalled uneasily what Mrs Cambus had said to me the day before, what Mrs Cambus ought perhaps not to have said to a girl of fifteen. But she was a gossip and known for it in the village.

  ‘Never tell my mother anything,’ Anne used to say. ‘Absolutely not anything.’

  What Mrs Cambus had said to me was: ‘That young newspaper reporter is always round at Laurel Cottage. People do remark on it. Of course, it's hardly for you to say anything to your aunt but your father might drop a hint.’

  I repeated this to no one. It was extremely distasteful to me, giving me a crawly sensation on my skin whenever I thought of it. My skin crawled then as I looked at Chad, sitting so easily, so very much at home here, taking it for granted he would be asked to stay for lunch – cold pheasant eked out with canned Prem come over on Lease-Lend – knowing where the cutlery was kept, laying the table, pouring us glasses of Vera's home-made elderflower wine. And Vera's eyes were on him a great deal, watching his movements as if he fascinated her. I expected him to go when we did, his accompanying us to the bus stop signifying to me that he also intended to catch the bus, but when it appeared on the horizon, visible from at least a mile away on the Sissington road, he shook hands with both of us, saying:

  ‘Back to a quiet afternoon of Make Do and Mend.’

  My father looked a little puzzled. I knew Chad meant he would be tête-à-tête with Vera, holding her skein of wool, reading the Sunday Express to her while she converted bits of three old dresses into a maternity smock, making a log fire and talking secrets with the door closed. Until Francis arrived and disrupted everything. Or would the two of them have been doing something quite other?

  My parents had had the telephone since 1937 but they had never become used to it. It was a sacred instrument into whose mouthpiece you protruded your lips till your breath condensed on the Bakelite and enunciated each syllable carefully and at a louder pitch than in normal conversation. It was for making local calls or use in an emergency, not to be handled lightly or wantonly, and long-distance calls, even over the comparatively short distance of sixty-five miles which separated us from Great Sindon, unthinkable. My father and Vera communicated by letter as they always had. Eden hardly ever wrote except at Christmas and birthdays, yet, strangely enough, it was Eden who took over the communication of news to us about Vera's baby when Vera herself fell silent.

  At first, Vera's idea had been to have the child at home, something that would have been by no means unusual at that time. It was mildly frowned on to have a first baby at home but in no way vehemently denounced and more or less prohibited as it is today. Besides, this would not be a first baby. Later on, however, she changed her mind and booked into a nursing home in Colchester. We knew all this through Eden who occasionally phoned from Northern Ireland – to my father an awesome act and none the less astounding because paid for by the Government. Vera's letters, none of which survive, were infrequent, pedestrian accounts of the weather, the winter illnesses of her neighbours, and of her own apparently steady good health. Uncle Gerald was sometimes mentioned, but not where he was or where she thought he was, only as a subject for speculation of a I-wonder-what-Gerry-would-think-of-it or Gerry-wouldn't-believe-it-possible kind. Gradually, the secrecy, so dear to Vera's heart, so much a part of her character, closed in. The letters stopped and it was left to Eden.

  My father began to worry. As April lengthened and ended and May began, he would say most evenings:

  ‘I think I ought to phone Sindon,’ as a person today – though only a person of straitened means and lack of sophistication – might say, I think I ought to phone Australia.

  My mother, of course, never supported any plan of his that seemed to indulge his sisters. She would remark on the cost of phone calls or say something quite unjustified but irrefutable, such as:

  ‘Suit yourself, you'll get no thanks for it.’

  Eden, we knew, was due for leave and my father was comforted by hearing her voice when at last he did phone, first making great mental preparations and ensuring total silence in the house, wireless off, windows closed, before asking the operator to get him the Laurel Cottage number. Vera was well, very well, but no, there was no sign yet of the baby. Yes, it was overdue, but babies were often later than one expected, weren't they?

  ‘And how's that young man of yours?’

  Eden must have said a perhaps irritable, ‘I don't know what you're talking about, John’, for my father laughed and said he had no doubt there would soon be wedding bells. Then he sobered, recollected things. Of course, they were waiting for the war to end, was that it?

  He ended rather pathetically. She would keep in touch, wouldn't she? She would send him a ‘wire’ when the baby came?

  My parents' marriage was not a particularly happy one. They had married very young, they came from very dissimilar backgrounds. The yo
ung people today, my own children, say triumphantly to me:

  ‘It lasted, didn't it? They stayed together. Isn't that the test?’

  But the answer is no, it isn't. People did stay together in those days, ordinary middle-class, not very well-off people. Other possibilities were not really open to them. They had not committed adultery or been cruel or deserted each other. They had their home they had made together, their child, they were used to each other. And if they were not compatible, not united in soul and body, not blissful together and wretched apart, was this ground for dissolving a marriage at great cost in scandal, astonishment, deceit and money? I doubt if they ever considered it. My father continued to rile my mother with his silly, starry-eyed worship of his sisters, his old-fashioned, courteous, empty and meaningless idealization of women, and my mother, in her carping jealousy, never missed a chance of belittling his family and sneering at its members, winding up with a general denunciation of the English bourgeoisie.

  I overheard her say to him:

  ‘Gerald was in those Sicily landings. That was on the ninth of July last year. The ninth of July. You can't deny it, it's history.’

  He came out of the room, his face white and set. I, too, had been doing my sums. Who could resist it? This must have been, I thought, the longest pregnancy on record. Eden's telegram came on May 10th. VERA HAS SON. BOTH DOING WELL. LOVE, EDEN.

  It has been said that we can remember only from the time when we first learned to speak. We think in words, so memory also operates in words, and we can remember nothing of those first two or three years before we could speak. On the other hand, there is the school of thought which would have it that recall is possible from our time in the womb. Jamie has told me he can remember nothing of what happened to him before he was six (except for something which never happened) the reason, he alleges, being that he was too unhappy. His psyche, defending itself from further pain, blocked off the memories. I remember his early years, or episodes in them, very well. He could not have been unhappy. What more could a baby, a small child, need than such unwavering devoted love from a mother as Jamie had from Vera?

  Is it perhaps that knowing what happened and how he was used as a pawn in a game, he believes his early childhood must have been wretched? I think this is the truth of it for I know I have not falsified the past, so deeply did the change in Vera impress itself on me that summer. No trauma has distorted my memory, no bias or fear altered what I saw and heard. For me, of course, there was no involvement of the emotions unless to contemplate maternity and wonder how one will oneself approach it when the time comes, is involvement.

  Jamie was christened in August. I was going to stay with Vera for two weeks, my father joining me for a day and a night to attend the christening. It was as well we were there, for no other members of the family were, not Eden, not Francis, not Helen. Already formed in my mind was an image of how Vera would be with a baby. Routine-driven, I thought, everything done by the clock, a fanatical emphasis on hygiene, cot sheets ironed as well as laundered and napkins, too, I wouldn't have been surprised. He could not disappear at bed-time and be hunted through the house and streets but it could be impressed upon his infant ears that six o'clock was the crucial hour, the point in time after which no well-conditioned baby should be out of his cot.

  It was not like that. He was a beautiful child, a blond angel. Vera had written that his eyes were a deep, intense blue, and only in this respect did he fail to accord with her adoring description. His eyes, clear, large and full of intelligent regard, were a curious, changing agate as if the blue they had at first been were being washed out by amber-coloured water. His face, his cheeks, his limbs, his wrists and ankles, were rounded and satiny. He was three months old and he had begun to smile, all his smiles being directed at Vera.

  For once she was not at the gate, not scanning the street, preparing to tell us how late we were, how she had given us up, how she thought we were never coming. She came to the door carrying Jamie in her arms and when we followed her into the living-room she laid him down on the floor on a blanket and let him roll and flex his limbs and kick. I won't say I would not have known Vera if I had met her in the street. Of course the contours of the face were familiar, the quick bodily movements, but this was rather the Vera of the early photographs, the pretty, thin, fair-haired girl, than the sharp shrew with tight mouth and wrinkled eyelids. She was transformed by a serenity that clung to her like the most becoming of dresses, its rosy colour reflected in her cheeks, her knowledge of its flattery shining in her eyes.

  ‘You're looking very well,’ my father said, unable to stop looking at her, looking at her in a way so filled with admiration that I could not help thinking with resentment that he never looked at my mother like that and how gratified she would have been for a fraction of that admiring regard.

  ‘I haven't felt so well for years,’ Vera said. ‘But never mind me. What do you think of Jamie? Isn't he beautiful? Isn't he adorable? When you think how I wanted a girl! I wouldn't change him for the loveliest, best-behaved girl. Not that he's not well-behaved he's perfect, he never gives a scrap of trouble, do you, my angel, my lamb?’

  I could not agree that he was no trouble. To me he seemed a terrible handful, a source of endless labour, much of it exacerbated by Vera herself and her insistence on holding him constantly, spending an hour or more over his feeds, rocking him to sleep in her arms or against her shoulder. Gone was the sewing, the fine embroidery, the unpicked garments and cards of wool, gone the repeated references to Eden, the proud boasting about Eden's achievements, and gone, too, apparently, the vindictive jibes at absent Francis. In fact we had to ask in order to know.

  ‘Oh, Francis won't be home. He's so jealous of Jamie, though he won't admit it. And as for coming to the christening, he says he hasn't believed in God since he was seven. What do you believe in, then, I said, and he just said Me, meaning himself. Charming, isn't it?’

  ‘It's a pity Eden can't be here,’ said my father.

  ‘You wouldn't expect her to come all the way from Gourock for a christening, would you?’

  ‘Gourock?’ said my father. ‘I thought she was in Northern Ireland.’

  Another secret, evidently, another mystery… Vera slightly averted her eyes and a flush appeared on her cheeks. She wasn't upset, she wasn't displeased, though she had been caught out in a lie or at any rate a prevarication. ‘Oh, what does it matter where she is? “Somewhere in England”, as they say. We're not supposed to know anyway, are we?’ And she used the catchphrase everyone employed, from shopkeepers who had received requests for unobtainable goods to mothers criticized for unappetizing meals: ‘Don't you know there's a war on?’

  Jamie never cried. He wasn't allowed to. Babies who are carried, cuddled, their every want attended to, don't cry. Vera dressed him in the robe of white nun's veiling, trimmed with lace made by Great-Aunt Priscilla Naughton, which she and Eden and my father and, no doubt, Francis too, had worn to be christened in. It was a warm sultry day, no wind, the sky overcast. For the first time since I had visited there, the garden had been neglected and weeds grew in the flowerbeds, willowherb and giant hogweed and the six-foot-tall great mullein, its grey leaves and yellow flower buds eaten into holes by caterpillars. We walked to the church, Jamie in Vera's arms rather than the high and shiny black pram which had once been Francis's. We walked in a little procession, for Chad had arrived and joined us, along the main street and down the lane to St Mary's. The cattle and sheep which had been in the meadows when first I came to Sindon had largely disappeared and the fields been ploughed up for the war effort, for the growing of grain and sugarbeet. Jamie's magnificent robe flowed over and half-covered the tired, shabby dress of Macclesfield silk Vera wore. She waved to people in their gardens as she passed, something I could never have imagined her doing.

  My father was Jamie's godfather. There were no other sponsors. I should have loved to be his godmother but it had never been suggested and I was too diffident to ask. Anyway, this
is the great non-relationship, the meaningless function, godparents mostly being selected for their ability to give generous birthday and Christmas presents. Being his godfather gave my father no guardianship rights over Jamie when the time came, made him no surrogate parent. Nor, I suppose, did he, when Jamie was fourteen and at boarding school and holidaying with the Contessa, remember it was his duty to bring him before the bishop for confirmation. He whimpered a little when my father held him and again when he felt Mr Morrell's wet fingers on his forehead.

  When we left the church I thought Chad would go home but he didn't. He returned with us to Laurel Cottage and he was nervous and preoccupied as if he were waiting for something to happen or someone to come. My father talked to him about Eden, not going quite so far as to ask when they intended to become officially engaged but implying the question in almost everything he said. Not in the role of the heavy brother inquiring into a suitor's intentions, I don't mean that, but warmly and enthusiastically as if there could be nothing in his opinion Chad would want to talk of more. I could see that he had weighed Chad in the balance as a future brother-in-law and found him substantial enough. At last Chad said:

  ‘John, I think I should tell you there's no prospect at all of Eden and me getting married. I don't want you to be under a misapprehension. I feel you are and it may be my fault. I'm flattered, of course, very much so, but it won't ever be.’

  Vera, who had laid the sleeping Jamie into a nest of blankets and broderie anglaise pillows on the sofa, averted her eyes. She clasped her hands together and pressed down, exerting her strength. It was the first time I had seen her do this since we arrived. My father looked embarrassed and upset. He had become rather pale. But he tried pathetically to pass it off with humour.