A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘Out somewhere. To the West End. Perhaps the pictures.’

  ‘How awfully annoying!’

  I took them into our living-room. Their sleek young presences, their smart new clothes, showed up the deficiencies of a house that hadn't seen a coat of paint, a change of furnishings, during six years of war. The springs of the chair Tony sat in, his arms full of Jamie, were broken and the seat descended to the floor. There was no alcohol of any kind in the house, no coffee and not very much tea. I sensed that at any minute Eden would ask me if I was going to offer them anything to drink. All I could produce was orange squash of a very ersatz kind. I was tempted to offer Jamie's ‘government’ orange juice but feared Vera's wrath if I did. We had no refrigerator, of course, and the orange juice was lukewarm.

  It was only about eight o'clock and unlikely that my parents and Vera would be back before ten thirty. Jamie fell asleep and Tony carried him upstairs. Instead of coming down at once, he sat up there by the cot, waiting to make sure he was going to go on sleeping. Eden was wearing a very beautiful pair of white leather shoes with low-cut perforated tops and high heels. The rest of us were reduced to wooden-soled clogs. I still don't know where and how she got those shoes. Two, three and four years later we were still standing in long queues on the chance of obtaining a pair of Joyce sandals. But Eden always knew people who could get her things, who had fingers and feet in the black market, who brought things into the country in diplomatic bags and book bags, who sold clothes coupons and bypassed queues and kept things ‘under the counter’ specially for her. She sat in another, slightly less dilapidated chair, contemplating those shoes, lightly stroking the right leg that was crossed over the left, looking at the right shoe with her head a little on one side, a long lock of golden hair falling forward. Without looking up, she said to me:

  ‘He is one of the Pearmains, you know.’

  I didn't know. She made me very aware of my old white blouse and dirndl skirt.

  ‘I suppose you go shopping sometimes, don't you?’

  ‘Oh, that Pearmain,’ I said. ‘You mean Brewster and Pearmain?’ Swan and Edgar, Debenham and Freebody, Marshall and Snelgrove, Brewster and Pearmain. I felt quite overcome. I felt shy of Tony whereas I hadn't before. I had been going to ask her about that evening at the theatre, why she had looked through me, but somehow this revelation about Tony Pearmain made it impossible. And Eden, capitalizing on it, so to speak, as if she sensed the awe she had inspired in me, added:

  ‘I met him at a party at Lady Rogerson's.’

  Should I have known about Lady Rogerson? Had Vera perhaps told me when she spoke of Eden's being ‘demobbed’? All this brought home to me how little I belonged even by then.

  ‘Lady Rogerson looks on me more or less as a daughter. Naturally I went with her when she stayed at Fontlands. We'll be going again for the twelfth.’

  This was incomprehensible. I think it was a couple of years before I understood that Fontlands was the Pearmains' country house (with grouse moor) in Yorkshire, Lady Rogerson the old woman she was being a companion to and the twelfth the twelfth of August when grouse shooting begins. Eden asked me what time the others would be back and when she heard it would be a couple of hours said she didn't think they would stay. Tony came back and said the ‘poor little chap’ was fast asleep and had I listened to the wireless that day? I shook my head. What was there to listen to any more?

  ‘We've dropped a new sort of bomb on the Japs,’ Tony said.

  ‘What sort of bomb?’ I said, not very interested. ‘A kind of V2?’

  ‘Bigger than that, it seems,’ he said. ‘Place called Hiroshima, or however you pronounce it.’ He pronounced it Hero-sheema. ‘The war in the Far East will be over now, you'll see. I left the little chap's door open so you'll hear him if he cries again.’

  Off they went in the red sports car. That remark of Tony's about was I trying to kill Jamie was the only, even faintly, witty thing I ever heard him say. His family owned a huge department store, his cousin had married into the Italian nobility. He was, is, as dull as ditchwater and as rich as a goldmine. He was also good-looking, a far cry from Chad who was poor and nothing much to look at and never opened his mouth without saying something interesting or amusing or provocative. Eden seemed pleased with herself when she left, the bad temper she had shown when she found Vera and my parents were out quite gone. But, of course, even in their absence she must have accomplished most of what she set out to do by that visit and if nothing at all had been done for Vera, if matters had been made a little worse – well, tant pis.

  My father considered himself middle class. He was constantly saying so with a kind of shameful pride. What he never said was that the middle class don't commit adultery whatever the upper and lower may do, but it was a deeply felt aspect of his creed. It would not have crossed his mind that a sister of his could be unfaithful to her husband. He and my mother did not get on well, nor can I say that at the bottom they loved each other for I am sure they did not, but while she lived my father would never have had to do with another woman. It would have been the same for him as stealing or engaging in some fraud at the bank. Therefore, when Gerald came home and he and Vera almost immediately parted, my father's course was not to wonder why and come to the conclusion most people did, that Vera had been having a love affair with Chad Hamner, but to put the blame on Gerald. At first, though, he would not admit that a separation had taken place.

  Vera didn't tell him about it. That wasn't her way. There was no question, of course, of Gerald being demobilized. He was a regular soldier. We had all supposed he would come home on leave and then, wherever he might be sent, possibly to Germany with the army of occupation, she would go with him. Laurel Cottage could then be sold and the proceeds divided three ways. However, Vera's letters made no mention of her accompanying Gerald when in the autumn he went with his regiment to somewhere near Lübeck, nor did she give any explanation or reason for her staying behind.

  Eden quite often came to see us that winter, usually alone but once bringing Tony Pearmain to meet my parents. She was silent in a mysterious way on the subject of Vera and Gerald. That is, she gave the impression of knowing everything but of being unwilling to betray. It was Helen who told us.

  She and my father had never really got on. He had always disliked her. He came near to admitting that he resented her being better off and having a higher social position than the children of my grandfather's second family. And his feelings were unaltered by the fact that Helen only had these things because her own father had rejected her. She was impossibly affected, he used to say. But they had never been not on speaking terms; there had never been an open quarrel. Helen wrote to him to ask if he would have any objection to her giving Eden's wedding reception at her house, and in this letter she mentioned the Vera–Gerald split.

  At least my father already knew Eden was going to marry Tony Pearmain. Only just, but he had been told. Eden rang him up with the news the night before it was in The Times. Of course she shied away from telling him because, although Tony was more than suitable, was a great catch in fact and all that he should be in the eyes of an older brother, he was not Chad Hamner. My father really did go on about this sort of thing, behaving as if human beings were biologically monogamous, imprinted with the image of a single partner as the grey goose is or the gibbon. In his view, changing the mate you had first selected was tantamount to a defiance of nature. He looked gloomy when he put the phone down and came across the room to us shaking his head. I could find it in my heart to feel sorry for Eden who had been bubbling over with excitement and had surely not expected her brother to be quite so aghast.

  Apparently he had believed Tony was some sort of relative of her employer (we all knew about the Lady Rogerson set-up by then) and that Eden occasionally acted as his secretary. My father was able to convince himself of anything he really wanted to be the case, however improbable, if only he tried hard enough.

  �
��I had no idea,’ he said, passing his hand across his forehead in a bewildered way. ‘I thought she was all fixed up with that nice chap we met at the christening. I don't understand all this chopping and changing. What didn't she like about that journalist chap, I wonder?’

  ‘Hadn't got enough money,’ said my mother.

  ‘People don't always have to stick to the same people all their lives,’ I said, foreseeing difficulties of my own in this area and not wanting, when the time came, to face too many inquests with my father. ‘Not when they meet them when they're eighteen, not for sixty years, surely?’ It seemed appalling. ‘I don't think Eden was ever in love with Chad anyway or he with her. I don't think it was that kind of thing.’

  ‘What was it, then?’ said my father. ‘He didn't come to the house to see my sister Vera, did he?’

  This was said in the scathing tone of someone presenting a totally absurd proposition, unworthy of serious consideration. It is rather disquieting to hear, as in this case, sarcasm and innocence combined. He was innocent. In the same tone he would have suggested Chad might have been coming to the house in order to make an offer for it or because Vera's wireless had better reception than his own. I said nothing, watching knowledge dawn in my mother's eyes and a smile twitch the corners of her mouth.

  Next day we read the announcement in The Times. ‘The engagement is announced and the marriage will shortly take place between Anthony Fairfax Pearmain, only son of Mr and Mrs Oliver Pearmain, of Fontlands, Ripon, Yorkshire, and Edith Mary, youngest daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Arthur Longley, of Great Sindon, Essex.’

  Helen's letter came a few days later. This was not one of those my father read aloud at the breakfast table. He read it and walked out of the room, taking the letter with him. Presently he came back, looking very flustered and upset, and gave the letter to my mother, the first page first, then, reluctantly, the second.

  ‘A very nice place to have a wedding,’ he said, making an effort. ‘That's a lovely house they've got there.’ He seemed to remember, which restored his gloom, his resentment of Helen's possession of Walbrooks, though he could surely never have convinced himself any other member of the family had a right to it. He turned pettishly to my mother. ‘You see what that silly, affected woman says.’

  ‘About the wedding, do you mean?’

  She knew very well he didn't mean about the wedding but she said that to provoke him.

  ‘Of course not about the wedding. About my sister Vera. Pernicious trouble-maker, that woman is. Naturally my sister doesn't want to go off living in married quarters in Germany of all places.’

  But the damage was done. Or the truth was told. My mother just looked at him in that way she had developed lately when he made out, as she put it, that his sisters were ‘a double reincarnation of the Virgin Mary’. She put her head on one side, opened her eyes wide and raised her eyebrows as high as they would go.

  What exactly had Helen suggested? I never saw that letter and it was lost long ago. Probably my father destroyed it that same day. I doubt though if Helen went so far as to put forward what was in my mother's mind, what she actually retorted to my father some months later when she was suffering during one of their quarrels from being unfavourably compared with his sister.

  ‘Gerald knows very well Jamie isn't his child. He knows he can't be his child. He may be a fool but he's not such a fool he doesn't know a woman isn't pregnant ten months!’

  I was embarrassed that I had overheard. I wanted no more of it and began to long for the autumn when I should go away to Girton and no longer hear them getting into each other's skin, under the scabs where the sores never quite healed. For a long time now I had come to my mother's conclusion, had done the requisite arithmetic and noted Vera's impossible gestation of something around 312 days. I had got used to the idea of Vera and Chad, too, and had almost persuaded myself that I had actually witnessed their embraces, their kisses. While I had been sleeping in Eden's room, I told myself, Chad had come quietly to Vera, creeping up the stairs. It did not seem like him to do this. The whole affair seemed incongruous, Vera his senior and looking so much older, their sense of humour not at all the same, their tastes so divergent. But I had already learnt by then what a mysterious area sex is and how the reason for sexual relationships defies analysis. Jamie, of course, was Chad's child and that was why he had come to the christening – why also so many other people had not. Jamie had Chad's dark brown eyes and pale olive skin. I supposed there would be a divorce and Chad would marry Vera and this vaguely disappointed and irritated me. At the back of my mind was always the feeling that if only he would have waited, he could have had me.

  It soon became very clear that Vera was going to live indefinitely at Laurel Cottage. I think there was some correspondence and a few phone calls as well as one interview between my father and Eden on this matter. There was no hardship for Eden. She was marrying a man whose family owned, Helen told me, no less than five country houses. Tony and Eden would be able to take their pick of which one they wanted to live in.

  ‘Goodbye new house, new car, holiday in Switzerland,’ said my mother.

  ‘We couldn't have had all those, anyway,’ my father said.

  ‘Just one of them would have been nice.’

  I should have liked to say to them that quite soon, no doubt, Chad would provide a home for his child and the mother of his child but of course I didn't. To my father, Chad was the rather nice chap who still carried a torch for Eden. And my mother, who took an almost gleeful pleasure in the fact that Jamie could not be Gerald's child, never went so far as to provide an alternative father for him, speaking as though Vera had produced him by parthenogenesis and as if this in itself were a solecism that put her beyond the pale.

  Eden was married to Tony Pearmain at St Mary's, Great Sindon, on a fine, sunny Saturday in the summer of 1946.

  Will you believe that I was one of Eden's bridesmaids? My dress cost me not a single clothing coupon, for all the silk came to Eden from Hong Kong, brought in by someone she knew in BOAC. Part of the time I stayed at Helen's, part with Vera. It was during the week before the wedding, while I was at Laurel Cottage, that Vera and I and Jamie took that walk which led us past the cottage where Vera as a child had found old Mrs Hislop's body. She was more expansive that day than I had ever known her but not so open that she could speak of the disappearance of Kathleen March.

  The strange thing is that I have reached this point in my private reminiscing, my chronological going over in my thoughts of all my memories of Vera and Eden, of Chad and Francis and Jamie, when Daniel Stewart writes to me with his remarkable discovery. I even dreamed of Kathleen March the night before his letter came, having cast myself in the role of invisible onlooker watching Vera and Mavis sitting on the river bank and the unguarded pram with the child in it standing among the willowherb and the meadowsweet. Kathleen's father passed me on the bridge, blinded by headache. What woke me was the horror that came out of the bright meadows, the blue sky, a black and scaly monster one can hardly believe a woman of my age would fantasize, a thing that stepped straight from the illustration to an Andrew Lang fairy story. It snatched the child and I woke up with one of those cries that are the dreamer's attempt at a scream. The evening before I had been reading M. R. James's story The Mezzotint in which a similar incident to this takes place.

  The morning post brings from Daniel Stewart a new chapter. He has stumbled on these facts by chance. He was sure no one else had spotted the connection. What did I think?

  In the annals of unsolved murders (I read) the Kirby Theiston case must be one of the most bizarre and also the most neglected by criminologists. Is this because it has so many features in common with the Constance Kent mystery? Or because, until very recently, the apparently most important characters in the drama were still alive?

  Constance Kent, a young girl still in her teens, living in the village of Rode in Somerset, was tried for the murder of her infant half-brother and acquitted. May Durham, a girl
of seventeen, living in the village of Kirby Theiston in Norfolk, was arrested for the murder of her two-year-old half-sister but released without being brought to trial. Constance, always suspected, always looked on askance, ended her life in a convent. More than half a century later, May Durham, equally ostracized, was exiled by her own family to Australia in the company of an aunt where five years later she died of tuberculosis. In neither case was the true perpetrator ever found.

  Kirby Theiston is a village with a population of around five hundred lying to the west of Norwich. In 1922 the population was rather greater than this and the dual carriageway road which now bisects the village had not yet been built. The church is Saint Michael and All Angels and the principal house, Theiston Hall, once the seat of a branch of the Digby family of Holkham, was occupied as it had been for the previous twenty years by Charles Ethelred Durham and his family. A fine English country house is Theiston Hall, parts of it dating from the fifteenth century, but largely rebuilt at the end of the seventeenth by Henry Dill, a pupil of Archer, in the baroque style with a bowed south front, octagonal drawing-room and hall with ceiling paintings by Thornhill. Durham was the grandson of a wealthy Victorian manufacturer of cotton goods from Rochdale, but neither he nor his father had ever had any occupation beyond that of country gentlemen. No less a landscapist than Loudon had designed the gardens in the late nineteenth century but Durham, a dilettante with artistic aspirations, uprooted the herbaceous borders, the parterres and the rosebeds soon after he came to Theiston and set about creating gardens on the model of those he had seen while travelling in Italy, at Bagnaia, at Settignano and the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli. Large quantities of statuary were imported and as late as 1922 men were still at work on the steps, ornamental ponds, follies and temples necessary to the ‘Italianization’ of the garden.