by Barbara Vine
‘I mustn't forget to take that with me,’ she said. ‘That's absolutely my favourite statue, you know, Faith. It was wonderful being in London and seeing it every week.’
I couldn't help remembering how she had been in London and had seen me but for reasons of her own chosen to ignore me.
‘I suppose this room is going to be Jamie's,’ I said.
‘Really, I haven't thought about it,’ she said. ‘You'll have to ask Vera.’
Eden did not like children. Or so it seemed to me, seeing her with Jamie. She took very little notice of him except to tell him not to do things, more specifically not to touch things when the things were hers. She sat up in bed and transferred her engagement ring, which she wore night and day, from her left hand to her right. It was a spectacular ring, not so much a cluster as a dome of diamonds on a thin platinum band. Eden told me next morning that she hadn't slept a wink all night and perhaps this was true. Since I had slept, I was in no position to judge.
Her face looked a bit drawn and her eyes puffy. I was getting my energy together to get up and go for my bath. We all had to have a bath and since I was the least important I was to have mine first, at 7.30, to allow time for the hot-water tank to heat up again.
Eden said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and astounded me by making me the recipient of the first confidence I had ever had from her. And what a confidence! I had begun to get over my awkward habit of blushing by then but I felt my cheeks burn and I looked away, not meeting her eyes.
The words burst from her, unchecked. ‘Is he going to know I'm not a virgin?’
‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘How should I know?’
The six years between us were nothing, the relationship of aunt and niece was everything. A deep embarrassment conquered almost every other feeling. It wasn't until later that I reflected how incongruous it was that the girl who asked me this question was the same one who had stormed at my father over my failure to write a thank-you letter, the same one that had ignored me in the street.
‘Only I'm not,’ she said. ‘They say men know.’
‘Only if they've slept with lots of girls, I should think,’ I said, common sense asserting itself. ‘Has he?’
She said she didn't know. She sat up, wrapping her arms round her knees. With her head tied up in a chiffon scarf, she looked like Hope sitting on the world in that picture. Grandmother Longley used to have a print of it in sepia which disappeared when Vera took over.
‘Why ask me?’ I said. ‘Why not ask Vera? She's more likely to know.’
‘I can't.’ Crisp and desperate. ‘It's out of the question.’
‘I read somewhere,’ I said – all my experience came from books – ‘that you get the same results from riding. Horses, I mean. Did you used to ride?’
She shook her head. ‘That's something else I've got to tell him, that I've never been on a horse. He thinks I have. He's never known anyone who can't ride.’
With difficulty I kept a straight face. ‘Well, don't go and tell him, will you? Not about the riding, the other thing. Remember what happened to Tess of the d'Urbervilles.’
But Eden had never heard of Tess. While I was having my bath I wondered which of the men it was Eden had lost her virginity to. Chad? Surely not, if he was Vera's man and Jamie's father. I flinched at the whole idea. The naval officer, the Honourable, who got drowned? The man she had gone to the theatre with? Or perhaps they had all been lovers of hers. I was intrigued and a bit shocked. This was 1946. The idea of a woman having lovers outside marriage was no longer horrifying, unspeakable, or the daring prerogative of an upper class, but it was still shocking to older people, and to my generation and Eden's something to be discreet and reticent about. That, I thought, was why she didn't want to ask Vera's opinion. Vera was nearly forty and things had been different when she was young. I don't know how I managed to hold this view while at the same time believing that Vera had been unfaithful to Gerald and was having a love affair with Chad, but I did.
This must be the only instance I have ever known of a woman being given in marriage by her own nephew. My father had been hurt by Eden's failure to ask him to give her away. She gave him (on the phone) a typical Longley excuse – you couldn't call it a reason – for not asking him. He put the phone down and came back to my mother and me, putting a brave face on things.
‘She says it wouldn't do, not when I've got a daughter of my own. She says it would be another thing if you were married and I'd already given you away.’
‘I'm afraid Faith can't get married just to oblige her,’ said my mother.
Francis was to do it. He came down to breakfast wearing the pinstriped trousers of his morning suit and the white shirt that went with it, though no tie. Vera fussed about, saying he would get egg on his clothes. Francis, of course, played up to this with a tease I had seen once before. He left the table, sat in an armchair and balanced on one of its arms a full cup of tea in a saucer. Now I had scarcely ever seen Francis do a maladroit thing, he was a very graceful, manually dextrous person, who never dropped or spilt things except on purpose. And if I knew this, Vera must know it much better. But she never learned. Francis played up to her anxieties, moving his elbow in such a way as to come within a quarter of an inch of the cup, shifting in the chair to make it rock, lifting the cup to his mouth and replacing it off-centre in the saucer. If the tea had spilt, it would have gone all over his trousers and shirt sleeves too probably or else on to Jamie, who had chosen that particular patch of carpet to sit on and play with a stack of old wooden bricks that had once been my father's.
Vera could move Jamie. She did and he set up a howling until he was allowed back again. With Francis she could do nothing but beg him to move the cup. She even gave him a small side table, first removing all the knick-knacks with which it was loaded. Francis responded by placing on it the newspaper, his cigarettes and an expensive-looking gold cigarette lighter. The tea he had hardly touched.
‘It's got cold,’ he said. ‘I'd better have a fresh cup,’ and he tipped the tea away, refilling the cup and putting it back on the arm of the chair.
Why is it that really beautiful women when en déshabille can look so much more awful than ordinary-looking ones? I have noticed this again and again. They think it unnecessary to bother, I suppose. Men have told them they would look beautiful in a sack and possibly they would, indeed they would, a sack might not be an unflattering garment; it is not sacks we are talking about, though, but grubby old blue flannel dressing gowns and tatty stained headscarves, dirty marabout mules and flaking nail varnish. Eden sat at the table exhibiting all these, eating nothing, her face greasy, a bit of cherry skin from last night's supper trapped between her front teeth. Jamie, who was beginning to lose his total dependence on Vera as the only person in his world, went up to Eden with a toy car in his hand. She turned to him a face of impatient despair and without exactly pushing him away made at him that sort of gesture one makes when someone else's cat or dog is importunate – a brisk dismissive sweep of the arm.
Vera would never reproach Eden. They seemed less close than they had been but this rule still held. She looked wretched.
‘Come to Mummy, my darling,’ she said and she held out her arms to him.
It was extraordinary what happened then. The tea in the teacup having served its purpose, Francis poured it away and, going to Eden, raised her up into a standing position, took her in his arms and hugged her closely.
‘Bear up, my old love.’
She hid her face in his shoulder. They stood there embraced, swaying slightly. I sat there at the table alone while on one side of me Vera hugged Jamie and on the other Francis hugged Eden and at first I felt bored by them and then – the old feeling back again – left out.
Vera said in a dreary, neutral sort of voice, ‘The hairdresser will be here in ten minutes.’
Eden gave a little scream and let go of Francis.
‘I have to talk to you!’
‘Do you, sweetheart?’ he said. ‘I ex
pect that can be managed. My time is all yours. I'm giving you my day.’
I guessed she was going to ask him what she had asked me. And somehow I knew he would know the answer. He was the kind of person who always knows things like that.
‘Go get your bath,’ he said, ‘and then we'll let our hair down and take our knickers off or whatever girls do when they talk.’
‘Francis!’ Vera shouted at him. She held Jamie tight against her as if someone were menacing him. I thought she was going to reproach Francis for that remark about knickers. ‘Smut’ she would call it. But she didn't. ‘What do you mean, “talk”? What can you have to talk about? Eden's getting married at midday.’
It was curious. I had the feeling she was talking to Eden yet it was Francis she addressed in that hectoring tone she would never have used to Eden. Is it hindsight that makes me say she looked pale and frightened? I expect it is. Stupidly she said:
‘I forbid you to upset Eden!’
He burst out laughing. The hairdresser rang the front doorbell and I went to let her in.
For some reason, perhaps because I saw him as Gerald's successor, I expected Chad to come to the house during the morning. But he didn't come and his name wasn't mentioned. My parents were staying at a hotel in Sudbury, the bridegroom and his family at a much grander one in Dedham. There were going to be two hundred people at this wedding. Eden had wanted to spend her last night as Miss Longley at the Chatterisses' house, Helen later told me, had almost taken it for granted she would, having in mind a grand dinner to impress her future in-laws. Helen would have been quite happy to produce the dinner but her heart bled (as she put it) for poor Vera.
‘Think how unhappy she would be, darling,’ she had said to Eden. ‘Do stay that one night with her, I beg. You have so much and, really, when you come to think of it, she has so little.’
And Eden, giving in with a bad grace, had said incomprehensibly, ‘I should have thought Vera had had quite enough of me.’
On my way to dress, I passed Vera's open bedroom door and saw her inside dressing Jamie in blue shorts and white silk shirt. The last time I had seen them in there together, Jamie had been at Vera's breast. Her expression now was no less radiant, committed, adoring. Chad had told me that the way to make a character in fiction lovable is to give him something to love. His old mother will do, his spaniel will do, at a pinch his budgerigar will do. I had always rather disliked Vera but you couldn't dislike a woman who loved a child so dearly as Vera loved Jamie. She was transformed, softened, altogether sweetened by him. The awful word for what he was doing for her is ‘tenderizing’, the process used on steak.
‘We thought he could be Aunt Eden's page, didn't we, my lovely?’ she said. ‘But Aunt Eden didn't like the idea. She thought children might be troublesome. Which,’ she added reasonably, ‘is quite understandable.’
What has become of Eden's wedding photographs? I suppose Tony has them still or, more likely, has long ago thrown them away. He has never re-married and spends most of his time abroad. In the Far. There is one wedding picture of Eden in ‘the box’, posed alone, but perhaps no record now exists of how Eden and Francis looked together, glorious fair-haired twins that they seemed, a Hollywood bridal couple in the days when film-stars were beautiful people, films were sleek and polished and grooming was obligatory before attending any function. They were a little unreal too, waiting there in Vera's living-room, standing because sitting more than she had to would have crumpled Eden's tulle. Waxworks they might have been with their smooth faces and gleaming hair, the sheen on their clothes and the stiffness in their fingers, facsimiles of people someone had the forethought to make, knowing that one day Tussaud's might be glad to have them. But it is Vera only who stands in Tussaud's, her effigy plumper and glossier than the real woman ever was but, by some grotesque accident or design, dressed in the suit she wore for Eden's wedding, dark blue with a fall of blue and white spotted foulard at the neck.
When I walked up the aisle behind Eden, one of a bevy of whom Evelyn who married Jonathan Durham, Patricia Chatteriss and a Naughton cousin called Audrey were the others, I saw Chad in a front pew on the bride's side but a long way from Vera who with Jamie was correctly sandwiched between Helen and my mother. On the other side of Helen, between her and the General, sat their son Andrew who had been a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain and then a prisoner of war, my cousin but not quite my cousin, for we had one not two grandparents in common. Darker than any of us Longleys, he had a cadaverous look about him then, his face all hollows, his cheeks wasted. In the camp he had got very thin and had never regained that lost weight. To me there was something intensely romantic about his appearance, something heroic. What must it have been like to have an aircraft disintegrate around you, to embark on that terrible fall amid the fireworks of anti-aircraft guns, to drift down through the night sky into the enemy's country where God knew what awaited you? I looked at him and, without smiling, he winked at me. Later on I was pretty sure that wink had been meant for his sister but at the time I thought it was for me.
Chad was staring in Eden's direction with a peculiar, suffering intensity. It made me wonder if he had turned to Vera when Eden rejected him. I turned my eyes away, fixing them on the back of Eden's veil, not wanting later to be accused by Vera of unbridesmaidenly behaviour. What can you say about a wedding? All weddings are the same, all brides are beautiful, all flower arrangements the loveliest one has ever seen, all music the best one has ever heard – till next time. Except in Jane Eyre, no one ever does get up and speak of impediments. And for all the curious circumstances surrounding Eden's wedding, the paranoid strangeness of hers and Vera's behaviour, no one could justifiably have done so. What had happened did not constitute an impediment in the legal sense, though no doubt it would have done in Tony Pearmain's eyes.
Who had chosen the Wedding March from The Marriage of Figaro for the walk back down the aisle? Not Eden who, I am sure, had scarcely heard of Mozart. Tony, then, or his mother, or his best man. It was a brave attempt at being original which failed because that march was written for an orchestra and defies all arrangements for the organ. The organist – sister of Mrs Deliss at the Priory – did her best, and the instrument jerked and wheezed and pounded and none of us knew how to walk in time to it, finally adopting a kind of goose step. I could see people in the congregation wincing. Chad, who I thought would sympathize with Eden, winced too and then went through the lip-pursing, face-contorting motions of someone who can't repress his laughter. He put his handkerchief up to his face and pretended to blow his nose.
Jamie sat quiet throughout the ceremony and came quiet and awed to Helen's house. But there he fell in with the caterers' people, maids who carried him off to the kitchens, swathed him in dinner napkins and fed him with ice cream. Food was served in the dining-room which had french windows opening on to the lawn, and poor enough food it was in 1946, needy nothing trimmed in jollity, the Richardson silver and the flowers distracting the mind and palate too from chicken and Spam, rabbit vol-au-vents and mock cream. It was a marvellous, hot day, one of those rare English summer days which are clear as well as sunny and there is no haze to mask the sky. Somehow or other, without help, the Chatterisses had managed to keep the garden going throughout the war. Helen, who looked as if her hands had never done heavier work than fine sewing or the washing of porcelain, had spent part of every day gardening while Andrew was missing, the best method, she used to say, of bringing herself a measure of peace of mind. Knowing nothing about it, but modelling her herbaceous borders on those she had seen on a pre-war visit to Glyndebourne, she had gone about her neighbours' gardens helping herself to snippets and cuttings of their plants until those borders that in Richardson days had held nothing but roses and lavender bushes, now formed long, thick ribbons of colour, filled as they were with the crimson and ivory spires of astilbe, with agapanthus, the blue poppy, and echinops, the blue thistle, with nepeta in a blue mist, silvery artemisia and cineraria, with southernwood
that is called lad's love, and Alchemilla mollis, the maiden's breath. The lawns ran down to the shallow sheet of water, lily-covered, that Helen called a pond and Vera, when speaking of it to acquaintances, ‘the lake’. Standing by the water's edge with a glass of something that was not quite champagne in my hand, feeling with my toes through my thin pumps (satin shoes of my mother's from the twenties dyed purple) the iron-hard, callus-like remains of the great tree stump under the turf, I asked Andrew if they had imported the swans specially for the wedding. They drifted, with a dignity that was indifferent to these human watchers, among the bronze-coloured, dish-shaped lily leaves and under the willows that trailed their hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
‘They arrived yesterday,’ he said. ‘We're very pleased to see them. There've been no swans at Walbrook since the pair were shot.’
‘Someone shot swans?’ I said.
‘Don't you know the story?’
‘I never know stories,’ I said. ‘I don't know how it is that everyone knows them but me but that's the way it always is. I didn't know about Vera saving Eden's life under the tree that used to be here until three years ago.’
‘Oh, that.’ It was Francis. No one could sneer so splendidly as Francis. He had come up behind me with Chad.
‘Well, it happened,’ I said.