by Barbara Vine
‘She always had the instincts of a Girl Guide.’
‘Tell me about the swans,’ I said to Andrew.
‘My great-grandparents, my mother's grandparents who used to live here, had a little boy. His name was Frederick and if he were alive today he would be seventy-eight. But they lost both their children, their son when he was three and their daughter, my mother's mother, in her twenties. There was a pair of swans nesting on the pond here. Frederick had a nurse who was an ignorant, backward sort of girl, more or less retarded, I suppose. She took him to the pond and showed him the cygnets and the cob – that's the male swan – attacked him and – well, beat him to death with its wings.’
‘That's horrible!’ I said.
‘Yes. They dismissed the nurse. My great-grandfather got his shotgun and came down here and shot the cob and the pen and all the cygnets. I suppose he was out of his mind with shock and misery. But now, after seventy-five years, the swans have come back.’
Francis drawled, ‘Do you suppose these have a family in the reeds? Perhaps we should get one of the caterers' girls – the one who dropped the sherry bottle – to bring Jamie down here.’
There was a shocked silence. Then Chad said:
‘Not really amusing, dear lad.’
‘That depends on your taste,’ said Francis. ‘I find I have a particularly sophisticated idea of what constitutes entertainment. For instance, I have often thought how much I should have enjoyed the Roman games. I should have liked to do what Wilde said Domitian did and peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the Circus.’
Andrew said nothing but his face was very severe and condemnatory. Chad was laughing. He began telling us how his grandfather had refused to let his mother, at the time a woman of twenty-five, keep a copy of Dorian Gray in the house. But suddenly he fell silent and quoted, in quite a different sort of voice:
‘There is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.’ He seemed to be addressing the swans. ‘And thank God for that,’ he said.
He and Francis went off – to tease someone else, presumably.
‘I thought it unfortunate,’ Andrew said, ‘their mentioning Oscar Wilde in quite that way and quoting him too in your presence.’
I was enchanted by his gentlemanlike, not to say courtly, behaviour. I was so overcome I forbore to point out that the quotation was from Landor, not Wilde.
‘An extraordinary pair. I find it hard to think of Francis as my cousin.’
‘Do you find it hard to think of me as your cousin?’ I said, emboldened by the mock champagne.
‘I don't think I do quite. Think of you as my cousin, I mean. Do you want me to?’
‘Oh, no.’
He looked curiously at me. Patricia and Evelyn and Jonathan Durham were approaching us across the lawn.
‘Francis is up at Cambridge, isn't he?’
‘Oxford,’ I said.
‘I must say that's rather a relief. I'm going up to Cambridge in October.’ I did not tell him that I was, too. Why tell him something it would be more interesting for him to discover from some other source? ‘I shall be rather a mature undergraduate,’ he said, and broke off to introduce Jonathan to me.
I wonder now if Andrew had delayed telling the story of the little Richardson boy and the swans until Jonathan had joined us, would Jonathan have spoken of his own sister, killed at the same age? And if he had, mentioning Jephson in the telling, would I have made the connection forty years before Daniel Stewart? But the swan story was past and Jonathan had not heard it and soon it was time for Eden and Tony to leave for their honeymoon in a borrowed house in Derbyshire. Why is it that the upper classes, or at any rate the rich, from the royal family down, are lent country houses by their relatives for honeymoons while the rest of us go to such more interesting and exciting places as Brighton or Paris or Capri?
Back we went to Laurel Cottage, Vera and I and Jamie. This was pure altruism on my part and I was proud of myself for it. My parents had gone back to London. Helen asked me to stay at Walbrooks ‘with the rest of the young people’ and I would have liked to, I would have liked to very much, and surely it would be more tactful to leave Vera alone with Chad for the evening and perhaps the night?
‘Jamie and I will be all on our own, then,’ she said a little peevishly.
I thought this unlikely. Francis would surely be there. He was in the room with Helen and Vera and me while we discussed this, standing apart and listening in that way he had, like a character in the Jacobean drama, Bosola, for instance, gathering crumbs for future malicious use, I thought. But I said I would go back with Vera. Perhaps I sensed that today she had finally lost Eden for ever. I was unprepared for her cheerful manner, a quite unforced contentment, on the way home in Mr Morrell's car and afterwards as she was getting Jamie ready for bed.
‘Things went very well, didn't they?’ she said, dipping him into the bath amid his flotilla of toys. ‘The weather couldn't have been better and it was a lovely service. Didn't you think the music was lovely?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wasn't too keen on that march they went out to. It sounded as if something had got broken in the organ.’
‘Blessed is he,’ said Vera, ‘who sitteth not in the seat of the scornful.’
This was a favourite Bible quote of hers and my father's, Eden's too for all I know. They got it from their own mother. Considering their attitude to life, this is as fine an example of projection as one might come across. I should have known better than to criticize anything connected with Eden. Vera soaped Jamie and gently splashed him and he shrieked with delight and splashed her back. When she said that about the seat of the scornful, her face had creased up and packed itself into a hard, fixed mask. She was already getting that vertical pleating on her upper lip most people don't develop before fifty. But playing with Jamie she was transformed again, young again, with the untried, innocent face of the portrait in ‘the box’.
She surprised me by talking of Eden in a way I had never thought possible. I suppose she was beginning to think of me as grown-up. Up till then she had referred to Eden only to praise something she had made or done or to boast of her friends and her social position.
‘If I'm not much mistaken,’ (another typical Longley phrase, this one), ‘Eden will have a baby within the year. You can imagine he'll want children – well, he'll want an heir and his father will.’
It sounded feudal to me and I didn't feel I had any comment to make on it.
‘Yes, they'll want a son. Of course Eden loves children, she worships them.’
That was not how it had seemed to me when I saw her push Jamie away that morning or on the innumerable occasions I had seen her ignore him when he spoke to her.
‘Eden will want six, you can be sure of that. And since money is no object, I see no reason why they shouldn't have a big family. If I'm not much mistaken, my dear, the next big function we go to will be Eden's son's christening. He'll be a very lucky little boy.’ This was addressed to the now dry, powdered, pyjamaed, sleepy Jamie. ‘Everything handed to him on a gold platter. But one thing's for sure, isn't it, my sweetheart, he won't have more love than my boy. That's something no amount of money can buy.’
Francis had not returned with us and now, two hours later, he had not appeared. Vera, tucking Jamie up in bed, lifted her face from kissing him and said:
‘They're so lovely when they're little and when they grow up they're just people. They're not like you, they haven't got your ways and they're more unpleasant to you than they are to their worst enemy.’
I listened, fascinated, amazed at this unexpected sensitivity, hoping for more, destined, of course, to be disappointed.
‘He isn't going to be like that, though, are you, my sweetheart? Francis was too much with other people, you know, that was the trouble. His ayah first, then his school. He hardly knew me. Little children are best when they are just with their mothers. You can see that in pictures of primitive people, can't
you, savages and aborigines and so on. Those people always have their babies on their backs. I am going to see to it Jamie and I are never apart.’
Chad didn't come either. The sun had gone in at about six – if I were an adherent of the Pathetic Fallacy I would say it went in when Eden left – and the long summer evening was dull and gloomy. There is something depressing, anyway, about the evening after a wedding. One feels excluded. The point is that one is excluded, everyone is except the two that it was all for, for what they are embarking on no one may share in. It is rather as if one went along to the opera and had tea in the tea tent, walked round the lake, drank the champagne and, just as the curtain went up, was sent home again. I could have said that to Anne Cambus, to Chad, perhaps to Andrew Chatteriss, but not to Vera. So we sat there more or less in silence, she knitting a jumper for Jamie in a complicated Fair Isle pattern, I reading until the light failed. Vera had long given up attempting to teach me to knit or sew or crochet and she seemed resigned to my reading, though I believe she thought it a wicked waste of time. That evening, though, she had the advantage of me for she had reached a plain section of the jumper and could do the stocking stitch without looking at her work. For reasons of economy, presumably, she was always loath to put lights on. She deferred it even longer than usual and when I suggested having the table lamp on just for me, she reacted like the old irritable Vera of my childhood.
‘The room will be full of insects. All those moths will get in.’ It was impossible to convince her that not all moths, indeed not the vast majority, are the kind that eat your clothes. And this was a misapprehension made all the more ironical by the fact that her son was destined to become a distinguished entomologist. ‘We shall be riddled with moths,’ she said. ‘I should have thought it was so peaceful just to sit in the twilight for once.’
In the twilight we sat, Vera's fingers moving automatically, and the needles, wooden wartime needles, making a soft click-click-click. What did I think about? Eden's wedding night, I fear. Young people then were more given to prurient curiosity. Experience came later to them and less variously. Principally I wondered how she had overcome, if she had overcome it, Tony's finding out he wasn't the first. Vera's earlier remarks about Eden's fondness for children and the large family she would have interested me hardly at all at the time and I am surprised now that I remember them. Probably my memory is inaccurate, though I am sure the gist, the essential inner sense of those remarks, remains. I have often thought of them since.
Was she afraid even then? Were her Eumenides gathering, sitting like crows in the trees about the darkening lawn or fluttering against the window panes like the moths she so disliked? I think so. I think future events cast their shadows even then, like the real shadows which suddenly flared in long bands across the lawn as the sun appeared briefly again before its setting.
It may be fanciful of me but I expect she thought she had paid. She had rendered up a heavy price: her husband, her freedom, a financially comfortable future, whatever of Francis she might have salvaged, Eden's devotion. She had given this enormous ransom to the Furies and I expect she hoped that they would keep away. One small thing only the gods had to do for her and why shouldn't they do it? For most women they did it, too frequently sometimes, constituting a curse and not a blessing. So why not here, in this instance? You might also have said of Vera that she wanted only to be left alone. When she said she wanted to sit in peace in the twilight, she meant that in more than a literal sense. I hardly think that the news which came to her almost immediately Eden returned from her honeymoon could have pleased her, though at the time the rest of the family saw it as being particularly to her advantage. Did her heart sink? Did she feel trapped? No doubt she prayed that the next letter would bring her the news she longed for or that one evening the telephone would ring…
The dusk grew depressing. I said that I thought of going down to the Cambuses for a while. Vera uttered her automatic, ‘At this hour?’ but put up no more objections. I think this must have been just before she met the new Mrs Cambus, who was to become her dear friend and support (and principal witness for the defence at her trial), or at any rate before she got to know her well, for in saying goodbye to me she did not mention her but merely told me to be sure and bolt the back door after me when I came in. How far I had progressed in growing up since the eight o'clock bedtime days – or how far she had in tolerance! But Josie Cambus was not mentioned as she certainly would have been had this visit been paid two or three months later when all sorts of messages would have been given to me to deliver and Vera's love sent.
Anne's mother had died of cancer and within six months her father had married again. My husband says Donald Cambus and Josie had been lovers for a long time and I think Anne suspected this, therefore resenting her new stepmother more than she might otherwise have done. Josie, who had been a widow with two sons, she saw as longing for her lover's wife to die, jubilant at her death, impatient to step into her shoes, though in fact I don't think this was Josie's nature at all. I got to know her well, eventually very well indeed, and I came to understand that her principal trait was motherliness; she was one of those people whose mission in life is to look after other people, and in coming to Sindon, giving up her secretarial job, her house in a suburb of London, she was driven as much by a desire to retrieve Donald Cambus's household and care for his children as by the need to be with him always.
But that evening she and Donald were out and Anne and I spent an hour or two alone together, talking about the wedding of course, about Eden's anxious inquiry of the morning (which I am afraid I unhesitatingly repeated) and then Anne grew venomous about poor Josie and what she called her designing ways. For her part, she couldn't wait to get away to teacher training college from which, she said, she would never return to her father's house.
I went home to Laurel Cottage the back way, something I had rarely been in the habit of doing at night. The gate in the back fence of the Cambuses' garden led into a narrow lane or path that eventually, after crossing the edge of a field, cutting the corner of a farmyard and running between high flint walls, passed the back fence of the Laurel Cottage garden. The reason I avoided it was the farmer's dog, a black Labrador with a nasty temper. But this dog I had seen from the Cambuses' living-room window, setting out on a walk, correctly leashed, with its owner, so I took to the path, having switched on my torch. It was a bit after half-past ten.
Very dark. A dense, humid, by now quite cold, moonless night. Nobody knows what darkness is until they have lived in an English country village where the inhabitants stoutly oppose the installation of street lamps. It was impossible to see anything that night except a sort of lightening of the blackness overhead and a deepening of the blackness where a hedge was or a wall or tree. It was easy enough to find my way with the torch. I came to the gate in the Laurel Cottage fence and there saw the first lights since I had left the Cambuses'. There was a light on in Vera's bedroom and the faintest gleam or glow of light from the hovel.
It was still standing, still threatening to collapse without going further towards doing so. The falling house that never falls. Eden's Wendy house it had been, where she had played with dolls, washing them and mending their clothes, no doubt, putting them to bed at six. Inside its crumbling wattle and daub Anne and I had acted out, over and over, the tragedy of Mary Stuart, blowing up Darnley and hiding Rizzio in vain behind her skirts. As I came towards it its broken window flared with light, with guttering bouncing light. How far this little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world
They didn't see me. They were otherwise occupied and their eyes were not for seeing passers-by. Their light, a candle in a saucer on the gate-leg table, was to enable them just to see each other. Out of politeness, I turned off my torch. If this sounds blasé, if it sounds as if I wasn't shocked, horrified, aghast, overturned into a tumult, it is not so, for I was, I was all those things. But discretion did not quite leave me, that and a shrinking from their seeing tha
t I had seen them.
I looked once and went on towards the house. Chad and Francis were making love, undoubted, uncompromising sodomy – for I saw all that in their forked radish nakedness – on the hovel floor.
Eden could have had her pick of Pearmain houses. Instead she chose to buy Goodney Hall. My father was delighted and so was Helen. She and Vera would hardly be separated now, they would be able to see each other two or three times a week, for Tony's wedding present to Eden had been a car.
People said it was sweet of Eden, it was considerate of her, to make her home near her sister's. Later on they said it was malicious. I don't believe kindness or malice came into it. Eden had been brought up by Vera to be a snob and she had outdistanced her mentor. All her life, I think, she had longed and longed to be rich and have the power wealth brings, and whereas Vera frankly and honestly basked in the reflected glory of Helen's prestige, enjoying it vicariously, proud just to be able to have Helen for her sister and drop her name in company, Eden had envied her and felt resentment in much the way my father did. Now she could turn the tables on Helen. Walbrooks, after all, was only a farmhouse, if a grand one. Goodney Hall, at Goodney Parva on the Stoke side of the Stour, was what my grandmother Longley called a ‘gentleman's house’, and it was rather better than that, for it had been designed in 1786 by Steuart who was the architect of Attingham Park in Shropshire and St Chad's Church in Shrewsbury. It had a portico with immensely long columns, a Chinese drawing-room and principal bedroom described as Etruscan, and altogether it reminded me of the Pavilion at Brighton. But it was exactly what Eden wanted, it brought her ascendancy over Helen and almost everyone else she knew. When my father next wrote to Vera, he told her how pleased he was, but in her reply Eden and her move were not mentioned. Nor did Eden herself reply to the letter he sent her, asking her, now she was so comfortably settled, to consider he and she making over their shares in Laurel Cottage to Vera. And this may have been just as well, for mention of the project made my mother furious, igniting fearful quarrels between my parents.