A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  ‘If you do that, I swear I'll leave you,’ she said to him, ‘and then you won't be able to give houses away, you'll have to find a home for me.’

  My father hoped, and constantly expressed this hope, that Gerald and Vera would patch up their differences and live together again. They were not divorced and in those days before divorce became so easy as it did in the early seventies, had no prospect of being so. Adultery was a possible ground, yet I now wondered, in the light of what I knew, if there had indeed been adultery. Ten months children were not unknown, if rare. Blue-eyed parents may have a brown-eyed child if there are brown eyes among their forebears. Perhaps Gerald had known all this, had known there was no adultery, and the separation had come about simply because he and Vera had ceased to love each other, had grown indifferent or preferred the single life the war had taught them both to live. One thing was certain. Chad Hamner was not her lover and never had been. Jamie was not his son.

  So many things became clear as a result of what I saw that night, by candlelight, in the hovel at the end of Vera's garden. So much was changed. I was no Go-between, though, I was no traumatized witness of a primal scene. It is true that I slept very little that night; it had been a shock what I saw, but it was rather an interesting, a fascinating, shock than an unpleasant one. It explained so much, and some of it not unflattering, a relief really, to myself.

  As a possible lover of my own, the first perhaps, Chad had been put out of the running by becoming (as I thought) Vera's. After I thought he was Vera's I was not such a fool as to want him or to hope for him any more. But I had still minded that he could have preferred Vera to me, I was disappointed about that. I believed that he had loved Eden but that this was an early rehearsal for coming to love me, I thought he should have waited for me, and that it was only impatience or weakness of character that made him turn instead to Vera. I was relieved to understand none of this was so. I looked back, intrigued out of the possibility of sleep or thinking of anything else, by the revelations, the clarifications of so many words and acts of the past years.

  Those inexplicable visits to the house in Eden's absence, always the day before Francis was due home or when a phone call from Francis was expected, these were explained. Those declarations of the hopelessness of his love, his remark to my father that brave hearts and persistence will not always triumph, his gazing in church, not at Eden as I had believed, but at Francis who escorted her – all these I now understood. And I understood Francis's coquettish behaviour, his posing, his wit, in Chad's presence. Somehow I knew, too, that this was not a happy love, a relationship of mutual desire and affection, but one-sided, a case of there being one who kisses and one who lets himself be kissed. But that not often, perhaps less and less often and at a price, Francis occasionally yielding rarefied favours to strengthen his hold.

  And I saw something else, though not that night, not until I was myself older and better versed in these things. Chad had met Francis through Eden. How else would they ever have met each other? Chad – who had moved away, who had succeeded in getting himself a job on the Oxford Mail to be in the city where Francis was – had worked on the local paper in Colchester then and Eden had been working for her solicitor. Whether they had met in court or at a cocktail party or in the solicitor's office hardly mattered. They had met and Eden had introduced him to Francis. That meant she must have known. That meant that at eighteen, when Francis was only thirteen, she had known, had connived at and certainly encouraged a love affair which in the 1940s was criminal and was regarded by most people as disgusting, monstrous and beyond words unnatural. In other words, she had brought home to her sister's house a man who loved boys and had presented to him her sister's child as his catamite. As her accredited lover he came, or rather her suitor, so that he might set about – though not very successfully, not very happily, Francis being what he was – seducing a pre-pubertal boy.

  I was never outraged, knowing Francis as I did, but I was astounded. I would not have thought Eden had it in her. Why had she done it? What was in it for her? I have never known and I don't know now. I can only make guesses. Secrets, having them, creating them, keeping them and half-keeping them, were the breath of life to her, and here was a secret she could keep from Vera. Or it may have been more practical and less neurotic than that. It may have been that in those days before she went into the WRNS, when she presented to the world the image of untouched, beautiful, innocent girlhood, a girl within a budding grove, an almost Victorian concept of perfect girlhood, quiet, meek, pure, accomplished, she was in fact engaged in a love affair with someone totally unsuitable. I rather incline to this view, based on guesswork though it is. It is so entirely the kind of thing Eden would have done, secretly met her uncouth or merely married lover, someone anyway Vera and my father and Helen and all would utterly have disapproved of, while Vera believed her in the safe company of Chad. And Chad, for his own purposes, would willingly have connived at this, while Francis watched the game with amusement, occasionally playing a hand or two when the fancy took him. Poor Vera, I had been used to thinking of her as in control, a presiding authority. I began to see her as everyone's dupe. Neither of these descriptions, of course, was entirely true, for she had alternated between the two.

  And now Eden was installed, chatelaine-like, at Goodney Hall, ‘a stone's throw’, as my father put it, from Great Sindon, though in fact it was ten minutes' drive away, on the Suffolk side of the Stour Valley where the Weeping Hills rise and dip and roll away towards the Vale of Dedham. It was a year before I saw the house, for I had gone up to Cambridge the autumn after the wedding, and the following year when I returned to these places, to this neighbourhood, in the long vacation, it was with the Chatterisses I stayed and not with Vera or Eden.

  People had started going abroad again for their holidays. Tony had taken Eden to Switzerland, to Lucerne, and Helen had had a postcard with a picture on it of Mount Pilatus, the lake in the summit of which is one of the seven ancient entrances to hell and where Pontius Pilate forever sits, washing his hands. Vera's card was of a chair lift and she seemed disproportionately pleased with it, even bringing it with her when she and Jamie came over for lunch next day.

  ‘I expect they are making the most of it,’ she said. ‘This will be their last chance to go anywhere like that for a long time.’

  ‘Eden will have a nanny for the baby,’ Helen said. ‘It won't make that much difference to their lives.’

  This was the first I had heard of Eden's baby. She was not yet quite two months pregnant. Vera could talk of nothing else. She was overjoyed. Eden had been married more than a year now. She, Vera, had begun to wonder if anything could be wrong, for she knew how passionately Eden longed for children, but now all was well. Vera speculated as to the child's sex, what name would be chosen, whom it would look like, precisely when it would be born and what kind of labour Eden would have. This went on all through lunch, kind Helen showing no impatience, listening and responding to Vera, but the General and Andrew and I restless and bored and Patricia, who had come home for a week's stay, frankly asking once or twice (though in vain) if we couldn't change the subject.

  ‘I was the first to be told,’ Vera said. ‘Do you know, Eden told me what she suspected even before she told Tony? She said, I think, I hope, I'm almost certain I'm going to have a baby and I want you to be its godmother. I was so happy I burst into tears.’

  Jamie was three and a bit, articulate in speech now, a ‘good’, quiet boy who still had a sleep in the afternoons and went to bed by six-thirty. He seemed intelligent. He had rather a stilted way of talking which was naturally appealing in such a young child because it was ‘quaint’. He would refer to ‘adults’ instead of ‘grown-ups’ for instance, and get all his past tenses right, never saying ‘rided’ for ‘rode’, or ‘eated’ for ‘ate’. And he was a happy child, he was very happy then, I would vouch for that. I wonder if he remembered that visit, that day at Walbrooks, when he chose to call himself an Italian version of Richards
on. After lunch, Helen showed us all the ‘surprise’ the General had given her for her birthday, a likeness by Augustus John of a sweet, plain-faced woman in a dark dress with a lace collar. It was her grandmother, taken in late middle age, and it had been sold when the old Richardsons had died in the twenties by the lawyer who managed the estate for Helen, the heir, and who had not known Helen would have wanted every memento in existence of Mary Richardson. But the portrait had come on to the market again and the perspicacious General had bought it and now it hung in Helen's drawing-room.

  Helen hardly ever talked about the hard part of her childhood, her father's abandonment of her just when she had lost her mother, she never made a heavy thing of it as Francis did of his deprivations. But she could not speak of her grandmother without passionate feeling and now as she stood in front of the painting, looking particularly at the folded hands, the third finger on the left hand with its weight of thick gold wedding ring and engagement ring of rubies in a cumbersome Victorian setting, the tears came into her eyes.

  ‘I like that lady,’ Jamie said. ‘If I saw her I would sit on her lap.’

  This was to be favoured indeed, for Jamie never sat on anyone's lap but Vera's.

  ‘Would you, darling?’ Helen was delighted. ‘Well, she was a sweet, kind lady and she would have called you her lamb.’

  ‘I should like you to call me your lamb,’ Jamie told Vera, and then, of course, she had to and Jamie took her up on it every time she forgot.

  Those holidays, too, we all went to see Eden. It was an extraordinary, dramatic and upsetting occasion. We went in the General's car, a 1937 Mercedes Benz that had been holed up in one of the Walbrooks stables while the war was on because the General said the village people might throw bricks at a German make of car. And rightly so, he said. He had had no business to be buying a German car even then, even secondhand, he must have been off his rocker, it was just pouring marks into Hitler's war effort. On the way we called for Vera and Jamie, both of whom were wearing new clothes made by Vera. Vera cut up her old cot blankets to make a jacket for herself and coats and trousers for Jamie. In 1947, if you didn't want to wear Utility clothing you made your own. Vera had made Helen's dress from the skirt of an old crepe de Chine ball gown. I was wearing the skirt part of an old cotton frock with a cotton jumper my mother had knitted. I mention all this because of what Eden was wearing and what she had brought back from Switzerland.

  The house, Goodney Hall? Well, it was – and is, I expect – a fine, elegant, not very large, eighteenth-century country house of which I am blasé enough to say there are many in England. The gardens had parterres and herbaceous borders and a pleached walk and rhododendrons that were famous and a greenhouse full of showy flowers. There did not seem much character to the house, no imprinting upon it of the personalities of its new owners. I heard later that Tony had bought it with all its furniture, bought it lock, stock and barrel, as they say, and perhaps there wasn't much else he could have done. He and Eden knew nothing about antiques and one could hardly have put Utility furniture into Goodney Hall. I remember Eden's house as furnished entirely in pink and green, though of course it can't have been like that. Surely there was yellow in the Chinese drawing-room and red in the Etruscan bedroom, but if there was I don't recall it. What I remember are pea-green carpets and French furniture with pink silk seats and big pink Chinese vases with smudgy patterns, truly boring pictures, mostly mezzotints, of north European towns and ships on stormy seas, and green velvet curtains with heavy tassels of tarnished gilt.

  But Eden, you could tell, was immensely proud of it. She was also enormously happy. And she looked quite different. I don't mean she looked well in the sense of being healthy. She didn't. She was thinner and paler and her face was less full. This, I thought, must be because she was pregnant. She looked different in the way rich women do. One might paraphrase that interchange between Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and say the rich look different, they have more scope. In this particular way, Eden looked different even from Helen – Vera and I didn't enter the competition – who, after all, was wearing a home-made dress and had washed her hair herself. Everything about Eden, you see, was of the best, the most expensive top-grade stuff. The best hairdresser in London had cut her hair, she was wearing the most prestigious range of make-up available. She had on her huge diamond engagement ring and an eternity ring Tony had given her two weeks before when she told him she was pregnant. The dress she wore was white broderie anglaise, one of half a dozen she had brought back from Switzerland and which she had spread out on the (presumably) Etruscan bed before we arrived. The Swiss were different, too. There was no austerity there and nothing Utility. The shops were full of clothes, Eden told us, dresses and suits and shoes and silk underwear and silk stockings and she had bought masses, as much as they could – I waited for her to say ‘afford’ – carry home.

  Vera was disproportionately grateful for her present. This was a brooch made in the shape of an edelweiss, of bone or horn, I suppose, but it looked like some prototype of plastic. It was a nasty little brooch, not at all well-made. Eden seemed to have bought a great many things, gentian and edelweiss jewellery, all intended as presents for this friend and that, discriminating not at all between her loved sister who had been a mother to her and the woman who came up from the village to do the rough work. Then there descended on to the bed from a fine carved wood chest quite a dozen carved wooden animals, exquisitely carved in the way only the Swiss can work, so that the reclining St Bernard looked about to get up and stroll away and you would not have been surprised if the Siamese cat had stretched itself and begun washing its whiskers.

  Jamie, of course, became very excited. At first he was simply filled with awe. He had never seen anything like this before. I wasn't very fond of children then, I was never one of those girls who adore young children and want to hug them and take them out and look after them, but just the same, the expression on Jamie's face as he looked up at Vera moved me. He was so entranced, so overcome with wonder, with delight, at these things which literally looked like real animals in little, that first he smiled, then burst into joyful laughter.

  ‘The dog!’ he said. ‘The cat! Look, Mummy, that one's a bear. Look, Mummy!’

  He was a gentle child and it was a gentle hand he put out to touch the back of the dog that looked for all the world as if covered with fur.

  ‘No, please don't touch!’ Eden said rather sharply.

  There were no toys in the shops for children. There were children born at the beginning of the war or just before it who had never had a new toy worth calling a toy, who had inherited siblings' hand-downs, some of whom were lucky enough to have relatives who could sew and knit dolls or carve horses and carts. But Jamie wasn't one of these latter. If Francis had ever had toys – of course he must have, though you couldn't imagine it – they had long been lost or given away. Jamie had had to make do with that old set of bricks that had been my father's, Vera's own worn, bald fluffy teddy, and such things as kitchen utensils. He took no notice of Eden. He picked up the dog and held it in his hands, close up to his face.

  ‘Put it down! It's not a toy.’ Eden snatched the dog from him. She said to Vera, ‘Why do you let him do that? I thought he was supposed to be obedient.’

  I remembered from long ago the letter to my father: ‘I think you might teach your child better manners…’ My heart didn't often go out to Vera but it did then. She made no retort to Eden, no defence of the child to whom these things were a wonder and a delight. Love had tamed and humbled her. She said nothing. She took Jamie into her arms and he cried into her shoulder. The curious thing was that his crying wasn't the normal, unrestrained howling and sobbing of a child deprived of something he very much wants to have. It was quiet, sustained, more like an adult's grief. And yet you had the impression – Andrew told me afterwards that he did too – that Vera was a rock to Jamie, that even in his misery, it was almost a pleasure to him to have those arms, that shoulder, those gentle, whispered
words. Vera, too, drew a kind of sustenance from his unhappiness because it was confided in her only, only she could comfort and support, she alone was humankind to him.

  We had to make a tour of the house and a tour of the garden. Vera had recovered and praised everything extravagantly, flattering Eden absurdly, complimenting her as if she personally had planted out and pruned the roses, grown the raspberries, embroidered the petit point chair seats and painted the lotuses and dragons on the porcelain. She was like one of those sycophants who hung about the nobility in the eighteenth century, like Mr Collins with Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Eden accepted it all with gracious smiles, but she did not look well, she looked tired and there was something languid about the way she moved, though she brightened up and became enthusiastic again, as effervescent as she had been over the Swiss booty, when we came to the room that was to be the new baby's nursery.

  It was on the end of the house, a corner room with windows facing west and windows facing south, and it had been a child's room before, though perhaps a long time ago, for the paper on the wails was all faded Arthur Rackham fairies and between a pair of windows stood a dappled grey rocking horse with worn saddle and harness. I have a very clear, sharp recollection of standing in that room, filled with bright, soft August sunshine as it was, the sunshine making spots and squares on the pink carpet that had a pattern all round its edge of white convolvulus intertwined with improbably pale green ivy. The wallpaper reminded me of Eden's picture, her favourite she had said it was, of the Peter Pan statue, and I wondered if she would hang it in this room. The west-facing windows looked out over the Weeping Hills, that gentle range of slopes and dips and wooded rises so unlike a Suffolk landscape, and the south-facing ones over the broad sweep of lawns ringed by stately trees. All along the terrace below stood at intervals stone urns ornamented like Keats's urn with youths and maidens and people going to festivals and mysterious priests and heifers lowing to the skies and bold lovers never kissing, and in the urns grew Agapanthus africanus, the blue lily, and white and purple allium, in rare and special varieties, as Vera the sycophant had taken care to tell us. Vera now leaned out of one of these windows, praising the view. Helen looked a little bored, or as bored as kind Helen could ever show herself to be. Jamie, of course, had climbed on to the horse and this time Eden didn't stop him. She was telling us all how the room was going to be decorated and furnished and how the nanny would have the communicating one. Besides, the horse was old and shabby, doubtless to be chucked out along with the little wooden chairs and table and the brass bedstead, so it didn't matter about Jamie playing with it, did it?