A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  Andrew said, ‘You ought to have peacocks, Eden. You ought to have a pair of peacocks out on your terrace.’

  ‘Goodness knows where you'd get peacocks, darling,’ said Helen, ‘Old Mrs Williams couldn't even get a budgie when her Bobby died.’

  Eden turned round. ‘I wouldn't dream of having peacocks.’ She was suddenly petulant. ‘Hateful things. Have you heard the noise they make? Have you heard them scream?’ Her lips trembled. I couldn't imagine what was the matter with her. ‘I don't want to be wakened up by screaming at four in the morning.’

  ‘Good thing you're having a nanny then.’

  Eden ignored this quip of Andrew's. ‘Shall we have a drink before lunch?’

  Poor Jamie once more had to be parted from an entrancing toy. He didn't cry this time. He put his hand in Vera's and walked along beside her, down the long corridor, down the balustraded staircase. Tony now appeared. He only went to work in London three days a week and this wasn't one of those days but he had been out somewhere seeing a man about coppicing their wood. At once he busied himself with pouring our drinks, and being the sort of man he was – kind, well-meaning, sociable, dull and totally insensitive to mood or the differences between people or their tastes in contrast with his – treated us while he did so to an account of exactly where and how he had obtained this gin, that whisky, that sherry, and where he expected the next bottles would come from. They had a great many glasses of all shapes and sizes and it was of the first importance to Tony to use the correct glass for each kind of drink. He even insisted on a different shape of glass being suitable for dry sherry from that suitable for medium sherry, something I have never come across since.

  ‘And now how about this young chap?’

  Vera said Jamie could have squash or some of the ‘government’ orange juice she had brought with her but Tony wouldn't allow that.

  ‘Oh, come on, we can do better than that. Personally, I believe in getting a boy used to wine from an early age. It was what my father did for me and I've never had cause to regret it.’

  ‘Hardly at three, surely?’ said Andrew.

  ‘I wouldn't be too sure of that. I wasn't much past that. My governor was set on my knowing wine, you see, and he said it was never too soon to start.’

  ‘I suppose he laid down a pipe of Montrachet for you?’ Andrew said very seriously.

  I didn't hear Tony's reply. I was conscious only of thinking he shouldn't tease Tony, it was as bad as teasing Jamie would be, and then, looking up, reaching out for my sherry, I happened to glance in Eden's direction and saw blood running down her leg.

  It had the effect of freezing me. My fingers had just made contact with the glass and there they rested on the cool, hard, slippery, rounded surface, or rather clutched at it, while my gaze fixed on Eden's left leg. She was standing up. The woman who lived in and looked after them, her husband being gardener and handyman, had come into the room with two platefuls of canapés, bits and pieces of egg and cheese and pickles on rounds of toast. Eden had taken these from her and was in the act of offering them to Helen. As she leant forward the full skirt of her white dress had swung up a little so that the backs of her knees were visible. None of us was wearing stockings – you had to give coupons for them and it was hard to get them anyway – but Eden had on very pale, thin stockings, Swiss no doubt, and the blood in a thick, dark trickle was flowing down the inside of her leg, had reached the knee, the calf, was approaching the ankle and the thin ankle strap of her white sandal.

  Oddly enough, I didn't think of what this must mean. I only thought of periods and when things like that had happened or nearly happened to me. Most of all I thought of Eden sitting down when the canapés had been distributed and the blood staining her beautiful, ice-white, eyelet-embroidered skirt. But still I didn't know how to handle it. Come to that, I am not sure I would know how today. If I had whispered to her, when she and the plate were in front of me, to come outside with me a minute, I had something to tell her, I am quite sure she would have looked up and laughed and demanded of the company what could I possibly have to tell her that everyone might not hear, what could I possibly want to keep private from the rest?

  She was like that. She was Eden. So I shook my head at the canapés and let her go past me and at last had the presence of mind to catch Helen's eye and give her a look of such entreaty that Helen, so clever, so tactful, so insightful, immediately got up and said to Eden that she must use the bathroom before lunch and she expected I would like to also.

  Women didn't talk about their periods then. Or not much. Perhaps to contemporaries, and usually with euphemisms. As soon as we were outside the door, I told Helen briefly what I had seen. I called it the ‘curse’. At least that was an improvement on Vera's ‘a visitor in the house’.

  Helen laid a hand on my arm. ‘But, darling, it can't be. She's pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘I forgot that.’

  ‘I mean, dearest heart, if that's what you saw, she isn't pregnant any more.’

  And she wasn't. But we didn't have to tell her. When we went back into the room, Steuart's Chinese drawing-room that I remember as pink and green though it must surely have been yellow, Eden was gone and Andrew was looking mystified and Tony who ought to have been looking mystified, not to say anxious, was still going on about instructing children in worldly know-how, having proceeded by this time to the smoking of cigars. We sat there. We waited. Jamie said he was hungry. He didn't like scrambled egg and gherkins on cold toast and I can't say I blamed him. Suddenly Vera said:

  ‘Is Eden all right?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Tony. ‘She just popped off to powder her nose.’ Everyone says ‘absolutely’ now but no one did then except Tony and he said it all the time.

  Vera went upstairs. She had to take Jamie with her because he wouldn't be left, he wouldn't be parted from her. Mrs King, the housekeeper, came in to say lunch was ready and Tony said, all right, we'd be along in a minute. He went off, too, but not to find out what was wrong with Eden as I believed but to open some wine that had to be allowed to ‘breathe’.

  I said to Andrew, ‘Eden's having a miscarriage.’

  ‘Christ.’

  There was a phone in the room. At that moment we heard it make a sort of tinkle, a sign that the extension upstairs was being used. Somehow we all knew this was Vera phoning the doctor.

  ‘Don't you feel,’ said Helen, ‘that we should stand not upon the order of our going – or whatever that tiresome woman said – but go at once? I mean, maybe take Jamie and leave Vera here with Eden?’

  ‘Not take Jamie,’ said Andrew. ‘Please not. Peacocks would be preferable. But by all means go.’

  ‘I couldn't eat anyway,’ I said.

  It was amazingly difficult to put all this across to Tony. Of course, it fell to Helen to do it, to explain, but we were there, we heard it, and his obtuseness was unbelievable. He kept insisting it must be a joke, Eden was teasing him, trying to make him anxious – what must their marriage have been like? – and she and Vera were upstairs ‘talking secrets’, all girls together. Then Vera came down. She was white-faced and grim. Jamie was in her arms, half-hanging over her shoulder.

  ‘I've sent for the doctor. Eden's having quite a severe haemorrhage. I imagine she's lost the baby.’

  The only one of us to have any lunch was Jamie. Vera looked distraught, deeply wretched and concerned, but Jamie still came first with her. She took him out to the kitchen and got him something to eat, milk and a chicken sandwich. Helen and Andrew and I went back to Walbrooks and eventually, late that afternoon, I suppose, Tony drove Vera and Jamie home. The doctor had Eden taken straight into hospital.

  What happened to her there? I have never really known. No doubt Tony knows – that is, if he can remember, and if he can, will he want to talk about it? Woud he want to tell Daniel Stewart? I am sure not. Eden had miscarried and she had some sort of operation. I have since thought that perhaps it was an ectopic pregnancy that she had had, on
e in which the foetus implants itself in a Fallopian tube. As the embryo grows, the tube may rupture, in which case the tube itself must be removed by surgery or the woman will die. On the other hand, the foetus may detach itself and be expelled without damage to the tube. I know only that after this miscarriage it was rumoured through the family that Eden would not or should not have children. It would be dangerous for her to become pregnant again or – this was the alternative version – impossible for her to become pregnant. My mother said:

  ‘I can't help wondering if it's the result of the life she led in the Wrens.’

  I didn't know what she meant. My father didn't know what she meant. We both thought this was some half-formed, half-superstitious, minatory legacy of Victorian morality. But what she suggested was quite feasible, quite medically accurate in fact. She was inferring that Eden, sleeping around, had contracted gonorrhoea, one of the possible after-effects of which is to bring about a blockage of the Fallopians. This is said to have been responsible in the past for many one-child families. The bride would catch gonorrhoea from her husband at the same time as she conceived, so that one child would be safely born. But the disease by then had done its work and the tube or tubes had been blocked so no further conception could take place. If Eden had indeed caught gonorrhoea from a lover, the result could have been an ectopic pregnancy.

  There was no real reason to believe this. One hears of the Fallopians being blocked after abdominal surgery. Eden had had her appendix out as a child. Or surely it could be simple, unaccountable misfortune. All that seemed certain was that Tony Pearmain had no heir and most probably never would have.

  Fifteen years or so after all this happened, Chad Hamner told me the story of his life over tea in Brown's Hotel. I had met him by chance in Bond Street, having gone there to have my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon's. Tea at Brown's is a very civilized business. You sink into your armchair and they bring you a small, home-made, toasted teacake which they drop on to your plate with a pair of tongs. The implication is that this is what you must eat, this is what all English gentlefolk eat as a matter of course for their tea. The cakes, which arrive on a three-tier silver stand, are optional but in any case for later. There they are, looking inviting, but the teacake must be eaten first – like at nursery tea.

  In this milieu, Chad and I were perhaps out of place. We didn't look out of place, of course, we looked like everyone else, just as elegant and urbane, me with my hair cut, Chad grown thinner and his hair beginning to go grey. He was the first man I ever came across to abandon the sports jacket for a casual one with a zipper. It was on the pavement outside Asprey's that we met. He put out his arms and I went into them and we stood there embraced, though the strange thing was that we had never hugged each other before, never kissed or even touched hands as far as I can remember. But the bond between us was a strange one. There cannot be many people who are linked together by a hanged woman.

  I don't know why we went to Brown's. Certainly not because Chad was staying there or had become rich or even habitually went there. As a journalist he was free-lancing, he had a flat in Fulham (which in 1963 was not fashionable or interesting or ‘upwardly mobile’) and I don't think he was doing very well for himself. For Francis he had ruined his life, he had destroyed all prospects of success. He told me this while we ate our teacakes. For a long time he had accounted the world well lost for love, but the trouble with that one is that love doesn't last and then one remembers that the world was once there for the losing.

  He wouldn't have started on it if I, with an emotional rush of desire to confide and confess, had not come out with what I had seen that night after Eden's wedding. I had told no one till then – not even Andrew, not even Louis. Chad looked me straight in the eye, a cool, steady gaze, unexpected really after what I had just told him.

  ‘I was sick with love,’ he said. ‘That's what the translation of the Song of Solomon ought to say, not sick of love. I only wish I could have got to be sick of love. I fell in love with Francis when he was thirteen. Rather classical, don't you think? The Emperor Hadrian and Antinous. An ugly old chap and a beautiful youth.’

  ‘Hardly old at thirty,’ I said.

  Chad gave one of his enormous Gallic shrugs. ‘Age is a state of mind. I felt old when I was with Francis and I felt ugly. What I did was something most people would think abominable even today, but I didn't do it much, he wouldn't let me. And I wasn't the first. Does that surprise you? He used to let me make love to him approximately three times a year. Nineteen forty-five was my bonanza year – he must have been celebrating the war being over – and he let me do it four times. No wonder I couldn't get him out of my system.’

  ‘Francis makes nonsense of Freud, doesn't he?’ I said. ‘Poor Vera wasn't exactly a domineering, possessive mother to him.’

  ‘Yes, but Francis wasn't really queer. Not like I am, not to the core. I've never had a woman. Francis was simply all things to all men and women as it suited his book. I used to ask myself why he bothered with me and I came up with two answers. I'm still sure they were true. The first is that it's wonderful to be adored – I mean I should think it is, I've never been adored – wonderful to have someone worship you and know that nothing you can do, no amount of indifference and neglect and downright unkindness that you can mete out is going to make an atom of difference.’

  ‘What's the other one?’ I said.

  ‘Francis liked doing things he and others believed to be wrong. He liked to do them simply for the sake of wrongdoing. Actually, that's very rare, it's much rarer than you might think. Even the great sinners of this world – Hitler, say, Stalin, certain multi-murderers – believed that what they were doing was right or that the end they were attaining to was right. Hardly anyone sets out to do evil like Milton's Lucifer does, and he never convinces us, he always seems rather a pleasant chap. And it's not a case of “Evil, be thou my Good”. Francis wanted evil to stay evil, to be his evil, and for that reason to be desirable to him. But none of that made any difference to my loving him. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth.’

  A chord was struck. I thought of what Anne and I had used the hovel for on rainy days and what Chad and Francis had used it for on misty nights.

  ‘Like Mary Stuart,’ I said, ‘following Bothwell in her shift.’

  ‘Underpants in my case,’ said Chad, ‘only he seldom let me get that far. I missed so many opportunities for him, you know. I was stringer for a national paper and they offered me a job on the staff but I turned it down. I only got to see Francis in the school holidays as it was but if I'd been in Fleet Street I wouldn't have seen him at all. The Oxford Mail job seemed heaven-sent. It was possible to see him every day if not to speak to him. And then I got fired. About six months after you saw us together that night I got fired. And that again was through Francis. I don't mean it was Francis's fault, it wasn't, it was mine, but it was through him it happened.

  ‘I had a job one evening for the paper, covering the annual dinner of a tennis club at Headington. You don't go to things like that, you get a handout beforehand of the general programme and pick the rest up from the secretary or someone afterwards. I had no intention of going. I was taking Francis out to dinner, it was going to be the first time I'd been alone with him for a month. You know they say everyone has a peak experience in his or her life? A day or a few hours when one knows the most perfect, the highest degree of happiness, of ecstasy if you like, of one's entire existence. Well, that evening was mine. I thought so at the time and I've had no reason since to change my opinion. Francis came back to my flat and we made love and he was kind to me and I was gloriously happy and it was my peak experience. It was also the last time I was happy for a very long while – I mean the last time I was even moderately content. I wrote my tennis club story from the handout without checking up on it, the paper came out, and the next thing was I was up in front of the editor being asked why I hadn't thought to mention that the guest speaker at the dinner, a local bigwig, had dropp
ed dead while making his speech. So I got the sack and came back to darkest north Essex – where at least I was more likely to see Francis than anywhere else – and because someone had left, they gave me my old job back.’

  He told me a lot more that afternoon, how he had followed Francis to London and because Fleet Street wouldn't have him then, had gone to work as a reporter on a local paper out in northwest London called The Willesden Citizen. And how Francis had got tired of him at last and one day had struck him, knocking him down three flights of the staircase that led up to his bedsit in Brondesbury Park. There were even more painful things: how Francis turned his fondness, a fondness he even then still retained, for playing practical and more subtle jokes, upon him; how his determination to be rid of Chad had led him to humiliate him in public far more cleverly and deviously than in his boyhood he had ever humiliated Vera. So by the time Francis was in his mid-twenties and Chad over forty, it came to an end and Chad was no longer very well, no longer strong enough to do a general reporter's job in a bleak northern suburb.

  ‘I'm like Hadrian in more ways than one,’ he said and he pointed out to me the diagonal crease that crossed each of his ear lobes. Apparently these occur in people with a predisposition to coronary heart disease; it is medical fact this, it is proven, not an old wives' tale. We know from busts of Hadrian and Hadrian's head on coins that he had those lines on his ear lobes and it was from coronary heart disease that Hadrian died.