A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  Suddenly she began to speak, apropos of nothing that had gone before, yet as if this were only the continuation of a conversation she had been carrying on for weeks. And in a way it was, for later on I learned she had made a similar appeal to Josie, to the Morrells, and even to Helen, though Helen had said nothing of it to us.

  ‘If we went over there now,’ Vera said, ‘Tony wouldn't be at home. I know that for a fact. And it's June's afternoon off. I've stayed there so much I know all the workings of that household. There would only be Mrs King with Eden and Mrs King's not very strong, she must be sixty if she's a day. We could easily do it. I could do it if you'd keep Eden talking. It would be easy.’

  People with an obsession have their minds so filled with it to the exclusion of all else that they assume others must know what they are talking about without introduction. It was like this with Vera. It seems strange to me now that I hadn't the least idea what she meant and that Andrew hadn't.

  ‘Fetch Jamie, of course,’ Vera said. She was impatient. ‘Bring him home. Take him away by force. It's the only way.’

  We both thought, we found out afterwards, that Vera had gone mad. Andrew said:

  ‘Doesn't he want to come home, Vera? Is that it?’ He spoke gently and cautiously.

  ‘Of course he wants to come. He's only five, isn't he? What does he know? It's Eden won't let him. Everybody knows that. Eden wants to keep him because she can't have children of her own.’

  ‘Now look, Vera. Wait a minute.’ Andrew sounded as appalled as I felt. ‘That can't be true. You're a bit overwrought, aren't you? You don't look well. But you mustn't exaggerate. Has Eden been putting pressure on you to let her adopt Jamie? Is that it?’

  ‘Pressure!’ said Vera. She gave a dreadful throaty laugh and, sitting down on the extreme edge of her chair, began to wring her hands.

  ‘Because all you have to do is refuse. They can't take him from you. The law won't let them. Surely you know that?’

  She made an impatient, rather violent, gesture of shaking her head back and forth. ‘You've got the car and there are two of you and you're young and strong. You could fight Eden. You could shut Mrs King up in her room and Faith could keep Eden talking while I got Jamie from the nursery and if Eden saw before we got away, you could keep hold of Eden while Faith and I got away.’

  ‘I can't drive,’ I said.

  Andrew glared at me. I suppose it did sound as if I were taking her seriously.

  ‘Look, Vera,’ he said, ‘I think you ought to see your doctor. Get something for your nerves.’ People did talk about nerves then and not neuroses. ‘Have a quiet lie down and think about it. Any time you want to bring Jamie home, we'll fetch him for you. OK? Any time – you only have to say the word.’ I loved him for that. He was being strong, the way I believed he always was. ‘Only we have to do it above-board,’ he said. ‘Let Eden know and be firm about it, but we have to be civilized, too, don't we?’

  She gave him a look of ineffable scorn. ‘Why will no one help me?’

  ‘You don't need help, Vera. Or not in that way. You need a doctor's help, if you ask me.’

  ‘I don't ask you. The only thing I ask you, you won't do.’

  Neither of us felt we should leave her in that state, though I think we were both beginning to feel a tremendous distaste for the whole business. We thought we understood, you see, we thought we understood about the pressures and the resistances. We suggested she come back with us to Walbrooks and Helen and stay for a few days and maybe see Helen's doctor. She would have none of it. If she went anywhere it would be back to Eden's to be with Jamie.

  ‘But does Eden really want to adopt him?’ I asked Helen that night.

  ‘It seems like it, darling. She can't have babies, she never will be able to. And apparently she's been persuading Vera very hard for the past three months to let her adopt him legally. She's told me so herself. Of course, as to keeping him from Vera by force, that's all nonsense.’

  ‘Is it though? What exactly happens if Vera says she wants him now and she's going to take him? She hasn't got a car. I mean, would Eden physically hold on to him? Would she shut him in the nursery? Would Tony and June Poole help her?’

  ‘I can tell Vera's been talking to you.’

  ‘No, she hasn't,’ I protested. ‘At any rate she didn't tell me all this.’

  ‘The fact is, I suppose, darling, Vera doesn't want trouble. She doesn't want an outright breach with Eden. And of course she doesn't –we've been such a united family.’

  I couldn't see it that way myself and said so. Arthur Longley hadn't been united to Helen when she was little and he married again. Gerald and Vera hadn't remained united and Francis had never been united with anyone. Those two sisters had always disliked my mother and she them, and my father and Helen had not got on. So much for being united. Andrew said – to my surprise:

  ‘Don't get me wrong but mightn't it in the long run be the best thing in the world for Jamie if Eden adopted him? Vera hasn't seemed entirely sane lately. She's alone. She's not well off. You have to ask yourself how ideal she actually is as a parent.’

  ‘Why do you have to ask yourself?’ I said. I hate phrases like that. ‘How ideal is any parent? The point is, surely, that she is his parent and the only parent he's got as far as one knows.’ Helen registered shock at that. When I say ‘registered’, I mean showed it in Helen's special way, making an oooh mouth and putting up her eyebrows. ‘Vera loves him, you don't seem to realize that. She really loves him passionately, doesn't she, Helen? I don't believe you've ever seen them together or you wouldn't talk about ideal parents.’

  ‘I was thinking of the child,’ Andrew said. ‘I was thinking of his chances. This way he'd have two parents, young parents, too. A beautiful home. Money for his education. The right background.’

  That disgusted me. ‘Eden hates him,’ I said. ‘She hates children.’

  ‘No, she doesn't, darling,’ said Helen. ‘I've seen them together, I saw them last week, and she's as doting as Vera now.’

  That night it was when we began to take sides. No one openly expressed this, no one came out with it and said Eden should have him or Vera must keep him, but silently we took sides. Curiously enough, Andrew, for all his initial protestations, came into the Vera camp. I think his sole grounds were that he didn't like Eden and wanted her to get her come-uppance. The General was on Vera's side because he had sentimental ideas about maternity. Helen astounded me by taking up the attitude Andrew had held. In adoption by Eden and Tony she saw unparalleled material advantages for Jamie. Besides, this way the family would be less likely to be split, she felt, for Vera would spend half her time at Goodney Hall to be near Jamie whereas if Vera won, Eden would never speak to her again. I remembered the profound sisterly love there had once been between them and marvelled.

  ‘What a pity it was Vera ever had that flu,’ said Helen, as if this had brought it all about. But that was what we all thought at the time.

  I must not give the impression that the Vera—Eden—Jamie business occupied us to the exclusion of all else. We thought about it a lot, we talked about it, but we had other things, too. Andrew and I specially had other things. We were moving from a friendship, a cousinship, into a love affair. Patricia, too, was contemplating marriage, and she brought the man she was living with in London down to Walbrooks for a fortnight. Not that any of that older generation knew she was living with him, it was not something one openly admitted to in 1949, and when they came to Helen's they were given separate bedrooms as a matter of course. There was a good deal of secret padding about the passages of the Richardsons' old house those August nights.

  About a week after that visit of ours to Laurel Cottage, Eden dropped in one morning. She came alone, having left Jamie at home with June Poole and Mrs King. She was on her way, she said, to pick up Vera who was returning to Goodney Hall with her until the end of the month. I think the question of Jamie must have been preying on Helen's mind otherwise she would hardly have burs
t out as she did in our presence and that of Patricia's boyfriend, Alan. It was as if she couldn't contain herself.

  ‘Darling, it really isn't fair to poor Vera to go on like this! You simply must make up your mind what you want to do and do it. And the poor little boy – what must he be feeling?’

  Eden was very calm and aloof. She was wearing a dress of fine Indian cotton in large shaded checks of navy blue and yellow with a wide collar and deep decolleté, the neckline being filled in with ruffled lace. The skirt was full and longish and such were the formal fashions of the time, even for driving about the countryside in the mornings, that she had on nylon stockings with pointed clocks and dark seams and very high-heeled, ankle-strap shoes of navy-blue glacé kid. Her mouth and fingernails were painted crimson. The perfume she was wearing was a very pungent one, Coty's Emeraude.

  ‘My mind is made up, Helen,’ she said. ‘Tony and I know exactly what we want. We want Jamie. There's no difficulty on our side. It's Vera you should be talking to.’

  ‘If Vera isn't in agreement with you, young lady,’ said the General, ‘you'll have to give it up. You know that, I suppose?’

  I could see Eden hated him calling her young lady as I hated it when he did it to me. It was a term he used to Patricia and Eden and myself when he was less than pleased with us.

  ‘I don't want to talk about private things in front of all and sundry,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, darling, all and sundry! How can you? We're all family here.’

  Eden didn't think Alan family, though she hadn't quite the nerve to say so. ‘Anyway, it's private between Vera and me.’

  ‘Not if you're upsetting your sister, it isn't,’ said the General. It wasn't clear if he meant Vera or his own wife by ‘sister’. The devil entered into me, for I knew that of all people's interference, Eden would hate mine the worst. Well, she would have hated my mother's more.

  ‘Why can't you just adopt any baby?’ I said. ‘Why can't you go to an adoption society? I should have thought you'd want a little baby. Jamie's five.’

  ‘I'm well aware how old Jamie is, Faith. Thank you very much for putting your oar in. What business it is of yours I don't quite know.’

  ‘Please don't quarrel, darlings,’ Helen cried. ‘I can see you'd want your own nephew, Eden. I can see that. He's a sweet little boy anyway, he's a darling and – you could send him to Eton!’

  This was so absurd it made us laugh and went some way to clearing the air. Eden said, still smiling:

  ‘I may as well tell you since you've brought the subject up, that it's all settled. I didn't want to announce it till all the odds and ends are tidied up. We are going to keep Jamie, he will be our son, it's only a matter of a few formalities. And of course Vera will spend just as much time with us as she wants until she gets used to the new arrangement.’

  We were all a bit stunned. Whichever camp we were in, I don't think we had envisaged anything like this happening quite so fast. And I remembered Vera begging us to kidnap Jamie. It was only a week ago that she had appealed to Andrew and me to help her.

  ‘But Vera loves him,’ I said. ‘He's everything to her.’

  Eden was hating me. It was that which gave me courage. ‘All the more reason why she'd want the best for him.’

  ‘You know that one doesn't work. No one is that self-denying.’

  ‘I'm not going to talk about it with you, Faith. You're not old enough to understand. As far as I'm concerned, you're still more or less at school.’

  ‘I know love when I see it,’ I said. ‘Vera told Andrew and me last week to get Jamie away from you. She implied you were keeping him by force.’

  ‘Oh, Faith,’ said Helen.

  Andrew let me down. He didn't say a word. His father asked him. He said, was that true, and Andrew just shrugged his shoulders. But if he had supported me, if they had all been made to believe, what could we have done? Patricia left the room, taking Alan with her. She said, ‘Come on, Alan, let's go outside.’

  ‘Do you really think,’ said Eden with infinite scorn, ‘that Vera would be coming to stay with me, that I'd be fetching her now, if she was opposed to our adopting Jamie? Do you? Do you think she'd allow it if she was? Why wouldn't she just get hold of Jamie and walk out of the house with him? Or does Faith think I'm keeping him a prisoner?’

  There were no answers to that. Eden soon went, parting coldly from all of us. The General was cross with me after she had gone, calling me a firebrand. I had a tremendous row with Andrew in which at last I forced him to admit Vera had asked us to kidnap Jamie. I also got him to tell this to his parents, though he toned down and qualified the truth a lot, making it look as if Vera was hysterical and needed mental treatment.

  This upset Helen disproportionately. People didn't accept mental illness then like they do today. They always had to defend themselves by saying there had never been anything like that in their family. That was what Helen did say but at the same time as being horrified at the idea of Vera's mental disturbance, seemed anxious to blame everything on to it. She said she would make a point of finding out for herself, though. She would go over to Goodney Hall in a day or two and speak to Vera alone.

  I should have liked to go with her but she wouldn't let me. Although she didn't put it quite like that, she implied I should only antagonize Eden. The Chatterisses didn't have any notions about economizing by not using the phone so I phoned my father and spoke to him about Vera and Jamie. He was never much good with phones, having come to them too late in life, and he always tended to address the mouthpiece rather than simply talk to the person at the other end. He spoke on phones as if everything he said was being recorded for people unused to the sound of English. This, added to the facts that, like Eden, he believed me too young to involve myself in this matter and also too presumptuous as a mere niece, made our talk unsatisfactory. He kept saying he couldn't follow any of it but Vera and Eden must know what they were doing. The most important thing was that I shouldn't get on bad terms with my aunts.

  Helen came back, looking quite cheerful. Vera was perfectly normal, she couldn't imagine what Andrew had meant. She and Jamie had been out together, out for a walk to Goodney Parva, when Helen got there. Surely that could put paid to any ideas of Jamie's imprisonment? Vera had brought him back and sent him off upstairs to June Poole and talked to Helen about Jamie starting school. He would be going to Goodney Parva village school, starting that September.

  ‘I asked her if she'd be living there too and she said, no, she'd be back at Laurel Cottage by the end of August. Then I came out with it and asked her if it was true Eden and Tony were going to adopt Jamie legally. She said she didn't know about ‘adopt legally’ but they were going to keep him, have him living with them. I asked her why. She didn't say anything, just made a face. She was embroidering one of those ridiculous cushion covers, you know the way she and Eden do, darling, like they needed what-d'you-call-it? – occupational therapy. She just went on sewing away, not looking at me.’

  ‘Did you actually get to the crux?’ said the General. ‘Did you ask her if that was what she wanted?’

  ‘Yes, I did, darling. Don't interrogate me. She said quite calmly that it was absolutely what she wanted and not to talk about it any more. I don't think she's a bit mental, Andrew, really I don't. More lethargic, if you know what I mean.’

  My father wrote me a letter. He said he had the greatest confidence in his sisters doing the right thing and putting their duty before personal considerations. They had been properly brought up and that was something that would stand them in good stead. There was no history of mental illness in our family, none whatsoever, and he wanted me to believe that. The last thing he wanted was for me to worry about that sort of thing. However, he thought it probable that my mother's dislike of his sisters, which he attributed to jealousy, had affected me and prejudiced me against them. It would cause him bitter sorrow to think that anyone could have attempted to destroy the affection and admiration he knew I felt for Vera and Eden. And
so on. Wouldn't I go and stay with them for a few days before I came home? After all, there was no need for me to prolong my stay with Helen who was only a half-aunt.

  Nothing would have induced me to stay at Goodney Hall, always supposing I had been asked. Eden, of course, didn't ask me. Eden being Eden would no doubt have expected a written apology before she even asked me to tea. I stayed at Walbrooks for about three weeks and then I went home to my parents, having promised to return in September and go up to Cambridge with Andrew at the start of the Michaelmas Term. It was impossible to make my father understand why I hadn't gone to Eden and Vera. I was growing tired of explanations, more particularly because I had come to guess there were things both Vera and Eden knew that none of the rest of us did, and to act without that knowledge was useless. To speculate was useless. A letter came from Vera but it does not survive. Why, I don't know, as we certainly had no coal fires in September. It told my father that she would be returning to Sindon at the end of the week (she had stayed on a fortnight more than arranged already) and that Gerald wanted a divorce. He had met a woman he wished to marry and would provide Vera with grounds. In those days a woman had to prove that there had been a matrimonial offence, adultery or desertion or cruelty, to divorce her husband – breakdown of the marriage was not enough.

  ‘She'll be well rid of him, he's treated her monstrously,’ my father said.

  Eden became ill at an awkward time for the Goodney Hall household. June Poole was on a week's holiday. Tony's father had had a slight heart attack and Tony was staying in Yorkshire. These things could not have been arranged. They were coincidental. What Eden had the matter with her was not specified and therefore gave rise to a mystery. It wasn't a cold or flu. Might it, we speculated, be another miscarriage? By the time I was back at Walbrooks she had been taken into hospital.