by Barbara Vine
‘Mummy should never have been allowed to know where he'd been. They should have had the sense to lie to her. It was this stupid doctor asking her if she knew where he'd been and telling her about the ticket in his pocket that did the damage.’
‘You knew all that,’ I said, ‘at fifteen?’
‘Not really. No, I didn't. I sort of pieced it together afterwards. I mean, when I was older. But I did know about Charmian – that was the girlfriend – and that she lived at Elmswell and he'd been there, and Mummy didn't know that. Not at first.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
Marianne spoke almost triumphantly, ‘Because of the result, darling, the effect on her. She was so absolutely devastated. She couldn't have been like that if she'd known all about the affair beforehand.’
‘Look, Marianne,’ I said, ‘I'm not a psychiatrist. I mean, I'm not even a nurse. I'm just a carer. I don't know why these things affect people the way they do. I'm very ignorant really.’
‘You've been kind to Mummy, darling, that's all I know. You've been more like a daughter than I have.’
It's awful, isn't it? The words that come into your head – and almost into your mouth – are the ones you're always hearing on TV or reading in magazines, ‘I'm only doing my job.’ Of course I wasn't such a fool as to say them.
Instead I said, ‘You mean she was what you said, devastated, when your father died?’
‘Not immediately. That was the strange thing. But perhaps it's not so strange, Jenny. Do you think shock delays things? It was months before it seemed to hit her. I mean, more than a year maybe, eighteen months, I don't know.’
I asked her what she meant. What convinced her Stella was in such a bad way? She didn't answer directly.
‘Of course it was Mummy who found Charmian, but you know all about that.’
‘I'm sorry?’
‘Don't you know the story? I'm afraid I rather treat you like one of the family, Jenny. I take it for granted you know our family history as well as we do. Charmian shot herself. With a shotgun. I don't know the details, I've never known. It was quite a long time after Daddy died, months, but it was because of him. She couldn't bear life without him. Mummy found her.’
‘Your mother found her? You mean found her dead?’
‘She went to her house. She'd been jealous of her for years, she really disliked her, but I think she got to like her after Daddy died. I suppose she was sorry for her. Anyway, she went there and found Charmian dead in one of the barns. That was the beginning of it, I think. But I was so young, Jenny, and I had my own friends, and I was desperate to get to be an actor. There must have been so much I didn't see. But I know that before I went away to drama school when I was seventeen she'd gone into an awful depression – well, she'd just gone inside herself. I don't think she ever really came out, or not for years.’
‘But that was two years after your father died,’ I said.
‘Yes, that's right, just before drama school. Mummy was depressed before I went away. It wasn't exactly depression, it was more as if she was – well, stricken. All sorts of things she used to do she just stopped doing. Driving the car, for instance. We had another au pair by then, Maret had left, we had a Norwegian called Aagot – amazing names they have – and Mummy just gave over the driving of the car to her. She drove Richard to school and did the shopping. Mummy wouldn't even go in the car. She had that friend, that actress, Gilda Brent, and Gilda's husband, whatever he was called…’
‘Alan Tyzark.’
‘That's right, Alan Tyzark. Mummy used to see a lot of them. I can remember him taking us out for drives, he liked kids, didn't have any of his own, and she used to go about with Gilda an awful lot, but after her depression started she never saw them. Just when she needed friends she dropped them. The only people she had anything to do with apart from us were the Brownings next door. I remember asking her why she never saw Alan and Gilda, if she wouldn't drive herself, why not let Aagot drive her over to see them, but she wouldn't.
‘I was at drama school for three years and when I came home for holidays I used to try to get her interested in – well, things, people. I expect I interfered in things too much, but you know how you can be at that age, a right little do-gooder. I even rang the Tyzarks up, meaning to ask Gilda to come over and see Mummy but Alan answered and said Gilda was away. He'd always been tremendously nice to me but that time, it was the last time we ever spoke, I might have been a total stranger. Of course it was obvious there'd been a quarrel. Mummy seemed determined to quarrel with everyone. She didn't go anywhere, she didn't take on another au pair when Aagot left.
‘She just devoted herself to Richard. Daddy had wanted him to go to prep school, boarding school that is, but Mummy wouldn't have that. I don't say she babied him, she didn't, but she wanted him with her. You could say she lived for him. And very gradually she got a bit better. We're talking about more than twenty years ago, and people didn't get treatment for depression. They were still caught up in that get-yourself-together thing. I can actually remember my cousin's wife Priscilla telling Mummy, “There's no one can help you but yourself, Stella.” And the result of that was that Mummy quarrelled with her. They didn't speak for months.
‘Mummy did get better and she never spoke of it, you know, I don't remember her ever mentioning my father. She absolutely never talked about him. But now… well, she mentioned him today. She just said, “I've been thinking about your father,” and then she said, “I'm glad I married him because otherwise I wouldn't have had you.” Sweet, wasn't it? But I think his death still haunts her. It's absolutely dire, you know, darling, to realize when your husband dies that your whole married life has been a lie.’
I couldn't tell her she'd got it wrong. I wasn't in the business of breaking up her illusions. She went back to have another word with Stella before leaving and as we came out of the lounge I tried to find a tactful way of telling her not to leave it too long before she came again.
‘If you could manage it in a week or two?’
‘Oh, darling, you mean she may not…’
‘I don't know. No one knows. But to be on the safe side. She does love to see you. Could you come on her birthday?’
‘I shall be seventy-one on December the 3rd, Genevieve,’ Stella said to me when I took her breakfast in next morning. ‘That's one year more than man's allotted span, quite a respectable age once upon a time. I shouldn't complain.’
‘You don't complain,’ I said.
‘Have you a minute? I know I mustn't monopolize you but if you've just five minutes?’
I sat on the end of the bed.
‘Poor Marianne has got it into her head I'm unhappy about Rex's death. Did she say anything to you?’
‘She did a bit.’
‘I like your discretion! Don't worry, I shan't ask you what she said.’
Stella was in good spirits. Skeletally thin she might be, and with a new wheeziness in her voice, but the light in her eyes was very nearly merry.
‘I do love to see my daughter, Genevieve. And I must confess it amuses me to see her get hold of the wrong end of the stick, poor darling. Fancy her thinking I was sad because of Rex! Misunderstanding's an awful thing, yet I suppose it's inevitable if we're ever to have any privacy. The fact is I was so utterly indifferent to Rex by the time he died that his death was no more to me than the man next door's would have been. I'd probably have cared more about the man next door‘s, I always liked John Browning.’ She sighed. ‘Charmian – well, yes, that was different.’
Her merriment had been short-lived. A cast of seriousness came across her face. She had been picking at a thin slice of brown bread and butter, but she pushed the rest of it away and made a little face of distaste. She eats practically nothing now. I think it's cups of tea and milky coffee that are keeping her alive. She looked at me, then away.
‘Charmian,’ she said. ‘I pitied her so and she'd have hated that if she'd known. Imagine, Genevieve, she didn't know about Rex, she didn
't know he had died. He used to phone her every day, he had done for years and years, even when…’ a small almost cynical smile, her eyebrows pushing more wrinkles up into her forehead, ‘he was supposed to be staging one of his come-backs to me. Every day, year in and year out, every single day but not, of course, the next day. He was dead and she didn't know. She must have waited for his call and it didn't come. She waited for three days before she phoned the firm. It was his nephew Jeremy who told her. But imagine her waiting like that, Genevieve, and growing more and more afraid and not daring to phone his home. Oh, the nightmare, it doesn't bear thinking of.’
Receiving the news, thinking what it might mean to her, Stella had forgotten all about Charmian. Or, rather, it had never occurred to her to let Charmian know. She even asked herself later if, unconsciously, she'd done it on purpose, if she'd tortured Charmian deliberately by keeping her in the dark. I don't see how you can do a cruel act unconsciously, if it isn't conscious it can't be cruel, but that's the way Stella is. None of it was her fault but she was filled with remorse. She said she was sorrier for Charmian than she'd ever been for anyone in all her life.
She wanted her to know that for years she hadn't minded about their affair. It was years since she had felt love for Rex. That only made Charmian worse, reproaching her for not loving Rex who ‘needed love so much’. For some reason she thought Charmian would want to talk, but Charmian only attacked her for not suggesting divorce to Rex. If she didn't love him why had she wanted to stay married to him? Misunderstanding, Stella said, it was all misunderstanding.
But something happened that never had before. Out of the death of the man that had been the husband of one of them and the lover of the other grew a relationship. Given time, they might have become friends, but they weren't given time. They began seeing each other, they began meeting, and after a while they stopped talking about Rex and talked instead about the things countrywomen do discuss, the houses being built in the villages and the new road and how the hedges were being uprooted and the cost of the hunt.
Because Gilda insinuated herself into most things that Stella did, she too got to see Charmian sometimes. She would phone early in the morning to find how Stella meant to spend her day and if it included a morning visit to Charmian, would announce that she was coming too. Or she would invite them both in that overbearing way of hers that Stella at least found so difficult to defy. The three of them would talk and have coffee and sit chatting in each other's houses. It must have been an awkward situation, three women who didn't really like each other, Charmian still in love with Stella's dead husband, Stella in love with Gilda's living husband and Gilda always projecting the image she had made of herself as somehow superior to both of them, more sophisticated, cleverer, more beautiful and elegant.
And Stella, the ‘little thing’, was patronized by both of them. To Charmian she was the woman her lover had married but never loved, and, more than that, she came from the wrong background for Rex's wife. In her eyes Rex had married far beneath him. Gilda, of course, simply treated Stella as an ignorant ‘greenhorn’, on the way home speculating about what Rex could possibly have seen in Charmian and making guesses in raw sexual terms. Charmian looked ‘such a fright’, there must have been some other reason for her ‘hold on him’, some love-making technique or a even a – well, Stella called it a ‘physiological peculiarity’. God knows what Gilda called it.
‘Why did you put up with it?’ I said.
‘I suppose I was sorry for both of them. Have you ever heard of the mother of the Gracchi?’
Well, of course I hadn't.
‘She was a Roman woman. A friend she was visiting spread out all her jewellery collection, boxes of it, for her to see and boasted of it. She called her two sons to her and said, “These are my jewels.” I had my jewels, Genevieve, I had my children, and I had Alan too.’
Stella thought Charmian was ‘getting over it’ just as in a few years' time people thought she was beginning to get over her own trouble. One morning, having made a vague arrangement to call and see Charmian on her way to Ipswich, Stella got to Elmswell at about eleven. Charmian's car was on the drive that led, not to the garage, she had no garage, but to the various outbuildings behind the house.
There seemed to be no one at home, in spite of the car. Stella rang the doorbell a couple of times and when there wasn't any answer she thought Charmian must be in the garden. It was late summer and a fine day. Charmian grew dahlias, she was proud of her dahlias. Stella went round the side of the house.
‘There was a great screen of cypresses,’ Stella said. ‘They were very ancient, far older than the house. Cypress wood is almost everlasting, did you know that? The gates of Constantinople were made of cypress and they lasted a thousand years.’
A big paved courtyard with buildings that had once been stables were on one side of it, a dairy and cold room on the other, long disused, a coach house that other people would have converted into a garage with a flat over it but Charmian's family never had. The garden beyond was walled. Fan-trained fruit trees grew against walls of cut flints and underneath, in the borders, were the dahlias, giants and cactus and pom-poms, Bishop of Leandaff and King Albert's Mourning. There were heleniums too, mustard yellow, and pink chrysanths and silvery lad's love. Stella walked down the path, looking for Charmian, calling Charmian. She was expecting that witch-like figure to appear from among the flowers, to have been bending over, to stand up and raise an arm in that stiff salute. Coming back again between the giant cypresses that last for ever, she looked in the stables and the dairy and then she came to the coach house. She searched everywhere because by this time she was worried. She thought Charmian might have cut or otherwise injured herself while gardening and collapsed.
It was true that she had injured herself and true too about the collapse. Stella found her on the coach house floor. Although she was forty-five years old she had never before seen a dead person, so it was unfortunate that the first one she saw had half her head blown off. The blood, Stella said, oh, the blood, I shall never forget it, I shall never be rid of the sight of it.
Later on, at the inquest which she had to attend, it was told by the people who work out these things how Charmian had done it. She had taken a shotgun, a twelve bore, and standing up put the barrel not into her mouth, that would have been impossible, but pointing up under her chin, held it with her left hand and pressed down with her right thumb on the trigger. The result was so terrible that Stella screamed. There was no one near to hear her but she screamed and screamed.
No one had phones in cars then, Stella said. Anyway, she couldn't have held a receiver, she couldn't have driven her car, her hands, her whole body were shaking. She ran down the high street, calling out, screaming, crying that Charmian was dead, that Charmian had killed herself. She had lost all control, she barely knew what she was doing, it was too late for Charmian, she wanted help for herself.
The police, when they came, asked if there was anyone they could get in touch with to be with her. She said, Alan Tyzark. She said it without thinking. It was automatic, he was the first person in her thoughts, he always was. In her shock, she had forgotten Gilda, and by chance he was alone at home and Gilda was out. He came at once.
‘He came in Gilda's car,’ Stella said. ‘I was at the police station, drinking a cup of tea. They were very kind to me, very considerate. I was watching for him from the window and when I saw this red car coming, this red Anglia, I thought, oh, no, it's not him, it's Gilda. That was her car you see, the Anglia, not his, she'd bought it secondhand a few months before.’
‘A red Ford Anglia?’ I said.
‘He had a Rover, a grey one. They were both quite old cars, they couldn't afford anything newer. I thought it was Gilda in the red car but it wasn't, it was Alan on his own. He put his arms round me, he didn't care about anyone seeing, and he said, “I'm going to take you to your house.” I thought he meant my home in Bury, but he took me to our house where we always met, he took me to Molucca
. We stayed there all day. We lay on the bed – not for love-making, I don't mean that – he just held me and we lay there side by side until the evening. He'd even arranged for Priscilla to look after Richard. I don't know how he explained it to Gilda, I don't know why he had her car and she had his, I don't know what he said to her. It was weeks before I spoke to her again.’
‘Stella,’ I said, ‘that red car, is that Gilda's car in the garage at your house?’
She gave me one of her sidelong looks. It's the expression of a child who's accused of doing something naughty but not very bad and still doesn't quite want to admit it. Guilty but amused, slightly annoyed.
‘What if it is?’
‘I thought you said Gilda died in a car crash.’
‘I was telling you about Charmian. She wrote to me, you know. She sent me a letter. Well, she sent it to my house, care of me, it was really to Rex. She wrote it to Rex who was dead. It was her version of a suicide note.’
Charmian must have gone out to post the letter that morning or perhaps the night before. The envelope was postmarked the date of her death and it arrived at Stella's on the following day. Her handwriting had always been unreadable and she typed everything on an antique typewriter that belonged with the house. She had typed simply, ‘I cannot live without you. I have tried but the days are too long.’ It was signed right at the bottom of the sheet with that scrawl of hers that was ‘Charmian’ but might have been anything.
Stella knew she should pass it to the coroner. But she wanted to show it to Alan first. He looked at it and then at her and said,
‘My own sentiments. They're playing our tune.’
‘You won't kill yourself though,’ she said.
‘How do you know what I'd do if you died?’
She said she shivered when he spoke those words. ‘What shall I do with her letter?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Let me take care of it.’ And he asked her if she really wanted to see that in the papers, an admission that Charmian had been Rex's lover.