It was a long time before I gave in and let her come. We wrote to each other frequently and those letters of ours were true love letters. They were inspiring – heroic in tone –
And so, at last, I let her come …
Well, she came.
She wasn’t allowed to stay very long. We knew then, I suppose – but we wouldn’t admit it. She came again. She came a third time. After that, I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. Her third visit lasted ten minutes, and it seemed like an hour and a half! I could hardly believe it when I looked at my watch afterwards. It had seemed, I have no doubt, just as long to her …
For you see we had nothing to say to each other …
Yes, just that …
There wasn’t, after all, anything there.
Is there any bitterness like the bitterness of a fool’s paradise? All that communion of mind with mind, our thoughts that leapt to complete each other’s, our friendship, our companionship: illusion – nothing but illusion. The illusion that mutual attraction between man and woman breeds. Nature’s lure, Nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit. Between me and Jennifer there had been the attraction of the flesh only – from that had sprung the whole monstrous fabric of self-deception. It had been passion and passion only, and the discovery shamed me, turned me sour, brought me almost to the point of hating her as well as myself. We stared at each other desolately – wondering each in our own way what had happened to the miracle in which we had been so confident.
She was a good-looking young woman, I saw that. But when she talked she bored me. And I bored her. We couldn’t talk about anything or discuss anything with any pleasure.
She kept reproaching herself for the whole thing, and I wished she wouldn’t. It seemed unnecessary and just a trifle hysterical. I thought to myself, Why on earth has she got to fuss so?
As she left the third time she said, in her persevering bright way, ‘I’ll come again very soon, Hugh darling.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t come.’
‘But of course I shall.’ Her voice was hollow, insincere.
I said savagely, ‘For God’s sake don’t pretend, Jennifer. It’s finished – it’s all finished.’
She said it wasn’t finished, that she didn’t know what I meant. She was going to spend her life looking after me, she said, and we would be very happy. She was determined on self-immolation, and it made me see red. I felt apprehensive, too, that she would do as she said. Perhaps she would always be there, chattering, trying to be kind, uttering foolish bright remarks … I got in a panic – a panic born of weakness and illness.
I yelled at her to go away – go away. She went, looking frightened. But I saw relief in her eyes.
When my sister-in-law came in later to draw the curtains, I spoke. I said, ‘It’s over, Teresa. She’s gone … she’s gone … She won’t come back, will she?’
Teresa said in her quiet voice, No, she wouldn’t come back.
‘Do you think, Teresa,’ I asked, ‘that it’s my illness that makes me see things – wrong?’
Teresa knew what I meant. She said that, in her opinion, an illness like mine tended to make you see things as they really were.
‘You mean that I’m seeing Jennifer now as she really is?’
Teresa said she didn’t mean quite that. I wasn’t probably any better able to know what Jennifer was really like now than before. But I knew now exactly what effect Jennifer produced on me, apart from my being in love with her.
I asked her what she herself thought of Jennifer.
She said that she had always thought Jennifer was attractive, nice, and not at all interesting.
‘Do you think she’s very unhappy, Teresa?’ I asked morbidly.
‘Yes, Hugh, I do.’
‘Because of me?’
‘No, because of herself.’
I said, ‘She goes on blaming herself for my accident. She keeps saying that if I hadn’t been coming to meet her, it would never have happened – it’s all so stupid!’
‘It is, rather.’
‘I don’t want her to work herself up about it. I don’t want her to be unhappy, Teresa.’
‘Really, Hugh,’ said Teresa. ‘Do leave the girl something!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She likes being unhappy. Haven’t you realized that?’
There is a cold clarity about my sister-in-law’s thought processes that I find very disconcerting.
I told her that that was a beastly thing to say.
Teresa said thoughtfully that perhaps it was, but that she hadn’t really thought it mattered saying so now.
‘You haven’t got to tell yourself fairy stories any longer. Jennifer has always loved sitting down and thinking how everything has gone wrong. She broods over it and works herself up – but if she likes living that way, why shouldn’t she?’ Teresa added, ‘You know, Hugh, you can’t feel pity for a person unless there’s self-pity there. A person has to be sorry for themselves before you can be sorry for them. Pity has always been your weakness. Because of it you don’t see things clearly.’
I found momentary satisfaction in telling Teresa that she was an odious woman. She said she thought she probably was.
‘You are never sorry for anyone.’
‘Yes, I am. I’m sorry for Jennifer in a way.’
‘And me?’
‘I don’t know, Hugh.’
I said sarcastically:
‘The fact that I’m a maimed broken wreck with nothing to live for doesn’t affect you at all?’
‘I don’t know if I’m sorry for you or not. This means that you’re going to start your life all over again, living it from an entirely different angle. That might be very interesting.’
I told Teresa that she was inhuman, and she went away smiling.
She had done me a lot of good.
Chapter Three
It was soon afterwards that we moved to St Loo in Cornwall. Teresa had just inherited a house there from a great-aunt. The doctor wanted me to be out of London. My brother Robert is a painter with what most people think is a perverted vision of landscapes. His war service, like most artists’, had been agricultural. So it all fitted in very well.
Teresa went down and got the house ready and, having filled up a lot of forms successfully, I was borne down by special ambulance.
‘What goes on here?’ I asked Teresa on the morning after my arrival.
Teresa was well-informed. There were, she said, three separate worlds. There was the old fishing village, grouped round its harbour, with the tall slate-roofed houses rising up all round it, and the notices written in Flemish and French as well as English. Beyond that, sprawling out along the coast, was the modern tourist and residential excrescence. The large luxury hotels, thousands of small bungalows, masses of little boarding houses – all very busy and active in summer, quiet in winter. Thirdly, there was St Loo Castle, ruled over by the old dowager, Lady St Loo, a nucleus of yet another way of life with ramifications stretching up through winding lanes to houses tucked inconspicuously away in valleys beside old world churches. County, in fact, said Teresa.
‘And what are we?’ I asked.
Teresa said we were ‘county’ too, because Polnorth House had belonged to her great-aunt Miss Amy Tregellis, and it was hers, Teresa’s, by inheritance and not by purchase, so that we belonged.
‘Even Robert?’ I asked. ‘In spite of his being a painter?’
That, Teresa admitted, would take a little swallowing. There were too many painters at St Loo in the summer months.
‘But he’s my husband,’ said Teresa superbly, ‘and besides, his mother was a Bolduro from Bodmin way.’
It was then that I invited Teresa to tell us what we were going to do in the new home – or rather what she was going to do. My rôle was clear. I was the looker-on.
Teresa said she was going to participate in all the local goings-on.
‘Which are?’
Teresa said she thought mainly politics
and gardening, with a dash of Women’s Institutes and good causes such as Welcoming the Soldiers Home.
‘But principally politics,’ she said. ‘After all, a General Election will be on us any minute.’
‘Have you ever taken any interest in politics, Teresa?’
‘No, Hugh, I haven’t. It has always seemed to me unnecessary. I have confined myself to voting for the candidate who seems to me likely to do least harm.’
‘An admirable policy,’ I murmured.
But now, Teresa said, she would do her best to take politics seriously. She would have, of course, to be a Conservative. Nobody who owned Polnorth House could be anything else, and the late Miss Amy Tregellis would turn in her grave if the niece to whom she had bequeathed her treasures was to vote Labour.
‘But if you believe Labour to be the better party?’
‘I don’t,’ said Teresa. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to choose between them.’
‘Nothing could be fairer than that,’ I said.
When we had been settled in at Polnorth House a fortnight, Lady St Loo came to call upon us.
She brought with her her sister, Lady Tressilian, her sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, and her granddaughter, Isabella.
After they had left, I said in a fascinated voice to Teresa that they couldn’t be real.
They were, you see, so exactly right to have come out of St Loo Castle. They were pure fairy story. The Three Witches and the Enchanted Maiden.
Adelaide St Loo was the widow of the seventh Baron. Her husband had been killed in the Boer War. Her two sons had been killed in the war of 1914–18. They left behind them no sons, but the younger left a daughter, Isabella, whose mother had died at her birth. The title passed to a cousin, then resident in New Zealand. The ninth Lord St Loo was only too pleased to rent the castle to the old dowager. Isabella was brought up there, watched over by her guardians, her grandmother and her two great-aunts. Lady St Loo’s widowed sister, Lady Tressilian, and her widowed sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, came to join her. They shared expenses and so made it possible for Isabella to be brought up in what the old ladies considered her rightful home. They were all over seventy, and had somewhat the appearance of three black crows. Lady St Loo had a vast bony face, with an eagle nose and a high forehead. Lady Tressilian was plump and had a large round face with little twinkling eyes. Mrs Bigham Charteris was lean and leathery. They achieved in their appearance a kind of Edwardian effect – as though time had stood still for them. They wore jewellery, rather dirty, indubitably real, pinned on them in unlikely places – not too much of it. It was usually in the form of crescents or horseshoes or stars.
Such were the three old ladies of St Loo Castle. With them came Isabella – a very fair representative of an enchanted maiden. She was tall and thin, and her face was long and thin with a high forehead, and straight-falling ash-blonde hair. She was almost incredibly like a figure out of an early stained-glass window. She could not have been called actually pretty, nor attractive, but there was about her something that you might almost call beauty – only it was the beauty of a time long past – it was most definitely not at all the modern idea of beauty. There was no animation in her, no charm of colouring, no irregularity of feature. Her beauty was the severe beauty of good structure – good bone formation. She looked medieval, severe and austere. But her face was not characterless; it had what I can only describe as nobility.
After I had said to Teresa that the old ladies weren’t real, I added that the girl wasn’t real either.
‘The princess imprisoned in the ruined castle?’ Teresa suggested.
‘Exactly. She ought to have come here on a milk-white steed and not in a very old Daimler.’ I added with curiosity, ‘I wonder what she thinks about.’
For Isabella had said very little during the official visit. She had sat very upright, with a sweet rather faraway smile. She had responded politely to any conversational overtures made to her, but there had not been much need for her to sustain the conversation since her grandmother and aunts had monopolized most of the talk. I wondered if she had been bored to come, or interested in something new turning up in St Loo. Her life, I thought, must be rather dull.
I asked curiously, ‘Didn’t she get called up at all during the war? Did she stay at home through it all?’
‘She’s only nineteen. She’s been driving for the Red Cross here since she left school.’
‘School?’ I was astonished. ‘Do you mean she’s been to school? Boarding school?’
‘Yes. St Ninian’s.’
I was even more surprised. For St Ninian’s is an expensive and up-to-date school – not co-educational, or in any sense a crank school – but an establishment priding itself on its modern outlook. Not in any sense a fashionable finishing school.
‘Do you find that astonishing?’ Teresa asked.
‘Yes, do you know, I do,’ I said slowly. ‘That girl gives you the impression that she’s never been away from home, that she’s been brought up in some bygone medieval environment that is completely out of touch with the twentieth century.’
Teresa nodded her head thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean.’
My brother Robert chimed in here. It just showed, he said, how the only environment that counted was home environment – that and hereditary disposition.
‘I still wonder,’ I said curiously, ‘what she thinks about …’
‘Perhaps,’ said Teresa, ‘she doesn’t think.’
I laughed at Teresa’s suggestion. But I wondered still in my own mind about this curious stick of a girl.
At that particular time I was suffering from an almost morbid self-consciousness about my own condition. I had always been a healthy and athletic person – I had disliked such things as illness or deformity, or ever having my attention called to them. I had been capable of pity, yes, but with pity had always gone a faint repulsion.
And now I was an object to inspire pity and repulsion. An invalid, a cripple, a man lying on a couch with twisted limbs – a rug pulled up over him.
And sensitively I waited, shrinking, for everyone’s reaction to my state. Whatever it was, it invariably made me flinch. The kindly commiserating glance was horrible to me. No less horrible was the obvious tact that managed to pretend that I was an entirely natural object, that the visitor hadn’t noticed anything unusual. But for Teresa’s iron will, I would have shut myself up and seen nobody at all. But Teresa, when she is determined on anything, is not easy to withstand. She was determined that I should not become a recluse. She managed, without the aid of the spoken word, to suggest that to shut myself up and make a mystery of myself would be a form of self-advertisement. I knew what she was doing and why she was doing it, but nevertheless I responded. Grimly I set out to show her I could take it – no matter what it was! Sympathy, tact, the extra kindliness in a voice, the conscientious avoidance of any reference to accidents or illness, the pretence that I was as other men – I endured them all with a poker face.
I had not found the old ladies’ reaction to my state too embarrassing. Lady St Loo had adopted the line of tactful avoidance. Lady Tressilian, a maternal type, had not been able to help exuding maternal compassion. She had stressed, rather obviously, the latest books. She wondered if, perhaps, I did any reviewing? Mrs Bigham Charteris, a blunter type, had shown her awareness only by rather obviously checking herself when speaking of the more active blood sports. (Poor devil, mustn’t mention hunting or the beagles.)
Only the girl, Isabella, had surprised me by being natural. She had looked at me without any suggestion of having to look away quickly. She had looked at me as though her mind registered me along with the other occupants of the room and with the furniture. One man, age over thirty, broken … An item in a catalogue – a catalogue of things that had nothing to do with her.
When she had finished with me, her eyes went on to the grand piano, and then to Robert and Teresa’s Tang Horse which stood on a table by itself. Th
e Tang Horse seemed to awaken a certain amount of interest in her. She asked me what it was. I told her.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked her.
She considered quite carefully before replying. Then she said – and gave the monosyllable a lot of weight, as though it was important – ‘Yes.’
I wondered if she was a moron.
I asked her if she was fond of horses.
She said this was the first one she’d seen.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I meant real horses.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, I am. But I can’t afford to hunt.’
‘Would you like to hunt?’
‘Not particularly. There’s not very much good country round here.’
I asked her if she sailed and she said she did. Then Lady Tressilian began talking to me about books, and Isabella relapsed into silence. She had, I noticed then, one art highly developed; the art of repose. She could sit still. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t cross her legs, or swing them, or fiddle with her hands, or pat her hair. She sat quite still and upright in the tall grandfather chair, with her hands on her lap – long narrow hands. She was as immobile as the Tang Horse – it on its table, she in her chair. They had something, I thought, of the same quality – highly decorative – static – belonging to a bygone age …
I laughed when Teresa suggested that she didn’t think, but later it occurred to me that it might be true. Animals don’t think – their minds are relaxed, passive, until an emergency arises with which they have to deal. Thinking (in the speculative sense of the word) is really a highly artificial process which we have taught ourselves with some trouble. We worry over what we did yesterday, and debate what we are going to do today and what will happen tomorrow. But yesterday, today and tomorrow exist quite independently of our speculation. They have happened and will happen to us no matter what we do about it.
Teresa’s prognostications of our life at St Loo were singularly accurate. Almost at once we became plunged up to the neck in politics. Polnorth House was large and rambling, and Miss Amy Tregellis, her income diminished by taxation, had shut off a wing of it, providing this with a separate kitchen. It had been done originally for evacuees from the bombed areas. But the evacuees, arriving from London in mid-winter, had been unable to stomach the horrors of Polnorth House. In St Loo itself, with its shops and its bungalows, they might have been able to support life, but a mile from the town, along ‘that narsty winding lane – the mud, yer wouldn’t believe it and no lights – and anybody might jump out on yer from be’ind the hedge. And vegetables all mud out of the garden, too much green stuff, and milk – coming right from a cow quite hot sometimes – disgusting – and never a tin of condensed handy!’ It was too much for Mrs Price and Mrs Hardy and their offspring. They departed secretly at early dawn taking their broods back to the dangers of London. They were nice women. They left the place clean and scrubbed and a note on the table.
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 3