Again it was Camilla who came to my rescue with her suggestion of seeing the engagement presents. “Ella darling,” she called from our sofa, “aren’t you dying to see what everyone’s brought you?”
“Of course she is,” said Pamela, smiling.
Sensing my chance and seeing Ella about to protest, I joined the chorus with a well-timed “So are we.”
“Well why don’t we open them now, sweetheart?” said Charles on cue.
Ella looked doubtful. “We could, I suppose,” she said.
“Then let’s,” said Pamela decisively, rising. To the few guests who remained, she said, “You won’t mind coming upstairs, will you? It’s just that there’re too many gifts to bring down.” And with a laugh, taking the arm of her future son-in-law, she left the room and led the way upwards. Alexander followed with Camilla and the girl with the villa in Biarritz. A plump relation, the only other member of the party still present, had gone to sleep in an armchair. Ella and I were left alone.
“So,” I said quickly, my irritation at lunch giving an edge to my voice, “this is it?”
“What?” She looked at me from under the sweep of her blow-dried fringe and I saw something of the woman I remembered.
“Is this the island?”
There was a pause. The relation in the armchair gave a gentle snore.
“Is this what you meant by events overtaking you?” I persisted, courageous after weeks of pent-up frustration and excitement.
With a sharp nod of the head Ella motioned me out of the room and onto the landing. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, putting her foot on the first stair.
“No of course you don’t. I forget that in our particular school of fish one should never admit to having said anything real.” There was a note of sarcasm in my voice which I saw made her uncomfortable. “Particularly if one hasn’t said it to someone one’s known since childhood.” I was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which my words came.
“Don’t talk to me about schools of fish.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a tired metaphor.”
“All right then, I’ll ask you plainly. What on earth are you doing?”
“I am marrying the man I love, James.” But even as she said it, her tone rang false. We both observed this. “And anyway,” she whispered almost fiercely, angry herself now, “I don’t see what business it is of yours whether I’m happy or not.”
“It’s only my business in as far as you’ve made it my business,” I said quietly.
“Well I’m sorry I mentioned anything.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said that I don’t think you are. When you first met me, that day in the park, you were looking for a way out. You were looking for a way out that night at Camilla’s party, too, weren’t you? I think you wanted me to help you find one.”
It was wise of me at this point not to have come out with any of my wilder theories on the question of Ella’s motives; as it was, the gist of what I had said was correct and she did not contradict it.
“And then when your engagement was finally announced,” I continued, warming to my theme, “and things were truly out of hand, you decided that there was no way out and so you gave in, you accepted what was happening. To use your own phrase, you decided that it was easier to swim with the current than against it.”
“Hush,” she said, “they’ll hear you.”
I lowered my voice but went on. “Even now, though, you despise yourself for being so weak, don’t you?”
“How dare you …”
“Tell me that you don’t despise yourself. Tell me that you relish wearing that silly pink dress and being made to look like a baby doll that can’t think for itself. Tell me that,” I concluded triumphantly, “and I’ll go upstairs and gawp politely at your engagement presents and not bother you again.”
She looked at me, speechless, and I saw to my mingled horror and relief that there were tears in her eyes.
“Tell me,” I insisted, “and I’ll go. Tell me,” for now I was in full stride, “that you can’t imagine ever loving anyone more than you love Charlie Stanhope now and I will go. I won’t even say good-bye, if you like. I’ll just leave.”
“I will tell you nothing of the sort,” she said, with an attempt at dignity. “But you had better go all the same.”
“Not until you tell me why,“ I replied, seizing on a new angle of attack. “If only to satisfy my curiosity. Tell me why you’re marrying him.” Confident that I knew the answer, I expected her finally to crumble into the safety of confession. I was disappointed. Instead, she drew herself up to her full height and looked me squarely in the eyes.
“Ella darling!” came a shrill voice from upstairs.
“Go on,” I persisted, “tell me.”
Ignoring all that I had said up to this point, she made a visible effort to recover herself and when she spoke it was in a tone of quiet command. “You have no right to expect me to answer you,” she said softly. “You are a guest in my parents’ house. You have certain obligations. Fulfill them and oblige me by doing what I say.”
“What is that?”
“I want you to go upstairs right now and thank my stepmother for a delicious lunch,” she said evenly. “Then I want you to take Camilla home, to see her safely in at her front door, and to go home yourself. Forget my metaphors; forget everything I said in the park; forget our conversation at the Boardmans’. Put it all down to the confusion of a young girl about to get engaged. Put it down to anything you like, but stop asking me about it.”
“Ella!” came from upstairs, louder this time; a man’s voice. I heard the creaking of wood as someone with a tread I recognized came down to find her. “Ella sweet-heart, where have you got to?” The voice was Charlie Stanhope’s, cheerful as ever.
“I hope you have understood me,” she said.
Our eyes met. We heard Charlie on the landing above us.
“Please James,” she said, her attitude changing, “not now.” Seeing the light of hope in my eyes, she went on hurriedly. “Not ever.” She looked at me frankly. “I’ve made my bed, I’ve come this far. Now I intend to lie on it.”
“It’s not too late,” I said. “You’ve got your whole life still to get through. Spending it washed up on an island with Charles Stanhope can’t be a tempting prospect.”
“Don’t talk to me about islands.“
“Why not? It’s your word.”
“I’ve told you. The metaphor is tired.”
“But it’s still apt, I think.”
“Think what you will,” she hissed, and I sensed a note of exasperation in her voice.
“Your whole life is ahead of you Ella, don’t you see?” I went on more gently.
“That’s what you kept on saying that night,” she said as Charles appeared on the stairs.
“You two been nattering down here all this time?” he said jovially.
“It’s still true,” I muttered.
“What is?” asked Charlie.
“Only that trains wait for no man,” said Ella brightly, putting her arm through her fiancé’s, “and that James, no matter how much we beg him, won’t miss his.”
“Too bad,” said Charlie as I followed them both upstairs to say my good-byes.
CHAPTER 6
THUS FAR I HAD BEEN DEFEATED, crushed by the determination of those steely green eyes. And you may be sure that I took my defeat to heart in the days that followed the party at Chester Square. But you may also be sure that I remained unshaken in my romantic beliefs and that I returned to my thoughts of Ella and her predicament with renewed vigor. I had, I thought, done myself credit on the rainy day of her engagement party; and I felt that the bond between us had strengthened in some indefinable yet concrete way, despite all evidence to the contrary. Youth is optimistic; that is its consolation. And I waited patiently to allow events, if only they would, to follow their natural course.
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In so doing I was not arrogant enough to suppose that Ella could not resist the temptation of seeing me again; rather, I suspected that she could not for long resist a temptation of a different kind: she would, I felt sure, want an opportunity to justify herself more effectively than she had done at her engagement lunch. So I settled down to wait and resolved to bide my time.
The Stanhope-Harcourt wedding was set for the following March, seven months away; and as the days since the Harcourts’ lunch party stretched into a week, I comforted myself with the thought that time, at least, was on my side. Ella Harcourt, I suspected, was a proud woman; and I held firmly to this suspicion for it served to explain her continuing silence. I told myself, correctly as it turned out, that it would be foolish to badger the house in Chester Square; that I had done all I could. And no more chance encounters with any members of the Harcourt family ensued, though I looked out for them as eagerly as ever. For a week I waited, unencouraged.
On the eighth day I received her letter. I have it with me now, with all the others she wrote me; and looking at its jagged writing, its heavy paper, its brown ink, I think with a sharp sorrow of the girl who wrote it and wish, as so many have wished before me, that the past were more fluid, that it might be possible to return, by a route other than memory, to the day so long ago when Ella’s letter found its way onto the mat in my parents’ hall.
Talking like this is good for me; it brings me face to face with a past I have spent more than forty years trying to avoid. I see the boy that I was—the romantic, naïve, essentially innocent boy that I was—and I begin to understand him. That is an important step. Realizing his innocence is important; for I know now that he, that I, was not born wicked; that his sin, that my sin, was not original. It came from outside, from an unfortunate collusion of circumstance and chance—and, yes, weakness—which I could not have foreseen and over which I had no control. I know now, in a way I have not known until now, that as I read Ella’s letter I was an ordinary young man: an unexceptional, unremarkable, ordinary young man. Essentially innocent. If I was fascinated by Ella Harcourt, my fascination echoed the fascination of countless other young men for countless other young women. If I questioned the structure of the world, so did millions of others also. If I desired to prove my freedom from convention, from the confines of received wisdom, then so did every other moody young man of my or any other generation. I was hardly unique; others might have done what I did.
But they did not; and I must accept that fact.
I must accept, too, that there were many who did worse things than I, that my actions have their place on some sort of scale. History is full of men far more evil than I. Nero; Ivan the Terrible; Hitler. Will they be punished more or I less? Perhaps they, like me, began innocently enough. I would be interested to hear their stories. I would be interested to hear more of Sarah’s story. And why? Because extenuating circumstance interests me, and I have little left to live for now save my own intellectual satisfaction. Having seen a sort of justice done, having in fact been its instrument in the case of my wife, unrepentant to the last, I can devote my energies to pleasing myself until the day when my own end comes. Then judgment will be meted out on me, though unlike Sarah I am sorry for what I did and have been so for almost fifty years; perhaps that will count for something.
But before I face my future I feel that I must face my past. If I had one wish it would be to do that. And facing one’s past is no easy thing: until yesterday I had no thought for anything but the present, you see. I was afraid to look backwards or forwards: for in one direction lay what I had done, what we had done, Ella and I—and in the other lay the punishment I would receive for it. But I am braver now, I can look more closely.
I have Ella’s letter here. I shall read it to you. It is dated Saturday; the scrawled address reads 23, Chester Square, S.W.I.
Dear James, it begins.
You will be glad to discover that our conversation last week had, if no other effect, at least that of making me see the light about the awful makeup I had plastered over my face. You were right, I looked like a doll. I guess I just needed someone insulting and presumptuous enough to tell me so and I thank you for your rudeness—I thought it had been socialized out of you. Perhaps it has and I got the last drop of it; I hope not. But I didn’t look like a doll for long, you’ll be relieved to hear. As soon as everybody had gone I went upstairs and scrubbed it all right off; I wet my hair, too, leading Pamela to remark at dinner that I looked “distinctly bedraggled”. (She likes phrases like that.) She was furious incidentally—we had spent the morning together at her beautician’s, you see. My face was the result of a bonding exercise.
How American, I hear you say. Well I guess I am an American and proud of it. But I have an English name and you will remember how we agreed that a name is the least private thing about a person. That, perhaps, will form the beginning of my answer to your question of last week. “Why?” you asked me. “Why are you marrying Charles?”
Why indeed. But before you get on your high horse I think you should put yourself in my position, if only for a moment. If your (I don’t know how many times great) great-grandmother had also seduced Charles II, you might understand more of what I’m saying. Your name, like mine, might stop describing and begin defining you instead, along strict lines which you don’t altogether like. I, heaven knows, am defined by my name. Do you honestly expect that the Hon. Ella, daughter of Lord and Lady Harcourt, niece of the Earl and Countess of Seton, with her very own mention in Who’s Who?, could possibly marry anyone other than Charles Stanhope, eldest son of Sir Lachlan and Lady Stanhope, of Barton Manor, Wilts and Windham Road, Fulham, ed. Eton and Oxford? Of course not. This may be the nineties but we are not all as free as we like to think ourselves. (And I say this only half jokingly.)
Flippancy aside, though, I suppose the time has come to be frank with you. I have got myself, as I said that day in the park, into a mess. And it is a mess, as I also said then, which is entirely of my own making. This I freely admit. That’s why I’ve been considering going ahead with everything over the past few weeks, because I made my bed and I should lie on it. Quite why I insisted on making it, on setting this whole bizarre machinery in motion, I cannot explain to you completely. I have asked myself why a thousand times and if I never get a straight answer why should you? But there is an answer nevertheless, or rather several little answers which together might explain what I’ve done. If you’d really like to know why I’m marrying Charles, and think you might have any bright ideas—once you know all the little answers to that very big question—of how I might get myself out of this ludicrously old-fashioned predicament, then meet me under the departure board at Paddington at 2:15 tomorrow afternoon. If I don’t see you, I’ll know that you have quite wisely decided to steer clear. I would probably do the same in your position.
Sincerely,
Ella Harcourt
No endearment, nothing more personal than her name.
But of course I went. Who wouldn’t have gone in my position? And I went with joy in my heart and music on my lips.
Ella was standing under the departure board at Paddington, small and lost in the crowd. In jeans and an old sweater, her hair tousled from sleep, she could not have looked more different from the woman who had spoken so demurely of engagement gifts and wedding plans a week before.
“Hello James,” she said when she saw me.
“Hello Ella.”
We looked at each other.
“Thank you for coming.”
“There’s no need to thank me.”
It was she who bought the tickets and as she did so said to me, half-apologetically, “I’m afraid it’s rather a long journey. But I can promise you excellent fare when we reach our destination. There’s a sweet pub in the village which I’m sure you’ll like. Until then, you’ll have to submit to the standard train sandwiches.” And taking my hand, she led me down the platform towards the Cornish Express.
I remember her in
that train. I remember the green wool of her sweater against the cream of her skin; the sweep of her hair; the scent of her soap. Here was Ella unadorned: not the decadent figure in the park; nor the decorative guest at Camilla Boardman’s party; nor still the artificial doll at her stepmother’s lunch. Ella Harcourt was a woman of many facets; she possessed a quality of aesthetic malleability that I have known in no one but her, and I have known many women in the course of seventy years. Sitting in the drabness of a second-class railway carriage she was as lovely to me as she had been on a park bench and in the half-light of a book-lined alcove. And as I stared, trying to explain to myself why this was so, I discovered the truth that beauty is elusive and defies description. Prettiness lends itself to words; but beauty is something finer, a thing apart. Ella was beautiful.
She was also inclined to be communicative. And with only a little encouragement from me she gave me an outline of her life.
“If you really want to know,” she began, smiling, “I was born in London on a misty day in November almost twenty-four years ago. Exhibited by my proud parents as an example of all that is wondrous in childhood, I was in point of fact an ugly, filthy-tempered baby with no hair but healthy lungs. I was inclined to scream.”
I laughed and she gave me a wry smile.
Lighting a cigarette, she continued. “When I was six my mother, a perfectly respectable nice young English girl, took the liberty of dying in a car accident. Most regrettable. For her, of course, and also for my father who happened to be very much in love with her, but chiefly for the family at large. Unable to do anything they watched as poor Alexander, in his grief, transferred himself bag and baggage to America in the hope of starting afresh and finding happiness once more. Very poor taste, everyone thought, giving in to your emotions like that. And what was worse, he insisted on taking his little girl with him, who under the influence of some barbarian colonials absorbed, as everyone had feared, some unfortunate habits which have tainted her to this day. It was felt—though such things are never said, of course—that she could only bring disgrace on the family name.”
The Drowning People Page 7