The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  She paused to tap her ash into a plastic cup. I listened, absorbed. “When poor Alexander committed the supreme treachery, twelve years on, of returning to London with a new American wife,” Ella continued, her face distorting into an expression of chill disapproval, “the family despaired. And what was more, his daughter had gone over to the other side. Her vowels were rounded no longer; her manners (never excellent) had deteriorated sharply. Clearly something had to be done. But she was eighteen and very headstrong, altogether unwilling to listen to good advice. An ungrateful child. Yet the fact remained that she was a Harcourt, and showed every sign of remaining one indefinitely. So it was vital that she was taught to behave like one without delay.” She took a meditative drag. “How to mold her correctly remained a problem; but fortunately she was interested in art history, a relatively proper discipline; and the Courtauld was seized on as a very civilizing place for her to do her degree.” Ella smiled. “The degree once done, however, and cultured conversation acquired, it wasn’t thought seemly for her to have a serious job, however much she herself seemed both able and willing to get one; so she was taken under various wings, introduced to endless people, given a sufficiently smart set of lifelong friends. By the time she was twenty-three she knew people like Camilla Boardman, supreme arbiter of all that is best in young England today, and was engaged to a very nice young man. Even her accent, though it remained far from perfect, had certainly improved. She could at last be married off without shame.”

  “And Charles Stanhope was the nice young man?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pause.

  “So what do you think of my story?” asked Ella. “Do you like it? Is it as you imagined?”

  “Yes,” I said, happily, thinking how correct I had been in my theories all along.

  “The unfortunate thing,” she went on, putting the butt of her cigarette into the plastic cup and taking a new one from the packet in her bag, “is that what I have just told you is not the whole story. By no means is it the whole story.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised by the change in her.

  “Well … you remember my letter?”

  I nodded.

  “How I said that there were lots of little reasons which, taken all together, might possibly explain how things have come to turn out as they have?”

  I nodded again.

  “The explanation I have just given you is one of those little reasons. Perhaps the smallest.”

  “What are the others?”

  “There aren’t many others, in fact. I was exaggerating. There’s just one, really.” She took a deep breath. “And it is, on the whole, a little murkier than what I’ve just told you.” She paused and raised her eyes to mine. “The two reasons are related, of course, but substantially different. The one you don’t know is a little more … cold-blooded.” She looked at me steadily and I felt the challenge in her eyes.

  Silently I met it. “Go on,” I said.

  “Are you sure you want me to?” She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke out of her nostrils in a defiant swirl.

  I felt the tingling vertigo of one standing on a knife edge. “Go on,” I said again.

  “Okay then. But you’ll have to wait until we get there.” She smiled at me and I saw her shoulders relax. “There’s something I want to show you,” she said. “Something that will explain things far more eloquently than I could.”

  It is from that moment, on that journey (a journey I have since repeated more times than I can count) that I date the beginning of it all. In London I had been fascinated, it is true, but mine had been a fascination based on romantic notions of plight and salvation. Ella had filled my thoughts, but more as a princess in a fairy tale might have done than as a being of blood and flesh. Her aura was ethereal and I, a mortal, had succumbed to it. But I had been held at arm’s length and largely ignored. What intimacy there had been had been haphazard and insubstantial, completely at the mercy of coincidence and whim. But now I had passed a test that I only dimly understood but which I knew enough to value. I had promised myself and had been given in return a right to claim something. What I might claim I hardly knew, but no longer was I peripheral.

  This mysterious woman with the changing eyes and smiling lips had plucked me from my life, on a whim, and had taken me on a six-hour journey to be told some- thing I might not even understand. From everyone she knew, of all the people in her life, she had selected me to be her confidant; it was to me that she had chosen to explain the tangle of motive and error that had led to her engagement; it was to me that she looked for help in extricating herself from the depths in which she floundered. From the school of fish which flashed its scales before her eyes she had selected me to swim with her, to brave currents, tides and oceans by her side.

  So slid Ella’s metaphors in my mind: colliding; joining; mingling with my own romantic dreams of passion and valor. Yes I was a dreamer; to that charge I plead guilty. And as I dreamed I stared at her smooth white neck and felt that there was nothing I would not do to be worthy of her trust.

  We passed the remainder of that journey in silence, watching the blur of passing towns from the carriage window; listening to the rattle of the train; allowing its gentle rhythm to lull us to near sleep. We spoke little; Ella smoked a great deal; I watched her fingers as she lit and disposed of her cigarettes.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE TRAIN FOLLOWED THE COAST for the last half hour of its journey to Penzance. Ella and I sat in complete silence in a carriage which gradually emptied as it passed through Devon. She had stopped smoking. I watched her profile as she gazed at the view, occasionally following the direction of her unblinking eyes, feeling her intent with expectation and wondering what it might be for. She had told me nothing of our destination and I, enjoying the suspense, had not asked. Then I saw it and knew as I did so that I saw what she had been waiting for. Rising tall and many-turreted above the sea, the windows of the Castle of Seton winked at us in the sunset. Behind its bell tower the sun, a scarlet ball, dipped towards the Atlantic sending rays of gold fanning outwards in a mauve sky, turning the castle’s gray granite to a rosy pink, catching the gilt on its weathercocks as they spun in the wind. It was mysterious; distant; thrilling.

  “There it is,” said Ella softly. “Our island.”

  I was to hear the same words, with a different emphasis and meaning, as I made the same journey years later as a married man. Seeing Seton for the first time, however, my thoughts turned not to my future but to its past, to the centuries that had come and gone while it, impassive, had commanded the steep cliffs of its small, jagged island, unmoved by the human dramas played out within its walls. It is strange for me now to think that this place was ever new to me, that as I passed it for the first time in the shabbiness of a second-class railway carriage it held no associations, nor much promise of them. Seton is austere and cold; brilliant but aloof; it is cautious of intimacy. Yet its trust, once given, is eternal. It will guard Sarah’s body with the untiring watchfulness of a mother for her young; and it will guard my body too, when the time comes. Yes, it will guard mine too.

  Ella and I sat in silence as the train sped on, watching the fairy-tale image recede into the distance.

  “It’s like Camelot, don’t you think?” she whispered.

  “Like Camelot,” I echoed.

  The station at Penzance was a bustle of people and bags and lines waiting for taxis. “Come on,” said Ella, tugging my arm. “Let’s walk. It’ll only take an hour or so. And the last boat to the island doesn’t leave until ten.” So we walked through and out of the town. A light drizzle began to fall. Hot and tired from traveling, we welcomed the rain and the air and the smell of the sea. We walked together, smiling, a little awkward now that we had actually arrived, as two lanes gave way to one and cars grew slower and less frequent. At last we had left the crowds and clustered buildings of the town behind, and Ella led me from the main road an
d onto a smaller track which led down to the beach. “Look here,” she said, pointing.

  I looked and saw the castle, rising from its cone-shaped island, a natural progression of the granite, ringed by blue sea.

  “So this is the view Blanche saw,” I said.

  “What do you know about Blanche?” She looked at me sharply.

  “Not much. Only that she was your grandmother and that she lived here.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Sarah.”

  “I see.” There was a pause. “So she’s got to you already.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  “Tell me then.”

  Another pause.

  “Not now, James,” said Ella at last. And before I could speak she had moved abruptly on, first walking and then running down the steep incline thick with binding grass, which led to the beach. “I think we can make it to the boats from here,” she called as I stood uncertain whether to follow. “Run!” Her command came to me over the wind. So through the rain I ran, hot from exertion, my clothes sticking to me from the combination of sweaty train hours and the damp of the drizzle. It began to rain heavily now. I ran on. And always Ella was before me, crying out, a long unbroken shout of something lost between joy and rage; a sound I could not explain or understand but which held me in its thrall, even as the sand spilled into my shoes and the rainwater ran down my neck. Running behind her, always nearing, always eluded; it is how I have spent my life. Talking of it now I can taste the salt in the air and feel the pounding of my blood.

  We were taken to the island by a bearded fisherman obviously surprised by our lack of luggage. “This is the larst boat, sir,” he said, “if you’s thinkin’ of comin’ back tonight.”

  “We weren’t,” Ella replied for me.

  “Very well, miss.”

  And in a rickety boat that smelled of mackerel we made the short crossing to the island’s harbor as the last of the sun dipped below the horizon. I was half surprised to find a village beneath the castle walls, for in my mind I had already cast Seton as a self-sufficient entity, removed from our world; but I was glad of a beer and a plate of steaming cod, drowned in batter, in the “sweet pub” of which Ella had told me. It also took guests, and she reserved two rooms before we sat down to dinner, giving her surname as Warrington.

  “My mother’s name,” she said quietly as she passed the register. “Only a fool would sign Harcourt on this island; he wouldn’t have a moment’s sleep for all the attention he’d receive.”

  I nodded, understood, and signed my own name.

  When we were sitting at a table in the cozy bar, listening to the rain beat steadily on the windowpanes, she smiled at me. “So, here we are.”

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?” I asked, feeling the weight of family history even in the worn leather of the pub which bore the Harcourt arms on its sign.

  “It is, partly,” said Ella. “I wanted to show you the island and the castle. But there’s something much more specific that I want you to see.” Our fish arrived. She paused. “But it must wait until tomorrow. Everything’s closed to tourists until tomorrow morning.”

  “But,” I began, a little surprised, “I thought this was your castle? Surely you’re not a tourist in your own family’s home?”

  “No,” she replied, smiling at my innocence. “Of course I could take you to lunch with Uncle Cyril and Aunt Elizabeth if I liked. I don’t imagine they’d be delighted to see me, particularly, though they wouldn’t show that. But I can’t, of course, for obvious reasons.”

  “Amongst which are … ?”

  “Well for starters, you blind boy, the fact that you aren’t Charlie Stanhope. It would never do for them to see me here with anyone but him.”

  “At least not until you’ve extricated yourself?”

  “At least not until I have, as you say, extricated myself.”

  “I see.”

  “But there’s another reason too.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’d much rather show you it in private. The painting, I mean. That’s what I’ve brought you here to see. It might make things clearer; at least I hope it will. One should never underestimate the importance of visual aids.” She smiled. “And privacy is important. Not that I mind day-trippers; they won’t affect us. It’s family presence I want to avoid if I can. I want the anonymity of the tourist. And you’ve been seeing quite enough of my relations as it is.”

  Something about the brittle laugh that followed this made me know of whom she was speaking. “I’ve only spoken to Sarah properly once,” I said. “I mistook her for you, in fact.”

  “At my own engagement party?” Ella raised an eyebrow.

  “No. Before that. In the park, as it happens.”

  The eyebrow came to rest again; Ella looked at me steadily. “Well you must have got very chummy,” she said finally. “She seems to have told you all the family history you need to know.”

  “She told me about your grandmother,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Ella paused. “I never knew her,” she said finally, discarding my sympathy.

  “I really wanted Sarah to tell me about you,” I said.

  “I bet she was happy to advise in that respect. Did she tell you I was a vulgar little upstart? Or was I just crass?”

  “She said that you two didn’t see much of each other,” I replied, evasively.

  Ella sensed my evasion. “I’m sure she said much more, which your fine manners couldn’t possibly permit you to repeat. I understand, James. I can fill in most of the gaps for myself anyhow.” There was a silence. I felt Ella’s eyes on me and busied myself with my cod. Across the table she lit a cigarette, with a murmured “You don’t mind, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Thanks.”

  More silence.

  “I wish you’d look at me,” she remarked. I looked up. There was a moment of hesitation on her part, as though things hung in the balance; perhaps, even then, they did. Then she said, in a quiet, low voice, “Do you know anything about jealousy, James? About what it does to people?”

  I shook my head. Feeling as I did so that I was not so naive, I said, “Yes. I understand jealousy.”

  “Ah, but have you ever felt it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But only briefly, spasmodically,” Ella went on, speaking quickly. “Sure, you can think of times when you’ve wanted someone’s car, or someone’s money, or something of that sort.”

  I nodded.

  “But that feeling hasn’t lasted long, has it? It hasn’t built up into something consuming; it hasn’t spread. Has it?”

  “No,” I said, truthfully.

  “Well the jealousy you’re talking about is only a distant relation of the kind I’m concerned with. You don’t mind my boring you with this?” I shook my head. “The kind I mean is an illness, a disease. It eats away, spreading into everything a person does, into everything a person thinks.” She exhaled, blowing her smoke to the ceiling. “The jealousy that you experience—and I hope you won’t take offense at this—is of the common and garden variety by comparison. Like the common cold it affects everyone at some point, and though it may even affect them badly it seldom leads on to anything more serious. It’s not a virulent strain of disease; one shakes it off easily. There may not be a cure for it, but its symptoms can be alleviated, suppressed. Do you follow me?”

  I nodded. “Another of your metaphors.”

  “Another of my metaphors,” she said, and laughed. Her laugh did not last long. Her face set again and she looked at me intently. “The jealousy which I am trying to describe is extreme,” she continued, almost urgent now. “It is dangerous in a way in which your jealousy is not dangerous. It’s out of control; in some ways like a disease. What cures there are for it must be administered in its early stages or all is lost. If allowed to fester, it spreads.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

>   “So that you will understand what I tell you tomorrow,” she said quietly.

  “Tell me whatever it is now,” I said, suddenly decisive, gripping her hand as she rose to leave the table. “I can’t wait another night.”

  She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “Don’t be imperious, James. It doesn’t altogether suit you.”

  “I don’t care.” I was suddenly exasperated. “You have brought me on a six-hour journey to an island I never knew existed. You have talked to me of oceans and families and … and mysterious paintings which might make things clearer. I don’t want paintings. I don’t want metaphors. I don’t even thrive much on mystery. Just tell me why you’ve brought me here.”

  “Let go of me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’re making a scene.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I looked up at her in steady earnest and met the command in her pursed lips and blazing eyes unflinchingly. Slowly she sat down again.

  “I brought you here because I thought you would help me,” she said after a moment, almost grudgingly.

  “And so I will,” I replied, relaxing my grip on her hand. “But you can’t keep me in the dark like this.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You have. Oh I get odd snippets here and there, I admit. You talk to me about the pressure of convention and the tide of public opinion. You talk to me about your family and a world that I don’t understand. And then you talk about jealousy, about your particular kind of jealousy.”

  “It’s not mine,” she hissed.

  “Then whose is it?”

  “It’s not mine alone, at least. It’s … Well, if you must know it’s mine and Sarah’s.”

  “Sarah’s?”

  “I know you don’t believe me. That’s why you must wait until tomorrow. You don’t believe because you don’t understand. You can’t understand. I have told you as much as I can …”

  “About what? About why you got engaged to Charles?”

  “About much more than that. But yes, about that too.”

  “Then why won’t you tell me the rest now?”