“I can understand that,” I said.
“Can you? I’m glad. Because it’s now that my own story starts.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “You can see the tremendous influence Blanche had over her whole family, particularly in death. Though no one said it—the Harcourts don’t talk, you know—everyone thought about insanity and mental illness. They brooded on violent death. So many of them had died so horribly, you see: their mother; two sisters; my mother; Sarah’s father. And Sarah and I, the only children in the family, could feel that pressure as we grew up: we knew that people worried about us, that they feared for us. And we knew why, too; we knew that our grandmother and our aunt had both killed themselves. It’s not a knowledge that’s easy to deal with when you’re young.” She paused, considering something. “Of course it might have brought us together, I suppose, if we had seen more of each other at that crucial time. And if we hadn’t both grown up looking so like our grandmother. As it was the way we looked was a constant reminder of how we might turn out. And Sarah felt it even more than I; she saw that picture downstairs every day of her life.”
“You mean she lived here?”
“Yes. Uncle Cyril and Aunt Elizabeth took her in after her parents died. They didn’t have children of their own, you see.”
“And Sarah grew up here…”
“Yes.”
“Poor girl.”
“Yes. And I grew up in America, away from all this. But I knew of it, of course. I came to Seton to visit; I saw that painting; I watched myself turn into its image.”
“And?”
“And I watched Sarah, too. She watched me.”
“And you saw the same person.”
“Precisely.”
“I think I’m beginning to see.”
“We felt like two halves of one whole, so to speak, but it didn’t make for closeness. We weren’t like twins. We each needed, I think, to conquer the other before we could feel like a complete person. Do you understand that? The feeling that, far away, another possible version of you is living, thinking, growing. If we’d never seen much of each other it might have been all right. But when I was eighteen Daddy married Pamela, who couldn’t resist the temptations of London for long, especially with a name like Harcourt to open doors for her. So we came back.”
“And you and Sarah were thrown together again. The two halves were reunited.”
“That was how it felt, sometimes. And such different halves we were.”
“Well, you had had such different lives.”
“Of course. She had lived here, on this island, steeped in tradition, in the cult of our family.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t. You’ve no idea how the Harcourts are treated here. It’s positively feudal, a little kingdom cut off from the world. A society of obligation and duty and ritual and … all the things that I was free from in America. Away from it I could be myself. Growing up within it, Sarah could only be one person: the future chatelaine, the keeper-in-waiting of the castle. And that’s who she became.”
I nodded. Ella lit another cigarette.
“The tragedy, though,” she went on, “is that Sarah never will have Seton. When Cyril dies, if he has no children, which seems increasingly likely, it will be my father’s. And then it will be mine. It was given to a woman, you see; an Act of Parliament was passed to make sure that it could be inherited by one too. Oh there are plenty of provisions, of course: no Catholic can inherit, no divorcée, no convicted criminal. That last clause was added by the Victorians, I think. Typical. But since I am neither Catholic nor divorced nor a felon, in the course of time it will all be mine.”
“Which explains Sarah’s…”
“Hatred. Hatred of me,” Ella finished.
“I see.”
“And it’s worse because she loves this place, she understands it in a way I never could or will. I’ll never be anything more than a tourist here. With my accent and my ideas, how could I ever be anything else?”
“So far I follow you.” I was quiet for a moment, trying to straighten things in my mind. “But what did you mean yesterday when you talked about a pattern of behavior you couldn’t change? You likened it to an addiction, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Who were you talking about?” I went on. “What did you mean?”
“I was talking about me and Sarah, James. You’ve no idea of the extent to which each of our lives is dictated by the other. No idea. I know that Seton will be mine one day. And I know that I’m not worthy of it. Have you any idea what that feels like?” Seeing me about to reply, she went on quickly, opening the window behind her and letting in a gust of sharp, cold air. “You couldn’t and I’m glad you couldn’t. My family has lived here for more than three hundred years. Have you any idea how long that is, how weighty such a history must be? Can you imagine how much responsibility it carries with it?”
I shook my head,
“And to know that you’re not equal to it but that someone else is, that you haven’t had the training required but that someone else has. I sometimes think it would be much better for us both if Sarah and I just swapped places. If only I could get rid of my accent and she could acquire it, she could have my name and I hers. Then I could think as I liked, do what I pleased with my life, have the freedom I so badly want and which Sarah’s got. And Sarah could fulfill her destiny.” She ran a distracted hand through her hair. “But the roles are switched, you see. Fate has tricked us. She can never have what I have. And I’m left striving to acquire what she has: that rigid poise, that self-control, that certainty of the world and her place in it. It’s so alien to my nature but I want it so badly. I want to prove to her that I deserve her blessed Seton, that I will take care of it. I want to acquit myself honorably, for heaven’s sake.”
She paused.
“Can’t you understand that?”
“I do understand it, Ella,” I said. “I understand it completely.”
“Then tell me why I might have married Charlie,” she said sharply, quickly. And I understood the importance of the test.
“You got engaged to Charles,” I said slowly, thinking carefully, choosing my words with caution, “because he is precisely the sort of man Sarah might have married. Eton, Oxford, just charming enough without being too clever. He would have been the perfect partner for the Countess of Seton. I presume you get the title with the house?”
She nodded.
“But in the end you won’t marry Charles. Ultimately your sense of self is too strong.”
“I hope so, James.”
I got up from my sofa and crossed the room to kiss her.
She held up a hand to stop me. “No. You should know one more thing first.”
“What’s that?” I asked, standing over her.
“Charlie Stanhope was not just the kind of person Sarah might have married. She would have married him, had I not…” Her voice trailed off.
I drew away. “Had you not…”
“Sarah was in love with him, James. Completely in love with him, in that passionate way people who are usually cold fall in love if they ever do. I took Charlie away from Sarah. Partly, I admit, for what he represented; but that was a temptation I could have resisted.” She paused. “The shameful thing,” she went on slowly, “the thing that’s made me see how out of control all this has really become, is that I took Charlie from Sarah only because she wanted him so badly. Coldly, quite calculatedly, I set about taking him from her; and I got him.” She looked at me. “Do you see how frightening this thing is? I would have done anything, sacrificed anything—my future, Charlie’s future—just to hurt Sarah, just to show her that all her training, all her perfect breeding, counts for nothing.” Ella was crying now. “I can’t believe what I’ve done.”
It was not a time for words. Not yet. I went over to the cold ledge on which she sat and put my arms around her shaking shoulders. “Come on,” I said softly. “It’s not too late. At least you understand it, at lea
st you know it was wrong.”
And I thought as I said it that understanding was tantamount to letting go, to a kind of absolution. I omitted the step of confession, which can come before or after understanding but which must come at some point on the path to peace. So too did I ignore the making of amends, which alone makes forgiveness acceptable, even if it remains possible without it. I would not make the same omissions now. When we sin we pay in a multitude of ways. Sometimes acknowledgment and confession can help us towards absolution, but nothing is possible without reparation. Ella was fortunate, even if she did not choose to make use of her good fortune: she could have made her reparations and asked forgiveness from Sarah; she could have confessed; and thus she might have found peace. From a distance of fifty years I envy her that freedom.
I have no one with whom to make amends, at least not in this world. And thus there is no one to forgive me; I remain unabsolved. Sometimes God forgives people. He might forgive me if I could ask Him to; but I cannot, for I have never troubled Him before. I have never considered Him except politely, vaguely, with token prayers at Christmas and Easter and the occasional wedding. And I cannot turn to Him now that my need is greatest and I have nothing to give: no thanks for blessings; no praise for happiness; just bitterness for wasted years. I should add ingratitude to my sins. My guilt is ever with me and I must accept that fact. Eric, who alone might have forgiven me, is dead.
Sin requires confession and absolution: there is a cycle to be observed if one is ever to be cleansed of guilt. I didn’t know that this was so as I held Ella on that cold window ledge, watching the waters of the sea as my neck grew wet from her tears. I thought then that I could save her alone, that my help, my understanding, was all that she would need. I did not tell her to go to Sarah; I did not wish her to share the intimacy of confession with anyone but me. Already I was jealous of her trust. And so I held her as she cried and answered “No” when she asked “Do you hate me?” and murmured words of love and forgiveness and hope, only the first of which was mine to give. But they had their effect. Ella stopped crying, believing what I said, and in thus believing she made her grave mistake. She did not know, perhaps did not care to know—and I who suspected did not tell her—that the only person within whose power forgiveness lay was Sarah. I comfort myself with the thought that if she had known, she would probably still have preferred the price of a guilt largely untried as yes to the shame of apology. Ella, as I had thought before and should have known then, was a proud woman. And pride is the undoing of many.
But pride, as it turned out, was not ultimately to be Ella’s undoing; it was the lack of trust in the world which comes from betraying yourself that was to be her downfall. Those who give expect much to be given to them; those who take expect much to be taken from them. And by comforting Ella I disguised the dangers of what she had done in the protective gentleness of soothing words. I did not do her a service. Far better that I should have made her—for in that brief moment she would have done anything that I suggested— return to London by the next train and confess all to Sarah and to Charles. Then there would have been a scene; tears and bitterness would have flowed. And something would have been released; the festering wounds in both cousins would have been opened. They might have been made clean again. Injury, like guilt, should not fester; like guilt it often does.
But my soothing of Ella did much to cover over her guilt and so Sarah’s injury was allowed to fester undisturbed. I could not have known then that this would be so—on that point at least I am sure—but that did not alter the fact that it was. As I stroked Ella’s hair and kissed the soft skin of her neck, I thought only of stopping her tears and of healing her pain. I was too young to know that tears can purify and too unsure to guide Ella rather than comfort her. My soothing made confession, and thus forgiveness—which might have purified in the giving as well as the receiving of it—at first unnecessary and then impossible. How could I have known that it might have saved us all?
CHAPTER 9
IHAD NOT BEEN LONG BACK FROM CORNWALL, perhaps only for a day or two, when the telephone rang and I answered it to Camilla Boardman’s breathless cadences and elongated vowels. “Daaarling. Where have you been?” she cooed. It was an accepted fiction between us that after periods of noncommunication it was to me that the blame for this lapse should fall. It was ten days since I had taken her to the Harcourts’ lunch and ten days since, smiling and deferential, I had deposited her at her door and we had promised to call each other soon.
“I’ve been here, Camilla,” I lied. “Just very busy.”
“Musicking again?” Camilla separated artistic endeavor into three broad categories: musicking, artyings and literaturing.
“Yes. Got to practice, you know. The Guildhall starts soon.”
“I know darling.”
“What can I do for you?”
“It’s more what I can do for you. I’ve just had the most fantastic idea.”
“Ye-es?” I was cautious of Camilla’s fantastic ideas.
“I can’t think why it hasn’t occurred to me before.”
“Ye-es?”
“There’s someone you simply must meet. You’d enjoy each other such a lot.” Camilla was wholehearted and sincere—though not always completely disinterested—in her social benevolence.
“Who?” I asked, interested; her enthusiasm was infectious.
“My mother,” she said simply.
And so it was that I attended my first Boardman “morning.”
The house in Cadogan Square appeared to have sustained little damage as a result of Camilla’s birthday party: if cigarettes had been dropped or champagne cocktails spilled, the results of such disasters had been artfully concealed or removed. But the feel of expansive emptiness had gone. I sensed this the following day as I was admitted by a Portuguese maid who disappeared with a smile as soon as the door had closed behind me. Furniture and ornament had returned to hall and drawing room, both now a clutter of Victoriana; and through the bibelots, past the open doors to what had been the dancing room, I saw a group of six or seven men and women on uncomfortable chairs pulled in a semicircle around their hostess. Regina Boardman, like her name, was stately and well preserved; and she spoke with the attentive yet authoritative tones of the society patron.
“I think salon is such an awful word to use in England,” she was saying as I entered.
Silently I waited for her to notice me, and when she showed no sign of doing so I coughed She turned slowly, as though careful not to unsettle her hair. “You must be Mr. Farrell,” she said warmly, and offered me her right hand to shake as she indicated a chair with her left
“My daughter speaks very highly of your talents.”
“Thank you,” I said, as I took my place in the chattering circle.
But sparkling though the conversation of that morning was, its subject matter is not what has remained in my mind; nor can I remember the faces of the people who contributed so eloquently to it. I rack my brain for a memory of Eric and am cheated. It is rather the tableau as a whole which has remained vivid: I see Regina Boardman, fund-raiser par excellence, patron saint of struggling artists and other hopeless causes, holding forth to a group of her devoted supplicants. It is a scene which, properly allegorized, might have hung on one of the walls of her heavily Victorian house: Charity Throned in Splendour. Yet Regina’s style was not Victorian, though her taste in furniture might have been; and her approach to us, as to all her causes, was thoroughly modern. She was efficient and hard-nosed, you see, with a beady eye for opportunity. And when not dealing with the management of public appeals, she had the leisure and the inclination for private patronage.
That morning I was welcomed under the banner of her protection with a gracious smile and a cup of coffee. I accepted both gladly and joined the discussion with enthusiasm, for I recognized my side of the bargain: Regina, unlike her daughter, had a high respect for culture and though not a thinker herself she liked to seem one. So see took care to
listen to people who thought and to support those who put their thoughts into words for her benefit.
There was a more concrete system of reciprocation in operation, too, though I only learned of it as I was leaving. Regina Boardman was one of the wise who understand that generosity which is not reciprocated is stifling, and by the time we were in the hall, departing en masse, she had extracted a promise from each of her guests to contribute to a cause quite distinct from their own professional advancement. There was nothing stated about this arrangement; it simply existed. Regina asked and you said yes. She did not expect you to support her causes with your money but with your expertise and your time. And the cause for which she was marshalling support that morning, as we said our good-byes, was the restoration of decaying religious buildings. Not for Regina Boardman were the jewels of St. Paul’s or the Abbey; such national monuments would be no test of her fund-raising prowess. She was interested, instead, in the smaller churches; in the buildings which, as they crumble, are the price a secular age must pay for its indifference to organized religion.
She was organizing a concert at St. Peter’s, Eaton Square. The success of her appeal depended on it and someone had failed her. “I had three Beethoven violin sonatas all lined up,” she said to me, her face a picture of pain, “and the soloist I had in mind has got some sort of recording deal and gone off to Berlin. Very good for him, and I’m quite thrilled of course, but the timing of it’s a nuisance nevertheless.”
It happened that the violin sonatas in question were required pieces for my Guildhall course and I had been working on them for some months. In a flash of clarity I realized that Mrs. Boardman probably knew this from her daughter, and that it was not only chance or affection which had brought me to Cadogan Square. But Regina had mastered an art with which Camilla was still struggling: she had a way of presenting her own desires so that they coincided precisely with the interests of the person from whom she was extracting a favor. Inducement was her forte. And as she stood chatting with me on the steps of her house, waving to her other guests as they walked away across the square, she skirted prettily around, and then offered me directly, a sizable inducement indeed. Michael Fullerton, a reviewer from The Times, would be covering the concert at St. Peter’s.
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