Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  I could not shake off my bitter awareness of how greatly I had failed him. I brooded upon this constantly; it did not improve my spirits. The self-accusations did not remedy the trouble; they merely affixed the blame.

  And although I knew that I was being unreasonable and unjust, I began to grow more critical of my husband, as well. My impression of latent power, which had once made his slow, lazy grace so attractive to me, had been false. He was merely phlegmatic. How else could he have come to accept the grave imperfections of our marriage with such calm imperturbability, leaving any responsibility for trying to overcome them entirely to me?

  What could I do? I had already tried everything—and everything had failed.

  Sometimes I tried to imagine the kind of woman who might have pleased my husband better, but this was a futile exercise. I was never able to envision some wonderful lady whom I might take as a model. All I could see were wispy images of myself—not as I was now, but as I had been in the early years with Frederick.

  I knew now I could never produce a convincing imitation of that glowing creature—she had been dead for years and was now as unfathomable a stranger as I sometimes felt my own husband to be. And although he might yearn for some modest signs of passion, that could not be the woman he looked for in me. He had never laid eyes upon her she had vanished long before he met me.

  And she was surely the last woman who could have pleased him. She was the reckless, shameless creature who had posed for the paintings that were the source of all the trouble.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Of all the staff at Charingworth, it was Watkins, my husband’s exacting head groom, by whom I felt most overawed and yet with whom I was most comfortable. Upon my arrival, I had expected the entire household to treat me with thinly veiled scorn due to my plebian background and my inexperience with the role of chatelaine. But this was not the case.

  Nearly all the staff, however, had a somewhat independent air. They had welcomed me cordially and behaved respectfully. But while there appeared to be no underlying disdain, it was clear that they were observing me carefully, reserving judgment, always watchful.

  Watkins was the most forthcoming. He seemed to approve of my passion for riding and the readiness with which I welcomed any advice he could offer that might improve my skill and knowledge. He also provided me with a circumspect family history by means of anecdotes from the stables. From these I gathered that my husband’s father had not been particularly fond of horses and was, in fact, somewhat intimidated by all but the most docile mounts. In contrast, Watkins confided to me, the former Lady Camwell, now Lady Whitstone, had a heavy, rather cruel hand with the bit and used the crop too freely. But my husband was a real horseman, he told me.

  “He’s not like his father, you know,” the old groom said. He gave me a keen look. “Sir Anthony holds the reins very lightly. But don’t let that deceive you. He always knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  Since I was well acquainted with my husband’s skill in the saddle, I wondered what had impelled Watkins to make this point so portentously. I supposed it was pride in his employer.

  But if it was, there was nothing servile in it. And, conversely, it seemed that my husband was able to dispense with his stiff admixture of hauteur and diffidence when he was around the shrewd old man—at least when I was not present. I knew this because I came upon them once, unexpectedly.

  I remember the day, because I had quarreled with my husband that morning—well, perhaps it was not exactly a quarrel, for we never quarreled, but we had had another slight disagreement.

  I thought I had glimpsed a small but unmistakable flicker of distaste in my husband’s eye when I had appeared at the breakfast table in one of my very oldest and plainest gowns, and somewhat later he interrupted the silence of our meal by saying, “I shall be going to London at the end of the week. Would you care to join me?”

  I thought this an odd request. It had been some time since he had sought my company in town.

  “I really have no reason to go to London,” I said thoughtlessly, and then wished that I had chosen more tactful words of refusal.

  My husband looked down at his empty plate as if he were committing the design on it to memory. Finally he raised his eyes again and said, “I would like to have you fitted for some new clothes. You seem badly in need of them.”

  I would have dearly loved some new gowns, but it had become a peculiar point of pride for me to wear my old ones. By this means, I was able to assure myself that I had not married him basely, to indulge my appetite for luxuries, but only to save myself from ruin.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Perhaps my gowns do not meet your exacting standards, but they suit me very well. My tastes are simple. Besides, I am sure I would find the fittings very tiresome.”

  My husband pushed back his chair and stood up abruptly, bestowing upon me a look of sheer exasperation. I thought he was about to speak, but he seemed to swallow the words that trembled on his tongue.

  “You are angry,” I said, surprised.

  He bit his lip and then either his expression changed or I was able to read it better. He almost looked as if the insignificant rebuff had wounded him.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t wish to impose my tastes upon you.”

  For a moment I wished that he would. It does me no credit, I know, but that is what passed through my mind in the brief interval before he turned and left me: I thought what a great relief it would be to be swept forward under the power of a personality stronger than my own, to be carried away despite my own leaden inertia, and with little or no regard for my will.

  The feeling passed, or perhaps I pushed it away. I merely shrugged as he departed without another word. It was a fine day, and after lingering over my breakfast, I decided to change into one of my riding habits—for in this department, I was not too proud to accept my husband’s generosity—and to take Andromeda out.

  As I walked toward the stables, I saw my husband and Watkins so deep in conversation that at first neither of them was aware of my approach. My husband was leaning against the door frame, his hands in his pockets. Everything in his demeanor was relaxed, except for the intensity of his expression as he listened to the words of his ancient groom. His head was bent, his eyes narrowed, and a little smile that gave his face a look of mingled regret and amusement played across his handsome features. There seemed something so intimate about the conversation that, had the groom not been so very old and had his rough clothes not contrasted so greatly with those of my polished husband, they might almost have been father and son.

  But now Watkins had observed my presence, and as I came within earshot, I heard him say, as if to seal the discussion, “Well, you know what I think. She’s a sound little filly all right, but she needs a touch of the crop to soften her.”

  My husband looked startled, then lifted his head and broke into laughter. The late autumn sunlight gleamed on his hair and his teeth flashed. I felt a sharp, poignant thrust, as I realized suddenly that he was still a very young man. Ordinarily his youthfulness was concealed by his air of cool dignity.

  My husband saw me, and his easy laughter and the charm of his expression faded. I felt a momentary envy of the humble Watkins, who seemed able to evoke that vanished aspect of the man I had married.

  “I hardly think that’s called for,” said my husband in response to Watkins’s remark. Then he glanced again in my direction and the now unfamiliar sparkle returned to his eyes. “Although, I must say, the idea has got a certain appeal.”

  My nerves tingled. I ignored the curious sensation.

  “How dare you speak of my horse that way!” I exclaimed. Andromeda was the only filly in our stable. Their presumptuous discussion of her outraged me.

  I saw Watkins give my husband a piercing, knowing look.

  “I assure you, my dear,” said my husband, now with his customary grave politeness, “we were not speaking of Andromeda. Are you taking her out?”

  “Yes, it’s too
lovely a day to waste indoors,” I said, slightly embarrassed by my furious outburst. I supposed my husband must be thinking of buying another horse. Apparently the two men had been discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the animal which had caught his eye.

  “Well, enjoy your ride.”

  With that, my husband turned his attention back to the groom.

  I wished perversely that he had offered me his company, but our rides together were already a thing of the past.

  Upon joining such a respectable English family, I had supposed that I must become a dutiful churchgoer. Frederick had held fashionably agnostic views, and I—having witnessed a little religious hypocrisy during my youth in England and having learned a great deal more about it from my grandmother—was an even greater skeptic. But sometimes, when I was out in the countryside astride Andromeda, I would be swept with a restrained but powerful pantheistic fervor.

  Nor was my husband particularly devout; it seemed that he attended our village church primarily to maintain his connections to the community, and with what I considered ostentatious humility, he did not even take his seat in the Camwell family’s special pew.

  I regarded my husband’s attendance at the services he did not find particularly instructive or uplifting as silly and hypocritical. I implied this in a comment I made the first time I accompanied him to the little stone church. I had gone chiefly because I was bored. Once or twice the sermon nearly made me giggle, but more often than not the platitudes had me gritting my teeth.

  “I can’t imagine why you bother to attend,” I said afterward. “You don’t take it any more seriously than I do. You really go only to polish that upright image of yours, don’t you?”

  “Not entirely,” replied my husband calmly. He could never be provoked to rise to the bait on the rare occasions when I yielded to an unkind urge to needle him. “It’s true that I put little faith in conventional dogma, but I do find much to admire in Christianity. The sermons, I’ll grant you, tend to be dull and disappointingly shallow—I’m always astonished that a gentleman of such limited imagination would choose what surely ought to be the most challenging and demanding of professions. But it’s a living, of course.” He smiled wryly at his own slight joke. “And I do believe that, in certain ways at least, the Christian faith has had both a radical and a civilizing influence.”

  “Civilizing!” I exclaimed. “What can you be thinking of? The bloody Inquisition? The Crusades? The persecutions of the Jews? The slave trade? Or was it the burning of witches that you had in mind?”

  “Not at all,” he replied in his unruffled way. “But surely you’ll admit that, whatever the failings of its practitioners may be, Christianity’s original precepts are quite remarkable. If you doubt that, try to imagine a time when retribution was the only law. Then think how utterly revolutionary it must have been to suggest that only someone without sin ought to cast the first stone. Isn’t that the very essence of a compassionate morality?”

  I laughed. “Do you know anyone in England who lives by that code?”

  “Don’t you?” he asked, and I fell into silence.

  In spite of such exchanges, I was not often unkind to my husband. Generally, I lashed out only when I felt he was pushing me to display some emotion I could not feel or to make some response when I wished only to be left alone.

  But most of the time I felt saddened when I thought of his empty, joyless life, so earnestly and responsibly conducted—and I tried very hard to behave well. Before our marriage I had supposed that once we were in England the ties of family and society would compensate my husband at least in part for my own limitations. But he had no close family ties other than to Neville Marsden, whom we rarely saw anymore, for, to my enormous regret, some slight coldness seemed to have arisen between the cousins.

  Moreover, my husband cared as little for country society as I did. He had taken the unrest in Ireland and the agricultural depression in England seriously enough to slash his tenants’ rents, which was a major cause of the bad blood between him and the rack-rent Sparlings.

  His interest in agriculture I thought very dull. Although we both shared a passion for the outdoors, it did not provide much common ground. Mine was a romantic love of Nature; his, a practical concern with science and natural history.

  But still he was always kind to me, and except for my little flare-ups, which were very few and far between, I managed to curb the tongue which guilt and depression had begun to hone to a razor edge.

  There was the matter of the camera, for example.

  If there was one invention that I detested, it was the camera. In my hierarchy, the medium of paint and canvas soared far above that of the soulless, treated plates that merely absorb whatever image the lens admits.

  This had become one of my small, private objections to my husband. I would have preferred that he have no artistic impulses at all, but he had the very worst—he was an amateur photographer.

  I did not discover this, however, until I came to Charingworth, at which point I concluded that it was by far the silliest of all his interests and thanked heaven that he never insisted, after my earliest refusals, on attempting to capture my image.

  He once showed me two or three examples of what he regarded as his best efforts: one was a portrait of Watkins that bespoke the man’s character better than any words I could write here; another was a stunningly natural picture of one of the village boys proudly holding a catapult. And how had he coaxed his restless subject into remaining so patient and cheerful during the long exposure? By promising the child the portrait as a present for his mother, and by answering all his questions about the camera’s workings.

  I told him they were very good, and never admitted my aversion to his hobby. Of course, I did not tell him quite how fine I thought them. He was, after all, a dilettante. The superb quality of these particular portraits could only be a happy fluke, and I did not wish to encourage his love of the camera.

  We had been married for nearly seven months, our amiable estrangement deepening daily, when, one evening in March, I arrived at the dinner table to find a small package, beautifully wrapped and tied, at my place. I opened the card.

  “To Fleur. With my love, which is as constant and enduring as these. Anthony,” I read.

  Oh, was there really no end to it! He had stopped proclaiming his love for me months ago, and I no longer needed it—I had cured myself of that by keeping my distance and by focusing on the inevitable final separation. We did not share a bed and often did not even sleep under the same roof.

  Why had he chosen this moment to shame me with such a reminder, however subtle and well meant, of an emotion which I’d dared to hope had faded to mere affection?

  “Won’t you open it?” he said.

  Uneasily, I removed the wrappings and lifted the cover of the green velvet jeweler’s case within. There lay a spectacular diamond necklace, made in the dog-collar style, like the ones Princess Alexandra wore to cover a scar on her throat, a style that had been instantly adopted by virtually every lady of fashion.

  I appraised it with my grandmother’s eye and reeled at the thought of what it must have cost him.

  “It’s very lovely,” I said, closing the box and trying to force some warmth into my voice. “Thank you, Anthony.”

  My husband arose from his chair and came to where I sat. He opened the velvet case once again, lifted out the jewels, and fastened them around my neck. They lay there heavily, like ice against my skin, a blatant symbol of possession.

  As soon as I was able to retire to my room, I did so, on the grounds that my head ached. An hour or so later there was a tap at my door, so soft that it would not have awakened me had I been sleeping. It was my husband, who had not come to my room for months. Leaving the door open to admit the light from the passage, he entered.

  “How do you feel?” he asked me softly. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No, thank you. My head is no better. When it aches like this, sleep is the only
help for it.”

  “And how are you otherwise?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I saw his slender black silhouette merge with that of an armchair which stood near the foot of my bed.

  “You are not well, Fleur. You grow thinner every day. If this goes on, soon you will not even cast a shadow.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Anthony. I have always been thin.”

  “And have you always been so wretchedly unhappy?” he asked.

  I was so astounded by the forthrightness I thought I had long ago discouraged forever that I did not know how to answer. Fortunately, he spared me.

  “I have tried to respect your delicacy, Fleur,” he said, “your disinclination to unburden your heart to me. But I cannot remain silent any longer. It will not do. My hesitation to insist upon confronting your difficulties—whatever they may be—has already driven us apart. Perhaps that can never be mended. But something continues to eat away at you before my very eyes. I cannot simply watch and do nothing.”

  I remained speechless.

  “I know that I have wronged you,” he continued preposterously. “I have no right to ask for your forgiveness and your trust. But I do. I would do anything to restore your happiness; I would make any sacrifice.”

  “You have wronged me?” I finally managed to articulate in a whisper.

  “Most assuredly I have wronged you. I know it. You must know it, too. I was too hasty, too eager to make you mine. You were not an unhappy woman when I knew you in Paris, Fleur. But I pressed my suit too quickly and carried you away—perhaps before you were ready to close that chapter of your life. I think…” Here he stumbled, but then went on. “I think that you confused an affection which might have developed into love, under more favorable conditions, with love itself.”

  I felt as if he had knocked the wind out of me.

  “You are mistaken, Anthony,” I choked out.

  “Tell me how.”

  I tried to say more, but my breath was too ragged.