Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  I awoke around dawn. The room was cool, but I was still warm in the curve of my husband’s body. I remembered dimly how, after rising once to open the windows as was his habit, he had drawn the bedclothes over us, only barely breaking my slumber.

  I gazed at his sleeping face, now heartbreakingly youthful and defenseless.

  But how would those features arrange themselves when he awoke with the night gone, and, with it, that brief and glorious truce I had sued for and won?

  I did not stay to find out. I was already in my own bed when the pale early sunlight slid down the river, from one graceful bridge to the next, gleamed on the lofty towers of Notre-Dame and on the lowly wet cobbles, and lovingly caressed the leaves of the great horse-chestnut trees that are everywhere in Paris.

  We did not speak of that night again.

  Never had my husband seemed more stern and unapproachable than he did a few hours later, when he took me to the Gare du Nord and put me on a train bound for Calais.

  I was on my way back to England. Alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Although the truce had expired, my husband’s next offensive was a subtle one. In mid-June, after leaving me to wonder how he might be enjoying himself apart from me, he summoned me again to London. His request for my company had been occasioned by a desire to take me to the theater.

  As we were about to enter his box at the Haymarket, he was greeted by a fellow who cast a look at me and said with a laugh, “So you’re back again, Tony?”

  My husband introduced us. The other immediately straightened his back, took his hands from his pockets, and bowed to me with grave respect.

  “What a pleasure it is finally to meet Lady Camwell,” he said. “I could not resist coming to see the adorable Miss Neilson once again,” he added to my husband. “But I see that cannot be your motive.”

  “Julia Neilson is pretty enough,” agreed my husband, in a way that would have made me feel rather slighted had I been the adorable Julia. “But I thought that Fleur might enjoy the play.”

  “Well, perhaps you won’t enjoy it,” he murmured a little later as we took our seats. “But I think you may profit from it.”

  “You have seen it before?”

  “In April, when it opened.”

  I wondered who had sat at his side then, and since he seemed to do little that was not calculated to remind me of my sins, what humbling lessons lay in wait for me.

  I recognized the playwright’s name. I had seen him once, not long before my second marriage, when he had been the toast of Paris. Marguerite had pointed him out to me in a café.

  I was severely disappointed, however, once the curtain had risen on A Woman of No Importance. It seemed to me that the play sorely lacked the emotional depth my recollection of the playwright’s admittedly vain but kindly face had led me to hope for. It was wonderfully amusing—breathtaking in its cleverness—but so frothy and insignificant, so deliberately brittle, that I felt vaguely irritated every time it wrenched a smile from my lips.

  Still, to my surprise, at the beginning of the Second Act, I was struck with a pang, rather than a giggle, when Lady Stutfield spoke of how women are always trying to escape from men: “Men are so very, very heartless. They know their power and use it.” And although I actually laughed when Mrs. Allonby declared, “Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men,” it was at the astuteness, and not the apparent absurdity, of her perception.

  It was not until the Fourth Act, however, that I began to feel very uneasy. I had no reason now to wonder why my husband had selected this play. For, although I was irreligious and detested the melodramatic Mrs. Arbuthnot to boot, I felt thoroughly admonished when she explained why she would rather endure disgrace and social ostracism than marry the father of her son. “How could I swear to

  love the man I loathe…. No: Marriage is a sacrament for those who love each other.”

  My discomfort took yet a sharper edge when even the puritanical moralist Hester—played by the ravishing Julia Neilson—called Mrs. Arbuthnot’s choice not to legitimize her son an honorable one and reminded us all that real dishonor lies in marrying without love.

  Although by this time I was moved and shaken by the tone the play had assumed, I was not sorry when the final curtain fell.

  My husband then decreed that we would have supper at Romano’s, in the Strand. Perhaps that noisy exuberance of sportsmen, Gaiety girls, army officers, and theatrical managers all jammed together in the famous dining room—so long and narrow that it had been nicknamed the Rifle Range—was not quite the correct milieu for a well-bred gentleman’s wife, but I didn’t object. I was thrilled at the chance to glimpse this livelier side of English life. But after we made our way into the restaurant, and after my husband had acknowledged a few greetings from the Rifle Range, we were led upstairs to a private room, there to enjoy our supper in quiet and intimate splendor.

  “Now tell me, did you enjoy the play?” my husband asked.

  “As much as anyone can enjoy being tried and condemned, however amusingly,” I replied. “That was what you intended, was it not?”

  My husband shrugged. “Perhaps I merely wanted to see you laugh. But if the shoe fits, of course…”

  “Even so,” I said, “I could not help but admire the play. I take its deeper message to be a more generous one. Perhaps it can remind us both of the dangers of any hardness of heart.”

  “Indeed?” said he indifferently. But I saw his color rise.

  “For example,” I continued with a magnanimity which was, alas, not unmingled with spite, “it suggests to me that perhaps I ought to judge you less harshly for the vices which you concealed from me so well and for so long.”

  Again he laughed. “To which of my vices do you refer?”

  “To your famous succession of mistresses. And the other pleasures of the demimonde which you apparently enjoy to the hilt with God-knows-whom.”

  I had not missed the knowing, admiring glances my husband had garnered from some of the bolder-looking girls downstairs, nor the whispers, which I could not make out, nor the appraising eyes directed at me.

  My husband laid down his fork, and resting his left forearm and his right elbow on the edge of the table, pointed his knife at my breast.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Those mistresses whom I have at least had the decency not to flaunt in your face, although you have never given me any reason to suppose that you cared anything about where, as you once put it, I went crawling. I’ll have you know, the only time in my life that I have ever crawled was in trying to make you happy. And what a thankless task that was.”

  My gaze fell, but finally I lifted my eyes back to his.

  “Yes,” I said very slowly. “You were discreet. And considerate. And I have been thankless.”

  My husband’s expression did not soften.

  “And if you were sincere about taking the play as a caution against judging other people harshly,” he continued severely, “there would be no need for me to point out that I had every intention of being faithful to you until you proved to be such an unsatisfactory wife.”

  “That’s entirely false,” I said, my temper flaring again. “You know as well as I do that you took up with your mistresses long before you became disenchanted with me.”

  “But only after you made it painfully clear not only that you took no pleasure in our marriage bed but that you were perfectly satisfied with that state of affairs and did not wish to change it,” he retorted. “That account you received of me from Madame Mansard, although accurate in every other respect, exaggerated the haste with which I broke my vows. It took me somewhat longer than a week or two to swallow my pride and admit to myself that I could never thaw your frozen heart.”

  “How much longer?” I whispered.

  “How much longer? Well, if you must know… perhaps you recall the night you told me outright that I could never give you any pleasure?”

&n
bsp; I shadowed my face with my hand and did not reply.

  “I did not break my vows to you until the following evening.”

  “The very next evening?” I whispered.

  “The very next evening,” he repeated without even a hint of remorse.

  I turned my head away and pressed my fingers against my lips.

  But still he continued.

  “Before you upbraid me further, ask yourself this. Why do you suppose all my mistresses had black hair? And why do you think I turned to those other diversions you are so eager to condemn? One must do something to whet one’s appetite for a woman when she is not the woman one wants… one wanted.”

  I reached for my champagne glass, but it was already empty and my husband, who valued privacy above service, had dismissed the waiter. I twirled the stem slowly between my fingers as I considered his admission.

  My husband took the glass from my hand. He filled it, set it down, and after he had returned the bottle to the ice pail, he covered my hand with his for a moment.

  “Drink,” he said.

  So I did. I took one sip, and then another; slowly the sparkling anodyne dulled the edge of my distress.

  “I hoped the play would make you laugh,” continued my husband more gently. “And once or twice I think it did. Now tell me truthfully, heathen that you are, did you not like Lord Illingworth in spite of yourself?”

  That did make me smile.

  “Very much so,” I admitted. “And didn’t you, in spite of yourself, find Mrs. Arbuthnot’s mother love somewhat excessive?”

  “Cloying,” he agreed. “But I think I have every right to call the grapes sour. What about you? Were you no luckier in your upbringing? Didn’t your grandmother love you like a mother?”

  “I really know nothing of how mothers love, but I suppose she loved me in her way,” I said. “Unfortunately, it was a way that made me desperate to escape her plans for me.”

  “What plans were those?” he asked.

  I had told him so little about her—he knew what she had been, but nothing of what she had intended for me. I recalled his scathing remark, made only a few weeks earlier, about my “unfortunate antecedents.” But it was all water under the bridge now. The champagne, and the sense that I had nothing left to lose, unfettered my tongue. I began to speak with astonishing candor about my girlhood, about my grandmother. But now a cascade of soft, unfamiliar feeling for her washed over me. I recalled the play’s gentle admonitions against moral inflexibility. I wanted to defend my grandmother from my husband’s contempt.

  “You can have no idea what it was like for her, to be so poor—how hard she had to work and how much she had to sacrifice. She took in washing. She took in sewing. She helped out when there were dinner parties at the vicarage —not at the dinners themselves, of course, for her past was no secret and her presence would have outraged everyone, but before and afterward. Sometimes she would be there most of the night, washing up and cleaning. For her betters. They thought they were being charitable.”

  And I had been ashamed of her.

  “She was so bravely determined that I should never want,” I continued, despite the lump that had risen to my throat as I thought of how ready I had been to judge her, and of how much I owed her. “She made everything possible for me, everything.”

  Without doubting the sincerity of Frederick’s love for me, I felt pierced by the sudden, painful realization that, had it not been for the sophistication, the education, and the grace with which my grandmother had endowed me, I could never have commanded the attention of such a pampered aesthete.

  My husband was silent as I sat lost in thought, vainly regretting my thanklessness.

  Finally I lifted my head from my reverie to notice that my glass was empty once again and my husband was refilling it.

  I took another swallow and said to him, rather shakily, in what must have seemed to him a complete non sequitur, “Perhaps you would have judged me less harshly, as well, had your cocoon of wealth not given you such glib notions of integrity.”

  The bright color flooded his cheeks again. He said nothing to defend himself.

  I lifted the glass to my mouth yet again: It seemed that I was tearing through the bottle at a phenomenal rate.

  “Well, she’d have been pleased with me, at any rate,” I continued tactlessly, as my thoughts turned back to my grandmother. “She would have felt I had surpassed even her hopes for me—in the very moment that I was going down for the third time.”

  My husband’s color rose even higher.

  “So that is how you felt about marrying me,” he said after a long silence, as if to himself. “Well, perhaps the fish will have to be content with his four nights and cast Jonah back upon the shore.”

  At this I was overwhelmed by confusion. Very likely it was due to the vast quantity I had imbibed. I looked away and found myself wondering whether Jonah had sometimes missed his fearsome intimacy with that great creature, had ever awakened in the dark of night longing for the belly of his devouring protector once he had been flung free of it.

  But of course I did not say this.

  My husband may have had a little too much champagne himself, for, although we did not say much more across the table, later, when we had climbed into his carriage for the journey back to Grosvenor Square, he said, “You know, for a moment or two tonight you reminded me of the way you looked the first time I ever saw you.”

  “When you called on me with Neville?” What could have reminded him of that fateful day?

  “Oh no. It was long before that.”

  At first I was puzzled. Then I understood. “Oh, you mean Neville’s painting from The Winter’s Tale.”

  “No. Not the painting. You. It was in Paris. I was dining with a friend—it was Phil Harborough, as a matter of fact. You may remember meeting him at the reception for Caylat.”

  “Oh yes, Philip. The talker.”

  My husband laughed.

  “No, Fleur,” he corrected me gravely. “Philip, the raconteur. In any case, we were at the Coq d’Or. It was the autumn of eighty-eight. You were across the room with your husband and Marguerite and Théo and another couple. You were in an emerald green dress and you had a red rose in your hair.”

  My mind shot back across the years to that ancient tavern in the Rue Montmartre. If my husband had gone down on his knees to me, then and there, and declared his undying love, he could hardly have astounded me more. How could I not remember that joyous night at the Coq d’Or? Even now I can see the candlelight dancing over Frederick’s laughing face, I can reel off the names of everyone who stopped by our table. I recall everything—everything except the pale Englishman who must have been gazing at me from across the room.

  “You were positively incandescent. I thought your husband must be the happiest man on the face of the earth. I remember making some idiotic remark—well, I was still very young—about understanding for the first time in my life why a moth would fly into a flame. Phil told me who you were. Of course, I ought to have recognized you from Neville’s painting, but I hadn’t—there was no comparison between the painting and… the real thing.

  “Neville knew how much I admired that particular masterpiece, not to mention the others he owned. I had been urging him to introduce me to your husband—I had hoped to commission something equally magnificent for myself. But once I had seen you, it was out of the question. I was

  forced to recognize the wisdom of the Tenth Commandment.”

  The carriage rattled us softly through the dark London streets. I thought of my husband’s cold mother, of the civilized cruelty in which he had been raised, and of how stingingly that, and his purchased pleasures, must have contrasted with the mellow, tender joie de vivre of the love feast he had witnessed in Paris.

  “Your face was glowing. I attributed that to the warmth of your nature.” Now his voice had taken on its familiar, ironic edge. “But I suppose you were just full of champagne, which seems to do as much for you as paint.” />
  I shook my head, still lost in that bittersweet remembrance.

  “I’d had nothing to drink. Frederick had just gotten a commission for a group of paintings that would pay more than anything he’d ever done before. We were celebrating. It seemed like the happiest night of my life—I didn’t know it was the end of everything.”

  “The end?” said my husband, puzzled.

  “Yes, that was the night I lost my daughter.”

  I stopped, my voice catching. I had said far too much.

  My husband turned toward me. I could not read his expression.

  “Your daughter!” he exclaimed.

  I could answer only with a sharp little nod.

  “So you did have a child,” he said softly.

  Again I felt that vague surprise at how little he knew about me. But of course I had never mentioned her to him.

  “What happened?” said my husband.

  “She was born three months too early,” I said, now in the toneless voice I had found safest to adopt at the time of her death. “She died.”

  “How devastating for you.”

  “I am afraid I took it a little too hard,” I said, still in the same flat voice.

  “Too hard? What do you mean?”

  “Well, it isn’t as if she were ever truly a person,” I lied as crisply as I was able to. “But I grieved excessively. Why, I can’t say. I hadn’t actually known her so, of course, there was really no reason to feel quite so—”

  “My God, Fleur, how can you say that! You carried her in your body for months! How much closer could you have been to her?”

  I glanced at him, amazed. But already tears, idle tears, useless tears, had begun to spill from my eyes. I turned my head and brushed them away angrily.

  “You must think I do nothing but weep. I don’t know what is wrong with me these days. I used to have some self-control. I never cried.”

  “Surely you wept for your child?”