If she was a prig, she was not so far gone that she did not sometimes recognize it, and smart behind the eyes accordingly. But to know is not to cure. She was beset by all kinds of dark helplessnesses that might become obsessions. If I am lost, then who can be saved; she was egotist enough to ask. She wanted very badly to make amends for the sins of others. So that in the face of desperate needs, and having rejected prayer as a rationally indefensible solution, she could not surrender her self-opinion, at least, not altogether. Searching the mirror, biting her fine lips, she said: I have strength, certainly, of a kind, if it is not arrogance. Or, she added, is it not perhaps – will?
One morning, while the curtains were still keeping the sun at bay, Laura Trevelyan set her mouth, and resolved to exercise that will in accepting the first stages of self-humiliation. As she had been giving the matter thought since quite an early hour, all the young woman’s pulses were beating and her wrists were weak by the time Rose arrived to admit the light.
The girl watched the thick arms reach up and jerk in that abrupt manner at the curtains. Then, when the room had received back its shape, and the can of water was standing in the basin, and one or two things that had fallen had been picked up and set to rights, the woman said:
‘You have not slept, miss.’
‘I would not say that I had not slept,’ Laura replied. ‘How can you tell, Rose?’
‘Oh, I know. There are things you can tell by knowing.’
‘You are determined to mystify me,’ laughed the girl, and immediately frowned to think how she must run the gauntlet of her servant’s intuition.
‘I am a simple woman,’ Rose said.
Laura held her face away. The yellow light was blinding her.
‘I do not know what you are, Rose. You have never shown me.’
‘Ah, now, miss, you are playing on my ignorance.’
‘In what way?’
‘How am I to show you what I am? I am not an educated person. I am just a woman.’
Laura Trevelyan got up quickly. She would have liked to open a cupboard, and to look inside. Her feelings would not have been disturbed by such a reasonable act and sight of inanimate objects. However, nothing important is easy. So she looked instead at Rose, and saw her struggling lip. In moments of distress, or even simple bewilderment, this would open like a live wound.
They were both exposed now in the centre of the thick carpet. They could have been trembling for a common nakedness. In the girl’s case, of course, her nightgown was rather fine.
‘There, miss,’ said Rose, covering her mistress with usual skill. ‘The mornings are still fresh.’
The two women were touching each other, briefly.
‘They are not really,’ shivered Laura Trevelyan, for whom all intimacies, whether of mind or body, were still a plunge.
Then she walked across the room, combing out her hair that the night had thickened.
‘Rose,’ she said, ‘you must see that you take care now. That you do nothing unnecessarily strenuous. That you do not lift weights, for instance, nor run downstairs.’
She was ashamed of the clumsiness, the ugliness of her own words, then, of their coldness, but she had not learnt to use them otherwise. She was, in final appraisal, without accomplishment.
‘You must not hurt yourself,’ she said ridiculously.
Rose was breathing. She was arranging things.
‘I’ll not harm,’ she said at last. ‘I have come through worse. I have been laid right open in my time.’
She did not expect exemption.
‘I shall resist all attempts to make me suffer, or to bring suffering to others,’ said the younger woman, to whom it was still a matter of will and theory.
The rather strange situation made her speak almost to herself, or to an impersonal companion. Since she had begun to prise the other’s close soul, she herself was opening stiffly.
‘I did not expect to suffer,’ Rose Portion was telling. ‘I was a young girl, in service in a big house. I was in the stillroom, I remember, under as decent a woman as ever you would be likely to find. It was a happy place, and in spring, when the blossom was out, you should have seen it, miss. It was the picture of perfection. That was it, perhaps. I did trust, and expect over much. Well, it is all past. I loved my little boy that was given me, but I would not have had him suffer. That was what they did not understand. They said it was a thing only a monster could have done, and all considered, I was getting off light with a sentence of transportation for life. But they had not carried my little boy, nor lain with all those thoughts, all those nights. Well, there it is. I was not meant to suffer, not then, or now – you would have said. But sufferin’ creeps up. And in different disguises. You do not recognize it, miss. You will see.’
Soon after this, as she had done what she had to do, the squat woman went out of Laura Trevelyan’s room. The girl remained agitated, moved certainly by Rose’s story, but disturbed rather by dangers she had now committed herself to share.
So that when Aunt Emmy, in the days that followed, was going about the house, wondering what should be done about Rose, her niece did not know.
‘You are no help at all, Laura,’ Mrs Bonner complained, ‘when you are usually so bright, and full of clever ideas. Nor can I expect help from Mr Bonner, who is too upset by that German. If it is not one thing, it is another. I must admit I am quite distracted.’
‘We shall think, Aunt,’ said Laura, who was rather pale.
But thought, which should be an inspiration, was clogging her.
Laura is becoming heavy, Aunt Emmy said, and would add this worry to her collection.
Then, she hit upon a cure, so simple, but infallible, at least to Mrs Bonner, for to cure herself was to cure her patients. She would give a party. It would revive all spirits, soothe all nerves, even the frayed German ones. For Mrs Bonner loved conviviality. She loved the way the mood would convey itself even to the candle-flames. She loved all pretty, coloured things; even the melancholy rinds of fruit, the slops of wine, the fragments of a party, recalled some past magic. Whether as a prospect or a memory, a party made her quite tipsy – figuratively speaking, that is – for Mrs Bonner did not touch strong drink, unless on a very special occasion, a sip of champagne, or on hot evenings, a glass of delicious brandy punch, or sometimes of a morning, for the visitor’s sake a really good madeira, or thimbleful of dandelion wine.
‘Mr Bonner,’ she now said, seriously, though holding her head upon one side in case she might not be taken so, ‘it is but a week, do you realize, to the departure of Mr Voss and his friends. It is only right that you, in your position, and we, naturally, as your family, should celebrate in some way. I have been thinking,’ she said.
‘Eh?’ said her husband. ‘I am not interested in that German except in so far as I am already committed. Let the relationship remain plain; it is so distasteful to me. It would be hypocritical to add trimmings, not to mention the expense.’
‘I understand,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘that he is something of a disappointment. But let us leave aside the character of Mr Voss. I would like to see you do justice to yourself, and to this – I cannot very well refer to it as anything but an event of national significance.’
She did not know she had achieved that, until she had, and then was very pleased.
Her husband was surprised. He shifted.
After coughing a confident though genteel cough, Mrs Bonner produced the flag she intended to plant upon the summit of her argument.
‘An historical occasion,’ she pursued, ‘made possible by the generosity of several, but which you, originally – do not deny it, my dear – which you, and only you, inspired!’
‘It remains to be seen,’ said Mr Bonner, more kindly because it concerned himself, ‘whether it was an inspiration or calamity.’
‘I thought now,’ said his judicious wife, ‘that we might give a little party, or not a party, something simple, a pair of birds and a round of beef, with a few nice side dishes.
And a good wine. Or two. And as for the friends of Mr Voss, I do not intend to invite all and sundry, for some, I understand, are just common men, but one or two who are comme il foh, and used to mix with ladies and young girls. Belle has a new dress that nobody has seen, and Laura, of course, can look charming in anything.’
So Mr Bonner was gently pressed, and finally kissed upon the forehead.
Mrs Bonner conceived her plan upon the Friday, exactly one week before the projected departure of the expedition by sea to Newcastle. On Friday afternoon, Jim Prentice, after saddling Hamlet, took the cards, that were in Miss Trevelyan’s fine Italian hand, to drop at the lodgings of Mr Voss and Mr Topp, and those of Mr Palfreyman, who, it had been decided, might be considered comme il foh. And there was a Miss Hollier, whom people invited when they were in a scrape for an extra lady. Miss Hollier was a person of modest income and middle age, but of really excellent spirits. Well trained in listening to others, she would sometimes pop such good ideas into their heads they would immediately adopt her suggestions as their own. Moreover, and appropriate to the occasion, the lady was a distant connexion of Mr Sanderson of Rhine Towers, one of the patrons of the expedition. Lastly, there was Tom Radclyffe. If the Lieutenant had been omitted from Mrs Bonner’s list of those who were to receive cards, it was because he remained in a state of almost constant communication with a certain person. It was taken for granted Tom would come.
These, then, were the guests who were bidden for the following Wednesday.
It proved to be a night of drifting airs. Belle Bonner had come, or floated into her cousin’s room to show her dress of light. It was a dress of pure, whitest light, streaming and flashing from her. Her hands and arms would pass through those shafts of light to smooth out any encroaching shadow. Her hair, too, shone – her rather streaky, but touching hair, still drenched with sunlight, and smelling of it.
‘Oh, Belle!’ said Laura, when she saw.
The girls kissed with some tenderness, though not enough to disarrange.
‘But it does not fit,’ said Belle, becoming desperately herself. ‘I shall split open. You will see.’
‘And ruin us!’ Laura cried.
They were both laughing, unreasonably, dreadfully, deliriously. They could well die of it.
‘At least Miss Hollier will not see,’ Laura burst out, too loud, through her laughter; ‘not if you were standing in your worst chemise and petticoat. She is far too well brought up.’
‘Stop, Laura!’ Belle begged.
She was mopping herself.
‘I insist, Laura. You really must. Perhaps not Miss Hollier, but somebody else. I do believe Mr Voss notices everything.’
Almost immediately it was felt they must remember their age, and they set to work, sighingly, to repair themselves.
If Laura would be noticed less than Belle, it was because she was beautiful on that night. This became slowly clear. Belle ravished, like any sudden spring flower, but Laura would require her own climate in which to open. She wore a dress of peacock colours that did not take to full light, but brooded and smouldered in subtle retirement, which did, in fact, invite her arms and shoulders to emerge more mysteriously. Her head was a jewel, but of some dark colour, and of a variety such as people overlook because they have not been taught to admire.
‘Let us go down,’ Belle suggested, ‘before Mamma is there, and have a quiet sip of something to give us courage.’
So the two girls, smelling of French chalk and lavender water, were winding down. It was a heady staircase. They had pinned clusters of camellias at their breasts, and were holding themselves rather erect, lest some too sudden gesture or burst of emotion should turn the petals brown.
That night anything could happen. Two big lamps had transformed the drawing-room into a perfect, luminous egg, which soon contained all the guests. These were waiting to be hatched by some communication with one another. Or would it not occur? The eyes appeared hopeful, if the lids were more experienced, themselves enclosed egg-shapes with uncommunicative veins. All the while the white threads of voices tangled and caught. Men’s voices that had come in, toughened the fibre. But nobody said what they intended to say. This was sidetracked, while the speakers stood smiling at what had happened, and adopted, even with traces of sincerity, the words which had been put into their mouths. It was still rather a merciless dream at that early hour.
Until Tom Radclyffe, who was blazing with scarlet, and whose substantial good-fortune was the best reason for self-confidence, burst out of the awkward dream and took reality by the hand. The stuff of her surprising dress caused him little shivers of devotion as it brushed along his skin. Everyone else, sharing his devotion, was agreed that Belle was the belle.
Even Mr Voss suffered a pang for cornfields and ripe apples.
‘Seldom have I regrets for the Germany I have left,’ he remarked to Miss Hollier, ‘although I will suddenly realize I have a yearning to experience another German summer. The fields are sloping as in no other land, with such slow sweeps. The trees are too green, even under dust. And the rivers, ah, how the rivers flow!’
So that the excellent Miss Hollier felt quite melancholy.
Then Mrs Bonner, who had a surprise for Mr Voss, brought a book she had remembered, that some governess had left, it could have been, of German verses, evidently.
‘There,’ she said, with an amusing laugh, as if patting bubbles upward.
‘Ach,’ breathed Voss, down his nose.
But he seemed pleased.
He began to read. It was again a dream, Laura sensed, but of a different kind, in the solid egg of lamplight, from which they had not yet been born.
Voss read, or dreamed aloud:
‘Am blassen Meeresstrande
Sass ich gedankenbekümmert und einsam.
Die Sonne neigte sich tiefer, and warf
Glührote Streifen auf das Wasser,
Und die weissen, weiten Wellen,
Von der Flut gedrängt,
Schäumten und rauschten näher und näher.…’
He closed up the book rather abruptly.
‘What is it, Mr Voss?’ Mrs Bonner asked. ‘You must tell,’ she protested.
‘Ah, yes,’ begged Miss Hollier. ‘Do translate for us.’
‘Poetry will not bear translation. It is too personal.’
‘That is most unkind,’ said Mrs Bonner, who would pursue almost morbidly anything she did not understand.
Laura now turned her back. She had touched hands with the German, and exchanged smiles, but not those of recognition. She did not wish for this. He was rather sickly when moved by recollection of the past, as he was, in fact, when collected and in the present. She was glad when the dinner was served and they could give their attention to practical acts.
All went well, although Cassie had overdone the beef. Mr Bonner frowned. Dishes were in profusion, and handed with unexpected skill, by Rose Portion, whose condition was not yet obvious beneath her best apron, and an elderly man, lent by Archdeacon Endicott who lived in the same road. The Archdeacon’s man was of awful respectability, in a kind of livery and cotton gloves, and only once put his cotton thumb in the soup. In addition to these, there was the invisible Edith, whose oo-errr was heard once from behind doors, and who would gollop the remainders of puddings before walking home.
Voss ate with appetite, taking everything for granted. That is how it ought to be, Laura had to tell herself. She was annoyed to find that she was fascinated by his method of using a knife and fork, and determined to make some effort to ignore.
‘I would be curious to read little Laura’s thoughts,’ remarked Tom Radclyffe, with the pomposity of one who was about to become her cousin.
It did amuse him to be hated, at least by those who could be of no possible use.
Laura, however, would not hate just then.
‘If I take you at your word, you may regret it,’ she replied, ‘because I have been thinking of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost e
verything. I was thinking how happy one can be sitting inside a conversation in which one is not compelled to take part. Words are only sympathetic when they are detached from their obligations. Under those conditions I am never able to resist adding yet another to my collection, just as some people are moved to make collections of curious stones. Then, there was the pretty dish of jellied quinces that I saw in the kitchen this evening as I passed through. Then, if you still wish to hear, Miss Hollier’s garnet brooch, which I understand she inherited from an aunt, and which I would like to think edible, like the quinces. And there was the poem read by Mr Voss, which I did understand in a sense, if not the sense of words. Just now, it was the drumstick on Mr Palfreyman’s plate. I was thinking of the bones of a dead man, uncovered by a fox, it was believed, that I once saw in Penrith churchyard as I walked there with Lucy Cox, and how I was not upset, as Lucy was. It is the thought of death that frightens me. Not its bones.’
Mrs Bonner, who feared that the limits of convention had been exceeded, was making little signs to her niece, using her mouth and the corner of a discreet napkin. But Laura herself had no wish to continue. It was obvious that her last remark must be the final one.
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