The Honeymoon

by Dinitia Smith

  In late spring, Sir James said that she was strong enough to go down to Witley for the summer. “You’re fit as a fiddle, my lady,” he said.

  “But the little pain?” she asked. “It’s still always there — on the left side. It never goes away. I know it’s going to come back.”

  “You don’t know. It won’t necessarily.”

  “But what if it does and I’m in the country?”

  “I’ll rush down from London immediately. Country air is what you need,” he said. He smiled down at her, kind and amusing. “I’ve got one prescription for you.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  He laughed. “One pint of champagne daily. Champagne chases away all sorrows. Best medicine in the world.”

  She ordered Brett and Mrs. Dowling to pack up. In the third week in May she left London. She arrived at the Heights amid the new green and the spring flowers, the pink phlox, the violets showing through the grass. The horse chestnut blossoms were already in bloom, outrageously full and luxuriant. Were the flowers more lovely in England than anywhere else in the world?

  On her second day there, Johnnie drove the sixteen miles from Weybridge to see her.

  Now that it was warm she had discarded her usual black for a white muslin dress and mantilla, white being the color of summer mourning, and lighter in the heat.

  They continued with their Dante in the summerhouse, which was down a steep slope from the main house and the terrace, and built on flat ground. George had himself roughed out the design for it. It was a little fairy place, with a conical roof and a finial on top, shaded inside yet open to the breeze and with clematis climbing up the sides.

  Sitting on the bench with her, Johnnie was physically close yet removed. As if he’d been made suddenly cautious by their new isolation. She could smell faintly his young man’s perspiration, not unpleasant. He wore his shirt open at the neck, his red chest hairs escaping from it, his skin gleaming with health and youth.

  She admired him as if he were a son. A mother loved her son for the purity and cleanliness of his young body. A son was the embodiment of maleness in its unthreatening form; masculinity was harmless in the sweetness and youth of a boy who was dependent on her. And ultimately, wasn’t the love of a mother for her son in some way sexual too, the love of the female for the body of the male, but the love of an ideal? Nature’s ideal, something young and pure. And untouchable.

  She realized again that she’d never actually seen Johnnie with a woman his own age, other than courteously talking to some female guest in a group. “Perhaps he’s just a man’s man,” George had said. “He just prefers the company of his friends. I ran into him the other night on Shaftesbury Avenue and he was with a group of young men and they were having a grand old time. Been drinking a bit. They were laughing and playing with one another. On their way to some club, they said.”

  “You don’t think he’s a —” She couldn’t say it.

  “A Nancy boy? I doubt it.” He laughed. “Though, you never know.” He thought about it a moment, then he shook it off. “He’s just a late bloomer, that’s all. He’ll find someone eventually.”

  But in the ten years they’d known him, Johnnie hadn’t found someone. Other than his mother, the person Johnnie seemed closest to was Albert Druce. “I shouldn’t say this, but he’s even more of a brother to me than Willie, I think,” Johnnie said.

  Albert’s wife, Anna, looked just like a female version of Johnnie, she could have been his twin sister. Albert had taken for a wife a woman who looked just like his best male friend. Marian had seen a portrait of Anna from before she married Albert: she was very pretty, with long, curly red hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. After she married, her looks had faded. She had removed herself from her marriage, it seemed, and was completely preoccupied now with the children, Eliot and Elsie. She refused to let the nanny tend to them, and she hardly had time for adult conversation. Every time you tried to speak to her, she’d spot the children doing some mischief and hurry over to bring them to order. Of all Johnnie’s myriad nephews and nieces, he was fondest of Albert and Anna’s children, Eliot and Elsie, and he was their godfather.

  Marian invited Johnnie to dinner with his brother, Willie, and his two sisters, Mary and Eleanor. Narrow-eyed Willie was quiet and watchful. Mary was worshipful as always, Eleanor small and bubbly like their mother.

  After supper, Eleanor asked Marian if she’d play the piano for them. She hadn’t touched the instrument since George died. “I don’t think I could …”

  “Mama so loved to hear you,” Eleanor said. “Do it for us.”

  They followed her into the drawing room and she opened the piano bench. On top of the pile of music were the sheets for Liszt’s “Bénédiction,” the piece he’d played for her and George in Weimar years ago.

  She put them up on the stand and stared at the first page, trying to remember how to read notes. They were just shapes and lines, dead before her eyes.

  Finally, she summoned her memory. She took a deep breath. The notes and the old connections came clear. She began to play, but stumbled over the trills and stopped.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Go on,” Johnnie said. “For us. Make us happy.”

  Johnnie and Willie and the two women sat very still, waiting to see if she’d go ahead. She tried again. She sensed them sitting back, but her energy flagged, and she stopped. “I’m so rusty,” she said.

  Mary, tall and kind, came over and kissed her cheek.

  In the seclusion of the summerhouse, Johnnie’s concentration on Dante was now total. The heavy scent of jasmine hanging in the air around them, and the prescribed champagne, which she took in small doses throughout the day, made her languorous. There was a swelling of her body in the heat.

  They arrived at Canto II, and the first mention of Beatrice. She stopped to give him a brief explanation of what was to come: “Her real name was Beatrice Portinari. Dante saw her only a few times in his life and they probably never spoke or touched one another. She married Simone dei Bardi and died when she was only twenty-four. Yet her image haunted Dante all his life. She was the personification to him of spiritual and physical beauty, a holy figure, his guide, forever chaste.”

  “They never touched?” he asked.

  “Probably not. But he held her up as his ideal always.”

  He read the passage “E donna mi chiamò beata e bella …”

  She interrupted. “Not a long e. It’s ‘eh,’ a short e. Remember, you separate out the syllables …”

  “ ‘A — lady — called — to me … blessed and beautiful … I begged to serve at her command …’ ”

  He continued, first the Italian, haltingly, then smoothly, better than ever, stopping every few lines to translate. “ ‘For I am Beatrice who made you come … I come from a place where I long to return … Love moved me … which makes me speak — ’ ”

  Again he stopped. He faced her. His face was damp, his eyes glowed. “Be-a-tri-che,” he said softly, pronouncing the syllables long and separate in the Italian way, the accent on the final e. Then, in a whisper, “You are my Be-a-tri-che.”

  She was embarrassed and averted her eyes. He said, “You’ve got the voice of an angel. I thought that the moment I met you. It was the first thing I noticed about you in Rome.”

  And then suddenly came the words, “Marian, will you marry me?”

  “What!” She let out a laugh, then she hid her face in her hands and shook her head.

  “I’m serious. George wanted me to take care of you. I want you to be my wife.”

  In spite of herself, she spluttered, “This is utterly ridiculous!”

  But his face was stern, his voice hushed, intense. “I mean it.”

  “Johnnie,” she said, suppressing another uncomfortable laugh. “I’m embarrassed. Perhaps you should go.”

  He must have gone mad. She touched his shoulder. She could feel the solidity and tautness of the muscle under the cloth of his shirt. “You’re swee
t, Johnnie. But this is silly. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I think we’d better go back up to the house.” She stood up.

  “Promise you won’t make me stop coming?” he pleaded.

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly. “I promise.” Her hands were shaking. She put her arms down at her side to hide them. “But maybe you shouldn’t stay for tea.”

  He paused, then rose. He began climbing the stone steps to the terrace. She watched his departing form, tall and elegant. He didn’t know what he was doing. It was a lie, a chimera.

  She waited in the summerhouse until he’d disappeared. The shadows lengthened. When she was sure he’d gone, she walked slowly back to the house. Was it possible that he could be physically attracted to her? That he saw something in her that was pretty?

  Brett had set the supper table, as usual for her alone, with the gold-rimmed Royal Doulton and a white lace cloth. Before she touched the food, she drank down the glass of champagne that Brett always put there to accompany the meal. These days, in accordance with Sir James’s prescription. In seconds, its calming effect pervaded her body.

  What had come over him? He was grieving for Anna, he wasn’t himself. The sensuousness of summer, the glow on her skin from the heat, distorted her, made her seem young to him.

  This man, with his long-stemmed body, his clear blue eyes … desiring her? The flight of fantasy disappeared as quickly as it had come on.

  Brett poured another glass of champagne, wiping the mouth of the bottle with a linen towel. “What a lovely prescription, ma’am,” Brett said, “that Sir James has given you.”

  “Yes, lovely.” She drank down half of it at once. “But it’s a shame to have it by myself. Would you have a glass too Brett?” She’d never asked Brett to sit down at table with her before. Brett had been with them since she was a fourteen-year-old girl, a tiny, boyish figure, totally devoted to her and George. Brett was the surest thing in her life now, steady, constant, a certainty. But who was Brett, she wondered suddenly? The only thing she knew about her was that every Sunday, on her half days, she dressed in her long black coat and hat and went out to Hackney to visit her mother. She lived in the servants’ quarters upstairs, a place where Marian never ventured. She wanted to be respectful of the servants’ privacy.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Brett said. “But I’m a teetotaler.” There was a boundary that Brett knew better than to cross, that made her ultimately unknowable to them and preserved her dignity. Servants forced themselves to love their masters to make their daily work tolerable.

  “You’re good to be a teetotaler,” she told Brett. She picked up the glass, raised it to Brett, and took another sip. “Don’t worry, Brett. It’s only the second glass. Doctor’s orders — remember?”

  That night, when she went up to bed, the second floor of the house was hot and airless. There was an immense orange moon in the bedroom window hanging over the land, seeming almost as big as the earth itself. A nightingale had recently taken up residence in the elm and, as if on cue at her presence, it began to sing. “Yup-yup-yup … tweet-tweet-tweet …”

  It was so hot that she took off her chemise and drawers. She was about to put on her nightdress when she caught a glimpse of herself in the cheval mirror.

  She stepped closer to the mirror. She’d lost weight. Her flesh seemed to hang in creases from her arms and thighs. Her breasts, once firm, were flattened and hollowed out. The woman’s hair between her legs had thinned and become gray. She was an old woman, not to be seen by anyone. Did the same thing happen to other women when they aged? She had no sister living, no Chrissey, whom she might have seen undressed.

  Outside, the nightingale continued its song, little trills going on and on, mysterious and lonely in the dark. Light-winged Dryad of the trees …

  Its song drowned out all the other sounds of the night, the grasshoppers and the cicadas … “Yes-yes-yes,” it seemed to say.

  When he next came to call, carrying his Dante, he said not a word about their previous conversation, as if afraid she’d make him go away forever.

  The summer had reached its apex, not even the shade of the summerhouse provided relief. Johnnie kept on with his translation, stuttering like a schoolboy, constantly looking up for approval as he plodded along, she smiling constantly with encouragement.

  “You’re making a noble effort,” she teased.

  “This is the most important thing in my life now.”

  “I would hope you have something better to do.”

  “No,” he said.

  In late August they arrived at Canto VII and the Fifth Circle of Hell, where the sullen and the perpetually self-pitying are mired in the banks of the river Styx.

  “Tristi fummo ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra,” he read.

  “Yes?” she prodded.

  “ ‘Sad’?” he asked. “ ‘We were sad …’?”

  “Yes?”

  He stumbled along. “ ‘We were sad in the sweet air …’ ”

  “He’s saying there is no virtue in gloom. It’s only an excuse for idleness. He’s telling us we must give up gloom.” She paused and smiled. “Perhaps we should listen to him,” she said. “Both of us. ‘The sun makes the air sweet and we shouldn’t use our sorrow to be idle here …’ ”

  Suddenly he clasped her hands in his. “Let’s take the lesson,” he said. “Please, don’t make me go away again. I want to marry you, Marian. I want to make you happy.”

  At once she wished she could disappear, that her body would shrink into itself. The thought of … what he would think if … if he actually embraced her, kissed her full on the lips … felt her body close to his own — smelled her, her breath?

  “It’s impossible. I can’t,” she said gently.

  “But why?”

  “I’m terrified … I couldn’t bear another man ever to — to be a bride — the physical side —”

  He put his arm around her shoulders. “Marian, if that’s what you’re worried about …”

  She nodded blindly.

  “Then,” he said, “it’s no impediment. We don’t have to be that way … We can be — lovers in our hearts and minds, but not the other way, if that’s what you insist on …”

  An odd disappointment slid from the back of her throat down to her womb. She surprised herself. Was he willing to give that up?

  “I can’t think about it now,” she said. “It’s all too soon. It hasn’t even been a year.”

  “Then,” he said, “let me just take care of you. We’ll put the subject aside. For now. All I want, more than anything in the world, is to see you healthy and happy. And perhaps to see you write another novel again.”

  She didn’t answer him. They’d reached a détente. She hadn’t refused him absolutely, though they’d agreed not to discuss it.

  They began taking private walks through the woods, arm in arm along the dappled paths. He didn’t mention his proposal, but he seemed at ease, grateful she hadn’t cut him off entirely. He seemed resolved to abide by her admonition that there be no real physical contact between them, and he held his arm out stiffly for her to hold.

  He never kissed her on the lips upon arrival and departure, only on the cheek.

  As they walked along the paths, as she looked up at him at her side and admired his young man’s beauty — he was thirty-nine years old, to her, young. She admired the damp flesh of his neck, his curls stuck to his forehead in the heat; she wondered, just for a moment, what it would be like if his lips did touch hers. But the thought lasted only a second. Then fear overcame her.

  They began to ask each other questions, like typical young lovers exploring the contours of one another’s souls.

  “Have you ever been in love?” she dared to ask.

  “I’ve never loved anyone but you,” he said firmly.

  “Please — don’t say that.”

  “But it’s true,” he said calmly.

  “You mean, you’ve never even had a — romance?”

  “I never h
ave,” he said.

  It had taken a lot to ask him that and she didn’t pursue it.

  Another time, he asked her, “Do you believe in God?”

  “I believe in the religion of humanity,” she told him. “I believe God is but a projection of our own best qualities. Religion is doing good, kindness, bringing a smile to someone’s face, the smile on a father’s face when he catches sight of his little girl.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said. “What language did Jesus speak, anyway?” he asked.

  “Didn’t they teach you that at Rugby?”

  He smiled, abashed. “Probably. I don’t remember. As I’ve said, I wasn’t much of a pupil, I’m afraid. Hebrew, or Greek, wasn’t it?”

  “Jesus was born in Bethlehem,” she said, “but he spent most of his life in the Galilee in the North. They spoke an Aramaic dialect. He probably had a little Greek too, because that was the lingua franca of the day, and some Hebrew, because it’s very like Aramaic.”

  “I should’ve known that,” he said.

  “Well, now you do,” she told him.

  A letter came from Blackwood, saying that, contrary to all expectations, Theophrastus had completely sold out, six thousand copies in four months. She had no interest in the reviews. They were probably bad.

  The next morning, in a surge of new confidence, she took out the “quarry” in which, before George died, she’d started making notes for her new novel on the Napoleonic Wars, and she began to write again.

  She’d conceived, dimly, of a central character for the story. He’d be a man wrongly accused of something. There was always someone wrongly accused in her books. The central character in her new book would be wrongly accused of selling weapons to the French enemy.

  Now, what to name him? The naming of a character was so important, like christening a child. You had to live with it for years. Perhaps Cyril — from Kyrillos, “lordly, masterful,” with its sacred undertones. Cyril Ambrose — “Ambrose,” connotations of amber, something embedded within, hidden. “Cyril Ambrose,” she wrote, “a man of inventive power in science as well as philosophy married young, is very poor, has a family to support …”