Gaslight
Page 4
There have been many marriages which have been lubricated by the concealment of such inequalities, the wife so sure of her husband’s inferiority that she has no need to assert herself.
But in the hotel chosen by Jack in the Rue Vaugirard, a tumbledown place which revolted Bella, despite his assurance that it was perhaps the most famous of its kind among artists and bohemians, there was no tenderness. There was uncertain confidence and only the most brutal display of cruel strength.
Yet it would not have been true to say that she regretted her hasty marriage. To be away from Great-aunt Annie and the dying house in Holly Place was like being born again; having lived so long behind the shutters of the penitentiary, she had almost forgotten that there was another world outside. The weather was as warm as Paris, the grand hostess of capitals, was gracious. The broad boulevards and the narrow streets and secluded places enchanted her equally by their magnificence and surprising charm. And it was to Jack that Bella owed her gratitude for this release. He could be the most charming of companions when he was at ease, a creature of impulse whisking off at a moment’s notice to the races at Longchamps; riding in the Bois de Boulogne; visiting the Louvre (rather reluctantly), the Opera with moderate pleasure and Les Halles with gusto.
He was a fluent conversationalist, talking with nonchalance of earthquakes in Japan, of sailing round Cape Horn, of the Australian gold rush and shipwreck in the Pacific. His world was as wonderful as it was weird, populated with flying fish and breasted manatees, kangaroos, wallabies and the duckbilled platypus. When Bella recoiled from a large spider in her washbasin, he picked it up and deposited it on the balcony before treating her to a dissertation on the types of spiders that really were frightening, like the hairy tarantula, “as big as my fist,” he said, thrusting a clenched hairy hand towards her. “The bite of the tarantula,” he said, “produces the dread disease of tarantism. You dance and dance until you die!” He went on to the dread black widow spider and the bird-eating spiders of America.
Bella listened to these grisly stories of insect horror, fascinated as well as appalled; so much so that later she looked up tarantism in Dr. Ogilvie’s Dictionary, where she read that it was “a fabulous disease . . . popularly supposed to be caused by the bite of the tarantula.” But she did not confront her husband with this information, because by then she had already discovered that he preferred life “tuppence-colored” to “penny-plain.” She had caught him out in innumerable inconsistencies.
She wanted to know as much as possible about his life before she met him. “It’s the Great-aunt Annie in you coming out,” he reproved. “But it’s reasonable,” she said. “Love isn’t reasonable,” he answered. “Love is a mystery. Know everything there is to know about a woman, or a man, and love flies out the window.”
Perhaps this was the reason why he told her at one time that he was in Japan in the summer of the same year that at another time he said he was in San Francisco. It might have been deliberate lying. But Bella suspected that he did not know what had happened to himself and what to other people. During their stay in Paris, Bella suggested that they should call upon a Mrs. Armitage, who had been at school with her in London and had married a gentleman in the Foreign Service, now serving as Third Secretary in the British Embassy. Mr. Armitage had been present at the afternoon tea-party to which they were invited after leaving their cards and Bella overheard him describing to Jack a journey he had taken up the River Amazon to Manaos. She did not, since she was supposed to be listening to her old school-friend’s account of her baby daughter’s attack of scarlet fever, catch more than a few sentences here and there. But these sentences were identical with those used later that same evening by Jack in his description to her of a journey which he had taken up the Amazon.
When Bella, smilingly, commented on the similarity of the two journeys, taking it for granted that Jack would admit to having appropriated the story, she was appalled by her husband’s violent repudiation. “I do not know what you are talking about, my child,” he said, the veins on his temples bunching.
“But I overheard Mr. Armitage.”
“He also made the voyage,” Jack admitted. “In fact his mentioning it recalled my own experience to mind. Is that so very strange?”
“But running ashore on the mud bank and not being able to get out and push it off because of the alligators; and then being floated off by the tropical storm. It’s a good story, Jack. I’m not blaming you.”
He laughed, shortly and unjoyously. “If you had ever sailed up the Amazon, my girl, you would realize that running on a mudflat is as common in those parts as getting your feet wet if you do not wear galoshes on a rainy day in London. As perhaps you will see for yourself if we come to visit those parts.”
Six years later, they did sail up the Amazon as far as Manaos. They did run aground on a mudflat; and on another lucky occasion they saw a couple of alligators. But it was perfectly simple to get clear of the mudflat by using long poles.
Bella had learned by then not to point out awkward discrepancies. As for Jack, he had forgotten that he had ever sailed up the Amazon before.
“Ah, well!” Bella thought. “Jack’s only a frustrated novelist. Perhaps if I ever have a child, he’ll be another Mr. Trollope.”
CHAPTER FOUR
But the years passed and there was no child to give Bella maternity as an alternative to wifehood. She seldom wore the cameo brooch which had given her such pleasure on the first day of marriage. Persephone had returned to earth from Hades bearing a full harvest in her horn of plenty. It seemed to Bella a mockery that she should sport Persephone’s imagery, while still barren in her womb. When she conceived would be time enough. (In chill moods of self-examination, she taxed herself with failure. Was she not just a cold Victorian woman, recoiling from a normal Victorian man?)
The fob watch she did wear, taking pleasure in its prettiness and the occasion it made for compliments, the hand thrust forward to hold the little watch, the backs of fingers laid upon her chest in a clandestine caress. “Pardon me, madame!” The eyes lifted from watch to face. “Beautiful, quite enchanting!”
Jack Manningham could be a very jealous man at times; but at others he would appear the most complacent of husbands.
It was a strange life, moving from country to country. They did go, as Jack had hinted, to Guadalajara, Mexico; but whether it was for the opals, Bella never knew. Her husband certainly succeeded in retaining his mystery. When asked by strangers what his line of business was, he would answer vaguely, “I’m a man of affairs, a sort of entrepreneur, you might say.” Or he would say, “I believe in having many irons in the fire.” The only hints he would give to Bella would be to say, “I shall be introducing you to Senor X or Senor Y or Mr. Z. He is an important connection.”
This meant, in their unformulated married code, “I shall not be jealous, if you allow X, Y, or Z to pay you the compliments which your beauty naturally evokes. But, of course, if anyone else does, you will incur my jealousy.”
As a woman, awakened by Jack to a consciousness of her beauty, Bella enjoyed the periods of limited license. Any guilt was lulled by the knowledge that she was furthering her husband’s affairs. She did not burrow deeply into what those affairs were, because she valued her happiness and peace of mind more highly. That he was unfaithful she knew without being able to cite any verse of many such chapters. His business affairs, she suspected, would not bear any closer scrutiny than the anecdotes he told of his exploits. One had to go on living; and she had cut off retreat from her marriage by breaking with her family. She could not go back and acknowledge that she had been wrong; she was too proud for one thing and, for another, the lively agony of marriage to Jack was better than the deathly harmony of watching Great-aunt Annie clinging on to a living death in Holly Place.
Only once was there a crisis, and that was in Kingston, Jamaica. “I don’t like introducing you to a half-breed, my girl,” Jack said. “But Oliver Matteos is very important to me.”
Mr. Matteos was a young man with a voice of great beauty and range. A graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, he had a command of the spoken English language which outdid that of Bella’s father or any man she had known. She could have closed her eyes and listened to its cadences, harmonizing the intrusion of new ideas within the syntax of long, but always perfectly controlled, periods, had it not meant depriving herself of the joy of contemplating the tortured beauty of his face. At Oxford, Oliver Matteos had won a half-Blue for running in his first year. In his second, he had contracted infantile paralysis which left him with a muscular atrophy of the right leg, making the life of an active man, though not impossible, extremely painful. His face, naturally of a handsomeness almost arrogant, was tempered with suffering. Oliver Matteos was the sort of man whom Bella had imagined Jack Manningham to be when she met him in Hampstead. On her first meeting, she was attracted to him. Next morning she realized to her distress that she was in love.
At luncheon that day in their hotel she knew also that Oliver Matteos was in love with her, not by anything he said but by his instant reaction to her slightest feeling, even anticipation of what she was going to feel. At the same time, she wanted more than anything to touch him or be touched; and she was terrified, because she knew that her husband was as sensitive in jealousy as he was insensitive in love. With her Greek sense of Nemesis, she knew that she must have nothing to do with any man other than Jack, otherwise she would provoke disaster. The shelter which opened upon happiness perforce was closed.
When they left Jamaica, Jack was cocky with the success of whatever had been his business with Matteos. “You were magnificent, my girl,” he said at dinner, “and as a reward, I shall order a magnum of bubbly.”
“But I don’t like champagne. It makes me hiccough.”
“You shall have it all the same,” he answered, “and anything you can’t drink, I shall finish for you.”
Later that night he blundered into the cabin and exercised his “marital rights.” It wasn’t until over a year later that she learnt that on the same night Oliver Matteos had shot himself. She reproached herself that it might have been out of frustrated love of her. Later, she discovered that Matteos had been swindled in a deal by someone and was bankrupt. She never learned—or inquired—by whom.
Bella was an intelligent woman and if her husband had ever sought her advice about his affairs, she might have given him good counsel. But any overtures she made to win his confidence were dismissed first by the playful, “Business is not for you to worry your pretty head about, my child.” When she persisted, he added, “It was curiosity that killed the cat.” The emphasis that he gave to the word “killed” made Bella for the first time wonder whether it was curiosity which had killed the cat in the adage or somebody else, whom the cat’s curiosity endangered. It made her wonder about her husband’s capacity for violence.
Being a woman who had always desired a quiet life, Bella came to recognize the areas within which she could roam at peace and to avoid the danger signs. This was not as easy as it would have been if her husband had been of settled ways, conducting his life and business in a fixed place and according to regular routines. As it was, Jack was a sort of one-man army, waging a series of campaigns, the strategy and tactics of which varied from country to country. A course of action which might be applauded in Valparaiso would be frowned on in Talcahuano or Antofagasta for reasons which her husband never chose to explain, or only in the vaguest terms.
Having arrived in a new city, Jack might say, “Here we shall have to make our own friends.” This was an invitation to Bella to strike up acquaintance with strangers in whatever the hotel might be which he had chosen. She was a good listener and lonely men and women readily gave her their confidences; which she passed on to Jack, since they amused him. In some cases, Jack himself would strike up friendships with them, and on occasion do business. “Business, my dear girl,” he had once explained expansively, “is merely a question of putting two and two together and pocketing the difference.”
Careless about spending money, Jack Manningham was meticulous in compiling his notebooks. The stock-in-trade of the entrepreneur, he said, consisted in knowing who could do what for whom where. There were three index books, Geographical, Personal and Subject, with an elaborate system of cross-references; to say nothing of a dozen or more bulky octavo notebooks, fastened with clasp and lock. These he kept in a solid wooden dispatch box, covered in black leather stamped in gold with the initials J.M. He kept it always locked except when he was writing up his notes, a task which he chose to do alone, complaining that the presence of another distracted him.
Bella thought that it would have been important for an entrepreneur to perpetuate acquaintanceships and where possible turn them into friendships. But Jack sometimes behaved capriciously. In São Paulo for example, they went on an excursion to see the Independence Monument at Iparanga, when whom should Bella see but Herr and Frau Biedermeyer, a German couple whom they had met in Pôrto Alegre. Herr Biedermeyer was a wealthy manufacturer of cotton textiles; and Jack had visited their house overlooking the Rio Cai several times for an evening of cards. Bella caught Jack by the elbow and waved with her parasol to attract their attention. But when Jack saw them, he turned abruptly, forcing Bella to turn with him, and began to walk away.
“But it’s the Biedermeyers, darling.”
“I know perfectly well that it is the Biedermeyers.” The veins in his temples stood out as he continued to propel Bella away from the monument until he found refuge in a cantina down a side street. There he bought Bella a refresco and himself a beer.
“I don’t understand,” Bella said. “I had no idea that you had quarrelled.”
“I had hoped it would be unnecessary to tell you.”
“But it’s only fair.”
“You may think it ridiculous,” Jack said somberly, “but if there is one thing I find contemptible it is a man who cheats.”
“You mean Herr Biedermeyer cheated at cards!” Bella could not help laughing. “I can’t believe it. It’s ridiculous! There’s no reason why he should.”
“That,” said Jack, “makes it to my mind all the more despicable.” His tone was so prim, his indignation so self-righteous that Bella was hard put not to call his bluff. Whatever had been the cause of Jack’s reluctance to meet Herr Biedermeyer, it was not the German’s cheating at cards. By now, however, she knew better than to contradict even the most transparent falsehood.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” He leaned forward, ready to pounce upon her disbelief and raise a cloud of anger to hide the memory of his lie and its occasion.
“Why shouldn’t I believe you?” she asked. “People are very strange, aren’t they?”
For a little while he seemed placated. He went to the entrance of the cantina, which was curtailed against flies with strings of wooden beads, and looked out, but the monument square was hidden. “Do you think I’m strange?” he asked, when he came back.
She laid her hand upon his clenched tarantula fist and smiled. “Mysterious.”
He was momentarily puzzled, then he grinned, the Biedermeyers apparently obliterated by this shake of the kaleidoscope. “Mystery Manningham, the man you never get to the bottom of, eh? One-Jump-Ahead-of-You Jack.” He drained his glass. “That calls for another.”
Most of the time, Bella felt herself older than Jack. He was a little boy, unsure of himself, a braggart, a charmer, a show-off in ways so obvious that they had only to be detected to be pardoned. As long as she could regard her husband in this light, she was comparatively happy. A lifetime of vagabondage would be intolerable; but six footloose years passed with new countries and new faces providing a novelty in a marriage which would have foundered if they had ridden out their storms anchored in one place.
Bella suspected that her husband’s rest
lessness was somehow connected with his business. Places became “too hot” for him. “It’s time for us to skip,” he once said, inadvertently.
“Skip?”
“Strike tents and vanish like the Bedouin in the night.” He covered up with a panegyric on the Ishmaelites, the wandering herds of caribou, the adventurous life of the river eel breeding in mid-Atlantic.
“Where would you want to breed?” she asked.
“Breed?” It was clearly a factor which did not enter his calculations. “Shall we take that hurdle when we come to it?”
It was, thought Bella, something which Jack regarded like the Day of Judgment, as being remote and improbable. Yet it came by the time that they reached Paramaribo in Surinam, that tropic imitation of Holland. A Dr. Van der Maas, who lived in a trim house on a canal with dutch tiles like a Vermeer, confirmed the pregnancy.
Bella began to wear the Persephone brooch like a badge of liberty. “I would like to have my baby in England,” she said, “if you don’t mind, Jack.”
The two of them had survived the adversities of the Latin American climate better than most. But the dysenteries which they had suffered were such that Bella feared a child of hers might not survive. If Jack insisted on staying, she was prepared to make a break, even if it proved on separation to be final. Indeed, since she could be more honest to herself than she could be with him, she would not be heartbroken if her husband refused to accompany her. A child would stand a better chance of happiness with her alone than with them both together.