by James Wilson
I was so exhausted that even the cold air could not keep me fully awake on that journey through the night, and I slipped between sleep and consciousness, and half-dreamed that I was fleeing some dark confinement with Turner, who chuckled gleefully at our escape – or, rather, that I was Turner, and the chuckle was mine.
But now – you will be relieved to hear! – I am fully restored to myself.
Your loving husband
Walter
XIX
From the diary of Marian Halcombe,
29th September, 185–
I have been on my knees, giving thanks. I shall, I know, meet grief and pain and weariness of heart again, as surely as I have met them before; but today – let me joyfully acknowledge it – I have been truly happy. Thank you, Lord.
The morning, it must be said, gave little enough hint of what was to come; for I had slept poorly, and gave myself a momentary fright when I peered into the glass and saw there, instead of the lively, cheerful face I had expected, a haggard, half-familiar woman in middle life, with dark rings beneath her eyes and the first silver threads in her tangled black hair. By energetically plying the hair-brush, and smiling brightly (as you do on being introduced to a stranger), and murmuring silly little phrases of encouragement – ‘You’ll do very well, Marian, indeed you will’ – I soon banished her; but the baleful image lingered in my memory, like an awful vision of the future.
Matters were not greatly improved when, leaving the house a little later, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a dense fog, as still and chilly as the tomb, which stung our eyes, and clogged our mouths and noses, and speckled our hands and faces with sharp little crystals of soot. I had – I now realized – been looking forward to our boating expedition with unreasonable, childish pleasure, and the certainty that I should be deprived of it cast me down as palpably as a physical burden, bowing my shoulders and slowing my step. I tried, however, to conceal my disappointment; and, taking Walter’s arm, laughed, and said with as much bravado as I could muster:
‘We shall be fortunate to find the river at this rate, let alone see anything from it.’
The journey to Brentford seemed endless, for the cabman – unable to see further than his horse’s ears, and fearful, presumably, of colliding with another vehicle, or running down a child – crawled along at a snail’s pace (and a cautious snail at that); and when we looked out of the window we could make out nothing to tell us where we were, or how far we had come – so that, for all we knew, we might have been travelling very slowly in a circle, and still only a hundred yards from our own front door. But then, all of a sudden, the fog thinned to reveal a line of black battlements (belonging, alas, not to the romantic old castle I at first imagined, but to a row of hideous brick villas, which seemed to think they might disguise their newness with a show of trumped-up antiquity); and then it had dwindled to a few wisps of mist; and by the time we neared Brentford, ten minutes later, you could see, through a dazzling chalky gauze, the unmistakable brilliance of a cloudless sky.
We turned into a broad, tree-lined road, and pulled up, about halfway along, in front of a modest gate crammed between a coach-house and a tall boundary wall. The house itself – which stood back a little way, behind a worn carriage sweep mottled with weeds – seemed, from the street, entirely characterless: neither large nor small, neither old nor new; quite indescribable, in fact, save as a catalogue of angles and dimensions. As soon as you walked through the door, however, you found yourself in a charming, well-proportioned hall, hung with delicately drawn portrait sketches, and freshly painted in pale, old-fashioned colours that accentuated the impression of light and space.
A stocky manservant of about thirty, with a florid complexion and a sweet smile (that peculiarity alone, surely, must make the household remarkable, for how many footmen are encouraged to smile at visitors?), led us to a large parlour at the rear of the building. For an instant, I had the illusion that I was entering Elizabeth Eastlake’s boudoir; for this room occupied the corresponding corner of the house, and exerted, as it were, the same architectural force: you felt the shadowy bulk of hall and staircase bearing down on you, pressing you forward as insistently as a hand on the neck, and the big french window drawing you towards it, with its promise of freedom and fresh air. It took but a moment, however, to see that the presiding spirits of the two places were entirely different; for where Fitzroy Square is all oak and varnish and titanic chaos, this was brightness and elegance and classical order. The books were ranged with military discipline along their shelves, without a single mutineer on chair or table; there were no curiosities to be seen (unless you count a pair of graceful porcelain figures on the chimney-piece); and in place of the bulging bureau was a little writing desk, with fluted Grecian legs, and a drawer barely deep enough to accommodate a small family of envelopes, that looked as if it might have been used by the Empress Josephine to compose billets-doux to her husband.
A slender woman of perhaps sixty-five – who contrived, somehow, to appear fashionable in a straight powder-blue dress that would have been considered démodé twenty years ago – rose from a scrolled chaise longue to greet us.
‘Miss Halcombe! Mr. Hartright!’ she said, advancing towards us with arms outstretched. ‘You’ve brought the sun!’ Her voice was soft and melodic, with none of the roughness of age – so that if you had heard it without seeing her, you would have imagined that it belonged to a woman thirty years younger. She glanced at the window, flung up her hands in a kind of priestly invocation, and then – in a single sweeping movement, as gracious as a dancer’s – extended them towards us, taking Walter’s hand in one and mine in the other, so that we stood like a chain of children preparing to play ring-a-ring-o’-roses.
‘If we stop to be polite,’ she said, ‘the day will be gone. So shall we agree, this very minute, we’ll take our chances, and venture out, now?’
‘Yes,’ said Walter and I together, without a moment’s hesitation.
She coloured and nodded with evident pleasure. ‘I confess I didn’t entirely despair when I saw the fog,’ she said, moving towards the door, ‘but my poor husband was quite determined we were doomed. He’ll be more than glad to hear that matters have mended.’ She paused, and added, as if as an afterthought: ‘You will not, I hope, object to taking the oars, Mr. Hartright? There will not be room for our man as well.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Good.’ She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her hands with excitement; and then – with a little ‘Oh!’ that was as much a cry of joy as a word – disappeared into the hall.
Sometimes, when their little one has done something especially charming, you may see parents give each other a conspiratorial smile compounded of fondness and indulgence and shared delight; and it was just such a smile that Walter and I exchanged now. Then, without a word (for why speak, when your meaning has already been so perfectly conveyed?), we gravitated to the window, and gazed out on an artful confection of paths and lawns and rose-bushes – still dotted here and there with flowers, and with the last vapours of mist clinging to them like fleece snagged on a bramble – surrounded by formal little hedges. We had been standing there, in companionable silence, for a minute or more, when Walter suddenly startled me by saying:
‘He must be blind.’
‘What!’
‘Her husband. Look.’ He gestured towards the french window; and then, realizing he might make his point more strongly, opened it. ‘No. Smell.’
I did so. The air was hard and cold, and thick with the smoky residue of fog; but mingled with it, like the last echoes of a forgotten world, were the pungency of thyme, the narcotic sweetness of rosemary, and the dying breath of the roses.
‘The garden is planted for scent, not sight.’
‘That’s a small enough foundation for a great edifice,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they both just prefer sweet smells to brilliant spectacle.’
Walter shook his head. ‘If he could see, he would have known without
being told.’
‘Known what?’ I said, half-laughing (and, it must be said, entirely lost).
He raised his face to the clearing sky. ‘That the weather was better.’
‘How do you know he didn’t?’
‘Because she said: “He’ll be delighted to hear that matters have mended.”’
I considered a moment. He was right, of course: Mrs. Bennett had said that, and it did seem curious, now I came to reflect on it, though I had paid no attention to it at the time.
‘Very good,’ I said. ‘We shall lose you to the detective police.’
It was at that instant, I think, that I first became aware of the change in Walter – a change I should, perhaps, have noticed before, for the signs must have been there since his return from Sussex, and, once I was conscious of it, I found myself remarking it again and again. Instead of laughing, and replying in kind – as, assuredly, he would have done only a few weeks ago – he made no response at all, but continued looking out of the window, his brow slightly creased with the effort of pursuing some train of thought I could not even guess at. It was not that he was cold or distant, exactly – only that our friendship, with its teasing and its affection, its rituals of mockery and self-deprecation – had been supplanted in his mind, at least for the time being, by something larger. For a few seconds, it is true (I could not help it then, and cannot deny it now), I felt wounded and bereft, like a child whose boon companion has entered the adult world, and left her behind; but, almost at once, this tincture of bitterness was swept away by a flood of joy – for had I not hoped and prayed that my dear brother would recover himself, and grow to manhood again? And was he not doing so, before my very eyes? And should we not then be truer, deeper friends yet?
‘Now, I think we are quite ready,’ said Mrs. Bennett’s voice behind us. We turned and saw her standing in the doorway, next to a stout old man in a thick black redingote. He was almost bald, but with heavy white whiskers – as if his hair had decided to migrate, like Mrs. Booth’s balcony, but in the opposite direction, from the top of his head to his cheeks – which gave the odd impression that his face was wider than it was tall.
‘My dear, this is Miss Halcombe, and her brother, Mr. Hartright,’ she went on. ‘But time enough for proper introductions later.’
She had already started back into the hall; but her husband stayed where he was, and held out his hand, and mumbled ‘How do you do?’, staring at a point exactly mid-way between Walter and me with the dull milky eyes of a blind man.
Quite a spectacle we must have made, as we processed to the river: Mrs. Bennett, in a brilliant red cloak and carrying a small guitar, talking to Walter in the vanguard; then me, talking to no-one, but simply glorying in the sun that shone more brightly on us with every step; and finally the manservant, with Mr. Bennett hanging on to his elbow, and a basket of provisions and a stack of railway rugs in his arms. At length we entered a small untidy boatyard littered with planks and wood-shavings and coils of rope brittle with dried tar, where the servant vanished without a word. Mrs. Bennett was talking animatedly to Walter about cutters and skiffs and dories, her hand darting about like a frantic wren as she illustrated her argument with a mast here and a thwart there; and her husband, though he stood a little apart, as immobile as a Buddha, and could presumably see nothing, seemed to be listening with keen interest; so I ventured by myself on to a rickety wharf to admire the view.
Even this far upstream the Thames was strewn with filth, which the current had thrown against the piles of the jetty and formed into little islands – with plains made from fallen leaves and waterlogged paper, and mountains from the necks of half-submerged bottles, and, in one instance, an entire hinterland created from a drowned cat, its sodden fur as sleek as a rat’s. But the far shore was another world; for there, rearing up like an exotic temple, was the new Palm House at Kew Gardens, its billowing glass roof shot through with light, and the gorgeous red leaves of an American maple flaming beside it; and beyond that, towards Richmond, the tree-fringed slopes and hollows of the Old Deer Park, rising and falling and rising again with the sweet regularity of a calm sea, or of some gentle pastoral melody. The associations with Turner were not hard to see: indeed, this whole scene was a kind of mirror image of London from Greenwich Park, with the foreground dominated by the mighty Thames, the father of our greatness, now reduced to little more than a stinking cesspool by the greed and venality of the modern age; while, in the distance, an Elysian landscape, restored to glorious life by the unclouded sun, seemed to show us a vision of a happier time. Less explicably, I also found myself thinking of another painting I had seen at Marlborough House. There was no sea, and no figure that might remind me of Apollo or the Sibyl; there were no ruins; and – while its character was undoubtedly classical – this vista of beech and chestnut, of copse and meadow, had none of the parched brilliance of the Mediterranean, but seemed to glow with that deep-hued, temperate lushness you see only in England. Why, then, was I so forcefully put in mind of The Bay of Baiae, and of the vague, troubling sense of mystery that still seemed to hang about it in my recollection? The answer must be there before me; but, try as I might, I could not find it, and was still vainly searching when the manservant returned to announce that our boat was ready.
‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ said Mrs. Bennett. She led the way through the yard (to my surprise, she seemed to know all the workmen personally, and greeted them by name, receiving in return a grimy thumb and forefinger raised to a frayed cap, or a muttered ‘Good afternoon, ma’am’) and down a flight of stone steps. At the bottom, a broad little skiff, neatly furnished with rugs and cushions, with the basket set squarely amidships and a pair of oars resting in the rowlocks, bobbed and shivered at the end of its rope. She held it steady while Jonathan handed her husband in, and settled him in the bows; then she climbed nimbly into the stern herself, helped me to the seat beside her, and smiling up at Walter said:
‘Very well, Mr. Hartright, if you please.’
And so began six wonderful hours. Walter took his place amidships; and then Jonathan cast us off, and stood watching and waving from the steps (truly, he seemed more like the Bennett’s son than their servant) as we glided into midstream and turned to go upriver. There was no space for a tiller, but steering expertly with a piece of ribbon attached to the rudder, and calling instructions to Walter – ‘A little harder with your left, Mr. Hartright,’ or ‘We should not, I fear, come well out of a fight with that. Why don’t you take a well-earned rest for a moment, and let it go?’ – Mrs. Bennett brought us safely past a string of barges, and astern of a clanking collier that set us bouncing and rocking in its wake. For a moment we seemed lost in the pall of black smoke that gushed from its funnel and hung threateningly over the water, blotting out the sky and dimming the sun to no more than a pallid silver disc; but then it was gone, as miraculously as the morning’s fog, and we emerged into that sunlit other world I had seen from the boatyard.
We could not, of course, entirely put the ugliness of modern life behind us: it was there in the ceaseless traffic of the river, and the broken cigar-box that slapped against the side of the boat, and the streets of mean, anonymous little houses sprawling along the north bank. But it ceased, from that moment, I think, to be the dominant reality. Lulled by the rhythmic dip and groan of the oars, delighted by the sight of a wild tangle of roots here, or the gothic ruin of some old coots’ nest there, we drifted along in a kind of enchantment – saying nothing, and each of us thinking his own thoughts, of which the only outward sign was the dreamy smile on every face. I think, indeed, I must have really fallen asleep, though I have no idea for how long; for one moment I was watching Mr. Bennett put his hand over the side of the boat, with a look of beatific pleasure, as if by trailing his fingers in the water he might feel the colours that he could not see; and the next we had stopped with a jolt, and Walter was making us fast to an overhanging branch; and Mrs. Bennett was opening the basket, and saying:
‘I hope yo
u care for cold veal pie, Miss Halcombe?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘Yes, indeed.’
She took out a white cloth, and laid it, still folded (for there was not space to spread it out) in a narrow strip at our feet. ‘I have chosen the bill of fare on purpose, Mr. Hartright,’ she said. ‘If you cannot share a picnic with Turner, you shall at least know what it would have tasted like. A pie’ – here she started removing the dishes as she named them, and setting them before us – ‘Beef. A chicken. A lettuce, cut this morning, if you will believe me, from our own glasshouse. Pull-bread. A cranberry tart. Then it would have been strawberry tart, but, alas, the autumn is upon us.’ There was a gravity and wistfulness in her voice, as she said this, which I had not heard before, and which made me suppose she was thinking: And not merely the autumn of the year, but the autumn of life, too.
‘I like cranberry just as well,’ said Walter.
She made no response, save a shake of the head; and realizing that he would not coax her from her melancholy by making light of it, he took another approach, and tried to distract her with a simple, direct question:
‘How was it that you came to know Turner?’
‘Oh, his uncle was a butcher at New Brentford,’ she said – and I knew instantly that Walter had judged right, for there was a renewed liveliness in her voice that told you this was a subject close to her heart, and that it was a relief to her to speak about it. ‘Mr. Marshall.’ She shook her head and smiled. ‘I still remember him. Turner stayed with him as a child, I believe, and later continued to visit him. We lived nearby – my father was a clergyman’ – here she nodded and smiled at Mr. Bennett, who, as if he mysteriously sensed it (or perhaps merely because he anticipated her next words), nodded also – ‘like my husband; and a fine amateur artist. He met Turner one day when they were both sketching by the river, and saw immediately that he had genius, but that he stood in need of friends.’