by Ursula Bloom
‘What did you say?’
‘Why did you marry Edward?’
He thought she’d avoid the question. She didn’t. Kay was always a very direct person. ‘When you’re young you do silly things. I was interested in divinity. I thought that Edward, being so strong in the faith himself, could make me secure. I suppose I wanted to stand on his shoulders and reach to the stars. Only you can’t stand on other people’s shoulders in this world. You don’t reach the stars that way. I know that now.’
He admired the fact that she could dismiss it so calmly, standing there looking down at the valley with a smear of sugar brushed across her mouth from the Berliner Pfanner Küchen that she had been eating. Like a child, he thought.
‘And you’ve regretted it?’ he asked. He didn’t know why.
‘What do you imagine? Edward’s smug. I suppose he is in a very early incarnation or something. He has never made me feel secure.’
‘How dreadful for you!’
‘No. One of these days I’ll reach the stars in my own way. On my own feet. That’s all.’ And suddenly she swooped forward. He watched her going and followed more slowly. She exalted him. Here he was himself, and nothing that mattered had ever preceded it. He could be young, he could be gay. The facade had been stripped away.
They spent the conventional English Christmas, going across to the Excelsior in a party that the Gasthof made up. Aubrey was in fine fettle. He kissed Kay under the mistletoe, feeling that she would expect this much of him, and he was in that inconsequent Christmassy mood that does crazy things. She turned to look at him and the brightness in her eyes had gone cold. The brilliance was hard.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked.
For the first time he recognized a barrier sprung up between them. A halt, with no who-goes-there?
‘I’m sorry. I thought ‒ being Christmas ‒’ and he stumbled over the words, confounded by the stern brightness of her eyes.
She rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand, and the gesture was that of a disgruntled eighteen-year-old. It seemed impossible to believe that she was eight years his senior.
‘I’m very sorry, Kay.’
‘Please never do anything like that again. I don’t like it. It spoils everything.’
‘I’ll never do it again.’
‘It’s silly.’
‘I know. It was just ‒ being Christmas ‒’ but he knew that he felt limp.
They danced afterwards, he trying in vain to recapture the lost magic of the mood, yet failing. He felt that he had become deflated, like one of the colour balloons that the carnival guests threw so gaily at one another. Radiantly bright one moment, nothing but a crinkled dull skin the next. Kay must have known how badly he was feeling about it all, for afterwards they went out into the glittering street that looked like a fairy tale with its strong scent of snow and fir, and she took his arm confidingly. She drew him a little apart from the others, singing as they returned to the Gasthof.
‘Aubrey, please don’t feel hurt about that. I am rather a curious person in some ways, I just hate to be touched. It must seem queer to you, but contact terrifies me, then I snap.’
‘I’ll never do it again.’
‘I know you won’t. It was horrid of me biting your head off, and it’s spoilt my evening as well as yours. You meant nothing by it, and I was a little beast picking you up for it the way I did. I couldn’t help it. I’m like that.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘It isn’t all right, and I’m furious with myself. Still, it’s better now I’ve said I’m sorry. Let’s forget it.’
‘Let’s.’
She put out her hand and took his, holding it firmly. The others were laughing in the roadway, and singing Good King Wenceslas rather noisily.
‘What do you suppose the Swiss think of the mad English who keep Christmas that way?’ he asked.
‘Just what you and I think,’ and she laughed. He laughed too.
‘I feel better now.’
‘I’m glad. Something of Christmas night is left to us.’
They walked back hand in hand. They did not know they were hand in hand, only that the stars were close and world lit by faery.
Later he tried to tell Kay about Alice.
The longing to tell somebody haunted him. It was a dreadful confession to make, but he had got to do it. And once he had thought of telling her, the idea pursued him and would not leave him alone. He told her the day they sat on the edge of the pool watching the skaters. They were drinking hot foamy chocolate, and eating custard cake. The sunshine was everywhere, and the world beautiful and buoyant. He felt able to accomplish anything, to tell anything. Perhaps the feeling of guilt about Alice was becoming too big for him. Perhaps he was getting further from the escapade and seeing it in its proper perspective.
‘You know why I’m spending Christmas here, instead of home at Thornhill with my people?’
‘Do I?’
‘I think you do,’ for he recognized the evasion in her voice. ‘It was Alice Carter,’ and, even as he said it, he felt the connection between himself and the old Adam who declared it-was-the-woman-Thou-gavest-me!
‘Edward married her to young Herrick.’
‘I know. I suppose it was the best thing to do, there seemed to be nothing else. It was all a pretty rotten business.’
‘What about the child? I suppose you didn’t think of that?’
‘Mother said that we had to consider what was the best thing to do for everybody’s sake, not just for one person’s.’
She pursed up her mouth. ‘I should have thought that the child was the only important person. It never asked to be born.’
‘I ‒ I don’t know how it happened. It was a shocking affair, like something in a dream, a very bad dream, and I’ve felt vile about it ever since.’
‘I expect you have. After all, if you make a false step it is always liable to trip you up. Further false steps don’t make the thing any better.’
‘All the same, what else could I have done?’
‘I think you should have been honest.’
‘But how? How could I?’
‘It’s difficult, I know, especially with the world as it is today, and everybody ready to condemn everybody else, but it could have been done. I’m sorry for Alice; she’s very simple, she has no brains, and, poor girl, she hardly understands what has happened. It’s so often that the brainless type has a physical charm to which she herself is blind. And then, of course, it’s fatal.’
She turned her face again to the sunlight on the snow, and the skaters on the ice just before them. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it. It seems all wrong out here.’
‘I know it’s all wrong out here, yet for some unearthly reason, I want to talk about it. Perhaps because I realize you’re the one woman who can help.’
‘No, I can’t. Not yet anyway. One day, Aubrey, I think you’ll find your real self, not the imitation you’ve spent your whole life trying to make. Then you’ll be different, but for the moment you want to be somebody you aren’t. I’ve put it clumsily, and it sounds frightful. I’m sorry. I wish I could explain what I mean.’
‘But, Kay …’
‘No, I can’t talk about it. Not here. Not now. Let’s leave it. Look at that couple waltzing over there. They’re wonderful. It must be a wonderful feeling.’
He knew she changed the subject on purpose. Suddenly he wondered if he drew her into his arms and kissed her, would it change her? The idiocy of the impulse passed and left him quite horrified that it ever had possessed him. She hated contact, and anyway she was Edward Benson’s wife. He mustn’t think things like that, he told himself, what on earth was happening to him? So, to change the subject too, he said, ‘I’m starting work in Mainwaring in the early spring. At Mr. Clement’s office.’
‘I wonder if you’ll like it.’
‘I’m sure I shall. Architecture has always interested me very much. Poetry more, of course, but that’s impossible.’
/> ‘Is anything impossible?’ she asked, and then quite suddenly:
‘Out of the mid-wood's twilight
Into the meadow's dawn,
Ivory-limbed and brown-eyed
Flashes my faun;
O Hunter, snare me his shadow,
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else, moonstruck with music and madness,
I track him in vain.’
Her voice was exquisite. He would not have believed that she could have spoken the lines so caressingly, with such infinite tenderness, and he said reverently, ‘I did not know that you loved it too.’
‘Of course I love poetry. Who doesn’t?’
‘Lots of people. My mother. The village folk that come to tea. They think I’m a little crazy and I have to pretend. You were right, I’ve never found my real self yet, because I never dared to be my real self.’
‘You will be one day.’
‘Not if I stay on at Thornhill; I love it, it’s my home, but it suffocates me.’
‘One day you’ll break away; you’ll have to. You cannot live behind a facade all your life, and that is what you’re trying to do. We are all intended to be individuals. You’re trying to be a chameleon instead, and it isn’t working out very well.’ She began to laugh at the thought. He knew that he ought to be vexed with her, but she had analysed the situation too well; he was a chameleon and it wasn’t working out well.
Aubrey saw the manager of the Gasthof come out and, seeing them, hasten towards them. It was irritating to be disturbed when they were so happy together. The manager was a stocky little Swiss with a goatee beard and a contrasting bald patch on the head which almost met two upstarting points from the temples, much like the alps themselves. His skin was vigorously tan, his eyes grey like the slate roofs of some north-country village in England. He carried a cable with rather overdone pomp, and presented it, bowing low.
‘For you, mein Herr,’ he said courteously, and extremely stiffly.
The moment he saw it, Aubrey guessed that it could not be the harbinger of good news, there must be further trouble about Alice. It was from his mother. It said quite simply that his father had died suddenly in the night and would he please return immediately.
Aubrey had never thought of his father dying, for he had seen him for ever in the background of Thornhill, a big strong man, never ageing. The cable slipped out of his hand, and it was Kay who picked it up and read it.
‘I must go back to my mother at once,’ said Aubrey after a moment, and his voice sounded unreal.
‘I’ll see about reservations for you.’ Kay was efficient. He saw her get up and go back towards the Gasthof with the manager. She walked like a boy. He saw the skaters still skimming across the ice, poised like dark birds against the brilliance of the background, and it seemed incongruous that whilst all this was going on death should be drawing the curtains on Thornhill.
He couldn’t feel sad. He knew that he had never liked his father, and that he had been obliged to sit as the silent witness of all those family bickerings that chafed him to madness. They were ended. No more parrying for an opening. That was finished for ever.
Presently Kay returned. She came in front of him and stood there looking at him, and he had the feeling that her frail personality had suddenly become an immense prop.
‘There is the night train that you can catch quite easily. Herr Scharenbrock is arranging everything for you. You’ll catch the rapide, there is no need to hurry, and you’ll only have to change at Basle.’
‘Basle?’ Memories of Basle suddenly filled him, in strange contrast to those of Thornhill. The early morning and the keen cold that acted like an aperitif, the chocolate that foamed, and the light struggling through the darkness of the station that smelt of fir, and resin, and of frost.
‘I’m so sorry about this, Aubrey. You’ll feel it dreadfully, and coming so suddenly too. It was frightful for your mother that it should happen whilst you were away.’
‘Never mind. I shall be with her tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I’ve cabled telling her so. Signed it as from you, which I thought was what you’d want. Now there is your packing to do. Shall I see about it?’
They went indoors, and up the stairs together, over-carved. His room had double glass windows; the steam heat and the furnishing entirely different from anything at Thornhill, and the strange thing was that Thornhill seemed the unreal, although it had been his life’s background, and this the real. He sat mechanically in a chair watching Kay, who went systematically to work. She cleared out the drawers one by one, handling the clothes deftly, packing the valise as he could never have done it himself. She strapped it firmly, writing out one of the flamboyant labels as supplied by the Gasthof.
‘That ought to get you there,’ she said.
‘I ‒ I’m horribly bemused.’
‘Yes, I know, and I don’t wonder.’ She paused a moment, her hands in her trousers pockets, looking at him. ‘Aubrey, did you love him very much?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘It makes it almost worse, doesn’t it? When you love a person tremendously and he goes, you know you gave him your best; you could not have done more. With someone you didn’t care about, there are regrets.’
‘Yes, that’s it unfortunately.’
‘Never mind. One can’t help not loving some people and caring deeply for others.’
He looked at her hungrily. ‘I don’t want to go back, Kay. I don’t want ever to see the place again. I want to run away, and I can’t.’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘I feel so rotten. So unworthy. A bad son. And then that affair with Alice, and now my whole future so uncertain and strange and difficult. I’m a bitter disappointment to myself most of all.’
‘Aubrey,’ she said, ‘you’re not a bitter disappointment to yourself; all your life lies before you. You’ll make a lot of it one day, you’ll see. I know you will. And now I’m going downstairs to ask about some sandwiches for you to take in the train in case the buffet is shut at Basle. It’s best to be prepared.’
‘Thank you, Kay. I wish I could express my feelings, but, well ‒ this is a bit shattering.’
‘I’ll be back at Fincham in February if you want me. I ‒ I rather hope you will want me. I’ll always do anything I can, you know that?’
‘Yes, I know that.’
And later, the last thing he saw of her when the sleigh turned the corner, was standing there in those slim dark trousers, with the white sweater, and the uncared-for hair.
He drove in grim silence, and all the time he was thinking that he had liked her with a quite different emotion from that which he had ever felt for a woman. She was alive. Switzerland had been a period of initiation, for a short while he had caught a glimpse of the man he might be, and wasn’t. He did not want to return to the man who lived at Thornhill. Now he was doubly unsure of himself.
Seven
It was late at night when Aubrey got back to Thornhill.
As he drove through the sleet to the village, the wind whistled eerily and the hail peppered the window like machine-gun fire. A more sinister home-coming could not have been imagined, and his heart sank. Strangeness had come to the house, so that now it seemed that he trod on foreign soil, and, the horror of death encompassing him, he realized the far more significant power his father had now than he had ever had in life.
There were Christmas roses in a bowl on the hall dresser, and Milly came to the door, her face mottled with crying and holding an ostentatiously black-edged handkerchief to her eyes. Milly had never liked his father, as he knew, and he could have slapped her for crying now when she didn’t mean it.
His mother, entirely tearless, sat in the drawing-room, wearing a dead black frock buttoned austerely to the neck and faced with crepe. He knew that she had not wept, for her face was as when he had left, and quite cold; her hair was smoothed back, and he noticed the little whiskers on the nape (they had always irritated him so much) and
they showed even more than before against the black frock.
‘Mother, this is awful, how ever did it happen?’
‘It was a stroke. He died in his sleep, there wasn’t any time to do much for him.’
‘I’m terribly sorry about it. Awful shock! Coming so quickly.’ He felt awkward because he was unable to offer any consolation in the loss of a man she had obviously disliked. She gave him details in the same tone in which she would have discussed the death of a stranger, and all the time Aubrey knew that it infuriated him so that he became hyper-sensitive to the sharp ticking of the clock (he had never noticed it so acutely before), and every little inflection of her tone.
At last she said, ‘You’d like to see your father?’
The one thing that Aubrey did not want to do was to see his father, but he could not see how he dared refuse. Convention insisted that he must accompany his mother as she rose and went emotionlessly upstairs. He followed. She opened the door of the room, and crossed to the bed, whilst her son recoiled from her lack of distress. It would have been so much more human if she had cried, but death did not dismay her. It meant merely that the door of the cage had been opened, and a man she disliked had left her for good. She drew back the cover from his face. Aubrey, his hands clenched, and his teeth biting his lip, looked down at the face, and saw that for the first time his father looked quite magnificent. There was nothing in death. This was the empty shell of a man. No more! The atmosphere of the house, the dweller on the threshold, were mere illusions that he had conjured up to terrify himself. Now he could thrust them away.
‘It’s dreadful for you,’ he said.
‘I know. But he didn’t suffer.’
‘That’s one blessing.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’
She replaced the cover on the face that had been so ennobled by death. Together they went out of the room, and he had the impression that standing there he had been closer to his dead father than to the living mother. He hated himself for the thought.
There was an impressive funeral, and afterwards tea was served to a select few in the drawing-room at Thornhill for the reading of the will. The solicitor was weedy, in not too well-fitting clothes of a dead decade, inside which his ageing body had shrunk. He did not enjoy his work, and kept moistening his lips and looking nervously about him. Nothing would put this man at his ease, and later they were to know why.