A Long Time Ago
Page 26
He had been through a period of nervous disintegration, when the forces which governed his character seemed to be at a standstill. That was over now. He had come to himself. And though he felt remote from any sort of decision at the moment, he knew that his nature, confident, insensitive, and a little unscrupulous, would eventually carry the issue.
“If you should wait till after the child is born …” pleaded Muffy.
“I shall do what’s best for her,” he said. “I’ll think over what you’ve said. You were right to tell me at once. I’m obliged to you.”
He looked at his watch and drank up the coffee, which had grown cold. Bidding good night to Muffy, he went back to see how Maude and Barny were getting on.
She watched him striding across the court, looking, she told herself resentfully, as if he’d bought the place. It was broad daylight now, and a glow on the eastern tower told of the approaching sunrise. When she drew back the curtains in the keep it was so light that she could blow out the candles. She washed the coffee things, rehearsing mentally a narrative of these things:
“He didn’t seem to feel it as he ought, ma’am, but I think he will do what is right in his own way. He is a hard gentleman. I said to him, I said: ‘She doesn’t know any more than the babe unborn.’ ‘Oh!’ he says, ‘stupid of her.’ ‘Stupid!’ I could have boxed his ears. But it’s his nature to be hard, I suppose. And that’s the whole truth of it, ma’am. Miss Ellen, she never knew. I said: ‘It’ll kill her if you tell,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t understand.’ And she wouldn’t, would she? Not Miss Ellen …”
On the dresser there was a penny bottle of ink and a leather writing case which Mrs. Annesley had given to her at Christmas. She got as far as sitting down at the table and dating the letter which she would have wished to write.
“Dear Madam …” she wrote.
But it was too difficult. Her powers as a letter-writer were very limited and the narrative, so fluent in her mind, escaped her when she tried to commit it to paper. She got no further than Dear Madam.
Sunlight filled the sky and all the birds on the island began to sing. Muffy chewed the end of her pen for a little while. And then she gave it up. There was no need to write it in a letter. Plenty of people would tell Mrs. Annesley what had happened, how Barny had been taken ill, and how Dick had come back, and how everything seemed to have turned out for the best. Her story would keep. Soon she would be seeing Mrs. Annesley and they would have a long talk, and then she could be sure that her tale would go no further. Mrs. Annesley never betrayed confidences. After all it was not very safe to write things down. You never knew who might read them.
She tore up the sheet, yawned twice, and went to bed.
EPOLOGUE
SUNDAY EVENING
1
KERRAN was annoyed with Hope for taking so seriously the letters which she had written herself. She read each of them twice, with amused comments, exclamations, and scattered reminiscences, as the fragments of her own forgotten past came back to her. And when she came to her Stanzas written in Dejection at Inishbar, she wanted to take a copy of it.
“You can keep it if you like,” said Kerran. “Keep all your own letters if you like. And Rosamund’s too. I only kept them because my mother did. They have no value in the main story.”
“I was a far more imaginative child than Rosamund. Yet there was always this legend that she was an exquisite, sensitive little thing and I was a lump. I resented it obscurely at the time, and now, looking back on it I resent it still more. These family legends are exasperating. They stick and stick. To one’s aunts and cousins one remains what one was at ten years old, or what they thought one was at ten years old, till the day of one’s death. I can still remember the exasperation … of course Rosamund was so much better produced than I was. She had very pretty clothes … djibbahs with nice embroidery, while I was kept in clumsy holland smocks. And she was brought up to be so much more cultured: Aunt Louise took her about. She went abroad and to concerts and things. She was much more like a modern child. I got plenty of solid teaching, but nobody ever encouraged me to have any æsthetic interests. I had to do it all for myself. And the mere title of that poem … Stanzas Written in Dejection … shows that at least I’d discovered Shelley for myself. It’s pathetic. And I can remember all those humiliating comments on my legs. I’m sure Aunt Louise still thinks that something ought to be done about them.”
Kerran got so tired of it at last that he went out for a short walk, leaving her to finish the letters by herself. When he came back it was dark, and tea had been brought into the library. She was sitting on the floor by the fire, with the bundle in her lap.
“Will you pour out,” he asked, “or shall I?”
“You. I always spill, and that annoys you.” She got up. “You want these letters back, I suppose? I mayn’t just show them to Alan?”
“No, you may not. You can keep your own if you like.”
At first she thought that she would. But then she said that the collection ought to remain complete.
“You say they have no value to the main story. But they have, in a way. I mean, it gives the entire picture of the family party. There we all were, children and all, each living our own lives. The mere fact that there was a whole group of people, a whole community, living, as it were, entirely outside the drama, makes one understand how confused, how piecemeal, the whole thing was. That’s one of the great mistakes one makes, looking back at things which have happened in the past. One sees the thing as a whole, and one forgets that the people at the time did not see it as a whole. One doesn’t make allowance for their unawareness, and how things which appear to be consecutive later were not consecutive then.”
“Perhaps you are right,” said Kerran, locking up the bundle in his cabinet. “Help yourself to tea-cake and tell me what you make of it all.”
Hope shook her head impatiently.
“I don’t make much. It seemed to dwindle out so, at the last. The letters get so dull … all about packing up and how soon Uncle Barny could stand the journey. And of course one gets bored by all the repetition.”
“It did dwindle out. Your father stayed on the island. It was obvious that he had made it up with your mother. There was no more to be said. Barny’s health was the thing which most occupied our minds for the rest of the time.”
“Still, I don’t feel I know any more than I did before,” complained Hope. “These letters tell one everything but the one important fact. They give the bare outline, though some of them are rather contradictory, and they show up the characters of the people who wrote them. But they don’t tell me why he did it or what mother thought about it.”
“Nobody knew.”
“A letter from either of them would have been worth the whole bundle. But he never writes at all and she merely writes about knitting wool and the Waverley Novels. What do you think yourself?”
“I never could make up my mind,” confessed Kerran. “Partly because I’ve had these letters to refresh my memory. The others have all got very definite ideas. You’ll remember there were considerable discrepancies in their views, even at the time, and these have widened. After all, our memories are at the mercy of our prejudices. We forget the facts which seem to be irrelevant or incongruous, and what is left is liable to be modified or distorted by what we wish to believe. Your Aunt Louise, who had, as you may have noticed, a certain tenderness for your father …”
“Oh, yes! I’d never realised that before. It’s most illuminating!”
“Well, Louise believes that it was the one love of his life. She has quite forgiven him and she has almost managed to forgive Elissa. She thinks that he came back to your mother from a sense of duty … that the whole thing was a tragedy.”
“But father wasn’t the man to let his whole life be a tragedy!”
“I agree. Maude believes that this episode was one of many. And Barny did too—as far as I can remember. She thinks that your father was a confirmed libertine and that your mot
her was merely coping with a situation to which she was very well accustomed. These aren’t theories with them any more, they’re convictions. I have heard Maude asserting that the affair had been going on, quite openly, for some time before they left the island, and that they were discovered en flagrant délit on the bathing beach. Louise has got a wonderful account of all that passed between Gordon and ‘poor Dick’ when Gordon went over and saw them at the cottage. I can find no evidence in the letters that they had any conversation at all on that occasion, but Louise has it all cut and dried … what Dick said to Gordon and what Gordon said to Dick …”
“You must show them the letters!”
“No, no! Too dangerous. They’d all be at one another’s throats in no time.”
“We-ell …” Hope sipped her tea meditatively. “I wonder if it really happened at all!”
“What?”
The idea had only just occurred to her, but she developed it with a growing conviction.
“My first instinct was to say that it couldn’t have happened. That it was impossible. And I’m beginning to wonder if I wasn’t right. You all contradict one another in your facts. You all contradict one another in your deductions. I can’t help asking myself if you weren’t all wrong. I don’t believe there’s anything in it at all.”
“My dear Hope! Some of the facts are undisputed. Gordon saw him at her cottage.”
“I daresay. But he didn’t see her. Nobody saw her again. How do we know that she was there at all?”
“What was he doing there?”
“I believe she went back to England. The cottage was a sort of annexe to the castle. It belonged to the Nugents, didn’t it? Why shouldn’t he stay there if it was empty. You all say that it rained for the whole of the three days. I daresay he was waiting for the rain to stop so as to get off on his walking tour.”
“No, Hope. It won’t do. There’s her own account of it to be got over.”
“Oh, she was a liar. That’s proved again and again. She’s quite discredited as a witness. She’d be quite capable of making it all up. I’ve no doubt it’s what she would have liked to happen and she didn’t like to admit that she left Ireland without bringing off an appropriate amour. I daresay she believes it herself now.”
“It won’t wash. It’s too improbable. It’s flat against all the facts.”
“Facts are only one kind of truth, and very misleading at that. What I go on is what I know, not all this mass of contradictory statement. I know that these particular people were incapable of being involved in this particular story. I know what my father was like. He was not that kind of man. He could not have acted in that way. He would not have fallen passionately in love with a woman like Elissa. He wasn’t an uncontrolled, impulsive, temperamental person, and he never liked highfalutin women. All that soulful humbug … he would never have put up with it. But he would have had to be insanely in love to do what you say he did: to desert his wife in that brutally callous way and risk his whole career. He might have found her physically attractive. By all accounts she was a most seductive creature, and I don’t know enough about him to be sure that he might not have been unfaithful to mother, though it would have surprised me. But he’d have taken care that it wasn’t found out. They must have had plenty of opportunities on the island. It wasn’t necessary to pack up and run off with her quite openly. Besides, if he’d been really in love with her he wouldn’t have allowed Guy Fletcher to bring him back so meekly. He’d have gone the whole hog and damned Uncle Barny with the rest of them. That’s my first argument. It doesn’t square with father’s character. Nor does it square with mother’s. I’ve said so all along. She wasn’t the woman to forgive such a thing. She might have reconciled herself to letting him go, but she would never have taken him back. Or even if she had, for the sake of her children, there would always have been an estrangement between them. I lived with them. I know there was no estrangement. She loved him passionately till the day of his death. She must have convinced herself that there was nothing in it.”
“Well, then, why didn’t she say so?”
“How should I know? We can’t ask her, unfortunately, for I’m sure Elissa’s book would distress her. I’ve hidden it in my suit-case, and we must do our best to see that she never knows about it. Luckily she doesn’t read much. But to return to my argument. You all keep saying yourselves that you can’t understand them, how you’ve been utterly deceived in him, how you’d thought him incapable of such behaviour, and how her attitude is a complete mystery. Well, you were quite right. He was incapable of such behaviour and so was she. He wasn’t the man to count the world well lost for a second-rate Diva, and she wasn’t the woman to overlook it if he did. He didn’t and she didn’t. And in your heart of hearts you all knew that they hadn’t. That’s why the whole thing dwindles out so. You all half knew that it had been a mare’s nest, so it was easy to forget it and behave as if it had never happened. Because it didn’t happen.”
“Don’t go on so fast. Let me get my bearings …”
“You do agree that there’s something in what I say?”
“You’re very specious. But I’ve believed that it happened for twenty-five years, and I can’t, in five minutes … but I wish I’d thought of it before, though. I shall certainly put it to Louise and Maude. Just as an experiment. It’ll make them furious. I shall tell them that you believe it never happened.”
“And tell them my grounds.”
“Oh, your grounds won’t cut much ice. You base your theory on your knowledge of your parents’ characters. So do they. Louise knows that your father was an incurable romantic: she’s as certain as you are that he wasn’t. And she knows that your mother was stupid, selfish, and too cold-blooded ever to grasp the situation. Maude knows that he was a rake and she was a saint. I’m the only person who doesn’t claim to know all about them.”
“But their convictions are built up on a prejudiced selection of imperfect memories. Mine are quite fresh. I come to the facts for the first time, the contemporary facts, as recorded in the letters. I’m sure I’m right. I may have slipped into a stereotyped view of my father, since he’s been dead for some years. But mother … it’s impossible. There’s nothing mysterious about mother. She’s a bit of a saint, but not that kind of saint. All her conventions … her prejudices … she couldn’t have been through such an experience without being shaken to her depths. Does she strike you as a woman who’s ever been shaken to the depths? Don’t you feel that she’s always led a rather protected life? Of course she’s had trouble … Peter being killed, and then father dying. And she faced it with great courage. Her religion helped her. She believes that they have gone to Heaven and that she will meet them again and everything will be all right. She thought that the war was dreadful, but that it was quite right that England should protect Belgium and that Peter was a hero because he had died for his country. She never saw the waste and wickedness of it, as our generation does.”
Kerran looked at his watch. When Hope began to talk of “our generation,” she was likely to go on all night, and he remembered that she had a bus to catch.
“I don’t see what the war has to do with it,” he said.
“Only this: that she meets trouble in a pre-war way. She’s sustained by all her pre-war convictions and prejudices. She thinks of God as a nice old country gentleman. Her religion is the religion of a person who has lived a sheltered life: who’s never been churned up and forced to remake all their values about things. She couldn’t have lived through all this Elissa business and remained quite what she is. Her kind of stability isn’t possible for our generation, that has had to face up to all kinds of shocks and readjustments. What I mean is that she couldn’t have lived through anything so modern. If she had, she’d be more modern in herself.”
“Men were faithless, and their wives forgave them, even before the war.”
“Yes. But not men who belonged to their period so completely as my father did, or wives like mother. I can imagine it al
l happening to me and to Alan. Or to our grandparents. But not to mother and father.”
“You may be right. I’ve always said one should ask the young.”
“I hope you don’t call me young. I’m thirty-six, remember. Show the letters to somebody fifteen years younger and see what they say. But my generation is a very interesting one. We were enough in touch with things before the war to …”
“I’m very sorry to interrupt you, Hope, but your bus goes in seven minutes.”
“Oh, does it? I must fly!”
She jumped up and pushed the tea table so that slops and milk were spilt on the tray.
Kerran felt glad to get rid of her and her clumsy movements, and the loud voice in which she laid down the law. Her theory had ceased to interest him. He was a little resentful at her summary disposal of the past. This had happened and that had not happened. This was possible and that was not possible. People who belonged to the Church of England did not mind their sons being killed in the war. Unfaithful husbands were not forgiven in the reign of King Edward. Stability was produced by an absence of shocks.
“Sola! Sola!” he said to himself, as quiet once more descended on his library. “And what does she know about it all?”
2
ELLEN had not gone to church because she was too busy. She worked in the garden until it was dark and then she packed up some things for Hope to take back to London in the morning: a dozen new-laid eggs, three pots of home-made strawberry jam and some nice broccoli. By the time that she had finished it was too late to get down into the village for evening service, so she sat in the drawing-room and turned on the wireless. While she got on with her knitting she listened to a talk upon the habits of the wood wasp. She had a pair of socks for Michael in hand, and she could listen-in as long as she did not have stitches to count. But when she came to turning the heel she switched the wireless off, as it disturbed her.