Circles don’t have an end, she thought And life is linear, with a beginning and an end, somehow, sometime. I’m very tired.
At the toll booth, an elderly man with an automatic smile took her change. For some reason he made her think of an animal at the zoo, imprisoned without having committed any crime. To think of spending your life in a little cage, taking coins! Nothing that lived, animal or human, ought to be confined. She hated zoos and belonged to a committee for their abolition. Alex had always laughed, in a nice way, with mild amusement, and so had Martin, because she had joined so many causes: against the slaughter of whales and seals; for the preservation of the forests; againt drug abuse; for foster homes and battered wives. Well, as long as you lived in the world, you owed it something, didn’t you?
And she felt a piercing compassion for everything that lived, the sort of feeling that flashed through you now and then with such dear intensity that you couldn’t possibly feel like that all the time, or even most of the time. It would sicken your soul. But shall I ever clear my own way, she thought?
The little car moved off the highway and slowed around the curve of the road. It was a lane, really. She still had enough memory of America and its roads to call this a lane. The car crept up the drive at Lamb House and into the garage.
In the burning afternoon the house lay shadowed among hovering beeches. It opened its arms. When she had stepped inside, it would close them around her again, walling the world away.
And she stopped a moment to listen to the infinite buzz and hum of a thousand little creatures busy in the grass. A butterfly, Parnassius, pale crystal gray, lit on her arm, its frail folded wings trembling there before it fluttered off into the light. And a leaf fell, a very small leaf, oval and yellow, spiraling slowly through the quiet air.
Oh, lovely, blooming world! Birth into life, life into death, the leaf and the bird in me, I in the leaf and the bird, unending round of radiance and darkness. But shall I ever clear my own way? she thought again.
The maid, Elvira, one of the last remaining village girls who hadn’t preferred the factory, had seen her from the window and came running.
“There’s a young lady in the hall. She asked for you. She’s been waiting. An American, I think.”
Now, in the summer before their final year at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons—known informally as P. and S.—five young women were traveling through Europe. They followed the route trod by generations of students since the days of the eighteenth century’s Grand Tour: through Italy’s museums, cathedrals and ruins and up over the Alps, westward and northward to the chateau country in splendid summer leafage, and at last across the Channel to London. Together and on foot they went down the guidebooks’ lists, from the Tower and the palaces to Samuel Johnson’s house.
Alone, Claire made her personal and private explorations. With some reluctance, Jessie had given the address of the house where they had lived when Claire was born: an austere white house of expensive flats in what had once been an aristocrat’s town mansion. The street was quiet under its linden trees. Having no exotic attractions for tourists, it seemed yet as foreign as a hill town in Tuscany.
Claire felt a mingling of excitement and nostalgia. She stood there for a while and then, following the city map, walked over to Kensington Gardens to see the statue of Peter Pan. She had perhaps not realized how intense had been her need to see these things, for under the neat and capable exterior of this young woman—neat, now that she had learned the requirements of simple grooming—lay a core of sentiment. A sentiment, she thought humorously, a sentiment almost Victorian.
The group was to spend a week in Scotland before going home. On the morning of the day they were to depart from London, Claire made a decision. Then, having prepared herself in advance with a railroad timetable, for she had been playing delicately with the idea ever since they had left New York, she proceeded to the station and took a train into the country.
These little villages straight out of Thomas Hardy followed a design: two rows of cramped, quaint cottages flanking a broad street which ended in a country road. Then, that branched off into three or four lanes, each leading to a fine, great manor at the back of a field on which one was not at all surprised to see a flock of sheep cropping the grass. So it was easy enough to find the place.
She stood in the high, square hall of a very old house. A young maid had admitted her, then left her alone among dark portraits, a vista of long rooms and smells of flowers overlaid with a pungent whiff of brass polish.
Now that she was actually here, Claire felt her first sinking apprehension. How could she have dared to come? It was an impudent intrusion upon a past that didn’t belong to her, an invasion of privacy. One would have every right to order her away—
Someone asked, “You wanted to see me?”
A thin, dark woman stood in the doorway. An instantaneous impression flashed in Claire’s mind, as when a picture snaps onto a screen: lady of refinement. She wore the delicate, plain dress that such ladies wear to the city in hot summer. She could have been a young woman aging too soon, or an older one who had stayed young.
“You don’t know who I am,” Claire said, trembling a little. “But—”
“But I can guess. You’re Jessie’s daughter. You look like her.”
“I’ve startled you most awfully, haven’t I?”
“You’ve startled me, yes. Why have you come?”
“No reason except curiosity. My own. No one else knows I’m here.”
“Well, curiosity’s a good enough reason, I suppose.”
The eyes, Claire thought; those strange, light, startling eyes, at once dreamlike and perceptive, they—they struck you!
And she said softly, “A family feud! All that secrecy and for all those years! Do you never think how strange and sad it’s been?”
The fantastic eyes swept Claire from head to foot “Oh yes, oh yes, I think!”
The eyes looked away for a moment and then returned, “it’s rather awkward just standing like this. As long as you’re here, you might as well have a cup of tea with me, don’t you think?”
Claire followed into the kitchen. The little maid had disappeared. Fern poured water from a copper kettle into the teapot. A huge white cat slept on a chair beside the table where a tray of violets flourished. She moved the cat and the violets.
“Sit down,” she said.
Her tan, long hands were clasped tightly and nervously in her lap. Then she loosened them and put them on the table, as if commanding herself.
“I used to wear my hair like that when I was your age.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you. They didn’t do you justice. You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“What shall I call you? Aunt Milly and my mother call you Fern; once, a long time ago when I asked him about this house, my father spoke of you as Mary.”
“I didn’t know I was spoken of at all.” And this was said with a slight rueful, humorous turn of the lips.
“Well, you aren’t very often. But you still haven’t told me what I should call you.”
“Whatever you choose. I don’t mind ”
“Well, Mary, then. Aunt Mary. It suits you. It’s an ordinary name, but not on you.”
“You may even drop the ‘Aunt,’ you know.”
“All right, then. Mary. Although it doesn’t make much difference, does it, what I call you for one afternoon, since I shall probably never see you again?”
Mary poured more tea. The cat slept on, and the old clock chattered on the wall. A stranger entering the kitchen would have thought that these two women were carrying out a daily ritual.
Mary said abruptly, “I wish sometimes I could see Jessie again.” Her hand moved round and round the cup, stirring the tea. “I wrote to her. I wanted to explain, if I could. But she never answered.”
“What could she have said?” Claire defended. “After all, you couldn’t have expected her to answer, ‘It’s all right, forge
t it, I understand.’ She couldn’t have done that, could she?”
“That’s true.” And the two plain syllables, spoken in minor key, touched Claire with a sense of finality.
“I hear,” Mary said, “I hear from Aunt Milly that Jessie has made a great name for herself.”
“She has. It’s amazing what she’s done.”
“I’m glad. If you care to tell her you’ve seen me, say that I’m glad.”
“I’ll do that Is there anyone else you want to know about? Anything you want to ask me?”
“No,” Mary said.
There was a little silence until Claire spoke again.
“My mother has no ill will toward you anymore. That’s past. I thought you might want to know.”
“Is that really so?”
“Quite so. Not that she would want to see you … just that she has no anger.” “And you?”
“I? Well, I would hope to have some understanding of people. It would be a pity if I hadn’t, wouldn’t it, since I’m a doctor, or will be by this time next year?”
“Yes, I know you are.”
“Aunt Milly, I supposer?”
“Of course. The town crier. That was what we called her when we were children. How is she, by the way?”
“Failing, since Uncle Drew died. She’s long past eighty, anyhow.”
Silence again. What should she say next? When ought she to leave? And frowning a little, Claire squeezed more lemon into the cup, fussing to occupy her hands.
“Elvira thought you were an American tourist come on the wrong day.”
“An American tourist? The house is open to tourists?”
“Yes, ifs the only way one can afford to keep a place like this.”
“It’s an enchanting house,” Claire said. “You haven’t seen it. If you’ve finished your tea, I’ll take you around.”
They walked down three steps into what must once have been a banquet hall, Mary explaining, “It hasn’t been used in years, it’s so enormous.”
“But I remember it!” Claire cried.
“You, you were here a few times. Can you remember Emmy and Isabel, too? And Ned?”
“Only vaguely.”
“Come, I’ll show you their pictures. This one’s Isabel in her wedding dress.”
Claire observed that the girls looked like Valkyries.
“Yes, don’t they? Ned’s quite different Would you like to see the grounds? At the gates there, those are temporary kennels for the visitors’ dogs. The English always take their dogs when they go tripping, you know. And over here, back of the orchard, is the byre. We only keep four cows now, and of course, I hardly need all that milk. But people want to see the place as it was in its best years.”
It was that time of late afternoon when in northern countries the sun slants at so acute an angle that the grass is gilded, and trees in the middle distance are washed in silver light. On the path ahead of Claire, Mary’s silhouette was dark against this ecstatic flare of light.
Fey, Claire thought suddenly, recalling the word her mother had once used to describe Mary Fern. She belonged in this place. No proper reserve of dress or manner could belie the different and secret thing that was hidden in her. And she remembered the destroyed and long-forgotten photographs of the woman on the garden bench, the shadowed face under the straw brim—
“Here’s where I work,” Mary said.
She opened the door of a small brick structure in back of the main house. At the far end of the single room, a glass wall faced the northern sky. The other three walls were covered with paintings. Even at first look, one saw that they were of important quality. Claire was stunned.
“Surely not all yours?”
“All mine.”
On an easel stood an oil of a very old man in front of a stone shed. The man was as strong and winter-gray as the stone; the whole was without a single superfluous line or stroke of brush. For a few minutes Claire studied it.
“Lonely,” she said.
“Yes, that’s Jasper. He’s almost ninety, and he comes to milk the cows.”
“The end of an ancient way of life. That’s what you’re saying, aren’t you?”
“Of course. You can’t blame the young people for wanting to go to the towns. And yet the old country people seem so cheerful. I don’t know. But then, there seems to be more all the time that I don’t know.”
Claire walked slowly around the room, past the fair head of a genial girl, Isabel or Emmy perhaps; past a spray of reddening oak leaves in a copper bowl; a slum street, semiabstract, with animated crowds under lines of hanging wash; a mourning woman with her head on her arms.
“My God,” she said. “You did all this? Nobody ever told me.”
“They didn’t know. And if they had known, why should they have told you?”
“But you’re no—no talented amateur! You must be a name.”
“They tell me so,” Mary answered quietly.
And standing there in the sudden stillness that fell between them, something went all soft in Claire. This woman had lived through passions of which she, Claire, still knew almost nothing. She had endured and had come through to create all this. As Jessie had come through also, in her way. And Claire thought: Women survive.
There came then an acute, abrupt awareness of blood tie. There had been so few in her small separated family, and she had always suffered from their lack. She had a swift recollection of the house in Cyprus, a mental picture of every dim, high room. She fancied, although no one had told her which bedroom had been Mary’s, that the one at the top of the stairs must have belonged to her in childhood. From its windows one would have looked down on the side lawn and the table to which, on sultry afternoons, the lemonade was brought …
“What are you thinking?” Mary asked.
“I feel sad here,” and Claire touched her heart.
“Yes.” Mary held out her arms. “Oh yes! We could have loved each other, you and I.”
Afterward it became clear that if Mary had known her son was to arrive from Egypt, she would not have invited Claire to stay overnight. But Ned had not been expected until the end of the month.
Shortly after breakfast, an athletic young man in a sober business suit came striding up the driveway carrying in each hand an enormous travel-worn suitcase. Five huge dogs clamored all over him in exuberant and loving welcome. When the greetings were past and the clamor had died, Mary made the introductions.
“So you’re the American cousin. I remember you,” he said.
“You couldn’t possibly. I was only three years old.”
“And I was eight. You cried because of my dogs. I had to put them outside, and I was mad as hell.”
“I don’t blame you. You must have hated me.”
“I did,” he said.
The top half of his face was earnest. He wore tortoise-rimmed glasses like Claire’s. The bottom half contained a well-marked, cheerful mouth, strong teeth and a square chin made gentle by a touching cleft. He was a boy come home to shelter and food (“Hotels for six weeks! I’m starving!”). He was also a man come back from conquest.
This combination of positive competence with lively eagerness was extraordinarily attractive. It was a perfect reflection of Claire herself. She saw that instantly. Perhaps this is one of the meanings of “love at first sight,” although no doubt there are more meanings than one …
By the end of the first hour they had learned everything that was important about one another.
“There’s nothing else I ever wanted to be except a doctor. It’s my life,” Claire had told him, along with the facts that she loved animals, music, travel and art, although she knew very little about either music or art; she was a night-person, very sloppy and forgetful, and hated to cook.
He told her that he loved dogs, music—about which he knew rather a good deal—cooking, history and old houses. Business, its competition and expansion, fascinated him. He despised “social” people and “class.” He thought he would be at home
in America because there was so much less of that sort of thing there.
“I’ve seen half the world, anyway. Now I want to see the States.”
“It’s so funny to hear people say ‘the States.’ ”
“Why? What do you say?”
“America. The United States.”
“I like your accent.”
“You do? Most Englishmen don’t. I like yours because it’s so neat, which sounds funny coming from me.”
“You’re free and easy. I always think Americans are like that. But I’ve never known any very well.”
“Your mother is American.”
“Not really. She’s been here so long, she even speaks like an Englishwoman.”
After a moment, Claire said thoughtfully, “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Why shouldn’t you have?”
“Because. The air’s thick with things we mustn’t mention. Chiefly, my father. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I know.”
“If I did the right thing, I would leave here now.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No.”
“I don’t want you to either …”
They bought a Wedgwood plate for Jessie in the village, bicycled to a country pub for lunch, climbed the belfry, read on stained glass windows the distinguished names of military heroes and, in the churchyard, deciphered the eroded names of the humble unknown. And they talked.
“My father doesn’t know I found those photos or that I know anything,” Claire told Ned, “not even why he and my mother were divorced. I’m supposed to think it had something to do with money—or just generally not getting along. I guess,” she reflected, “Mary thought he would stay on after the war.”