Poor Strafe was pulling at Cynthia, pleading with her, still saying he was sorry.
‘Mrs Strafe,’ Mr Malseed tried to say, but got no further. To my horror Cynthia abruptly pointed at me.
‘That woman,’ she said, ‘is my husband’s mistress, a fact I am supposed to be unaware of, Kitty.’
‘My God!’ strafe said.
‘My husband is perverted in his sexual desires. His friend, who shared his schooldays, has never quite recovered from that time. I myself am a pathetic creature who has closed her eyes to a husband’s infidelity and his mistress’s viciousness. I am dragged into the days of Thrive Major and A.D, Cowley-Stubbs: mechanically I smile. I hardly exist, Kitty.’
There was a most unpleasant silence, and then Strafe said:
‘None of that’s true. For God’s sake, Cynthia,’ he suddenly shouted, ‘go and lie down.’
Cynthia shook her head and continued to address the waitress. She’d had a rest, she told her. ‘But it didn’t do any good, Kitty, because hell has invaded the paradise of Glencorn, as so often it has invaded your island. And we, who have so often brought it, pretend it isn’t there. Who cares about children made into murderers?’
Strafe shouted again. ‘You fleshless ugly bitch!’ he cried. ‘You bloody old fool!’ He was on his feet, trying to get her on to hers. The blood was thumping in his bronzed face, his eyes had a fury in them I’d never seen before. ‘Fleshless!’ he shouted at her, not caring that so many people were listening. He closed his eyes in misery and in shame again, and I wanted to reach out and take his hand but of course I could not. You could see the Malseeds didn’t blame him, you could see them thinking that everything was ruined for us. I wanted to shout at Cynthia too, to batter the silliness out of her, but of course I could not do that. I could feel the tears behind my eyes, and I couldn’t help noticing that Dekko’s hands were shaking. He’s quite sensitive behind his joky manner, and had quite obviously taken to heart her statement that he had never recovered from his schooldays. Nor had it been pleasant, hearing myself described as vicious.
‘No one cares,’ Cynthia said in the same unbalanced way, as if she hadn’t just been called ugly and a bitch. ‘No one cares, and on our journey home we shall all four be silent. Yet is the truth about ourselves at least a beginning? Will we wonder in the end about the hell that frightens us?’
Strafe still looked wretched, his face deliberately turned away from us. Mrs Malseed gave a little sigh and raised the fingers of her left hand to her cheek, as if something tickled it. Her husband breathed heavily. Dekko seemed on the point of tears.
Cynthia stumbled off, leaving a silence behind her. Before it was broken I knew she was right when she said we would just go home, away from this country we had come to love. And I knew as well that neither here nor at home would she be led to a blue van that was not quite an ambulance. Strafe would stay with her because Strafe is made like that, honourable in his own particular way. I felt a pain where perhaps my heart is, and again I wanted to cry. Why couldn’t it have been she who had gone down to the rocks and slipped on the seaweed or just walked into the sea, it didn’t matter which? Her awful rigmarole hung about us as the last of the tea things were gathered up – the earls who’d fled, the famine and the people planted. The children were there too, grown up into murdering riff-raff.
The Blue Dress
My cinder-grey room has a window, but I have never in all my time here looked out of it. It’s easier to remember, to conjure up this scene or that, to eavesdrop. Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. In Brussels an English politician breakfasts with his mistress; a pornographer pretends he’s selling Christmas cards. Carefully I listen, as in childhood I listened to the hushed conversation of my parents.
I stand in the cathedral at Vézelay, whose bishops once claimed it possessed the mortal remains of Mary Magdalene, a falseness which was exposed by Pope Boniface VIII. I wonder about that Pope, and then the scene is different.
I sit in the Piazza San Marco on the day when I discovered a sea of corruption among the local Communists. The music plays, visitors remark upon the pigeons.
Scenes coalesce: Miss Batchelor passes along the promenade, Major Trubstall lies, the blue dress flutters and is still. In Rotterdam I have a nameless woman. ‘Feest wezen vieren?’ she says. ‘Gedronken?’ In Corniglia the wine is purple, the path by the coast is marked as a lover’s lane. I am silly, Dorothea says, the dress is just a dress. She laughs, like water running over pebbles.
I must try, they tell me; it will help to write it down. I do not argue, I do precisely as they say. Carefully, I remember. Carefully, I write it down.
It was Bath, not Corniglia, not Rotterdam or Venice, not Vézelay: it was in Bath where Dorothea and I first met, by chance in the Pump Room. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, actually bumping into her.
She shook her head, saying that of course I hadn’t hurt her. She blamed the crowds, tourists pushing like mad things, always in a hurry. But nothing could keep her out of the Pump Room because of its Jane Austen associations.
‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘Goodness! You poor thing!’
‘I was on the way to have some coffee. Would you like some?’
‘I always have coffee when I come.’
She was small and very young – twenty-one or -two, I guessed – in a plain white dress without sleeves. She carried a basket, and had very fair hair, quite straight and cut quite short. Her oval face was perfect, her eyes intense, the blue of a washed-out sky. She smiled when she told me about herself, as though she found the subject a little absurd. She was studying the history of art but when she finished that she didn’t know what on earth she was going to do next. I said I was in Bath because my ex-wife’s mother, who’d only come to live there six months ago, had died. The funeral had taken place that morning and my ex-wife, Felicity, had been furious that I’d attended it. But I’d always been fond of her mother, fonder in fact than Felicity had ever been. I’d known of course that I would have to meet her at the funeral. She’d married again, a man who ran a wine business: he had been there too.
‘Is it horrible, a divorce?’ the girl asked me while we drank our weak, cool coffee. ‘I can never think of my parents divorcing.’
‘It’s nice you can’t. Yes, it’s horrible.’
‘Did you have children?’
‘No.’
‘There’s that at least. But isn’t it odd, to make such a very rudimentary mistake?’
‘Extraordinary.’
I don’t know what it was about her manner that first morning, but something seemed to tell me that this beautiful creature would not be outraged if I said – which I did – that we might go somewhere else in search of a better cup of coffee. And when I said, ‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said it confidently. She telephoned her parents’ house. We had lunch together in the Francis Hotel.
‘I went to a boarding-school I didn’t like,’ she told me. ‘Called after St Catherine but without her charity. I was bad at maths and French and geography. I didn’t like a girl called Angela Tate and I didn’t like the breakfasts. I missed my brothers. What about you? What was your wife like?’
‘Fond of clothes. Very fine tweed, a certain shade of scarlet, scarves of every possible variation. She hated being abroad, trailing after me.’ I didn’t add that Felicity had been unfaithful with anyone she had a fancy for; I didn’t even want to think about that.
The waiter brought Dorothea veal escalope and steak au poivre for me. It was very like being in a dream. The funeral of my ex-mother-in-law had taken place at ten o’clock, there had been Felicity’s furious glances and her husband’s disdain, my walking away when the ceremony was over without a word to anyone. I’d felt wound up, like a watch-spring, seeing vividly in my mind’s eye an old, grey woman who’d always entertained me with her gossip, who’d written to me when Felicity went to say how sorry she was, adding in a postscript that Felicity had always been a handful. She and I
had shared the truth about her daughter, and it was that I’d honoured by making the journey to her funeral.
‘They say I am compulsively naughty,’ Dorothea said, as if guessing that I wondered what she had said to her parents on the telephone. I suspected she had not confessed the truth. There’d been some excuse to account for her delay, and already that fitted in with what I knew of her. Certainly she would not have said that she’d been picked up by a middle-aged journalist who had come to Bath to attend a funeral. She spoke again of Jane Austen, of Elizabeth Bennet, and Emma and Elinor. She spoke as though these fictional characters were real. She almost loved them, she said, but that of course could not have been quite true.
‘Who were encumbered with low connections and gave themselves airs? Who bestowed their consent with a most joyful alacrity?’
I laughed, and waited for her to tell me. I walked with her to a parked car, a white Mini that had collected a traffic warden’s ticket. Formally we shook hands and all the way to London on the train I thought of her. I sat in the bar drinking one after another of those miniature bottles of whisky that trains go in for, while her face jumped about in my imagination, unnerving me. Again and again her white, even teeth smiled at me.
Within a day or two I was in Belfast, sending reports to a Washington newspaper and to a syndicate in Australia. As always, I posted photocopies of everything I wrote to Stoyckov, who operates a news bureau in Prague., Stoyckov used to pay me when he saw me, quite handsomely in a sense, but it was never the money that mattered: it was simply that I saw no reason why the truth about Northern Ireland should not be told behind the Iron Curtain as well as in Washington and Adelaide.
I had agreed to do a two-months stint – no longer, because from experience I knew that Belfast becomes depressing. Immediately afterwards I was to spend three days in Madrid, trying to discover if there was truth in the persistent rumour that the Pope was to visit Spain next year. ‘Great Christ alive,’ Felicity used to scream at me, ‘call this a marriage?’
In Belfast the army was doing its best to hush up a rape case. I interviewed a man called Ruairi O Baoill, whom I’d last seen drilling a gang of terrorists in the Syrian desert. ‘My dear fellow, you can hardly call this rape,’ a Major Trubstall insisted. ‘The girl was yelling her head off for it.’ But the girl had been doing no such thing; the girl was whey-faced, unable to stop crying; the girl was still in pain, she’d been rushed to hospital to have stitches. ‘Listen,’ Major Trubstall said, pushing a great crimson face into mine, ‘if a girl goes out drinking with four soldiers, d’you think she isn’t after something?’ The Red Hand of Ulster meant what it said, O Baoill told me: the hand was waiting to grasp the hammer and the sickle. He didn’t say it to his followers, and later he denied that he had said it at all.
Ruairi O Baoill is a sham, I wrote. And so, it would appear, is a man called Major TrubstalL Fantasy rules, I wrote, knowing it was the truth.
All the time in Northern Ireland and for three days in Spain Dorothea’s voice continued about Emma and Elinor and Elizabeth Bennet, and Mrs Elton and Mr Woodhouse. I kept imagining us together in a clean, empty house that appeared to be our home. Like smoke evaporating, my failed marriage wasn’t there any more. And my unhappy childhood slipped away also, as though by magic.
‘Dorothea?’
‘No, this is her mother. Please hold on. I’ll fetch her.’
I waited for so long I began to fear that this was Mrs Lysarth’s way of dealing with unwelcome telephone callers. I felt that perhaps the single word I’d spoken had been enough to convey an image of my unsuitableness, and my presumption.
‘Yes?’ Dorothea’s voice said,
‘It’s Terris. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember. Are you in Bath again?’
‘No. But at least I’ve returned from Northern Ireland. I’m in London. How are you, Dorothea?’
‘I’m very well. Are you well?’
‘Yes.’ I paused, not knowing how to put it.
‘It’s kind of you to ring, Terris.’
‘D’you think we might meet?’
‘Meet?’
‘It would be. nice to see you.’
She didn’t answer. I felt I had proposed marriage already, that it was that she was considering. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I began to say.
‘Of course we must meet. Would Thursday do? I have to be in London then.’
‘We could have lunch again.’
‘That would be lovely.’
And so it was. We sat in the bow window of an Italian restaurant in Romilly Street, and when anyone glanced in I felt inordinately proud. It was early September, a warm, clear day without a hint of autumn. Afterwards we strolled through Leicester Square and along Piccadilly. We were still in Green Park at six o’clock. ‘I love you, Terris,’ Dorothea said.
*
Her mother smiled a slanting smile at me, head a little on one side. She laid down an embroidery on a round, cane frame. She held a hand out.
‘We’ve heard so much,’ she said, still smiling, and then she introduced her sons. While we were drinking sherry Dorothea’s father appeared, a thin, tall man, with spectacles on a length of leather, dancing on a tweed waistcoat.
‘My dear fellow.’ Vaguely he smiled and held a hand out: an amateur archaeologist, though by profession a medical doctor. That I was the divorced middle-aged man whom his young daughter wished to marry was not a fact that registered in his face. Dorothea had shown me a photograph of him, dusty in a crumpled linen suit, holding between finger and thumb a piece of glazed terracotta. ‘A pleasure,’ he continued as vaguely as before. ‘A real pleasure.’
‘A pleasure to meet you, Dr Lysarth.’
‘Oh, not at all.’
‘More sherry?’ Dorothea suggested, pouring me whisky because she knew I probably needed it.
‘That’s whisky in that decanter, Dorothea,’ her brother Adam pointed out and while I was saying it didn’t matter, that whisky actually was what I preferred, her other brother, Jonathan, laughed.
‘I’m sure Mr Terris knows what he wants,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, and Dorothea said:
‘Terris is his Christian name.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’
‘You must call him Terris, Mother. You cannot address a prospective son-in-law as Mister.’
‘Please do,’ I urged, feeling a word from me was necessary.
‘Terris?’ Adam said.
‘Yes, it is an odd name.’
The brothers stood on either side of Dorothea’s chair in that flowery drawing-room. There were pale blue delphiniums in two vases on the mantelpiece, and roses and sweet-peas in little vases everywhere. The mingled scent was delicious, and the room and the flowers seemed part of the family the Lysarths were, as did the way in which Adam and Jonathan stood, protectively, by their sister.
They were twins, both still at Cambridge. They had their mother’s oval face, the pale blue eyes their parents shared, their father’s languid tallness. I was aware that however protective they might seem they were not protecting Dorothea from me: I was not an interloper, they did not resent me. But their youth made me feel even older than I was, more knocked about and less suitable than ever for the role I wished to play.
‘You’ve travelled a great deal,’ Mrs Lysarth said. ‘So Dorothea says.’
‘Yes, I have.’
I didn’t say I’d been an only child. I didn’t mention the seaside town where I’d spent my childhood, or reveal that we’d lived in a kind of disgrace really, that my father worked ignominiously in the offices of the trawling business which the family had once owned. Our name remained on the warehouses and the fish-boxes, a daily reminder that we’d slipped down in the world. I’d told Dorothea, but I didn’t really think all that would interest the other Lysarths.
‘Fascinating, to travel so,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, politely smiling.
After dinner Dr Lysarth and I were left alone in the dining-room. We drank port in a manner wh
ich suggested that had I not been present Dr Lysarth would have sat there drinking it alone. He talked about a Roman pavement, twenty feet below the surface somewhere. Quite suddenly he said:
‘Dorothea wants to marry you.’
‘We both actually –’
‘Yes, so she’s told us.’
I hesitated. I said:
‘I’m – I’m closer to your age, in a way, than to hers.’
‘Yes, you probably are. I’m glad you like her.’
‘I love her.’
‘Of course.’
‘I hope,’ I began.
‘My dear fellow, we’re delighted.’
‘I’m a correspondent, Dr Lysarth, as Dorothea, I think, has told you. I move about a bit, but for the next two years I’ll be in Scandinavia.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He pushed the decanter towards me. ‘She’s a special girl, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know, Dr Lysarth.’
‘We’re awfully fond of her. We’re a tightly bound family – well, you may have noticed. We’re very much a family.’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘But of course we’ve always known that Dorothea would one day wish to marry.’
‘I know I’m not what you must have imagined, Dr Lysarth, when you thought of Dorothea’s husband. I assure you I’m aware of that.’
‘It’s just that she’s more vulnerable than she seems to be: I just want to say that. She’s really a very vulnerable girl.’
The decanter was again moved in my direction. The tone of voice closed the subject of Dr Lysarth’s daughter. We returned to archaeological matters.
I spent that night at Wistaria Lodge and noticed at breakfast-time how right Dr Lysarth had been when he’d said that the family was a tightly bound one. Conversation drifted from one Lysarth to the next in a way that was almost artificial, as though the domestic scenes I witnessed belonged in the theatre. I formed the impression that the Lysarths invariably knew what was coming next, as though their lines had been learnt. My presence was accommodated through a telepathy that was certainly as impressive, another piece of practised theatre.