Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘It’s the twenty-eighth of February, Colin.’ Her voice, Colin thought, sounded a little unsteady. ‘And it’s the last day of filming—unless Tomas Court has decided to go over…’

  ‘He never goes over.’

  ‘Then you’re a free man in about—what? Two hours? Three hours?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said Colin. ‘He says he’s going to do this in one take—and I believe him. That means I’ll be with you before dark. They’re shooting the first scene of the movie now, then I’m leaving.’

  ‘Why do they do that? Shoot inside out and back to front? It’s confusing…’

  ‘Not when you’re used to it.’ Colin drew in a deep breath. ‘Darling, I’m going to ask you something that I first asked you on the telephone in a cottage not far from here. Lindsay, tell me—and by my calculations, this is for the thirty-fourth time of asking, are you going to marry me, yes or no, because in my pocket, at this moment…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lindsay.

  ‘I have—somewhere—ah, here it is, this special licence, which means that tomorrow, in Oxford, whether you consent or not, I’m taking you to…What did you just say?’

  ‘I said yes,’ said Lindsay.

  Colin then became incoherent. She became incoherent. She decided to wait until he was with her before telling him that this would be, in effect, a shotgun wedding.

  ‘Ten weeks,’ said Lindsay, coming to the end of her confused, halting, hesitant explanation.

  They were standing in the kitchen at Shute Farm, where Colin, having driven at fearless speed, but with the caution of a prospective bridegroom, had arrived half an hour earlier.

  Listening to her explanation, Colin had blushed one of his agonizing blushes. His face was now white. He was hearing a tremendous rushing sound in the quiet of this room. Its power astonished him; it came to him, very slowly, that this sound indicated profound joy, a joy so overwhelmingly intense, it left him speechless. Moving towards Lindsay and taking her in his arms, he found speech did gradually return to him, so he could express, by word and by touch, the fears, hopes, desires and plans which sprang into his mind now—and that she, similarly gifted, could reply to them.

  Some considerable while later, a father-to-be’s panic came upon him. He felt that Lindsay should not be standing. He felt she might need to lie down; he felt she might need to eat—or possibly not to eat. He felt perhaps she needed fruit, or milk; he certainly felt—though he kept this to himself—that Lindsay must, at the earliest opportunity, be seen by Harley Street’s most expensive, wise and infallible obstetrician. Was she sleeping? Could she rest? Did she have cravings? Colin hoped, with a fond, wild hope, that she had the most impossible of cravings—whatever she craved, he would obtain for her.

  ‘Oh, God, God, God,’ he said, striding up and down the kitchen, hitting his head on the beams several times, and scarcely noticing. ‘Darling, you must sit down. Put your feet up. Do you need a rug? Are you warm enough? You shouldn’t have been alone. If I’d known, if I’d even suspected, I’d never have left you. Sod the movie. Sod Tomas Court. I’d have been here. Oh, God, God. Can we still get married tomorrow? It might be too much. All that stress. Women get stressed on their wedding days. Clothes! Flowers! They worry about things like that. I told Tom. Christ! Tom! Tom has the ring. I’ll have to call him now…’

  ‘Tom has the ring?’ Lindsay said slowly.

  ‘Of course Tom has the ring. Tom’s going to be the best man. We fixed it all, weeks ago. The Ulanov Manoeuvre—you pin the queen with a bishop and a knight—he said your game always collapsed immediately. What am I going to do? The honeymoon—I’d forgotten about a honeymoon. Oh God, I’m so happy. This is a disaster. What’s my father going to think? He’ll never forgive me for this. He adores you. He’ll think I’ve behaved appallingly. Appallingly…’

  ‘Why don’t we go and see?’ Lindsay said, rising. ‘Why don’t we go and tell him? And yes, I can walk there, dearest Colin, and yes, I might even be strong enough to marry you tomorrow. I feel amazingly strong, and well. Pregnancy isn’t an illness, Colin.’

  ‘Pregnancy! Pregnancy! Oh, what a wonderful, glorious word,’ cried Colin, hitting his head on a beam again. ‘With child. My child. I love you so much. Let me get your coat, and a scarf, you’d better wear a scarf. Lindsay, I can see for a thousand miles. I can move mountains. I can perform wonders…’

  ‘Well, yes. So it would seem…’ Lindsay smiled.

  ‘I’m frightened. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life, and I’m afraid.’ Colin fell to his knees and pressed his face gently against her stomach. He began to kiss her woolly skirt, the waistband of which Lindsay, with pride and excitement, had let out for the first time that morning. She rested her hands on his hair, her heart full with the love she felt for him. Then, gently, she drew him to his feet.

  She allowed herself to be wrapped up like a parcel in layers and layers of unnecessary but loving protective clothing, then they set off for Shute. On the track Colin was armed with a glorious optimism; by the time they reached the wood, he felt he might not be worthy; crossing the deer park, he felt he might be, if Lindsay could help him.

  Colin went into his father’s study alone to break the news to him. His expression was anxious; Lindsay waited and communed with Colin’s dogs, stroking their rough fur and their elegant muzzles.

  Colin came out after some considerable time, his expression astonished. It seemed that Colin’s father, so soldierly, so old school, so imbued with a lifetime’s belief that a man under no circumstances showed emotion, had behaved in a way Colin could never have foreseen. He had said, ‘By Jove,’—his only oath—several times; several times he had remarked that he was so surprised that Colin could have knocked him down with a feather. He had begun on a few terse remarks about man’s estate and his son’s future responsibilities, frowning fiercely, his moustache bristling. Then, breaking off, he had embraced his son; much coughing, turning away and blowing of his nose had not been able to disguise the fact that he was weeping.

  It was bad enough that Colin should witness this weakness; for Lindsay to witness it was unthinkable. He would be coming out to her, Colin said, in a few moments, when he had regained his composure. His parting shot to Colin had been, ‘Damn good thing you’re making an honest woman of her tomorrow. Left it a bit late by my standards. Luckily for you, she’s an honest woman already. Knew it straight off. First second I laid eyes on her.’

  Colin’s father regarded this remark as a witticism of Wildean elegance. So pleased with it was he that he was to repeat it to Colin, at intervals, for some years to come. Being of the old school, it was not a witticism, needless to say, which he would have dreamed of expressing to Lindsay. To his daughter-in-law to be, he said in a gruff way that she was a good woman for taking this son of his off his hands. ‘By Jove,’ he added, coughing again, ‘thought I’d never get shot of him…’

  Lindsay smiled and kissed the old man, the kiss causing him to suffer severe bronchial disturbance; he bolted from the room immediately.

  Lindsay was very touched by this. A sojourn here was teaching her, she felt, the value of certain conventions.

  So the wedding passed off the next day, happily, and without untoward incident, at a small registry office in Oxford. Tom remembered the ring and attended the ceremony with Cressida-from-upstairs on his arm, having discovered that Cressida, a sensible girl, had a way of making Katya forgettable. This discovery he had made with a little assistance from Colin, who had suggested one day in Yorkshire that this friend of Tom’s might like to come up to watch a day’s filming; of this assistance, Tom remained unaware, for Colin was subtle.

  Colin’s father attended, and—while not disgracing himself with tears—blew his nose loudly and continuously throughout the ceremony. Pixie attended, looking formidable and smiling pityingly. Lindsay’s difficult mother arrived late, but was there, and remarked only a few times, as she clasped her headmaster husband’s arm, that she was glad to see her daughter at
last following her own example. Rowland McGuire, unable to attend because of work commitments, sent excellent champagne, his love, and a telegram which, when read out by Tom, was agreed by everyone to be very dry, very witty, rather risque, but very Rowland.

  Lindsay wore a whitish ensemble bought in a great rush that morning, a blue garter borrowed from Pixie, and a ring—an old ring, Colin’s father assured her—which had once belonged to Colin’s mother. It was a beautiful ring, and although Lindsay believed Colin when he said its stones were very ordinary garnets, she also knew beyond a doubt that they were rubies.

  Markov telephoned at intervals throughout the day, requiring updates on everyone’s precise degree of happiness; he contrived to conceal his deep affection for Lindsay beneath remarks which, as usual, were both affected and waspish.

  Mellowing slightly by the time of his final call to Shute, he announced he had decided it was time he made an honest man of Jippy. He was starting to plan a marriage ceremony somewhere suitably charming, such as Big Sur, or Las Vegas. Signing off, he informed both Colin and Lindsay that they had his lover to thank for their present state of bliss. Jippy, he added, sent them both—or, rather, sent them all—his blessings.

  It was that night in New York, much affected by that day’s events in England, which he had watched from afar, that Jippy began dreaming.

  These dreams, which first came to him that night, and continued for some nights afterwards, came to him when he was lying beside Markov, in a state between waking and sleeping. In these dreams, he discovered, he watched present and future with a steady tranquillity. This form of precognition had never happened to him before and he much preferred it to those flashes and flickerings which had previously constituted his clairvoyance.

  In these dreams, he found, he could watch over those he loved, such as Lindsay and Colin; he could watch them and others, with engagement, yet with distance. He could feel, as he watched, pity, fear and compassion, yet he no longer wished to intervene; he no longer had that painful need to seek to spare and protect; he no longer attempted to pull the invisible strings he saw manipulating this universe. He watched and accepted these inevitabilities.

  And so he saw, in these nights of dreamings, that the outcome for others was less benevolent than it had been for Lindsay and Colin. He watched the director Tomas Court complete a movie which, from start date to final cut, was almost the same length of time in gestation as a baby. Nine months, and the visions Court had seen in his mind, those ghosts, were fixed upon celluloid. Tomas Court, with whom Jippy felt a certain fellowship, moved on to his next movie. Jippy could see that ultimately his health would fail him; he could see, meanwhile, that the loving war—or warring love—with his wife was still continuing.

  Jippy watched this man and this woman and their son at a ranch in Montana, near Glacier. Then, with some reluctance, he scanned away from them, moving off on his dream thermals, to look at another man, woman and son, whose future lay, clear as a lake, spread out to his view below him. He watched Pascal Lamartine meet a fate that had dogged his footsteps for many years, and which Jippy had seen plucking at his sleeve that Thanksgiving night at the Plaza.

  It could only have gone one way, the dreaming Jippy felt, and he sensed that this person, who had been waiting for Lamartine so long, was someone Lamartine himself had been seeking. He might have taken many forms, this person, and he might have issued forth in the course of almost any war, in any country. It could have been Beirut, or Mozambique, or Bosnia: it proved to be a small town of little importance in Sri Lanka. The instrument was not a mine or a bomb, as it might have been, but a boy—a frightened boy, toting a scavenged rifle, who fired out of panic and confusion, as Lamartine raised his camera.

  The boy, horrified to see the realities of guns for the first time, bent over the body and touched the blood with a wondering finger. He had not quite believed, until that moment, how easy it was to kill a man, and he had not foreseen that a killing could happen so very quickly. He looked at the eyes of this stranger, which were glazing, then ran away, hid, prayed to his gods and vomited. Later, astonished that this event had been so simple and that he had survived it, the boy came to boast of his feat. He added embellishments; he fictionalized it. And dreaming Jippy, sorrowing for the dead man, sorrowing for the boy, saw that this fictionalizing, like the death, was inevitable and unremarkable. Similar things happened every second of every day and, sensing their clamour, dreaming Jippy moved onwards.

  He watched the consequences of this event, which he had only been able to glimpse before, and now saw through his dark glass clearly. Lamartine’s wife was graceful in her widowhood, assiduous to her son’s welfare, and assiduous in preserving her dead husband’s memory. Some years later, she married an American—a man old enough to be her father, her friends said—whom she had first encountered at her father’s funeral.

  Was she happy then? Jippy did not stay to watch over her future happiness or lack of it. He moved off again on his thermals, which were swifter and more powerful than a jet plane. He could have paused in his dreamings in a thousand places; travelling on, he could feel their stories rising up at him. Sorrows drifted up like smoke as he passed, but Jippy, a kind man, wanted benevolence, so he moved on and on, pausing only when he was in its vicinity.

  So it was that Jippy saw Dr Miriam Stark return home one day from her women’s college, her mind preoccupied with thoughts of Rowland. She was a woman who lived her life by rules, and one of those rules—to let no man come close to her—she was beginning to fear she had broken.

  On a summer’s evening, heavy with the scent of roses, she let herself into the small house to which she had refused Rowland admittance. It was situated in that part of Oxford where a confluence of rivers and a canal create small packages of land; her house, looking out over water, filled with the sounds of water, was virtually moated. This house, quiet, scholarly, calming and familiar, she found both unchanged and changed that evening. Its rooms, as always, were orderly, but she could not look at them, as she usually did, with serenity.

  She had done wrong, she felt; she had done wrong to create this cool, quiet, virginal enclave. She walked through its peaceful rooms with a sense of mounting perturbation; in her sitting-room, with its books and its French windows opening onto the garden, she found her son; he had fallen asleep on a couch. He was still wearing his tennis clothes—he had been playing tennis with friends all afternoon—and his racquet lay beside him. He had a book on his knees, and in front of him, switched off, was a television bought by Miriam and rarely watched by either of them.

  This boy was fourteen, now approaching his fifteenth birthday. When awake, he had the clumsiness and awkwardness of any adolescent, but asleep, he was beautiful. Miriam stood there for some while, looking down at him. He was sprawled full-length, his long golden limbs stretched out, with the easy grace of some youth, some Adonis in a Renaissance painting. His head was tilted back, exposing the line of his throat; his face was flushed from the sun and from sleep, and his dark hair, in need of cutting, curled with a girlish grace around his neck and forehead.

  He was going to be as tall as his father was; he had his father’s hair, his father’s features and his father’s extraordinary eyes; this beauty was inherited. In the past, watching it form, Miriam had regretted this and tried to make herself blind to it. She had wanted this child as her child only, and she had wanted to deny the part his father had played in his making. It was, after all, the most minimal possible—the fatherhood here came about as a result of chance, a miscalculation, a copulation neither partner had intended to take place, which, afterwards, had dismayed both of them.

  The Rowland McGuire of that time was a very different man to the one she had remet recently: he had been more markedly arrogant, less scrupulous and more impatient. He was making a career for himself, as she was, and shortly after their one night together, he left to take up the first of his postings in America. She, glad he had left, glad he need not threaten her equilibrium, had
continued to write her book. When, two months later, having heard nothing from Rowland McGuire in the interim, she discovered she was pregnant, she had felt a fierce angry pride rise up in her; she would have died sooner than inform him.

  So she had brought up her boy alone, without male aid, and this too she took pride in. She felt scorn at the need other women seemed to have for male companionship, finance and protection. She needed none of it. This scorn, and this shrinking from the male sex, from men who conquered and colonized females with such ease and such carelessness, remained with her. She wanted a lover only occasionally, and she hated the idea of a husband.

  So she did not regret her past actions; she did not for one instant believe in, or wish for, any future for herself and Rowland. Certainly not; yet still there was that sense, that perturbing sense of her own wrongdoing. Rowland McGuire now mourned his single state and mourned his childlessness; this boy, she saw, was not solely her possession.

  And so, later that night, when her son was in bed and asleep, a dreaming Jippy watched her pace her room, then, with reluctance, breaking off then recommencing, begin to write a letter. Jippy watched her pen move across the paper; he watched the black ink flow. Words, words, words. It was late, very late, before she finished the letter.

  Did she send it? Jippy saw her carry it as far as the front door of her house; he watched her hesitate. Then his air thermals lifted him away, to a house in London, a house overlooking a Hawksmoor church, the spire of which could be seen from its main bedroom. Rowland McGuire did not sleep, he saw; watching him, Jippy felt he might act, or he might not act. He might receive the letter, or, not receiving it, be told its contents in some other fashion, on some other occasion. In his dreamings, Jippy, who was soft-hearted and given to optimism, bestowed on this scholarly woman and this solitary man, a wish for a benign resolution. He stayed to see Rowland McGuire open his shutters to the morning and pick up the telephone—then he moved on for the last of his visitations.