Perhaps you will be quicker than I was in seeing how the pieces joined. Perhaps you will be quicker and more ingenious than I was in solving what might, or might not, have been a crime.
One word of warning, though, before we begin: Who was telling this story, in the main? Why, Constance. And what is Constance? A decorator.
Take care with decorators! It is not always wise to trust them. Like those other compulsive rearrangers of reality, like con men, photographers, or writers, they marshal deception among their tools.
Consider: what is the first rule in the decorators’ manual? What is the first technique they must learn?
To trick the eye. Or so Constance used to say, in the days when I was her pupil.
TWO
I
A COMET AND A COPULATION
“EDDIE, WON’T YOU STAND BY ME?”
The year is 1910; the month is April, the day a Friday, the weather fine. My family relish spring at Winterscombe. They cannot know they approach the end of an era, that they are poised, even now, on the cusp of two worlds.
One month from now the King will be dead—Edward VII, who has stayed, on one occasion, at Winterscombe. His funeral, which my grandfather will attend, will be a glorious affair: Nine kings will ride in the procession, and Edward’s nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, will have the position of honor, directly behind his uncle’s hearse. Those kings, the Kaiser, the numerous archdukes, princes, and queens, divide Europe among them; many, by birth or intermarriage, belong to the same family, the progeny of Queen Victoria—dominant from Britain to the Urals. Four years after this funeral, that family will be at war.
My own family, who have their own smaller conflicts to come, cannot know this, naturally. It has not yet occurred to them, or to anyone else, that the sightings of Halley’s comet this spring could be ill-omened. That suggestion will be made, at Winterscombe and elsewhere, but only with hindsight.
Not now. Now, Halley’s comet is a cause for celebration. To my grandmother Gwen, it is the excuse for a party. That party will commence in a few hours’ time; meanwhile, it is morning. The air is sweet, the lake serene; visibility is good, the light excellent for the taking of photographs.
My grandmother Gwen prepares to pose for the camera of her eldest son, Boy.
Turning her head, she rests her lovely but astigmatic eyes on the figure of her lover, Edward Shawcross. He is eight feet away from her, his outline slightly blurred. She holds out her hand to draw him closer; she smiles.
“Eddie,” she says, “Eddie, won’t you stand by me?”
Gwen knows nothing of comets or stars, could not identify with any certainty even such constellations as the Plough, or Orion. Halley’s comet has captured her imagination all the same. She feels she knows how it will look: a great bolt of light, blazing across the sky. The comet’s tail could be two hundred million miles long, Eddie has told her (consulting newspapers who have been consulting astronomers). Two hundred million; Gwen glances at Eddie with pride. He is a writer; he understands, Gwen feels, the poetry of facts.
Tonight, she will watch the comet with him. There will also be some forty other guests, of course, and the servants will watch from the kitchen garden side of the house, but for Gwen the other comet-gazers are an irrelevance. This momentous evening will belong, she feels, to her and to her lover. They will watch together; under cover of darkness, she may hold Eddie’s hand; then, later …
But that is later. Now it is morning, and (the servants are well-trained; all arrangements were completed weeks before) Gwen has nothing to do. She may give herself up to the spring air, to the delights of the oyster faille of her new dress (already admired by Eddie). She may enjoy Eddie’s proximity and her husband Denton’s absence. She can relish the fact that she has escaped the house, and is now settled at her favorite place at Winterscombe, a small rustic building fronted by a loggia, tucked away in the gardens, a place Gwen has made her own. The Stone House it is called.
She can relax here in her Petit Trianon, as Eddie calls it, which she has furnished simply and charmingly to her own taste. Winterscombe is Denton’s house; years ago she made a few desultory attempts to set her mark upon it, and—in the face of Denton’s irritable intransigence—soon gave up. Easier to retreat here, where she keeps her watercolors and her easel, her wildflower press, her embroidery silks and frames, the American books she loved as a child, and one or two pieces of furniture, simple but good, which she had shipped from Washington, D.C., when her mother died.
Here she can enjoy the light on the lake in the distance, the pale green of the woods beyond just coming into leaf. Earlier, in the distance, she glimpsed Denton, together with his head keeper, Cattermole, disappearing into those woods, probably to check on the pheasants, possibly to shoot rabbits or pigeons, possibly because Cattermole has been complaining about poachers yet again.
That momentarily spoiled the view, but now Denton and his keeper are out of sight and unlikely to return again for at least an hour, so Gwen feels at peace again. She sighs. The air at Winterscombe, Gwen likes to maintain, is not merely fresh; it is benign.
Her youngest son, Steenie, aged ten, pulls at her skirts, and Gwen bends to lift him up onto her lap with a fond smile. Eddie Shawcross, as bidden, has moved forward; he has taken up his place behind her. She can smell the smoke of his cheroot. Feeling they make a charming group, almost a family group—herself, Steenie, her lover—Gwen lifts her face so its most flattering angle is turned to the lens of her eldest son’s camera.
This camera is the latest thing, an expensive Adams Videx, mounted on a tripod. Her son Francis—always known as Boy—is bending over it, fiddling and adjusting. Boy is eighteen; he has left school; he is about to embark on military training at Sandhurst and a career as a soldier. Gwen cannot think of Boy as grown up; to her, he remains her child.
The Videx was a present from Gwen for Boy’s last birthday; Boy is in love with it. In the last few months photography has become his obsession—which does not please his father, Denton, at all. Denton’s present to Boy on that eighteenth birthday was a matched pair of Purdey shotguns. These guns (a status symbol, we might call them—Denton likes status symbols) are the finest of their kind. They took two years to make. Denton himself supervised every detail of their design. He escorted Boy to the Purdey fittings, and—although he knows the guns are a piece of ostentation, particularly for an eighteen-year-old boy who is a poor shot—Denton remains proud of them. Her husband (and this pleases Gwen, though she would not admit it) is jealous of the Videx.
Boy takes photographs all the time now, of the family, of the servants, of the house. He took them last fall at the Winterscombe shoot, when he should have been shooting guns, not film; this made his father furious. Boy, usually frightened of Denton and his rages, has in this respect shown a new and unexpected obstinacy. He continues to take his pictures; he will not give up.
Now, draping the black camera cape over his head and shoulders, Boy squints through the viewfinder. Like his mother, he is pleased with the composition, the family group—and Eddie Shawcross is such an established friend that, as far as Boy is concerned, he almost counts as one of the family. Boy’s eyes rest on the inverted image of his mother: She is thirty-eight and a remarkably handsome woman, although our tastes in beauty may have changed. She has given birth to seven children and lost three of them, but she has retained her figure. It conforms to the Edwardian ideal of an hourglass shape. Her features are strong, her hair dark and loosely gathered up, her expression placid. There is in her pale eyes a dreaminess suggestive of lassitude, which many men find sensual and which her husband, Denton, when angry, attributes first to stupidity and second to laziness.
Gwen sees Boy is ready to take his photograph. It will involve a one-minute exposure, during which everyone must remain absolutely still. One quick glance down at Steenie, who is looking up at her with gratifying adoration; one quick glance back at Eddie; yes, all is well.
No, all is not well. From the co
rner of her eye Gwen catches a blur of movement, a dart of black. It is Eddie’s daughter, Constance.
Until this moment Gwen has succeeded in forgetting Constance is present—an easy thing to do; the child is forever skulking in corners. Now, in the nick of time, Constance has insinuated herself into the picture. She darts forward, kneels at her father’s feet, to the side of Gwen’s chair, and turns her small unattractive face obstinately toward the Videx. Forgetting herself, Gwen frowns.
Boy, under his camera cape, looks through the viewfinder, hand poised to press the bulb. A moment ago the composition was excellent. Now Constance has unbalanced it; it is spoiled. Boy is too polite to say so; he ignores the expression on Constance’s face, which is characteristic, if hostile. He checks the others: Steenie—pretty, charming, delicate. Shawcross—well-groomed, handsome, negligent, every inch the writer. His mother … Boy ducks out from the camera cape.
“Mama,” he says urgently, “Mama. You must smile.”
Gwen casts Constance a small look; she turns back to Boy. Eddie Shawcross, sensing her irritation, presses his gloved hand against her shoulder. One thumb (invisible to Boy) massages the nape of her neck. Gwen, mollified, decides to forget Constance. She tilts her chin back to the flattering angle. Leather against bare skin; suede against bare skin. It is delicious. Gwen smiles.
Beneath the camera hood the bulb is pressed. For a minute the camera whirs; for a minute no one moves.
In the distance, from the direction of the woods, a shot rings out. (Denton, or Cattermole, and another rabbit dead, Gwen thinks.) No one reacts to the shot—which was quite far off—and so, luckily, Boy’s exposure is not spoiled.
One minute later, Boy emerges, flushed.
“There,” he says triumphantly. “It’s done.”
Another shot rings out, farther away this time. Steenie yawns and climbs down from his mother’s lap. Boy is busy dismantling his tripod. Gwen, sure neither son is watching her, arches her back a little. For a second she feels against the nape of her neck the press of her lover’s thighs. She stands, stretches, meets his eyes, reads the message in them, falters, and looks away.
She turns, feeling guilty now, and happy enough to be generous, feeling she should make amends to Constance. She ought to make more of an effort to befriend the child, to include her. Gwen looks in every direction. But no; Constance has gone.
Later the same morning: Boy has set up his tripod in another part of the garden, by the croquet lawn. Two players: his other brothers, Acland and Frederic. Acland is winning; one can tell this not so much from the position of the croquet balls and hoops as by the expression on the brothers’ faces.
Acland is a year younger than Boy, and is now some four months away from his eighteenth birthday. Frederic is not yet fifteen; sometimes he resents this.
Freddie is in a temper; his face is dark with it. His mouth scowls; his brows are drawn together. The resemblance to his father, Denton, is marked. Father and son—both powerfully built, wide-shouldered, square-hipped, something about their stance suggesting the boxer, squaring up to the world, picking where and when to land the punch. Both expression and stance are misleading; unlike his father, whose famous rages may rumble for weeks, even months before they erupt, Freddie’s temper blazes quietly, then dies away and is forgotten. Fifteen minutes after this photograph is taken, Freddie’s anger will have passed.
For the most part, Freddie enjoys life; his demands are few and simple. He likes good food (he is already a little stout); he is developing a taste for wine; he likes to flirt with pretty girls, though he chafes at his lack of opportunity.
A sunny nature, Gwen will say of Frederic, the least troublesome of her sons. Freddie has none of Boy’s agonizing shyness—indeed, he will chat as openly and happily to a complete stranger in a railway carriage as he will to his family. He is not highly strung, as Steenie is. Freddie seems to have been born without nerves. Freddie’s great quality (Gwen maintains) is his simplicity; he may talk too much, but to be with him is to bathe in the easy warmth of a June day. So peaceful, Gwen will think, so cheering, so jolly, so … unlike Acland. And here she will pull herself up guiltily, then sigh and acknowledge the truth: Acland is the most difficult of her sons; she loves him, but she does not understand him.
Acland, in Boy’s photograph, stands a little to the side of the frame, and (unlike Freddie, who stares straight at the lens) Acland’s head is slightly turned, as if he distrusted or disliked this fixing of his image in a picture. A tall young man, thin compared to his brother. His clothes are elegant and his stance (croquet mallet in hand) is a studied one, carefully negligent. But Boy is a subtle photographer, and he has caught something in Acland’s attitude—a hint of arrogance, a suggestion of triumph. Not only has Acland won this game, he is pleased to have won, and cannot disguise his pleasure in his victory.
In the photograph the light glances across Acland’s face, and the wind has lifted his hair from his forehead. The picture (sepia) cannot show this, but Acland had fair hair lit with red; his eyes (the most remarkable feature in an arresting face) were perceptibly different in color, the left eye hazel, the right clearest green.
When he was a small child, Gwen—delighting in this son who resembled no one in the family—gave him fanciful nicknames. She called him her changeling child, her Ariel—until Denton, enraged by this sentimentality, put a stop to it. Then Gwen desisted (she was usually obedient to Denton); but in the privacy of her own room or the nursery, she would use the nicknames again.
Acland was so quick, so bright, so strange and unpredictable, so fierce and sudden in his passions. He was made of fire and air, Gwen would think—there was nothing of earth in him.
In those early years Acland was Gwen’s delight. She was proud of his quick intelligence, she delighted in his company; she discovered—and this touched her to the heart—that Acland was vulnerable. He raced after things, must always acquire more information, must always understand—and this pursuit of his, as if he always chased something just out of reach, made him hectic.
This driven quality in him, marked even when he was very young, made him always restless: Gwen discovered that when he was so, she could calm him—not with words, not with arguments (they were always useless) but simply with her presence.
“Ah, Acland,” she would say, “you can’t fight the world,” and she would take him in her arms, watch him become peaceful.
When he was a boy. Later this changed. Perhaps when Acland first was sent away to school, perhaps when her last child, Steenie, was born—Gwen sometimes cites these events by way of excuse, but she knows that, truthfully, neither episode explains what happened. Suddenly, apparently without cause, Acland grew away from her. If he needed solace he no longer turned to his mother, and by the time he was twelve the break was complete.
He no longer confided in her as once he did; he seemed to fear betraying his emotions, and he judged people, Gwen thought, judged them in a way she grew to hate—and fear. He showed little sympathy and made no allowances; mention the frailty of human nature, and Acland would exhibit scorn. No, he looked, estimated, judged, and then, too often, he dismissed.
To be dismissed by Acland, aged fifteen or sixteen, was not a pleasant experience. It was withering. Gwen told herself that it was youthful arrogance, a by-product of Acland’s intellect, that it would pass—but by that time Eddie Shawcross had come into her life, and Acland’s implacable refusal to accept Shawcross cut Gwen to the heart.
She could hardly plead on her lover’s behalf, although she tried from time to time to emphasize his strengths. She gave Acland copies of Shawcross’s books—and then suffered in silence when Acland remorselessly explained why he thought them bad. She tried—in the first year or so—to throw them together; and then she gave up. It occurred to her that Acland knew, that he was not deceived, as the rest of the family were, about the true nature of her relationship. Then Gwen became truly afraid. Acland did not just judge the world in general, she saw; he judged he
r, his mother, judged her and—presumably—found her wanting.
I have lost a son, Gwen would think sometimes, close to tears, and she would yearn to throw her arms around Acland, to tell him everything, to explain. Fearing him, she never did so. Acland, she knew, might be brought back to her, but there would be a price, and that price would be Shawcross. To regain her son’s confidence and respect, her lover would have to be sacrificed—and this Gwen, for all her occasional unhappiness over Acland, cannot bring herself to do. She loves Shawcross; she cannot give him up, and this her son would never understand. Acland, Gwen tells herself, is too contained; passion does not exist in Acland’s universe.
In this judgment Gwen is quite wrong, for Acland himself is in love. In the past year a universe has been unlocked by this love, yet he does not speak of it to his mother or to anyone. Acland protects the love from the gaze of others behind a barrier of sarcasm and nonchalance.
Meanwhile, all that hidden away, Acland poses for Boy’s photograph. He swings the mallet, rests it, holds still (although he hates to be still, and Boy’s endless photographs make him impatient). A glowering Freddie, an inattentive Acland.
“Keep still,” Boy commands, and the camera whirs.
“Such a day! Such a day! Such a day!” Acland shouts when at last the exposure is over, and he throws himself down full-length upon the grass.
Freddie and Boy regard him, face lifted to the sky, arms outstretched, expression rapturous.
Freddie grins. Boy, dismantling his tripod, gives Acland a prim glance. Acland’s moods are too precipitate, in Boy’s opinion. They veer from heaven to hell, from the black to the sublime, too easily. Boy finds these moods pretentious.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Acland,” he says, and tucks his tripod under his arm. “Do you have to be so extravagant?”
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