Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  “Wrong,” Acland replies, and does not even glance in Boy’s direction. “Wrong, wrong, wrong! I am not extravagant. I am … steadfast.”

  He proclaims the word, perhaps to his brothers, perhaps to the sky, perhaps to himself.

  Freddie’s response is an amiable kick; Boy’s response is to leave. He proceeds across the lawn and, at the edge, looks back. Acland still has not moved. He lies on his back and stares up at the sun, but his expression has changed, and his face—as pale and precise as a marble monument—is serious.

  Shall we move on? Boy took a great many other photographs that day—that key day—and some of them are helpful.

  Here is one of the houseguests, Mrs. Heyward-West, formerly the King’s mistress. She is descending from a motorcar, wearing furs, a huge hat, and a motoring veil, which she has just lifted. Nearby, another houseguest, Jane Conyngham—plain Jane Conyngham as she was unkindly known, and one of the great heiresses of her day. Jane, whose long-widowed father owns adjoining estates in Wiltshire, has known the Cavendish family from earliest childhood. She has been invited this weekend for a special reason: Lord Callendar plans to marry her off to his eldest son, Boy; a proposal is imminent.

  We shall come to Jane in due course. Meanwhile, dressed in an unflattering walking suit, she stands next to Acland, and her gaze is fixed upon him. Jane has an intelligent face. We would not call her plain now, perhaps, for our standards in beauty have changed. She stands next to Acland, absorbed, and Acland—predictably—is looking the other way.

  Next, a group of servants, lined up outside the servants’ hall in serried ranks, as if for a school photograph. How patient Boy must have been! Toward the back, at the end of a line, is a girl called Jenna Curtis.

  She is then aged sixteen and has been in service at Winterscombe for two years; both her parents, now dead, worked there before her. Jenna has been steadily promoted over the past two years and is by this time a between-stairs maid. For this party of Gwen’s, however, she has a new role: Jane Conyngham’s personal maid has fallen ill; Jenna has been pressed into service. Today, it is she who will unpack Jane’s dresses and iron them and lay them out. It is she who will help Jane Conyngham dress her hair for the great dinner, and she will do so with such tact, skill, and patience that Jane (shy herself, and easily intimidated by smarter maids) will actually remember her and will—a few years later—promote her marriage. A mistake.

  The sixteen-year-old Jenna is pretty. By modern standards she is plump. She looks rounded, soft as a dove; her eyes are wide and dark and calm. A lovely girl, even though her uniform is drab and her cap is unbecoming.

  My Jenna, I thought, when I first found this photograph. She was unrecognizable as the Jenna I remembered. But then, the Jenna I found in the notebooks was different too. Words and pictures: I placed them side by side, and I considered.

  One last photograph. Come with me; we are indoors now. Boy has abandoned people for interiors; he has had trouble lighting this.

  Boy, it seems, has a project of his own, not yet revealed to anyone. It involves photographing each of the rooms at Winterscombe, mounting the pictures in an album, and then presenting it to his father, Denton. The gift may bring his father ’round, Boy thinks; Denton may see that there is a use to the Videx after all, for Denton is immensely proud of his house.

  Above all, he is proud of this room in which Boy now stands. Unblushingly, Denton refers to this room as “the King’s bedroom.” All the other bedrooms have names too: There is the Blue room, the Red room, the Chinese room, the Honeysuckle room … but those names are rarely conjured by his father. The King’s bedroom, however, he mentions at every opportunity, especially to guests new to Winterscombe.

  It is one way of reminding them (should they not know) that Denton’s house has received royal visitors. It provides Denton, a patriot, a monarchist, and a snob, with the lead-in he seeks. He can then launch himself on the anecdotes his family have come to dread: how King Edward graciously complimented him on the excellence of his shoot, his claret, his view, his architect, his plumbing, above all his perspicacity in marrying such a beauty as Gwen.

  Denton will mention the King’s remarkable good humor while at Winterscombe (the King’s temper being notoriously unreliable); he will attribute it to the excellence of the Winterscombe air, unequaled (Denton believes) in any other part of England. Denton will mention the King’s cordial invitation to shoot with him at Sandringham; he will neglect to mention that this visit never materialized.

  Then, ignoring Gwen’s frowns (Gwen, being American, finds all this glorification of the monarch tedious), Denton will occasionally take his guests upstairs so that they can view for themselves the room where the King slept.

  He will pace about a room which is swaddled and stuffed. He will punch the ballooning pregnancies of the red velvet chairs, smooth the bulges of the crimson curtains, caress the curvatures of the four-poster bed. The whole room was redecorated for the King’s impending visit, and in the bathroom beyond, the wonders of German plumbing were installed at vast expense, but it is the bed, which Denton himself designed, which remains his pride and his delight.

  It is so large it had to be erected by the estate carpenters in the room itself. Steps are required to mount it. At its head is a canopy embroidered with the royal arms; at its foot, two cherubs disport themselves suggestively. The mattress, hand-stuffed with horsehair and finest wool, is eighteen inches thick; Denton, to demonstrate its luxury and resilience, will—occasionally—bounce on it. However, he does so with a certain reverence, for to Denton this bedroom is a shrine, a hallowed place. Sometimes Denton allows himself to speculate on the mysteries this bedroom may have seen. (When the King visited, the Queen was indisposed, but his current mistress was of the house party.) He speculates, but he maintains respect. And for this reason, the King’s bedroom has not been used in five years. Until this weekend.

  This weekend its sanctity will be broken—Gwen has insisted upon it. With so many guests for her comet party, and only eighteen bedrooms at her disposal, Gwen finds herself short of accommodation. For once, and with a hostess’s authority, she has insisted, and Denton—furious—has been overruled. The King’s bedroom shall be occupied. Gwen has decreed that Eddie Shawcross shall sleep in it.

  Her lover has in fact been nagging her for months to let him use this room. Shawcross has a lively sexual imagination, and Gwen knows that he must have particular plans for this room—though he will not tell her what they are, for he is secretive. The unspecified plans have inflamed her own imagination; for months, temptation and timidity fought a fierce battle. Finally she took the risk and, to her own astonishment, found Denton could be vanquished.

  After her victory, it is true, Gwen felt some anxiety. She would look at her husband, wonder if he suspected, ask herself if she had gone too far. But in the past few days these anxieties have receded. Denton’s temper is bad, but there is nothing unusual in that, and (Gwen thinks, is almost sure) her husband still does not suspect. This is partly because she and Shawcross have been commendably discreet; partly because Denton is unimaginative; mainly (she tells herself) because Denton is not interested.

  Since the birth of Steenie, Denton has stayed away from her; the punctual weekly peremptory visits to her room have ceased. Instead, Denton makes punctual weekly visits up to London, where—Gwen assumes—he keeps some woman. True, he does not like Shawcross and does not bother to disguise his dislike, but this is just snobbishness on his part, Gwen thinks. Denton dislikes Shawcross because of his class, because of the school he went to, because he is a writer—a profession for which Denton has the most profound contempt. But this snobbishness is, in a way, helpful; it would not occur to Denton that a man such as Shawcross could be his rival.

  So, on the whole, Gwen feels safe. Because she feels safe she is gradually becoming less cautious. She has begun to chafe at her marriage to Denton; she has begun to resent his churlishness. She is thirty-eight; Denton is sixty-five. When she finally ne
rved herself to make the announcement that Eddie would sleep in the King’s bedroom this weekend, when her husband’s face purpled with rage, she found herself asking a new question: Must she remain tied to Denton for the rest of her life?

  This question she keeps to herself. She does not dare to hint of it to her lover. For what is the alternative? Divorce? That would be out of the question. She would lose her children, lose her place in society; she would be without money and she would be ostracized. Such a route to freedom is unthinkable, and, Gwen suspects, Eddie Shawcross would not welcome it. His only source of income is his writing; he finds it hard even to support Constance and often complains of that. And besides, he is not a man renowned for his fidelity. When Gwen first met Shawcross he already had a considerable reputation as a ladies’ man, with a particular penchant for women of the aristocracy; Shawcross, it was said, did not like to bed lower than the wife of an earl, and his men friends made unsavory jokes about his methods of rising in society.

  In the circumstances it is a continuing source of wonder to Gwen that she attracted Shawcross at all, and that, having attracted him, she has held on to him. Their affair has endured four years; Gwen does not like to ask but she thinks that, for Shawcross, this is a record. However, he has never in all that time admitted to loving her, and with him Gwen never feels secure. Divorce? Separation? No, she would not dare to mention such ideas to Eddie; the least suggestion of pressure, and he might leave her.

  Instead, just of late another idea has come to her; it came to her, in fact, for the first time when she insisted Eddie should sleep in this room, when Denton’s face purpled, when he shouted and slammed out of the room. There it was, curling into her mind like smoke: What if her husband were to die?

  Gwen is ashamed of this thought, but once admitted, it will not go away. If her husband were to die she would be rich—very rich indeed—and that fact might alter Eddie’s attitude considerably. Gwen, shying away from this speculation, tells herself that she is only being sensible. After all, Denton is much older than she. He eats too much. He drinks too much. He is overweight; he has gout; he has that choleric temper about which his doctors often warn him. He could die; he might die … He could have a seizure, an apoplexy….

  Gwen does not want Denton to die. Indeed, the very thought of his death causes her distress, for despite his irascibility Denton is in many ways a good husband and Gwen is protective toward him. Providing he is humored, Denton is easy enough to live with. He loves his sons and is fiercely proud of them; he can be gallant to Gwen, even considerate. She and her husband are, for the most part, comfortable together; Gwen is wise enough to know that this easy marital steadiness suits her and should not lightly be thrown away.

  On the other hand, there is Eddie. On the other hand, she would like to be free…. Except what does it mean exactly, that word free? Free to be with her lover, free to give herself up to him? This freedom she enjoys already. But free to be with Eddie permanently? Free to marry him? No. Gwen shies away from that thought. Eddie is a lover; she is not always sure she would like him as a husband.

  Meanwhile, she has the best of both worlds. Denton does not know; Shawcross does not complain, and the demands he makes on her (such demands! Gwen glories in them), though intense, are limited. Don’t rock the boat, Gwen, he said to her once, and though she was hurt by the remark and found it somewhat coarse, she later accepted that what he said was sensible. The great thing is, they are safe.

  Was Gwen right about this? We shall see. Certainly she was right as far as her eldest son was concerned. Boy—honorable, devoted to his mother, in awe of his father—could not conceive of either parent as an adulterer. As far as Boy is concerned, his parents must love each other, for they are man and wife. As for Shawcross, he is a good, loyal, trusted friend. Boy cannot understand either his books or his jokes—and this makes Boy feel humble.

  Now, setting up his tripod, screwing the last nuts into place, Boy sees only a room, a room whose photograph may please his father; he has sensed no undercurrents before and he senses none now. It is simply … a bedroom. He regards the undulations of the bed, the billowing curtains that divide the sleeping quarters from the dressing room; he frowns at the heavy draperies across the windows and, fussily, adjusts them to let in more light. Why, someone could hide in this room and never be discovered, Boy thinks, and then forgets the notion at once, to concentrate on technical matters.

  Indoors, with less natural light, the exposure must be longer. Two minutes, Boy decides, hoping no one will come in to spoil the shot. Two minutes …

  Remember this bedroom, please. It is important.

  “Why are you called Boy?”

  Boy looks up from his camera, startled. The girl has come into the room silently, has perhaps been there for some while, watching him. Luckily, his photographs are complete, and Boy—busy dismantling his Adams Videx—had thought himself alone. The girl is standing just inside the door and seems uninterested in the answer to her question, for she is already looking away from him, a small frown on her face. Her gaze circles the room; it takes in the royal arms, the fat bed, the undistinguished oils of Denton’s Scottish estate, and the curtains. Boy hesitates and she looks back at him.

  “You’re not a boy. You’re a man. You look like a man. So why do they call you Boy?”

  Her tone is irritable, almost accusing. Boy, easily embarrassed, finds himself beginning to blush. He bends his head to hide it, hoping the child will go away.

  To be truthful, Boy does not like Constance, and this makes him ashamed, for he is generous-hearted and he knows it is uncharitable. After all, Constance is motherless, does not even remember her mother, Jessica, who died of tuberculosis in a Swiss sanitorium when Constance was just two years old.

  Yes, Constance is motherless, and her father treats her coldly, almost cruelly. Boy, observing this, seeing how Shawcross mocks his daughter in front of friends, has told himself that Constance must bring back painful memories, must remind her father of the loss of his wife. But even if there are reasons for this behavior, it is not kind, and Boy feels sure Constance must be very lonely. He should not dislike her; Constance should be an object of pity. After all, it is not as if she stays at Winterscombe all the time. Surely, on those brief occasions of her visits he can afford to be friendly?

  On the other hand, to be friendly to Constance is not easy. Constance obstinately repels pity; whenever Boy feels it welling up in him, the child seems to sense it and deflects it at once. Her manner is abrupt, prickly, rude. She seems to have an unerring instinct for the weaknesses of others; she homes in on those weaknesses at once, and Boy can never make up his mind whether this is policy on her part or accident. He tells himself it is accident. After all, Constance cannot help her manners; it is just that she has never had the right guidance. She must have a nurse or governess to help her, but such a figure is never in evidence at Winterscombe, and perhaps Eddie Shawcross cannot afford to employ a lady of the right type.

  If there were such a person, Boy thinks, looking at the small figure in front of him, she would insist that something be done about Constance’s appearance. Her hair is always unkempt; her face, hands, and fingernails are often grubby; she wears cheap, ugly, unflattering clothes. No, Constance deserves kindness; her rudeness must be caused by lack of training, not ill-nature. After all, Constance is only ten years old.

  Now, Constance is waiting for an answer (yet again, she has homed in on a weakness), and Boy does not know what to say. He loathes the nickname Boy, wishes his mother and family would drop it now and forever. He fears (correctly as it happens) that this will not occur. Now, trapped, he has to say something. He shrugs.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. Mama called me that when I was little, and it stuck, I suppose. Lots of people have nicknames, family names. It isn’t important.”

  “I don’t like it at all. It’s foolish.” The child pauses. “I shall call you Francis.”

  To Boy’s surprise, Constance then smiles at him.
The smile lightens her normally tight, sullen little face, and Boy’s guilt and shame at once deepen. For Constance, too, has nicknames, though she may not be aware of them. Her father refers to her simply as “the albatross.” “Where is the albatross now, I wonder?” Eddie will remark archly to his audience, and will sometimes even mimic the weight of that ill-omened bird around his neck.

  Boy and his brothers use a different name: Constance Cross, they call her. It was Acland’s idea. (“Well, she is always cross,” he explained. “She is also a cross we have to bear. Several weeks a year.”)

  Constance Cross, the albatross. It is very unkind. Boy decides, there and then, that he must make amends.

  He smiles at Constance shyly and indicates his Videx.

  “I’ll take your photograph if you’d like. It won’t take long.”

  “You took it this morning, earlier.”

  A flat answer. His overture is rejected as usual. Boy perseveres.

  “Yes, but that was with the others. This will be just you. On your own …”

  “In here?” The child’s face shows a sudden glimmer of animation.

  “Well, if you liked—I suppose I could. But the light’s difficult. I really meant outside—”

  “Not outside. Here.”

  Her tone is now definite, even demanding. Boy caves in. He begins to remount tripod and camera, bends over to screw the tripod legs into place.

  When he looks up again, he is startled, almost shocked. The child has struck a pose for him. She has clambered up onto the King’s bed and is now sitting on it, legs swinging, her skirts slightly hitched up. Boy stares at her in dismay, glances toward the door.

  It is not just that the child is sitting on the sacred bed and probably creasing the counterpane, which would make Denton Cavendish roar with rage; it is the way she is sitting.

  Boy stares fearfully at a pair of dusty buttoned boots that end at the ankle. Above the boots he can glimpse wrinkled white cotton stockings and a layer of none-too-clean petticoats.