Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  “A warning? Heavens—how dramatic!” Constance smiled. “Am I to hear some terrible revelation, because if so, you should know—”

  “No revelations, Constance. Nothing so startling.”

  Maud was already moving toward the door. It became clear to Constance that this interview was over.

  “Just one small thing. A vulgar phrase puts it most succinctly, I think. In selecting Montague—and I’m sure, Constance, it was you who did the selecting, not the other way about—in selecting Montague, you have bitten off more than you can chew.”

  “Really?” Constance tossed her head. “I have very sharp little teeth, you know….”

  “You’ll need them,” Maud replied, and went out, and closed the door.

  V

  IN TRANSIT

  WEXTON TELEPHONED TO TELL ME he was in flight. From a biographer, on this occasion—or rather, from a would-be biographer, a young American academic whose persistence made Wexton shudder.

  “He’s after me,” he said in lugubrious tones. “He’s interviewing people. He’s been to Virginia. He’s been to Yale. He’s even been to France. And now he’s in Hampstead. Trying to flatter me. When that doesn’t work, he tries threats …”

  “Threats, Wexton?”

  “Oh, you know. That he’ll publish anyway. That he’s sure I’d welcome the opportunity to set the record straight. He’ll be going through the trash cans next. I know his type. I want to come to Winterscombe. I have to escape.”

  Wexton arrived a day later. He was carrying two enormous suitcases, both very heavy, whose contents he declined to explain. “Wait and see,” he said. “My problem. Not pajamas and a toothbrush, I can tell you that.”

  I was very glad to see him. I had realized by then that embarking upon the past as I had, alone in a large house, was a mistake. My next commission (the one in France) had been delayed by the illness of my client; ten days spent working at my London offices had not, as I hoped, severed the links with the past. Winterscombe, Constance’s journals, had tempted me back.

  By the time Wexton arrived, his presence massive, sensible, reassuring, I was already beginning to see both these papers and the past zones as a trap. I was no longer sure of the balance of my own judgment. To my questions—and by then my mind thronged with questions—the dead returned dusty answers, answers I knew to be incomplete. In the case of Constance, the only reply was further questions and ambiguities. I felt confined in Constance’s hall of mirrors, with its tricksy reflections. I saw, and I half-saw; I had begun to fear I might never get out. Yes, I was very glad to see Wexton.

  On the day he arrived I told him about Constance’s journals and the manner in which they had been given. I took him into the drawing room, expecting dismay. The room dismayed me: It was a mess, a clutter, a cascade of papers. It looked obsessional; it was obsessional. Wexton, I thought, would cure me. He would tell me to stop.

  To my surprise, he did not. He ambled up and down, picking up a letter here, a photograph there. He discovered an old box of Steenie’s Russian cigarettes, lit one, and stood puffing on it in an amused, reflective way.

  “People can’t resist it, I guess,” he said at last. “Keeping all this stuff.”

  “This house is especially bad. Nothing was ever thrown away. I suppose there wasn’t time, when my parents died and the war came. No time to sift, anyway. So everything was kept. It was just bundled into boxes and packing cases. No attempt to order things, no classification. There’s so much evidence. Now, scarcely anyone writes letters—but my family never stopped. And diaries, journals … Who keeps diaries or journals now?”

  “Statesmen. Politicians. They do,” Wexton replied with gloom. “Still, those are different. Exercises in self-justification. Writing with an eye cocked for posterity. Juggling with the verdict of history. Except—no. Maybe all diaries do that.”

  “Look at all these letters. I can’t remember when I last wrote a letter—a proper one, I mean, not a business one—”

  I stopped. I could remember. I remembered then: the letter, weakly and cautiously phrased, to avoid betraying the fact that I still loved, and still hoped; I could remember the letter as vividly as I could the man to whom it was sent.

  “It won’t change,” Wexton continued. “People love to record themselves. We’re just in between methods right now. You wait. In fifty years someone in your position won’t be sifting through a whole lot of letters and diaries, sure. But there’ll be a substitute. Home movies instead of photograph albums. Computers! Imagine that. It’ll happen. They’ll store themselves away on machines. Great spools of tape. Do computers run on tape? People can’t resist it, you see. It’s the last vanity. Parting shots from the grave.” He paused. “It’s worth remembering that aspect when you go through all this. Not too many people in that situation tell the truth.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  Wexton shrugged. He picked up one of the black notebooks, then laid it down.

  “Can you imagine Constance—on computer?” He grinned. “Or Constance’s home movies?”

  “Don’t tease me, Wexton. It isn’t as easy as that. This is my family. My parents. My past too. And I don’t understand it. I can’t tell lies from truth.”

  I explained then, as much as I was able. I brought Wexton up-to-date. I explained that Constance seemed convinced that her father had been murdered, and that when she came to name her suspects, it was members of my family who comprised her list. I told him, briefly, the truth as she wrote it, about her childhood. I told him how she had selected her husband, at her dance.

  “Constance, Constance, Constance,” he said, when I had finished. “That’s an awful lot of Constance. What about everyone else? What are they? Bystanders? Spear carriers?”

  “No, Wexton, obviously not. I know they’re not. But even when I look for them, I can’t find them. I can’t hear them. Constance drowns them out. Look—”

  I held out to him one of the black notebooks, the one I had just begun to read. Wexton shook his head.

  “All right. Listen then. This is 1916. October 1916. I’ll read you just a little bit. Then maybe you’ll see what I mean.”

  “October 1916? So she’s not married yet?”

  “No, she isn’t married yet.”

  “And it’s before—?”

  “Yes. Well before. That’s 1917.”

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  I read Wexton the following extract. Like many of the entries in the journal, it took the form of a letter. More than a diary, this was a one-sided dialogue—between Constance and a man she knew to be dead.

  Poor Jenna [she wrote]. I went to see her today, Acland, for your baby’s sake. Don’t you hope Hennessy is killed soon? I do. I hope some German gets him in his sights. For Jenna’s sake, and mine. Acland, if you can, guide the bullet, will you? Nicely. Between the eyes, I think.

  What else? Montague is the very devil—but you know about that. Today I read him my latest letter from Jane, in my Jane voice. It was not very kind, perhaps, but it was very funny. Poor Jane. Do you know why she’s gone to France? She wants to go to the place where you died. Such a waste of time! She won’t find you there, for you’re somewhere else—and only I know where that is. You’re mine, not hers. We have a pact, remember?

  Oh, Acland, I wish you would come again in the night. Won’t you? Just once?

  “You see?” I closed the journal; Wexton made no comment. “It’s all so perverse. Writing to a dead man. Montague is the very devil—what does that mean? I met Stern. Constance claims he never loved her, but he did. He loved her very much.”

  “He said so?”

  “Oddly enough, he did. It was not long before he died—maybe he knew he was dying and that was the reason. I’m not sure. He told me a story …”

  I looked away. I could see Stern as I spoke, sitting in the quietness of that room in New York, telling me how his marriage to Constance had ended and giving me advice—advice I did not take.

  “A story?�
�

  “An episode. I found it sad—bitter, perhaps. He didn’t speak bitterly, though. He seemed to think of it as a love story. He avoided that word all the way through, and then, when he had finished, he looked down at his hands. He had very beautiful hands. He said, ‘You see, I loved my wife.’”

  There was a silence. Wexton turned away. “Well, yes,” he said. “I always imagined he did. Steenie used to say he was cold. I never thought that—the opposite, in fact. Whenever I met them, here at Winterscombe … He used to watch Constance, you know, all the time. And when he watched her, his whole face changed. It was like seeing a furnace door swing back. You couldn’t look at it. It burned your face. All that strength of feeling, held in check.” He paused. “A peep into the inferno, that marriage, I always thought. People manufacture their own hells. Did Constance love him, do you think?”

  “She claims not to. And he goes to great lengths to deny he loves her—or so she says. You see? Just another thing I don’t understand.”

  “What exactly?”

  “Love. These letters, these journals, all these papers—they’re all so filled with love. The more I see the word, the more I distrust it. Everyone uses it. They all hijack it. They all mean something different by it. Which of them is right? Steenie? Gwen? Constance? Jane? Or you, Wexton—you’re here too. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know that.” Wexton’s face had become puzzled. He patted at his pockets in an absent-minded way, frowned at the fire.

  “Jane? Why do you call her that?”

  “Because that’s what happened to me, Wexton.” I turned away. “That’s what I mean. I think of her in that way because I’ve read too much Constance. I know that.”

  “Your own mother?”

  “Yes.” I turned around angrily. “I was only eight when she died, Wexton—”

  “Even so. You remember her, surely, as she was?”

  “I don’t know anymore, Wexton. Sometimes, when I read her diaries, I think I do. Then I go back to Constance’s journals, and she slips away. She’s Jane again. The heiress. The nurse. A kind heart. No imagination. A life of good works.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  Wexton, I could see, was very distressed. He began to walk up and down the room in an angry way. He stopped and banged his hand down upon the desk.

  “It’s not right. That happens—to people like your mother. The good get wiped out. The bad get the best dialogue, the best plot lines. While your godmother was dancing about in London drawing rooms, there was a war on. I told you that. I told you to look at the war. Your mother was there. She was in the thick of it. She was a nurse. She did things. What did Constance ever do? Mess about with men. Set about snaring a rich husband—”

  “Wexton—”

  “Okay, okay. But it’s wrong. You shouldn’t let Constance get away with it. She’s hogging the spotlight. But then that’s not surprising. She always did.”

  I was chastened by this, because I knew Wexton was right. The outburst was fierce, from a man who was rarely immoderate except on the subject of literature. I listened, and I hope I learned.

  Later that day I did return to my mother’s journals; I followed her to the war. I followed her to France. Over the next two days, when I read, I read my mother’s story exclusively. I listened to that quieter, very different voice. It was then, I think, that she began to come back to me for the first time. I saw her again as the woman I remembered. She emerged, to continue Wexton’s metaphor, from the wings; there she was, in the lights.

  Wexton knew, I think, that there had been a change in me, and that an unfair bias was in the process of being corrected. He apologized for his outburst, even claimed a bias of his own: Constance was not as trivial, and certainly not as one-dimensional, as he had claimed. “I overstated,” he said.

  One afternoon, returning from a walk by the lake, Wexton settled himself by the fire. We drank tea. Dusk fell. Wexton smoked some of Steenie’s Russian cigarettes. We sat there in a companionable silence for a while, the air aromatic, the room comfortable, the house at rest. It was that afternoon that Wexton told me about the war, and my mother, as he recalled them.

  “You know,” he said, settling back in his chair, clasping his hands, stretching out his long legs, “your mother went out to France a month or so after I did. She was prickly, defensive, difficult to know at first. We remet in a town called Saint-Hilaire. It’s still there. I revisited it once, after the war. Does she write about that?”

  “Your meeting? Yes, she does.”

  “I remember it very well. It was the worst winter of that war. Maybe this is infectious—for once, I feel like talking about the past. About the war. Your mother too. Listen. It was like this …”

  Just outside Saint-Hilaire there was a narrow headland. It jutted out into the Channel. It was known locally as the Pointe Sublime.

  It was not sublime in winter. It was cold. The wind cut. The view across the Channel was obscured by cloud. Jane ignored this. She turned up the collar of her coat and bent her head. She trudged along the narrow path above the dunes. She intended to reach the end of the headland, then walk back again.

  Late afternoon; it was beginning to drizzle. The air was brackish; she could taste salt on her lips. When she reached the end of the headland, she looked back. She could see the cafés of Saint-Hilaire—their lights were being switched on. In one of the cafés an accordion was playing.

  Next to the cafés was the larger bulk of the hospitals. There were five of them, and they had once been hotels. In that one—the third from the left—Jane now worked. She had been on duty there all night and all morning. There, on the first floor. She looked at the ranks of windows. They lit up, one by one. Her ward. It had once been the hotel ballroom.

  The waters of the Channel were slick, oily. She watched them heave. To right and left the dunes were wired. She traced their lines: a zigzag of barbs. The beach below was more heavily fortified.

  Impassable. She moved to one side, into the lee of the dunes. She wished she had worn a hat. The wind caught her smooth copper hair and blew it about. It whipped her face. Perhaps the wind veered, for she could no longer hear the accordion. She could hear the guns.

  Heavy artillery, more than thirty kilometers away, a breathy reverberation.

  Where was the war? Over there—always over there, where the guns boomed. And where was Jane? Always, she had decided, on the periphery; she was close, but she was not close enough.

  She knew where the war was, in theory. If she had had a map, she could have traced it. The war was a snake, six hundred miles long. Its head was in Belgium, and the tip of its tail touched the border with Switzerland. The snake’s spine meandered. It was patterned with trenches. It was a somnolent snake, and sometimes it shifted its position, making a new curve here, a new loop there. It accommodated advances and retreats; its position never altered greatly. It was well fed, this snake; after all, it ingested a daily diet of men.

  There was the war, in theory. She could trace it on a map. She had traced it on a map. She did not believe her finger when it traced; she believed something more frightening. She believed the war was everywhere, and nowhere. She believed she had glimpsed this war long before it was ever declared, and would continue to see it long after any armistice. She believed the war was both an exterior and an interior thing. She believed it could transmute. She had never seen cells through a microscope, she had never witnessed their capacity to divide and subdivide, but if she had she might have said, “Yes, war is like that.”

  This made her afraid. What made her especially afraid was that she believed the war was inside herself. It had got in. She had let it in. It was there, and she might never get rid of it.

  This belief seemed to Jane unreasonable, even mad. It was not a balanced way to think, and Jane told herself she thought in that way because she was tired. Because she ate poorly. Because her patients died, and their wounds were terrible. This happened. It was something all nurses must guard against. S
he must guard against it, too, for she had to be well enough to continue to nurse. That was it. Fix upon something simple. To continue.

  That night, Boy would be passing through Saint-Hilaire on his way back to England. The letter from Boy, requesting a meeting (their first since she had broken their engagement), was in her pocket. Standing in the lee of the dunes, Jane took it out and read it again. The rain spotted the pages and blurred the ink. The wind teased the pages and tried to twist them out of her hand. It was not a communicative letter, in any case. It was, as she had come to think of Boy, opaque. It resisted understanding. It began, as Boy’s letters always had, “My dearest Jane.” It ended, equally predictably, “Yours most affectionately, Boy.”

  Jane folded the letter back in her pocket. She would keep the appointment, although she did not want to. She turned to go back, and it was as she turned, glancing to her left, that she saw she was not alone, as she had thought. Not twenty feet away from her was a young man.

  He was sitting in a shallow depression, on a shelf of sand and marram grass. He looked windswept. His hair stood up in curious quills and peaks. He wore around his shoulders an assortment of scarves, sweaters, and rumpled jackets. They were surmounted by a greatcoat, and gave him a hunched look. He was frowning. On his knees was a large notebook.

  Whatever he wrote there seemed unsatisfactory. One minute he would write; then he would cross out. He would frown at the notebook, then at the sea, as if he blamed it in some way. Wexton. The American poet. Steenie’s friend from London. She had met him outside the hospital in his ambulance the previous day. She did not want to meet him again today.

  Jane edged away from the dune. He appeared not to have seen her. She had nothing against Wexton—who, whenever she had encountered him, seemed pleasant—but she preferred to be alone. She took a furtive step toward the path.