Below them on the beach, Winnie, with a group of her “gels,” was preparing to swim. They were enduring what Winnie described as “the warming-up process.” This procedure (Wexton felt sure it would be necessary; the weather might be warm but the water would be icy) involved the throwing to-and-fro of a large striped beach ball. Winnie, mountainous in a black woolen bathing suit that reached from neck to knees, worn with a frilled bathing cap that reminded Wexton of dairymaids, led this warm-up.
“Jump, Clissold,” he heard her call in a commanding voice. “Oh, you silly gel. Not like that. Higher.”
Colonel Hunter-Coote, a very small neat man with birdlike bones who, when next to Winnie, resembled an anxious sparrow, watched this performance with an air of pride. Only when the waiter approached did he turn. He then tried to interest Jane in the prospect of what he called pudding.
“Oh, but you must,” he said. “One of those sort of cake things they have here. Winnie likes them.” He eyed the approaching tea cart. “Why don’t you let me choose for you? Now those, for instance. I can definitely recommend those. Oui, garçon. You’re sure you won’t, Wexton? Deux—ex—pâtisseries, s’il vous plâit, monsieur. No, no, not the cakes. Those. That’s it. Oh, jolly good. Merci beaucoup.”
Jane, catching Wexton’s eye, smiled. Her own French was fluent, as Wexton knew; Hunter-Coote’s was execrable. He spoke it in a very loud voice, with an expression of profound embarrassment. It had obviously never occurred to him that Jane might speak French; she and Wexton had an unspoken pact not to disillusion him.
Jane ate the pastry, then, when the coffee was brought, accepted a cigarette from Wexton. She smoked occasionally now—something that would have horrified her a year before—but she smoked in the manner of a novice, taking small puffs, then letting the tube of tobacco lie between her fingers. She gazed out to sea. Wexton thought she was daydreaming.
She looked peaceful, contented; she was greatly changed, Wexton thought. When he had first met her, he had thought her more tense, more striving, more pent-up than almost anyone he had ever known—and this had interested him. Her nervous mannerisms had almost disappeared; this had interested him too. He liked Jane, had liked her even when he met her in London. He thought her … good. Or if not good yet, at least trying to be good. And that was interesting. Not many people bothered.
Jane had removed her straw hat now and was fanning her face with it; she turned in the direction of the promenade. From beneath the awning, one band of sunlight lit her hair. In this light it was as red as maples in the fall; the pallor of her skin against the flame of this hair was remarkable. Across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose there was a dusting of freckles; Wexton found these, in their symmetry, pleasing. They drew attention to her eyes, whose beauty lay less in their formation than in their tranquil expression.
Jane possessed a quality he found difficult to define, but which was most apparent when she nursed. Now, she no longer used that quick bright blank voice they had taught her at Guy’s; she did not need it. She might lay her hand on a man’s arm, and Wexton could see a mysterious process of transference take place: From Jane to the man, there was an intense outflowing of energy. This energy calmed. And yet energy, too, seemed the wrong word for something so serene. For want of a better word, Wexton would have said Jane possessed grace.
That term, a hangover from his Episcopalian upbringing, fretted him a little.
He leaned forward in his seat so that he might also see what had caught her eye on the promenade at Paris-Plage. Not Winnie and her gels—though they had the loyal attention of Colonel Hunter-Coote, and Winnie seemed to be preparing to swim. Jane looked away from the beach. She looked toward a now-familiar sight.
There, on the promenade below them, was a group of Red Cross nurses pushing wheelchairs; they lined the chairs in a neat row, so that their occupants faced out to sea and the warmth of the sun was on their faces. The nurses arranged red blankets across their knees; they fussed over them briefly; they withdrew.
Such expeditions were judged remedial for these special patients, whose wounds were invisible. These men were explained by various euphemisms: They had “neurasthenia”; they had “battle fatigue.” At the camp they were restricted to a certain wing of the hospital and were nursed only by the most experienced of the Red Cross. There, too, they were brought out into the sun; someone presumably had faith that fresh air and sunlight might heal them.
Wexton, who had carried some of these patients in his ambulance, doubted that. If they had damage to their bodies—and some did—that might be cured; he doubted even time would heal the damage to their minds.
The men with broken minds: they embarrassed people. They were shipped here first, then—once the doctors were sure there was no malingering—they were shipped back to England. They were sent to special hospitals in remote parts of the countryside, in order that they might have peace and quiet. That was the official line. Wexton doubted that too. He thought the relevant authorities preferred to hide them away; they were more than an embarrassment—they were an accusation.
The men with broken minds; the men who had seen the unspeakable; the men who had been driven quietly—it was usually quietly—mad. For some time now Wexton had believed that it was these men only who were sane.
Jane watched them, he saw, with a fixed concentration, and when she finally turned back, Wexton saw that her eyes shone: with tears, he thought, and then realized that it was not tears. Jane was angry.
“Oh, I say!” Colonel Hunter-Coote rose to his feet. Jane and Wexton moved with him. They moved to the edge of the terrace, with its pots of geraniums, and looked down at the beach. Hunter-Coote cheered.
“Keep it up, Winnie. Jolly good.” He turned to Wexton and to Jane, his small brown eyes irradiated with love. “Isn’t she the most remarkable woman? Nothing daunts her, you know. Absolutely nothing.”
Some way out, the figure of Winnie could be discerned. She advanced upon the sea, head high; she gave the waves a quelling glance. She flapped her arms. An impertinent wave splashed her face; it engulfed her to the armpits. Winnie waited for it to subside and then launched herself upon the swell of the next. Once the small tidal wave created by this attack had diminished, Winnie swam. Her teeth were clenched. Her chin crested the water. Her frilly mobcap bobbed. It was some while before Wexton realized why this intrepid progress looked so odd. Then it came to him: Winnie was swimming doggie-paddle.
Jane perhaps realized this at the same moment, for she began to smile. She glanced at Wexton and her smile broadened. She did not look back again to the promenade and the lines of wheelchairs.
At the end of the afternoon they began the walk back to the station. Hunter-Coote and Winnie walked in front; Jane and Wexton followed them. The sun was warm. The road was dusty. Their feet kicked up white dust as they passed. Wexton whistled. Jane stopped, removed her hat, and lifted her face to the sun.
“Maybe it’s wicked. Maybe I shouldn’t”—she took Wexton’s arm—“but I feel happy. I feel at peace.”
“Acland?”
“Yes. I can feel him. Just as I hoped. He’s very close.” She looked up at Wexton anxiously. “I know he’s dead. But I can still feel it. Do you think I’m imagining it, Wexton?”
“No, I don’t.” Wexton’s creased face was sad. “Steenie was close—and I knew. He isn’t anymore—and I know that too. You can’t explain it. Maybe it’s a sixth sense. Or an eighth. Or a tenth. It’s there, anyway.”
“I’m sorry, Wexton.” Jane took his arm. “Was it Conrad Vickers?”
“Well, Vickers was available when Boy died—and I wasn’t. Steenie had witnessed a terrible thing. He would have needed someone to talk to—”
“But it wasn’t just that?”
“No. I don’t think so. It might have happened anyway, sooner or later. Steenie’s very young. He’s very impressionable. He likes …”
“Fashionable things?”
“Kind of. And I just read and write all the time
. I can see it’s pretty dull.”
Jane made no comment. Wexton looked at the white road, at the decorous but affectionate figures of Winnie and Colonel Hunter-Coote. He looked at the flowers by the wayside, the small train that puffed into the station just ahead. Jane’s hand lay on his arm.
He felt energy flow from her hand; the loveliness of the day and the serenity of the valley beat in upon him. The sky was azure; there were small puffs of white cloud. He felt the surprising perfection of the moment. He would change nothing—not the clouds, not the sky, not the shape or disposition of the houses, not a blade of grass, not even the faithlessness of Steenie. The knowledge of that was part of the day’s composition. It pained him, but the pain gave sharpness to the beauty around him. A poem, just there, hovering at the outer edges of his consciousness.
“I’m all right,” he said finally. “Steenie too. He’s moved into his own studio. He’s having that exhibition of his paintings soon. All that will help.”
“Are they good—Steenie’s paintings?” Jane turned to look at him.
“Some of them are good.”
Jane stopped once more. She sniffed the air. “I believe in God—today. Yesterday I didn’t. Today I do. I didn’t expect that to happen. Maybe it’s the sun … and the air. I can’t feel the war today—maybe it’s that. Never mind anyway.” She gave him a rueful smile; she took his arm once more. “Forget my religion. Tell me yours. Tell me about words, Wexton.”
“A poem, you mean?”
“Yes. Tell me a poem.”
“All right,” Wexton said.
He started on a sonnet, one he knew by heart, one that fitted the day and the walk and the white road and the station just ahead and the steam of the train hissing.
Fourteen lines: by the time he reached the end, they had reached the platform. Winnie was fussing: The train was two carriages short.
“Just tell me,” she was saying to an aged French porter. “Just explain. Are we to sit in the luggage racks? This is a disgrace. There is no room for my gels.”
Later that April my uncle Steenie did have his first exhibition of paintings. It was also to be his last exhibition, although Steenie did not know that then, of course. It was, in social and even critical terms, a success. In later years Steenie liked to recall his moment of triumph, but Steenie was no fool; his triumph had also been the occasion of self-discovery. “I found out I was a dabbler,” he would say.
The circumstances surrounding that exhibition were to prove memorable: It was held late in the war; it was some three months after Steenie and Freddie had witnessed Boy’s death; and it was on the very day of Steenie’s preview party that the strangest event in my family’s story occurred.
We will come to that event in due course. (News of it reached Steenie and others late that night.) But even before this news was broken, it was—according to both Steenie and Constance—an important day. “A day of reckoning!” Constance said.
Constance and Steenie spent that day together; they had spent many days together in the six weeks since Constance had returned from her honeymoon. That morning, Constance had visited Jenna and her baby, a son born the previous Christmas, named Edgar. Constance seemed to Steenie oddly obsessed with this child, whom he had never seen. She would dwell at length on the charms of the child, his quietness, his green eyes, the minute details of his babyish progress. Steenie found this tiresome and suspected insincerity. Constance was now full of plans for poaching both Jenna and the child from the Cavendish family. According to her, Jenna had no wish to take up marital life with Jack Hennessy once the war ended; there was no reason why Jenna had to go back to Winterscombe to live as a head carpenter’s wife; there was every reason (Jenna was the best maid she had ever had) why Jenna and child should take up residence with Lady Stern and her husband.
There were, Constance had admitted, one or two minor problems. In the first place, she and Stern still did not have a permanent residence. Since their return from their honeymoon they had spent a great deal of time inspecting houses both in London and the country, but despite the fact that money was no object, they seemed unable to settle on one they both liked. Constance became, Steenie found, oddly evasive on this subject. (In fact, Steenie had the impression she was keeping something back; whatever it was, he could not worm it out of her.) Meanwhile, they were renting a series of houses in London, each more magnificent than the last.
Apart from this difficulty, there were other problems regarding the hiring of Jenna; Constance tended to dismiss them with a wave of the hand, but they seemed to Steenie serious. In the first place, Jenna herself was opposed to the idea. (“She’s frightened of Hennessy, that’s all,” Constance would cry. “She need not worry—I will deal with him.”) Also, the idea was opposed by Montague Stern—with vigor.
Steenie found this odd. Why should Stern care whether his wife had one maid or another? What possible difference could the baby make in a household that was bound to be a large one? Constance did not explain her husband’s opposition. She said, in a dismissive way, that Stern thought she fussed too much about the baby; she would, however, talk him around. Steenie, privately agreeing with Stern, doubted Constance’s husband was the kind of man to be “talked around”; he was wise enough not to say so.
Constance’s frequent visits to Jenna and her child always seemed to leave her in a pensive and uncommunicative mood. The day of Steenie’s preview was no exception. But then Steenie had found that these moods of Constance’s were more frequent now—and they did not always seem to be caused by visits to Jenna. He would catch her staring off into the middle distance when he was in mid-anecdote, clearly not listening to a word he said. She had changed since her return from her honeymoon; she was quieter, more subdued, thoughtful. Even her movements, always so swift, had become slower. There was a new quality to her beauty which Steenie had never seen before: It had lost its hard-edged defiance; it had acquired a stillness and a repose previously lacking. Steenie had wondered once or twice if she might be expecting a child; when there seemed no evidence of this, he assumed that her husband had wrought this change in her—and that made Steenie curious. He would dearly have liked to know more on the subject of Constance’s married life, her attitude to her husband, indeed the circumstances of her honeymoon in Scotland. But when Steenie asked how the time in Scotland had been, she gave what he felt was a very odd reply. The telegram giving the news of Boy’s death (in a shooting accident—that was the official line) had been there, awaiting Constance and her new husband when they first arrived at Denton’s shooting lodge.
“So my honeymoon began with a death,” Constance said. And then she changed the subject.
At the time Steenie had been glad she did. He did not want to be reminded of Boy’s death. He had been discovering, those past three months, just how remorseless memory can be. No matter how hard Steenie tried to suppress what he and Freddie had witnessed, the memory stalked him, then pounced. It insinuated itself into his dreams and his daily life; no matter how fast he ran (and, those three months, Steenie had been running very fast indeed) it caught up with him. I understand now what the Greeks meant by the Furies, he wrote in a letter to Wexton, one he never sent. The letter was unposted because Steenie had some self-respect left; he knew he had no right, now, to turn to Wexton for help—he was too deeply embroiled in his new love affair with Conrad Vickers. I have betrayed you, Wexton, he wrote in another emotional letter, also unsent, but he knew that was not the whole truth, for he added a postscript: Worse, I have betrayed myself.
So, the night of his preview, both Constance and Steenie were tense. They had spent the afternoon at the gallery, Constance on the telephone, making sure that everyone on Steenie’s ambitious guest list would be coming that night; Steenie checking that his paintings were advantageously hung. They were. The lighting could not have been more flattering. The framer’s handiwork was irreproachable. The surface prettiness of his paintings, their pleasing coloration, his own gift for line—all this was still
apparent to Steenie. So, unfortunately, was the paintings’ irrelevance. They were decorative, charming, oversweet; they were the visual equivalent of a diet of Turkish delight. Steenie thought of Boy. He thought of what had happened to Boy’s head. He looked at the paintings again.
Glucose and rosewater, Steenie thought, and fled.
He and Constance returned to his new studio. His splendid new studio. Steenie, fencing with emotion as always, refusing to raise the subject of Boy, pretended to himself and to Constance that his greenish complexion, the fact that his hands shook, were entirely due to nervousness. The preview. The party. The guest list.
“It’s going to be ghastly,” Steenie said. “No one will come. No one will buy. They’ll slink off, making polite noises. I think I might be sick.”
“Don’t be feeble, Steenie,” Constance replied, staring off into the middle distance once more. Then, as if repenting her absentmindedness, she became kind. “Why don’t you have a drink? Just a little. That will help. Where’s the champagne I sent you?”
“In the bath. Keeping cool.”
“Then open a bottle.”
As Steenie gave his attention to the champagne, Constance prowled about; she moved a chair a few inches; she rearranged a heap of cushions that might have been found in a seraglio; she switched on, then off, a lamp she had provided. She seemed totally absorbed.
This was the first occasion, Steenie would later say, on which he truly noticed Constance’s obsession with rooms, her desire to dictate to the inanimate. It did not occur to him then that Constance might wish to order a room because other aspects of her life were in disorder. All Steenie could see was that Constance, three months a wife, was certain—about everything.
Steenie was not. His capacity to make any decision veered as wildly as his moods. He felt he could not control his own life, let alone the details of his environment. One moment he would think of Boy; the next, Wexton. He would vow never to see Conrad Vickers again, then rush off to meet him half an hour later. Everything was in flux—whereas Constance exhibited an unfailing tenacity. This was the only material for the curtains; that sofa was unthinkable, this the perfect one. The result was a studio that was eclectic, dramatic, resonant, and unconventional. It made Steenie very uncomfortable. It was, he thought as he poured champagne, Constance’s room and not his.
Dark Angel Page 57
