by Belva Plain
His mother looked surprised. “Why nothing more, I should think.”
And he went on, vehemently, “Because she has a few misshapen bones, is she any less a woman? Is she to be put away as damaged goods, returned to the manufacturer, because of that?”
His mother was silent.
“By the way, what did she want?”
“Just to know why you’d been staying away and whether you might want to come over this evening.”
Twenty minutes later Martin stood in the Meigs’ library. It went very quickly. His mind had simply made itself up, and he didn’t have to think about words. The father grasped Martin’s two hands in both of his.
“You won’t be sorry. It’s probably the wisest decision you’ll ever make.” There were tears in his eyes and at that moment Martin began to like him. “God bless you both.”
Jessie’s answer to his question was surprisingly calm.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because I don’t want to be an albatross around your neck. I couldn’t bear it.”
“You will never be that, I promise!”
She had a pretty mouth and when she smiled, two charming dimples appeared at the corners. Taking her face between his hands he kissed her gently.
“I’ll make life good for you,” he said.
He meant it, with all his heart.
Book Two
THE WEB
Chapter 8
Fern always teased Alex that she had married him because she loved his house.
“Well, naturally,” he would answer, “how could anyone help but fall in love with Lamb House?”
Among its oaks and orchards it lay as though, like them, it had been planted there; so farsighted had they been, those Elizabethans with a sense of home and long generations.
Through diamond-paned casements one looked south toward the village of Great Barrow. Little Barrow lay three miles to the west. On the tilted slope above the valley, pear trees flowered and the hills rolled back into a haze.
Fern turned from the easel. The spaniels, sprawled with noses to the grass, raised their heads in question. They had followed her across the Atlantic and shadowed every move she made.
“No,” she told them, “I’m not finished yet.”
And she raised her eyes to the living picture beyond the easel. In the upper left-hand corner lay a green square dotted with pinpoints of white which seemed scarcely to move, although they were live sheep on the Baluster farm. Everything was small and perfect, as in a meticulous Book of Hours. The valley was the merest hollow in the swell of the land.
“As if God’s finger touched, but did not press, in making England,” she said aloud, and was pleased with herself for quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She had been studying the English poets from Chaucer to Eliot, for if one were going to live in a country, she believed, one ought to know its poets.
“Now that I know you well enough, I’ll confess,” Alex’s mother had told her only a few weeks before. “I wasn’t very happy about having an American daughter-in-law. So many American girls are simply not ladies; I can’t help saying it. But you are, and so very charming, Fern! Everyone says so.”
They had been standing in the upstairs hall, which, like the great one downstairs, was blazoned with family portraits: squires in eighteenth-century breeches and lace cuffs, clerics in grim black, an admiral with a three-cornered hat, two cabinet members—Tory, nineteenth century—and over one fireplace, the original Elizabethan with beefy face and sleepy eyes to whom this manor had been given for favors rendered the Crown somewhere in the West Indies. They were all Lambs.
Alex’s mother came from a decent undistinguished family of schoolteachers.
“Naturally,” Alex said with some amusement but no unkindness, “all this ancestor business means more to her.” His late father, though, had been bored and sometimes irreverent about it.
On a table in the angle of the stairwell stood a group of photographs in silver frames.
“That, of course, is Edward VII as Prince of Wales,” the elder Mrs. Lamb had informed the younger.
Fern had dutifully bent to read the scrawled inscription.
“My husband often went on shooting parties in Scotland with His Royal Highness.”
“Went whoring with His Royal Highness too, I’ll wager,” Alex had remarked in private.
“I had this photo of Susannah put up here in the hall while you and Alex were on your wedding trip. It used to stand on the piano in the drawing room, but I should think that too conspicuous, not fitting, now that Alex has married you.”
Fern had murmured that she wouldn’t have minded, which was true. She felt no jealousy, although her mother-in-law apparently expected her to. The girl was dead, after all. Here she sat for all time in her patrician simplicity with hands on lap and a pearl rope looped around the little finger. The one memorable feature of her neat face was a timid expression in the prominent eyes. Could she perhaps have had some foreboding that she was going to die and leave her week-old boy?
“To tell the truth, I was never very happy about Susannah, although she was English to the bone.”
Perhaps she had only been intimidated by this mother-in-law!
“You are far prettier, you know.”
What an unnecessary, heartless thing to say!
“It’s a good thing Neddie has no idea about his mother.”
“Hell have to be told I’m not his mother.”
“Why, yes, sometime, of course. But he does love you, Fern.”
“And I adore him.”
Sometimes there is immediate bonding between two human beings. It has no connection at all with age or circumstance. It is simply there.
“You’ve handled him splendidly, everyone says so.”
She knew it was said she was “marvelous with Neddie,” making no difference between him and her “own” infant girl. They didn’t understand. Neddie was her “own.”
“He’s not been jealous of the baby at all! Usually they carry on dreadfully when a new baby comes into the house, or so I hear. Unfortunately, I never had more than one. You’re sure you’re not rushing things in that respect, Fern?” This last had been spoken with a glance, a light progression of the eye as it blinks in its rhythm and recovers from the blink, toward the midsection of Fern’s body, where the new swelling was just barely visible. “After all, Emmy’s not a year yet.”
“The doctor says I’m quite healthy.”
Fern’s own patience surprised her. Two years ago she would have had to swallow exasperation; now she was learning to see beneath the surface of people and things. Behind this pallid face with its indrawn lips, behind the accent—which, even here in England, was a fairly blatant imitation of the royal family’s accent—she saw a lonely woman who had striven foolishly all her life.
So she said gently, “If this one’s a boy, we shall name him Alex, of course. Will he be the fifth or the sixth?”
“He will be the sixth Alexander Lamb. Should you want me to come a week or two ahead of time to plan for the christening, I’m sure I’ll be able to manage it. And I can stay on afterward, as long as you like.”
Poor soul! She was waiting to be invited to live with them at Lamb House. But that, Fern thought, I will not do. She’s perfectly well-housed at Torquay with all the other prosperous widows. No, that I will certainly not do.
“You know,” Mrs. Lamb had complained, “it’s Neddie who should have borne the name. Don’t you think it’s disgraceful that Susannah insisted on naming him for her father? True, her father had died that year, but even so, the firstborn son should be named after his father.”
“Well, anyway, he looks like Alex,” Fern had assured her, although it was probably not true. Neddie would be narrower and darker than Alex. But it was what the older woman wanted to hear.
Pregnancy, like love, she thought now, can be calming to the nerves. The doctor said some women became euphoric. This
inner radiance then, this vitality and warm contentment with her own body, the home and the people who surrounded her—this must be euphoria. And, taking up the brush, she corrected some greens with a stipling of gilt where the sun had glazed them.
A little group came in sight around the corner of the house: Neddie, running ahead of the nurse who was pushing Emmy in the perambulator. Fern held out her arms and the little boy ran into them. She put her face down on his crisp hair which smelled of pine shampoo. It pleased her that this child who had been shy with strangers had so readily accepted her and loved her.
He wiggled free.
“Shall we have music again, Mummy?” he asked.
“Mummy’s busy,” Nanny Hull admonished.
“Later this after, darling. We’ll put a record on.”
“The singing man?”
She laughed. “Yes, yes, the singing man.”
Neddie had come into the room when Alex had a Caruso recording on the phonograph. Without making a sound, he had sat down to listen, and then had waited while Alex wound the phonograph again to repeat it.
“And will I have yellow cake, too?”
There had been a cake with yellow icing that day, and now they were turning into a ritual, the singing man and the cake.
“You’ll have cake, if you promise to eat your supper. You mustn’t stuff on sweets,” Nanny said.
“Of course he mustn’t.”
The baby Emmy was asleep. She was blond and already long for her age. She would be large-boned, as if she belonged entirely to Alex and not at all to her mother. With curiosity Fern touched the pink hand that lay curled like a shell on the blanket. I don’t know her yet, she thought Everything is closed up, a gift in a glossy box. It is delivered at the door, and one can only guess what is possibly inside. But it is all there, and there’s little we can change.
Still, at the same time, we could teach her anything, couldn’t we? Mandarin Chinese, if we wanted to, instead of English? Everything is so confusing. I feel light-headed.
“Have you had a bit too much of the sun, Ma’am? If you don’t mind my saying so, you ought to put up your work for a while today. You’ve been at it since noon.”
The woman spoke considerately and probably sincerely, except for her use of the word “work.” She couldn’t possibly conceive of what Fern did as “work.”
“Yes, thank you, Nanny. Perhaps I shall.”
“It’s fearful hot today.”
Funny what the English called fearful heat! It couldn’t be more than eighty. Still, she obeyed, as Nanny drew the wicker lounge chair into the shade and plumped the cushions.
“There you are! A nice bit of nap will do you good. I’m to take Neddie down to his pony and he’ll go for a ride with Mr. Lamb.”
Fern closed her eyes, letting the drowsiness of pregnancy have its way. She was so catered to, so loved and cared for! How many women with two children had leisure to go all deliciously relaxed and limp? One could feel so guilty thinking about one’s unearned privileges.
Old Carfax, stirring in the perennnial border, struck a stone with his hoe. He was being careful not to wake her. He was a wiry little man, pasty-skinned in spite of a life out in the weather. For thirty years he had been tending this garden: it was an extension of his back, of his roped and sinewy arms.
Fern opened her eyes just as he stooped to remove a thread of weed which would have marred the perfection of the rosebeds. She watched him move on through the perennials: violet steeples of campanula, gold coreopsis, dusty dark-blue globes of echinops. Fragrance of stock and musky spice of phlox hung in the sweet air. Behind the border stood a solid wall of yews, still wet with last night’s rain.
“The yews are as old as the house,” Alex had told her the first time he had brought her here. “We’ve a priest’s hole on the third floor behind a false wall. I’ll show you. Part of the family was Catholic, you know, but it got to be too dangerous for them, I suppose, and we’ve all been C of E. for two hundred years at least. They also say Cromwell slept here, but I don’t know whether that’s true.”
“It’s like all those houses at home, where Washington’s supposed to have slept while he was chasing you or you were chasing him.”
They had been sitting on the stone bench, the one where Carfax had just now set a flat of Michaelmas daisies. They’d sat there talking for an hour or more, then quite suddenly Alex had asked her to marry him and as suddenly she had accepted.
Yet they had really been leading up to that moment from the time they had been introduced in the winter. Aunt Milly had pursued her purpose with utmost tact, to be sure! And ordinarily Fern would have been outraged by any such “scheme,” but because she herself was so strongly drawn to Alex, she hadn’t objected.
He was delightful. It was, quite simply, good to be with him. It was heartening—was that the right word? Yes, heartening was a very good word, she decided. There was a kind of crinkling good nature in his face even when he was being earnest, and she had told him so. She was not used to men who laughed. Certainly Father had done very little laughing!
He had a fine curiosity about practically everything. At dinner he could listen to Uncle Drew’s talk of securities and German reparations. He could ask pertinent questions of a guest concerning blight-resistant roses. With a cricketeer he talked scores and plays. One felt that he could manage anything. And he had a certain reserve; Fern was comfortable with that. Traveling through Europe, she had had to fend off too many young men on dark hotel terraces. To a girl whose life had been unusually reclusive, that sort of thing could be flattering at first, but after a while one got tired of having to decide between accepting sticky kisses when one felt nothing for the man or, by resisting, risk being labeled “prig.” But Alex had been satisfied to go slowly, sensing her wish to feel the way, to move as a river flows, deepening to the place where all the streams gather in a final rush, which would be the more marvelous for having come gradually.
So she had read, and so she believed.
Obviously he was affected by his responsibilities. He had inherited a substantial business in maritime insurance; but unlike many young heirs he had not turned it over to managers; he ran it himself. The greater responsibility, of course, was to his child.
She remembered the day he had first brought Neddie to the hotel. They had been on the way to the zoo. She had opened the door and there they stood, the tall man and Neddie, who was just two. She had knelt, putting out her arms, and the little boy had come quite willingly, while she murmured the things adults do.
“What a fine big boy you are! And is this your bear? How are you, Toby Bear?”
She had been fourteen, almost grown, when her mother died. The loss had seemed to mark her more than any other happening in her life until then, and perhaps that was why she had been so moved by Alex’s child, when he put his hand in hers.
“Strange,” Alex said. “He’s usually quite timid with people he doesn’t know.”
Alex’s eyes had been very soft and in that instant Fern had known he could be trusted.
All during the late winter and early spring they saw London together. Alex had friends in a variety of circles: business, music, society and art They ate with a pair of schoolteachers in Soho and dined at Claridge’s before the opera. They walked in the parks and on streets which Fern had visited with Jane Austen, with Thackeray and Galsworthy. And, as so many Americans do, she fell in love with the grand, old, mellow city.
In a mews near Curzon Street Alex had a flat furnished, as she was later to learn, like Lamb House. Oak and yew were seventeenth-century; mahogany was eighteenth-century; the landscapes were nineteenth-century. Here was the progression of the family, marching through history.
Alex had discerning taste. She told him he ought to be in some business having to do with the arts—antiques or a picture gallery. He had been pleased.
“But maritime insurance is more lucrative. I can always buy art. Some day I’ll be buying a Meig, you know.”
&nb
sp; “You’ve never seen any of my work. How can you say that?” she had replied.
“Just a feeling I have about you.”
They had been having dinner at the flat, so he was a host being courteous and that was all. Yet she could remember everything that had been said.
She had sighed. “I’m so confused in my mind. I wish I knew whether I had any potential.”
“There’s only one way to find out. By doing. It’s a shame you haven’t had more encouragement.”
“More? I’ve had none at all.”
Except for Martin Farrell’s. He, admittedly knowing nothing about art, had nevertheless urged her to struggle on. And sitting there across the table from Alex, she had become aware of the letter in her purse which had arrived from Martin just that morning.
It had been written in a state of joyous excitement. She, with her own hopes, had understood that a door had been flung open for him, a wide and generous entrance to the future! And she was very, very glad for him.
But there had also been a faint sense of shame. She had thought, all the weeks of that hot, lovely summer in Cyprus and especially on the last night, that something was growing—that given time, perhaps when she came home … She had obviously been mistaken. Three years of further study! Very likely he wouldn’t marry until long after that.
Women, herself included, tended to be foolish about doctors, as about pianists or romantic actors, whom young girls pursue and old ladies adore.
Foolish. Foolish.
“London suits you,” Alex had remarked abruptly.
And looking out at the shine of the expensive street, she had reminded him: “I’m also a country person.”
“What you need,” he’d said, “is to have a home in a quiet country place where you can paint, yet be near enough to the city for first-rate classes.”
And he had reached across the table to press her hand.
