When he had gone Elaine dressed and went out. She took a bus to Bond Street, where she walked among the fashionable men and women on the pavements and looked in shop windows at expensive watches, gloves and linen. At eleven she had a pot of tea in a quiet, elegant teashop, dreaming that she was as prosperous and happy as the well-dressed ladies chattering about her, dreaming of the time when she would be Mrs Brett, part of Tom’s family. Then, she mused, she would be able to discomfit and offend them, as they once had her. She heard herself commenting on Mrs Bretts new dress,
‘The latest line looks much more elegant on a less full figure.’ She heard herself saying of his sisters, ‘Such a pity about the girls’ complexions. It must be the water hereabouts which produces such a muddy look.’
She paid her bill, got up and left the café. As if sleepwalking she went the mile or so to Bedford Square, and entered it not by the gate, which was locked, but through a loose paling behind a tree. She squeezed in, then walked across the square to a bench under another tree, from which she could observe the Bennetts’ front door. She had done this three days running and did not know why. She saw the carriage of a fashionable milliner arrive, and two hat boxes delivered. Then came the arrival of Lady Kilmoyne, erect, sweeping in with her pale face taut with concealed exasperation, a maid behind her carrying a large leather bag.
Then, for half an hour, nothing happened. The solid door with its brass fittings stayed shut. Nothing stirred behind the curtained windows. The square drowsed. Elaine stood up, smoothed down her dress and left the square in the same way she had entered it.
Thirty-Four
Flora stood in her warm bedroom, a streak of sun burning across the carpet. She moved from one foot to the other.
‘I must pull the curtains further back,’ the dressmaker said. She did so. Light poured in. For the fourth time she unfastened the tacking of one long satin sleeve of Flora’s wedding gown and began to re-pin it.
‘Please stand with your weight evenly on each leg,’ the Frenchwoman instructed her. ‘I believe you are supporting yourself on your right foot. It unbalances the dress.’
‘I’m not,’ Flora told her.
‘That is how it seems. Please stand still, also. I do not want to prick you.’
‘I hope you won’t. Why was all this left so late?’
The wedding was to be in a month. Already a trunk, in the process of being packed, layered with tissue paper, stood beneath the window.
‘It’s not late,’ said the dressmaker. ‘The dress will be ready the day after tomorrow.’ She stood back. ‘Yes, at last it’s right. Will you try on the veil?’
‘My hair’s not done.’
‘It is necessary mademoiselle,’ she asserted.
As she lifted the lace veil on to Flora’s head Beth Bennett came hurriedly into the room. ‘Lady Kilmoyne has brought Justin’s grandmother’s veil. She wore it at her own wedding. The lace is priceless. Very, very old. But it wants washing. What shall I do? This is so unexpected.’
‘Oh, aunt,’ Flora said impatiently. ‘To think how long it took to settle on this.’ She tore off the veil, now settled under a chaplet of pearls and flowing down her back. She threw it down.
‘Will you allow me to look at the new veil, madame?’ the dressmaker asked.
‘By all means. I would welcome your advice. Oh how to arrange it. And how to wash it.’
‘Surely I’m not forced to wear it?’ demanded Flora.
‘Not forced, no,’ her aunt said. ‘But it would be tactful to do so, if you could bring yourself—’
‘It is very lovely,’ said Madame Eglantine, lifting the long cascade of lace, from the box. ‘But it is, as you say, in need of washing. And with the utmost care. I will do it for you, Mrs Bennett. It will be safe in my hands, I think.’
‘Does no one ask me if I want to wear it?’ demanded Flora. She began to pull off the wedding gown. The Frenchwoman intervened desperately, trying to save the area she had just pinned from falling apart again. ‘Well, settle it how you like, do what you will,’ she said, snatching her dress from a chair and throwing it on over her head. ‘I shall go out.’ And she was gone.
‘A difficult time for a girl,’ the dressmaker tactfully said. ‘All will be well once she is married.’
‘No doubt,’ Beth Bennett said, as she lowered the lace carefully back into the box.
A maid came into the room with a telegram. ‘Oh heavens!’ Beth said. ‘What now?’ She opened the telegram.
‘Not bad news, I hope,’ said the dressmaker.
‘No – my husband has delayed his return to London. That is all.’ Almost to herself she said, ‘Why? I wonder why.’
‘The charms of a household preparing for a wedding don’t attract some gentlemen,’ Madame Eglantine said placidly, folding the wedding dress carefully for removal back to her workshop.
‘No doubt you are right,’ said Beth.
Downstairs the front door banged. Beth Bennett, knowing Lady Kilmoyne was still in the drawing room, flinched.
The dressmaker said, ‘Courage, madame. If you had seen what I have seen of families before a wedding, instead of groaning you would thank your lucky stars your own house is so calm.’
‘Heaven help the others,’ Beth said.
Flora went to the barracks and asked for Justin, who came hurrying from the interior of the building. She was still, without any conscious thought, trying to fling off the knowledge of her dead brother’s presence and the horror of understanding what this presence might mean to her. ‘Take me out somewhere,’ she demanded. ‘I never want to go home again.’
He laughed and agreed. ‘Let’s get out of London and go and have tea on my aunt’s lawn at Twickenham.’ And this they did, driving down small roads to Justin’s aunt’s house, where they ate tea with her on her lawn overlooking the river.
They walked back hand in hand along the towpath, leaving the car behind. By the time they reached Hammersmith Bridge it was nearing eight.
‘Let’s go to a restaurant,’ Flora suggested.
‘Should you not tell your aunt?’
‘But I’m with you,’ Flora said gaily.
‘Very well,’ he said, doubtfully.
‘You’re very stuffy sometimes, Justin.’
So they went to a restaurant, a large famous one in a West End hotel. The peaceful mood of the afternoon disappeared as Flora, eating little, demanded champagne, became challenging.
She began to list, in the manner of a joke, her conditions of marriage. ‘I go wherever you go, but you do not come wherever I go, or ask questions, ever, about where I have been. We spend as much time together, or apart, as I say. You do not question me about my friends or associations, correspondence – anything.’
‘That is all very well and good,’ objected Justin, looking carefully at the beautiful, flushed, animated face. Had she had too much wine, he wondered. ‘But you see,’ he said, ‘much of what you ask is impractical and some, I must say, shows a kind of mistrust of me and my feelings for you.’
‘Oh well,’ she declared. ‘You’re very old-fashioned. Do you really want to keep a woman as a chattel? As folk say, if that’s what you require don’t marry a woman, buy a dog.’
‘I do believe,’ he said, ‘a wife carries her husband’s name, his honour and the honour of his family in her hands. ‘You may call stuffy Flora—’
‘Indeed, I do.’
‘You may call me stuffy,’ he repeated, ‘but, no matter how times change, some things do not alter and it is not very sensible to pretend they do.’
At this Flora stood, and left the restaurant rapidly, sweeping through the tables with her head high.
Justin put down his napkin and followed her. She had no money. It was night. He could not let her go home alone. As he followed her he reflected that a man who had only a few months earlier been anxious that he was to marry a woman too still and other-wordly to be cheerful and comfortable with, who had welcomed her apparent blossoming when it unexpectedly cam
e, did not have the right to complain now that his bride-to-be was too volatile. And yet he did. There was something hectic, almost unbalanced, about Flora these days. Perhaps she would settle down, be less restless once they were married. That was what people said.
By now he had caught up with her, on the pavement outside the hotel. He put his arm round her. ‘Let me take you home, Flora.’
‘Oh leave me alone,’ she said, flinging him off.
Embarrassed, he said, ‘Flora, please—’
But the commissionaire at the door had already gestured and summoned a cab. Justin hustled Flora into it.
‘I wished to walk,’ she said.
‘It’s getting too dark,’ he said.
‘Oh – damn,’ she said.
He put his arm round her, appealing, ‘Flora.’
Suddenly she was kissing him passionately. His hand was on her breast, hers on his thigh. ‘Flora,’ he breathed.
‘Oh, Justin, I don’t know what gets into me. Justin, please. I must be yours. Please.’
‘Flora!’
‘Please.’
‘Yes. Yes. Soon.’
They went into the square, where they stayed, embraced, under a vast beech. Flora’s back was against the trunk.
‘You must go in,’ he said.
‘Let us go off somewhere.’
‘No – not now. Not long now.’
The woman in the shadows who had been quietly watching them stood up and slipped away. Elaine Selsden, envy coursing through her as if her blood were poisoned, started the walk back to her lodgings.
Suddenly Flora opened her eyes, looked across the gravel path to the cluster of trees some one hundred yards away. She screamed, ‘He’s there! He’s there!’
‘Who?’ asked Justin, springing round.
‘The soldier. The soldier,’ she cried. Justin saw no one.
‘I’ll search for him,’ he declared.
‘Don’t leave me.’
They searched the square thoroughly, Justin with a rapid pace, crashing along the darkened paths, pulling Flora after him. They found no one. ‘He must have slipped away,’ Justin said. He led the shaking Flora into the house.
Flora was put to bed. Beth said to Justin, ‘Oh dear. I fear she is being haunted by an obsessed young man. He will forget her, I hope, once you are married.’
‘The sooner we are, the better,’ Justin said stoutly.
Beth agreed wearily. Upstairs, Flora stared terrified into the darkness. She dared not tell anyone whom – what – she had really seen. For yet again she had seen the figure she knew to be her dead brother, Miles, as he would have been, had he grown up.
Thirty-Five
Sunshine filled the compartment, striking across plush seats. Dust motes danced in the air. The train pulled on through a peaceful rural landscape, sometimes obscured by big puffs of engine smoke streaming past the carriage window, them re-emerging.
Mrs Grose, a sturdy, comfortable woman in a print dress, a straw hat and practical black shoes and stockings, was alone in her carriage. A stout leather bag with brass clasps lay on the seat beside her. Her round face bore an expression both calm and resolute.
Yet she was afraid.
Across the empty compartment she could almost see the two figures travelling with her. Each time she looked back from the window she thought she might this time actually see them sitting opposite her, he, red-headed, with his strong, pale face and that mocking, arrogant, crooked smile; she thin-faced, dark of eye, a modest, submissive air masking boldness and the courage of the wanton. But they never appeared. She could hear them, though, behind the putting of the train, hear the movement of Jessell’s skirts, Quint’s feet on the floor of the compartment.
It was strange, she thought, that during the first part of her journey from Bly to London she had not been conscious of their presence. It had been after London that she had known they were with her.
She gazed across at where she thought they sat. Quint and Jessell. Jessell and Quint.
Her voice, almost friendly, as if talking to children, she said aloud, ‘So you are coming with me, are you? I wonder what you want. And what you want in exchange.’
At Mermaid Street there was a bustle as preparations were made for Mrs Grose’s arrival. At Lion House Geoffrey Bennett said, ‘I’ll make every effort to see Mrs Grose today, then get a late train back to London. This may be my last chance to hear the full story of what happened at Bly all those years ago. I cannot neglect it.’
‘Very well,’ Henry replied. ‘I’ll drive you back to London, whatever the hour, if you miss the last train.’
‘I dread the interview. Even more, as I have sold Bly now, and told Mrs Grose of it. But it must be done. There’s no news of Elaine Selsden yet, I suppose?’
Henry Reeve shook his head. ‘Her poor sister is under great strain.’
Not long after this conversation Mrs Grose found Marguerite Selsden waiting for her at Strand station.
Thirty-Six
Elaine sat furiously reading a magazine in the poor room in London where she and Tom Brett were living. He was out visiting another firm in order to ask for work. The previous night Elaine had come in late after spying on Flora and Justin in the square. She had undressed and flung herself into bed, giving Tom, who had waited up for her, no account of where she had been. ‘You’re not my keeper,’ was all she had said furiously.
And now this! She pored over the cheap magazine she had bought earlier. Inside was a sycophantic article about Flora’s engagement and forthcoming marriage. There was a photograph of the Kilmoynes’ house in Grosvenor Square and an artist’s impression of the big dining room, the table set with flowers, epergnes, glass and silver, as it might be for the wedding breakfast. The article was full of flowery phrases – ‘the inexpressibly lovely bride’, ‘the costly, luxurious surroundings’. The writer must have based the account on gossip and speculation, for Lady Kilmoyne would never have sanctioned it. But for Elaine every word was the truth. The sentences rang through her tired brain: ‘the wedding of the season’, ‘the beauteous bride and her handsome, gallant fiance’, ‘one of the first families of the land’, ‘luxury’, ‘costliness’, ‘priceless gems’, ‘happy ever after’.
‘I saved her,’ ran Elaine’s thoughts. ‘Yet once she grew up she never thought to enquire where I was or how I was living. Nor did her family. My job was done. They threw me away. I accepted this, took it for granted. Why? Why? I deserve a place in the church when she marries. What does she deserve? All this? No, she has done nothing to deserve it.’
She sat on furiously in the dusty room, where flies buzzed.
Thirty-Seven
After his interview with Mrs Grose Geoffrey Bennett had been unable to return to London. He said despairingly to Henry, ‘I cannot face Beth and Flora after hearing what I have heard this evening. I should dismiss the tale as hysteria and superstition, but, Henry, I cannot, I cannot. I will stay another night, if I may.’ He had gone to bed, walking upstairs like an old man. Now Henry sat in the dining room, his writing paper on a blotter, a silver inkwell in front of him. He wrote to his brother in Boston.
Dearest Charles,
Forgive me for not having written to you earlier and now, forgive me again, for presenting you with a problem. Will you give me your advice? Now I know you have said often that people believe an experimental psychologist such as yourself, to be an alienist, a hypnotist, a priest, or a black magician – or any combination of all four. And here I am, about to treat you in the same way! Yet I hope you will not see this as a burden, but a challenge – so I hope.
It concerns the two ladies whom I mentioned to you once or twice before in passing, Miss Marguerite Selsden and her sister, Elaine. I wrote to you about the astonishing (and, to me, embarrassing) scene ending in the discovery that Miss Elaine had previously been governess to young Flora Bennett and her brother at Bly, where the boy committed suicide, though only ten years old. There is more, now. The day after that revelation Miss Ela
ine ran off. It is now three weeks and there is still no word from her. Her sister is very alarmed and I think wonders if she is dead, either by her own hand or even murdered. I doubt if she has killed herself. During my little contretemps with Miss Elaine, I sensed that there was some method in her madness and some strong intentions informing her behaviour. I think if she got what she wanted she would become happy, or at least content, like any other person in the world, a little mad, a little sane, a little good, a little bad. I believe she wants a husband, a home and children and can have no great expectation of them. She lacks money, interests, has no family other than her sister, is virtually friendless. And so – what has she? Even her health is not strong. In her shoes, no doubt we would all go a little mad. Give the woman what she wants and she would soon be well – that was my conclusion.
Her weakness is in not being able to endure the unedurable. A man in that state can advance on the world, sword raised, crying ‘Give me what I want!’ A woman must achieve her ends more subtly, and if that subtlety shades into cunning, then it is not too surprising.
But I digress. I must tell you that the position now is that, Elaine Selsden being gone, Mrs Grose, the old housekeeper at Bly when the boy died, has come to Strand. Geoffrey urgently wished to see her and question her about his nephew’s death. The meeting was awful; Geoffrey has been very badly affected by it. As for me, I do not know what to think.
Briefly, Mrs Grose is a sensible, comfortable-looking woman in middle age. Geoffrey asked her to come to Lion House and she promptly came. Mrs Grose, Geoffrey and I met in the small drawing room here. I knew poor Geoffrey to be both anxious and embarrassed. His position was difficult from the start. He was appealing to the lady to give him an account of events in which she was involved and over which he had been secretly reproaching himself for many years, believing that his own negligence had been the cause of his nephew’s suicide (and what can any of us imagine more horrible than the suicide of a child?). Yet he had just sold the house in which Mrs Grose had lived, and which she had dutifully tended since she was a young woman. One might say, well, her duties as housekeeper of an empty house had not been too onerous for many years, and that Geoffrey having offered Mrs Grose a cottage and pension had done a great deal more than he was required to. Nevertheless, I know he felt awkward about this aspect of the encounter.
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