A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Marry in haste and repent at leisure. But I’d hardly think of Fulke as that sort of man.’ Dora was beginning to regret the turn this conversation had taken. One odd Ferneydale marriage was bound to have as a shadowy context another one. ‘Of course,’ she went on, feeling she mustn’t abruptly shut up on it, ‘there’s coming to be more and more divorce blowing around, and legally and technically it’s going to be easier and easier. I read somewhere the other day that, if present trends continue, one marriage in three will be breaking up by the 1980s. And whether or not there are any children by it. That would be a factor, wouldn’t it, with your brother-in-law?’

  ‘I suppose Fulke has children.’

  Dora Quillinan found herself sitting down abruptly on a rustic bench, and with a sense that she had stumbled on something almost pathological. Penelope couldn’t have spoken out of absolute ignorance. She had simply allowed to get a shade out-of-hand an attitude she had adopted towards Fulke Ferneydale and his affairs in general.

  ‘Sophie had a son almost straight away,’ Dora replied gently. ‘That’s why I said that stupid thing about a shot-gun marriage.’

  ‘I’m wool-gathering. It must be the sight of Tommy, that ancient flame. He has a son called Damian. A queer sort of name to penetrate to the folk.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Dora’s discomfort had grown in face of Penelope’s random remark. She had a sense, too, that some sort of revelation was coming along. ‘Fulke made rather an out-of-the-way choice of name for his son, too,’ she said. ‘Silvan.’

  ‘Yes.’ Penelope seemed to have forgotten her momentary profession of ignorance. ‘Silvan Ferneydale. It was certainly laying it on a bit thick in the rural way. Silvanus was a divinity of the fields and forests. It seems rather hard to be condemned to go through life with a name inviting ridicule. But Fulke’s is often a queer sense of humour. Of course Sophie wouldn’t see the excessive boskiness of the total effect at all.’

  ‘Probably not, poor kid.’

  There was silence for a few moments. Tommy could be observed wheeling a barrow away into the middle distance. Penelope, too, had now sat down on the bench.

  ‘I must tell you something,’ Penelope said. ‘It’s shameful not to have done it long ago. Fulke’s wasn’t a shot-gun marriage. But there’s another common term that conceivably fits. It was on a rebound. From me.’

  ‘It happened at that awful school play,’ Penelope said slowly. ‘Or just after it was over. Fulke came over from France to see it, you know, on the cock-and-bull strength of having a grandmother who was an Old Girl, or some such nonsense. There we were, with the paint wiped off our faces but still all dressed up, at a party for the parents and people. The senior girls all having glasses of sherry in the presence of their admiring papas and mamas. So there I was – pretending, I suppose, to be an Elizabethan boy pretending to be an Elizabethan girl pretending to be an Elizabethan young man. Doublet and hose and a little dagger and a hat with a big feather. Fulke came up to me and said, “Ganymede, will you marry me?” It was a shock. You see, I was rather in love with Fulke. And I didn’t for a moment think it was a silly joke. He meant it – quite desperately.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I said, “No”. Just that – and it was quite desperate too. He believed me at once, and something that came to me as acutely painful happened to his face. But it was only a kind of dark flush. He turned away, and I think he left the party at once. I’ve never spoken to him, or seen him, since. And he was married to Sophie Dix – I believe with all the trimmings – within two or three months.’

  Miss Quillinan took time to digest this, and even to wonder whether another marriage might be described as a kind of rebound in slow motion.

  ‘Penelope,’ she then asked, ‘did you understand yourself?’

  ‘No, not a bit. It was just some deep thing. And it felt like being suddenly dropped into one of those deep-freezes. I’m not sure I haven’t felt a little frozen ever since.’

  At this point, and perhaps to the relief of both the young women, there came an interruption to their talk. Penelope’s father and his friend Mrs Martin had turned a corner of the vicarage garden and were before them. And as there happened to be a couple of deck-chairs close at hand, the two elders drew them forward and sat down on them in a companionable way. Mrs Martin nowadays spent quite as much time at the vicarage as when Penelope had been her pupil. Penelope had become the house’s mistress (if in a slightly unusual fashion), and her former governess now ranked as the household’s most intimate friend. That she was also its closest observer was very likely too. The years were dealing with her more kindly than with her former employer – perhaps because she didn’t pay too much attention to their passing.

  Mr Rich, although he had sat down with every appearance of comfort, almost at once took out his watch and studied it with anxiety.

  ‘Where is Caspar?’ he asked. ‘I hope he didn’t miss mass today?’

  ‘He certainly didn’t miss mass. And he’s in his study, correcting some proofs.’ Penelope had answered patiently, for – as all three knew – here was one of her father’s oddities. Once so offended by Caspar’s perversion to Rome, he was now regularly apprehensive lest his son-in-law’s religious inquiries should lead to some further course of untoward conduct. Too much interest in religion struck Mr Rich as an unwholesome thing, somewhat akin to being excessively concerned about the state of one’s inside. His father’s generation of clerics had been much troubled by the business of losing their faith; there had been upheavals within families, and bishops burdened by the need unobtrusively to arrange this or that. Fanatical parsons – and not always all that young – had even walked out on their jobs, to live on what a later age would come to call the dole. But on the whole the Anglican church had coped – and could still cope – fairly well – turning on some high-powered professor of theology, for example, to analyse what ‘faith’ is, after all. Of course the papists were up to that sort of thing too. But Mr Rich had a dim idea that, even with a member of the laity, they regarded such fallings away as much more calamitous. And his son-in-law Caspar, although not exactly a towering figure in the regard of the Vatican, was earning a respectable place among his own lot. If he did a spectacular back-sliding, there might be an extremely disagreeable situation. It wouldn’t, indeed, affect Caspar’s economic standing, which was virtually non-existent, so far as Mr Rich could see. But he himself, although wholly innocent, might be brought into the picture – as having yanked Caspar out of Rome, so to speak, without successfully restoring him to Canterbury. It was a disturbing thought.

  That his daughter might have disturbing thoughts, and have occasioned them equally in her schoolfellow, was not in Mr Rich’s mind. Mrs Martin was in different case: aware that between these two young women something had been going on. She hoped – and believed – it wasn’t anything to be really alarmed about. Penelope hadn’t been confessing to Dora that her marriage had proved distinctly dull. Still less could she have announced it to be a mariage blanc, since Mrs Martin knew it to be nothing of the sort. Something had not perhaps ignited quite as it should, but a certain warmth of growing affection was certainly there. Thirty years ahead, if they both lived so long, Penelope and Caspar would be a pair indissolubly wed.

  But Mrs Martin was not wholly confident about the salubrity of Dora Quillinan as a possible confidant of her late pupil in this sphere. She liked Dora, and judged her to be without any tendency to rash speech or action. But she was very much a modern girl, and with a consequent frankness that somehow only emphasised a touch of the enigmatic about her own intimate life. And to be modern was to elevate certain aspects of sexuality to a position in which rather damaging topplings-over became a hazard not to be ignored. Mrs Martin felt about sex rather as Mr Rich felt about religion. It ought not to be inordinately brooded on.

  That this sort of thing was now revolving in the former governess’s head was no doubt the consequence of a perception that some unusual confidence had been goi
ng on when she and the vicar had interrupted it. But nothing of the kind, of course, was within the range of the vicar’s own observation.

  ‘I’ve been hoping to find Caspar,’ Mr Rich said, ‘because something of considerable interest has occurred to me, and I’m sure he would be glad to hear about it. Let me explain.’ Mr Rich paused to glance at each of the three women in turn – and perhaps with a faint air of intellectual indulgence or condescension such as that instructive person in The Pilgrim’s Progress may have exhibited when explaining things to Christian’s wife with pictures, because she was a woman and it would be easier for her that way. ‘Consider,’ Mr Rich said, ‘a rectangular blank screen, rather like that of the television machine which you, Penelope, have lately introduced into the vicarage. And consider as appearing on this screen a perpendicular straight line – ideally without dimension as being simply the shortest distance between one point and another. The screen itself we may take to represent the continuum.’ This was a new term which the vicar, in pursuit of his metaphysical inquiries, had lately taken to using a good deal. ‘The straight line is the Present; it moves across the screen – whether at a uniform pace or not, I cannot yet say; and what it leaves behind is the Past, while what lies ahead of it is the Future. Do you follow?’

  The ladies said they followed.

  ‘But now consider this. You all three, I believe, possess a sufficiently constant visualising faculty actually to have seen with your inner eye the simple phenomenon I have just described. But I should be surprised if each of you had not seen that straight line, endowed with the arbitrary signification I have ascribed to it, as moving from left to right and not from right to left. And I believe this to be almost universal. Artists, for example, when predominantly concerned to suggest the movement of persons or objects through space and consequently through time, organise this on their canvas in the manner I have described: in fact from left to right, and not the other way on. So here is a problem worth considering when the nature of Time is our topic. It is this that I must put to Caspar, who probably hasn’t thought of it.’

  Mr Rich paused here, clearly gratified by his concluding reflection. But no very lively discussion ensued. Mrs Martin had long since come to think about Time much as she thought about sex: one could have too much of it. Penelope and Dora had other horizons in view – or so, to Mrs Martin, it continued to appear. She experienced a sudden strong dislike of that blank screen. It might be an image of the continuum, but it was an image of a vacuum as well. And as they all four stood up and strolled back to the vicarage, it was in the vicarage, surely, that the vacuum lay. An empty nursery – actually several rooms once known as the nursery wing – undoubtedly had something to do with it.

  Part Four

  IX

  Time, however simply its effluxion may be represented on a blank screen, is a complex affair of hurryings and lingerings, fullness and emptiness, in any individual’s experience. Of this Penelope, grown to womanhood, was well aware. Several years had gone by before she had so much as begun to ask herself whether Caspar Ferneydale’s evident devotion was something she could respond to; and she had gone on asking herself the question for several years more. And during all this period, and even although a good deal in the way of confidences had been passing between them, she had never ventured to find out whether Caspar had any knowledge of that strange and untimely proposal on Fulke’s part. If he had not, she felt obscurely that her own disclosing of it might somehow tell Caspar more than he’d want to know.

  Caspar had been the only person to take any positive satisfaction in Fulke’s abrupt transforming himself into a married man. She supposed this to have its source in Caspar’s religious convictions. Fornications and adulteries, she knew, were not regarded by his sort of theologian as mortal sins if – severally and as they came along – they were promptly confessed and repented of. Fulke’s had been a very bad way of life, all the same – particularly since he was a writer whose talents had come to command admiration among his contemporaries. Penelope suspected that it was not any sort of major artist whose offer of marriage (made in that bizarre theatrical context) she had violently shied away from. And she knew that in this estimate she was supported by what might be called the higher critical opinion. Fulke’s ambition was to go to the top. But although popular views might be enthusiastic, and the name of Ferneydale receive brilliant illumination at night in Shaftesbury Avenue, he wasn’t destined for the top, and must be conscious of the fact. Fulke like his brother, indeed, was going to be a failure in his own way. Penelope’s awareness here even added a shade of guilt to her memory of the manner in which she had turned him down. And this, again, may conceivably have influenced her eventually accepting Caspar’s suit. There remained for her a formidable aspect in which she found Caspar unexciting and even slightly dull. But she came to know that fate had made her the person who could bring him domestic happiness and security of an order he sorely required. It was here, in fact, that the big test still lay ahead of her.

  The eventual wedding had naturally been quite a grand affair. There was a huge marquee on the vicarage lawn, and the resources of the Hall were thrown in too. Fulke and Sophie found it impossible to turn up, so the bridesmaids were not reinforced by the oddly named Silvan in the character of a seven-year-old page. After the reception Penelope and Caspar drove to Heathrow, took a late plane to Pisa, and were in Assisi on the following day. It happened that Caspar had never visited this celebrated city, and he felt that there was a great deal of ground to cover. Thus St Francis and Giotto had their prominent place in the pleasures of his honeymoon.

  James Ferneydale, that harassed City man and model country squire, had been well-pleased with both his sons’ matches, but on two distinct accounts. In Sophie Dix Fulke had married the only child of another business man: one unquestionably of very considerable fortune. Like Fulke himself in the earlier stages of his career, Fulke’s father held a poor opinion of authorship as a gateway to permanent prosperity, and he therefore regarded the acquisition of a substantial heiress as a measure of commendable prudence in the marital way. With Caspar it was otherwise. If anybody needed a wife with money it was Caspar, and Penelope Rich had no more than a small private income which had come to her from an aunt. But Mr Ferneydale owned a romantic streak. A daughter-in-law whose ancestors had been among the greatest in the land many centuries ago strongly appealed to him. Had it been suggested to him that Caspar upon his marriage should assume the name of Rich-Ferneydale or Ferneydale-Rich he would have seen nothing absurd in the idea.

  In fact Mr Ferneydale, who liked to be proud of things, contrived to be proud of his two sons, despite the incomprehensible nature of their predominant interests. He was thus always prepared to talk about them, although on Fulke he was often singularly without up-to-date information. Caspar, dwelling as he did only beyond a hedge and a ha-ha, was better documented from week to week. But then Caspar’s weeks seemed to pass in a notably uneventful way.

  By this time Dr Hurcomb had retired from practice, and the returned Charles Gaston had become the medical man relied upon both at the Hall and the vicarage. Although in his mid-thirties, and thus much of an age with Fulke and Caspar, he was still known as ‘young Dr Gaston’ in the district at large. This was perhaps because his looks were of the sort that wear well, and also perhaps as a consequence of his having remained unmarried. Nobody knew why he had retained this condition, but it was believed by some that had Penelope Rich not become Mrs Caspar Ferneydale during one of Gaston’s absences abroad some different fate might have befallen her. However that may have been, had Penelope’s marriage not taken her in large measure beyond her father’s jurisdiction, the vicar might have looked with disfavour upon Charles Gaston’s standing in what might at any time become an intimate professional relationship with his daughter. Mr Rich would naturally envisage a physician of the silver-haired sort as appropriately attending the bedside of any young woman brought up to due standards of modesty. But Caspar, although old-fashi
oned in many of his attitudes, was without this feeling, and moreover believed that much of Gaston’s travelling around was in the interest of remaining conversant with current advances in scientific medicine as many general practitioners (such as old Hurcomb) were not. And with Gaston personally the vicar got on very well. The doctor was a cultivated man, widely-read, and with rather more than Caspar’s skill in conversing on intellectual topics with a wary regard for the confined knowledge and intellectual limitations of an elderly and rather lazy country parson. Gaston knew all about the vicar’s interest in Time and his naive belief that he was incubating a significant contribution to our understanding of it. He could even put Mr Rich in the way of reading what other thinkers were finding to say on this perplexing topic.

  Dr Gaston got on well, too, with James Ferneydale. If brought in to take a look at an aged parlourmaid who had gone inconveniently wheezy when handing vegetables, or an outdoor man beginning to go wrong at the knees, he would always find leisure for a friendly but properly deferential chat with the master of the household. The deference was, of course, of a formal sort. In fact it had transpired that Charles Gaston, in addition to having attained a higher reputation in his profession than had been supposed, owned an uncle who was a very considerable landowner in a neighbouring county. Mr Rich had been heard to remark that the young man, despite his modest station, was after all a bird of one’s own feather.

  Gaston possessed, too, other qualifications of the social sort. He was already the senior member of what was coming to be known as a group practice, and as a result was able to treat himself to absences of considerable duration. He liked travel, and could talk entertainingly about various places and peoples. The gift of scientific curiosity seemed with him to spill over into a general interest in the mainsprings of human behaviour wherever he encountered them. Here he had perhaps a link with Fulke Ferneydale, whose profession lay in that sort of thing. So the two men had remained on familiar terms, meeting up with one another from time to time in places remote from Mallows. In fact it was from Charles Gaston that the elder Ferneydales frequently received a first intimation of the current activities of their elder son. It wasn’t that Fulke conducted himself as if alienated from his parents. But he did appear to find little occasion to communicate with them on interests and activities remote from their own.