Cosmo had never in any way objected to the presence of Mags in his house. She had made things easier all round, it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Even at the time of his office affair it had not occurred to him that her presence could possibly be designated as an error; and in all honesty she had never been a source of irritation to him. It was her death, her absence, that had brought the facts to light.
‘We have to talk, you know,’ he said, still eating ham and salad. ‘There are all sorts of things to come to terms with.’
‘Talk, Cosmo? What things? What do you mean?’
‘We could have made a mistake, you know, having Mags here all these years.’
She frowned. She shook her head, more in bewilderment than denial. He said, ‘I think we need to talk about it now.’
But Cicily wanted to be quiet. Immediately after supper she’d go through the clothes, arranging them for Oxfam, keeping back the things for Mrs Forde. She wanted to get it done as soon as possible. She remembered being in the sanatorium one time with Mags, both of them with measles. They’d talked for hours about what they’d like to do with their lives. She herself had at that time wanted to be a nurse. ‘I want to have babies,’ Mags had said. ‘I want to marry a decent kind of man and have a house in the country somewhere and bring up children.’
‘You see,’ Cosmo was saying, ‘there’ll be a certain adjustment.’
She nodded, not really listening. Half of Mags’s desire had come about: at least she’d lived in a house in the country and at least she’d brought up children, even if the children weren’t her own. There still was a school photograph, she and Mags and a girl called Evie Hopegood sitting in the sun outside the library. Just after it had been taken Miss Harper had come along and given Mags a row for sprawling in her chair.
‘Incidentally,’ Cicily said, ‘the man’s coming to mend that window-sash tomorrow.’
Cosmo didn’t reply. Perhaps this wasn’t the right moment to pursue the matter. Perhaps in a day or two, when she’d become more used to the empty house, he should try again.
They finished their meal. He helped her to wash up, something that hadn’t been necessary in the past. She went upstairs, he watched the television in the sitting-room.
Young men and girls were playing a game with tractor tyres. They were dressed in running shorts and singlets, one team’s red, the other’s yellow. Points were scored, a man with a pork-pie hat grimaced into the camera and announced the score. Another man breezed up, trailing a microphone. He placed an arm around the first man’s shoulders and said that things were really hotting up. Huge inflated ducks appeared, the beginning of another game. Cosmo turned the television off.
He poured himself another drink. He was aware that he wanted to be drunk, which was, in other circumstances, a condition he avoided. He knew that in a day or two the conversation he wished to have would be equally difficult. He’d go on trying to have it and every effort would fail. He drank steadily, walking up and down the long, low-ceiling sitting-room, glancing out into the garden, where dusk was already gathering. He turned the television on again and found the young men and girls playing a game with buckets of coloured water. He changed the channel. ‘I can’t help being a lotus-eater,’ a man was saying, while an elderly woman wept. Elsewhere Shipham’s paste was being promoted.
‘It’s no good putting it off,’ Cosmo said, standing in the doorway of the room that had been Mags’s. He had filled his glass almost to the brim and then had added a spurt of soda water. ‘We have to talk about our marriage, Cicily.’
She dropped a tweed skirt on to Mrs Forde’s pile on the floor. She frowned, thinking she must have misheard. It was unlike him to drink after supper, or indeed before. He’d brought a strong smell of alcohol into the room, which for some reason offended her.
‘Our marriage,’ he repeated.
‘What about it?’
‘I’ve been trying to say, Cicily. I want to talk about it. Now that Mags is dead.’
‘Whatever had poor Mags to do with it? And now that she is dead, how on earth –?’
‘Actually she consumed it.’
He knew he was not sober, but he knew as well that he was telling the truth. He had a feeling that had been trying to surface for days, which finally had succeeded in doing so while he was watching the athletes with the tractor tyres: deprived of a marriage herself, Mags had lived off theirs. Had she also, he wondered, avenged herself without knowing it?
These feelings about Mags had intensified since he’d been watching the television show, and it now seemed to Cosmo that everything had been turned inside out by her death. He wondered if James and Julia, looking back one day on their parents’ marriage, would agree that the presence of Mags in the house had been a mistake; he wondered if Cicily ever would.
‘Consumed?’ Cicily said. ‘I wasn’t aware –’
‘We were neither of us aware.’
‘I don’t know why you’re drinking whisky.’
‘Cicily, I want to tell you: I had an affair with a girl seven years ago.’
She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes unblinking. Then she puckered up her forehead, frowning again.
‘You never told me,’ she said, feeling the protest to be absurd as soon as she’d made it.
‘I have to tell you now, Cicily.’
She sat down on the bed that had been her friend’s. His voice went on speaking, saying something about Mags always being there, mentioning the Glenview Hotel for some reason, mentioning Robert Blakley and saying that Mags had probably intended no ill-will.
‘But you liked her,’ she whispered. ‘You liked her and what on earth had poor Mags –’
‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry, Cicily.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m sorry for being unfaithful.’
‘But how could I not know? How could you go off with someone else and I not notice anything?’
‘I think because Mags was here.’
She closed her eyes, not wanting to see him, in the doorway with his whisky. It didn’t make sense what he was saying. Mags was their friend; Mags had never in her life said a thing against him. It was unfair to bring Mags into it. It was ludicrous and silly, like trying to find an excuse.
‘The whole thing,’ he said, ‘from start to finish is all my fault. I shouldn’t have allowed Mags to be here, I should have known.’
She opened her eyes and looked across the room at him. He was standing exactly as he had been before, wretchedness in his face. ‘You’re making this up,’ she said, believing that he must be, believing that for some reason he’d been jealous of Mags all these years and now was trying to revenge himself by inventing a relationship with some girl. He was not the kind to go after girls; he wasn’t the kind to hurt people.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m making nothing up.’ The girl had wept when, in the end, he’d decreed that for her there was too little in it to justify their continuing the association. He’d felt about the girl the way he’d wanted to feel about being unfaithful to Cicily: guilty and ashamed and miserable.
‘I can’t believe it of you,’ Cicily whispered, weeping as the girl had wept. ‘I feel I’m in an awful nightmare.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘My God, what use is saying you’re sorry? We had a perfectly good marriage, we were a happy family –’
‘My dear, I’m not denying that. All I’m saying –’
‘All you’re saying,’ she cried out bitterly, ‘is that none of it meant anything to you. Did you hate me? Did I repel you? Was she marvellous, this girl? Did she make you feel young again? My God, you hypocrite!’
She picked up from the bed a summer dress that had been Mags’s, a pattern of checks in several shades of blue. She twisted it between her hands, but Cosmo knew that the action was involuntary, that she was venting her misery on the first thing that came to hand.
‘It’s the usual thing,’ she said more quietly, ‘for men in middle age.’
<
br /> ‘Cicily –’
‘Girls are like prizes at a fun-fair. You shoot a row of ducks and there’s your girl with her child’s complexion still, and her rosebud lips and eager breasts –’
‘Please, Cicily –’
‘Why shouldn’t she have eager breasts, for God’s sake? At least don’t deny her her breasts or her milky throat, or her eyes that melted with love. Like a creature in a Sunday supplement, was she? Advertising vodka or tipped cigarettes, discovering herself with an older man. You fell in love with all that and you manage to blame a woman who’s dead. Why not blame yourself, Cosmo? Why not simply say you wanted a change?’
‘I do blame myself. I’ve told you I do.’
‘Why didn’t you marry your girl? Because James and Julia would have despised you? Because she wouldn’t have you?’
He didn’t reply, and a reply wasn’t really expected. She was right when she mentioned their children. He’d known at the time of the affair that they would have despised him for making what they’d have considered to be a fool of himself, going off with a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.
‘I want you to understand about Mags,’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to talk about, it’s all connected, Cicily. I should have felt sorry for you, but there was always you and Mags, chatting. I kept saying you were all right because you had Mags. I couldn’t help it, Cicily.’
‘Mags has nothing to do with it. Mags was always blamed by people, ill-used behind her back –’
‘I know. I’m sorry. It simply appears to be true, it’s hard to understand.’
She sobbed, seeming not to have heard him, still twisting the dress between her fingers. She whispered something but he couldn’t hear what it was. He said:
‘I’m telling you because I love you, Cicily. Because it can’t be between us.’
But even as he spoke he wasn’t certain that he still loved Cicily. There was something stale in their relationship, even a whiff of tedium. A happy ending would be that Cicily would find another man and he a girl as different from Cicily as the girl in his office had been. Why should they sit for the rest of their days in Tudors or the bar of the Glenview Hotel trying to make bricks without straw? What was the point, in middle age, of such a dreary effort?
In the room that had been Mags’s the weeping of Cicily grew louder and eventually she flung her head on to the pillow and pressed her face into its softness in an effort to stifle her sobs. He looked around at the familiar clothes – dresses and hats and skirts and blouses, pairs of shoes lined up on the floor. At this age happy endings with other people weren’t two a penny, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps they had the strength and the patience to blow life into a marriage with which they had lost touch. He shook his head, still standing by the door while Cicily wept. It was asking too much of her; how could she suddenly look back at every cut knee Mags had bandaged, every cake she’d baked, every word she’d spoken, and see them differently? How could she come to consider that Mags, an innocent predator, had got her own back simply by being in their house? Yet Cosmo knew that that was the truth. He and Cicily would try for a bit because they had no option, but the disruption that Mags’s modest presence had so meticulously denied would creep all through their marriage now, a victim’s legacy from her victim’s world.
The News from Ireland
Poor Irish Protestants is what the Fogartys are: butler and cook. They have church connections, and conversing with Miss Fogarty people are occasionally left with the impression that their father was a rural dean who suffered some misfortune: in fact he was a sexton. Fogarty is the younger and the smaller of the pair, brought up by Miss Fogarty, their mother dying young. His life was saved by his sister’s nursing the time he caught scarlatina, when he was only eight.
Dapper in his butler’s clothes, a slight and unimposing man with a hazelnut face, Fogarty is at present fascinated by the newly arrived governess: Anna Maria Heddoe, from somewhere in England, a young woman of principle and sensibility, stranger and visitor to Ireland. Fogarty is an educated man, and thinks of other visitors there have been: the Celts, whose ramshackle gypsy empire expired in this same landscape, St Patrick with his holy shamrock, the outrageous Vikings preceding the wily Normans, the adventurers of the Virgin Queen. His present employers arrived here also, eight years ago, in 1839. The Pulvertafts of Ipswich, as Fogarty thinks of them, and wishes they had not bothered to make the journey after old Hugh Pulvertaft died. House and estate fell away under the old man, and in Fogarty’s opinion it is a pity the process didn’t continue until everything was driven back into the clay it came from. Instead of which along had come the Pulvertafts of Ipswich, taking on more staff, clearing the brambles from the garden in their endeavour to make the place what it had been in the past, long before the old man’s time. The Pulvertafts of Ipswich belong here now. They make allowances for the natives, they come to terms, they learn to live with things. Fogarty has watched surprise and dismay fade from their faces. He has watched these people becoming important locally, and calling the place they have come to ‘home’. Serving them in the dining-room, holding for them a plate of chops or hurrying to them a gravy dish, he wishes he might speak the truth as it appears to him: that their fresh, decent blood is the blood of the invader though they are not themselves invaders, that they perpetrate theft without being thieves. He does not dislike the Pulvertafts of Ipswich, he has nothing against them beyond the fact that they did not stay where they were. He and his sister might alone have attended the mouldering of the place, urging it back to the clay.
The governess is interesting to Fogarty because she is another of the strangers whom the new Pulvertafts have gathered around them in their advent. Such visitors, in the present and in the past, obsess the butler. He observes Miss Heddoe daily; he studies her closely and from a distance, but he does not reveal his obsession to his sister, who would consider it peculiar. He carries Miss Heddoe’s meals to her room when normally this duty would be Cready’s or Brigid’s; he reads the letters she receives, and the diary she intermittently keeps.
October 15th, 1847. I look out of the window of my attic room, and in the early morning the men are already labouring on the road that is to encircle the estate. The estate manager, the one-armed Mr Erskine, oversees them from his horse. Mr Pulvertaft rides up, gesturing about some immediate necessity – how a particular shrub must be avoided, so his gestures suggest, or where best to construct a bridge. The estate manager listens and assents, his men do not cease in their work. Beyond the trees, beyond the high stone walls of the estate, women and children die of the hunger that God has seen fit to visit upon them. In my prayers I ask for mercy.
October 17th, 1847. Fogarty came in with my dinner on a tray and said that the marks of the stigmata had been discovered on a child.
‘Is the child alive?’ I demanded when he returned a half-hour later for the tray.
‘Oh yes, miss. No doubt on that. The living child was brought to Father Horan.’
I was amazed but he seemed hardly surprised. I questioned him but he was vague; and the conversation continuing because he lingered, I told him the Legend of the True Cross, with which he was unfamiliar. He was delighted to hear of its elaborations, and said he would recount these in the kitchen. The stigmata on the child have been revealed on feet and hands only, but the priest has said that other parts of the body must be watched. The priest has cautiously given an opinion: that so clearly marked a stigma has never before been known in Ireland. The people consider it a miracle, a sign from God in these distressful times.
October 20th, 1847. I am not happy here. I do not understand this household, neither the family nor the servants. This is the middle of my third week, yet I am still in all ways at a loss. Yesterday, in the afternoon, I was for the first time summoned to the drawing-room to hear Adelaide play her pieces, and George Arthur’s lessons being over for the day he sat by me, as naturally he should. Charlotte and her mother occupied the sofa, Emily a chai
r in a recess. Mr Pulvertaft stood toasting his back at the fire, his riding-crop tapping time on the side of his polished boot. They made a handsome family picture – Emily beautiful, Charlotte petite and pretty, the plump motherliness of Mrs Pulvertaft, her husband’s ruddy presence. I could not see George Arthur’s features, for he was a little in front of me, but I knew them well from the hours I have surveyed them across our lessons-table. He is bright-faced, and dark like all the family except Mrs Pulvertaft, whose hair I would guess was red before becoming grey. Only Adelaide, bespectacled and seeming heavy for her age, does not share the family’s gift of grace. Poor Adelaide is cumbersome; her movements are awkward at the piano and she really plays it most inelegantly.
Yet in the drawing-room no frown or wince betrayed the listeners’ ennui. As though engrossed in a performance given by a fine musician, Mr Pulvertaft slightly raised and dropped his riding-crop, as he might a baton; similarly expressing absorption, his wife’s lips were parted, the hurry and worry of her nature laid aside, her little eyes delighted. And Emily and Charlotte sat as girls more graciously endowed than a plain sister should, neither pouting nor otherwise recoiling from the halting cacophony. I too-I hope successfully – forced delight into an expression that constantly sought to betray me, while surreptitiously examining my surroundings. (I cannot be certain of what passed, or did not pass, over George Arthur’s features: in the nursery, certainly, he is not slow to display displeasure.)
The drawing-room is lofty and more than usually spacious, with pleasant recesses, and french windows curving along a single wall. Two smaller windows flank the fireplace, which is of white marble that reflects, both in colour and in the pattern of its carving, the white plasterwork of the ceiling. Walls are of an apricot shade, crowded with landscape scenes and portraits of the Pulvertafts who belong to the past. Silks and velvets are mainly green; escritoires and occasional tables are cluttered with ornaments and porcelain pieces – too many for my own taste, but these are family heirlooms which it would be impolite to hide away. So Mrs Pulvertaft has explained, for the same degree of overcrowding obtains in the hall and dining-room, and on the day of my arrival she remarked upon it.
The Collected Stories Page 119
