Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  The maid turned upon her a stare as stony as adamant. “What, you mean London?” she said. She gave herself a scornful sort of twitch, bridling her bony shoulders. “This”—directing the tip of her sharp nose at the fashionable parade of parasols and silk hats along the busy pavement—“this is not my London, ma’am.”

  To this rebuff Isabel responded with her smile of practised vagueness, and once again retreated into herself, as into the folds of a capacious, all-covering cape. She could never be annoyed with Staines, not fully; she knew that what appeared in the young woman a large, unremitting and ill-tempered disdain was no more than a mask for an incapacity to show her ever-marvelling appreciation of Isabel’s tolerance and loyalty. For the maid loved her mistress, incoherently, inexpressibly, and would be willing, as she might say herself, to walk barefoot over burning coals, if thereby she might strike up for Isabel a spark of needed warmth. Acknowledging this fact to herself for the thousandth time, Isabel found her thoughts turning back to the somehow related matter of the weeping man. It was true, she had never witnessed a grown-up human being display in public such helplessness, such haplessness, such raw infantile grief, yet now it occurred to her, who had lately suffered so many blows to the spirit, to wonder why it was not more common, why it was not an everyday occurrence, to be witnessed at any time at any street corner—why were we not all given to periodic outbursts of public wailings? For in the scale of things, she was sure, the weight of the world’s sorrow would sink the balance so sharply that the pan on that side would make a brassy bang on the counter-top. Indeed, she felt at this moment that she might direct the cab to stop, and leap down and run back and take her place beside that poor soul and pour out her own distress upon the commonplace air; but of course she did not.

  How had the man arrived at such a sorry pass? From the intense manner of his weeping it might have newly dawned on him how desperate were his circumstances, yet it was not lately he had stumbled into such wretched straits, that much was plain. Perhaps some fresh misfortune had just befallen him. It seemed to Isabel that he was bewailing not the particular but the general, as if today at last all of his misfortunate and bedevilled life, if it merited to be called a life, had come to a head somehow and overwhelmed him. Should she have defied Staines and offered him, if nothing else, at least a word or two of comfort? She suspected there would be no comforting a sorrow such as his, yet that suspicion, however strong it might be, did not exonerate her. Was it not her duty, from her place of vantage, to reach down a hand to the crushed and helpless, to the ones who might have soared but instead had plummeted from the sky and lay now with broken wing, flailing and twitching on the pavement at her feet? Her spirit, the better part of her, moaned in sympathy with the weeping man, yet in another cold and calculating region of her consciousness the necessary defences were already being erected. What, after all, could she have done for the poor wretch? What comfort would a word of hers have brought to him? Money, yes, she might have given him money, and a large portion of it, at that; but even her silver would not have saved him, for surely he was beyond saving. No: as well hope to help the lost souls in Hades. And yet.

  II

  At the hotel in Dover Street she declined the suite of rooms that had been prepared for her, requesting instead only a single chamber for herself, and a bed for her maid. This caused a consternated flurry, and the manager himself was called in to deal with the matter. He was a plump smooth person with waxed moustaches, wearing a frock-coat and sporting a rich dove-grey cravat stuck with a diamond pin. He assured the “dear madam” it was a suite that had been ordered: the command had come from Gardencourt by telegraph that morning. Isabel detected the hand of Ralph’s mother—Mrs. Touchett, practical lady though she was, would not be capable of imagining anyone putting up in anything less than a fleet of hotel rooms—but insisted nevertheless on her own preference. There followed an ostentatious consultation of the register, accompanied by frowns and sighs and a rapid twirling of moustaches, and at last she was led to a pleasant first-floor room, where chintz reigned in flowery triumph, and two tall windows, curtained with gauze, gave on to the narrow busy street below. Isabel, despite the manager’s lingering air of mild affront, said this would do very nicely, and went and stood at one of the windows with her back turned, savouring the evocative fragrance of dusty muslin, until the man, murmuring politenesses, consented to withdraw. Meanwhile Staines took charge of the delivery of the luggage—the only tangible outcome of her clash with the station porter, Isabel noted, was a broken clasp on a pigskin dressing-case and a bad dent in a hat-box—and the disposition of her mistress’s “things.”

  In the street outside the sun was shining, for the afternoon still lingered—the seemingly endless journey from Gardencourt, first by dog-cart along by the Thames, with their luggage piled on a four-wheeler behind them, and then on the hurrying train from Pangbourne, had in reality taken somewhat less than two hours in total. Isabel, parting the faintly crepitant curtains, stepped into the bay of the window and leaned her forehead against the glass to bathe a moment in its sharp chill smoothness. Staines had completed the unpacking and stowing, and now withdrew to her own quarters, and stillness descended upon the room like a fall of dew. Letting her eyes close, Isabel dipped into the dark behind her lids as if into the mossy coolness of a forest pool. Yet she could not linger long, for in that darkness she was sure to meet the padding, yellow-eyed, implacable creature that was her conscience. Strange: she it was who had been wronged, grievously wronged, by her husband, and by a woman whom she had considered, if not her ally, then not her enemy either, yet it was she herself who felt the shame of the thing. Or was her failure to live up to her cousin Ralph’s hopes and expectations—reasonable hopes, legitimate expectations—was that the thing the trace of which the beast from the forest was following? She did not know, she could not think: so many things were interpenetrated and beyond her strength to separate and assess singly, on their own merits, their own demerits. She felt within her all the shrinkings of a sinner, only she could not identify the sin.

  But if a particular sin could not be singled out, she had plenty of possibilities at her disposal nonetheless. There was pride, yes indeed, pride, and vanity, and complacent self-absorption, though goodness knew she had been dragged away from the looking-glass roughly enough by Gilbert Osmond and Serena Merle, her husband and his—but Isabel could not find a term that might suitably be applied to the ineffable Madame Merle. Isabel was well aware of the danger of succumbing to the sinner’s secret love of self that glories in the sackcloth and under the soft fall of ashes. “Adored” was the last word the dying Ralph Touchett had uttered in her hearing, and it came to her now that she had taken it for granted that she would always be adored by someone, without having to adore in return—that was complacency, that was vanity, that was pride, all of which affects had gone a long way to sustain her notion of herself as a singular figure, and a force in the world, or at least her miniaturised version of the world. And so she had been allowed to live along, happily, in the house of herself, which, as she acknowledged now, was no more substantial in dimensions than a doll’s house.

  Happily? The word caught her up, and brought her back sharply to the reality surrounding her, the reality of sunlight, of street, of passers-by, of the whole strange busy transaction of being alive. She had lived long years with her husband—they had not been many, the years, but they had been long—crouched in the cramped confines of the little model dwelling that she had so handily fashioned. Had she been happy? At first, perhaps; but that contented first had soon given way to a lamentable second, which state had itself lately ended with such violent abruptness that her nerves still vibrated from the blow, like the tines of a tuning fork. Now she posed again the question she had been asking herself since she had departed from Italy to come and be at her cousin’s deathbed, the question of how much of the truth about the real nature and circumstances of her marriage she had known all along without letting herself know she kn
ew it. If she had committed a great wrong, against herself and others, perhaps that was precisely it, that she had willed her own ignorance. But how, she inwardly cried, how could she have avoided it, with her husband and Madame Merle so actively abetting her in her purblind state, holding the veil firmly drawn over her eyes, the wonderfully scented, silken veil? And the fact was, of course, that her husband had not been with her in that little house, but had been outside it all along, standing upright and at his leisure, with his hands in his pockets, and only leaning down to peep in at her amusedly now and then where she sat huddled with her arms circled about her knees and her head so sharply inclined she could see little more than the tips of her toes.

  She sighed, there at the window. She was weary. She put up her hands and pressed her fingertips to her brow. “Headache” seemed nowadays for her the name of a permanent state of being. She turned and walked back into the room and stood vaguely at a loss at the foot of the vast high slightly frightening bed. Would she be able to sleep upon such an expanse of feathers and springs, of ticking and wool, of linen and satin? Should she summon Staines to fetch her a sedative? There was bound to be a chemist’s shop nearby that would be open. No, she must not come to depend on artificial palliatives, but must get by on the exertions of her will alone. If she could not force herself to sleep she could at least command rest. Yet the thought of lying here for hour upon hour gazing upwards sightlessly into a depthless dark filled her suddenly with a sort of anguish. She set a hand to the bedpost and gripped it tightly and bade herself be calm. Tonight would be only another night among nights; it would pass, and another day would come. She went and drew open the wardrobe, instinctively avoiding her own eye in the mirror set into an inner panel of the door, and chose an evening-gown at random. Not five minutes later she was downstairs, enquiring for directions to the dining room. Yes, she would have a table; no, there would be no one joining her.

  It was early, and she thought at first the small dim room was empty. How expectant the chairs and tables seemed, bedecked with silver and crystal and linen and carefully arranged in ranks, like so many dancers ready to plunge into a waltz and tensely awaiting the first crashing chord from the orchestra. The maître d’ appeared—another frock-coat, another grey cravat plumped up like a pigeon’s chest—and she was murmuringly led to a place in the corner and deftly seated, although, despite the man’s soft obsequiousness of manner, she had momentarily the sense of having been screwed down into her chair, like a cork forced into the neck of a bottle. Restaurants always reminded her a little of the schoolroom, if an unusually democratic and well-appointed one, where she had been sent to receive lessons in some of the finer and more venerable social disciplines. She was handed the menu, and glancing about, as one does when this small ceremony is being enacted, she spied at a table in the corner diagonally across from hers a gentleman of somewhat stout appearance, bearded and balding, who was reading a newspaper with the aid of a pair of pince-nez. He was, she judged, on the brink of his middle years, though still displaying an aspect of youthful vigour, despite the marked rotundity that strained the buttons of the lower half of his waistcoat. This waistcoat was the sole slightly remarkable aspect of himself that he presented to the world’s inspection, for while his jacket and his flowing bow tie were mutely black, and his starched collar was a pillar of pristine whiteness, his gaily sported vest—which is what it would be called at home—was composed of alternating vertical stripes of sky-blue and buttercup-yellow satin. Such a splash of colours set her to wondering what he might be—a man of the theatre, perhaps, an actor-manager, or even a playwright? She could see from the skill with which he had folded his newspaper for ease of propping against the water jug that he was well accustomed to dining alone. Feeling her eye on him now he lifted his head and regarded her with cool directness over the steel rims of the nippers clipped to the bridge of his nose. She essayed a small smile, which he did not return, not out of coldness or unfriendliness, it seemed, but as if he considered a reciprocal gesture of politeness on his part would be superfluous. He went on looking at her for some moments, quite still and calm and not at all intrusively, but taking her in, merely, as she immediately was. Did he know her, had they met at some time, somewhere? He seemed in a way familiar, but she had come to a stage in her life when everyone seemed so who stepped out of the passing crowd for long enough to be held steady and fixed upon for a moment. Yet she had the impression, caught there in the unblinking beam of those preternaturally wide-open, glossy-grey and somewhat protuberant organs, that she was being checked and assessed—no, reassessed; she might have been a portrait that he, the portraitist, had come upon unexpectedly, hanging on the wall of a gallery he had chanced to wander into, and in front of which he had paused, looking to see how his composition had weathered with the years, and what time had done to the quality of the pigment.

  At home—that was how it had come to her, that the man’s waistcoat would be called a vest at home. She sat back on her chair, marvelling at herself. It seemed to her she had long since ceased to think of that foundered behemoth on the far side of the Atlantic as anything like home. But is it not to there, to home, that the injured child runs, for safety and solace? And what was she once more, if not a child, and injured?—no matter what indignant protests might be lodged by the side of her that was grown-up and healthily sound. Injured, yes, injured and—she was compelled to confess it—homeless.

  The waiter came and she gave her order, and had forgotten what it was before the young man had turned away with the retrieved menu in his white-gloved hand. Her mind was upon the morrow, and now she realised that there was a telegram she had forgotten to send. She summoned what she thought was the original waiter, although he turned out to be a different one—there seemed to be so many of them, and all seemed to look alike—and requested him to bring to the table a telegraph form and a pencil. Her first appointment next day was to be at the bank, and at lunchtime she hoped to see her friend—or, rather, she should say, her acquaintance, since she had no more right to intimacy with the lady than that—Miss Florence Janeway, at her home in Fulham. The call to the bank would be tedious at most, with the usual flutterings and flummeries, but Miss Janeway was an altogether different prospect, even though it was Isabel herself who had proposed the visit, which the telegram she was about to write would reconfirm. It appeared she needed to talk to someone, a thing she had never needed before, if by talk was meant a laying out of facts and feelings so that they might be considered with the benefit of an additional pair of eyes, another instrument of measuring and placing and judging. Was that what she anticipated, was that what she hoped for, of Miss Janeway? There were others in this city she could turn to, one of whom was her friend—and she verily was her friend, by any standards—namely Henrietta Stackpole, with whom she was to put up tomorrow night, at her lodgings in Welbeck Street, before setting out on her return journey to Rome. Miss Stackpole, however, the good, the decent, the ever-sensible Henrietta, was too much vexed at Isabel over too many things for Isabel to think of employing her as a sounding board. No, Henrietta would have to be left to “cool” for at least another day. What Isabel needed was the long, indeed the remote, perspective of Miss Janeway, who, she expected, would neither accuse her nor let her off. And yet, for all that, the question remained why she must have anyone either to lay a charge against her or pronounce her innocent. If she felt in need of a confessor, the naves of numerous of the churches in London were lined with confessionals.

  She knew very well, of course, that it was herself she wished to converse with, only her voice had gone so weak and her hearing so faint that she would have to do so through the open channel of some other, if need be, even if that other were not very much more than a blank stranger. It was a risk, it was a perilous risk, but one she had to take.

  Now the two indistinguishable waiters appeared simultaneously at her table, one with the telegraph form and the other with her fish. She scribbled a message to Miss Janeway, then turned her at
tention to her plate. The morsel laid across it was grey in hue, and smeared over with a beige sauce upon which a firm yet shivery skin had already formed. The hermits of the desert could hardly have been less the gourmand than Isabel Osmond, but all the same she never ceased to wonder at the inventiveness of English chefs in transforming perfectly presentable produce into messes of a kind that a French or Italian schoolboy would descend to sampling only on a dare. She probed the fish cautiously with her fork and separated off a flake of flesh uncontaminated by sauce and chewed upon it with the gloomy resignation of a ruminant. Looking to that other table across the way, perhaps with the intention of exchanging an empathetic glance with her fellow-suffering fellow-diner, she found to her surprise that the portly gentleman had vacated his table. She could not understand how he had managed to depart without her noticing. He seemed to have consumed nothing, and the only proof of his having been there at all was the folded newspaper he had left behind him, still expertly propped against the jug. She felt an obscure sense of disappointment at being so curtly abandoned to the solitude of the sombre room. Yet what had she hoped for, what did she imagine she had missed? She would hardly have entertained the friendly advances of a man she did not know, however considerate or courtly he might have proved to be, while seated all alone at a hotel dining table. Yet the way he had looked at her, with that calmly candid, undeflected gaze, had seemed to offer—what? Not sympathy, certainly, which anyway she would have rebuffed; some form of sustenance, then? The word came to her, but she was not at all sure what it meant, in the context of the two of them sitting here isolated from each other and as far from direct contact or communication as the dimensions of the room would allow. But definitely, mysteriously, she did miss him, now that he was gone. It was as if she were an invalid making her feeble way over difficult terrain, who had found suddenly that a hand that had been sustaining her for so long she had ceased to notice its support had suddenly been withdrawn, leaving her to totter on alone. Absurd, absurd, she told herself. What a fantasy to weave about a person she had never seen before, and would most likely never see again!