Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  The waiter came and took away her plate.

  III

  The great grey stone edifice seemed to look down upon the sunlit street with its nostrils flared in pained reprehension and disdain. The tall doors admitted her willingly enough, however. Inside, there was a cathedral hush, and high-collared pale young men in black tended their desks with a positively priestly intentness and devotion. Having given her name, she was shown into an oak-panelled waiting room, where after a matter of moments there appeared a lofty person of wintry aspect with a very long and very sharp white nose, who announced himself as Mr. Goresby. Although his title, as she half heard him say, was under-manager for something or other, it was apparent from the measured stateliness of his carriage that he was keenly aware of himself as possessed of a large authority. He shook Isabel’s gloved hand gravely and made a stiff bow. He offered his condolences on the sad demise of “young Mr. Touchett,” then cleared his throat and remarked the clemency of the weather. Behind the chill blandness of his look she detected a faint but lively gleam—So this, she imagined him saying to himself, this is the famous young heiress of whom we have heard so many words spoken and so much exclaimed.

  They sat down at a small circular table, and tea was brought. She had not been offered this refreshment, and had she been she would have declined it, for she did not wish to spend more of her morning in this distinctly oppressive pantheon than she could help. It was only a bank, she knew, as impersonal and detached as an institution could be, yet it brought to her mind certain things she would rather not have been reminded of, such as the burdensomeness of her wealth, which by an intricate web of connections made the burden of her sorrow for her cousin Ralph’s death harder still to bear. Mr. Goresby, stirring his tea, was now enquiring politely as to her immediate plans: Would she be travelling back to Rome, where he understood she had her principal residence, or were there further business affairs she must attend to in London? She replied that she would set out for Rome the following evening, then was surprised to hear herself add that she might stop in Paris for a day or two on the way. She frowned, and glanced aside; she could not think from where had come the idea of Paris—it had popped into her head at just that moment—and wondered at herself for it. What was there in Paris to detain her? Was it merely a ruse to delay her return to Rome and all that awaited her there? If so, she would not lack for cities along the way that would be more than happy to offer hospitality to a moneyed young woman—“widow,” she realised with surprise, indeed with shock, was the word that had first occurred to her; it was an absent-minded tribute to her late cousin, as she supposed, but also perhaps, in a frightening way, a pointer to a darker thought, a darker wish, at the very possibility of which she felt herself begin guiltily to blush.

  Now she set down her cup and, with a firmness which, as she was aware, verged on the rude, brought the talk abruptly round to the piece of business that was the reason for her being there. She wished, she announced, to withdraw a sum of money, in cash. Mr. Goresby raised his eyebrows calmly and said that of course he would be happy to facilitate the transaction—he would attend to it personally. However, when Isabel mentioned the sum she intended to withdraw, he flinched in a manner that caused the cup and saucer he was holding to make a brief but definite rattle.

  “My dear Mrs. Osmond,” he breathed, “that is a very large sum, to be taken out, in cash.”

  This gave her pause, and she experienced a flash of misgiving, so that now it was her turn to flinch. The truth was that she had no object in mind in making the withdrawal, and had fixed upon the amount by a whim. In fact, it was only now, seeing the bank official’s startlement, that she asked herself why she should wish to take upon herself, upon her very person, such a tangible store of money—what did she intend to do with it? She did not know. Had the impulse, which she had not questioned until now, sprung from a primitive urge for safety and assurance by way of amassing and hoarding? She was surprised at herself, but her sense of sheepishness only compelled her to put on a bolder, even a more brazen, front, and she looked Mr. Goresby firmly in the eye and repeated her request, and reaffirmed the amazing amount. He swallowed with some difficulty—she saw the wobble of his Adam’s apple—and with the ghost of a queasy smile excused himself and rose, and creaked his way to the door, where he paused a second and glanced back at her over his shoulder, still with that uneasy spectral smile, then made a soundless exit.

  This time she was left unattended for some minutes in the room’s faintly ticking, surreptitious silence. She sat very straight on the chair, both hands resting on the clasp of the black silk reticule that she held balanced on her knees, and tried to think of nothing at all. She felt very light, almost weightless, as if she were levitating somehow a fraction of an inch above the chair on which she was seated. She thought of her schooldays, and of waiting in a cold room to face the wrath of authority over some misdemeanour committed unwittingly yet unamenable to being explained away. Why had she been so foolish as to come here today—what childish compulsion had she thought to appease? Well, she was paying for her rashness now.

  And she would have to go on paying for some time yet. Presently Mr. Goresby returned, accompanied by a second official, in morning dress and spats, whose name was Grimes. Where Mr. Goresby was tall and thin, Mr. Grimes was short and stout, though it was clear the latter stood upon a higher rung of the fiscal hierarchy than his gaunt colleague. He approached Isabel with a curiously springing, one might almost say a bouncing, step, chafing his hands together in a washing motion, a broad but decidedly nervous smile puckering his bewhiskered chubby cheeks. He said that Mr. Goresby had informed him of her desire to make a withdrawal, in cash; he mentioned the sum she had specified; he pursed his lips. That was a large and, dared he say it, a potentially perilous quantity of banknotes for a lady to be carrying with her through the city’s busy streets. He cast a dubious look at the silken purse on which her hands rested. Did she have someone waiting for her outside the bank, preferably in a private carriage, a relative, perhaps, a male relative, or even a servant, one whom she could trust and whose protection, whose strength and protection—in fine, whose brawn, although he did not use so brash a word—she could depend on? She had not? Ah. Mr. Grimes exchanged a glance with Mr. Goresby. They both displayed the marks not only of anxiety but of embarrassed discomfiture. Isabel rose to her feet. For how much longer would she have to endure this absurd torment, a torment that was all the more acute by virtue of the fact that the painful yet faintly comical predicament she had blundered into was of her own making?

  “Please, gentlemen, you mustn’t concern yourselves,” she said, producing, from a hitherto unsuspected histrionic capacity within her, a brilliant smile. Then, continuing to play the player and desperately improvising, she went on to declare that her husband awaited her at a lawyer’s office not three minutes’ walk from the bank. The fact was—she widened that theatrically mendacious smile another notch—a house, a delightful little place in Dover Street, yes, Dover Street, had unexpectedly come up for sale, and they must fairly snatch at it, while the chance was there. “The owner is going abroad at once, and we have been given until midday today to agree the purchase and make a down payment as a mark of our intent. So you see why I am here.”

  She looked from one to the other of the worried faces before her; it would have been impossible to say on which of the two visages was registered the deeper doubt. Nevertheless, there she was before them, a smiling customer, and a highly valued one at that, with every right to withdraw however large a portion of her own substantial fund she wished, and in whatever form she cared to specify. So, after a whispered exchange between the two officials, Mr. Goresby departed, leaving Mr. Grimes to escort Isabel out of the waiting room, across the building’s nave-like floor, up a broad marble staircase resembling a frozen waterfall, and into his unexpectedly poky little office, which smelt of candle grease and stale tobacco smoke. There the two of them waited for ten of the longest minutes it seemed to Isabe
l she had ever endured, until at last Mr. Goresby reappeared, bearing before him in both hands, as if it were the Grail itself, a leather case containing a big white crackling bundle of legal tender. A document was produced and laid on Mr. Grimes’s desk, and Isabel was handed a pen with which to inscribe her signature. In the hush while she signed she could hear, above the scratching of the pen, the stertorous breathing of Mr. Grimes and Mr. Goresby’s lighter and therefore somehow more anxious-sounding aspirations. Now came another moment of awkwardness, when she enquired as to the provenance of the attaché-case in which the notes were stored, and was informed that it was Mr. Goresby’s personal property. Oh, but then, she exclaimed, how was she to repay him for the sacrifice? Would he allow her to recompense him the value of the case, so that he might replace it with a new one? This brought on a prolonged clearing of throats and a casting down of eyes, and Isabel felt herself flush in the shaming realisation of having committed a gaffe. Mr. Goresby said that perhaps she would find an opportunity to return the case to him at some future date, but that in the meantime she must accept it as a token of the bank’s concern for her safety and peace of mind—here he demonstrated how securely the flap of the case could be fastened—and also as a gesture of appreciation and goodwill on his own part, a gesture in which of course he would include Mr. Grimes, his superior, as he generously, and no doubt advisedly, added. Then both men bowed to her, smiling as if in pain, and walked her between them out of the office, down the staircase and across the echoing marble hall to the tall front door. She felt, with the case under her arm, like a once-favoured niece being sent out into an unwelcoming world by two sadly disappointed, disapproving uncles. Once outside and released, she paused for a moment on the top step and took in a slow deep draught of the morning’s mild air. How lucky it was, she suddenly thought, that Staines had not been with her—there was that, at least.

  IV

  Yet as she walked along in the still tentative sunlight of the early-summer day her agitation began to abate and she found herself able to think back over the past hour with only the faintest after-shudder of shame. And, indeed, why should she be at all ashamed of having allowed herself so harmless an adventure? If she had lied, about the purchase of the fictitious house in Dover Street, her lie had been one of convenience, and had hurt no one; if she had been frivolous, her frivolity had not been without a dash of daring; if she had been irresponsible, her irresponsibility had been in some sense an affirmation of the fact of her freedom. And freedom, for Isabel, was and always had been a significant quality, perhaps for her the most significant of all, for how was life to be in any way tolerable if one were trapped and trammelled on all sides? In the implications of that question lay the reason, or at least part of the reason, for her being here, on this hazy London morning, with a satchel stuffed full of legal tender under her arm. The conditions in which she had lived these past years, the years, that is, of her marriage—so surprisingly, so shockingly few!—had made it imperative that something of hers, something exclusively her own, should be affirmed, and its latitudes exercised, however narrow such latitudes might be. She was not of so coarse a cast of mind as to imagine that mere money constituted the temple of liberty, although it was perhaps one of its pillars, but such were the restrictions within which she had been struggling, like a lamb caught up in a hedge of thorns, that even the little gambol she had indulged in at the bank could seem a wild dance of ecstatic vernal release.

  The air was so still that she heard faintly afar the chimes of Big Ben: it was midday already, and she was due to take luncheon at Miss Janeway’s house in a little less than an hour. She had intended to return to Dover Street and request that the attaché-case be stored securely in the hotel safe, but there would not be time for that now. She found a cab rank and, having named her destination, which lay in the depths of Fulham’s maze of back-streets running out to the river, she mounted the high seat of the hansom and settled herself with the case clutched tightly to her side. Her bravado was diminishing by the moment; she no longer conceived herself a gay corsair bounding off upon the main with her bag of booty, but acknowledged instead how reckless and foolhardy she had been in imagining that she could blithely entrust herself and her treasure to the dangerous shoals and reefs of the city’s public thoroughfares. She pictured an eye-patched brigand of the streets leaping up at her with a flashing blade held fast in his teeth and snatching the case out of her grasp and plunging back into the passing crowd as swiftly as he had come. And would it not serve her right to be thus set upon and piratically robbed?

  However, here was the broad calm vista of the Mall, and the Palace nobly presiding off at the end of it, and then Constitution Hill flanked on both sides by ample trees powdered with young June’s tender foliage in a score or more shades of gauzy green. Lulled by the softness of the scene and the whir and warble of the cab-wheels on this smooth straight stretch of roadway, Isabel felt her heart, which had been struggling within her like a cat in a bag, settling back to its accustomed muted beat. Her thoughts winged their way idly here and there, alighting at last on Miss Janeway. Isabel had first encountered this admirable lady at a meeting in a somewhat dingy hall in Wigmore Street to which she had gone, not entirely willingly, in the company of her friend Henrietta Stackpole. She could not now remember what the purpose or the topic of the meeting had been—it was years ago, when she was still unmarried—but she retained the impression of an atmosphere of muted ardency, and of a passionate glister in the eyes of the preponderantly female audience rustling excitedly all about her. Miss Stackpole, dear Henrietta, was a journalist of a particular American stamp, in that she judged it incumbent on the people and places she proposed to write about to convince her of their worthiness before she would so much as dip her pen in the inkpot. She had only a slightly exaggerated notion of her status as a commentator on the ways, and wiles, of the English at large, although there were some unkind natives of the realm who had been heard to mutter that she was no more than a purveyor of social tittle-tattle to the ever-avid ears of leisured ladies in New York, Boston and San Francisco; and certainly it was nothing less than the truth that she did often supply copy to the less intellectually high-toned of the American monthlies, for a body had to live, after all, as she would remark with a sigh.

  At the close of the meeting the pair had come out into the darkness and drizzle of the late-autumn evening, and on the pavement under the glass awning there was such a flexing and ballooning of black umbrellas that it seemed a flock of night-winged birds was about to take flight and flap away over the rooftops. In the midst of the twittering crush Henrietta’s eye had fallen on Miss Janeway. The two greeted each other with measured warmth—Henrietta “was not the kissing kind,” as the saying has it, and neither, decidedly, was Miss Janeway—and Isabel was drawn forward and introduced as “Miss Isabel Archer of Albany,” rather like, as she forgivingly thought, a prize exhibit at a rural fair. Miss Janeway’s smile was friendly enough, but the hand she offered Isabel was cool outside with an impression of brittleness within, like a bundle of twigs bound up in a vine leaf. She was a dry neat person, lean and tall, as tall as Isabel herself, with prematurely silvered hair, which, along with the powdery-pink smoothness of her skin, gave to her an ageless aspect. She spoke with a firm light voice, and was, as Isabel soon detected, slightly hard of hearing.

  Isabel and Miss Stackpole were staying during that earlier visit to the city—Isabel had come up from Gardencourt then, too, but in far happier circumstances—at a funny little hotel on Cavendish Square, and since by now the rain had given way to fog, Henrietta would not hear but that Miss Janeway should accompany them thither and partake of a glass of hot port to dispel the evening’s autumnal vapours, before setting out on her long homeward journey to Fulham. So they had proceeded to the Portland Palace, as the little hotel grandly styled itself, and sat for half an hour, the three of them, in the cramped downstairs parlour, where they were ministered to by an elderly, rheumatical and tremulous night waiter, w
ho stumbled on the mat and spilled port over his knuckles and shook his head and sighed in deprecation of his own unhandiness. Miss Janeway—it was rumoured that in her youth she had gone under the sobriquet of “Florrie,” but this Isabel found impossible to credit—was, as quickly became clear, a person of pamphlets and polemics, of parades and protests: in a word, a member of that species, still rare at the time, known as the New Woman. However, she had none of the fearsomeness of which this novel and partly mythical phenomenon, this latter-day Amazon, is so often accused; she was not shrill, she was not strident, and as for argumentativeness, no one could have been more measured, more downright placid, in the expression of her opinions than this somewhat distant, drily humorous, middle-aged silver-haired bluestocking. Isabel had long ago forgotten what it was they had talked about that night, as the fire hissed and muttered in the hearth and the fog came up and rolled itself against the windows, like so many thick wads of steel shavings. The conversation, whatever it concerned, had been brief, for Miss Janeway had soon put aside her glass, from which she had taken no more than the merest sip, and rose, saying she must not miss her omnibus, for it would be the last one of the night. As she was leaving, standing in the hotel doorway and struggling to unfurl a refractory umbrella, she had half turned back to Isabel and said something that the girl—for she could still be thought a girl in those days—was to remember in aftertime with a pang that had never lost its point.

  “You seem to me, Miss Archer,” said the lady, “a person possessed of a large potential; do be careful not to under-spend your resource.”