Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  Henrietta had gone back to the parlour to fetch a pair of gloves that Miss Janeway had forgotten, and so had not been present to hear this piece of advice, if that was what it was, delivered. And, indeed, it was in her absence that her two friends had exchanged between them a look that would not have been allowed them, Isabel considered, had they not been alone. It was a look, on Miss Janeway’s side, of more force and penetration that the shared moment and the words spoken seemed to warrant, although Isabel had returned it with an equal force, and, she believed, an equal candour. Afterwards, when Miss Janeway had been swallowed in what was rapidly turning into that dense variety of fog known, mysteriously, as a “London particular,” and Henrietta had retired to her room to apply a final polish to an article on the English sport of beagling for the New York Interviewer, Isabel had returned to the parlour and sat in solitude for a good half of an hour beside the dreamily diminishing fire. Her thoughts moved, as thoughts do, in large loose loops, but at least once in every round they revisited, like a planet at its perihelion, the question of what precisely Miss Janeway’s portentous remark might have been meant to mean. The words themselves were perfectly plain and clear, but was the formulation into which she had set them intended as advice or admonition, as challenge or condescension, as encouragement or the expression of a deep doubt? Whichever it was, Isabel had never forgotten the moment, there in the hotel’s flickeringly lighted vestibule, on the threshold of night and fog, with the woman’s calmly piercing eye fixed on her. She suspected, she strongly suspected, that the way in which she had conducted her life in the intervening years would represent a serious falling short of the expectations, however tentative and circumspect, that had seemed implied by Miss Janeway’s injunction. She felt she had overspent herself, to the point of emotional and spiritual bankruptcy—but was it so? Had she not, on the contrary, withheld and hoarded the resources she should have lavished on others? She tried to recall the Biblical lesson of the talents and its exact purport, but it became confused in her mind with the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye, and in the end she gave it up. The air was so mild, and the leafing trees so lovely, as they passed by Hyde Park Corner, that the darkness of her thoughts could not but be lightened.

  Miss Janeway’s house proved hard to find. The narrow streets between Fulham Palace Road and the waterside, although pleasantly appointed with handsome bow windows and lilac trees in lavish tender blue blossom, all appeared much alike, and her driver, whom she had hired for his experienced and confident aspect—his whiskers were particularly impressive—was plainly unfamiliar with the area. He had to stop frequently to ask for assistance from such denizens of the neighbourhood as would deign to be thus accosted, and whose help in every case somehow turned out to be singularly unhelpful. As they went blunderingly along, Isabel could hear the fellow muttering to himself on his high perch behind her, and it occurred to her to wonder if he might not have a secret bottle up there that he had been resorting to for comfort and fortification in the toils of this trying odyssey they were bound upon. At last there came into sight a policeman, in a tall helmet and a broad belt, stationed on a corner by a red pillar box and rocking himself pensively on the balls of his notably extensive feet, who, having paused to give his moustaches a flourishing wipe to right and left with the side of a thumb, pointed them with ponderous assurance in the direction of Cedar Street. When they pulled up at last at number seven, Isabel realised that her long sojourn abroad had left her incapable of dealing with the baffling intricacies of shillings and pence, and she could not be sure if the fare being demanded of her was as grossly inflated as she suspected it to be. She thought to delay paying, so as to consult Miss Janeway in the matter, but instead surrendered utterly, and on the spot fumbled the coins out of her purse—oh dear, was that a florin or a half crown?—and handed up, with face averted, what she judged to be more or less the demanded amount of jingling silver and copper. She dearly wished Staines had been with her—Staines would have known exactly how to deal with a bibulous cabman—but the maid had requested the morning free in order to visit her sister, her only surviving relative, at her abode in Hackney. Mrs. Gilhooley, for such was the sister’s name, was married to an Irishman, a hod-carrier by trade, although Isabel was not entirely sure what the carrying of hods entailed, or, indeed, what a hod itself was, exactly. There had come into existence, during the years when Staines and her mistress were residing abroad, a numerous brood of little Gilhooleys, although Cissy—Mrs. G.—loved them all as if, according to her sister, “they was each of them but the one and only.” Isabel had insisted the darlings must have a coin apiece as a token of her warm if necessarily distant regard, but when the money was proffered to her, Staines, inevitably, had set her face and hidden her hands firmly behind her back, saying in a loud voice, with her gaze fixed on a spot an inch above the top of Isabel’s head, that Madam should not think of frittering her wealth away upon “them little scallywags.” This kind of tussle, which was commonplace between the two, amused Isabel as often as it irritated her. Today, however, she had been startled when, the contest having barely been joined, the maid had suddenly abandoned her stance of defiance and, with a moan of apology and distress, had made as if to embrace her, saying, in a thickened voice, “Oh, but, ma’am!” It was only then, taking a small step backwards, that Isabel became aware of the warm spots of moisture speckling her cheeks, and realised that she had, unknowingly and all unaccountably, begun to weep.

  V

  The house, which smelt of dried lavender and silver polish, was as neat and pleasingly plain as its occupant. On all sides the predominant shade was grey—warm-grey walls, silver-grey floorboards, even lively-grey air—in the midst of which Miss Janeway appeared like an emanation of the place itself. To Isabel’s eye she seemed hardly altered from their last encounter, which had also been their first, at the Portland Palace Hotel that long-ago foggy night after the Wigmore Street meeting, except that she looked, not thinner, but as if hollowed out somehow, and there was a knot of tension in the space between her eyebrows that suggested she was, as Isabel had become in recent times, a semi-permanent dweller in the land of the megrims. She wore a straight-sided taupe dress, with a narrow froth of lace at collar and wrists that was her sole concession to the notion of self-adornment.

  She received Isabel with a show of muted welcome, managing the trick of coming forward while at the same time seeming to draw back, with a twist to her lips that was nearly but not quite a smile; the restraint of her demeanour was a pointed invitation for both of them to acknowledge that any more vigorous display of sentiment was not to be indulged in by grown-up persons such as they were—or such as Miss Janeway indubitably was, for Isabel was not at all certain the lady before her would ever be able to bring herself fully to accept her, or anyone else, for that matter, as an intellectual coeval.

  “You look hot, my dear,” Miss Janeway said, with an all but imperceptible intensification of that not-quite smile. “Would you care for something cooling? A glass of lemonade, perhaps?”

  Isabel in fact had not been aware of the level of her temperature, but under the force of Miss Janeway’s steely solicitude it seemed she must be bright-red and positively glistening all over. She said that a glass of plain water would be a welcome balm, and a maid was summoned. This was a petite and pretty girl, whose complexion and eyes made a nice contrast of pink and blue—she was not at all of the fellowship of the sturdy Staineses—and who faced the visitor with an air of openness and assurance that was, Isabel privately conceded, a credit to the egalitarian tenets of the house.

  “Some water, please, Daisy, for Mrs. Osmond,” Miss Janeway said. “And tell Cook luncheon at half past, yes?”

  “Certainly, ma’am,” Daisy said, and departed, casting another easy, smiling glance in Isabel’s direction.

  The two ladies, with Miss Janeway going ahead, entered a pleasant little drawing room and seated themselves at a square table of waxed deal placed, just so, in what was surely the dea
d centre of the floor. They sat opposite each other, on upright chairs, as if, Isabel thought, she were here to be interviewed by a potential employer. Then she noticed how Miss Janeway strained her head forward a little at the left side, and remembered that she had been slightly deaf, which must be why she had placed herself so as to have a direct view of her visitor’s face. But had the poor woman’s hearing declined so drastically that she was reduced to lip-reading? At this thought Isabel experienced a small sharp stab of pity, which in turn made her feel obscurely ashamed.

  “Your stay in London will be brief?” Miss Janeway enquired.

  “Yes, tomorrow I set out for Rome,” Isabel answered, trying not to seem to shout, “or perhaps Paris, first. I have not decided.”

  “My goodness, such freedom!” Miss Janeway pleasantly exclaimed, bringing her long-fingered ivory-pale hands together in front of her in a single, soundless clap.

  Ah, Isabel thought, if you only knew!

  Daisy returned then, bearing on a little tin tray Isabel’s by now sacral-seeming cooling glass. The sun in the window had assembled a complicated shape, like a broken birdcage made of old gold, and thrown it down on the floor, where it lay partly athwart the legs of the deal table. Isabel’s fat bag of banknotes was wedged awkwardly between her hip and the rungs of the chair-back. She had seen, when she first arrived, Miss Janeway take in the bulging satchel with a discreet, swiftly sliding glance. Now she felt again acutely how childish she had been to cause such a deal of money to be materialised in front of her; yes, childish, for she was like the spoilt child at a magic show whose rich daddy has bribed the magician to turn his top hat inside out and show her the tawdry mechanism by which the poor dazed rabbit is made to pop up. “But money is not money, my dear!” Ralph Touchett’s elderly father had said to her, with one of his gentle, feathery laughs, sitting in his chair on the lawn at Gardencourt to take the last of the sunlight on a summer evening that now seemed to her impossibly far off in the past. “That is,” he had continued, “it’s not what the good plain folk of this world imagine it to be. That stuff, the stuff with which they feed and clothe themselves and their children, putting away what little surplus they can keep of it against that famous and much-feared rainy day—well, I say, child, that’s not money: that’s small change.”

  But what, then, was money? She had pressed this question on the wise old man, who in his days as a banker had amassed a fabulous fortune by shrewd manipulations of the mysterious commodity of which they were now speaking, but he had only laughed again, shaking his head at her naivety. Left therefore to make it out for herself, she had figured money, real money and not “that stuff,” to be as an underground river, a vast dark unseen rushing force sweeping along with it rattling shoals of stones and the torn-off roots of plants and trees and endlessly replenishing from below the secret springs of power. What had she to do with this unstoppable, elemental surge? What was she, despite the airs and graces she had been required to put on over the years, but one of the “plain folk” whom Mr. Touchett had so lightly spoken of in his characteristic and kindly condescending fashion? The satchel at her back seemed all at once a horribly burdensome extrusion of herself, something along the lines of a hunchback’s hump.

  “I gather from our dear friend Henrietta Stackpole,” Miss Janeway said, directing her careful gaze at the table-top now, “that the welcome awaiting you on your return to Rome may not be as warm as one might expect of that sun-blest city?”

  Isabel sat very still, like a fox, she thought, who has heard the blare of the huntsman’s horn sound frighteningly close to the covert. But for how long, she asked herself ruefully, and aware of mixing her sporting metaphors, had she imagined the bush could reasonably be beaten about? Miss Janeway, it seemed, was as plain in her speech as she was in everything else. Was it not exactly in hope of just this quality that Isabel had made her meandering way here to the riverside reaches of the city? She had come to talk and, more importantly, to be talked to. Now that the moment had arrived, however, the moment of being pitched precipitately into just that “talk,” something within her, some sulkily resentful and, once again, childish version of herself, resisted. Miss Janeway, who obviously had an eye for such things, at once perceived her visitor stubbornly hesitate, and smiled, and setting her palms flat on the table before her suggested briskly that, although the half-hour was still a good ten minutes short, they might run the risk of Mrs. Pullan’s wrath—this person, Isabel surmised, must be the cook—and venture into the dining room to demand their luncheon.

  The main course of this predictably modest repast consisted of boiled broccoli, boiled beans and boiled spinach, garnished all over with a light sprinkling of chopped almonds. At least the nuts, Isabel noted, had been spared the ordeal of the ebullient cauldron. She was aware of Miss Janeway’s eye bent discreetly upon her. Was the frugality of the fare meant as a test of her spiritual mettle? She was certainly no trencher-woman—she nursed a positive aversion to the celebrated roast beef of old England—but the expanse of steaming greenery confronting her, even with the amelioration of the pretty tan-and-cream particles of almond, she found peculiarly daunting.

  “I eat no flesh,” Miss Janeway observed, in a tone not at all apologetic, and even added, with what seemed a hint of reproach, that she hoped her guest “would not feel the want of meat.”

  Isabel, with forgivable fraudulence, hastened to assert her total contentment with what had been put before her, and stalwartly took up her knife and fork. Her hostess, however, continued to observe her.

  “I have it as a moral principle,” she said, “that any living thing possessed of facial features should not be converted into food.”

  To this Isabel could find no commensurate rejoinder, and therefore said nothing, and instead raised to her mouth a floret of broccoli not much smaller than, and of much the same texture as, so it seemed to her, a miniature shrub.

  For some little time the two ladies ate together in silence save for irrepressible herbivoral crunchings. Daisy the maid came and went, attending with deft cheerfulness to the modest needs of the table, now re-stocking the bread-plate, now topping up the water jug, all the time sustaining a rosy-cheeked smile and distributing freely her self-contented glances. It seemed, all in all, Isabel reflected, a notably peaceable household, with an easy-going way to it that belied its directress’s faint though definite frostiness. Did the chill of her demeanour betoken a particular disapproval of her visitor, perhaps? The possibility was there, and Isabel had to acknowledge it, and, if she decided it was more than a possibility, modulate her behaviour accordingly. But what should such a modulation consist in, short of finishing up her greens and making her excuses and departing, as speedily and with as much politeness as she could muster? Meanwhile she was distracted by an inability to stop herself enumerating in her mind the varieties of creatures possessed of some sort of face whose flesh she had thoughtlessly partaken of over the years.

  It occurred to her, as surely it should have done long before this, that perhaps her silence in response to Miss Janeway’s frank question about Rome had seemed rude, if not indeed offensive. When this notion dropped inside her, like a suddenly plunging plumb-line, she at once set down her knife and fork and turned up her face to the lady before her and spoke out in perfect unpreparedness.

  “Yes,” she heard herself say, or blurt, more like, “it is a cold welcome that awaits me in Rome.”

  Miss Janeway’s eyebrows, which had so far been as straight as pen-strokes, rose up now in two steep arches, while in the places where her cheekbones were most prominent there appeared two round bright patches of pink.

  “My dear,” she murmured, holding her own knife and fork suspended in mid-air, “oh, my dear!”

  This abrupt show of sympathy left Isabel more than anything uncertain and confused. It was not that she was unappreciative, only the effect on her was curious. The warmth of Miss Janeway’s response, which was like a sudden glow of sunlight on the crazed surface of a frozen pon
d, sent the young woman skimming back through the years to a certain time, that seemed to her now immemorial, and to a certain moment of that time, when on a damp and, to her, not unpleasantly doleful spring afternoon she had sat on a sagging horsehair sofa in a funny old room in her grandmother’s house in Albany, with a book open on her lap, a formidable work tracing in overly intricate detail the immense history of German philosophy, doggedly concentrating on the dense text and attempting frowningly to shut her ears to the clamour of many small children at their “play hour” in a little school on the other side of the street. She had lately, herself, become an orphan, following the death of her father, and she was not sure what to make of this novel state she had suddenly found herself in. Up to now, in her lazy conception of the thing, she had thought of an orphan largely as a barefoot waif in a sentimental novel, and certainly not such as she herself was, a strapping and perfectly well-shod person in her twentieth year. She mourned her father, naturally—her mother had died a long time before—but she could not deny that his passing had left her in a position that was, at least in one of its effects, interesting: that is, the effect of her having been set free. Oh, it was a circumscribed freedom she had entered upon, certainly—her father had left very little money, and the bulk of it had of course to go to her two older, married sisters—and the horizons of her life seemed not markedly broader than they had been. All the same, she was aware of an inner lightness, a buoyancy, even, that she was sure she should be, yet was not, ashamed of. The dead make a space for the living, she told herself by way of self-exculpation; it is the natural order of things. She felt, that rainy afternoon in Albany, as she struggled diligently to stay in step with Herr Professor Hegel’s tracking of the undeviating forward march of the Spirit of History, that she herself, in her newly lightened state, was surely on the way somewhere too, even if she had no more control of her direction than a hot-air balloon that had slipped its tethers and must drift where the wind listeth.