Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  She had come down herself in response to Staines’s vigorous plying of the brass knocker—the maid’s manner of signalling her mistress’s arrival at their doors had been likened by more than one among Isabel’s small circle of acquaintances to the summons of the Last Trump—and brushed aside Isabel’s apologies for the lateness of the hour. She greeted her friend not with a smile of welcome, Isabel grimly noted, but with instead a sharp and searching look. Thus was fore-signalled, even as the door was opening, the interrogation Isabel dreaded, but knew was inescapable, and which she had avoided for a day by the expedient of putting up at Pratt’s Hotel on her return from Gardencourt, rather than coming straight here to Wimpole Street.

  “You are exhausted, I see,” Henrietta said, with what, had Isabel not known her better, would have sounded more like severity than sympathy.

  “I’m somewhat tired, I confess,” Isabel replied. “Yesterday’s journey was uncommonly long, although I suppose simply it was that the train was uncommonly slow.”

  There was a deal of business to be attended to immediately—the coachman had borne in the baggage and now Staines was directed to show him to the back stairs—and it was not until the two friends were themselves ascending towards Henrietta’s parlour that the lady of the house spoke again. “Was it very terrible, at the end?” she asked. This time there was no mistaking the sincere and tender concern in her tone, yet for a moment Isabel imagined confusedly that she was still speaking of the rigours of the train journey, but then understood that the subject in fact was the circumstances of her cousin’s death.

  “No,” she said, “not terrible. Peaceful, rather, though melancholy in the extreme, of course.”

  Henrietta gave her another searching look, and they resumed their ascent.

  Mr. Bantling, substantial, smooth and smiling, was waiting to greet them in the doorway at the top of the stairs. He was without a jacket, Isabel saw with some surprise; it was a mark, she supposed, of a new access of ease between the happy couple as the day of their nuptials drew near. She had also taken note of Henrietta’s gown of coruscating brittle blue satin, obviously of recent purchase, and the product, if she was not mistaken, and she was sure she was not, of one of the more discreet and exclusive of the Paris houses. Henrietta had never been a “dresser,” and in the uncharacteristic sumptuousness of her costume this night Isabel felt certain she detected the influence of Mr. Bantling, who, although an unlikely arbiter of fashion, would be eager that his intended bride should be properly “kitted out.”

  “My dear Mrs. Osmond,” this gentleman said now, moulding his smile to a graver frame, “how sad a circumstance it is that we see you nowadays only at sad times.”

  On the previous occasion, when Isabel was on her hurried way down to be with her dying cousin, Henrietta had contrived to leave her alone for the space of some minutes with Mr. Bantling, and that gentleman, despite a soldierly awkwardness of expression, had found the words, simple and kindly, in which to speak of his old friend Ralph’s unfailing good nature, and of his patience and fortitude in face of his final illness, and despite all her woes she had been comforted.

  The three of them now entered together the high dim room, where despite the years of Henrietta’s occupancy there still lingered a faint trace, the very faintest, of Major Horace Henry’s pipe tobacco.

  “We held dinner,” Henrietta said, “in hopes that you might still come, but then this great hungry beast”—she cast a mock scowl in the direction of her fiancé where he hovered jacketless behind her—“had to be fed, and so you find us in our dishevelled post-prandial state.”

  Isabel glanced with veiled amusement at her friend; Henrietta, who for so long had been a self-appointed scourge of the British and their, to her, maddeningly complacent ways, had moved so far as to take on, surely under osmotic pressure attendant upon extended proximity to Mr. Bantling, something of her lately adopted country’s hearty archness of tone.

  They stood in silence, Mr. Bantling and his soon-to-be bride, and gazed upon their friend—for surely by now she was friend to both of them, and well-nigh equally—with an easy fond regard. Then Mr. Bantling looked to Henrietta and delicately cleared his throat in what was patently a pre-agreed signal.

  “Robert begs to be excused,” Henrietta said, turning to Isabel and folding her hands before her. “It seems there is a card game at his club that simply cannot proceed without him.”

  Bob Bantling blushed and loudly laughed—it had always been his way to treat his companion’s utterances, even at their most inconsequential, as the very acme of cleverness and subtle wit—and in hardly more than the blinking of an eye had donned his jacket and taken up his hat and cane and dived off into the night. Henrietta and her guest allowed a moment for the flurry of his departure to subside, smiling, yet aware, to their surprise, of being a little shy of each other and the contiguous intimacy to which they had been so abruptly abandoned.

  IX

  Henrietta summoned her maid, a sallow, sleepy-eyed girl, and bade her bring coffee and cakes. When she had gone the two women remained standing in the middle of the room, held there by a curious indecisiveness; it was as if they were waiting for someone of larger authority to come and direct them as to how they should dispose themselves. The night, slate-blue and shining, pressed against the panes of the bow window on which the curtains had not been drawn; the air in the room seemed unwontedly warm and constricting.

  “I suspect,” Isabel said gently, “that your fiancé has become a little frightened of me.”

  Henrietta stared. “Frightened?—my Robert?” she said. “Why ever would he be frightened of you?” Then she saw the idea of it. “You mean, because you are in mourning? You think him afraid of your grief? Then you underestimate him. He is a soldier, remember, or was, at least. He is not unacquainted with death and its distressful consequences.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Isabel said, with a placating shrug. “No doubt I’m being fanciful. I hardly know my own mind, these days.”

  “Should you imagine,” her friend persisted, her voice rising and broadening in pitch—here was a flash of the Henrietta of old—“that his admittedly abrupt departure was due to wariness of you, then certainly you are mistaken. If he fears anyone, my dear, it is myself.”

  “Oh, yes,” Isabel responded lightly, “I can see how with whip and chair you keep him in check.”

  She stopped. Henrietta regarded her in silence for a moment: Had she in her irreverence gone too far? What she had confessed a moment ago was true: in these woeful and turbulent times she hardly knew herself. Yet since she had left Rome to be with Ralph at the end, and especially in the days that had elapsed since his death, she had, when she was among people, the sense of having herself passed over an ultimate boundary, into some other bourne, and that her presence here in the world was as a phantom, a sort of ghastly revenant, whose touch would freeze, whose look would terrify. It was fancy, all fancy, she knew it. Yet try as she might she could not rid herself of the notion of being somehow beyond nature. That was how she framed it, that she had become denatured, although she was not at all sure what she meant by it.

  Henrietta had turned away, and was repositioning one of the cushions that sat in a row, like so many plump, self-satisfied pets—pug-dogs, say, or large soft colourful cats—along the deep back of a rather lumpy-looking sofa.

  “The fact is,” she said, “the good man and I had agreed beforehand that he would absent himself—‘slope off’ was the term he employed—once you had arrived and he had said a civil word to you. He knew, of course, that you and I would wish to be alone.”

  At this last Isabel felt rise in her an impulse of protest. It might be Henrietta’s wish to be alone with her—indeed, she was sure it was—but the wish was far from mutual. She knew what awaited her. First there would be the litany of questions, sympathetic, to be sure, but probing and relentless too, followed by the familiar homily, urging upon her what she should and must do, in order to—in order to what?
Save herself? That, the saving of herself, or something like it, would be what Henrietta would proclaim her friend’s first duty, now that, as it seemed, her marriage had come to a crisis, a crisis that appeared likely to prove terminal. The idea of self-rescue, so aspirational and lofty, struck Isabel as almost comical, and she almost laughed. It was true, there was something to be saved, something of life itself, precious and essential, but she felt, strangely, that this act of preservation, of redemption, need not necessarily involve her. She might perform the ceremony of preserving and redeeming, while at the same time standing back, or to one side. It was what the priests did: in Rome she often went on a Sunday morning to watch them do it, the ritual conjuring of invisible flesh and blood upon the altar.

  Now the maid returned with coffee and macaroons, and the two women, released from their spell of indecision, seated themselves opposite each other in deep armchairs at either side of the window. Henrietta, never one to recline, held herself upright with her left hand laid along the arm of her chair, a pose that gave to her the aspect of an heraldic figure, representing the spirit of Justice, as it might be, or Retribution. Once again Isabel felt within her a stirring of rebellious protest; she had not come to Wimpole Street to be judged, much less to have a sentence handed down upon her. Which of course begged the question of what it was, then, that she had come here for. At this, she checked herself: Henrietta Stackpole was one of her oldest, and certainly one of her truest friends, and she would do well, she told herself severely, to keep this steadily in mind during the course of the cross-questioning—and, oh, how cross it would be!—that she knew was now about to begin. Sure enough, Henrietta’s first enquiry, though it sounded innocent enough, addressed itself straight to the heart of what had been for a very long time a contentious matter between these two insistently independent spirits. “Did you speak to Lord Warburton after the funeral?”

  “Well, he spoke to me,” Isabel mildly replied.

  Henrietta refused to smile.

  “I understand that is not, of course, the same thing at all,” she said, with a hint of cold rebuke.

  “No, I suppose it isn’t,” Isabel murmured, taking a sip of coffee and lowering her eyelashes over the cup. “He is to be married, you know.”

  It had occurred to her to wonder if Staines had managed to find a place for herself in the dim far reaches of the house. Could Miss Stackpole’s sleepy-eyed servant be counted upon to show the maid to a corner where she might lay her head for the night? But then, Staines would be capable of improvising a lair for herself on the floor, among her mistress’s half-unpacked bags, if she were put to it.

  Henrietta was gazing at her friend with eyes that seemed to bulge brightly in their sockets. “May one ask who it is His Lordship”—the honorific was sarcastically pronounced—“has chosen for a bride?”

  “Oh, Lady somebody,” Isabel said, with all the signs of distractedness. “An heiress, I believe, from one of the great families. Mrs. Touchett told me of it—she could not recall the name. The thing has been announced—I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

  “I do not follow with any interest the doings of the aristocracy,” Henrietta said stiffly.

  Isabel looked to the window. “Strange, I don’t think of him as an aristocrat. He seems too amply liberal in his views.”

  Lord Warburton, of Lockleigh Hall, it should be said, was one of the premier peers of the land, heir to a fabled fortune and, unlike others of that ilk—not that there were many as favoured as he with the riches and talents of this world—deeply immersed in the politics and policies of his time. That Isabel had hardly set foot upon English soil before this formidable gentleman had proposed marriage to her, and that she had rejected him with an almost equal alacrity, still left Henrietta perplexed—though not displeased—even at this remove of years.

  “He asked me to come to Lockleigh,” Isabel went on, with an air of inconsequence, which, although her friend wondered at it, seemed not at all assumed but wholly genuine. “He said his sisters would be there at Whitsuntide and would be glad to see me. I confess I too should be glad to see them, for they’re very sweet and kind.”

  “Yes,” Henrietta responded flatly. “I have met them.”

  “Oh, of course, I was forgetting that you were at Gardencourt once when they came to call.”

  A brief silence ensued. Lord Warburton’s sisters, the Misses Molyneux, were precisely the kind of women—meek, placid, ever accommodating—for whom Henrietta, sharing her friend Miss Janeway’s opinions in the matter of female suffrage, reserved her strongest disapproval and disdain.

  “And did he say,” Isabel’s friend now enquired, with honeyed irony, “if his fiancée, ‘Lady somebody,’ would be there also, at Whitsuntide, should you come to call?”

  Isabel, for her part, nodded an ironical acknowledgement, dimly smiling. “That was my thought, too. But I did not ask. It hardly mattered, as I had no intention of visiting Lockleigh.”

  “I should think not!” Henrietta fairly burst out. “The wonder is he dared to ask.”

  Isabel, with deliberation, put her coffee cup aside. “He was merely being polite,” she said. “Or perhaps a little more than that. The invitation was meant, or so at any rate I took it, as a seal of closure upon”—she hesitated—“upon what might have been and never was.” She glanced at Henrietta and saw her formulating a question and not being sure if she dared pose it. “Do I regret rejecting him?” she said softly, sparing her friend the daring choice. “No, I don’t. I regret nothing—that is to say, I regret everything, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “Oh, Isabel!” her friend said, in what was hardly more than a whisper, yet a whisper fraught with feeling.

  Isabel slowly shook her head. “You must not pity me, you know, dear Henrietta. That would be the unkindest thing. I do not pity myself—I blame myself, yes, I accuse, I excoriate, but I do not pity; I shall never sink that low.”

  She looked again to the window and glimpsed down in the street, by the light of the gas lamp, a man in a black hat walking past on the far pavement. His carriage was so erect and his step so firmly determined that her heart skipped a beat, though a single beat only, at the possibility that he was someone whom she knew. But now it took only a closer look for her to see that he was not the one she had thought he might be; the world, after all, can boast of many tall hard stubborn straight-backed gentlemen.

  “You haven’t asked,” she said, turning away from the window, “of Mr. Goodwood. That bespeaks admirable forbearance on your part.” How, she wondered, out of what callous resource, could she find it in her to tease her friend at such a moment, on such a topic? “He also returned to Gardencourt,” she went on, “a week after the funeral, and on the same day as Lord Warburton—practically, indeed, on that nobleman’s heels. It was a day of comings and goings, of entrances and exits, rather like a comedy act in the music-hall.”

  She paused, struck by something that had come into her friend’s expression, a ripple, merely the faintest, of pain, as it seemed, the mute pain of one who hears carelessly dismissed as of no worth a thing she would have deemed herself blessed to have been offered. And seeing it, seeing that pang of muffled suffering, Isabel herself experienced a hot spasm of mortification and shame. She, the ever-sought-after Isabel Archer, she might scoff at the mournful persistence of her numerous admirers, but what did that leave to others? Bob Bantling was good enough, and more than good, he was precious, he was peerless, in his way, but that was not the way of Lord Warburton and his millions, of Ralph Touchett and his abiding lonely passion, of Caspar Goodwood, even, and his stern New England lean brown look.

  “And did he speak to you, Mr. Goodwood?” Henrietta asked, with a definite note of sourness.

  “He did, yes,” Isabel somewhat wearily replied. “He always does. He can be markedly loquacious, for one who puts such store by the virtues of a masculine reticence and restraint.”

  “Perhaps he thinks you do not hear him properly—”
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br />   “That I do not listen, you mean?”

  “—and is impelled therefore to repeat himself.”

  Isabel rose and again faced the window and the summer night’s blued darkness beyond the glass. She did not wish Henrietta to witness her expression when she said what she was about to say, for she could feel her cheeks begin to flush already.

  “He kissed me.”

  “Ah,” Henrietta exclaimed, though without emphasis, merely marking the beat while she waited.

  “It was evening,” Isabel went on. “I was walking on the lawn, under the oaks—you recall the oaks at Gardencourt, how their shadows stretch so far and so sharply across the grass when the sun begins to set? I came upon a bench, wreathed in ivy. It was a spot I remembered.” She spoke in a low voice, reflectively, as if recounting the thing for her own benefit, not to experience it again in recollection, but to inscribe it on her memory, recording it for a future time, for that special form of posterity she imagined the remainder of her life would be. “I had sat there, on that very bench, six years previously, not long after my arrival in England, when a letter was brought to me from the house, to say that Caspar Goodwood had followed me from America. This time I would not sit down, at first—I was afraid, afraid that if I did I would somehow call up the past to stand before me again. But I was tired, and gave in. I should have heeded my instincts. I can’t say how much time had passed, but the twilight had come on, when I looked up and—”