Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  “And Mr. Goodwood was there?” Henrietta, behind her, offered helpingly.

  Isabel, still with her face to the window, sighed. “Yes, he was there, so eager, so ardent, so filled with hopeful resolution, as only he can be, in his stiff way.”

  “I don’t know why you call him stiff,” Henrietta said, with a marked stiffness of her own. “He is a New Englander, he observes the proprieties. If that’s to be stiff, then I approve it.”

  Henrietta had backed Mr. Goodwood’s cause with Isabel from the start, even though she was indeed, as Isabel could plainly see now, a little in love with him herself, for all that she was pledged to Mr. Bantling. Isabel’s conscience, in regard to Caspar Goodwood, suffered even yet a residual soreness, for in Albany she had encouraged him, seeing only when she came to Europe how impossible he would be for her. To have married him, she acknowledged, would have been to elect to live between seasons, neither in summer nor in winter, neither in spring nor in fall; together, they would have inhabited a weatherless world.

  “He had been given new hope, you see,” Isabel said. “My cousin had spoken to him, Ralph on his deathbed had spoken to him, and told him—told him—”

  “Told him what?” Henrietta impatiently prompted.

  Now on a sudden Isabel turned almost violently from the window and sat herself down again, and crouched there in the armchair with a fist pressed to her mouth, her gaze fixed desperately upon nothing. Henrietta put out a hand instinctively to touch her, but then withdrew it slowly.

  “He told him,” Isabel muttered, her voice distorted behind her knuckles, “he told him of how my life is—my life in Rome.”

  There was silence. Henrietta rose, the satin of her gown rustling, and crossed quickly the small space that separated the two armchairs, with a hand again extended, which this time she did not withdraw, but laid instead on Isabel’s tense, hunched shoulder. “And will you now tell me,” she softly urged, “how it is, your life in Rome?”

  “I’ve told you—”

  “My dear, you told me, two weeks ago, in this very room, before you set out for Gardencourt, that your coming away from Italy, to see your cousin before he died, had caused a break—”

  “I spoke of no break!” Isabel cried out. “You did not hear me say the word ‘break.’ ”

  “I did not have to hear it, it was there in everything you did not say, a yawning chasm.”

  Isabel, crouching there, sank lower again into the deep recess of the chair, as if to make herself so small and hidden that she should quite disappear, never be found again. Henrietta, her fingers on her friend’s shoulder still, felt the tension in her suddenly relax, to be replaced with something far worse, a limpness, a laxity, that seemed the very token of a general surrender. Now Isabel, without lifting her head, reached up blindly and fumbled for her comforter’s wrist and pressed it briefly. “Go back, now,” she murmured, “go back and sit down, do.” Henrietta hesitated, and then returned reluctantly to her chair. Isabel, bethinking herself, hurriedly consulted the watch that hung on its chain at her bosom. “But look at the hour!” she cried. “Poor Mr. Bantling, by now he will have lost every penny he owns at the card table!”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Henrietta said drily. “Mr. Bantling, I can tell you, is more than he looks. He’s the very devil at bridge, and comes home with banknotes spilling out of every pocket and sometimes from under his hat.” Isabel, despite herself, had to smile at the notion of her friend’s fiancé as a card-sharp at once cunning and dashing. “Besides, you don’t think he stays here, do you? My Bob is too jealous of his reputation to allow anyone to imagine such a thing. He keeps a room at the club—his billet, as he calls it. No, my dear, we shall not be disturbed, not this night.”

  Isabel’s heart, not half an hour previously, would have sunk at such a prospect, but the time had come, she realised, for an unburdening.

  X

  Yet in the event it felt to her less like a sharing of confidences than a continuation of that process of self-communing she had set in train at Miss Janeway’s table earlier in the day. Henrietta’s attendance on her was as a shell she had picked up and put to her ear, not to catch the susurrations of the sea but the sound of herself confessing to foolishness and arrogance, willed blindness, failure and defeat. For it seemed to her now that she had failed, that she had been defeated. The passionate pledge she had made to life but a short while ago, in the carriage on the way here to Wimpole Street, suddenly seemed to her as hollow as—yes!—as the echoing inner chamber of a seashell.

  They conversed, the two friends, late into the night, if it truly was a conversing. Isabel spoke again of the ivied bench at Gardencourt on which she had been seated that recent eve when Caspar Goodwood had surprised her. “It was the same spot where, half a dozen years ago, on that day when I received Mr. Goodwood’s notice of his arrival in England, I looked up and spied Lord Warburton bearing down upon me with his proposal of marriage.” She gave a little wondering laugh. “In a world as wide as ours is, how can it be that so much that was momentous in my life should converge on such a tiny scrap of turf?”

  They had become mingled in her mind, those repeated occasions in that same small corner. She thought of her suitors now not as a comic duo in a slapstick show—she was ashamed for having thought of them so in the first place—but like the mechanical figures in a medieval clock tower, who come trundling round at their appointed intervals, vividly limned and fixed of aspect, ever new and ever the same. Or that is how she would have conceived of them, had it not been for the fact that Caspar Goodwood, this time, had broken the round and seized her in his arms and sent a flash of fire coursing through her being the like of which she had never experienced before. He had kissed her, but what, after all, was a kiss? She had been kissed before—or had she? In the meeting of their lips, his upon hers and hers yielding to his, it was as if some process of chemical melding had taken place, a fusing of essences, hers with his and his with hers, after which surely she could never again be quite herself, separate and solitary, one and alone. Yet what did it signify, this mysterious merging? Caspar Goodwood, with all the force of his appreciable being, had conjoined the two of them in his embrace, had combined their othernesses into one, and yet she felt as isolated as ever, set far off upon a dark and desolate plain. She could not judge which had done her more damage: the subtle anathema her husband had laid upon her in Rome when he saw she would defy him and hurry to be with her dying cousin, or the possibility of a radiant instauration that Caspar Goodwood’s kiss had opened before her, a possibility she knew would never be fulfilled yet could never be denied. Having been struck by the lightning flash of his love, could she ever entirely be again what she had been before?

  “And what,” Henrietta asked, “did you say to him, to Mr. Goodwood?”

  The flat, the prosaic practicality of the question summoned Isabel back from the wastes of desolation where she had been wandering. Henrietta always had been for her a friendly flame before which to warm her hands.

  “I fear I said nothing that was not harsh,” she answered, offering to the other a small wan smile of apologetic pleading. “I told him that he frightened me—he thought I meant it literally, that I had been scared by his looming up at me out of the twilight.”

  “Yes,” her friend conceded, “he tends towards literalness, I grant you that.”

  “I told him I wanted nothing more than that he should leave me alone and let me be. He demanded to know why I would even think of returning to Rome and all that awaited me there, and I said I would do it if only to get away from him. Oh, I was horrible, horrible.”

  “You sound as if you’re proud of yourself for it.”

  “Do I? Perhaps I am. There’s horror for you.”

  Henrietta in her armchair was sitting even further forward now than she had before—she was, as they have it in the theatre, “on the edge of her seat,” only actually as well as figuratively.

  “And yet you say for all your horribleness he�
��”

  Here the mature maiden faltered before the word, so that Isabel was compelled to fill it in for her. “Kissed me? Yes. He kissed me.”

  “And may I ask how you responded?” Henrietta enquired, with a heightening of colour at her throat and over her cheekbones that was, despite herself, a clear testimony as to what her own response would have been, had she been the favoured one, not Isabel. Mr. Caspar Goodwood was a man of substance, a former athlete and the present owner of a successful cotton-mill, a man of whose kisses, bestowed in no matter what circumstances, most women would feel it not only an excitement but a privilege to be the beneficiary. But in most women Mr. Goodwood had no interest. In Albany, six years previously, young Isabel Archer, over the space of the few seasons during which he had assiduously courted her, had made him no promise, but nor had she forbidden him to have an expectation of her. He had followed her to England to press his case, and she had rejected him, as she had rejected Lord Warburton; but now, this half-dozen years later, having heard from Ralph Touchett how her marriage had proved a bitter match, he had come to her once more, only to be once more rebuffed.

  “I left him there,” Isabel said simply, “at the bench, and ran to the house. When I looked back, I could no longer see him for the darkness.”

  The silence that followed this did not fall, but rose up between them, rather, like a welling of cold yet insubstantial water. They heard footfalls in the street below, they heard the gas lamps hissing on the walls above them. It was Isabel at last who broke the brimming surface of the pool in which they had been briefly immersed.

  “You asked me what happened in Rome,” she said.

  “I think I can guess.”

  “Ah, no, my dear. Your mind is too fine and clean for such guessing.”

  “Can it have been so dreadful?”

  “More so than you can imagine,” Isabel murmured, and her voice, by virtue of its very softness, made the dimness lurking in the corners of the room seem to shrink back further still. She looked aside, in that way she had, frowning, as if in search of some firm support upon which to set her gaze and let it rest there a while before embarking on her tale. “It begins so far back,” she said, “so far.” Now she turned her head and fixed her eyes almost fiercely on her friend. “I must tell you first that it was not the idea of Mr. Touchett senior to leave me a fortune in his will—the seed of that idea was planted by the son in his father’s consciousness. It is thanks to Ralph that I have my riches.” She paused. “You seem not at all surprised.”

  Henrietta gave the merest shrug. “I had thought something of the sort must be the case. You see? There are things I am capable of guessing.”

  “Indeed, indeed,” Isabel said, smiling and nodding. “Forgive me for seeming to underestimate you.”

  “There is no seeming to it,” Henrietta responded calmly, without a hint of rancour. “You do underestimate me, you always have, in the matter of my grasp of life’s intricacies.”

  “But how did you—?”

  “Guess? How would I not? Your cousin was determined to do something for you, to ‘set you up.’ That Ralph Touchett loved you, that you were the passion of his life, was the plainest fact about that anything but plain, that deeply subtle person.”

  Isabel opened her eyes wide. “And I thought you held him in such low regard!”

  “My dear, my dear, have you not grasped even yet how deplorably, how dismayingly, how endearingly wrong you have been about so many things?”

  “Of course I have—I have known for years of my mistakes, my catastrophic misapprehensions, only I did not know that everyone else knew of them too.” She lifted the coffee cup to her lips, and finding the coffee cold she peered at her watch. “What is the time? Heavens, it’s midnight! I didn’t notice the tolling of the hour.”

  “We have till dawn, if that’s what it takes,” Henrietta said. “Shall I call for more coffee? No? But let us turn out the lamps—they give me such an ache behind the eyes. Will you be content with candles?”

  “Of course. That’s all we have, in Rome. We’re very backward there, as you know. I think you wrote about it once, our Roman backwardness, for the New York papers.”

  “No,” Henrietta corrected, smiling, “it was for the Boston Atlantic, and for a far more substantial fee than ever I would have got from the New York Interviewer!”

  The maid was summoned to renew the candles in a big brass candelabrum, majestically suggestive of the synagogue, that stood on the mantelpiece in exotic splendour. Isabel enquired of the by now positively somnolent maid, as she applied flame to wicks, how Staines was faring, and was informed that the person in question was happily set up in a very nice little room behind the scullery, complete with cot and candle, and had retired all of an hour ago; the faintly resentful tone in which this information was imparted bore the implication that the visiting servant enjoyed a position of pampered privilege unheard-of below stairs in this establishment. “I can rouse her, if Madam wishes,” the girl said, with a discernibly vindictive glint, but Isabel said no, no, there was nothing that she needed. The flaring candles sent shadows leaping up the walls, and the window-panes became gleamingly opaque again.

  Isabel felt at once exhausted and agitated. The matters she had been made to face before her daring departure from Rome—she had the sense of having been grasped at the back of the neck and thrust hard up against them—jostled before her now, like so many monstrous chunks of the tumbling masonry of her life. She wished to relate the painful tale of her misfortunes, indeed she would sit up until dawn to do it, as Henrietta had suggested she might, but there was too much of it for her to know which jagged block to fix on first. It was Henrietta, however, who impelled the narrative on its way by reverting to the topic of what she considered, as would soon show, to have been the keystone of the entire edifice. “I wonder,” she said, “how well-advised your cousin was in his magnanimity towards you.”

  “Well-advised?” Isabel frowningly responded. “I believe Ralph was his own adviser, and took scant account of the counsel of others.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt that was the case.”

  The ironical emphasis Henrietta laid upon her words served to deepen Isabel’s frown.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said.

  “What I mean, my dear Isabel, is simply—simply!—that your greatest troubles, your greatest trouble, I should say, since I deem you singularly misfortunate, sprang like a rank flower out of the heap of money that the Touchetts, father and son, so freely, so cavalierly, laid at your feet.”

  Isabel, marvelling briefly, not without amusement, at Henrietta’s unwonted rhetorical flourishes—it was not for nothing indeed that she had been long among the English!—shrugged in dismissive acquiescence. “What you say is true, in part at least, but you can hardly blame my trouble, as you call it, on my cousin’s generosity of spirit.”

  “Are you sure his generosity was entirely spiritual?”

  Isabel sat back in her chair, as if to take the benefit of a longer view, and gazed at her friend in perplexity. “Are you suggesting my cousin was driven by some base motive to persuade his father to leave me a portion of his fortune?”

  “I don’t believe your cousin was capable of the least baseness,” Miss Stackpole hastened to declare, “and I should say so even if he were not lately dead and deserving of all respect. He loved you, as we have agreed, and wished to see you thrive in the world. You are the kind of young woman, daring, agile, supremely self-composed—”

  “Oh, come!” Isabel cried, with a deprecating laugh. Her friend, however, would not be balked.

  “—the kind of young woman,” she went on, “whom people watch, and envy, and inwardly urge on, even when they see clearly, which you do not, the precipice towards which your bounding stride is taking you.”

  Here Isabel thought to enter a renewed plea of protest, but paused. Had she not acknowledged, herself, the degree to which her frail and ailing cousin had lived, or sought to live, through
a vicarious participation in her life? He had tacitly approved when she rejected Caspar Goodwood, and had stood back in breathless awe at her refusal of Lord Warburton; that a girl in her position—for this was in the time before she had any prospect of a fortune—should spurn a man of Warburton’s wealth and stature in the world surely betokened a spirit that nothing could prevent from achieving the very pinnacle of its potential. But perhaps that was the trouble: Ralph had wanted wonders of her. That he had it in his power to fund her fearless ascent of the sheer rock-face of her—of his!—ambitions must have seemed to him the justification, the compensation, for his having to bide below, in the shadowed valley, while she scaled the radiant heights. And what a drab disappointment it must have been for him that instead of pressing onwards to the peak she had lost her footing and plunged headlong down the sheer cliff that Henrietta had spoken of just now.

  “We all had a hand in urging you on,” her friend said, and gave a quick little sigh. “I certainly don’t hold myself innocent in the disastrous course you took—”

  “Disastrous?” Isabel pleaded almost piteously, in a small weak voice.

  “You seemed to us whatever is the female version of a ‘parfit gentil knight.’ When you were about we smiled at each other in the secret hooded way that parents do when their child is independently brilliant in front of a class of worthy dullards. We bragged of you. I depicted you—anonymously, don’t worry—in articles I knew you would never stoop to read, as the very epitome of young American womanhood comporting itself beautifully, oh, beautifully, before the wondering eyes of fusty old Europe. You were our blazon!”