Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  Here she stopped, and turned her face determinedly away, whether in impatience, anger or regret, Isabel could not tell.

  “What a sad let-down I must have been for you all, in that case,” she miserably said.

  Henrietta whirled upon her in an outburst of passion. “We were furious at you, furious! You had so much, and you exchanged it for”—she scrabbled after a formulation that would match the enormity of the case, but fixed instead on a desiccated puniness—“a pinch of dry dust that would fall through your fingers and leave not a trace!”

  This made Isabel wince. Was she not, in her torments, to be afforded even a touch of the tragic? But Henrietta’s image was apt, after all: she was in a dry place, in a parched season, with not a sign of fructifying rains.

  “I’m sorry,” Henrietta said, curbing her outrage with a visible effort and looking to left and right of her with bird-like twitches. “I have no right to speak to you in this way. You never asked us to have expectations of you. It is for you to live your life according to your convictions. I grieve that you’re unhappy now, and only wish that you may be happy again in the future.”

  To this Isabel could but bow her head. Henrietta rose from her chair, disturbing the candle flames and causing the phantom shadows around her on the walls to prance and plunge. As Isabel had done earlier, she now set herself at the window above the deserted street. “Oh, look at the moon,” she inconsequently murmured, craning forward to peer up between the houses into the summer night’s humid, deep-violet sky. “What will happen,” she asked, without turning, “when you return to Rome?”

  “Ah, I cannot think of that now,” Isabel said, with weary dismissiveness. “It’s what happened before I left that is taking all of my thoughts.”

  “You told me before you went down to Gardencourt that if you go back—”

  “When I go back,” Isabel dully intoned.

  “—that your husband will not make a scene, at least not in the ordinary sense.”

  What Isabel had said was that Osmond would make a scene that would continue relentlessly for the rest of her life. But she saw no sense in iterating that insight now. “What will happen will happen, as my stoical Italian neighbours say. I have little influence in the matter.”

  Now Henrietta did turn her head, and, looking back over her shoulder, studied her friend for a moment in silence. “But you have intentions?” she said. “You have a plan, surely.”

  “Yes, I have a plan, of a sort. It is a consequence of a number of things I learned before I came away. It all fell upon me in a tearing rush.”

  “All?”

  “Yes, there was much of it. Though it came in segments, it felt all of a piece. It was as if a wardrobe had toppled over on one—a large part of it was witnessing one’s own image in the door-mirror smashing into shards.”

  Henrietta moved from the window and resumed her seat. The candles the maid had lighted, Isabel noticed, had already burned some way down, and as yet she had done not much more than tug at the fringes of her tale to straighten them.

  “There must be somewhere for you to begin,” Henrietta said, in her practical way.

  “Begin to tell you all that happened, you mean? It was not so much a matter of things happening, as of things—coming out.”

  “Secrets, you mean? Revelations?”

  Isabel reflected. “Well, there was one deliberate act. My husband banished his daughter to a convent. She had been there before, and now he sent her back for another taste of confinement. It was tantamount to condemning her to a penal colony.”

  “Dear Lord!” Henrietta indignantly exclaimed. “What on earth had the child done to merit such correction?”

  “She fell in love with the wrong man—wrong in the eyes of her father, that is. He was an inoffensive poor fellow, her swain, but Pansy would have him and no other.”

  “So her father had her incarcerated! It’s like something out of the Middle Ages. Your husband has been so long in Europe he has lost the last traces of American egalitarianism. People over here think they’re so civilised, but they’re savages compared to—why, to a hall full of New Jersey teamsters!”

  Isabel was pulling absent-mindedly with the fingers of her right hand at a loose filament in the lace at her left wrist. “Her father,” she said quietly, and as if distracted, “wished her to marry Lord Warburton.”

  “Lord—?” Miss Stackpole could not summon the name for outrage, and her eyes bulged with the force of it. “Tell me it’s not so.”

  “Well, it’s not—but it might have been. The gentleman indicated an interest.”

  “Why, the thing is unnatural—he must be near thrice times the girl’s age!”

  “Oh, not so much as that. But there would have been a not inconsiderable gap, I grant you.”

  “Did he—did he ask for her hand? I mean, did he utter the words?”

  “It did not get that far. Pansy loves, or loved, Mr. Rosier—Ned Rosier, I think you met him, in Rome?—and Lord Warburton, being the man he is, saw that he was not favoured, and withdrew. He conducted himself throughout with the greatest delicacy and discretion. Only my husband fixed upon it that I had interfered—”

  “Interfered?”

  “Yes; that I had put Lord Warburton off, so to say, out of jealousy, or vindictiveness, or the simple pleasure of thwarting my husband’s fine and subtle scheme. From this if nothing else you will see how little he knows me, despite the years he has had in which to observe me.” She paused; Henrietta, she saw, was looking at her with what appeared a faint shade of doubt. “Please say,” Isabel went on, with almost a hint of playfulness, “please say, Henrietta Stackpole, that you do not suspect me capable of such meddling.”

  XI

  The candles had consumed another inch of wax when Isabel gave in to her fatigue at last and announced that she must, she simply must, go to her bed. Beyond the large gaunt parlour Henrietta’s lodgings broke up into a seemingly endless warren of what were little more than cells, and Isabel was reminded of the convent of San Marco in Florence, where Fra Angelico’s murals adorn the walls of so many similar little square low-ceilinged chambers. The quarters she had been allotted were a sort of cabinet-with-bed that she guessed must be not much bigger than Staines’s lair behind the scullery. She undressed and lay down on the narrow cot and composed herself for sleep. Henrietta had sent her off with a fresh candle, and when she had extinguished it, the smoky impenetrable darkness seemed to press in from all sides and crowd about her menacingly. For all that her aching mind yearned for blessed oblivion, she could not sleep, and at last she got up and sat on a rickety, rush-bottomed chair by the window with her chin resting on her fist. Above the darkly gleaming rooftops with their deep-shadowed chimney pots hung the same full moon that Henrietta had exclaimed at earlier. To Isabel it had the look of a big round lumpy clay-coloured face peering at her askance, with a gloating smirk.

  In the long interval that they had sat together, Isabel had related to her friend no more than a fraction of the tale she had to tell. She wondered now if perhaps that had been for the best—what was to be gained by undoing all at once the stiffened rags in which her wounds were wrapped? She had concealed those wounds for so long, for years and years, thinking it her duty to suffer in silence, but what if that reticence were only another mark of her arrogance, her overweening self-regard? Once, somewhere in the vast ornate barn of the Vatican, she had come upon a statue of St. Sebastian, not quite life-sized, as is so often the case with the figures in that great basilica—it was as if for the Church of Rome the majority of her saints had stopped short at adolescence—which, when her eye fell on it, set up in her a small shiver of revulsion. It seemed plain from the appearance of the martyr, with his creamy flesh, his upturned and passionately anguished eyes, his slackly parted crimson lips that found a repeated echo in the bleeding slits where the arrow shafts were embedded, that his suffering was in fact a form of ecstasy. She feared that was how she would appear to others should she make public her pain
. But she was no sanguinate martyr; nor did she intend to seem to be.

  All at once she gave a start—she had fallen without noticing it into a kind of sleep and her fist had slipped from under her chin—and she rose from the chair now and got into bed quickly, so as to exploit the onset of drowsiness, and firmly closed her eyes. For a little while her mind resisted the Lethean pull upon it, but soon the current of sleep caught her up and swept her away.

  She woke in daylight and did not know where she was, which for some seconds caused in her a muffled panic. It was early, for the sunlight coming in at the mean little window beside the bed was brittle and lacked warmth. In these latitudes at this time of year there was hardly any night to speak of, only an intensified glimmering twilight that lasted the few hours between the final going down of the sun and its hurried coming up again. She lay motionless, gazing up blankly at the mottled ceiling, where damp-stains, long dried, resembled a map of a world different from this one yet perfectly plausible in itself, complete with oceans and continents, islands and archipelagos, shorelines and lakes and mountain ranges. She hoped it was not so early that she would have to bide here long alone: she felt an unaccustomed yearning for the everyday human concourse. Usually she was content with her own company, but this morning she wanted, yes, she eagerly looked forward to the mindless bustle and business of the matutinal hour. In the end she had slept well enough, for however short a time. It did not seem to matter where she laid her head nowadays, since there was no longer a bed anywhere that she could properly call her own.

  Presently, to her relief, Staines appeared, starched and brisk as always, bringing tea and toast on a silver tray, along with a copy of The Times, folded as firmly as an Englishman’s umbrella and smelling, so it distinctly seemed to Isabel, of the smoothing-iron. If the journal had been pressed before being offered to her it would be the sallow-faced maid, and certainly not Staines, who had wielded the iron; nor surely had the vital service been carried out at the behest of a mistress as democratically minded as Henrietta; no, it would have been done at the direction of Mr. Bantling, surely, in whose family this little ritual was probably a tradition stretching back to the first invention of the daily news-sheet.

  Staines nodded dourly towards the steadily burgeoning sunlight in the window. “Going to be a scorcher,” she intoned, as of one announcing the imminence of the Apocalypse.

  “That will be nice,” Isabel murmured distractedly, drawing herself up in the bed and arranging the pillows into a plump support for her back. “There’s a thing,” she went on, “that I wish you to do, without delay.”

  “Yes, madam,” Staines said, and sniffed. Staines’s day was strictly demarcated along the lines of her own regulations and precepts, and breakfast time, according to her scheme, was the time for breakfast and nothing else, certainly not for the giving and receiving of directives of a practical nature. This morning, however, Isabel was disinclined to abide by her maid’s rules.

  “Please reserve two seats on an early train at Charing Cross,” she said, “connecting with the first manageable ferry to Calais.”

  “Calais?” the maid as good as yelped—the destination her mistress had named might as well have been Timbuctoo.

  “Yes, and then please book for the express onwards to Paris.”

  Here the maid hesitated: she did not care for surprises, and the announcement that they were to be on their way again so precipitately certainly had surprised her; on the other hand, the news that they were to go to Paris was not unwelcome, for Paris she did like, despite the persistent presence there of French people. And so, on balance, she was willing, insofar as she could ever permit herself to enter upon such an uncontentious state of mind.

  The reason for Isabel’s haste in setting forth was a thing that Henrietta had told her in the early hours of the morning, when they had parted in candlelight at the door of Isabel’s cellular little room; the thing imparted was that Caspar Goodwood had telegraphed to ask if he might call here at Wimpole Street this morning, and if the hour of eleven o’clock would be a suitable time for him to appear on Henrietta’s doorstep. “And what did you say?” Isabel had cried. “What did you tell him?” Why, that he would be more than welcome, Henrietta had calmly answered, while Isabel had stared at her dumbly, shaking her head in a kind of frenzy of denial. She wondered again now how her friend could have done such a thing, how she could have invited that good man, of all men, to present himself at these lodgings when she knew Isabel would be here. The only observation Henrietta had offered, as they stood by the light of the candle, like a pair of carven busts facing each other in a gallery at night, was that she had not known that Mr. Goodwood’s ardour had been rekindled—she had assumed that flame had long since died, for want of fuel—or that he had actively renewed his passionate pursuit of a lady who had refused him more than once and was, into the bargain, married. Isabel was not at all sure she had believed this account, delivered as it was with such wide-eyed candour that it seemed it must be a mask of disingenuousness. Had Henrietta apprised Mr. Goodwood of the fact that Isabel would be here? No, Henrietta airily replied, she had not thought it any concern of the gentleman as to who should or should not be in the house when he called. This only served to deepen Isabel’s suspicions. Her friend was a person of the highest probity but, as we have already noted, she had been an energetic promoter of Mr. Goodwood’s cause in the days when Isabel’s hand was still for the having, and as recently as two weeks ago she had openly urged Isabel to break with her husband and lay claim once more to her independence, to the extent that such a condition was represented in the person of Mr. Goodwood. Was it impossible that Henrietta should have stifled temporarily her commitment to strict honesty and frankness for the possibility of a happier future for her at present unhappy friend, under the care of a man who, by tenacity of purpose if nothing else, had demonstrated that he genuinely valued and truly loved her? But Isabel, having lately learned how drastically her fate had been tampered with by people pretending to want only the best for her, was in no mood to accept another piece of interference in her affairs, no matter how well-intentioned. She had not, last night, pressed Henrietta further on the matter of Mr. Goodwood’s promised, or better say threatened, visit this morning, not least because she had no wish to catch out her friend in a falsehood, albeit a benign one—benign, that is to say, according to Henrietta’s lights—but had determined simply to be gone from Wimpole Street with the greatest possible dispatch, even if it did make her feel a little like a financially embarrassed hotel guest engaging in a “flit.”

  Now as she sat leaning back against the pile of pillows and sipped her tea and nibbled at a slice of toast, deriving from neither the least savour, she could not prevent her thoughts from returning speculatively to the possibility Henrietta had brought to her mind, that her cousin Ralph, by arranging without her knowledge that a fortune should be settled upon her, had all unintentionally done her a grave disservice. It was a notion that Ralph himself had raised, when on his deathbed he had wondered aloud, in an access of anguish, if he had not ruined her—“ruined” was the very term he had used, but at the time Isabel had not understood, or had not wished to understand, what he might mean by it. That he had intended the money to make her happy and free she did not doubt by a whit; but had he had the right, she wondered now, so to interfere—there was that word again, she could not resist it—in the course and conditions of her life? She had always set a great store by the concept of personal independence: each life is given once, with no possibility of repetition or revision, and the individual actor on whom the vivifying gift is bestowed must play his hour upon the stage with unflagging conviction and in the full realisation that there will be only an opening night, with no “run” to follow. What justification had anyone to leave his seat and step on to the stage and seek to redirect the action?

  She put away her cup and closed her eyes and covered them with a hand. These were wicked thoughts to think of a person so recently dead, a person, mor
eover, who had loved her unreservedly, without hope of having anything of her for himself, save the harmless pleasure of murmuring “Brava!” and casting a rose at her feet, before the interval curtain came down, to encourage her performance in the second half. And yet, she reflected, life is not a metaphor, is not a dramatic monologue or a dazzling circus act. It is a mundane project, carried out not in powdered air or on burnished boards, but upon plain ground, without the transfiguring touch of art, without transports of any kind, except on those occasions, rare and precious, when in ordinary daylight, and impelled by mysterious powers larger than ourselves, we seem to see the world before us burst into unearthly radiance. It was in expectation of knowing such moments, as many of them as she could bear, that Isabel had come to Europe. But Europe had proved a much more muted place than her fancy had made it into before ever she had landed on its shores. Experiences had come to her here, experiences rich and full, but from none of them had there flashed a fire sufficiently strong to sear her soul—not until, so recently, so unexpectedly, so incomprehensibly, she had found herself burning in Caspar Goodwood’s embrace, when in the lush blue twilight at Gardencourt, beside the old stone bench, he had grasped her in his electric embrace and branded her with a kiss. Before all else, before the revelations in Rome and her flight from that city, before the treachery of Serena Merle and the unmasking of her husband, before even—God forgive her!—before even the death of her beloved cousin, the fact of that kiss, and the heaped pyre of possibilities it had set alight inside her, took all precedence, consumed all oxygen, and set her staggering backwards, clutching at her throat and gasping for breath. That was the reason she was so soon in flight again. It was not Caspar Goodwood’s unwanted attentions that had caused her to flee, but the fear of being touched again by that transforming fire. Nor was it the man himself she was frightened of, but the disembodied menace he represented: he was a form of infernal paraclete.