Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  Henrietta as good as gaped. “Where she ‘made off to’?”

  “Yes. She must have gone somewhere, to recover herself. The lady has always a place to go to, a place that will accommodate her in return for the pleasure of her company and of her many social gifts, and I’m sure she had then, as well.”

  Once more Henrietta stopped in her tracks, although this time Isabel did not stop with her, but went on, with her head down, her gait, dull and determined, resembling that of an automaton.

  “You mean,” Henrietta said to her retreating back, and set off hurriedly and soon caught her up, “you mean Madame Merle—?”

  “Yes,” Isabel said, with a pursed vehemence, and this time it was her turn to halt. “Yes, Serena Merle is Pansy Osmond’s mother.”

  XIII

  Henrietta could not decide which she found the more shocking: the things she was being told or the effect the telling of them had upon her friend. In the space of but a few minutes Isabel seemed to have grown older by many years, indeed by many decades. It was as if the young woman that she was had been replaced by the hunched and desiccated crone that she might be expected to turn into only in the far-off reaches of the future. If Henrietta had not been thoroughly convinced already of the weight and extent of her friend’s misery, this sudden transformation, the spectacle of which shook her to her solid core, would have banished all doubt. At a point in their long talk of the previous night Isabel had recalled that when she first came to Europe she had looked about at so much softly abraded antiquity and had become on the spot impatient of her own lack of years. Untried and rough-edged, as she appeared to herself, she had felt acutely the want of a finish that only time and the accumulation of experience could effect. But might it not be, she wondered, that in her impetuousness she had raced where she should have sauntered, pounced where she should have paused? Had she robbed herself of her own youth? Isabel’s companion, in the stillness of the summer midnight, had listened to these rueful musings and tactfully kept her counsel; in her view of the constitution of things it was a flouting of the fundamental laws of life to seek to be something other than one was. She was aware of the moral questions such a prescription begged were it to be applied to, say, the Emperor Caligula, or King Richard III or, for that matter, Gilbert Osmond and his malign familiar Madame Merle; but for Henrietta such creatures existed in an altogether other dimension, a cool crystalline place of the damned, sealed off by a pane of thick and impenetrable plate-glass from the sphere inhabited by herself and Isabel and others like them, such as Mr. Bantling, and Caspar Goodwood, and, oh, a host of decent fair right-thinking people. If to Henrietta’s eye her friend had a fault, it was that, like the stern-faced Germanic thinkers whose works she claimed to revere, she devoted an unconscionable degree of speculation to questions entirely incapable of solution. Philosophy, in the opinion of the correspondent of the New York Interviewer, was a harmless diversion from the true brisk business of being human, which was nothing more and nothing less than to live a harmonious, fulfilled and useful life.

  “Forgive me,” she said now, “if I seem to be pressing upon an open wound, but I need to be clear in my mind as to the details of this matter: You are saying, are you not, that your husband’s daughter is the child not of the late Mrs. Osmond, but one that he and the Merle woman had together?”

  Hearing herself say it, she felt she should apologise for the bluntness of her words, but Isabel took the question plain and straight, which was how it had been delivered, and did not shy from it.

  “Yes, that is the secret the Countess Gemini revealed to me, but a few weeks ago, in my house, in Rome.”

  Henrietta said nothing for a time, turning the thing over in wonderment, breathless before the thought of such a studiedly sustained and horrible subterfuge.

  “And the daughter, Pansy,” she asked at last, “is she aware of her true origins?”

  “No, of course not. They kept it hidden from her—they kept it hidden from everyone, so clever were they, so circumspect.”

  “But the sister, the countess—?”

  “Oh, she knew, of course.”

  “But how? Had her brother confided in her?” This possibility was posed in an extreme of incredulity.

  “I don’t know how she knew,” Isabel calmly replied. “I did not ask.” She smiled despite herself. “There is not much that can be kept from Amy Osmond, and I feel sure it was ever thus, especially in the case of a suppressed scandal as deliciously well-seasoned as this one.”

  Henrietta, struggling to encompass and absorb all that she had so far heard, walked along with a pace as dully automatic as her friend’s had been a minute previously, putting down her feet one after the other with a heaviness indicative of the difficulty she had in coming to terms with a state of affairs entirely incommensurate with her conception of how people should comport themselves in regard to, in regard for, their fellow human beings. It must be remarked also, though in a whisper, that in another, baser, part of her mind she was demanding furiously to know how someone who took such pride in her own acuity as an observer of human behaviour and as an unresting reporter thereon—herself, that is—could have “missed out” on so glaring an instance of deceitfulness, mendacity and outrageous brazenness. It was true that the conspiracy, and it was nothing less than a conspiracy, had been carried on in cloistral quiet by two masterly practitioners of the art of the surreptitious, yet she could not but ruefully acknowledge that it was a poor sort of a newshound who should have failed to nose out so strongly odoriferous a truffle. Not that readers would tolerate the recounting of such a scandal in the pages of the Interviewer, or at least not without a vaguening veil of decency being interposed between the bald facts and the purity of their gaze.

  In favour of Henrietta the compassionate person, if not in that of the disconcerted journalist that she also was, we must point out that her chagrin at having lost a “story” made her blush for her own perhaps too hard-baked and sometimes unshameable professionalism. It was partly to still or at least to push aside these turbid and discomforting thoughts that she turned once more to her friend with almost a howl of renewed outrage and incredulity.

  “But why,” she demanded, “why did your sister-in-law wait so long before telling you? And why tell you now?”

  Isabel in reply sounded almost placid. “As to the first part of your question, I have already answered it: she was afraid of her brother, and of his—his consort—”

  “And all of a sudden she had ceased to fear them?”

  “No, I’m sure not. But for all that she may seem to be of no more substance than a gadfly, the countess is not without spirit—she was born in Baltimore, remember. She recognised that something of moment had occurred between her brother and me, that we had entered upon a darker and more perilous, more painful passage than anything she had known of or guessed at heretofore, and that the time had come when she must speak out. And, of course”—here Isabel smiled—“there was also a small sharp pleasure to be derived from being the one to dash the scales from my eyes at last. She was simply irritated by me—she said so herself—by me and my self-willed ignorance, although she was considerate enough to call it my ‘innocent ignorance.’ She was irritated by the way I had kept myself blinded for so long, and appeared set to continue to do for the rest of my life. She was bored—that was her word—with my not knowing, and bored with herself for not enlightening me.” Here she paused, and when she resumed, she spoke in a tone of reflective realisation. “I do think, you know, that we do not sufficiently acknowledge the force of boredom in human affairs. Or, rather, I should say, the terror human beings have of being bored.”

  In the course of these somewhat aimless animadversions, an observer of the pair of friends as they circumambulated the dusty outer fringe of the little pleasure garden might have been forgiven for thinking that one of them, namely Miss Stackpole, had herself drifted into that very state of unappreciated potential upon which Isabel had just been musing. However, such an assumpt
ion, on the part of a speculative faun, say, peeping out from his hiding place among the verdure skirting the path, would have been mistaken. Far from having given way to boredom, as her slackly frowning expression might have suggested, Henrietta instead was intently occupied in gathering various loose strands of speculation into a cohesive and concentrated unity, and now she turned to her friend with the suddenness and fluttering force of an eagle swooping down out of the sky.

  “I have remembered,” she exclaimed, breathless before the fact of it, “that it was Madame Merle who introduced you to the man you would marry—it was she who put you in the way of him. Oho!”—this a kind of verbal grim clapping of the hands—“I see it now, I see the entire thing. She was his John the Baptist, but he was no Redeemer—quite the opposite, in fact. And between the two of them they ensnared you. What chance had you of eluding them, innocent that you certainly were? Once you had old Mr. Touchett’s money, you became an object of desire, to both of them. You couldn’t see what was afoot. Fortune-hunters we imagine as young and bright, with glossy teeth and soft moustaches and a winning smile, not a grizzled widower twice your age with a ready-made daughter of fifteen years old. That woman had her work cut out for her, to bring you round without your noticing. Ah, but what a wicked scheming witch she is!”

  “I choose to believe,” Isabel said, in a small thin voice, “it was for the sake of her daughter that she acted as she did.”

  “Ha! It was, I’ll wager, because they were penniless, Osmond and your Madame Merle, so-called—what, by the way, of Monsieur Merle, if there ever was such a person in the first place?”

  “There was. A Swiss, of some kind. No one ever spoke of him. He died, although he was living still at the time of Pansy’s birth. So, you see, the fact of her true parentage had to be kept hidden on all sides.”

  A little girl in a dark-blue pinafore came towards them on the pathway, running lightly along and concentratedly bowling a hoop that in its circumference was taller than herself. Isabel watched her, half in delight and half in trepidation, as if the vivid little creature were the ghost of the past itself, flickering there amid the dappled sunlight of summer.

  “Well, at least she seems to have got little out of it for herself,” Henrietta said, with satisfaction, “for still she has to wander about Europe living off rich acquaintances of the likes of your Mrs. Touchett. I trust you didn’t take her in? Although I suppose you did, since you imagined her to be your friend. Did you confront her, when you learned of her perfidy?”

  “It was rather she who confronted me,” Isabel said measuredly. “She it was who told me Ralph Touchett was the one who persuaded his father to make me an heiress.”

  “Did she now! No doubt she enjoyed it.”

  “Yes, I suppose it must have given her some shred of satisfaction. Such an irony, there: I had thought if anyone had spoken for me to Mr. Touchett it would have been she.”

  “That woman,” Henrietta declared, with a deep throb of indignation, “that woman would be incapable of speaking for anyone but herself, for she recognises no one else’s existence in the world, except perhaps that of your husband, her erstwhile—” She stopped, and pressed her lips tight shut, for she would not allow herself to say the word, the scandalous word. “When did he cast her off, I wonder? As soon as the child was born, I suppose, and the story fabricated, and he knew himself safe, the heartless ruffian.”

  For some minutes Isabel had been on the point of protest, of turning to her friend and pleading with her to say no more. She could not stretch to the level of anger against her husband and Madame Merle that Henrietta had so plainly reached. There was the shrillness of excess in it, and a vehement self-righteousness, which Isabel considered—she could not avoid acknowledging it—just the tiniest shade vulgar. However grievously he had wronged her, she owed a duty to her husband not to hear him maligned and mocked for a scoundrel and a fortune-hunter—nay, for a common embezzler! Nor had she the freedom to turn on Serena Merle and present her as one of Macbeth’s witches, if not indeed as the king’s murderous wife herself, thrusting incarnadined hands towards a cold heaven and calling out to be cursed. If only life were as simple as a play, with heroes and villains, and clowns and songs and the clash of unseen battles, and a curtain at the close of each night’s performance! Certainly she had ample cause to castigate Gilbert Osmond and his subtle co-conspirator, but she could indulge herself in hating them only if she were prepared to pronounce worthless and excise from the drama of her life, from the actual drama of her real life, one of its richest and most intricately woven acts.

  By now Henrietta had added Mrs. Touchett to the line of targets against which to propel the arrows of her indignation, and was criticising that lady for a gross dereliction of responsibility towards her niece; but Isabel turned and interrupted her with what in other circumstances would have been blank rudeness.

  “They have both suffered injury, you know, Madame Merle more seriously than my husband, of course. She is, I can assure you, a most unhappy woman. She has lost everything, including her child—”

  “The child,” Henrietta asserted loudly, swivelling her bent bow towards a previous mark, “which was never more to her, it seems, than an inconvenience, and which she disowned to save her reputation!”

  “Yet I cannot believe her so lacking in maternal care that such a renunciation, even though she made it willingly, would not have caused her pain. There is no mother who will not weep for the loss of a child.” She smiled. “Medea is the invention of a man.”

  Henrietta, flushed of cheek and with a riposte ready prepared, nevertheless held back. Isabel, she reminded herself, had in her time shed salt tears over an emptied cradle. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a voice tight with restraint, “I’ve said too much, I always do.”

  “My dear—”

  “No, you’re right to rebuke me. Enough that you have to bear such a burden of woe without my adding to your load with my hectoring.”

  Isabel was ready to apply further assuagement to the dents she feared she had inflicted upon her friend’s amour-propre, but at that moment she caught sight of Staines, her bonnet set square on the crown of her head—no one else had Staines’s ability to turn a scrap of felt and feathers into the simulacrum of a Vandal’s horned helmet—advancing determinedly towards her from the roadway, where a hansom cab was parked, with, directly behind it, another carriage, a four-wheeler, on which were loaded a steamer trunk along with various bags and bandboxes, all of which she recognised as her own. The maid, as she informed her mistress, with a vexed waggling of the head, had already been three times round the square in search of her and her friend. The boat train would leave from Charing Cross in less than an hour, and if they were to be on it they must set off without delay—without further delay, as Staines pointedly emphasised, with another accusatory twitch of the head.

  There followed then that passage of awkwardness inevitably entailed in a hurried parting precedent to what is likely to be a lengthy separation between old friends, and more than one feint at final departure was cancelled by a breathless running back for another pressing of hands, another exchange of kisses, another plea, another promise, so that when Isabel had finally climbed to her seat in the impatiently waiting cab she felt hot and flustered and not a little foolish for allowing herself to be caught up in such a deal of, for her, unwonted fuss. However, when she looked back she experienced a pang of tender sadness at the sight of Henrietta, standing there on the pathway against the towering mass of what, despite the steady sunshine, now seemed sombre trees. How they dwarfed and isolated her, those indifferent and restlessly stirring giants! We are so small, Isabel thought, and the world is so vast. Then the driver flicked his whip and the cab gave a little lurch and rolled away from the kerb, out into the blare and bustle of the traffic. Staines was saying something to her but she was not listening. She had glimpsed a person making his way through the endlessly intermeshing crowd of pedestrians on the far side of the street, a tall figure, in a g
rey coat and a grey hat, lean and brown and with a gait of an unmistakable stiffness, his jaw set square and his eye fixed firmly before him. It was Caspar Goodwood, bound, surely, for Wimpole Street, in hope of finding her there, at her friend’s lodgings. As she watched the last of him receding from her—the cab was moving swiftly now and she had to turn her head sharply back to keep him in view—the thought came to her that she would never see him again, and for a second it was as if a great gust of hot and stifling wind had sprung up and engulfed her.

  XIV

  Once more there was the clacking and crashing of steel wheels on steel rails, then the lurch of arrival, and the crush of the embarking crowd, then a brief gliding respite amid salt air and a gaiety of breezes, then the swaying gangplank again, and the clamour of the Customs hall, and then, oh, then, the sulphurous travelling inferno of yet another train. In these recent days of disruption and hectic travel Isabel seemed to herself an unnatural point of stillness at the centre of an implacable riot of commotion and chaos. The stillness that she seemed to embody was not the stillness of one at rest. She too was moving, she too was being borne forward, inexorably, towards a destination she did not wish to reach. Sometimes she felt that she was part of a funeral cortège, and that she was in the hearse—no, that she was the hearse, somehow, carrying inside her some small expired thing, the cold little corpse of her own heart, her own self, her own life. Perhaps when she reached Paris she should go direct to Père Lachaise and have the final rites performed over herself. To die, yes, to die would solve so much, so very much. But she would not die, she had no intention of dying. Death, the possibility of death, was a fantasy only, not even a nightmare but a daydream, in which she allowed herself now and then to indulge, as a person lost in chronic melancholy might betake herself to the churchyard of a Sunday eve and pace the cindered walkways and be comforted, a little, by being for a while in the company of those whose sorrows were for ever at an end.