Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  “I take it those are not the terms in which she expressed herself?” the countess satirically queried. “It hardly sounds the authentic note of Mrs. Osmond as I know her.”

  Her brother showed a pursed smile, shrugging; for one so measured, it was notable how on occasion it amused him to embroider; words, for him, the language itself, were mere modes of play, when they were not being put to serious employ as weapons of war.

  “Whatever her intentions may be,” he said, “I mean to frustrate her in them. She shall not have my daughter, at any price. What a thought, indeed!”

  “And you, what do you intend?” the countess asked. The excitement she had felt a moment ago—for all that she deplored so much of him, her brother battle-ready was a spectacle thrilling to behold—had given way to simple curiosity. She did not understand the struggle that was under way between Osmond and his wife; that Isabel should desire to prise Pansy loose from her father’s unyielding grasp and have her for herself was as novel and as improbable as had been Lord Warburton’s short-lived wooing of the girl; yet something tremendous was afoot, some contest between titans, of that she was certain, and she herself, it seemed, was to be a part of it, for otherwise why was she here, on Osmond’s hilltop redoubt, engaging with him in the charade of “afternoon tea”?

  “What do I intend?” he said now, pensively repeating the enquiry she had a moment since addressed to him. He turned to her. “Rather, I think, we should ask the person in question what she would wish me to intend for her.” He sauntered back to the table and took up from the tea tray a little bell with an ivory handle and shook from it a silver sound. At once Giancarlo appeared, tottering and vaguely mumbling, and Osmond, speaking in a slow, loud voice, for the servant was hard of hearing, requested him, per favore, to summon la signorina to their presence.

  XXI

  Pansy came forth from the house with the promptness of an actress responding to her cue. She wore a plain black dress with a scrap of white lace showing at the collar. Some few weeks short of her majority, she moved within a fixed aura of abstracted melancholy, as if she were to be for ever more in mourning for the shelter and security of a childhood that by season’s end would have officially elapsed. Her dress, so severe in line, and starkly unsuitable in the summer light surrounding her, seemed not quite to fit her, and was suspended a little crookedly upon her slender figure. But then, the countess reflected, nothing Pansy ever wore looked exactly the right size for her, the consequence, so her aunt supposed, of the fact that when she was still in her teenage years and her father had not yet come into the benefit of the bounty his second marriage would bring to him, the few items he could afford to put upon the child’s back required periodic adaptation at seam and hem in order to accommodate the succeeding stages of her growing girlhood. She stood now before her father and her aunt in her accustomed attitude of placid and slightly vacant acquiescence, absently turning one black slipper back and forth on the edge of its heel in a half-circle in the gravel beneath her. The countess, studying her, could as always see nothing in her of her mother, except perhaps a certain calculating coldness of expression, carefully veiled, which she might be thought to have inherited from Madame Merle, the serene chill of whose gaze was never more in evidence than when she was smiling. Nor, for that matter, did the girl display any ready resemblance to her father; she seemed, as it might be, a sport of nature, a self-sustaining thing, grown independent of the stock from which it had sprung. Her features, her aunt noted, had lost some of their former porcelain delicacy; she had begun, at last, to look something like a woman, a process that unfortunately could not be said to have wrought, as yet, any profound improvement in her looks. Pansy herself seemed unaware of the transformation she was undergoing—either that, or she was determined to resist or at least to disguise the marks of a burgeoning maturity, by maintaining, with a convincingness worthy of her father at his most dissembling, an appearance of demure blandness and childlike docility. Despite such efforts, the countess, with her keen sense for these things, was certain that somewhere about her niece’s person there was the stub of a fuse waiting in eager readiness for the first incandescent application of a match.

  “Come, my dear, join us, and take some tea,” her father said.

  Pansy greeted her aunt in passing with a vague unfocused smile. “Oh, but, Papa,” she said, “the tea must be cold by now—let me make some more.”

  She reached for the teapot but Osmond stayed her hand with one of his. “Please, no,” he said gently. “Let us summon Giancarlo, and have him do it for us.”

  The young woman, still with her hand outstretched, looked at him uncertainly; the preparation of this innocent beverage was an accomplishment on which she prided herself, and was the sole social ceremony in her father’s world at which she had succeeded in making of herself the presiding priestess: Was she now to be dismissed even from this humble sphere of authority? Dutifully she stepped back from the table, lowering her eyes and setting her face into its accustomed mask of filial obedience. Osmond noted her chagrin, however, and, still seated himself, took her by the wrist and guided her forward to a chair. “Please, sit,” he said, “and let us leave the tea-making to the servants, and to little girls. Yes?” He smiled up at her, with an encouraging nod, and, having hesitated for the merest instant, she did as she was bade, and took her place between her two relatives.

  The countess had watched this curious passage between father and daughter with the deepest attention and interest; Osmond, few of whose actions were unpremeditated, had marked the moment as one of ritual significance, and furthermore had ensured that it should be recognised as such not only by his daughter but by his sister also. What, this sister now asked herself, what was he up to? She had believed at first, and feared, that she had been brought up here to Osmond’s hill—she always thought of Bellosguardo as being her brother’s exclusive domain—so that he might exact retribution on her for having dared to inform on him to his wife, but by now it was apparent, if from nothing other than his equable and smiling demeanour, that this was not so, and that something far more subtle and far more fascinating was to be played out here today, as upon a stage, within the broad and lofty proscenium of the Tuscan sky.

  Osmond again picked up and agitated the little bell, and again the major-domo answered its tinkling peal, and was dispatched to the kitchen to fetch a vessel of boiling water and fresh leaves for the pot. “Subito, signor barone,” the old man said, employing the peculiar honorific by which it was his custom to address the personage whom he, like the countess, considered to be the rightful master of Bellosguardo, disregarding the fact, or perhaps forgetful of it, that this gentleman had long since ceased to live here, and now had his permanent residence in Rome. Osmond sketched a gracious gesture of dismissal, and the servant departed, shuffling backwards, bowing and droning.

  A tense little silence fell on the table, although the tension was exclusive to the two females present, for Osmond continued to appear entirely at his ease; indeed, he was looking positively genial, as if a programme he had set in place for the afternoon were proceeding with gratifying smoothness and in steady accordance with his plan. “Well well!” he said now, with a cheerful sigh, and clapped his palms lightly on his knees and stood up from his chair and made his way forward amid the rose bushes and positioned himself yet again at the parapet to survey the valley’s vista stretched out in the day’s sun-struck stillness. The heat-haze of earlier was much dispersed by now, and the city was coming more clearly into view, in all its delicately varied shades of umber and amber, of ochre and old gold. Faintly through the dense unmoving air came a ponderous and quavering vibration of successive slow bell-notes from the tower of the cathedral of Maria of the Flowers, the terracotta-coloured dome of which sat high above all that surrounded it. Osmond raised an arm and swept it in a wide and generously commanding gesture, like a conductor at the close of a particularly fine performance drawing the orchestra before him to its feet. “Ah, but look: what would an a
rtist of genius not make of a view as characteristically picturesque as this!” he exclaimed. “It would take a Turner, let us say, or a Bonington, to do justice to our Tuscan splendours.” He beckoned to his daughter. “Come, dear, come and see it as if you were such a one, and with your eye fashion a contained scene out of Nature’s sprawling spectacle. One must do more than look at pictures if one is to learn anything of the art of painting.”

  The girl rose and went and stood beside her father and gazed down upon the landscape and the shimmering city with an expression of earnest application. Osmond draped an arm lightly upon her shoulders, which made her flinch: she was not accustomed to being embraced. On returning home from her most recent confinement in the convent, which she longed to think would be the last she would be made to endure, she had found awaiting her a handsome and, as she supposed, costly volume of prints by the latter of the artists her father had just mentioned, who, she discovered, with a not quite explicable small soft shock, had died when he was not many years older than she was now. She had gone to her room and sat by the window with the big book open on her knees, turning over slowly the heavy stiff pages. The scenes depicted seemed to her very pretty, and even she, who knew so little about paint or painting, could not but see that they were executed with dazzling skill and artistry—how was it one so young should have done so marvellously much?—but her view of them was in part obscured by a kind of misty unease. Gifts from her father were as rare as his paternal caresses, and the one no less than the other caused her to shrink back into herself apprehensively, like a snail into its delicately spun shelter. She had the obscure yet indubitable sense that this sumptuous portfolio was something at once more and less than a gift, and that eventually the bill for it, in bulging figures, would be presented to her, and that most likely she would be required to settle it in kind, although what that kind might be she could not guess. By now she knew well her father and his ways; she loved him, she supposed, as the world and the nuns assured her she must; he was the only parent she had known, until the coming of the second Mrs. Osmond, who seemed now to be gone, and gone for good, or bad, rather, to the girl’s sad distress and deepening sense of grievance—her step-mother had pledged not to abandon her, though Pansy’s hold on that pledge had become so tenuous as hardly any longer to exist—but she was well aware that nothing her father said or did was to be taken exactly as he offered it, with his practised candour and assumed simplicity of manner and intent. There was always, with Papa, an attached extension, a length of invisible elastic by which the thing given might be instantly snapped back. Hence, over the years, she had learned to be wary, to take nothing for granted, to doubt the face value of everything that was presented to her. She did not think her father underhanded, or deceitful: he did not lie, not in so many words. It was simply that, behind the lively attention he made a great show of bestowing on those around him whom he considered worthy of the effort—including herself, his daughter had to assume—there was always a calculation being made, another matter under consideration, another motive at work. She did not resent this in him: it was merely the way he was, the way things were; besides, it was not for a girl to resent her father, for such resentment, as the reverend sisters had taught her, would be a grave sin. But what was this painter, this Richard Parkes Bonington, who painted so skilfully and who had died so young—what was he to her, that Papa should suddenly wish her to know him and his works?

  Osmond, leaning there beside her with his arm resting about her shoulders, was speaking of the painter even yet, lavishly extolling the charm of his scenes, the richness of his tints and textures—“those cerulean silks, those crimson brocades!”—and lamenting the fact that so few products of his genius were to be seen in Italy, for of course the Italians, with their inveterate insistence on extremes, were incapable of a true appreciation of an art as quiet and devoid of sensational effects as that offered by this supreme yet always modest master.

  “How I envy my old friend Lord Lanchester,” Osmond exclaimed, with a sigh, “who at Fernley Hall possesses one of the finest private art collections in England, including a dozen—no, more like a score!—of Boningtons.”

  He stopped, and removed his arm from around Pansy’s shoulders—to the countess’s eye his hold on the girl had seemed that of a constable apprehending a miscreant, or a gaoler restraining one of his charges—and walked back to the table and resumed his seat, just as the major-domo, as if at a concealed signal from his master, arrived with a jug of water, and a pinch of tea-leaves in a little silver pot.

  No one, as it turned out, had a thirst sufficient for a second round of tea, which was as well, for the water the servant had brought was hardly lukewarm, and the leaves were a variety of Assam, while before they had been drinking Lapsang. Osmond leaned back once more on his chair, crossing a slender ankle on a skeletal knee, and again joined his fingers and thumbs at their tips to make a triangular cage of air, humming to himself and idly scanning the white-gold sky. He maintained this attitude of contented vacancy for some little time. His sister, sitting very still, with her small pink mouth pursed and her scant chin tucked in, watched him with fixed attention, as she had watched him for the duration of the little performance he had just now put on—extolling the beauty of the landscape and the city in its midst, summoning his daughter to his side and drawing her to him in an ostentatiously close embrace, all the while expatiating on that painter, Donington or Bonington, or whatever the fellow’s name was—while the inkling that had begun to stir in her a while past continued to strengthen, although even yet she could find no certain form for it. She knew he was conscious of her scrutiny, which seemed only to amuse him. In their young days he had delighted in games of hide-and-seek, in which, no matter how closely she might stalk him, he always managed to elude her, and would stay crouched in his place of concealment until he judged the moment ripe to leap out at her and make her scream.

  Now he frowned, though, and gave a little start, as if a sudden thought had struck him, and letting his hands fall to his lap he leaned forward, with his eye upon his daughter. The girl was still at the parapet, with her back turned to them, holding herself motionless in a stiff and oddly unnatural fashion, like a laggardly pupil who for her slowness had been made to go and face the wall and remain there and not stir on pain of worse punishment. However, when her father called to her, bidding her return to the table, she showed no sign of feeling herself happily released, but on the contrary turned back with what seemed reluctance, putting on a smile with the effortful care of an actor in an antique drama about to “go on” and fitting to his face the stiff plaster mask suitable to his part. Osmond extended a hand to her once more, and she approached and suffered him to enfold both of hers in the cage of his long and slender fingers. She stood above him, gazing gravely down into his brightly beaming countenance. His sister, meanwhile, watched this further piece of pantomime with a moue of disgust, feeling the sting of deliberate exclusion; it was as if her very presence had been cancelled, as if she had been elided from the action, like a stage corpse, visible but inconsequent, required only not to move and to try not to breathe.

  “Tell me, how would you like it,” Osmond asked of his daughter, “if I were to send you to England to pay a visit to my friend, and stay a while, perhaps, at his country seat?”

  “Which friend, Papa?” the girl enquired, in a mechanical-sounding voice.

  She knows! the countess thought, with a grim sort of thrill. She knows, or has guessed, at least, the sly plot Osmond has all along been developing.

  “Why, Lord Lanchester—who else?” Osmond exclaimed, laughing. “I’m proposing to you a visit to Fernley Hall—it’s in Kent, if you know where that is—so that you may see the Boningtons there. I believe among them are the originals of two or three that are reproduced in the volume I gave you.” He waggled his head humorously. “Wouldn’t you like to view them, in the flesh, as one might say?”

  “You would take me there?” The girl sounded at once tentatively
hopeful and afraid.

  “Oh, no, not I,” her father said, with another gaily dismissive laugh.

  “But, Papa, I’ve never been anywhere,” the girl protested, with awful simplicity.

  “Ah, but you would not be alone,” Osmond replied. “I have no doubt there is someone who could be found to escort you, some suitable duenna.” He did not so much as glance in his sister’s direction, though she was fixed upon him with narrow-eyed intensity, her look as piercing as the beam from a burning-glass. “You would enjoy such a trip, I am sure,” he said, still addressing his daughter, “and derive much benefit from it besides.” Now at last he allowed himself to turn to the countess. “Don’t you think so, Amy?” he asked. She saw the hooded gloating behind the large bland innocence of his look. She could make no reply, and he turned up his face once again to his daughter, where she stood gazing down at him with a fascinated glassiness of expression, quite still and yet seeming somehow a-tremble. “You might even make some additional side-visits, for Lanchester cuts a mighty figure in England, you know”—here there occurred a caesura, brief as the intake of a breath, as the name of another English nobleman hovered for an instant in the air above the table—“and I have no doubt he would be happy to provide you with introductions to other houses just as grand as Fernley, with just as many lovely pictures to look at.” The countess, mesmerised as she was by the sinuously gradual unfolding of her brother’s tawdry scheme, could not but admire the stealthy skill with which, for his own ends, he was making Pansy seem an art enthusiast of long standing. “The sons of English gentlemen,” Osmond was saying, “are wont to make the Grand Tour of foreign places, so why should not we respond by packing you off on a little tour of England? And then, my dear, England would be much preferable to the convent, yes?” His fingers still enfolded both her hands, and now he gave them a gently encouraging squeeze. “Much, much preferable, I’m sure you’ll agree.”