Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  She dressed quickly and engaged in a careless essay at the arranging of her hair—suddenly so many things seemed not to matter any more—and made her way down through the house. The usually less than lively air was suffused with the perfumes of the garden, which the rain had freshly released. Passing by the piccolo salone, she heard voices from within, and paused and tapped lightly on the door, and her aunt’s voice bade her enter. This dim and rather seedy room, cramped and peculiarly overpowering, was reserved by Mrs. Touchett for the receiving of visitors, and was therefore very much neglected. Mrs. Touchett’s guest this evening was a young man, although perhaps he was not quite as young as his youthful appearance made it seem. He was slight of stature, with hair of a striking dark-red hue, a broad unwrinkled forehead, and lively green eyes that made Isabel think of a friendly cat. He wore grey trousers and a black frock-coat, and was balancing on his knee a scuffed and decidedly rusty silk top hat. He could not have been described as handsome, but he had about him such an aura of balanced ease and energy that the question of anyone at all being handsome or otherwise seemed an irrelevance. Isabel guessed at once he must be that Mr. Devenish, correspondent of the London Clarion, who the previous day had called upon her and left his card. He proved her surmise correct when he rose hastily now, inadvertently overturning his hat and spilling it on to the floor, and proceeded to introduce himself. He had a pleasant light English voice, the pleasantness of which was not marred but on the contrary curiously enhanced by a slight stammer. Isabel proffered her hand and smiled; she was conscious of her aunt’s dark little eye fixed on her with accusing acerbity. “I told Mr. Devenish you were resting,” the old lady said. “We expected you down before this.”

  “Yes, I was about to give you up and leave,” the young man said genially to Isabel, keeping his green gaze fixed upon her. “Very glad I didn’t.”

  “You left no address here in Florence,” Isabel, still smiling, replied.

  “Didn’t I? Oh, that’s me all over—no brain whatever, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re a relative of Miss Janeway, I think?”

  “Yes, I’m her nephew. She had me positively swear an oath that I should not fail to call on you. Our friend Miss Stackpole was able to tell me of your whereabouts—I was bent on seeking you out in Rome, but happily here you are!”

  “Is your work in Florence?” Isabel enquired. “I mean, are you the paper’s Florence correspondent?”

  This provoked Mr. Devenish to issue a high mirthful hoot. “Ah, my dear Mrs. Osmond, if only we could stretch to that! I’m afraid we are a very humble organ, and can barely afford to keep an office in London—I say ‘office,’ but in truth it’s no more than a lightless basement in the Gray’s Inn Road.”

  “Then you are on vacation here?”

  “On holiday, you mean? I suppose you might call it that. I have been here a week, perched in a garret in an establishment, calling itself a pensione, at the back of the main railway station, living on a convict’s rations of bread and water.”

  “Oh, well, in that case we must offer you some sustenance,” Isabel said, laughing. “Miss Janeway would never forgive me if you were to perish of starvation.”

  “I have asked for tea to be brought,” Mrs. Touchett said tartly. “If we are patient we may have it within the hour.”

  Isabel, bethinking herself, turned her attention guiltily to her aunt, conscious of having so far entirely neglected her in favour of Mr. Devenish. The frail old lady was hunched in the depths of her chair, as if she had been folded carefully and set aside there, out of the way. She held her cane propped upright before her, with her papery hands clasped one over the other on the ivory knob. “Shall I go and see to it, dear Aunt?” Isabel solicitously enquired. She glanced back at Mr. Devenish. “They don’t at all understand tea here, and cross themselves before they go about the brewing of it, as if they had been commanded to engage in an act of witchcraft.”

  “Well, I would forgive them much for the quality of their coffee,” the gentleman affirmingly responded.

  Isabel smiled at him again; indeed, it came to her that she had been smiling well-nigh continuously since she had entered the room—Mr. Devenish’s good humour was catching. She had got out of the way of being treated pleasantly, and of being pleasant in return, in the ordinary human fashion; for a long time, for years and years, she had crouched inside herself, holding her breath and ever on the watch, like a child hiding in a cupboard from a capriciously cruel parent. What had she done, what had she ever done, to deserve the life of caution, watchfulness and dread to which she had been condemned these recent years? Yes, she had been proud; yes, she had prized her own counsel over that of others; yes, she had allowed herself to be married for her money; but did these sins, grave as they might be, deserve the retribution that had been wreaked upon her? Yet it was foolish, she told herself, foolish to skulk and be afraid. Today, in at last confronting her husband, she had pushed open the cupboard door a chink; outside, the room was bright, the floor swept, the crockery safe on its shelf, and no one was there, waiting with switch in hand for her to show herself. It was time for her to step forth and stand up straight and live—and live. She heard in the distance the thunder rolling.

  Their tea was brought, along with bread and biscuits and slices of sweet cake. Mr. Devenish proved himself possessed of a hearty appetite, and partook with unabashed freedom of all that was on offer, expatiating widely the while on a broad range of topics, at times with his mouth nearly full. The Clarion, the “dear old rag,” as he fondly called it, was robustly committed to the hottest causes of the day, including electoral reform, Home Rule for Ireland, liberalism, trade-unionism, disestablishmentarianism—indeed, he mentioned so many “isms” they seemed to swoop about the room like swallows—and, of course, universal suffrage for women. When he touched upon this last, he directed at Isabel an especially warm and meaning glance. “My aunt, as you know, Mrs. Osmond, is a leading campaigner in the cause.” He turned his attention to Mrs. Touchett, bent in her chair, who was watching him with a bright beadiness that Isabel feared he might mistake for approval of the views he had been so freely expounding. “Recently my aunt has not been well,” he said, addressing the old lady, and frowning and lowering his voice, “but she carries on the struggle regardless, though there are occasions when she is reduced to directing operations from her sick-bed.”

  Isabel’s aunt, unmoved, glared at him.

  “Oh, yes,” Isabel interjected hastily, with the urgent air of one anticipating an imminent volley of gunfire and attempting to draw it off. “Do tell me of the state of her health, although I must say that when I met her at the beginning of the summer and we had lunch together, she seemed in very strong spirits.”

  “Ah, well,” Mr. Devenish said, “as far as spirit goes, nothing daunts her, but, in bodily terms, I fear I must tell you she is failing fast.” He looked down, and fixed his gaze a moment on his already knocked-about hat, which for the sake of safety he had set on the floor beside the leg of his chair. “The doctors give her but a month or two.”

  There was a silence. Behind the hush could be heard the steady drumming of the rain outside, and thunder, too, was still grumbling away, up behind the hills. Then Mrs. Touchett stirred herself. “Perhaps the lady in question would have been better advised to conserve her energies in the cause of her own well-being,” she coldly pronounced, “and leave the great matters of the world to those fitted to engage with them.” She rose slowly and with much effort from her chair, leaning her scant weight so heavily on her cane that it vibrated visibly throughout its length. Painful though it was to watch her, Isabel knew better than to offer assistance, and so too, by instinct, did Mr. Devenish. Upright at last, the lady looked from one of them to the other with an expression of angry defiance. “I have household matters to attend to,” she said shortly. “Young man, I shall bid you good evening.”

  “And good evening to you, ma’am,” Devenish responded, with his brand of eager politeness. “Thank
you for receiving me—it was an honour to meet you.”

  They stood upon the moment there, all three, and the silence stretched between them. Isabel could see that the young man fully expected that it would be Mrs. Touchett who would depart, leaving him alone with her niece, and she could think of no practical way to disabuse him of the idea. Then Mrs. Touchett spoke, directly and to the point, though the words she employed were innocuous enough. “I hope, Mr. Devenish, you have brought your umbrella with you, otherwise I fear you are in for a drenching.”

  “Oh, I have my hat,” the young man replied. “That will do well enough to shield me from the elements.” He turned to Isabel, not without a flicker of rueful amusement in that remarkably virescent eye of his. “A great pleasure, Mrs. Osmond,” he murmured, offering his hand. “I hope we shall have the opportunity to meet again, if not here in Florence, then somewhere else—London, even, for I know my aunt would be very happy to receive you again in Fulham. She recalls your luncheon together there with much warmth.”

  “As I do, also,” Isabel replied. She could feel her aunt’s stare boring into her, like the glinting tip of a sharp little metallic implement. “If you should see her before I do, please convey my friendliest greetings to her, and my concern for her sad condition.”

  She walked with him to the front door, where he paused, with his hat in his hands. “I fear your aunt disapproves of me,” he said under his breath.

  “You shouldn’t feel personally frowned upon,” Isabel replied with a smile. “She disapproves of things generally—the world as it’s constituted fails to come up to her standards, which are very high, I’m afraid.”

  “She is a formidable lady, certainly,” Mr. Devenish said, laughing, and shaking his head. Then he paused, looking down again at his hat.

  “You know,” he said, with shy hesitancy, “I had intended to depart Florence the day I called on you and left my card.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “Yes.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “I didn’t wish to go without having seen you.”

  “I’m glad, then, that you waited,” she said, in a determinedly neutral tone; she knew the mile a man might take if he were offered no more than an inch.

  Still he lingered, frowning, with lips pursed. She attended upon him keenly, even with a certain suspense. She guessed he would know something of her recent troubles—Henrietta Stackpole ever considered it her duty to expose injustice and point to its perpetrators, at the cost, should it come to it, of disclosing a friend’s private sorrows—and had he shown the slightest hint of compassion or commiseration, she would have bade him a brisk farewell, shut the door on him, and found his calling-card and torn it into fragments. In her present circumstances she would rather be mocked than sympathised with. However, it was another tack he took. “My aunt told me of your generous act of patronage,” he said.

  For a moment Isabel was confused, and then she understood. “Oh, yes—the banknotes. I feel I behaved in rather a foolish way.”

  Myles Devenish stared. “But how could that be? You made a great contribution to the cause.”

  “The cause?”

  “Well, of suffrage—of freedom.”

  “Ah, freedom,” Isabel murmured. “It’s a word that has been much on my mind in recent weeks. I’m very glad I was able to help your aunt. She is an admirable woman.”

  “That she is, that she is,” the young man declared. He seemed to have more to say, much more indeed, but he confined himself to a quick goodbye and made a gallant little bow, and was gone.

  XXXII

  The storm was still prowling sullenly in the hills above the city, and Isabel felt febrile and on edge, as if tiny charges of electricity were shooting along her veins in all directions, and she could settle to nothing. She wandered aimlessly about the great gaunt hollow house, cross at herself and the things she encountered, no matter how eagerly they pressed themselves to her attention. She was like a bored child, whose brightest playthings have lost their lustre, astray in the empty hours of a deserted Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Touchett had retired to her quarters upstairs, leaving word that she would dine there alone later; evidently a scattering of the disapproval she had directed at Mr. Devenish had become deflected on to her niece. If that was the case, Isabel was glad of it. Her aunt was aware that she had been out to Bellosguardo, and she would surely have sought, in her coolly detached fashion, to know something of what had passed between Mrs. Osmond and her husband, after such a lengthy and, so it had been reported, stressful separation between the ill-contented couple. The last thing Isabel could have borne this evening was one of her aunt’s interrogations, which were always as pointed and probing as a surgical procedure.

  She went to the garden room and selected a book from a shelf there—a volume of Browning’s verse, which she thought would surely be apt to her mood—and seated herself in a wicker chair by the window. She was soon distracted by the crestfallen aspect of the garden—the rain had left everything bowed down in disarray—and the garish light that made the panes of glass beside her glitter menacingly. At home, by which we mean Albany and its environs, since for her there was nowhere else now that merited the appellation, she had loved the twilight hour, invested as it was for her with a sense of vague, melancholy and yet always exciting promise; here in the south, each day was brought to a brusque, unceremonious close, the darkness falling almost with a clatter, like the grille in front of a shopkeeper’s stall. She put aside the book, and rang for Staines and informed her that she too would take a solitary dinner, in her room. “Just some eggs will do,” she murmured, turning her eyes once more to the dismal garden, where already there was hardly a glimmer of daylight lingering.

  “Shall I light the candles, ma’am, or will you be going straight up?” the maid enquired.

  “Yes, light them, please, but only one or two,” Isabel responded. There was a time when she would have thrilled to sit like this of a darkling eve, after rain, but the darkness was thicker now, and there were things that moved in it, indistinct but unmistakable forms, like wild beasts at the mouth of a cave, which only flame could keep at bay. “And bring me something to drink—a glass of moscato, perhaps.”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  “And, Staines—”

  “Yes’m?”

  “Thank you for caring for me, as you do.”

  The maid reddened a little. “Well, it’s what I’m for, ma’am, isn’t it?”

  “But I thank you, all the same.”

  She found it strange that she should feel so little disturbance within her at the close of such a day. It was only now she realised for how long a time, in a deep recess of her mind, she had been arming herself, all unawares and yet diligently, meticulously, coldly, for the struggle in which that morning she had joined with her husband. And was she to have no sense of victory, was she to experience no satisfaction? No misgiving, even? No remorse? Was this all there was to be of aftermath? Why was she not upstairs prostrated on her bed, weeping, if for nothing other than the bitter relief of having brought the thing off, of having carried the day? For there was no doubt that she had prevailed. Osmond, as he had threatened, would make all the difficulties for her that he was capable of, and he was capable of much—he was capable of anything!—but it would avail him naught. She had read her Maistre, and knew from that dark-minded savant of the moment in battle when one side, even if the stronger in manpower and matériel, suddenly loses heart, or nerve, or will, or all together, and on the spot collapses. She had seen the realisation of defeat dawn in Osmond’s eyes today. It was not a thing she had ever expected to have occasion to witness. Yet it had not been a rout; there would be no disorderly retreat, he would not turn tail and run. It was not his way to submit himself to indignity; nor was it hers to force him into such submission. He would, as he had warned her, do everything in his power to obstruct her—he had acquaintances in the bureaucracy, in the judiciary, in the Vatican, even—while she, on the contrary, would make the way easy for him where
ver she could. She recalled again his speaking to her, so memorably, of how in his dealings he valued honour above all else, a precept to which, so she had discovered, he paid poor observance, it was true; but even if he were to stoop below his own standards, that was no reason for her to crouch alongside him. No matter by what means he might attempt to thwart her, she would honour—yes, she would honour—the terms she had set out to him when they faced each other today across the table in that high room in Bellosguardo, a site that already in her mind had taken on the trappings of a memorial to the culminating engagement in a long struggle for liberty.

  The maid had lighted the candles, the flames of which had extinguished on the instant the last glimmer of dusk in the window, and Isabel had been brought her glass of wine—it stood on a little tray beside her—yet still the maid lingered, even though Isabel had released her to her own devices until she should be required to come again a last time, to her mistress’s room upstairs, bringing her a bedtime tisane. Isabel watched her with curiosity, as she straightened a candle in its holder, and smoothed the wrinkles in a floor rug, and plumped up yet another cushion. It was clear the kind-hearted creature had something on her mind. She stopped by Isabel’s chair now, expressing herself concerned that Madam had gone through such a long and, as was obvious, an exceedingly arduous day, especially as only last evening she had still been “afire with that awful fever.” Isabel conceded that she was tired, and promised to go to bed directly after she had finished her dinner, which perhaps she would take here, on a tray, and not, as she had thought to, in her bedroom, the nocturnal gloom of which had been intensified by the memory of the days and nights of illness she had been compelled to endure there. A silence followed, or would have, were it not for the peculiar humming sound, like a vibration lingering on the air after the tolling of a church bell, that Staines emitted, unconsciously, so it seemed, whenever she had an inner quandary to grapple with.