Mrs. Osmond

by John Banville

  “Ah, my dear, so you have come,” a honeyed, deep-toned voice said behind her.

  “Yes, I have come,” Isabel said, turning with calculated deliberateness towards the stairs, on the lowest step of which Madame Merle had paused, one hand resting on the newel-post and the other employed in pinching the skirts of her pale-blue gown so as to hold the hem suspended a protective inch above the carpet.

  “I wondered if you would come, you know,” this lady said with a smile, “so long were you about it. For myself, I’ve been here the best part of a week, awaiting you.”

  “But you had my telegram last evening?”

  “I did, with relief—I worried that some mishap might have befallen you, since last we communicated.”

  “I had business to attend to. It took more time than I had anticipated.”

  “Ah, yes, business,” Madame Merle said softly, with a feline sibilance. “For a person of means I’m sure it must be very time-consuming.” She was all of her accustomed magnificent self, fair of hair and smooth of complexion, with her large handsome face, and shoulders that were nothing but impressive, if perhaps a shade too broad; with her candid grey eye and that elegantly lazy smile, wholly characteristic, that lifted her mouth a little at the left corner; with all, in a word, of her imposing if not to say daunting presence, before which the very prints on the walls seemed to lean a little more steeply forward in respectful acknowledgement. She gestured towards the sala da tè. “Shall you take some refreshment?”

  “No, thank you. I lunched on the train.”

  “On the train! That was intrepid of you. I feel I should offer you an antidote, rather than further fare.”

  On the instant Isabel’s gaze grew sharp—antidotes and their opposites were among the darker topics she had come here to raise—but the blandness of Madame Merle’s manner reassured her that her intent had not been somehow anticipated.

  “I should prefer a place where we might speak in private,” she murmured.

  “But of course—my suite here includes a very pretty little parlour, where we shall be sure of being undisturbed. Unless, of course”—she paused, and her smile again drew up her lips at one corner—“you fear I might be the spider, and you the fly?”

  “Oh, I trust my wings have strength enough to escape any web you might fashion for me.”

  To this sally Madame Merle, still smiling, responded only by lifting a sardonically appreciative eyebrow. “Come, then,” she said silkily, and side by side the two ladies ascended the broad staircase.

  The room they entered was not so modest as might have been expected from Madame Merle’s figuring of it. It had a sofa and a pair of armchairs, a low circular table with an inlaid glass top, and two fine, deep-embrasured windows side by side facing in the direction of the Piazza di Spagna. The sofa, upholstered in sea-green satin, had the aloof and dignified aspect of some grand elderly lady of a bygone age, and looked as if the last thing it expected was to be sat upon; the chairs, however, knew their place well enough, and extended humble arms in a gesture of commodious and well-padded accommodation.

  “Oh, these Roman summers!” Madame Merle exclaimed—the atmosphere in the room had the texture of a tepid fog—going from one of the delicately mullioned windows to the other and throwing them wide. She glanced back at Isabel. “Is that better, or worse? One never knows, since often the air in the streets is stuffier than that indoors.” She checked herself. “But I forget myself, and speak to you as if you were a stranger newly arrived in this infernal place—that’s my name for it in summertime, you know, the Infernal City.”

  “Yes, and Gilbert’s too,” Isabel said. “I imagine you would be hard put now to say which of you thought of it first.”

  This, the barest shadow of a challenge, Madame Merle met with another of her distant, blank-eyed smiles. “Are you quite sure you won’t take something?” she asked. “A cooling drink, or an ice, perhaps? I could ring for a dish of water-ice, they do it wonderfully here, especially the lemon-flavoured one. No? Ah, well then, let us sit, at least. One finds it wearying even to remain standing, in such heat.”

  They sat down in the armchairs, which had been set directly opposite each other at either end of the forbidding sofa, so that the two women found themselves starkly face-to-face with nothing between them save the glass-topped table. It was an arrangement that they both felt at once to be distinctly theatrical, and it was a question, their being thus histrionically disposed, as to which of them, lacking a cue, would be the first to speak. Through the wide-open windows there entered untrammelled the confused clamour of the street below, where twin concourses of tourists flowed and mingled in both directions, and there were the cries of souvenir-vendors, and the curiously hollow-sounding, weary hoof-beats of plumed carriage horses drawing their complements of sightseers back and forth between the Spanish Steps and the river. Madame Merle had opened a painted fan and was flicking it in front of her face with rapid, butterfly strokes; of the two women she was decidedly the ampler, and the temperature in the room therefore was more distressing to her than it was to Isabel. “You have an air about you of stern intent,” the older lady said now, striving for lightness but failing to keep an edge of irritability out of her voice. “Have you changed your mind and come to rebuke me, as you so markedly refrained from doing when we chanced upon each other in Paris?”

  “Ah, no,” Isabel replied. “I am past the need to rebuke anyone, except, perhaps, myself. As I told you, on that occasion at the Princess d’Attrait’s, what I seek is not revenge, but a reckoning.”

  “Between revenge and reckoning there is not such a great distinction to be made, is there? Anyway, I believe, rather, the term you used that evening was ‘an accounting’—in fact, I’m sure it was, for I noted it well, and gave much thought to it, afterwards. It seems to me”—here the lady switched the fan to her left hand, the right one having grown weary from its efforts—“you have had a sufficient accounting, or reckoning, call it what you will, from the Countess Gemini, and who knows how many others?”

  “Are there so many others who know enough to be capable of enlightening me as to your schemes, yours and my husband’s?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, woman, how should I say who knew what and who didn’t? Do you imagine I kept a register? Do you think I had a cadre of informants who came to me each evening with word of what they had overheard during the day? I was above such pettiness—we were above it, we!”

  It surprised Isabel with what equanimity, with what an extent of protective numbness, she had absorbed the blow of that we—for it had been meant to strike her full in the face with all the force of a wielded cudgel. She had been acquainted with Madame Merle for a long time; the lady, for all that she was Brooklyn-born, had been one of the first through-and-through Europeans she had encountered, after she had first stepped on to English soil, and was still Isabel Archer, late of Albany, in the state of New York; they had stayed at Gardencourt together, in what by now could be called “the old days”; they had taken the Grand Tour in each other’s company, with never a cross word exchanged between them; they had been each other’s confidante and les plus grandes amies for years—for years!—but only now did it occur to her that she had never before seen her, Serena Merle, so highly wrought, so far beyond the run of herself, as she so plainly was, sitting here, flushed and furious and vainly fanning herself, in these absurdly genteel surroundings—the sofa! the cushions!—at the centre of a ruined empire overrun by latter-day barbarians armed with Baedekers and billfolds. Had she, had Isabel Archer, as in her mind she suddenly was again, had she come at last to her second moment of triumph, to her second time of, yes, reckoning? A week ago she had faced her husband, on that afternoon at Bellosguardo, and had faced him down; was she to do the same now with her husband’s erstwhile consort? So it must be, otherwise how account for the bitter taste in her mouth, for the depth of darkness in her heart? In that instant, she almost hated herself.

  “When Osmond took his wife away fro
m Naples and brought her to Piedmont, many years ago,” she said, in a voice that surprised her by being of a remarkable steadiness, “he knew she would die there, didn’t he?”

  It was not a question, but neither, in some peculiar fashion, was it a statement; it seemed to her, rather, in the manner of an hypothesis, the soundness of which she did not herself doubt, but which required to be put out upon the common air in order for it to be publicly authenticated. As to Madame Merle, her immediate response was the abrupt stilling of the fan she had been so vigorously manipulating, while her gaze fixed itself as if upon a mote in the middle distance. She spoke not at all for some moments, and Isabel was content to wait upon her without betraying the least sign of impatience. Indeed our heroine—and just then she was nothing if not heroic—permitted herself to take a modicum of pride in the control she was managing to exert over her own impulses and emotions. She was conscious of having stepped with awful ease over a boundary that before had seemed so high she would have surmounted it only at the expense of splintered fingernails and scraped knees; here, now, on the other side, she was in a new realm, alien and oddly featureless, a parched place, where a cold wind whipped up eddies of dust and sent soiled scraps of paper scudding over the level dry ground; it was, she realised, the blighted country where Madame Merle and her like had their abode. And Isabel herself, had she not been made to live there too, for years and years, without realising, or at least without acknowledging, the fact? Was that a real boundary she had seemed to step over, or a barrier her imagination had erected for her, so that she should not see for what it was the dead world into which she had been so subtly, so smoothly, inveigled? If that were the case, then today she would make her escape, no matter how solidly real the hurdle or how hard to scale, and return herself from that dead land, scuffed and bleeding, as it might be, to the domain of the living.

  When Madame Merle stirred herself out of stillness at last it was as if a stone monument had come stiffly to life and turned its head with great effort on the pivot of its marmoreal neck. “My dear Isabel, I must say, one is never in want of surprises in your company nowadays. Gilbert Osmond do away with his wife? Wherever did you come by such a wicked notion?”

  “I said nothing of his ‘doing away’ with her,” Isabel evenly replied. “But I believe he put her in the way of mortal harm, as deliberately, shall we say, as you put me in the way of him.”

  To this Madame Merle returned a hard cold laugh. “Do you think of your marriage as having been a form of dying?”

  “I would not put it so strongly as that,” Isabel calmly observed. “Not so strongly. Anyway, it is no business of yours what my marriage was or wasn’t, even if you were instrumental in the making of it.”

  “ ‘In the making of it’? You seem to have surprisingly scant regard for yourself as an active agent in your own fate. Yet you came to us flying the banner of independence, flaunting the reputation of a young woman who would not be made to do anything, by anybody, that she had not already fixed on doing herself.”

  “You saw exactly what my strengths were, and my weaknesses,” Isabel murmured, “and weighed them judiciously in the balance.”

  She hardly knew what she was saying, and hardly cared: she had introduced a matter of grave moment, and each crabwise step away from it that Madame Merle effected convinced her all the more firmly, and all the more miserably, that the terrible tale that Staines had told to her, the source for which was none other than Madame Merle’s own personal maid, was nothing less than the truth. She felt like one who, standing at a window, had witnessed an atrocity committed in the street below, from the sight of which the perpetrator’s confederate was drawing her away, with an arm firmly linked in hers and speaking earnestly and volubly of everything save the corpse sprawled on the pavement below, and the blood trickling into the gutter. What Staines had disclosed was that the man who some fifteen years later was to become the husband of Isabel Archer had conveyed his first wife to Piedmont after word had come to him that there was an outbreak of typhoid fever in the region, and that the worst of the contagion was centred upon Alba. The deluded Mrs. Osmond had gone willingly enough, trusting her husband’s assurance that the northern air would offer a welcome respite from the noxious vapours of the south—the uncommonly hot weather of the summer had persisted into autumn and showed no signs of abating—and would be a tonic greatly to the benefit of her delicate state of health. The Albanese city fathers had done all in their power to suppress the fact that sickness was rife in their streets—if the tourists stopped coming, what of the season’s harvest of fragrant truffles and succulent peaches, and of that year’s vintage of those opulent wines for which the region is celebrated by the wide world’s palate?—but Osmond knew the truth of the matter, by way of that network along which the guild of true collectors discreetly communicates. Someone he was acquainted with had told him there was sickness in Alba; Madame Merle was in Lecce, about to bear his unlooked-for child; in Alba lay the possibility of a solution to his predicament, or at least an amelioration of it.

  Over the years Isabel had learned many things about her husband that she could not have guessed at before she had married him. That was only natural, of course; indeed, successive discoveries, leading to a deepening of knowledge and an intensification of intimacy, was what she had looked forward to with the keenest anticipation when she had agreed to share her life with Gilbert Osmond, the extent of whose knowledge of the world and its wonders had so impressed her, and the subtlety and variousness of whose mind she had confidently expected never to see exhausted. She had soon learned that in all his aspects he had his limits, and that they were exact, and rigidly demarcated; indeed, the realisation of his narrowness of vision, of thought, above all of emotion, was the thing that most sorely disappointed and pained her. She believed she could have borne almost anything else; let him be a philanderer, a shameless cheat, a Byronesque transgressor—let him be anything other than the pinched vindictive spirit she had discovered him to be, and she would have found some way to reconcile herself to her life with him. But he was what he was, and what he was she could not find it in her to accept, try as she might, but now, suddenly, startlingly, there was manifest, in the tale Staines had told her, a version of him she had never glimpsed before. He was a gambler. Yes, a gambler; not a daring one, not one who would smash down his last handful of gold upon a single square of the roulette table and face disaster fully in the intoxicating thrill of the moment; but a gambler nonetheless. He had wagered that his wife would die in Alba, and he had won. The stakes were high: he would have risked the forfeiture of his reputation as a gentleman, as a person of the highest probity, as a paragon of honour, should his lover have returned from her sequestration in the south and displayed before the public, or at least that thin slice of the public whose regard he prized, the incontrovertible evidence of his deplorable foolishness in allowing himself to fall a victim to passion—passion, the affect of all the affects that, when it was evidenced in others, Gilbert Osmond lost no opportunity to mock! No, the thing could not have been borne; to lose face would have been, for him, insupportable, for what else had he other than the appearance of being what he was not?

  Of course, Isabel reflected now, seated in the full insuppressible glare of Madame Merle’s antipathy—intensified, as it was, by that lady’s anxiety over her own security and interests—she would have had to grant Osmond a grudging admiration, however deplorable his actions, had he put himself, as well as his wife, in mortal danger by venturing north to that afflicted province. But he had not; no, he had not, for the dice had been weighted in his favour.