The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  It is only when I see his hand in Ella’s that I know the worst; and even then I struggle to believe it. The proof is conclusive, however, when I see Charles lean down and kiss her long and publicly and I watch her return his kiss as everyone’s glasses rise in a heartfelt toast and someone starts singing “For They’re Two Jolly Good Fellows.” Both pull apart, flushing with happiness; and Ella looks up, smiling her thanks, and sees me on the stairs.

  Our eyes meet, I think.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE DETAILS OF HOW I LEFT THAT OVER-LARGE HOUSE; of how I submitted to Camilla’s fervent embrace as I said my good-byes; of how I avoided Ella and Charles in the crowds of guests, kissing and coating each other in the hall; all are blurred. What I remember after all these years is the exhilarating sensation of clarity I took away with me that night, the complete understanding of a situation which I felt myself uniquely equipped and placed to change.

  I knew now what Ella’s island looked like: dutiful, untroubled, endless; the security of a loveless but socially acceptable marriage. Barren indeed. I could see the current that had washed her up on it, could picture the subtle stages by which she had succumbed to the tides dragging at her feet, could imagine the gradual weakening of her strength to resist. How nineteenth century her dilemma was, I thought; but then how nineteenth century she was herself in some respects. And I remembered her talk of ancestors and tradition with the fascination of the uninitiated. My own family might know families which had such things, but we had no direct experience of them ourselves, however much might be implied to the contrary.

  I could speculate about the intimate conversations Ella had endured with her mother; about the number of times she had been asked whom she liked best of the young men she knew; about the delighted way in which her family would have pounced on so blandly well bred a young man as Charles Stanhope. And to please them she would have begun to see more of him; would have allowed him, perhaps, to imagine that she felt more than she did.

  And then events, as she had told me herself, had overtaken her in a spectacular fashion and before she knew what was happening her engagement was being announced by a high-spirited Charles and she was being subjected to the congratulations of her friends and the rejoicings of her family. It was a romantic dilemma and one which held for me the romantic role of Ella’s savior. I clung to it in the weeks after Camilla’s party and nursed romantic plans of private rescue like the schoolboy I was.

  Had I had any idea quite how far wide of the mark my conclusions had fallen, my feelings would doubtless have been very different. As it was, I threw myself into my day-dreams with a vigor which carried over into the rest of my life and surprised my parents, for no longer was I a sulky companion at the breakfast table. On the contrary, I now had a goal which was quite distinct from my battles with them and I was prepared to be conciliatory. Instead of warring with my family I focused my attention on a more immediate goal: the liberation of Ella from the clutches of convention. And I daresay that had I had any opportunity to execute my long pondered-over designs, I might have embarrassed myself seriously. Even now, as I look back on that time, I shudder with embarrassment. But I also chuckle at my own naïveté. I cannot bring myself entirely to pity the earnest figure I was, with the shuffling gait and furrowed brow. I envy that lost self his passion; for he was in love, and in hopeless love at that. It is not an unpleasant sensation.

  It was not a sensation which persisted long either, at least not in its initial form. For six weeks my mind was filled with daring plans but little action. My one concrete success was in obtaining Ella’s telephone number from Camilla Boardman on the pretext that I had had no opportunity to congratulate her friend on her engagement. “Jamie darling,”Camilla cooed at me down the telephone, “it’s just like you to be so sweet. Wherever did you get such perfect manners?”

  But the gruff voice that answered the telephone at the Harcourt house in Chester Square regretted to say, on each of the weekly occasions on which I scraped together the courage to call, that Ella was not at home. Thus thwarted, I considered writing and rejected it; considered waiting and accosting her on the street and rejected that too, at least as an initial measure; considered flowers; a dramatically phrased telegram; an engagement gift with a meaningful card; and rejected them all. For days I was in the sweetest of black despairs as I imagined the date of Ella’s wedding drawing ever nearer, with me helpless to do anything about it.

  I was brought down to earth with a jolt one afternoon by seeing the object of these dreams, her nose in a book, sitting under a wide-brimmed straw hat on a deck chair across the water from me. I was in Hyde Park once more, having walked from my own home and made the long detour via Chester Square in the hopes of seeing her. They had not been realistic hopes, I knew, and I had settled myself by the Serpentine to enjoy the sun and to indulge in idle contemplation of how things might have been. Confronted so unexpectedly by the reality of my musings I was taken aback. Then I thought that I must have been mistaken and looked again, my pulse quickening. Over the water sat the girl on whom my thoughts had focused exclusively for more than a month, which at that age is an eternity. There was no mistaking the delicate oval of that face, the slightly upturned tilt of that small nose; only the glow in her cheeks was new. For a damsel in such distress, she looked irritatingly healthy.

  Slowly I got up and made my way around the lake and through the crowds on the bridge: stalking her; wondering what she would say when she saw me. As I approached I saw her reach into a large basket at her feet and extract a packet of cigarettes and a small silver lighter. I paused and watched her fingers as she attempted to light the long, thin roll of tobacco in her hand. Her lighter needed to be refilled, I noticed; I noticed too that she was smoking a different brand from the one she had smoked before. When I was sufficiently close but still behind her and so out of her view I stopped, coughed and called her name. The pale blue of the eyes that turned to face me warned me, though no other feature did, of my mistake. They were eyes I did not know then, but which I have come to know intimately since.

  “I’m afraid that I’m Sarah Harcourt, not Ella,” the girl said, turning towards me and taking off her sun hat, shaking out a wave of dark brown hair. “There’s no need to be embarrassed.” She smiled at me, sensing my awkwardness. “We were often mistaken for each other as children. Until my hair darkened, in fact.” There was, nevertheless, an embarrassed silence. “We both look like our grandmother, you see,” she continued, filling the void between us before it reached unpleasant proportions.

  I nodded. Privately I thought this a strange fact to offer, but a moment’s reflection convinced me that it was precisely the sort of allusion which Ella herself might have made; so I responded to it, thinking as I did so that Sarah’s accent, very English, betrayed no trace of her cousin’s American lilt.

  “You’re almost identical from a distance,” I said. “Apart from the hair of course.”

  The faintest suggestion of irritation passed over the face that looked up at me from under its wreaths of hair; but Sarah’s thin lips composed themselves hastily into a polite, if slightly chilly, smile. “I’m told it’s unusual for cousins to look so similar,” she said.

  Again there was a pause, which she seemed to expect me to fill this time. I mumbled something about her grandmother probably having had very dominant genes.

  She nodded at this. “Yes, she was a remarkable lady. She affected a great many people. I never knew her, but I’ve read some of her letters. She was terribly funny about the English.”

  “But wasn’t she English herself?” I thought that polite inquiry was the best course to follow in this unlikely situation.

  “Oh no, she was American. My family’s long had American connections. But then you must know that if you know Ella. She’s one of them, in a way.”

  “I thought she was English,” I said.

  “By birth, yes,” said her cousin. “But by education she couldn’t be more foreign. And I think you’ll agree
that it’s education which counts in such cases.” She spoke of foreignness as she might have spoken of a benign but unsightly growth: one of life’s little unpleasantnesses, regrettable of course, but not seriously threatening. Such things as having a virtual American in one’s family, Sarah’s tone implied, had to be taken in one’s stride.

  As she spoke I looked closely at her and saw that she was not quite as like Ella as I had at first thought. Her hair, which fell in a neat shiny sheet to the middle of her back, was the most obvious point of difference between her and her cousin. But Sarah’s face was different too: it was longer; her lips were thinner and more set than Ella’s; the bridge of her nose was more severe than her cousin’s. She belonged, I thought, to a different generation; and although I took her to be about my own age, I felt instinctively deferential towards her without quite knowing why. Sarah Harcourt, it seemed to me (and in this I was correct), was not a person with whom liberties could be taken lightly.

  “Can I do anything for you, or will only Ella do?” She looked up at me politely.

  I hesitated.

  “I’ll tell you where you can find her if you’ll buy me an ice cream.” Clearly Sarah was feeling conversational “I’m completely out of change,” she went on, still looking up at me from the striped canvas of her deck chair. The note of command in her voice, though faint, was unmistakable; and I complied. To make conversation as we walked towards the kiosk on the bridge I asked her how she came to have an American grandmother.

  “It’s a long story,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “But I’ll tell it to you, if you like.”

  “I should like that very much.”

  She looked at me searchingly, apparently assessing my sincerity. I must have passed her test, for once we were reestablished by the Serpentine, ice creams in hand, she began her story; and as she talked she convinced me, as perhaps no one else could have done, that Ella Harcourt was unlike anyone I had ever met. If, in my daydreams, I thought I might have magnified her beauty, her image taught me that I was wrong. But Ella’s charm went deeper than that; and a certain similarity in gesture and manner between the cousins served only to emphasize, for me, the superiority of one in subtle respects which I tried silently to define as I listened to the other. The regal, slightly stiff set of Sarah’s angular shoulders reminded me, I thought, of the natural grace of Ella’s; the detached ice of Sarah’s blue eyes made me think of her cousin’s, green and sparkling in my memory; the absence of hand movement in Sarah’s conversation recalled the occasional but effective use that Ella made of her hands. Yet Sarah was not without a certain compelling air of her own, though her methods were subtly authoritarian and Ella’s were not.

  “My grandfather,” she said, “was a very poor man with an illustrious name. And my grandmother was a very rich woman with no name at all, to speak of. She was also American.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Oh it’s a simple one, really. My grandmother’s father felt that a title for his daughter was just the thing to ensure the respectability of his money; and his future son-in-law had an ancient, weather-beaten house with a leaking roof and no electricity to run.” Sarah looked at me, assessing my reception of her anecdote. I smiled. “So a match was arranged,” she went on. “A bargain was struck. Each side got what they wanted: titled grandchildren for my great-grandfather; central heating for my grandfather. The only person they neglected to consult was my grandmother, Blanche, who arrived in England at the age of eighteen, was married at nineteen, and had conceived a complete and not entirely irrational aversion to her husband by the time she was twenty.”

  I nodded.

  “That didn’t stop her from producing four healthy children for him, though,” Sarah continued. “An heir and three spares, if you like. She understood that that was her end of the bargain.” Ella’s cousin paused. “But she was one of those compelling women who need people and life about them. The decaying house, a castle in fact, was in Cornwall. And her father wouldn’t finance a house in London that befitted the status of the new couple, so in Cornwall she languished, painted once by Sargent, but otherwise left undisturbed by the fashionable world.”

  “And what did she do with her time?” I found myself surprisingly interested by this forbidding young Englishwoman eating ice cream at my side, and found further to my surprise that my interest was independent of her similarity to her cousin.

  “Well, she wrote letters; she redesigned the garden; she saw to the upbringing and education of her children. She ran the house smoothly, presiding over the small army that was needed to keep the place going; she got in the way, as much as she could, of her husband’s philandering.”

  “I see.”

  “But her mind needed more of an outlet than such activities could provide.” Sarah smiled at me. “Blanche, you see, was not at heart a domesticated woman. That was the thing. And she was highly gifted, which made things worse.”

  “So what happened to her in the end? What did she find to do?”

  “She didn’t really find anything at all. That was her tragedy. And there’s only so much solitude, by which I mean so much isolation from her equals, that a woman of that kind can bear.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Blanche’s granddaughter was quiet for a moment, looking silently out over the cheerful, boat-filled lake. “She killed herself eventually,” she said at last. “Jumped out of a window onto the terrace. Caused a huge scandal at the time, as you can imagine.”

  I could imagine. “How awful,” I said quietly.

  “Isn’t it? I think it affected her children profoundly.”

  “It must have done.”

  There was a pause.

  “And there,” she said briskly, looking directly at me once more, “you have the story of how I come to have an American grandmother. I hope I didn’t tell you more than you care to know.”

  “No, not at all. I found it fascinating. And tragic.”

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “It certainly has both of those qualities.” She turned to me, confidential suddenly. “I have an idea, you know, of writing Blanche’s biography one day. She was a woman who gave to everything she did the kind of glamour one usually finds only in fiction. I think hers would be an excellent story to tell. And I think, too, that she would have wanted it to be told.”

  “She certainly chose a very public way of ending her life.”

  “Yes she did. She was also, of course, in an interesting position historically.”

  I nodded.

  “One of the emancipated young women from America sent to prop up the ailing feudal system with democratic gold.” Sarah smiled. “It’s funny to think, isn’t it,” she went on, warming to her theme, “that young women like Blanche helped to sustain all from which the Pilgrim Fathers had fled so far?”

  “Very.”

  There was silence, though this time it was not an uncomfortable one.

  “Well,” I said at last, “I’m sure it would make a very interesting book.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, rising. “But I’ve kept you from your reading for far too long.” I nodded towards the deck chair and the novel lying on it. “What is it?”

  “It’s The Buccaneers. By Edith Wharton. A friend of my grandmother’s incidentally.”

  “And of Henry James,” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “Well good-bye,” I said.

  “Good-bye.” She held out her hand.

  “You couldn’t pass on a message to Ella, could you?”

  The same flicker of irritation which I thought I had observed earlier reappeared and was, as earlier, modified at once to a polite smile. “Of course,” she said, “though I’m not sure when I’ll next see her. We don’t see very much of each other.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Frankly, we don’t get on. Oh you needn’t be embarrassed,” she continued after a moment, sensing my d
iscomfort. “It’s an open secret. I find her rather crass; she, I daresay, finds me too English and reserved. But doubtless she’ll tell you her criticisms of me herself when next you see her.”

  “I doubt that,” I said, doubting too whether I would ever see Ella again. Obviously an acquaintance with Sarah was going to bring me no nearer my goal.