The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “Oh she will, I’m sure. Very sweetly but very deftly. That’s her way. But do you want to give me a message for her anyway, just in case I run into her before you do?”

  “Tell her you saw James Farrell,” I said, realizing that until now I had not offered my name to Sarah and she had not asked for it. “Tell her that you saw James Farrell and that he wondered how life on her island was suiting her.”

  “Is that all?” Sarah eyed me quizzically.

  “That’s all. She’ll understand.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Well, good-bye again.”

  “Good-bye.”

  And with that I left her and walked once more over the bridge and down the carriage track. I felt Sarah’s cold blue eyes on me as I went and I turned on the far side of the bridge to wave. But she was seated, her nose in her book once more. If she saw me, she gave no indication of having done so.

  CHAPTER 5

  AS IT HAPPENED, NONE OF THE HARCOURTS gave any sign of acknowledging my existence in the days which followed my meeting with Sarah, days which I spent practicing my violin and thinking of Ella. I found to my delight that I was able to transform the bittersweet frustration which hopeless love produces into the energy which serious work requires, and even my parents were impressed by the resulting ardor of my diligence. Throughout that hot August I was never far from the air-less room at the top of the house where my violin was kept; and as I practiced I played to an imaginary audience of one, hoping as I did so that the sheer dexterity of this or that scale would impress her, or that this or that sonata would make her smile. I played a good deal of Brahms at that time, I remember; and I remember finding in the drama of the music a fitting accompaniment to my own secret dreams of rescue and of valor.

  Youth is foolish and youth in frenzied love is worse. Even now I smile to think of those heady days in that stuffy room; I smile but am glad to have lived through them, hot and dusty though they were, young and foolish though I was.

  But Ella, the unwitting object of all my thoughts, remained nowhere to be found or seen. She was never at home to my telephone calls; she never gave any sign of having received a message from me; the forbidding Georgian portals of the house in Chester Square never yielded up her slim frame when I happened to be passing, as I frequently was. But the effortless way in which she had entered my mind; the strange, unlooked-for meeting with her cousin; the occasional photographs of her and Charles which appeared in the magazines I read while having my hair cut; all fanned the flames of my interest in her. I continued to play and dream and be disappointed.

  But even the interest of an unusually impressionable boy begins to wane. With no encouragement from the unknowing object of my devotion, without so much as a note or a look from her—either of which might have conquered me forever, I felt—the intensity of my enthusiasm could not be maintained indefinitely. And it might, I suppose, have faded and finally died, consigned to history as a last memory of fiery adolescence, had Fate—if indeed such a force exists—not decreed otherwise.

  The instrument that Fate selected to bring Ella and me together once again was chosen with exquisite taste: it was Camilla Boardman; and she telephoned just as I was deciding that there was nothing to be done, and that if Ella wished to waste herself on Charles Stanhope she was welcome to do so.

  “Daaarling!” cooed the voice I had not heard since it had given me Ella’s telephone number many weeks before.

  “Camilla. How are you?”

  “How are you? That’s far more to the point.”

  “I’m well, thank you.”

  “So why have you been hiding away? Positively ignoring all your friends.”

  I knew Camilla well enough to be suspicious of her tone of mock injury. Cautiously I replied that I had not been hiding away, but that I had been practicing hard in preparation for the Guildhall.

  “Oh I forget you’re off to be a famous musician,” she said. “You’ll still remember me when you’ve made it, won’t you darling? Even with all those terribly glamorous women throwing themselves at you.”

  I sensed that a compliment was appropriate. Hesitatingly, I attempted one. “They couldn’t possibly be more glamorous than you, Camilla … darling.”

  “Oh Jamie, you’re so sweet. So lovely. You always are.” The frequency of Camilla’s emphases prepared me for her inevitable climax. “In fact that’s just why I’ve called you. Ed Saunders has left me completely in the lurch, like he always does.”

  Ed Saunders was Camilla’s current man, I gathered, and I pretended to recognize his name. “Oh Ed,” I said.

  “Yes, the toad.” A petulant Camilla was even more alarming than usual. “And Ella Harcourt’s engagement party starts in an hour, would you believe?”

  “Ella Harcourt, did you say?” I caught my breath, hoping against hope.

  “Yes, her parents are giving a lunch for her and Charlie. Everyone’s going to be there. Pamela—that’s Ella’s stepmother—is a fabulous entertainer. And that toad Ed has just rung me up and told me he’s got laryngitis and can’t possibly come. Laryngitis. Honestly!” said Camilla, as though it numbered amongst the rarest of tropical diseases. “In August! And so,” her voice changed tone, “I wondered whether you might possibly be free. I couldn’t bear the thought of going alone. And,” realizing that this probably sounded selfish, “I haven’t seen you for ages and I remembered how well you and Ella got on at my party.”

  I wondered privately how many people she had called before trying me. Aloud I said, “I’m not sure, Camilla. Of course I’d love to see you, but it’s very short notice.”

  Camilla respected few people as much as she did those with multiple engagements.

  “I know, darling,” she said. “And if his laryngitis doesn’t kill Ed you may be sure that I will. But I would so like to see you. And if it’s any consolation, I’m sure it’ll be a very brilliant affair. Wonderful food.” Camilla was tenacious in pursuit of her social goals. “And there’re bound to be lots of Oxford people there,” she went on. “And …” She considered what further inducements she could offer. “Ella’s cousin will be there, of course. She’s very pretty. An odd fish, by all accounts,” for Camilla was a strictly truthful person, “but very pretty.”

  “I know,” I said, thinking of Sarah’s cold beauty.

  “So you’ll take me then?”

  An hour later I found myself on the steps of the house in Chester Square, past whose black door I had so often walked in the hope of meeting Ella. Camilla, beside me, squeezed my hand with relief and smiled a practiced and perfectly formed smile of red lips and white teeth, expensively arranged. “Darling you’re a savior,” she whispered in my ear as I rang the bell.

  We were late, for it was part of Camilla’s creed always to be missed, and we entered the drawing room just as the other guests were beginning to shuffle hungrily and glance at their watches. There were perhaps thirty of us in all: a dowdy but respectable pair in tweeds whom I took, correctly, to be the Stanhopes; several people my own age, amongst whom I recognized the girl with the villa in Biarritz; and the Harcourts themselves, tall and stately, precisely as I had imagined them, talking to Sarah by one of the long windows which gave onto the square. Neither Ella nor Charles was anywhere to be seen.

  Camilla moved straight towards her host and hostess, her arms flung out in a gesture of greeting. Trailing in her wake, I noticed that conversation had died. “Lady Harcourt,” she said, embracing a tall, angular woman with red hair scraped off her face and piled in complicated wreaths on her head. “How lovely to see you.”

  The voice that replied asked her, in the drawling tones of a Bostonian, not to stand on ceremony. “My name is Pamela,” said the angular woman with a certain emphasis, extending a bony, bejeweled hand to me as she did so. “We’re just waiting for the happy couple. They’re upstairs putting down the engagement presents.”

  As she spoke I felt how empty my hands were, but on cue Camilla produced an extravagantly wrapped parcel from
her handbag and gave it to her hostess. “This is from us both,” she said with her sweetest smile, as she turned to kiss her host.

  Alexander Harcourt had the same coloring as his daughter, although on him the blond hair was thinning and the cheeks were ruddy rather than rosy. His eyes were blue, like Sarah’s, but shone like Ella’s; and he moved with the confidence of a handsome man who has always been thought one. His hands were large; his shoulders broad; his manner frank. I liked him.

  “Here they are now,” he said, nodding amiably at and past me, towards the drawing room doors. His wife, very erect in a green dress which did not suit her, went forward to greet her stepdaughter. “How lovely you look,” I heard her say as she kissed her cheek.

  If Ella did look lovely, I could not see it. The skillful hands of a hairdresser had fluffed away the sleek lines of her short hair and almost persuaded it into a bob for the occasion. The work of the makeup artist was visible too, in the pink of the lips and the sparkling blue of the eye shadow. The circles beneath her eyes, if they still existed, had been expertly concealed. In a pink floral dress with puffed sleeves, she looked like an Edwardian doll and moved with the stiffness of one. She did not appear to see me.

  “You look fantastic, darling!” Camilla, as ever, was the first in the impromptu line that formed to greet the engaged pair. Charles, standing behind Ella in a dark suit, his hair severely parted, glowed with pleasure as his fiancée submitted to the embraces of his friend. I waited with the other guests as he and Ella, relinquished with reluctance by Camilla, came down the line, receiving the congratulations of their parents’ friends and their own.

  Ella saw me while three people still separated us. She was kissing Sarah formally on both cheeks when her eyes, straying down the line, met mine. Instantly she looked away, and I thought that I detected evidence of a real blush beneath the blusher. I glowed at this secret triumph.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here,” she said as she reached me, and made a point of offering her hand rather than her cheek.

  “Camilla invited me,” I said. “And in any case I haven’t had an opportunity yet to congratulate you and Charles.”

  She looked at me for a moment, more embarrassed than hostile, and passed on.

  Charles, when he reached me, greeted me as an old friend.

  “So this is the splendid girl I wasn’t to talk about?” I asked smiling.

  “This is the girl,” he said, looking down the line at Ella. “And she is splendid, isn’t she?”

  “Congratulations,” I said quietly.

  He moved on. The afternoon proceeded. Lunch was served on a long, silver-laden table in the dining room, a lofty, red-papered space with a large reproduction chandelier and a view of the garden. Outside it was raining. I sat between Camilla and Sarah and opposite the girl with the villa in Biarritz, who was sitting next to Charles. The food, as Camilla had confidently predicted, was excellent; the wine, too, was good; tubs of freshly picked roses, pink like Ella’s dress, filled the room with their scent. Occasionally I heard snatches of Ella’s conversation, three places down on my left, tantalizingly close.

  But it was only as the meal progressed and I heard more that I realized that every phrase I caught was precisely as it should have been; that my love was speaking with precisely the same thoughtless, practiced ease of which she had been so critical a few weeks before. Her thanks for people’s presents were pretty; her enthusiasm for the wedding plans nicely put; her secrecy about her dress conventional. Nowhere could I detect any trace of the woman with the gaunt face who had spoken to me of drowning in the darkness of the Boardman stairwell; and this transformation infuriated me. Ella, it seemed, had decided to swim with the current rather than against it; and she was swimming with a rehearsed grace which reminded me of Charles’s and impressed me as little as his had done.

  Yet I did not despair of her wholly. Something in her voice reminded me of the voice I had listened to in the park and in the alcove. I heard again the confusion of her words then, the sincerity with which she had railed against the forces that were … How had she put it? Pulling her under. And Ella pulled under had resolved to put a brave face on it. So I thought, and in so thinking I was half right; I came closer to the truth in that conclusion than in any of my flights of nineteenth-century fantasy. I was wrong only in thinking that I knew what had pulled her down.

  Tantalizing though Ella’s presence was, however, I did not forget my duties as Camilla Boardman’s partner; nor was I allowed to. The infectious laughter of the woman who had brought me, the intimate way in which she confided other people’s indiscretions, the complete and gratifying attention she paid to my responses, all combined to put me in an agreeable mood. Ella was not the only one, I thought, who could conceal her feelings behind a flow of seemingly effortless social patter. I would show her that I was as adept as anyone. And so I talked—to Camilla, to Sarah, to the girl with the villa in Biarritz—all the while wondering how to get Ella to myself for a moment and resolving not to leave the house without at least making an attempt to do so.

  Sarah Harcourt, rigid in blue linen on my left, spoke to me of her distaste for pink roses. Her criticism, inaudible to her hostess, was more for Pamela than for Pamela’s flowers, I suspected; and I thought that I understood where the disapproval came from. Pamela, for Sarah, was an invader. To begin with, her accent was American and thus hardly to her credit; but what was more to be deplored was her self-conscious attention to the anglicizing of every other personal detail. Pamela’s hair, piled above her head, was impressively Edwardian; her jewelry was heavy and old-fashioned; she addressed the caterer’s maid who waited on her with just the correct amount of polite disdain. All this, I could see, irritated Sarah almost as much as her cousin’s charming conversation irritated me. And although she said nothing, I felt within her the hostility to foreigners, particularly usurping foreigners, which is latent in certain English souls. She sat by my side, hardly touching the food which was put before her, splendidly regal. I noticed that no one spoke to her but that her presence was very much felt, and I thought again that she was someone to be treated with deference but no intimacy: an outsider by choice and circumstance. Even Camilla, though nothing and no one could upset her iron self-assurance, seemed disinclined to engage Sarah in conversation, sensing her to be a difficult conquest. And I, looking at the set lines of Sarah’s mouth and wondering how I could ever have found in her an exact likeness of Ella, felt sorry for her in a way I would never have dared to express. Sarah was the prisoner of her own self-control, I thought; and today, thinking back on her then, I see that I was right.

  Only once did the girl with the villa in Biarritz attempt conversation with Sarah, and her choice of opening was unfortunate.

  “Do you know,” she said from across the pink roses, “I never knew that Ella had a sister. Are you very close?”

  There was the slightest suggestion of a pause; but it was frosty enough to halt the conversation around it in the moment before Sarah smiled and said that she and Ella were only cousins.

  “What? But you could almost be twins,” the girl blundered on, smiling still.

  “We could not be twins,” came the acid reply, just loud enough for Ella to overhear; and by the forced cheerfulness of her conversation it seemed to me that the object of the slight had heard and was consciously ignoring it.

  “Oh you could be,” the hapless girl persisted. “You’re almost identical.”

  “But our styles are quite different,” came the sweetly damming reply; and Sarah leaned back in her chair, languid and serene, as if inviting comparison between her sleek lines and Ella’s painted cheeks. Half smiling, she lit a cigarette with a smooth movement of long fingers and smiled at her cousin; and it was left to Camilla to cover the ensuing silence by redirecting our attention to the splendors of the Chelsea Flower Show.

  Lunch finally came to an end with pungent, sweet-smelling coffee in paper-thin china cups shaped to look like rose buds. There were different c
olors in the set (mine, for instance, was yellow) and it amused me to see Sarah being handed a pink one. I looked for her eyes, thinking that we might share the joke, but they were set and unseeing. As Camilla exclaimed over the exquisite prettiness of the china and asked her hostess where she got it from, I saw Ella’s cousin glance at her watch.

  We left the lunch table in a troop and moved into the drawing room, an ocean of uncomfortable sofas of ornate wood and somber pattern. Almost at once the party began to split up, for lunch had lasted longer than anticipated and many of the guests were late for engagements elsewhere. I saw that Sarah was one of the first to say her good-byes and that instead of kissing Pamela she shook her hand. Alexander she kissed, and Ella too, although the brushing of the cousins’ cheeks which passed for a kiss did not suggest much unspoken affection. Charles, rising, leaned forward to kiss Sarah and was rewarded by the quick out-stretching of her fine white hand.

  When she had gone, Camilla found a place next to me on a sofa and said, softly enough for only one or two people who would share her opinion to hear, “Well I said she was an odd fish, and you can see that I was right. Very strange. Hardly spoke at all.” She considered the question gravely for a moment. “I think she’s superior,” she said at last, with an air of finality. “And frankly I don’t see any reason why she should be, do you?”

  But her question was merely rhetorical; I was not expected to answer it and when I did not she let the matter drop and spoke of other things. I listened to her vaguely, concentrating most of my attention on the question of how I could possibly get Ella to myself for a moment. A moment was all it would take, I thought. But one by one the guests got up to leave and I felt my time of opportunity dwindling. Ella showed no inclination to talk to me and I had no desire to cross the expanse of carpet and sit with her and Charles. I wanted her alone or not at all.