The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “I tried so hard to help Ella,” her cousin said with shy frankness. “I knew she needed help. You’ve no idea how much I wanted to prevent … what happened at Seton. I … I feel in some ways responsible.” And I think her eyes even filled with tears.

  I remember how Sarah cried; how prettily she did it; how her tears made you want to touch the velvety skin beneath her eyes. I remember wiping them gently away that night as she kissed my fingers.

  “Thank you,” she said, and stroked my hair.

  “I tried so hard to warn people,” she went on, slowly. “But no one would listen. No one but Uncle Alex. He was the only one, apart from me perhaps, who recognized Ella’s condition. He had seen it in his mother and sister before, you see.”

  I nodded, sick at heart.

  “He tried to help Ella; he was the one who sent her to all those doctors. I suppose that’s why she …” Sarah’s voice tailed off. “But Ella wouldn’t accept his help, or anybody else’s for that matter. She was always stubborn. And when I tried she … But I can’t tell you what she did; it was too awful.”

  “Tell me,” I murmured; and some part of me really did want to know the worst.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Do.”

  She looked at me, her blue eyes filling with tears again. “Well, if you must know….”

  “Tell me,” I said gently.

  “She threatened to kill me also.”

  There was a pause as Sarah waited for herch words to take their full effect.

  “Of course I never thought she’d do anything,” she went on when she saw that they had done so. “If only I’d known she was serious … I might have been able to do something. I might have been able to …”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said softly, right on cue.

  “But I feel responsible.”

  “Well you shouldn’t.”

  For a long while, in horrible sympathy, I held her close.

  “No, you’re right,” she said eventually. “I shouldn’t.” With delicate grace Sarah dried her eyes. “It was Ella, after all, who would never admit her problems. And doctor after doctor told her the same thing: that you have to acknowledge your illness before you can deal with it. That was what Ella refused to do. And she was so stubborn. Short of having her committed, what could Alexander or Pamela or I or anyone else have done?”

  “Nothing,” I murmured. And I tried not to hear Ella’s voice in a crowded Prague café years before; I tried to drown the sound of her asking me, with wry humor, if I knew how stable you had to be to survive a session with a really respected psychiatrist. “You did your best,” I said to Sarah; and as I did so I resolved to let go of the past. I wanted no part of it.

  “Yes I know,” she said slowly. “I know I shouldn’t blame myself.” She leaned her head against my chest. “She was so jealous of me, James; so terribly jealous.”

  “I know.”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She talked about your grandmother mainly.”

  “And about Seton?”

  “Yes.”

  “She never could bear the fact that I was better suited to it than she was. She used to hate me for being English, you know; English in a way she never could be, I mean, despite being born here.”

  I said nothing.

  “She hated me for understanding the island in a way she never could. She spent her whole life trying to prove that she could care for it better than I. And the sad thing is she hardly knew it.”

  “Really?”

  “She only went there for birthdays and the occasional Christmas.”

  I looked at Sarah and the tears had gone from her eyes.

  “It was a terrible responsibility for her,” she went on, changing tone slightly. “A real weight around her neck. She was terrified of not rising to the task, you see.”

  “Poor Ella.” And I remembered the warmth of her tears on my neck as she had cried in that tower room above the sea years ago.

  “Yes, I was sorry for her also.” Sarah paused. “Perhaps that’s why she killed Uncle Alex so publicly. Perhaps, on some level, she wanted to get caught. That’s how I understand it, at least.”

  “Why should she do that?”

  “Well, she’s saved herself from Seton.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But even as I spoke I heard from distant memory Ella’s voice telling me that no Catholic could inherit; no divorcée; no convicted criminal.

  “She can never have it now,” my love’s cousin said softly.

  “So what will happen when your uncle dies? Now that Alexander’s dead.”

  Sarah’s face looked up at mine, suitably grave; but there was something faintly uncomfortable about the intensity of its large blue eyes. “It’ll be mine,” she said slowly; and remembering it now she seemed almost to caress her words as she spoke them. “The island, the house, the title,” she said. “All mine.”

  “And Ella?”

  “Ella will get nothing.”

  We lay in silence as Sarah stroked my back.

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” she said at last.

  “Neither can I.”

  “But you’re glad I am?”

  “Glad you’re here?”

  She nodded.

  “Very.”

  “And you mean that, don’t you?”

  There was a pause.

  “More than you can know,” I said at last.

  For a while we lay together, not speaking; and I felt Sarah’s long hair tickling my chin. As I moved my head she rolled over, away from me; and when she looked at me it was with sudden seriousness.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  She said nothing for a moment, as though considering her words. And her voice, when it came, was all disarming gentleness.

  “Does it frighten you to think that Ella was mad?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” she went on slowly, ignoring my question.

  I did not reply. But in the silence I could feel the tears coming; and blushing, embarrassed for some reason, I nodded as I blinked them away.

  “Then we won’t ever think of her again,” said Sarah quietly; and her tone, though gentle, was final. “We won’t ever think of her again.”

  Gazing into Ella’s face, though it had blue eyes now instead of green and a forehead higher than I remembered, I leaned down to kiss a mouth I hardly knew but which I had fallen in love with years ago.

  “Never again,” I said.

  And six months later we were married.

  CHAPTER 31

  IT IS CURIOUS, YOU KNOW; I find it curious to think that the story of my life seems so nearly told, so nearly done, though I have left more than forty years of it untouched. Forty-five years, in fact; for that was the length of my marriage to Sarah. And talking of it now it seems a long time; certainly it sounds like one. Forty-five years. The bulk of my life; the time so many call the best days of it all. And it’s strange to think that a week, a year, ten years ago, I would have called it that too. Unthinkingly, and yet feelingly, I would have credited my wife for what happiness I had. And in some sense I would have been right to have done so. Even now I think that; even now that I know what she did.

  My gratitude persists, you see; for old habits are hard to break. And ours, by any standards, was a contented marriage. Sarah was, in many ways, an excellent and loving wife. I will not find it hard to cry at her funeral. On the contrary, my tears will come easily. Standing at my place in the chapel next week, on the Harcourt däis above and at right angles to the congregation, under decaying banners and cobwebbed arches, I will cry. Publicly, appropriately, I will weep for my dead wife; for the mother of my child. Privately I will cry for us all: for Ella and for Eric as well as for Sarah; for myself also. Perhaps particularly for myself, if now—at this late stage—I can admit to such selfishness. I am
the last of us, you see; it is I who must continue unjudged and alone. The truth, which might have been expected to free me, to have given me at the least a new lease on life, has in fact done neither. The telling of all this, the remembering, the undoing of all that Sarah taught me, has left me … tired, more than anything else. I have had a long day. And part of me is unwilling still to see through all Sarah did, to destroy the edifice she built so carefully over so long. Part of me hankers even now for the security of her deception. But the foundations have been rocked; the walls are tumbling. Old waters rise again. Having come so far I cannot turn back now; I cannot seek once more the safety of the shallows in which she kept me with such quiet, gentle authority. I must remember our marriage; I know I must. I must see it with the harsh clarity of new knowledge. I cannot comfort myself any longer as Sarah once taught me so well to do.

  But what is there to remember? The years, though long, seem curiously free of incident; at least now they do, by comparison with what came before. Sarah had a way of glossing over life, you see; a way of reducing its impact. Emotion frightened her, I think; and she taught me to be frightened of it also. She worked to eliminate feeling in both our lives, to reduce the power sensation has to unsettle and provoke. And she was masterful in ways I am only now beginning to suspect.

  I remember my first journey here as possessor; I remember the way the sun glinted on the weathercocks as we passed it on the train; I remember Sarah’s whispered words of victory: “There it is, our island.” And remembering that moment I remember also how she loved this place; and I know that she was not frightened of all feeling.

  On the contrary, my wife was capable of an intense, possessive love. And what she felt for this house she later transferred to our child; for she was always feudal at heart. Sarah needed her heir. And when Maggie was born I was in some way secretly relieved that she was so obviously a Farrell. Blanche’s features, so truly preserved in both Sarah and Ella, found no expression in her great-granddaughter. And I was pleased by that; pleased by this symbol of another break with the past.

  We called her Margaret, at Sarah’s suggestion, after the first Countess of Seton; and she is grown-up now with children of her own. She will be here in the morning; and her family will come with her, I suppose. The house will be full of life again; life in the midst of death. And I will have to tell her how her mother killed herself; how she shot herself, cleanly through the temple, in her private sitting room. I wonder what the children will be told; but I will leave that to their mother. It is she who must decide. And perhaps Sarah’s death will bring us closer, for Maggie—and her husband, I suppose, whom I do not like—is all I have left in the world; and we were distanced more by Sarah’s obsessive love for us both than by anything else. My wife’s love was selfish; I see that now. She wished to be everything to Maggie and to me, and as a result we were not allowed to be much to each other. Certainly I, encouraged to be an approving yet distant father, became just that; for Sarah had trained me well by then and I did not think to question her.

  It is odd to think how subject I was to my wife; certainly now I find it odd, for though by no means a natural leader I am hardly subservient. It is not in my nature. But subservience was not the keynote of my relationship with her. That was Sarah’s trick. She had a way of masking her authority, you see; of making one’s quiescence to her wishes seem a case of voluntary self-will. She was similar—in that respect, if in no other—to Regina Boardman; and as Regina had done for the early part of my career, so Sarah did for my later emotional life. She assumed responsibility for it; and I was more than happy to grant it her.

  Under Sarah’s expert guidance I learned to forget; to block the avenues of recollection and recall. It was what I had tried, unsuccessfully, to do in the years which followed Eric’s death; but it was only under my wife’s unspoken tutelage, and by her silent example, that I learned to bury my past with anything like success. Uncertain of how much she knew, I was wary of discussing her cousin with her; in fact I said almost nothing about Ella over forty-five years and Sarah did not broach the topic. She had meant what she said in bed with me that first night; and I took her lack of intrusion as illustration, were it needed, of her endless tact. I never analyzed her calm beyond my admiration for it. I never thought—and this is where her genius lay—that Sarah’s sovereign poise concealed any darker truth; or that there might be secrets beneath her serenity.

  I was thirty when Cyril died; Sarah and I had been married for five years. And I came to Seton with her, to the house which might have been Ella’s and mine, with a curious feeling of appropriate progression. My wife had weaved her spell on me by then; I had been properly prepared. And I was not troubled by memories of my first visit here or of the girl who brought me on it; for by then I had come to see my love for Sarah as a saner expression of an earlier, misguided feeling for her cousin. Sarah, by artful stages, had assumed all but a tiny portion of Ella’s former place in my life. And though I never went to the tower room again, I did not often think of it either.

  Married life changed me; Sarah’s strength reshaped me in ways that only now—having remembered the boy who married her; having called him fitfully back to life—I can begin to understand. It is only now, now that I have looked honestly for the first time at what really drove my music, that I see how Sarah disliked and worked against it. And I understand her dislike now, and the subtle ways in which it manifested itself. My music was something apart from her; an outlet of feeling beyond her control. And she would not have that. For Sarah my violin was a rival; and its competition for my devotion was keener than any that another human being might have offered. It was for that reason that she hated it; and she worked against it with determination and a cold deliberation which I realized, perhaps, but did not wish to admit; and to which I succumbed in the end.

  Sarah and I did not fight; her methods were not violent ones. She was no obvious autocrat. The storms that rock most marriages had no place in ours. Instead, by gradual stages, she drew me into the world of this place: subtly, slowly, she saw to it that Seton’s rhythms became mine; that I adopted its code of ancient duty and privileged ritual as my own. The world outside—which Camilla once, in a moment of frustration on a visit, called the real world—became less real as a result; the pressures of recording schedules and concert commitments seemed distracting, inconsequential details. And gradually I gave them up.

  But I gave up performance for another reason also; a reason which more clearly illustrates all that Sarah did, all the power which she held. Under her influence I lost respect for my playing, you see; and with respect went all desire to perform. You cannot play without feeling; and feeling is precisely what Sarah denied me. My belief in my music, for so long so central to my survival, evaporated with my marriage. And it was proper that it should have done so; for having played as I once did, having played as I did the night of the Hibberdson, for example, when it seemed that Ella’s love and all it meant were about to be returned, mediocrity was no destiny for me.

  Alone tonight, with nothing for company but a yellowed bundle of aging reviews, such arrogance jars sharply. Who am I to make such pronouncements? Who am I to say what I might have been? I am no one, it’s true; and hard though that is to make, it is an admission I cannot avoid. Pretense is no use now. But I know at least what I once was. And in remembering my life I have shared the credit for my playing; I have shared it in ways I could never have dreamed of doing—or of attempting to do—before today. And so I can say this without arrogance: that my recording of the Mendelssohn E Minor ranks with the best; and that such an achievement carries with it a certain responsibility. I could only have moved forwards after that, not backwards; I could not have permitted myself the dubious luxury of poor but continued performance. And I am lucky that I have always, deep down, been a good judge of my own efforts. Such knowledge saved me years ago from spoiling the one unsullied achievement of my life.

  It is a blessing that my music—even later, when Sarah had tau
ght me so well—was immune to self-deception. I knew when my playing died; I knew and I mourned it but I did not fight. When technical prowess was all I had to offer, when I was reduced to the status of master technician merely, I stopped. And I am glad that I did. Technical accomplishment can be learned and it must be practiced; but real playing—like real living, I suppose—requires feeling. And that is what I ceased to have.

  I did not resent my loss then; and though I mourned it, I did not realize, as I have done now, that it was Sarah who deprived me of it. Perhaps dimly I suspected; perhaps dimly I knew that the bond between my wife and me could not have hoped to fuel my playing as either Ella or Eric, in their different ways, had done. But I did not know consciously; and if I had I would not have minded: for Sarah offered me a peace for which I would have sacrificed anything. And it was a peace, I think now, which stemmed from her capacity for stability. That—and the deception on which it relied—was central to Sarah’s creed; that and an hypnotic calm which encouraged the years to fade into one another; which blurred the greatest events with the smallest; which made emotional differentiation at once impossible and undesirable.

  My violin was not the only sacrifice I made for a place in Sarah’s sanctuary. My friends, few but loyal in the years before my marriage, were given up also; and that I minded more. My wife did not share; certainly she would not share me. And one by one my friends—and even my family—gave way to the icy chill of her smile in welcome and accepted my invitations with less enthusiasm, inviting me instead to parties in London; parties which the duties of Seton life increasingly prevented me from attending.

  Camilla Boardman, less enthusiastic at the news of my engagement than I had thought she would be, persevered the longest; she tried, I think, to make friends with Sarah in a way I might have told her was impossible. A frequent guest in our early years here, she was Margaret’s godmother, for my wife acquiesced easily in small things. And there was something comforting about Camilla’s consistency; about the way in which her curls stayed as tight, her breasts as prominent (though not perhaps quite as pert), her emphases as wonderfully pronounced in middle age and after as they had ever been in youth. At her last dinner here—I see it so clearly now—she talked loudly of her clients, for success had made her more indiscreet than ever, and she tried to make Sarah accept tickets for one of her charity shows.