She holds him in her arms. The whimpers fade. He does not wake. She has banished the nightmare. And at some point that blissful sense of union, of being joined to another, and that feeling of it being all, gradually gives way to desire. For it was impossible, after all those years, not to let lone desire, lone delight, finally have its way. As she stares down at his face, made younger, it seems, by sleep, eyes kiss. And then she lowers her face, and lips kiss. She leaves her lips on his only for as long as she dares without waking him. And as she lifts her lips from his she is light. Made weightless by the daring of her kiss. And seems to float back to her side of the bed. The nightmare banished. The Furies gone. Tom, once again, is sleeping the deep sleep of the child. And, she imagines, when he wakes he will remember only the dream of being kissed by a soothing Beatrice, when, all the time, it was her.
She could sing. There are ways of knowing someone: their talk, their manner, their little tell-tale signs that let you know something is wrong or something is right. But is there anything closer than this? The young, the young … Surely, she tells herself in the darkness, she has known him now, as surely as any wife or lover. In a way that another age, one that feels differently, will find impossible to comprehend. He is her Tom again. And always will be now. For if every moment can contain a lifetime of living, then a lifetime can be contained in a moment. And this is hers.
The salty wind fans her face. Only moments survive. But what happens when the memory fails and the moments die? Who will be there to say: this is how it happened? That one summer’s day a middle-aged couple took off in a borrowed car, drove into a storm, and took refuge in a country inn for the night. A night that inquiring scholars and biographers in years to come will all agree never happened. Could never have happened. One the world must never learn of or think possible. For he was a married man. She rubs the satchel hanging from her shoulder. The rocks near. Not long now, not long …
In the early hours of the next morning, while Tom was slowly emerging from the deepest of deep sleeps, all nightmares banished, she went downstairs as the sun spilled over the rolling green hills in front of her, sat down, and, in her journal, the one she now carries in her satchel, recorded every single detail of the night before she forgot, carefully writing down the date of the entry at the top of the page: June 31st, 1939.
The drive back, by a different road, is silent. There are no games. The waters have receded, the bitumen is dry. The journey swift. A blue sky stretches from one side of the country to the other, the sun climbs towards midday. But Tom sees none of this. Tom is thinking. She knows he is and can almost hear it. But thinking what? The mind of Europe has much to ponder. But not, she imagines, the limitations of Byron, Milton and Tennyson. All essays he has recently written and which he sent her, as he always does. And as much as she reads them for what they say about their subject, she is always on the look-out for those private references that are always there, those flashes of the private man, the private life, intended for one reader only, like coded messages beamed out to her across the sea.
He has much to ponder, but not any of that. When he woke did he remember the dream of being kissed? The memory of a dream figure, a Lady of silences in a white gown, banishing the Furies from his sleep? Soothing the brow of troubled sleep and silently withdrawing? For just as he beams out private, coded messages across the sea to her in his writing, she is there in the poems too. She knows she is. And as much as she would never call herself a muse, as much as she would never claim such a title (for that would be beneath the white Lady of silences) she knows that’s what she is. But she never makes claims and she never steps from the timeless into the cold light of day. For there she would dissolve. She is a dream.
And it is this, Emily is sure, that Tom is pondering. For the kiss was no dream, nor was the embrace. But he thinks it was. Can he have the Lady as she is (issuing instructions like the Boston sergeant major that Mrs Woolf takes her for, laughing too loudly or brazenly wearing a dress with all the colours of a country garden) and keep the dream? Indeed, he is not the only one pondering this. Their thinking is loud, each aware of the other, and each aware that at some point they must speak their thoughts. But not with the air rushing over their faces, and with the noise of the engine. They must eventually, she tells herself again, speak their thoughts, not shout them.
And so, in what she takes as mutually agreed silence, both possibly pondering the same question, the lead foot of the Lady in white steps on the gas, and in what seems little or no time they are entering the high street of the town. They pull up at the front of their cottages and Emily slowly turns round to Tom. Where to from here? He is pondering the road, then looks back at her.
‘This is my promise,’ he begins, ‘that one day you will have your wish. One day we will. When the time is right.’ He pauses and looks out the windscreen, watching the people of the town going this way and that, incidental as ants, then turns back to her. ‘You remember when I came to see you just before I left for Oxford?’
She nods, of course she does.
‘That day I came to …’ He stumbles, and she can see he stumbles because the memory of that day is still difficult, the pain still fresh. ‘I came,’ he resumes, once more watching the ants on the street, ‘to profess my love. You know that. You knew that.’
Yes, yes. She knows. She knew. But the world annoyed her that day and she sent him away. And has there not been a day, has a day not passed since, when she has not wished herself back into that garden and given him the response he came for that their lives might begin again?
‘Those feelings,’ he continues, ‘are … are still there. Older, for much has happened, but still there. And this is my promise, that you shall have what you wish for. When the time comes.’
And they both know what he means: when the time comes. Were they ever allowed to forget that he was married; that she was a dream, and a secret one? And wasn’t there always, stronger or fainter depending on the day, that constant feeling of contending with overwhelming odds: two modern players in an ancient drama that never gave them a chance? History, society, manners, the very times they inhabited, as well as the constant of an annoying world that never, and has never, just let people be.
But not this morning. This morning is bright with hope. This morning comes with a promise, and the hope that, against all odds, they just might win out, after all.
The sea spray whips her face, the rocks near, and Emily looks up at the cloudy sky above the open sea to where the great event of the beast crouches: tense, impatient, ready to spring. Or was it springing all the time, a pounce that was decades in the doing? Did they have their great event, and was it continually unfolding, there in front of them all the time?
Tom stops speaking and reaches out his hand for hers. ‘This is my promise.’
She raises his hand and kisses it. The longed-for moment in the garden revisited, recreated in the front seat of a borrowed roadster. And her smile brightens. Wide and unrestrained. How … how American, after all. How wonderfully, wonderfully American of them, after all.
‘Mr Eliot,’ she says.
‘Miss Hale?’
‘We Boston ladies take promises seriously.’
‘And in Missouri, Miss Hale, a man does not make a promise lightly.’
‘I should hope not, Mr Eliot, because, when the time comes, I will hold you to that promise.’
They step from the roadster, collect the rug and picnic basket, and, walking side by side, her head resting on his shoulder, they enter the cottage, where her aunt and uncle rise from their chairs with questions of where they have been and seeking reassurance that all is well. She observes a momentary frown on Tom’s face: a look that says, oh, you. I’d forgotten. But it passes as quickly as it appears. And Emily, placing the hamper on the lounge-room table, quickly assures them that, indeed, all is well.
It is then that they tell Tom that he has parcels and business waiting for him at the post office and that his office in London has called. He no
ds, turns to the three of them, then makes his way to the door he has only just entered, adding as he leaves that he shouldn’t be long.
Upstairs, from her room in the next door cottage, she watches him, walking up the high street, looking down, his pace slow and unhurried, like a man savouring and prolonging a moment, unwilling to leave it or lose it.
He fades from view. At the same time she sees her aunt and uncle strolling up the street. Shopping. Or church. Or just walking. She is light. She is happy in a way she has never known before or thought possible. May even, she imagines, never be this happy again. And with that thought her lightness leaves her. A cloud passes over her, sudden and dramatic. Never this happy again … And with it a single, insistent thought has now driven all others from her: he will weary of me. He will weary of the moment. Never this happy again … neither him, nor her. Never again. Of this much she is certain. And in an instant. And of course, when he does weary of her, she will not hold him to that promise. How could she? No, she must act. She must simply banish the possibility of this ever happening and his ever becoming weary of her. Now. The previous night, this morning, the whole extended moment, she knows, is the culmination of a lifetime of waiting. She turns the ring on her finger round and round. She has known him now, surely, as well as any wife or lover. A beam has pierced her heart. And this, the ecstasy of Emily Hale, aged forty-eight, single, a stranger in a foreign land, is the culmination of a lifetime’s longing and waiting. But he will weary of her. Surely. And this rapture, born of the knowledge that for one night she held him and cradled him and soothed him to sleep, banishing the Furies from his dreams, will dissolve with his weariness. And because it is all she has, she knows she must preserve it. Keep it from the ravages of weariness and time. So that whatever happens now, wherever their story takes them, she will always have this rapture, always have the ecstasy of the saints to sustain her, whatever follows.
She is leaving in a few days. Why not now? At the very height of their intensity. With the ache of his longing still sweet in his veins and hers. The Lady in white, silent and secret, must withdraw as she was always meant to.
Quickly she swings round to the wardrobe and the chest of drawers beside her bed, gathers a small suitcase and packs those things she needs. It doesn’t take long. Packing never does. And within minutes she is standing in the lounge room of the cottage next door, hastily writing a note, saying she has been called away. Urgently. An invented phone call. A friend in London. No address. She writes Tom’s name on the envelope, knowing he will tell her aunt and uncle. And with barely a glance around the room, she is on the street and walking towards the bus stop, just in time for the midday bus, for she has observed its departure on many occasions, only she never thought that one day she would be on it.
As the bus leaves she turns to look out the window, a glancing farewell to the town, and sees the distant figure of Tom making his way down the high street to the cottage, where her note will be waiting for him on the lounge-room table: Tom, her Tom again, head down, even paces; for all the world deep in the composition of a line or two. The bus passes the medieval market hall, familiar buildings and shops, and she sees them, Tom and Emily, Emily and Tom, everywhere she looks — pausing by a shop window, buying something at a market stall, greeting familiar strangers on the high street — Emily and Tom, the middle-aged couple that the town took them for. Wherever she looks, there they were; there they are. Looking back at her, observing her departure with pained surprise. And suddenly she rises and is on the point of calling out to the driver to stop. This is a moment of mad panic. What is she doing? But then she imagines the note on the table, Tom possibly reading it right now, her aunt and uncle entering the cottage to be told the news, and she knows she can’t go back for she would look ridiculous: her ecstasy turned to farce. She has set these events in motion and is now controlled by them.
She slumps back into her seat, carried by the current, swept out of town by events that she herself initiated but which she is now powerless to stop.
Emily is standing barefoot on the deck. Her shoes are behind her, the rocks in front of her. Near and becoming nearer. The boat sways, the sea is rougher. And the storm clouds that have threatened to break all day roll round in the sky, rumbling. Henry keeps an eye on the waters in front of them, while also glancing back at the barefooted Miss Hale.
It is written. It was all written. Did she ever do anything that wasn’t? Good Emily, proper Emily, who sang sweet songs in parlours, but who never really stepped beyond that parlour world onto a real stage because it was beneath her aunt, beneath her uncle, beneath her. For would not the clocks in all those parlours have stopped if she ever had? Would not time itself have ceased to tick out of sheer shame, the glass of the framed portraits of the country’s elders have shattered on parlour mantelpieces across the city, and the street lamps have dimmed in disappointment? It was written. And when Tom draped her in a white dress, assigned to her a life of silent withdrawal and contemplation, there and not there, solid and a dream, Tom’s Emily, never hers; when they made their pact of silence in an age of pacts, without as much as saying so to each other — was it not written too? All of it.
And where was Emily? Who was Emily? What did she become? In the end, nothing more or less than what was written. The Lady in white: withdrawn and withdrawing, faceless, her name lost in the writing. Was her life stolen, or did she hand it over? And while all this was taking place, while her life was being written, the Emily who was never recorded was just waiting to shed her white gown and step from myth into fact, bringing with her the gift of ordinary human love; just as she was waiting to shed her silence, because silence never came naturally to her. But she never did. And she never will. And what came to pass unfolded, it seems to her at the moment, with the inevitability of an ancient play. And as much as she told herself that if she was patient, and if she waited long enough, all would come to her, it never did.
She looks at Henry and she can see he’s worried: about her, the sky and the waves slapping the side of the boat. And when he turns his wary gaze on her, what does he see? Trouble. Crazed eyes and trouble. A handful, crying out, ‘Take me to them!’ He’s trapped. The sea is rough now, and he can’t leave the wheel. And she’s got the look of a woman who just might do anything. And as much as he might want to grab her and sit her down, he can’t. He’s invited a handful onto his boat. It’s all over his face. His nervous, jerky movements at the wheel. He’s heard the stories of the changed Miss Hale. In and out of hospital. Trying the patience of friends, and losing them. A changed Miss Hale from the one he last met years before; this is the barefooted, unwritten Emily, clutching her satchel.
As the rocks near and the boat continues to sway, she looks down at the satchel and opens it. And straight away all those faded letters with the faded stamps of dead kings appear to her. And her name on the envelopes: Emily Hale, at varying addresses across the country. She looks at the letters and looks to the sky and back again. I am Emily Hale, I am Emily … I am … There it is on the letters. That’s who she is. In the poems she is the Lady; in the letters she is Emily. And they are all addressed to her in that familiar, slightly spiky writing. Words, writing, combed like his hair, neat and shiny. The memory of receiving all of them comes back, clear and strong. The thrill of simply looking at the envelopes even before opening them. Letters written during those years in which they lost each other. Some dozen or so. Letters, she has decided, that the world must never get its hands on. All making one mention or another of their night together, and all professing love at one point or another, or all the way through. And with passion. For she had left him with the longing still in his eyes, and that longing was poured into his letters. Letters the world must never see. As well as her journal in which their night together is faithfully recorded. For he was married, their night could never have happened, and she was a secret that only a handful of people knew about. That Boston woman. And as much as she knows what happened that night, the letters might tell
a different story, as letters can. Could be read in all sorts of ways. Depending on who is reading them. And why they are reading them. And that would never do. For he was her Tom in the end. Always was and always will be her Tom. No matter the rash, the impulsive acts, no matter the years living in a foreign country trying to be something he never was, or the seas and years that separated them, nobody knew Tom the way she did. He was hers. He hers, she his: the young Tom who gazed in wonder at her across his cousin’s parlour, the broken Tom who fell into her arms in the market square, the Tom who stepped out from the cottage in the town with the longing still in his eyes, and whom she left that way. The only woman he ever loved!
And it is that love, and the incumbent duty of love, that now brings her to these rocks, closer by the minute. Nobody, not in their hearts, in all of that stuffy island he chose to live in, with its stuffy towns and closed circles fixing you in judgement over combs of homemade honey, ever knew Tom the way she did. The way that Boston woman did. The only woman he ever loved! And it’s all in these letters that the world must never see. For the world would talk, the wrong talk; the world would pry; the world would cheapen everything with its touch and destroy all she has left and all they ever had. And so the Lady will maintain her silence. The Lady will be true. To the very end.
And it is at this point that she reaches for the letters, and clutching them, waving them in the air, runs barefoot to the railing, the wet smack of a wave slapping the side of the boat as she does, catching her, rocking and tripping her, leaving her falling forward onto the railing itself and peering down into the grey waters. All in a flash. And for a moment, in shock but oddly calm, hazy but clear, she longs for those waters. For the oblivion of those waters. Yes, yes, a watery death! And for those few moments she feels herself hovering between two worlds, finely balanced on the edge of the known and the unplumbed salty sea, noting at the same time, with an odd detachment, that she is still clutching the letters. Then she feels the arms of Henry around her waist, pulling her back towards the cabin, slowly inching his way across the deck, for he is old now and she is at this moment, she knows, and can’t seem to help it, a dead weight.
A New England Affair Page 11
