Who is Sarah?
Out of what shadows does she come?
13
For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil…
Tennyson, Maud (1855)
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.
So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised. Perhaps it is only a game. Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them. Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on you. Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should have written “On the Horizontality of Existence,” “The Illusions of Progress,” “The History of the Novel Form,” “The Aetiology of Freedom,” “Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age”… what you will.
Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions. Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen—unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all—or all that matters. But I find myself suddenly like a man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation. She would instantly have turned, had she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows.
But I am a novelist, not a man in a garden—I can follow her where I like? But possibility is not permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wives—and the reverse—and get away with it. But they don’t.
You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.
Oh, but you say, come on—what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk… and meet Sarah again. That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy;
I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I wish him to be real.
In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their freedom as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.
I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any more than you control—however hard you try, however much of a latterday Mrs. Poulteney you may be—your children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself.
But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it… fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.
So if you think all this unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has nothing to do with your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those other capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind the scenes of this book… I will not argue. But I shall suspect you.
I report, then, only the outward facts: that Sarah cried in the darkness, but did not kill herself; that she continued, in spite of the express prohibition, to haunt Ware Commons. In a way, therefore, she had indeed jumped; and was living in a kind of long fall, since sooner or later the news must inevitably come to Mrs. Poulteney of the sinner’s compounding of her sin. It is true Sarah went less often to the woods than she had become accustomed to, a deprivation at first made easy for her by the wetness of the weather those following two weeks. It is true also that she took some minimal precautions of a military kind. The cart track eventually ran out into a small lane, little better than a superior cart track itself, which curved down a broad combe called Ware Valley until it joined, on the outskirts of Lyme, the main carriage road to Sidmouth and Exeter. There was a small scatter of respectable houses in Ware Valley, and it was therefore a seemly place to walk. Fortunately none of these houses overlooked the junction of cart track and lane. Once there, Sarah had merely to look round to see if she was alone. One day she set out with the intention of walking into the woods. But as in the lane she came to the track to the Dairy she saw two people come round a higher bend. She walked straight on towards them, and once round the bend, watched to make sure that the couple did not themselves take the Dairy track; then retraced her footsteps and entered her sanctuary unobserved.
She risked meeting other promenaders on the track itself; and might always have risked the dairyman and his family’s eyes. But this latter danger she avoided by discovering for herself that one of the inviting paths into the bracken above the track led round, out of sight of the Dairy, onto the path through the woods. This path she had invariably taken, until that afternoon when she recklessly—as we can now realize—emerged in full view of the two men.
The reason was simple. She had overslept, and she knew she was late for her reading. Mrs. Poulteney was to dine at Lady Cotton’s that evening; and the usual hour had been put forward to allow her to prepare for what was always in essence, if not appearance, a thunderous clash of two brontosauri; with black velvet taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations from the Bible the angry raging teeth; but no less dour and relentless a battle.
Also, Charles’s down-staring face had shocked her; she felt the speed of her fall accelerate; when the cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from such a height, what use are precautions?
14
“My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-i
nformed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”
“You are mistaken,” said he, gently, “that is not good company—that is the best. Good company requires only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice.”
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Visitors to Lyme in the nineteenth century, if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal facing travelers to the ancient Greek colonies—Charles did not actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world news summary from the steps of the Town Hall—were certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to. Ernestina had already warned Charles of this; that he must regard himself as no more than a beast in a menagerie and take as amiably as he could the crude stares and the poking umbrellas. Thus it was that two or three times a week he had to go visiting with the ladies and suffer hours of excruciating boredom, whose only consolation was the little scene that took place with a pleasing regularity when they had got back to Aunt Tranter’s house. Ernestina would anxiously search his eyes, glazed by clouds of platitudinous small talk, and say “Was it dreadful? Can you forgive me? Do you hate me?”; and when he smiled she would throw herself into his arms, as if he had miraculously survived a riot or an avalanche.
It so happened that the avalanche for the morning after Charles’s discovery of the Undercliff was appointed to take place at Marlborough House. There was nothing fortuitous or spontaneous about these visits. There could not be, since the identities of visitors and visited spread round the little town with incredible rapidity; and that both made and maintained a rigorous sense of protocol. Mrs. Poulteney’s interest in Charles was probably no greater than Charles’s in her; but she would have been mortally offended if he had not been dragged in chains for her to place her fat little foot on—and pretty soon after his arrival, since the later the visit during a stay, the less the honor.
These “foreigners” were, of course, essentially counters in a game. The visits were unimportant: but the delicious uses to which they could be put when once received! “Dear Mrs. Tranter, she wanted me to be the first to meet…” and “I am most surprised that Ernestina has not called on you yet—she has spoiled us—already two calls…” and “I am sure it is an oversight—Mrs. Tranter is an affectionate old soul, but so absent-minded…” These, and similar mouthwatering opportunities for twists of the social dagger depended on a supply of “important” visitors like Charles. And he could no more have avoided his fate than a plump mouse dropping between the claws of a hungry cat—several dozen hungry cats, to be exact.
When Mrs. Tranter and her two young companions were announced on the morning following that woodland meeting, Sarah rose at once to leave the room. But Mrs. Poulteney, whom the thought of young happiness always made petulant, and who had in any case reason enough—after an evening of Lady Cotton—to be a good deal more than petulant, bade her stay. Ernestina she considered a frivolous young woman, and she was sure her intended would be a frivolous young man; it was almost her duty to embarrass them. She knew, besides, that such social occasions were like a hair shirt to the sinner. All conspired.
The visitors were ushered in. Mrs. Tranter rustled forward, effusive and kind. Sarah stood shyly, painfully out of place in the background; and Charles and Ernestina stood easily on the carpet behind the two elder ladies, who had known each other sufficient decades to make a sort of token embrace necessary. Then Ernestina was presented, giving the faintest suspicion of a curtsy before she took the reginal hand.
“How are you, Mrs. Poulteney? You look exceedingly well.”
“At my age, Miss Freeman, spiritual health is all that counts.”
“Then I have no fears for you.”
Mrs. Poulteney would have liked to pursue this interesting subject, but Ernestina turned to present Charles, who bent over the old lady’s hand.
“Great pleasure, ma’m. Charming house.”
“It is too large for me. I keep it on for my dear husband’s sake. I know he would have wished—he wishes it so.”
And she stared past Charles at the house’s chief icon, an oil painting done of Frederick only two years before he died in 1851, in which it was clear that he was a wise, Christian, dignified, good-looking sort of man—above all, superior to most. He had certainly been a Christian, and dignified in the extreme, but the painter had drawn on imagination for the other qualities. The long-departed Mr. Poulteney had been a total, though very rich, nonentity; and the only really significant act of his life had been his leaving it. Charles surveyed this skeleton at the feast with a suitable deference.
“Ah. Indeed. I understand. Most natural.”
“Their wishes must be obeyed.”
“Just so.”
Mrs. Tranter, who had already smiled at Sarah, took her as an opportunity to break in upon this sepulchral Introit.
“My dear Miss Woodruff, it is a pleasure to see you.” And she went and pressed Sarah’s hand, and gave her a genuinely solicitous look, and said in a lower voice, “Will you come to see me—when dear Tina has gone?” For a second then, a rare look crossed Sarah’s face. That computer in her heart had long before assessed Mrs. Tranter and stored the resultant tape. That reserve, that independence so perilously close to defiance which had become her mask in Mrs. Poulteney’s presence, momentarily dropped. She smiled even, though sadly, and made an infinitesimal nod: if she could, she would.
Further introductions were then made. The two young ladies coolly inclined heads at one another, and Charles bowed. He watched closely to see if the girl would in any way betray their two meetings of the day before, but her eyes studiously avoided his. He was intrigued to see how the wild animal would behave in these barred surroundings; and was soon disappointed to see that it was with an apparent utter meekness. Unless it was to ask her to fetch something, or to pull the bell when it was decided that the ladies would like hot chocolate, Mrs. Poulteney ignored Sarah absolutely. So also, Charles was not pleased to note, did Ernestina. Aunt Tranter did her best to draw the girl into the conversation; but she sat slightly apart, with a kind of blankness of face, a withdrawnness, that could very well be taken for consciousness of her inferior status. He himself once or twice turned politely to her for the confirmation of an opinion—but it was without success. She made the least response possible; and still avoided his eyes.
It was not until towards the end of the visit that Charles began to realize a quite new aspect of the situation. It became clear to him that the girl’s silent meekness ran contrary to her nature; that she was therefore playing a part; and that the part was one of complete disassociation from, and disapprobation of, her mistress. Mrs. Poulteney and Mrs. Tranter respectively gloomed and bubbled their way through the schedule of polite conversational subjects—short, perhaps, in number, but endlessly long in process… servants; the weather; impending births, funerals and marriages; Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone (this seemingly for Charles’s benefit, though it allowed Mrs. Poulteney to condemn severely the personal principles of the first and the political ones of the second); [4] then on to last Sunday’s sermon, the deficiencies of the local tradesmen and thence naturally back to servants. As Charles smiled and raised eyebrows and nodded his way through this familiar purgatory, he decided that the silent Miss Woodruff was laboring under a sense of injustice—and, very interestingly to a shrewd observer, doing singularly little to conceal it.
This was perceptive of Charles, for he had noticed something that had escaped almost everyone else in Lyme. But perhaps his deduction would have remained at the state of a mere suspicion, had not his hostess delivered herself of a characteristic Poulteneyism.
“That girl I dismissed—she has given you no further trouble?”
Mrs. Tranter smiled. “Mary? I would not part with her for the world.”
“Mrs. Fairley informs me that she saw her only this morning talking with a person.” Mrs. Poulteney used “person” as two patriotic Frenchmen might have said �
��Nazi” during the occupation. “A young person. Mrs. Fairley did not know him.”
Ernestina gave Charles a sharp, reproachful glance; for a wild moment he thought he was being accused himself—then realized.
He smiled. “Then no doubt it was Sam. My servant, madam,” he added for Mrs. Poulteney’s benefit.
Ernestina avoided his eyes. “I meant to tell you. I too saw them talking together yesterday.”
“But surely… we are not going to forbid them to speak together if they meet?”
“There is a world of difference between what may be accepted in London and what is proper here. I think you should speak to Sam. The girl is too easily led.”
Mrs. Tranter looked hurt. “Ernestina my dear… she may be high-spirited. But I’ve never had the least cause to—”
“My dear, kind aunt, I am well aware how fond you are of her.”
Charles heard the dryness in her voice and came to the hurt Mrs. Tranter’s defense.
“I wish that more mistresses were as fond. There is no surer sign of a happy house than a happy maidservant at its door.”
Ernestina looked down at that, with a telltale little tightening of her lips. Good Mrs. Tranter blushed slightly at the compliment, and also looked down. Mrs. Poulteney had listened to this crossfire with some pleasure; and she now decided that she disliked Charles sufficiently to be rude to him.
“Your future wife is a better judge than you are of such matters, Mr. Smithson. I know the girl in question. I had to dismiss her. If you were older you would know that one cannot be too strict in such matters.”
And she too looked down, her way of indicating that a subject had been pronounced on by her, and was therefore at a universal end.
“I bow to your far greater experience, madam.”
But his tone was unmistakably cold and sarcastic.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 10
