‘Not at all. No one knows about that, anyway.’
‘It still seems rather strange to me. I mean, that she can bring herself to come here. And also that you can sit and talk with her, exchanging pleasantries as if nothing had happened.’
‘Indeed, my dear Paul. It is true that I was vexed with her at first, but I have grown very fond of her since. Actually, I firmly believe that she loves you. Paul. And it is because that is what I believe, or rather, because I know it for certain, that I no longer have any ill feeling towards her.’
‘Oh, Mama!’ he faltered. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I can’t explain, but everything tells me that it is so. Little things she says … a word here, a word there …’
He was too dazed by the rosy prospects unfolding in his mind’s eye to respond, and his mother pursued with her counsel:
‘It is perfectly clear that she loves you. The pair of you could still find happiness together. Next time you see her, try not to behave as if you don’t care, as if you have put it all behind you. You ought to get to know her a little better.’
‘Don’t you think I know her well enough?’
‘No, Paul, you do not. I assure you, God help me, that she loves you!’
‘But she can’t!’ he stammered. ‘It’s impossible! Oh, Mama, it’s impossible.’
‘That is what she said, too!’ thought the old lady, rising. She enfolded him in her arms once more.
‘But she does! She does love you, my dear, dear boy!’ she whispered. A radiant smile crossed her features, making her seem ten years younger than her age.
…
She thought it best to leave them be for a while, now that she had instilled in both their minds the notion of a misapprehension that might yet be rectified, and she bided her time.
Paul kept delaying his return to Bodegraven. The day after his conversation with his mother he called at the Verstraetens’. He arrived at four, an hour at which the family was usually gathered together and there was most chance of Freddie dropping by. So disappointed was he when she did not appear that he could not help asking Marie in an urgent undertone:
‘Won’t Freddie be coming this afternoon?’
She was startled by the question. ‘I don’t know, Paul. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s been so long since I’ve seen her,’ he almost whispered.
Marie blushed; she wished she could tell him how sorry Freddie had been about how things had turned out last summer, but she did not dare, for fear of inadvertently snarling the delicate fabric of emotion between them. It was up to them to find a resolution, but when would they do so? Perhaps never, thought Marie.
Paul did not see Freddie that afternoon. During dinner he asked his mother:
‘What would you say if I paid the Van Erveloorts a visit this evening?’
‘I’m sure they would like that,’ she replied.
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Oh, just a word here and a word there. Enough for me to look on the bright side, at any rate. You’ll see, Paul.’
Her response did not clarify matters, but was reassuring to him nonetheless. After dinner he grew agitated and began to pace the room sunk in thought.
‘Do sit down, Paul, and don’t let your coffee go cold.’
‘At what time do you think I should call on Madame van Erlevoort?’
‘Not before eight, my dear. Between eight and half-past.’
‘I used to call at any time, quite casually!’
‘And that is precisely why you ought to avoid any suggestion of a casual call.’
He sighed. In that case he would have a glass of cognac first, he decided, wondering what Freddie could possibly have said to his mother. He took a book and pretended to read. Madame pretended to doze, but in reality she was no less nervous than Paul.
The clock struck half-past seven, and he flung his book aside.
‘It’s stuffy in here; I need some air. I think I’ll take a stroll first,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’
She smiled. ‘Good luck, my dear,’ she said softly.
…
That evening the Verstraetens, accompanied by Georges and Lili, made their way to the Voorhout; a cable had been sent to Etienne in Leiden summoning him home, and Madame van Erlevoort had asked Henk and Betsy to come, too.
For the latter it was the first time since the rupture between Eline and Otto that they visited the Van Erlevoort residence. However, all feelings of antagonism had vanished. The festive spirit ran high, for the news of Paul and Freddie’s betrothal had come as a complete and very welcome surprise.
When Madame van Raat returned home that evening, worn out from the emotion, she felt too tired to undress for bed, and sank into her easy chair to sit for a while, her veined hands folded on her lap, her chin sunk onto her breast, filled with wonder at the successful outcome of her instinctive machinations. That she, for all her despondence and lassitude, had had a hand in it! But then it was her son’s happiness that was at stake, and her piety had given her strength.
XXXV
Uncle Daniel and Aunt Eliza showed no surprise whatever when, a few days after St Clare and Vincent had taken their departure, Eline announced her intention to return to The Hague. They knew her to be capricious by nature, wanting first this and then that, never satisfied. But this was no caprice. The idea had been growing in her mind ever since that evening when St Clare had asked her so bluntly ‘How do you come to be here?’, and she had felt as though a curtain had been swept aside, revealing to her with devastating clarity that she did not indeed belong in her uncle’s Brussels apartment, and even less so among the coterie he and his wife associated themselves with. And it was out of her feelings for St Clare – respect, friendship and possibly even love – that she had resolved to leave Brussels.
She wrote to Henk, asking him to rent two rooms for her in a ladies’ boarding house, or else in one of the new chic hotels. She received a prompt reply from him, as well as notes from Betsy and old Madame van Raat, all protesting that she should not take rooms but make her home with them instead. Betsy wrote saying that it was time to forgive and forget what had passed between them, and imploring Eline not to be so eccentric as to go and live on her own when there was plenty of room for her at Nassauplein. Old Madame van Raat extended a similarly urgent and affectionate invitation. But Eline declined their offers with effusive thanks, and was not to be dissuaded from her pursuit.
So Henk gave up with a forlorn shrug and went with Betsy to pick out a handsome two-room apartment in a spacious boarding house on Bezuidenhout. Thereupon Eline returned to The Hague.
She recalled how tired she had been from all her travels when she arrived in The Hague the previous summer to make her stay with old Madame van Raat. She compared the fatigue she had felt then with her present state of exhaustion, which seemed to have robbed her even of the capacity to shed tears. For St Clare’s sake she had mustered the last remnants of her strength to show herself the way she had once been: attractive and engaging, if not radiant. And now that St Clare had gone, she realised that although she had tried to be candid and guileless with him, she had found herself putting on an act yet again, to avoid letting him see her as utterly brokenspirited – at death’s door even. Now that it was no longer necessary to work herself up to a pitch she was falling apart, and besides, the emotional upheaval of that final confession had left her feeling so drained that she felt sure she would never get well again, mentally or physically.
Her cough was very bad, and she sought treatment from Dr Reijer once more. But she did not mention the morphine drops prescribed by her physician in Brussels, mindful as she was of Reijer’s earlier refusal to supply her with a sleeping draught. It was February, bitterly cold, and she kept to her rooms.
Rising from her bed in the morning she was overcome by the same sense of purposelessness as when she was staying with Madame van Raat, and rather than get dressed she would slip on her peignoir and recline on a couch, savouring the restful feeling that no
thing was demanded of her, that there was no earthly reason for her to get dressed, and there was nothing to stop her remaining as she was, in her slippers, with her hair undone, for as long as she chose. She had been found thus, undressed, dishevelled and vacantly staring out of the window by various callers, including Madame van Raat, Betsy, Madame Verstraeten, and Marie and Lili. She did not read, she did nothing at all, and hours went by during which even her thoughts came to a standstill. At times she would abruptly throw herself on the floor and lie there pressing her face to the carpet with her eyes tightly closed, until a knock at the door – the maid bringing her lunch tray – made her scramble to her feet in sudden fright. She barely touched her food, and a grim little smile, half satiric and half crazed, etched itself on her features.
The evenings inflicted hours of agony on Eline. Her mind would be in a frenzy of agitation, as though electrified by the dread of a sleepless night. A vertiginous glare flooded her brain, her ears were filled with an incessant hum. A maelstrom of remembrances whirled by, and visions rose up before her. She started in fear at a shadow looming on the wall or the glint of a pin on the floor. But she took her drops, and was muffled at last by a leaden mantle of sleep.
…
For long moments she stood staring in the glass at her faded beauty. Tears would rise to her eyes, whose brightness seemed to have been snuffed out for ever, and her mind drifted to her past. She was filled with yearning for those former days, having lost sight of what they had entailed, for she was finding it increasingly difficult to think clearly. It was as if there were certain limits to what she might think about, which she might not venture beyond. However, the sluggishness of her powers of reason lessened her melancholy, which, had she been of clear mind, would have mounted to a dangerous crisis. Instead, she now spent hour upon hour racked with doubt as to what she could possibly do with her useless body and her useless existence, dragging herself from one spasm of coughing to the next in the prison of her rooms. She shed bitter tears over her unfulfilled desires and lay writhing on the floor, her arms outstretched towards a phantom lover, for both in her dreams and in the daytime ramblings of her mind she had begun to confound Otto with St Clare, unconsciously attributing the utterances and ideas of the one to the other, so that she no longer knew which of the two she had ever truly loved, or still loved. When, during such fits of equivocation, she tried to battle through to a resolution, she came up against those thought-confining limits again, and became so enraged by her powerlessness that she thumped her head with her fists, as though trying to discipline her wayward brain by force.
‘What is the matter with me?’ she asked herself in despair. ‘Why can I remember nothing of hundreds of things that have happened, except that I know that they happened? Oh, the dullness in my head! I’d rather be in terrible pain than suffer this dullness! I must be going mad …’
A shudder ran down her spine like a cold snake. Suppose she did go mad, what would they do with her? It did not bear thinking about, and yet, even as she struggled to banish the spectre of encroaching insanity, she had a sense of crossing a forbidden limit. Because if that was what she was doing then she must be … losing her mind!
At such moments she would cover her eyes and her ears with her hands to block out all sight and sound, as though the first impression she might now receive would push her over the brink into madness. So terrified was she of this happening that she did not breathe a word to Reijer about the befuddlement in her brain.
During her prolonged spells of inactivity she became enslaved by strange fantasies and delusions, often rising to a bizarre strain of ecstasy, from which she would suddenly start awake in shock. Reclining on her couch, nervously toying with the tassels on the cushions or twisting a strand of her long, tousled hair, she mused on the theatrical illusions she had cherished in the old days of her duets with Paul, when she thought she loved Fabrice. Then she became an actress, she was on stage, she could see the audience, she smiled and bowed, it rained flowers …
She rose to her feet in a daze, and began to hum some recitative, or a few phrases from an Italian aria as she drifted about the room, throwing up her hands in despair, reaching out beseechingly to a fleeing lover, falling down on her knees and begging for mercy even as she was being forcibly dragged away … Diverse roles floated into her mind: Marguerite, Juliette, Lucie, Isabelle, Mireille, and in her transport of excitement she became all these heroines, acting out their most tragic moments in swift succession, only to wake abruptly from her delirium to find herself all alone in her room, making strange gesticulations.
Coming to herself again, she thought:
‘Oh God! Is it true? Am I going mad?’
She sank on to the couch again and kept very still, wide-eyed with fear, as though some horrible catastrophe were about to strike, as though the faces in the paintings and prints on the walls had suddenly come alive, jeering at her and grimacing like demons.
After such a day she would resolve, in quiet dread, to take possession of herself. The following morning, upon waking from her leaden, artificial slumber, she rose promptly from her bed and dressed with care, after which she went out to make some purchase, take coffee with Henk and Betsy, or call on either the Verstraetens or Madame van Raat. She said she was lonely, and people invited her to dinner now and then out of pity. On such occasions the evening passed quite cheerfully, and she returned to her rooms afterwards glad to have reached the end of another day, but almost fainting with exhaustion from her unwonted animation, her forced brightness, her unnatural, shrill laugh, not to mention her endless coughing. And she would pay heavily at night: the drops had no effect; she remained wide, wide awake, prey to the wildest phantasms conjured by her sick mind as she relived the day’s strenuous activities.
She was the subject of much talk, and Betsy frequently remarked with a worried frown that she feared Eline was ill; she was acting so strangely these days, and Reijer was not at all satisfied either. And everyone felt sorry for her: poor, poor Eline, who used to be so elegant and alluring, so gay! Now she was like a shadow of her former self on the rare occasions that she was seen venturing out in the street with nervous, unsteady gait, her muff pressed to her lips, and there was something almost timid in the way she tilted her head in greeting the Van Larens, the Hijdrechts, the Oudendijks. No indeed, she was not at all well; it was evident for all to see.
…
It was raining: a cold, driving March rain, and Betsy was at home, sitting in the violet anteroom by the conservatory with her armchair pushed into the light so that she could read her book, Pêcheur d’Islande by Pierre Loti. But the story bored her: she could not imagine fishermen being quite so sentimental. Beyond the potted palms in the conservatory she could see into the garden, where the bare trees glistened starkly in the downpour. Ben sat on the floor by his mother, his head lolling against her skirts, his eyes fixed on the leafless branch of an elm tree tossing madly in the wind and rain. He heaved a sigh.
‘What’s the matter Ben, is anything wrong?’ asked Betsy.
‘No, Ma,’ he said in his slurred voice, looking up at her in wonder.
‘Then why did you sigh, darling?’
‘Don’t know, Ma.’
She looked at him intently a moment, then laid aside her book.
‘Come here, Ben.’
‘Where, Mama?’
‘Here, on my knee.’
Smiling, he clambered onto her lap. Her tone, formerly sharp when addressing her only child, had softened of late.
‘Do you love your mama?’ she asked fondly.
‘Yes.’
‘Give me a hug, then.’
He threw his short arms about her neck.
‘And now give me a kiss.’
Beaming doltishly, he kissed her.
‘Mama is never bad, is she?’ asked Betsy.
‘No.’
‘Do you like sitting on Mama’s lap?’
‘Yes.’
The overgrown seven-year-old snuggled up agai
nst her bosom.
‘Tell me, Ben, is there anything you’d like to have? Shall Mama give you something nice?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Not even a cart, for instance, with a pony, a proper pony? Then Herman could teach you to drive.’
‘No, thank you,’ he said blankly.
She grew impatient, and was on the point of scolding him for being so witless, but stopped herself just in time. She held him close and kissed him.
‘Well, if there’s anything else you want to have, you must tell me, do you hear?’ she resumed, almost in tears. ‘You’ll tell me, won’t you, Ben? What do you say, little man? Promise you’ll tell Mama?’
‘Yes,’ he replied in a tone of blissful contentment.
And she shut her eyes, shuddering at the thought that she had an idiot son. What had she ever done to deserve such a punishment?
She sat there holding her child on her lap for some time, when she heard someone approaching through the salon. It was Eline.
‘Well hello, Elly.’
‘Hello, Betsy. Hello, Ben.’
‘So you went out in spite of the rain?’
‘I took a cab; I couldn’t stay indoors a moment longer. This weather makes me so dreary, and I thought … I thought I was going mad with boredom. Oh, God!’
With a strangled cry she dropped into a chair and tore off her short veil, as if she needed air.
‘Just imagine: the same four walls of your room day in day out, all by yourself, with nothing to distract you – surely that would drive anyone mad? Anyway, I can’t stand it any more; if it goes on much longer I’ll go insane …’
‘Eline, prends garde: l’enfant t’écoute.’
‘Oh, him … he doesn’t understand, and I don’t think he ever will!’ she ranted hoarsely. ‘Come over here, Ben, and listen to me. Shall I tell you what to do when you grow up? Never think about anything, poppet! Don’t think at all! Just eat, drink and have fun for as long as you can, and then … then you must marry! But don’t start thinking, whatever you do!’
‘Eline, vraiment tu es folle! Mind what you’re saying!’ Betsy burst out, more concerned for her child than for her sister.
Eline Vere Page 52
