The act of ravishment, taken in isolation, was by no means abhorrent to her. Indeed, once she had recovered from the shock of finding herself stark naked in the presence of a passive audience, she offered him no resistance. But when, at the climactic moment, he vanished in a shell-burst, she had a sensation of having violated not only her body but also her entire conception of decency and the civilised code, and this was reinforced by the mournful gaze of some European defenders at an adjoining barricade. Including, unfortunately, Miss Polly Condit Smith, the pretty American girl who was the toast of the garrison.
It might have been with the prospect of keeping such startling dreams at bay that she drank far more than her quota at the Tryst supper table during her Christmas stay. Adam kept a good cellar and a particularly fine claret, so that she sometimes went to bed gay, flushed, and temporarily at peace with the world, feeling herself secure in these familiar surroundings where everyone behaved towards her as someone sorely in need of a little cheering up. But no sooner was she asleep than the businesslike Colonel Shiba appeared and went to work, methodically, on the hooks and buttons of her bodice, and now there was an added embarrassment for, in addition to the silent garrison, her brother-in-law Clinton Coles was watching.
One night early in the new year, when all but the Irish party had packed up and left (Clint had stayed on to attend the January conference) the dream was particularly vivid and she awoke from it, less than an hour after lying down, with the virtual certainty that she had indeed been ravished. The claret had left her mouth parched and her head throbbed as she sat up, and when she was fumbling with the candle she had a distinct impression that its glow would reveal Colonel Shiba stretched beside her.
But then, coming to terms with the familiarity of the room, and the night sounds from the coppices that were inseparable from Tryst, she realised that it was not Colonel Shiba's ministrations that had awakened her but the rumble of voices in the room adjoining hers, a room occupied by Clint and Joanna. She heard Clint's boisterous arrival, guessing that he was the worse for drink, then Joanna's mellow laughter following a stumble on his part, and the sounds, together with evidence of such cosy intimacy on the far side of the wall, renewed in her a desperate awareness of her own loneliness and deprivation, whirling her back to the days when she and Joanna were the conspirators on this corridor, flitting in and out of one another's rooms in order to giggle and gossip about their beaux. So poignant was the memory that tears began to flow and a sense of terrible injustice bore down on her, projecting her from bed to window, there to contemplate the western prospect of the slope bathed in moonlight as far as the blur of woods where Adam's Hermitage sat on the knoll marking the northern boundary of the estate.
It was a prospect that might have soothed her had it not been for the persistent rise and fall of voices in the next room punctuated by Joanna's ripples of laughter. Evidence of such accord and conviviality increased her melancholy, so that she was suddenly aware of an overpowering need to make closer contact with human beings untroubled by her terrible sense of isolation. It was then, with a suppressed cry of excitement, that she remembered the cistern telegraph, a device she and Joanna had sometimes employed when the rest of the household was asleep and they had secrets to exchange. An array of superannuated leaden pipes, that ran the length of the western wing, had long since ceased to serve any practical purpose. They were a relic from an earlier tenant, installed some seventy years ago as a crude means of conveying stored rainwater from the huge cistern in the loft to a few of the more important bedrooms on this side of the house. Adam, reorganising the entire plumbing system soon after he bought the place in the early 'sixties, had done little to disturb the existing network, judging, no doubt, that its dismantlement would do more harm than good to the old structure, and the girls, discovering a practical purpose for this in their early teens, had often used it to communicate with one another after they had been granted the privilege of separate and adjoining rooms.
By removing oaken plugs in the section of pipe that ran under the window, it had been quite practical (and very stimulating!) to communicate with one another, and it now occurred to Helen, standing in her nightgown and listening to the amiable sounds from the next room, that she had only to put her ear to the pipe to be certain of hearing more, if not all, of the exchanges between man and wife.
Ordinarily it might have struck her as a Peeping Tom device, but in her present mood she did not give a row of pins about such niceties. She had her ear to the pipe within seconds of remembering its presence, and it was just as she thought. Although, presumably, a plug was still in place next door, the voices became distinct and she could hear everything that was said, as well as every movement about the room.
* * *
The relationship of Joanna and Clint had been genial and uncomplicated from the earliest days of their association, and marriage had simply broadened and deepened it. Joanna, by now, had few illusions about him, seeing him as an amiable, overgrown adolescent, particularly when he was in liquor, but Joanna did not look for rectitude in a husband. Of all the Swanns, she was the least exacting. Clint was kind, easygoing, fond of the children, a good provider, and a roystering, affectionate lover. What more could a woman expect of a man, seeing that few men matured in any case?
From time to time, in the early days of their marriage, she had been bothered by his extravagance and hurt by his over-fondness for lively company, male and female, but he always returned to her after a brief lapse, and she had a serene conviction that he was glad he had married her. Marriage not only provided him with an anchorage, of the kind all men of his stamp needed. It also enabled him to sidestep the gloomy certainty of inheriting his father's pill business, leaving him free to throw in his lot with the free-ranging Adam. When she looked back on their absurd elopement (she thought of it as that although it had been mounted and stage-managed by Henrietta after she had confessed to being two months pregnant) she concluded that Clinton Coles had been a beneficiary rather than a victim of embarrassing circumstances.
On this particular night George had been over again, plotting family tactics for the forthcoming January conference, and when Clint and George hobnobbed they could make substantial inroads into Adam's wine stocks, so that she was not in the least surprised when Clint appeared, about one-thirty a.m., drunk as a fiddler and falling flat on his face when he tried to slip his braces and trousers off. He became clumsily amorous the moment she slipped out of bed to assist him, landing a hearty slap on her bottom and grabbing her by the waist as she bent to seize his trouser legs. Together they rolled on the rug, Clint taking advantage of the frolic to hoist her nightgown, but he seemed incapable of pressing his advantage. She said, not minding this horseplay in the least, "Wait, Clint! For heaven's sake, boy. Stay still a minute while I get you to bed!" where she would almost surely have accommodated him, as the quickest method of getting a good night's rest, had she not, at that moment, heard a sound close at hand that drove all thoughts of him out of mind.
It was unmistakably a sob. A long, dry sob, indicative of acute wretchedness, and it came, unaccountably had she been a stranger to the house, from the direction of the window-seat. She scrambled up then, leaving Clint in disarray on the floor, and hurried across the room, where, on the instant, she identified not only the source of the sob but the way in which it had been relayed to her. It came from Helen's room next door via the old cistern telegraph they had used as girls.
It sobered her on the instant. She felt neither shame nor resentment in the realisation that Helen had been eavesdropping. Only pity and concern that she should be driven to seek such a means of sharing an intimate moment of a man and woman whose lives, in contrast to her own, were so free of strain and misery.
Although excessively outward-looking she was by no means insensitive, particularly as regards Helen, her girlhood ally. She had been all too aware of her sister's taut nerves since her return home and had done everything she could think of to comfort and relax her,
introducing her into the uninhibited Dublin scene in the hope that, sooner or later, she would form an attachment with someone that could lead to remarriage and a chance to forget her frightful experiences in the East. She was a generous soul and her sincere affection for her partner in so many youthful adventures had survived their long separation. She had a certainty now that Helen's marriage had not been a success, or not as she understood the word. Rowley had been a worthy, solemn, self-opinionated old stick, so dedicated to his work that he would have neither time nor inclination for frolics that made married life so agreeable, despite the tendency among men, even men like Clint, to dismiss women as frail, fluttering creatures, entirely dependent on their mates. Perhaps alone among the Swann girls, she had taken accurate soundings of her parents' marriage, particularly her mother's approach to her father. A woman—a wise woman, that is—did not quarrel with the fact that it was a man's world. She set about making the best of it, and one certain way of doing this was to pander to male appetites, giving them free rein everywhere but in the kitchen. This, at least, kept them even-tempered, and any woman with an ounce of sense could manipulate an easygoing man wholly preoccupied with his own concerns that were limited, in the main, to food, bed, counting-house profits, and the raising of progeny, approximately in that order.
She turned away from the pipe, jerked Clinton's trousers free, removed his shirt, underpants, and shoes, and took a firm grip under his armpits, saying, "Now get to bed and sleep it off. I won't be a minute."
His renewed clutch at her was easily evaded, and he flopped back on to the bed, grinning foolishly, and saying, in the assumed Irish accent he adopted for these occasions, "You're a foine woman, Jo! Said it often and say it again!… A foine woman!" But by then she was gone, not even waiting to slip into her bedgown, and had hurried into the gallery and along to Helen's room where, as she half-expected, she found the candle burning and her sister sitting on the edge of a rumpled bed, the very picture of melancholy.
There seemed no profit in beating about the bush, so she said, sitting beside her and throwing an arm about her shoulder, "I heard you at the pipe. Don't worry, love. Clint didn't. He's far too bottled. Now, what is it, Helen? How can I help?" She was rewarded by a convulsive embrace on Helen's part and another sob, stifled this time, that released a steady flow of tears.
They sat there for a long time until Helen mastered herself sufficiently to say, "It was unforgivable… Me eavesdropping like that… I… I don't know what's come over me lately… I remembered the pipe and then… well, you're so happy, Jo! And for me everything's so sour and wretched. There's no end to it, and when I'm alone and have those awful dreams…"
"What dreams, Helen?"
"The one about Colonel Shiba, the Japanese attache. And sometimes the frightful one I used to have before about… about seeing Rowley's head on the post. Not as it was but alive."
Joanna tightened her grip. She knew all about Rowley's head, but the name of the Japanese attache had no significance for her. She said, "Tell me about the bad dreams then." Helen made no response. "Just saying things, just putting them into words. It makes them less important, Helen. Goodness, it's no wonder you have terrible dreams after what you've been through. Anybody would. Most women would have gone out of their minds."
"Maybe I have."
"Not you. Tell me. Tell me everything."
Outside in the coverts one of the resident Tryst owls hooted. It was a mild night for January and the wind, crossing the Weald from the southeast, went to probing the barley-sugar chimney-pots, but without the savagery it showed throughout most of the winter. Joanna draped a blanket over their shoulders without releasing her grip on Helen's shoulders, and Helen said, "I don't have the worst one now, or not often. But the new one is almost as bad. It's so real. I can feel it happening to me. And so silly, too, for that man never behaved towards me in any way but correctly. He was a gentleman and brave as a lion. Everybody thought so."
"The Japanese colonel?"
"Yes. He was there when I shot that officer through the loophole."
"What happens to you in the dream, Helen?"
She told her, shamefully and haltingly, but forcing herself to describe both dreams in detail. She told of the macabre leer on the face of a decapitated head. She described the firm, expertly performed ritual of a public ravishment on a couch of sandbags sown from quilts and blankets.
"Do you think I'm going mad, Jo? Surely that's a mad dream to have time and again, isn't it?"
"No, it isn't mad. And I think the dreams are linked in a way. One's come to blot out the other." And then, without diffidence, "Tell me about Rowley. Tell me about your life together before he was killed. How was he? How did he treat you?"
"He was always kind, or tried to be in his funny, absentminded way."
"I didn't mean that. How did he treat you as a woman?"
"He didn't, not really. Whenever he did I… well… I had to encourage him, to remind him I was his wife even. He wasn't like any other man I've known. You remember how most men didn't need much encouragement that way. Clint still doesn't, does he?"
"No, not Clint!" She came near to chuckling, despite what seemed to her the terrible poignancy of her sister's plight. "But Rowley was never in the least like Clint, thank heavens. Sometimes I used to think Rowley wasn't a man at all, just… just a kind of… well, a saint, if you like. But saints shouldn't marry, should they? And this one did. It must have been awful for you. I don't know how you put up with it all those years and in all those awful places."
She thought hard, trying with all her might to relate the stray images and conjectures that occurred to her and arrive at some kind of conclusion that would lead her to comprehend Helen's present state of mind. She tried putting herself in her place, not as a woman who had survived unbelievable terrors and hardships, but as a wife lying beside a husband night after night, unable to awaken more than a token emotional response in his body. It was very difficult but because she was her mother's daughter, and because, instinctively, she turned her own sensual nature to very good account, she could get some glimmering of the truth, and in the wake of that truth she saw a possible solution. Or the means of promoting a shock, physical and spiritual, that held promise of a solution. Love and pity rode roughshod over her upbringing, and all the canons of so-called civilised behaviour, for here was her own sister, who had dragged herself home from the threshold of hell, and was now defeated by the clamour of her body and degradation of spirit that Rowland Coles's indifference had invoked. Innocently perhaps, and from the highest motives, but mercilessly none the less.
She said, "Listen, Helen. Wait here. I'll only be gone a moment. Wash your face and put a comb through your hair while I'm gone," and she took her sister's hand, jerked her up, and pushed her towards the wash-stand, pouring water from the jug and dipping a flannel in it. "Go on! Make the effort, for everybody's sake," and she hovered by the door until Helen began to lave her face. Then she slipped away, moving barefoot along the gallery to the stairhead where Adam left a fixed oil-lamp burning all night in the deep niche beside the sewing-room door.
She went down and stepped gingerly between the two truckle beds inside, then through into the wainscotted dining room, pungent with cigar smoke. In a sliver of moonlight she found and lit a candle, carrying it to the sideboard where, among other decanters, stood one containing Adam's choice port. She poured a beaker and carried it back, lighting her way up the stair to the door of her room and peeping inside to see Clint sprawled naked across the bed. She pulled back the sheets and rolled him in, and although he muttered and opened his eyes, the lack of focus told her he was still asleep. She went out again and into Helen's room, where her sister was sitting in front of the mirror brushing her long dark hair. She seemed calmer now, although her hands trembled violently. Jo said, handing her the port, "Drink it down. Drink all of it. It's what you need. It'll do you good," and Helen, after a single look of bewilderment, began to sip. A little colour returned to her chee
ks.
"You're very kind, Jo. You always were the best-hearted among them. I'll manage now."
"Until you sleep you'll manage. Then you'll dream again, one dream or the other. There's something else you have to do, Helen, and no one can do it for you. No doctor, nobody, you hear? Go in to Clint now. I'll stay here until you come back."
"To Clint? Me?"
She slammed down the glass so hard that the stem snapped and the bowl rolled across the dressing-table as far as the pincushion, leaving a small pool of dregs on the polished surface. "You can't mean that, Jo. You… you can't!"
"But I do mean it! You need a man more than any woman I ever saw, and I mean to get you one of your own the minute we go home. But you can't wait that long, not to feel… feel wanted and needed. Not to feel like a woman again. You needn't worry about his side of it. He's bottled and won't know he's providing you use your wits. Just go to him, like I say. Just this once."
Give Us This Day Page 38
