The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  There came into the room a sudden ray of hope. Then everyone looked at Amory and the same thought entered every mind: what would Amory do if she did return?

  8

  EXTRACT FROM HARRIET’S NOTEBOOK

  Yet another day has gone by, and the shock waves have not yet settled, the ripples are still spreading from the dark centre of the pool where the stone was thrown in. We are all restless, unable to settle, and earlier this evening, I wandered up to Mama’s bedroom, where I stood looking at the rich elegance spread around. Papa is right about one thing, at least. She will find living without luxury insupportable, not to mention an existence beyond the pale of society, even if she means to live in Egypt for the rest of her life. Ostracised! I simply do not understand how she could willingly have chosen that – when she knows very well what it will mean to her, she who has always lived surrounded by people whose high opinion is paramount to her. Especially not with the example of Millie Glendinning before her. Simply for an affaire? Try as I will, I cannot envisage my cool, sophisticated, conventionally worldly Mama suffering some overwhelming passion for anyone – let alone Valery Iskander! — allowing it go so far beyond her control that she has lost sight of all she is forsaking. Yet what other explanation is there for her reckless behaviour? We know nothing of Iskander, or of the circumstances in which they first met. Papa might know more than he is saying (and remembering the unquestioning way he seemed to accept the reason for her abrupt departure, it seems to me he very likely does) but I for one could never pluck up the courage to ask him.

  The bedroom curtains had not been drawn together and bright moonlight silvered the room; it bore a strange, abandoned, forlorn aspect, but I was reluctant to light a lamp. Whether I was viewing the scene coloured by the loss we were all experiencing, I had no means of knowing, but the things she had left behind seemed to be invested with a poignant life of their own, reminders that stirred a complex web of emotions in me. Mama and I have not always seen eye to eye, but I have always loved her. Or have I – truthfully? A dutiful affection, yes, I feel that, but true, profound love, such as I have for Papa? I do not know, but even so, I am tormented by the knowledge of how dreadfully unhappy she must have been to reach the point where she could abandon us all. And more than that: why have none of us ever seen it? Feelings of self-blame and guilt are an indulgence we cannot afford, but still I ask myself if my sisters, too, have felt this same faint remoteness between herself and her daughters which I think I have always sensed, without being consciously aware of it. Marcus – well, like most men, I suspect, he adores his beautiful mother.

  I wish I could share his unshaken belief that she will return. Sometimes I do indeed believe that one day she will reappear, and everything will return to normal, just as if she had never gone away, but at the same time I live in dread of the consequences if ever that should happen. Papa is such a stickler for correctness, that everyone around him must live their lives honourably; it goes without saying that his wife must be beyond reproach. I cannot even consider the possibility of his overlooking what she has done and taking her back on condition that she behaves herself for the sake of outward appearances. Yet the alternative, divorce, would be equally unthinkable. Divorce puts both parties at the mercy of civilised society. Marital misdemeanours may, and do, occur, but they must not be seen to occur. As it is, tongues will begin to wag soon enough, there can be no hiding for long the fact that my mother has gone. It will undoubtedly cause shame to fall on her name, and as for Papa – well, he is bound to suffer more, trying to carry on with his life, knowing that everyone knows she has made a fool of him. He is not a man who can bear to be laughed at.

  I could not keep still, and was pacing about the moonlit room while thinking all this. Clara Hallam had tidied it, but had left one or two items lying where they were, a sentimental touch which I would not have suspected the woman capable of. An abandoned white kid glove lay on the arm of a peach velour chair, an extensive array of Mama’s cosmetics was lined up on the dressing table. A nightgown of dove-grey silk was lying across the cream satin counterpane, ready for wear, pinched in at the waist by Hallam as though her body were inside it, flung back in a pose of abandon. Hallam, when she told us, said her mistress had taken little else but the grey walking costume, something I found so difficult to believe of Mama – she who changes her clothes several times a day! – that I decided now to check for myself.

  But Hallam was right, nothing else appeared to be missing. I even opened the wardrobes where her furs were kept, cedar-lined to keep out the moths, unlikely as she is to need furs in Egypt. There they all were – the sables which my father gave her rippling sleekly under their protective shoulder wraps, and still clinging to them was that distinctive scent she orders to be made up specially for her in Paris, by Worth. Her favourite cloak hung there, a long, exquisite garment of gold tissue, also lined with sable; silver foxes and a soft, thick velvet evening coat of mole colour, trimmed with miniver.

  Closing the door, I noticed that same scent lingering on the air in the room itself, yet overlaid by something faintly rotten. Those lilies on the dressing table, that was it! They were over, past their best, already beginning to fester in the tall glass vase. The lilies Kit had given her for her birthday.

  Kit. He is going to take it very badly. He admires Mama so tremendously. There has always been an unusual rapport between them, and something being said beneath the surface that for some reason I have never cared to probe. We haven’t seen him at Charnley since Mama went. I am disappointed in him, I thought he would have rushed down here immediately to offer his sympathy. I have been waiting, longing to unburden myself, but he has not yet come.

  A difficult decision lies ahead for me. It does not need second sight to see that as the eldest daughter, it will be universally accepted that my moral responsibility is now to take over Mama’s social duties for my father’s sake. Escape, to a worthwhile life of my own, would now seem to be even more out of the question than before, at least until I marry, when I might well simply be exchanging one form of imprisonment for another. Unless, of course, I were to marry Kit.

  I believe he, at least, would never expect me to sublimate my own desires and pretend to be a conventional wife. He would respect my need for fulfilment outside the boundaries of running a home and raising children. I should be allowed to follow my own inclinations, to study as I wished … but to marry simply to gain such freedom seems to me the worst form of dishonesty.

  Papa, for one, has never been against a match between us nor, I believe, was Mama, though I never fully understood her attitude. On the one hand, she urged me to make up my mind before it was too late, on the other, she constantly warned me of what might be in store if Kit and I were to marry. As if I had not worked that one out for myself!

  I am racked by indecision. Do I truly love Kit? That dangerous attraction he has for me somewhat frightens me in its intensity, for I realise it is not necessarily love. But even if it were, marrying him could be a disaster. He could never, for instance, be the rock against which I could lean in times of stress, as my father has been for my mother. Nor, I suspect, does he have that capacity for faithfulness which one might expect from a husband. While I have no desire to possess another human being utterly – I would despise myself if I had – I do not want to share him with a side of his nature over which he has no control. But – he makes me feel alive. He teases me and makes me laugh, not always an easy task, I admit. I feel right with him.

  I had had enough of such thoughts. And suddenly I had no wish to be in this room any longer.

  I turned to go, and it was then I noticed the grey suede journal on the writing table by the window. I had once or twice seen Mama making entries in this book, but she always put it away when anyone came into the room. It had a tiny brass lock, and I picked it up, though without any intentions of forcing the lock and intruding on private thoughts. She must have overlooked it in her haste to leave, but the thought that someone else – Hallam, perhaps, i
f she had not already done so – might find a way of opening it and reading it, made me slip it inside my pocket.

  The following week was one which, for the rest of her life, Harriet could never contemplate without despair. A week which was an awful anti-climax to those events which had gone before, and was the beginning of the path towards what inexorably followed some time afterwards. A week in which hope died.

  The police later went over everything that had happened from the time when Beatrice disappeared to the time of the fatal tragedy, in an effort to find out what had caused it, but not as much as they might have done, had they not previously been told about her leaving. Marcus had refused to give up on his insistence that the police should be informed of her flight, even in the face of his father’s indifference and Wycombe’s warnings about the publicity which would inevitably ensue.

  “What can the police do that we haven’t done?” Amory had said heavily. During the space of a week, he had grown older and greyer. He had been brought up not to exhibit his feelings, but the struggle not to do so was clearly almost too much for him. He would pull out of it, he assured his children, but it was difficult to believe. An accidie seemed to have entered his soul, utter despair. “Supposing they trace her, supposing they do find her with this fellow Iskander, are they going to force her to return?”

  “I simply won’t believe she is so lost to all decency that she has gone off with that man! Dash it, Father, she may have had some sort of brainstorm and be wandering God knows where. She may even b-be–”

  “Marcus!” said Wycombe quietly.

  Amory, roused out of his own lethargy by his son’s evident distress, put a hand on his sleeve. Marcus subsided. “All right, Father. I’m sorry. But if there’s any chance at all, shouldn’t we take it? We must n-n-never give up hope of finding her and p-persuading her to return!”

  He was silenced by the look on his father’s face, but then Amory said heavily, turning away, “Do as you wish, my boy, do as you wish.”

  “Perhaps Marcus is right, old friend. Maybe it would, after all, be in everyone’s interests to inform the police,” said Wycombe, after several moments’ deep thought.

  So they were called in, though afterwards Marcus said they might have saved themselves the trouble. The two policemen who came were from the local force. Uncomfortable at dealing with the gentry on such highly personal matters, and working under directives from on high, they seemed happy to accept the obvious conclusions, without too many questions. “I’m afraid it seems to be a cut and dried case, sir. Your wife and the Egyptian gentleman disappearing on the same day, as it were,” said a sergeant by the name of Maitland, an inexperienced young man with baby-blue eyes who looked as though he wasn’t old enough to be told about such things.

  They asked the obvious questions, received the expected answers, which Maitland’s constable wrote laboriously in his notebook. Then he said, “It’s been a week – and you have had no communication whatever from your wife, sir?”

  Amory, who had already told them this, merely nodded.

  Maitland coughed and said, with as much reproof in his tone as he dared, “It might have made things easier, sir, if you had reported the disappearance at once.”

  “We believed she would return,” Marcus said. He met the baby-blue eyes and saw they were not by any means as guileless as he had at first thought. “As she still might. Or be found, at any rate.”

  “I shouldn’t hold out too much hope of that if I was you, sir. Not much chance of tracing anyone, once they’re out of England – and as for Egypt!” Egypt might well have been beyond the stratosphere, as far as he was concerned. He added, speaking once more to Amory, “as I believe the Chief Constable has – er – already indicated, sir.”

  So someone had had a quiet word in the ear of the Chief Constable, and perhaps the Lord Lieutenant of the county as well. The Home Secretary, even, it was tempting to think. At any rate, it was clear that whatever Maitland himself thought, what he was saying had come first from the lips of higher authority. To Harriet, at least, it was obvious they were just going through the motions.

  “Well now,” the sergeant went on heartily, “you say you have carried on with your normal life, sir, this week? You and your son went up to your chambers in London just as usual?”

  “As to that,” said Amory heavily, “things will never be normal again,” a sentiment which was later recalled by Sergeant Maitland and his constable.

  But it was inevitable that a modicum of normality returned, although the focus of the house had disappeared, its centre fallen apart. No one had realised how Beatrice had managed the smooth running of Charnley, without seemingly raising a finger. It barely existed without her. Mrs Betts carried on the usual housekeeping routine, knowing exactly what had to be done, but it was not the same. They had the identical menu for dinner twice running in one week.

  A few days after Beatrice’s disappearance, Wycombe departed, there being nothing else he could do, and on the same day Rose Jessamy announced that in view of what had happened, she, too, would be packing her bags and leaving.

  “But you can’t!” said Marcus. “You can’t leave the rooms as they are! Mama would want you to finish them. What will she do if she comes back and finds them half-finished?”

  There was a pause. “Marcus, she isn’t going to come back,” Rose told him gently.

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Women don’t get to the stage where they decide to do something as drastic as she has done, and then simply change their minds.”

  “She will at least write, I know she’ll write,” Marcus said desperately.

  “Marcus …”

  “Then will you stay and finish your work – for my sake?”

  She felt a sense of panic, as if she were being bound and tied with cords, like Gulliver in Lilliput. She was becoming far too fond of Marcus; the freedom which she cherished above all else was being threatened, while it was obvious in which direction his feelings were directed. “It was your mother who commissioned me to do the rooms, Marcus. I don’t think your father will have any interest in paying for them now.”

  “Let me speak to him – and if he agrees, will you stay and complete the work?”

  She looked at his unhappy face – he was taking this so much more badly than the girls. She had come to know that, underneath his reserve, Marcus was a passionate young man, and much of his passion was for Charnley, the family, and the sense of continuity meant by it all. Charnley was at the centre of his being, what gave meaning to his life, more so than it would ever mean to Amory. He had revealed throughout this crisis – though doubtless unaware of the fact – a growing responsibility for the house, and the family, an awareness that this was what he was cut out for. More important to him than his career at the Bar would always be his life here, carrying on the old traditions, keeping the house and family going, growing roses. When he had got himself over this first hurdle, this refusal to accept his mother’s betrayal, he would, sooner or later, accept this himself. Where this left her, she preferred not to think too deeply about.

  “Very well,” she said, more gently than was usual with her, “if he agrees, I will finish what I started.”

  Amory made no bones about it. “But of course Miss Jessamy must carry on until it’s done. She needs the money, and we must fulfil our obligations.”

  The weeks went by, and Amory withdrew more and more into himself, and Vita lost so much weight that none of her dresses fitted properly But after Beatrice’s portrait had been removed from the drawing room, the John Singer Sargent, in which she wore a deep blue velvet dress that echoed the blue of her eyes and caught the translucency of her skin (and perhaps, it could be discerned now, a certain reticence in her eyes), Amory began to look a little better. August came, but he declined an invitation to shoot grouse in Scotland, and another for a partridge-shoot in September. But when October arrived, he announced that he might as well go along to Stoke Wycombe for the pheasants, and an
audible sigh of relief went through the house. He went down to the gun room the evening before his departure to inspect and choose the guns he was to take with him, and was there for some time before the single shot was heard.

  An accident, while cleaning the barrel, was the conclusion the police came to. It could not be anything else, for he had made arrangements to leave the following day for his friend Lord Wycombe’s shooting party, and he had left no note. He had been in slightly better spirits of late, and had obviously begun to accept the disappearance of his wife. But to anyone who knew Amory, acceptance of Beatrice’s defection was not a possibility. As for an accident, it was unthinkable. No one could more rigidly have adhered to the rules of gun-cleaning than he. To play about with a loaded gun was as foreign to his nature as to forget to shave or clean his teeth each morning.

  For the next few weeks Marcus, the new heir to Charnley, was closeted with his father’s men of affairs: solicitors, bankers, brokers. Finally they went away and he called his three sisters into the library. He, too, had lost weight, and his height made him look gaunt. His face was careworn with responsibility. He wasted no time in coming to the point.

  “I have decided to sell Charnley”

  No one answered him. Three black-clad mourning figures sat before him, speechless. Three pairs of female eyes gazed at him with blank incomprehension. Amory’s marble clock on the mantel struck six, in a tired sort of way. No one had remembered to wind it up this week, and it was running down. The sound died away, and still no one spoke. It was as though the enormity of what Marcus had said had struck them all dumb.

  “I have no choice!” he shouted angrily at them, at last. “There is no m-money. Not a penny! Have you any idea what it costs to keep a great place like this going? Even if I were to sell the furniture and keep it empty, it would still eat money – leaking roofs don’t repair themselves! Dry rot doesn’t simply go away! How much money is needed to pay the staff their wages, do you think? Do you realise we employ forty-five people in all?”