I laugh. “How can you say that, when you know the amount of paper and ink expended by your own father! He almost never sat down unless he had a pen in his hand.”
Kitty smiles. “Sometimes I thought he preferred writing to speaking. Do you remember how he’d write notes to us every day, and leave them in the nursery or on the dining table, or tucked into our apron pockets or Bessie’s gloves? Silly things, you know, riddles and poems. And then he’d pretend he had nothing at all to do with them. What, write you a poem about Miss Penelope Prattle who couldn’t hold her tongue even if her life depended on it? I have better things to do! But read it to me, pray, as I have pretensions to being a writer, and am not too proud to pick up a point or two from one who has clearly got to the heart of the matter! And he’d make me read it to him, and he’d listen and laugh as heartily as if he’d never heard it before, so that sometimes I wondered if he had really not written it, after all—even though the evidence of his handwriting was there in front of me.”
“He could always keep a good straight face,” O’Rourke adds with a laugh.
“And every other kind of face,” Kitty retorts, remembering suddenly that she is supposed to hate her father. “Especially the one that has two sides.”
She won’t let go. Nor will I. “You know I won’t have that, Kitty. Your father was not a hypocrite.”
“So what are we to make of his relationship with a certain person in the theatrical profession—if not the oldest one?”
“Kitty!” Her language betrays Augustus’s influence, as ever.
She ignores me. “You are hypocrites, too, if you cannot admit that my father—my wonderful father, the great family man—kept a mistress half his age for more than ten years. And that he went into paroxysms of rage if you so much as referred to her!”
We are silent. Kitty has gone red. O’Rourke looks uncomfortable. His wheezing is obvious when he speaks: “I think, Kitty, you should have more respect for your mother than to say such things.”
“My mother is not a fool. She knows the truth.”
“Oh, my dear little Kittiwake!” He shakes his head at her again. “You have always been a stickler for ‘The Truth.’ But the Truth has many shades, you know. You’ll learn that as you progress through life.”
The color is high on her cheeks. “So it was right for him to do that, was it? It was right for him to cast out Mama and never speak to her again? It was right for him to take up with an actress, and yet forbid me to practice the profession myself?”
“No, it was far from right. But we don’t know all the facts, do we?”
“We know enough!” She gets up and starts to march around the room, as is her wont. As I watch her quick, nervous pacing, I cannot help thinking of Alfred, his energetic step, and the way he acted out the story of Death’s Dancing Boots, throwing himself about the house like a madman with such a look of mortal dread on his face that it was hard to believe he was not in earnest. He’d rush out of the house and accost complete strangers, beseeching them to take off the boots, for mercy’s sake, while keeping up the manic jig. One day, in his enthusiasm, he almost fell down the area steps, which brought the notion of death too close for comfort. But I remember that of all the children Kitty was the one who was always the most horrified and absorbed, the one who would try to follow and hold his coat-tails: Let me help you, Papa. Let me help!
“On the contrary, Kitty,” I say, “None of us really knows the Truth.”
“He knows.” She flashes her eyes at O’Rourke. “Don’t tell me my father never confided in his best friend? Men talk to men, don’t they? About their conquests? About their whores?”
O’Rourke flinches at the word, but answers her manfully. “Not in this case, I assure you. You use that word of her, but all I know is that she was a young actress. And that she had a mother who was also an actress—”
“I know all that! And I know about the house he gave them, and the presents. And the money he has left in his will. And I know that she simpered about the room with Mr. Golding all agog, while her mother had the gall to call me Miss Kitty!” She stares at us angrily.
“If you know all that, what exactly is it that you wish to know further?” O’Rourke is very busy with the fire tongs now, covering his agitation.
“I don’t wish to know anything; I’m disgusted with the whole thing! But she exists, doesn’t she? He made Mama leave our home because of her! He embroiled us all in dreadful scandal to protect her! But however badly he behaved, he managed to end up as the virtuous one. That is why he was two-faced! Why am I the only one to acknowledge that?”
O’Rourke and I are silent, but at that moment Wilson comes in to say that lunch is all laid up, and that she supposes we’ll be wanting the oysters first. So we leave the vexed topic of Miss Ricketts and adjourn to the dining room, where a bottle of Hockheim sits proudly in the middle of the table, and two dozen oysters lie opened on a platter.
“This is capital,” says O’Rourke, with emphasis. He pours wine into our glasses. “I have not lunched with you for such a long time, Dodo—and I have not had oysters for a good while, either!”
“I’m not surprised,” I say, “after that time at Wellard Street.”
“To be sure!” We both start to laugh at the recollection.
“What’s so amusing?” Kitty slides an oyster down her throat and munches on some bread as if she is famished.
I laugh again. “Well, when your father and I were first married, Michael decided to give us a present—”
“In recompense for all the hospitality I’d had at your parents’ hands—”
“So he bought several quarts of oysters—”
“All very alive and best quality, I was assured—”
“And brought them back and presented them to us still in their box.”
“And were they not good?” Kitty looks up from her own oyster.
O’Rourke and I laugh again: “We shall never know!”
Kitty looks perplexed.
“They had not been opened,” I tell her. “And between the three of us and the people upstairs and the people downstairs, and even our landlady herself, there was no such thing as an oyster knife to be had late on a Tuesday night.”
“Alfred would not be defeated, of course,” says O’Rourke. “He attacked the shells with a kitchen knife, then a bread knife, and then a pocketknife—”
“And then the fruit knives!”
“And the teaspoons! And then, in desperation, he set about them with the poker and the fire tongs. I never saw anything so funny—until the poor fellow’s hands were so gashed he had to retire from the fray.”
“So we had to sit and eat our bread and butter while looking at the oysters and using our imagination, which, as Alfred said, was the best sauce in the world.”
“He used that scene in Edward Cleverly.” Kitty pours herself more wine.
“Well, why shouldn’t he? It was very comical.”
“Everything was grist to his mill, wasn’t it? Even us—his children. Even his wife.”
“I am tired of your complaining, Kitty. This was meant to be a congenial luncheon. I insist we only talk of pleasant things.”
“As usual,” I hear Kitty mutter under her breath. She looks so mutinous that I wonder why I have gone to so much trouble on her behalf. But after lunch I tell her I have a note for her to take back to her husband.
She eyes me sharply. “For Augustus? Is it about the will?”
“In a way,” I say, sitting down at the little writing desk.
“He hasn’t asked you for money, Mama?”
“No, he has not.” That is true at any rate. I write briefly; I am a slow writer, although very neat.
Dear Augustus,
Sissy needs some proof of the situation. Please furnish documents to Mr. Golding as soon as you can and there may be hope. I can do no more, Dorothea Gibson.
I fold and seal it, then hand it to her. Kitty looks at it as if it’s about to burst into flame. “
What’s this all about? Is that why you went to see Sissy?”
“I can’t say.”
“I shall speak to Augustus directly I get home.” She crams her hat on and fixes it with a vicious pin. “You mistake my nature if you wish to conceal things from me.”
“Yes, do speak to him, dearest. That is by far the best thing.” It’s not Augustus’s usual practice to be at home in the afternoons, but I imagine with no credit at the tables, and no welcome at his club, he may well be there. Kitty will get “the Truth” out of him, I’m sure. And I shall be relieved of this awkward third-party position.
20
WHEN KITTY HAS GONE, IN A WHIRL OF BEADS AND trailing pieces, and with her characteristic look of determination, O’Rourke and I sit down by the fire once more.
“So what made you call on Sissy?” He looks at me with eyebrows raised. “I suppose it was Augustus.”
“Yes. He needs money. Did you know?”
“It’s common knowledge, I’m afraid. The man’s been living on air for months. Everyone’s after his blood: Jews, bailiffs, everyone.”
“Why did you not tell me?”
“What could you have done?”
“What I have done—spoken to Sissy.”
“I hardly thought you would do that. You once said, if I recall, that you’d like to put her in a barrel of tar and pitch her out in the China Sea.” He smiles. “I was quite entertained at the thought.”
I am surprised I put voice to such a desire, even though I thought such things all the time. “Sissy wasn’t to blame for everything,” I say.
“Maybe not. But she had a choice, and she chose to humiliate you—staying on with Alfred while you were sent packing like an unsatisfactory servant!”
That was how I had felt, certainly; there was no ceremony at all about my departure. But if Sissy had not stayed, what then? “It wasn’t easy for her to brave it out,” I say grudgingly, “when all the so-called friends who had once been so glad to drink his wine and eat his food now seemed only too eager to believe the worst of him—including, it would seem, my own mother.” I take a deep breath. “It is a terrible thing to admit, Michael, but the more I think of it, the more I believe Mama may have been at the bottom of those dreadful rumors.”
“Surely not. Not about her own daughter.” O’Rourke frowns in disbelief.
“But you see, she hardly regarded Sissy or me as her daughters by then. We’d both followed the primrose path to perdition as far as she was concerned. I honestly don’t think she minded if our names were dragged through the mud, as long as some of it stuck to Alfred.”
“But what would she have gained from such slander?”
“Gained? I don’t know. Maybe she thought she was avenging Alice—though God knows Alice never needed to be avenged. Maybe she simply hated Alfred for being there at the end, the last person to look at her, the last person to hold her in his arms.”
“But why should she hate him so badly for that?”
“I don’t know. She felt deceived, I think. Alfred had always been a great favorite with her. She’d even forgiven him for marrying me before our engagement was out. But the moment Alice died, it seemed as though everything she had once liked about him, she now deplored. The day of Alice’s funeral, when he was beside himself with grief, she looked at him as if she would have struck him dead upon the spot. And after that she took every opportunity to imply that he was some kind of Bluebeard. It would have been laughable had it not caused such constraint between us. Every visit I made to Chiswick was purgatorial; and if Alfred were ever in my company, she would refer to him in the third person: Would your husband like tea? Will your husband kindly pass the cake?”
“Oh dear, I never knew it was so bad.” O’Rourke purses his lips. “So when Sissy defected to the other side—”
“—she wouldn’t speak to either of us. But Papa died barely a year afterwards, and she was left alone. I did try to repair matters then. I asked Alfred if she could come to live with us, and he said she could if she were so minded—after all, my house is known as the General Infirmary. But she didn’t seem to want reconciliation. She spurned Alfred’s olive branch and wrote saying that she had heard that he was gambling and drinking, and—well, making all sorts of accusations that were not true. I wrote quite sharply to her. I told her that some of his friends were disreputable, but that Alfred had no time to indulge himself in vices, even if he had wanted to. I told her his nose was forever to the grindstone, and what leisure he had was always put at other people’s disposal. I said it was disgraceful of her to impute otherwise.”
“And did she admit she was wrong?”
“Not at all. She said she had her information from ‘the most reliable sources.’ She said it was I who was blind to Alfred’s real character, and I would come to rue the day I’d married him. Of course, when our separation occurred, she thought herself vindicated. ‘I suppose it is some young actress,’ she wrote. ‘And he with his high-and-mighty attitude about self-sacrifice and family love.’”
He looks surprised. “Did she know, then? About Miss Ricketts, I mean?”
“She can’t have done; after all, you know how little I knew myself. But I’d once foolishly confessed my jealousy of his theatrical ladies. And as he’d been performing Lord Royston while I’d been conveniently away in Leamington, she was putting two and two together. And was not so wrong, as it turned out.”
“But to spread rumors about him and Sissy! Surely that is spiteful beyond belief.” O’Rourke takes out his handkerchief and wipes his forehead in an agitated fashion. “Did she care nothing for your feelings?”
“On the contrary, she reveled in the way fate had proved her point, called me her ‘poor dear girl’ and invited me to live with her and Cousin George. But I had to be her ally, and plot against Alfred; telling the world how he had neglected me and favored other women. ‘You could write a piece for the Lounger,’ she said. ‘You could tell your own side of the story. That would teach him!’ But I knew enough about Montague Miles to warn me of the dangers of engaging with the gossip writers. I didn’t want that. Nor did I want to live in Coventry, seeing George’s children day after day and knowing I could never see mine. So I said no—and she seemed to wash her hands of me from that moment.” I shrug. “So there I was, with an implacable husband and an implacable mother, too. And a sister who took my husband’s part, and lawyers who were pressing me every minute of the day. And friends who seemed to have melted away like dew. Except you, of course, Michael! You kept me sane, I think—if I ever was.”
“You were as sane as anyone could have been. And I cannot take any credit for it. I should have been more alert to the Ricketts business.” He turns to me, and grasps me with both of his cold, dry hands. “You know, don’t you, that I fought for you afterwards? I did everything I could. I begged, I implored—I practically lay down on the floor in front of him. But he gave me that iron look and asked me how I, a single man, could presume to lecture him, a man of twenty years’ experience? In spite of the fact that his wife was alive and mine was long dead and our child within her, he still maintained that I was in some ways the happier man because the ‘gilt of romance’ had never been rubbed off my particular piece of gingerbread by the ‘slow attrition of dispute and disagreement.’ ‘How can you know the anguish of those locked for years in a loveless union?’ he asked me.”
“He can’t have believed that, though, can he? Not loveless. Not for years.”
He looks sadly at me: “On the contrary, Dodo, I am sure he was utterly convinced of it. He’d worked himself up to a perfect passion on the subject, and nothing I could say, nothing I could remind him of, would make him think otherwise. Instead he paced up and down the carpet, accusing me of adding to his woes. And when I wouldn’t speak ill of you, he ordered me out of the house, and went in search of people whose views would be more congenial—sycophants, hangers-on, lawyers. People who didn’t really understand him, who didn’t know what such a public scandal would do to hi
m—or you.” O’Rourke takes my hand again. His grasp is weak, his fingers almost bloodless. “Dodo, believe me, you were only a little cog in the great machine of unhappiness that he was caught up in. As far as he was concerned, it was the Whole World that was against him and he—poor little eight-year-old Edward Cleverly—was fighting the Whole World.”
“But why say we had a loveless union?” I feel the tears prick at my eyelids. “I know we were the most wretched of couples at the end. But to say that we’d never been happy after all the loving things he said to me; after all the letters he wrote—that was a simple lie.”
O’Rourke makes a wry mouth. “Oh, have you forgotten that Alfred never told a lie? If facts didn’t suit him, he simply brought his mind to bear upon them, and they miraculously took on different form—so different that he could raise his hand and swear black was white in utmost sincerity.”
O’Rourke is right; once an opinion formed in Alfred’s mind, it became to him as inviolable as Scripture. I think of Alice and the ring she never gave him. And I see his busy pen striking swiftly through all the pages of our past, crossing out affection and happiness, and writing in misery, incompatibility, disharmony instead. “He reinvented our lives, didn’t he?”
He laughs dispiritedly. “You could say it was his most accomplished piece of fiction.”
“But why did he have to go to such lengths?” I burst out. “Couldn’t he be like other men and admit that he’d got tired of his old wife and wanted somebody younger, fresher, more to his taste?”
“My dear woman, can you see him admitting that—even to himself? Alfred, the exemplary father? Alfred, the great advocate of family life? No, it had to be you, Dodo. It had to be your character that was at fault. You had to be sullied and vilified so he could be excused—and not only excused but positively praised for his forbearance.” He bangs his fist on his knee and starts to wheeze. “By God, my blood boils when I think of it. I wonder I was ever able to speak to him again.”
I rise and put my arm around him. “Oh, take care, Michael. Don’t get so agitated. It’s not good for your health.”
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