Gentlemen and Players

by Frances Vernon

  When she got back to the Rectory she started thinking again about Sarah and Sophie. She was sharp with her household that day, and was obliged to go early to bed and look after a head which was aching with care.

  *

  ‘I think it’s quite monstrous. Why should I be made responsible for her?’

  Edwin said nothing. Sophia was seated at her bureau, her back held very straight, and he was looking at the back of her head. ‘Damn Father,’ she said.

  ‘My love, won’t you enjoy having a little responsibility? Entertaining Sarah might give you something to do. You know that you don’t have enough to occupy your mind.’

  ‘Edwin, don’t tell me you’re in favour of this idiotic plan!’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘I will not have her here permanently.’ She turned round, and looked at him as though she feared that he was going to force her. ‘It’s all very well for you to talk, Edwin. You’re only in in the evenings, and of course our new Sarah is delightful in small doses. Such chatter, such cheerfulness, such daring plans. I have to listen to her all day and every day. I’ve had a whole week of it. I do have other things to do, you know. She won’t understand that, she’s too self-centred, she has no responsibilities herself.’

  He thought for a while and then smiled. ‘Very well, Sophia, I’ll help you to get your own way. Not that I have a great deal of respect for your responsibilities, which consist at the moment of ordering the dinner and dusting the chimneypiece.’

  ‘Rubbish, Edwin. I have letters to write, and the books to do, and I have to take Miss Matty for walks twice a day.’ Miss Matty, the springer spaniel, wagged her tail and Sophia made kissing noises at her.

  ‘You don’t have enough to do, all the same. Quite what you ought to do, my love, I confess I’m not sure, but I do see that as Sarah is in the same situation your being constantly together is not a very good idea. You are not – er – calm and nurturing at the moment, Sophia, and Sarah needs a calming influence.’

  Sophia was about to be angry. Then she jumped up and said, ‘Oh my love, your nasty little lecture has backfired. That’s a very good argument for adopting Susan’s plan.’

  ‘So it is. Now don’t tower over me and crow. There’s a suspicion I have that I want to mention.’

  ‘Oh, Edwin.’

  ‘Yes, my love. I think you are affronted because your father’s implication – and they all acknowledge it – is that Sarah’s disgrace will be more easily concealed – at least more easily forgoten by the world – if she stays in obscurity, that is, with us. We are obscure, Sophia.’

  ‘Don’t speechify, Edwin.’

  ‘Quite right, I was being pompous. But I’m going to say this. You are now hankering for your former station in life. Having come down in the world is beginning to bore you. No, let me finish,’ he said, pleased. ‘You knew when you married me that you were leaving fashionable society. You took enormous delight in the fact, didn’t you, and it did worry me a little at the time. Well, you’ve tried seeking out your old acquaintances, and they cut you. Sophia, I’m sorry to hurt you, but they’ll do it again. Only very close friends will continue to know you.’

  ‘I have none,’ said Sophia, twisting away again. ‘I never had any and I can’t make new ones.’

  ‘You do and you can, but you find it difficult, I know, my love. In the meantime, until you are quite settled, I must be everything to you, mustn’t I?’ He spoke very softly and watched a tear swell in her right eye, for she had turned back to him.

  Sophia sniffed. ‘Yes, you’re right, aren’t you? Edwin, will you always forestall quarrels by guessing my thoughts?’

  ‘Yes, always, Sophia. I deal very well with you really, don’t I?’ She giggled. ‘You’re happy really, aren’t you? Your discontent is superficial, I’m sure. Oh, Sophia.’ He reached up and smoothed her hair. ‘I wish I could give you everything you want, really I do. I wish I could grant every little wish of yours, my queen, and I do regret deeply that I can’t.’ She gazed, and part of her wanted to giggle again. ‘Yes, my love, I’m being very romantic. Indeed, you are queen of my heart: just like in a Mudie novel. What do you want, Sophia? Titles and orders?’ He grinned, shaking her hands up and down.

  ‘You naughty man. I just wish at the moment that Susan would come and spirit Sarah away to her Rectory. You know how very fond she is of looking after people. Oh, dear. Oh, dear.’

  They kissed.

  At Lynmore Rectory Susan had just remembered that Sarah was the mother of three small, living children whom she had left with their nurses at the house in Curzon Street. No one else had mentioned them and Susan wondered what people would say if she brought the subject up.

  CHAPTER 15

  LOVE

  ‘My very dear sister Susan,’ began Sarah, and then scribbled at the top, ‘Bryanston Square, March the Something, 1888.’

  ‘Never could I or anyone else truly express it but I must write of my happiness, for you do not understand and I doubt you ever will.

  ‘It seems to be both a thousand years ago and but yesterday that I left the man who was my husband.’ Sarah was not divorced. ‘Each day I grow not older but younger. Each day, each night, each daydream, each dream, makes of me more of a new woman. Each morning I watch the sunrise over the rooftops, that exquisite flush of coral and carmine and cream, I feel my heart rise and rise into my head, I think: there is a whole day before me, and beyond that a night, and more days and more nights for so many, many years. Who can tell what will happen: and yet I know that the worst is over for ever. I no longer bubble with joy and laughter all day, Susan, but my happiness is deeper now, deeper and calmer. I am quiet and content as I have never been before, and I think that I glow. It is only to you, dear sister, that I write thus, I no longer talk of it with Sophia and Edwin. Can you decide whether happiness is greater, shared, or locked in one’s heart? Have you ever been truly happy, Susan?

  ‘Never before have I noticed what is around me. Until this year I could hardly have told you when it is the daffodils flower: now I sit among them in Hyde Park, all alone quietly, looking at their frail green golden trumpets and stroking their leaves which are damp with the spring which is welling in the earth. Wordsworth could do them no justice.

  ‘I watch the sunset as well as the sunrise. Have you ever really watched one, Susan, so busy as you always are with your garden and your stillroom and your husband? It is deeper than sunrise, there are lavenders and lilacs and indigos in it, gradually they creep over the rose and the red. You will think me odd, I know, that I think of such things in London, where they are contrasted with the hard cold streets, the fog and the grey. It is the contrast that I love, so odd am I: how much more marvellous are sunset and sunrise and daffodils against this setting! They are more lovely here than in the park at Lynmore. For London itself is lovely in its way: I love the streets, the clatter and the colour of mankind against the rows of dreary houses. And in each house there is a life. Is it not a wondrous thought?

  ‘Susan, I will tell you how terrible was my marriage. I married because I was a romantic and foolish and strong-minded young girl. I believed in love, love not of the world, of gaiety and freedom and peace, but in love of a man, and a husband at that. Now I know that there is only lovemaking, from which delicious act one detaches the mind and the heart. One does not love, there is no such thing as love. Now I am thirty-two, when I believed myself to be in love I was nineteen. I married at twenty-one, and for a year I continued to live with my idea of love. Oh, he was kind in those days, Susan, before my money was spent. My thirty thousand pounds! How, how I wish I had been born in poverty, born, let us say, to a man possessed of no more than a thousand a year, a fair competence only. What I would have been saved from, Susan!’ (Henry Templecombe had a thousand a year of his own.) ‘Never, I believe, have I told anyone that he used to beat me. Rarely, it is true, and I was too frail always in those days to be beaten very harshly even by such a man as he, but the mental pain, Susan! I spoke not a
word, not even to Edwin. I lay in silence and darkness. I said nothing to my husband if I could help it, I evaded him, frightened as I was, never did I provoke him to attack me, but attack me he did. He called me heartless and inhuman because with difficulty, living in those days in very correct circles as a lady of fashion, I feigned well-bred indifference to him and never did I show that his cruelty hurt me, never did I cringe, Susan. Such was his perversity that to this he objected. Such was mine that in agony I endured his treatment for nine years. Heartless and inhuman! Little could he have ever guessed, that I was possessed of a heart overflowing, which was shrivelling, losing its natural damp, shrivelling and dying like the sweet trumpet of a daffodil when May comes in. Now again it overflows, but with love for no man, only for the world, for my quiet life apart, my dinners with Sophia and Edwin, my trips to the theatre, my walks in the park. I shall not love men, but I shall enjoy them: Susan, I shall be a courtesan!

  ‘I am your very loving sister, Sarah Agnes.

  ‘P.S. I am using my middle name now. Agnes means a lamb: a little part of me is lamb-like, for I am young, new to the world, until last year I never lived but in a deep dark cave of misery.’

  In August the year before Susan, Sophia, Edwin and Augusta had obtained for Sarah the use of half the house in Bryanston Square, three servants and a lady companion, and she was in addition paid an allowance of six hundred pounds a year. In September she had been settled there, and since she left Sophia’s house she had written almost daily to Susan, always writing in the same vein and sometimes using the same words. Sometimes she told her sister that these thoughts were old, and yet they were still new to them both.

  Sarah read over her letter twice, and decided that tomorrow or the next day she would write about how she was separated from her children and what charming children they had become. Now, she felt lazy, as though she had just eaten a large, rich dinner.

  Sarah took no drugs of any kind now, she slept well and was never in bed in the daytime, she ate plenty of food and went for long walks. Her appearance had changed because of it. She had put on weight, the dark half-circles beneath her eyes had gone, and her thick tight skin was no longer dull yellow and blotched. She was as sallow as the Mona Lisa, her deep-set eyes were almost the same, and so was the near-smile on her face which she had had all her life. She wore her dark, wild hair down now, cut off below the shoulder and held back with a band like Alice in Wonderland’s, so that it framed her face and neck. It suited her very well, for now she was happy and in good health she looker far younger than she was. Every day Sarah saw her reflection in the mirrors which hung in all the rooms at Bryanston Square: when she looked, she knew that she would become an attractive woman, and as she was told by Edwin Sacheverell, the only man she saw regularly, she grew prettier every day.

  *

  ‘Susan, you cannot sit in a train clutching those flowers as though you were a little country child going to visit grandmamma,’ said Octavius, handing her into the governess cart. ‘And I’m sure Sophia won’t appreciate my early tulips. She never took any interest in gardening.’

  ‘She will expect me to bring flowers from my garden, and clutch them in the train,’ said Susan. ‘I’m a simple countrywoman going to visit my London sister, am I not?’

  ‘It might have been worse,’ he said. ‘You might have taken that bloodstained hare from the pantry.’ They had had arguments the day before about her going off to town.

  ‘Much worse,’ said Susan. ‘I thought I would hail a cab outside King’s Cross, holding it up by the ears. Only we had it jugged on Tuesday.’

  He laughed and she squeezed his elbow and told him he would do very well on his own. They did not talk much on the way to the station. Octavius saw her through the turnstile and kissed her goodbye on the forehead.

  It was the second time Susan had gone to London without any family. The first time, her maid had gone with her, but like Sophia she now considered that she did not need a lady’s maid. She put the flowers, wrapped in newspaper, out of sight on the rack above her seat, sat down and began to read Sesame and Lilies. She thought that she must look like a bluestocking. There was no one else in the compartment and, after ten minutes or so, Susan laid down the book and gazed out at the fields jerking by.

  She had not seen Sophia since her marriage to Dr Sacheverell, and she had not seen Sarah since her own wedding. Since Sarah’s removal to Bryanston Square, Sophia had been writing regularly to Susan. Susan had not expected to be invited to Bloomsbury. She wondered whether Sarah would avoid Tavistock Square during her visit, not wishing actually to see her, although Susan did not doubt that she would send letters full of secrets to her there.

  No carriage had been sent to collect her, and when she arrived at King’s Cross it took her some time to find a porter, and for him to find a hansom for her. When she reached Sophia’s house she did not tip the cabby enough and he refused to carry her heavy portmanteaus up the steps. Sophia opened the door to her herself, saying that she had seen her arriving. Susan was not shown upstairs at once, but taken into the drawing room and offered a little madeira. She asked for barley water, and Sophia drank madeira, standing in front of the fireplace, talking. The drawing room was untidy, and Susan’s grey ulster and small squashed-looking hat were flung over an armchair. Although it was only April there was no fire, and the room was cold. Susan sipped her barley water and looked round, thinking that there would be wine at luncheon, which would warm her.

  ‘I daresay it’s nice after all these years to come and see it all for yourself,’ said Sophia, and Susan turned her head towards her and saw that she was grinning. ‘You haven’t changed a bit, Susan.’

  ‘I’ve certainly been looking forward to my visit, Sophia. You haven’t changed at all either, dear.’

  ‘Not changed! My dear Susan, I am at last enceinte!’

  They talked all about it.

  Just before luncheon Susan asked to be taken upstairs to wash her face and tidy her hair. Her room was on the second floor, long and narrow with a high ceiling, and it faced the square. She found a bathroom next door and when she had visited it Susan looked about her at the tall windows, the fireless grate, the plain, well-kept old-fashioned furniture and the sombre decoration in dark brown and clean white. It was good to feel homesick after all these years. She had not lain in bed without Octavius since her wedding, she thought, as she let her eye fall on the high, single bed; and there was surely not a bright colour or a subtle colour in the house.

  At luncheon Sophia gave her the steaming heavy food which Augusta favoured. She said that Edwin was a great gourmet and did not allow it as a regular thing.

  Susan had never met Edwin Sacheverell. He came in just before dinner, went straight towards Susan, called her the mysterious third sister, and kissed her hand with both merry eyes on Sophia. Susan flushed. She knew, although he had not said so, that he had been longing to meet her. She must be very different from his expectation, but he would still tease Sophia’s Mrs Proudie, because he adored his wife.

  The food at dinner was very good, except for the pudding, which Sophia had made that afternoon. They laughed about her attempts at cookery, until Susan said that perhaps she ought to try her hand at plain food. Sophia laughed and agreed with her, but said that there would be no amusement in it, and Susan agreed with that.

  ‘Domesticity,’ said Edwin. ‘Did Sophia tell you, Mrs Potter, that there are a few people coming to dine tomorrow? Sarah’s coming.’

  ‘No, she didn’t tell me, Dr Sacheverell. Neither did Sarah.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Not since my wedding, and that’s three years ago.’

  ‘Be prepared for a surprise, Mrs Potter. Our little Sarah is turning into a beauty.’

  ‘Nonsense, Edwin,’ said Sophia.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is really, but still.’

  They knew that Susan had heard from Sarah but they did not want to discuss her further.

  *

  Sar
ah arrived fifteen minutes early as the Sacheverells had said she would. Susan was quite flustered at the sight of her, and showed it. She admired her loose hair, its colour and curl, its ivory band and its practical length. She thought that Sarah, whose allowance was not large, might be running up debts at the dressmakers’. She admired her taste: Sarah’s frock was very pale pink, with a wide, heart-shaped neckline, not over-decorated. She was not tall enough to wear the fashionable long-waisted slightly convex bodice which Sophia had, and she wore instead a higher, gently curving waist. Her face was painted, as it had been when Susan last saw her, but very subtly.

  Sarah kissed Susan on both cheeks and hugged her hands.

  ‘I don’t usually bother about clothes, you know, there is so much else to think about in this world, isn’t there? Your gown is quaint, Susan, it’s quite charming. But when I take trouble, I do take trouble.’

  ‘If you are to become a proper demi-mondaine, Sarah, you must indeed take trouble, all the time,’ said Edwin, waving a finger at her. ‘You never know when your clients might call.’

  ‘Oh, Edwin. Yes, you are quite right. But rest assured that I shall never wear black or grey or lilac ever again. Did you know, I wore little else in the days when I was cohabiting with Templecombe? I say cohabiting because, is marriage not supposed to be a sacrament of love, although to be sure there’s no such thing, and therefore, is not a loveless marriage null and void? He never loved me.’

  Sophia, who was sitting very close to the fire, taking no care to ensure that she did not become flushed, said to Susan, who was sitting behind the firescreen opposite her, ‘Don’t worry, Susan, she never talks like this in front of other people.’