At about that time Sarah attempted suicide, and was taken to live with the Sacheverells. She was quiet and irritable and she kept much to herself, and did not talk about her suicide attempt, or about Gabriel Morrison. Sophia talked to her and advised her, briskly and flirtatiously, to take another very young man as a lover, which she thought would be a possibility for Sarah. She did not think that such a woman as her sister would ever find a husband like Edwin.
Sophia Sacheverell lived happily ever after.
CHAPTER 20
SUSAN POTTER
Sentimental thoughts made Octavius angry. He was thinking them because that day’s weather had suddenly reminded him of his honeymoon in Strasbourg, nine years before. His garden had been spoilt by late frosts, but today it seemed fine and when the May sun came through the patchy clouds the light was strong, and there was warmth when the sharp breeze suddenly lowered. The lawn was wet and his feet were damp and cold, because he had gone out in light shoes. He was slightly afraid of catching a chill, and Susan would say that he would catch one, so he went indoors and changed his shoes and socks.
He heard Susan chanting the tally of the linen next door. Octavius curbed his irritation.
‘Susan,’ he said, going into the linen cupboard.
‘Yes, my dear?’ She did not carry on counting the linen, she would not do that, but she made a note in her laundry book and turned round to face him. He looked down.
‘I thought, you know, that we might all go on holiday this year.’
‘We haven’t been on holiday for years, have we?’
‘No. ’89, I think it was.’ He smiled a little.
‘No? Well, where were you thinking of?’
‘Some quiet place – Lyme Regis?’
‘Wouldn’t the children find it dull?’
‘Possibly. They could bathe, I suppose. They enjoyed it last time.’
‘I remember Charlotte saying it was too dreary for words.’
‘Somewhere gayer, then. What is a gayer place, Susan? Bournemouth? Ramsgate?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t know, Octavius,’ said Susan, laughing.
‘Perhaps we could even go to Deauville or somewhere like that. I believe Sophie and her husband went to Trouville.’
‘Yes, I think they did.’ She made another note in the little book.
‘You don’t want to go on holiday, do you, Susan?’
‘Well, my dear, I do think that family holidays are a great nonsense. No one really enjoys them, they are a duty not a pleasure, like so many pleasures. You don’t really want to go either, Octavius,’ she added.
After a moment Octavius said, ‘That’s the sort of cheap cynicism I would expect of your sister.’
‘I think it’s the spirit of the decade, Octavius. What Charlotte so proudly calls fin de siècle.’ She smiled. ‘I hope I haven’t offended you.’
‘Oh, no, of course not. Do you want to carry on with the linen?’
‘Well, yes, because you see it must be packed by eleven, and one of the damask tablecloths has gone astray.’
He left her.
Susan finished organizing the laundry and then went to visit a sick parishioner. At luncheon she talked to her nieces, who were old enough now to lunch downstairs. She visited her children in the nursery afterwards, then went to call on the wife of the Rural Dean. In the late afternoon she dusted the drawing room, arranged some flowers, and mended the lace on one of her evening dresses. Octavius spent the day in his study, rewriting a couple of paragraphs in the first chapter of his Life of Cardinal Pole. He saw Susan again just before dinner and she told him that the hassocks in the church would have to be replaced, and that Martin Caldicott, the Rural Dean, was going to complain about the altar reredos, which was very ornamental. She would never concern him with practical details about the Rectory or the parish, only about the church.
‘Did Mrs Caldicott tell you so?’
‘Not in so many words, naturally, but so I gathered,’ said Susan, who had been told so by Mr Caldicott. He had not been serious.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ he said, and she looked up from her embroidery. ‘Indeed?’
‘The reredos was erected three years ago, Susan, and I haven’t yet been imprisoned for ritualism. Nor has Caldicott even gone whining to the bishop.’
‘You’re very irritable, my dear,’ said Susan in a low, smooth voice. She always spoke cheerfully when he was feeling irritable, but now she was wondering passionately if he knew that only a few months ago she had admitted to a dear fondness for Martin Caldicott.
He turned towards her. ‘I am not irritable,’ he said, instead of, ‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ She said nothing. Her hands were shaking very slightly. Looking into the fire Octavius shouted, ‘How dare you presume to lecture me on the rights and wrongs of – of my practices! My ecclesiastical practices!’ He had just remembered that they had scarcely mentioned anything to do with religion since Susan had confided her latitudinarian leanings in February, 1884. Mr Caldicott shared them with her.
‘You know that it’s unreasonable to say that,’ said Susan in her low voice, trying to embroider. ‘Why do you want to quarrel, Octavius?’
‘I do not want to quarrel!’
‘What do you want, then?’
He turned round. ‘You’re always so damned reasonable, aren’t you, Susan?’ he said, springing up and standing before the fire. ‘Don’t you have any passions at all?’
‘How should I know?’ said Susan, quivering.
‘That remark is staggering, absolutely staggering.’
Susan knew this. ‘And so damned typical, I suppose.’ She rarely swore. A tear slipped down her plump cheek, though she did not want a scene of any kind. Octavius saw it.
‘Susan,’ he said gently, and came towards her. When he knew she was worried or upset he still, always, comforted her by touching her.
‘No,’ she said, which she never had. He withdrew.
‘Have you any idea what it’s like to be married to you?’ he said in a passionless voice.
‘Are you now going to accuse me of – of rejecting your advances?’ said Susan, getting to her feet.
‘You can be very melodramatic sometimes, Susan.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that,’ she said. ‘I know what it is like to be married to me, thank you very much. I have been an excellent wife to you. I have never interfered with your province, never, I have kept your house well, borne your children and listened to your endless petty grumbling without a word of complaint.’
‘You simper and pat me on the head as though I were a child!’ said Octavius, because it was true.
‘One of the great feminine clichés, Octavius, is that men are just children, and I abide by that, I’m afraid.’ She sat down again and folded her hands in her lap. ‘The truth is that I have spoilt you disgracefully.’ She sat quite still, and spoke angrily. ‘I think, dear, that you ought to have tried marriage with Sophie. We wouldn’t be talking like this if you had, let me tell you.’
‘No, I would be married to Sophie! I wish I had married Sophie!’
She lost some colour. They had not mentioned Sophie in connection with Octavius since the early days of their courtship. ‘You know that’s not true. You are just saying that to hurt me. I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Octavius. You want me to be a true companion to you, all of a sudden. You want me to listen to you, and talk to you, and do things with you, and – be intimate generally. Don’t you remember that when we first married it was I who wanted that? And you’ve never, never let me talk about my problems with you, we’ve never talked about anything of importance, and it was you who chose that we shouldn’t do so. Now you’ve changed your mind but I’m afraid I’m too old to change my habits, although I’m very fond of you.’ She paused. ‘And you know, to return to the previous subject, that Sophie would have turned you down in any case.’
He saw her bite her lip and blink, and took a stride towards her.
‘Sophie!’ Susan screamed. �
�You don’t know anything about Sophie and the dance she leads Edwin Sacheverell! She has the sweetest husband in the whole world, and he adores her, and she has cuckolded him! Yes, cuckolded him, Octavius!’ she gasped. She was not quite sure yet that this was true.
‘If that is true, Susan, I don’t think it’s very becoming for you to tell me,’ said Octavius, standing still.
She walked towards the door, and shut it behind her. Then it opened again and she looked upon Octavius’s flushed face. He had maintained his position in front of the fire. ‘Do you think your pomposities affect me?’ she said, and left the room once more.
*
Had she not gone back into the room to speak like her precocious niece, Charlotte Templecombe, Susan would have apologised, and she would not have dined opposite Octavius. During dinner they both spoke cheerfully for about a third of the meal, and afterwards, Octavius apologised for saying that he wished he had married Sophie. Susan flushed when he mentioned it, and neither of them referred to her conduct or, at any greater length, to his. Both wondered, after dinner, whether they would make love that night, as they usually did on difficult days when they had not spoken to or about each other. Each was relieved because they did not, but patted each other’s shoulders and brushed cheeks before rolling over in bed. Susan knew that they would always share a bed and be glad to do so.
The next day, Susan, who had little to do, received a letter from Thomas. Considering it and answering it filled up her morning. Thomas, who was now up at Christchurch, Oxford, was asking her to lend him three hundred pounds.
‘My dear Thomas,’ wrote Susan at length. ‘How nice it was to hear from you, after all this time. I do hope that you will be spending some of the Long Vacation at home, for we all missed you at Easter.
‘And now you will want to get down to business, as they say. How difficult it is for me to talk about this without moralising, Thomas! but I will not and cannot lend you three hundred pounds. You know (you have had the goodness to point it out yourself) that you have borrowed money from me twice before. I will not say that you were very tardy in repaying me the first time, and I admit that you have borrowed larger sums before now, yet I do not think these circumstances would justify my lending you money yet again.
‘You will say, why did I lend you five hundred last year, if I am now going to be squeamish? You will be more irritated by my refusing now, than you would have been by my refusing then. I must give you my reasons. The first time, Thomas, it was your bills that you could not pay – not only your “battles” (is that the word?) but tradesmen’s bills, and so forth. Now everybody who is at all sensible expects a young man to spend a trifle wildly when he first goes up to University, so I helped you out of trouble because your parents would undoubtedly have “kicked up a dust”. On the second occasion (I hope all this is not causing you pain, Thomas) it was the first time you had lost money at cards (or was it on a horse? I can’t remember). I lent you the money because I knew that you had been punished enough by the fear that you would be quite unable to pay and would be obliged to go to Father. (He would not, in fact, have told you to go and earn the money somehow, as I remember you feared at the time.)
‘But now, Thomas, you do not say what you want the money for. I presume you are in debt of course, but to whom and for what? Of course your private life is none of my business, but I should like to know what extravagances I would be paying for, if I lent you the money – to put it very baldly, I’m afraid. You are too old to be rescued from your scrapes by a fairy godmother, Thomas. It is time you assumed your own responsibilities: you are in your second year, you will soon be of age, and able to do exactly as you please. I suppose you will have bachelor lodgings in St James’s somewhere, and become a “man about town”, with an eyeglass and a ridiculously high collar. Lucky old you!’
Susan thought that her brother must have been having some trouble with a woman, and was too honest to tell lies to his sister: lies intended to protect her in her middle age from too great a knowledge of the world. So he had explained nothing, only asked for the money. Susan paused, then, looking back, added, ‘Oh, how prim this letter is! I hope you will forgive me for scolding and advising you from my position of superior wisdom, but in matters such as this one must say what one truly thinks. I believe, to digress minutely, that part of my problem is being quite unable to understand how people can get into debt. My mother reared us all in habits of strict economy, and I have learned them (both Sarah and Sophia, as I expect you are now aware, are given to extravagance). I believe that in the future, it will no longer be a social solecism to dread living beyond one’s income!
‘I hope to see you before the vacation. I shall be passing through Oxford in a fortnight’s time, taking Charlotte and Emily to stay with their aunt (Templecombe’s youngest sister, Lady Harriet Fentiman – you must know her) where, I should think, they will meet their unfortunate father – they do not stay with him in London, of course. I wish that some other arrangement might have been found for that poor, lonely little boy – I only hope that when he goes to school he will in some ways be happier. Octavius says boys are more trouble than girls, and would not have him here. We might perhaps discuss your problems at greater length then. I should be very happy to give you luncheon at some nice hotel in Oxford – I love to eat in public places once in a while! And then, perhaps you would not object to showing Charlotte and Emily and me round a few of the principal sights of the city of dreaming spires? – but you must not feel obliged to. Your loving sister, Susan Potter.
P.S. Octavius is right in saying that boys are far more trouble than girls, Thomas!’
After luncheon, Susan went for a long walk, alone, in the park of Lynmore Hall. On her walk she worried somewhat about Charlotte, who was being sent away to school at Cheltenham Ladies’ College in the autumn, and then about the younger children. All her own children were pretty and healthy, particularly her younger daughter Christina Maud, who was two. Charlotte Templecombe was the most beautiful and the most delicate of all the children, and her sister Emily the plainest and most reliable: dumpy and obedient. Her son, Alfred, was to be sent away in September too, to a good school, because although Susan did not believe that boarding school was entirely healthy, it would be bad for him to grow up surrounded by women as had her own brother, James, who had died when he was ten years old. Charlotte was going because she was bored in the schoolroom, and not quite happy at home, and precocious: and because there was no day school within reach of Lynmore. It was quite usual now for girls to be sent away to school, and Susan did not think that it was a good idea for them to remain at home until seventeen or eighteen. It was likely that Emily and Gwendoline and Christina would all leave home as well, at eleven, or twelve like Charlotte, or thirteen. Susan stopped musing quite suddenly as she thought that, in less than ten years, she would be alone in the Rectory, without her children, save for three or four months of the year.
Suddenly she was angry at the thought that Charlotte was going to be as much of a worry as Sarah and Sophia. Susan saw her bicycling in bloomers, reading The Yellow Book, perhaps smoking in her bedroom, arguing and succeeding in horrifying Octavius, the moment she left school. She would be discontented, and discontent would lead her to drinking spirits, taking lovers, and idleness, and she would take no notice of the advice of Aunt Susan. It all seemed very probable. Susan knew very well that she was jealous, and she remembered how, at seventeen, though never earlier, she had said that she would never be an old woman who envied the young.
With the very smart slim walking stick which she carried outside when she remembered, Susan snapped off the heads of two or three young willow-herbs. She had now reached the pond at the bottom of the terraces below the Hall, and she looked up. Sitting outside the house were Nicholas and Augusta, who were reading, side by side, in the sunshine. Susan walked briskly up the terraces and gaily waved her cane at them. She greeted her father and stepmother with a big smile and for a few minutes leant against an urn on the te
rrace, opposite them, chatting.
They wore spectacles and Nicholas had a rug wrapped round his knees, which Augusta told Susan, in front of him, made him look even older than he was, and they all smiled. Nicholas said, ‘Wait, my dear, until you get to my age.’ He was now sixty-seven, and Augusta was fifty-six.
Susan was not surprised to see them together, for since Sophia’s marriage they had often been in one another’s company, and baited one another without much rancour. Sophia and Sarah had never found this out because they were never told and they hardly ever came to Lynmore. Susan had thought of laughingly telling her parents (separately, not together) that when one of them died the survivor would miss the other. She knew that her youthful impertinence would outrage Augusta’s firm cynicism, and her father’s dim faith.
*
Susan and Octavius went to Strasbourg in September, without the children. While there they talked as they had done on their honeymoon, only more so, and they saw the same sights. At one point Susan told Octavius that in nearly ten years their marriage had not changed, and he squeezed her in reply.
When she died twenty-six years later, in the Spanish influenza epidemic which followed the First World War, he had engraved on her monument:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
SUSAN ROSE
BELOVED WIFE OF OCTAVIUS POTTER
BORN 1st MARCH, 1857, DIED 30th JANUARY, 1919.
FROM ENVY HATRED AND MALICE
AND ALL UNCHARITABLENESS
SHE WAS DELIVERED
R.I.P.
CHAPTER 21
SARAH TEMPLECOMBE
Sarah found it almost embarrassing to see a man who loved children. Edwin was the only man she knew who did so, though Nicholas and Octavius treated them with forbearance.
It was after dinner at Tavistock Square, and the adults were all going on to a New Year ball. Laurence and Lavinia had come downstairs in their nightclothes to see their parents and their aunts dressed up and ready to go. They were standing at their father’s side and he was chatting to them and showing them the ornate watch which he carried when he went to parties. Sophia was laughing, and she had a hand on her son’s shoulder. Susan, listening, talked to Sarah, whose eyes were upon the Sacheverell family.
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