by JH Fletcher
And so she smiled soothingly, content — for the moment — with the progress she had already made. ‘I am interested in everything you wish to talk to me about. Including — I should perhaps say especially — matters of business. If it pleases you to do so.’
To show intelligent interest without threat was a tricky matter. But living with the temperaments of artists had equipped her for most things, and Eugénie was confident she was equal to the challenge.
‘I would deem it an honour if you were willing to confide in me,’ she said.
‘Perhaps I shall,’ he said with surprising candour. ‘In time.’
‘I look forward to it.’ And finished her wine.
‘I know better than to offer you another glass …’
Oh yes; a man, even this man, could be trained.
‘You may always offer,’ she told him.
‘Then would you —’
‘Thank you. No.’
And they laughed together.
‘Another time, perhaps,’ she said, to console him.
‘I hope another time for a lot of things,’ he said, with a meaningful and gallant look.
‘We shall have to see, shall we not?’ Giving him the benefit of her full and candid smile. Behind which she concealed herself most effectively.
Weeks passed, and months. They remained together, growing closer, she hoped. But never too close. Never to the point of …
Despite all the pressure he could bring to bear, she would not. Once she had, she would have lost control of the situation. Even, perhaps, of herself. So she kept him at bay, contrary to her own ardent wishes, while he complained bitterly that she did not, could not, love him.
He bullied, accusing Eugénie of playing for the highest of stakes; it was an allegation that she chose neither to confirm nor deny. Nor was she always available when he wanted her to be.
She had told him about the children. He took it well, but was thoughtful for a day or two, as though the existence of the unseen children had created problems in his mind. Certainly, he never suggested he should meet them, or Martha Shawcross, whom he had met socially in the days before the fire.
‘I believe she is very much mutilated,’ he said. But spoke casually, without feeling, a man making conversation about a displeasing view.
‘She is a lot more than her injuries,’ Eugénie said defiantly. ‘Which she has borne very bravely. I like her.’
And did. Martha was without agendas, the only person she knew with whom she could be herself. Her only friend.
The thought startled her. Surely Henry was her friend?
But knew he was not, at least not without reservations. Henry would always be a man for agendas, and Eugénie was not foolish enough to imagine that she might be exempt.
Most Sundays, although no longer all, she took the early train into the Blue Mountains to spend the day with Martha and the children.
At first, Martha commented if she missed even a week.
‘They wondered where you were. So did I.’
Came gradually to accept it, as did the children. Until Eugénie knew herself to be what she had feared she might become: a stranger to her children and their life, which had become increasingly unfamiliar to her. She told herself it would not do and, for several weeks, was careful to visit every weekend, as at the beginning. However, she saw that Henry would not indefinitely tolerate being second fiddle. Soon her good intentions grew blunted; she fell back into her old ways. Weekly visits became fortnightly, then monthly. A year after meeting Henry Pearman she was seeing the children once every six weeks, and both they and Martha Shawcross had ceased to comment about it.
Still she had not let Henry into her bed. Until one day he put it to her straight.
‘This can’t go on. What you permit is, of course, up to you, but if you keep refusing me we shall have to stop seeing each other.’
She caressed the side of his face. ‘Poor Henry. Is it really so hard for you?’
‘Very hard.’
So it was, although not physically. Eugénie was well aware that men had ways of resolving such problems; knew, too, that Henry would have done whatever might be necessary. No, it was the rejection itself that aggravated him; a man of wealth and power who had never been refused anything in his life, he resented the way she held him, so effortlessly, at arm’s length. ‘You will agree, I hope, that I have not pressed you too severely.’
When Henry became pompous, it meant that he was feeling a fool. Good, she thought, but knew it would be dangerous to overdo it.
‘You have been most considerate …’
‘What more do you want from me, for heaven’s sake?’
They both knew what she wanted. But Eugénie Desmoulins, French, two children by a former marriage, without money, position or prospects, and Henry Pearman, wealthy, influential, connected to the most powerful men in the colony? … Unthinkable.
Except that, more and more, he found himself thinking of it.
There were dangers; he survived on influence, which depended on status. A marriage as unsuitable as this could damage him. Yet would it? He had tested her, discussing matters of business with her. He had found her alert, perceptive, sensible. She knew what she knew and was unafraid to say it; knew what she did not which, in his experience, was rare, and admitted that, too. In private she regarded herself as his equal, a judgement that he had come more and more to accept, but was careful to defer to him in public. It would have been better had she been rich, but Henry knew that he could make enough without help from anyone else. As for being French … That might even be an advantage; her foreignness concealed what might otherwise have been thought a lack of breeding.
We can call her a Countess, he thought. If we have to call her anything. And was surprised to find his thoughts had progressed so far.
He confided in his mother, who was old but wise in the ways of the colony.
‘Bring her to see me.’
Eugénie needed no warning to be on her best behaviour. Was careful to charm, but not too much; to be deferential, but not too much.
The Pearman house had been in the family for two generations, making it one of the oldest in the colony. It was also grand, suiting it admirably to its owner’s personality.
One Sunday afternoon, limping on her ebony cane, Mrs Pearman permitted Eugénie to escort her around the grounds, which were extensive and showed the care of the many hands that were paid to do the work.
They paused beside a stone bench set beneath a tall and splendid tree. It reminded Eugénie of the first time she had met Mrs Pearman’s son.
‘We shall sit here,’ the old lady decreed. And did so, permitting Eugénie to join her. Mrs Pearman skewered her with dark and hooded eyes. ‘My son said something about your being a Countess. Is that true?’
The temptation to confirm the lie was strong, but Eugénie resisted it. ‘No, Madame, it is not.’
Mrs Pearman’s expression revealed nothing. ‘Tell me about yourself.’
Eugénie looked her in the face and did so, fully and accurately.
‘I see.’ The old lady sat motionless, save for the lips that worked to and fro, digesting what she had been told. ‘You know what my son has in mind —’
‘He has told me nothing —’
‘Don’t play games with me, child! You know very well why you are here. He is rich, well regarded, moving in the highest circles of our society. You are … what you are. If you were in my position, what would you say if he asked whether he should marry you?’
‘I would say yes.’ Hoping that her heartbeat deafened only herself.
‘A seamstress? You would make him a laughing stock.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I am strong.’
Again Mrs Pearman’s arrogance flexed its sinews. ‘You think he needs your strength?’
‘Everyone needs strength, wherever it comes from. But I will give him more than that. I will give him support, understanding, good advic
e …’
‘You do not mention love.’
For a minute the two women looked into each other in silence.
Eugénie said, ‘There is another reason why you should say yes.’
‘Which is?’
‘Because I believe he will marry me anyway, whatever you say.’
‘Do you, indeed?’ Mrs Pearman used her stick to lever herself upright. She looked down at Eugénie, still seated on the bench. ‘I have a notion you may very well be right.’
Eugénie went through the motions of asking the children what they thought but, as Aline would have said, had already made up her mind.
Eugénie Desmoulins married Henry Pearman, in his mother’s home outside Sydney, on a fine Saturday morning in May 1876, while the wind raised a blizzard of autumn leaves and flung the bride’s veil, another heirloom of the Pearman family, in tugging spirals about her shining head. The two girls were there, white-clad, with chaplets of flowers in their hair and posies in their hands. Martha was there, too, prominently seated, and to hell with those who cringed inwardly at her appearance or wondered whether she should not have been incarcerated somewhere away from the world’s fastidious eyes.
Mrs Franklin was not invited; Eugénie had no need of her now and cherished the thought of her mortification. She had no need of a number of things. Working in a dress shop, or anywhere, would clearly be beneath her dignity, given her new status.
‘My husband will have need of me in affairs of business,’ she explained when she handed in her notice. ‘He wishes me to assist him in entertaining. He has many friends, to say nothing of his business associates. I am afraid I shall be very busy.’
And shaped her mouth into an expression of regret, which fooled Vesta Franklin for not one second.
Who nevertheless did what she could to make the best of a most unsatisfactory situation. ‘I hope you will be very happy.’ And strangled her in her mind, behind the loving smile of one colleague to another. ‘No doubt you will be buying your gowns here now.’
‘We shall see.’
They both knew how likely that would be.
After the wedding, the champagne and top-hatted antics of the guests, after the speeches, wedding cake and congratulations, the lascivious eyes that stripped her naked where she stood, they departed to a house up the coast that had been made available to the happy pair, to enable Henry to get down to what for him was the real business of the day.
Eugénie stood on the terrace, hands on the stone railing, and looked out at the countryside. Beneath the house, the expensively manicured grounds descended into trees: a selection of imported oaks, sturdy and imposing, with beyond them an apologetic gathering of threadbare native gums. In the distance she could just make out the silver glint of the sea.
She thought of Tench Street, the days she had spent tramping the iron streets in search of work. She remembered how often Vesta Franklin had put her in her place, the condescension of the Madame Chevaliers of the world. And now this.
To be rich and powerful … In exchange for the offering of her physical self, which would mean nothing, and would in any case not touch the essential being that, armoured by trauma, would remain forever impervious to her husband or anyone else.
Henry came to claim her, to seek vainly within the moist folds of flesh for what could not be found, the essence and spirit of the woman whom he had thought to capture but who, in reality, had captured him. His mother had known, thought Eugénie, as her husband carried her away. But could do nothing now. Of the children, returned with Martha to what had long been their home in the mountains, she thought not at all.
‘My darling!’ she cried. ‘My lover!’ Arching her back in exultation, thinking, To this have I come. At last.
PART III
THE FALSE PATH
Nicht eine Träne
Weintest du Vater und Mutter
(Not a tear
Did you shed for father and mother)
— Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, first performed 10 June 1865
Alan
The Antarctic Society dinner turned out to be not so bad, after all. It gave me the chance to get on my high horse about the degradation of the icecap, the dangers in the exploitation of what used to be the only pristine wilderness left upon the face of the earth.
It is expected of me; besides, it is the truth. Someone should speak up for the truth, if only as a change from the multitude that doesn’t. Much good it does, of course; you don’t deflect humanity’s greed so easily. The Japanese and Norwegians will continue to butcher whales in the interests of what they call science; there is ongoing pressure from some of the richest men, and countries, to obtain access to the mineral deposits that lie beneath the ice. They will spare nothing, until nothing remains to be spared.
Marie was never what you would call a political animal yet, when the opportunity arose for her to go to Russia with Brett Samochin at the start of the Revolution, she dared to hope that the New Order might open the door to a great and glorious future for mankind. A lot of other people did, too. And what did they get? The Light that Failed, as Koestler put it: the systematic degradation, imprisonment and murder, not of the human body alone but of the human spirit, too, industrial practices that poisoned the very citadel of life itself. And not only in what they used to call the Soviet Union; they say the air of Beijing will kill all but the strongest. China, the world’s most populous nation, has the world’s largest pollution problem. About which nothing, nothing, is done.
Giles Kingdon was at the dinner, prancing in his inimitable way. After the speeches he tackled me: some things are as inevitable as sunrise. He clutched my arm, indulging me with his smoker’s breath.
‘Well done! How wonderfully you spoke!’
He would have killed the last whale in the oceans if he could have arranged the publication of a book about it. How I Wiped Out A Species. The True Confessions.
His elbow gouged my ribs. ‘Have you considered my proposal?’
He had made no proposal, simply a series of arrogant assertions. In which — how many times did I have to tell him? — I had no interest.
I smiled at this face that I could have battered most cheerfully. ‘Have you considered my answer?’
‘A man like yourself, who can speak so movingly about what matters in the world … How can you refuse to create your own monument to your grandmother’s memory?’
Like certain politicians, he possesses double the normal allocation of teeth, which he twinkled at me beguilingly. I clenched my fists, envisaging fangs in scattered heaps upon the floor. Denied its forest of ivory, that mouth would be a sight to see, indeed. Unhappily, I am too civilised these days, or too old, to give vent to my inclinations. I could not wait to get away from him.
‘I’ll be after you,’ he called, laughing in his jolly way as I retreated. ‘I shan’t give up.’
I’m afraid he was right, but neither shall I.
Impasse.
I have a bottle in my room. Where would the world be without good cognac? Decorously I sip until, sick of grovelling before the rituals of a decadent world, I slug and guzzle it instead. I drink to the downfall of Giles Kingdon and all the rest whose extermination would so cleanse the earth. I sleep my brandy-soaked sleep. I wake in the morning, daisy fresh, which is more than I deserve, determined upon one final indulgence, and that the most precious of all, before I return to my fastness in the Blue Mountains. I shall have lunch with my daughter.
Kristie is twenty-three, a thoroughly modern woman. At times modern enough to startle me but I, for all the years I have spent in the desolate regions of the earth, have always been a conservative man.
I love her, which should go without saying, but cannot. I also like her, which is less common, and find her interesting which, between two generations, is perhaps the rarest attribute of all. Interesting for her own sake, because she possesses what these days is called attitude; interesting, also, because she reminds me so much of how Marie must have been in her
youth. Marie, more than most, was a woman with not only extraordinary talent but attitude, too, and it was the combination of the two that enabled her to go on paying the appalling price demanded by devotion to her art, that made her finally into the towering figure she became.
Aline
1
The news that Eugénie was planning to marry the rich and, to some, succulent Henry Pearman came like the hammer of doom to Martha Shawcross.
The children had become her life. They, the dog and her cottage amid the trees represented all she had of value in the world. Now the mother, on the back of so glorious a success, would naturally reclaim her daughters, and Martha would be deprived of the only human company she valued.
She wished, very much, that it were not so but, against the world’s imperatives, she had always been helpless. She decided it was her duty to prepare the children for the imminent change in their lives; then she discovered, with gratification and alarm, that they no more wished to leave her than she to see them go.
‘I want to stay here,’ said Aline. ‘Forever.’
‘I want to stay here, too,’ said Marie.
‘That’s what I want, darlings.’ She clutched them both in her woebegone arms. ‘But I’m afraid you may not be able to.’
Apart from other considerations, there was the question of schooling. For the children of Eugénie Desmoulins, seamstress, the local school had been good enough — better, indeed, than they might reasonably have expected. The daughters of Mrs Henry Pearman were a different case. For them, it was to be expected that there would be private tutors in the palatial new house being built on the outskirts of Sydney for the happy couple and their dynasty. Later, perhaps, even a residential Ladies College, where girls of quality were taught what they would need to know, and not to know, in that station in society to which God, in His infinite mercy, had called them.
‘I shall run away,’ said Aline.
‘So shall I,’ said Marie. But she could show a measure of independence, nevertheless.
