Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
She had never drunk, only watched drinkers: inexpertly she stood holding the glass. With slow recklessness she raised the potion to her lips. The drink touched her lips, then began to go down well; she could soon amuse herself by rolling round the damp olive in empty mistiness. Glad to be disembarrassed of the martini, and at how small pains, she smiled as she handed him back the glass. ‘You needn’t tell me who anyone is; it doesn’t matter.’
‘No?’ he said, disconcerted. ‘No, I suppose not, really.’
‘Oh, I expect it could,’ she conceded, looking at him kindly.
‘Vesta,’ he said in extenuation, ‘is still a trifle scatty after the Fête. She rather let herself in for that. It was quite a thing for her.’
‘I remember Fêtes at this castle when there was no one here.’
‘This place,’ he said, looking up at the ceiling, round the walls and even out of a window for Jane’s benefit, ‘I imagine, must have seen many changes.’
‘Yes it has. No one has stayed here long.’
‘Let me give you another?’ he said hastily.
‘Yes, thank you. The olive will do again.’
‘Old Terence, there—if you won’t object to my telling you who he is?—remembers this place in the former gay days.’
‘Which?’ asked Jane, on the point of making a now experienced movement of glass to lips.
‘Quite a time, I’m afraid, before
you
were thought of!’
‘That would be true of any gay days,’ she said composedly. ‘But which?’
‘Oh, you know; before it was 1914.’
‘Which is Terence?’ Having been shown, she walked away, carrying the cocktail.
This time, she came not so much towards the others as at them, with all the boringness of her youth. As a sensation, they had already had her: had she been a merely beautiful girl she could have been mortified by being simply the same dish come round twice—as it was, as implacably making a place for herself among them she sat down, she knew how far that was, or was soon to be, from the truth. She had invaded an open-yet-closed half-circle, orientated, by the habit of this country, towards the fireplace: tonight, because of the heat wave the grate was empty—in view of which, or rather to escape from the view of which, Lady Latterly would have done well to rearrange the room, but had not thought of it. The men, abandoning the certain loftiness they had had while standing, had lowered themselves—in all senses, Jane considered—into deep chairs; which rendered them, whether or not they liked this, almost supine before Lady Latterly and Mamie. For those two sat rearing spirally up, one at each end of the sofa once Mamie’s only, each with her spine supporting a stack of cushions. Clearly there would be no notion of dinner till glasses had been refilled many times more—hard at it, the party were contradicting each other, some with passion, some with dogged authority, on a subject of which Jane understood little but that it had ceased to be the quite same for them all. A somewhat hopeless move to let the girl in, on the part of the man who had taken it she was staying here, and in spite of everything still did so, was overruled by the others by closing ranks, and still more was discountenanced by the girl herself. For upon her other hand was old Terence.
She drank; then, keeping the stem of her emptied glass in balance between her two longest fingers, took advantage of solitude to study him. Only native other than Jane here, her neighbour reacted to her telepathy with a sort of uneasy, dodging, delaying half-glance out of the corners of his wetly bright, too-blue eyes. Alcohol, though he had a famous head, so quickly brought to the surface his Irish birthmarks that, even by this stage of the evening, one no longer could have mistaken him for the others—indeed how, it was to be wondered, could the girl have done so even at first? From the being out to the skin he was more florid. His exaggeration of his bravado, his brogue, himself was less exactly deliberate than he fancied—how much was acting, how much second nature? Vanity, guilt and sentimentality were at work in him, undiagnosed yet worked upon by the aliens. Bad enough having got himself in with this set without being detected by God’s spy. ‘Hey?’ he said, ‘what d’you look at me for?’
‘Only, I wonder what you remember.’
Terence behaved like an old boy attempting to beetle at her with one eyebrow, in an automatic, ‘wait-till-you’re-married’ way. He then announced: ‘The trouble is, I’m an old man.’
‘That’s why I—.’ She stopped, she hoped, just in time. Terence, not having listened, did not take umbrage—chiefly, her anxious pause made him hope he had checked her, might yet give her the slip. He trailed his eye away, let it be caught elsewhere, and did the best he could to appear gone. Jane, however, soon gently recalled him.
‘Can you, for instance, remember this house?’
‘Why would I want to remember it, when I’m sitting here?’
‘Years ago, I mean.’
Terence, leaning her way confidentially, said: ‘Now don’t
you
start having me on too, there’s a dear good girl. By now there are too many years ago, and I’m getting sick to death of the whole bang lot of them—rotten old romancing and story-telling: you make the half of it up, and who’s the wiser? What does it matter, anyway?—Yes, I daresay,’ he had to add, with a gleam of lust, not for her, ‘I
could
make you sit up, but then again I might not: nothing’s much to any of you these days—is it now?’ he asked, suspicious, measuring her. ‘You can buy up a lot; you can’t buy the past. What is it?—not even history. Goes to dust in your hand.’
‘I don’t buy,’ she said, ‘I have no money. Do you remember Montefort?’
‘Montefort? Pity that place has gone.’
‘But I live there.’
‘Good God. What are you doing here, then?’
‘I was asked.’
‘She’s a wonder,’ quoth Terence, dallying with his tumbler, satirically thumbing the new cut glass. ‘And you—fish out of water, or not, eh?’
She only smiled and swept back her gold hair, as though by showing more of her face to show how little she had to fear from anyone—but the gesture, as answer, was unconscious. She continued: ‘You were at Montefort?’
‘Why not? That is to say, at one time.’
‘When?’
‘Now you tell me this: who’s your father?’
She told him. None the wiser, trying hard not to show it, he hazarded: ‘I ever buy a horse off him?’
She said impatiently: ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’
‘Well, I understand that place had got into farmers’ hands?’
‘Well, it has.’
He took another look at her.
‘When
were you most at Montefort?’
At that, Terence banged down his tumbler, and menaced Jane with the palm of a raised hand—he had the right to give her a sound slap, in default of which he smote an arm of his chair. ‘Now it’s no use trying to pin me down! When I say “one time”, I mean the time I mean, and that’s good enough.’ He blustered away at her: ‘I’m my own calendar.’ Then his tone changed. ‘Though I don’t mind telling you this—’ He looked warily round them, then leaned towards her: his features twitched. ‘These days, one goes where the money is—with all due respect to this charming lady. Those days, we went where the people were.’
She drew a profound breath. ‘My cousin Guy—’
But Peregrine stood over her with the shaker; Jane held up her glass to be once more filled—at which Mamie could not but pop her eyes. ‘These are powerful, you know—or perhaps you don’t know?’ she called across, direly waving the drink of which she spoke as she re-scrambled for balance among the cushions. Jane glanced at Mamie’s pomegranate toenails, curling out of a
sandal, but said nothing: the contents of the glass, which sip by sip became the contents of her, had no bearing whatever upon the situation that she could see. She experienced the absolute calmness, the sense of there being almost no threat at all, with which one could imagine fighting one’s way down a burning staircase—there
was
a licking danger, but not to her; cool she moved down between flame walls. Only, all went to heighten her striking power—and had she not struck when she spoke the name! It had left her lips and was in the room.
Guy was among them. The recoil of the others—she did not for an instant doubt it was a recoil—marked his triumphant displacement of their air. She saw the reflection of crisis in each face, heard it in loudening, dropping then stopping voices. Dinner had been announced; but it was not, could not be simply that—the butler vanishing from the door had no more than offered an alibi or afforded cover for a single, concerted movement of disarray on the part of these poor ghosts on whom the sun had risen, to whom the cock crew. Lady Latterly moaned as she stood up; dissolution flowed through the chiffon and her limbs as she linked what was left of an arm through dissolving Mamie’s. Jane herself rose, stood, the better to enjoy the spectacle of the flight, the glissade of the shadow-show, the enforced retreat from here to nowhere—but herself was caught in the mist of their thinning semblances. She tottered, was thankful to find her hand ensconced on the chimney-piece of eternal marble. She was right; there
was
one more figure among the men—all knew this; what were they waiting for?
Or might no man move till she raised the spell?
Lady Latterly, turning round in the doorway, said: Jane, my sweet, I
think
men want to come in to dinner!… What can you mean, Mamie?’ she murmured, aside, askance. She billowed back in her tracks and scooped up the girl: three abreast, the ladies entered the dining-room.
‘Why do I never have a butler who can count?’ asked Lady Latterly, indicating, when they had all sat down, an empty place, laid, and an empty chair. ‘Oh, no, though, I forgot: that was for Priscilla. - No, leave it, Duffy; but
do,
another time, count!’
‘Are you sure he thought it was for Priscilla?’
‘What can you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Oh I do hate your manner: don’t be occult!’
‘Why are you having it left then?’
‘What, that place? Because it was for Priscilla. To make you sorry.’
‘As a matter of fact, Vesta, you never asked her.’
‘Oh, that’s so, so untrue!’
‘Well, so Priscilla says.’
Peregrine interposed: ‘I know there’s a castle in this country where an extra place is laid every night for dinner. It’s in some way connected with the family curse.’
‘How do
you
know?’
Peregrine lost heart. ‘You had a banshee, Terence?’ he said hopelessly.
Terence, one side of the empty place, edged his chair first confidentially in to, then uneasily outward again from it; then began to spoon up liquidly-jellied madrilene at a great rate. The man on the other side found himself with no alternative to Mamie. She however was busily reaching out, pulling out a rose from the centre bowl—leaning across her neighbour, she dropped the rose between the knives and forks of the empty place, saying
‘There,
darling! You’re my ideal man.’ In the following pause the rest of the roses, outraged and candle-scorched, began to shed petals over the salted almonds. Seated across the table, which was a round one, Jane faced the gap in the ring of lit-up masks.
‘Duffy,’ said Lady Latterly, ‘take the roses away. They look second-hand.’
‘Really, Vesta.’
‘Well, Mamie keeps on awarding them.’
‘Only one,’ said Jane, who was seen to smile.
‘Well, I can’t stand Mamie being Lady Macbeth.’
‘No,’ Peregrine said, ‘you’ve got this all mixed up with Ophelia.’
‘Oh well, Ophelia; just as you like. I suppose you know Ophelia was raving mad?’
Mamie, hauling a velvet strap up a fat white shoulder, said: ‘All I know is, I did a beautiful thing.’
Jane gave her the half-smile again.
Darkness rose to a height in the corners of the room; there were dimmed lamps over the serving-tables. Uncurtained windows stood open; breathless seemed the night, yet now and then a
tremor ran through the candles each time causing a shadowed contraction of all faces. An owl was to be heard back in the woods; and the Irish butler, moving about, gave the impression of harkening for something more. Guy had dined here often.
A moth sheered the candles and fell scorched on to Mamie’s rose—at which Terence’s eyes consulted Jane’s: unostentatiously putting a hand out he pinched the moth to death. Talk, which zigzagged up to a pitch, stopped: everyone was aware of the old assassin wiping his fingers off on the sheeny napkin. The girl’s odd bridal ascendancy over the dinner table, which had begun to be sensed since they sat down, declared itself—
she
was the authority for the slaying. Tolerating the tribute of the rose, she could not suffer dyingness to usurp: she let out a breath as the moth was brushed from the cloth. That done, she was withheld again. Her dilated oblique glances, her preoccupation less with eating and drinking than with glasses and forks gave her the look of someone always abstaining from looking across too speakingly at a lover—not a soul failed to feel the electric connection between Jane’s paleness and the dark of the chair in which so far no one visibly sat. Between them, the two dominated the party.
Or, so they acted on barbarian nerves. In this particular company, by this time of the evening, even counterfeit notions of reality had begun to wobble. Who knew, who could not compute, to a man, exactly how many sat round the table? The evening offered footing to the peculiar by being itself out of the true—there was something phantasmagoric about this circle of the displaced rich. Reason annihilated itself when these people met. Together, they pressed themselves and each other to the extreme limits of their faculties: beyond what they were capable of lay what? They had warped their wits with disproportionate stories; at any turn the preposterous might lay final claim on them—there was no censor. Even Shakespeare had stalked in. He and drink played havoc with known dimensions. There was a stir if not a kindling of exhausted senses, only now to be heated by being haunted; between the sexes there lingered on an amorous animosity, far spent. Mood had been dipping towards a vacuum; the camp lights sank—outside waited the stilly night. Had they been imaginative, had so much as one of them been a person at any other instant aware or keyed-up, they would together have made less apt conductors: as it was the current made circuit through them. Something more peremptory, more unfettered than imagination did now command them—there
had
been an entrance, though they could not say when.