Cashelmara (15 page)

It was at that moment that I first met Edward. No wonder I did not care how old he was. At first it did not occur to me to think of him as a gentleman caller, but when he proposed I was certainly not about to ape the heroine of a romantic novel and refuse him with the conventional sigh that “it could never be.” My immediate reaction was: Well, why not? And if that sounds grasping, practical and not at all conduct befitting a heroine, I can only apologize and repeat that I want this to be a truthful memoir.

How Edward won Francis’ consent to the match I shall never know. I asked Francis, but he went a most alarming shade of puce and refused to answer. On my honeymoon I again asked Edward to enlighten me (I had begged in vain for enlightenment before he had left New York), but Edward merely gave me his charming smile and said there was no reason why Francis should not have been delighted by my splendid match.

“No reason in the world,” I said, laughing, “except that you hate each other.” And when he looked shocked by this bluntness (Englishmen are too polite ever to admit to hating anyone) I added, “I’m sorry if I’m not supposed to know, but I would have had to be blind and deaf not to notice.”

But Edward refused to be drawn into a discussion of Francis, and after a while I realized that the enmity between them ran deeper than I had ever guessed. Francis had told me frankly that I should not expect him to visit me in England, but I had attributed this to his anti-British prejudice and thought he would overcome it in time. Now I began to suspect that there was more afoot than his characteristic chauvinism, and the suspicion was distressing. I would have loved Francis to visit me. I was sure he would have been proud of how fetching I had become (it still amazes me how vastly a powerful incentive can improve even the plainest girl’s appearance), and since I was no longer jealous and frustrated I thought he would once more have found me far more agreeable than Blanche.

But the die had been cast. I had chosen Edward, accepted exile and had no regrets—except for wishing that the severance from my family were less complete. It would have helped if I could have talked more to Edward about those I missed, but since he refused to discuss Blanche as well as Francis our conversations were limited to Amelia and the children. The roots of Edward’s antagonism to Blanche were also a mystery to me. He had made a great fuss over her when he had first arrived in New York, and I could only suppose she had given him offense by some thoughtless word which she had never dreamt would cause him such deep injury. Blanche was often thoughtless but never malicious. I tried to tell Edward that, but when he merely smiled politely I thought in exasperation that his remorseless neutrality was just as tiresome as a raging torrent of abuse.

It was an unfortunate situation, and when I returned to London at the end of the honeymoon I might have felt very homesick at the prospect of settling so far from my family had I not been so much in love with Edward. But I was ecstatically happy. Indeed so much at ease did I feel in our relationship that I fancied I knew him as well as it was possible to know anyone, and this was a comforting thought to me as we arrived at his house in St. James’s Square.

His son Patrick was waiting to receive us. I was exceedingly nervous of meeting Patrick, who was only three years my junior, for when Edward had told me his son was a difficult boy who gave him great trouble I had imagined myself being presented to a sulky lout who had no trace of any social graces. I was therefore all the more astonished when I found not the lout I had feared but the most friendly, delightful and courteous young man I had ever met. I could not believe it. I boggled at him, so surprised that I forgot even the most elementary good manners, and when at last I remembered myself sufficiently to say “How do you do,” I was still baffled by the discrepancy between what I saw and what Edward had led me to believe.

I think it was then that I first suspected I did not know Edward quite as well as I thought I did.

“I’m delighted to meet you at last, Cousin Marguerite,” said my stepson. “I was sorry to miss the wedding. Please forgive me for being unable to attend. I hear it was a very nice ceremony.”

“Um,” I said. “Yes. Delightful, thank you.”

“May I address you as Cousin Marguerite?”

“Drop the ‘cousin’ if you wish,” I said, smiling at him. Americans do tend to be informal.

“My dear,” said Edward, speaking to me exactly as if I were a child of six, “I don’t think at this point that such informality would be proper.”

I was so astonished that he should censure me in such a fashion in front of his son that I could only stare at him speechlessly, but he had already moved away from us toward the staircase. Around us in the hall the footmen were bringing in our boxes from the carriage, and the butler was fluttering around hissing instructions.

Patrick stammered, “Shall I order tea, Papa?”

“No.” He could not have been more abrupt. He added to me over his shoulder, “This way.”

Patrick was looking so unhappy that I had to smile at him again and tell him I was looking forward to continuing our conversation later. Then I followed Edward upstairs to our apartments.

He did not speak to me. He ordered hot water peremptorily and made a great fuss when it was not brought at once. His valet tripped over a bag and was abused; my maid began to look nervous; the entire atmosphere became charged with uneasiness. Finally we separated, he retiring to the dressing room, and with my maid’s help I washed off the worst of the journey’s dust, redressed my hair and donned a fresh day dress. Afterward, dismissing her, I listened at the dressing-room door. When I heard nothing I guessed he had already dismissed his valet, and presently, summoning my courage, I knocked on the door and walked in.

He was standing by the window, his hands resting lightly on the sill, his mouth set in a narrow line. As the door opened he swung around to face me.

“You might at least have waited until I gave you permission to enter,” he said abruptly.

The cleverest move I could have made then would have been to burst into tears, but I have never been the sort of female who weeps easily, and even if I had been I think I might have been too horror-stricken at that moment to have summoned even the dryest of tears. No one I loved had ever spoken to me in such a way before. Such icy rage was quite beyond the bounds of my experience.

I panicked. “How dare you treat me as if I were a child in the nursery?” I shrieked, sheer fright making me appear furiously angry. “And why are you in such a sulk anyway?”

At that point he lost his temper. That was a nasty shock to me since I had no idea he possessed a temper to lose. He said it was a pity I had no inkling how to behave, and he had been a damned fool to marry a girl who was obviously much too sensuous to give him a moment’s peace of mind. “You’re just like your profligate of a brother,” he added, making the fatal mistake of relaxing his iron neutrality on the subject of Francis and I screamed at him, “Don’t you dare say such a thing about my brother! Don’t you dare!” But unfortunately he did dare and made several more insulting remarks about Francis’ moral character until I cried hysterically, “At least Francis loves me, even if you don’t, and I’m going right back to America to live with him again!”

Then at last, thank God, I reached the state where there was nothing else to do but burst into tears and weep passionately all over his shirt front. I am uncertain when his shirt front suddenly presented itself to be wept upon, but it arrived without noticeable delay, and when I felt his arms around me I knew the crisis was past. I had survived our first marital quarrel, and, having found it a dreadful ordeal, I resolved then and there that it was to be our last. One of the most appalling aspects of the whole incident was that I still had no idea why he should have been so angry with me.

He was apologizing in a shaken voice that sounded quite unlike him. I heard him say, “I’m sorry. It’s not like me to be so foolish, but I care so much that I can’t help myself. I can’t bear to think you might not care for me as much as I care for you.”

“But you silly, silly man!” I said, bewildered, through my tears. “You know how much I love you! How could you possibly think—”

“It was seeing you with Patrick,” he said, and suddenly I sensed what a terrible effort it was costing him to be honest with me, and I knew I should make an equal effort to be understanding in return. “The two of you looked so young together … and Patrick looks much as I used to look when I was his age.”

There was a silence. I was still groping for the right words when he said, trying to shrug off his awkwardness and his private pain, “It was nothing. Just a passing foolishness. You needn’t be afraid I shall lose my temper every time you smile at a man young enough to be my son. Forgive me, if you can, and let’s not speak of it again.”

I kissed him. When I answered I tried to speak simply, because I knew I was too inexperienced to do anything else. “I’m sorry you were upset,” I said. “Being sixty must be horrid sometimes, rather like being a wallflower at a dance. I hated watching Blanche smile at her partners even though I knew she didn’t care a nickel-cent-piece for any of them.” Kissing him again, I asked him if we might go downstairs and have tea. “Oh, and by the way,” I said some minutes later after he had returned my kisses in a way which left neither of us in any doubt of our feelings for each other, “Thomas is coming next year, in April, I think, but I must ask a doctor soon to make sure.”

He was dumfounded. I had given him no previous hint about my condition, but when he asked me why I had been so secretive I said merely that I had wanted the news to be a surprise.

“It’s certainly a surprise!” he said, laughing, and he seemed so genuinely pleased that I screwed up my courage to ask him if he was sure he did not mind becoming a father again.

“Why should I mind?” he said easily, and then, remembering certain details he had confided to me about his first marriage: “This is your child, my dearest, not Eleanor’s. The circumstances are very different.”

I asked no more questions. I always felt it best not to pry into his relationship with Eleanor, and the more he told me about it the less I understood. As far as I could gather, she had become pregnant as often as possible in order to avoid sleeping with him—a clever ruse, since it was the only way she could have a separate bedroom and still remain in theory a good wife—and had refused to permit Edward to practice anticonception. I had never heard of the word “anticonception” before, and after I had deduced its meaning I was greatly surprised to hear that one could do anything, short of total abstinence, to prevent children arriving in the world. However, after acknowledging regretfully to myself that it was probably only one of many subjects about which I was quite ignorant, I did make a conscientious effort to regard Eleanor with compassion. Edward treated her behavior as if it were some strange malaise—a possibility, I admit, since madness can take the most unlikely forms when a woman is in her forties—but no matter how much compassion I tried to dredge up I still could not rid myself of the opinion that her behavior was not mad but just plain contrary. Of course it was impossible for me to say so. Edward had been devoted to her despite their troubles, and I supposed grudgingly that if she had been able to keep his devotion while trying to behave like a nun she must have had certain remarkable qualities.

“You mustn’t be jealous of Eleanor,” Edward had said to me kindly on our honeymoon.

“Jealous? I? Of course not!” I had exclaimed with a little laugh, but of course I was passionately jealous and longed to outshine her in every possible way. Like Francis, I love to come first. Being second is not my style at all, and I was delighted when Edward told me I was a much better wife in the bedroom than that beautiful, witty, intelligent creature whom I felt sure I would have detested on sight.

“The baby’s going to be a boy,” I said later after an eminent doctor from Harley Street had confirmed my condition. “I’m positive it’s going to be a boy.”

Eleanor had usually succeeded in producing girls.

“Well, Thomas is a fine name,” said Edward, remembering my first reference to the baby, “and I should certainly like to have another son.”

He was so very far from satisfied with poor Patrick.

Patrick was quite the most handsome boy I had ever seen. He did have a great look of Edward, particularly around the eyes, but his expressions were so different from his father’s that the resemblance seldom seemed striking. His hair was an opaque shade of gold. Edward’s hair had been that color once, I learned, although when he was a year or two older than Patrick the gold had darkened to brown. Patrick was not yet as tall as Edward, but he was clearly going to be just as tall and just as splendidly proportioned before long. He was still no more than a boy, and during our early conversations I began to feel as if I were indeed old enough to be his mother, but I was far from immune to masculine good looks, and there was no denying he was exceptionally beautiful. Of course I did not say so to Edward, but in private I was pleased that Patrick was so agreeable and pleased too that I did at least know one person still in his teens.

Edward had an enormous circle of acquaintances, but not one of them was under forty. I had long since reconciled myself to the prospect of moving in elderly circles, but I admit that when I first began my life in London the prospect still seemed intimidating. His friends were all scrupulously polite to me, but the English have many different degrees of politeness, and I suspected they regarded this young American girl who had so uppishly attached herself to London society as very much the ugly little cuckoo in their gorgeously feathered nest.

Soon my social life resembled an obstacle race that seemed more and more arduous to its sole participant. When one is first married one is not normally overwhelmed with callers, for both Americans and British respect the custom of “summering and wintering the bride,” but because of Edward’s position I soon found myself receiving the wives of his closer friends and being obliged to call upon them in return. This quickly proved to be a dreadful bore, for what could I, a young American scarce out of the schoolroom, have to say to a dowager duchess who had never thought it necessary to travel out of England? I immersed myself frantically in a study of the newspapers in order that I might talk about current events and spent long hours poring over Burke’s Peerage in an attempt to familiarize myself with the aristocracy.