“You found one? I know you went through my things.” She paused. “I should like to say—I opened only one. The last one. I destroyed the others, unread.”
“Constance, that doesn’t make it any better. It was a wicked thing to do. It was cruel.”
“I know that.”
“Then why did you do it?” I paused. “I’m leaving, Constance. I’m leaving you, and Frank. I will never come back here, and I won’t see you again. So before I go, I want to know: Why would you do such a thing as that?”
“I’m not sure.” She seemed to consider the matter. “I have always found it difficult to account for my own actions. Other people always seem so very sure. They did it for this reason; they did it for that. I always feel there are a multitude of reasons—and they may change from day to day—”
“Constance, I’ve heard all that before. Why did you do it?”
“Well, I think I did it for you. Also for myself—I would not deny that. I was jealous, perhaps. But mainly for you. I was looking ahead—to the future, you see. You set such store by that friendship, and I said to myself:
Oh, that is very sad.
Poor Victoria. She will be let down by this great friend of hers. He will grow bored by this correspondence, or he will forget her, or he will die—she will be disillusioned in time, and disappointed, as women are always disappointed by men. I wanted to spare you that. You see …”
She began to gesture, with those tiny glittering hands. There was a slight return of agitation.
“You see—you had put all your trust in him. I could see that. And that is
always
a mistake. Never do that, Victoria. It’s like shutting yourself in a prison, throwing away the key. The more you care for someone, the more—in the end—they disappoint you. Men are better at knowing this than women. They spread their bets. Whereas we—all for love. It is our greatest failing.”
“Constance, I was a
child,
writing to a friend, in wartime—”
“Ah, but an unusual friend. A friend with unusual powers. A boy who could smell blood, and war, in a wood. Maybe it was that which made me take against him.”
“Why should that be? You liked that story. You told me.”
“My father died in that place.” She turned away her face. “I
never
liked that story.”
I knew there was no point in pursuing it further. All I would get would be more ingenious explanations, explanations that would spiral away, advance, then double back. I stood up. Constance at once became alert.
“What are you doing?”
“I told you, Constance. I’m leaving.”
“You can’t leave. We need to talk.”
“No. You talk too much. You always did. I don’t want to listen anymore.”
“You can’t go. I’m still ill. I’m not well yet.”
“You’ll have to get well without my assistance, Constance. I’m sure you can. Oh, and you should know: Frank tore up that check.”
“How high-minded of him! But then he is high-minded, and it does rather show. Was that why you decided not to marry him?”
“No. I admire him, and I love him, Constance. It had nothing to do with that. I’ll go now.”
She gave a sudden gesture of alarm; she rose to her feet. “You’re not really going? You will come back?”
“No. I won’t come back.”
As I turned toward the door, she began to move toward me. I saw her with Frank’s eyes: swift, decorative, mesmeric, dangerous, absorbing others into the force field of her own destructiveness. She seemed, for a moment, dismayed. Her tiny hands gestured in the air. Her little rings glinted. She made one of her rushes at me, as a child does, demanding in an imperious way some confirmation of affection. My godmother, who had never grown up.
She rested her hand on my arm. I think she tried to kiss my cheek. Her hair brushed my face. I smelled that scent she always used, ferns and civet.
The kiss missed. I walked through the doorway. Constance caught at my arm. “Oh, stop—please stop. You’re leaving for good—I understand now. That is it, isn’t it? I can see it in your face. Oh, please don’t go. Stay awhile. You can’t leave me alone. I’m not strong. Come with me. Look, Victoria, look at all these rooms, all these memories. That was where you stood, just there, in the middle of the carpet, when I cut your hair. Do you remember the braids—how you hated them? And Bertie—think of Bertie. When he was old and ill, that was where he lay—in that corner there. You loved me then. The books—don’t you remember all your father’s books? Please stop. Just here. Look at this hall. Don’t you remember, the day you arrived, and you came in here—such a solemn little thing! You counted your reflections—you must remember that! You counted six Victorias, then seven, then eight. Look again. Look now. Count again. You see how stern and tall and moral you look? And I look so sad and so small? Look, can you see the tears? I’m so sad. My heart hurts. Constance and Victoria. Mother and child. How many of us can you see? Nine? Ten? There’s more than that. Please, Victoria, I don’t want to be alone. Don’t leave me. Don’t go….”
I did leave. I did go. I walked out the door and into the elevator. I left Constance in her hall, with all those reflections of herself to keep her company. Until the moment the door closed, I’m sure she thought she could persuade me back, for she was good at persuasions. Think of all the others who had loved her, the practice she had had.
For a few weeks Constance continued to pursue me by telephone. I saw Frank several times before I left for that commission in France. There were arguments, pleas, then a sad diminuendo, over suitcases; hurried meetings in which each of us found it difficult to meet the other’s eyes.
He saw me off at the airport; he insisted on that. Neither of us could find anything to say. I think we both regretted his decision to come. I passed through passport control; I looked back, for one last view of him.
It was cold outside. He was wearing a dark overcoat. Passengers pushed past him and pressed about him on all sides. He looked distraught, dispossessed. He reminded me of refugees, photographs of refugees, on the border between nowhere and nowhere.
I wanted to go back, but I picked up my suitcases, rounded the screen, boarded the plane. I drew a line under the sum, just as he had.
Some time after this—I think it must have been about three years later—I came across him, but at one remove.
Time
was devoting its lead story to the new generation of American scientists; there, on its cover, were photographs of the ten people who, according to
Time,
led the field in their disciplines. An astrophysicist; a nuclear physicist; a biochemist. The biochemist was Dr. Gerhard. I wrote to him then, to congratulate him on the progress of his work; I received in reply a letter very like my own, guarded, polite, noncommittal.
Some two years after that, when I was working on a project in California, I saw him again—and again at one remove. One night, alone in a hotel room, I switched on the television and there he was. It was a documentary, a series commissioned by NBC, designed to make medical research comprehensible to the layman. Frank fronted this program. He did it very well: He made science and the painstaking pursuit of disease into a quest that was moving and understandable.
He looked to me unchanged.
This series, and a second that followed it, made Frank Gerhard famous. It made him that rare thing, a public scientist. I almost wrote to him then, but his new fame deterred me. I did not write, though once, when his program came on, I was weak—I touched the screen. I touched his hair, his face, his eyes, his mouth. An electronic pulse. The glass was warm. I missed him very much.
He wrote to me too. It was about six months before my uncle Steenie fell ill, before I went to India. He, too, it seemed, kept in touch at one remove. He had read an article about my work in an American magazine; there were photographs of a sixteenth-century house in the North of England, now a museum, which I had helped to restore.
He complimented me on this work, in a formal way. It was a short letter, which I reread countless times. I carried it everywhere with me. He had signed it as he used to sign those childhood letters. It ended:
your friend, Frank.
When you love someone, there is always the compulsion to see a secret message, to decode; you read into words meanings you would like to find. I knew that. I understood that love has its links with espionage.
I considered the term
friend.
On the one hand, it was a powerful link with the past, a word that for me—as Frank must have known—was charged with emotion. On the other hand,
friend,
from a lover, from a man I had once looked upon as a husband—that could be read as a polite demotion.
If Frank had given me one more sign, one small and secret indication, I would have answered him. As it was, I hesitated; I delayed; I procrastinated. My uncle Steenie became ill. I did not write an answer to a letter I hoped might be an overture; I was too afraid I might be wrong.
Instead, I let time catch me up and propel me along. I returned to Winterscombe to help Steenie die the way he wanted to die. I listened to him read from Wexton’s letters; I listened to that voice of love and sanity. Perhaps, if I am honest, the change began then.
These were the stations of that change: I arranged a funeral; I went to India; I went to America; I looked for my godmother; I returned to Winterscombe. I read. I searched for Constance—and in the process, if I found Frank Gerhard again, I also found myself.
Then, that October evening, I drove from Winterscombe to a London lecture room. It was a large lecture room, and it was packed. I sat in the back row, next to a student whose denim jacket was weighted with badges. The badges proclaimed the defiance of a new generation: MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.
I can remember the moment when Dr. Gerhard was introduced and came onto the platform. I can remember the moment when the lights dimmed. I can remember that the lecture was highly technical and was accompanied by slides. I can even remember some of those slides, the cells they showed, the vision they opened up of our invisible, active, interior universe. I cannot remember what was said; it afflicted me too deeply to hear the sound of his voice.
Once, I felt almost sure he had seen me. His gaze was directed toward the back of the hall; in mid-sentence he halted, then continued. He spoke without notes; it was the one moment of brief hesitation.
When the lecture was over, the speeches of praise and thanks complete, Dr. Gerhard left the room. There was to be a reception, I knew. I watched the students in the audience file out; I watched older, professorial figures close ranks.
I did as I had planned to do. It was a London university lecture hall; I had a note for Dr. Gerhard, already written. I entrusted it to a porter, and left.
It was ten by the time I reached Winterscombe. Wexton had gone to bed. He had written me a note. It said:
Your godmother called. She wouldn’t leave a number. Or a message. She said she might call back.
I stared at this note for some time. The fire was dying down. I threw some more logs upon it. I watched them catch, and the flames leap. Until then, Constance had been remote from my thoughts; it was not her call I was concerned with that night.
I sat down by the fire and put the telephone on the table beside me. I forgot Constance almost at once. I willed the telephone to ring. I tried to calculate how long that reception might continue, at what point Frank Gerhard might receive my note. At ten? At eleven? And, when he had received it, would he telephone at once, or the next day, or not at all? An hour passed. I had an excuse, a reason, for every one of those silent minutes: The reception continued; the porter forgot the note; the note was delivered, but left unread.
By eleven-thirty I had other reasons for that silence—and less innocuous ones. The imagination, at such times, is always vigorous. I saw how foolish it was, after such a gap of time, to assume Frank thought of me as I thought of him. Then, at one minute after midnight, the telephone rang. My heart leaped. I picked it up; I listened, for some seconds, to silence. Not quite silence: it was a bad connection, and I could hear on the line a soughing and a whispering, a sound like the sea heard in a shell, a sound like the wind, shifting leaves and branches. When a voice finally spoke, it was distorted by distance; it advanced and was clear, then receded.
“Victoria,” Constance said.
The disappointment was acute. I could not speak. There was another silence, a sighing along the lines; then she spoke again.
“Have you read my present?”
“Some of it. Not all of it. Constance, where are you?”
“At a station. I’m calling—from a station.”
“Constance—”
“You didn’t cheat? You did begin at the beginning? You haven’t skipped to the end?”
“No—”
“I knew you wouldn’t. Did you like the flowers I left for Bertie?”
“Constance—”
“How sad it all is! Other people’s lives. They’re never quite real, don’t you think? Just a little blur on the side of the picture. The focus wrong, or maybe someone moved at the wrong moment. Did you solve the murder? Did you discover who was killed? I have to go now—”
“Wait—”
“Darling, I can’t. There’s someone with me. He’s calling, gesturing—I’m afraid he’s getting rather impatient. You know how men are! Better not keep him waiting. I just wanted to be sure my present was safe. Goodbye, darling. Love and blessings.”
She had replaced the receiver. I listened to the line hum. Constance’s voice worked inside me: Even after a gap of eight years, it still had power.
I am still not sure if it was Constance alone who conjured me back into the past, one last time. I think it was partly her, partly the man I loved, partly the fact that to sit and wait was unendurable.
I wanted to act. Instead, I read. I opened the drawer and once again took out Constance’s journals. I laid them on my mother’s writing table. I stared at them for some time. I feared those plain black covers. Yet inside them, eventually, must be Frank and myself.
They had been given to me in chronological order. I had kept them that way. I cheated. I reached for the notebook at the bottom of the pile. I had no wish, then, to read of putative murders, or distant family history. I wanted to go forward. I wanted to understand missing letters, Constance’s view of my own missed opportunities.