Hastening along corridors and down stairs, Jane believes she knows the reason for Boy’s alacrity. There are many places in which a conventional man may be expected to propose: by a lake, for instance, overlooking some charming vista; on a terrace by moonlight; perhaps in a conservatory—yes, that would suit Boy. Any of those places, but a gun room? Never. In the gun room, safe from proposals, they discover something astonishing: The matched pair of Purdeys is missing.
This discovery—which takes some time to confirm, for Denton’s gun room is a veritable arsenal of weapons—seems to make Boy very nervous indeed. In a testy and abstracted way, he explains: His father has organized this gun room with fetishistic care. There are only four keys to the room: His father has a key, he has a key, Acland has recently been granted one, and the last is in Cattermole’s safekeeping. Other keepers are occasionally admitted to the room to clean guns, but only when his father or Cattermole is there to supervise them.
Despite the fact that the glass-fronted case containing the Purdeys is unlocked, and the guns clearly not there, Boy refuses to accept that they are missing. He hunts high and low, in corners, behind cupboards, his manner becoming more and more agitated.
“Papa will be furious, absolutely furious! Please”—he takes Jane’s arm in a pleading way—“please don’t mention this, will you, to anyone?”
“Of course not, Boy,” Jane replies, and she keeps her word. The incident will be recorded in her journals, but it will never be discussed, just as Boy’s announcement that the guns have been found after all (two days later) will never be discussed. Boy will never mention the matter again—not even when he is called upon to give evidence to an inquest intended to examine all the events of this night in fine detail.
In the gun room Jane sees on Boy’s face a look of childish dismay.
Poor Boy,
she thinks. Boy, who is unmanned by his father, is not really worrying about his father and the Purdeys; he is worrying about his father and a proposal.
She feels a spurt of pity for Boy, trapped in this farce every bit as much as she is. She will tell him, she thinks, and tell him now: she does not want him to propose, and if he does, she will certainly refuse him. All the sentences are there, stacked waiting in her mind. They are there, but they are never spoken.
At that moment a gong is struck. It echoes, reverberates, through halls and passageways: a ghostly sound. Boy jumps. But that gong is only a signal: a signal for the comet, a signal for the guests that it is time to gather outside.
Boy seems to greet it as another reprieve.
“Better hurry,” he says, and Jane, knowing her moment of honesty has been lost, looks around at weapons, then follows him.
So many people, outside on the terrace at Winterscombe, gazing up at the night sky. A breeze blowing; a calm night; expectation. “Over there!”
It is Acland who glimpses it first, and points. All around him people mill and push, crane their necks, fill in the waiting minutes by trying to identify the constellations.
The polestar, Orion, Cassiopeia, the twins Castor and Pollux, the Great Bear, the Little Bear. Tonight the sky is clear of cloud; the stars are glorious. They look (Acland thinks) like bright seeds scattered across the heavens by the hand of a generous, a profligate God; their profusion dazzles his mind. He moves away from the others so that the buzz of their conversation will not intrude on him, so that he can be—as he prefers it—alone.
He looks up at the sky and feels exultant. On such a night all things are possible; all the shabby things of life, all nuance and subterfuge and compromise and untruth are banished. For a moment, just before he sees the comet, he experiences a great soaring of the spirit, as if he left the dull gravitational pull of the earth far behind him and was swept up among the stars.
The sensation does not last. It is already fading when he glimpses the comet first, and the comet sobers him. He had expected it to be a disappointment, this comet, this much-heralded phenomenon. Random particles, gases, and dust. He had been sure it would be less than spectacular.
As soon as he sees it, he knows he was wrong. The comet awes him; it awes his companions. As he shouts, and points, the conversation dies away; the people on the terrace are silent.
One long curvature of light. The comet arcs; the stars pale; the darkness flares; the great trajectory is silent.
It is this, Acland thinks, that makes the apparition so unearthly and so fearsome. Volition, blaze, and silence. With such speed and conflagration, he expects noise, the crackle of flame, the burst of an explosion, even the roar of an engine (like a motorcar or a steam train, like an aeroplane—Acland has seen an aeroplane, once).
But the comet is as silent as a star, and it is this (Acland decides) that is so awesome. This, and—just for an instant—a perception of the future. For this comet will return, of course, some seventy-six years from now; that much is certain.
Acland looks and calculates (as perhaps, just then, each person looks and calculates). The comet will next be seen in the year 1986. The digits sound foreign, unimaginable, bizarre. By then, he will be … ninety-three.
He will not live that long—of that fact Acland is at once sure. It is too ancient, too unlikely, too far beyond the allotted span of three-score years and ten. He keeps his eyes on the comet, watches light curl. He knows: once only in a lifetime; he will never see it again.
Acland watches and (briefly) understands his own mortality. It saddens and angers him. So few years, Acland thinks; before it is over, he would like to do one thing daring, one thing extreme, one thing glorious.
He turns impatiently, furiously, away. He must be with Jenna; he must be with her
now
—and he does not care who sees him leaving.
Life is so short
, Acland thinks, and turns in the direction of the stables; there, Jenna has promised to meet him. He quickens his pace. No one sees him leave except Jane Conyngham (who always watches him).
The air is sweet in Acland’s lungs. The exultancy has returned.
Tonight, I could do anything,
Acland says to himself, begins to run, and glances back, once, over his shoulder.
But no. No one calls after him, no one shouts his name, and, much later, no one will ask where he has gone.
And the other watchers? Some of them, too, are frightened. Even Denton feels melancholy steal upon him; he thinks of his stiff joints, his shortness of breath, the closeness of the graveyard. Gwen, wearing her sealskin trimmed with ermine, standing next to Shawcross just as she planned, understands how expectation can be shriveled by reality.
She had envisaged an unclouded happiness. Now her mind is troubled, rent in two by hope and panic. For the first time, today, she has questioned her own adultery. She no longer dismisses all the doubts at the back of her mind. She has admitted them; they throng. She loves Eddie; she does not love him. He loves her; he does not love her. She is a mistress; she is a mother. And now, for the first time, those two roles collide, and she fears, obscurely, some punishment.
She has sinned. She looks at the comet and she knows it. Not erred, sinned. Eddie would laugh at the word, but for once she will not be influenced by Eddie. Nothing, she decides, can excuse what she has done. The shame of it sickens her. Again she sees herself, a child, sitting in the parlor listening to her father read from the Bible, and she knows now as surely as she ever knew then: Sin invites retribution.
Eddie has taken her hand but she tugs it away. She will make amends, break off this affair, and she will never be tempted again. Eddie glances at her, but Gwen does not even notice. She is trying to calculate her punishment and, with a swoop of irrational terror, understands whence it will come.
She will not be hurt—of course not. That would be too easy. No, someone she loves will be hurt. The loss will be her punishment. Frantic now, she searches the faces of the crowd for her children, her husband. Then, turning away, she stumbles back across the terrace toward the house.
“Gwen, where are you going?” Shawcross calls. Gwen does not look back.
“To see Steenie,” she says. “I have to see Steenie.”
Steenie and Constance have been allowed to stay up. They are kneeling side by side at the window of the nursery. The window is wide open and they lean out over its ledge dangerously. Steenie’s face is flushed, excited; Constance’s face is pale and closed. They both stare at the sky, watch the light fade on the horizon.
Nanny Temple, her gray hair in a pigtail down her back, well wrapped up in a red flannel dressing gown, fusses behind them. When Gwen rushes into the room and sweeps Steenie into her arms, Nanny Temple is aggrieved. The nursery is her domain.
Gwen covers Steenie’s face with kisses. She insists that she must take him back to bed, give him his glass of milk, settle his pillows, feel his forehead, tuck the sheets and blankets up to his chin. Even then, she is inclined to linger. She remembers the nights she sat here when Steenie was ill, certain that if she left him her protection would cease and he would die. The fear of those nights is with her again; only when she is sure that Steenie is asleep, his breathing regular, will she consent to leave.
Then, abstracted, she scarcely notices that Constance has been forgotten, and that only now is Nanny Temple insisting the child come away from the open window.
The window is shut; the curtains are closed.
“Time for the sandman,” Nanny says briskly.
“Goodnight, Constance,” Gwen calls, leaving. Constance, who knows she will not sleep, allows herself to be led to her bedroom.
“I buried a rabbit today,” she tells Nanny as she is tucked into bed.
“Of course you did, dear,” Nanny says, extinguishing the night light. Nanny Temple (who does not like her) is well used to Constance’s lies; her policy is to ignore them.
“It was a baby rabbit. A gray one,” Constance adds.
“Off to dreamland,” Nanny says, and shuts the door.
In the darkness Constance lies rigid and still. She flexes her fingers. She thinks. She hums, flatly, a metallic little tune. She waits, and after a while the albatross comes, as he comes each evening.
Constance watches as he circles the ceiling; she listens to the slow beat of his huge white wings. This albatross is no bird of ill omen—how stupid people are. This albatross is her counselor, her friend, her guardian among the angels.
And he is beautiful. Each day he flies to the ends of the earth and back again; each day he traverses the oceans of the world. One day he will take Constance with him—he has promised her that. She will sit on his back, and rest between his wings, as secure as a nut in a shell—and then she, too, will see the world. Constance looks forward to that. Meanwhile, she watches and she waits. Patiently.
Downstairs, it is eleven o’clock; the chandeliers are illumined, the Cavendish drawing room glitters; Jane Conyngham is playing the piano.
To begin with she has played the expected pieces: a tinkly waltz or two, a gentle mazurka, the kind of music a gentlewoman should play, the kind of music Jane detests and despises.
To begin with, people were listening to her; they gathered in a circle, perhaps expecting that their hostess would join Jane at the piano, as she often does. Gwen has a sweet voice and her repertoire is designed to pluck at the heartstrings. But tonight, re-joining her guests with an easy apology, Gwen has declined to sing.
Jane, lifting her eyes from the piano keys (she knows the wretched mazurka by heart), sees Gwen begin to circulate. Gwen begins with her most distinguished guests, the elderly earl and his wife, who rarely appear in society. She moves on to Denton’s sister Maud, and to Sir Montague Stern, the financier. She greets colonels and captains, statesmen and politicians, City men and stockbrokers. She encourages Boy and Freddie to circulate among the young women present. With a laugh and a smile she shepherds her husband and his sporting cronies in the direction of the smoking room, or billiards. A word here, a touch on the arm there. Gwen is good at this, Jane observes.
The mazurka comes to an end. The circle around the piano disperses. Her playing will be background noise from now on. Jane rests her fingers against the keys. She does not mind; to be on the periphery is to be private.
For a while, resting between pieces, she watches the other guests, remembers the comet. She did not look at it at first, not for some while, for her eye was held by the figure of Acland, separate as always, outlined against the light of the sky, arm outstretched, finger pointing.
Jane bends her head to the keys. She is aware that Acland is not in the room and that he did not return from the gardens—although no one else seems to have noticed. No matter; she is being ignored, and so she can allow her mind to dwell on Acland. She thinks of his reddish hair, and how with that unearthly light from the sky, it flared like a halo around his head. She itemizes his features, which, for Jane, possess an endless fascination. Acland has pale skin of great translucence; it betrays his emotions as litmus does chemicals. When Acland is angry (and she has often seen him angry), he pales; when he is happy or excited or amused, color washes thinly over bone. When she thinks of Acland it is always in terms of speed. He has a quick mind, a quick tongue, a precipitate judgment. He must always move on—to the next place, the next idea, the next person, the next project, and in his company Jane often feels fearful. Acland, she senses, can be destructive; he is splendid, but careless.
When she watched him earlier, outside in the garden, Jane felt as if a struggle took place inside her own skin. It was as if something inside her, something wild and rebellious, an incubus, were fighting to get out. Now that incubus is back; Jane can sense it. This incubus—which is no such thing, of course, but merely temptation—makes devilish suggestions. It sings a song of a wild world, a world outside the careful boundaries in which Jane lives. There, a different Jane could forget about such tiresome concepts as duty, discretion, and obedience. She could forget about her ailing father and the hopes of her widowed aunt, and she could be … free.