So Constance went down the staircase at Winterscombe to dance. There she is, at the top of these stairs; the music begins; it drifts upward on the air. She is wearing her ball gown, which is white, decorated with sequins.
Little rings are crammed on her small fingers. Her hair is up for the first time. Her eyes slant upward at the corners. There are pearls around her throat, pearls that Maud has given her.
Full fathom five thy father lies
(Constance thinks);
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
She stands very still. The words perfume her mind. The music drifts. Her mouth turns down at the corners, her waif face, her sad little clown face. She gathers her will. There is an ink stain on one finger. Constance waits to feel cured. She waits to feel free.
Full fathom five is a long way down, yes—but in Constance’s case, would it have been deep enough?
Actually, a fathom isn’t so very much: it’s six feet. So, full fathom five, which sounds such a long way down, is only thirty feet. I think Constance could have consigned her father much, much deeper than that—thirty fathoms, forty, it would have made no difference: Shawcross couldn’t be drowned, or not in his daughter’s subconscious anyway. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, he’d rise up.
Constance, who had never heard of the subconscious mind, thought she could contain her father in a book. She thought she could net him with words, drown him in paragraphs, hammer down the hatches, close that book and close that life. She couldn’t, of course; memory does not work like that. None of us controls memory—it controls us.
We cannot forget. We are the stuff of memory: all those images, all those details, sequences, episodes, which we all carry around with us in our heads and which we call the past—that is what we are. We may try to control it—as Constance did, and I had done too—selecting an image here, an event there, turning our own pasts into ordered, linear, comprehensible narratives. We are all novelists, I think, when it comes to our own lives—but the past resists this kind of tweaking. I’m sure it does. It has a life all its own, sometimes benign, sometimes virulent. It is as tough as a microbe, as adaptive as a virus, and just when we think we’ve composed it in a pattern that suits us just fine, it re-forms; it transmutes; it assumes a very different shape. And if we ignore this, turn a blind eye—or, if you like, suppress—what does it do? It sends up a subversive little message: Up comes an image, an event, we thought had been safely forgotten. Hey, says the memory (which refuses to lie down), what about this? Don’t you remember that?
This had happened to me. I had spent eight years trying to forget happiness. That had been hard enough, and one of the things I’d discovered at Winterscombe was that I had not succeeded. How much harder for Constance then, who was trying to forget abuse.
When I’d read that particular entry in her journal, I did not want to go on. Like her, I closed the book. I walked around Winterscombe, from room to room. I went into the ballroom, where Constance began the next stage of her life. I went to the foot of the stairs and looked up.
It was just a ballroom. They were just stairs. There was no twang from the past. That seemed wrong. I felt that the vitality and the violence of past events ought to have left some discernible imprint; the quality of the air here ought to have been different, so that even someone who knew nothing of the house or its history could have stood here and sensed … what? A chill in the air, a concentration of molecules—all those sensations that people describe when they try to define a haunting? Even I, knowing what I knew, could sense nothing. The ballroom remained a room; the stairs remained stairs. They were stubbornly inanimate.
I went back to the journals, which were not. I went back to the photographs of Constance, taken that night. I thought of her standing at the top of those stairs. I pitied her, and I also feared for her—because, to some extent, I knew what happened next.
I knew that Constance did choose a husband, the night of her coming-out ball; I knew who that husband was, and I knew something of subsequent events. In fact, many of the things I thought I knew at that point were wrong; Constance’s marriage, like her childhood, was full of secrets. Then, I looked at Constance at the top of those stairs, and I thought:
She is about to make her worst mistake.
I thought Constance had tried, pathetically hard, to free herself of her father—and I was certain she had failed. Shawcross the escapologist was out of that notebook, off its pages, before Constance even left her room. Shawcross was not even dead. In Constance’s memory he lived on. He stood there with her at the top of the stairs; he went down with her to the ballroom, and out with her into her future life.
Constance might have been certain that she selected her husband of her own volition, her own free will, but I didn’t agree. I didn’t believe that at all. Constance’s choice of a husband caused mayhem. It was a choice that had her father’s fingerprints all over it.
A husband it had to be. After all, what were the alternatives? Constance was—she saw this—a prisoner of her time and her society. Women of her adopted class did not work; women of her own class did—and depressing work it was, too. Constance had no intention of dwindling away her days as a governess or a companion. To become a secretary, some menial species of clerk? Never. Nursing? Constance rejected that at once. It was the war alone that made nursing a socially acceptable profession, and even this war could not last.
No, marriage it must be—marriage, which would release her from the confines of the Cavendish family and their charity. Marriage, which Constance, who was still very young, associated with freedom. Marriage—but to whom?
As she went down the stairs, Constance had in her mind a clear but abstract idea of the man she needed. She had made one of her lists. He must be rich, obviously; well connected, preferably; titled, possibly; single—for simplicity.
The right man, she had decided, must be already established. Constance was too impatient for life to make do with a man still climbing the ladder. He need not be handsome—Constance had observed that handsome men were often vain; she found that tedious. She thought she might prefer him to be clever; whether his nature was kindly was immaterial. Of course, if she could select a man who had looks
and
wit, fortune
and
position, the marriage might be more agreeable. Constance might be decided upon a husband, but she did not relish being bored.
When she drew up this list for herself, Constance thought of Acland. He fitted each category, after all, as snugly as a well-made glove shaped itself to fingers.
This idea she rejected almost at once. Constance had Acland locked away in a separate compartment of her mind. She respected him too much to classify him as husband material. A husband was a means to an end; Acland was … himself. She preferred to think of Acland as a temptation that must always be out of reach. In that way, his uniqueness was preserved.
So Constance put Acland, with his bright hair, in a little lacquered mind-box. She locked the box. She threw away the key (until some years later, when she decided to retrieve it again). Inside that box, with him, was impossibility, excess, music, and gunshots—the chaos of life. Inside the box, Acland was safe. He could never be ordinary. So, Acland was ruled out. Constance had to select another candidate.
She told herself, when she reached the foot of the stairs, that her mind was open, that in no way did she lean more toward one man than another.
In her heart, I suspect, she knew that was not entirely true. There was already a bias there, but Constance would not acknowledge it. It might be anyone, she said to herself. The possibilities made her giddy.
She was arrogant, of course. I don’t think that it occurred to her for one moment that the man, once selected, might fail to respond. But then, beauty gives confidence, and Constance was very beautiful that night.
Anyway, there she is, at the foot of the stairs, with the music drifting. Lifting the hem of her white dress in her white-gloved hand, she walks toward the ballroom where, some twenty years later, I will dance with Franz-Jacob, in his brown boots, and not understand that when he stops dancing, it is because he fears for a sister in Germany, for a telephone ringing in another part of the house.
She approaches the ballroom. Its pink curtains are not tattered, the orchestra plays in its box, the chandeliers are lit, and the air is brilliant.
She is wearing new dancing slippers; the heels are a little too thin, so she finds balancing difficult. She looks like a woman, but she walks like a child.
She is greeted by Gwen, who kisses her. By Sir Montague Stern, who bows over her hand in his odd foreign way. By Maud, who tells her how lovely she looks, and who draws her forward with pride in her protégée. As convention demands, she dances the first dance with a slow and gouty Denton. She dances the next, in an inattentive way, with Freddie.
By the end of this dance, her spirits are soaring. As he leads her from the floor, she stops, turns to him, clasps his arms.
“Oh, Freddie,” she says, “the future. I want it so much. And I can hear it now. I can. It’s there—listen …” She breaks off, tilts her head. Freddie finds himself blinded by the loveliness of her face. He stammers some reply, but Constance interrupts.
“Oh, Freddie, will you forgive me for all I did, all I was? I know I hurt you—and I swear to you, I shall never hurt anyone, ever again. I feel so very happy tonight. I can’t bear for you to look sad. You and Francis and Acland and Steenie—you’re the best brothers in the world. I love you all so much. I love you to death. I shall
make
you be happy. Look, I’m going to put some luck in your hand, now, quickly, in your palm. Close your fingers over it and hold it tight. There! All the past has gone away and we need never think of it again. You see what I’ve given you? Tomorrow. Just like that, in the palm of your hand. Now, go and dance, Freddie.” She smiled. “With
someone else.
”
Freddie did as she asked. He danced a polka, then a foxtrot, then a waltz. He enjoyed these dances, up to a point. He was curing himself of Constance, he told himself, though he knew he was not cured quite yet.
In a way, he thought (returning to one of the small gilt chairs at the side of the floor, sitting down beside Jane Conyngham), he was glad to relinquish Constance. She went too fast. She muddled things; she muddied things, and Freddie preferred these things, whatever they were—life, he supposed—to be slower, more cautious, above all
simpler
.
Freddie sat down in a puffing way, out of breath from the spins of the waltz. He mopped at his forehead and greeted Jane. He looked around the floor in a hopeful way, at the passing dancers, at the women in particular. Freddie was not anxious to fall in love—too much of an upheaval, just then—but he would have been quite glad to find some ordinary girl whom he could see from time to time. Someone to take to the theater, so he did not have to tag along behind Steenie all the time.
None of the passing women held his eye, and he found his gaze strayed back, in the most irritating way, to the small and animated figure of Constance. She had not sat out one dance. Freddie, knowing it to be foolish, resented this. He resented the men who were her partners.
Wrenching his gaze away, he turned to Jane with some relief. He had grown to like Jane after all. She was kind. She was sensible. She was easy to talk to; she was both resilient and astute. Freddie, who had been exposed through his ambulance work to aspects of life from which he had previously been shielded, began to understand a little the rigors of her work. Because of this, he respected her. He was not pleased, therefore, when Jane turned his attention back to the dance floor and, even worse, back to Constance.
“Who’s that dancing with Constance now, Freddie?” she asked.
Freddie averted his gaze with a jerk. “Oh, God, I don’t know,” he said irritably. “One of the devoted swains.”
“Is it that American, the one Maud mentioned? What was his name? Gus Something. Gus Alexander, that’s it.”
“I can’t see,” said Freddie, refusing to look. “If he’s wearing diamond shirt studs the size of pigeon’s eggs, then it probably is.”
“His studs are quite large. And they do glitter.” Jane’s voice was dry.
“Then it’s him. Can he dance?”
“Not terribly well. He looks as if he’s wearing boots.”
“Then it’s definitely him. I can’t stand him. He talks about money all the time. How much he’s made—down to the last cent. Also, he thinks he’s in love with Constance. Do you know how many roses he sent her the other day? Two hundred. Red ones. In a horrible gold basket thing. The kind of thing Stern would have chosen.”
“And was she pleased?”
“Of course she was. Constance loves extravagant gestures. She says people ought to be more vulgar.”
“Does she indeed? Well, you know, Freddie, I sometimes think Constance might be right about that.”
“Right? How can she be right?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Jane frowned. “We make all these rules and regulations, and most of them are arbitrary and silly. We decide you must hold a knife a certain way. Or we decide it’s not done to talk of certain things—like money. Why not? Why not just be like Mr. Alexander and say what you think?”
“And eat your peas off your knife while you’re doing it?”
“There are worse crimes, Freddie.” Jane paused. “When I am at the hospital …”
Jane never completed this sentence. She stopped, and Freddie did not prompt her. She looked out across the ballroom, at the tiers of hothouse flowers, at the chandeliers, which made the air as lucid as glass. She saw the ballroom; she also saw the hospital.
The transition from one world to another was abrupt; Jane found it difficult. She felt she ought to be able to separate the two worlds and see them as distinct, but increasingly she found this impossible. This inability to separate the parts of her life frightened her. She believed it was caused by overwork; sometimes she found it a little mad.
That morning at Guy’s, she had been treating the wound of a small boy. His name was Tom. Tom slept in a crib in the women’s ward because the hospital suffered from chronic overcrowding. Tom had (among other things) rickets; like most of the children, and many of the women, he came from the East End and he suffered from malnutrition. He also had a diseased kidney; the previous day it had been cut out, leaving a neat round hole, like a bullet wound.