“Touch me.” Constance caught his hand and drew it down against her. “Kiss me. Talk to me. Talk to me when you touch me. I like that. Tell me—tell me what will happen. Tell me why it will be easy. A man your age, my aunt’s lover, and a girl young enough to be your daughter. Why will there be no scenes, no outrage?”
Stern moved behind the chair. He leaned forward. His eyes met hers in the mirror. His hand lay against her throat.
“There may be argument,” he replied. “And I am sure there will be some outrage. That much is unavoidable. But I think you will find that no one, Constance, will put obstacles in our way.”
“Maud?”
“I shall take care of Maud.”
“Denton, then? Denton will never allow it.”
“Denton is not your father. In any case, Denton will agree.”
“Touch me. Oh, God, yes, like that. Denton? That is impossible. Why?”
“Why?” Stern bent forward. “Why? First, because Boy is no longer to marry an heiress. Second, because Denton owes me a great deal of money.”
The word
money,
as he spoke it, seemed to carry some sexual charge. They both became still for a moment. Their eyes held.
“A great deal?” Constance leaned back. She rested her head against Stern’s thighs. She rubbed her head gently back and forth.
Perhaps it was this action of hers, perhaps the cupidity in her voice—whichever the reason, Stern abandoned his pretense of control.
“Oh, a very great deal,” he replied in a deliberate voice, and at that, a small shudder passed through both their bodies.
“Be quick,” Constance said.
Stern adjusted the chair a fraction of an inch. Above the black silk of her stockings, Constance’s thighs were very white. Constance fixed her eyes upon the mirror. She watched his touch, and his taste. When Stern bent between her thighs, she cradled his head; she began to speak. Salty and staccato rushes of words. Constance liked words, particularly those kinds of words; she liked the sweetness of their shock.
Words, and watching, the most reliable trigger of all: They had never failed her, so far.
Some weeks after this, as she had known was inevitable, Constance received a summons from Maud.
She went alone, at Maud’s request. She waited alone in Maud’s drawing room. She touched the furniture. I am afraid she first looked at the paintings and then counted them.
This would be the first time she had seen Maud since Stern had paid his visit to Denton, and the permission for their engagement had been obtained.
Stern, to Constance’s irritation, refused to discuss his own conversations with Maud. On that subject, his discretion was absolute.
From Gwen, too, she had been able to learn little of Maud’s reaction, although she had questioned her at length. Gwen was still sunk in grief for Acland. She roused herself sufficiently to plead with Constance. She suggested this engagement was unthinkable. Then, faced with her husband’s inexplicable intransigence, with Constance’s insistence that she must obey the dictates of her heart, Gwen had submitted. Unable to dissuade Constance, she avoided her.
So now, waiting for Maud (and my great-aunt kept her waiting some time), Constance felt a certain lively curiosity. She wondered how Maud would appear. Would she be tearful? Reproachful? Might she, even now, still hope to persuade Constance that this marriage could not occur?
Constance was learning to prepare for all the major scenes in her life as an actress might for a new role upon the stage. For this occasion she had composed a very pretty little speech. When my great-aunt Maud finally appeared, Constance was disconcerted. Maud entered her drawing room in her usual way, with an air of brisk efficiency and apparent good temper. She did not embark upon arguments or reproaches. She made no pleas.
Constance, taking a pause for a cue, then launched herself upon her speech. She reminded Maud of how much she owed her; she recalled Maud’s kindnesses to her in the past. She made it clear that this indebtedness had, for a long time, caused her to fight her own feelings for Sir Montague. She had tried to ignore them; she had tried to combat them—but at length, when she came to realize his regard for her, she had been overcome.
She went on in this vein for some while; Maud heard her out. If, once or twice, Constance felt Maud’s expression was scornful, she ignored it. She pressed on to the end. When she had finished, Maud remained silent for some while; both women were still standing.
“You did not mention the word
love
,” Maud said at last, in a reflective way. She turned her gaze to the windows. “How odd. Neither did Montague.”
Constance was annoyed by this. She felt
love
was a word Stern should have employed to give strength to his argument with Maud, even if he avoided it when with her. She frowned.
“I don’t wish to cause any further hurt,” she began.
Maud cut her off with a wave of the hand.
“Constance, please do not take me for a fool. You are perfectly indifferent to the hurt you cause, as I am well aware. In fact I sometimes think it goes beyond that. You have a positive taste for mischief, I suspect. In any case …” She turned back to Constance and gave her a thoughtful look. “I did not ask you here to question you, or argue with you, Constance. I have no desire to listen to pious speeches, so you can spare your breath.” She paused. “I asked you here to tell you something.”
“And what was that, Aunt Maud?”
“You are not my niece. Please to avoid that title.”
“What was it, then?”
“You do not know Montague.”
Maud moved away. Constance stared at her back. She made a face at it.
“Obviously I shall come to know him better—”
“Possibly. You do not know him now.”
“Do you?”
At that, Maud turned. Constance had spoken in an insolent tone of voice; she perhaps hoped to provoke Maud, whose containment was beginning to vex her. If so, she failed. Maud looked at her for a while in silence. Her expression could be read as contemptuous; it could also be read as pitying.
“Yes, I do,” she replied after that pause. “I know him perhaps as well as anyone can. I don’t intend to meet you again, Constance, and so, before you leave, I thought I would give you a warning. Not that you will heed it, of course.”
“A warning? Heavens—how dramatic!” Constance smiled. “Am I to hear some terrible revelation, because if so, you should know—”
“No revelations, Constance. Nothing so startling.”
Maud was already moving toward the door. It became clear to Constance that this interview was over.
“Just one small thing. A vulgar phrase puts it most succinctly, I think. In selecting Montague—and I’m sure, Constance, it was you who did the selecting, not the other way about—in selecting Montague, you have bitten off more than you can chew.”
“Really?” Constance tossed her head. “I have very sharp little teeth, you know….”
“You’ll need them,” Maud replied, and went out, and closed the door.
W
EXTON TELEPHONED TO TELL
ME he was in flight. From a biographer, on this occasion—or rather, from a would-be biographer, a young American academic whose persistence made Wexton shudder.
“He’s after me,” he said in lugubrious tones. “He’s
interviewing
people. He’s been to Virginia. He’s been to Yale. He’s even been to France. And now he’s in Hampstead. Trying to flatter me. When that doesn’t work, he tries threats …”
“Threats, Wexton?”
“Oh, you know. That he’ll publish anyway. That he’s sure I’d welcome the opportunity to set the record straight. He’ll be going through the trash cans next. I know his type. I want to come to Winterscombe. I have to escape.”
Wexton arrived a day later. He was carrying two enormous suitcases, both very heavy, whose contents he declined to explain. “Wait and see,” he said. “My problem. Not pajamas and a toothbrush, I can tell you that.”
I was very glad to see him. I had realized by then that embarking upon the past as I had, alone in a large house, was a mistake. My next commission (the one in France) had been delayed by the illness of my client; ten days spent working at my London offices had not, as I hoped, severed the links with the past. Winterscombe, Constance’s journals, had tempted me back.
By the time Wexton arrived, his presence massive, sensible, reassuring, I was already beginning to see both these papers and the past zones as a trap. I was no longer sure of the balance of my own judgment. To my questions—and by then my mind thronged with questions—the dead returned dusty answers, answers I knew to be incomplete. In the case of Constance, the only reply was further questions and ambiguities. I felt confined in Constance’s hall of mirrors, with its tricksy reflections. I saw, and I half-saw; I had begun to fear I might never get out. Yes, I was very glad to see Wexton.
On the day he arrived I told him about Constance’s journals and the manner in which they had been given. I took him into the drawing room, expecting dismay. The room dismayed
me:
It was a mess, a clutter, a cascade of papers. It looked obsessional; it was obsessional. Wexton, I thought, would cure me. He would tell me to stop.
To my surprise, he did not. He ambled up and down, picking up a letter here, a photograph there. He discovered an old box of Steenie’s Russian cigarettes, lit one, and stood puffing on it in an amused, reflective way.
“People can’t resist it, I guess,” he said at last. “Keeping all this stuff.”
“This house is especially bad. Nothing was ever thrown away. I suppose there wasn’t time, when my parents died and the war came. No time to sift, anyway. So everything was kept. It was just bundled into boxes and packing cases. No attempt to order things, no classification. There’s so much
evidence.
Now, scarcely anyone writes letters—but my family never stopped.
And
diaries, journals … Who keeps diaries or journals now?”
“Statesmen. Politicians. They do,” Wexton replied with gloom. “Still, those are different. Exercises in self-justification. Writing with an eye cocked for posterity. Juggling with the verdict of history. Except—no. Maybe all diaries do that.”
“
Look
at all these letters. I can’t remember when I last wrote a letter—a proper one, I mean, not a business one—”
I stopped. I could remember. I remembered then: the letter, weakly and cautiously phrased, to avoid betraying the fact that I still loved, and still hoped; I could remember the letter as vividly as I could the man to whom it was sent.
“It won’t change,” Wexton continued. “People love to record themselves. We’re just in between methods right now. You wait. In fifty years someone in your position won’t be sifting through a whole lot of letters and diaries, sure. But there’ll be a substitute. Home movies instead of photograph albums. Computers! Imagine that. It’ll happen. They’ll store themselves away on machines. Great spools of tape. Do computers run on tape? People can’t resist it, you see. It’s the last vanity. Parting shots from the grave.” He paused. “It’s worth remembering that aspect when you go through all this. Not too many people in that situation tell the truth.”
“You don’t think so?”
Wexton shrugged. He picked up one of the black notebooks, then laid it down.
“Can you imagine Constance—on computer?” He grinned. “Or Constance’s home movies?”
“Don’t tease me, Wexton. It isn’t as easy as that. This is my family. My parents. My past too. And I don’t understand it. I can’t tell lies from truth.”
I explained then, as much as I was able. I brought Wexton up-to-date. I explained that Constance seemed convinced that her father had been murdered, and that when she came to name her suspects, it was members of my family who comprised her list. I told him, briefly, the truth as she wrote it, about her childhood. I told him how she had selected her husband, at her dance.
“Constance, Constance, Constance,” he said, when I had finished. “That’s an awful lot of Constance. What about everyone else? What are they? Bystanders? Spear carriers?”
“No, Wexton, obviously not. I
know
they’re not. But even when I look for them, I can’t find them. I can’t hear them. Constance drowns them out. Look—”
I held out to him one of the black notebooks, the one I had just begun to read. Wexton shook his head.
“All right. Listen then. This is 1916. October 1916. I’ll read you just a little bit. Then maybe you’ll see what I mean.”
“October 1916? So she’s not married yet?”
“No, she isn’t married yet.”
“And it’s before—?”
“Yes. Well before. That’s 1917.”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
I read Wexton the following extract. Like many of the entries in the journal, it took the form of a letter. More than a diary, this was a one-sided dialogue—between Constance and a man she knew to be dead.
Poor Jenna [she wrote]. I went to see her today, Acland, for your baby’s sake. Don’t you hope Hennessy is killed soon? I do. I hope some German gets him in his sights. For Jenna’s sake, and mine. Acland, if you can, guide the bullet, will you? Nicely. Between the eyes, I think.
What else? Montague is the very devil—but you know about that. Today I read him my latest letter from Jane, in my Jane voice. It was not very kind, perhaps, but it was very funny. Poor Jane. Do you know why she’s gone to France? She wants to go to the place where you died. Such a waste of time! She won’t find you there, for you’re somewhere else—and only I know where that is. You’re mine, not hers. We have a pact, remember?
Oh, Acland, I wish you would come again in the night. Won’t you? Just once?
“You see?” I closed the journal; Wexton made no comment. “It’s all so perverse. Writing to a dead man.
Montague is the very devil
—what does that mean? I
met
Stern. Constance claims he never loved her, but he did. He loved her very much.”
“He said so?”
“Oddly enough, he did. It was not long before he died—maybe he knew he was dying and that was the reason. I’m not sure. He told me a story …”
I looked away. I could see Stern as I spoke, sitting in the quietness of that room in New York, telling me how his marriage to Constance had ended and giving me advice—advice I did not take.