The Sleeping Beauty (13 page)

‘It is none of her business,’ he thought. ‘She might be my wife, she is so curious and possessive.’ He did not offer to buy the picture for her, as he did not believe it to be her real reason for returning.

In a great flurry of rain, they were borne on towards London. Everything rural lay behind them; trees thinned, the fields were gone and now the windows of houses looked only an arm’s distance from them. They flew across bridges above roads busy with traffic, and, at last, into the tunnels.

Lightly, lightly Vinny’s thoughts went – wary, delicate; as if Isabella were reading every one. He was on tiptoe with fear. Too tired to trust his judgment, he wondered how much to explain to her and again decided that he could explain nothing. ‘I have taken too many risks already,’ he thought.

She smoothed on her gloves and smiled at him. ‘It was nice of you to buy the bureau,’ she said. ‘That was the best part of the day. It was wonderful to see Mrs Mitchell not getting it.’

The bureau, hours earlier, he had intended as a parting-gift to Rita – to hold the papers he would no longer be dealing with. Isabella turned away, seeing his look of exhaustion.

‘Well, we are back again,’ she said, trying to be gay, as they came to a standstill under the discoloured glass roof of the station.

‘And the day is ending as it began,’ she added, looking up at the dirty panes vibrating with rain.

But to Vinny the difference between setting out and returning was the whole of the measure between hope and despair.

Some dazzling days came after the rain. Betty wore her mauveand-white striped uniform and no coat when she took the baby for walks. If Laurence were home for a weekend he often arranged to meet her at the top of the cliff and sometimes pushed the pram for her, with great energy as if it were a lawn-mower. His mother’s dismaywould have been mixed with incredulity had she seen him; for he appeared quite unselfconscious and even took an unmanly interest in the baby. Betty’s uniform delighted him, especially the little frilled bands over her rolled-up sleeves. It was his first time of being happy for years, and he saw that manhood was indeed a wonderful escape from boyhood.

Both he and Betty felt at variance with their elders and far from at home in their homes. Her problems were more easily explained than his; for they were difficulties of poverty and shame; insuperable, but avoidable.

‘You couldn’t take anyone there,’ she explained, ‘so it wouldn’t be any use having a friend.’ But he felt that she
did
take him home, and saw, as vividly as if he had been there, the family eating their bloaters in the kitchen. The scene fascinated him and although he knew that he would dislike them all
except her mother – who unfortunately for herself had high standards of behaviour as her daughter had – he would have enjoyed sitting down to a bloater with them. Betty’s nice feelings were like his own mother’s, faddish, feminine; but he was always pleased to hear about them for, retailing them, she exposed the rest of the picture.

‘You can’t imagine how disgusting it is – having to go to the lavatory at the bottom of the garden, and washing at the scullery sink. Then the kitchen’s too hot and smells of Grandma’s Germolene, or else she’s soaking her feet. And Dad not particular about saying “pardon” when he belches.’

He could not envy her this home as she envied him his: he thought of Grandma as a filthy old party, but was not repelled by her. ‘She doesn’t belong to you,’ Betty said. ‘If she did, you’d long for her to die. She keeps talking about her corns and her false teeth and her wind – at mealtimes, too.’ As a family, they seemed to be exceptionally troubled by wind. They also had rows. Father rowed with Grandma; Mother with Father. They quarrelled with their neighbours and relations. Sometimes, Betty got her ears boxed for answering back. Yet, to Laurence, hate, disgust, indignation seemed easier emotions to bear than guilt and embarrassment. In his world, the elders were disgusted with the young – tactlessly and illogically disgusted that they should manage to live in the sad conditions bequeathed to them. No apologies were made for having handed on such a world, and Isabella, for instance, gaily blamed her son for taking what he found. She lamented the old days and often told Laurence what he had missed. He thought that he inherited all her generation’s sighs, as well as the fruits of their foolishness.

More and more she made difficulties for him. She frustrated, with herlast-minute questions and suggestions, his plans for meeting Betty. Since the sale, she felt herself back again to the days after her husband’s death, face to face with a grief as sharp as it
had been at the beginning, with a sense of loss almost complete. Vinny had tided her over; but, once he removed his support, she saw that he had only helped her to pass the days: the pain had been allayed, but the malady itself persisted. Vinny had indeed seemed to remove his support, and the romantic friendship she had envisaged continuing into old age had already dwindled. Sometimes she wished that he had left her alone; for, added to her loneliness, there was now the pain of feeling herself excluded. This had always been the most hurtful experience to her and one that repeated itself throughout her life. She was so often the instrument of bringing two of her dearest ones together, while hoping humbly that they would manage to think well of one another, if only because she herself thought so well of both. After a time – whether it was school-mistress and mother, brother and husband – she would begin to feel herself too much a third party, too unnecessary to them. Although there was often sexual jealousy entangled in her emotions, it was not always an ingredient and could not much worsen what was so bad already. The chief agony was to feel herself outside – jokes were made which she did not understand, or understand quickly enough; she would feel that she was making no mark: her innocent little tests of their affection always turned out negatively – if, on walks, she went a little ahead, no one hurried to keep up with her; if she lagged behind, no one turned to see where she was. Having once had two friendships, she would suddenly find that she had neither.

She had been much less than in other affairs the instrument of bringing Emily and Vinny together; but she wished she had sent him to The Victoria in the beginning, and not taken him to Rose Kelsey’s; for now only courtesy and kindness ever brought him to visit her and she knew that he dissembled rather than confided in her, which would have been the only – though faint indeed – salve to her wound. Moreover, since the day in Market Swanford, she realised that Vinny had always
been a stranger to her. Apart from feeling the impotence of her own personality, she was forced to suspect that, unlike herself, who had no mystery, no secrets (save her little flutters on horses), behind the façade of other people lay a labyrinth of mystery, a vast terrain of secrecy, which resulted in unaccountable behaviour. If Vinny, then why not Evalie Hobson too (who always seemed so simple); why not Laurence? Perhaps Harry, too, had had his hidden life.

For this reason, when Vinny next called, she turned over to him all of Harry’s files of papers and letters.

‘There is no hurry … but if you could be so good … you would know better than I what I should keep … and you could throw away the rest.’

Vinny felt stifled with the weight of other people’s papers.

‘I feel it is not my business,’ he began.

‘It might not be mine,’ she said simply. ‘I am always hearing that men have their secrets. Harry and I were happy together – or, rather, I believed that we were. It would be a pity to begin wondering things.’

He thought that she must have begun wondering already and he sat down there and then, rather fearfully, and began to untie the bundles of papers. Isabella could not help hovering about. She fidgeted round the room, trying not to glance at him. ‘Heartache is
real
pain,’ she thought. ‘We ought not to be made like this – always wanting what we mayn’t have – and then getting pains in the chest because of it.’

Harry could not have left things tidier and there was nothing personal, except Laurence’s school-reports, and a little bundle of letters Isabella had written when they were betrothed. Vinny was relieved to recognise the handwriting.

‘Well, I find nothing but political letters,’ Vinny said, ‘and how should I know whether one should keep them or not? I know nothing about politics. There are just these …’

When she took the old letters from him, she felt that the thread of her past was stretched out to its very beginning. The letters seemed to have been written far, far back, much longer ago than her childhood; yet not written by her at all, but by some eager, bold young woman, who could say all the things which even a year of marriage made impossibly embarrassing.

Vinny had looked solemnly away.

She had not yet read a line of any of the letters, but the sight of the handwriting, the old-fashioned stamps on the faded envelopes, reminded her of the incautious contents. She remembered, too, her state of mind, in which she had wanted no one but Harry – the desert-island stage of their infatuation – yet a fortnight’s honeymoon had really been enough after all.

‘Being in love is a great inconvenience,’ she suddenly said. ‘The world can’t deal with it, and one can’t oneself.’

‘How true,’ said Vinny.

‘I don’t know how some people can go on doing it again and again all their lives. One says such ridiculous things.’ She slid a letter from its envelope. It was full of wild reproaches. Harry had had to work late and ‘I am not made of stone,’ she had written. ‘So unjust,’ she added.

‘Unjust?’

‘Oh, flying into a bate, as we used to say at school … I believe that is really something to do with falconry … rather interesting … and then purposely misunderstanding. Seeing no faults, then suddenly seeing more than could ever be there.’

Then the air in the room seemed to contract with apprehension, as her heart did. ‘He is going to say something dreadful,’ she thought.

‘I am in love,’ he said.

He stood up and with immense dignity awaited her reply.

*

When Vinny returned to Rose’s it was an hour of change and bustle. The lovely weather had prolonged the afternoon in which the house had lain under a spell, with only Mr Tillotson’s white tennis-shoes drying on an upper sill to show that anyone had ever lived there. Now, suddenly, the spell broke. Mrs Tumulty, in black alpaca, and carrying an enormous black butterfly-net, came down the drive. Lindsay Tillotson appeared, yawning, at his bed-room window. He felt rather enervated, having spent the afternoon making love to his wife and then reading the
Manchester Guardian
while she slept. The evening loomed before him. He told himself that it would soon be over: then he saw that tomorrow loomed, too, and – such was his mood – all the days of his life.

Mrs Tumulty entered the house. Someone in the kitchen began to chop herbs on a board. The children came up from the beach; first, their voices floated towards the house: then Constance burst through the macrocarpas in her pink sunbonnet.

‘We never hear a cough now,’ Lindsay said over his shoulder. His wife yawned till her eyes watered and she wiped them on a corner of the pillow. ‘As soon as the decorators are out, they can come home,’ she said.

‘I’ll be glad.’

‘It has seemed endless,’ she agreed.

Sometimes, the days seemed endless to the children, too. In the mornings, they scarred and dug the sands and at luncheon-time the tide smoothed it all out again, erasing for ever Constance’s castle and Benjy’s name which he had scraped with his spade. Occasionally, they made tentative approaches to other children, edging close to their moated castles or pools, running to fetch a ball for them if it came their way. Then Nannie called them back. Not to get sandals wet. Not to be rude and stare at others. To mind their own
business, if they pleased, and time in any case for their milk and biscuits.

Betty, returning with the baby, who thrust his arms and legs from under the fringed canopy, met Nannie as she came round towards the front of the house, and sharp words, Lindsay thought, ensued. He could not quite catch what Nannie said, but her displeasure was evident, from her gestures and the brisk way in which she bundled the children into the house.

Lindsay turned back to the room, so that he did not see the most dramatic scene of all and would not have understood its drama if he had.

Vinny, returning, saw Lindsay take in his tennis-shoes from the sill, heard raised voices, baths running, pans clattering in the kitchen. The garden looked deserted, but somehow only just deserted. Then Emily came out of the house, carrying a basket of gooseberries.

His love, since he had spoken of it to Isabella, had become more settled and permissible. A step forward had been taken, and with new confidence he accompanied Emily to a seat beyond the shrubbery where perhaps she had sat all the afternoon, for her book, her sun-glasses and knitting had been left there, and Philly’s cutting-out magazines.

The sea, winking with light, was stretched taut like a piece of silk. Confronted by this and the enormous expanse of sky, Vinny felt much less able to talk than indoors, in, for instance, Isabella’s parlour. His lack of words panicked him: he had no time to be patient. At any moment one of his enemies might come round the bushes – Rose, Philly, his mother. His mother seemed just now his worst enemy. Having seen how things were with her son, she had determined to take away the excuse of her presence and was returning to London. She also made his love seem ludicrous to him and talked spitefully of glandular disturbances which his father had suffered at his age.

‘Your mother is happy this evening,’ Emily said. ‘She found a butterfly she had been after for years. A kind of fritillary, I believe.’

Vinny sighed; Emily glanced at him in surprise. For a moment, she thought that the butterfly-hunting must depress him. Then she realised that his mother did.

‘She is a remarkable woman,’ she said slyly.

‘Yes. Remarkable.’

‘And very forthright. You know where you are with her.’

‘Yes, but you don’t want to
be
there.’

‘How convenient, though – and for you, too, because old people can be a burden – that she should still find so much interest in all those hobbies – looking at things, collecting things … oh, I collect things myself – all those shells – but only because I am bored when I am out for walks, and to please Philly, too, perhaps. Your mother, though, is really absorbed in the things for their own sake. She was telling me of some wag-tails she was watching …’

‘She simply can’t mind her own business.’

‘I thought you were a loving and attentive son …’

‘And so I may have been,’ Vinny said slowly.

‘Surely, people don’t suddenly change …?’

Her head was bent as she topped-and-tailed the gooseberries and dropped them into the basin. He felt that she kept her eyes downcast, not to be drawn into a glance at him.

‘But of course people suddenly change,’ he protested. ‘Newspapers are full of stories of
how
suddenly they change – timid men all at once take a hatchet to their wives; happy people go off and hang themselves; cowardly people do something incredibly brave; clergymen’s wives surprise themselves by doing a bit of shoplifting. I have surprised myself by finding my mother intolerable. I have quite changed. And you have changed, too. You told me so yourself. I cannot imagine what
you were like before you cut yourself off from other people and became your sister’s prisoner. No wonder you are bored … you said you were bored just now,’ he reminded her for she had caught in a breath as if she were about to protest. ‘Bored when you go for walks.’