Dark Entries (14 page)

‘For me,’ he said, looking away from her and out at the treeless, houseless, sea-bound plateau, ‘you are someone quite different. I shall call you Ariel.’

She could hardly have heard him as he gazed into the unceasing wind flooding through the open window of her car.

‘Is the Island uninhabited?’ he asked after ten more minutes without sign of smoke or chimney. ‘Or, rather, do all the Islanders live in the capital?’

‘Only visitors live in the capital,’ she answered smiling. Then suddenly she pointed through the window to the sky: ‘Look! Geese!’ she cried. He could see nothing; nor did the wind or the sound of the car permit of the possibility that the distinctive sound of geese in flight could reach his ears. But Ariel appeared transported with joy. ‘How wonderful! The geese have waited to welcome me!’ she cried. ‘To welcome
us
!’
she added, with apology light and heart-warming in her tone. She seized Carfax’s arm. ‘The geese are the true aboriginals of the Island,’ she said in mock seriousness. ‘But the visitors come to paint them and catalogue them and protect them, so not many come back now.’

‘The white settlers set traps for the native people of Tasmania and soon had them exterminated,’ remarked Carfax.

‘But the white settlers themselves then fell into the traps,’ she replied softly. ‘That is
why the visitors have to huddle together in the capital. That is why the rest of the Island
seems to you uninhabited. You see? Not a building in sight.’

But as she spoke the hills opened and Carfax saw Fleet for the first time.

He found the house hard to place architecturally. Like Inigo Jones’s Parliament House in Edinburgh, it was probably older than it looked – possibly much older, for Carfax recollected that he had no knowledge of Island buildings. On the other hand, it might have been a supremely accomplished modern pastiche, weathered to an aspect of misleading age by the Island storms. But a pastiche of what? Of a most beautiful small mansion of the eighteenth century Carfax decided: perhaps the early eighteenth century . . . In any case such speculation was subordinated to wonder at the skill with which the lovely house had been placed in
hiding from the world. Carfax had visited Compton Wynyates and marvelled there at the faintly similar effect to that now before him; but the concealment of Fleet was supreme and final, a wonder of imagination and ingenuity, an echo from the deep unconscious.

‘How glorious to live there!’ Carfax cried with a schoolboy enthusiasm he had never noticed in himself before.

She smiled serenely at him and began to push stray corners of her shirt into the top of her trousers, preparatory to alighting.

‘I have never seen anything one half so lovely.’

The car sped up a beautifully firm, even, yellow drive, the gravel rustling sensuously beneath the wheels. Flat, tight lawns called to the spirit on either side and Carfax visualised peacocks. Above the front door something had once been carved, a date, a monogram, a crest, a rebus; but crumbling age or crumbling modern stonemasonry, one or the other, had rendered it now unintelligible. The door was opened by a maid in an elegant grey silk dress. Ariel was momentarily stretching herself upon the step, her oilskin coat a heap at her feet. She was still smiling her small, serene smile. She looked a wonderful quiet happiness.

‘Welcome to Fleet!’ she said, something in the intonation
at once masking and mocking the conventionality of the words.

‘Welcome home, madam,’ said the grey-clad maid.

Carfax’s first impression was that the house was full of people. He then perceived that the effect came from several mirrors which reflected and counter-reflected their three figures. These mirrors were not many; but the skilful placing of them gave an effect of magnitude and mystery apparently aided by the construction of the house. Apartments of the most various shapes and sizes led into one another in all directions without doors; and as no two apartments seemed to be decorated alike, the mirrors set up a chiaroscuro of reflections co-existent with but apparently independent of the rich and bewildering chiaroscuro of the apartments themselves. Carfax found he could seldom certainly identify the origin of any particular reflection; and was perpetually troubled by the apparent existence of two separate houses within the space rightly occupied by one. Each room, considered by itself, was perfectly proportioned and exquisitely decorated; but when much of the whole was seen at once, the mind tended slightly to waver and check.

The staircase, which rose before him, passed from side to side of its well, dividing and reuniting at frequent alternate landings: the perfect miniature of a grand staircase on which a duchess receives her guests. Carfax followed the grey-clad maid to his room. As he ascended, he noticed that the constructional principle followed on the ground floor was repeated on the floors above: the same interconnecting undoored rooms, each room different in size, shape, and colour; the same mirrors. The effect was slightly vertiginous: Carfax thought of the three-dimensional chess his divinity tutor had tried to interest him in at Oxford. Also he noticed the stair carpet. A long yellow snake extended its length down the centre of the wide, deep green; the coils of the snake varied in relation to their background, and Carfax, who tended to the obsessive, found himself watching for particular variations to repeat themselves. His room seemed to be on the top
floor of the house but he failed to detect a single indisputable repetition in the pattern of the carpet.

At the top of the house the rooms were no longer interconnected and without doors, but the disposition of rooms and corridors was still mysterious and complicated.

The room he had been given was unexpectedly conventional. A white panelled door was set in red-blue wallpaper. A big, old-fashioned brass bedstead, rather French and ornate, set the tone of the furniture: heavy, formerly expensive, never perhaps in the best of taste; very unlike the rest of the house, he thought. The grey-clad maid set down his bag, remarked: ‘Tea will be downstairs, sir, when you are ready,’ and departed. Carfax crossed to the window and looked out.

Outside was the same empty moorland of the drive in the car, running down to the same clear sea. As they had approached the house, Carfax had considered it to lie in a large dell almost surrounded by fairly high, steep hills. The beautiful wide, empty view now stretched before him, was intoxicating and magnificent; but he found himself completely at a loss to explain whence had come his former strong impression that the house lay uniquely concealed from all the world.

He knelt upon the floor to look in his bag for his field-glasses; and, as he did so, came into that conscious relationship with the pattern and texture of the carpet which begins only with close physical proximity. The carpet, though pleasantly deep-piled, had not, during the brief time he had been in the room, seemed to him otherwise remarkable. But now he noticed that the not unusual pattern appeared, like the snake on the stairs, nowhere to repeat itself. He groped in his mind for the explanation, and before long it came to him that both carpets were possibly pieces of very much larger carpets – of very large carpets indeed, he quickly realised. Reassured by this hypothesis, which related the carpets to the sum total of his life’s experience, he briefly examined the view with his strong field-glasses. There was not a house, not a figure, not a road, not a pylon, not even a hedged field: only the ancient sea, the wine-like air. Wagner’s
words to Baron von Keudell returned to him. This clear, sunny emptiness was what his mind most needed. Deeply content, he put away the field-glasses and descended to tea.

The grey-clad maid was waiting in the hall and took him to a small square drawing-room, where Ariel lay extended on a sofa, a tea-tray by her side. The room appeared to be in an angle of the house, for there were windows in the centres of two adjoining walls; through which, Carfax noticed, the prospect consisted entirely of the near enveloping hills.

‘What a beautiful house!’ Carfax exclaimed warmly over his bread and butter. ‘But you must find it difficult to keep up in these days?’

‘We do not have to pay British taxes on the Island,’ she replied. ‘And everything is much cheaper and better and more abundant.’

‘Even domestic servants? Forgive my curiosity. It is only that I am deeply impressed with the beauty of your house. There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices.’

‘My servants have always been with me,’ she answered. ‘I do not think they are dissatisfied.’

‘I am quite certain they have no reason to be. This place is paradise. Absolute paradise. But people tell me that servants want the pictures nowadays, and there’s always the question of what used to be called followers. You seem very isolated here. But I suppose you have lots of visitors, and they bring servants of their own?’

‘The people here are not like the English, you know.’ She poured him a second cup of tea. ‘I have few visitors, but people here have interests of their own and never feel bored.’

‘Few visitors in
this huge house? I visualised the whole place crowded with them. It all seems in such perfect order, as if every room were awaiting an occupant in the next hour or so. Besides, you yourself—’

‘Yes?’ Her tone had no flavour of mockery.

‘You hardly strike one as living in sequestered solitude on a remote island.’

‘I have never said solitude. After all, you yourself are here.’

‘I am being foolish. It is because I am so very unused to such dreams coming true as you and your house and my being here.’

‘That, I think, is because you fail to draw the essential distinction. I do draw it. You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labour when they call it peace, your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous. Does not some modern Frenchman, exhausted by it all and very naturally, say, “Hell is
other people”? But here there are no other people: therefore no war, no marriage, no Government orders, and only such work as you choose and like and Nature herself requires you to do. Here a distinction is drawn. I am surrounded only by my friends – who are not like other people.’

‘Am I, then, so unlike other people?’ Carfax asked in the schoolboy naivety, new come upon him, which seemed so pleasant to him.

‘You are in flight from them!’ she exclaimed smiling.

Shortly afterwards she referred briefly to the delights of the house: a carefully selected library, a well-stocked music room with two pianos, a small studio on the roof, a formal garden with a pool. ‘And, of course,’ she added, ‘there’s always the Island itself. You can spend a long time exploring that. All your life, in fact. Because the Island’s always changing. When Nature’s advertising agents say that in
books about beauty spots, they are of course trying to conceal what they regard as her frightful sameness and dullness. But here things are different. The Island is
never the same and never repeats itself.’

‘Or if it does, the pattern is too large for one mortal to comprehend?’ interrupted Carfax, thinking of something else
.
‘Or one lifetime, perhaps?’

‘No, I do not think it ever repeats itself,’ she answered musing. ‘Always there are variations. But, of course,’ she
added, ‘the man in us looks rather for the pattern such as it is, the woman for the variations.’ She smiled again. ‘But the immediate point is that you won’t be seeing much of me during the day, so I do hope you’ll find things to do. We are quiet here, but I hope not dull.’

Eagerly he reassured her about both these hopes.

Carfax, who found in her movements a grace he had vainly sought elsewhere, watched her as she rose from the sofa and crossed to the door. She entranced him; so that only a corner of his eye and a fragment of his attention engaged themselves with the figure of what appeared to be a huge and burly man passing first one window and then the other as presumably he walked round the corner of the house. Ariel said nothing: and Carfax, as stated, was entranced by her.

He spent the evening drawing in the garden. The spring sun shone and the surrounding hills protected him from the wind. Immediately he entered the garden his attention had been seized by a certain aspect of these hills: a large landscape of a force and significance utterly unprecedented in his experience clamoured through his brain to be released on to paper or canvas. Without going further he started work, his swiftly moving pencil leaving behind it a line of astonishing power and certainty. It would be a sombre work. In a few hours Carfax had been so far emancipated as to be producing once more and at long last a sombre work . . . Even Ariel passed almost from his consciousness as drawing followed drawing and he detached the pages of his block. His pencil travelled as if held by planchette. Tomorrow he would start the final version, the masterpiece. He worked until the gathering cold and damp reminded him that the year was yet young and the Island not a thousand miles from England.

To his astonishment she appeared for dinner in the costume, though simplified, of an Elizabethan man. Dressed in black, and with her white shirt left open at the neck to show her whiter skin, she might have been an actress about to play Hamlet, a Bernhardt or La Verne; were it not that her
smooth golden hair hanging on her shoulders made not only her sex but in some way also her authenticity apparent at a first glance. The long black stockings showed off
her lovely legs and ensured that every small delightful grace of movement appeared to the greatest advantage.

Carfax asked one question.

‘Why do not all women dress like you?’ he exclaimed softly. ‘To awaken wonder and love?’

‘My friends do,’ she answered simply, offering him an exquisite little glass.

The small dining-room was oval with a ceiling which, though probably flat, was painted, after the manner of Biagio Rebecca, to appear steeply concave. As they sat at each end of a small oval table in fine satinwood, the grey-clad maid, now changed into evening black, perfectly served the perfect courses.