Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (11 page)

When Jenny walked into the big room, Peter was standing with his back to the open fire, looking very much at home.

“I couldn’t tear myself away from all those people,” she said.

“What a crew! Antediluvian!” Hilary Stevens gave a light apologetic laugh. “Never look at ’em, don’t you know?” Then, as if to herself, “Know them by heart. It’s a mistake to put up photographs. They go dead on you.”

“What have I missed?” Peter asked.

“Oh, people … photographs … all the people!” F. Hilary Stevens waved them away like so many ghosts whose presence she took for granted, who, perhaps, did not interest her. “I put them up when I first moved in, ten years ago, staking my claim, as it were, but since that day I’ve hardly looked at them.” Mrs. Stevens was sitting in the wing chair by the fireplace. The strong afternoon light sharpened the planes of her face; she looked her age. “How do you take your tea, Miss Hare?”

“Strong, with sugar and milk, please.”

“Americans like lemon. I have a lemon, just in case, but of course good English tea requires milk. Miss Hare is a sensible person,” she announced to Peter, with evident satisfaction.

“Very sensible,” said Peter, giving Jenny an amused look, “very sensible indeed.”

F. Hilary Stevens caught the glance, and pounced, “No irony, please. There is nothing so irritating—so fashionable too. I am so tired of irony.” She deftly poured the tea as she spoke, giving Peter a mischievous smile as she handed him the cup to pass to Jenny, “Or is it that I am afraid of it?” she asked the air, resuming the dialogue with herself. “It kills poetry perhaps.”

“Perhaps …,” Peter ventured as a question.

“You’re not sure?” She laughed again. “Neither am I! The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.” The withdrawal was complete. She was not to be drawn so soon. “And your tea, Mr.… Selversen?”

“Milk, please. Who would dare say lemon?”

“Why not? You’re not sensible, are you? Men don’t have to be.”

“Do women?” Jenny asked.

“Of course, naturally. Women have to deal with the things men in their wildness and genius have invented. It’s clear as daylight.” The eyes hooded themselves while F. Hilary Stevens poured her own cup, by now strong, and added a lashing of milk. “Pass the sandwiches, if you would be so good,” she said to Peter, and to Jenny, or to herself, murmured, “Anchovy. I spent hours slicing through thick slices of bread to achieve a reasonable facsimile of a sandwich. You can have no idea,” she turned to Peter with her most charming smile, “how sensible women have to learn to be.”

“And if they are wild and genius-y, what then?” Peter asked as he offered the plate—gold-edged, wreathed in roses, and piled high with elegant little sandwiches—to Jenny.

“Then.…” The pause was held as by a rather fine actress. But in mid-air, she changed her mind. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” She stuffed half a sandwich in her mouth. When she had swallowed it, she asked, “Will you tell me when the interview begins? I feel rather nervous. I was not able to work very well this morning, so many questions, probable or improbable, hovered in the air. I am not good at answering other people’s questions,” she dared them. “So often they seem irrelevant.”

“Yes, I know.” Peter sat down and crossed his legs, deliberately unhurried. “We’ll try to be relevant, as relevant as we can. But if you like, you could both ask the questions and give the answers; we have no rules. In fact, what a good idea! That would relieve us of all responsibility!”

“Oh, I am not responsible—God forbid!” Then she added, obviously enjoying herself, “It was just contemplating your responsibility that made me nervous this morning.”

“We were dreadfully nervous,” Jenny said.

“Really?” The gray eyes narrowed. “But it’s your job, after all; you are used to it, aren’t you?”

“You don’t get ‘used to’ genius,” Peter said gently. “No interview in my experience has been in any way like any other.”

“Mmmm,” Mrs. Stevens tasted this remark with evident pleasure and then set the pleasure aside with a shake of her head, “Let me say at once that I have no illusions about my ‘genius.’ ” She gazed out at the sea and half closed her eyes. “A small, accurate talent, exploited to the limit, let us be quite clear about
that!
” Then she added, perhaps unaware that she had spoken aloud, “Damn it!” Opened her eyes wide, and turned back to the tray before her. “Have some more tea. When does the interview begin?”

“Whenever you choose, looking back, to have had it begin,” Peter said, passing his cup.

“I am to be my own censor?”

“Would you dislike that?”

“Poetry writing, I sometimes think, is nothing but self-censorship. I spend my life disciplining the impulse, when the impulse is there. But I sometimes wonder whether if I had quelled the censor, I might not have done better. Women are afraid of their daemon, want to control it, make it sensible like themselves.” She turned to Jenny who was grateful to be included. She had felt as if she were watching a fast ping-pong game and, as a player, was hardly in the league. “Do you agree, Miss Hare?”

“Oh yes! I suppose I’m a fool to think it should get easier as one gets older.”

“Nothing gets easier as one gets older. Everything is harder, even buttoning one’s slipper!” Jenny instinctively looked down to note the elegant slippers, bronze, with one button. And Miss Stevens followed her eyes. “It’s the stooping,” she explained. “The trouble is that one becomes a kind of donkey.” And she laughed. “Yet …,” the dialogue set itself up again, “I suppose the donkey teaches one a few things, to handle oneself with less waste of energy, for instance. There is less energy to waste, don’t you know? Writing poems is always easy and always very hard at the same time—at any age.”

“In what way easy, Mrs. Stevens?” Peter placed his cup and saucer down with a click on the tray. The click did something to the atmosphere—he had meant it to.

“The interview begins here,” said F. Hilary Stevens, settling back into her chair, and almost entirely closing her eyes. “Easy … hard …,” she murmured. “Easy because one can’t do it at all unless one is propelled. Set in motion, as it were. Until there is momentum. Elusive,” she opened her eyes and smiled. “I have sometimes raced the motor for hours and found I was standing still. Something went agley. The darn thing didn’t start.”

“You weren’t in gear,” Peter suggested.

“Precisely. How does one get in gear? What does it?”

“Possibly that is the question we had most in mind to ask,” Peter exchanged a glance with Jenny, a glance of delight and of triumph, then added soberly. “But just because it is
the
question, I suggest we leave it for a moment and come back to it through the logical sequence of your work.” He took out a pad and laid it on his knee. F. Hilary Stevens watched him with a slightly mocking, slightly nervous look which he caught as he lifted his head. “Is that agreeable to you, Mrs. Stevens?”

“I am delivered up, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“May we go back a bit before returning to the poems? At twenty-three you made a tremendous hit with a first novel, not inappropriately called
The Bull’s Eye
. Yet, despite your success, you broke the mould, and shortly afterwards published poems and only poems for many years. Would you like to talk about this?”

F. Hilary Stevens sat back in her chair, sitting up very straight. The tension was visible. “It’s harder than you might think to talk about it. Give me a minute.” Again she looked out beyond them to the sea. “It was, I must confess, a painful experience. I got in beyond my depth. Oh, I had written honestly enough, but the last thing I had wanted or imagined was a
succès de scandale
. It was a shock.” She turned to Jenny with a rather shy smile, as if asking for the first time for help.

“It’s such a spontaneous book,” Jenny plunged in, encouraged by the unspoken plea. “So fresh—it made me think of a brilliant water color. But I suppose people were shocked because you talked about things like women falling in love with each other, took this for granted, set it in its place; and the love affair with the young man is awfully good.”

“You are kind.…” But Mrs. Stevens’ attention was clearly absorbed elsewhere. “I know,” she said, “I’ve got it!
Rosenkavalier!
” She looked from one to the other of them, and drew a blank. “The ambiguity, don’t you see? That’s what made it sell! I didn’t know quite what I was doing myself. Oh, if I could have written that book twenty five years later, then it might have been something!” The tone changed; she leaned her chin on one hand and went into the familiar dialogue with herself. “Yet one writes to find out. I suppose I dislike the book because it seems to me now superficial, not worthy of its subject. I never looked Medusa in the face.”

“You forget that you had a style!” Peter said.

“Oh well, these self-intoxicated explosions may have some significance—,” she brushed Peter’s praise aside. But perhaps it had been relieving. For the first time since their arrival, she seemed perfectly natural, as she said, “I mean to be honest with you. That is why you have come, to help me to be honest, is it not?”

“I hardly think we imagined ourselves in that role,” Peter said gravely, but there was a twinkle in his eye.

“I should never have let you come if I had not imagined that a benefit would ensue. It is possible,” Mrs. Stevens said, “that I feel so strongly about that book because I have been trying to elude it all these years. You could never guess what it really sprang from, nor shall I tell you.” She swallowed a secret smile. “That is irrelevant.”

“I wonder …,” Peter leaned forward, but she had already escaped him, and was standing at the French windows at the other end of the room, hands in the pockets of her purple jacket, looking out.

Peter made some quick notes on his pad, and Jenny looked around the big formal room, taking it in for the first time, since she had until now been wholly concentrated on the presence of F. Hilary Stevens herself. She noted pale gray walls, a big old-fashioned sofa covered in a chintzy faded rose pattern, the eighteenth century mantelpiece which bore several amusing bibelots, a lustre jug, a Burmese duck covered in gold leaf, a Chelsea shepherdess with a lamb; over the mantle her eyes came to rest on a pencil sketch by Sargent of a person whom Jenny at first took to be a young man in a velvet jacket with a Byronic, open white collar, and then suddenly recognized as Mrs. Stevens herself. She rose to decipher the date, 1920, contemporaneous then with the success of the novel. Sargent had caught well the gleam of mischief, of self-mockery, which had remained characteristic of his subject. It was clear that she had always been a charmer, and knew it.

The other paintings in the room enhanced the atmosphere of light, order, and peace: two French impressionists, one of an apple orchard in flower, and the other of women transplanting lettuce in a vegetable garden dappled with light and shadow. There was a pot of blue hyacinths on the long refectory table, and a few daffodils had been arranged to charming effect in a Venetian glass under a Venetian mirror. Clearly this was not a room where anyone did any writing. A little cool, it might have felt, but for the glow of the wood fire, and the tea tray abandoned there like a still life among them. Yet, despite the coolness and order, the room communicated a sense of life with a keen edge. The house was full of presences; she who lived here alone was surrounded by angels or ghosts, perhaps by both. Yes, it had an atmosphere like its creator, Jenny decided, of contained pressure, of something fiercely controlled. Lifting her eyes to the small figure standing there alone at the end of the room, she wondered what was flowing back with such force into that consciousness? For the withdrawal had been less a withdrawal, Jenny felt, than a strong compulsion toward something else, someone else, perhaps evoked by all the talk about the novel.

The disturbing thing for Hilary, of course, was that she could not approach one element in the past, without raising all its elements, without being assailed by ghostly presences. On the surface she could be quite consciously brisk and analytic, even detached. But under the surface, she was filled with echoes and rumors, with startling images, and the easy talk about the novel had not really been easy at all. Too much flowed back into consciousness. How to separate art and craft from life? How handle all this now before witnesses? She was appalled by the intensity of her feeling, unexpected really, not prepared for, despite her wakeful night. Standing at the window she knew what it was to be in the power of the daemon: there in that summer in Wales, in 1911, the Muse had made her appearance for the first time, and Hilary, the Hilary now over seventy who was also Hilary at fifteen, saw that that episode was perhaps the key to everything. Unconscious of the incongruity of the gesture, she picked up a long silver box, extracted a thin cigar, lit it, and took several puffs, thinking about Phillippa Munn, her governess, who had been the instrument of revelation. They had been sent over with bicycles and knapsacks and told to amuse themselves while Hilary’s parents traveled in Spain: as usual she was being “sent away,” and as usual whatever pleasure there might be in the adventure was tied down to becoming “cultivated”; Phillippa was instructed to give Hilary Latin lessons, and they were reading Virgil.

Images, scenes, flowed up now. A summer afternoon. They were sitting among the ruins of a castle, looking down on the wide curve of a bay below, munching at huge indigestible meat sandwiches, and drinking cider. Miss Munn was happily unaware that English cider is not exactly like New England cider, and hardly a proper drink for governesses and young girls. The day was hot and rather buggy, and their long skirts were wound tightly around their legs, over high laced boots.

Just below them a young boy was scything a small field. The rhythm of his walk, slow and meditative, his pauses to whet the blade, had a hypnotic effect. For the last half hour they had sat in companionable silence, watching him.

“Why wasn’t I born a boy, Miss Munn? It’s so unfair!”

“Well, you weren’t, so I would sit up, if I were you, and straighten your skirt.”