The Counterlife (41 page)

She pushed open the door to a large bedroom whose windows looked out to a field where some cows were grazing. “This was the nursery. Where Maria and her sisters grew up. Sarah was the oldest and she got to have a bedroom first, and Maria had to go on sleeping here with Georgina. This was a great source of bitterness. So was inheriting Sarah's clothes. When Sarah grew out of them, Maria was made to wear them, and by the time she was finished they weren't worth passing on to Georgina. So the oldest got new clothes and the youngest got new clothes, and Maria, in the middle, never did. Another source of bitterness. We were awfully hard-up for a bit, you know. Maria never quite understood that, I don't think.”

“But of course I did,” Maria said.

“But you resented things, I think. Perfectly naturally, quite naturally. We couldn't afford ponies, and your friends could, and you seemed to think it was my fault. Which it wasn't.”

And was recalling Maria's resentment meant to suggest something about her choosing me? I couldn't really tell from Mrs. Freshfield's tone. Maybe this was affectionate banter, even if it didn't sound that way to me. Maybe it was just straight historical reporting—fact, without implication or subtle significance. Maybe this was just how these people talked.

Out in the hallway I decided to make a last effort. Pointing to a bureau at the head of the stairs, I said lightly, as if to no one, “A lovely piece.”

“That's from my husband's family. My mother-in-law bought that. She found it in Worcester one day. Yes, it's a very nice piece. The handles are right too.”

Success. Stop there.

While Phoebe napped, Maria and I walked down the road to the little church where she'd been taken to worship as a child.

“Well,” she said, after we had left the house, “that wasn't too bad, was it?”

“I have no idea. Was it? Wasn't it?”

“She made a real effort. She doesn't do treacle tart unless it's a special occasion. Because you're a man there was wine at lunch. She obviously thought about your coming for a week.”

“That I didn't get, quite.”

“She went to Mr. Tims, the butcher, and asked him for a specially nice joint. Mr. Tims made a real effort—the whole village made a real effort.”

“Yes? Well, I made a real effort too. I felt as though I were crossing a mine field. I didn't have much luck with the furniture.”

“You admired it too much.” Maria laughed. “I must teach you never to praise someone's possessions to his face quite that way. But that's my mother, anyway. You praise it and, if it's hers, she runs it down. You made a hit with the Stilton. She cooed in ecstasies when we were alone in the kitchen.”

“I can't see her in ecstasies.”

“Over a Stilton, oh yes.”

There was a dark patch of ancient yews outside the tiny church, a nice old building, surrounded by tombstones. “You do know the name of this tree,” she said to me. “From Thomas Gray,” I said, “yes, I do.” “You had a very good education in Newark.” “To prepare me for you, I had to.” Maria opened the door to the church, whose earliest stones, she told me, had been laid by the Normans. “The smell,” she said when we stepped inside, and sounded just a little stunned, as people do when their past comes wafting powerfully back, “—the smell of the damp in these places.” We looked at the effigies of the noble dead and the wood carving on the bench ends until she couldn't stand the chill anymore. “There used to be six people in here for evensong on a winter Sunday. The damp
still
gets right through to my knees. Come, I'll show you my lonely places.”

We walked up the hill through the village again—Maria explaining who lived in each of the houses—and then got into the car and drove out to her old hideaways, the “lonely places” that she would always revisit, whenever she came home from school, to be sure they were still there. One was a beech woods where she used to go for walks—“very haunting,” she called it—and the other lay beyond the village at the bottom of the valley, a ruined mill beside a stream so small you could hop across it. She'd come there with her horse, or, after her mother had decided that she was having a hard enough time paying for the children and their schools without ponies to be fed and looked after, she'd ride out on her bicycle. “This is where I'd have my visionary feelings of the world being one. Exactly what Wordsworth describes—the real nature mysticism, moments of extreme contentment. You know, looking at the sun setting and suddenly thinking that the universe all makes sense. For an adolescent there is no better place for these little visions than a ruined mill by a trickling stream.”

From there we drove to The Barton, which was quite isolated, behind a high ivy-covered wall on a dirt road several miles outside of Chadleigh. It was getting dark and, as there were dogs, we hung back by the gate looking to where the lights were burning throughout the house. It was built of the same grayish-yellow stone as Holly Tree Cottage and most every other house we'd seen, though from its size and the impressive gables it couldn't have been mistaken for the home of a poor local weaver or even of a bailiff. There was a strip of garden beyond the wall leading to the French windows downstairs. Maria said that the house had no central heating when she was a child, and so there were log fires in all the rooms, burning from September through May; electricity they'd made themselves, using an old diesel engine that pumped away most of the time. At the back, she said, were the stables, the barn, and a walled kitchen garden with rose patches; beyond was a duck pond where they had fished and learned to skate, and beyond that a nut woods, another haunted place full of glades and birds, wildflowers and bracken, where she and her sisters used to run up and down the green paths frightening each other to death. Her earliest memories were all poetic and associated with that woods.

“Servants?”

“Just two,” she said. “A nanny for the children and one maid, an old parlor maid left over from before the war. My grandmother's parlor maid, called by her surname, Burton, who did all the cooking and stayed with us until she was pensioned off at the end.”

“So moving into the village,” I said, “was a comedown.”

“We were just children, not so much for us. But my mother never recovered. Her family hasn't given up an inch of land in Gloucestershire since the seventeenth century. But her brother has the estate of three thousand acres and she has nothing. Just the few stocks and shares inherited from her mother, the furniture you admired so, and those portraits of horses you failed to overpraise—kind of sub-Stubbs.”

“It is all extremely foreign to me, Maria.”

“I thought I sensed that at lunch.”

*   *   *

While Phoebe, buoyed up by the mince pie, entertained Georgina, and Maria continued talking to her mother about the Chiswick house, I edged into a corner of the church crypt, away from the crush of the hungry carolers juggling wine cups and bits of pastry, and found myself across from Maria's older sister, Sarah.

“I think you like to play the moral guinea pig,” Sarah said in that gun-burst style she was noted for.

“How does a moral guinea pig play?”

“He experiments with himself. Puts himself, if he's a Jew, into a church at Christmastime, to see how it feels and what it's like.”

“Oh, everybody does that,” I said amiably, but to let her know that I hadn't missed anything, I added, slowly, “not just Jews.”

“It's easier if one's a success like you.”

“What is easier?” I asked.

“Everything, without question. But I meant the moral guinea pig bit. You've achieved the freedom to knock around a lot, to go from one estate to the other and see what it's all about. Tell me about success. Do you enjoy it, all that strutting?”

“Not enough—I'm not a sufficiently shameless exhibitionist.”

“But that's another matter.”

“I can only exhibit myself in disguise. All my audacity derives from masks.”

“I think this is getting a bit intellectual. What's your disguise tonight?”

“Tonight? Maria's husband.”

“Well, I think if one's successful one should show off a bit—to encourage everybody else. Georgina's our extrovert—that says everything about this family. She still works hard at being Mummy's good girl. I, as you must have heard, am not entirely stable, and Maria is utterly defenseless and a little spoiled. Her whole life has been aimed at doing nothing. She manages to do it very well.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“Oh, there's nothing in the world that makes Maria so happy as a big, big check.”

“Well, that's easy then. I'll give her a big one every day.”

“Are you good at choosing clothes? Maria loves to have men help to choose her clothes. Men have to help Maria with everything. I hope you're prepared. Do you like to sit in that chair in the store while some lady twirls around and says, ‘What do you think of this?'”

“It depends on the store.”

“Yes? What store do you like? Selfridge's? Georgina keeps a horse down in Gloucestershire. She's something else entirely. All this English carry-on. Yesterday she had a big one-day event down there. Do you know what a one-day event is like? Of course you don't. It's physically terrifying. These huge, huge fences. Real English lunacy. At any moment a horse might fall and crash your brains.”

“Such as they are.”

“Yes, just mad,” Sarah said. “But Georgina likes that.”

“And what do you like?”

“What I'd like most to do? Well, what I'd most like to do and would be hard for me, which is why I really don't aspire to it in the near future, is what you do—and my mother does. But it's the hardest life I can imagine.”

“There are harder.”

“Don't be modest. You think it's the suffering that makes it so admirable. They say if you meet a writer it's sometimes more difficult to hate his work than if you just get the book and open it up and throw it across the room.”

“Not for everyone. Some find it much easier to hate you having met you.”

“My whole childhood was spent vomiting away all over the place whenever I had to perform or deliver. As I was then still in hot contention for Mummy's good girl, I had to perform and deliver
all the time.
And now I have this terribly agonizing relationship with any piece of work that I'm doing. I've never been able to function, really, in work. Neither can Maria—she can't work at all. I don't know that she's done anything for years, except to tinker with those one and a half short stories she's been writing since school. But then she's beautiful and spoiled and gets all these people to marry her instead. I'm not prepared to stay at home and be so hellishly dependent.”

“Is it ‘dependence'? Is it really hell?”

“What does a woman do who is intelligent and brings a lot of energy and enthusiasm to all that domestic carry-on, and in the end, for all very natural reasons, the husband disappears, either right out of the house or, like our dear father, with sixty-two girls on the side? I think the good reason that this option has disappeared is that intelligent women are not prepared to be so dependent.”

“Maria's an intelligent woman.”

“And didn't have such a hot time of it, did she, the first time round.”

“He was a prick,” I said.

“He wasn't at all. Have you met him? He actually has some wonderful qualities. I enjoy him enormously. At times he can be infinitely charming.”

“I'm sure. But if you remove yourself emotionally from somebody's life, as he did, their sense of connection will eventually be eroded.”

“If you're helplessly dependent.”

“No, if you require some human connection from the person to whom you are married.”

“I think you are leading an impostor's life,” Sarah said.

“Do you?”

“With Maria, yes. There's a word for it, actually.”

“Do tell me.”

“Hypergamy. Do you know what it is?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Bedding women of a superior social class. Desire based on a superior social class.”

“So I, putting it politely, am a hypergamist; and Maria, taking revenge against the rejecting father by marrying beneath herself, is helplessly dependent. A spoiled, dependent woman of a superior social class who likes big checks with her bedside bonbons and whose life has been aimed at doing nothing. And what are you, Sarah, aside from envious, bitter, and weak?”

“I don't like Maria.”

“So what? Who cares?”

“She's spoiled, she's indolent, she's soft, she's ‘sensitive,' she's vain—but then so are you vain. You surely have to be quite vain in your profession. How could you take seriously what you think about otherwise? You must still be very much in love with the drama of your life.”

“I am. That's why I married a beauty like your sister and give her those big checks every day.”

“Our mother's terribly anti-Semitic, you know.”

“Is she? No one told me.”

“I'm telling you. I think you may find that in experimenting with Maria you've gone a bit over the top.”

“I like to go over the top.”

“Yes, you do. I've read your famous ghetto comedy. Positively Jacobean. What's it called again?”

“My Darling Self-Image.”

“Well, if you are, as your work suggests, fascinated with the consequences of transgression, you've come to the right family. Our mother can be hellishly unpleasant when it comes to transgression. She can be hard like a mineral—an Anglo-Saxon mineral. I don't think she really likes the idea of her languid, helpless Maria submitting to anal domination by a Jew. I imagine that she believes that like most virile sadists you fancy anal penetration.”

“Tell her I take a crack at it from time to time.”