The Drowning People (11 page)

“Ah, but have you ever felt it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But only briefly, spasmodically,” Ella went on, speaking quickly. “Sure, you can think of times when you’ve wanted someone’s car, or someone’s money, or something of that sort.”

I nodded.

“But that feeling hasn’t lasted long, has it? It hasn’t built up into something consuming; it hasn’t spread. Has it?”

“No,” I said, truthfully.

“Well the jealousy you’re talking about is only a distant relation of the kind I’m concerned with. You don’t mind my boring you with this?” I shook my head. “The kind I mean is an illness, a disease. It eats away, spreading into everything a person does, into everything a person thinks.” She exhaled, blowing her smoke to the ceiling. “The jealousy that you experience—and I hope you won’t take offense at this—is of the common and garden variety by comparison. Like the common cold it affects everyone at some point, and though it may even affect them badly it seldom leads on to anything more serious. It’s not a virulent strain of disease; one shakes it off easily. There may not be a cure for it, but its symptoms can be alleviated, suppressed. Do you follow me?”

I nodded. “Another of your metaphors.”

“Another of my metaphors,” she said, and laughed. Her laugh did not last long. Her face set again and she looked at me intently. “The jealousy which I am trying to describe is extreme,” she continued, almost urgent now. “It is dangerous in a way in which your jealousy is not dangerous. It’s out of control; in some ways like a disease. What cures there are for it must be administered in its early stages or all is lost. If allowed to fester, it spreads.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“So that you will understand what I tell you tomorrow,” she said quietly.

“Tell me whatever it is now,” I said, suddenly decisive, gripping her hand as she rose to leave the table. “I can’t wait another night.”

She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “Don’t be imperious, James. It doesn’t altogether suit you.”

“I don’t care.” I was suddenly exasperated. “You have brought me on a six-hour journey to an island I never knew existed. You have talked to me of oceans and families and … and mysterious paintings which might make things clearer. I don’t want paintings. I don’t want metaphors. I don’t even thrive much on mystery. Just tell me why you’ve brought me here.”

“Let go of me.”

“I won’t.”

“You’re making a scene.”

“I don’t care.”

I looked up at her in steady earnest and met the command in her pursed lips and blazing eyes unflinchingly. Slowly she sat down again.

“I brought you here because I thought you would help me,” she said after a moment, almost grudgingly.

“And so I will,” I replied, relaxing my grip on her hand. “But you can’t keep me in the dark like this.”

“I haven’t.”

“You have. Oh I get odd snippets here and there, I admit. You talk to me about the pressure of convention and the tide of public opinion. You talk to me about your family and a world that I don’t understand. And then you talk about jealousy, about your particular kind of jealousy.”

“It’s not mine,” she hissed.

“Then whose is it?”

“It’s not mine alone, at least. It’s … Well, if you must know it’s mine and Sarah’s.”

“Sarah’s
?”

“I know you don’t believe me. That’s why you must wait until tomorrow. You don’t believe because you don’t understand. You
can’t
understand. I have told you as much as I can …”

“About what? About why you got engaged to Charles?”

“About much more than that. But yes, about that too.”

“Then why won’t you tell me the rest now?”

“Because you won’t believe me. And you might not respect me if you did.” She pulled her hand away from mine. “I wish that a metaphor about currents and tides explained the mess I’ve made of things with Charles,” she began. “And it
does
a bit, you know. It does. But only a bit.” She smiled, calmer now. I listened.

“Of course my family are delighted that I’m marrying. Of
course
they’d be horrified if I married anyone who wasn’t as ‘suitable’ as Charlie. That’s all true. But there’s more to it than that. And I’ve got myself deep into something I can’t quite explain but which frightens me much more than marrying Charlie could possibly frighten me. Something in my past—a habit, a way of behavior, if you like—is out of control. Oh it’s not drugs,” she added quickly, seeing the look of comprehension on my face. “But I am like an addict. I’ve lost the ability to stop. The fact that I might have married Charlie has made me see that. It—this thing—is taking me over. I can see that because it has made me do something concrete which I despise myself for having done. Have you any idea what it’s like to despise yourself? Not only for what you’ve already done but for what you see you might do. I’ve been taken there; I’ve been shown that blackness. But I can’t see where it ends. And I’m frightened of it.”

“ ‘It’ being jealousy?” I was struggling to see a path through the clouds.

“Oh no, James. Well, yes … But it’s more complex than that. All my explanations, even my metaphors, can’t do justice to it. It’s alive in me, not in a physical way, but it’s there nonetheless. My id. It’s subtle and elusive; it’s not obvious. No one would recognize it, save perhaps one other person; I have difficulty in recognizing it myself. But it frightens me, I tell you that frankly.”

“Why me?”

“What?”

“When you could have shared this with anyone in the world, why did you choose to share it with me?”

My question broke the flow of her tumble of words.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I don’t know but also, in a funny kind of way, I do know. You came when you were asked for, you see. As I sat on that bench, in an empty park, feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my life, you appeared. Oh I don’t mean I thought you were an angel, not in those running shorts at least.” She chuckled at the recollection. “And anyway, an angel would have been no use. The help I need is of the most human kind.” She smiled shyly. “I almost told you everything then. I would have done if you’d only asked. But you didn’t; and then something made me hesitate. I knew that before I could explain it to anybody I had to be able to explain it to myself. I knew also that it was no good explaining it to just anyone. So I didn’t tell you.” She paused. “I need another cigarette,” she said, and lit one.

I watched her draw on it, thinking of the cigarette she had smoked in Hyde Park on that warm morning weeks ago. I felt that years had passed since then, that the cardboard figure of Ella which I had taken away with me and made three-dimensional in private hours of daydream was being dismantled before my eyes. From the wreck of the romantic doll I had created I saw a woman emerge who had no notion of nineteenth-century dilemmas and dashing saviors. Yet she was frightened and alone, as my creation had been, though for reasons other than the ones which I had devised. This new woman was reaching out to me and I took her hand, not knowing where she might lead or pull.

Ella continued. “But then you appeared again at Camilla Boardman’s,” she said, “just when I was trying to pretend that nothing was really wrong. And you made up that silly excuse about a handbag and endeared yourself instantly.” She smiled. “Then you listened to me as I talked, and I felt that here was someone who might throw me a rope.” She paused. “But I didn’t want it,” she said at last. “You need to admit to yourself that you’re drowning before you can be rescued and I couldn’t do that. It was up to you to tie the rope around my wrists by force if needs be. I couldn’t come to you. And perhaps I wouldn’t ever have been able to. But as things turned out, you—
you
of all people-—appeared at my engagement party, and there you did tie the rope around my wrists, in a manner of speaking.” She put her hand on mine. “Of course I could see that it terrified you to do it. You’ve been brought up to believe that one shouldn’t speak to a woman as you spoke to me that day.”

Still I listened.

“But you made me see that you might be strong enough to help me, and I know that the hand that pulls the rope must be firm and the arms that hold it powerful. I thought that you might be strong. I wrote to you, not knowing whether you would meet me at the station or not. But you did. And now you’re here.” She leaned towards me. “Thank you,” she said softly. And she kissed me.

Even from a distance of almost fifty years I can feel the touch of those soft lips, can feel the tingling that ran through me as they leaned to touch mine. Ella’s lips: long observed, long imagined, finally given. Our kiss: shivering, electric, long, deliberate, gentle. I can taste the cigarette smoke of it.

“Thank you,” I said in my turn.

“And now you know a little more than you did.”

“I do.”

“And the rest you shall know tomorrow.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. Good night, James.”

“Good night, Ella.”

She got up slowly and left the room, deserted now but for a few loyal patrons who had been locked in to continue their drinking uninterrupted. It was long past midnight.

CHAPTER 8

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS COLD
. A chilly wind whipped the small streets of the island, sending the tourists scurrying to shelter in tea shops with Tudor beams and low doors. The islanders themselves paid no attention to the weather, moving with ruddy cheeks through the gusts which ripped the tiles from their roofs and sent sprays of sea into gardens and boats. Above the village, aloof, stood the castle, a disdainful eye on the new army which trooped up its steep hill and paid the uniformed attendants at its gates for admission. The weapons of these invaders were not the halberd, bayonet or musket of bygone ages; they were the camera, guidebook and traveling pouch of the modern era. Their leaders did not exhort their followers fearlessly on snow-white chargers; instead they explained, in as many languages as there are countries, that there was a gift shop selling island memorabilia at attractive prices on the left past the Italian fountain. I listened to snatches of Seton’s history from these guides as Ella and I walked behind them. I heard how it had been a monastery since the early twelve hundreds; how in 1536 the monks had been expelled by a vengeful Henry and his cardinal; how the great rooms had lain empty for almost a hundred years. I heard too how the seventeenth century had brought the place fitfully back to life, first as barracks, then as ammunition store and finally as prison. It was Ella who told me how the castle had then been given—by a guilty or grateful king, who is to say?—to Margaret, Countess of Seton in 1670 for “services rendered,” as her descendant put it with a wry smile.

As I listened to all this I felt the castle watching me— and the other invaders who climbed its hill—with cool, untroubled disdain. If cannonballs and shot had failed to cripple it in the Civil War, it seemed to say, what hope had we with our flashbulbs and chewing gum? Hewn from ancient granite, its walls four feet thick in places, it had the air of grim permanence which only eight centuries’ exposure to cold wind and cold sea can impart. Walking with Ella under the delicate swirls of its wrought-iron gates, a Victorian addition, I felt that no alterations, however cozy, could change the primeval nature of the place. Seton would not be molded; it would not bend to the most persuasive of hands. One might change; add; improve; install hot water and electricity as Blanche had done; heat; furnish as one liked; but the character of the castle was immutable: cast in the very stone of its crenellations; expressed in the thick set of its towers and the defiance of its walls.

Inside we passed heavy rooms of solid furniture cordoned off by silk ropes, the American lilt of Ella’s voice making me think of another young American girl, long ago, walking the corridors we walked then. Taking my hand, Ella led me through splendors of library and drawing room; past the dusty brocade and Chinese screens of the King’s Bedroom; up stairs and along corridors. At length we emerged in the great hall, a high, cold, magnificent room of flagstones and mullion-panes. The hunting trophies of the Victorian gentleman lined its lengths; at its farthest extreme, set between two huge windows, was a painting, a portrait.

“There it is,” said Ella softly, nodding towards its heavy gilt frame. “That’s what I’ve brought you all this way to see.” She followed me as I walked towards it, her words joining the echoes of whispered French, German, English and Japanese which composed the secret code of Seton’s modern invaders.

The great hall at Seton is a long rectangular room on the first floor, once the monastery refectory, and you enter it in the middle of its west side. The two walls to the north and south hold pairs of great windows that reach almost to the floor. One of these pairs gives on to a narrow balcony with a low balustrade, a quite inexplicable Victorian addition, from which a terrace, far beneath, is visible. The other is exposed to the sea, which pounds on the cliffs a hundred feet below it. It is a large, dramatic room, not entirely without charm. A magnificent Elizabethan table, of ships’ timbers salvaged from the Armada, stands in its center. Otherwise the hall has no furniture, nothing in fact save the stags’ heads on the walls and the painting of Blanche.

Ella’s grandmother gazed out at the room, over the heads of the tourists who photographed her picture, towards the windows on the opposite wall and the sea that crashed below them. Her portrait hangs, whether as memorial or cruel joke I do not know, between the windows that give onto the balcony. It is from this balcony that she threw herself, and her death (though not its means) are commemorated by a bronze Latin plaque set in the flagstones below. The castle guides translate it by rote.

I remember seeing Blanche’s picture for the first time; I remember looking up at the features of Ella and Sarah, neither one yet both, distilled in a face of extraordinary charm; I remember the brush strokes of her blond hair, luxuriant and long, piled high above her face with its small nose and high cheekbones. She is wearing a pale blue dress, and one small hand is visible clasping a closed book. She stares out at the sea, a wistful look in her eyes. Perhaps she is thinking of home.