The Drowning People (3 page)

Since she doesn’t seem disposed to say anything further, I question her more closely, telling her that one never knows.

“His name’s Charles Stanhope,” she says, uttering a name I indeed do not recognize. I say this and she looks up at me and smiles.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted your run,” she says. “But I’ve been sitting out here on this bench for so long I think I’d’ve stayed here forever if someone hadn’t disturbed me and broken the spell.”

“What spell?” I am bold enough to ask.

“The spell of wakeful hours.” She looks up at me, eyes twinkling. “The rut of question-answer-same-question your brain gets into when developments take a turn you didn’t really expect.”

I see her fumble absently in her bag for a cigarette, watch her light it, and follow silver-gray smoke circles upwards to a pale blue sky. The park is noticeably warmer now; people are trickling in, and as they pass they cannot help but look at us, an odd pair under the trees. I can smell the faint odor of sweet perfume and soap and stale cigarette smoke that surrounds her; can hear the click of her lighter flint as she makes a flame; can see, as she holds her cigarette, that one of her nails is bitten to the quick.

“Have you been out here all night?” I ask.

She nods, with a little tightening of pale lips. “Oh yes,” she says. “This bench and I are old friends. It’s heard more of my secrets than it cares to remember, I suspect.”

“And has it offered good advice?”

“Well that’s just where benches have the advantage over people. They don’t offer advice; they don’t sympathize. They just sit, listening, reminding you by their very immovability that nothing in your life can be that earth-shattering. I think benches are a good guard against melodrama.” She looks up at me. “I suppose you think me very melodramatic.” She says this more as a half-murmured musing to herself than as a question to me. “Sitting here in these clothes,” she goes on. “Smoking. Drinking coffee. Forming crazy relationships with benches.” She looks up at me again, shyly this time, and we both laugh.

“Not at all,” I say, itching to ask her more but being constrained by … what? By twenty-two years of being told that it is rude to pry; by a certain social reserve which is characteristic of me to this day; by a fear that she is troubled by love for another, whom I instinctively hate and whose existence I want to put off confirming until the last possible moment.

“You are very polite,” she says eventually, in a tone which sows doubt in my mind about the sincerity of the compliment.

I nod, and as I do so her words sound in my ears like an accusation. I feel that something is required of me, but what it is I do not know, and as I am not experienced in talking to pretty women I say nothing.

“I wonder if that is your personality or your education,” she goes on. “This admirable respect you seem to have for my privacy. In your place I should be curious to know what prompts a fully grown woman to sit up all night in a lonely park and grow garrulous with the larks.”

This sounds like an invitation, which I cautiously accept. “Would you tell me if I did ask?” I say quietly.

“Five minutes ago I might have done,” she says, closing the clasp of her bag with a click. “But your presence has cheered me too much for confidences. And of course this old bench is still just where it was last night, a fine example to us all.” She pauses. “Constancy in a changing world.” She smiles and pats the worn wood of its seat. “I feel better now,” she says, “and less inclined to … bore you with my troubles. All of which, I should add, are purely of my own making.”

“They wouldn’t bore me at all,” I say, now wanting to know more than ever what is troubling this beautiful, fragile woman with the softly foreign accent and the bitten fingernails.

“Well I’m glad to know you’re human,” she says and we both laugh again.

“Could I ask your name, at least?” I say, braver now that I sense she is about to go.

“You could. A name is the least private thing about a person.” She gets up and leans over to stub her cigarette on the ground. She puts the butt into an empty carton in her bag. I hear the click-click of the clasp closing and unclosing. I see that she isn’t wearing any shoes and watch her pick up a pair of black satin pumps which have been collecting dew under the bench. There is a pause.

“Well then, what’s your name?”

“I’m Ella Harcourt,” she says, standing, and offers me her hand.

I shake it.

“And you are?”

“I’m James Farrell,” I say.

“Well, James …” There is a slight awkwardness between us, born of intimacy almost attempted and just missed. “It was a pleasure,” she says at last.

Now whose education is dictating what they say? I think to myself, irrationally annoyed at her leaving. She sees my irritation and laughs.

“Good-bye,” I say, getting up too.

“Enjoy the rest of your run,” she says and turns to go, barefooted, her shoes in one hand, the empty Styrofoam cup in the other. I see the redness on her heels where the pumps have been chafing her. She walks delicately, but purposefully and quickly. She does not look back. I sense that she knows I am watching her. It is a long time before she is gone completely from my view, for the carriage track is straight and almost empty. I stand looking after her shrinking form, hearing the thud of my pulse once more, aware of tiny sounds usually lost: the scratch of squirrels’ claws on bark, the rustle of a breeze in the oak leaves, an indignant magpie.

CHAPTER 2

I
HAVE SAID THAT
I
STRUGGLE TO RE-CREATE MYSELF
as I was then in any way that makes sense to me now. At twenty-two one labors under the delusion that one knows everything; at seventy, I find to my regret how little I hold certain. I am mistrustful of myself; of recollection; of feeling. And my memory, long disused, is imperfect; that I freely admit. Yet certain images, as I am discovering, remain with one always. Ella sitting in the park that first morning is one such image: it has returned to me, with very little effort on my part, as complete and perfect as if I had observed her yesterday. And it has brought with it a host of other images: the sights and sounds and smells that surrounded our second meeting; the weight of the people crushing in on every side; the manic tinkle of their purposeful laughter; the sweet taste of brandy in champagne. Rising above it all I hear the cadences of Camilla’s voice, the shrill rapid emphases of her speech, the fantastic elongation of her vowels.
“Daahling!”
For the scene that now flickers into life is the scene of Camilla Boardman’s twenty-first birthday party and I can see Camilla, her auburn curls framing her face with all the elegance which coiffeurial skill can impart, leaning on the present table, smiling at no one in particular and fingering the silk bow of a large striped gift. The “intimate dinner” for “a few of her
closest
friends” is over, a dinner to which I have not been invited, and I am arriving with a horde of others to join the “crush.”

I am tired. I have spent seven long hours practicing in a cramped, airless room at the top of my parents’ house; an endless trill from a Beethoven violin sonata drums in my head and my fingers twitch involuntarily at the stimulus. A difficult passage of pizzicato, frequently repeated, which joins the trill as I say my first hellos, has made the tips of the fingers on my right hand ache. I want nothing more than to go to bed, to dream of my music in peace; but Fate and my mother have decreed otherwise and sent me, bathed, brushed and faintly bemused, to the birthday party of a highly eligible girl who scares me a little but whom I like and who my parents think is someone “one should know if one can.”

My fellow guests and I are under the high ceilings of the Boardman drawing room in Cadogan Square; bewigged, darkly painted gentlemen stare down from the walls; the furniture has been cleared from the center of the long room and most people are standing. Younger sisters and their friends, in black skirts and white blouses, circulate with trays of champagne and count the hours until 2:00
A.M.
and the presentation of a check for their pains.

In remembering the friends of my early twenties Camilla Boardman stands preeminent. Not for any special intimacy on our part (although, in a purely platonic way, that did develop later) but for the absolute panache with which she did things. Camilla took herself from the realm of the cliché and into that rarefied space beyond parody. Her curls were curlier, her dresses tighter, her breasts rounder, her vowels longer, her use of the exclamation mark in conversation more indiscriminate, than anybody’s I had ever met. My mother was delighted that I knew her and harbored secret hopes, I am sure, of just such a daughter-in-law. I, needless to say, was thoroughly in awe of the great auburn-haired beauty who flung her arms around me on the slightest provocation (a compliment she paid to all the men she knew) and who, that evening, took her present from me with a squeal of delight and dragged me into the center of the room to “mingle.”

“Darling, you look
fabulous,”
she cooed, tweaking the lapel of my dinner jacket and reminding me with the subtlety for which she was famed that I had not yet complimented her on her dress.

“So do you, Camilla,” I said feelingly, looking with frank pleasure at the swathe of tight white silk, like a second skin, which covered just the polite minimum and offset the gentle glow of her tan so admirably.

“I bet you say that to
all
the girls,” she whispered slyly into my ear, but I was spared the inevitable
“naughty
boy” by our arrival at the center of a group I did not know, all the members of which seemed to be on terms of easy familiarity with each other. Hastily, for streams of guests were arriving, Camilla performed the introductions.

The faces of the people to whom she introduced me are faded now. Their names have collided, blurred and finally commingled with the names of countless other drinks party guests with whom I have spoken for ten minutes and then never seen again. I remember black dresses and gleaming shirtfronts; curls; hopeful sideburns; occasional laborious attempts at disheveled Bohemian chic; monogrammed cuff links. These were the people my parents had educated me to know and whom it pleased me privately to despise. I have said that my mind at this age was beginning to take its first tentative steps towards independent thought; and these steps, naturally enough, were leading me away from the received ideas on which I had been brought up, away from the unquestioning observance of social form which an education in the 1950s had instilled in my parents. I now viewed such concepts with extreme, and to my mind enlightened, distaste.

It had not always been thus; indeed even then (for all my superiority) I was conscious of looking much like my fellow guests and of making conversation much like theirs in accents just their own. This made me wonder, as the trill continued its endless tattoo in my head, if perhaps they were judging me as I was judging them. Perhaps this was a charade for us all; perhaps we each, individually, appreciated the absurdity of the ritual we were forced to act out; perhaps it was only collectively and outwardly that we submitted to it in such numbers and with such apparent willingness. In my superiority $$$ was not overly hopeful.

One has such thoughts at that age. I had not yet learned the advantages of complete conformity, preferably unconscious, to a given code of behavior, or the benefits to be derived from the subjection of self to a social system designed to keep both people and feeling in check, unruffled in the smooth maintenance of social hypocrisy. You don’t kill for good manners. Had I never considered any system of values beyond that of the drawing room, I would certainly never have killed Sarah. But then Sarah deserved to die; and had I never strayed from the confines of polite morality, from the limits set by sermons preached in school chapels to tweed-suited audiences, I would never have been able to punish her as she deserved. Odious word, “punishment.”

I little knew, as I stood at Camilla’s party that evening, how soon my eyes were to be opened to a truer reality, to an infinitely more varied and correspondingly more dangerous range of moral possibility than that to which I had hitherto been exposed. My mind was too obsessed by its habitual worries about how other people saw me and I saw them to see beyond the confines of its own social rebellion, which (because it was only ever stated privately or, very occasionally, in the ugliest of the scenes with my parents) was hardly rebellion at all. That evening I was preoccupied—as I have said—with the possibility that some amongst my fellow guests might despise me for the same reasons that I despised them; might think that I, too, talked only of holidays in the south of France, or of weekends in the country, or of parties in London that I had been to or pretended to have been to. And all the while I talked animatedly of someone’s villa in Biarritz, lacking the means, the courage, and perhaps even the inclination to give my criticism voice.

Oh yes, it’s all flooding back now. The bundle of contradictions that passed, in my own mind, for self-knowledge: the desire to break from the mold but to prove to myself how admirably I could fit it if I chose; the formation of social theories I lacked the nerve ever to articulate and used only in the long struggle with my parents over my future; the blend of arrogance and humility which made me by turns delighted and appalled by my hypocrisy. I had, in those days, an ability to think and not to think; to convince myself that I was living when I was not; that I was feeling when I hardly knew what feeling was. I thought I knew everything: my own mind; my own opinions; my own values. I was smug in a way which cried out to be put to the test, though I had no idea that this was so; and because I did not know I was ripe for it, the test (when it came) was unexpected and its results disastrous.

But that belongs to a later part of this story.

I stood, that evening, as I say, talking of someone’s villa in Biarritz. I smiled, I drank the champagne cocktails, I discovered that I had been at school with someone’s brother and told an amusing (and not altogether kind) anecdote about his time there. Occasionally the high notes of Camilla’s conversation drifted towards me: the string of superlatives with which she greeted the arrival of each guest and gift; hasty introductions; loud exclamations over dresses. I was nearing the end of anything useful I could say (or invent to say) about villas in Biarritz when I felt her nudge my arm and push into the centre of the group a lean, rather pale young man, tall with floppy blond hair and small hands which belied his great height.