The French Lieutenant's Woman (12 page)

In London the beginnings
of a plutocratic stratification of society had, by the mid-century,
begun. Nothing of course took the place of good blood; but it had
become generally accepted that good money and good brains could
produce artificially a passable enough facsimile of acceptable social
standing. Disraeli was the type, not the exception, of his times.
Ernestina's grandfather may have been no more than a well-to-do
draper in Stoke Newington when he was young; but he died a very rich
draper--much more than that, since he had moved commercially into
central London, founded one of the West End's great stores and
extended his business into many departments besides drapery. Her
father, indeed, had given her only what he had himself received: the
best education that money could buy. In all except his origins he was
impeccably a gentleman; and he had married discreetly above him, a
daughter of one of
the
City's most successful solicitors, who could number an
Attorney-General, no less, among his not-too-distant ancestors.
Ernestina's qualms about her social status were therefore rather
farfetched, even by Victorian standards; and they had never in the
least troubled Charles.

"Do but think,"
he had once said to her, "how disgracefully plebeian a name
Smithson is."

"Ah indeed--if you
were only called Lord Brabazon Vavasour Vere de Vere--how much more I
should love you!"

But behind her
self-mockery lurked a fear.

He had first met her the
preceding November, at the house of a lady who had her eye on him for
one of her own covey of simperers. These young ladies had had the
misfortune to be briefed by their parents before the evening began.
They made the cardinal error of trying to pretend to Charles that
paleontology absorbed them--he must give them the titles of the most
interesting books on the subject--whereas Ernestina showed a gently
acid little determination not to take him very seriously. She would,
she murmured, send him any interesting specimens of coal she came
across in her scuttle; and later she told him she thought he was very
lazy. Why, pray? Because he could hardly enter any London drawing
room without finding abundant examples of the objects of his
interest.

To both young people it
had promised to be just one more dull evening; and both, when they
returned to their respective homes, found that it had not been so.

They saw in each other a
superiority of intelligence, a lightness of touch, a dryness that
pleased. Ernestina let it be known that she had found "that Mr.
Smithson" an agreeable change from the dull crop of partners
hitherto presented for her examination that season. Her mother made
discreet inquiries; and consulted her husband, who made more; for no
young male ever set foot in the drawing room of the house overlooking
Hyde Park who had not been as well vetted as any modern security
department vets its atomic scientists.
Charles
passed his secret ordeal with flying colors.

Now Ernestina had seen
the mistake of her rivals: that no wife thrown at Charles's head
would ever touch his heart. So when he began to frequent her mother's
at homes and
soirees
he had the unusual experience of finding that there was no sign of
the usual matrimonial trap; no sly hints from the mother of how much
the sweet darling loved children or "secretly longed for the end
of the season" (it was supposed that Charles would live
permanently at Winsyatt, as soon as the obstacular uncle did his
duty); or less sly ones from the father on the size of the fortune
"my dearest girl" would bring to her husband. The latter
were, in any case, conspicuously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was
fit for a duke to live in, and the absence of brothers and sisters
said more than a thousand bank statements.

Nor did Ernestina,
although she was very soon wildly determined, as only a spoiled
daughter can be, to have Charles, overplay her hand. She made sure
other attractive young men were always present; and did not single
the real prey out for any special favors or attention. She was, on
principle, never serious with him; without exactly saying so she gave
him the impression that she liked him because he was fun-- but of
course she knew he would never marry. Then came an evening in January
when she decided to plant the fatal seed.

She saw Charles standing
alone; and on the opposite side of the room she saw an aged dowager,
a kind of Mayfair equivalent of Mrs. Poulteney, whom she knew would
be as congenial to Charles as castor oil to a healthy child. She went
up to him.

"Shall you not go
converse with Lady Fairwether?"

"I should rather
converse with you."

"I will present
you. And then you can have an eyewitness account of the goings-on in
the Early Cretaceous era."

He smiled. "The
Early Cretaceous is a period. Not an era."

"Never mind. I am
sure it is sufficiently old. And I know how bored you are by anything
that has happened in the last ninety million years. Come."

So they began to cross
the room together; but halfway to the Early Cretaceous lady, she
stopped, laid her
hand
a moment on his arm, and looked him in the eyes.

"If you are
determined to be a sour old bachelor, Mr. Smithson, you must practice
for your part."

She had moved on before
he could answer; and what she had said might have sounded no more
than a continuation of her teasing. But her eyes had for the briefest
moment made it clear that she made an offer; as unmistakable, in its
way, as those made by the women who in the London of the time haunted
the doorways round the Haymarket.

What she did not know
was that she had touched an increasingly sensitive place in Charles's
innermost soul; his feeling that he was growing like his uncle at
Winsyatt, that life was passing him by, that he was being, as in so
many other things, overfastidious, lazy, selfish ... and worse. He
had not traveled abroad those last two years; and he had realized
that previously traveling had been a substitute for not having a
wife. It took his mind off domestic affairs; it also allowed him to
take an occasional woman into his bed, a pleasure he strictly forbade
himself, perhaps remembering the black night of the soul his first
essay in that field had caused, in England.

Traveling no longer
attracted him; but women did, and he was therefore in a state of
extreme sexual frustration, since his moral delicacy had not allowed
him to try the simple expedient of a week in Ostend or Paris. He
could never have allowed such a purpose to dictate the reason for a
journey. He passed a very thoughtful week. Then one morning he woke
up.

Everything had become
simple. He loved Ernestina. He thought of the pleasure of waking up
on just such a morning, cold, gray, with a powder of snow on the
ground, and seeing that demure, sweetly dry little face asleep beside
him--and by heavens (this fact struck Charles with a sort of
amazement) legitimately in the eyes of both God and man beside him. A
few minutes later he startled the sleepy Sam, who had crept up from
downstairs at his urgent ringing, by saying: "Sam! I am an
absolute one hundred per cent heaven forgive me damned fool!"

A day or two afterwards
the unadulterated fool had an interview with Ernestina's father. It
was brief, and very satisfactory. He went down to the drawing room,
where Ernestina's mother sat in a state of the most poignant
trepidation.
She could not bring herself to speak to Charles, but pointed
uncertainly in the direction of the conservatory. Charles opened the
white doors to it and stood in the waft of the hot, fragrant air. He
had to search for Ernestina, but at last he found her in one of the
farthest corners, half screened behind 'a bower of stephanotis. He
saw her glance at him, and then look hastily down and away. She held
a pair of silver scissors, and was pretending to snip off some of the
dead blooms of the heavily scented plant. Charles stood close behind
her; coughed.

"I have come to bid
my adieux." The agonized look she flashed at him he pretended,
by the simple trick of staring at the ground, not to notice. "I
have decided to leave England. For the rest of my life I shall
travel. How else can a sour old bachelor divert his days?"

He was ready to go on in
this vein. But then he saw that Ernestina's head was bowed and that
her knuckles were drained white by the force with which she was
gripping the table. He knew that normally she would have guessed his
tease at once; and he understood that her slowness now sprang from a
deep emotion, which communicated itself to him.

"But if I believed
that someone cared for me sufficiently to share..."

He could not go on, for
she had turned, her eyes full of tears. Their hands met, and he drew
her to him. They did not kiss. They could not. How can you
mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and
then not expect the prisoner to be racked by sobs when the doors are
thrown open? A few minutes later Charles led Tina, a little
recovered, down the aisle of hothouse plants to the door back to the
drawing room. But he stopped a moment at a plant of jasmine and
picked a sprig and held it playfully over her head.
 

"It isn't
mistletoe, but it will do, will it not?"

And so they kissed, with
lips as chastely asexual as children's. Ernestina began to cry again;
then dried her eyes, and allowed Charles to lead her back into the
drawing room, where her mother and father stood. No words were
needed. Ernestina ran into her mother's opened arms, and twice as
many tears as before began to fall. Meanwhile the two men stood
smiling at each other; the one as if he had just concluded an
excellent business deal, the other as if he was not quite sure which
planet he had just landed on, but sincerely hoped the natives were
friendly.
 

12

In what does
the alienation of labor consist? First, that the work is external to
the worker, that it is not a part of his nature, that consequently he
does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a
feeling of misery, not of well-being . . . the worker therefore feels
himself at home only during his leisure, whereas at work he feels
homeless.
--
Marx,
Economic and Political Manuscripts (1844)

And was the day
of my delight
As
pure and perfect as I say?
--
Tennyson,
In Memoriam (1850)

Charles put his best
foot forward, and thoughts of the mysterious woman behind him,
through the woods of Ware Commons. He walked for a mile or more,
until he came simultaneously to a break in the trees and the first
outpost of civilization. This was a long thatched cottage, which
stood slightly below his path. There
were
two or three meadows around it, running down to the cliffs, and just
as Charles came out of the woodlands he saw a man hoying a herd of
cows away from a low byre beside the cottage. There slipped into his
mind an image: a deliciously cool bowl of milk. He had eaten nothing
since the double dose of muffins. Tea and tenderness at Mrs.
Tranter's called; but the bowl of milk shrieked ... and was much
closer at hand. He went down a steep grass slope and knocked on the
back door of the cottage. It was opened by a small barrel of a woman,
her fat arms shiny with suds. Yes, he was welcome to as much milk as
he could drink. The name of the place? The Dairy, it seemed, was all
it was called. Charles followed her into the slant-roofed room that
ran the length of the rear of the cottage. It was dark, shadowy, very
cool; a slate floor; and heavy with the smell of ripening cheese. A
line of scalding bowls, great copper pans on wooden trestles, each
with its golden crust of cream, were ranged under the cheeses, which
sat roundly, like squadrons of reserve moons, on the open rafters
above. Charles remembered then to have heard of the place. Its cream
and butter had a local reputation; Aunt Tranter had spoken of it. He
mentioned her name, and the woman who ladled the rich milk from a
churn by the door into just what he had imagined, a simple
blue-and-white china bowl, glanced at him with a smile. He was less
strange and more welcome.

As he was talking, or
being talked to, by the woman on the grass outside the Dairy, her
husband came back from driving out his cows. He was a bald,
vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a
Jeremiah. He gave his wife a stern look. She promptly forewent her
chatter and returned indoors to her copper. The husband was evidently
a taciturn man, though he spoke quickly enough when Charles asked him
how much he owed for the bowl of excellent milk. A penny, one of
those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally
turn up in one's change, with all but that graceful head worn away by
the century's use, passed hands.