The Ghost Writer (17 page)

But as the extremity of their host's emotion subsided, she became aware that he was not as happy as he professed to be. His earlier anxiety reappeared; he asked them several times whether they were completely certain they had seen Robert in the photograph. With each repetition, Uncle Theodore's assurances sounded less convincing, her own more forced. Her spirits sank lower as the afternoon wore on, until the pressure of Mr Thornton's haunted, beseeching gaze became quite unbearable, and despite the warmth of their farewells, she left with the dismal feeling that their visit had done him more harm than good.

"I wish he had never seen that book!" she said passionately, as they were walking back to the station. "What he really wants is for Robert not to have died in the war; to have him back alive and warm and breathing, and he can't have that, and cant bear it, and the photograph only torments him."

"Indeed. But—er—how did you know, my dear, exactly what he wanted us to see?"

She explained about her illusion.

"I see—or rather, I didn't. So you think it was simply your memory of the other photograph?"

"I suppose it must have been," she replied uneasily, remembering that Mr Thornton had not actually brought out the earlier picture for comparison, "only just for that instant, I really did see Robert, sitting there in his uniform..."

***

C
ORDELIA WAS STARTLED OUT OF HER RECOLLECTION BY
the awareness that Uncle Theodore was standing beside her on the landing, contemplating the portrait on which her own unseeing eyes had been fixed.

"I am so sorry, my dear. I did not mean to alarm you. You seemed so deep in thought, I didn't like to interrupt."

"No, I'm glad to be interrupted. I was remembering our last visit to poor Mr Thornton."

Uncle Theodore, when agitated, had a habit of running his hands through his thick, unruly silver-grey hair; today it was sticking out wildly in all directions. Small and wiry (at five feet seven, he was only a little above Cordelia's height), he had always looked years younger than his age. But today he seemed to be feeling the burden of his sixty-seven years; his face had taken on a greyish tinge, making the lines scored vertically down his cheek seem more than ever like fine scars or claw-marks. And there was a lurking indecision or anxiety in his bloodhound eyes that reminded her suddenly of Mr Thornton.

"Is something troubling you, uncle?" she asked, when he did not immediately reply.

"Not exactly—the fact is, my dear, I have something to say to you, and I don't know where to begin."

"Well," she smiled, "you should take the advice you always used to give me: begin at the beginning, and go on until you come to the end."

"Ah, the beginning..." he murmured, his eyes upon the face of Imogen de Vere. "Did you know" he continued, as if irrelevantly, "that your grandmother and I were once engaged to be married?"

"No, I didn't," said Cordelia, surprised.

"Ah. I thought perhaps Una might have said something."

"No, she hasn't."

I see.

He paused, as if seeking guidance from the portrait.

"As you know, I grew up mainly in Holland Park; we only came here for the summers, then. Her fathers house was only a few hundred yards from ours, but much grander. He was a City man—stocks and shares and directorships, all that sort of thing—and did very well out of it. Whereas we were in tea, as you know; perfectly comfortable, but by no means rich."

He lingered for a while on familiar ground, rehearsing the slow decline of the importing house founded by his grandfather, and the growth of the friendship between himself, his sister (Una was two years younger than Theodore), and Imogen Ward.

"Imogen and I were so slow to realise that we were in love—it was mutual—that I couldn't tell you when it began. We must have been eighteen or nineteen before anything was declared between us. But once we had spoken, we were quite certain—that is to say I was quite certain—that we would be married as soon as she had turned twenty-one.

"We knew that her father wouldn't like it. Horace Ward didn't approve of me, for a start; he thought, quite rightly, that I lacked ambition; and then, aside from the difference in wealth, he was violently opposed to marriage between cousins. We were second cousins, not first, and the relation was on our mothers' side, not his, but it made no difference. Any degree of relation was too much for him. From the day she first sounded him out, I was banned from their house, and she from ours, under threat of disinheritance. To do him justice, he was very fond of her; I think he genuinely believed that if he'd consented, he would have been making a sort of human sacrifice of his only daughter, for whom some princes mightn't have been good enough—quite apart from their habit of marrying their cousins. Anything she wanted was hers for the asking; anything except me."

Theodore was still speaking as if to the portrait of Imogen de Vere.

"Why must you be so reasonable, uncle?" said Cordelia tenderly. "He sounds absolutely horrible."

"It's a sort of failing, I suppose, always to see the other side. There are times when you should simply act ... If I had known what I know now, I'd have waited, and asked her to run away with me on her twenty-first birthday. We went on meeting in secret, but inevitably, word got back to him; there were more scenes, and more threats ... it was a terrible strain for her ... until I began to fear that I really was ruining her life. In the end we agreed, Imogen and I, that I would go out to Calcutta as my father had hoped, to look after the business there, and stay two years, and then, if our feelings hadn't altered ... She had just turned twenty when I left.

"Her letter telling me that she was engaged to a forty-year-old banker named Ruthven de Vere arrived about three months before I was due to come home. I stayed for fifteen years."

He turned away from the portrait, towards the window at the head of the staircase, studying the wintry fields. Traces of last weeks snow still clung to the highest of the hilltops beyond.

"But uncle, I don't understand. How could she come to live with you, after all that?"

"Do you mean, because of the impropriety?"

"No, no, I mean, how could she accept, after what she'd done to you?"

"You mustn't be angry with her, my dear. Not on my account. She was seriously ill; both her parents were dead; de Vere had charge of all her money, what was left of it; she had nowhere else to turn. We'd kept in touch, you see. Another excess of reasonableness on my part; doubtless many would call it lack of spirit."

"I wouldn't. She was very lucky, to have such a generous spirit to turn to," said Cordelia, taking his arm. "But why did she leave her husband, just when she became ill? Did Papa ever see his father again? Why would Papa never speak of him? Or Aunt Una? Even you? Did you ever meet him? Ruthven de Vere, I mean?"

"No, my dear. You must remember, I was away in India until the year before—it happened; if my mother had lived longer, I wouldn't have been here at all. And Imogen's letters had been mostly about Arthur. I had heard that they had a grand house in Belgrave Square—it was one of the first in the square to be equipped with electric light—and entertained very elaborately, but she hardly mentioned any of that. Or her husband. I wrote, of course, to let her know I was back, and she replied that she would love to bring Arthur to see us, and how sorry she was to hear about my mother.

"That was the last I heard from her, until I got her wire..."

He turned back to the portrait, wincing at some painful memory.

"Why on earth did she marry him in the first place?" cried Cordelia angrily.

"Because she was in love with him, I presume. He was handsome, and cultivated, and charming, as even Una—who attended the wedding only at my insistence—was forced to concede. And a most attentive husband—everybody agreed about that—"

"Uncle, will you
please
stop trying to defend him? You don't believe a word you're saying. The way you said attentive' made my flesh crawl; you're only making me loathe him even more."

"My dear, you misunderstand me. I'm not defending him, I assure you, not in the least; only trying to show you how the marriage must have appeared in the eyes of the world. Even at the end."

"I don't care what the world thought, I want to know what really happened. Why he never saw Papa again. Why Papa never once mentioned him. Uncle, have you all been hiding something you think is too horrible for me to hear? I'm twenty-one now, I'm a grown woman. Besides, it couldn't be worse than some of the things I've imagined."

"Are you quite sure of that?" he asked quietly, his eyes still fixed upon the portrait. Something in his tone set her skin crawling again, though she tried not to show it, and for a little while neither of them spoke.

S
TRUGGLING TO RECONCILE HER ANGER AT THE WOMAN
who had betrayed a true and faithful lover to marry for money (for surely she wouldn't have accepted de Vere if he'd been poor?) with the familiar face before her, Cordelia found that she simply could not do it. This woman—the Imogen the painter had seen and rendered with such compelling subtlety—was surely incapable of
deceit,
cruelty, or greed. She looked so...
untouched,
that was it ... so entirely self-possessed ... that calm, accepting gaze that gave you the impression she understood exactly what was in your heart ... a perfect stillness, yes, but living, vibrant, trembling on the edge of speech. "Thou still unravished bride of quietness": the words came to her unbidden; and with them the awareness that her anger had melted away.

"I see why you could not be angry with her," she said at last.

"I am glad you see that, my dear. It is a true likeness. His name was Henry St Clair—the painter, I mean."

"But you've always told me, uncle, that you didn't know who painted it."

"I said it was by an unknown artist, which was, and remains, true. But yes, I equivocated. When your dear father died, I resolved not to burden you with anything of—of which we must now speak—until it became necessary to do so. But now you are indeed twenty-one, and a grown woman, the necessity is upon us."

Once more he took counsel from the portrait.

"She met him—Henry St Clair—in a gallery in Bloomsbury. At a small exhibition of landscapes, including one of his, which she happened to be admiring while he was there. This is what she told me, you understand, on the one day we spoke of it. She described him very vividly: freckled and wind-burnt from a recent sketching tour—on foot, sleeping under trees; he couldn't afford so much as a bed in a village inn—slender, with one of those fresh, boyish faces that makes a man look years younger than he really is, brown eyes, curly brown hair which he wore quite long—a sort of animated brown study, she said, because he was wearing a brown velveteen jacket, somewhat paint-stained, and brown corduroy trousers.

"She bought the picture; they left the gallery together, and walked all the way up to the Heath, where they sat and talked for hours. That first afternoon, she said, was like emerging from a dark cavern into sunlight; there was a radiance about his personality ... you needn't frown for my sake, my dear; I encouraged her to speak freely. He warned her that he was constitutionally vulnerable to melancholia, but throughout the time she knew him, he remained in this sunny, upland mood. And if it hadn't ended so appallingly, I would have been simply glad, I assure you ... but I must not run ahead of myself.

"He had his studio above a restaurant in one of the back streets of Soho; I believe the family who ran it spoke almost no English. He told her he liked being surrounded by people talking in languages he couldn't understand; he found the noise of the kitchen cheering, and could eat downstairs for practically nothing. And after years of living hand to mouth, a modest legacy from a remote relative had—or so he assured her—lately freed him from the daily struggle for survival.

"The picture she bought—for two guineas; he would accept no more than the gallery's asking-price—was the first he had ever sold. He had been in London for several years, working relentlessly at his painting whenever he was not out earning his living (work, he said, had always been the best anodyne for his melancholia), never satisfied with what he produced, always striving to surpass himself. He had exhibited canvases before, during fits of enthusiasm, but had always removed them when the inevitable darkening of his mood followed, and his tendency towards merciless self-criticism regained the upper hand. But their—friendship was the word she insisted upon—their friendship, and the reprieve it brought from his despondency, gave him the impetus to work towards an exhibition of his own, and to begin the portrait you see before you.

"He had worked at portraiture as hard as he had worked at his landscapes, using various members of the restaurant-keeper's family for models, but every attempt before this had been painted over or scraped out. At first she worried about his devoting so much time to the picture, which obviously couldn't be shown. She came to his studio as often as she could, whenever her husband was—as she thought—safely occupied in the City. But as the weeks passed, she watched him becoming calmer, more confident, more assured, until, she said, the subtle transformation taking place in him became as absorbing as the progress of the portrait itself. Whilst he was working, they hardly exchanged a word, but those days of silent communion were, she said, amongst the happiest of her life—"

"It was not fair of her to say such things, to you of all people!" said Cordelia.

"Very little in life is fair. What Imogen Ward was to me, Henry St Clair was to her. We don't choose such attachments, my dear; they choose us. She came to me at the worst moment of her life; that was reward enough. I wanted, above all, to understand. And as you will shortly realise, there were things it was necessary for me to know.

"As to her relations with her husband; there was much that she withheld, but the truth was plain enough. Ruthven de Vere was not—or had not been—a cruel or negligent husband; on the contrary, he took enormous pride in her appearance; but there was an essential coldness at the heart of his regard; he valued her as a collector would value a rare and precious stone.