The Sleeping Beauty (5 page)

Rose and Isabella were going down the border examining the plants and Isabella was pointing at them with her umbrella. She looked up at Vinny with the relief of a woman who has been left too long with someone she dislikes.

‘But won’t you have tea?’ Rose asked.

‘Mrs D. will have it ready for us at home. I mustn’t annoy her,’ Isabella said hastily. ‘And I made a special cake. We just thought it better to bring Vinny’s things before it grew dark.’

Round the macrocarpa trees came the Tillotson children, straggling and calling, and as Vinny and Isabella walked out of the gate on to the cliff-road the Tillotson baby (too young for the sands) was coming along in his pram. They could see his mittened hands waving on either side of the hood. The young nursemaid, buttoned up in her reefer coat, stared at them boldly as they passed.

Harry’s name was in the nine o’clock news, and Isabella insisted on listening to it and insisted on crying a little in a fussy way
when she did: and all her bracelets jingled as she dabbed her eyes.

Polling had not been heavy. ‘There, you see,’ she said accusingly to Vinny. ‘I am sure they will have lost to Labour. I am glad that Harry never lived to see this day.’

Vinny was oddly unable to attend to her. For the first time in his life tears were distasteful to him and he was struggling against impatience and fatigue. The arrangement and planning, enabling him to get away on a Thursday, had tired him, he reasoned with himself. He would not entertain the idea of being bored with Isabella’s grief. He drove the notion away before it could cross the threshold.

‘What are you thinking?’ Isabella asked.

‘Of you.’

‘Then why frown and shake your head?’

‘Worry for you.’

‘How wonderful! If you are to worry for me, I need not. It will be a great relief. Harry always did the worrying, like carving the joint and seeing to the drinks.’

‘Such a silly woman when one gets to know her well,’ he decided.

‘Do you hate me to speak of him?’ she asked.

‘Hate?’

‘I notice that people do hate it. They take a step back, away from me, and half-close their eyes, waiting for me to stop. Evalie always does. Yet how else can I keep him going?’

‘You shall talk of him all the time, if you want to. And I will often do the same. I should warn you, though, that talk alters people.’

‘How can it, if we only say the truth?’

‘You won’t. You’ll leave out, for instance, the days when you were not on speaking terms. I vividly remember one of them myself, when you spoke at one another through Laurence and
me. It was painful and embarrassing for us all. And when you had an argument with him, he would suddenly lower his own voice and tell you not to shout. Very adroitly he did that – one of the tricks of his trade, I expect. “Of the dead only good” is what really finishes them off. Death from romanticism. It is always destructive.’

‘But I could not go about telling people how we quarrelled. And we seldom did.’

‘I meant that when you and I talk I won’t have some idealised Harry foisted off on me.’

‘No one else
cares
!’

He did not deny this, and when he did not, she went on: ‘I do blame God for that … making the pretence of caring suddenly fall in, so that we see we are really alone all the time.’

‘No need for God if it were otherwise,’ Vinny said carelessly. He was not intending to be drawn into religious discussion.

‘But when it
dawns
on one!’

He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and examined them intently, one by one – a sign, which Isabella did not recognise, that he was choosing words carefully, sorting them over, as he appeared to be sorting over the keys in his hand. She did, however, notice a change in his voice when he spoke.

‘Does Rose Kelsey back away, as it were, from mention of Harry?’

‘But I
should
not mention Harry to Rose Kelsey.’

‘Why?’

Their talk was slowing up with suspicious pauses.

‘I … faintly dislike her.’

‘Why?’

‘I am not at ease with her.’

He returned the keys to his pocket and then looked straight across at Isabella. ‘She is not warm-hearted?’ he suggested briskly. His careless way of seeming to wind up the conversation
was a trap which she fell into. No longer suspicious about the tone of his voice, no longer feeling drawn, she was now ready to talk about Rose for an hour or more.

‘I really can’t bear her. She dresses so badly.’

‘Yes, you warned me.’

‘The colours! Navy blue and brown her favourite combination and always a bit of pink petticoat dipping down at the back edged with coffee-coloured lace.’

‘Darling!’

‘But I can’t criticise her behaviour, because
she’s
had a hard life and you know that excuses any sort of off-handedness.’

‘It sometimes appears so.’

‘When her husband died she hadn’t any money, and had to take in all these paying-guests. I didn’t know him, but people in the town say he drank. As if everyone doesn’t. At any rate, it was his fault about Emily.’

‘Emily?’

‘Rose’s sister. If you keep taking out your keys, I shall think you are bored and want to go to bed.’

‘I’m not bored.’

‘Well, do say, darling, when you want to be off. Don’t let me keep you up.’

‘And don’t let her change the subject!’ he prayed. He did not know how to bring her back to the point, without the direct questions she resisted.

‘And then there is that child, Philippa. Loopy or mentally-retarded or whatever one calls it. Oh, it is enough to make anyone dress badly … such a great heap of trouble.’

‘What happened about Emily?’ he asked.

‘She was with Rose’s husband in the car, and whether he had one of his bouts or orgies going on, I don’t know, but he ran the car into a wall and killed himself, and nearly killed poor Emily as well. For months she was in hospital, and when she came
out, Rose began to devote her life to her and has done so ever since.’

‘Has she no life of her own, then?’

‘None any longer. Her fiancé left her because of the accident. One reason for not liking Rose is that, when she told me that, I thought she relished the idea.’

‘Why should he have left her?’

‘Her face was ruined, you see. I mean, the face she had. She came from hospital looking quite different – very beautiful in a way, but not in the way in which she had been beautiful before. In fact, the look of her now rather appals me.’

‘Yes, yes, I see.’

Isabella looked up quickly in surprise.

‘I saw her in the house,’ Vinny said. ‘It must have been she … But for this man to break off the engagement … I thought that was never done … one never hears of anyone doing it … of refusing the chance for martyrdom. It’s a kind of caddishness I haven’t met before and I thought I had met every kind. And … she is nevertheless very beautiful.’

‘He didn’t know that she was going to be. She was many months in bed with no one to see her; for she must not move or speak or cry.’

He imagined her lying there, piteously preconceiving all injury she had yet to suffer, in chrysalid isolation; no longer herself: not yet emerged from nothingness.

‘She has no one now but Rose and that loony child who treks about everywhere after her. Rose protects her. Rose is washing away her husband’s guilt. I hope it is not too macabre for you up there, but it is only for the night and I think that Emily is rarely seen, or Philly either. What unhappy lives people have – always a more dreary sort of unhappiness than one’s own.’

‘Looks matter more than anyone could imagine,’ he said.

‘I have always said so,’ Isabella agreed complacently, touching her pearls.

‘I think I should go now.’

‘Yes, I suppose Rose won’t like you to arrive too late.’

‘I shall see you in the morning. Then we must talk about the Auction Sale.’

In the hall, he kissed her goodnight and walked away from the house in a dream.

He thought of Emily lying under the spell of her alien beauty and Rose’s devotion enclosing her like a thicket of briars.

How the weeks spin by, Rose thought, or spin
round
, it sometimes seems, as if it were the same Friday coming again and again.

Since she had become happy, the days were all alike; dates flew off calendars as they do in films; mornings were dealt out with scarcely any variety – a different breakfast, a different coloured sky – and even the headlines of newspapers repeated the briefest sequence of hate and foreboding. The passage of time was most felt at the end of the afternoon, with the day heeling over into oblivion – oblivion, because no day was to be remembered when all days were the same.

She had always loved monotony and the small recurring excitements of domesticity were enough for her – shopping triumphs; satisfactions of meals served and eaten; the interest of keeping an alert eye on the staff. The job was difficult enough to challenge her courage. Often she was tired. The inconvenient old house cried for attention, money, at every turn. She wore herself out on inanimate things and was at peace. She had never been at peace as a wife; never, in the old days, at peace as Emily’s sister. As girls, Emily had been the gay, the party-going
one; and Rose, lacking, as far as looks went, only vivacity, spent too much time in the cloakroom at dances, agonised at having to reappear and be again rejected. If she unbent, it was only into foolishness, and silences fell. ‘Forfeits’ at parties had frozen her. She had felt her nerves growing taut with apprehension. Nowadays, no one asked her to bow to the wittiest and kneel to the prettiest. No one asked her to discard her dignity. No one made love to her, or drank too much when she turned away from them. Devotion could at last be what she had always understood it to be, a matter of favourite puddings, carefully aired clothes and leaping fires in sick-rooms. The burden of her maternity – tenderness – Emily took from her. She could feel that she had done everything for Philly because Emily did not mind becoming a child again and playing foolish games; did not mind kissing, caressing; implied no condescension. Rose had a special voice for her daughter – a bright, inquiring voice, which in its effort to drive out dismay left out love. She had never left out any other thing. All that anyone could suggest had been attempted for Philly. She did not grow up. Her eyes could reflect cunning or desperation but not intelligence. ‘She might have been pretty,’ Rose sometimes thought. But something had not quite met, not quite budded together, so that she was not whole, could not transmit thoughts wholly, nor receive them. Little took root in such stricken soil; though sometimes (‘Oh, not increasingly!’ Rose often prayed) a murderous growth was glimpsed. A word, an association, would suddenly tug at this mandrake-like horror, and a scene of sharp evil would erupt, not to be warded off; for neither Rose nor Emily could deny that it was unequivocally brought about. The most haphazard phrase or suggestion might disclose her virulence. And Rose hoped that Emily would always be there at those times, to hear out the inarticulate rage, take the anger to herself and in the end draw the sobbing and contorted creature to her breast.

For the most part, Philly was contented and the days passed for her – and for Emily as well, since they were always together – in busy idleness. In Rose’s sitting-room, where Rose never had time to sit, they arranged collections of shells; they combed one another’s hair, and watered their pots of ferns. (‘Like two Victorian mermaids,’ Emily often thought.) For hours, Philly sat at the table, doing what everyone called her ‘shading in’ – filling in pictures in old magazines with pencil strokes and smudges, working with clumsy absorption. Emily would sit at the window and watch the sea, a piece of sewing in her hands. That Rose, from possessiveness, kept her idle, she realised; but was too apathetic to demur. She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died. Fighting her way through veils, layers, of darkness she would reach at last the small reality of being alive and in her own bed. When she could struggle towards and grasp her name, she was always reassured, and would lie back upon her pillow in relief, though weakened and depressed.

To steady herself, she tried to remember the past – the safer past of girlhood. She would cling to the picture of herself and Rose, with their long hair over their shoulders; their old-fashioned life in their chintzy, pretty home. Telling herself the story calmed her. ‘Rose always wore pink,’ she would lie and remember, ‘because of her name, and I wore white. Father called us “the girls”. We lived in a gentle world, as gentle as the names our mother had chosen for us. The tennis-court had plantains in great patches, and a sagging net which we were always running to measure with our racquets. There were river-picnics: our dripping arms would reach for the slippery yellow water-lilies smelling of almonds. The dances Rose hated, I loved. Rose liked the kitchen and being with mother. Mother
was everything to her, yet still she would not kiss her good-night. “It wouldn’t hurt you, such a little thing,” I once pleaded with her. Now I see that it would have both hurt and violated her. “Not little!” she cried. “It would be over the whole day if I had to.” Yet,
I
loved to kiss her. I loved the smell of her hair and the touch of her. Then, I liked holding hands with young men in taxis and the secret messages of entwined fingers. Rose always clasped her hands together fiercely inside her muff, looking steadily ahead, leaning forward a little. Yet Rose married and I did not.’

Now, Rose was happy at last and Emily sat at the window and watched the wrinkled sea and rarely lifted her sewing to make a few stitches.

On Fridays, lately, Vinny had arrived in the evenings for the weekend. Rose thought that one day he would marry Isabella. She did not know how once, when Laurence was at home on leave, Vinny had felt quite thwarted at having to stay with Isabella again. His desire to be under the same roof as Emily (a desire roused by both curiosity and compassion – two strong emotions in him) could not encompass such frustration. To protect himself from further threats – and Laurence often threatened – he had arranged to bring his mother for a holiday.

Emily had given up her room to her and moved in with Philly. It was the sea-ward room with the rattling door, and Rose had made a long plush sausage and filled it with sand to keep out the draughts.

‘We are a full house,’ she said happily, ‘with Mr and Mrs Tillotson as well at the weekends.’

And it was not natural now for Vinny to stay with Isabella, Laurence or no Laurence.

*

Mrs Tumulty, stepping out of the big, black wedding-taxi, looked, Rose thought, like Madame Vuillard. Her wide, bony face seemed polished, her narrow spectacles had slipped sideways. She was deeply in black, though black of a rustiness and dustiness that had derived a special texture from its defects. Under her dignity there was jauntiness, merriment on her thin lips. Though old, she was full of gay anticipation; for she loved to be with her son and to make new friends, as she was always confident of doing.

She came nimbly out of the car and stood on the drive surveying the garden and the sea down below, nodding her head in approval of the strong air. The Tillotson children, coming round the corner of the house, skirted her warily, and made a crab-like entry of the porch, watchfully stepping away from her. To them, she looked woefully black.

Rose was in the hall. She took Mrs Tumulty’s cotton-gloved hand and made her a speech of welcome. Vinny and the gardener brought in the most curious weather-beaten luggage – an old leather hat-box; a round-topped trunk with labels of countries which no longer existed, hotels which had been shelled in 1916 and never risen again; a gladstone-bag; a wicker hamper. There were also Mrs Tumulty’s bird-watching glasses and a black japanned box in which she collected fungi; for she was a great naturalist.

Emily’s bare, blowy room delighted her. She loved wild, exposed places and a wind that could make her eyes water; but she was very happy, too, in the flat in London which she shared with Vinny, reading travel-books and cowboy-stories most of the day, or going to Whiteley’s (her favourite shop) and asking a lot of questions about things she had no intention of buying. She could not go on a bus without having an adventure, usually brought about by not minding her own business, and there was always some curious incident to relate to Vinny when he
returned home in the evening. She had no gift for exaggeration or furbishing up a story and unfortunately the incidents sounded flat even to herself.

She spread out her old ebony-backed brushes and looking-glass (the glass had once come loose and she had taken it from the frame and found it padded with a piece of brownish newspaper containing, in French, a reference to Napoleon); she took off her hat and combed her thin hair more evenly over her freckled scalp. Then in the mood of a great beauty going to a ball, feeling herself ‘all set’, she went downstairs to find out about everybody.

She was pleasurably suspicious of Vinny’s seaside weekends and intended to sort things out, especially the women. Isabella she had met once before and thought her a poor, silly creature. Rose had made a better impression; Emily a much worse one. Mrs Tumulty had no especial grudge against beauty, as long as it did not detract from liveliness. Anything passive she abhorred, and Emily’s dead-white skin, her lack of expression, about which Vinny had found no words to forewarn her, no heart to explain or discuss, annoyed and repelled her. She could sense Emily’s life drifting by in an incurious desuetude. This languid refusal of what she, Mrs Tumulty, was greedy for was irritating.

‘I hope the children won’t worry you,’ Emily said, with a vaguely polite intention; but this – to be spoken to as if she were immensely aged or an invalid – was more annoying than ever.

‘I love noise,’ she said firmly. ‘I never have too much of it. I can’t even settle to a book without the wireless on. I went all through the Blitz,’ she added. The phrase, so worn, so ignored,
she
made militant and aggressive. She had met disaster with action; had set out fully equipped, as when on her old travels, for the air-raid shelter; unpacked thermos, gas-mask, knitting; told children to get off to sleep; given information; analysed the
war-news; silenced rumours. In the mornings, she had explored the streets; pushing aside broken glass with her umbrella; stepping neatly over fallen masonry. Often, with her brisk words, she had given courage.

‘I don’t like quiet,’ she reaffirmed.

Emily said nothing. She put a tray with glasses and the sherry Vinny had brought on a table near to Mrs Tumulty and drew up a chair for Vinny, who was still in his garden-room.

‘Were you here all through the war?’ Mrs Tumulty asked condescendingly. It was true that the war had given her a new lease of life.

‘No. No, I was not.’

‘In London?’

‘For a while.’

‘Did
you
go through the Blitz?’ She made it sound like an examination, Emily thought.

‘I … no, I’m afraid I didn’t.’

‘Nothing to be afraid of –
not
going through it. It was much more the other way round.’

‘Yes, I expect so.’

‘Did you get called up at all?’

‘For a little while.’

‘Only for a little while?’

‘I was in hospital a long time.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear, very sorry.’ Calamity Mrs Tumulty relished. Disaster opened her heart. ‘Won’t you have a glass of sherry, too?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Oh, you should. It is full of iron, you know. I love it, and the sweeter the better for me. Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘I was in a car accident.’

‘Then I sympathise, for I nearly lost my life once that way. ‘Well, this is
it
,’ I remember thinking. More amazed than
anything. Perhaps that’s how, in the end, we most of us meet death. I saw the look of amazement on the faces of the dead during the war. I recall how it all flashed through my mind – not fear, but surprise. “Surely not
me
!” I said to myself. Too much luggage for those Alpine roads. We skidded and turned over. I crawled out through the sunshine roof, or whatever they’re called. “Ha-ha!” I said to myself. “Not
me
after all. I thought not.” I left my skirt behind me. We laughed about it afterwards. Oh, we did laugh! Here comes Vincent. I know that cough of his. Pure nerves. I never suffered from nerves, but his poor father did. Always fidgety. Where were you hurt, dear?’

Vinny switched on the light as he came in, and Emily’s hand flew up to her cheek as if she had been struck.

‘My face,’ she said in a faint, shocked voice.

Mrs Tumulty looked at her with frank interest, as no one had looked at her for years. Sipping her sherry, saying nothing, in her lack of confusion she seemed outrageous to her son.

Mr and Mrs Tillotson arrived just before dinner. Wind-nipped, duffle-coated, they climbed out of what they called their vintage Bentley and unpacked their luggage. Erica Tillotson wore fur-lined boots for nearly all of the year when she was not wearing open sandals, and usually corduroy skirts, and a red cotton handkerchief either over her hair or tied round her neck. She was very flushed from driving in the open car and her face contrasted darkly with her china-white teeth.

Lindsay Tillotson, though tall, frail and pallid, had the almost inhuman indifference to discomfort of many young men who have been at English public schools. In the war, when he was taken prisoner in Crete, he had watched the sturdy, the hardy – bony Scots, Australians, New Zealanders – dropping out on long marches, dying of hunger, of heat, or of cold. He had always managed to endure these things and in his spare
moments wrote home to his wife about Greek temples, butterflies, flowers or wine. He so lamented the death of Virginia Woolf that death might not have been all round him: he wrote wistfully of Mozart, as if music were his only deprivation. When he came home he had scarcely altered in his appearance, for he had always seemed starved and fatigued. He looked unlike the rich business-man he was, and Mrs Tumulty put him down at once as a film director.