Mrs. Osmond Read online

  By the time they arrived at the Gare du Nord night had fallen, the deep-violet night of Paris in summer that has no hint of the Stygian to it, that seems not night at all, but only a pause, generally agreed upon, like the interval of an opera, but an interval during which the lights do not go up but down. Isabel, at Staines’s command, sat on a bench in the station’s vast resounding central hall while the maid issued directives, very loudly, in English, to various puzzled porters, glaring at them for what she considered their insolence and all-round laziness and guile. A fiacre was found that would accommodate the two passengers inside, with their luggage piled on a little supplementary cart attached behind, and shortly thereafter they found themselves being transported pleasantly down the rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, towards one of the sparkling centres of that perpetually illumined city.

  Telegraph messages had been sent ahead, to the Hôtel des Étoiles, near the Tuileries, and Isabel’s suite awaited her, lamp-lit and aired, to the extent that any space may be said to be aired in Paris, in June. The Étoiles was a modest little place, hardly more than a pension, but Isabel often stayed there—she had a horror of those overstuffed establishments that designate themselves as “grand” and made her feel like a great dull overstuffed doll—for it was comfortable and, as even Staines conceded, admirably well-kept and clean. Additionally, a select and highly demanding coterie of epicureans were of the opinion, an opinion they shared with few outside their own charmed circle, that the dining room at the Étoiles, however humble the aspect it presented to a world in want of its dinner, was one of the more delectable treasures of a city that could hardly be said to lack for notable eating places. And indeed no sooner had Isabel been settled in her quarters—which included a delightful miniature drawing room the walls of which were painted all over in Provençal-blue—than she instructed Staines to go down and speak to the patron about the securing of a dinner table. It surprised and even shocked her somewhat to realise how hungry she was. No matter how troubled the spirit, she thought, the body will persist in its wilful ways, demanding its food and its drink, its rest and its exercise, and all those little ordinary attentions of the day, those pamperings and pettings, that it never for a moment doubted were its due. Since she had left Italy and set off on her travels, wading, as it seemed, through a mire of misery, her physical self had accompanied her like a single-mindedly demanding child that had been thrust into her less than willing care. Still, the faint fragrances wafting up from the kitchen were as imperative in their insidious way as a trumpeter’s clarion sounding from the door of the mess-hall, and she was, she had to admit, as eager for her victuals as any trooper just in from an afternoon spent tramping up and down in the dust of the parade ground.

  The maid had hardly reached the door when Isabel bade her tarry. Staines stopped with her hand on the doorknob and turned back enquiringly. Isabel hesitated, looking down and biting her lip. When she raised her eyes again she was smiling abashedly.

  “Why don’t you,” she began, “that’s to say, perhaps you would—” She stopped, and lifted her hands in a helpless gesture; her cheeks had gone quite pink. “Please come and have dinner with me!” she got out at last, all in a rush.

  The maid stood, still with her hand on the porcelain knob, and gazed at her without expression. They both registered how quiet the room had suddenly become.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t understand,” the maid said, and the truth of her words was apparent from the blankness of her look.

  “Well, it’s quite simple,” Isabel exclaimed lightly, but with a nervous laugh. “I wish you to accompany me to dinner, as my”—she stopped, swallowed, then lifted high her chin and spoke it out firmly—“as my guest.”

  She felt, for a moment, as dizzy as when, she did not know how many hours earlier, she had tottered down the berthed ferry’s swaying gangplank. The gap that had opened beneath her now was in its way deeper and more dangerous than the few yards of the English Channel she had walked over before stepping lightly on to the quayside at Calais. Staines, for her part, was even more distressed than her mistress, and at a far more elevated level. There she stood at the doorway, mute, unmoving, like a climber of high places who in a moment of lapsed concentration glances into the limitless chasm below his feet and, seeing it for what it really is, becomes on the instant frozen to the ledge where he is perched. At last she summoned up the power of speech.

  “But how could I, ma’am?” she said, or pleaded, rather. “They wouldn’t let me in!”

  “Nonsense!” Isabel said stoutly, as much to encourage herself as to impress the maid. “Of course they’ll ‘let you in.’ We are not in England now, and no one knows us. Why, pray, should not two ladies sit down and dine together, here in this capital of civilisation?”

  The maid’s eyes widened. “Ladies,” she breathed, as if she had heard a gross blasphemy casually uttered.

  “You can tell me about your family,” Isabel blithely went on. “I should like to hear more about your sister—in Hackney, is it?—and her husband and his work, and the little ones, your nephews and nieces.” She could not, she realised, remember Staines’s sister’s married name. “There is so much we do not know about each other.”

  But Staines was still stuck upon that word “ladies,” as if it were a pin and she a butterfly fixed by it to a board. “Two ladies, at dinner,” she murmured, gazing before her, entranced, as if the impossible scene were there in front of her eyes, shimmering on the air of the little blue room. Then she came back to herself and looked at Isabel and shook her head. “I couldn’t, ma’am,” she said, slowly, sadly. “I couldn’t.”

  Isabel sighed. She was beginning to lose patience, although she knew very well her exasperation was only another ploy to quell her sense of having set out upon a great transgression. And yet, after all, she put it to herself crossly, after all why should not she, why should not they, the two of them together, flout an absurd convention? What was to stop them swinging the blade and breaking the shackles society had bound them in?—she was aware of her figurings slipping out of focus and mixing themselves together. And who anyhow was to attempt to bar their path to freedom, except some popinjay in a greasy frock-coat with a dyed moustache and a napkin over his sleeve? Here she had to stop and make herself dismount from her high horse. Distinctly to her mind came an image of Miss Janeway, looking at her directly with a puckered parched little smile and one sceptical eyebrow arched. But no, all the same, no, she would not be diverted from the course she had set herself upon, no matter where it should take her.

  “Please, now, do as I say,” she said to the maid, closing her eyes and holding up a peremptory palm. “Go down at once and instruct the manager to reserve a table for two—for two, mind—at nine o’clock. Then you may lay out a gown for me, and”—she wavered, but only for an instant—“and choose something that you should like to borrow for yourself, my blue shawl, for example, or that lace wrap I know you admire, or—or—well, whatever you wish. You may take your pick!”

  She had finished with a gay little flourish, like the parting flick of a dancer’s fan, but then, returning her full attention to the woman before her at the door, she saw that the poor creature was still frozen to the spot high up on the narrow ledge of her own vertiginous fright.

  “Oh, ma’am!” the maid whispered. She was even yet clutching the doorknob—Isabel saw how white her knuckles were—not with any intention of opening the door, it seemed, but rather as if to stop herself from falling. “Oh, ma’am!”

  “What?” Isabel asked softly, struggling to keep out of her voice any hint of the wave of weariness that had washed over her suddenly. “What is it you’re afraid of?”

  “Oh, ma’am,” the maid said yet again, but this time with a tremor of passionate entreaty, so that for a moment Isabel feared that the terrified girl—and what was she, only a grown-up girl, for all her fierceness, largeness and mannish angularity?—might fall to her knees like a suffering captive and hold out clasped and quiverin
g hands and plead for release. “You don’t understand—you couldn’t. If I was to go into that dining room and sit down with you at table, why, they’d—they’d all know, you see, they’d know who I am, and what I am, and”—her voice grew faint—“and they’d laugh at me.”

  XV

  And so it was that half an hour later Isabel was seated in the dining room at a table by herself, picking listlessly at an exquisitely prepared confit de canard. The recent tussle with Staines, which had concluded with pain and humiliation on both sides, had quite robbed her of her appetite. What had she been thinking of, to urge the timid creature towards an impossible breach of an ancient code—what madness had taken hold of her? If Staines had been French the thing might have been carried off as a harmless blague, although Isabel was inclined to suspect that the reputation of French maids for coquetry and merry diablerie was largely the work of the Comédie-Française. In Italy, of course, one’s personal maid might sit down to dinner with one every night of the week, at home or in the trattoria, and think it merely one of the more pleasant of the duties required of her by her mistress. But Staines was English, and a Cockney at that, and the English were the People of the Law. And, besides, what would they have talked about, really? Accounts of Staines’s sister Mrs. Gilhooley—that was the name!—and her hod-carrying husband and their ever-expanding brood of “nippers” would soon be exhausted, and what gulfs would open between them then, there at the table, while the smirking waiters came and went, treating Staines with elaborate deference and addressing her as chère Madame and flapping the menu at her as if to shoo her back to her rightful place among the lowly.

  Names, she realised, names were so important: they were the lubricant of the social round, and she was bad with names, she “had no head” for them, as the saying is—look how she had forgotten Mrs. Gilhooley’s name, even though a passing mention of it might have opened up a little avenue of intimacy and gone some way towards soothing Staines’s alarm at the prospect of dining, in public, with her mistress. And Staines herself had a name—it was Elsie, Isabel knew, although she was not sure what it was a diminutive of—so why had she not taken the risk, a small risk, surely, and addressed her by it? Elsie, she should have said, my dear Elsie, I wish you to come and dine with me as my guest here in the Hôtel des Ètoiles, by the Tuileries Garden, on the banks of the Seine, on this softly lovely summer night. Surely even so dour and doughty a person as poor Miss Elsie Staines could not have resisted an offer as direct, as simple and as personal as that. But even as she was formulating these thoughts, in another part of her mind she was laughing in mockery of herself and her sentimental delusions. The world is as it is, she thought, and even one so wilful as I—she was still laughing at herself—will not change it by inviting my personal maid to dinner. She picked up her knife and fork; the duck had gone somewhat cold, but it would be a shame to let go to waste such a masterpiece of culinary art.

  As she ate, her thoughts drifted back to the topic of names and naming and their talismanic significance. It occurred to her, on the spot, and with a little shock that was strong enough to make her pause with her fork lifted halfway to her mouth, that she had never heard Gilbert Osmond and Serena Merle address each other directly by their proper names. Surely that, if nothing else, should have given her pause, as it was giving her pause now, and made her consider carefully, as carefully as a police investigator turning over the circumstances of a crime—and had there not been a crime? and was she not investigating it?—the peculiar nature of the relation that existed, and had existed for so many years, between these two people, as it could be made out from the graceful, elaborate and fiendishly subtle dance they were engaged in together. It was what they did not do, the words they did not speak, the looks they did not exchange, the accidental contacts they so scrupulously avoided, that should have pricked her suspicions and woken them up.

  She put down her cutlery and leaned back on her chair and closed her eyes. What was the good of going over it all again like this? The stable door was smashed and the bolting horse was a dot in the distance. She signalled to the waiter to bring l’addition for her to sign. She had travelled so long a journey, and she was tired.

  Yet for most of the night she slept badly. After falling into an uneasy doze she woke suddenly into that state of stark clarity that sweeps sleep away like a hanging veil of cobwebs to reveal a depthless and unyielding dark. She rose and went to the window and drew back the curtain and stood looking out at the silver and gilt lights of Saint-Germain reflected in the river. The same fat moon that had attended her midnight exchanges with Henrietta Stackpole in her parlour in Wimpole Street was here suspended on the tip of a slender spire standing up between the bulking burly shoulders of Notre Dame; last night—could it really be so recent as that?—it had looked to her like a gloating face, but now it seemed a severed head stuck upon a pike. Strange to think of its coldly polished radiance touching so many places that she knew: the house and street where she had grown up in Albany; the ghostly grey lawns of Gardencourt and the bench where over the years she had sat through—“endured” seemed to her the better word—such a number of momentous encounters; the Hôtel des Étoiles and this window where she was standing, and all the silvered roofs of Paris; the old, old house perched on the hill of Bellosguardo, with its enchanting vista over the Val d’Arno, where in the late spring evenings countless nightingales draped the darkness for miles with their exquisite, pained and plaintive calls; the Palazzo Crescentini, in Florence, in one of whose lofty apartments Gilbert Osmond had first taken her hand in his. It comforted her a little to think how all things must submit themselves together equally sub specie aeternitatis.

  Her mind, haul on its reins though she would, returned once more by its own will to that shaming passage earlier with the maid. Over the course of the past weeks it had more than once occurred to Isabel to wonder exactly how much Staines knew of her mistress’s present predicament. One of the things she had learned since coming to Europe, and in England especially, was the startling extent to which the denizens of “below stairs” were aware of even the most secret matters going on in the supposedly sealed world above their heads. More remarkable than the range of knowledge they were privy to, however, was how little store the servants seemed to put by such knowledge, and how little it seemed to interest them. “Prenez garde!” the master of the house might murmur, up at the far end of his dining table, touching a finger lightly to his lips, unaware that the scandalous topic his guests have launched upon has already been considered, and dismissed, by the uniformed shadowy figures moving unseen on quiet feet here and there behind their chairs. They might be, those ministering shades, the inhabitants of a village nestled under Mount Olympus, who hear the thunder rumbling high above them, as the gods dispute, hear clearly, and pause to ponder the runic import of each peal, only to move on a moment later about their mundane business. Staines surely knew, could not but know, that Isabel’s life in general and her marriage in particular were in a state of deep crisis—why else would they be hurrying like this hither and thither about Europe, from Rome to Gardencourt, from Gardencourt to London, and now from London, so precipitately as practically to constitute a scandal, to Paris, as if pursued by demons? Yet never once, by even the flicker of an eye, much less the uttering of a word, had the maid sought to question what their travels were prompted by or what they entailed or where or when they might culminate. Her task was to keep a tally of her mistress’s baggage, to put porters in their place, to purchase train tickets and make certain the ferries had a first-class lounge, to tick off cabmen and browbeat hotel waiters and tweak the ears, if necessary, of slovenly chambermaids. What she might think of Gilbert Osmond, or—great heavens!—of Serena Merle, poor floundering Isabel would not even attempt to fathom. Those two, of course, behaved towards the maid as if convinced they would pass straight through the lowly creature without noticing, should she be foolhardy enough to stray into the path of their imperial progress. Surprisingly, it was Pansy, a
nd Pansy alone, with whom Staines had over the years formed a secretive and mysterious pact of intimacy. There was little, in years, between the pair, and on occasion they might be glimpsed, in one or other of the many chambers that comprised the Palazzo Roccanera, the home, such as it was, in Rome, of the Osmonds, seated together in conspiratorial quiet, their heads bent over their separate bits of embroidery; always at such times the atmosphere between them, superficially placid, seemed to vibrate at a deep level with what might be suppressed mirth, or some intensity of shared knowing, or mutual expectancy. Madame Merle had spoken once to Pansy’s father, in Isabel’s hearing, remonstrating with him softly, smilingly, on the inappropriateness of this strange relation between girl and servant, but Osmond had only laughed, and remarked lightly that it was “the Italian way.”

  “I suppose it is,” Madame Merle had replied evenly, but had gone on to press her point, ever so gently yet with a palpable firmness of touch. “However, the maid is not Italian, and neither, for that matter, is Pansy.”

  Osmond, standing before an easel and dabbing a fine sable brush at one of his clever but undeniably insipid little watercolours, had paused for a second and glanced over his shoulder in response to the lady’s lightly veiled challenge.

  “And for that matter, my dear woman, neither are you!”

  This sally, bland and, so far as Isabel was concerned, inscrutable, seemed nevertheless to please him greatly, and he turned back to his damp sketch with that smile, the one Isabel had come to know so well, which exposed, at either extremity of his thin dry mouth, the fine sharp tip of a gleaming eye-tooth. This easy mutual intimacy between her husband and his friend of long-standing, which the pair often entered upon when the three of them were together, was supposed to betoken a wider happy communality in which Isabel was included, and for a long time, for an unconscionably long time, Isabel had taken it as such; now, however, she realised that in reality it was a private place, a little closed chamber into which the pair would retire to partake together of the sweetmeats of shared memories, familiar jokes, choice snippets of past gossip that for them was still current, still polished, still precious.