Mrs. Osmond Read online

  She could not now remember exactly what she had expected being married to a man such as Gilbert Osmond would entail; she supposed it was the point, that her expectations had been savingly inexact. She had presumed that his passion—although passion was not a word she judged applicable, in the circumstances—would be exquisitely judged, meticulously calibrated. He would comport himself so delicately, with such gentle insistence, that she would register him as hardly more than a disembodied sensibility, a mind afloat in the fineness of its own distinction. She had a vague notion of herself enveloped in a sort of soft sea-mist, inside which an essential aspect of her would remain untouched, unbreached, unbroken; instead, he had turned out to be not the mist but the sea itself, a violent element surrounding her on all sides and pressing irresistibly upon the shell of her very being. This was the great surprise, the great shock. She had thought a deep part of herself, an essential part, a part as polished and impenetrable as a pearl, could always, must always, be shielded from him, and that by his nature he would allow it to continue so; on the contrary, that essence, that allness of herself, was precisely what she was required to give up. What she discovered, with an awful thrill, was that nothing could be kept from him, that he would have everything of her, and the surprise and the shock of it were the swooning completeness of her surrender, the moaning abjection with which she prostrated herself before him. Of course, once he saw how it was with her, he saw too how to turn the thing to his advantage. Her passion was the question, and it would be his power. Now came the exquisite judgement, the meticulous calibration, in the matter of giving and withholding. There were occasions—drowsy dawns, shuttered noons—when as she knelt before him, a palely glimmering, suppliant form, he would gaze down at her for a while through half-closed eyes, in that way he did, and then would rise with a sigh and a cold smile and, brushing aside her imploringly outstretched hand, would stroll away to his books, or his china, or his easel, and leave her there, trembling in frustration and shame. Assailed now by such recollections, and worse—she tried, oh, how she tried to fend them off!—she shuddered inwardly, and shut her eyes. When, a moment later, she opened them again, she turned her head and looked out through an open doorway into the garden, and saw her husband there.

  He had paused on a pathway, under a trellis of vines, and was patting his pockets and frowning—he must have forgotten something at his neighbour’s apartment, his cigar case, most probably, since it was a thing he frequently mislaid and left behind. He wore a pale loose linen suit and a cambric shirt with a soft collar; his waistcoat was unbuttoned and his straw hat was pushed far back at an uncharacteristically casual and what for anyone else would have been a comical angle, although it nevertheless gave to him, with his narrow face and tapering beard, the look of one of El Greco’s haloed, white-clad saints. Although they were separated only by some yards, he would not yet have seen her, so bright was the sunlight surrounding him and so dimly shadowed the doorway within which she stood. She made no sound or movement, only stayed still and watched him. He was usually so sharply self-aware a man that, caught there in the glare of noonday and not knowing he was observed, he appeared to Isabel unwontedly a figure of the ordinary sort, distracted, agitated, vexed both at his own forgetfulness and the stubborn way that supposedly inanimate, taken-for-granted things have of making themselves infuriatingly elusive. A moment ago she had been thinking of him and recalling his spiteful cruelties with a bitterness of her own, but now, seeing him so prosaically there, a man she had once convinced herself she adored, she felt a sort of softening towards him, a weary resignation in the face of his misusing of her. He had done her grave wrong, but he too in his way had been tricked and disappointed, not by her, it was true, but by his own mistaken assumptions, his assured expectations—she had not been the person he had taken her for, she had not been the wife he believed he was in want of, the wife he imagined Madame Merle had found for him. Isabel, the real, actual Isabel, had defied him, or so he would have it; she had set out the charter of her rights and demanded they be respected; her ideas—her confounded ideas, as he declared them—he had taken as an affront to his husbandly authority; most recently, as we know, she had chosen to fly to her dying cousin even after he had warned her, with unmistakable directness, of the consequences for the harmony, or what remained of it, of their marriage. Appearances meant much to him—meant everything, as it might be—and she had violently put a rent in the veil. In Rome, in Florence, in London and New York and many places besides, for all he knew, they spoke behind hands of her desertion; spoke of it, and snickered, so he was convinced. By disobeying him, and leaving him open to the world’s mockery, by that, above all else, he considered his wife to have traduced him. And now here she was, come to add to his injuries, as he would see it, and as, indeed, she supposed would be the case. What would he say, what do? He had turned about, as if to go back by the way he had come, and retrieve whatever it was he had lost. She stopped him, however, by stepping forward quickly, into the sunlight, and uttering his name.

  XXVIII

  She was distracted at first by a curious optical phenomenon, which she could not account for except to think it must be somehow, to the eyes of one lately recovered from fever, the effect of the abrupt transition she had made from the gloom of the doorway into the day’s full dazzle. At the sound of her voice her husband had stopped and turned about, and stood somewhat awkwardly before her, listing a little, framed within the arch of vines, as if he had been required to pose there by a photographer and instructed to remain motionless for the taking of his portrait. The strangeness was, to Isabel’s appalled yet obscurely fascinated eye, that he looked a shade reduced in stature, that he was smaller by an inch or so than he should have been. She really was unable to see how the thing could have come about—he seemed to have been “taken in” a size, in somewhat the way that formerly, as we remember, the growing Pansy’s dresses used to be “let out.” Was it possible that in a mere space of weeks she had forgotten his true proportions? It was not only that he appeared shorter than she had remembered him to be; no, the reduction, if that was truly what to call it, had been effected all round, so that his face, his beard, his arms and legs and hands and feet, all were a slight yet, to her, perceptibly miniaturised version of what they had been when she last saw him. She blinked rapidly to dispel the illusion, as illusion it must be. Yet for his part was he not looking at her in equal perplexity, as if to his eye she too were altered, as he was to hers? If so, was he seeing her diminished, or increased?

  “You might have sent word that you would be coming today,” he said, taking off his hat and peering irritably into the crown. “You know how I dislike being required to deal with the unexpected.”

  “Yes, forgive me,” she replied, and immediately regretted the meek-sounding words; she should not have started out apologetically, since it was not how she intended to proceed.

  “I had your letter,” he said, after a pause. “I confess I could make little of it. You do not usually obfuscate to such a degree.”

  She smiled. “I don’t know how you would know, for I can’t remember the last time I wrote to you, it was so long ago, although seemingly you do.”

  “Oh, I remember your letters well, brimming with schoolgirl gush as they were. Anyway, I wasn’t referring to your epistolary style. You convey your meaning clearly enough, on the whole. I hope that’s what you’ve come here to do.”

  Still with a faint smile fixed in place she turned from him, and walked to the stone parapet and stood looking down upon the long valley and its molten meandering river.

  “Have you been long away from Rome?” she asked. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “It will be the last time—the house and lands are to be sold entire.”

  “Ah. You’ll be sad, then.”

  “How did you find me, if you didn’t know I was here?” he asked coldly, still standing in the shade of the vine leaves and addressing her back.

  “I learned of your presence
from Aunt Lydia.”

  “Ah, the immortal Madame Touchett,” Osmond said, with violent disdain. “I suppose you’ve told her all there is to tell. She doesn’t receive me, these days.”

  She turned her head to look at him. “That surprises me. She doesn’t judge people, except by her own eccentric standards.”

  “Judge?” he said with a sniff. “By what right should she think to judge me—she, or anyone else?”

  “I employed the wrong term,” Isabel murmured, and turned back to the view, which for all that she looked at it she did not see. She felt tired suddenly; a thought had come to her, an insight so weighty it wearied her just to sustain it, for it seemed to her of sufficient force to have a universal application. What she saw was that it had not been Osmond she had fallen in love with, when she was young, but herself, through him. That was why he was no more to her now than a mirror, from the back of which so much of the paint had flaked and fallen away that it afforded only fragments of a reflection, indistinct and disjointed.

  She turned and walked back to where she had stood before, facing him on the gravelled pathway. He held his hat in his hands, fingering the brim. He still had that strange appearance of being somehow reduced, yet the effect seemed to her now not one of diminishment, but rather of concentration, as if he had drawn the belts and buckles of his armour tight the better to do battle with her.

  “The sun is so strong,” she said. “Do you think we might go inside?”

  She could see him turning over the question, judging if it would not be to his better advantage if she were to be kept standing here in the midday’s fierce glare and blinding glitter. He relented, however, and gesturing with his hat invited her to step through the doorway, where he followed after her. Within, Isabel seated herself on a straight-backed chair beside the table, feeling in need of the comfort and support of the venerable wood, while Osmond took to a big deep sofa below one of the three cross-barred windows that looked into the courtyard, half reclining with his hat beside him and his legs thrust straight out in front of him and his narrow, his emaciated, ankles crossed. In a further room a clock marked the hour with a rapid brassy chime, as if appropriately to signal the beginning of the bout. It was Isabel who made the first pass.

  “I encountered Mr. Rosier in Paris,” she said. “We found ourselves by chance in the Louvre at the same hour one day.”

  Osmond lifted a disdainful eyebrow. “Hardly to be counted a happy chance, I venture. How is the paltry fellow? Still pining for my daughter, I suppose.”

  “No, indeed, he has quite cured himself of her, or claims to have. He is to marry.”

  “Is he, now,” her husband drawled, affecting to suppress a yawn. “And who is the lucky maiden he has fixed his soft-boiled eye on this time?”

  “A Miss Rothstein, native of Paris.”

  “So he has got himself in with the Jews! I was not aware of them being native to anywhere, save some steamy warren beneath an escarpment in Palestine. Who is she? What is her father, banker or merchant? I’ll wager he’s one or the other.”

  “He is a dealer, one of the main ones, I believe, at the Hôtel Drouot.”

  “But of course a dealer, and a successful one, no doubt—I think I’ve heard of him. Rosier’s type will have none but a man of means for a father-in-law.”

  “He would have had you,” Isabel said, with a quickness and sharpness she had not intended, or had not been aware of intending—in her dealings with Osmond she always felt that there were two versions of her engaged: herself, and a hardly recognisable, fearsome other whom she strictly monitored but who nevertheless broke out on occasion. Her husband, leaning sideways on one elbow and with the fingers of both hands intertwined and resting upon the fob-pocket of his pale satin waistcoat, drew his head far back and looked at her long from under halfway-lowered lids. “I mean,” Isabel hastily distinguished, “he would have had Pansy, even if she were poor.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” Osmond said, with a silky softness.

  They were silent then, and the sounds from without, near and far, asserted themselves upon the air of the room. Isabel looked at her hand where it rested on the table, and saw it for a moment as an alien, creeping thing that had without her noticing attached itself to her wrist. Everything was suddenly hideous and horrible. Why had she come here, to this place that held in it so much of the lost and sullied past?

  “Is Pansy still at the convent?” she asked.

  “No, she is not.”

  “Then she is here, with you?”

  “No, not here, either.”

  In the dimness of the room the long rectangle of the doorway open on to the garden seemed an overly vivid, framed depiction of conflagration and motionless turmoil. Isabel could not quite make out her husband’s expression, where he lolled lazily among shadows on the other side of the room. Now he stirred himself, and rising from the sofa crossed to a high old polished oak cabinet, and took up a goose-necked flagon and poured a measure of tawny wine into a goblet of carved Venetian glass. She had often noticed, when they confronted each other in one of these exchanges—not that this exchange was quite like any they had ever engaged in before—how deliberate and carefully measured his every word and gesture seemed. Acutely self-aware as he was, on this occasion he did not entirely convince. For all the deceits she knew him to be guilty of, it did not suit him to pretend to be what he was not—his true self he considered sufficiently formidable. That was Lucifer’s saving grace: the Lord of Lies was never other than authenticity itself. Whereas Osmond, the Osmond she was seeing today, being uncertain of her and her intentions and consequently uncertain of everything, carried himself with too much of a ponderous swagger, like an actor miscast in his part and hiding behind an exaggerated style.

  “I could not at all grasp the sense of the lines about my daughter in your letter,” he said over his shoulder, lifting the goblet level with his eyes and scrutinising the tint and texture of the wine. “I am assuming there was some sort of sense to them, and that they were not mere rambling”—he bestowed on her a smile broadly arch—“for you do tend to wander, you know, on the occasions, happily few, when you take it into your head to put pen to paper.”

  It should have seemed to her more remarkable, she reflected, more perverse, indeed, than it did, that they had from the outset passed over in silence the only truly momentous thing that had occurred since they had last conversed together, namely the disclosure to her by the Countess Gemini of the secret that he and Madame Merle had kept concealed from her so carefully yet so brazenly, and for so long. She had no doubt that he knew what she knew, for the languid impudence of his manner, if nothing else, told her so. Madame Merle had straight off recognised in Isabel’s expression the evidence of her newly acquired knowledge, that day in Rome they had by accident come face-to-face when Isabel, bound for England and her cousin’s deathbed, had stopped at the convent in the dispiritingly narrow street hard by the Piazza Navona to say her painful farewells to Pansy. It would be hard to conceive that his former lover, and not incidentally Pansy’s mother, would not have dispatched a note to Osmond to inform and warn him of what she had guessed of Isabel’s new state of enlightenment. He would not even have had to confront the Countess Gemini with her betrayal of his secrets to his wife. And Isabel now could not but marvel at his actorly self-control, however flawed his performance; in her letter to him from the Hôtel des Étoiles she had been deliberately vague as to the extent of her knowledge of the web of fiction he had spun for her, and vaguer still on how she intended to act upon that knowledge; surely he must be on tenterhooks to hear the details of the famous “proposals” she had given the merest sketch of in her letter. Yet there he stood, leaning back against the cabinet, holding his wine aloft in one hand and resting the other in the crook of his elbow, gazing down at her in amused defiance, daring her to embark on the assault, in whatever form she chose, the assault that he was in no doubt she had come here to launch against him. Well, then, what else was there for
her to do but to rise to meet him, and on his own terms?