Mrs. Osmond Page 27

  “And you, what of you?” Isabel enquired, mustering all her reserves of bravery and defiance. “I never heard you speak of these things when you were scheming to marry me. And when your scheme came good you were happy enough to take my ‘filthy fortune’ and play at being the shrewd investor.”

  “ ‘Play’? I would remind you, madam, my ‘play’ at investing made half as much again of your fortune for you.”

  “For me? Ah, Gilbert, I have gone far beyond believing your mythologies.”

  He was still preparing a riposte when abruptly she turned from him and strode out into the garden, for she felt she would suffocate if she were to spend another moment in that room. Outside, however, the heat struck her a great stifling blow and made her throat constrict, and she was compelled to flee into the sheltering shade of an ancient fig tree, and there she stood, gasping a little, feeling the clammy dampness gather under the band of her straw hat. She looked about, somewhat desperately. Above the flowerbeds the air shimmered. She felt faint; she wondered if her fever might be returning. She touched one of the tree’s big leaves; its underside felt wonderfully cool and fresh to her fingers. There used to be an old wooden seat hereabouts, she remembered, but it was gone now. In the early days of her marriage, when she and Osmond lived here at Bellosguardo while the Palazzo Roccanera was being got ready to receive them, she and Pansy used to sit together in the tree’s friendly shade, reading to each other, or busying themselves with their needlework. She had been so happy—or so she had believed, for did she not sense, even then, a faint pre-echo of the heartsickness that was to come?

  She heard the patter of light steps behind her, and turned to see a barefoot boy approaching through the garden. He wore loose knee-breeches, and a calico shirt much too large for him, so that as he walked he had to keep throwing back from his shoulders and his arms the floppy collar and the flowing sleeves. His smooth skin was tanned by the sun to the texture of oiled wood, and glistening thick black curls tumbled on his forehead. He greeted her with the broad white flash of a smile, and produced from a pocket of his breeches a small leather case polished from use—she recognised it as the receptacle in which her husband kept his cigars—and asked her if she might convey it to the signore, who had left it behind him after his recent visit to la casa Boott. This latter formulation, the uttering of which made the lad’s cheeks bulge comically, sounded so charming and innocently droll that despite her agitated state she smiled, and when the ragazzo turned to go she bade him wait while she searched for a coin with which to reward him for his errand. Then he went off, skipping, with his bit of copper clutched in his brown little fist, and looking after him she experienced a pang of faint yearning and regret. All was not, was not vile and corrupt, as Osmond figured it to be; his version of the world was a place she could not live in.

  He came out of the house now, and, having paused in the doorway and glanced about the garden in search of her, approached at a slow and pensive pace, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers and his eyes on the ground. When he stood in front of her he was as a visitor idling in a museum who has stopped to view a not particularly striking exhibit. “You seem an allegory of something,” he said disparagingly, “posed like Eve in her full-fruited arbour, anticipating the appearance of the serpent.”

  She gazed back at him unperturbed, having succeeded in regaining, or reasserting, her composure, and determined not to be so foolish as to follow him into the treacherous tangles of his metaphor. “Will you tell me where Pansy is?” she asked.

  He looked down again, smiling somewhat, and scuffled about in the gravel a little with the toe of one of his pale shoes.

  “Well, she is in England,” he said.

  “England.” Isabel had spoken without emphasis, in a flat dull tone, expressing no surprise and certainly no dismay, for she was neither dismayed nor surprised. She had long ago developed a carapace resistant enough to shield her against the small soft bombshells her husband devised and dropped upon her with exquisite timing and perfect aim.

  “Yes, England—Kent, to be precise,” he said. “I judged it a nice piece of symmetry that she should journey to that pleasant but enigmatic land while you were departing from it.”

  “Do you care to tell me why you sent her away?”

  “I did not like the implications regarding her in the letter you wrote to me. I felt that she—well, that she needed protecting, and where better to sequester her than in a far-off green and pleasant land?”

  “Against whom or what did you judge her in need of being protected?”

  “Why, against you, my dear. By the way, is that my cigar case you are clutching so fiercely to your bosom? I take it Mr. Boott sent it round, for I hardly imagine you went yourself to fetch it for me.”

  She handed him the case, and he selected a cigar and lit it; the match-flame was unreally pale in the sunlight, and as she looked at it, for the moment of its flaring, Isabel had a new sense of inexplicable unease. Osmond watched her through a pale-blue and dispersing small flaw of smoke. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to lay your cards on the table?” he said, in what seemed a perfectly agreeable fashion. “I worry about the hand you’re holding; it seems to me it is the upper hand, if I may so put it.”

  “What cards?” she asked. “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Tell me of the money, my dear,” he said, leaning his face close to hers and waggling his head, an action at once menacing and horribly comical. “You hold it all, so I may neither bet nor bluff. Tell me, then: What is your wager?”

  She hesitated but half a moment, long enough for her to draw in breath. “I want my freedom from you,” she said, “mine, and Pansy’s too.”

  XXX

  Afterwards, what she recalled most clearly was not the ugliness of their exchanges, although certainly there had been a deal of that, but the oddly muted manner in which they were conducted. The two of them might have been attending the reading of a will, or meeting in the bankruptcy court to wind up finally a business that had long since failed. They had remained indoors, and Osmond had cast the stub of his cigar into the fireplace and the pair had seated themselves opposite each other at the table, and all that was missing on the bare board between them was a strew of documents done up with tapes and sealing wax, with an inkhorn and a quill standing by. Isabel had rehearsed her terms so thoroughly, in the deeps of countless wakeful nights, that she rattled them off with the dispatch of a Queen’s Counsel anxious for his luncheon. In all of it there was one word that neither of them uttered, the most momentous word, the initial of which was a big bulging hateful D, that an unhappily married couple may hear, though it loomed over the table with all the awful potential of a reserved judgement. The arrangement she proposed to him was as simple as it was stark, and she left him in no doubt, if not by spoken terms then assuredly by tone—she would not have thought herself to be capable of such measured dryness—that she counted on him to accept it without quibble, since she would not alter or revise it by one whit. They were to part, never to see each other again, at least not by design; she would allow him to continue to reside at the Palazzo Roccanera—although it was Osmond who had found the place, who had bedecked and adorned it according to his exquisite taste, hers was the sole name on the deeds, in accordance with the strong, indeed the irresistible, advice of her English lawyer in Rome, the cautious Mr. Pettigrew—while she, along with Pansy, would take up residence elsewhere, in France, perhaps, or England; as to money, she would make over to him that portion resulting from the shrewd and profitable investments he had earned by the use of her original fortune. Osmond, who had sat stiffly upright, listening to her, at this last point stirred himself and delivered a sharp sidewise smack to the table with the palm of his left hand. “Oh, there’s munificence!” he exclaimed, with a high sort of laugh. “I suppose you consider yourself the soul of generosity, to be granting me what is, by any standard, my own money.”

  “I don’t know what your ‘any standard’ could be,�
�� she responded with calm restraint. “You made what you call ‘your’ money on the back of mine—without my fortune behind you, your financial skills would never have been tried. By the strictest standards, which obviously are not yours, the profits you made are mine.”

  He sat with his shoulders squared and his head set back and gazed at her stonily for an extended moment, during which she waited, genuinely interested to know what he would say next. A certain dreadful fascination, she had to acknowledge, attached to the unique exchange in which they were engaged, and when Osmond spoke at last it was apparent that he was experiencing the same dispassionate interest as she.

  “My dear Isabel, I did not think you had it in you,” he said, with a mildly wondering and rueful admiration. “Had you shown such spiritedness from the start, who knows what might have been saved between us?” He drew the leather case from the breast pocket of his coat and selected another cheroot. Isabel, frowning, begged him not to smoke, since the acrid smell of the tobacco would be sure to give her a headache; he ignored her, however, and when he struck a flame he did so with a vindictive little flourish. Then he leaned back on his chair and crossed an ankle on a knee and hooked a thumb again in the pocket of his cream-coloured waistcoat and, throwing back his head once more, regarded her along one side of his nose. “Putting from us, for now, the disagreeable topic of money, may I ask what is your interest in my daughter that you would take her from me, my only child? I never knew you to be so fond of her.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Isabel blankly replied. “There are many things about me you did not know, and many you didn’t know about her, either.” She moved her chair a little way back, in order to be out of range of the cloud of blue tobacco smoke that he had set lazily turning above the table. “I judge it best to remove ‘your daughter,’ which you ever made a point of calling her in my hearing, to remove her, Pansy, as far as I may, from under the weight of your influence, and that of her—her mother.”

  “Ah, her mother,” Osmond echoed her, nodding. “I wondered if you would ever work yourself up sufficiently to say it outright.”

  “How should I have said it before now, outright or otherwise, since I was unaware the relation existed?”

  “Would you have been better off knowing? Are you better off now?”

  “You lied to me.”

  “My dear woman, you lied to yourself—which of us is the more culpable?”

  It struck her, as it often had in the past, how he could shape so persuasively the twisted logic of his vision of the world and its ways; he managed it, she judged, by stating the most doubtful propositions with the least emphasis, smoothly, a touch wearily, as if he were rehearsing truths that no one ever, anywhere, would think or have thought to question.

  “The strangest thing is,” she said, and was surprised to catch the curiously wistful note in her own voice, “I almost admire the skill with which you kept your secrets from me, you and—and that woman.”

  Osmond rose from his chair and crossed to the hearth and knocked the ash from his cigar, then remained there, turned so as to face her, with an elbow propped on the high mantelpiece and the heel of one shoe hooked on the brass rail at the grate.

  “I’m told you persuaded ‘that woman’ to abandon her sinner’s penitential flight to America and instead return to Italy. May I ask what your motive was for such a bizarre and quixotic action? Did you figure her a repentant Magdalene and yourself a forgiving Christ?”

  “I believe that only you, Gilbert,” his wife said, again with a tinge of bitter admiration, “would be capable of deriving amusement from the predicament we find ourselves in.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right,” he said, with a sigh, holding up his cigar and studying it. “I do find the oddest things droll, even quaintly comic. Although I have my limits. Money, for instance, does not make me smile, when I’m in the way of losing it.” He blew very gently on the tip of the cigar and thus imparted to it a sullen brief glow. “How am I to live, do you imagine, on the pittance you propose to leave me with?”

  “I would hardly describe it as a pittance. I recall how proud you were when you reported your achievement to me—‘a tremendous return,’ was how you described it. Besides, you will not have the expense of me, or of Pansy. I should think you will do very nicely, and if things should go hard for you, why, you can always sell off a picture, or an Etruscan vase—I shall not be claiming my share of the treasures you amassed with the benefit of my fortune.”

  He looked at her long. “And you accuse me of finding humour in the situation,” he said quietly, with the faint lisping sibilance that came into his voice when he was at his angriest.

  Isabel rose to her feet. “You married me for my money,” she said, making of it no more than a matter of fact. “Now our marriage is at an end, and I am taking the money back.”

  “Take it, then. I wish you well of it. But as to the break between us that you insist on, be warned, I will not make it easy for you. I shall put every obstacle in your way that it’s in my power to do—and my power is not to be underestimated, as you, dear wife, very well know.”

  “I have directed Mr. Pettigrew to draw up the papers,” she said. “He knows what to expect from you, and you, I trust, know what to expect from him. Do not be deceived by his dusty frock-coat and his stoop—he is adept at clearing obstacles.”

  She could feel how hard was the face she was setting against him, harder than it had ever been before in her life, harder even than it had been that day when she heard the truth from the Countess Gemini; harder than it would ever have to be again, or so she hoped, fervently but with not much conviction.

  Osmond turned to the fireplace and dropped another half-inch of ash on to the polished hearthstone.

  “Then I bid you good day,” he said shortly.

  She waited silently and in the end he was compelled to turn back to her. They faced each other, standing there, she by the table and he with the tall black recess of the fireplace behind him; no more than yards separated them, though it might have been the deepest chasm, at the bottom of which she seemed to hear, distantly, oh, how distantly, the shattering of a small frail discarded thing that once she had deemed so precious.

  XXXI

  All through that long hazed-over afternoon the heat of the shrouded sun beat steadily upon the air, until an entire half of the congested sky had been pounded into a swollen lead-blue cloud in the shape of an anvil, tinged along its lower rim with a delicate, sore-seeming redness, like an incipient rash. Isabel, in concert with the day, came down from the hill of Bellosguardo feeling once more feverishly inflamed, with the dust of the road on her lips and a throbbing ache behind her temples. When she arrived at the Palazzo Crescentini she found it deserted, the entire household seemingly having succumbed to the airless languor of the atmosphere and retreated into shadow and coolness; the ground-floor apartments, as she moved through them, had the aspect of vigilant unease that takes over in a house during those intervals when the accustomed human bustle lapses into stillness. She made her way up the many flights of stairs to her room, where she was grateful to find the shutters drawn against the incendiary intensity of the sky. She removed her outer attire and lay down on her bed to rest, her spirit stilled, her mind bathed in a welcome balm of vacancy. It was strange how lightly the recent encounter with her husband weighed upon her. She was like a climber of high places who, returned for respite to the lowlands, recalls the peaks as little more than a chimera of blue air and blown snow.

  She fell briefly into a kind of sleep, from which she woke and peered about her in the hot gloom, prey to nameless fright, not knowing for a moment where she was. She rose from the bed and poured water into a basin and wetted her fingertips and pressed them to her eyelids and to her aching temples. The water, though it made a fresh little plash against the bluish-white enamel of the bowl, was half warm and somehow thick, and afforded her little relief. She went to the window and drew open the shutters; the anvil-cloud of earlier had by now swollen to t
he point of entirely filling the sky, which loured over the rooftops like an inverted sea, brimmingly, bodefully still. She felt a movement of sluggish air against her face—it was as if the city itself had let go an exhausted gasp—then all reverted to heat and heaviness. She had much to do, and many matters awaited her attention, but lassitude enveloped her like a shroud of sodden warm sacking. Her life, it seemed to her, had rolled ponderously to a halt. She had steamed along for such a time, driven by a fiery determination to bring to a head the crisis that her marriage had turned into, but now her energy all was spent. What was to become of her? The prospect she had flaunted before Osmond of herself and Pansy setting out together, like a pair of caped and booted venturers bound for the Golden Horn—what was it but a fantasy worked up into a prop to sustain her in her confrontation with her husband and, through him, with her fate? It occurred to her that in all her planning and plotting she had never once paused to consider whether Pansy might not have her own plots and plans, if the girl—the young woman!—might not be preparing, even now, in some grand English parlour, among lofty lords and brilliant ladies, to affront her own fate. Poor Isabel! Having scaled the heights of Bellosguardo and planted there the ensign of her independence, was she now to be brought tumbling down by mere inertia and infirmity of purpose? At just that moment, as if in gargantuan affirmation of her doubts, there rolled across the pendulous and livid sky, with bangs and rattles and colossal bumps, an extended peal of thunder, at once portentous and wholly absurd, followed by the slowly swelling swish of rain.