Mrs. Osmond Page 7

  She wondered at what time Miss Janeway’s dinner guest would arrive in Fulham. What was the name she had said? Wilson? Walston? Whoever she was, Isabel hoped the lady knew what to expect of Mrs. Pullan’s culinary skills and had fortified herself accordingly in advance.

  Thinking of Miss Janeway now, Isabel could not but see in this neat dry sharp-eyed person an image of what she might herself have become had she not ventured out into the world, the world as it was and not as Miss Janeway was convinced it would be, off in the hazy future when universal right should have been established at last. She had taken personal risks, the like of which she suspected Miss Janeway would disdain precisely because they were personal and not shouldered for the sake of the general good. Without doubt the greatest of those risks had been her consenting to marry Gilbert Osmond; the risk, however, as she was obliged to acknowledge, was apparent only in hindsight, and it would be self-deception to congratulate herself for her courage and daring. When he had proposed their union to her, a thing he had done with an application of delicacy and consummate, if calculated, charm that she could even still only admire, it had seemed to her the safest and most sensible arrangement she could enter upon— But here her thoughts stopped short, and she sat up as straight as the yielding amplitude of the armchair would allow. An arrangement: the word had slipped into her mind in sideways fashion, but there it was, in all its baleful neutrality. Was that how she had thought of her marriage to that clever and immensely cultivated man, as a mere arrangement, like the repositioning of an item of furniture, such as a chair, a table—a bed? But no, no: there was a limit to the lengths to which she might go in excoriating herself. She had loved Gilbert Osmond, as much as her youth and want of experience had allowed. That the world at large had considered her to be throwing herself away on an arid dilettante—even Ralph, especially Ralph, had been against the match, although he had refrained from saying so in so many words until after she had sealed her fate and accepted Osmond—had served only to make her more certain of the rightness of her choice. Oh, there had been an arrangement, from the first there had been an arrangement, of that there was no doubt; it was not she who had done the arranging, however, nor had it been entirely the work of Gilbert Osmond, although he would not have been other than wholly acquiescent in the planning of it. No, it was Serena Merle, Osmond’s confidante and confederate of old, who had conceived and put up the entire thing, once it came out that Isabel was to have a plump portion of old Mr. Touchett’s money.

  Isabel closed her eyes and sat so still, there at the window in the seemingly endless twilight’s glow, that an observer in the room would have sworn she had stopped breathing and had turned into an effigy of herself. The money: she felt befouled each time she thought of it and the disasters it had wrought in her life. For her, the alchemical process had been reversed, and gold had been turned into dross. Money was like one of the products of those fundamental operations of the physical life that must not be mentioned, that must be passed over in the strictest silence, if the necessary norms of civilised society were to be maintained and preserved intact; but it was always there, something we must not seem to know yet cannot not know, something that must be disavowed, save in the secret closet of the self.

  Now suddenly she opened wide her eyes, and sat up, and then jumped up, clasping her hands before her. She had at that moment remembered the satchel of banknotes—what had become of it? She must have left it at Miss Janeway’s house. Yes, yes, that was what had happened: she had left it wedged against the back of the bent-wood chair when she and Miss Janeway had stood up from the table, she crossing to the window to look out at the garden while her hostess settled herself on the faded green sofa. Perhaps it was still there, unnoticed by anyone. But the maid—what was her name?—surely she would have discovered it when she was clearing the table and setting the room to rights in preparation for dinner? At this thought Isabel flushed, flushed twice, in fact, first in fright and then in self-recriminating shame. Why should she imagine the maid—Daisy! That was her name—why should she imagine that Daisy would be any less honest than Miss Janeway herself? Yet it was a great deal of money, probably more than the girl herself would earn in a lifetime of service. Oh, what to do? What to do? She paced back and forth at the window with her hands clasped at her mouth and the knuckles of both thumbs pressed so hard against her nether lip that she could feel behind the soft flesh the sharp contours of her teeth.

  And then the answer came to her, the answer to her dilemma, clear and compact as one of those telegraphed messages that she had thought of a little while ago, humming through the wires. In fact it would involve the dispatching of a telegram, and she was about to ring for a pad and pencil, such as she had employed in confirming to Miss Janeway her presence in London and reconfirming that they were to lunch together, but as her fingertip was approaching the bell she stopped herself, and again consulted her watch. A telegram would not do it, a telegram would not do it at all; what she had in mind called for the more generous breadth, the wider margins, of a proper letter. Staines was due back from her sister’s at any moment, and before she had even removed her bonnet could be redirected to Fulham. It was true, the evening was latening, but if the cab was a fast one, and the driver competent enough not to get himself and his passenger lost in that warren of riverside streets, the errand could be run in little more than an hour.

  She went to the bureau that was set against the wall to one side of the bed—which now seemed less lofty and less alarming than it had at first sight the previous day—and sat down, feeling light-hearted almost to the point of frivolity. There was notepaper aplenty, each sheet embossed at the head with the hotel’s crest. She took up the pen from where it lay in a groove above the blotter, opened the lid of the inkwell, dipped in the nib, and began to write. What was freedom, she thought, other than the right to exercise one’s choices?

  VIII

  The smoke-blue twilight was deepening at last into night and she was again in a carriage with her maid, travelling through the quiet of the city northwards towards Wimpole Street. In the end she had decided she could not face again the hotel’s tenebrous dining room, and instead of going down to dinner had ordered eggs and toast and tea to be brought to her in her chamber. By the time she had finished her supper, which she took at a little table by the window above the by now shadowed street, Staines had fulfilled her errand and returned from Fulham. The hotel would later send on their baggage to Miss Stackpole’s lodgings, for there the two were to stay the night. Isabel had so arranged it that she should be with her friend at an hour when it would be too late for dinner, but not so late that there would not be time for a talk—Henrietta would expect, would demand, a talk, and not a brief one, either. Isabel was dreading this ordeal—she could think of it as nothing other than that—and she was drawing up in her mind a list of possible innocuous topics she might introduce, or throw down, more like, as a series of stumbling blocks in the way of Henrietta’s relentless onward drive.

  Two weeks previously, on her journey down to Gardencourt, Isabel had paused briefly here in London and allowed herself to be interrogated by her friend on the circumstances in which she had left Rome to come and share with Ralph Touchett his final days and hours. She had given only the sparest account of the tumultuous emotional events that had preceded her departure from the Eternal City—the common cognomen nowadays gave her an inward shudder, with its Dantesque suggestion of a place of endless incarceration, endless suffering—but now the time had come for her to take her friend fully into her confidence, or as fully as she deemed advisable; she owed this act of confession to Henrietta, and to herself. Yet she had no doubt but that the revelation of so many painful and pernicious matters would cost her dear. One of the many terrible things she had recently been made to learn was that there were no limits to the depths of private disgrace and abjection to which one could plummet. Her husband and Serena Merle had together pushed her from the plaster pedestal upon which, she now realised, she had set her
self so long ago, even as early as in her girlhood, that she had ceased to be aware of it under her feet; now, still tumbling and turning in precipitous fall, she would, by displaying her wounds and woes to her friend, emerge from the concealing clouds and appear in plain air, in the sight of all who cared to look. Oh, she had no doubt her friend would keep her secrets safe—there was none more decent or discreet than Henrietta Stackpole—but to have told even one person was tantamount, for the teller, to having told the multitude.

  Now Staines spoke, for the first time since they had quitted the hotel; she too, as it would prove, had been brooding upon a grave matter.

  “I talked to your friend’s cook,” she said, her voice sounding strangely disembodied in the extreme dimness within the carriage.

  “Oh, yes?” Isabel responded. “Mrs. Pullan.”

  The maid sniffed. “I wasn’t told her name.”

  “Well, that’s it, that’s what she’s called: Mrs. Pullan.”

  “Right, then. She didn’t say.”

  There was another sniff.

  “I did not encounter her,” Isabel offered apologetically, although she was not at all sure what there was to apologise for. “I only heard her spoken of, and in hushed tones. Is she so very fierce?”

  This the maid took as a rhetorical question, and did not grace it with a reply. There was a brief silence. They heard a bell in some nearby belfry solemnly tolling the half-hour. In the hushed gloaming through which they were progressing the wheels of the carriage made upon the roadway a distinctly loud and grating noise.

  “She’s free in her talk, whatever she’s called,” the maid said, and now she too sounded exaggeratedly loud, in the manner of one “breaking out.”

  “Is she?” Isabel responded cautiously, and felt an inner coldness, as if something icy had touched her heart.

  “She told me a thing about her mistress which I reckons she shouldn’t of,” Staines said, in the same aggrievedly censorious tone. To Isabel’s ear it was uncertain who it was that was being censured, Mrs. Pullan in absentia, or herself, although she did not know of any way in which she could be held at fault in the present instance; but then, no matter at what target Staines’s arrows were ostensibly aimed, once in flight they tended inevitably to bend, by a magnetic force acting mysteriously on them, in her mistress’s direction.

  “And what was it she told you?” Isabel had to ask, since it was clear Staines had no intention of volunteering the information without being prompted. Having asked the question, however, Isabel realised she was not certain she wished to hear the answer.

  The maid was seated in such a way that the glow of the intermittent streetlamps did not reach as far as her face, and Isabel found it unnerving to crouch like this—she felt herself to be crouching forward anxiously—and be spoken to out of the darkness by this eerily sourceless, harsh and recriminatory voice.

  “Maybe you knows already,” Staines said, with a continuing sullenness of tone.

  “Say what it is and I shall tell you if I know it or not,” Isabel replied, permitting herself a finely measured hint of impatience; dealing with Staines, she reflected, was like having repeatedly to coax and cajole some needy and not entirely tamed creature to come forward sufficiently in its lair to be seen and tended to.

  “It’s that she’s not well, the lady.”

  “Miss Janeway?” Isabel redundantly enquired.

  “She’s not well at all,” Staines replied, “not at all at all. Leastways that’s what the Pulling woman said.”

  “Ah.” Isabel let herself sink back slowly against the taut leather of the seat behind her. “So she’s ill, then.”

  “Six months, the doctor give her.”

  “Oh, as little as that,” Isabel said faintly. She looked out of the window at the darkling street and the indistinct buildings passing by; the carriage, the dusky air, her own voice and the maid’s, all had taken on suddenly a funerary weight. “Heavens, the poor dear thing!”

  “So you wasn’t aware, then,” the maid said, softening markedly, if not entirely willingly. “Maybe I shouldn’t of said.”

  “No, no,” Isabel hastened to reply, “I’m glad you told me, I’m glad to know. Well, not glad—”

  “Only I thought as maybe that was why you made the particular effort to go that far to see her,” the maid said, rekindling a mildly resentful note. “And then sending me to her with the letter, and all.”

  “Did you meet her? Did you talk to her, to Miss Janeway?”

  “No, I give the letter to the maid—a saucy manner that one has. I was going out by the back door when the cook appeared, with her hat on, and wouldn’t hear of me leaving until I’d had a cup of tea—two cups, as it turned out—and a slice of her plum cake, seeing as I’d missed my supper and was facing all that long way in the cab back up to Piccadilly.”

  The accusatory tone of this last Isabel disregarded; her thoughts were dashing here and there, like a wild bird trapped in a room, seeking escape or shelter.

  “But how could she, the cook, make such a delicate and tragic revelation,” she asked, “when she had not even told you her own name?”

  “Well, you see, she’ll be in want of a position, soon,” the maid said.

  The simple statement sounded to Isabel callously, almost brutally matter-of-fact, until she reflected that after all she had never known what it was to be without “a position” in the world; even when her father had drunk and gambled away the family’s scant fortune, and then had wrought the ultimate dereliction by dying early, she had not doubted that there was a place—a placement, if you like—awaiting her that would sooner or later present itself, if she would only bide her time and be patient. And had she not been justified in her assurance, however complacent, even presumptuous, her waiting might have seemed to an observing stranger? Daniel Touchett’s beneficence, though it had come to her through the covert agency of his son, Ralph, had set her up, as they say, had set her up magnificently. That subsequently she had been brought low did not invalidate her initial confidence. Despite all that she had suffered in these recent, these catastrophic times, when the roof of her world had collapsed upon her, she could not find it in herself, bruised and battered as she might be, to regret stepping forward into that world once its portals had been opened to her. She had been offered much—she had been proposed to by two suitors, one of them a peer of the realm, master of myriads of acres and who knew how many great houses—and much she had spurned. She had observed, and thought, and hung fire, making patience her watchword. If in the end the step she had taken into the world’s wideness had been disastrously misdirected, it was she who had taken it, asking no guidance, assisted by no one’s hand. She had made a monstrous mistake, but she could say, triumphantly, that she had lived, and would live yet, richly, deeply, to the broadest stretch of her being. To this conviction she clung, as fiercely, and at times as desperately, as a shipwrecked mariner clinging to a spar.

  Miss Stackpole’s first-floor lodgings consisted mainly and most forcefully of a large lofty brown drawing room with a big bay window that goggled out in seeming wonderment upon a portion of the innocent and undistinguished frontage of the opposite side of Wimpole Street. She had preserved the place largely as it had been when she had first taken it, for she was impatient of those women who insist upon applying a feminine gloss to whatever quarters they happened to be placed in for any appreciable period of time. It was Mr. Robert Bantling, to whom not long before she had become affianced, who had directed her towards the apartments when their owner, an old chum of his, for so he figured his friend, had given them up and decamped with his regiment to India. Her first glance about the gaunt rooms had seemed to her fiancé reprehending, and had provoked in him a nervous laugh. Over the years of their acquaintanceship, and there had been a good many years before the pair had reached the point of the plighting of troths, Mr. Bantling had developed a wide repertory of laughs, from the indulgent to the frankly frightened, in dealing with, in negotiating his way round,
his not always predictable and often downright baffling beloved. “I imagine, my dear,” he had said, touching the tips of a finger and a thumb nervously to his moustache, “you’ll be wanting the painters and decorators in to brighten things up and dispel the bachelor blight left behind by old Horace, eh?” Horace, Major Horace Henry, was the friend who had taken himself off to the great subcontinent.

  “I don’t know why you should think that,” Henrietta had replied, with a bright sharpness, giving him what he thought of as one of her large looks, opening wide her lively eyes and drawing her head far back as if to take a broader measure of him. “Your friend’s taste in furnishings and fittings is perfectly acceptable to me. Mahogany is a restful shade, and the lingering odour of pipe tobacco puts me in mind of my late Uncle Winslow, of whom I was very fond. So, you see, I shall be quite content.” And so she had been, and so she had remained, to Bob Bantling’s grateful relief.

  Henrietta was fair of complexion and short in stature, and where once she had been plump she tended now to a definite stoutness, as Isabel again noted, upon her arrival at Wimpole Street that summer night along with her baggage and her maid. Although it was scarcely more than a fortnight since the two friends had last encountered each other, on the morning when Isabel was passing through London on her way to Gardencourt, somehow the intervening death of Ralph Touchett had caused his cousin to look at everything around her, no matter how familiar, with a new and keener discernment. And it was with the aid of this enhanced faculty that now she saw how Henrietta, even as she was on the point of exchanging maidenhood for marriage, had already entered prematurely upon middle age, at least as far as appearances went. She stooped, ever so slightly, and a gathering of light-brown curls at the back of her neck, oddly but definitely reminiscent of a bunch of grapes, betrayed here and there a fine seam of silver. The bright light of her eye had not dimmed, but the peculiar stillness and fixedness of gaze, which she had always been wont intermittently to fall into, was now a more frequent and more marked, more worrying, phenomenon. Her arbitrarily stopping like this and staring, seeming to look inwards rather than out, had the effect on those around her of making them feel suddenly and strangely isolated, of having been abandoned to their own agitatedly self-conscious devices. Henrietta herself seemed unaware of these brief cataleptic absences, and would emerge from them instantaneously and pick up without the least effort, in mid-sentence, in mid-word, even, the thread of what she had been saying.