Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (20 page)

Philip finally found the letters hidden in the back of a photograph of Violet and her sister Marian, who was now in India with her husband. He had never liked the portrait, had always wished Violet would get rid of it, but it was the only picture she had of Marian. He did not like the dark directness with which the sisters looked out of the frame. It seemed to him unpleasant—and most unlike Violet. That girl’s face, remote and delicate and somber, had nothing to do with the woman he had married.

He picked it up, turned it over, pried loose the back with a savage wrench.

The letters fluttered out like great helpless moths and drifted to the floor. He dropped the portrait heedlessly and picked them up, his hands shaking.

There were three of them; he could tell by the ink, which darkened from the terrible crimson color of blood, through a rich garnet, to a red so dark it was almost black. The handwriting was square and flowing, elegant yet as neat as print. The paper was translucently thin, as if it had been spun out of the great richness of the ink.

He looked first, viciously, for a signature. There was none on any of them, only an embossed signet, the imprint of a linden leaf. It meant nothing to him.

He put the letters in order, darkest and oldest to brightest and newest, and began to read.

The second letter:

Violet, my song,

I dream of your breasts, their small sweetness. I dream of your thighs, of the nape of your neck, of your fragile hands. I dream of the treasure between your thighs, of its silken softness beneath my fingers, and its warmth. I dream of your kisses, my Violet, of the taste of your mouth, the roughness of your tongue. My truest flame, my mortal queen, I dream of the feel of your lips on my skin, the feel of your fingers in my hair. I dream of your laugh, of your smile, of your velvet-rich voice.

You asked me once if I would not forget you. I could see in your eyes that you believed I would, that you thought yourself no more than an amusement, a toy with which I would soon become bored. I could not tell you then that it was not true, but I tell you now. I have not forgotten you. I will not forget you. You are more to me than you can imagine. Return to me.

After he had read them all, Philip crumpled the letters in his shaking hands and hurled them away as if they were poison. His brain seemed full of fire. When he bent, automatically, to pick up the portrait, he found another object wedged in its back, an elaborately woven knot of hair, as firm and soft as silk; its color seemed to shift with the light, from ink to ash to fog. It had to be the token the final letter spoke of.

He was standing with it in his hand, staring at it in a dry fury, when he heard the rustle of Violet’s dress in the hall. As she came in, her face already surprised, his name on her lips, he shouted at her, “
Who is he
?”

She looked from him, to the crumpled letters, to the portrait, to the token in his hand. The expression left her face, as if she were a lake freezing over. She said, “No one.”

“Who wrote you these letters, Violet?” he said, striving to keep his voice low and even. “You said you hadn’t had suitors before me.”

“I hadn’t,” she said. “I did not lie to you, Philip.”

“Then what are these?” He pointed to the letters.

She looked at him, her eyes as dark and direct as the eyes of the photographed Violet lying on the floor. “Mine.”

He was so jolted he took a step backwards. It suddenly seemed to him that he was facing a stranger, that this woman standing here, her red-gold hair gleaming in the sunlight from the windows, was not his wife, Violet Strachan Osbourne, but some almost perfect replica, like a Madame Tussand’s waxwork come to life. “But, Violet,” he said, hating how feeble he sounded even as he said it, “I am your husband.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“Then why won’t you tell me the truth?”

“It would not help.” She looked away from him, not in embarrassment or shame, but merely as if she were tired of thinking about him. “If you will leave me now, in an hour I will come downstairs, and it will be as if none of this ever happened. We can forget it.”

He did not want to talk to this Violet, so cold and patient and indifferent. He wanted to take her offer. But . . . “I cannot forget. Who is he, Violet?”

She came into the room, picked up the letters and carefully smoothed them out. She came past him, picked up the photograph, returned the letters to its back. She turned to him then and held out her hand, her eyes level and unfathomable. He surrendered the token. She put it with the letters, then replaced the back of the frame and returned the photograph to its accustomed place. Only then did she say, “I wish you would reconsider.”

“I cannot,” he said, with greater certainty now. “I will forgive you, but I must know.”

She looked into the distance for a moment, as if she were thinking of something else. “I do not think I have asked for your forgiveness, Philip.”

“Violet—!”

She looked back at him, her eyes like stone. “If you insist on knowing, I will tell you. But I do not do so because I think you have a right to hear it, or because I want you to ‘forgive’ me. I do so because I know that I will have no peace otherwise.”

“Violet . . . ”

“You married me two months after we met. I was glad of it, even gladder when I became pregnant so quickly. I thought she would lose interest then.”

“
She
?”

The look Violet gave him was almost pitying. “My lover, Philip. The Queen of Elfland.”

In fear and fury, he erupted at her: “Good God, Violet, do you expect me to believe this nonsense?”

“No,” she said, and the flash of her dark eyes went through him like a scythe. “I don’t care what you believe. You may hear nothing, or you may hear the truth. I will not lie to you.”

“I thought you loved me,” he said in a failing whisper.

“I wanted to. And I like you very much. But she was right. I cannot forget her, though God knows I have tried.”

It came to him then clearly, terribly, that she was not lying. Those letters with their strange paper and stranger ink, the knot of hair with its shifting colors, the fabulous roses—all those things forced him to face the idea that Violet held secrets from him, that there was something in her he had never even guessed at.

“She found me,” Violet said, and he knew dimly that she was no longer speaking to him, “when I was eighteen. There was a spinney at the bottom of our garden with a stream running through it. Marian and I went there to read novels and write poetry and do other things Mother disapproved of. Sometimes we would talk of what we meant to do when we were grown. We would never marry, we told each other solemnly. I wanted to be a poet. Marian wanted to be an explorer and find the source of the Amazon. But that day I was alone.”

It was another thing he had never known about her. He had never known that she wrote poetry at all, much less that she had dreamed of poetry instead of marriage. It was another fragment of her that he had not held, when he thought he had held everything that she was.

She had drifted across to the mirror, the massive heirloom cheval glass in its mahogany frame. She was running her fingers over the carved leaves and flowers; her reflection in the glass seemed like a reflection in dark water.

“I can’t remember what I was doing. I just remember looking up and seeing her. She was standing in the stream. I knew what she was.”

The eyes of her reflection caught his eyes. He watched Violet remember where she was and to whom she spoke; her face closed again, like a door slamming shut.

“She seduced me,” Violet said, turning to face him. “We became lovers. At night I would sneak out of the house and cross the stream to her court. One week, when my parents took Marian to visit her godmother, I told the servants I was staying with Edith, and I spent the entire time with . . . with
her
. She begged me not to go back, but I could not stay. Do you understand, Philip?
I could not stay
.”

She seemed to see in his face that he did not understand, and the vitality drained out of her again. “The night before I married you, I asked her to let me go, to give me a year and a day to try to be your wife. She did as I asked.”

“But then she began writing letters,” he said, because he had to prove, to Violet, to himself, that he was truly here.

“Yes. I have not answered them. I have been faithful to you.”

He held up his hands, palms out in a warding gesture, as if the bitterness in her voice were something he could push away. But he could not keep the reproach from his tongue: “You kept the letters.”

“Yes,” Violet said, her tone too flat to be deciphered, “I kept the letters.”

The third letter:

Violet, my only heart,

I know that your silence must mean you will not return, that you have chosen your other life. I could compel you to return, just as I could have compelled you to stay. I hope you understand that my choice not to do so is itself a gift, the only way you have offered me to show you that I love you. I do not know what there is in your life to treasure: your husband, as blind and senseless as a stone? your fat, stodgy infant who will surely grow up to resemble his father? the mother whose love you cannot win, the father who has never noticed you? your sick and clinging friend? the infrequent letters from a sister who thinks of nothing but her husband?

You know the wonders and joys I can offer you. You know that in my realm you will be honored as you are not in your own. Violet, it is pain to me to know how you are treated, how little those around you see you—much less recognize your beauties—even as they use you and destroy you. I know that you will not heed me; I feel in your silence that your mind is made up. You are better than the mortal world deserves.

I will give you three gifts then, since you will not let me give you more. Your freedom, even though you turn it into slavery; this token—I wish that perhaps you will wear it next your heart; my roses, that your house, too, may become a garden. And I give you, still, my hope that you will return.

The silence in the bedroom was as heavy as iron, heavy as lead. Philip could not find the strength to lift it. In the end, it was Violet who straightened her shoulders and said, with an odd, crooked smile, “Well, Philip?”

“You don’t love me,” he said.

The smile fell from her face. “No. I am sorry.”

“What about Jonathan? Your
son
?”

The Queen’s careless description, “your fat, stodgy infant,” hung unspoken between them. Finally, Violet said, “I will do my duty by him.”

“My God, Violet, I’m not talking about duty! I’m asking if you
love
him!”

“You are asking too much.” The color was gone from her face; for the first time, he was forced to admit that the solemn photograph captured something that was really part of Violet. Before he could compose himself against that realization, another hit him: that he did not know her, that the sparkling, marvelous conversations, on which he had founded his love, had given him nothing of her true thoughts, nothing of her heart. He had worshipped her as her suitor; he had worshipped her as her husband. But until now, he had come no closer to her; truly, as he had thought earlier, she was a stranger to him.

In the pain of that revelation, he said, “You used me. You’re
using
me and Jonathan.” Then, with a gasp, “You’re using my love!”

“I have given everything I have to give in return!” Violet cried. “Is this all there is, Philip? Have I no choice but to give everything to her, or to you? Either way, what is there left for me?”

“Violet—”

“No,” she said, so harshly that he was silenced. “I see that I am like Ulysses, caught between Scylla and Charybdis. To neither side is there safe haven.”

He looked away from the bitter anguish in her face. He still loved her. He did not think he would ever forgive her for what she had done, but her despair struck him like barbed arrows. “I am sorry,” he said at last. “I did not realize I was asking so much.”

“You have asked no more than any man asks of his wife.” She sank down slowly onto the chair by the window, resting her forehead on her hand.

“I did not wish to . . . to crush you,” he said, fighting now simply to make her hear him. “I did not know you were so unhappy.”

“I am not unhappy,” she said without raising her head. “I chose between love and duty, and I am living with my choice. I had not . . . I had not expected to be offered that choice again. That makes it harder.”

“Will you go back to . . .
her
?”

“No. I cannot. Her love will destroy me, for I am only mortal, a moth, and she is like the sun. My poetry was immolated in her ardor, left in her garden with my heart, and I cannot sacrifice more to her.” He thought for a moment she would go on, but she said only, again, “I cannot.”

“Will you . . . will you stay with me?”

She raised her head then to stare at him; her face was set, like that of someone who looks on devastation and will not weep. “Hav. . . choice?”

“No, I mean . . . I meant, only, will you
stay?
With
me?
”

“You know that I do not love you.”

“Yes, but . . . ” He could not think how to express what he wanted to say, that he needed and loved her whether she loved him or not, and was forced to fall back, lamely, on, “You are my wife. And the mother of my son.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice inflectionless. “I am.”

He said, in little more than a whisper: “Don’t shut me out, Violet, please.”

“Very well,” she said. Her smile was a faded reflection of its former luminous beauty. “What is left is yours.” She turned away, but not before he had seen the brilliance of tears in her eyes.

He wanted to comfort her, but he no longer knew how. He stood, awkward in the fading afternoon light, and watched her weep.

On the landing, the roses of the Queen of Elfland, as clamorous as trumpets, continued to shout their glory to the uncomprehending house.