Summer Will Show (4 page)

So clear, so authentic was the recollection that walking along the road between the dusty hedgerows and the parched fields she yet had a feeling of a rainy afternoon and of the safe pleasure of being within doors by a fire. It was only what she had said that she could not remember. Out of all that letter, so swimmingly written, so clear-headedly willed, that letter which was to decide the remainder of her life, she could not remember a single phrase, a single sentence.

If I had been jealous, thought Sophia, if the last angry embers of love had smouldered in me when I wrote, I should remember my letter still. And if there had been a twinge of hope left, I should have kept a copy of it. But as it was, I wrote it as one writes a business letter, a letter dismissing a servant, or refusing an application.

Now the lodge gates had swung to behind her, and the shade of the avenue dappled her progress. I go to my house, she said to herself, alone. I rule and order it alone. And no one doubts my sufficiency, no one questions my right to live as I do. I am far safer than if I were a widow. For at my age, and in my position, I should be pestered with people wanting to marry me, I should have to live as cautiously as a girl. But now I can stand up, and extend my shade, my suzerainty, unquestioned as a tree. No cloistered fool of a nun could live freer from the onslaught of love than I, and no queen have a more absolute sway.

She turned off to the stables, to order the carriage which was to fetch Hannah and the children. While the horse was being put in she stood by, making desultory conversation with the coachman, and looking round the stable-yard. Here she had run as a child, to strut over the cobbles with her legs apart in an imitation of old Daniel, to plunge her bare arm into the bins of corn and oats, to sniff saddle-soap and the bottles of liniment and horse-medicine, to dabble in the buckets and, when no one was looking, to lick the polished metal on the harness, so cold and sleek to the tongue. Again she felt the sense of escape; for here everything was clean, bare, and sensible; there was no untidiness, and no doubt. Her horses (she did not admit it but the thought was there) were everything that her children should have been: strong, smooth-skinned, well-trained, well-bred. The texture of the muzzle searching her hand for sugar, so delicately smooth, so dry and warm and supple, satisfied something in her flesh which the kisses of her children left unappeased. To them she responded with tenderness, with pity, with conscience, with a complicated anguish of anxiety, devotion and solicitude. Even in bending to kiss Damian the thought would spring up:
His forehead is very hot. Has he a fever?
But to this contact her own vigorous well-being could respond with an immediate and untrammelled satisfaction.

At the stroke of the stable-clock the pigeons flew off with a whirr. In a moment, even while the vibrations of the metal still hung on the midday stillness, they would fly back to the roof and sit sunning there; but she was bidden away. What next to do? Dymond’s bull, Topp’s girl, Mamma’s tomb ... .

Mamma’s tomb came into the province of the gardener. He was in the tomato house pinching off the lesser fruits. A good servant, she thought, watching how unerringly he nipped away the poor, the imperfect, the superfluous growths. A heavy smell, spiced and pungent, flowed from the vines, and from his hands. The sun beat through the glass upon the white-washed wall, the shadows of the vines with their dangling fruits were sharply patterned. The grey-green foliage was hung with swags of orange and scarlet fruit.

“A good yield, Brewster. Better than last year, I think.”

He nodded, and said in a voice that, for all his years of service in England, retained its Scottish whine,

“There’ll be too many, I’m thinking, for the house to eat them.”

He seemed to be reproaching her for living alone, for not keeping up the state which his tomatoes, his peaches, his melons and nectarines, deserved. She countered him swiftly.

“In that case, the rest can be sold.”

It might not be genteel to sell one’s superfluous fruit. Neither was it genteel to live apart from one’s husband. But the one and the other was sensible, was rational, was concordant with Sophia’s views as to the conduct of life. Brewster had intended no reproach, she could see that now, for it was without any reservation that he began to speak of a fruiterer in Weymouth who would make a good offer. It was foolish of her to have thought that he would reproach her. She lived singularly uncriticised by her household, so calmly enforcing her will upon them that they felt themselves supported by it. Every inch of Sophia’s body, tall, well-made, well-finished, her upright carriage, her direct gaze, her slow, rather loud voice and clear enunciation, warded off criticism.

“Good. Then you will see to that this afternoon, Brewster.”

“Yes, madam.”

Mamma’s tomb had been troublesome from the first, owing to Mamma’s odd wish that a weeping willow should be planted over it. The willow dripped, cast its leaves, and stained the white marble. Moreover, in Sophia’s opinion, it looked rather silly and sentimental. It was strange how Mamma, in her two years of widowhood, had remodelled her character, on that first flood of forsaken tears sailing off into a new existence of being fashionably feeling. She had read poetry, she had read novels. She had covered pages of hot-pressed lilac paper with meditations and threnodies of her own composition, and had pressed mournful flowers between the pages. Refusing carriage exercise, she had taken to wandering about the garden in the evenings, and at her bidding an arbour had been put up, where she could sit in the dusk, catching colds and looking at the moon. When fetched indoors by Sophia, instead of knitting or embroidering, she would play the piano — not very well, since she had not touched the keys since her marriage except to play quadrilles and waltzes — but with prolonged enjoyment and great expressiveness. She became as finicking as a girl over her meals, grew thin, developed a cough, and declared on the slightest provocation her intention of dying as soon as possible of a broken heart; and after two years of this conduct she had done so, withering mysteriously, with the strongest resemblance to a snapped-off flower that could have been achieved by human suggestibility and human obstinacy.

Sophia had watched this behaviour with bewilderment, embarrassment, and disapproval. It was not new to her that people could behave like this. At her boarding-school several of the young ladies had complied with all the dictates of fashion in being romantic and sentimental, and during the short season in London in which she met and married Frederick she had worn the prevailing mode of feeling as duly as she had worn flowers in her hair. One was foolish, and the other was messy; but while they were the mode it would have been eccentric not to make a show of compliance. Mamma had approved her demeanour, Papa, philosophically, had approved her compliance; but there had never been, at any point of the Aspen triangle, the slightest yielding of heart to these whims of behaviour and feeling. Sophia might gaze at the moon as much as she thought fit; but she gazed at it through the drawing-room windows. Sophia might visit a waterfall, or a ruin; but she must change her stockings and have some hot wine when she returned. Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.

No one had understood this more whole-heartedly than Sophia, and in the second week of her honeymoon, as she and Frederick strolled under the archway of their twelfth Rhine castle, she had come to a sudden decision to cut short their travels and return to Blandamer House, where the settling down could be more effectively put into action. Seated upon a block of crumbling masonry and prodding the earth with the tip of her parasol, she listened to Frederick reading aloud legends of robber barons and mysterious maidens. It had taken another week to move him: legends by day and roulette and the opera-house in the evening made up a life that Frederick was loth to relinquish; but at last, seated in their travelling carriage on the deck of the Channel boat, she beheld the chalk cliffs of Kent whose whiteness promised her the chalk downs of Dorset. She could not turn to her husband to express her pleasure, since he was walking up and down with his cigar; but indeed she had not needed to; her pleasure was sufficient without expression.

Already she had been quite well able to do without Frederick; and returning to her father’s house, she seemed to be bringing her husband with her like one of the objects of art which she had bought on her travels. Inevitably a return to sensible real life meant a return to Blandamer. The Willoughby house, too large and traditionally splendid for the Willoughby means, was let on a long lease to a Person from the North who had made a fortune during the wars. Edward Willoughby and his wife, flourishing on the rental in London, had no mind to encourage a younger brother and his country wife to settle near by. A visit or two had shown Sophia that she was not popular with them, and hearing them speak of the Person from the North, she had suspected that to them she had seemed socially little better than he, since to a mind so elegant as Mrs. Edward Willoughby’s the production of military small-clothes and the ownership of an estate in the West Indies were almost equally commercial and suspect. Conscious of this, she had determined to make a country gentleman of Frederick; and since he would one day or other share with her the ownership of Blandamer, it seemed to her, and to Papa too, sufficiently conscious of that dowry of debts which Frederick had brought to the marriage, proper that her husband should begin at once to accustom himself to the life which the course of time would entail upon him.

So they had settled down. To her this process meant arranging the west wing as their peculiar domain, teaching the servants to address her as Madam instead of Miss, holding her own with Mamma, choosing her clothes for herself, and awaiting the birth of her first child. Now, looking back upon those years, she could admit that for Frederick things might not have been so easy. Re-rooted in her old life, the more strongly settled there by the additional weight of marriage and maternity, she had watched Frederick fidget — at first watching with compunction, then with annoyance, at last with indifference. Then, scarcely noticing his absence, she had let him go again. Frederick was in Northamptonshire, staying with friends for the shooting season; Frederick was at Brighton for his health; Frederick was at Aix-les-Bains being a companion to an uncle from whom he had expectations. From these absences he would return, affable, wearing new clothes and laden with gifts, to admire the growth of his children, to exercise his riding horse, to lounge and twiddle through a spell of bad weather until he went off again. Sometimes, taking pity on his aimlessness, she would put aside her work and play a match of billiards with him; she was a better player than he, though not so well in practice, and their rivalry under these circumstances was almost the only thing that made their relations real and living. Meanwhile Mamma ate, slept, netted, and fondled her grandchildren, and Papa, suddenly grown old, laid every day more and more of the cares of the estate upon Sophia’s shoulders. In the evenings, before the tea-equipage was brought to the drawing-room, the four would play whist together, and Sophia and her father would beat Frederick and Mamma.

She was too haughty to deny herself that luxury of the proud-minded — a sense of justice. Justice made her admit that things were not too easy for Frederick. And on the day when the growing sympathy of the neighbourhood for that poor neglected young Mrs. Willoughby first penetrated the calm of Blandamer, it had been natural for her to reply that no sensible person could expect Frederick to stay perpetually tied to her apron-strings. Resenting this first waft of criticism, she had written to her husband encouraging him to prolong his stay at Aix. Frederick immediately returned. Sophia engaged lodgings in Mayfair, provided herself with clothes of the latest fashion, and took him off for a month of gaiety, leaving behind her full and exact directions of everything that should be done in the nursery, the home farm, the Sunday School and the hot-houses during her absence. With the same method and resolution she had arranged four weeks of exemplary fashion and enjoyment — dinners, balls, breakfast-drums, the races, the opera, Hyde Park and the hairdresser; and during the first week she had as unflinchingly stormed her sister-in-law for introductions and invitations. But this had not been necessary, after all; Frederick knew already every man, woman, and head-waiter they encountered.

Filling her diary with careful accounts of everything seen, done, heard, and visited, Sophia had thought to herself, as day after day was written down and disposed of, Once back at Blandamer I can be happy and sensible again; and it was with a feeling of nearing the winning-post that she left her farewell cards, paid the bills, and dropped kid gloves and bon-bon boxes into the waste-paper basket.

That visit to London had done much to stay local criticism. The pity due to a neglected wife faltered before the aspect of such a fashionably dressed young woman who had heard Grisi and seen Vestris. But the excursion, so well calculated to circumvent the doubts of others, had done as much, or more, to breed uneasiness in herself. Heretofore an absent Frederick had been a shadowy creature, a something dismissed to wander in exile from the real life and centre of life at Blandamer, to drink watered milk and eat stale vegetables, breathe bad air, and keep unhealthy hours. Now the place of this spectre was taken by the Frederick she had seen in London, a Frederick popular, sought-after, light-hearted, affable, open-handed and probably open-hearted — her satellite of Blandamer changed to a separate and self-lit star.

A weaker or an idler woman might have been jealous; a woman in love would certainly have been so. Indifference and responsibility preserved her from any sharper pang than annoyance, and the grim admission that the current opinion as to her pitiable state must be, in the eyes of the world, well-founded. Papa’s death, the growth and illnesses of her children, the cholera, the potato disease, and Mamma’s strange florescence of widowhood distracted her attention from the increasing frequency and length of her husband’s absences, his uneasy behaviour, half-frivolous, and half-servile, when he was with her. Even when she knew for certain that he had been many times unfaithful to her, and was again neck-deep in an adultery, she was not jealous. She was furious.