The French Lieutenant's Woman (4 page)

"
My
dear madam, your feet are on the Rock. The Creator is all-seeing and
all-wise. It is not for us to doubt His mercy--or His justice."

"
But
supposing He should ask me if my conscience is clear?"

The vicar smiled. "You
will reply that it is troubled. And with His infinite compassion He
will--"

"
But
supposing He did not?"

"
My
dear Mrs. Poulteney, if you speak like this I shall have to reprimand
you. We are not to dispute His
understanding."

There was a silence.
With the vicar Mrs. Poulteney felt herself with two people. One was
her social inferior, and an inferior who depended on her for many of
the pleasures of his table, for a substantial fraction of the running
costs of his church and also for the happy performance of his
nonliturgical duties among the poor; and the other was the
representative of God, before whom she had metaphorically to kneel.
So her manner with him took often a bizarre and inconsequential
course. It was
de
haut en bos
one moment,
de
has en haut
the next; and sometimes she contrived both positions all in one
sentence.

"
If
only poor Frederick had not died. He would have advised me."

"
Doubtless.
And his advice would have resembled mine. You may rest assured of
that. I know he was a Christian. And what I say is sound Christian
doctrine."

"
It
was a warning. A punishment."

The vicar gave her a
solemn look. "Beware, my dear lady, beware. One does not
trespass lightly on Our Maker's prerogative."

She shifted her ground.
Not all the vicars in creation could have justified her husband's
early death to her. It remained between her and God; a mystery like a
black opal, that sometimes shone as a solemn omen and sometimes stood
as a kind of sum already paid off against the amount of penance she
might still owe.

"
I
have given. But I have not done good deeds."

"
To
give is a most excellent deed."

"
I
am not like Lady Cotton."

This abruptly secular
descent did not surprise the vicar. He was well aware, from previous
references, that Mrs. Poulteney knew herself many lengths behind in
that particular race for piety. Lady Cotton, who lived some miles
behind Lyme, was famous for her fanatically eleemosynary life. She
visited, she presided over a missionary society, she had set up a
home for fallen women--true, it was of such repentant severity that
most of the beneficiaries of her Magdalen Society scrambled back down
to the pit of iniquity as soon as they could--but Mrs. Poulteney was
as ignorant of that as she was of Tragedy's more vulgar nickname.

The vicar coughed. "Lady
Cotton is an example to us all." This was oil on the flames--as
he was perhaps not unaware.

"
I
should visit."

"
That
would be excellent."

"
It
is that visiting always so distresses me." The vicar was
unhelpful. "I know it is wicked of me."

"
Come
come."

"
Yes.
Very wicked."

A long silence followed,
in which the vicar meditated on his dinner, still an hour away, and
Mrs. Poulteney on her wickedness. She then came out, with an
unaccustomed timidity, with a compromise solution to her dilemma.

"
If
you knew of some lady, some refined person who has come upon adverse
circumstances ..."

"
I
am not quite clear what you intend."

"
I
wish to take a companion. I have difficulty in writing now. And Mrs.
Fairley reads so poorly. I should be happy to provide a home for such
a person."

"
Very
well. If you so wish it. I will make inquiries." Mrs. Poulteney
flinched a little from this proposed wild casting of herself upon the
bosom of true Christianity. "She must be of irreproachable moral
character. I have my servants to consider."

"
My
dear lady, of course, of course." The vicar stood. "And
preferably without relations. The relations of one's dependents can
become so very tiresome."

"
Rest
assured that I shall not present anyone unsuitable." He pressed
her hand and moved towards the door. "And Mr. Forsythe, not too
young a person." He bowed and left the room. But halfway down
the stairs to the ground floor, he stopped. He remembered. He
reflected. And perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with
malice, a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy--or at least a
not always complete frankness--at Mrs. Poulteney's bombazined side,
at any rate an impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room.
He stood in the doorway.

"
An
eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff."
 

5

O me, what
profits it to put
An
idle case? If Death were seen
At
first as Death, Love had not been,
Or
been in narrowest working shut,
Mere
fellowship of sluggish moods,
Or
in his coarsest Satyr-shape
Had
bruised the herb and crush'd the grape,
And
bask'd and batten'd in the woods.
--
Tennyson,
In Memoriam (1850)

The young
people were all wild to see Lyme.
--
Jane
Austen, Persuasion

Ernestina had
exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval,
delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the
great illustrators of the time--in Phiz's work, in John Leech's. Her
gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of
the rest. At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very
prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address
her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a
corresponding tilt at the corner of her lips--to extend the same
comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets-- that
denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total
obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps
have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a
man like Charles she proved irresistible. She was so very nearly one
of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Abertinas,
Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at
every ball; yet not quite.

When Charles departed
from Aunt Tranter's house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces
or so down to his hotel, there gravely--are not all declared lovers
the world's fool?--to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate
his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and
went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed
through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room
in her aunt's house that she could really tolerate.

Having duly admired the
way he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top
hat to Aunt Tranter's maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and
hated him for doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset
peasant eyes and a provokingly pink complexion, and Charles had been
strictly forbidden ever to look again at any woman under the age of
sixty--a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully escaped by just one
year--Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been furnished for
her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy then as
the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt
Tranter's house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style
of a quarter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in
the first fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful,
and to which the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV,
could be attached.

Nobody could dislike
Aunt Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently
smiling and talking-- especially talking--face was absurd. She had
the profound optimism of successful old maids; solitude either sours
or teaches self-dependence. Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best
of things for herself, and ended by making the best of them for the
rest of the world as well.

However, Ernestina did
her best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner
at five; on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the
other rooms; on the subject of her aunt's oversolicitude for her fair
name (she would not believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might
wish to sit alone, and walk out alone); and above all on the subject
of Ernestina's being in Lyme at all.

The poor girl had had to
suffer the agony of every only child since time began--that is, a
crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her
slightest cough would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim
summoned decorators and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown
caused her mama and papa secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this
was all very well when it came to new dresses and new wall hangings,
but there was one matter upon which all her bouderies and complaints
made no impression. And that was her health. Her mother and father
were convinced she was consumptive. They had only to smell damp in a
basement to move house, only to have two days' rain on a holiday to
change districts. Half Harley Street had examined her, and found
nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life; she had
none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition. She
could have--or could have if she had ever been allowed to--danced all
night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all
the next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting
parents' fixed idea than a baby to pull down a mountain. Had they but
been able to see into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all
her generation. She was born in 1846. And she died on the day that
Hitler invaded Poland.

An indispensable part of
her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her
mother's sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season;
this year she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No
doubt the Channel breezes did her some good, but she always descended
in the carriage to Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in
Siberia. The society of the place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter's
lumbering mahogany furniture; and as for the entertainment, to a
young lady familiar with the best that London can offer it was worse
than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter was much more that of a
high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her flat-footed nurse,
than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed, if Romeo had
not mercifully appeared on the scene that previous winter, and
promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at
least, she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had
certainly a much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had
ever allowed for--and more than the age allowed for. But fortunately
she had a very proper respect for convention; and she shared with

Charles--it had not been
the least part of the first attraction between them--a sense of
self-irony. Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a
horrid spoiled child; and it was surely the fact that she did often
so apostrophize herself ("You horrid spoiled child") that
redeemed her.

In her room that
afternoon she unbuttoned her dress and stood before her mirror in her
chemise and petticoats. For a few moments she became lost in a highly
narcissistic self-contemplation. Her neck and shoulders did her face
justice; she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she
knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her
hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a
hot bath or a warm bed on a winter's night. She imagined herself for
a truly sinful moment as someone wicked--a dancer, an actress. And
then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something very
curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in
profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And
she hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.

For what had crossed her
mind--a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch
her eye in the mirror--was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of
dimly glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her
profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her;
it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require,
and which seemed to deny all that gentleness of gesture and
discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles.
She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her
mind.