The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (9 page)

I risk making Sarah sound
like a bigot. But she had no theology; as she saw through people, she saw
through the follies, the vulgar stained glass, the narrow literalness of
the Victorian church. She saw that there was suffering; and she prayed
that it would end. I cannot say what she might have been in our age; in
a much earlier one I believe she would have been either a saint or an emperor's
mistress. Not because of religiosity on the one hand, or sexuality on the
other, but because of that fused rare power that was her
essence--understanding and
emotion.

There were other items: an
ability--formidable in itself and almost unique--not often to get on Mrs.
Poulteney's nerves, a quiet assumption of various domestic responsibilities
that did not encroach, a skill with her needle.

On Mrs. Poulteney's birthday
Sarah presented her with an antimacassar--not that any chair Mrs. Poulteney
sat in needed such protection, but by that time all chairs without such
an adjunct seemed somehow naked--exquisitely embroidered with a border
of ferns and lilies-of-the-valley. It pleased Mrs. Poulteney highly; and
it slyly and permanently--perhaps after all Sarah really was something
of a skilled cardinal-- reminded the ogress, each time she took her throne,
of her protegee's forgivable side. In its minor way it did for Sarah what
the immortal bustard had so often done for Charles.

Finally--and this had been
the crudest ordeal for the victim--Sarah had passed the tract test. Like
many insulated Victorian dowagers, Mrs. Poulteney placed great reliance
on the power of the tract. Never mind that not one in ten of the recipients
could read them--indeed, quite a number could not read anything--never
mind that not one in ten of those who could and did read them understood
what the reverend writers were on about ... but each time Sarah departed
with a batch to deliver Mrs. Poulteney saw an equivalent number of saved
souls chalked up to her account in heaven; and she also saw the French
Lieutenant's Woman doing public penance, an added sweet. So did the rest
of Lyme, or poorer Lyme; and were kinder than Mrs. Poulteney may have realized.

Sarah evolved a little formula:
"From Mrs. Poulteney. Pray read and take to your heart." At the same time
she looked the cottager in the eyes. Those who had knowing smiles soon
lost them; and the loquacious found their words die in their mouths. I
think they learned rather more from those eyes than from the close-typed
pamphlets thrust into their hands.

But we must now pass to the
debit side of the relationship. First and foremost would undoubtedly have
been: "She goes out alone." The arrangement had initially been that Miss
Sarah should have one afternoon a week free, which was considered by Mrs.
Poulteney a more than generous acknowledgment of her superior status vis-a-vis
the maids' and only then condoned by the need to disseminate tracts; but
the vicar had advised it. All seemed well for two months. Then one morning
Miss Sarah did not appear at the Marlborough House matins; and when the
maid was sent to look for her, it was discovered that she had not risen.
Mrs. Poulteney went to see her. Again Sarah was in tears, but on this occasion
Mrs. Poulteney felt only irritation. However, she sent for the doctor.
He remained closeted with Sarah a long time. When he came down to the impatient
Mrs. Poulteney, he gave her a brief lecture on melancholia--he was an advanced
man for his time and place--and ordered her to allow her sinner more fresh
air and freedom.

"
If you insist on the most
urgent necessity for it."

"
My dear madam, I do. And
most emphatically. I will not be responsible otherwise."

"
It is very inconvenient."
But the doctor was brutally silent. "I will dispense with her for two afternoons."

Unlike the vicar, Doctor
Grogan was not financially very dependent on Mrs. Poulteney; to be frank,
there was not a death certificate in Lyme he would have less sadly signed
than hers. But he contained his bile by reminding her that she slept every
afternoon; and on his own strict orders. Thus it was that Sarah achieved
a daily demi-liberty.

The next debit item was this:
"May not always be present with visitors." Here Mrs. Poulteney found herself
in a really intolerable dilemma. She most certainly wanted her charity
to be seen, which meant that Sarah had to be seen. But that face had the
most harmful effect on company. Its sadness reproached; its very rare interventions
in conversation-- invariably prompted by some previous question that had
to be answered (the more intelligent frequent visitors soon learned to
make their polite turns towards the companion-secretary clearly rhetorical
in nature and intent)--had a disquietingly decisive character about them,
not through any desire on Sarah's part to kill the subject but simply because
of the innocent imposition of simplicity or common sense on some matter
that thrived on the opposite qualities. To Mrs. Poulteney she seemed in
this context only too much like one of the figures on a gibbet she dimly
remembered from her youth.

Once again Sarah showed her
diplomacy. With certain old-established visitors, she remained; with others
she either withdrew in the first few minutes or discreetly left when they
were announced and before they were ushered in. This latter reason was
why Ernestina had never met her at Marlborough House. It at least allowed
Mrs. Poulteney to expatiate on the cross she had to carry, though the cross's
withdrawal or absence implied a certain failure in her skill in carrying
it, which was most tiresome. Yet Sarah herself could hardly be faulted.

But I have left the worst
matter to the end. It was this: "Still shows signs of attachment to her
seducer." Mrs. Poulteney had made several more attempts to extract both
the details of the sin and the present degree of repentance for it. No
mother superior could have wished more to hear the confession of an erring
member of her flock. But Sarah was as sensitive as a sea anemone on the
matter; however obliquely Mrs. Poulteney approached the subject, the sinner
guessed what was coming; and her answers first interrogation.

Now Mrs. Poulteney seldom
went out, and never on foot, and in her barouche only to the houses of
her equals, so that she had to rely on other eyes for news of Sarah's activities
outside her house. Fortunately for her such a pair of eyes existed; even
better, the mind behind those eyes was directed by malice and resentment,
and was therefore happy to bring frequent reports to the thwarted mistress.
This spy, of course, was none other than Mrs. Fairley. Though she had found
no pleasure in reading, it offended her that she had been demoted; and
although Miss Sarah was scrupulously polite to her and took care not to
seem to be usurping the housekeeper's functions, there was inevitably some
conflict. It did not please Mrs. Fairley that she had a little less work,
since that meant also a little less influence. Sarah's saving of Millie--and
other more discreet interventions--made her popular and respected downstairs;
and perhaps Mrs. Fairley's deepest rage was that she could not speak ill
of the secretary-companion to her underlings. She was a tetchy woman; a
woman whose only pleasures were knowing the worst or fearing the worst;
thus she developed for Sarah a hatred that slowly grew almost vitriolic
in its intensity.

She was too shrewd a weasel
not to hide this from Mrs. Poulteney. Indeed she made a pretense of being
very sorry for "poor Miss Woodruff" and her reports were plentifully seasoned
with "I fear" and "I am afraid." But she had excellent opportunities to
do her spying, for not only was she frequently in the town herself in connection
with her duties, but she had also a wide network of relations and acquaintances
at her command. To these latter she hinted that Mrs. Poulteney was concerned--of
course for the best and most Christian of reasons--to be informed of Miss
Woodruff's behavior outside the tall stone walls of the gardens of Marlborough
House. The result, Lyme Regis being then as now as riddled with gossip
as a drum of Blue Vinny with maggots, was that Sarah's every movement and
expression-- darkly exaggerated and abundantly glossed--in her free hours
was soon known to Mrs. Fairley.

The pattern of her exterior
movements--when she was spared the tracts--was very simple; she always
went for the same afternoon walk, down steep Pound Street into steep Broad
Street and thence to the Cobb Gate, which is a square terrace overlooking
the sea and has nothing to do with the Cobb. There she would stand at the
wall and look out to sea, but generally not for long--no longer than the
careful appraisal a ship's captain gives when he comes out on the bridge--before
turning either down Cockmoil or going in the other direction, westwards,
along the half-mile path that runs round a gentle bay to the Cobb proper.
If she went down Cockmoil she would most often turn into the parish church,
and pray for a few minutes (a fact that Mrs. Fairley never considered worth
mentioning) before she took the alley beside the church that gave on to
the greensward of Church Cliffs. The turf there climbed towards the broken
walls of Black Ven. Up this grassland she might be seen walking, with frequent
turns towards the sea, to where the path joined the old road to Charmouth,
now long eroded into the Ven, whence she would return to Lyme. This walk
she would do when the Cobb seemed crowded; but when weather or circumstance
made it deserted, she would more often turn that way and end by standing
where Charles had first seen her; there, it was supposed, she felt herself
nearest to France.

All this, suitably distorted
and draped in black, came back to Mrs. Poulteney. But she was then in the
first possessive pleasure of her new toy, and as sympathetically disposed
as it was in her sour and suspicious old nature to be. She did not, however,
hesitate to take the toy to task.

"
I am told, Miss Woodruff,
that you are always to be seen in the same places when you go out." Sarah
looked down before the accusing eyes. "You look to sea." Still Sarah was
silent. "I am satisfied that you are in a state of repentance. Indeed I
cannot believe that you should be anything else in your present circumstances."

Sarah took her cue. "I am
grateful to you, ma'm."

"
I am not concerned with
your gratitude to me. There is One Above who has a prior claim."

The girl murmured, "How should
I not know it?"

"
To the ignorant it may seem
that you are persevering in your sin."

"
If they know my story, ma'm,
they cannot think that."

"
But they do think that.
I am told they say you are looking for Satan's sails."

Sarah rose then and went
to the window. It was early summer, and scent of syringa and lilac mingled
with the blackbirds' songs. She gazed for a moment out over that sea she
was asked to deny herself, then turned back to the old lady, who sat as
implacably in her armchair as the Queen on her throne.

"
Do you wish me to leave,
ma'm?"

Mrs. Poulteney was inwardly
shocked. Once again Sarah's simplicity took all the wind from her swelling
spite. The voice, the other charms, to which she had become so addicted!
Far worse, she might throw away the interest accruing to her on those heavenly
ledgers. She moderated her tone.

"
I wish you to show that
this ... person is expunged from your heart. I know that he is. But you
must show it."

"
How am I to show it?"

"
By walking elsewhere. By
not exhibiting your shame. If for no other reason, because I request it."

Sarah stood with bowed head,
and there was a silence. But then she looked Mrs. Poulteney in the eyes
and for the first time since her arrival, she gave the faintest smile.

"
I will do as you wish, ma'm."

It was, in chess terms, a
shrewd sacrifice, since Mrs. Poulteney graciously went on to say that she
did not want to deny her completely the benefits of the sea air and that
she might on occasion walk by the sea; but not always by the sea--"and
pray do not stand and stare so." It was, in short, a bargain struck between
two obsessions. Sarah's offer to leave had let both women see the truth,
in their different ways. Sarah kept her side of the bargain, or at least
that part of it that concerned the itinerary of her walks. She now went
very rarely to the Cobb, though when she did, she still sometimes allowed
herself to stand and stare, as on the day we have described. After all,
the countryside around Lyme abounds in walks; and few of them do not give
a view of the sea. If that had been all Sarah craved she had but to walk
over the lawns of Marlborough House.

Mrs. Fairley, then, had a
poor time of it for many months. No occasion on which the stopping and
staring took place was omitted; but they were not frequent, and Sarah had
by this time acquired a kind of ascendancy of suffering over Mrs. Poulteney
that saved her from any serious criticism. And after all, as the spy and
the mistress often reminded each other, poor "Tragedy" was mad. You will
no doubt have guessed the truth: that she was far less mad than she seemed
... or at least not mad in the way that was generally supposed. Her exhibition
of her shame had a kind of purpose; and people with purposes know when
they have been sufficiently attained and can be allowed to rest in abeyance
for a while.