The Scent of Water (20 page)

Valerie was in bed for a week, for Dr. Fraser said she was anemic and run down as well as shocked. The rest was something she was supposed to enjoy but it was frightful lying and listening to Paul laughing downstairs with the other women. One or other of them always seemed to be there, Joanna mostly but sometimes Mary or Mrs. Croft. They prepared dainty meals for her and carried them up, Mrs. Croft with the cheerful briskness of the professional nurse, Mary with grace and smiling dignity, Joanna matter-of-fact and kind, but all of them equally maddening. They knew all about her and Charles now and were thinking the worst and enjoying it. They were flirting with her husband and enjoying it. Their food choked her and she ate very little of it, at least while they were there. When they were not there and Paul brought her up a tray with delicious leftovers she thought it her duty to get her strength back. She had begun by disliking Joanna the least of the three but ended by almost hating her.

On the last day before she got up, Joanna came in after tea to get the trays ready for supper. She sent Paul out for a walk and came up to Valerie’s room.

“Look here, Val, I want to talk to you,” she said, shutting the door firmly behind her, and sitting on Valerie’s bed she tucked her feet up.

“I’ve got an awful head,” Valerie murmured.

“I dare say. You don’t eat enough. Now look, Val. When you get up you’ll feel weak. Let Paul help you. I’ve simplified the arrangement of the kitchen and he knows where everything is and can find his way about perfectly well.”

“You’ve rearranged my kitchen?”

“I had to. The way you had things it was so confusing that Paul couldn’t possibly manage in it. Now he can. Let him do things. He’d be happier if you let him do more.”

“So you think I don’t make my husband happy?”

“I didn’t say so. Now don’t fly off the handle because there’s something else I must say.”

“What?”

“You’ll be thinking now that all of us know about your friendship with Charles. Well, some of us knew before you had that smash. You can’t keep things dark in a village as small as this one. But what I want to say is this. No one supposed for a moment that the affair was serious. You know what I mean. We knew you wouldn’t be such a fool, especially with a man like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like Charles.”

Valerie looked blank. “He’s so distinguished,” she said. “Like his father.”

“Unfortunately not,” said Joanna. “He has a sort of look of his father sometimes and he might have looked like him if he hadn’t been just no good at all.”

“Charles? No good?”

“Surely you know?”

“No.”

“But how could you not know? It’s so obvious. Val, what a child you are!”

Valerie flushed scarlet and the tears came into her eyes. Had she really cared for the man? Joanna wondered. She was ready with her sympathy but Valerie’s next remark scattered it.

“What a fool you must all think me!”

“Never mind, Val. It’s over now. Forget it.”

Valerie forced the tears back, for she was too humiliated to cry. Joanna kissed her and went away and her anger at the motherliness of the kiss, the kindness as to a child, kept her going until bedtime. But the next day, downstairs in the sitting room for tea, she felt sunk in humiliation. How could she go on living with everyone thinking her such an ignorant fool and with her wonderful romantic love, that had seemed like a round golden ball, sunk to the proportions of a little sordid pebble? And she had not even got Paul now. Mary Lindsay had taken him from her. She had deliberately set out to steal him. Now she had lost the two of them, both lover and husband. No story that she had ever read had ended like this in total loss.

After supper Mrs. Hepplewhite came with a huge armful of roses and carnations.

“She’s a bore!” said Valerie, exhaustedly contemplating them when she and Paul were alone again. “I’ve not enough vases.”

“She’s a darling,” said Paul. He was in the armchair, contentedly smoking, Bess at his feet, but he got up. “I’ll get something for them.”

Valerie collapsed upon the sofa and listened. He was moving about the kitchen, as though he were sighted. She had never allowed him in the kitchen because it drove her distracted when he bumped and fumbled, and she had not had the patience to simplify things for him, as Joanna had done. Besides, she did not want him there. Joanna was maddening! He came in with the kitchen bucket, filled with water. “Here you are, Val. Stick the flowers in here for now. You can deal with them in the morning.”

He put the bucket carefully beside the flowers, but he had filled it fuller than he knew and some water slopped over onto the carpet. It was the last straw and she burst into tears. He sat by her on the sofa and flung an arm around her, but without alarm. That sense of release and power was still with him, and with it the joyous conviction that nothing just now could go very wrong. Rarely, these times came, tossing one up like a lark from the earth, and one continued to go up until the meridian was reached. One had to come down again but there could be quite a long spell in the sun before the impetus was spent.

“Why are you crying now?” he asked her. “Is it Charles? Are you in love with him?”

“You wouldn’t care if I was!”

“I care very much. Tell me, please, and tell the truth. You don’t know how much it matters to both of us that you should tell the truth.”

He held her more firmly, his heart beating so hard with the urgency and risk of this turning point that she could feel it, and moved her hand that she might feel it beating under her palm. She had done that in the old days and now she did it again, a reflex response of memory, but in spite of her wretchedness an echo of the old thrill came back. She felt weak as water, and as though her limbs were dissolving and flowing away. She tried to move her hand but she couldn’t. She left it where it was, the strong beat sending answering hammer strokes through her own blood. Paul pulled her closer so that her head was on his shoulder.

“Tell me,” he said. It was not a plea but a demand. He had lifted her clean above deception and evasion and she answered truthfully, “I thought I was. I’m not any more.”

“Then why are you crying? Because people are talking about you and thinking you a little fool?”

“Not only that.”

“What else?”

She struggled suddenly but he did not let her go. She felt a ruthlessness in the pressure of his arms and answered in anger. “What right have you to blame me for Charles? If I’m a fool so are you.”

“I haven’t blamed you for Charles. And why am I a fool?”

“Can’t you see that woman’s out to get you?”

“You mean Mary? I like her and she likes me and she likes my work. That’s all. You answered me truthfully and I’ve answered you truthfully.”

“Not all as far as she’s concerned. Your work! It’s you.”

He considered this. “I honestly think not. It would be absurd.”

“Of course it’s absurd. She’s probably even older than she looks. But women can be vampires at that age. It’s their last chance.”

The word vampire as applied to Mary dissolved him into laughter against his will but he was careful to hold her closer while he laughed. “I mean absurd because of my deficiencies, not Mary’s age.”

“You’re attractive.”

“You think so after all these years? Val, you’re a sweetie.”

She relaxed like a child and said, “I’m so tired.”

“Let’s go up then.”

“Aren’t you going to work?”

“Not tonight.”

They shut up the cottage, put Bess out and let her in, and went upstairs. At her bedroom door she said, “Good night, Paul,” and went in and shut it. He answered her gently, accepting the closed door, but some time later he strolled into her room with his pillow under his arm. She was lying in the center of the double bed reading a magazine. He dropped the pillow on the bed. “Val, I’m fed up with this,” he said. “Shove over.”

She looked up at him in astonishment and then moved over.

T
HE hot summer days slipped by and the garden grew parched with drought, and then there was a thunderstorm in the night and after that it rained and went on raining, and Mary felt as though she had fallen through the surface of a river, sunk down and found herself still alive in a dim green underwater world that had an even greater intensity of life than the sparkling one that had vanished.

The house, vacated now by the last workman, was marvelously calm and she found herself gazing in awe at the green light that lapped over the ceilings like water, and at the pools of silver that lay on the floor when the clouds broke at sunset. Looking out of the windows she saw the garden green and wet and dim, the drenched flowers hanging heavy heads. The birds sang rapturously because the drought had broken and their voices, and the voices of the wind and rain, seemed spellbinding around the house. The boy in the pool looked intensely alive, as though it were he who had spun this web of music about her, keeping her housebound. She did not want to break it, for she was experiencing a new intimacy with the house now that she was so dependent on it for warmth and shelter. It talked to her in the tick of the grandfather clock, in the creak of the old boards and the scurrying tap of the mice who had evaded Tiger. Edith came daily for her lessons, so quietly happy that her journeys through the shadows and the greenness had a smooth serenity like the comings and goings of a silver fish. And Queen Mab’s coach and the tea set were back in the parlor. When Mary lit the fire on chilly evenings the blue glass cups and saucers sparkled like sapphires under the crystal globe. When she was alone in the house Tiger came with her wherever she went, striding at her heels, and when she was busy he would play silently, leaping at moths, prancing on spiders, or lying languidly on his back playing with his own tail, an apparently boneless creature, shadowy and soft, so graceful as to seem fluid. Yet the bones were there, and fiery new life within the softness.

Mary too was conscious of fire. It burned inwardly, renewing and warming her but at times wounding her too, so that it seemed that her life flowed away and yet returned to her again, describing a circle that had Paul for its center. He was unconscious of her life about him, for his writing had come alive again and so, he hoped, had his marriage. About the first resurgence he was quite sure, about the second not so sure, for Valerie was unpredictable. But she was at least his wife again and in the relief of it work went well. He came to Mary as often as he could without rousing Valerie’s jealousy to fever point; there was good, not harm, he instinctively knew, in keeping it moderately warm, at blood heat. He loomed up out of the rain with a dripping Bess and bundles of manuscript under his mackintosh, and Mary dried Bess and gave him tea by the parlor fire, and undertook to read more of his work; a play, a new chapter of his book, another poem. He had found in her what he had never had, a sympathetic but intelligent critic. She could wield the pruning knife mercilessly yet at the same time she watered the roots. They talked much of his work, little of Valerie, yet she knew about Valerie and in this thing as well as the other she struggled to channel all her energies into the one outgoing power of desire. She scarcely knew what this power was, and did not give to it the name of prayer, but she did realize that her desire must be for his fulfillment and nothing else. When he left her she was exhausted yet when the morning came she could go on.

Her absorption in Paul was not making her unaware of anyone else. She found herself very sensitively aware of Cousin Mary, Edith and Jean Anderson. But above all just now of John. She began talking to him, not with her lips but in her mind, as she moved about the house and in bed at night. Sometimes she spoke of Paul and his work, hardly separating the two men in her mind, and at other times of their days together in the past. In the years after his death she had been afraid to think of him too much, partly through sorrow and partly through shame, because she had been so inadequate, but now she thought of him constantly and was coming to understand him much better. Yet she remained unaware of what was happening, as at the turn of the year one can remain for a while unaware that the light is strengthening.

The rain stopped. Jean Anderson woke up one morning in her usual waking state, a depression that never failed to frighten her though it was so familiar. There followed the struggle to speak. It was extraordinary how hard it was to do so, when all day long speaking to Him was her salvation and delight. But in the early morning dumbness was upon her like chains. She would lie sometimes for ten minutes, knowing there was a way of escape but unable to take it. It was not so long today. It was only a few minutes before she made the effort that always seemed so impossible, and said, “Please will You help me. Illumine my dark spirit with Thy light. Then shall my night be turned into day.” After that she was no longer imprisoned, and she heard the voice. “It is Thursday.”

A sense of warmth crept over her. Thursday was the day that she and Mary went out together in Mary’s car, but it had been so wet lately that they had either had to cancel their outing or go shopping, and Jean hated shopping, even with Mary, because of the noise. Last night, longing for some sunlit hours with Mary, and for a drive they had planned to the Roman road across the downs, she had prayed that it might be fine again. Her brother said it was childish to pray about the weather because it obeyed the immutable laws of nature. God did not go messing about with His own laws and she was only wasting her time. But it confused her to try to think what she could pray about and what she couldn’t. She had to pray about everything or she couldn’t live, and it was surprising how the fine days came, and the cat had her kittens safely and she was able at all times to obey.

“Look out of the window.”

She obeyed. Huddling her dressing gown about her she drew the curtains and looked out. From her high east window she could see over the garden to the country beyond. The sky was veiled in silver and swathes of mist lay over the fields. The trees and the quiet cattle stood knee-deep in it but the lifted crests of the trees were illumined, as though some glory was preparing. She watched as the mist thinned and brightened. She dared not cease to watch yet when it happened her eyes had not been able to observe the moment of miracle. All she could say was that the sun had not been there and now it was, a ball of pale gold hung like an apple against the silver sky. Suddenly every blade of wet grass below her, every leaf and twigful of crystal lanterns, caught on fire and the robins began to sing. For a few moments the sun was hers and then with grateful joy she gave it back to Him again.

At breakfast her brother said to her, “I couldn’t find it in any of the Westwater antique shops.”

“What, dear?” she asked absently, because she was intent upon pouring out his coffee without spilling it.

“Good heavens, Jean! You know perfectly well that I spent most of yesterday in Westwater looking for that Queen Anne card table of the Adams’s. Then I went to supper with Fraser and when I got back you’d gone to bed.”

She remembered now. A few days ago he and Mary had played bridge with the Adamses and the Queen Anne card table with the candle sconces, their most precious possession, had not been there. They had played their bridge on a deal table brought in from the kitchen. No one had commented upon the loss but Mary and the Vicar had known what had happened. Charles, getting progressively worse in the noisy hospital ward, had been brought to the quiet of a private ward by his father’s command. The card table must have been sold to pay for his room and the Vicar had set himself to find it and buy it back. The fact of the old couple playing bridge on their kitchen table had upset him more than anything had upset him since the upset of leaving Oxford. Also it was an insult to the game to play it on deal.

“James, I’m so sorry to have forgotten,” she said, and slopped his coffee into the saucer, for his tone had been sharp. But the memory of the sunrise was still with her and she managed not to be tearful.

He took the cup without comment but sucked his cheeks in and out, as was his habit when suppressing comment. The suppression of comment was always difficult for him and the movement of his facial muscles was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual victory.

“It’s Thursday,” he said. “Don’t you go out with Miss Lindsay on Thursdays?”

She smiled at him. His congenital antipathy to women had not caused him to be predisposed in Mary’s favor and for some while she had been referred to as the Lindsay woman. But he had discovered her to be intelligent and capable, her conversation easy without distressing fluency, and at times even well informed. What she saw in Jean he couldn’t imagine but she had certainly done her good. So now Mary was Miss Lindsay. She would never be Mary to James Anderson, for he did not wish to be James to her. He shared with certain primitive tribes the conviction that once you yield your name to another that other has power over you. Only a spaniel bitch he had once kept had had power over James Anderson. No woman, ever.

“Yes, James,” said Jean.

“Going today?”

“Yes, James.”

“Then get her to take you to Thornton. There are a couple of good antique shops there. Of course I know it’s like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay but there’s always a chance.”

Jean looked down at her plate so that he should not see her face. Thornton! It was such a noisy little town, noisier even than Westwater because the London Road went through it. And they had set their hearts on the peace of the downs. But James wished it and she must obey.

“Yes, James,” she said. “We’ll go to Thornton.”

“We’ll go the long way around, by the river,” said Mary when she was told of their misfortune. “I haven’t much hope of finding the card table but we’ll try.”

The day was so lovely that Jean soon forgot her disappointment over the downs. Mountainous clouds were piled upon each other, snowy mass upon snowy mass, dazzlingly luminous, the lakes of sky between them deeply blue. The clearings in the woods were brilliant with willow herb and by the river the wild irises had hung out their golden banners among the reeds. Sometimes pheasants called in the woods and once a kingfisher flashed across a stream between the alders. It was a serene countryside, tidy and comfortable, the meadows and woods giving place sometimes to gentle green knolls crowned with silver birches and cypresses, with chestnut avenues leading to hidden houses. It had no wildness, and majesty was in the sky alone. I would tire of it, thought Mary, if it were always summer here. But winter is coming with the great winds and the snow.

Jean chattered of the hens and the cat and the sunrise this morning. Mary never found her talk trivial because Jean herself was not trivial. Her lines of communications might be crossed but behind the confusion she knew things. Much more than I do, thought Mary, and stopped the car at a gate that gave them a view of a church tower among orchards, a loop of the river flung around it and a sharply green hill behind rising against the tremendous clouds. “Does this satisfy you?” she asked.

“Yes, but it’s almost too much. It was easier this morning when there was only the sun hanging like an apple in the mist. I could give that as though I had taken it off the tree. Well, so I had. It was given me on the tree.”

“What tree?”

“The world.”

“I thought you must mean that tree in the Garden of Eden.”

“They are the same,” said Jean. “And if Eve had given the apple back to him it would have been all right. It was eating it that led to motors.”

“Motors?”

“James says that the internal combustion engine is the root of all evil.”

“Aren’t you enjoying my car?”

“I’d enjoy it more if it was a dogcart.”

Mary laughed and drove on. When they reached Thornton they found the narrow high street packed with traffic. There was an airfield not far away and jets screamed overhead. Mary was inclined to think that the Andersons were right. Of all the evil things that man had plucked from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, machinery was possibly the worst. It had destroyed bodgers, with all that meant in terms of human dignity, and without these ghastly planes bombs could not be dropped.

The first antique shop yielded no results, except a slight cessation of noise when they got the door shut. The second was down a quiet side street and behind it was a paved court cool with ferns. There was no Queen Anne card table in the shop but the assistant, in the absence of the owner, suggested that there might be in the storeroom beyond the court. Would they like to come through?

In the long dim room beyond the ferns the floor was so irregular that the dead centuries leaned together in the dusty sunlight. Cracked mirrors were propped against bow-fronted chests of drawers, wig stands against console tables, high-backed chairs lurched drunkenly and tallboys had their heads back against the wall. They looked sad and poor, polish gone and surfaces cracked, listless and weary as Mary had seen very old people look. With one glance she knew they would not find the beautiful Queen Anne card table here but to satisfy James Anderson they had to look. The shop bell rang and the assistant left them.

Mary was looking at a wig stand, wondering who had used it, thinking how strange it was that it should be here still and its owner dust long ago, when from the far end of the room there was a crash and a cry. She turned quickly as Jean came toward her, white and trembling.

“What is it, darling?” she asked. “Have you broken something?”

“Yes, a golden mirror with cupids. The glass is broken.”

“Well, never mind. I’ll buy it and have fresh glass put in. I’d love a cupid mirror in the parlor.”

“It’s not just that.” Jean trembled so much she could scarcely formulate the words. “It’s the coffin. The very one. When I saw it I stepped backward and the glass went over.”

“What coffin?”

“The one she tried to put me in.”