The Sleeping Beauty (6 page)

She was disappointed that they did not appear for dinner. Nannie and the nursemaid sat alone at the big table near the sideboard, among tins of glucose, packets of Ryvita and bottles of Scott’s Emulsion. They ate quickly, with their heads bowed, and murmured and whispered to one another in snatches.

After dinner, Vinny walked down to see Isabella, and his mother took her knitting into the drawing-room. Presently, Mr and Mrs Tillotson came in. They said ‘good evening’, settled quietly on the sofa and opened their books. For a while, nothing was said. Mrs Tumulty sometimes, when she started a new row of knitting, gave their side of the room a comprehensive glance, which took them vaguely in, but as if they were no more interesting to her than the William-and-Mary tallboy behind them. Mr Tillotson was reading Colette in French and Mrs Tillotson a war book which Mrs Tumulty had not liked to put on her library-list since reviewers had labelled it ‘not for the squeamish’. She was not a squeamish reader, but liked to be a respectable library-subscriber.

She knitted quickly, as if she were limited for time; but nothing ever came of her knitting. When she was alone, she could not waste her patience on it, and she did it now only because she had hoped for conversation, which being buried in a book might have precluded. She was getting nowhere with the silence in the room, when Mrs Tillotson said, as abruptly as if she had not been reading at all: ‘Constance is much better.’

Her husband seemed slowly to draw his attention up from his book as if it were a bucket in a well. He turned a look on her, at first blank, but soon considering. He pondered her statement gravely, but half his gravity was still preoccupation with his book. He implied that it was no light affair interrupting him and he even put his finger on a word to mark his place, like a child.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He waited as if to know whether he should begin yet to reassemble his concentration. Just as he lifted the book again and refocused his attention, she said: ‘But Baby looked flushed.’

‘I didn’t notice.’

To Mrs Tumulty’s disappointment, they then returned to their books and Mrs Tillotson seemed absorbed. For reading, she wore some pink-rimmed glasses, which reflected on her cheek-bones, giving her an indignant look. After a while, she said: ‘He may be teething.’

But Mr Tillotson did not reply.

Mrs Tumulty was no feminist. She did not use her vote, believing (although she herself could never have been sexually attractive to men) that public affairs are more effectively and picturesquely influenced behind the scenes; either by what she called ‘political hostesses’ or by intellectual courtesans. Hardy as she always had been, she insisted on deference to the frailty of her sex and, when she and her husband were on safari in Africa, she had always expected him to make an effort of standing up when she entered his tent, even if he bent double in doing so.

Vinny’s manners she had cultivated and cherished, as if they were some animate thing which care and patience would bring to sturdy growth. He had spent a boyhood of running fast across rooms to open doors, was always jumping to his feet, pulling off
his cap, giving up his chair; had scarcely ever sat down for more than three seconds in a bus. He was out of cars first and into them last, and could scoop up an armful of silly little parcels and carry them down Bond Street for any lady with an asexual charm. He was too powerfully built ever to seem to dance attendance, and his manner which had been anxious and clumsy in youth had become, under his mother’s surveillance, smooth and discreet. He was as calm as a Buddhist. All the same, Mrs Tumulty kept her eyes open for lapses, and several had occurred when Emily had left them before dinner.

Vincent had switched on the light as he came in and, leaving the door wide open, gone to look out of the window. Emily had hurried away. Neither had spoken. He had continued to stare out of the window at the bare garden and had suddenly begun to whistle. Rose, coming in to attend to the fire, had stopped Mrs Tumulty’s protests; but as soon as the Tillotsons had gone off early to bed, she began to express her displeasure.

Vinny, still with the coldness of outdoors about him, alert from his brisk walk back from Isabella’s, seemed too invigorated to sit down. He paced about the room and, as soon as his mother mentioned Emily, began to fill his pipe.

‘So it is Emily!’ she thought, noting this sign of discomfiture. She suddenly felt that she did not know her own son – a sensation common enough to most mothers, but new to her.

‘So unlike you to be off-handed,’ she said, having touched on everything – the open door, the lack of a ‘good evening’, the turned back, the whistling.

‘We should not drink sherry without inviting them to join us. It is under their roof, if our own sherry. Refusal or acceptance is a nice point which we must leave to them. The fact that it is an awkward situation will only mean that they will have adjusted themselves to it by now.’

‘As you were already drinking the sherry, I was sure you had offered it,’ he said.

Mrs Tumulty frowned. As a boy he had never ‘answered back’, or expected to have a last word. She was disturbed, and to be more so.

‘To ask,’ he began, wheeling round in a great circle, confronting her, ‘to ask such questions of her … of Emily … of Miss Otway … to force her to answer … surely it was insensitive in the extreme?’

‘She had just told me she was in hospital.’

‘She
tells
nothing. Merely makes replies.’

‘I couldn’t know. I am sorry, Vincent,’ Mrs Tumulty said with dignity. She took off her spectacles and polished them on her handkerchief. Her handkerchiefs had name-tapes sewn on them as if she were at boarding-school. ‘I will apologise.’

‘No.’

‘Please do not speak so fiercely to me.’

‘I thought you … stared at her,’ he said in great anguish.

‘Nonsense. I merely looked in a kindly way. You are wrong about everything. You know so little about life – shut up at Lloyd’s all day, a bachelor. You have never borne children … ah, you may well smile, but through one’s own pain one learns about human nature.’

‘I am sorry I caused you such distress.’

‘You are not sorry at all. No one ever is: or grateful, either.’

‘You were born yourself.’

‘I am only trying to say that I know more of the world than you … there is not a continent I haven’t explored. And where have you been? To the Winter Sports,’ she said scornfully. ‘I have also lived longer than you.’

‘That follows from what you were saying previously.’

‘I know that people would always rather seem interesting than pitiable. I am not suggesting that Miss Otway is abnormal
in any way – if you like those Mona Lisa looks she may seem striking … she lacks vivacity … whether or not as a result of her misfortune neither you nor I can say … If she is sensitive, as likely as not it is on account of other people’s reticence; fear of being thought pathetic. I always think that the deformed and wounded must most of all dread to see strangers turning quickly aside, lowering their eyes, from pity or embarrassment. Very hard to bear. A good
stare
shows interest, not revulsion. I’ve been stared at all my life; by natives; by children. I do not find it disconcerting. Why should Miss Otway?’

He did not reply.

‘Why should Miss Otway?’ she repeated.

‘You have been round the world for nothing if, when you return, you have still only yourself to measure her against.’

‘It is unlike you to speak so rudely to me, Vincent.’

She rolled up her knitting and stabbed the needles through the ball of wool. ‘It is also unlike you to smoke your pipe in a drawing-room without permission.’

His antagonism melted. He began to laugh at her, but in such a way that she smiled, too, and shook her head. She could sense that he was caught up in an adolescent fascination, unbecoming to his years, but perhaps transient.

‘He should have married,’ she thought. Although worried by his attitude to Emily, she was at the same time revived by this concern and went to bed with a great taste for the morrow.

Vinny did not go at once to bed. For some time, he had longed to have the drawing-room to himself. His mother had left the door open as if expecting him to follow her, and, pacing about the room, pretending to be reflectively smoking his pipe, he managed to elbow the door nearly shut; but dared not deliberately latch it. As if he were being watched, he meandered about
the room, puffing and humming; sniffed at a bowl of jonquils; folded a discarded newspaper, and was at last fascinated by a large pink sea-shell lying on the top of a bookcase. He picked it up, swung it about at arm’s-length, and then held its freckled lip to his ear as if he were listening to the sea. With the other hand he reached furtively round behind some Dresden figures and drew out two photographs in a leather holder. If the door was opened, he thought he could replace the photographs unseen and would say, in a half-sheepish, half-boyish way, holding up the shell: ‘These things always intrigue me …’ or some other trite remark, to show that he felt himself caught out simply in a piece of childishness. The photographs, however, so beguiled him that when he suddenly sensed somebody in the doorway, he spun round guiltily, dropped the leather folder to the floor, snatched his pipe from his mouth and stood facing Rose in consternation, the shell held out foolishly in his hand, as if to propitiate her.

She glanced over her shoulder into the hall, then shut the door. When he had picked up the photographs, she crossed the room and took them from him in rebuke.

His elaborate precautions so often miscarried, because the curiosity and fascination, which made them necessary, also made him preoccupied. Rose, he could tell, was much more annoyed by his prying than was reasonable.

‘I can’t resist photographs.’

It was worse than having to explain about the shell, and it was still not the truth.

‘You are a menace to my happiness,’ Rose thought. She looked at the folder in her hands and then opened it. Her own face seemed a creamy-sepia blur. At nineteen, her mouth drooped innocently; her eyes were unclouded by the terrors of love. She looked at the camera with a mingling of trust and doubt, as if crying out: ‘Be good to me!’

The companion photograph had slipped sideways behind the mica covering and she straightened it.

‘Who is it?’ Vinny asked. His rough voice sounded desperate.

‘My sister.’

He did not speak.

She handed the photograph to him, with an abrupt gesture as if she were thrusting upon him something disgusting which would hurt him only as he deserved. She watched his shock with hatred.

He wondered how the camera could make such gaiety static. The expression seemed so fleeting that he half waited for it to change, for the mouth to straighten into gravity and the raised eyebrow to relax. He imagined her teasing the photographer, saw the poor flustered man retreating under his black tent, dazzled and confused. Her eyes did not cry out: ‘Be good to me!’ but the tenderness of her expression so triumphed over the mischief that instead she seemed to affirm: ‘I will be good
to you
.’ ‘But in a minute,’ her eyes added. Then, he thought, the face had vanished; before the minute came.

‘Well?’ said Rose.

He had so rarely known hatred in his life that he was now overwhelmed by the sensation he felt towards Rose.

‘She looks gay and lovely.’

‘You would not have recognised her.’

‘No.’

‘No one could.’

‘Why do you leave this photograph here?’

‘I hid it once, but the day I went to fetch her from hospital I brought it out again. I saw that it was worse for it not to be there.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘When people try to face the truth one must face it with them.’

‘And the truth, after all,’ Vinny said, ‘was only that one kind of beauty replaced another.’

‘People did not recognise her in the street. I was with her often when it happened. She once said that she felt like her own ghost, coming back, watching everyone she had known, and no one seeing her. She tried to laugh, but it was the only time she spoke of it. I dreaded her going out; and after a very little while she did not.’

Vinny, glancing now at Rose’s photograph, saw the timid mouth, the rigid way of holding the head. She looked ready to be wounded for everybody, and full of the sensibility which had done her sister such disservice.

‘But she appears so high-spirited,’ he protested. He imagined her laughing (however appalled she had been, she had tried to laugh in her old way); but her little joke about being a ghost had gone astray. Rose had recoiled for her, presented her with little awkwardnesses, and had not allowed her to bring herself back from darkness and isolation. He could imagine the early opportunities going by, encounters prevented, friends warded off, until at last she was left with her own idleness and the society of a half-witted child.

He put the photographs in their place. Unspoken words clashed between him and Rose, but nothing was said save their polite good-nights.

In the morning, he awoke to the sound of sobbing. He seemed to swerve out of his dream, bringing the sound with him – a muffled, guttural crying which he could not understand. His mother would not have hesitated, and neither did he, but pulled on his dressing-gown and went to see what was wrong.

It was early, and light was so far only a negation of darkness in which furniture stood forward menacingly as blocks of shadow. As he opened the door leading to the kitchen stairs
Emily turned in surprise. She took a pace back, and as she did so, Philly tried to slip past her towards the garden-door. She wore only her nightgown and her hands and feet were blue. Her face was covered with tears and her lips drawn back on her chattering teeth. Vinny for a moment saw scarlet marks round her wrists before Emily grasped them again, held fast to the girl, who rocked and moaned, trying to lift her arms and dash them free. She made sudden butting movements with her head and, before Vinny could stop her, bent deftly and bit Emily’s hand. He took her shoulders and wrenched her away, shook her until she gasped; then, up against his strength, her own gave out, her eyelids sank and she began to weep. Holding her close and chafing her arm, he turned to Emily and took her hand which she had tried to hide behind her back. She was so cold that the teeth-marks were only beginning to redden. Blood sprang from them in bright beads. Tenderness for her, an extreme of feeling, tired him; but it was an exhaustion of the spirit only, and when he had wrapped Philly up in a blanket from his own bed he picked her up as if she were a small child and carried her easily.