The Sleeping Beauty (7 page)

Emily went up the stairs ahead of him. She wore an old blue dressing-gown and her hair was spread over her shoulders. He watched, as if it were the most surprising and exotic revelation, her pink heels lifting from her slippers as she climbed the stairs. She held back the baize-covered door for him and followed him across the landing. Still no one stirred. The house stayed in the grip of silence. A wedge of threatening light lay in the well of the staircase, but the landing, with its rows of closed doors, was dark.

Philly’s room was brighter: the windows wide open and the curtains drawn back. They could hear the sea, the tide in, right up on the rocks, tumbling into inlets and dragging back with a rattling of pebbles.

‘Here!’ Emily said, throwing open the bed-clothes ready for Philly. He put her down gently. Still wrapped in the blanket, she lay and shivered, her hands clasped tightly on her breast, the knees drawn up sharply. Saliva had run from the corner of her mouth as he carried her, and he wiped it away on an edge of the sheet.

Emily stood back, watching him; but when he looked at her, she glanced away.

‘Is she ill?’ he whispered.

She shook her head.

‘There is always silence,’ he thought. Even downstairs, he had only asked her to fetch the blanket and she had done so without a word. As if she understood his thoughts, she seemed to make a great effort; her lips parted before she spoke. He could see that she was very cold and she struck her hands together, the one smeared with blood.

‘This has happened before. She will sleep now.’

‘Should you fetch your sister?’

‘I’ll tell her later.’

‘Or a doctor, perhaps?’

‘There is no need.’

‘May I fetch anything for her … hot-water bottles … brandy?’

‘I’ll see to it.’

‘But you are shivering.’

She seemed to sway with the cold.

‘Thank you for your help,’ she said, dismissing him.

Rose, on her way to the bathroom, saw the unlatched door and heard their low voices. Disbelief, then horror, froze her. She locked herself away from them, leaning over the hand-basin as if she were retching, her hands gripping the cold porcelain. She felt as if someone – her sister? – had lifted an enormous sheet of ice and smashed it over her head.

Stealthy and silent from shock, she stood quite still, wondering what to do first to reassemble her sanity, the order of things, how to deal with her non-comprehension, sort out explanations. She even breathed warily. When she raised her head, she saw her reflection in the mirror before her – dazed eyes, and her two plaits hanging neatly over her shoulders.

Then she heard Vinny crossing the landing. The baize-covered door sighed and shut behind him. With absurd vehemence, Rose began to clean her teeth. She went on with this for a long time, as if she were afraid to stop; as if she could think of nothing else to do; dreading all action and suspending thought.

Vinny dressed and went out into the garden. He made his way down the cliff-steps, and leant over the rustic-work handrail, pretending to be watching the waves slapping the cliff down below. He saw none of it – only a picture of Emily in Philly’s room, her hands pressed flat against the wall behind her, her steady look downwards. When she had turned her head sideways, her long hair made a beautiful sweeping line from brow to shoulder. Now, in his imagination, he crossed the room to her and drew back the curtain of hair, kissing her throat and her shoulder. He excused his imagination any prelude to this and in reality he could have arranged none. Inability to cross the gap from wooing to lovemaking and many unconcluded love-affairs, had left him with a large circle of women friends. They bore him no ill-will, valuing his continued attentions – presents, compliments; their pique soon vanished. They married, loved, elsewhere. Only very stupid husbands resented Vinny.

The curious hesitancy in him was caused by his romanticism, his longing for perfection. At the beginning of each relationship, he struck all the right notes; but sophistication, lightness,
gallantry, could not carry him through anything so dire as passion. There were changes to make which defeated him. The circumstances were never right – pitch darkness, for instance, was, he felt, essential. Women, having been kissed and stroked, then helped into their coats, were surprised. Sometimes, they went home in such a fury of righteousness to their husbands that they behaved for a while impossibly; having, unexpectedly, no guilt to expiate, they wondered why they should waste their resolutions of kind attentiveness, exonerated as they were by their fidelity (which their disappointment very soon became to them). Next morning, roses from Vinny helped them to forgive.

On one of the few occasions when circumstances were not too daunting – a warm and moonless night in Burnham Beeches – he had been with the woman who became his wife. She took the initiative in everything, and as she detested being ‘fussed’ as she called it and giggled when he stroked her arms, the transition was soon – and in Vinny’s mind far too rapidly – made. He thought it most inartistically done and had nothing to be pleased about in recalling the evening. In his mind, he labelled it an ‘encounter’, and the marriage which followed was ‘buying experience dearly’. He did not so much dislike his wife as pity her for not arousing his love. He thought hers a sterile existence – since he rarely saw her – and guilt mingled with his irritation. He did not blame her for trickery, and saw as a pathetic manoeuvre the imaginary pregnancy with which she hastened him into marriage. That she had gained some financial security at the expense of losing his respect for her, seemed to him a tragic bargain. He could not have lived with her or told his mother any of the story. He went to see her rarely and only with proper warning. They talked over business matters amicably. When once, from motherly sensations and a little vague pity for him, she had embraced him, he had moved neatly aside and rummaged for his pipe, hoping he had not
given too much offence; but feeling violated. She did not want him in her everyday life, for she was a lascivious woman and his nice feelings shamed and bored her; but she would have missed the idea of him. He sent her picture-postcards whenever he went away, as if she were a child, and often he longed to be rid of her. This morning, he saw her in a worse light than ever before – as an obstacle between Emily and him, a loathed encumbrance in a hazard difficult enough of itself.

To win Emily now appeared to be the great task, the meaning, of his life. At his age, practised though he might be, he felt uncertainties, disadvantages that he would have dismissed in the past. All circumstances guarded her from him – ill-will and perhaps enmity – her own total indifference; his ineligibility; his impatience. For the first time, courtship was not to him an end in itself. He suffered the humiliation of desire, in the day and in his dreams. To reach her would require patient drudgery. Like taming a falcon, he thought – each step forward would mean two more backwards; all progress containing the danger of failure.

‘I shall soon be fifty,’ he thought, and he turned and went back up the steps very briskly, as if to hurry anywhere would help.

The façade of the house had sprung alive, with curtains all drawn back and children’s voices calling. A little boy leant out over a sill and was pulled back roughly by the nursery-maid. Mrs Tumulty stood at her bedroom window looking at the sea through a telescope. As he crossed the lawn, the gong sounded, filling the house with its absurd confusion and followed by the children tearing down the stairs towards the dining-room.

‘You look peaky,’ Mrs Tumulty said. She whipped out the damask napkin with a crack like a whip.

‘Peaky?’ he said disdainfully.

‘Yes, Vincent,
peaky
. As if you slept badly, or scarcely at all. Prunes,’ she said to the little maid who served them.

A bustle was going on at the big table by the sideboard. Nannie became a different person when Mr and Mrs Tillotson came in.

‘Would this little person like a cushion to sit on?’ she asked the boy, Benjamin. Puffed-wheat suddenly cascaded out of the packet the nursery-maid was opening. She blushed and Nannie gave her a look. Then she folded a cardigan and put it on Benjamin’s chair.

‘There now, is that better?’

‘No, no better.’

‘Say “thank you”, Benjamin,’ Mr Tillotson said.

‘
You
should have had prunes,’ Mrs Tumulty said to Vinny, who drank his coffee and kept glancing out of the window. ‘What are your plans for today?’

‘My plans for today!’ he thought. ‘My plans for today are to hang about hoping for a glimpse of her, to have my heart eaten away by the thought of her; to feel my blood bounding maddeningly, ridiculously, like a young boy’s; to despair; to realise the weight of my misery and hunger with each step I take.’ He wanted to shut himself in his dreary room, to try to gather together some discretion; find some mode of behaviour. Every word spoken cut him; he shrank from the glances of other people – unless there was some person who would listen to him all day long while he talked of Emily and dramatised his situation. Only that could appease him.

‘I haven’t any plans,’ he said: and then, with a great effort, added: ‘Anything you would like. A walk,’ he said vaguely. He was then surprised to hear himself saying: ‘I think I shall buy a car.’ He was astonished to hear this and stared at his mother, as if she had spoken, not he.

‘A car?’

‘It would be more convenient.’ He imagined driving Emily along the leafy lanes in the summer. They came to the top of a hill and there was a shimmering view and tiny flowers set tight in spongy turf; the smell of thyme; minute faded blue butterflies; dried rabbit-droppings; empty snail-shells. He spread his jacket on the grass (because of the rabbit-droppings and baby thistles) and Emily sat down on it. He began to unpack the picnic-basket. He still could not find any suitable dialogue for them. Emily remained monosyllabic.

‘You remember how expensive you found the garage,’ his mother reminded him.

‘I heard someone crying this morning,’ little Constance said in a loud voice. ‘It was really in the night.’

‘Eat up, dear.’

‘I did. It woke me up.’

‘It woke me up,’ Benjamin agreed.

Nannie was paying great attention to them today the children found. Usually, she and Betty, the nursemaid, just talked together and sometimes made strange remarks, such as ‘Little pitchers have long ears’ and ‘Someone not a hundred miles from here.’

‘Was Baby crying?’ Mrs Tillotson asked.

‘No, madam, not a whimper. Some little people have wonderful imaginations.’

‘It wasn’t a baby anyhow,’ Constance said carelessly. ‘It was a lady.’

Mrs Tumulty dribbled out a prune stone into her spoon, her eyes fixed on the Tillotson table.

‘I might find somewhere cheaper,’ Vinny said, but she was not listening. Her ears almost seemed to move forwards like a cat’s to catch the children’s words.

‘I think I paid through the nose before,’ Vinny said, willing her to listen to him. ‘From what I hear,’ he persisted. ‘I was speaking to Fred Jackson about it the other day …’

‘Ladies ought not to cry,’ Benjamin said.

‘That knife is too large for him, Nannie. Have this little one.’

‘I like big knives.’

‘Do as you are told,’ said Mr Tillotson.

‘I know ladies do sometimes cry,’ Constance said, glancing at her mother for confirmation, looked doubtful, and said: ‘At funerals, I expect.’

‘When their children die a mother would cry,’ Benjamin said patronisingly.

‘May I have some more coffee, mother?’ Vinny asked.

‘Bible women cry,’ Constance was saying.

‘Bible women are a lot of babies.’

‘Now, Benjy, we are all waiting for you,’ said Mr Tillotson.

‘Not so much in your mouth, darling,’ Nannie whispered.

‘I was frightened when I heard the crying.’

‘Thank you,’ said Vinny. ‘Shall we go for a walk? Would you like that?’

‘Yes, dear, anything.’

‘Now, no more talking,’ Mr Tillotson said.

‘Yes, no more stories, dear,’ their changed, weekend Nannie said. ‘What will Mummy and Daddy think?’ (‘You are only silly when they are here,’ she seemed to imply.)

A long ritual of patent-medicines began, dollops of this and that. Vinny felt nauseated at the sight of dark brown malt being twisted down by one, a fishy cream by the other. Benjamin began to gag, unable to swallow.

‘Don’t be a silly boy,’ Nannie said. ‘Come along, now, woollies on and quick march.’

When they had gone Mr and Mrs Tillotson drank another cup of coffee in peace.

‘What was all that about, Lindsay?’

‘One can’t encourage them.’

‘Constance dramatises everything.’

‘Best to ignore it.’

‘But such a taste for the sensational. So sensationally inventive.’

‘All children are.’

They spoke for a moment about the weather to Mrs Tumulty and Vincent before they left the dining-room, surveying the sky vaguely. When they had gone, Mrs Tumulty said: ‘I shall be ready in half an hour. In the garden.’

When Vinny returned to his room, his bed was made. A different blanket replaced the one in which he had wrapped Philly. He thought that at some time during the day he would see Emily and she would make some explanation about the morning. But he rarely saw her. His meetings with her were all sudden and disconcerting.

When Emily told Rose about Philly and of how Vinny had helped them both, Rose felt ashamed. All the same, the truth could not quite wipe away what she had first believed with such creative intensity that, against all rationality, her imagination would not be wasted. It left some residue in her mind which had always been a good soil for her suspicions.

From the first, her marriage had been destroyed by her inventive jealousy. Obsessed by sex as only those who fear it can be, she had watched her husband patiently for signs that other women were less disdainful than she was herself. In his simple bonhomie she found plenty to torment her. Once, seeing his pleased glance at a girl sun-bathing, she had pretended a sudden and violent illness. They returned to the house. He was doggedly sympathetic in the practised weary manner so often seen in the husbands of ailing wives. Nothing was too much trouble and her sickness became real to both of them and even, such was the triumph of mind over matter, to her doctor. Some nights later, when they were at last in a convalescent state with
one another, she dreamed of the young girl and of what, in the nightmare, was his desire for her. Furiously, yet greedily, in her dream, she concocted for them behaviour she would never have admitted to her thoughts. In the morning, the dream so hung over her that she could not bring herself to look at her husband, or face her own degradation. She had neither the humour nor common-sense to digest frailty or imperfection. She tried to wrench life round into her own pattern. Friends and relations, unable to comply, drifted away, and her own husband drifted away, not with other women, as she had feared; but with excessive drinking. There were always loopholes, she saw, and people fled through them. She fled away from herself in her own dreams, which took revenge on her self-discipline in the most startling and decisive way.