Grahame, Lucia (16 page)

As for me, I did not sleep at all.

After that the beauties of Greece and Italy made barely any
impression on me. I knew I had made a terrible mistake; if it hadn't been for
my clumsy and foolish effort to feign passion, the severity of my limitations
as a wife might have become apparent more gradually, and my husband's
disappointment would have been less sudden and shattering.

Now his subdued air only fed my despondency. His manner had never
been particularly effervescent, but where it had once had the delicious tang
and crackle of very dry champagne, it now became mild and flat. He tried, of
course, to spare me any sense of failure and to hide his own unhappiness.

And I tried to hide mine. During the day, I made sincere attempts
to fight my deepening lassitude, and to exhibit the same delight in the glories
of the ancient world that I had once in Paris. But it was all false. There was
no heart in anything I said or did.

I longed to be able to treat my husband with the fondness that I
honestly felt for him, but I was unable to. My sense of guilt, the constant
awareness of all that I was hiding, made spontaneity and warmth impossible.

Equally painful to me was my husband's withdrawal of the simple
gestures of affection, unworthy though they made me feel, that had come to mean
too much to me.

For a moment or two, when the mystical loveliness of Delphi
infused him with wonder and awe and penetrated even my gray indifference, he laid
his arm across my shoulders and I leaned against him with a feeling of relief
and joy.

The light embrace grew warmer, more reassuring. He started to draw
me around toward him. But then he stopped, withdrew his arm, and moved a step
or two away.

The abrupt change in his manner left me raw. But I knew he hadn't
deliberately intended to hurt me, that in fact he would have gone to almost any
length to spare me pain, so as soon as he lifted his arm from my shoulders, I
fanned myself with my hat and said, with a gay little laugh,
"Thank
you—it
is awfully warm here."

He would never know what that brittle remark had cost me, and I
couldn't resent the distance he kept thereafter, although I hated it. I
respected him for having too much self-regard to subject himself to the
frustration of holding a woman he could never wholly possess.

The awkwardness between us did not diminish with time. I knew my
husband had expected that it must. Although he had found the path he'd so
hopefully set out upon with me a far rockier one than he had supposed, he still
believed that the light of love would guide our feet to a smoother road. But I
knew
I
would never reach the golden highway— not with those paintings
and Poncet's greed hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles.

The best I could hope for was that things would remain as they
were; my husband, in his innocence, still dreamed that love and patience would
transform them.

Meanwhile, the exigencies of travel thrust us together in ways
that were painful to us both. Every time he took my hand to help me down from a
carriage, every time we brushed too closely against each other by accident, I
could feel the spark of tension between his body and mine. It kept me
continually on edge.

We did not stop at Florence, which was to have been the grand
culmination of our honeymoon tour.

We had intended to stay there for a fortnight.

Instead, we passed through it on a train, for in Rome my husband
had abruptly proposed that we cut our travels short and return immediately to
England.

I did not object. I knew that he was right. In England, everything
would be easier. We would not be so constantly in each other's company, so
relentlessly pushed up against the invisible obstacles that divided us. In
England there would be a thousand other demands upon his time, which would
surely give us long hours of respite from each other.

In England, we took up residence on my husband's large estate,
Charingworth. Here I had my own bedroom, and in it I slept alone. My husband
had told me his door would always be open to me, but how could I go to his bed
when I knew not only that nothing
bad
changed but that nothing
could
change?

I had thought that anything would be better than that strained
honeymoon which was not a honeymoon. But England was worse. During our travels,
my husband's inevitable presence had sometimes caused me pain, but in England
his frequent absences from home only deepened my loneliness. He spent a great
deal of time in London; he had a house in Grosvenor Square where he sometimes
stayed for days on end. The first two or three times he went there, he asked me
to join him, but at that period I hoped that a little time apart might make
things easier for us, so I declined. After that, he stopped asking.

Sometimes I did travel to London, just to escape for a few hours
from the role I had so unwillingly assumed and which was proving to be so
uncongenial. But I always went alone, and spent my time wandering restlessly
through the galleries of one museum or another. I never slept in Grosvenor
Square since, by train, Charingworth was less than two hours from London.

My husband never failed to treat me with the same kindness and
consideration he had always shown. But I still could find no way to ameliorate
his unspoken dissatisfactions. Every effort I made to appear lively and gay,
every small but awkward gesture of affection, felt ghastly to me— always
contrived, always calculated no matter how true the feeling behind it.

Most of the time my husband gave the appearance of having accepted
the uncomfortable state of affairs with the same imperturbable calm that he
exhibited in every other aspect of our life together.

Nevertheless, some question seemed to hover on his lips. And there
was one on mine, as well. I often longed to ask him if he really imagined that
our ailing marriage was somehow miraculously going to fix itself What was he
waiting for? Surely he would not be content to live like this forever. Yet he
took no action. Was he waiting for me?

And what could I do? Go to him with the truth and bring the whole
sorry house of cards tumbling to the ground? I knew what would happen then—the
shutters behind those clear gray eyes would come down and close me out forever,

Or I could go to him as I had in Athens, willing to try to give
pleasure but incapable of receiving it, and expose myself to the same
frustration and humiliation.

No. The only other justification for going to his bed would be to
give him a child. But that seemed as far beyond my abilities as everything
else, and if by some miracle it were not, how could I love the child of this
man who seemed every day to be growing more remote? It could never be the one I
had lost. And if I
was
foolish enough to love it, what would become of
it once the tissue of lies was finally ripped open? Perhaps my husband's strict
sense of honor would lead him to declare that I was unfit to raise his child
and he would take it from me.

In the meantime, his generosity was unstinting. But while the
allowance he provided had so far enabled me to meet Poncet's relentless
demands, those same demands forced me to exercise extreme frugality in
everything else.

Once my husband, having discovered a new patch on one of my
well-worn gowns, asked how I managed to dispose of all the money he gave me.

"Must I account to you for how I spend it?" I asked
archly, but never had I felt so threatened.

He flushed. "Certainly not. But I have sometimes
wondered...." He hesitated.

"Yes?"

"I know so little about you, Fleur."

"You know everything about me. There is really very little to
know."

"Your early life... and your life in France." He could
not conceal his extreme discomfort; his rising color told me how much he hated
to pry, yet it now seemed that he felt driven to override his scruples.

"I have told you everything."

"It is apparent that you have already gone through a great
deal of money, and it is equally apparent that you spend nothing on yourself.
It has crossed my mind that perhaps you have needy dependents, whom you have
been unwilling to impose as a burden upon me, and for whose well-being you have
felt compelled to assume complete responsibility."

Now I was the one who flushed.

"If that is the case, or anything like it, there is no reason
to hide it from me," he continued. "Certainly there is no necessity
for
you
to do without in order to fulfill your obligations, whatever
they may be.
Everything
that is mine is yours, surely you know
that?"

I thought then, for one terrifying instant, that my poise would
crack. I tried to speak, to protest those suspicions which cast me in so much
better a light than I merited, but the words caught in my throat. My eyes
burned alarmingly. I clung to the image of my grandmother. She would have been
ashamed of me; she had always taught me that the last defense in an impossible
situation is to present to your enemy an unyielding stone wall. At the time I
had thought it was an embittered woman's drivel; now the memory gave me the
strength I needed.

"You are completely mistaken," I said. "The truth,
if you must know it, is that I have never been able to manage money." How
could he know that I'd been the very soul of husbandry during the lean years
with Frederick? "I am afraid I am forever coming up short—and with nothing
to show for it!"

"Well," he said, "if there
is
anything I can
do, you have only to ask."

I was silent.

"Besides," he went on, "you are a very lovely
woman, and I wouldn't mind seeing you looking a bit more
soignee."

My husband did not care much for society and made only the minimal
gestures toward it that were required of a man in his position.

At Charingworth, we paid occasional polite visits to some of our
neighbors, but except for these small acts of neighborly civility, we shunned
the endless rounds of fox hunts, shooting expeditions, country house weekends, empty
but rigidly orchestrated social calls, and elaborate dinner parties that
provided so many people of our station with their sole raison d'être.

That suited me very well, for I had no raison d'être at all, nor
had I any love for the upper classes or for their ostentations, prejudices, and
frivolities.

The one unmitigated benefit of my new life was my limitless
freedom out of doors. Instead of walking, however, as I had done in my youth, I
rode the filly with which my husband had presented me upon our return from the
Continent. When I was with Andromeda, I was almost happy. She was a glossy
little black horse with a white blaze on her face and an endearingly delicate
manner. But her fastidious airs disappeared when I brought her to a gallop and
her passion for speed was unleashed.

I had not learned to ride at the school in Montreux where my
grandmother had sent me for two years, so it was my husband who taught me. He
was a superb horseman and under his tutelage I took to the saddle quickly, with
a buoyant confidence, expecting that my fearlessness would win me his lavish
approval. Instead, even in his restrained way, my husband proved to be a
surprisingly demanding and critical instructor. I sensed that it drove him
wild, for example, if I either pulled too hard on the reins or grew too lax in
my control, but the only indication he gave of this was in the ironic tone of
his mild rebukes. Nevertheless, he let no error slide.

After I had licked the first few wounds to my pride, I found that
I did not object to my husband's manner of instruction. In fact, our rides
together, when he accompanied me on his chestnut stallion, Perseus, were among
the few pleasant intervals in our marriage. But they could not compensate for
its other disappointments.

Hardly ever, during this period of our lives, did my husband
express the frustrations that must have been gnawing at him. Even when his
temper frayed, he kept it as tightly controlled as the fist he had raised
against the windowpane in Athens.

One or two such incidents occurred in conjunction with his
mother's first visit to us, which she finally condescended to pay in early
November, after we had been settled for weeks in England.

Earlier, in a fit of boredom so great that even the idea of
seeking out the fabled dragon in her lair offered itself as an appealing
diversion from the stately passage of the long, slow days at Charingworth, I
had suggested that perhaps we ought to call upon her at her Yorkshire manor.