Rutherford Park (23 page)

“I’ve never known anything else,” she murmured. “I was the daughter. Now I’m the wife. I’ve simply moved from one protectorate to another. I’m a possession.”

“That can’t be true.”

“A figurehead, then.”

“You’ve created a lovely home. You’ve made a family. That is more than a figurehead. That is real.”

“Is it?” she asked. “I look at what women do—even the girls cleaning the rooms; I read such books, and I…I long to go out, you know, and do anything at all. Milk a cow. Mend a road. Dig a ditch.” He burst out laughing; she smiled in return. “It’s true. Even something as simple as…I would like to tend the gardens, for instance. But I am not supposed to. I may pick the flowers. I may say where they’re to be planted. But I can’t work. I can’t do anything of value.”

“You have enormous value in yourself.”

“Do I?” she said. “Charlotte talks of going to art school; did you know? She would like to work. William abhors it; he ridicules it. But I know what she means. She wants to see the world, to be
independent. She would fly an aeroplane if she could. Just like Harry.”

“And would you?”

She laughed softly. There was a pause. Then: “I rather think so. Yes.”

He leaned on the stone pillar of the veranda and looked down at her.

“I wanted to do so very much when I came here,” she said. “My father had always told me that I had no talent, no worth. I was in love with William, and I thought he saw something better than that.” She paused. “But I learned that I was too sentimental. One could not be romantic; practicality was everything. The role to play again. Expectations. I couldn’t intrude on the garden, because that belongs to March. I couldn’t alter traditions here; William would not countenance it. I had my children, of course, but I was not required to enjoy them. A nurse was employed. I used to shock her by sitting on the floor of the nursery and playing with the girls and Harry. One was not supposed to, you see? You were meant to have the children brought to you just before dinner, and that was all. I used to fish with Harry, too. That caused a terrible row.”

“But why?”

“Oh, ‘one was the wife of a Member of Parliament.’ All that.”

“This was William.”

“Yes. And the wife of the lord lieutenant of the county, when he had those roles. One did not take off one’s shoes and wade in the river.”

John began to laugh. “Sounds fun to me.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It was fun.”

“But your husband surely appreciates you, your character, your wishes.”

“I used to rather fondly imagine so,” she said. “But my husband,
as it turns out, has a life of his own.” A steely edge had come into her tone.

“As a Parliamentary adviser, I hear.”

“I don’t mean that,” she replied. The darkness lent her cover for the secret that now came flooding out; she slightly averted her face. “I mean that he has another son. Another woman. In Paris. He has known her for many years. Before we were married. And after.”

John was shocked, though not as shocked as he might have been some years back; he had learned that many English aristocrats favored a mistress. The old King had had several; his wife had even entertained them to tea. In John’s experience, the titled man who was faithful to his wife here was in the minority. And yet his heart bled for Octavia now, the Octavia who had not been allowed to even take off her shoes, when apparently William Cavendish had been taking off far more in gay Paree.

“I didn’t know about the son at all until he turned up at our London house this spring and asked for money,” Octavia was saying. “He wanted an inheritance, and William wouldn’t give it to him. He wanted to be part of the family, and William denied it.”

John was struggling for the right words. “To protect you, surely,” he managed at last.

She looked up at him. “He thought he could keep us apart, you see?” she said. “But things can’t be kept apart. They can’t be molded.” She paused. “They change, John,” she told him finally. “People do. Times do.”

“And…” The garden was pressing in on him, so much so that it seemed to be taking the air out of his lungs. He was painfully aware of her proximity and his own desire to touch her. She sat there like a ghost, so slight in the darkness. “What will you do?” he asked. He was trying very hard not to think of William Cavendish playing the British diplomat in Paris while all the time he had some woman
tucked away in one of those fancy belle epoque apartments. God damn the man. God damn him to hell.

“I don’t know what to do at all,” Octavia admitted. “I am completely lost.”

* * *

T
wo hundred miles away in London, Louisa was dreaming of her mother and of Rutherford.

She thought that she was in her own bedroom there: the apricot and pink and cream confection of colors that she herself had chosen. She was sitting in her low armchair, dressed in only her nightgown, and she had the sensation of waiting for someone—someone who had promised to be with her. On her dressing table she could see a reflection of herself in the looking glass, and the image was of a much older version of herself—tired, perhaps, dispirited, or disappointed.

It seemed that it was only with a great effort that she could raise herself from the chair, and she walked to the table to see herself in a clearer light. Looking down, she saw the items in front of the glass quite clearly: the silver-backed hairbrushes, the cut-glass scent bottles, the little silk-backed notebook she had taken to her very first dance. There too was the Royal Worcester plate on which she sometimes left her rings. She saw its familiar elongated shape, but in its center was a calling card that she had never seen before. She saw her hand, almost disembodied, reach down to the card and pick it up.
Maurice Frederick
, said the elegant printed script. And it came to her with a devastating clarity that the person she was waiting for was Maurice, but that he would never come. He had merely left the card, as one might do with an acquaintance.

A quite horrible sense of loneliness, one that she had never experienced, suddenly permeated the dream. She felt that this was a
state of mind out of which she would never recover; below her, in the house, she could hear footsteps and voices, but she knew that she would never again be able to join them. In the kind of bottomless panic that only a nightmare can produce, she rushed to the window, pulled back the curtains, and looked down. There on Rutherford’s terrace was Maurice himself. He was looking in each window very carefully, running his hand around each lock and frame as if he wanted to gain admittance.

When he had finally tried each one, he walked back until he was underneath her window again, and then he looked up. She called to him. She tried to make a signal that he should come to the front door and ring the bell. But he seemed not to understand her. All that happened was that he raised his hand, sadly, and turned and walked away. In no more than a breath, he had vanished.

Louisa woke up abruptly with a sense of horror.

She got out of bed and went to her own window there in the London house, and looked down into the street. Everything was as normal; a dawn light was beginning to break. Maurice was not there, of course. He was not looking up at her, or turning away. And yet she had the curious notion that he had been there at some time during the night, staring up at the house, keeping some kind of strange guard upon her, or trying to find a way through the locked doors and windows, as he had in the dream.

Trembling, she went back to the bed and sat on the edge for some time.

All that she could think of was that feeling of isolation and loneliness that the dream had brought to her: the sense of being cut off from the close and sociable world that she knew so well. She wondered what she might feel if she had no father, no mother, no brother or sister. She wondered what it might be like to be utterly
alone, waiting for someone or something that might never happen, or a wish that might never come true.

Her eyes filled with tears. It was Maurice’s world, she realized. Alone, without apparent family or friends. How might it be, she wondered unhappily, to move by oneself through places populated by others—others who were always in groups, or families, or in marriages or partnerships? It was how she saw him, and it was how he inevitably portrayed himself: as a perennially lonely stranger.

She got back into bed and pulled the covers around her.

In a moment or two, she turned her face into the pillow and softly whispered his name.

* * *

T
he summer night fell at Rutherford, but it was not a complete darkness. When John went to his room, he turned down the lights immediately, and undressed, and stood looking at the parkland bathed in full moonlight: an empty stage, a monochrome picture. He went to bed with the curtains open and the light falling across the room.

Somewhere below him in the house a clock struck midnight, then one. He had never felt less like sleep. William Cavendish and his son were at York; tomorrow they would be here. He imagined the older man showing him the volumes that were kept under lock and key in the library, on glass-screened shelves. He tried to imagine himself being polite, but couldn’t see it. He imagined far more vividly socking the old goat in the eye, and then cursed himself. It was none of his business; why should he care? Marriages went on like this; they had their own shape, each one with its own peculiar tensions. He asked himself whether he could be faithful to a woman for a lifetime, and doubted it. But then, that was the reason he
hadn’t married. He believed in keeping a promise; if he couldn’t keep it, he would never make it.

He closed his eyes; through the open window he could hear the barking of a fox somewhere far away, up on the hills. He pushed the sheets down; it was still stiflingly warm. For a long time he considered simply getting up and dressed and leaving during the night, walking all the way to the little station. What was it, four or five miles? He didn’t want to see William Cavendish. He didn’t want to see him stand next to Octavia.

He rolled onto his side and looked at the little clock on the bedside table. Ten past two. The soft clicking of the pendulum began to annoy him; it was ticking away his life. He ought to have moved on, left before now. He ought to have gone. He thought of Octavia standing at the bridge yesterday morning, the dark wool coat incongruously drawn over the innumerable folds of the nightgown. He thought of her naked feet below the hem of the skirt on that first day she had sat with him in the library. He clenched his fists and screwed his eyes shut, retreating into the old trick his mother had taught him to get to sleep: to count backwards through presidents. The Goulds didn’t count sheep at night; they counted the men they’d got into office. John started now with Woodrow Wilson, conjured up his long, aquiline face. Taft, Roosevelt…Taft, Roosevelt, McKinley…

It was no use.

He got up and pulled a dressing gown around him and went to the door. When he got out into the corridor, he could sense the huge house all around him, a great sleeping beast. He felt suffocated by it; he wanted to get out suddenly. He walked down the stairs, and at the curve above the great hall he stopped to look at the portrait of Octavia. It was massive—he judged it was not less than ten feet by six—and Octavia seemed to be rising above him in the
swathes of satin gown like some extraordinary incarnation, at once both more real and less real than the actual woman. He tore his eyes away and went on down, padding through the hall, looking up at the vast timbered ceiling, its detail obscured by the dark. It ought to have been inspiring, but it was oppressive. He made his way to the dining room, and through that to the doors to the same terrace where he and Octavia had walked earlier that night, and where he had been at first light that morning.

Out in the dark, he sat down on one of the terrace walls. This was no use at all. He hadn’t come to England to fall in love with someone else’s wife. Especially not an unhappy wife. A carefree woman who yearned for a little affair—maybe…maybe he could have happily got himself embroiled for a few weeks, though carelessness with women was not in his nature. But this. This bloody fever. That was what the English would call it: bloody. And it was. They were right to use that word; it was bloody in all its meanings. It was like being struck, opened up, exposed, and seeing your own gore splashed on the stones under your feet. He didn’t want another man’s wife. He didn’t want anyone. He was a traveler, a free soul. He was…He put his head in his hands, a gesture of defeated helplessness. He didn’t know what he was, and that was the truth. He had no idea any longer.

It must have been more than an hour before he walked back upstairs. On the galleried landing he paused for some time.

And then, with his heart thudding like a hammer in his chest, he went to Octavia’s door and opened it.

It took a moment for his eyes to accustom themselves to the shadowy dimensions of the room. He could see then a canopied four-poster bed with huge yellow-and-cream curtains; the walls too seemed to have a kind of creamy figured paper. He could smell flowers and Octavia’s scent. He stood stock-still, wondering whether
he had really lost his mind; he had never done such a thing, despite his reputation. He thought he might choke from his own labored breathing. He fumbled behind him for the handle of the door. And then he saw her.

She was not in bed. Octavia was sitting by the open window, partially obscured by the dressing table and its ornate looking glass; what he had dimly supposed was a portrait on the far wall suddenly materialized into a living person; it was her, hands calmly folded in her lap, staring in his direction.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Very sorry.”

She stood up. She was wearing some other, less ornate gown than the one that had been under the coat that morning; it was a silvery color, and it made a sound as she walked towards him, a sound like indistinct whispering voices. She stopped by the looking glass. “Come here,” she said.

He did as he was told, and crossed the room. Standing next to her, he saw that her thick dark hair hung down her back. “I’ve been watching you in the garden,” she murmured. “You’ve been there such a long time, John. What were you thinking about?”