The Ballad and the Source (32 page)

Sharply, she turned her head towards the door. Before I could tell myself that it was not sudden watchfulness, but an unconscious movement of emphasis, a mad notion pierced me: Cherry was about to come in. Till this moment, I had suppressed the image of the third, the absent one; but now she rose up, sucking her finger, inserting herself obliquely in quarter-­opened doorways, hovering, sidling and twining there, nagging for attention; then at first sign of Maisie's awaited pounce, withdrawing with noiseless rapidity and prolonged nerve-rattling­­­­ exhibitions of mystification on the door handle, from the other side. “Take no notice,” Maisie would hiss. “She wants us to think it's a blasted ghost.” With terror I thought that if I were to go out now and search through the fabulous shrubbery, I should come upon one of those match-boxes stuffed with scraps of moss, leaf, berry, petal which she delighted to hide there, in mouse-scale nooks and crannies.

“Peregrine,” I said. “Is he still alive?”

“Yes, he is alive,” said Maisie. “He lives with the Gillmans. Mrs. Gillman says he's twenty-five in January. I suppose he's immortal. I hated seeing him. He didn't look at me, he looked through a hole in space, as if Cherry had never been alive at all.”

Silence dropped between us. She got up, shifted a saucepan to the side of the range, opened the oven door and looked in.

“Casserole of pheasants with surprises,” she said. “
Pur
ée
of chestnuts with Brussels sprouts. Plum pudding. Everything's done and everything looks like food. I do know how to cook, actually. I stay in a gnome's cottage on the edge of a wood in the holidays with a woman called Willis, and we do the cooking. She used to live on nuts and grasses, but I've weaned her of them and now her appetite's as virile as mine. I'll go and see if they're ready for me to dish up.”

I came and stood beside her, tentatively offering help, while she drew forth her dishes and examined them. She shut the oven door again, straightened herself slowly, looked at me, smiled, and took my hand.

“I shall have a different sort of life from other people,” she said abruptly. “I shall never fall in love.”

Again the echo throbbed, carried this time from so far, through so many receiving and transmitting instruments, that I could barely reach the original source. “People think I'm just talking through my hat when I say that—schoolgirl swank—but it's true. I got over the whole thing in July,
1914.”

“What thing?” I asked.

“I mean, I got to know then what it was, this love business. I had enough of it to last a lifetime. Believe
me,
it's devilish. It's murder. There's been enough in the world of what men and women do to one another. At least there's been enough in one family. Enough harm done.”

She went on holding my hand in a warm grasp, just as she used to hold it. It seems to me now that she was unconsciously asserting the depth, the validity of her need for all that her declarations repudiated: reassurance; confident surrender; the seal of mutual possession. In the gesture, we still befriended one another, our affection made common cause in the face of all the inequalities of experience that divided us. The child made the gesture; but yes, the girl, the woman-to-be discarded all that it might have stood for or foreshadowed. She was not beside me; nor was she caught in the chasm whose first fissure had cracked open years ago in our shared territory. Some force had taken her, blown her clean across, and there she stood now, firm-planted on the other side, exposed, protected in an astringent air: an air dry, unfructifying, restorative as salt.

She dropped my hand.

“I understand Sibyl better nowadays,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “After Cherry, everything boiled up to a head. Do you know what I decided? To murder her for Cherry dying. I thought. … I thought I was being commanded to clean the world of such wickedness. Yes, I did, really. I'd got it all planned. Tanya turned up to be my friend in the nick of time. I suppose if you're not meant to be a murderer something does always turn up to stop the deed being done. Tanya took away my madness. Would you believe it, I began to pity the old girl; and you can't kill someone you pity.” She reflected on this, and added: “At least, I couldn't. About Cherry. … It pretty well broke her into pieces. You wouldn't have known her. I didn't see her till months after, but she hadn't
begun
to recover. She could only
just
breathe, and every breath hurt. What's that line about drawing breath in this harsh world with pain. … It seemed like that. I didn't know suffering, unhappiness I mean, could be like that. She explained it to me. She said if you're a mother and your child dies, you have to—you go on and on trying to give birth to a dead child. Oh, I shall never have one, thank God! She wasn't Cherry's mother, of course, but I didn't point that out. She did obviously have the flesh and blood feeling so strongly that it being one generation removed wasn't making any difference. It seemed to—even something up that
somebody
should feel like that for Cherry … although, as things turned out, it was all such devilish waste.”

A hard shadow fell across her face. After a moment or two she glanced at me and went on:

“What do you think she said? She said she'd known I'd blame her, and want to. … I said yes, but I didn't feel it any more. And as soon as we'd said that to each other, I stopped hating her for good and all. It
was
a shock! It made me feel quite weak in the stomach. I suppose it was awfully crass of me not to have realised that if you have a—very violent feeling about someone there are times when you might feel its exact opposite. And that's when the harm
is done.” Pacing up and down the red-tiled floor, she drew a deep breath. “You know how I always felt about her. It was war to the knife. She was my enemy. Well then—in a twinkling I had a different sort of surge inside me. I wanted to show her—”

“You didn't hate her?” I suggested, nervous.

“Yes. Do something fatuous, like—oh, I don't know! I couldn't trust myself any more. I thought to myself: this won't do. You've got to know where you are with people; and if you hate them, you can't know. Or—
or
if you love them—in a violent sort of way. It's all the same somehow. Did you know that?”

I said no.

“Well, I do, because—I know. And I know things that make me sure of it.”

“What things?”

She hesitated, then said brusquely:

“We must go to the others.”

Quickly I said:

“When did you start to call her Sibyl?”

“That time. She asked me to. Also she talked to me a bit about my mother—truthfully for once: I mean, as much as one person can see the truth. For the one and only time.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh … not much.” Evasive, she turned away and began to undo her apron. “We were both in the mood when we could say things, I suppose. Sort of—released.” She flung the apron on to the table among the feathers. “Oh … she told me something I asked her. And a bit about my mother's girlhood—how she was brought up, and what it had done to her. It sounded quite convincing. And I told her—but only a very little—about what it was like after she went away. It was all right, because she didn't try to sympathise; and she wasn't out for sympathy herself or—making excuses. It was just
saying.
After that we didn't talk any more. I didn't want to
…
because I was
determined
not to let anything go too far. Perhaps she was too. She knows a lot when she's at her best. When she's not on the prowl, she can be grand. Come on. We'll have to clean up later. God knows how.”

“How do you mean, on the prowl?” I asked, following her out of the kitchen.

With sudden, startling loudness, Maisie said in the
passage: “Plotting to get something she wants. Stalking. In ambush. Then—
pounce!
In with the claws.”

We came into the dining-room. Logs burned in the grate, the table was laid for six, above the glass and silver four white china cherubs held up long newly-lit candles. The connecting door into the drawing-room stood open, and beyond it I saw Jess, Malcolm, and two unknown figures standing by Mrs. Jardine's fire.

“Who is here?” I whispered, touching Maisie's elbow with a delaying hand.

“Gil and Tanya are here, of course. Didn't Malcolm explain? You know who I mean?”

“Yes.”

“They're married. They were married in London this morning. We went up to be witnesses. He's back from France on ten days' leave.”

“I see. … Does Mrs. Jardine know?”

“I don't know what she knows or doesn't know, I'm sure,” said Maisie sharply, stopping to shift the candlesticks a little. “We can ask who we like here. They're
our
friends. Anyway, this is Harry's house, not hers, and Harry'll be delighted.” Then as if in further justification, she added: “Besides, Gil will probably be killed, so what's the odds?
”

We went on into the drawing-room, and, in a dream, I was introduced to a man not very tall, in uniform, with a big head and face, and a lot of rough hair and massive shoulders; and to a young woman in fancy dress.

6

Jess and I were totally unused to anything in the nature of social occasions; but whereas Jess appeared to swim into parties as into her natural element, pleasurably anticipating them beforehand, immediately expanding in unselfconscious ease and gaiety to meet and mingle with them, I disintegrated altogether in the face of any call upon my communal instincts, and was aware only of a whirling, a burning, an alternate dryness and icy clamminess now within me, now about me. Through this combined maze, I beheld the company, my plate and its contents, and all the other objects of the dinner table in a nickering surrealist film sequence.

My reverence for art was intense if incoherent; and here I was, I told myself, for the first time in the presence of a genius. Mrs. Jardine had pre-illumined him with the divine fire. This was enough to make him appear ten times life-size; but, in addition, he was magnified in the candlelight by the effulgence of romance. A genius with his musician-bride; a bride with her bridegroom-genius. They towered and swelled, yet seemed a long way off, portentous as Easter Island effigies discerned through a telescope from the bridge of a storm-tossed vessel.

He did look like an idol. It seemed so then, and later I was sure of it. His eyelids were cut out under his forehead with a striking appearance of plastic symmetry, and the lower part of his face was a massive mask, the lips modelled on it, full, even, with a wide-cut prominent outline: anonymous lips in low relief. His hair sprang up and back from his brow in thick feathery brown wings, and his skin was a uniform pale brown. The eyes themselves were dark, long in shape. They seemed to slip and glance and slide in his head like two fishes flashing and turning their white undersides. I thought him ugly, terrifying. I could not take my eyes off him.

She wore a dress of stiff white silk flaring round the ankles into wavy rows of pleated flouncing, with an overskirt of white gauzy stuff, swept up to pile all its puffed fullness into the back, and caught here and there among its folds with bunches of blue and white buds. When she moved, it was a swan moving, and the sound she made was of stirred rushes. She had dressed her hair high on top of her head, with one or two curls tapering down her neck: it was dark fine hair and it would not stay in place; and this soft untidiness and the thin long neck and immature bony breast and shoulders framed by the low-cut bodice gave her a delicately amateurish, touching appearance.

What did Tanya look like? I never found out. At the time she was a great disappointment, because she did not conform in the least to my tuppence-coloured conception of a lovely bride. I thought her, indeed, a very plain kind of person. But now recalling her, I suspect that she had the equivalent of beauty, something wild, cool, lucent and subtle; like one of those January twilights that contain, for an hour, all the throats and buds of spring. Her face was long, serious, pale, with slow-moving­­­­ grey eyes, slightly prominent, and a forehead whose clear square was underlined by heavy straight black eyebrows. She had a mole on her cheek, and her upper lip slightly overhung the under one. The mouth was sensuous, full: it looked vulnerable; and when she smiled she looked extremely amused and mournful, and she showed a space of gum above her irregular teeth. In her period dress, she looked, I see now, like a minor but important character in a distinguished film or play, a type chosen by a sensitive director with an eye for poetic truth. Because of this there was something not quite right, not quite like life. She was the young schoolmistress; or the niece, the
protégée
in the country house, about to emerge from half light and be loved, about to throw off the shrouding hood of dependence and virginity and walk out acknowledged, radiant, into experience. Only there is something unsensational, irreparable, about to go wrong: it is clear from the casting. She was awkward and graceful; nervous and serene; dull, interesting. She had not a young face, nor a face that one could imagine ageing. She had, I now think, a vocational, a dedicated personality, within whose contradictions she was positive, intact; but all the same she was an orphan of the world, and the unity she expressed would never serve her to find her place—or seek it either.

Gil, Malcolm and Maisie talked and laughed hilariously, and she joined in the laughter in a subdued but wholehearted way, and now and then said something quiet which made them double up with amusement. It all seemed in an idiom to which I had no clue, and the jokes were private ones.

There was champagne, and they kept drinking healths. Jess and I had a glass each and were inhibited from accepting more. We took sips and swallowed wryly, almost choked by the tingling in our throats and noses. After half a glass I felt queer. The room started to whizz round, and once when my intention was to prop my elbow nonchalantly on the table, I failed to do so, and was jerked forward with a startling sense of disturbance in my centre of gravity. My cheeks began to scorch. I heard Malcolm say something about Grannie and Harry, and Maisie cried loudly: