The Drowning People (12 page)

“Do you see what I’m talking about now?” Ella asked quietly.

I felt the beginnings of understanding stir within me, but they were nebulous and incomplete. I looked at the woman by my side, the living breathing woman whose hand held mine; and I looked at her again, this time immobile, a thing of canvas and oils in a heavy frame. I started to speak, then stopped. “Explain to me,” I said finally. And quietly Ella led me out of the room and into the long gallery which houses the Seton china. I saw that several corridors opened off it, and that the opening of each was protected by a red silk rope. A guard sat sleepily on a high-backed chair at the far end of the corridor. Looking at him sharply to make sure that he did not see, Ella stepped over the first of the ropes and motioned for me to follow.

“Quickly,” she hissed. And quickly, almost running, I followed her down the corridor, through a door and up the spiral staircase behind it. Up and up we climbed, the darkness relieved on each complete revolution by a small arrow slit of window, through which we could see the blue sea, farther and farther away as we circled upwards. We passed first one then two doors set into the stone. Outside the third we stopped. “I’m just hoping this is open,” said Ella as she tried its wrought-iron handle. “Come on James, push.” So I pushed, and forced the unlocked door open on rusty hinges. We were in a small, oddly shaped sitting room tucked between the staircase and the tower wall. It was obviously unused; dust sheets covered the furniture and I saw, as Ella removed one of them, that there was a large dolls’ house in one corner. “Kinda spooky, don’t you think?” she whispered delightedly as she removed another sheet to reveal a moth-eaten sofa.

“Very,” I said.

“It was my favorite room as a child. My father used to bring me to stay here sometimes, you know. And I colonized this room for myself. There’re so many here it was never missed.” She smiled wistfully at the dolls’ house. “My mother gave me that,” she said. Then quickly, before I could say anything, she went on, “You know you’re the only person, besides my father, whom I’ve ever shown this room to? At least while it’s been mine.”

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “It’s lovely.”

“Isn’t it?” Ella looked slowly about her. “But I wonder why they’ve left it just as I did.”

“I don’t suppose they need the space. Why should they bother to clear it?”

“You’re probably right. Why bother? There’re enough rooms to dust as it is.”

“I’m sure.”

“Something like three hundred, as a matter of fact.”

“No.” But I could well believe it.

“It’s true.” Settling herself on a window ledge she motioned me towards the dusty sofa.

“What did you think of that painting?” she began, more serious now.

“Artistically or …” I hesitated. “Or in the context of what you were saying last night?”

“Both,” she replied.

“Well I thought it was beautiful, as a painting.”

“It’s by Sargent, you know.”

I nodded. “Sarah told me about it.”

“She
told you? What on earth did
she
tell you for?” Ella’s eyes were bright with instant fury.

“No idea. She didn’t tell me much, anyway.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing really. Not much more than that Sargent had painted your grandmother.”

“It was a wedding present from my grandfather.”

“I see. I presume, though, that you didn’t bring me to see it for its artistic merit alone.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Well then …”

Ella got up and walked over to another of the low windows by which the room was lit. Sitting on its ledge, her knees pulled up under her chin, she began to speak. I can see her there, framed by the blue of the sea far below her, I can hear her carefully chosen words; I can feel the tension between us, a tension of confidence dared and understanding attempted. I remember the intimacy of that cold afternoon, the way it became almost tangible in that small, strange, awkwardly shaped room. It both tempted and scared me; for much as I wanted it to grow, I felt its power even then.

“I talked to you last night about an id, about my id,” began Ella.

I nodded.

“Well I’ve been trying to answer for myself the question of how it began, of what it grew from. Do you understand?”

I nodded again.

“And I think that the answer is in that picture.”

“In what way?”

“In lots of ways.” She paused, thinking. “That picture is about family,” she said at last, “about my family. It’s about unhappiness and brilliance and madness and … a million things.” In a few words she told me the story of Blanche’s life and death, which I had already heard from Sarah. “When I was six and Sarah was seven,” Ella continued, “my mother and both Sarah’s parents died together in a car crash.”

“How awful. I’m sorry.” Even as I spoke, the words seemed inadequate.

“It was awful.” Ella looked at me; for a long moment neither of us moved.

“And how terrible for Sarah, too,” I said at last. “Losing both her parents when she was … how old did you say?”

“Seven.”

I paused, a faint realization crystallizing slowly in my mind. “This is to do with Sarah, isn’t it?” I hazarded, feeling that I was approaching some sort of truth.

“Yes, James. My life to date has been to do with Sarah.”

“Go on.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t jump around like this. First told you about my grandmother; now I’m telling you about me and Sarah. It might help if I told you about the generation that went between us.”

“All right.”

“Well, Blanche had four children: Cyril, the eldest, who now lives here with his wife; Alexander, my father; Anna, my father’s twin; and Cynthia, Sarah’s mother. Cyril was ten years old when his mother died; my father and Anna were eight; Cynthia was six. You can imagine what it must have been like for them.” She looked out to sea. “They each reacted in their different ways, but it scarred them all. Cyril took refuge in eccentricity; my father stopped talking much about how he really felt; so did Cynthia. Anna, on the other hand, was like Blanche: brilliant, very brilliant, but not stable. She became obsessed by her mother’s death.” Ella took a cigarette from a packet in her pocket and lit it. “She devoted her life to being as much like her mother as she could be,” she said, exhaling. “From the age of eight onwards she was devoted to Blanche’s memory, but not in a healthy way; not in a normal way. She wore her mother’s dresses; she did her hair in the same way as her mother had done hers; and she hated her father as much as it is possible for one person to hate another.” She paused. “There’s quite a history of insanity in our family, you see,” she said slowly, drawing deeply on her cigarette. “This house has plenty of dark secrets.”

I sat quietly, waiting for her to continue.

“Anna killed herself eventually, you know. Not here. At Oxford. She also jumped out of a window. Just like her mother. They buried her at Seton, of course, and the car crash in which my mother and Sarah’s parents were killed happened as they were driving back from her funeral.”

“Oh my God.”

“So, you see, my father lost his twin and his wife within a week of each other. That was why he took me away to America. I’m afraid I was a bit flippant about it all on the train. I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you everything then. Now I see it’s all spilling out.” She looked at me and I smiled. “Anyway, he hates this place. I think he feels Seton is somehow to blame for what happened to his family. Or perhaps it’s just too full of memories. I don’t know. What I do know is that he’s terrified of me turning out like Anna or his mother. That’s why he took me to America; first to California and then, when he met Pamela, to Boston. You couldn’t get farther from Seton than San Francisco, I assure you. He tried to forget he ever knew this place. And although he had to visit it every so often, he kept his visits to a minimum.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Can you? I’m glad. Because it’s now that my own story starts.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “You can see the tremendous influence Blanche had over her whole family, particularly in death. Though no one said it—the Harcourts don’t talk, you know—everyone thought about insanity and mental illness. They brooded on violent death. So many of them had died so horribly, you see: their mother; two sisters; my mother; Sarah’s father. And Sarah and I, the only children in the family, could feel that pressure as we grew up: we knew that people worried about us, that they feared for us. And we knew why, too; we knew that our grandmother and our aunt had both killed themselves. It’s not a knowledge that’s easy to deal with when you’re young.” She paused, considering something. “Of course it might have brought us together, I suppose, if we had seen more of each other at that crucial time. And if we hadn’t both grown up looking so like our grandmother. As it was the way we looked was a constant reminder of how we might turn out. And Sarah felt it even more than I; she saw that picture downstairs every day of her life.”

“You mean she
lived
here?”

“Yes. Uncle Cyril and Aunt Elizabeth took her in after her parents died. They didn’t have children of their own, you see.”

“And Sarah grew up here…”

“Yes.”

“Poor girl.”

“Yes. And I grew up in America, away from all this. But I knew of it, of course. I came to Seton to visit; I saw that painting; I watched myself turn into its image.”

“And?”

“And I watched Sarah, too. She watched me.”

“And you saw the same person.”

“Precisely.”

“I think I’m beginning to see.”

“We felt like two halves of one whole, so to speak, but it didn’t make for closeness. We weren’t like twins. We each needed, I think, to conquer the other before we could feel like a complete person. Do you understand that? The feeling that, far away, another possible version of you is living, thinking, growing. If we’d never seen much of each other it might have been all right. But when I was eighteen Daddy married Pamela, who couldn’t resist the temptations of London for long, especially with a name like Harcourt to open doors for her. So we came back.”

“And you and Sarah were thrown together again. The two halves were reunited.”

“That was how it felt, sometimes. And such different halves we were.”

“Well, you had had such different lives.”

“Of course. She had lived here, on this island, steeped in tradition, in the cult of our family.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. You’ve no idea how the Harcourts are treated here. It’s positively feudal, a little kingdom cut off from the world. A society of obligation and duty and ritual and … all the things that I was free from in America. Away from it I could be myself. Growing up within it, Sarah could only be one person: the future chatelaine, the keeper-in-waiting of the castle. And that’s who she became.”

I nodded. Ella lit another cigarette.

“The tragedy, though,” she went on, “is that Sarah never will have Seton. When Cyril dies, if he has no children, which seems increasingly likely, it will be my father’s. And then it will be mine. It was given to a woman, you see; an Act of Parliament was passed to make sure that it could be inherited by one too. Oh there are plenty of provisions, of course: no Catholic can inherit, no divorcée, no convicted criminal. That last clause was added by the Victorians, I think. Typical. But since I am neither Catholic nor divorced nor a felon, in the course of time it will all be mine.”

“Which explains Sarah’s…”

“Hatred. Hatred of me,” Ella finished.

“I see.”

“And it’s worse because she loves this place, she understands it in a way I never could or will. I’ll never be anything more than a tourist here. With my accent and my ideas, how could I ever be anything else?”

“So far I follow you.” I was quiet for a moment, trying to straighten things in my mind. “But what did you mean yesterday when you talked about a pattern of behavior you couldn’t change? You likened it to an addiction, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Who were you talking about?” I went on. “What did you mean?”

“I was talking about me and Sarah, James. You’ve no idea of the extent to which each of our lives is dictated by the other. No idea. I know that Seton will be mine one day. And I know that I’m not worthy of it. Have you any idea what that feels like?” Seeing me about to reply, she went on quickly, opening the window behind her and letting in a gust of sharp, cold air. “You couldn’t and I’m glad you couldn’t. My family has lived here for more than three hundred years. Have you any idea how long that is, how weighty such a history must be? Can you imagine how much responsibility it carries with it?”

I shook my head,

“And to know that you’re not equal to it but that someone else is, that you haven’t had the training required but that someone else has. I sometimes think it would be much better for us both if Sarah and I just swapped places. If only I could get rid of my accent and she could acquire it, she could have my name and I hers. Then I could think as I liked, do what I pleased with my life, have the freedom I so badly want and which Sarah’s got. And Sarah could fulfill her destiny.” She ran a distracted hand through her hair. “But the roles are switched, you see. Fate has tricked us. She can never have what I have. And I’m left striving to acquire what she has: that rigid poise, that self-control, that certainty of the world and her place in it. It’s so alien to my nature but I want it so badly. I want to prove to her that I deserve her blessed Seton, that I will take care of it. I want to acquit myself honorably, for heaven’s sake.”

She paused.

“Can’t you understand that?”

“I do understand it, Ella,” I said. “I understand it completely.”

“Then tell me why I might have married Charlie,” she said sharply, quickly. And I understood the importance of the test.

“You got engaged to Charles,” I said slowly, thinking carefully, choosing my words with caution, “because he is precisely the sort of man Sarah might have married. Eton, Oxford, just charming enough without being too clever. He would have been the perfect partner for the Countess of Seton. I presume you get the title with the house?”