The Exiles Return (11 page)

Valery had taken it all in her stride – the moves, the initial hardships, the readjustments – with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, hardly realising that all her surroundings, both people and places, were to her so interchangeable that they scarcely impinged on the core of her life – the happiness of her marriage. Everything to her was easy because of Peter. His presence, his voice, his touch, were the substance of her existence and even later, when they were already living in Eden Rise and he sometimes had to be away from home for days, he was still there, even in his absence, and he was always and unshakeably hers. Marie-Theres came through those first financially-restricted years as a small child always alone with her mother, in her arms or by her side, almost physically part of her. And to her, when Peter was not at home, Valery talked all day in her native German, while Peter and she spoke mostly Danish to each other; until, imperceptibly, the language of their host country took over.

As soon as they were more settled, Carl and then Anna were born. Marie-Theres was no longer an only child. Valery coped with her babies and with her housekeeping by trial and error and with her healthy, uncomplicated common sense. She managed with washing machines and dishwashers instead of with cooks and housemaids, she learned to drive a car, to shop at the supermarket. She exchanged small talk with the other wives and mothers and was liked by all of them because she was friendly, cheerful and completely unpretentious. Social ambitions in the context of American society were meaningless to her. When Peter occasionally brought home a member of his team, and these men were accompanied by their wives, Valery was equally pleasant to them all.

Peter sometimes marvelled at how unaware she was of anything that could be described as ‘social position’ or ‘status’, and he gave her credit for a broader idealism and liberality of outlook which she did not really quite deserve; for to her, née Princess Altmannsdorf, there did not seem much to choose between anyone she met in America except as measured in terms of money, and that was a scale that had no meaning for her other than that of convenience. She found that when they moved to a ‘better’ district and a more spacious house, which they did as soon as they could manage it financially, and bought a second car so that she could be more independent, then one lost sight of one’s former ‘friends’ and made new ones. It just happened that way. One tended to associate with people who shared the same living standards, lived in the same kind of house, ran the same kind of car. Anything else would have been awkward. As a child and young girl Valery had witnessed various vicissitudes in her family’s fortunes. They had been exceedingly rich, then, when she was quite little, very poor. That was why she had been sent to Denmark. Later, things had recovered, though the great castles and estates had never been regained.

But all these changes had made no difference to the fact that she was a Princess, that she had her sixteen quarterings – sixteen ancestors of noble birth. Social superiors did not exist for her. This certainty was so ingrained in her that she was quite unconscious of it and she would have been astonished if anyone had told her that this was the reason why everybody else, whatever their background, seemed to be on the same level. That was also the reason why she unhesitatingly conformed in outward appearance to the standards of dress, make-up and vocabulary of the women with whom she associated in daily life. She was so sure of herself, so utterly without a doubt as to who she was and always would be, under whatever circumstances, that she was only anxious to conform, to look and seem like everybody else, thus avoiding all questioning and curiosity about herself which she would have felt to be embarrassing and – it must be admitted – impertinent. Even her husband, who admired and loved her ease and affability, her total lack of self-assertiveness, had not penetrated the deepest truth – that this very conduct and behaviour on the part of his wife expressed the most subtle and exquisite form of pride.

Yet Marie-Theres did not see her mother in that light. To her she just seemed smug and self-satisfied and at one with the glossy, enamelled surface of suburban life which she herself found both exhausting and boring: exhausting because she was expected to be always on the go, always doing something, going somewhere, taking part in something else, never at rest, and this put a strain on her vitality which, albeit unconsciously, she needed for her inward growth, her silent struggle to come to terms with herself. And all this activity was so boring, pointless and repetitive, it felt at times to be almost too burdensome to bear. But how to talk to her mother about it? Her mother enjoyed this kind of life, she would not understand. Inarticulate as she was, how could she find words to confide in a mother who would not have the faintest idea of what she would be trying to say? Alas, those early days of intimacy, when Marie-Theres was a baby and Valery had been feeling her way into a new life, had long gone. Then, Valery had done all the talking, communing with herself rather than with the small child who had been but a passively listening companion. Now Valery had made her life and enjoyed it and Marie-Theres was on her own – wondering how to make hers.

Eden Rise, where they lived, was one of the new suburbs carefully planned to suit the lifestyle of people such as themselves. What Valery and Marie-Theres looked out upon from their adjoining bedrooms in the morning meant to the mother achievement and security, to the daughter monotony and oppression. What they saw was a carefully groomed strip of garden consisting of lawn and low shrubs that merged in a curve into other similar bands of grass and shrubs. Cement footpaths and driveways leading to garages formed a repetitive pattern between the road and the fronts of the houses. Across the road a similar fringe of gardens and the same ranch-type houses, brightly painted wood over concrete foundations, each with its wide plate-glass window on the ground floor, exposing the depths of its living space to the light of the skies and the gaze of neighbours and passers-by alike. One end of the road curved downwards to rows of more closely-clustered houses at the foot of the rise, the less expensive ones, of course. The other climbed upward, divided and looped round the summit. There were trees up there, visible over the roof-tops, the gardens were larger, the houses newer and more spacious and more secluded. Some had swimming pools. The Larsens would move up there one day.

Marie-Theres foresaw that her own life would conform to the same pattern. If she married Budd Gresham they would start by living in a small house at the bottom of the hill, and then they would move up – halfway as her parents were living now – and at last, perhaps, to the top.
If
she married Budd Gresham.
If
she married him. Budd was nice, she was very fond of him. But she didn’t want to marry him – though she probably would. What else was there to do? However, he had now left school and gone away to college and Marie-Theres was on her own.

And it was at this point that Valery became aware of her daughter as a problem. Marie-Theres had been lazy and dreamy since she had begun to grow up, although that was nothing remarkable in a fast-growing child. But now she was sullen, listless and, Valery felt, sometimes positively hostile to her. She refused to take an interest in anything. Valery had not noticed it so much while Budd was around. He had always called for her and taken her out to picnics, to dances, to watch a game. Now that he was gone, it appeared that she had no other friends, she belonged to no clubs, took part in no sports, refused the invitations of other boys, and declared all the usual activities of her contemporaries to be boring. After school hours or at weekends she just sat around or lay on her bed with a book or listened to a record picked up at random, while she seemed to be asleep with her eyes open and no one knew what went on in her mind.

Valery was sure that she was not pining for Budd, that she was not in love with him. That she would have understood. Valery knew what love was. What she did not understand, and what irritated her almost beyond endurance, was this indifference, this deadness in a girl so young and so lovely, with every kind of amusement and opportunity within her reach – as she pointed out to her again and again – only to be met with a blank expression and a shrug or sigh. It was becoming a burden on Valery’s own life. It was difficult to go out and play golf or bridge, to go to a club meeting or to a film with a friend, all things she looked forward to, if she knew that Marie-Theres, who ought to be enjoying life as much as she did, or at least to be doing something interesting or useful, was moping alone in her room. Sometimes she tried taking her with her, to the golf club, to a lecture or the cinema, but of course Marie-Theres did not fit in with the people in her own set, who belonged to an older generation, and it soon became clear to her that the presence of a girl tagging along with her mother was both incongruous and a nuisance. Besides, Marie-Theres’s obvious reluctance and bored expression on such occasions was enough to destroy all the pleasure she herself would have experienced.

In fact, Marie-Theres’s silent disapproval – if it was disapproval – was making Valery’s social life impossible. Carl and Anna were no problem. They always had something to do, friends to be with, at home, or at friends’ houses, or at holiday camps. They were children like everyone else’s children. But Marie-Theres? Valery had tried to talk to Peter about her, but here, in her turn, she had met with total incomprehension. What fault could she find in Marie-Theres? She did not get involved in undesirable company, she did not stay out late, her boyfriend was the nicest possible boy, a very promising young man. Well, yes, he was away at college just now, but he would come back in the vacation, they wrote to each other, didn’t they, or rather he wrote to her, and she didn’t pick up with anyone else in his absence. Was she to blame for that? Besides, Valery soon felt that it would be unwise to complain about Marie-Theres to Peter, for he was almost infatuated with his beautiful daughter.

Thus Marie-Theres was the one person who might conceivably come between them, and on no account must Valery allow even a hint of disagreement about their daughter to interfere with her perfect relationship with Peter. He was such a single-minded man, so ‘innocent’ she called it in spite of his cleverness; he was so totally absorbed in his work, and took his domestic life so much for granted, that only a major crisis would justify her in disturbing his peace of mind – not these rather intangible perplexities, which she found difficult to put into words and which she sometimes thought might be all in her imagination. So she dropped the subject almost before she had broached it. Perhaps there was nothing unusual in Marie-Theres’s behaviour, perhaps she was just going through a ‘phase’ in her adolescence and she would grow out of it, and perhaps she, Valery,
was
making a problem out of what was only an inconvenience. But then a crisis arose where she had least expected it and in a shape she had not foreseen: Miss Bates, Marie-Theres’s form mistress, came and spoke to her.

Miss Bates was rather a formidable woman and a highly competent schoolteacher. About the same age as Valery, there could be no greater contrast than between the two women. She was everything that Valery was not: professional where Valery was amateur, disciplined where Valery was easygoing, with a sense of her own superiority based consciously on education and achievement, while Valery’s was unconscious and inbred. Valery admired her enormously for being so essentially American and ‘modern’, while Miss Bates thought herself entitled to look down a little on Mrs Larsen who, she knew, was a ‘princess’ and must therefore be rather degenerate and lacking in moral fibre. The contrast did not make communication between the two women easy, and Valery had often reproached herself for not taking sufficient interest in Marie-Theres’s schoolwork and not keeping in closer touch with her teacher. But now she felt that the one person she could and should speak to about her daughter was Miss Bates.

However, she forestalled her. This is where Valery took up the tale in a long rambling letter to her sister, the letter which the Countess Lensveldt had before her as she was writing her reply. Miss Bates, it seems, had come to see Valery to talk about Marie-Theres. She had expected to hear complaints about the girl’s schoolwork and she thought they would probably be quite justified. But Miss Bates had taken quite a different line. She had started by saying that she had taken a fancy to Theresa (as she called her), that Theresa had attracted her special attention because – well, because of her looks. In a room full of growing girls, dark or fair, fat or angular, round-faced or freckled, all nice enough but none particularly distinguished, Theresa stood out like a work of art. She seemed to belong to a different race.

And the more closely Miss Bates observed her, the more set apart she appeared in more ways than just in looks. She did not mix with the others, she did not conform, and by the studied politeness in her manners she seemed to surround herself with a kind of vacuum which she allowed no one to penetrate. All, of course, except young Gresham, but there again their relationship had been different from a normal boy-and-girl friendship. Gresham had seemed to worship her in a romantic, subservient sort of way, hardly daring to touch her. Miss Bates had said she thought he had never even given her a kiss and this she found disconcerting. There was something wrong there. It also impinged on the girl’s work, which was not as good as it ought to be, for Theresa was far from stupid. Well, wrote Valery, now came the bombshell. Marie-Theres was suffering from a ‘blockage’ – Miss Bates’s expression – and she should see a psychiatrist: Miss Bates was prepared to recommend one who would go into Marie-Theres’s difficulties and help her to become ‘normal’. Valery said that she had never been so taken aback in her life. Although she had heard plenty of talk about psychiatrists since she had been in America, it had never crossed her mind that anyone from her own family might have anything to do with one. Nobody amongst
their
relations had been mad.