The French Lieutenant's Woman (9 page)

She did not create in
her voice, like so many worthy priests and dignitaries asked to read
the lesson, an unconscious alienation effect of the Brechtian kind
("This is your mayor reading a passage from the Bible") but
the very contrary: she spoke directly of the suffering of Christ, of
a man born in Nazareth, as if there was no time in history, almost,
at times, when the light in the room was dark, and she seemed to
forget Mrs. Poulteney's presence, as if she saw Christ on the Cross
before her. One day she came to the passage Lama, lama, sabachthane
me; and as she read the words she faltered and was silent. Mrs.
Poulteney turned to look at
her,
and realized Sarah's face was streaming with tears. That moment
redeemed an infinity of later difficulties; and perhaps, since the
old lady rose and touched the girl's drooping shoulder, will one day
redeem Mrs. Poulteney's now well-grilled soul.

I risk making Sarah
sound like a bigot. But she had no theology; as she saw through
people, she saw through the follies, the vulgar stained glass, the
narrow literalness of the Victorian church. She saw that there was
suffering; and she prayed that it would end. I cannot say what she
might have been in our age; in a much earlier one I believe she would
have been either a saint or an emperor's mistress. Not because of
religiosity on the one hand, or sexuality on the other, but because
of that fused rare power that was her
essence--understanding
and emotion.

There were other items:
an ability--formidable in itself and almost unique--not often to get
on Mrs. Poulteney's nerves, a quiet assumption of various domestic
responsibilities that did not encroach, a skill with her needle.

On Mrs. Poulteney's
birthday Sarah presented her with an antimacassar--not that any chair
Mrs. Poulteney sat in needed such protection, but by that time all
chairs without such an adjunct seemed somehow naked--exquisitely
embroidered with a border of ferns and lilies-of-the-valley. It
pleased Mrs. Poulteney highly; and it slyly and permanently--perhaps
after all Sarah really was something of a skilled cardinal-- reminded
the ogress, each time she took her throne, of her protegee's
forgivable side. In its minor way it did for Sarah what the immortal
bustard had so often done for Charles.

Finally--and this had
been the crudest ordeal for the victim--Sarah had passed the tract
test. Like many insulated Victorian dowagers, Mrs. Poulteney placed
great reliance on the power of the tract. Never mind that not one in
ten of the recipients could read them--indeed, quite a number could
not read anything--never mind that not one in ten of those who could
and did read them understood what the reverend writers were on about
... but each time Sarah departed with a batch to deliver Mrs.
Poulteney saw an equivalent number of saved souls chalked up to her
account in heaven; and she also saw the French Lieutenant's Woman
doing public penance, an added sweet. So did the rest of Lyme, or
poorer Lyme; and were kinder than Mrs. Poulteney may have realized.

Sarah evolved a little
formula: "From Mrs. Poulteney. Pray read and take to your
heart." At the same time she looked the cottager in the eyes.
Those who had knowing smiles soon lost them; and the loquacious found
their words die in their mouths. I think they learned rather more
from those eyes than from the close-typed pamphlets thrust into their
hands.

But we must now pass to
the debit side of the relationship. First and foremost would
undoubtedly have been: "She goes out alone." The
arrangement had initially been that Miss Sarah should have one
afternoon a week free, which was considered by Mrs. Poulteney a more
than generous acknowledgment of her superior status vis-a-vis the
maids' and only then condoned by the need to disseminate tracts; but
the vicar had advised it. All seemed well for two months. Then one
morning Miss Sarah did not appear at the Marlborough House matins;
and when the maid was sent to look for her, it was discovered that
she had not risen. Mrs. Poulteney went to see her. Again Sarah was in
tears, but on this occasion Mrs. Poulteney felt only irritation.
However, she sent for the doctor. He remained closeted with Sarah a
long time. When he came down to the impatient Mrs. Poulteney, he gave
her a brief lecture on melancholia--he was an advanced man for his
time and place--and ordered her to allow her sinner more fresh air
and freedom.

"
If
you insist on the most urgent necessity for it."

"
My
dear madam, I do. And most emphatically. I will not be responsible
otherwise."

"
It
is very inconvenient." But the doctor was brutally silent. "I
will dispense with her for two afternoons."

Unlike the vicar, Doctor
Grogan was not financially very dependent on Mrs. Poulteney; to be
frank, there was not a death certificate in Lyme he would have less
sadly signed than hers. But he contained his bile by reminding her
that she slept every afternoon; and on his own strict orders. Thus it
was that Sarah achieved a daily demi-liberty.

The next debit item was
this: "May not always be present with visitors." Here Mrs.
Poulteney found herself in a really intolerable dilemma. She most
certainly wanted her charity to be seen, which meant that Sarah had
to be seen. But that face had the most harmful effect on company. Its
sadness reproached; its very rare interventions in conversation--
invariably prompted by some previous question that had to be answered
(the more intelligent frequent visitors soon learned to make their
polite turns towards the companion-secretary clearly rhetorical in
nature and intent)--had a disquietingly decisive character about
them, not through any desire on Sarah's part to kill the subject but
simply because of the innocent imposition of simplicity or common
sense on some matter that thrived on the opposite qualities. To Mrs.
Poulteney she seemed in this context only too much like one of the
figures on a gibbet she dimly remembered from her youth.

Once again Sarah showed
her diplomacy. With certain old-established visitors, she remained;
with others she either withdrew in the first few minutes or
discreetly left when they were announced and before they were ushered
in. This latter reason was why Ernestina had never met her at
Marlborough House. It at least allowed Mrs. Poulteney to expatiate on
the cross she had to carry, though the cross's withdrawal or absence
implied a certain failure in her skill in carrying it, which was most
tiresome. Yet Sarah herself could hardly be faulted.

But I have left the
worst matter to the end. It was this: "Still shows signs of
attachment to her seducer." Mrs. Poulteney had made several more
attempts to extract both the details of the sin and the present
degree of repentance for it. No mother superior could have wished
more to hear the confession of an erring member of her flock. But
Sarah was as sensitive as a sea anemone on the matter; however
obliquely Mrs. Poulteney approached the subject, the sinner guessed
what was coming; and her answers first interrogation.

Now Mrs. Poulteney
seldom went out, and never on foot, and in her barouche only to the
houses of her equals, so that she had to rely on other eyes for news
of Sarah's activities outside her house. Fortunately for her such a
pair of eyes existed; even better, the mind behind those eyes was
directed by malice and resentment, and was therefore happy to bring
frequent reports to the thwarted mistress. This spy, of course, was
none other than Mrs. Fairley. Though she had found no pleasure in
reading, it offended her that she had been demoted; and although Miss
Sarah was scrupulously polite to her and took care not to seem to be
usurping the housekeeper's functions, there was inevitably some
conflict. It did not please Mrs. Fairley that she had a little less
work, since that meant also a little less influence. Sarah's saving
of Millie--and other more discreet interventions--made her popular
and respected downstairs; and perhaps Mrs. Fairley's deepest rage was
that she could not speak ill of the secretary-companion to her
underlings. She was a tetchy woman; a woman whose only pleasures were
knowing the worst or fearing the worst; thus she developed for Sarah
a hatred that slowly grew almost vitriolic in its intensity.

She was too shrewd a
weasel not to hide this from Mrs. Poulteney. Indeed she made a
pretense of being very sorry for "poor Miss Woodruff" and
her reports were plentifully seasoned with "I fear" and "I
am afraid." But she had excellent opportunities to do her
spying, for not only was she frequently in the town herself in
connection with her duties, but she had also a wide network of
relations and acquaintances at her command. To these latter she
hinted that Mrs. Poulteney was concerned--of course for the best and
most Christian of reasons--to be informed of Miss Woodruff's behavior
outside the tall stone walls of the gardens of Marlborough House. The
result, Lyme Regis being then as now as riddled with gossip as a drum
of Blue Vinny with maggots, was that Sarah's every movement and
expression-- darkly exaggerated and abundantly glossed--in her free
hours was soon known to Mrs. Fairley.

The pattern of her
exterior movements--when she was spared the tracts--was very simple;
she always went for the same afternoon walk, down steep Pound Street
into steep Broad Street and thence to the Cobb Gate, which is a
square terrace overlooking the sea and has nothing to do with the
Cobb. There she would stand at the wall and look out to sea, but
generally not for long--no longer than the careful appraisal a ship's
captain gives when he comes out on the bridge--before turning either
down Cockmoil or going in the other direction, westwards, along the
half-mile path that runs round a gentle bay to the Cobb proper. If
she went down Cockmoil she would most often turn into the parish
church, and pray for a few minutes (a fact that Mrs. Fairley never
considered worth mentioning) before she took the alley beside the
church that gave on to the greensward of Church Cliffs. The turf
there climbed towards the broken walls of Black Ven. Up this
grassland she might be seen walking, with frequent turns towards the
sea, to where the path joined the old road to Charmouth, now long
eroded into the Ven, whence she would return to Lyme. This walk she
would do when the Cobb seemed crowded; but when weather or
circumstance made it deserted, she would more often turn that way and
end by standing where Charles had first seen her; there, it was
supposed, she felt herself nearest to France.

All this, suitably
distorted and draped in black, came back to Mrs. Poulteney. But she
was then in the first possessive pleasure of her new toy, and as
sympathetically disposed as it was in her sour and suspicious old
nature to be. She did not, however, hesitate to take the toy to task.

"
I
am told, Miss Woodruff, that you are always to be seen in the same
places when you go out." Sarah looked down before the accusing
eyes. "You look to sea." Still Sarah was silent. "I am
satisfied that you are in a state of repentance. Indeed I cannot
believe that you should be anything else in your present
circumstances."

Sarah took her cue. "I
am grateful to you, ma'm."

"
I
am not concerned with your gratitude to me. There is One Above who
has a prior claim."

The girl murmured, "How
should I not know it?"

"
To
the ignorant it may seem that you are persevering in your sin."

"
If
they know my story, ma'm, they cannot think that."

"
But
they do think that. I am told they say you are looking for Satan's
sails."

Sarah rose then and went
to the window. It was early summer, and scent of syringa and lilac
mingled with the blackbirds' songs. She gazed for a moment out over
that sea she was asked to deny herself, then turned back to the old
lady, who sat as implacably in her armchair as the Queen on her
throne.

"
Do
you wish me to leave, ma'm?"

Mrs. Poulteney was
inwardly shocked. Once again Sarah's simplicity took all the wind
from her swelling spite. The voice, the other charms, to which she
had become so addicted! Far worse, she might throw away the interest
accruing to her on those heavenly ledgers. She moderated her tone.

"
I
wish you to show that this ... person is expunged from your heart. I
know that he is. But you must show it."

"
How
am I to show it?"

"
By
walking elsewhere. By not exhibiting your shame. If for no other
reason, because I request it."

Sarah stood with bowed
head, and there was a silence. But then she looked Mrs. Poulteney in
the eyes and for the first time since her arrival, she gave the
faintest smile.

"
I
will do as you wish, ma'm."

It was, in chess terms,
a shrewd sacrifice, since Mrs. Poulteney graciously went on to say
that she did not want to deny her completely the benefits of the sea
air and that she might on occasion walk by the sea; but not always by
the sea--"and pray do not stand and stare so." It was, in
short, a bargain struck between two obsessions. Sarah's offer to
leave had let both women see the truth, in their different ways.
Sarah kept her side of the bargain, or at least that part of it that
concerned the itinerary of her walks. She now went very rarely to the
Cobb, though when she did, she still sometimes allowed herself to
stand and stare, as on the day we have described. After all, the
countryside around Lyme abounds in walks; and few of them do not give
a view of the sea. If that had been all Sarah craved she had but to
walk over the lawns of Marlborough House.