The Honeymoon (17 page)

That night, encountering him in the hall, she stopped him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You were in a difficult position. I shouldn’t have walked out on you like that.”

“You’re forgiven,” he said wearily. “But I’m miserable with all this turmoil, and with the business.”

She felt sorry for him, and put her hand on his shoulder to comfort him.

He leaned forward with a kiss. He came to her room and she let him make love to her again. He was tender, though again hurried. After he finished, he pulled away, lying on his back, his arm over his eyes, distracted, put out.

“Is something the matter?” she asked, keeping her voice cool and neutral, though she’d just given in to him again. Instead of answering, he leaned over, kissed her on the lips, and departed. Had she not been enough for him?

She had to earn some money. She’d had the idea of writing another essay for the
Westminster Review
, on W. R. Greg’s
Creed of Christendom
. Greg was a Manchester cotton manufacturer, another of David Friedrich Strauss’s increasing number of disciples, a critic of the established church who admitted nonetheless that he found solace in prayer. She wrote up the review.
“Among these pioneers of the New Reformation, Mr. Greg is likely to be one of the most effective. Without any pretension to striking originality or extensive learning, his work perhaps all the more exhibits that sound, practical judgement which discerns at once the hinge of a question.”
The editor of the
Westminster
was then a man called William Hickson, and Chapman contacted him on her behalf, but Hickson didn’t want the piece.

She was in despair. She couldn’t earn a living in London.

He continued coming to her room, jamming the chair under the doorknob. “I need you so,” he’d exclaim, seizing her with a ragged breath. Meanwhile, antagonism swirled all around them, Mrs. Chapman jealous of Miss Tilley and both Mrs. Chapman and Miss Tilley jealous of her. But the more indifferent she tried to pretend she was to his
lovemaking, the greater pleasure it was — as if the mask of indifference satisfied her need for self-punishment, her guilt at once more surrendering to a man who belonged to someone else, who couldn’t love her, who could only hurt her. It gave her permission to allow it — and to enjoy it.

But she couldn’t stop herself from giving in to him, each time seeking to fill an unappeasable need, it seemed, for tenderness and devotion.
“Of the most affectionate disposition,”
Charles Bray had written of her.
“Always requiring someone to lean on.”
Every time hoping for more than Chapman could give. And at the end of each encounter, she rested, disappointed. And he was always so grateful.

Once more she suggested to him, “I really should go back to Coventry. I’m afraid I can’t earn a living here.” She couldn’t bear to live in a household where she was so disliked.

“I need you here,” he cried, to her relief. “Perhaps you could write an essay on Martineau and Atkinson for Empson at the
Edinburgh Review
. Let me speak to him.” Harriet Martineau had had an ovarian cyst and believed her friend, a man called Henry George Atkinson, had cured her through mesmerism. Chapman was publishing a book of their letters about it and he wanted to publicize the book.

“But if Empson knows my essay’s written by a woman —?” Marian pointed out. “He’ll never give it to me to do.”

“We won’t tell him, that’s all.”

Empson didn’t want the article either. He said the subject didn’t interest him.

The hopelessness dragged at her. Every step she took was heavy. Once again, she was a failure, trapped by her unmet need to be loved. It was the need of a wounded child,
she thought, not that of a woman in the full bloom of adulthood, a woman of talent and intellect.

That afternoon, in her room, she heard the sounds of shouting and crying coming through the floorboards. Miss Tilley, Mrs. Chapman, and Chapman were yelling back and forth at one another. She went out onto the landing. “I saw you holding her hand!” Miss Tilley shouted. Mrs. Chapman threatened, “If you ever go to her room again …”

She didn’t hear the rest. After forty-five minutes, he climbed the stairs to her room, wiping his brow with his handkerchief.

“I must leave,” she said, yet again. She waited for him to beg her to stay.

But this time he didn’t. He sighed. “I suppose it’s for the better. Susanna’s ruining my life. Miss Tilley is mad with jealousy. I don’t know how I’ll manage without you.”

On Monday morning he escorted her to Euston station. As they waited for the train, she couldn’t help herself. “John, do you have — any feelings for me at all?”

He looked down at her, grimacing. “Please don’t cry,” he begged. “I love you, and Susanna and Elisabeth too, only — I love you all in different ways.”

And then the train came and he kissed her goodbye.

Once again, she returned to Coventry ashamed and humiliated. Charles and Cara didn’t ask questions; Cara held her silently in a welcoming embrace. Thank goodness the house was big enough to contain them all, and she could stay out of their way and the Brays could afford to feed her.

Within a few days, a letter came from Chapman saying 142 Strand was unspeakably lonely without her, and he missed her terribly. All through the spring, he wrote saying he couldn’t manage the business himself and he needed an assistant.

Then he wrote to say he’d decided to expand his publishing empire and buy the
Westminster Review
. He had to find backers, write up a prospectus. How he wished she were there to help him. Would she mind if he came up to Coventry to discuss it with her? He badly needed her advice.

The night before he was to arrive, she went out into the garden to collect herself. She sat on the swing in the soft, dark air. She mustn’t expect him to love her, she must somehow learn to survive. There must be some part of her that was worthwhile without the love of a man, some essence within her that wasn’t dependent on a man’s love, that would survive if she were alone. But perhaps he was coming to Coventry to beg her to return to the Strand? To tell her he didn’t care any longer about Susanna Chapman’s fits of temper and Elisabeth Tilley’s histrionics? That he needed her too much to let her go?

He arrived on the noon train and there he stood in the doorway at Rosehill, tall and lanky, his dark, lustrous eyes looking past Charles and Cara with an intense gaze to where she stood behind them, trying to be invisible.

At supper he talked about his plans to buy the
Westminster
, to make it again an organ for the most radical thinking of the time. He hoped Charles would be an investor.

Afterward he told Marian, “I’ve written up a draft of my prospectus. I have such difficulty putting my thoughts into words. Do you think you could look at it?”

She went over it. He was a terrible writer, his thoughts were unfinished, there were dashes everywhere, triads and dyads of adjectives and verbs, all in one watery volume. She began laboriously to try to render his words into coherent sentences.

The next morning, he asked her to go with him to Leamington, to see Kenilworth Castle.

It was a lambent spring day. They sat on the grass. Before them was the great sweep of green leading up to the soaring ruins of the castle, the gift of Queen Elizabeth to her favorite, Dudley, the skeletons of its Tudor windows outlined starkly against the bright blue sky.

“They say the queen really loved Dudley,” she remarked.

He chewed on a blade of grass, his long legs stretched out before him.

“He entertained her here for weeks on end,” she went on, “with parties and masques. They say he had his wife, Amy Robsart, murdered, to keep the queen’s love.”

“Ah, love,” he said, exhaling into the spring air. “Ah, beauty!…”

“The queen wasn’t beautiful,” she went on. “She had smallpox. They say she had so many teeth pulled that she put rags in her cheeks to fill them out. But they say that she did have pretty hands.” Here she looked down at her own hands, slender and delicate, her only good feature. “Yet he wanted to marry her. I suppose for the power.”

He lay back on the grass, resting his head on his arms. “Female beauty is such a mystery. It’s witchery.”

“Witchery?”

“I’m thinking of my own weakness, the way I’m so swayed by it.”

She knew what he was saying. He was sexually beholden to Elisabeth Tilley. And Mrs. Chapman overlooked it because she knew that the governess fulfilled his needs, and otherwise he’d leave her. Susanna could tolerate Miss Tilley because she had the governess in her power, she was her employer and she couldn’t manage the household by herself. But Marian was too much to bear. She was a different kind of threat. With her, he had a meeting of the minds as well, and he needed her if his firm was to survive.

But, why, why couldn’t he be “entranced” by her too? Why hadn’t nature made her attractive too?

She felt a burning behind her eyes. She couldn’t help it, she began to cry. He was gazing at the sky, but he heard her sniffle. “Marian, what’s the matter?”

Embarrassed to answer, she buried her face in her hands.

“You mustn’t,” he said. “This is terrible. Please …”

She shook her head, her sobs overtaking her.

“Tell me,” he urged.

“I wish I were beautiful,” she cried.

“No!” he said. “It’s not that. We just can’t go on. There’s war in the house. I can’t afford to lose Elisabeth. And Susanna won’t give me any peace. It can’t be like this between us anymore.”

He reached into his breast pocket, found his handkerchief, and dabbed at her cheeks. She could hardly stand his touch, it only reminded her of what it was like to be held by him, the comfort of his arms.

Then he said brightly, “If I buy the
Westminster
, perhaps you could be the editor.”

“The editor? Why not you?”

“Because you’re a far better editor than I am. And I’ll still have to run the publishing side of the firm. I couldn’t pay you right away. But I could give you free room and board at 142.”

He went on. “You could also write for the magazine. I could pay you a contributor’s fee. You could do a regular column on foreign literature.”

For a moment, a surge of happiness blotted out her misery. “I’d like that, very much. But … will Miss Tilley and Mrs. Chapman ever allow it?”

“I’ll explain to them I need you for the firm, but only on the most proper terms, of course. They’ll have nothing to be concerned about anymore, the firm is the most important thing.”

“I see,” she said. But what did he mean, “the most proper terms”? That he was willing to give up their intimacy so she could do his work for him?

“I’ll tell them we’ve taken a solemn vow,” he said.

At this she stood up and began walking away from him, her mouth tight, furious.

He caught up with her. “Will you do it, Marian? Then I can tell them? Then you can come back to London,” he said, knowing that this, at the very least, was what she longed for.

Perhaps the scar from this wound would be a barrier defending her from doing the same thing again, from being wounded by someone else. She nodded. She would come.