The Honeymoon (38 page)

The next day she told Charley, “Dear boy, really, there’s no need for you to come so much.” He had been coming nearly every day since November when George died. “Gertrude and the girls need you,” she said. “Everything’s in order now, everything’s better with the spring. I can manage. Johnnie’s got all the business things under control.”

She thought Charley looked relieved. “I’m so grateful to Johnnie,” he said. “I know the Pater would be too.”

At last she visited his grave. The head gardener at Highgate led her along the gravel path to Number 84 and his headstone embedded in the bare earth.
George Henry Lewes, Born 18th April, 1817, Died 30th November, 1878
, the letters and numbers still sharp in the granite. The soil around it was packed, brown, dry, and sterile, crabgrass beginning to grow up.

She stood in the shade under the trees alongside the gardener in his cap. He leaned on his shovel and contemplated the grave with her, a wizened, bent-over old man, with dirt-stained hands and cracked nails. The Spirit of Dryness and Death, she thought, yet genial in his kingdom, at ease, not afraid of the dead bodies in their graves.

As they stood there, the birds chirped in the trees and bushes nearby, a stray cat sunned itself on a tombstone. Around them, the hushed voices of mourners and tourists could be heard, as if this were but a pleasant garden.

“It’s so bare,” she said. “I’d like to plant some ivy. What else, do you think?”

“Maybe jasmine?” the gardener said. “Blooms in the winter, nice little yeller flowers. They’ve got a nice scent, very delicate-like.”

“Yes. That would be good. When everything else is gray and desolate.”

He was beginning to live now in her mind as a shadow, in a one-dimensional plane. Sometimes she could summon the sound of his voice, his laughter, his exclamations — “Oh, bollocks!” and “Polly, where are you?” — the note rising at the end in his jovial way, promising relief from the hard work of the day. “Tell me where you are and I will tell you what I have in store for us today to cheer you up and make you laugh!” That voice would always be in her mind, wouldn’t it? A form of aliveness. But the image was fading now.

In late spring, Sir James said that she was strong enough to go down to Witley for the summer. “You’re fit as a fiddle, my lady,” he said.

“But the little pain?” she asked. “It’s still always there — on the left side. It never goes away. I know it’s going to come back.”

“You don’t know. It won’t necessarily.”

“But what if it does and I’m in the country?”

“I’ll rush down from London immediately. Country air is what you need,” he said. He smiled down at her, kind and amusing. “I’ve got one prescription for you.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

He laughed. “One pint of champagne daily. Champagne chases away all sorrows. Best medicine in the world.”

She ordered Brett and Mrs. Dowling to pack up. In the third week in May she left London. She arrived at the Heights amid the new green and the spring flowers, the
pink phlox, the violets showing through the grass. The horse chestnut blossoms were already in bloom, outrageously full and luxuriant. Were the flowers more lovely in England than anywhere else in the world?

On her second day there, Johnnie drove the sixteen miles from Weybridge to see her.

Now that it was warm she had discarded her usual black for a white muslin dress and mantilla, white being the color of summer mourning, and lighter in the heat.

They continued with their Dante in the summerhouse, which was down a steep slope from the main house and the terrace, and built on flat ground. George had himself roughed out the design for it. It was a little fairy place, with a conical roof and a finial on top, shaded inside yet open to the breeze and with clematis climbing up the sides.

Sitting on the bench with her, Johnnie was physically close yet removed. As if he’d been made suddenly cautious by their new isolation. She could smell faintly his young man’s perspiration, not unpleasant. He wore his shirt open at the neck, his red chest hairs escaping from it, his skin gleaming with health and youth.

She admired him as if he were a son. A mother loved her son for the purity and cleanliness of his young body. A son was the embodiment of maleness in its unthreatening form; masculinity was harmless in the sweetness and youth of a boy who was dependent on her. And ultimately, wasn’t the love of a mother for her son in some way sexual too, the love of the female for the body of the male, but the love of an ideal? Nature’s ideal, something young and pure. And untouchable.

She realized again that she’d never actually seen Johnnie with a woman his own age, other than courteously
talking to some female guest in a group. “Perhaps he’s just a man’s man,” George had said. “He just prefers the company of his friends. I ran into him the other night on Shaftesbury Avenue and he was with a group of young men and they were having a grand old time. Been drinking a bit. They were laughing and playing with one another. On their way to some club, they said.”

“You don’t think he’s a —” She couldn’t say it.

“A Nancy boy? I doubt it.” He laughed. “Though, you never know.” He thought about it a moment, then he shook it off. “He’s just a late bloomer, that’s all. He’ll find someone eventually.”

But in the ten years they’d known him, Johnnie hadn’t found someone. Other than his mother, the person Johnnie seemed closest to was Albert Druce. “I shouldn’t say this, but he’s even more of a brother to me than Willie, I think,” Johnnie said.

Albert’s wife, Anna, looked just like a female version of Johnnie, she could have been his twin sister. Albert had taken for a wife a woman who looked just like his best male friend. Marian had seen a portrait of Anna from before she married Albert: she was very pretty, with long, curly red hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. After she married, her looks had faded. She had removed herself from her marriage, it seemed, and was completely preoccupied now with the children, Eliot and Elsie. She refused to let the nanny tend to them, and she hardly had time for adult conversation. Every time you tried to speak to her, she’d spot the children doing some mischief and hurry over to bring them to order. Of all Johnnie’s myriad nephews and nieces, he was fondest of Albert and Anna’s children, Eliot and Elsie, and he was their godfather.

Marian invited Johnnie to dinner with his brother, Willie, and his two sisters, Mary and Eleanor. Narrow-eyed Willie was quiet and watchful. Mary was worshipful as always, Eleanor small and bubbly like their mother.

After supper, Eleanor asked Marian if she’d play the piano for them. She hadn’t touched the instrument since George died. “I don’t think I could …”

“Mama so loved to hear you,” Eleanor said. “Do it for us.”

They followed her into the drawing room and she opened the piano bench. On top of the pile of music were the sheets for Liszt’s “Bénédiction,” the piece he’d played for her and George in Weimar years ago.

She put them up on the stand and stared at the first page, trying to remember how to read notes. They were just shapes and lines, dead before her eyes.

Finally, she summoned her memory. She took a deep breath. The notes and the old connections came clear. She began to play, but stumbled over the trills and stopped.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Go on,” Johnnie said. “For us. Make us happy.”

Johnnie and Willie and the two women sat very still, waiting to see if she’d go ahead. She tried again. She sensed them sitting back, but her energy flagged, and she stopped. “I’m so rusty,” she said.

Mary, tall and kind, came over and kissed her cheek.

In the seclusion of the summerhouse, Johnnie’s concentration on Dante was now total. The heavy scent of jasmine hanging in the air around them, and the prescribed champagne, which she took in small doses throughout the day,
made her languorous. There was a swelling of her body in the heat.

They arrived at Canto II, and the first mention of Beatrice. She stopped to give him a brief explanation of what was to come: “Her real name was Beatrice Portinari. Dante saw her only a few times in his life and they probably never spoke or touched one another. She married Simone dei Bardi and died when she was only twenty-four. Yet her image haunted Dante all his life. She was the personification to him of spiritual and physical beauty, a holy figure, his guide, forever chaste.”

“They never touched?” he asked.

“Probably not. But he held her up as his ideal always.”

He read the passage
“E donna mi chiamò beata e bella …”

She interrupted. “Not a long
e
. It’s ‘
eh
,’ a short
e
. Remember, you separate out the syllables …”

“ ‘A — lady — called — to me … blessed and beautiful … I begged to serve at her command …’ ”

He continued, first the Italian, haltingly, then smoothly, better than ever, stopping every few lines to translate. “ ‘For I am Beatrice who made you come … I come from a place where I long to return … Love moved me … which makes me speak — ’ ”

Again he stopped. He faced her. His face was damp, his eyes glowed. “Be-a-tri-che,” he said softly, pronouncing the syllables long and separate in the Italian way, the accent on the final
e
. Then, in a whisper, “You are my Be-a-tri-che.”

She was embarrassed and averted her eyes. He said, “You’ve got the voice of an angel. I thought that the moment I met you. It was the first thing I noticed about you in Rome.”

And then suddenly came the words, “Marian, will you marry me?”

“What!” She let out a laugh, then she hid her face in her hands and shook her head.

“I’m serious. George wanted me to take care of you. I want you to be my wife.”

In spite of herself, she spluttered, “This is utterly ridiculous!”

But his face was stern, his voice hushed, intense. “I mean it.”

“Johnnie,” she said, suppressing another uncomfortable laugh. “I’m embarrassed. Perhaps you should go.”

He must have gone mad. She touched his shoulder. She could feel the solidity and tautness of the muscle under the cloth of his shirt. “You’re sweet, Johnnie. But this is silly. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I think we’d better go back up to the house.” She stood up.

“Promise you won’t make me stop coming?” he pleaded.

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. “I promise.” Her hands were shaking. She put her arms down at her side to hide them. “But maybe you shouldn’t stay for tea.”

He paused, then rose. He began climbing the stone steps to the terrace. She watched his departing form, tall and elegant. He didn’t know what he was doing. It was a lie, a chimera.

She waited in the summerhouse until he’d disappeared. The shadows lengthened. When she was sure he’d gone, she walked slowly back to the house. Was it possible that he could be physically attracted to her? That he saw something in her that was pretty?

Brett had set the supper table, as usual for her alone, with the gold-rimmed Royal Doulton and a white lace cloth.
Before she touched the food, she drank down the glass of champagne that Brett always put there to accompany the meal. These days, in accordance with Sir James’s prescription. In seconds, its calming effect pervaded her body.

What had come over him? He was grieving for Anna, he wasn’t himself. The sensuousness of summer, the glow on her skin from the heat, distorted her, made her seem young to him.

This man, with his long-stemmed body, his clear blue eyes … desiring her? The flight of fantasy disappeared as quickly as it had come on.

Brett poured another glass of champagne, wiping the mouth of the bottle with a linen towel. “What a lovely prescription, ma’am,” Brett said, “that Sir James has given you.”

“Yes, lovely.” She drank down half of it at once. “But it’s a shame to have it by myself. Would you have a glass too Brett?” She’d never asked Brett to sit down at table with her before. Brett had been with them since she was a fourteen-year-old girl, a tiny, boyish figure, totally devoted to her and George. Brett was the surest thing in her life now, steady, constant, a certainty. But who was Brett, she wondered suddenly? The only thing she knew about her was that every Sunday, on her half days, she dressed in her long black coat and hat and went out to Hackney to visit her mother. She lived in the servants’ quarters upstairs, a place where Marian never ventured. She wanted to be respectful of the servants’ privacy.