A Closed Eye (23 page)

They drove Imogen to school: she ran off without a backward glance. Harriet, trembling, got back into the car, and presently wiped her eyes. ‘This has got to stop,’ said Freddie, getting in beside her. ‘She dominates your life. You think about her far too much. She’s happy, she’s healthy, thank God, she’s intelligent—and she’s bored, Harriet, that’s what you don’t realize. She’s bored with your concern, and with your fussing. Let her go! She’ll go sooner or later, I can tell you that for nothing. Our place is in the background now. She’ll never want for anything, I promise you that. Neither will you, if anything happens to me.’

She turned to him in alarm. ‘Are you not well?’ she asked, with genuine concern.

‘I’m getting on. I have to think of these things.’

‘Don’t die, Freddie,’ she said, weeping again. ‘I couldn’t bear life without you. I know I’m tiresome, and not quite what you hoped, but I do value and respect our life together. I am so fond of you,’ she said, slightly surprised. ‘You are an ideal husband, you know.’

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have married you,’ he sighed. ‘I was too old. It wasn’t fair.’

‘But you see I was too young. I should always have been too young. I am a foolish woman, Freddie, not much good to you. My life comes out of books and dreams, like a girl’s. And I go to bed too early. I sometimes think I should never have married because I need too much sleep.’

He laughed, and after a while so did she.

‘You are more of a child than your daughter is,’ he said. ‘Strange how ready she is for life, while you still hang back.’

I hang back because I am waiting for a sign, she thought, and you must never know. And yet I should have made a rotten mistress. It was never on the cards, or at least it may have been on the cards but it was never a reality. I am Freddie’s wife, whether I like it or not; cautious, fearful women like myself are no good for anything else. She felt a nausea, a hollowness, and yawned nervously. ‘Could we stop for tea somewhere?’ she asked. ‘I feel quite exhausted.’

He glanced at her. ‘It means going in to Oxford,’ he said. ‘But I could do with a break myself. A real break. A holiday. I’ve been having these dizzy spells. Oh, nothing to worry about: at my age I must expect something or other.’

‘You’ve been feeling unwell, and you’ve said nothing?’ She was appalled.

‘Now don’t fly into a panic. You do it all the time. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Immy is quite right, you know, to resist you when you’re like that.’

‘Does she resist me?’ asked Harriet. ‘Is that what she does?’

He sighed again. Immy, always Immy.

‘I was talking to Sanders, at the club. You don’t know him. He was troubled by the same thing a couple of years back. Somebody recommended this clinic in Switzerland, near Geneva. He went there for a month, and he’s been perfectly all right ever since.’

‘I don’t think I could go away for a month,’ said Harriet. ‘Not until I know Immy is settled. You’d better see Mordaunt. It’s pointless to think of some foreign clinic that nobody knows anything about, when you’re not even sure what’s wrong with you. There are clinics here too, you know. Health farms. It’s probably what they call executive stress, one of the many diseases of Western civilization.’

She was chattering, because she was now very frightened. If Freddie left her on her own she would die. She knew that now, ineluctably. And if Freddie left her alone with Imogen how would she sustain that immense demanding appetite for life, so immeasurably greater than her own, and bring it to fulfilment, happiness, success? Anything she desires, she thought, I would give her. But I can’t quite do it on my own. And Freddie? For a moment she felt his loneliness, and saw that it corresponded to her own. She put a hand on his arm. ‘Dear, it is not too late.’

‘Tea always cheers me up,’ she said later, as they resumed their journey.

‘I noticed you made a meal of it.’

He was restored to something like good humour, now that he had weaned her away from her daughter and told her of his troubles. He knew from experience that he had not made a particularly deep impression, that Harriet’s thoughts were still with Imogen, that she dreaded the return to the empty house. Nevertheless he felt mildly appeased. What he had experienced as a dreadful secret (for he had been seriously alarmed) was no longer entirely his responsibility. The shared
confidence was to him significant, more significant in his mind than his daughter’s absence, for he had begun to notice in himself an antagonism that answered her own. He loved her dearly, as ardently as any rejected lover, yet he could not admire her as her mother so foolishly did. He saw a cruelty there which left him with grave doubts, saw, as Harriet failed to see, that Imogen found them both boring and unsatisfactory and that this characteristic was not merely a childish indifference to their failed lives but an active condemnation. Although he himself thought Harriet beautiful he knew that his daughter, except for some rare moments of favour, or of regression, found her timid and dull, fatally lacking in the kind of smart aggressive attractiveness that the young find admirable. Although without much sympathy or liking for Merle and Hughie Blakemore, whom he contrived never to see, he dreaded the day when he would have to defend them against Imogen’s snobbishness. They had given her too much, had spent too much time loving her, marvelling at that beauty and independence, which in themselves seemed such reassuring qualities, as if their stewardship alone had been responsible for that superior viability. Now he saw that they should have corrected, admonished, chastised, while the child was still young enough to mourn their displeasure. And if she had had to court their continued favour, what harm would have been done? Better a few misgivings, a little reserve, that the queenliness that Immy had never ceased to exhibit.

He himself was both afraid of and in awe of her physical fearlessness; awkward and clumsy himself, it was many years since he had been able to run up the stairs, or even to take them two at a time. As a boy he had fumbled catches, been overweight, slow to move, badly co-ordinated even then. As a businessman of almost national standing he had moved with more majesty, but inwardly he was still humiliated. His
gravitas
, he knew, was nothing more than a disguise. This flaw in
his physical make-up made him ludicrously susceptible to beauty in both women and men; he viewed them as if they were objects of virtù, paintings or sculptures, with the devotion of an amateur, eternally unqualified to take a detached view. To be the father of so beautiful a child—That black hair! That white skin!—had afflicted him with awe, and for some years, until she was about seven, he had felt that he did not possess the right even to criticize her. Now that she was older he was not so sure. He saw the woman she was going to be emerge, take shape: saw that she would be contemptuous, lawless, indifferent to another’s hurt. He feared for his wife’s soft heart, the heart which he himself was unable to reach. He felt sorry for her, unawakened as he knew her to be. He sighed and covered her hand with one of his own. It seemed to him at that moment that he would have to stay well in order to protect her. He had succeeded in worrying her, but only slightly. The rest he would have to take care of himself.

To Harriet the house echoed with emptiness. Even Freddie was affected by it and went out to his club every morning, walking there after breakfast as she had instructed him, mindful of his health. She had no idea what he did there, presumed that he read the papers, ordered coffee, found like-minded company, joined somebody for lunch. She similarly had no idea what he did in the afternoons, and it occurred to her to wonder, yet again, whether he found company of another sort. In fact he visited the art galleries around St James’s, went to the Royal Academy, aware that he cut a solitary figure, mildly melancholy, too humbled to be discontented. Harriet merely noted that he had nothing to tell her when he came home, after being out all day, and she assumed, rather sadly, that his life was a secret that both eluded and excluded her, that it was too late for confidences of an intimate nature, and that all they could do was observe the formalities of their relationship, and occasionally keep each other company.

If she had hoped for more from this period of their lives, with their daughter absent, and lost to pursuits which left them far behind, she submitted with a fairly good grace to her new loneliness, even grateful for the solitude which she remembered from years long past, when she was growing up and trying to make sense of certain anomalies: her father’s empty eyes and perpetual cheerfulness, Mr Latif’s hand on her mother’s breast, that same mother’s bad temper and discomfiture, her own deliberate lack of understanding. That innocence of hers, so willed, so excessive! And sustained throughout the years of adolescence, when Tessa, and Mary and Pamela, would look at her slyly, and then exchange their secrets and giggle, confident that she would always misunderstand them. Harriet, in her empty drawing-room, her morning duties discharged, the house silent in the absence of Miss Wetherby and her dog, absent, as was Freddie, on exercises of their own, thought back with distaste on her life, which now seemed to have been lost through inanition. Suddenly there was nothing for her to do. Freddie ate lunch out, so she made do with a sandwich. She could have taken a long walk, for in the early days of her marriage she had keenly regretted her lost liberty, but now that she was older she preferred to stay indoors and look out of the window. There was little to see in the quiet square; few people passed, and if she saw anyone she knew she retreated instinctively. Sometimes she thought of Tessa, sometimes of Jack. She realized now, at last, with sad conviction, that love of the one precluded the other, that the thrust of her own history allied her with Tessa. Jack had been merely the lure that she was bound, by the terms of her own nature, to resist. He remained unchanged in her mind, unaltered by time. In her imaginings he was always about to return, as if, at any moment, she might see him cross the square and come towards her. She was aware of the crassness of this fantasy, its out-of-date romanticism, its unforgivable
timidity. She would shake herself free of it then, make a cup of tea, settle down with a book.
Madame
, she read,
permettez-moi de vous dire que j’adore votre courage
 … When the light faded, as it seemed to more quickly now, winter and summer, she would get up and pull the curtains. Freddie, crossing the square, would see her lifted arm and wave back.

When Immy came home in the holidays she was already a stranger; taller, more boisterous, shrugging off their questions, demanding a television in her bedroom, suffering only Miss Wetherby’s adoring attentions. They came to know her moods, her restlessness, her boredom, were obliged to apologize for their lack of amenities, a house in the country, a ski chalet to which she might invite her new friends. ‘But darling,’ Harriet said. ‘You have a very nice house in town. Why don’t you invite your friends here? I’m sure they’d be delighted. There’s plenty of room for them to stay. Why don’t you invite Henrietta? Or Arabella?’ The names were invariably decorative, belonging, or seeming to belong, to Restoration comedy. ‘Actually, Henrietta has asked me to stay with her people in Somerset.’

‘Then Daddy and I must meet her first,’ said Harriet firmly. ‘And I must speak to her parents.’

This was successfully negotiated, although Harriet was not much reassured by Henrietta’s mother, who called at Wellington Square with her daughter before going on to Harrods. Tall, glamorous, a compulsive talker, Lady Aldridge’s eyes wandered expertly round the room while expressing unreserved enthusiasm at the prospect of having Imogen to stay. Harriet wished that Freddie were there, to put a damper on Jane Aldridge’s boundless and meaningless euphoria. Harriet wondered if the woman drank, or if she were already drunk: the eyes from time to time flashed desperation.

‘I’m afraid we’re rather selfish,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m sure Immy would love to come to you, but her father sees so little
of her … Perhaps next year. But we should love to have Henrietta. There is so much for them to do in London—my husband can always get a box at Covent Garden.’ At that moment she thought of Lizzie. Why, she said to herself, with some surprise, I had quite forgotten her.

Imogen was furious, of course, but then she so often was. ‘It is dull for her,’ said Harriet to Freddie, by way of excuse. Nothing came of the invitation to Henrietta; perhaps it had not been offered. One day, coming home with her shopping, Harriet saw a very young man getting out of a car and advancing towards her front door.

‘Can I help you?’ she called. ‘I’m Harriet Lytton.’

He swept off the tweed cap he had been wearing; she had time to appreciate a handsome brown face, dark eyes set a little too close together.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Julian Aldridge. Henrietta’s brother. I believe you met my mother. Is Immy around?’

He was perhaps nineteen, at the most twenty.

‘She’s not in,’ said Harriet thankfully. ‘Can I ask her to telephone you?’

‘Not to worry,’ he replied. ‘I just thought she might like to come for a drive.’

‘Daddy and I would much rather you met your friends here,’ she told a predictably angry Imogen. ‘Anyway, he’s much too old for you.’

‘I’m nearly fifteen,’ shouted Immy.

‘You are fourteen and a half,’ Harriet replied. ‘If you are so anxious to see your friends why not invite them to dinner?’

‘Oh, you don’t understand,’ was the predictable reply.

‘If you are determined to grow up so fast at least you might behave in a more grown-up fashion. You were positively rude to Daddy last night.’

It was as much as she ever managed to say. She found herself indignant on Freddie’s behalf, fearful of an explosion
of wrath from him. Imogen disregarded him, was careless of his basic reserve. Every month she trailed a slight feral odour, which he found distasteful. Harriet too found it distasteful, but could think of no suitable comment. In any event she knew that the girl’s negligence was in part deliberate. She seemed to want to antagonize. Harriet found herself occasionally intimidated, even frightened, as she might have been by a bully at school, when she herself was a girl.