A Desirable Husband (21 page)

Darcy had not heard this joke before, for a week ago Gerard and Finola had forbidden the children to repeat it. By saying these words two or three times, both children could cast themselves into hysterical giggles for a quarter of an hour, and they had been doing this for nearly a month. ‘Children,’ said Darcy. ‘Really’.

‘Stop it, Richard!’ said Finola, jerked out of her thoughts.

‘Darcy’s an ape-man
too
,’ said Eleanor, who had fallen off her chair.

‘Leave the room, both of you,’ said Gerard. His voice was not angry, or even interested.

Richard, still giggling, said in a high voice: ‘Mummy’s preg-nant.’

The men stared and moved their lips. Richard turned red, and Finola looked at him. ‘Yes, isn’t it nice? I suppose that’s why you’ve been behaving so badly, lately?’

*

Finola was marvellous, Gerard decided when he sat down in the Parnell pew. He had just been up to see one of the farmers, and he had decided to visit the church on his way back through Chalcot St Anne.

Gerard often came privately to church when he knew it would be empty. He found it easier to pray in the sweet dusty cold, within sight of the altar and the Parnell monuments, than in his dressing-room at home. He loved the place, although he was often overcome by a sense of sin when he knelt there, a sense which never seemed to lead to useful reformation. When there were other people in the church, he simply worried and looked embarrassed, and had thoughts about anything except religion. It was in the oddest places that, perhaps once a year, he felt what he called ‘the white glory’, the true reason for the religion he practised, which was an attempt to reach it.

Today after lunch, walking down a muddy hill, he had felt the revelation, and now he was trying to recall it. There was still great warmth inside him. The white glory, he knew, was a scent of heaven, a perfect absence of all sense of self, a calm straight love of all he could see, combined with the knowledge that it was not real and there was only God. He told himself this now, and knew it was true, but could not feel it again. He was resigned to this, and he began to concentrate on Christ’s passion, the thought of which usually made his eyes sting when he read about it in the Gospel of St Matthew. He did not like crying over this, because Darcy appeared to weep with just the same awe and anger and love over the death of Clarissa Harlowe; which made his own tears seem rather unsuitable, however good for him they were.

After a little while, Gerard ceased to think about anything. There seemed to be little point in thinking, when he could be quiet and peaceful, and did not feel that his own sins were particularly important. He was very happy. Quite suddenly, he became aware for the first time of a new and shocking fault in his character, but this did not make him miserable. It was a triumph.

He looked at the east window and realised that he had in fact made Finola do his proper work for him, when she came down to Combe Chalcot two years ago, to talk to Constance about what she must do. Then he had been
secretly angry with her, arrogant and cold to her. He closed his eyes. Now that his mother was to marry again, to marry so well, she could not disturb his conscience. All had been for the best. Gerard was warmed again, and lifted up, by agreeable humiliation: quickly he apologised to God for his brief but frequent losses of faith.

‘Hullo, darling,’ said Finola when he returned to the house. She was taking her afternoon rest in her bedroom, lying under the eiderdown fully dressed and reading
Daniel
Deronda
by the pallid electric light. Outside, the sky was just beginning to turn blue. ‘Has something happened?’ She could not remember having seen such strange eagerness in his face before.

Gerard sat down on the stool by her dressing-table. ‘No, no,’ he said. He added: ‘People always mean something bad, when they say that.’

‘Oh, you look quite all right. I just wondered. Are you up to mischief?’

‘No, I don’t think so!’ He paused. ‘I was just thinking, on the way back from Six-Acres – I’ve just realised that I haven’t been at all good to you, in the past.’ The sight of her was wholly good, and not in the least disappointing. He loved her quite as much as he had thought he did, in church.

‘Gerard!’

‘I’m talking about after Father’s death. When you came down here to talk to my mother –’ he had thought just what to say, and he looked at the room’s reflection in the mirror as he spoke – ‘you were doing what
I
should have done if I’d had enough – I’ve realised that now.’

‘I see,’ said Finola. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’ She did not frown, she spoke lightly.

This agreement was unexpected. ‘I think it is true, don’t you? So I must apologise for having been – cold, I think you called it, darling.’

‘Come and sit here,’ said Finola, moving to the side of the bed. He obeyed her, and they looked at each other, and began to think. Since her becoming pregnant, they had been
extremely kind to each other, and affectionate towards each other, but they had not talked.

‘I had no right to make myself so unpleasant to you,’ said Gerard after a moment, looking down at the bed. His expression had changed and he was speaking with familiar self-reproach. ‘And to think that I was remarkably forbearing, too.’

‘Well, these things happen. Oh, darling, don’t let’s be silly.’ She touched his hand, and put her head on one side. She wanted his love, but she did not want to listen to his conscience.

‘The more I think about it, the worse I feel,’ he said. He wanted to discuss it in great detail, but could not quite begin.

‘I suppose I shouldn’t have gone to Constance like that, even so, actually,’ said Finola rather gruffly. ‘I nearly lost you, after all. It
does
seem ages ago, doesn’t it?’ she added.

Gerard put his hands beneath her shoulders and pulled her onto his lap. ‘Precious girl.’ Finola began to cry silently: it was the best thing he could have done. She had been surprised and almost repelled when he had first spoken; now she realised just what he had said. ‘I was far more wrong than you. Far more,’ she heard him say.

‘I’m so lucky,’ she said. ‘
Hatefully
lucky.’

‘Fat one.’ Gerard had called Finola that in the first years of their marriage. The name meant that she was very small and slim and cuddlesome and always to be loved; and it made Finola giggle.

‘
Really
fat now,’ she said.

‘Really fat.’

They sat in silence, rocking slightly, for a little while. They knew that later, one day, they might perhaps examine their recent past together, but their thoughts were too mixed up now. Gerard’s few words had had the effect he intended, but he thought now, looking back, that this was miraculous.

‘I
am
forgiven?’ he said.

‘Yes, love,’ said Finola. ‘Of course, I’ll remind you how nasty you were. At regular intervals, to keep you in your place.’

‘O-oh,’ said Gerard. ‘Will you?’

‘Pompous. Hypocrite. Pig.’ Finola butted his shoulder with her head as she spoke each word.

‘Not as bad as that, darling.’

‘No, not quite as bad as that.’ She narrowed her eyes.

Finola’s pregnancy meant that they could not make love without difficulty, even at this most suitable moment. Gerard rather wanted to, but thought it best not to press her. Finola, looking into his face and then away, thought she never could quite want to make simple, affectionate love with him again. She loved him, and she was grateful for what he had said just now, but in spite of her gratitude she would always, always fight him in bed and enjoy his loving apologies for hurting her.

‘Finola, let’s live more simply,’ he said suddenly, raising his face. ‘All this is really so unimportant.’

Finola was still thinking of how she did not like his recent attempts at ordinary, placid lovemaking, though it was suitable for a pregnant woman.

‘Darling, what d’you mean?’

‘Oh, let’s get rid of all these servants,’ said Gerard. ‘They’re so unnecessary, we don’t need to live in this grand way. It stops us thinking about each other, and what matters. And it’s awfully out of date.’

‘Oh, darling,’ said Finola gently. ‘We’ve already got rid of most of them. I mean, when one thinks of what your parents had … Now Carlotta’s gone we don’t have
anybody
living in except Nanny. I think you must be forgetting.’

Gerard realised that he had been speaking of the past, but said all the same, ‘Sarah and Miriam come in every day. And there’s Mainwaring –’

‘Two days a week, and dinner-parties,’ said Finola.

‘It’s all these people prowling about the house I don’t like. I never have liked it. Do we need Nanny now?’ He was
imagining suppers in the kitchen, thinking of the thick soups, the bread and cheese and sausages which Finola had described as her childhood diet.

‘Well, we will need her!’ said Finola. ‘You know I had no one till Richard was nearly a year, what with the war and everything, and honestly darling, it was awfully hard work and such a worry.’

‘Do you know, I was forgetting?’ he said, messing up her hair as he looked at her plump abdomen. Gerard had never been repelled by pregnant women: he was fascinated by the thought of a man’s being able to produce such a large effect upon a woman.

‘You’re not
practical
,’ said Finola, catching his hand. ‘Silly unpractical man.’

‘Well, you must be practical for me.’

‘And we’ve got lots of money.’

‘Not lots. It’s true that I’m rich enough on paper.’

‘And we
will
have to live very simply one day. If there’s another socialist government, or something like that. We’ll be all right, though.’

‘They won’t really be able to get us, you mean?’

‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll think we’re important enough.’

It was a very amorous conversation.

‘Why won’t you marry me?’ said Darcy.

‘Because I’m not a marrying woman. Will you please drop the subject.’ Miranda was angrily crying.

She and Darcy were standing by the pond at the foot of the terraced gardens of Lynmore Hall, where she had been brought up. During the drive north from Sedley Warren to Cheshire, she had told him, for the first time, that her childhood had consisted of fear, humiliation, frustration and rage, which it had been her sisters’ delight to provoke in order to see her punished. She had known at the time that it was a great mistake to confide in him; but she had not been able to stop herself.

‘No Miranda, I will not drop it.’ Darcy had been very excited at the thought of seeing Lynmore, when he had discovered that her feelings about the place were on the whole so bitter. He had been only mildly hopeful when she had first suggested the visit, because any close friend might be taken to see a home of which she was fond in the ordinary way.

‘You don’t want to marry me, it’s just an obsession. Good God, can you
imagine
what it would be like!’ For months, since his first upsetting proposal at Combe Chalcot in September, he had made a flattering, comfortable joke of the subject. She had been able to tease him about how horrified he would be if she accepted, and thus to feel she had the moral upper hand.

‘I want to marry you. I’ve even told you I love you,’ said Darcy. ‘What more do you want?’

‘No!’ said Miranda. ‘You don’t love me, Darcy, you can’t, and you wouldn’t go against me if you did! You wouldn’t go
on
.’

‘Just please tell me why it’s impossible. And don’t say you’re married already, it’s a travesty of a marriage.’

‘Let’s go back,’ said Miranda. Darcy followed her up towards the house, and waited for an answer.

Lynmore Hall was a red and yellow brick mansion, with gables, twisted chimneys, and plenty of coloured glass in the windows. It had been built by Miranda’s grandfather in 1873, and had just been sold to a school. When she and Darcy had drawn up outside the house half an hour before, Miranda had been irrationally startled to see workmen carrying pieces of timber and buckets of rubbish in and out of the big front door. There was already a sign outside the gate which read, ‘Lynmore Hall School for Girls. Boarding and Day Pupils. Headmistress: Miss P.E. Kingston, M.A.’

‘Mother and Sebastian will be wondering where we are,’ said Miranda. Her brother Sebastian had lived at Five Ash Cottage, a little house a mile from the Hall, ever since her father’s death in 1949. She and Darcy were to have tea with him and her mother Flora, who lived with him, before they went on to spend the night in York. It would be a very old-fashioned tea, with a white cloth and a spirit-burner, and Flora Pagett would try with gentle puzzlement to find out just who Darcy was. Sebastian knew, and was extremely curious: Miranda closed her eyes and tried not to smile as she thought of it. This was not the time to smile.

‘Yes, Miranda, I’m sure they will be, but we’re going to talk about this.’

She was calmer now. ‘We can’t,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t, don’t you see? We have quite a lot at the moment, Darcy, and we really we can’t afford –’

‘So what do we have at the moment?’

‘Pleasure,’ said Miranda. ‘For God’s sake, do you
seriously expect me to try and divorce Henri?’ Miranda had once pointed out that she had no grounds for divorce, that the Church of Rome would not allow it, but they had fallen into the way of speaking as though she could divorce her husband easily, if only she chose.

‘Yes,’ said Darcy. ‘You don’t need to live in France! Sweetie, your real life is here, with
me.
For about six weeks a year, true, but all the same darling –’

‘That’s what you think, is it? You can be awfully selfish, Darcy.’ Miranda was scowling, because it was quite true that her private life was in England, with Darcy, and her business, and old friends. ‘As it happens, my real life is in France.’

Darcy had never been invited to stay with Miranda, either in Paris or in the converted
presbytère
in Haute Provence where she liked to spend most of the autumn. He would not expect to be invited to Vauxvilliers, but he had directly asked Miranda to entertain him in Provence. She had refused him.

‘Miranda, why did you marry Henri in the first place?’

She noticed that he was suddenly taking a purely rational interest, and she narrowed her eyes at him.

A part of Darcy’s mind was on Constance and William, with whom he and Miranda had lunched before coming up to Lynmore. Unlike Gerard and Finola, Darcy had made himself consider the possibility of the couple’s being wretched together after so many years of mere flirtation; but it had seemed to him that, in fact, Constance was making an effort. She did not deny that she loved being Lady Warren and thought the house worth any sacrifice, and, as she had told Darcy that afternoon, she had worked very hard for her good fortune.

‘I married him for several good reasons,’ said Miranda. ‘I liked him, I’ve always approved of the French view of marriage, I wanted the money and the title, I wanted to get out of England, I wanted –’ She paused. ‘It was my money I wanted to get hold of, actually, Darcy. My father told me when I was twenty he’d give me a hundred thousand
pounds if I got married and absolutely nothing if I didn’t. So, you see, I had to get married!’

‘Goodness me,’ said Darcy, turning.

Miranda thought the expression on his face unpleasant, and when he took hold of her chin in a masterful way, she pushed away his hand. ‘You’ve got your money now,’ he said. ‘So why do you stay with a man who doesn’t want you? I suppose it’s your grand life – lots of charming Frenchmen?’

‘Don’t be idiotic, Darcy.’

‘I won’t be treated like this!’ he shouted. ‘Either you marry me, or – for God’s sake you could at least live with me if you don’t want the
scandal
of
divorce
!’ Darcy had been very much influenced by the fruitful reconciliation of Gerard and Finola, and the thought that even his mother had married again.

‘Shut
up
!’

‘I hate to be commonplace, Miranda, but we can’t go on like this.’

‘Why not?’ she said. They were walking past the front of the house, and she tore off a few leaves of the unfurling Virginia creeper, and shredded them. ‘Why
not,
Darcy?’

‘Because!’ said Darcy. ‘Do you really want me to repeat it all?’

‘Why the hell can’t we? You must be mad to think of taking me on – God, when I think of it!’

‘I won’t see you any more,’ he said.

‘Oh yes you will.’

‘Now don’t let’s be childish, Miranda.’ Darcy took the remaining leaves of creeper away from her.

‘We’re both children, messing about,’ she said quietly. ‘We could
never
marry.’

There was silence for a while. They walked round the side of the house, past their car, and down towards the old grass tennis-court and the rough park beyond. Both of them had a desire to force out dreadful words at this worst possible moment: they wanted to see what would happen, and knew they must not try.

‘I’ll never marry you,’ said Miranda in a low voice in the end. ‘Even if Henri were to die, I wouldn’t.’ She wanted him to know that he had no power over her; although she loved him with tender gratitude, because by now she was convinced that he did love her.

‘You’re very cowardly, Miranda.’

‘It’s not exactly cowardly to have some common sense!’ she shouted. ‘Just let’s drop the subject.’

‘One has to be very brave to be foolish sometimes,’ said Darcy. ‘And of course, it
would
be foolish to throw up All for my sake, darling.’

‘I’m brave,’ said Miranda, thinking of her running away from school, her battles with her father, and her work for the Resistance; all of which she often considered to have been subtle forms of cowardice. ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Darcy. If I left Henri, and came to live with you – leaving aside the whole question of the scandal and so on – I’d lose everything I value about you. You’re an escape for me, don’t you see? I can think about you in France, whenever I’m sick of things. That’s why I’m fond of you. I can’t and I won’t put you in Henri’s place.’

‘Hardly flattering to me, when I want to
marry
you,’ said Darcy.

Miranda thought he was beginning positively to bleat. She said, ‘Darling, I
am
flattered. I only got upset because, in a way, I
would
like to – to marry you. Only it simply isn’t possible.’ She turned her head on her elegant neck. ‘And then I got cross because coming here is always rather a trial – let’s go back to the car, we simply
can
’
t
have a colossal row just before we go and present ourselves to Mother.’ She tucked her arm through his, and smiled grimly up at him.

‘I’m not going to carry on as your lover, Miranda.’

She said nothing, but she believed him. She closed her eyes, and thought that her light persuasion might quite easily have worked, though in the event it had made him severe as his brother.

Miranda had never been able to decide just what it was,
which made other people agree that a certain remark, or a certain person, was charming or dreary, chic or dowdy, good or bad. She believed there must be some strange thing behind such judgements, though she had always refused to believe in moral absolutes. Darcy had turned against her by a chance just as stupid as that which had made half Paris consider her fluent but appalling French to be an enchanting joke.

Gingerly she removed her arm from Darcy’s, and looked down at the thick young cow-parsley by the edge of the path. She thought about her home in France, and all her friends who amused her. After twenty years, she still had a licence to use the sentences full of classical archaisms, faulty grammar and vulgar argot which might have turned the French against her from the start. At any moment, this might change. She had told her sons what she really believed: that in society and among relations, the slightest real fault was unforgivable. Miranda wished that, now, it was really because of some fault of her own that Darcy refused to make her happy. She would have been able to do something if that had been the case, but she could see no fault of her own, only foibles of his, and it made her feel helplessly angry again.

When they were back in the car, and were ready for the last part of their journey, Miranda started to cry. Darcy shouted at her, and told her at one point that she must belong to him as Finola did to Gerard; but though the effort of talking in this way exhausted him, Miranda was not moved. They drove down the hill to Five Ash Cottage, where tea with Flora and Sebastian was as quietly awkward as they had expected.

*

The roses were tightly in bud, and the sunlight picked out their leaves: this afternoon was so much like summer that the gardener said a hard frost was coming. Finola was writing letters in the summerhouse by the rose-garden, where yellow wallflowers climbed up against the stone. She had replied efficiently to two invitations, and was now
looking at the words ‘Dear Miranda’ on a third sheet of paper. She thought she did not know quite what to say.

‘Thank you
very
much for sending such an exquisite dress for the baby. I’m too superstitious to go out and buy more than the essentials, until she or he actually arrives, but your dress is all wrapped up in tissue paper and waiting in the nursery,’ she wrote at last, and paused to eat two Bath Olivers, for which she had a craving at present.

Miranda had sent old-fashioned long clothes for a tiny baby, made of white cambric, lined, handsewn, and inserted with real lace. Finola knew that neither she nor Nanny would ever be able to iron such a dress properly, but it would look very well under the family christening-robe. ‘I wonder if you’d like to be a godmother? I suppose you had to become a Catholic when you got married, but if you’re allowed to be a godmother at an Anglican christening, we’d be so pleased.’

Finola wanted to say other, very personal things to Miranda, things which would probably shock her. Just lately, other people’s lives had become extremely fascinating to her. She reflected that she could always tear the letter up, if when she had finished it she could only imagine Miranda scowling at such impertinence from her.

‘Darcy told me that you and he were going to see your mother in Cheshire. I was v. glad to hear this, I always actually think of you as a sort of part-time married couple, and so it’s only right your family shd meet him … I wish you
were
married. Three years ago I’d have died at the thought of having you for a sister-in-law, but not now. Couldn’t you get away from France and all that, somehow? Everything Gerard’s told me about the French, the grand French I mean, makes them sound awfully cold and cynical. He claims that Frenchmen have no real respect for women (I don’t notice that most Englishmen have much respect or affection for us, I must say, and nobody could have more than Anatole!)’ She wrote swiftly, thinking of her father. Miranda ought to be reminded. ‘Which is very odd when I
think how feeble his mother was, never protecting him from her husband, who used to ill-treat him in various horrible ways. He still has marks on his back, Alice says.

‘Do you remember his telling us both about it one night in the kitchen, when we were girls, and everyone else was out for some reason? You were going on about how badly the English treat children, not thinking of them as human beings at all, and he agreed with you, and you said you’d heard that the French treated them much better. He told us about himself, and I cried I seem to remember, and you looked very angry. I suppose it was a bond between you, that you both ran away from your families when you were fourteen. I’ve always wondered, actually, whether Anatole loved you in the same way that Alice did; his only real fault is that he’s
still
terribly polygamous, just like Darcy except that he’s far kinder, and not all weak. Did you ever sleep with him? I know Alice always loved you far more than she did me, and I can’t resent it any more. I’m glad I’ve met you since, really I am –’