Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (15 page)

She laid this card on the table, and closed her eyes, which gave Peter a chance to lean forward and give Jenny’s hand an exhilarating squeeze of triumph.

“Yes, the Muse has been very much on our minds,” Peter said. “We agreed—didn’t we Jenny?—in the car on our way here, that the Muse was
the
question. It is wonderful that you are willing to speak of this.”

She opened her eyes. “But can I? Is it possible, I mean?”

“May I venture this—the epiphanies you have told us are behind each book—are these actual vistitations of the Muse? An incarnate Muse?”

“Of course, you idiot. Naturally!” For some reason Mrs. Stevens seemed irritated. Perhaps she regretted having broached the subject. She piled up the tea cups and saucers with a busy clatter. “Oh well—,” she said half to herself, and leaned back in the big chair, gazing down at them through the mesmerizing half-closed lids. “Graves calls her, if you remember, ‘sister of the mirage and echo.’ … That phrase has an extraordinary relevance to the Muse in question, the Muse of the sonnets.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the chair. In an instant the life which had been rising through her transparent skin like a wave, ebbed. She looked wan. The dialogue, through which conscience in some form peculiar to herself always reared its head, had evidently been resumed. Neither Peter nor Jenny would have thought of asking a question; it would have been like interrupting a piece of music. But they were taken aback when she suddenly rose to her feet, and stood in front of the fire, to say quite casually, “This is getting rather boring. One reaches a dead end sooner or later, talking
about
these things.”

“But we have only just begun!” Peter said.

“You couldn’t be boring,” Jenny threw in, desperate to recapture the moment of revelation which seemed to have just eluded them. “We listen, as it were, to the Delphic oracle.”

“That clever one!” Hilary Stevens sniffed. “
She
never said a thing that couldn’t be taken six ways at once.”

“You are sometimes not exactly as clear as crystal,” Peter said lightly.

“I mean to be.” The response was serious. “I mean to be crystal clear—Well then, about the Muse.… On that word, perhaps I had better see to the liquor. Mr. Selversen, be so good as to bring the tea tray into the kitchen for me, will you?”

He came back a few moments later bearing a tray holding glasses, a bottle of Scotch, a bowl of ice, and a jug of water, but he came back alone.

“Where is she?” Jenny whispered.

“I don’t know. She told me to get out the ice, and I suppose she must have vanished while I clattered about.”

“So far, is it going well, Peter?”

“Marvelous, if we can only get it all down! What worries me, though, is that there’s a Hell of a lot of ground to cover still. Will she hold out?”

“Maybe drop the idea of each book in sequence.”

“What do you think?”

“I think if the Muse is the thing, it doesn’t matter about each book.”

“O.K.” Peter’s head was bent over his pad and he was writing fast. “Maybe we’ll have a few minutes now to catch up.” Soon they were both hard at work, trying to recapture the word as it had been spoken. How important the silences had been, the expression in the eyes, so piercing and sometimes so remote! How to convey all this? They were so absorbed that they had no idea how long they were there in the great room alone.

Hilary leaned her forehead against the window pane in her bedroom. I’m in a terrible fog, she thought, idiotic.… How can I ever tell them? It was like trying to extricate one straw from a tightly bound up bundle, bundle of living, bundle of writing. How to extricate style, the changes in style from the life changes? She felt tension building up; the sweat broke out on her forehead. Not the interviewers’ fault of course. How could they know that all this was like an earthquake, throwing up lava and pieces of rock and rubble; the whole past in eruption.… Oh dear, it might be a good idea to lie down for a few minutes, flat on her back, breathe deeply, and see if she could stop the whirling sensation, and pull herself together.

But lying down did not have the desired effect, for there, the pressure of the buried memory, making its way up through layers and layers of consciousness, broke free. “I see,” she murmured, “I begin to see.” But what she saw would never be clear. It had been too strange.

Where and how had Willa MacPherson come into her life? Odd how some things just dropped out, disappeared, flotsam and jetsam on the stream of time …, no doubt they had met through someone in the publishing house where Hilary worked as a reader when she came out of the hospital in that intoxicating year of release, when even waking up in the dreary furnished room in Hampstead was an adventure, for just being alive again, allowed to think and feel, to eat what and when she pleased, to take a bus to Kew on an impulse, to sit in Regent’s Park in a deck chair and watch the children and the ducks—when every simple ordinary act of existence seemed like a miraculous gift—and above all conversing with people again, not doctors, not nurses, but her own friends who sat up half the night talking about politics, books, psychoanalytic theory, art, more often than not in Willa’s living room on Clifton Hill. Hilary did not have to evoke that room: it was there, the worn comfortable chairs, the two Victorian sofas, the fire in the grate, piles of new books, records, endless cups of tea, and Willa herself with her gray Irish eyes, her wit, her personal style, sitting in the big wing chair. She was, as sometimes can happen, a remarkable person leading a quite unremarkable life, at least on the surface; she did odd jobs for publishers, reviewed for a provincial newspaper, brought up two boys still in school at that time, was always anxious about money, a divorcée.…, the frame was ordinary enough, yet within it operated genius of the rarest kind. How to define it? There had been legendary French women, radiant centers like this, critics of life itself, yes, but those women who created salons had been rich, had belonged to a rigid social ethos: Willa had no great house to offer, no prestigious name such as Lady Ottoline Morrell’s, the English equivalent in the ‘twenties of the aristocrat concerned with the arts. Willa worked hard all day for a living, had nothing to offer her guests but tea and conversation, but the conversation was marvelous, marvelous because of her ability to draw the expert out and enter into his world, while at the same time leading him to explore other worlds; so a young biochemist found himself suddenly conversing with a composer just back from Paris and Nadia Boulanger, and enjoying it. So an elderly, unfashionable woman painter found herself talking brilliantly in answer to Willa’s questions, forcing the others in the room to put off their condescension. How did Willa find time to know so much, to be so aware over such a wide range? Of course she hardly slept, was known to read half the night, but it was not really knowledge after all that operated here, so much as a kind of superior feminine power to absorb the essence of a human being. Her poverty, her own hard life gave her, too, that extra dimension, compassion. She was able to elicit confidence. Every one of the men and women who were her friends saw her alone at one time or another, by accident or by intent. The door of that amazing house was never locked.

She was apparently always there for them: in what way were they there for her? Even after all that happened, Hilary never knew which, if any, of those distinguished men who frequented the house, had been her lover. Yet, although Willa sometimes appeared to be an intricate elegant machine, no one could fail to sense that the machine contained a living ghost, that this was a woman, and a woman first of all. How vulnerable, Hilary discovered, by chance.

This is trauma, she thought, as she lay on her bed, reliving an event which had taken place forty years before, and bearing again its difficult freight of shock and revelation. And she wondered whether trauma was not always perhaps experienced when the person most affected was a witness, not an actor, or became an actor only through being a witness of something beyond his understanding. Hilary had come, that day, from a publisher’s luncheon in honor of Seamus O’Connor whose second novel was being launched; she was eager to tell Willa about it. What luck to find her, for once, sitting alone in the November dusk, listening to a record, her Briard dog, Gustave Flaubert, at her feet. Hilary flung off her cloche hat, and sat down on the sofa, glad of the few moments left of the Mozart concerto, the interval of listening while the reverberations of the last hours sorted themselves out. There were few rules in this house, but one did not interrupt a piece of music with talk, however urgent.

“I had such a good time with Seamus O’Connor,” she began, when Willa rose to take the record off, “such a darling!”

“Is he?” Willa’s back was turned as she fitted the record into its case.

“But before I forget, I brought you a record, couldn’t resist, I felt so elated when I came out of the Café Royale!” And she laid the Brandenburg Concertos in Willa’s hands.

Willa’s expression was strange, as if she was not quite sure she wanted to accept them. She went back to her chair and sat down rather stiffly, holding the album upright, her hands just touching its edge. “I did have these once. Tell me about O’Connor.”

“He has bold blue eyes, rather hard, but so bright. Such an edge to him! A ruddy face, in fact he looks rather like a policeman. I liked him because he teased me about my novel, but in such a kind way I didn’t mind. And then we talked about landscapes, what kinds we feel for, what moves us.… The West of Ireland for him, Maine for me.” Reviewing the episode for Willa’s ears, Hilary, as always, was forced to evaluate. “I suppose what I enjoyed was the absence of literary talk, for once.”

“Will you see him again?”

“I don’t suppose so. He’s off to Sicily for six months, with his wife and children. But we did have fun!” Quite suddenly Hilary became aware of Willa’s silence. That final sentence, “we did have fun” sounded out of key. It hung there in the air between them, curiously embarrassing, while Willa made no response. She leaned her chin on the album. Finally she said, “Let’s hear these!”

As soon as the music began, Hilary was aware that the atmosphere in the room had become highly charged. Yet there was Willa, listening as she always did, her chin leaning on the palm of one hand, her eyes looking sideways. How well Hilary would have said she knew that face, but now she saw it as if for the first time … the wide brow, a little bombée, under gray hair covering her ears like a casque and parted on one side, the severe mouth, above all the great liquid eyes, eyes which reflected her inwardness as water reflects the moods of the sky, extraordinary eyes which illuminated the intellectual frame they inhabited. Something Hilary had taken for granted about Willa, her always being
present
for whomever sat opposite her in that room, could not be taken for granted now: she was obviously not there for Hilary. And when the vital fugue of the Concerto in G Major began to weave its way in and out, the tension grew so that Hilary would not have dared lift her eyes again, for fear of seeing something she was not meant to see.

She was not alone. The Briard hauled himself to a sitting position, threw back his shaggy head, and uttered a long despairing howl. Hilary remembered that she was relieved by that howl because she suspected this sort of hallucination, but the dog’s reaction convinced her that she had not been wrong to imagine that some extraordinary event was taking place. He settled down again in response to a sharp command from Willa, nose on his paws, but the dark eyes still roved anxiously about as if he feared the return of whatever had caused him pain.

At last the record came to an end. He gave a series of deep barks, more like howls than barks—one could only imagine them the expression of relief—got up, wagging his long plume of a tail, laid his head for a moment on Willa’s knee, then flopped down at her feet.

If all four walls of the room had fallen in at that moment, Hilary would have felt no surprise.

“Is there an earthquake going on?” she asked.

“An earthquake?” Willa’s voice was strained. “You are rather too perceptive.” She got up then, pressing one hand to her forehead. “Why don’t we go for a walk? Gustav is restless.”

Off they went into the dripping mists of the November evening. Hilary walked beside Willa, following her and the great dog who led them both, tugging at the leash. Every now and then they came to a street lamp haloed in light, then crossed through it into the thickening whiteness.

“Before we turn back,” Hilary finally asked, “tell me what all this is about, if you can.”

“I know Seamus—very well.”

“You do?” Hilary felt slightly cheated for having described him in such detail. Then Willa’s words flashed again through her consciousness. “Know … very well”: it could mean only one thing.

“You’re a writer, and you might as well know all there is to know about human affairs. I’ll tell you a strange story,” Willa said. Then there was a pause.

“Don’t, if you don’t want to.”

“I’ve buried it for ten years. Maybe it’s time I told it.” She sighed. “A strange story. I was thirty five, he was twenty,” she began. “The classic case of the lodger who moves in. My marriage was breaking up. Perhaps we had conceived the idea of a lodger as a way of easing the strain. His presence at family meals would prevent our wrangling in front of the little boys. Seamus thrived on this position, loved having a borrowed family, helped me with the dishes, played with the boys, who adored him of course (you can imagine!), drew J. out about his rare books, was just what we needed, or so it seemed.”

“Of course he fell in love with you. I can see that.”

“I don’t know whether he knows what love is. I fell deeply in love with him, anyway.” They walked on in silence. “He’s Catholic.”

“I suppose he felt guilty.”

“There is nothing so frightening to an Irish Catholic as passion in a woman.” Willa laughed a hard dry laugh. “It’s all right for a man, but a woman capable of passion—that is the flesh and the devil!” Then she added in a flat voice, “He may have had to save his soul, but he didn’t have to do it in just the way he chose. No,” she said with a certain violence. “He didn’t have to do it in just that way!”