The Beautiful Visit
Read The Beautiful Visit Online
Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
To Robert Aickman
CONTENTS
I woke because the fur wrapped round me had slipped off my feet, which were cold. As I moved to cover them, there was a loud creak and I discovered that my waist was encircled
with a heavy leather belt. This was not at all usual, and drawing the fur up to my chin I lay back again to think. If it came to that, I did not usually sleep in a fur rug. Lying there, the
ridiculous thought occurred to me that I had just been born. She was born with a girdle round her waist, they would say, to account for her misadventures. This is the kind of absurd notion one has
when half awake; but for some minutes I lay still, waking; enjoying the exquisite detachment and emptiness of my mind.
It was not dark nor light, but a very fresh early grey air, and above me I could see small round windows, uncurtained.
Round
windows! I looked down again and saw, a few yards away, a pair
of shining black boots which appeared never to have been worn. I was on the floor. I stretched out my left arm to touch it, and I was wearing a heavy gauntlet. The floor seemed to be shivering, or
perhaps it was I who shivered. Listening, I heard a faint indescribable sound, an unhurrying rush, a sound of quiet, continuous, monotonous movement. I imagined the noise one makes walking through
long dry grass; a little water spilt on to stone from some height; the distant drum-like murmur of a crowd ceaselessly conferring. Surely I must be the only person in the tremendous silence lying
outside the small sound I could hear. I felt alone, warm and alone, in a desert or in outer space.
At this, my mind pricked up its senses and drawing the fur closely round me, I sat huddled on the floor and stared at the two round windows which were now a perceptibly paler grey.
After a moment, I rose stiffly to my feet and went to a window. There was nothing to be seen but a limitless wash of sea, breaking, and glinting where it broke, like steel. Above it was a paler
empty stretch of sky, divided from the sea by a straight, faint, silver line. This whole round picture quivered, dipped a little, sustained the decline, and then rose again so that the original
proportions of two-thirds sea, one-third sky were visible. This, very generally speaking, was where I was: but why? where was I going? and how did I come to be here at all?
I walked softly to the door, opened it, and looked out. There was nothing but a dim narrow passage: I hesitated a moment, then closing the door again, stood with my back to it, surveying the
cabin where I had been sleeping. Catching sight of the boots again, I drew back the fur and looked down at myself. I was not reassured by my clothes, but clothes in which one had slept all night
are not very reassuring. There was a perfectly good bed in one corner. Why had I not slept in that? I went to look at the bed. Lying in the middle of it were two fat marbled exercise books.
I remembered everything: remembered who I was and felt imprisoned with the knowledge that I was not free and new and empty as I had been when I woke on the floor. I stared at the two books which
contained my life. I took them and sat beneath one of the windows, intending only, I think, to glance at them for the contrast they provided to my present circumstances. After all, I had little
idea what would happen next. My life loomed before me, as wide with chance as it had been the day I was born.
CHAPTER ONE
I was born in Kensington. My father was a composer. My mother came from a rich home, and was, I believe, incurably romantic. She married my father, despite the half-hearted
protestations of her family, who felt that to marry a musician was very nearly as bad as to marry into trade, and far less secure. I imagine their protestations were half-hearted, because she was,
after all, their seventh daughter; and if they had been at all vehement in their disapproval I cannot imagine my mother sticking to her decision. At any rate, her family, after attending the
wedding (there are pictures of all my aunts looking sulky, righteous, and incredibly tightly laced, on this occasion), washed their hands of her, which was far the cheapest, and from their point of
view, the most moral attitude to adopt. It was certainly the cheapest. My father was not a good composer, he was not even successful; and my mother had no idea of money (or music). She had four of
us in as many years, and I was the fourth. We would all wear passed on clothes until our nurse would no longer take us near the shops, and our contemporaries laughed at us; and then suddenly, in
the drawing-room, would hang rich fiery brocade curtains; or perhaps there would be a party, and we would have new muslin frocks with velvet sashes; worn for that one occasion, and outgrown long
before the next. I always remember my mother as pretty, but ceaselessly exhausted by her efforts to keep the increasing number of heads above water.
We had the usual childhood, with governesses, and interminable walks in Kensington Gardens. We soon learned that most people’s fathers were not composers, and we boasted about ours to the
other children we met on our walks: affected a knowledge and love for music which we did not feel, and held prearranged conversations about it for the benefit of these richer and generally more
fortunate friends. We were intelligent, and they were impressed. It all helped us to bear the lack of parties, seaside holidays and expensive toys.
Eventually, of course, my two brothers went away to school, and I was left at home with my sister. In all the years we grew up together, only two things stand out in my mind. The first was our
poverty. I do not think we were exactly poor, but we had, as we were continually told, a position to keep up. I think the situation was complicated by the fact that my father and mother had quite
different positions in mind; with the result that we oscillated hopelessly just out of reach of either.
The second was music. Music dominated our lives ever since I can remember. We were forced to listen to it for hours on end in silence; sometimes for a whole afternoon. My garters were often too
tight; I used to rub under my knees, and my father would frown, and play something longer, and even less enjoyable. He was a tired, disgruntled little man; ineffectually sarcastic, and haunted by a
very bad digestion, which made him morose and incapable of enjoying anything. I think even he got sick of music sometimes, but not until he had left it too late to start anything else: and my
mother, I think, would have been finally shattered if he had presented her with any alternative.
Occasionally, his work would be performed; we would all go and there would be desperate little parties in the Green Room afterwards, with a lot of kissing, and frenziedly considered praise.
We were all made to learn the piano; but I was the only one who survived the tearful lessons with an enormous woman, who lisped, adored my father, and ambled into unwieldy rages at our
incompetence. Also the chill, blue-fingered hour of practice before breakfast, choked the others’ less dogged aspiration. After some years, my father suddenly added another hour on to this
practice, and began to superintend it. He used to stand over me while I raced through easier passages of Mozart, or perhaps exercises of Bülow, asking me difficult questions which were larded
with sarcastic similies I was far too resentful and afraid to comprehend.
I remember us getting steadily poorer. There were eventually no parties, except at tea-time, when my mother would perforce entertain her more distant relations, who patronized her, and suggested
alterations in the household which she had neither energy nor means to allow.
The house smelt of dusty carpets and forgotten meals; of grievance and misfortune. There was cracked white paint on all the window sills, and there were slimy slips of soap in the basins. The
drawing-room degenerated to a dining, living and schoolroom; with the remains of furniture for all three purposes. There were yellowing pictures of us on the mantelpiece; languid, and consciously
cultivated. The glass bookcase with cracked panes held rows of dull dark volumes which nobody wished to read. I remember the sunlight, sordid and unwelcome on my mother’s sofa; and her head
drooping over the arm. Her hair was always parted in the middle, strained back, and escaping in brittle strands round her ears. She seemed perpetually struggling with an enormous round work basket,
writhing with grey and brown socks which gaped for attention. I can remember no colour that I can describe: no change of tempo. In the studio, the pianos stopped and started with monotonous
regularity when my father resorted to teaching. For several years there was a great jar of dusty crackling beech leaves. I remember odd ends of braid round the piano stools, which shivered when
pupils banged the door, as they invariably did. It was a very heavy door. Upstairs there were wide draughty passages covered with small faded mats over which one did or tripped. My mother’s
bedroom was filled with huge and reputedly valuable pieces of furniture: but her remnants of jewellery winked sadly in worn white velvet; her silver-topped brushes were always tarnished; there were
innumerable bent hairpins in cracks between the floorboards; and the whole room was impregnated with the brisk improbable smell of my father’s shaving soap (there was always a soft grey foam
on his brush). There were a great many gilt mirrors about the passages, all spotted and blurred with damp, like the passages themselves. We had a tiny garden, surrounded by black brick walls,
filled with straggling grass and silent fleeting cats. I do not recall anything else very much.
My elder sister put up her hair, and began going down to dinner. The boys were always away, and I did not, in any case, like them very much. I was horribly lonely. I read everything I could lay
my hands on, which was little; grew too fast; and, above all, longed for something to happen.
My sister began going to church a great deal and I found a purple Bible with silver clasps in her bedroom. She was out and I was amusing myself with her room and private things. There were a
crucifix, a rosary and a few books on religious subjects smugly bound in red and gold. Was she a Roman Catholic? I didn’t know anything about her; if I caught her eye at meals or in the
evening she would smile, remotely gentle, and go on eating or sewing, delicately withdrawn. Her speech was carefully non-committal and she didn’t talk to me much beyond asking me if I was
going to wash my hair or telling me to help our mother.
I opened the drawers of her dressing-table. Her underclothes were beautifully embroidered, all white and folded, made by herself. Her boots were polished, with no broken laces. Above them in the
wardrobe her dresses hung wasted with waiting; with no one to take them out into the air. They were chiefly white, mauve, dark blue and grey, with shoulders flopping sulkily off the hangers. The
mauve was pretty: I had never worn mauve. It had hundreds of little buttons made of itself. I took it out of the wardrobe. It swayed a little, and suddenly I was unhooking my skirt, tearing my
blouse under the arms as I wrenched it over my head, my long hair catching on the hooks, and then standing in my petticoat looking down at my ugly black shoes and stockings. I laid hands on the
mauve frock. The buttons were awfully difficult to do up. I couldn’t manage the one in the middle of my back at all. I twisted like a flamingo and heard the taut cotton cracking. Just about
to crack I hoped. Not actually torn. I turned to a long thin mirror by the bed. My petticoat was not long enough and there was a line like a let-down hem. The dress fitted me. How clean and trim
and old. I looked into the glass and said: ‘I love you, Edward,’ several times. My hair was wrong; he would laugh. I rushed to the dressing-table, the tight mauve skirts primly
resisting, and succeeded after some agonizing moments with hairpins in twisting a bun at the back of my head. ‘Good afternoon, Lavinia,’ I said, advancing on the mirror. ‘Good
afternoon.’ And I curtsied. At that moment my sister came into the room. I saw her face in the mirror. I turned round quickly so that she should not see the gap with the undone buttons. I was
very frightened and afraid the gap would make her more angry. I hated her for coming in. No harm, I kept repeating to myself, only one frock, no harm.
