The Woman Who Had Imagination (7 page)

The country began to change also. The yellowing wheat-fields, the dark fields of roots shining and drooping in the hot sun, the parched hayfields and woods were replaced by an immense park of old dark trees under which the grass was still spring green and sweet. Far off, timid and startled, groups of young deer,
palest brown against the dark tree-shadows, with an occasional dark antlered, resentful stag, stood and watched the brake go past with glassy, wondering eyes. Soon, through wider spaces between the trees, there was the big house itself, a square, stone tall-windowed place, with a carved stone balustrade round the lead roof and immense black cedars encircling the lawns. It looked cold and sepulchral even against the rich darkness of the trees in the hot sunlight.

The brake turned into the park through high iron gates on which the family crest blazed in scarlet and gold. It was as if it had driven into a churchyard. The passengers were suddenly transformed, sitting with a stiff, self-conscious silence upon them. As the brake drove along under a great avenue of elms extending like a sombre nave up to the lawns of the house, the horses fell into a walk. The fishmonger sat very upright on the driver's seat, preening his buttonhole, and the fat woman, sucking her last cachou quickly, wiped her lips clean with her handkerchief. The handsome young man in a rakish straw hat, taking his hand away from the school teacher's knee, ceased his seductive whispers. The carriage-drive emerged in an immense sweep from under the dark avenue into the sunlight and curved on between the lawns and the house. The brake pulled up behind a row of other brakes standing empty by a tall yew-hedge and the choir began to alight, the men handing down the ladies from the awkward back-step and the ladies giving little
delicate shrieks and pretending to stumble. Henry's father dragged out from under the brake seat an immense portmanteau of music. From over the lawns gay with parasols and flowing frocks, there came a scent of new-mown grass and women's dresses, the swooning breath of lime trees and a hum of human voices like the sound of bees.

Across the lawn also came a man in an old panama hat, a yellowish alpaca suit and a faded green bow, beaming with smiles and gestures of aristocratic idiocy.

‘Oh, pardon, pardon me!' he cried. ‘But 'oo are you? Oh! Orpheus choir! Yes! Orpheus! Marvellous! T'ank you a t'ousand times for coming. Yes! And if you desire anyt'ing please come to me. Anyt'ing you like. Anyt'ing. And T'ank you a t'ousand times for coming! T'ank you a t'ousand times! And eez it not ze most marvellous day? Most marvellous!'

In the full heat of the afternoon, tired from walking about the crowded lawns in the fierce sunshine and even more bored that he had been in the brake, Henry saw people passing in and out of the house through a side door on the terrace. Following them, he found himself in a wide lofty entrance hall that had about it the queer half-scented coolness of a church and the same hollow silence broken at intervals by the sound of
voices and strange receding and returning echoes. He took off his straw hat and wiped his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief. The air felt as cool as a leaf on his hot face. In answer to his question a negative-faced manservant standing at ease like a tired soldier at the foot of a wide stone staircase told him that the house was open to visitors till five o'clock. He walked quietly up the stairs, his feet soundless on the heavy carpet, staring at the magnificence of gilded ceilings, dim tapestries, old dark portraits, immense sparkling chandeliers, touching the flower-smoothness of old chests and chairs with his finger-tips as he passed. Upstairs he went in and out of innumerable rooms, staring at vast canopied bedsteads, lacquered cabinets filled with never-opened books and fragile china, dim painted screens and ornate fireplaces of cold blue-veined marble. He wondered all the time who had ever lived and slept there, contrasting it all unconsciously with the room behind the shop at home, with the cheap German silk-fronted piano, the brass gasbrackets, the cane music-rack, the broken revolving piano stool, the flashy green jars containing aspidistras whose leaves his mother counted and sponged religiously every Saturday. The place had an air of unreality. The yellow blinds, drawn to keep out the sun, threw down a strange shadowy apricot light. Here and there rents in the blinds let in streaks of dusty sunlight. When he put his hand on the walls they struck cold and damp. Across the floors he
noticed trails of candle-grease dropped perhaps by some servant coming in to lower the blinds at night or let them up again in the morning. How long ago? he wondered. There was a melancholy air of the past, of vague, dead, forgotten things. There was also a curious feeling of poverty about it all in spite of that rich magnificence. The blinds were old and stained, the paint was cracked and dirty, and here and there a ceiling had crumbled away, revealing naked laths draped with black skeins of cobweb.

Going slowly up the second flight of stairs, he stopped now and then to look at the prints on the walls. A clock in the house struck four, the notes very soft and delicate, a silver water-sound. Some visitors passed him, coming down, their voices dying away down the two flights of stairs like a vague chant. Going up, he found himself in a bare corridor.

Walking into a room by one door and out by another he turned along a narrow corridor in order to return to the stairs, but the passage seemed contained within itself, to lead nowhere. And in a moment he was lost. Trying to go back to the room through which he had come he tried a door, but it was locked. He began to try other doors, which were also locked. It was some minutes before he found a door which opened.

Relieved, he hurried through the room. But halfway across the floor, thinking of nothing but escaping by the opposite door, he was startled into a fresh panic by a voice:

‘But unfortunately, in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship's headdress slightly scratching the child's neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness, such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any creature professedly noisy. The mother's consternation was excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm. …'

At the word alarm he stopped. The voice stopped too. He felt himself break out into a prickling sweat. Across the room, with his thin fingers outstretched to a low wood fire, sat an old man in a torn red dressing-gown. He was sunk into a kind of sick trance. By his side there was a woman, a young woman. Arrested in the act of reading, she sat with her averted head still and intense, looking across the room with the blackest eyes he had ever seen, black not only with their own richness of colour but with an illimitable darkness of sheer melancholy.

‘I'm lost,' Henry said.

‘Lost?'

She stood upright as she echoed the word, rubbing the fingers of her left hand up and down the yellow leather binding of the book. Trying to face her he was sick with confusion. The old man turned stiffly and stared at him also. The old eyes were pale and vacuous.

Suddenly the woman smiled.

‘It's all right,' she said.

For some reason or other Henry could not answer her. He stood half-foolishly hypnotised by her figure, tall and wonderfully slender, her very long maroon-coloured
dress, her unspeakably brilliant eyes. Her voice had in it a kind of mournful sweetness which held him fascinated.

At last he attempted to explain himself. He had no sooner begun than she cut him short:

‘I'll show you the way,' she said.

He still could not answer. She turned to the old man:

‘Sit still. I'll come back.'

‘Where are you going?' he muttered querulously. ‘Who's that young man?'

In one swift movement she turned from the old man to Henry and then back to the old man again, smiling at the youth with half-grave, half-vivacious eyes. And there was the same mischievous solemnity in her voice.

‘He's the new gardener,' she said.

‘Eh?'

‘The new gardener. Here, take the book. Read a little till I come back. From the top of the page there. You see?'

‘What? I'd like some tea.'

‘All right.'

‘It's not so frightfully warm in here either,' he said pettishly.

‘Keep your dressing-gown buttoned. You're not likely to be warm. See, button it up.'

She fingered the buttons of his dressing-gown, quickly, impatiently. And then, while he still protested
and complained, she walked swiftly across the room, opened the far door and vanished into the passage outside. In bewilderment Henry followed her. She shut the door quickly behind him.

‘Well, now I'll see you out,' she said.

She began to walk away along the passage and he followed her, a step or two behind. She walked quickly with long, impatient steps, so that he had difficulty in keeping up.

They walked along in silence except for the sound of her dress swishing along the carpet until he recognised the window at which he had stood and looked down in the choir.

‘I'm all right now,' he said. He began to utter dim thanks and apologies.

‘Go and enjoy yourself,' she said. ‘Have you seen the lake?'

‘No,'

‘Go and see it. Across the park and through the rhododendron plantation. You'll find it. It's lovely.'

Before he could speak again she had turned away. There was a brief flash of maroon in the passage, the sound of her feet running quickly after she had vanished. He waited a moment. But nothing happened, there was only a curious, almost audible hush everywhere. Outside the singing had ceased. He moved towards the stairs in a state of dejected and tense astonishment.

The singing was over for the afternoon. There was nothing to do but wander about the lawns and terraces or take tea in the large flagged tea-tent. Privileged ladies were playing croquet on a small lawn under the main terrace, giggling nervously as they struck the bright-coloured balls. Gentlemen in straw boaters and pin-striped cream flannel trousers with wide silk waist-bands applauded their shots delicately. There was an oppressive feeling of summer languor, a parade of gay hats and parasols and sweeping dresses. Henry went into the tea-tent for a cup of tea to escape the boredom of it all. Coming out again he met the fishmonger.

‘Cheer up,' said the fishmonger.

‘Oh! I'm all right.' He put on a casual air. ‘I was wondering which was the way to the lake.'

‘The lake?' said the fishmonger. His eyes began to dance like little bubbling peas as soon as he heard the word. The lake? What did he want with the lake? Becoming quite excited, he took hold of Henry's coat-sleeve confidentially and led him across the lawn. So he wanted to know the way to the lake? Well! Very strange. He wondered what he wanted with the lake? Not for fish by any chance? Oh! no, not for fish. Perhaps he didn't even know there were fish in the lake? Henry protested. He cut him short:

‘Ah, you're dark, you're dark.'

Finally, losing a little of his excitement, he began to tell him of the days when, as a young man, he had fished in the lake. Fish! They hadn't breathing room. They were the days. But now there hadn't been fish, not a solitary fish, not a stickleback, pulled out of that lake for twenty years. ‘Not since old Antonio came.' It was a shame, wickedness. He began to talk with lugubrious regret. Who was Antonio? Henry asked. The fishmonger echoed the words with tenor astonishment, his voice squeaking. Antonio? Hadn't he seen him running about all over the place — ‘T'ank you a t'ousand times! T'ank you a t'ousand times!' So that was Antonio? Yes, Antonio Serelli. It was he who was mad on singing and had the choirs come every summer. It was he who hadn't allowed a line in the lake for twenty years. ‘In the old days you could give a keeper a drink and fish all day.' But not now. Antonio wouldn't allow it. The police had instructions to keep their eyes open for anyone carrying anything that looked like a rod. And Antonio would go mad if he heard a fish had been hooked. But then he was mad. They were all mad, the whole family, always had been. The girl and all.

‘The girl?' Henry repeated. ‘Who is she?'

‘Maddalena?' The fishmonger shook his head. He didn't know anything about Maddalena. He'd never seen her. She never came out. He only knew old Antonio.

‘And what's their name?'

‘Serelli.'

‘Which must be Italian.'

‘Half and half. Don't do to inquire too much into the ins and outs of the aristocracy.'

Finally he pointed out the path going down through a plantation of rhododendrons to the lake and Henry climbed over the high iron fence of the park.

‘Keep your eyes open,' the fishmonger whispered. ‘They say he's down there every night. Singing the fish to sleep I shouldn't wonder.'

Henry left him and walked down through the rhododendrons to the lake. It was larger than he had imagined, a wide oval of water, stretching for a quarter of a mile before him and on either hand. A thick wood came down on the opposite shore to the fringe of reeds and wild iris fronds. The water was still and smooth until a pair of wild duck, frightened by his coming, shot up and flew high and swift over the alders darkening the bank, their feet dripping silver, their long necks craned to the sun, their alarmed quack-quacking splitting the warm silence. The water-rings, undulating gently away, struck islands of water lilies with a soft flopping sound. Under the sun-shot water countless lily-buds were pushing up like dim magnolias and on the surface wide-open flowers floated like saucers of white and yellow china.

As he walked along the lakeside he could still hear the faint cries that rose from the crowded lawns, and
now and then the clock of croquet balls. Hearing them he thought of how he had wandered about the lawns and gardens trying to find courage enough to go into the house again in the hope of seeing for a second time the girl who had been reading to the old man. He could not forget the melancholy intensity of her face. But when finally he had hurried along the terrace the door had been locked.