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VIII

Although the Canadians had already drawn up a plan for their upcoming week in London, they were still left with another one in Canterbury, one very empty, uncharted week where plans were to be formed, if only ideas came more swiftly to the residents of Fanshaw Clinton.

Tess and Emmy were very fond of roller-skating and movie-going, so that Tess was compelled to suggest the aforementioned activity with due enthusiasm, not having skated in over a month. The proposition was received with relief. Their guests knew better how to occupy themselves than their hosts did. And so it was settled, that the ‘kids’ would go to an open-aired roller-skating rink. Eve was too grown-up for such childish recreation, but Lila still had the fossils of childhood within her, which drove her to humbly attaching herself to those who were going – Tess, Emmy, and Chris.

The music that played was suited more to the pubescent rollers than it was to the rather more grown-up Fanshaws and Canadians, but Tess and Emmy were well used to such ‘sweet music,’ and were very much disposed to enjoy themselves despite certain drawbacks. Emmy partnered with Lila, as she had never skated before, and Tess cheerfully clipped her hands to Chris’s arm, the latter pretending not to know how to skate.

“I have a vision of you roller-skating with banners for feminism,” he said to her in his far-away, deadpan way. “Like the suffragettes did. Wouldn’t you prefer joining forces with them, rather than with flappers as galling as Eve?”

“Eve is as much a fragment of our ridiculous culture as your mother is, no offense,” she replied with light-hearted criticism. She really knew how to deliver a morally oriented condemnation without offending, rather like a priest to a sinful churchgoer.

“That is a fact,” he said, sealing his lips until they had glided around the crowded rink a good five minutes without exchanging words. “Tess, I can’t help not liking you going away to London,” he said at last.

“Oh? Why not?”

“Well, for one, because you are sure to forget me. And then you might also be noticed by a lord, and be asked to marry him.”

“Me? Marry a lord? Chris, it’s like you don’t even know me!” she giggled, though both soon began understanding the depth of their argument, rather than lightly skimming the surface. “Darling,” she said with a grave smile at him. He wondered how she could skate without tripping, at that rate. It was very much in the style of a Hollywood gentleman driving a car without looking at the road. “No matter what comes to pass in London, and no matter how many suitors I might have, my plan remains constant. I must and will go back home – to study.”

“Do you mean to say that you plan to go to University?”

“That’s precisely it.” Instead of ridiculing her, as she half expected him to, he inquired, with forced humility, what she would be majoring in.

“Probably something in relation to writing. I’m very fond of nineteenth century literature, so that would be my first choice.”

“I see,” he murmured, loosening his grip on her arm. She was wearing a striped sweater vest, and her silky white arm was soft to the touch. Tess’s sweaters reminded him of his old nurse, a woman who had left him in this cruel world but a year hence.

“Have I ever told you of Nurse Annie?” he suddenly shot the question at her, feeling how very much a part of his world both women were – or had been.

“No,” Tess replied with wonder. “Who is she?”

“Was – mind you, Tess, she passed away last Easter. She was my nurse, as suggests her title (with an innocent smile) and she meant the world to me. My parents, up until the age of six, were very fond of me – or as much as they could be, considering their cold natures – but the older I grew, the more they seemed to distance themselves from me. Mummy especially. She only used me for occasional exhibition to her friends and acquaintance, for I was always a well-groomed boy, and daddy had always his mind elsewhere – away from the family.”

“How about me take a break?” Tess interposed, feeling a serious conversation about the Fanshaws coming on. Chris agreeing, they stepped off the skating rink, and purchased glasses of soda and ice. Then Chris led her with his hand on her back to a bench, where they could talk and observe the monotonous roll of the skaters in their private orbit.

“Mummy was quite a femme fatale in her day. She would gain every man’s admiration, and did not have the sense to know what to do with it, like a child receiving a pistol for its sixth birthday. She would be invited to friends’ summerhouses and carry on thoughtless affairs with men whom she was once courted by as a young debutante. Poor daddy… he always loved her, but after she had eloped with one of her beaus, he was blind enough to tyrannise her into returning to his protection. No sensible man would have done that. But he was in love – and is still – for love is a dangerous, obsessive illusion.

“The day that she returned, no one knew each other any more – not as we once did, at all events. We were strangers pretending to be a functional Edwardian family. That is where Nurse Annie comes in. She was recruited by the Old Man, and came to us in the autumn of 1910, when I was ten years old. Her name was Annabel Richardson, but mummy did not like the romantic twang of her Christian name, so that she ordered us to call her Nurse Annie. She was a delightful woman of twenty-six. When she came to us she was tall and well-formed, and she was the paragon of Gibson Girl beauty. At that time in my life, I was searching for a replacement for my mother, because she had disappointed me so gravely.

“Look at me now, Tess, and try telling me I am not a fallen individual – tortured and deceived by those whom I had once loved so deeply. I am disappointed in mummy for having cheated on daddy, and as a result of all my deformed notions of family life, I speak harshly to my sisters for being such hopeless flappers, and often contemplate my own death. I call Henry a ‘bluenose,’ which is true enough, though if you can believe it, we were once quite close. Life is built upon many uncertainties, Tess, but for the first time in my life I felt certain that Nurse Annie would make me lastingly happy. I am, by nature, a tender hearted young man, but years of frustration have made me into a pompous brute.”

“Well, was she your governess, or something?” his listener inquired as he lapsed into thought.

“Yes – and no. She was meant to teach us all, but ended in being a substitute for our negligent mother. Daddy was all right, for he did not consciously avoid us, but as children we could scarce make out the difference between conscious negligence and unconscious negligence. At any rate,” he sighed, sipping his soda. “Nurse Annie remained with us until I went off to college. After that, Eve would constantly be invited to stay at friends’ houses, most of whom were abroad, and Lila, with her dear older sister’s constant departures, sank into herself, though a brilliant future was said to be waiting for her, if only she would care to go toward it.”

Tess glimpsed the time on her silver watch-bracelet, and then said, the words coming out with a sigh, “How time flies. It was a whole hour ago that we arrived, and yet it seems we have been here a much shorter time.”

“To be sure it does,” said Chris, finishing off his soda water and then seizing her hand. His smile was slow and tender. What change he had suffered from the first day of his arrival! Loud striped coats no longer pleased him as decisively as they had, and though he still wore his fancy neckties, the country air had filtered his lungs and mind, and he breathed as well as thought with more ease and sensibility. It was shocking to her how great and negative an alteration fashionable city dwelling could produce on a human being as fragile as he was. For days, she had not had cause to dislike his behaviour, and her simple hope was to be fortunate enough to be in his company another week without the strain of his thunderous mood swings.

She rose, and followed him back to the rink. The sun was peaking out of its feathery wrapping, and shining rhythmically on the rink as the skaters glided without care, going round and round and never stopping. They fused into the soothing spin, losing themselves in its meaninglessness.

***

He was reclining in the tub in the bathroom adjoining his bedroom. He felt like Marat, his head leant back against the cool edge of the tub as his muscled right arm dangled down the side.

He had his sodden head wrapped in a white towel like a turban, much as the political man had in David’s painting, and cloths as well as old towels were draped everywhere that had edges. His left hand was bringing a cigarette to and from his coral mouth. He tried to remember the little he knew of Marat. Political theorist. Radical journalist. Jacobean. Friend of the people.

He transferred his thoughts from indifferent facts of history to Tess, and of the little time they had remaining together – though not together, for the presence of others cut up their mutual peace.

He had not come home hoping to meet someone so peaceful and pleasant as Nurse Annie had been. He almost wished to be good, and never return to London to be further wounded by its society, only to be with her. But life has too many complications to allow us to craft such simple schemes. He was conscious of it, and smiled with slow derision at the putridity of reality – it was like a putridly pink cocktail, really. It doesn’t look any better than it tastes.

And yet he felt that Tess had come to him from another world – she was so fresh, so unspoiled by it. Life. There was no mystery about her, because she had never lived through horror or elegant decadence. Every member of his family had experienced it – moral decline. He could not exclude himself from it either. And the poor, thoughtlessly frank girl was becoming so involved with him and his father. Would Cecil finally snap? Would this charming young woman inspire him to divorce his atrocious wife, and live out the remainder of his life with more honesty toward himself as well as his children?

A knock roused him from his thoughts.

“Who is it?” he called out, half rising from the bathtub.

“It’s me, you sap,” said his sister’s familiarly cool voice, controlled by a restraint of emotion. Her disposition had always been too frigid to allow her to be warm and friendly with him. She could only but manage condescension and indifference.

“Go away,” he grunted, sinking back into the tub with a wet, squeaking sound. “I’m taking a bath.”

“I can hear that,” she called back. “Now let me in.” She heard her struggling with the doorknob, and finally giving up upon finding it locked.

“What do you want, sis? Have you come to murder me, in the same style as that minx Charlotte Corday? Because if that is your purpose in disturbing my morning tranquillity, then I must tell you how indisposed I am to meet with such a gruesome end. I am too fine, and have not finished smoking my ciggy.”

“Don’t be so difficult. I want to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“I shall tell you that once you let me in.” Chris extinguished his cigarette in the water, and then leapt out of the tub, the tips of his fingers having wrinkled already from the excess of time he had spent in the water. He loosened the towel from around his head, and tied it snugly about his waist. Rubbing his recently shaved cheeks while glimpsing himself in the mirror above the sink, he took a few steps toward the door, and unbolted it, smiling snidely at her as they faced each other without a word.

After an indulgent stare, Eve pushed past him and dove recklessly into his absurdly tidy room. She ran a bewildered gaze over the said room, doubtless wondering how he could keep it in better order than she could hers. She watched him closing the door behind him, and then starting up the gramophone. A slow, morose tune began playing, to which she reacted with a contemptuous scoff and a low but demanding “Please turn that thing off – or at least play something merrier.”

“No,” he said pursing his lips and then folding his white arms over his chest. “I quite like Mozart, and if you don’t approve of him, then I’ll have Tess come in. Tess likes Mozart, you know.”

“You’re too amusing,” she said, her delicate nostrils flaring with truculence. She was eager to fight, but unlike Tess, it was on matters wholly unconnected with importance. She leant with the back of her palms on the marble parapet at one of his windows, and ate him up with her greedy eyes. He smiled steadily. He would not be so easily upset by her looks. “I came to tell you that I’m going away again.”

“Is that all?” he asked, his brows lifting and his eyelids drooping heavily over his eyes.

“No,” she retorted, coming towards him. She paused before him, boring her sultry eyes into his. He snorted into her inclined face.

“So I must gather that you came here on purpose to seduce me?”

“I’m dirty,” she said, “but not that dirty. I came to give you this.” And reaching into her jacket pocket – she had evidently gone out for a walk – she produced a sealed letter, and save for a name scribbled on the back, it was unaddressed.

“Who is it from?” he asked, plucking it aggressively from her claws.

“I think you know,” she said, turning to go. She paused at the door, half expecting him to demand more out of her, but he was glued in one place, with his eyes curiously bent upon the envelope in his hand. She left him to it, and the instant she had gone, he tore it open, and read the following:

Dearest Chris. Being a coward in matters of love – as I have never been in love before – I decided to write you this pathetic attempt at a confession. Since first I saw you, you have moved me – say provoked me. I have foolishly been hopping from one state of incurable heat to the other, half irritated and half inspired by you. I don’t pretend to be a wit, Chris, nor a poet, but I hope that I have been eloquent enough to please you. I cannot lie to myself. I love you. When I’m with you, my soul breathes. I have obstinately loved you, like a child, and you are in every part of my being.

He lingered on the affectionately blunt words. ‘I love you.’ But the ensuing sentence disenchanted him.

Your father knows. I don’t think that he approves of my attachment, but he must not mind it very much. Now, I have written enough. Emmy and I are going shopping with my aunt. You may expect us in time for dinner.

Yours ever, &c. &c.

There. He could be happy now. But the fact that their love had not the seductive condition of secrecy dispelled most of the illusion’s charm. How could she have betrayed her feelings to his father? Now their love was soiled by public knowledge. He hated the public. No one had the right even to think of them as lovers, let alone his father, who would distress himself further with grim thoughts of his unworthiness to be with Tess.

For once, her honesty would work against her. She would soon feel the full brunt of her conservative liberalism.

“You told my father,” he sneered, lighting up again and drawing deeply on his cigarette.