‘Lampson?’ said the Major. ‘Truth to tell I can hardly remember the fellow.’ He paused, stroked his moustache – a characteristic gesture – and shook his head regretfully. ‘Years older than she was, you know. Married her at eighteen, straight from school. Business associate of my grandfather’s, you see, legal wallah, solicitor I think. And then Irene turned out very different, poor girl. Had a mind of her own, read books, strong opinions – that sort of thing. Wrote stories herself, my mother said. Lampson was an old stick-in-the-mud, I daresay – they hadn’t a thing in common.’ He shook his head again. ‘Caused no end of a rumpus, of course, her going off like that. But you know, when one thinks about it, well … Poor girl … And she and Strong just fell for each other hook, line and sinker, I suppose …’
So I have taken the Porlock cottage for three months and you will be only four miles away. We can walk and talk and I shall persuade you that Stendhal is superior to George Eliot and you shall lecture me (just a little) on Christina Rossetti. Isn’t it a good prospect? I am bringing down a cargo of books to start work on Napoleon and plan to shut myself away and buckle down to it, with your company please as the icing on my cake …
It is after midnight and there is a blazing moon hung over Bossington Point and this note is the treat I allow myself after working all day. May I come on Friday afternoon? May I inflict more Napoleon on you and if your sister comes over may we all three do the walk on the hill? Your lovely letter came when I had been writing a piece for the New Age all day and was quite knocked up, head aching, ready to chuck up books once and for all, and with it the sun came out and I walked on the beach and read it again by the rock against which we sat last week …
I lay awake all last night. I should have gone away, Irene, that first time we met, and never returned.
‘Fact is,’ said the Major, ‘my mother took their side. Stood up for them, d’you see, against her parents. She’d never cared for Lampson, apparently. Thought he was a dry old stick, not worth Irene – there was some name she used to call him, afterwards, she and my father – Cas … Caso-something …
‘Casaubon?’
‘That’s right.’
What are we to do, my darling? What am I to do? Do you want me to go away?
Your letters … I lie in wait like some spider, a pipe-smoking typing spider – one eye on the paper, the other on the window, pretending to work. I hear the postman’s bicycle before it rounds the corner. I hear if he is slowing down for my door or if this morning he is spinning past and if he spins my heart drops unfathomable depths into my boots and the morning is ruined, it lies in ashes around me, it can rain black cats for all I care, the world is a foul mean dingy place …
Not at the weekend, you say. So be it. Five whole days, then.
Midnight. You are four miles away, and four thousand. After we said goodbye I watched you go down the hill – you stopped at the oak by the gate, as I knew you would, and looked back, and waved – and walking home through the valley I went over every word we said. I love you. You love me. God knows why you should do so, but you do. I am happier than ever in my life, Irene, happy in a way I didn’t know possible. And in black despair.
‘Wondered if you’d care for a spot of music tonight?’ said the Major. ‘Make a change from backgammon?’ He had produced from the depths of one of the many cupboards in the house a heap of 78s. The curious sounds that Mark had heard from time to time during the day were, he now realised, the Major’s attempts to limber up the ancient radiogram in the corner of the sitting-room. He now opened it and demonstrated with pride the revolving turntable. ‘Going nicely again. Wretched thing went phut for months but I’ve had a go at it with the oil-can and a screwdriver and hey presto!’ He looked thoughtfully at Mark. ‘I imagine you’d prefer classical stuff? This sort of thing your cup of tea at all?’ He held out a record from the pile.
‘Certainly,’ said Mark.
They sat at opposite sides of the fireplace. The Major lay back in his chair, gazing at the ceiling, and as ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ got under way, his right arm lifted from time to time and made stabbing gestures at the floor, not quite in accord with the beat but evidently deeply felt. At one point his lips moved, soundlessly, as though in song. The room was filled with Elgar; the Major got out a large handkerchief and wiped his face once or twice. When the record was over he sat up, blew his nose vigorously and put on the other side. ‘Fine stuff, eh?’
Mark nodded.
They moved from Elgar to the Nutcracker Suite and thence to Borodin and part of one movement of the Grieg Piano Concerto (the rest had been broken). The Major’s stabbing gestures gave way to more expansive movements of the arms. At the end of each record he would shake his head and say, ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ or ‘Wonderful the way those fellows think up stuff like that.’ Mark was invited to make his own choice and found some excerpts from The Magic Flute; the quality of the sound was somewhat distressing at points but the Major listened, rapt. When it was finished he said, ‘I like a nice bit of singing. ’Fraid there isn’t anything much else in that line – except …’ He went over to the pile of records and picked out another, which he put on the turntable, with a glance of apology in Mark’s direction. ‘You may not care for this sort of thing.’
A little distorted, as though coming from a long way away, the strains of thirties dance music filled the room. ‘Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone … Without a dream in my heart … Without a love of my own.’ The Major crossed the room to the tray on which stood the whisky bottle and poured them each a tot. He returned to his chair. It was beginning to get dark. The room, always somewhat gloomy, became twilit except for the single bar of the electric fire in the empty fireplace before which the dog lay, snoring like a simmering kettle.
Oh isn’t it heavenly …
To be so romantically and frantically in love with you …
The Major, one hand gently tapping the arm of his chair, had a beatific smile on his face. Once or twice he nodded absently, as though in agreement with the lyric. He looked at Mark, ‘This all right for you?’
‘Very pleasant,’ said Mark.
Love is the sweetest thing,
The only and the neatest thing …
There hung in the room an atmosphere of unspoken recollection, a hint of passions dried out like rose-petals but to which a faint scent still clung, a whisper of the girl and the song and the moonlight. Mark, infected, was filled with indefinable yearnings which seemed to have little to do with love or anything pertaining thereunto. He felt a sense of loss that was general rather than specific, a grief that was not entirely unpleasurable at departed emotions, at the scheme of things, at the passage of life. Once or twice images of Carrie or of Diana, long ago, flitted before him, causing a twinge but drifting away again as the singer on the gramophone, his voice creaking at points and employing a curious exaggerated pronunciation, moved on to another theme.
The rose that you caress
Is willing to die.
It loves you so very much
And so do I …
It seemed indelicate to break the mood with conversation. The Major sighed. He got up to change the record, brought the whisky bottle over and put a dash more in each glass, murmuring, ‘… little of what the doctor ordered does no harm.’
Smoke gets in your eyes …
Yet today my love has flown away,
I am without my love …
They sat on in the darkening room. The Major leaned back in his chair, tapping on the arm with one finger and softly humming. Mark, in a limbo just short of melancholy, roved around various moments and feelings and people; none of them, now, seemed of intense importance and perhaps more significant in this state of contemplation than at the time. He wondered, but did not like to ask, what the Major was thinking about, or feeling. The rapport between them was too comfortable and discreet a thing to rupture with intrusive enquiry; emotion, the Major implied, was perfectly acceptable but a matter for private indulgence. Whe
n the record finished and the needle ground to a halt he sighed again, looked at his watch, stirred the dog with his foot and said, ‘Well, time to take the poor fellow for his walk, I suppose.’
‘I wish I could offer to do it for you,’ said Mark. ‘I’m a total parasite, I’m afraid, as a visitor.’
The Major peered into the radiogram, blew at something and closed the lid. ‘Think nothing of it.’ He paused. ‘I’m only sorry you’re having to pig it rather. It’s not exactly the Ritz here, I know. When a chap’s lived by himself for a long time things get a bit out of hand. Needs a woman’s touch.’ He straightened, shoved the dog absently with a foot and pulled his moustache. ‘Could have been a different story, of course …’
Mark looked enquiring. The dog put its nose against the Major’s knee and snorted loudly. The Major patted it and shook his head briskly. ‘Ah well – all for the best, I dare say.’
The moment passed.
16
The letters, chronologically sorted in so far as this was possible, lay in neat piles on the table: those read, those yet unread, those from which transcripts should be taken. And each time Mark sat down in front of them again his unease grew.
He had never felt like this before. He had read without flinching and frequently without response of any kind the most intimate and revealing documents; he had marched resolutely into the privacies of strangers. It was, after all, his job. He could not, therefore, understand why it was that, now, here amid the dusty weaponry of the Major’s study, he confronted Gilbert Strong with greater and greater reluctance.
One of the surprises – one of the imponderables – was that this was a different Strong to any he had met before. Here was a Strong with all defences down, without any of the bombast or calculated stances, sincere, vulnerable and … doomed. For, as Mark read, he was unable to lose sight of his own foreknowledge. He felt like some cold omniscient Olympian eye, knowing as he read these words of love and hope and expectation that none of it would come to pass. Knowing what would happen.
Irene, after months of anguish, had decided to tell her husband of her love for Strong and ask for a divorce. His response – deduced from the Major’s recollections through his mother and from passages in Strong’s letters – had been unexpected and chilling. He had admitted that he did not love her, at least not in any sense of love that she recognised, but had cited her duty and her position. Divorce was out of the question, unless eventually he so chose and he implied that he never would.
And so she left, and went to Gilbert Strong in the Porlock cottage.
Do you know that this is the first time I have spent more than two hours away from you in two months? Confound London – confound editors and libraries and Napoleon. What are you doing at this moment? I know – you are walking up onto the moor, with your hair coming unpinned as it does at any excuse. No you are not – you are by the fire, reading and frowning and making notes of things to get our teeth into next week … And I am wretched without you …
I want children, Irene. I want a daughter who will grow up as a further dimension of her mother. Never mind about sons – oh well, them too, maybe, eventually.
When we are married – and we will be married, I know we will, I see the long years of our marriage ahead like a great spacious welcoming firelit room – when we are married we shall have a house in London because I want to show you off. I want to wave you around in pride. We’ll have that – but we’ll also have Porlock, or somewhere like Porlock, because we’re going to want to be alone, and work, and shut the door on people …
Friday, my love … Napoleon or no Napoleon, I cannot stand another day away from you.
I suppose there are other women in the world but if so I do not see them. I think you are the first woman, you are how the whole idea began, there has never been a woman before. And don’t frown, I shall talk nonsense if I wish – there is nothing you can do about it, two hundred miles away. Let me tell you why you are the first woman. Let me tell you about your eyes and your hair and your breasts …
Mark pushed the letters to one side and got to his feet, forgetting momentarily his ankle and uttering a yelp of pain. He reached for the stick lent him by the Major and limped to the door. Enough. A half-hour respite, at least.
Nowhere, subsequently, in all the mass of Strong’s preserved papers, was there any mention of Irene. This could not be fortuitous. He had deliberately set about eliminating any reference to her. Had Violet known about her? Had Susan? Undoubtedly Hermione did not. And why? The reason, it seemed to Mark, was manifest in the nature of the letters themselves: his relationship with her had had an intensity unequalled by anything that came after. Her death, it was easy to deduce, had shattered him; and his complex and somehow typical reaction had been to hide her away. From his wives, his friends, his colleagues and, finally, from any potential biographer. These letters were not supposed to be read.
And I wish, thought Mark with violence, I were not doing so. His response amazed him. Anyone else would have regarded all this as a stupendous piece of professional luck.
The Major was out on one of his protracted and complex shopping excursions. Mark went into the sitting-room and sat at the window, looking into the dank and untended garden. He thought about Gilbert Strong. He tried to come to some conclusions about the man. The point was not far off when he would have to stop accumulating and reading and questioning, and start to write.
And as he considered – piling up Strong’s qualities of tenacity, contentiousness, application, intellectual breadth, deviousness and so forth – it came to him that what was in question was not only an assessment of Gilbert Strong but the progress of a relationship. An entirely one-sided relationship: intense on his part, non-existent on Strong’s. Two weeks ago, Mark thought, I was having paranoic suspicions about the man: I was fully persuaded that he had gone to considerable lengths to frustrate and mislead me. Me personally, mind. And now that I am in possession of knowledge that seems intrusive – now that I have the upper hand, so to speak – I feel as guilty as though I had stumbled upon the privacies of some friend or acquaintance. I would much prefer to discreetly withdraw.
He sat, his ankle giving the occasional twinge, and stared at the Major’s rampant greenery; a light rain misted the view, as it usually did. Thoughts of Strong himself gave way to reflections upon the effect of Strong. But for Strong, but for the events of Strong’s life, but above all for Strong’s emotional condition in 1912, he would not be where he was – sitting with a sprained ankle in the house of a stranger. Nor would his own emotional state over the last few months be as it had been. Carrie; France. And, as the garden gate clicked and the Major hove in sight, draped about with plastic carrier-bags and with the dog stumping along at his heels, it occurred to Mark that, in some eerie way, by means of these two people, Strong’s life had extended into his own. The relationship was not entirely one way after all.
Carrie no longer thought of Mark with guilt; truth to tell she did not think about him a great deal at all since it was no longer possible for her to devote thought – if it could so be called – to anyone but Nick. But occasionally she returned to those days driving through France, and to the times before that, and she found that they had subtly changed, seen now through the enlightenment of experience. She felt, oddly, closer to him, with the arbitrary intimacy of people who share survival from some natural disaster. She would have rather liked to see him.
And then one day Diana telephoned, which at first induced in Carrie familiar symptoms of alarm. But Diana was perfectly friendly, matter-of-fact and without recriminations. She had discovered that Mark forgot to return to Dean Close with Carrie’s other possessions a jacket left in the car at Sarlat. He would do so at some later date. But not for a couple of weeks or so as he was stuck down in some neck of the woods place in Somerset with a sprained ankle, poor darling. ‘Incurred in the course of duty, apparently. Don’t ask me how, but this is the tale. So he’s being put up by a peculiar old boy in some way conn
ected with your grandfather.’
‘Oh,’ said Carrie. The last statement interested her not at all. After a moment she went on, ‘Gosh … Poor Mark. Is he … I mean how does he … Well, how is he otherwise?’
‘Fine. Working.’
‘Oh. Well … good.’
‘That business in France,’ said Diana, ‘is overcome, one way and another. A passing aberration. As these things usually are.’
‘Are they?’ said Carrie, in sudden apprehension, thinking not of Mark at all.
‘In my experience.’
Diana’s experience, Carrie had no doubt, was not to be questioned. Her uneasiness increased. She fiddled with the lead of the telephone, worrying.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
‘I thought we’d been cut off,’ said Diana. ‘Well, I must go. I’m at the gallery and we’re up to the eyes, as usual. I just thought you might have been wondering about that jacket.’
‘Thank you. Could you give Mark my love?’
Diana appeared to reflect. ‘Yes. I don’t see why not. Any other messages?’
‘No. No, not really.’ Carrie hesitated. ‘I’m glad he’s O.K. I mean, except for his ankle. But what you said about, about passing … passing aberrations. Not everything is.’
There was a silence. ‘How do you mean?’ enquired Diana cautiously.
‘Well, you and Mark weren’t. When you met.’
Diana cleared her throat. Behind this, Carrie could hear a woman’s voice telling someone, in tones of ringing authority, not to put the damn thing down that way up. ‘Well, we got married, for heaven’s sake.’
‘That’s what I meant,’ said Carrie.
‘Oh.’ Diana conveyed a quiver of the antennae. ‘Are you … Is there something else you were thinking of?’