Fools of Fortune

I

In Dorset in 1983, in Woodcombe Rectory, a bright young clergyman goes about his duties. For him the times are alien, as they are for the family at Woodcombe Park, obliged to lay down car parks and pick up litter. But busying himself with a roneoed letter, the clergyman comes to terms with the present, as the family does. He does not even know about the telegram that arrived, two generations ago, in bis pretty rectory on a Saturday afternoon, or how it lay on the hall-stand all afternoon, only a maid being at home until nearly five o’clock. Mrs Quinton died. When the shock of the message was arrested a second telegram had to be sent, from Dorset to the town of Masulipatam in India: Evie has sadly died. Mourning clothes were aired, remorse and guilt lay heavily on the rectory’s mood.

In Co. Cork in 1983 all that is vividly remembered.

2

We both wore black, a fact that had been noted by our fellow-travellers. The consideration for our mourning implied that it rendered us delicate: people had stood aside from our path, a woman had crossed herself, men touched their caps or hats. ‘The Irish are like that,’ my mother had explained.

At the harbour she embraced you. She dabbed at her eyes with a black-trimmed handkerchief. ‘Poor boy,’ she whispered. ‘Poor boy, poor boy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry, Willie.’

You did not reply.

A car drove us to the house and you said we must be hungry, that there was ham and salad. You led us to the dining-room where there was the same closed-in smell I remembered, not exactly fusty but suggesting a lack of use. A fire blazed in the small grate; silence hung awkwardly. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to eat and to listen to my mother talking.

‘All that terrible drinking. Well, of course, Willie, we did what we could. I mean, I said it, over and over again, Willie. When we were here last summer I pleaded with her every day.’

I asked if my room was the one it had been before. You answered brusquely, not looking at me. My mother had begun to talk again.

I left the dining-room and went upstairs. The house had remained fondly in my memory during the time that had passed, the stained glass in the hall door and the landing windows, the clutter of furniture that had escaped the fire at the other house. My bedroom was narrow, with dark walls and a single paraffin lamp: nothing had altered in it. I poured water into a flowered basin and washed myself, delaying over the task.

The funeral, you were saying when I returned to the dining-room, was to be at half-past eleven the next morning; your mother would be buried in Lough. Josephine came in, with teacups and a teapot on a tray. She arranged them on the white tablecloth and then left the room again, softly closing the door.

‘It’s only a pity,’ my mother said, ‘that they cannot come from India. They’d want to, of course. You understand, Willie? Your grandparents would wish to.’

You said you understood. My mother ate the ham and the salad, seeming to be hungry. You cut slices of fruit cake, slowly sinking the knife into the mass of raisins and sultanas, slowly withdrawing it. You poured tea and offered the cake. You didn’t look at me once.

‘I’ll rest for an hour or two,’ my mother announced when she had drunk two cups of tea. ‘Why don’t you two go for one of your walks? The fresh air’ll do you good.’

But you quickly replied that you imagined I’d want to lie down also. You were upset, I told myself, you couldn’t help sounding brusque.

‘I blame myself,’ my mother said. ‘In a way I blame myself for not being firm about the drinking. Yet what could anyone do? My own dear sister, and what could anyone do?’

She dabbed at her eyes with her black-trimmed handkerchief and then she went away. ‘I don’t think I’ll lie down,’ I said,

Without speaking, we walked down the hill and still in silence we crossed the bridge and made our way into the city.

‘My mother killed herself,’ you said at last. ‘She cut her wrists with a razor blade.’

You didn’t pause in your walk. You led me by shop windows full of clothes and china, past Woolworth’s and a chemist’s shop. Wind swirled the litter about on the pavement, seagulls screamed above our heads. A storm was getting up, you muttered in that same empty voice.

‘I didn’t know that about your mother, Willie.’

Two women with filthy children begged and clung on to me, saying they’d offer up Hail Marys for me, pulling at my sleeve. ‘Get off to hell,’ you shouted at them, hitting away their grasping hands. And later you said:

‘It’s not permitted for a suicide to receive a normal burial. I had to beg for that.’

We passed by the school you had gone to. Miss A. M. Halliwell, Principal, it said on a black plaque beside a closed blue door. ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might.‘ You had described Miss Halliwell to me. You had hoped we might meet her on the street.

‘We should not have left my mother alone that day. We should have known.’

‘I’m very sorry, Willie.’

‘We could have a drink in the Victoria Hotel. My mother’s only rendezvous.’

You spoke bitterly, and it seemed callous to visit a hotel which she had chosen to visit also. You were different in every way from the person you had been. Even the way you moved and walked seemed different.

‘Well, a glass of lemonade,’ I requested in a corner of the hotel lounge. My head had begun to ache. I wished I’d agreed when you’d suggested I might want to lie down. I watched you making your way across the empty lounge, my lemonade in a tall glass, your own amber-coloured drink in a smaller one. You sat down and there was a silence that felt as if you wished to punish me. I didn’t know what to say, but anything was better than the silence.

‘I’m going to be in Switzerland for the next few months.’ ‘Switzerland?’

‘An English professor and his wife take in a few girls every year. In Montreux.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t know what it’ll be like.’

‘No.’

‘Unfortunately, the girl I told you about, the head girl at school, is going also.’

You didn’t reply.

‘Agnes Brontenby,’ I added miserably.

You gazed into your drink, still not replying.

‘I know it’s awful for you, Willie.’

You turned your head away. I felt a blush of shame creeping into my cheeks. Were you thinking that I was a mingy little creature, ugly in my black clothes, silly to go on so about Switzerland? Had it sounded frivolous even to mention a professor and his wife at a time like this? It was selfish to want to share with you the mood we’d shared before, selfish when your mother was lying dead, when you’d had to persuade some clergyman to give her a decent burial. Miserably I lifted the glass of lemonade. It tasted sweet and horrible. I wondered if it had been manufactured by the father of the friend you’d told me about, and felt immediately that I should not have wondered so, since that was frivolous also. You despised me for being English. Over and over again the thought hammered at me, refusing to go away. Englishmen had burnt down your house and destroyed your family, and your mother’s self-inflicted death was part of the same thing.

‘Oh, don’t drink it,’ you muttered impatiently. ‘Don’t have it if you don’t like it.’

‘I wish I could be a help to you, Willie.’

‘She was tedious and embarrassing. She was unhappy: I should be glad she’s dead.’

It rained. A pebble rattled on the polished wood of the coffin. I watched while you remained with your head bowed, your chin pressed hard upon your chest. Once or twice you raised a hand to your face. I knew you wept; and anguish, like pain, possessed me too. I could not offer the comfort that passionately I longed to, I could not take your hand or honestly shed tears, except on your behalf. We turned, all of us, and walked from the grave, umbrellas held against the rain.

I shall for ever remember this day, I said to myself in the porch of the church, where pale distemper flaked from the walls and rust-marked notices were attached to the baize stretched over a board. The clergyman who had permitted your mother’s burial wiped raindrops from his spectacles. You held yourself apart, rain dripping from your black coat and your fair hair. There was stoicism in your Aunt Fitzeustace’s face, tears on your Aunt Pansy’s. ‘Poor boy,’ my mother whispered, ‘do please remember there’ll always be a welcome for you in Dorset.’

You were not present at the lunch provided by your aunts in the undamaged part of the house, and no one remarked upon your absence. Mr Derenzy and Father Kilgarriff were there; my mother kept the conversation going. I guessed you were somewhere in the garden or walking in the fields, not caring about the rain.

‘She never did recover,’ your Aunt Fitzeustace said. ‘Poor beautiful Evie.’

My mother repeated what she’d said to you: that our grandparents would have attended the funeral had the distance not been so great. ‘I blame myself,’ she repeated also, ‘for not being firmer about the drinking.’

Firmness might have had little effect, Father Kilgarriff softly pointed out; there was often nothing that could be done, no consolation for so grievous a loss. They spoke of you. At least you had the mill to occupy your thoughts, Mr Derenzy said. At least, your Aunt Fitzeustace said, you were no longer a child.

Still seated around the lunch table, we were given cups of tea and when eventually you appeared you drank some. Two dogs jumped up on you, others barked ferociously, as if alarmed because you were so drenched. You took no notice, and still you hardly spoke.

‘If there’s a shortage, Willie,’ my mother said on the journey back to Cork, ‘or if money’s tied up—’

‘There’s ample money, thank you.’

‘We’re there at the rectory, Willie. We’re always there, dear.’

I wished she would not go on so. I wished she could see that you did not want to have a conversation.

‘Take it step by step, Willie.’

‘Yes.’ ‘And what step shall you take first? What next, I mean?’

‘Next?’

Perspiration broke on the palms of my hands. I drew attention to some aspects of the landscape, feeling a warmth that spread from my face into my neck and shoulders.

‘Don’t let yourself brood, Willie.’

‘I’ll just go on at the mill.’

‘That’s very sensible, Willie.’

When we reached the house I sat alone for a while in the narrow bedroom I had so happily slept in during the weeks of our holiday a year ago. Vividly I recalled the details of the funeral service, hearing again the words that had been spoken, wondering what their meaning had been like for you. I longed to comfort you. I longed to be alone with you again, even though it had been so awkward on our walk and in the lounge of that hotel.

‘It was terrible for him, miss,’ Josephine said when I went to talk to her in the kitchen. ‘To find her like that was terrible.’

‘Yes, I know it must have been.’

‘He was going to write to you that evening.’

‘Write to me? To me?’

‘To say he was fond of you, miss. He was intending to send a letter.’

‘Fond of me?’

‘He has been fond of you ever since the summer you were here. He told me the afternoon of Mrs Quinton’s death.’

I went away to lay the table in the cheerless dining-room, but at suppertime you did not appear: you had gone out somewhere on your own. My mother and I ate more of the ham, and put some aside for you. ‘He had no lunch either,’ she sighed. ‘Marianne dear, you should have stayed with him.’

‘I think he prefers to be alone.’

All I could think of was what Josephine had told me in the kitchen. It seemed fateful that on that night of all nights you had intended to write to me. Many times I had wanted to write to you also, to attempt to continue the conversations we had had. But when I tried to a clumsiness overtook me and I found I could not properly express what I wanted to say in letters.

In the early morning we would begin our journey back to England. We could stay no longer because of my going to Switzerland, and as it was I would be late arriving there. I waited downstairs for an hour or so, but it was much later, when I was undressing in my bedroom, that I heard your footfall on the stairs, which seemed like fate also. I pulled my nightdress over my head and slipped into the cold bed. I wept immediately. Had we been together now, would I have put my arms about you, and drawn your head on to my breast to kiss away your suffering? And would you have forgiven me for the accident of my English birth? For an hour or more I lay there wretchedly, and then I rose and lifted the paraffin lamp from its shelf.

I did not knock, even lightly, on the panels of your door but opened it instead. All judgement had gone from me, all fear and rectitude. I cared about nothing except that you should know I loved you, that you might find at least some comfort in knowing it. I placed the lamp on your dressing-table and spoke your name.

3

‘Ah, Marianne, my dear.’

He always liked to meet new arrivals at the railway station, Professor Gibb-Bachelor explained. He was a man in his sixties, tall and exceedingly thin. His beard was grey and sparse, his wig jet-black, with a light wave in it.

‘You are a little late,’ he remarked, unchidingly, ‘arriving today, my dear.’

‘There was a funeral. My father sent a telegram.’ ‘Ah yes, of course. “I am going to meet the telegram girl,” I said to my wife before I left the villa.’ A conspiratorial laugh was slyly issued. ‘I shall call you that, little Marianne. My telegram girl. Welcome to Montreux.’

‘I hope my lateness hasn’t been inconvenient.’

‘Heavens, of course it has not! But I worried personally in case the funeral upset your travel bookings, and that the journey might be uncomfortable because of that.’

‘No, it wasn’t in the least.’

‘A parson, your father? Dorset, if memory serves?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dorset is delightful. And the funeral. Not someone close, I hope?’

‘An aunt. In Ireland.’

‘Ah, Ireland …’

Whenever he spoke he perused me closely, apparently seeking my eyes. A perpetual smile was not quite hidden by his beard.

‘No one dislikes Montreux,’ he confided as we drove off. ‘We become a family, my wife and I, with the girls who visit us. No one has ever been unhappy in our house.’

We passed by a great expanse of water, which Professor Gibb-Bachelor said was Lac Leman. All around us the Alps were capped with snow.

‘A troublesome country, Ireland. You felt quite safe, Marianne?’

‘Oh yes, quite safe.’

The car passed through open gates and drew up by a house with iron balconies in front of its windows, each of which was flanked by wooden shutters hooked back against a brown wall. A verandah stretched the length of this facade, containing the wide pine doors through which we now passed.

‘Gervaise!’ the Professor called in the hall while I waited with my luggage. He inclined his head in a way that was becoming familiar to me, sticking it out a little as he listened for his wife’s reply.

‘The telephone rang,’ a lank girl with spectacles informed him.

‘Ah, thank you, Cynthia.’

I was aware of garish colours on the walls: in the hall an excess of murals had all the appearance of being the work of the Gibb-Bachelors’ charges over the years. There was a lakeland scene, and an alp, and halfway up the stairs a castle with birds.

‘How d’you do, Marianne?’ Firm and jaunty, much shorter than her husband, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor was suddenly there. She was neatly dressed in different shades of mauve, her salt and pepper hair permanently waved. ‘Come please with me, Marianne.’

She led the way back to the room she had just emerged from.

‘Please sit down,’ she invited, placing herself behind a table and gesturing at a chair. There had been chairs of the same kind in the hall and in the verandah: cushionless, a loop of canvas for seat and back. Bare boards, I had noticed also, were the order of the day, with here and there a woven rug.

‘I am delighted to welcome you to Montreux,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor continued briskly, in a throaty Scottish voice. ‘Culture is the byword in our villa, but otherwise we live in the local manner. Classes are given daily by our friend Mademoiselle Florence, and my husband instructs in the history of the cantons and of the country. The regime is not arduous, but we do like an early start to the day and all conversation with Mademoiselle Florence is of course conducted in French. Thank you, Marianne.’

I rose and in turn thanked Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.

‘The other girl from your school…’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor poked through papers on her desk.

‘Agnes Brontenby.’

‘Ah, Agnes Brontenby. Of course. Agnes is quite delightful. We have as well, this autumn, Mavis and Cynthia.’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor paused. ‘Are you quite healthy, Marianne?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘You’re a wee little creature, but you mustn’t let that worry you, you know. Any disadvantage is better than gawkiness.’

I said I had become used to my diminutive size, but Mrs Gibb-Bachelor appeared not to hear me and continued with her theme.

‘It doesn’t mean you are unhealthy, Marianne. Your teeth look sound, eh? Well, that is excellent. Your mother will probably have told you that artificial teeth have ill-bred connotations.’

‘I don’t think my mother did, actually.’

‘Ah, well.’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor paused again. Her head slipped a little to one side. ‘In our Swiss home we do not ignore the manners of the past. You understand, Marianne?’

‘Yes, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘Excellent. You will share with Mavis. She suffers a little from rashes, but I do not believe the trouble is in the least way infectious. Your time here will be happy, Marianne. No girl has ever been unhappy in our home.’

‘So the Professor said.’

‘I can see the Professor has taken to you already. Now that is excellent.’

Following Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, I carried my suitcases upstairs. We crossed a landing which featured further murals, and entered a cell-like chamber containing two beds, one unmade. Mrs Gibb-Bachelor gestured at the room’s window, stretching to the floor and draped with net. She crossed the room to it, undid a latch and pushed the two curtained frames outwards: below us in the twilight lay Lac Leman and the twinkling lights of Montreux, towering above us the snow-peaked Alps. ‘One of the finest views in Switzerland,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor stated with confidence, and went away.

I closed the window and sat down on the edge of the bed, not yet unpacking. Ever since I had left Ireland I had found it difficult to be with other people. On the journey back to the rectory, and after we’d arrived there, I had longed to be alone, to escape from my mother’s worry about leaving you, and my father’s sympathetic murmur. ‘We must pray for his peace of mind’: more than once my father had bent his head over clasped hands, closing his eyes. When eventually I left the rectory to set out on my second journey the sense of relief made me feel ungrateful.

‘Hullo,’ a voice said. ‘Are you Marianne? My name is Mavis.’

‘Yes, I am Marianne.’ I stared back at the speckled face that stared at mine. I asked about letters, but when I went to the letter-rack in the hall it was empty. I didn’t know why I’d asked or had gone to look. Of course there wouldn’t be a letter yet.

The bosom of Agnes Brontenby was more shapely than it had been beneath a gymslip, her beautiful blue eyes more liquid even than I remembered them at school. In the dining-room she sat across the table from me, with the bespectacled Cynthia beside her and Mavis next to me. The Gibb-Bachelors ate privately, at some different time.

Free of murals, the dining-room was on the gloomy side. Its walls were a shade of gravy, as were the velvet curtains that all but obscured the windows. The pine boards of the floor were sprinkled with French chalk.

‘The food’s inedible,’ Cynthia informed me, and Mavis said that lastyear a girl had run away. But the sweetness of Agnes Brontenby already pervaded this gathering atmosphere; already, I guessed, she had stifled gossip on its utterance and discovered silver linings. She scooped up pale soup with vermicelli in it and said it was delicious. Only that afternoon Mrs Gibb-Bachelor had confided to her that the girl’s running away last year had been due to a misunderstanding. ‘Oh look, let’s not be horrid,’ she protested when Cynthia said she doubted if Mrs Gibb-Bachelor had ever told the truth in her life.

‘He’s awful,’ Mavis said.

‘Oh, quite beyond the pale,’ Cynthia agreed. She added that Mrs Gibb-Bachelor’s letter to her parents had categorically stated that each girl had a room to herself and that Mademoiselle Florence instructed in German as well as French. ‘Then why are we suddenly sharing?’ she demanded. ‘Have they mislaid some rooms or something? And how is it that Mademoiselle Florence can miraculously teach German since she says herself she can’t speak a word of it?’

‘Oh, you are funny, Cynthia!’ cried Agnes. ‘Mislaid some rooms!’

She tinkled with laughter and then became serious. She insisted that there had clearly been another silly misunderstanding. She couldn’t remember how Mrs Gibb-Bachelor had written to her own parents, but wasn’t it in any case best to be cheerful?

Mavis and I did not contribute to the argument that followed. Duties in the dining-room were to be shared among us: it was mine, that evening, to clear away, and Mavis’s to give us each a plate of sliced apple and cheese.

‘Another thing,’ said Cynthia, ‘there was a distinct reference to domestic staff.’

‘Oh now, the Gibb-Bachelors do do their best, you know. And actually I quite enjoy the kitchen-work course. Mrs Gibb-Bachelor’s going to show me how to make toad-in-the-hole.’

‘If you ask me these appalling people are doing extremely well for themselves—their house decorated, their food cooked, dusting and cleaning, early-morning tea carried to their bedside. Not to mention the way the Professor stands so close to you.’

‘Oh, Cynthia, you are amusing! But you’re missing England, aren’t you, Cynthia? You’ll love it here in the end, you know.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ said Cynthia.

When we had finished, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor was waiting for us in the hall.

‘Girls,’ she announced, ‘the Professor’s lantern lecture is at nine.’ She inspected each of us closely, as if for dirt. She fixed Cynthia with a stern eye. ‘My dear, I have to inform you that a napkin must be opened across the knee, never tucked into a garment. And it is ill-bred to prop ourselves on our elbows when drinking a cup of tea or other beverage.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘These are wee little faults I have noticed during the course of today, Cynthia. You understand too, Marianne?’

‘Yes, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘Then that is excellent.’

She strode jauntily away, her scent lingering behind her.

‘Foul old pussy,’ Cynthia said.

The Professor’s magic lantern showed us pictures of English landscape and houses which he attempted to relate to literature. He quoted the poetry of James Thomson, illustrating it with slides of Hagley Park. He quoted George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell, and in particular Wordsworth. ‘Here, by Nether Stowey, he walked with Dorothy. Here we see his house at Rydal Mount. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me…a sense sublime…’ He showed us Lyme Regis, and the Temple of Apollo at Stourhead.’/ have through every Garden been,’ he solemnly intoned, ‘among the red, the white, the green.’

The reedy, academic voice came and went, as did the pictures of woods and meadows and mazes and rose-beds. I thought about you, unable not to. ‘But there’s a tree, of many, one,’ the Professor continued. ‘A single field which I have looked upon …’ Trees and fields appeared on the sheet which Mavis had been requested to pin up as a screen, oak trees and beeches, Scotch pines, alders, ash and apple. The fields were shown in different seasons and there was talk of ploughing and then of mellow fruitfulness. ‘Will the wretched man never cease?’ Cynthia muttered beside me.

I dreamed of you that night, among the landscapes of the magic lantern show. Your warm body warmed mine, your lips were passionate, as they had been.

Non, non, Marianne,’ cried Mademoiselle Florence. ‘You do not make the effort.’

I tried. I apologized. I did my best to speak and smile.

… so very busy, wrote my father, with all the preparations for the Harvest Thanksgiving. Your mother has spent two days in bed, her nerves fallen all to pieces after the turmoil of the last few weeks, Ireland and then the arranging and rearranging of your journey to Montreux. My blessed child, you are in all our prayers.

In the famous castle by the lake the Professor stood by the pillar on which Lord Byron had scratched his name.

‘You’re troubled, little Marianne?’ he sympathetically enquired while the others marvelled over the flowing signature.

‘No,’I lied. ‘No, not at all.’

‘You may always come to me, you know. You may always tell me.’

He stepped a little closer and placed a hand on my shoulder. He was my friend, he said.

Again, that day, I looked in case there was a letter. In the early morning I had written down the Gibb-Bachelors’ address in Montreux and had placed it on your dressing-table. Then I had crept away while still you slept.

‘Visiting cards,’ decreed Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, ‘are placed on the hall salver or on some convenient table. Engraved of course, never printed.’ A married lady left one, and two of her husband’s. But should the lady called upon be unmarried or widowed then only one of the husband’s cards might be placed on the hall-stand or the convenient table.

I prayed, listening to her voice. I asked for forgiveness. I promised that I did not seek to excuse my sin, that I would live with it and suffer for it if I might be given a little mercy now. ‘Dear God,’ I pleaded. ‘Dear kind God, please hear me.’

Mrs Gibb-Bachelor smiled at each of us in turn.

‘And do not presume that hem-stitching is beneath you. The plain girl who is acquainted with the art of caring for her garments has the advantage over the pretty girl who is slap-dash.’

That day, too, I looked in the letter-rack, although I had resolved I would not any more.

The Professor said:

‘Little Marianne, you did not listen to a word of my lecture on Wordsworth’s sense of rhyme.’

‘Oh yes, I did indeed, Professor.’

‘Ah no, my little girl.’

To my distaste, he laid a bony finger on my lips and did not take it away. His wig moved slightly as he shook his head. We were alone in the library.

‘For me you are a special girl, Marianne. Your discontent is all the more distressing because of that.’

Again the finger, cold as ice, was laid across my lips. A fresh smile engaged the Professor’s own, drawing them back until large teeth protruded, like pale tombstones. We stood in the alcove of a window, I with my back to it.

‘Much of what I say when I speak of Wordsworth is specially for you, little Marianne.’

‘Please, Professor—’

‘You are labouring under stress, little girl.’

Again he came close to me, pressing me back against the window. His breath had garlic of a day or two’s duration on it. His hps touched my flesh, high on my left cheek, just below the cheek-bone, and while they did so the palm of a hand slipped down my thigh, as light as the touch of a butterfly. I pushed him away, shuddering and feeling sick in my stomach. How could I tell him anything? ‘We might go to Kilneagh,’ you’d said. ‘It would be nice to show you Kilneagh.’ How could I tell him that no day in my life had been as happy? The men in the mill-yard had shaken my hand. In Lough you’d pointed out Driscoll’s shop and the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven. In Fermoy you’d pointed out the ironmonger’s and the draper’s where you’d done your Friday shopping. We’d been too shy to say what really we felt, but somehow that hadn’t mattered.

‘Now, my dear,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor announced breezily in her office, ‘a wee little bird has told me you have fallen in love.’

‘If Agnes—’

‘I did not say Agnes, dear. But it isn’t difficult to know when a friend’s in love, now is it? There are time-honoured signals, are there not?’

‘This is a private matter, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘To be sure it is. On the other hand I cannot have my girls distressed. Our monthly visitation—clockwork regular, is it? Oh no, don’t look askance. I do assure you I have known love to upset girls mightily in that department. Quite topsy-turvy it all becomes.’

‘I would really rather not talk about this, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘My little bird is a reliable wee creature.’ Head on one side, Mrs

Gibb-Bachelor smiled, looking for a moment like a bird herself. ‘There need not be a secret between us, Marianne. Other girls before you have fallen in love with the Professor, my dear.’

In astonishment I denied that charge. Repelled and outraged, I spoke as firmly as I could. ‘I am not in love with your husband, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

Mrs Gibb-Bachelor softly replied that love, too often, was not a matter of choice. It was understandable that girls should love her husband: the Professor was notably attractive, many girls had found him so.

‘But this isn’t true, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor. In no way is what you’re saying true.’

‘My husband is a fine and sensitive person. No one blames you, Marianne. Indeed, to tell you the very truth, I often think it denotes a fullness of the spirit in a girl—’

‘I do not love the man.’

‘My dear, it is ill-bred to refer to the Professor in that way. It is also ill-bred to interrupt.’

‘Mrs Gibb-Bachelor—’

‘Above all, it is ill-bred to raise our voices. My dear, no blame possibly attaches to you and if our monthly visitation is not quite clockwork we must not worry. Love is its own master, Marianne.’

I shrugged my shoulders and was told that that was ill-bred also. I began a further protest, then abandoned it. After all, what did any of it matter?

‘It will pass,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor promised. ‘The sentiments that have seized you, Marianne, will pass. Time is the healer, my dear.’

These words dismissed me, and I did not reply.

‘Look, come for a walk,’ Agnes Brontenby invited, waiting for me outside Mrs Gibb-Bachelor’s office.

I shook my head and tried to pass her by, but she touched my arm with a restraining gesture.

‘Dear Marianne, you must be sensible. We have known each other for all these years. I always liked you at school, Marianne, and I am sure I always shall.’

‘Please leave me alone, Agnes.’

‘The Professor—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, it has nothing to do with the wretched Professor.’

I walked away, leaving her astonished that I should use such unpleasant language. She afterwards mentioned that, but I did not say I was sorry.

Day followed day, week succeeded week. Mavis’s rashes did not improve. Cynthia said she’d lost a stone because of the unappetizing food. The waiter in the Cafe Bon Accueil eyed Agnes Brontenby with a pleasure that was undisguised. ‘Dans I’immense salle regnait une ambiance joyeuse,’ dictated Mademoiselle Florence, but I could not understand and did not wish to. ‘Vous etes tres stupide,’ she shrilled at me. ‘Not ever a more stupide girl come to Montreux.’

Each morning when I awoke everything came tumbling back at me, the lamp flickering and going out, the smell of paraffin in the darkness. I tried to write to you but could not. I wanted to say I was sorry, but at the same time longed that you would write and tell me you were glad.

‘Ill-health bedevilled me as a younger man. I might have married earlier in my life if it had not been for that.’

Again I was alone with him, by the lake. He had contrived to dispose of the other girls in the Bon Accueil, hurrying them on to order our coffee and Florentines.

‘It is not wrong to feel tenderly for a man who is older than your father. You have been distressed by these feelings, little Marianne, but there is no cause for it.’

I shook my head, staring over the still water of Lac Leman. I felt his arm on my shoulder, and then the coarseness of his beard on my chin and cheek, like mattress hair. His large teeth, seeking my hps, were cold.

‘Please, Professor.’

I pushed at the scrawny body, as I had in the alcove of the library, the palms of my hands spread against his chest. His knees, one on either side of my left leg, grasped it strongly. He whispered that he could not live without me, and did not wish to. ‘You are my little wife,’ he whispered.

‘Please take your hands off me, Professor.’

I broke from his embrace and stood furiously some yards away. I wanted to stamp my foot and then actually did so, my heel making a sharp staccato on the tarmacadamed path.

‘I do not feel tenderly for you,’ I cried, causing two women who were passing with dogs to look discomfited. ‘I have no feelings of any kind whatsoever for you. I am not your wife. It is absurd to say I am.’

‘My little child, I simply wish you were.’

‘You have a wife already. You are a lecherous man, Professor Gibb-Bachelor. Your wife is disgraceful to encourage you.’

‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘I cannot help my feelings for you. You are beautiful, little Marianne, more beautiful than Agnes Brontenby.’

I told him then: I said I was no longer a virgin. ‘I believe you know that. I believe you’ve guessed, Professor Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘My dear sweet child, of course you’re a virgin. Do you not know the meaning of the term?’

I told him how I had left my bedroom and crossed the landing, carrying the lamp with me.I would love you for ever, I said, even if you despised me and were ashamed.

‘Oh, little heart, this is not the kind of talk we like.’

I hit him then. I hit him on the side of the face with my clenched fist. I told him he disgusted me. Without emotion I said:

‘So please in future leave me alone, Professor. Try this on with Agnes if you are tired of your wife. Try it on with Cynthia or Mavis or Mademoiselle Florence. But I would rather you kept your hands off me.’

‘You must not repeat this to Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, Marianne. It is the realm of fantasy, but it may be our secret, all this you like to think about your cousin.’

‘It is true. It occurred.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. But Mrs Gibb-Bachelor must not ever know. My dear, she’d pack you back to England this instant minute.’

‘I have no intention of informing your wife since she does not sensually attack me.’

‘Please, little child, don’t speak so harshly. I only love your prettiness.’

I did not reply, except to say when he addressed me again that if my sinfulness was in some way revealed in my demeanour it did not follow that I would satisfy his lust. He wiped at his cheeks with a handkerchief, pretending, I believe, to cry. But by the time we reached the Cafe Bon Accueil he had recovered his composure.

Conveniently he drifted into a reverie of such intensity that the scene by the lakeside might not have taken place. When later I said his attentions had become so pressing that I’d had to push him away from me and even had hit him Agnes Brontenby assured me I must have been mistaken. ‘Filthy old savage,’ Cynthia said, and was all for reporting the matter to Mrs Gibb-Bachelor. But I knew it wasn’t going to be worth it, for I would have no more trouble with her husband.

Please don’t think badly of me. Oh, Willie, I do still love you so. The words could not be written; they belonged in conversation, yet conversation was impossible. All of it was punishment, the haunting emptiness, the fear, the unknown in the years that lay ahead. The teeth and the breath of the Professor were punishment also, his knees and fingers. Of course he had smelt out my sin.

I spent that Christmas and the New Year with the Gibb-Bachelors, with Cynthia and Mavis and Agnes Brontenby. In early February all four of us prepared to return to England. ‘You have benefited enormously,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor insisted, the same remark to each of us. ‘Everything about you is splendidly improved.’

I could not remain in the rectory. I knew that as soon as I returned. I walked in the gardens of Woodcombe Park, since we, its poor relations, were permitted to: by the mock-Roman summer-house, by the willows and the lakes and the stately yews: so different your Kilneagh was, a poor relation too. Like some uncharted region, fearsome and unknown, Kilneagh repelled me now, yet the pocket money I had saved in Switzerland was added to the modest amount I otherwise possessed and the journey to Ireland planned. For how could my father bless his congregation with the peace of God, knowing no peace himself because of the ugly truth with which I would soon disgrace him? How could my mother bear those cruel glances at her Mothers’ Union meetings?

I fell in love with Willie, I wrote in the note I left behind for them and then I closed down shutters on my mind, unable to bear their pain as well as my own. I was pregnant with our child, I wrote.