A Closed Eye Read online

  Lizzie, relieved, swallowed. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Lizzie,’ said Freddie, putting down his paper. ‘Good to see you. All right, are you?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said once more.

  He waited attentively for something further to be said, then, when it was obvious that silence was to prevail, took up his paper again. Even Lizzie disappointed him.

  The ballet had an alarming effect on both children. Freddie did things well: the box was much appreciated, as were the orange juice and the champagne. Leaning over the velvet rim, animosity temporarily forgotten, they were almost disappointed when the house lights dimmed and the music started. After that they were lost to reason. She tried to explain the story to them, but they waved her away. In the first and second intervals they were too busy trying to stem Immy’s tears to bother much about Lizzie. Harriet smiled at Freddie, who was wiping away a tear of his own. ‘Harriet,’ said Lizzie hoarsely, plucking at Harriet’s sleeve. ‘Will they get married? Will the prince marry the swan?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Lizzie,’ she said, strangely moved by the urgency of the enquiry. ‘It will all end happily. You’ll see.’

  Miss Wetherby too had had a good afternoon. Miss Wetherby had prepared a tea of anchovy toast, cress sandwiches, and walnut cake, but they were too drained to eat much, or to talk. Freddie took a visibly tired Lizzie back to Judd Street, while Harriet put Immy to bed.

  ‘Can we go again?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘Whenever you come home. You and Lizzie.’

  Some days after this she was passed by a man in a car, travelling very fast. She saw a hand raised from the wheel in some sort of greeting. She thought it might have been Jack, but could not be sure. In her mind’s eye the gesture repeated itself for several days, but there was no way in which she could imagine a suitable answering gesture from herself. This worried her excessively: her lack of response. It was only the pain of Immy’s departure that put an end to her preoccupation.

  BUT Swan Lake does not end happily. It ends nobly, affectingly, upliftingly, as befits a tragedy. It ends, above all, appropriately. This matter of the ending—of a suitable ending—was to preoccupy Lizzie for some time. The resolution of the matter would, she knew, afford her a measure of relief But of all this Harriet saw no sign, for on leaving the theatre her thoughts were all of Immy; in comparison Lizzie seemed to dematerialize, to vanish into thin air, as if her presence were merely notional. Harriet, when she looked round for Lizzie, saw merely the unchanged and unchanging face of Lizzie, small, white, impassive, saw the unapproachable reserve, saw the same stoic tolerance, which extended to the unbecoming flowered dress, and the journey to Wellington Square uncomplainingly endured by train and cab. Had she thought to ascertain that the child had been accompanied? The cab had driven off, and she had forgotten to enquire. But Lizzie had survived her journey, whatever it: had been like. Lizzie, she thought, had even enjoyed the ballet.

  Lizzie’s uncharacteristic emotion at the end of Act II had certainly been expressed, but expressed so minimally in comparison with Immy’s lovely tears, perhaps an alteration in the timbre of her voice, and her two hands clenched into fists, as Odile, in black, deployed her dazzling, her irresistible seductions.

  In fact Odile’s variations had proved an intolerable ordeal for Lizzie. She could not have said why she was so frightened and repelled by the dangerous figure, and its assumptions of triumph, of victory. To see virtue so easily discarded, and the prince so easily beguiled, brought a feeling of sickness to her throat, and yet she could not have explained why. Only when the prince and Odette were reunited in the beauty of their apotheosis did she release the breath she had been holding. Stumbling after the others down the stairs and into the car she was still distressed, not quite reassured. Immy, for all her tears, was fully recovered. This simply served, once again, to reinforce her knowledge that she and Immy were constructed out of different material, and were bound to be strangers to one another. It was not simply that Imogen was loved, whereas she, Lizzie, was not. In her mind Imogen was like Odile, who can simulate passion without feeling. Her excesses, her carelessness, and what Lizzie perceived as ruthlessness were alien, frightening. Even Harriet, of whom she was cautiously fond, seemed dazzled by her, as the prince had been by Odile. This diminished Harriet in Lizzie’s eyes.

  Her quarrel was with appearances, attitudes, when she knew herself to be dedicated to seriousness. She was inclined to mistrust first, only later to accept. Her life had been all caution, wariness, withholding. Her lonely courage was of no advantage to her, since it merely prepared her for more loneliness and the need for further courage. Going away to school was for her one more ordeal, yet as far as she could see school would be no worse than the holidays, when she would be transported to Scotland and more strangers, or put on the plane to France to stay with her grandparents at Ramatuelle, where she was a not altogether welcome reminder of her dead mother. Blinking in the fresh air of Bow Street, Lizzie wished momentarily that Freddie might adopt her. But then that would mean seeing more of Immy, so that was no solution either. There was, she felt, no solution to anything. In her childish perception most outcomes, when not tragic, were uncomfortable. She looked askance at Immy, and at Immy’s insistence on being happy, or being made happy. This made Immy seem a lightweight, yet none the less demanding, for all the frivolousness of her nature. Altogether Immy was a painful subject, doubly painful now that the character of Odile had been shown to her. Lizzie could not have been said to have been reassured by her contact with art, since art casts so critical a light on life itself.

  None of this was she able to articulate, so that Harriet did not know, was never to know, how profoundly she had been affected. Harriet remembered Imogen’s tears, and felt tears in her own eyes at the thought of them. And she was to be parted from her for long years: how and why had she brought this about? It was true that Imogen was high-spirited and capricious, perhaps inclined to be disobedient. It was true that her vivid face was too often clouded with disappointment at what they had hoped was a modest treat. ‘Your favourite, darling,’ Harriet would say, serving her a pear enrobed in chocolate as a dessert. ‘I don’t like it any more,’ would be the reply. Anything to avoid that look of disappointment, Harriet would think, although Freddie was less indulgent. It was Freddie who had insisted on the school, although the child was so young. ‘Let her go,’ he warned, ‘or she will be bored stiff.’

  To Freddie, Imogen was somewhat alarming, since she resembled no one so much as Helen, his first wife, and sometimes, on waking, he had a moment of panic, wondering to whom he was really married. He saw in Immy some of that recklessness, that ruthlessness which Helen had mobilized in order to taunt him: he saw, in her childish eyes, a scorn that was unfriendly. He remembered Helen’s jibes, and knew that his daughter would be sexually unmanageable. He longed for her to be gone for a while, so that he could recover some peace with Harriet, whose dark head he saw bent docilely over the Cash’s name tapes. An additional worry was that he did not feel quite well. The panic, on waking, was compounded by a dizziness; once he had nearly fallen on his way to the bathroom. ‘What is it?’ Harriet had called. ‘Nothing. Go to sleep. It’s early,’ he had called back, but he had sat on the edge of the bath, sweating, until the attack, or whatever it was, had passed. Blood pressure, he told himself later in the day: must have a check-up. But while believing in all sincerity in the existence, the reality, of high blood pressure, he thought his trouble was caused by a vague unhappiness, by retirement, by his wife’s indifference, by the more than indifference of his daughter. He was careful enough not to approach the child, never to show her his dreadful eagerness to hear a loving word. He would be the provider in the background, and as such he would achieve some value in her eyes. The day would come when they would be brought together by Imogen’s material needs. Then he would deploy his resources. Until that time, he thought, he might just manage. But it put a strain on him, and he did not want to see
her for a while.

  They drove Imogen to school: she ran off without a backward glance. Harriet, trembling, got back into the car, and presently wiped her eyes. ‘This has got to stop,’ said Freddie, getting in beside her. ‘She dominates your life. You think about her far too much. She’s happy, she’s healthy, thank God, she’s intelligent—and she’s bored, Harriet, that’s what you don’t realize. She’s bored with your concern, and with your fussing. Let her go! She’ll go sooner or later, I can tell you that for nothing. Our place is in the background now. She’ll never want for anything, I promise you that. Neither will you, if anything happens to me.’

  She turned to him in alarm. ‘Are you not well?’ she asked, with genuine concern.

  ‘I’m getting on. I have to think of these things.’

  ‘Don’t die, Freddie,’ she said, weeping again. ‘I couldn’t bear life without you. I know I’m tiresome, and not quite what you hoped, but I do value and respect our life together. I am so fond of you,’ she said, slightly surprised. ‘You are an ideal husband, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have married you,’ he sighed. ‘I was too old. It wasn’t fair.’

  ‘But you see I was too young. I should always have been too young. I am a foolish woman, Freddie, not much good to you. My life comes out of books and dreams, like a girl’s. And I go to bed too early. I sometimes think I should never have married because I need too much sleep.’

  He laughed, and after a while so did she.

  ‘You are more of a child than your daughter is,’ he said. ‘Strange how ready she is for life, while you still hang back.’

  I hang back because I am waiting for a sign, she thought, and you must never know. And yet I should have made a rotten mistress. It was never on the cards, or at least it may have been on the cards but it was never a reality. I am Freddie’s wife, whether I like it or not; cautious, fearful women like myself are no good for anything else. She felt a nausea, a hollowness, and yawned nervously. ‘Could we stop for tea somewhere?’ she asked. ‘I feel quite exhausted.’

  He glanced at her. ‘It means going in to Oxford,’ he said. ‘But I could do with a break myself. A real break. A holiday. I’ve been having these dizzy spells. Oh, nothing to worry about: at my age I must expect something or other.’

  ‘You’ve been feeling unwell, and you’ve said nothing?’ She was appalled.

  ‘Now don’t fly into a panic. You do it all the time. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Immy is quite right, you know, to resist you when you’re like that.’

  ‘Does she resist me?’ asked Harriet. ‘Is that what she does?’

  He sighed again. Immy, always Immy.

  ‘I was talking to Sanders, at the club. You don’t know him. He was troubled by the same thing a couple of years back. Somebody recommended this clinic in Switzerland, near Geneva. He went there for a month, and he’s been perfectly all right ever since.’

  ‘I don’t think I could go away for a month,’ said Harriet. ‘Not until I know Immy is settled. You’d better see Mordaunt. It’s pointless to think of some foreign clinic that nobody knows anything about, when you’re not even sure what’s wrong with you. There are clinics here too, you know. Health farms. It’s probably what they call executive stress, one of the many diseases of Western civilization.’

  She was chattering, because she was now very frightened. If Freddie left her on her own she would die. She knew that now, ineluctably. And if Freddie left her alone with Imogen how would she sustain that immense demanding appetite for life, so immeasurably greater than her own, and bring it to fulfilment, happiness, success? Anything she desires, she thought, I would give her. But I can’t quite do it on my own. And Freddie? For a moment she felt his loneliness, and saw that it corresponded to her own. She put a hand on his arm. ‘Dear, it is not too late.’

  ‘Tea always cheers me up,’ she said later, as they resumed their journey.

  ‘I noticed you made a meal of it.’

  He was restored to something like good humour, now that he had weaned her away from her daughter and told her of his troubles. He knew from experience that he had not made a particularly deep impression, that Harriet’s thoughts were still with Imogen, that she dreaded the return to the empty house. Nevertheless he felt mildly appeased. What he had experienced as a dreadful secret (for he had been seriously alarmed) was no longer entirely his responsibility. The shared confidence was to him significant, more significant in his mind than his daughter’s absence, for he had begun to notice in himself an antagonism that answered her own. He loved her dearly, as ardently as any rejected lover, yet he could not admire her as her mother so foolishly did. He saw a cruelty there which left him with grave doubts, saw, as Harriet failed to see, that Imogen found them both boring and unsatisfactory and that this characteristic was not merely a childish indifference to their failed lives but an active condemnation. Although he himself thought Harriet beautiful he knew that his daughter, except for some rare moments of favour, or of regression, found her timid and dull, fatally lacking in the kind of smart aggressive attractiveness that the young find admirable. Although without much sympathy or liking for Merle and Hughie Blakemore, whom he contrived never to see, he dreaded the day when he would have to defend them against Imogen’s snobbishness. They had given her too much, had spent too much time loving her, marvelling at that beauty and independence, which in themselves seemed such reassuring qualities, as if their stewardship alone had been responsible for that superior viability. Now he saw that they should have corrected, admonished, chastised, while the child was still young enough to mourn their displeasure. And if she had had to court their continued favour, what harm would have been done? Better a few misgivings, a little reserve, that the queenliness that Immy had never ceased to exhibit.

  He himself was both afraid of and in awe of her physical fearlessness; awkward and clumsy himself, it was many years since he had been able to run up the stairs, or even to take them two at a time. As a boy he had fumbled catches, been overweight, slow to move, badly co-ordinated even then. As a businessman of almost national standing he had moved with more majesty, but inwardly he was still humiliated. His gravitas, he knew, was nothing more than a disguise. This flaw in his physical make-up made him ludicrously susceptible to beauty in both women and men; he viewed them as if they were objects of virtù, paintings or sculptures, with the devotion of an amateur, eternally unqualified to take a detached view. To be the father of so beautiful a child—That black hair! That white skin!—had afflicted him with awe, and for some years, until she was about seven, he had felt that he did not possess the right even to criticize her. Now that she was older he was not so sure. He saw the woman she was going to be emerge, take shape: saw that she would be contemptuous, lawless, indifferent to another’s hurt. He feared for his wife’s soft heart, the heart which he himself was unable to reach. He felt sorry for her, unawakened as he knew her to be. He sighed and covered her hand with one of his own. It seemed to him at that moment that he would have to stay well in order to protect her. He had succeeded in worrying her, but only slightly. The rest he would have to take care of himself.

  To Harriet the house echoed with emptiness. Even Freddie was affected by it and went out to his club every morning, walking there after breakfast as she had instructed him, mindful of his health. She had no idea what he did there, presumed that he read the papers, ordered coffee, found like-minded company, joined somebody for lunch. She similarly had no idea what he did in the afternoons, and it occurred to her to wonder, yet again, whether he found company of another sort. In fact he visited the art galleries around St James’s, went to the Royal Academy, aware that he cut a solitary figure, mildly melancholy, too humbled to be discontented. Harriet merely noted that he had nothing to tell her when he came home, after being out all day, and she assumed, rather sadly, that his life was a secret that both eluded and excluded her, that it was too late for confidences of an intimate nature, and that all they could do was observe the forma
lities of their relationship, and occasionally keep each other company.

  If she had hoped for more from this period of their lives, with their daughter absent, and lost to pursuits which left them far behind, she submitted with a fairly good grace to her new loneliness, even grateful for the solitude which she remembered from years long past, when she was growing up and trying to make sense of certain anomalies: her father’s empty eyes and perpetual cheerfulness, Mr Latif’s hand on her mother’s breast, that same mother’s bad temper and discomfiture, her own deliberate lack of understanding. That innocence of hers, so willed, so excessive! And sustained throughout the years of adolescence, when Tessa, and Mary and Pamela, would look at her slyly, and then exchange their secrets and giggle, confident that she would always misunderstand them. Harriet, in her empty drawing-room, her morning duties discharged, the house silent in the absence of Miss Wetherby and her dog, absent, as was Freddie, on exercises of their own, thought back with distaste on her life, which now seemed to have been lost through inanition. Suddenly there was nothing for her to do. Freddie ate lunch out, so she made do with a sandwich. She could have taken a long walk, for in the early days of her marriage she had keenly regretted her lost liberty, but now that she was older she preferred to stay indoors and look out of the window. There was little to see in the quiet square; few people passed, and if she saw anyone she knew she retreated instinctively. Sometimes she thought of Tessa, sometimes of Jack. She realized now, at last, with sad conviction, that love of the one precluded the other, that the thrust of her own history allied her with Tessa. Jack had been merely the lure that she was bound, by the terms of her own nature, to resist. He remained unchanged in her mind, unaltered by time. In her imaginings he was always about to return, as if, at any moment, she might see him cross the square and come towards her. She was aware of the crassness of this fantasy, its out-of-date romanticism, its unforgivable timidity. She would shake herself free of it then, make a cup of tea, settle down with a book. Madame, she read, permettez-moi de vous dire que j’adore votre courage … When the light faded, as it seemed to more quickly now, winter and summer, she would get up and pull the curtains. Freddie, crossing the square, would see her lifted arm and wave back.