From where came the means was not the point. Sex on such a grand, lordly scale had nothing to do with infidelity or betrayal, far removed from Maurice’s clumsy affairs with their candlelit dinners and false promises of love. Victor’s needs were simple; an uncomplicated coupling taken when the need came upon him, like a cup of strong coffee or a brisk walk, enjoyable, invigorating, and paradoxically, however exotic the company, a profoundly solitary exercise: a prelude to the real business of the day—work. And what work! Here amongst these rooms she could finger his lines of thought, delve into the mystery of the man. Over the years, suspended in rêverie in that floating room of light, she had come to believe that only she had the capacity to embrace and receive his monumental fertility. Every week she would take one of his notebooks home and place it on her bedside table. Let Maurice return from his expeditions to fall asleep in his adjoining bed, she would sit in hers and become, if not satiated, then hungrily content. She did not reproach her husband for his excesses, but not because she excused them, for she did not, but because she wanted as little to do with him as he did with her. What she had not told anyone since her arrival seventeen years ago was that once the flurry of moving to Guernsey had died down, once she had settled into the island’s ways, she had opened her eyes one morning and came to the conclusion that she had made a terrible and irreversible mistake. All her life she had fought to be allied to a certain kind of uncharted freedom, a man of spirit, and now, looking up from the comfort of their then double bed, watching Maurice mouth the minutes of the golf club’s last meeting, it was plain to see she had handcuffed herself to a dullard and sentenced her own free will to a life of imprisonment. Maurice was small-minded. Guernsey was small-minded. The forty thousand souls living alongside them had similar visions. Their horizons stretched no further than the rock on which they stood, a self-satisfied triangle, six by seven by nine, an immovable wedge of granite, stuck fast and impervious to change. Where was the glitter, the intrigue, where were the stakes to be played, the bolts from the blue? It was all so dull! The clubs with their empty protocol and pointless committees, the endless cocktail circuit, the spring and winter balls, all, in their proud pomposity, heartbreaking reminders of the glittering society she had left behind. When her sister had turned up she had hoped that she might be able to take Isobel under her wing, so that she could live once again a life of wit and nerve, but Isobel, wilfully indifferent to her schemes and confident in her own inherent abilities, had paid her little attention. Then there’d been that trouble over Ned Luscombe. Albert had come running to her about that the moment he found out. How could it be, he said, waving a pair of hedge-clippers in his hands, that his nephew would dare walk out with Mrs Hallivand’s niece? What if it went further, what if the worst thing in the world happened and they had to get married? They were headstrong those two, from stubborn stock, Albert had pronounced, ever the gardener, adding, “I could never be related to you, Mrs H., not even if the King himself commanded it.” She had laughed, the spell of her own horror at the story broken, for she saw at once that Isobel would never contemplate such an unlikely and unflattering alliance either. She had seen the look of incredulous pity pass over her niece’s face when Isobel had first been introduced to Maurice, the celebrated stories she had been told of her aunt’s glittering past transformed into insolent mockery. Ned hadn’t seduced her. Isobel had seduced him, and Mrs Hallivand knew why. To get back at her. To tell her to mind her own business, that she needed no lessons from such an abject failure as her. So she told Albert not to worry, that by next spring he would be able to tip his beret and wish her good morning with an easy heart.
“Thank God for that, ma’am,” he said. “No disrespect regarding your niece intended.”
“And none taken, Albert. None taken.”
She climbs the steps now and unlocks the heavy front door. Closing it firmly behind her, she pauses in the hallway and feels the silence fall upon her, something which the island itself once possessed, but which now she finds only within these walls. It is a curious thing, this weight of absolute security. In the early days, when she had discovered her dreadful mistake, she would throw open the windows at the Villa, and lean out, cursing this peace, as if, willing it, she might hear the old noises of city she loved, the hum of the hub, as her father had called it, winging over the water. Now, standing in its last refuge, she wishes the island’s long quiet would return. It has become part of her, but though she misses it such a realization does not please her.
Though her first port of call is usually the study, from where she works her way down, today she makes straight for the Red Drawing Room, a dark, heavy room, weighted down with oak rurniture. The lock turns easily and skirting round the edge she moves quickly to the window to open the centre section of shutters. Light falls in, bisecting the room, illuminating beams of dust. Through the shadows the magnificence of the room takes form, a fire screen worked by Mme de Pompadour and four gilt figures taken from the Doge’s palace, the silk tapestries covering the wall and ceiling. In the centre stands the great table belonging to Charles II. In former times a pair of archbishop’s candlesticks stood at either end, but these have been set down on the floor, and in their place lies a humdrum collection of bags and containers: a pickling jar full of six-inch nails, a dried milk tin packed with bolts; a closed shoebox with a scattering of sugar rounds its base, a carrier bag buiging with the same substance with the name Underwood written on the side, another, altogether more elegant, which announces that Voisin & Co. of King St, Jersey is the Shopping Centre of the Channel Islands; a clock; a pair of pliers; batteries from a torch. Placing the basket on the table Mrs Hallivand sets aside the tins and other cleaning paraphernalia and lifting the embroidered cloth which is tucked in all the way round uncovers a pound bag of sugar and the last packet of weedkiller left in the Lodge’s outhouse. She picks up the tin and, holding it in front of her as if it were dynamite or something which might give her an electric shock, lifts the lid of the shoebox.
“I very much doubt,” she says to the self-portrait hanging above the fireplace as she pours it in, “whether you or I have ever seen so much sugar before, even in peace time. Three ounces a week is all we get now.” She pauses and then decides. “I don’t suppose it would do any harm. And I have such a sweet tooth.”
She moves quickly to the little kitchen at the back, where in earlier times the caretaker would brew up a cup during visiting hours. There is a kettle there and a small paraffin ring and beside them stands the tea caddy with the Swiss maid and Matterhorn motif and in which lies a dwindling amount of real leaf tea. On a shelf directly above the kettle stands a sizeable brown teapot, good for four thirsty people, with a cracked lid and a spout which pours in an indifferent are. Mrs Hallivand turns the tap and as the water is slightly discoloured Iets it run for a full minute before she fills the kettle through its forred-up spout.