Bunny poured herself another cup of tea, smirking.
“It’s dead men you’re talking about,” Edward muttered, with the sour weariness of one doing his duty by an argument that he has long ago lost.
“There’s nothing wrong with this country,” Bunny said, “that a lot more corpses like that won’t cure.” She lifted her cup daintily. “Long live death! Is this your own cake, Charlotte? Scrumptious.”
I realised, with the unnerving clarity that always comes to me with the fifth drink, that if there were to be a sixth I would be thoroughly drunk.
One of the twins suddenly yelped in pain. “Mammy mammy he pinched me!”
Michael looked at us from under sullen eyebrows, crouched on the carpet like a sprinter waiting for the off. Bunny laughed. “Well pinch him back!” The girl’s face crumpled, oozing thick tears. Her sister watched her with interest.
“Michael,” Edward rumbled, and showed him the hurley stick. “Do you see this. .?”
Ottilie left to make more tea, and I followed her. Outside the kitchen windows the chestnut tree murmured softly in its green dreaming. The afternoon had begun to wane.
“Quite a lady,” I said, “that Diana.”
Ottilie shrugged, watching the kettle. “Bitch,” she said mildly. “She only comes here to. . ”
“What?”
“Never mind. To gloat. You heard her with Charlotte: you poor thing.” She made a simpering face. “Make you sick.”
The kettle, like a little lunatic bird, began to whistle shrilly.
“He’s not that bad,” I said, “is he, Edward?”
She did not answer. We returned to the drawing-room. A dreamy sort of silence had settled there. They sat, staring at nothing, enchanted figures in a fairy tale. Bunny glanced at us as we came in and a flicker of interest lit her hard little eyes. She would be good at ferreting out secrets. I moved away from Ottilie.
“You’re quite at home, I see,” Bunny said.
“People are kind,” I answered, and tried to laugh. My legs were not working properly. Bunny lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “That’s true,” she said. She was thinking. I lost interest in her. Edward knocked the bottle against my glass. His face was ashen. His breath hit me, a warm brown cloud. I looked at Charlotte, the only dark among all these fair. She sat, back arched and shoulders erect, slim arms extended across her lap, her pale hands clasped, a gazelle. Poor thing. My heart wobbled. The bruised light of late afternoon conjured other days, their texture felt but they themselves unremembered. I seemed about to weep. Edward cracked his fingers and sat down to the scarred upright piano. He played atrociously, swaying his shoulders and crooning. Bunny tried to speak over the noise but no one listened. Michael sat in the middle of the floor, playing sternly with the toy car I had given him. I took Ottilie’s hands in mine. She stared at me, beginning to laugh. We danced, stately as a pair of tipsy duchesses, round and round the faded carpet. Bunny fairly ogled us. His repertory exhausted, Edward rose and led Charlotte protesting to the piano. She fingered the keys in silence for a moment and then began hesitantly to play. It was a tiny delicate music, it seemed to come from a long way off, from inside something, and I imagined a music box, set in motion by a chance breeze, a slammed door, launching into solitary song in its forgotten spot in the corner of an attic. I stopped to watch her, the dark glossy head, the pale neck, and those hands that now, instead of Ottilie’s, seemed to be in mine. Light of evening, the tall windows — Oh, a gazelle! Ottilie moved away from me, and knelt beside Michael. The toy car had fallen over drunkenly on its side, whirring. He narrowed his eyes. He had been trying all this time to break it. Edward took up the mangled thing and examined it, turning it in his thick fingers with a bleared brutish lentor. I looked at the three of them, Ottilie, the child, the ashen-faced man, and something stirred, an echo out of some old brown painting. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They receded slowly, slowly, as if drawn away on a piece of concealed stage machinery. And then all faded, Bunny, her fat husband, their brats, the chairs, the scattered cups, all, until only Charlotte and I were left, in this moment at the end of a past that now was utterly revised. I hiccupped softly. On the piano lid there was an empty glass, a paper party hat, a browning apple core. These are the things we remember. And I remember also, with Ottilie that night moaning in my arms, feeling for the first time the presence of another, and I heard that tiny music again, and shivered at the ghostly touch of pale fingers on my face.
“What’s wrong,” Ottilie said, “what is it?”
“Nothing,” I answered, “nothing, nothing.”
For how should I tell her that she was no longer the woman I was holding in my arms?
Next morning along with the hangover came inevitably the slow burn of alarm. Had I said anything, let slip some elaborate gesture? Had I made a fool of myself? I recalled Bunny smirking, the tip of her little nose twitching, but that had been when I was still with Ottilie. Even so sharp an eye surely would not have spotted my solitary brief debauch by the piano? And later, in the dark, there had been no one to see me, save Ottilie, and she did not see things like that. Like what? In every drunkenness there comes that moment of madness and euphoria when all our accumulated knowledge of life and the world and ourselves seems a laughable misapprehension, and we realise suddenly that we are a genius, or fatally ill, or in love. The fact is obvious, simple, beyond doubt: why have we not seen it before? Then we sober up and everything evaporates, and we are again what we are, a frail, feckless, ridiculous figure with a headache. But in vain I lay in bed that morning waiting for reality to readjust itself. The fact would not go away: I was in love with Charlotte Lawless.
I was astonished, of course, but there was too a familiar shiver of fright and not wholly unpleasurable disgust. It was like that moment in a childhood party game when, hot and flustered, every nerve-end an eye, you whip off the blindfold to find that the warm quarry quivering in your clasped arms is not that little girl with the dark curls and the interestingly tight bodice whose name you did not quite hear, but a fat boy, or your convulsed older sister, or just one of Auntie Hilda’s mighty mottled arms. Or a middle-aged woman, emphatically married, with middle-aged hands, and wrinkles around her eyes, and the faint beginnings of a moustache, who had spoken no more than twenty words to me and who looked at me as if I were, if not transparent, then translucent at least. There it was, all, the same, sitting in bed with me, still in its party frock, with an impudent smile: love.
The secret pattern of the past months was now revealed. I saw myself that first day in the doorway of the lodge offering her a month’s rent, I stumbled again down the grassy bank to the glasshouse, sat in her kitchen in sunlight watching the shadows of leaves stirring by her hand. I was like an artist blissfully checking over the plan of a work that has suddenly come to him complete in every detail, touching the marvellous, still-damp construct gently here and there with the soft feelers of imagination. Ottilie a sketch, on the oboe, of the major theme to come, Edward at once the comic relief and the shambling villain of the piece, Michael a Cupid still, the subtlety of whose aim, however, I had underestimated. Even the unbroken fine summer weather was a part of the plot.
Of course there were to be times when the whole thing would seem a delusion. I would remark the fact that the actual life I led — burnt cutlets, the bathroom to be cleaned — was far from that ideal which somehow I would manage to think I was leading: the quiet scholar alone with books and pipe and lamplight, lifting melancholy eyes now and then to the glossy block of night in the window and sighing for die ferne Geliebte. When Ottilie came to me I saw myself as one of those tragic gentlemen in old novels who solace themselves with a shopgirl, or a little actress, a sort of semi-animate doll with childlike ways and no name, a part for which my big blonde girl was hardly fitted. But then, as suddenly as they had come, the doubts would depart, and the dream would take wing again into the empyrean, when I saw her coming up from the glasshouse with flowers in her arms, or glimpsed her lost in thought behind a tall window in which was reflected one tree and a bronze cloud. Once, listening idly to the shipping forecast on the radio, I saw her come out on the steps in the tawny light of evening and call to the child, and even still always I think of her when I hear the word Finisterre.