‘I like dressing up,’ she replied with equal point. ‘So did the Hortons. Why, they even had a theatre here. Oh, just a little stage they rigged up at the end of the real tennis court at the back of the house. But that’s where all those old clothes must have come from, including the Camelot outfits.’
‘What? — the Hortons had Medieval Pageants here, did they? The Death of Arthur? That sort of thing? They took the Gothic Revival that far?
‘Yes, they did indeed. That’s one reason why I bought the house. They had pageants and jousting tournaments and all sorts of Gothic things. Rose Blumberg was an actress, of sorts, before she married.’
‘Was she? I wondered about her. Jewish, marrying such a worthy-sounding Victorian, some provincial coal baron.’
‘He wasn’t so worthy, or provincial. They were lovers, to begin with. He was already married. There was quite a scandal before they came down here and built this place. I found out quite a bit about them.’
Alice walked away down the long corridor. ‘So they produced themselves, did they?’ I called after her. ‘“Life as theatre”; I thought the great new psychology was not playing games?’
‘What a bore!’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I’m hoping to get the stage going again. I’ve had the curtains fixed and talked to some of the local people. They weren’t mad about the idea. But then maybe that’s just because we’re a little too far out from Stow,’ she added optimistically.
Alice had changed herself meanwhile, into just such a classic cotton summer dress as I’d imagined her advertising in the New Yorker. And her hair, parted in the middle now and quite dry, had been combed to either side in a long wavy flow so that it came out like a black fan covering her neck and most of her shoulders. She wore no jewellery. But then of course, with her almost over-dramatic beauty, she didn’t need any. The two of us walked downstairs together, both of us quite different people.
But Arthur’s unaccustomed clothes had already begun to itch by the time we got to a small drawing-room beyond the great fireplace in the hall. My skin, though enclosed only by the lightest cotton, prickled in the heat. My face itched, too, the beard gone. I wished I was naked and bearded again.
‘Please, help yourself.’ Alice said. ‘Can you get me a lime soda?’
There was a generous Georgian silver drinks tray incongruously placed on the turned-down leaf of a Gothic lacquered desk in one corner. A heavy Victorian tantalus with three cut-glass spirit decanters stood on top. I gave Alice her lime juice and had the same myself, but with a good measure of gin thrown into it instead of the soda. The ice, I noticed, was already there, in a silver-lidded chalice adapted as a vacuum bowl, with a beautifully coloured enamelled kingfisher as a handle on top.
‘You were expecting someone?’ I asked. ‘With the ice.’
‘No. Mrs Pringle or it may have been Mary — she comes in most mornings to help — one or other, they fill it up every morning. It was a thing of Arthur’s. He was always expecting people.’
‘You don’t have any cigarettes do you, by any chance?’
‘Yes, somewhere. I don’t, but there are some.’ She found a silver cigarette-box behind some social invitations on the mantelpiece and handed it to me. There was a message engraved on the lid, cut as in sloping longhand. It said: ‘Arthur — with love, Alice.’
When I opened it there was another message, engraved on the inside of the lid, a verse:
Alice saw me looking at it.
‘It’s nice.’ I handed her back the box and lit the cigarette. ‘He didn’t take it with him?’
‘Arthur’s very busy.’
‘Yes. I suppose so. Everyone’s very busy these days. It’s the curse of the age.’ It struck me then how strange it was that neither of us had anything to do, becalmed in this great warm empty house, detached, suspended, waiting. It made me uneasy. ‘I’m sorry — about Arthur.’
I repeated the sympathetic phrase, but with an emotion now in my voice that had not been there before. And then a much stronger flood of feeling came to me, that I couldn’t account for at first, until I realised I was thinking of Laura. I walked away from the fireplace, looking round the room, my back to Alice so that she wouldn’t see the pain of this memory. There was a picture, an exquisite ink and pastel drawing, on the far wall, of a woman, a little like Alice, just the head and shoulders, with long wavy black hair. But the eyes were much bigger, the neck thicker, the lips even more bowed than Alice’s.
‘That’s a study of Jane Burden, by Rossetti. Dante Gabriel. For his Queen Guinevere.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes. Though people say she wasn’t really so ethereal at all. Bernard Shaw thought she was quite a frump. Only talked about pastry-making when he met her.’
‘Yes?’ I turned back to where Alice was standing by the fireplace.
‘Yes,’ she said. And she was smiling; one of her radiant explosions, almost mischievous, so that the whole mood changed and the sadness in the air quite disappeared.
The drawing-room, built at the corner of the house, had long windows looking both south and west, over two sides of the open parkland, but with the thick line of beech and oak as usual all round the horizon blocking out any further view. The room was a little more cheerful than the great hall, with a daisy-patterned Morris wallpaper and some fairly easy chairs covered in a heavy matching chintz. Yet, like the hall, with its great Victorian bracket lamp fittings and slightly fusty smell, the little drawing-room felt barely lived in. The desk where the drinks were had no other clutter; nothing poked from any of the pigeonholes at the back. There was a large engagement diary and a fine leather address book next a telephone by the tantalus. That was all. Elsewhere a few copies of the Field and Country Life were stacked too neatly on a small drum table by the window.
I said, ‘You hardly live in this room either, do you?’
‘Oh, I’ve a room of my own up in the tower, where I keep my things. This was where the ladies came after dinner. While the others had their port.’
‘You led a … a pretty formal life, you two, together here?’
‘Sometimes. Americans often like that more than you British. We even had place names in the dining-room, on little bamboo easels.’
‘I thought you’d have liked all that: courtly manners, formality, etiquette. Isn’t that one of your things? That article I read …’
‘Yes. I do like it. But I didn’t like the little bamboo easels. That was Arthur’s idea.’
‘You had a lot of dinner parties here?’
‘Yes. To begin with …’
‘A busy social life? Out among the county folk?’
‘To begin with. But that rather faded, thank God. People have somehow … died for me, recently anyway.’
Alice sat down by the fireplace, not at all the social failure, the rich American drop-out but poised, confident, beautiful. And I thought suddenly that despite her isolation here, how many other friends she must have, this very rich, attractive woman. And the more friends, surely, at just this moment in her life, on the brink of divorce: girl-friends, old flames, relations, sympathetic confidantes, or just scandalmongering nosy parkers. Where were they all? Surely the phone would go at any moment, long-distance from New York: or a big car from London would sweep up the drive, hell-bent on some mercy mission.