Camilla moved straight towards her host and hostess, her arms flung out in a gesture of greeting. Trailing in her wake, I noticed that conversation had died. “Lady Harcourt,” she said, embracing a tall, angular woman with red hair scraped off her face and piled in complicated wreaths on her head. “How
lovely
to see you.”
The voice that replied asked her, in the drawling tones of a Bostonian, not to stand on ceremony. “My name is Pamela,” said the angular woman with a certain emphasis, extending a bony, bejeweled hand to me as she did so. “We’re just waiting for the happy couple. They’re upstairs putting down the engagement presents.”
As she spoke I felt how empty my hands were, but on cue Camilla produced an extravagantly wrapped parcel from her handbag and gave it to her hostess. “This is from us both,” she said with her sweetest smile, as she turned to kiss her host.
Alexander Harcourt had the same coloring as his daughter, although on him the blond hair was thinning and the cheeks were ruddy rather than rosy. His eyes were blue, like Sarah’s, but shone like Ella’s; and he moved with the confidence of a handsome man who has always been thought one. His hands were large; his shoulders broad; his manner frank. I liked him.
“Here they are now,” he said, nodding amiably at and past me, towards the drawing room doors. His wife, very erect in a green dress which did not suit her, went forward to greet her stepdaughter. “How lovely you look,” I heard her say as she kissed her cheek.
If Ella did look lovely, I could not see it. The skillful hands of a hairdresser had fluffed away the sleek lines of her short hair and almost persuaded it into a bob for the occasion. The work of the makeup artist was visible too, in the pink of the lips and the sparkling blue of the eye shadow. The circles beneath her eyes, if they still existed, had been expertly concealed. In a pink floral dress with puffed sleeves, she looked like an Edwardian doll and moved with the stiffness of one. She did not appear to see me.
“You look
fantastic,
darling!” Camilla, as ever, was the first in the impromptu line that formed to greet the engaged pair. Charles, standing behind Ella in a dark suit, his hair severely parted, glowed with pleasure as his fiancée submitted to the embraces of his friend. I waited with the other guests as he and Ella, relinquished with reluctance by Camilla, came down the line, receiving the congratulations of their parents’ friends and their own.
Ella saw me while three people still separated us. She was kissing Sarah formally on both cheeks when her eyes, straying down the line, met mine. Instantly she looked away, and I thought that I detected evidence of a real blush beneath the blusher. I glowed at this secret triumph.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” she said as she reached me, and made a point of offering her hand rather than her cheek.
“Camilla invited me,” I said. “And in any case I haven’t had an opportunity yet to congratulate you and Charles.”
She looked at me for a moment, more embarrassed than hostile, and passed on.
Charles, when he reached me, greeted me as an old friend.
“So this is the splendid girl I wasn’t to talk about?” I asked smiling.
“This is the girl,” he said, looking down the line at Ella. “And she is splendid, isn’t she?”
“Congratulations,” I said quietly.
He moved on. The afternoon proceeded. Lunch was served on a long, silver-laden table in the dining room, a lofty, red-papered space with a large reproduction chandelier and a view of the garden. Outside it was raining. I sat between Camilla and Sarah and opposite the girl with the villa in Biarritz, who was sitting next to Charles. The food, as Camilla had confidently predicted, was excellent; the wine, too, was good; tubs of freshly picked roses, pink like Ella’s dress, filled the room with their scent. Occasionally I heard snatches of Ella’s conversation, three places down on my left, tantalizingly close.
But it was only as the meal progressed and I heard more that I realized that every phrase I caught was precisely as it should have been; that my love was speaking with precisely the same thoughtless, practiced ease of which she had been so critical a few weeks before. Her thanks for people’s presents were pretty; her enthusiasm for the wedding plans nicely put; her secrecy about her dress conventional. Nowhere could I detect any trace of the woman with the gaunt face who had spoken to me of drowning in the darkness of the Boardman stairwell; and this transformation infuriated me. Ella, it seemed, had decided to swim with the current rather than against it; and she was swimming with a rehearsed grace which reminded me of Charles’s and impressed me as little as his had done.
Yet I did not despair of her wholly. Something in her voice reminded me of the voice I had listened to in the park and in the alcove. I heard again the confusion of her words then, the sincerity with which she had railed against the forces that were … How had she put it? Pulling her under. And Ella pulled under had resolved to put a brave face on it. So I thought, and in so thinking I was half right; I came closer to the truth in that conclusion than in any of my flights of nineteenth-century fantasy. I was wrong only in thinking that I knew what had pulled her down.
Tantalizing though Ella’s presence was, however, I did not forget my duties as Camilla Boardman’s partner; nor was I allowed to. The infectious laughter of the woman who had brought me, the intimate way in which she confided other people’s indiscretions, the complete and gratifying attention she paid to my responses, all combined to put me in an agreeable mood. Ella was not the only one, I thought, who could conceal her feelings behind a flow of seemingly effortless social patter. I would show her that I was as adept as anyone. And so I talked—to Camilla, to Sarah, to the girl with the villa in Biarritz—all the while wondering how to get Ella to myself for a moment and resolving not to leave the house without at least making an attempt to do so.
Sarah Harcourt, rigid in blue linen on my left, spoke to me of her distaste for pink roses. Her criticism, inaudible to her hostess, was more for Pamela than for Pamela’s flowers, I suspected; and I thought that I understood where the disapproval came from. Pamela, for Sarah, was an invader. To begin with, her accent was American and thus hardly to her credit; but what was more to be deplored was her self-conscious attention to the anglicizing of every other personal detail. Pamela’s hair, piled above her head, was impressively Edwardian; her jewelry was heavy and old-fashioned; she addressed the caterer’s maid who waited on her with just the correct amount of polite disdain. All this, I could see, irritated Sarah almost as much as her cousin’s charming conversation irritated me. And although she said nothing, I felt within her the hostility to foreigners, particularly usurping foreigners, which is latent in certain English souls. She sat by my side, hardly touching the food which was put before her, splendidly regal. I noticed that no one spoke to her but that her presence was very much felt, and I thought again that she was someone to be treated with deference but no intimacy: an outsider by choice and circumstance. Even Camilla, though nothing and no one could upset her iron self-assurance, seemed disinclined to engage Sarah in conversation, sensing her to be a difficult conquest. And I, looking at the set lines of Sarah’s mouth and wondering how I could ever have found in her an exact likeness of Ella, felt sorry for her in a way I would never have dared to express. Sarah was the prisoner of her own self-control, I thought; and today, thinking back on her then, I see that I was right.
Only once did the girl with the villa in Biarritz attempt conversation with Sarah, and her choice of opening was unfortunate.
“Do you know,” she said from across the pink roses, “I never knew that Ella had a sister. Are you very close?”
There was the slightest suggestion of a pause; but it was frosty enough to halt the conversation around it in the moment before Sarah smiled and said that she and Ella were only cousins.
“What? But you could almost be twins,” the girl blundered on, smiling still.
“We could not be twins,” came the acid reply, just loud enough for Ella to overhear; and by the forced cheerfulness of her conversation it seemed to me that the object of the slight had heard and was consciously ignoring it.
“Oh you could be,” the hapless girl persisted. “You’re almost identical.”
“But our styles are quite different,” came the sweetly damming reply; and Sarah leaned back in her chair, languid and serene, as if inviting comparison between her sleek lines and Ella’s painted cheeks. Half smiling, she lit a cigarette with a smooth movement of long fingers and smiled at her cousin; and it was left to Camilla to cover the ensuing silence by redirecting our attention to the splendors of the Chelsea Flower Show.
Lunch finally came to an end with pungent, sweet-smelling coffee in paper-thin china cups shaped to look like rose buds. There were different colors in the set (mine, for instance, was yellow) and it amused me to see Sarah being handed a pink one. I looked for her eyes, thinking that we might share the joke, but they were set and unseeing. As Camilla exclaimed over the
exquisite
prettiness of the china and asked her hostess where she got it from, I saw Ella’s cousin glance at her watch.
We left the lunch table in a troop and moved into the drawing room, an ocean of uncomfortable sofas of ornate wood and somber pattern. Almost at once the party began to split up, for lunch had lasted longer than anticipated and many of the guests were late for engagements elsewhere. I saw that Sarah was one of the first to say her good-byes and that instead of kissing Pamela she shook her hand. Alexander she kissed, and Ella too, although the brushing of the cousins’ cheeks which passed for a kiss did not suggest much unspoken affection. Charles, rising, leaned forward to kiss Sarah and was rewarded by the quick out-stretching of her fine white hand.
When she had gone, Camilla found a place next to me on a sofa and said, softly enough for only one or two people who would share her opinion to hear, “Well I
said
she was an odd fish, and you can see that I was right.
Very
strange. Hardly spoke at
all.
” She considered the question gravely for a moment. “I think she’s superior,” she said at last, with an air of finality. “And frankly I don’t see any reason why she should be, do you?”
But her question was merely rhetorical; I was not expected to answer it and when I did not she let the matter drop and spoke of other things. I listened to her vaguely, concentrating most of my attention on the question of how I could possibly get Ella to myself for a moment. A moment was all it would take, I thought. But one by one the guests got up to leave and I felt my time of opportunity dwindling. Ella showed no inclination to talk to me and I had no desire to cross the expanse of carpet and sit with her and Charles. I wanted her alone or not at all.
Again it was Camilla who came to my rescue with her suggestion of seeing the engagement presents. “Ella darling,” she called from our sofa, “aren’t you
dying
to see what everyone’s brought you?”
“Of course she is,” said Pamela, smiling.
Sensing my chance and seeing Ella about to protest, I joined the chorus with a well-timed “So are we.”
“Well why don’t we open them now, sweetheart?” said Charles on cue.
Ella looked doubtful. “We could, I suppose,” she said.
“Then let’s,” said Pamela decisively, rising. To the few guests who remained, she said, “You won’t mind coming upstairs, will you? It’s just that there’re too many gifts to bring down.” And with a laugh, taking the arm of her future son-in-law, she left the room and led the way upwards. Alexander followed with Camilla and the girl with the villa in Biarritz. A plump relation, the only other member of the party still present, had gone to sleep in an armchair. Ella and I were left alone.
“So,” I said quickly, my irritation at lunch giving an edge to my voice, “this is it?”
“What?” She looked at me from under the sweep of her blow-dried fringe and I saw something of the woman I remembered.
“Is this the island?”
There was a pause. The relation in the armchair gave a gentle snore.
“Is this what you meant by events overtaking you?” I persisted, courageous after weeks of pent-up frustration and excitement.
With a sharp nod of the head Ella motioned me out of the room and onto the landing. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, putting her foot on the first stair.
“No of course you don’t. I forget that in our particular school of fish one should never admit to having said anything real.” There was a note of sarcasm in my voice which I saw made her uncomfortable. “Particularly if one hasn’t said it to someone one’s known since childhood.” I was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which my words came.
“Don’t talk to me about schools of fish.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a tired metaphor.”
“All right then, I’ll ask you plainly. What on earth are you doing?”
“I am marrying the man I love, James.” But even as she said it, her tone rang false. We both observed this. “And anyway,” she whispered almost fiercely, angry herself now, “I don’t see what business it is of yours whether I’m happy or not.”
“It’s only my business in as far as you’ve made it my business,” I said quietly.
“Well I’m sorry I mentioned anything.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said that I don’t think you are. When you first met me, that day in the park, you were looking for a way out. You were looking for a way out that night at Camilla’s party, too, weren’t you? I think you wanted me to help you find one.”
It was wise of me at this point not to have come out with any of my wilder theories on the question of Ella’s motives; as it was, the gist of what I had said was correct and she did not contradict it.
“And then when your engagement was finally announced,” I continued, warming to my theme, “and things were truly out of hand, you decided that there was no way out and so you gave in, you accepted what was happening. To use your own phrase, you decided that it was easier to swim with the current than against it.”